by Tim Winton
Contents
Fins
Molten Turtles
Flushes
Earth to Mrs Leonard
Lashings of Toast
Midnight
Zig-Zag
Everything is Not Alright
A Bomb Dropping
A Bit of Fresh Air
Complete Worstatiousness
Nan and Pop
This Hoovers
In Golf We Trust
Birdseed and Laxatives
Family Support
Victory
Hospital
Spag Bog
Shambolic
Guardian Angel
Being a Butthead
Pride
Brothers
Cyril
A Fit of Rosiness
Lockie Leonard, Fishing Legend
Bumpy Ride
Save Yourself the Sex Change
The Usual Diabolical Pandemonium
Fourteen
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Winton decided to be a writer when he was ten. It seemed like a good idea at the time and years later he still hasn’t come up with a better idea. He is the author of twenty books and lives with his family in Western Australia.
ALSO BY TIM WINTON
Jesse
Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo
The Bugalugs Bum Thief
Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster
Blueback
The Deep
for Bron
black hole sun
won’t you come
and wash away the rain
black hole sun
won’t you come
won’t you come . . .
SOUNDGARDEN
ockie Leonard shook the spray from his eyes, adjusted himself on the board and kept paddling as the wave rolled past and collapsed with a bum-tingling thud on the sandbar. Out of the cool mist another swell rose all seething and motley-green and shot six glistening, giggling missiles into the sky. They twisted in the air and came spearing straight at him. Lockie stopped paddling and stared. As any halfwit knows, of course, this is not such a smart thing to do when a big horrie wave is bearing down on you like a cement truck. But the human torpedo couldn’t help himself. Dolphins! Alright!
He watched them stall and turn in perfect formation, cutting white slices through the skin of the water, curving back on themselves the way no human surfer could even hope to. They romped and skylarked. They arched their backs, pulled in their flukes and buried themselves deep in the meat of the wave until they were surfing underwater, riding the inner force of the wave. Now that was desperately cool, no question. Lockie was stoked. He hooted as the dolphins suddenly cartwheeled out the back of the wave, but no one heard him because half a second after he opened his mouth, the whole motley-green business fell on him with a roar and he went straight to the bottom, yodelling all the way.
He bounced along the seabed, his wetsuit filling with sand, seaweed and small marine creatures, as his board dragged him by its twanging legrope. Hmm, life as a prawn net. He startled several flathead, overturned a turban shell with the tip of his funny bone and began to make some sort of effort toward saving his own life. When he finally found the foaming surface and honked the entire Southern Ocean out of his left nostril, he simply couldn’t manage to feel sorry for himself.
The sea went calm. Lockie clawed back out into deep water and lay still. He panted like a spaniel. All of a sudden a dolphin spouted beside him, then another, and then a whole whooshing crew of them were around him, whirling and leaping. They surrounded him mischievously, teasing and skiting like a bunch of little brothers lit up on red Smarties and Coke. Diving, they disappeared for a second and charged up from beneath him to swerve at the very last moment and whack their tails on the surface. Then, to rub it in a bit more, they leapt in formation right over him again and again, wagging their heads and giving him the eyeball.
In the end they came back and lazed around, cheeping and clicking so close that he ran his hands down their slick flanks and began to laugh in amazement. It was just plain inspiring. There was no other word he could think of to describe it. In a brilliant, glassy swell, out on his own with a mob of mad dolphins. Did it get any better than this?
The past few weeks had been pretty grim for Lockie. His best mate Egg had left town because his oldies split up. Lockie missed Egg’s mad jokes and his terrible complexion; he just missed having him around. Then there was Dot, the girlfriend he thought he had for a week or two. She was back in the big smoke, pigtails and all, and so his love life was down the toilet. As if this wasn’t enough to put a dent in your day, his little brother Phillip had turned eleven and started wetting the bed again, poor mutt. Lockie was back to sharing a bedroom with someone else’s damp patch.
Still it was pretty hard to keep feeling sorry for yourself with half a dozen buzzed-up dolphins using you for hurdles practice. All Lockie’s glumness, all his loneliness evaporated. I tell you, you have to be a hard case not to dig dolphins.
Then, in one strange second they all peeled off, dived and were gone. In the long lull between sets, Lockie waited, still hopeful that they’d return and stir up some more fun. But nothing happened. With all the excitement gone he suddenly felt his aching body. He’d been surfing for hours and even his pains had pains and his rashes had rashes. He could feel the end of his nose shrivelling under its coating of zinc cream. What a shame they took off, he thought. I could’ve handled an hour of that.
Just as he was thinking it, he saw a shadow turning in a swell. Yes! And as a small set rose in the distance, Lockie saw the dolphin’s fin pop from the crest of the first wave.
Then he stopped paddling.
Lockie sat up. He stared again. Hard. His heart went small and cold as a leftover rissole inside his Rip Curl vest. Because, you see, as any grommet knows, there are fins and there are FINS!
There it was again.
Hooley-dooley, that was no dolphin. Lockie Leonard was no brain surgeon but he knew the difference between ‘Flipper’ and ‘Jaws III’. It was a Noah’s ark. A man in a grey flannel suit. The fish with a tax collector’s smile. A swimming lawyer. Five rows of teeth with a tail, an appetite and a seriously bad attitude. In short, it was a cartilaginous fish charactised by a pointed snout extending forward and over a crescentic mouth set with sharp triangular teeth, a creature quite necessary to the fine balance of the marine environment but not particularly welcomed by hairy young persons floating on tiny pieces of fibreglass in the middle of the cold, lonely ocean. It was, in fact, a S S S H H H H A A A A A A R K!
The fin turned Lockie’s way. A little bow wave peeled off it as it accelerated. Lockie could feel every tastebud on his tongue. His solitary pimple throbbed on his chin. The fin came steaming in and Lockie felt adrenaline rip down his arms into the tips of his fingers. He began to wish that he’d brought a brown wetsuit.
The shark closed on him and, without even thinking, Lockie pulled his feet out of the water and tried to wrap them around his neck. He tried to make himself the size of a cashew nut, but the effort was too much and he overbalanced and fell straight into the water right where the shark flashed under him. For a moment he lay stunned on the water, expecting to see his gizzards drifting around him and one of his legs floating by like driftwood, but he felt no pain, nothing at all.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the fin break the surface again, turning for another run. Aayayayayayayiii!
Lockie pulled himself onto his board, aimed himself at dry land and tried not to think about life with a wooden leg. Or worse: life with only one buttock. Lockie Leonard, Halfbum. No, it didn’t exactly ring in his ears like music. He stopped thinking altogether and went like hellfire.
He was still paddling when he hit the dunes. Lockie Leonard, human torpedo.
Alive. On dry land. With both legs and all of his very small and waterlogged butt.
t was a long, hard walk up through the flash suburbs of town but Lockie hardly noticed it at all. Now and then a little rich person’s dog would scamper down a driveway to yap and rattle at him for a second, but after what happened at the beach today nothing could touch him. He was still tingling from his little meeting with the shark. Every time he thought about that dorsal fin hacking a U-turn in his direction Lockie’s toes curled up inside his Blundstones as though someone had hooked him up to a car battery. Yikes! He checked his board and various unglamorous bits of his anatomy for teeth marks but found none. He figured he must be in shock.
For a moment, at the turn-off to his place, Lockie looked up toward Vicki Streeton’s house and wondered what she was doing right this moment. Probably watching ‘Degrassi High’, he thought. And eating an apple. A red apple. There’d be bits caught in her braces.
He stopped in his tracks. Yes, he thought, I’m definitely in shock! Thinking about her! Lockie didn’t let himself think about Vicki Streeton anymore. Well, not more than twice a day, anyway. He kept his mind off those soft lips and the feel of that cool raspberry breath against his cheek. Best not to dwell on how her leg used to wind around his under the desk in Science, and there was no way known that he’d let himself recall those hair-raising passion sessions up in the pine forest behind the school. Let’s admit it, even if he can’t; Vicki Streeton was the love of his life. She was the sharpest, toughest, prettiest girl in his class, probably in the whole school. Geez, the things she said! The way she looked at you, the slide of her hips when she walked away. Aargh! For the whole of Lockie’s first year of high school, she was the Meaning of the Universe. He was just this poor sick puppy, the new kid in town, a nobody and a nothing and then suddenly she shone on him like a searchlight. Him. She chose him. And his life was different for ever.
Well, he didn’t think about any of that these days. He could hardly even recall the good times now. He just thought of how it felt to stand in a phone booth and hear the world coming to an end. Getting dropped like a hot spud. Seeing her cruising around with blokes with cars. Standing there, like some scrawny thirteen-year-old, knowing he was history. And the whole town knowing. Life in a country town—it’s like a soap opera sometimes.
Ah, it still stung like a mongrel to remember. So he put it out of his mind. But whenever he saw Vicki in the street—and believe me, in a town the size of Angelus it happened all the time—he broke out in a grimy sweat and felt his heart creep up his throat like a flaming fur ball.
Lockie was over it. He was cool about it. That was all behind him.
Sure.
Rrrrilly.
Hmm.
As IF!
He turned downhill towards his end of town, where the un-rich and the seriously un-glamorous lived, and tried to get a grip on himself.
As he got to the end of the driveway and looked across the vast boggy wetland that was the Leonard family’s front yard, Lockie relaxed a moment. It wasn’t much, that awful sinking homestead in the middle of the town swamp, but it was home. Actually, it was a disgrace but he’d lived here a year now and he’d just got used to the idea. It was a real copper’s house. Lockie supposed things might be different if the old man was a lawyer. Lawyers lived up on the hill whereas cops’ families were white trash in Angelus. Still, it was home. Anyway, after surviving a shark attack White Trash sounded good to him. It was his home now, this town, this house. At least it was safe. Quiet. Beautifully boring. Face it, after a shark attack a dog kennel would be enough.
Lockie loosened up and grinned. He had barely started squelching down the drive when a hideous explosion tore across the swamp. It pushed him back in his tracks and blow-waved his hair. The sky was full of smouldering bits of plastic and grubby smoke. Lockie began to run.
Just then Phillip, Lockie’s eleven-year-old brother, came tottering out from behind the big shed near the drainage ditch with his hair still smoking and his body and clothes all black.
‘What the hell was that?’ yelled Lockie.
Phillip smiled. His teeth were much whiter than usual, but then his face was usually pink. Hmm, pink trash.
‘Just as I thought,’ said Phillip. Truly excellent.’
The whole left side of Phillip’s head was singed bald but it didn’t seem to bother him at all.
‘What happened? What was it?’
‘What was it?’ said Phillip, getting that new scientific sound in his voice that Lockie was starting to hate. ‘That was two kilos of Ninja Turtles.’
Lockie’s jaw dropped and stayed down.
‘I got them cheap,’ said Phillip.
Lockie looked at the blackened wall of the shed. Sure enough, all over the ground there were bits of smouldering turtle. The boys’ parents came belting out of the house, squawking as mums and dads do.
‘Phillip!’ bellowed the Sarge with his copper’s tunic half out of his trousers and his handcuffs swinging. ‘Please explain.’
‘Two kilos of Ninja Turtles,’ said Lockie.
‘You alright, Phillip?’ said Mrs Leonard, looking strange.
Phillip smiled again and nodded.
‘What was all this in aid of? Getting the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle into space?’ said the Sarge, checking the shed for damage.
‘Sarge,’ said Phillip, ‘how many times do I have to tell you, it’s called Science. All you’re into is poetry.’
‘Here he goes again.’
‘Phillip, don’t you think these experiments are getting out of hand?’ said Mrs Leonard, still in her dressing gown at two in the afternoon.
‘Mum, this is only the beginning.’
The Sarge waved smoke away from his face. ‘Last week it was the letterbox and four perfectly decent oranges. And before that it was your mother’s cassette player being mated with her hairdryer and we all know what happened there. Not to mention the aerosol can we’ve still got buried in the ceiling of the living room.’
‘Science,’ said Phillip. ‘Face it, Sarge, you just don’t get it.’
‘Look at his hair,’ said Mrs Leonard, appalled.
‘Well,’ said the Sarge, ‘think of the money he’s saved us. Some kids want to pay for worse hairdos than that.’
Phillip suddenly got interested in the way a smoking Leonardo had melted itself against the handlebars of his bike.
‘I nearly got mauled by a shark today,’ said Lockie.
‘Nice try,’ said the Sarge. ‘But it hardly competes with an exploding box of plastic turtles.’
‘No, really, I did.’
‘Look, if I suddenly had a little brother who was a pyromaniac I’d probably feel a bit left out too. You’ve still got our attention, Lockie. Don’t worry.’
I’m not feeling neglected, Sarge, I’m saying I actually saw a shark while I was surfing.’
The Sarge ruffled Lockie’s damp hair with a huge, dorky grin on his face. ‘Yeah, mate. Course you did.’
‘It nearly ate my bum off!’
Lockie’s mum started bawling.
The three male Leonards just turned and stared at her.
‘They’re only turtles, love,’ said the Sarge.
‘And I did get them cheap,’ said Phillip.
‘I didn’t get bitten,’ said Lockie.
But Mrs Leonard just stood there in her dressing gown amid the battlefield of molten turtles and howled her eyes out.
ockie watched as the Sarge stumped out to the police car in the failing light. He was late for work now but he didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. There was a puzzled look on his face, a look that said he was almost worried. He looked quite odd without his usual daggy grin. You got used to the mad, cheerful look on the Sarge’s face; it was a surprise to see it gone. He’s a one-off, thought Lockie. They broke the mould after they made the Sarge. There he goes, upholding the law, protecting the good citizens of Angelus wearing one black sock and one green one. Hmm, nice look.
It was Phillip calling from inside.
‘Out here.’
Phillip stood inside the flywire door looking truly shocking. He’d had a shower and scrubbed up a bit but it made him look worse. He looked like a bantam chook that had been set on fire.
There’s a letter for you.’
‘Okay. Ta. Where is it?’
‘Inside. Blob’s got it.’
‘Blob?’ said Lockie. ‘What’s she doing with it?’
‘Eating it, actually.’
‘Geez, Phillip, thanks for telling me.’
‘I s’pose it makes a change from lino.’
By the time Lockie got to the kitchen his baby sister had gnawed one end of the envelope right off and was trying to digest the stamp. Lockie tugged at it gently but Blob wasn’t letting go. She didn’t exactly growl but she was a bit like a dog with a bone; she wasn’t going to give it up easily.
Lockie looked around for a moment and saw the phone bill stuck to the fridge with dinky little magnets. ‘What about that, Blob? A nice bit of FINAL NOTICE.’
Blob looked back at him with her cheeks bulging. It was hard to tell if those cheeks were full of spit and lino and real food or if they were just naturally fat and bulging.
Lockie wasn’t about to volunteer to find out, that was for sure. Blob didn’t mind a chunk of index finger now and then. He wasn’t putting his hands inside that teething maw. After all, he’d survived one shark attack today, and one was plenty.
Quite abruptly, Blob let go of the soggy mauled envelope and went cross-eyed with concentration. Her cheeks bulged out even further and the veins in her temples stood up like speed bumps. Lockie knew exactly what that meant. He grabbed the letter from its drooly puddle on the floor and bolted before the fireworks really got going.
In his room he read the champed pages of the letter. Egg’s handwriting was truly awful.
Dear Lockie,
How’s life in Rainytown? Sputaginous 1 suppose, huh? I saw on the news that the harbour clean-up is under way already. Mate, we really showed ’em.