Last Long Drop

by Mike Safe

  He strode the last metres up to them. ‘Bloody hell, Johno, you broke my board!’

  FOUR

  Harcourt ran the soft sand up and back along the length of the beach. The first few hundred metres were the worst, but once his resisting body had warmed to the task and his breathing kicked in, it became a simple matter of one foot in front of the other. Now that he amounted to being unemployed and had all this time on his hands, he was either surfing or running every day. Occasionally, he would do both, but not today.

  The thick heat of summer had finally given way to a cool change that had beaten its way up the coast, driving away the humid air and taking most of the holiday types with it, at least for the next day or two. Chunks of choppy water stirred by this new wind collided with what was left of the dwindling swell from the cyclone’s aftermath to produce a churned confusion that kept most of the surfers on land.

  Harcourt’s back was still sore from where he had been bounced off the reef and almost drowned the week before but antiseptic and a pack of sticking plasters from the local pharmacy had been all the treatment needed. Carpark had come off worse, needing a row of stitches to close the cut above his eye where his board had hit him. He had since taken to regaling anyone at the beach who would listen to his tale of the trio’s adventure down the coast. Harcourt, and especially Brown, chose to defer as Carpark’s story grew taller.

  Harcourt came to a rest on the salt-stained benches near the kids’ pool at the beach’s northern end. This was prime yummy mummy territory, where young mothers and their small children routinely gathered on weekdays to catch some sun and let little Gideon and Zoe splash about in the protection of a rock-enclosed wading pool. But today as the cool wind bore down, there was just Harcourt and a few cantankerous seagulls squabbling over food scraps that had been blown from an overloaded rubbish bin. The beach’s gentrification from working class grittiness to upwardly mobile young professionals’ playground was unrelenting. For long-timers like Harcourt and much of the surfing crowd, it wasn’t such a bad transformation as everybody’s property prices continued their steady march upwards. He and Tess had been there for much of their married lives, well over twenty years. It was where Jack and Kirsten had been raised and this spot was where Tess, in an entirely flattering string bikini, had enjoyed her share of yummy mummy moments, although all that seemed long ago.

  Carpark, who had a consulting role in a local real-estate business, could claim to be local gentry, having been born and bred here. Like Harcourt and Tess, he had a couple of adult children who had moved away: a son married and settled interstate, and a daughter who had inherited her father’s gift of the gab and now worked in an off-Broadway theatrical production in New York. Carpark had been divorced for going on ten years, something he made rather pathetic jokes about, although Harcourt knew the break-up had cut him deeply. From a purely monetary point of view, what had been a sizeable payday had also taken a considerable cut when he sold his real-estate business – and hence the need for him to keep up his consulting role. Still, he knew everyone and everything about the local market and his knowledge was worth good money.

  Brown’s background, on the other hand, was something of a mystery. He had arrived at the beach about fifteen years ago from across the other side of Australia – somewhere on the coast north of Perth, Geraldton maybe, after a relationship breakdown. So there was an ex-wife and child of whom he never spoke and Harcourt and Carpark had learned better than to ask. Most surfers who fled went the other way – from city to country. His reputation as a fearless big wave rider endowed him with a bit of a profile in certain surfing circles, although this was something he had hardly encouraged. The story went that he had first displayed this reckless disposition on the big and remote waves of northern Western Australia’s desert points and offshore reefs that back then most surfers on the east coast, thousands of kilometres away in distance and mindset, knew next to nothing about. Now he had his backyard business making surfboards for a mainly local crowd who were guaranteed a quality product at a reasonable price.

  It was to his friend’s place, up a side street, a couple of blocks from the beach, that Harcourt made his way. This part of the neighbourhood was zoned for light commercial and retail development. Dumped in with small businesses, everything from car repair yards to cheap boutiques and backyard operations such as Brown’s, was a mix of shabby housing in serious need of repair that sheltered low-rent backpackers, who cohabitated like the many cockroaches that had long ago overrun these places. It was only a matter of time before the local council, urged on by its developer mates, moved to change the zoning. This would surely be followed by some sleight-of-hand consolidation and quick sprucing up before selling off the lot at ridiculously inflated prices.

  The door to Brown’s work shed was closed from the inside and Harcourt had to bash on it several times before the sound of an electric planer ground to a halt and Brown pulled the inside bolt. He didn’t like being disturbed when he was working on a board and had a look that suggested as much. But seeing it was Harcourt, he simply ushered him inside. The shed’s floor was coated in white foam dust, the shavings from numerous polyurethane blanks, or a board’s inner core, one of which Brown was in the middle of working on. The dust had settled everywhere, including on Brown, who wore safety glasses as well as a mask over his nose and mouth. An extraction fan whirred away in the shed’s wall and removed at least a share of the floating particles. The irony was that, as the basic piece of equipment for an activity that was supposed to be about the great outdoors and all things healthy and natural, a surfboard was the product of a dirty, poisonous industry.

  In most board-making operations, even the smaller ones, the shaping followed by the glassing and finishing were usually separate jobs attended to by specialists. But for Brown, it was all him – including sweeping up the foam dust from the floor every now and then. Surfboard-making remained one of the few cottage industries that survived in a mass-manufacturing world and Brown was a true craftsmen.

  Mass-produced boards, ‘pop-outs’ as they were disparagingly called by the purists, were machine-built in massive numbers and dispatched around the world from anonymous factories in Southeast Asia. Such places in Thailand and China were staffed by cheap labourers who had never seen a wave, let alone surfed one. There was much grumbling among the old school craftsmen that this was the way the entire industry would end up going, but Brown was not particularly interested in the debate. ‘What will be will be’ was about as much as he would concede and he continued to get away with running his one-man noise-and-dust business in a suburban backyard surrounded by low-rent housing.

  Brown delved into a small fridge at one end of the shed and came out with a couple of cans of Victoria Bitter. Harcourt deferred and settled for a sugarless soft drink of some sort. ‘This is what my life has come to,’ he laughed as he popped the top and took a swig. ‘Jeez, this tastes like liquid cardboard.’

  ‘Could be worse,’ said Brown. ‘Anyway, I shouldn’t be on the grog when I’m working – I’ve actually got a lot to do at the moment. There’s a pile of custom orders – pretty unusual for this time of the year.’

  ‘I need to talk to you about the board I broke,’ said Harcourt.

  ‘Don’t say it – you don’t owe me anything,’ said Brown. ‘That thing had been lying around here for a year or more. Glad someone got a chance to ride it in waves it was made for. Not necessarily to break it, mind you.’

  ‘Well, it’s totalled now.’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ said a smiling Brown. He took a pull of VB. ‘Let’s put it down to experience.’ He paused and added, ‘You did all right. I know you were having serious thoughts about going out there at all.’

  ‘Oh, hell, yeah, I don’t have a problem admitting that. To tell the truth, I was plain scared.’

  ‘Johno, like I said when we were there on the cliff; no one has to prove anything to anyone anymore.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ Harcourt laughed. ‘But it’s li
ke you have to prove something.’

  ‘Well, that’s just me,’ said Brown. ‘It’s got nothing to do with being a hero, believe me.’ He took another pull on his can and went quiet for a second. ‘Something draws me to it. Makes me feel alive, gives me an extra dimension or whatever.’ He smiled again. ‘Still, we’ve had this conversation maybe a hundred times.’

  Harcourt shrugged. ‘If not more.’ He paused before adding, ‘In all seriousness, I don’t know if I’m up for too much of that sort of drama anymore. I was scared all right and in serious trouble. When that second wave pushed me back down I genuinely didn’t think I’d be coming up. The strange thing was that I never really panicked. I was on the edge, but I never went over it – and that’s kind of weird. I’ve lost it in the past – but on waves that were smaller and weaker than last week.’

  ‘Okay, you were scared, but you were also psyched for it,’ suggested Brown. ‘I mean, on the drive down and just thinking about it. We knew pretty much how big it was going to be and so maybe you were, in your own way, ready for it.’

  ‘Hah, the great mystery of the sea – it gives and it takes away,’ said Harcourt. He paused and then added, ‘You know, I’ve always wondered what it must feel like when you’re on the verge of drowning, of giving yourself over to it. That was me last week – but now it’s like a mystery I’ve experienced, but haven’t solved. It was the oddest feeling that I still don’t understand.’

  ‘That’s what the ocean does to you,’ said Brown. ‘Maybe that’s why we keep going back to it, the joy, even the fear and then there’s the mystery.’

  ‘Fair enough, but last week’s not a mystery I want to experience too often.’

  Brown, despite his earlier suggestion that he had work to do, cracked another beer and they adjourned from the shed to his overgrown backyard and a couple of garden chairs that had seen better days. They found a sheltered corner out of the cool southerly and sat enjoying what sun poked out from behind the clouds.

  ‘So now that you’re a man of leisure what are you thinking of doing with the next ten years of your life?’ Brown asked.

  Harcourt was sure that Brown had asked the question with the best intentions. There wasn’t anything mocking in what he’d said and, anyway, Brown, unlike some of the beach crowd, wasn’t a cheap shot kind of guy. Still, Harcourt felt a rising unease, because he didn’t have an answer.

  Harcourt didn’t like Silas Korg. For starters, how did anybody in this day and age end up with a name like that? He knew there had been a Saint Silas who had been some sort of missionary, helping out Christ’s apostles when they were doing whatever they did. This modern-day Silas also liked spreading the gospel, although his was principally about what a whiz he was at working the money markets and making lots of the folding stuff.

  As for the surname, Korg, the only Korg that Harcourt knew anything about was a Japanese company of that name, the makers of electronic keyboards, drum machines and highly functional guitar tuners. He was interested in the latter because he had what was pretty much a tin ear and often used such a gadget to keep his instruments more or less in tune. He had once mentioned Korg the company to Korg the person but Silas had shown zero interest. He was only interested in big boy toys – from a black BMW X6M coupe to a wardrobe of Italian designer suits and silk ties.

  Silas was handsome in that ‘am I hot or what’ sort of way. Of late, he and Kirsten had even been turning up in the Sunday newspaper social pages where they were portrayed as some sort of glamour couple – he with his overconfident smile, she, in a little black dress, a reminder of her mother, long, dark hair casually flicked back from a cool face that radiated a sort of sexy intelligence. All very nice, I’m sure, thought Harcourt, when he and Tess had happened upon the first of these photographs while thumbing through the papers one sleepy Sunday morning.

  Kirsten, at the age of twenty-six, had become a sort of curiosity to him. She had always been her mother’s girl, while Jack had been more his father’s son. That had seemed the natural way of things, although he enjoyed what he considered to be a protective and loving relationship with his daughter. There had been the inevitable moments of drama during her teenage years – a succession of spotty-faced, idiotic boyfriends, along with a gang of catty girlfriends who had encouraged a bout of marijuana smoking and pill-popping. While retaining her feisty nature and coming to realise her sexual potency where men were concerned, she left most of the dumb stuff behind and finished high school before embarking on an okay arts degree, majoring in media, and landing a junior reporting job on the paper where Harcourt had worked. Yes, there was nepotism involved which dated back to a time when he had some clout within the paper’s hierarchy. Over a couple of years Kirsten had worked on a number of rounds, from politics to crime, that revealed a good, steady reporting and writing style and an innate ability to give a story an edge.

  Then she had been offered a job as editor on an upmarket women’s magazine and, to Harcourt’s surprise, she’d taken it. He’d assumed she was interested in serious news and that would be her calling, but she wanted to get ahead – and in a hurry.

  ‘In another ten years newspapers won’t exist,’ she’d proclaimed.

  ‘What about magazines?’ Harcourt had countered. ‘They’re dead trees too.’

  Kirsten had given him one of her looks and said magazines had more going for them than general newspapers and her publication was engaging its audience with all sorts of ventures into online and social media.

  Now a year on he could only admit she had made the right decision and was a rising star with regular appearances on radio, TV chat shows and in the blogosphere where she championed her generation’s point of view on everything from boob jobs to how to forge peace in the Middle East.

  Kirsten and Silas arrived almost an hour late for the barbecue Tess had arranged the week before. Despite the southerly change, the night turned out to be mild enough to stay sitting out in the back garden after the meal was done and the conversation, like the wine, continued to flow. Silas’s politics were far enough to the right to be almost out of sight, while Harcourt’s were lost somewhere in a directionless middle of not knowing what they were or where they were going, somewhat like his working life. Too many years in the cynical world of the media with its endless backscratching and backstabbing aided by spin-doctoring and beat-ups had jaded his interest in politics and the big end of town.

  Kirsten’s politics, like those of her mother, were of the squishy left variety and the pair of them argued, more or less good-naturedly, with Silas over anything and everything that came up, from tax dodgers and welfare cheats to overseas aid and asylum seekers. Harcourt kind of zoned out. He had heard it all before as the topics went round in ever-decreasing circles until they were ready to disappear up their own fundamental orifices.

  ‘Please,’ he finally suggested, ‘can we talk about something else for a change?’

  The others stopped mid-argument and looked towards where he sat in the gloom, a long streak of gold above the garden trees being all that was left of the daylight.

  ‘Why?’ asked Kirsten. ‘What do you want us to talk about? Surfing?’

  She could be a superior little piece when she wanted to be, thought Harcourt. ‘No, I don’t want to talk about surfing.’ He paused, not wanting to come across as a grumpy old git. ‘But everyone has a point of view and they’re fixed on that point of view. Nothing contrary that anyone says to whoever has that point of view is going to change it, isn’t that right?’

  ‘So therefore we shouldn’t bothering talking about whatever it is anymore,’ said Kirsten. ‘Is that your point of view?’

  ‘No, it’s not my point of view, but you inevitably reach a stage where both sides just end up butting heads,’ her father replied. ‘That’s the way politics are played in this country – one side says up, the other says down, one says let’s go fast, the other says, no, we have to go slow. It’s always adversarial, a point-scoring exercise, a kind of spectator sport like
a football match but not as much fun, and the vast majority of people are sick to death of it. Most of them have lost interest.’

  ‘Okay, so what would you do about climate change, for example?’

  Now she really is being a little smarty pants, he thought, but decided to battle on. ‘Well, I liked some of the stuff that Danish guy, the one who wrote that book The Skeptical Environmentalist, or whatever it was called, had to say. It must have been a decade or more back. What was his name? Bjorn something or other, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Bjorn Lomborg,’ said Tess.

  ‘Ah, thank you, the publisher. I knew you’d know,’ he added, trying to be funny but knowing instantly that he wasn’t. ‘Well, he’s always reckoned it would be much more sensible to spend millions, even if it was raised through taxes, on renewable research and development rather than slugging industries and individuals with an emissions tax which, he reckoned, was about the least cost effective way of dealing with climate change while making only a miniscule difference, even if the entire world came on board and lived up to its promises.’

  ‘Sure, renewables are the way to go, though I don’t know about his carbon tax veto stuff,’ Kirsten said. ‘That seems a bit out of touch now, a bit too late. The thing is we can’t wait any longer, we need to be making progress, doing something now, not next decade, or the one after that.’

  ‘But even the idea of renewables having a real impact is years, decades away – and that’s wind, solar or anything else the greenies can dream up,’ added Silas. ‘We need base-load power and they simply aren’t anywhere achieving that and maybe never will be. And then to tax the coal industry out of existence and thousands of Australian jobs with it …’

  Now I’m getting it from both sides, Harcourt thought – the left and the right. But he battled on. ‘Well, a hundred plus years ago the very idea of us going into space and trying to land on the moon was sci-fi, nothing but fantasy. Jules Verne had written a couple of novels about it. Isn’t that right?’ He turned to Tess again for corroboration and in the all-but-enveloping darkness she appeared to nod agreement but said nothing. ‘But a hundred years later Apollo Eleven did just that!’