by Tim Winton
He reached a crest and saw the dark plane of the sea flecked with moonlight. His chest hurt. It felt like he’d swallowed the earth but he didn’t stop running.
When he saw the lantern he spilled down onto the beach, holding everything in. The men stood in the light with their rods and in their midst Max stood with a mulloway across his back, silver as a prince’s cape, glistening from arm to arm, still wet and trembling. Their father turned with the gaff in his hand. The smile left his face. Frank wide-legged it towards them, apologizing all the way.
Family
When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets—
He is out of his mind!
His skill has not changed. But the prize
Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting—
And the need to win
Drains him of power.
Chuang Tzu
AFTER THE SHIT FINALLY DIED DOWN Leaper chucked his board and wetsuit into the old HK and buggered off to White Point. It was four in the morning and he was still half pissed but there was no one out in the street, not even the dogged sportswriter who’d been camped outside in his Sigma since Sunday, so he went while he had the chance. He took it easy through the sleeping burbs and then as pony farms and market gardens gave way to the blankness of bush he began to relax a little. But the feeling only lasted a few minutes as fatigue overtook him and roos started appearing at the edge of the road so frequently and abruptly that he pulled over into a pine plantation, climbed into the back and slept in the jumble of stuff he’d tossed there in his haste.
He woke, shivering, barely two hours later. It was full daylight and a winter mist hung in the trees. He climbed into the front. The image in the rear-view mirror startled him.
Jesus, he muttered. I thought you were dead.
The face scowling back at him was so closed, so drawn and bitter, that it might easily have been the old man’s. Leaper felt flattened. He thought about driving back to the city but there was no food left in the house and the place was a stinking mire of bottles and pizza boxes. Back there the phone line was out of the wall and beneath a midden of dirty dishes and malarial sinkwater the mobile would be cactus by now. He couldn’t bear to be there again. He’d left the TV on its back, wide-eyed and out of commission, like a kinghit wingman. Wherever you walked in the house there was a sinister crackle of newspaper underfoot, his season like a carpet, photos of him flying above the pack with the wind in his cheeks and his fingers splayed for the ball. Others of him with his hands on his hips, his head down, the coach in his face, all fingerpointing and gob spray, with the howling crowd at their backs, and in every room, though stained and wrinkled or even plain screwed up, there was that picture they printed and reprinted for days, with the back page headlines, the one of him walking, solitary, up the players’ race with the game still in progress over his shoulder and the look of complete blankness on his face.
No, he wasn’t going back to that. But this morning White Point didn’t seem such a great idea either. What had he been thinking of? Family? Jesus, there was only Max, his brother, and a sister-in-law he’d never met, nieces he’d only heard about.
Leaper sat there a minute. He knew a surf would do him good. And right now, more or less sober for the first time in days, he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
Two hours later he crested the ridge and looked down on the great train of dunes and the winter sea and the hamlet in the narrow margin between them. He was stiff and hungry but as he coasted through the main drag, low in his seat, he resisted the urge to pull in to the bakery or the servo for breakfast. Fibro houses and shopfronts rolled by. He stole a glance at the old baitshop that still bore his father’s name and drove on down to the beach where the sand was white and hard-packed and the lagoon bristled with crayboats nodding and twisting at their moorings.
At the outer reefs that formed the anchorage, lines of whitewater spilled landward with the rumbling, far-off noise of heavy traffic. Leaper drove around the beach to the wide spit of the point itself. A spray of terns rose in his path. He wound down the window to breathe in the salt smell. Even in the weak June light the glare off the sand was enough to make him wince.
There was nobody else parked on the point but out on the reef he could see the white flare of a board wake on a distant wave. When he pulled up he clawed the binoculars from the glovebox to watch the surfer carve lines across the smooth face until the swell hit the deep water of the channel where wave and rider subsided into the sea.
Leaper got out and stretched against the old station wagon. He was sore and lightheaded. The land breeze was cool at his back, and when he turned to put his face into it he saw the water tower from the caravan park rising bigheaded from behind the scrubby dune. It gave him a strange pang to see it again. He’d grown up in the shadows of its trestle legs. As boys, in that van park in the lee of the sandhills, the tower loomed over Max and him; its faded red tank was a bloodshot eye that never closed. From anywhere in town or from miles out at sea it was clearly visible, the home beacon. From what he could gather, Max still lived over there with his missus and kids on the same site and maybe even the same van the old man dragged up in the sixties. Perhaps he’d go over and visit. Maybe they’d put him up for a bit until he got himself sorted out. Before he got that far he needed to feel his muscles burn. He didn’t want to run. He wanted the privacy of the sea.
He flipped up the rear window and dragged out his dusty board and laid it on the sand while he rooted around for the wetsuit. He didn’t know if it was the cold or fatigue or simple nerves that caused him to shake so much but he had trouble getting the wetty on, and when he finally did he realized that he needed a piss, and because he was leery of sharks out on the reef and too cold to haul the suit off again, he just stood there and let go where he was. The hot flush down his legs brought an unexpected twinge of shame, a flash of the schoolyard that he buried in the business of waxing the board.
From where he knelt Leaper noticed that an osprey had built a nest on the water tower. It was new to him but the bird’s guano-plastered wall of sticks was so well established that he suddenly sensed how long he’d been gone, just how many years stood between him and the boy he was when he learnt to play football on this very sandflat. Barefoot and bare-backed, he was the youngest of a feral mob of kids who roamed the town on their treddlies, haunted the jetty and played marathon games of footy with the sea and dunes as boundaries and only piled shirts for goalposts. Back then, the sandcrusted ball tore skin off his feet without him even feeling it. He ducked and weaved through the big kids and hung on the shoulders of grown men who laughed and said that he had springs in his feet. He was a natural. He had no idea that he was a freak. He only knew that Max hated it and he was late to the party on that front too. Leaper was so innocent that White Pointers thought he was dim, and looking back he wondered if maybe they were right.
With the board under his arm, Leaper jogged the few steps to the water and plunged in with a shout. For the first few moments he just put his head down and paddled to distract himself from the cold but after a few minutes he was comfortable enough to enjoy the dappled seagrass, the green sandy holes passing beneath him, the rhythm and repetition of the stroke, and the easy grace of his own body. There was something beautifully mindless in a long paddle or run or swim, a spaciousness he embroidered with whatever silly ditty came to mind to keep time. After the giddy relief from training, the muscles of his arms and back felt hungry for it again.
When he reached the inside reef he sat on his board a moment to find the passage through the limestone and coral. Whitewater pounded across the shelf and the gap was narrow. When he was through he began the business of duckdiving under broken waves until
he reached the channel. There was a lot of water moving out here. He was five hundred yards from shore. The swell seemed to be picking up. He returned to the jittery feeling he had before he hit the water.
As he paddled, a lone surfer dropped down the face of a big, reeling right-hander with the kind of confidence that marked him out as a local. He jammed a turn hard up towards the falling lip and then seemed to hang in the wave’s churning guts for a few seconds before a rush of trapped air spat him out. Leaper sat up in the channel to watch the rider come on in short, brutal signature turns until he slewed off the wave to settle in the quiet water beside him.
Thought I’d find you here, said Leaper with a grin he hadn’t expected.
Well, I’ll be fucked, said the other man without warmth.
How’s it goin, Max?
Don’t need a walkin frame yet.
So I see.
Long time since that board saw any saltwater.
Leaper nodded. A wetsuit did little to hide the fact that Max had stacked on some pudding, yet he still had his big deckie shoulders and his neck was like a straining-post. Max’s hair was buzz-cut and he’d grown a biker beard that gave him a fearsome look and blurred his resemblance to the old man. Nobody would mistake Max for one of the friendly hippies who’d taught them to surf here in their early teens. His big brother looked savage and battleworn. There were pulpy scars on his eyebrows and a fresh dint in his forehead.
They sat there in the calm a few moments, turning their feet in the light-shafted water with the reef shadowy beneath them. Max regarded him with that sour, doubtful look of his.
So what’s the story?
Leaper shrugged. I haven’t been back for a while.
Christ, you haven’t been anywhere for a while, from what I hear. The paper’s full of it. They sack you?
I walked.
Fucksake.
Leaper smiled, but the skin felt tight on his face.
Frank Leaper. The White Point jack-in-the-box. A two-season wonder.
So it seems.
Jesus Christ.
Both brothers sensed the fresh set of waves that trundled in toward them. They swung around and paddled seaward in a response that was automatic. After the years they’d spent out here on the reef their sudden animation was instinctive; their bodies thought for them. Several big waves broke outside. They took them on the head, duckdiving with their boards to escape the worst of the impact. Leaper relished the sluicing concussion across his back; he loved the way the force of the water prised his eyelids apart and raked through his hair like a gale. He surfaced from each explosion of turbulence and paddled hard and fast, his limbs and ligaments lulled into some kind of boyhood recognition, until he reached the calm deep beyond the break and sat up blowing a little. He was lightheaded and gripey with hunger but he felt unaccountably content, even at the prospect of dealing with Max.
His brother paddled past and sat some distance away. Leaper looked shoreward at the pink blob of the water tank above the dunes. He observed Max who fingered the water and stared out to sea. How would he talk to him, explain what had happened? And why should he bother; why did it matter? He’d spent his boyhood vainly trying to get Max’s attention. He aped his older brother, adored him, followed him at school and on the beach, blind to the fact that Max was contemptuous of him and had been from the moment he was born.
It was Max who introduced and fed the idea that his little brother was a bit simple. The fact that it wasn’t true was obscured by Leaper’s capacity to absorb and endure such meanness out of love, as though that’s all it was, his cruelty, a mere test of brotherly love. He was, without doubt, naïve. Leaper instinctively believed the best of people, beginning with his family. In his mind Max was only ever joking. As a boy of eight, he really did think that their mother was only going on holiday when she brought them here to the old man one summer, never to return. And he was almost twenty before he saw that, instead of hiding his feelings toward him, his father had no feelings at all.
Leaper wasn’t so naïve anymore; he’d seen plenty in his two seasons of glory. But he didn’t feel better or stronger for having been wised up. If anything he yearned for the unselfconscious part of him because, looking back, it was the only bit that felt authentic. This vigilant, grown-up version he’d been living was mostly an act. It was the reason he’d come unstuck this year in front of the whole country. He was certain of that; he’d had time enough to think about it. But what he thought might be achieved by talking to Max about it was a lot less clear. Even as he sat here he knew that his brother was part of the mess he’d made of himself – every minute in the water reminded him of something more that confirmed it – yet what did he expect from Max but the usual spitting disdain? You’d have to be a bit simple to persist with Max. And yet there were things to say. There was nothing to lose by saying them. Except maybe a few teeth and a bed for the night.
Another set bore down on the reef. This time they were ready. The brothers hustled and jockeyed for position and Leaper felt himself smiling with real pleasure at this instant reversion to form. He wasn’t as strong as Max, but he was so much fitter that it should have been no contest except for the fact that he was out of practice. He pulled back and gave his brother the wave and Max launched into it with an expression that said it’d always been his. The old conviction.
Leaper sat in the spray with a bitter laugh. He watched Max’s progress by the occasional flash of board or upflung arm that showed above the steady bending wave. Max still surfed with an angry intensity, a kind of misery Leaper saw in some footballers. It was the scrapping spirit of the bloke who played the percentages. No style, no natural flash, all power and no beauty. Max reminded him of the journeymen he’d played on, the ugly scramblers, disciplined triers. They were the ones who vented their frustration on the likes of him.
They weren’t alike, him and Max. All their efforts were in opposite directions; it was what each of them needed to try for that caused the trouble. Trying. The very word was a provocation between them.
He hadn’t missed Max. He stayed away from the old man’s funeral; given the home-and-away schedule, he’d had excuses enough for not being there, but he didn’t offer them.
Another wave reared from the deep. It seemed to stagger a moment as it confronted the shoaling reef, and a creaturely shiver ran along it as Leaper spun and paddled into his path. In a moment there was the old sense of being overtaken, of having been snatched up by something mighty, and he rose to his feet grinning. But before he’d even taken the drop and leant into his first turn, the wave was twisting on itself, hurling him out across the bubbling reef without the board underfoot. He hit the bottom hard and bounced across the coral reef in a welter of foam. When he surfaced, the board was tombstoning at the end of its leash and he could feel that he’d lost skin off his knees and elbows.
That was choice, said Max paddling by.
Stunned and winded, Leaper pulled himself onto the board and followed his brother back out to the break. He was surprised at the sudden flicker of anger that passed through him.
Some things are best left to the men, said Max when they sat up in the calm water outside.
Yeah, said Leaper. Whatever.
You never had the steel for it.
What? Football?
It’s a man’s game.
It’s just a business, Max. You’re so naïve.
Max glared at him, his beard streaming water, and Leaper felt his face flush with unholy pleasure.
You were soft, said Max with new feeling. You were a fuckin coward.
Leaper said nothing. He conceded that he was a lazy trainer and a lukewarm clubman, but he didn’t shirk the hard stuff; it just never found him. He wasn’t afraid of anything until the very end and even then, in the last awful, mid-season weeks, it was the very sudden and novel prospect of failure that scared him. The violence of the game didn’t really register because Leaper had never been injured. There was all that talk of him being too thick to fea
r getting hurt – Max’s old smear spreading beyond White Point – but it wasn’t about being stupid because even when the rest of his game went to shit, when the ball felt like a sandbag and his legs like pot ballast, he still had a kind of spatial genius, his instinct for evasion.
So, what the fuck happened? Max asked, as if despite himself. There was an exasperation in his voice that surprised Leaper.
I couldn’t do it anymore.
And what the bloody hell does that mean?
I don’t really know.
That you wouldn’t do it anymore. That’s what it looked like.
Watching, were you?
Christ, you moron! You play for my team; of course I was watchin. Tearin my fuckin hair out. You just bloody stopped.
Leaper smiled. Max grasped at the water now, the tendons rigid in his neck.
I gotta live here, said Max. You’re a bloody embarrassment.
But you hated it when I was good.
Fuck off.
Admit it.
Fuck off out of it.
Poor old Max.
You come here to blue with me? said Max with his pit-bull leer.
I dunno, said Leaper, noticing now that both his hands were bleeding.
You’re a fuck-up.
Leaper could hardly deny it. Only a few months ago he was still the prodigy. But come March he was hot and cold – enigmatic, in the words of the commentators – and in April he’d become first a disappointment and then a travesty. There was no obvious source of trouble to point to, no knee reconstructions to endure, no contentious overpayments or distracting sex scandal. He was a mystery. His demise was as puzzling as his emergence. One week he kicked ten at a canter and the next he couldn’t have earned a kick in a stampede. It just got worse. The crowd called him ordinary. The coach said he was rubbish. Players shunned him. Word was he wasn’t trying and that was the biggest laugh of all.