The Life

by Malcolm Knox

  ‘He looked into the Pacific and the Pacific looked back into him.’

  Malcolm Knox’s remarkable fourth novel tells the story of champion surfer, Dennis Keith, from inside the very heart of the fame and madness that is The Life.

  Now bloated and paranoid, Dennis Keith is holed up in his mother’s retirement village, shuffling to the shop for a pine-lime Splice every day, barely existing behind his aviator sunglasses and crazy OCD rules, and trying not to think about the waves he’d made his own and the breaks he’d once ruled like a god. Years before he’d been robbed of the world title that had his name on it—and then drugs, his brother, and the disappearance of his girlfriend had done the rest. Out of the blue, a young would-be biographer comes knocking and stirs up memories Dennis thought he’d buried for good. It takes Dennis a while to realise she’s not there to write his story at all.

  Daring, ambitious, dazzling, The Life is also as real as it gets—a searing, beautiful novel about fame and ambition and the price that must sometimes be paid for reaching too high.

  First published in 2011

  Copyright © Malcolm Knox 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory board.

  Allen & Unwin Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74237 299 0

  Internal design by Phil Campbell

  Set in 11.75/14.3 pt Bembo Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney

  eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  For Lyn Tranter

  He sleeps with the radio on, all-night news services.

  BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle Radio, National Public Radio, news in pulses, markets, terror, earthquake, war, numbers, old voices, waves of words cart him through the night. He is dark but his dreams speak from daytime.

  He likes the radio even when he is asleep.

  Most of all when he is asleep.

  From the word sea he fishes his up time, no alarm clock needed, early riser, alarm set inside him—

  Now: Here he comes this man—

  All in how you get up, all in how you plant the feet . . .

  Paddle paddle paddle and push, Go . . .

  He levers his fat legs, knee-free tubes, hairy calves off the horizontal and up . . .

  . . . plants his feet perfect:

  . . . standing up and on his way . . .

  Out of bed. Feet land in his thoughts

  in his thongs

  sore big toe, stubbed black last fifty years, stubbed by the land.

  Up out of his room, wash hands, past Mo’s room, seventy-five-year-old ladies don’t sleep good, sleep with their eyes open, their ears open.

  Turning a blind eye: her genius. Mo’s blind eye, 20/20.

  Feels his way down the hall.

  This place, this home unit: he had nightmares they’d of looked like this box him and Mo live in: blond brick, two bedrooms in a row of identikits built to confuse, who knows how the oldies find their way home from the dining hall.

  Galley kitchen, bathroom with rails, bedrooms with rails, tidy garden, concrete steps. With a rail.

  He is living in a retirement village. The Great One living in a retirement village.

  Depends what you mean

  by retirement eh.

  Snug two-bed unit with rails. Rails aren’t even metal, they’re white plastic. Wouldn’t hold him up if he fell on them. Diagonal security grilles on all the windows, all the doors, the screens. They’ve buggered up his diagonals, his lines he lives by, diagonals and perpendiculars, buggered up by security grilles, brown aluminium, every edge doing him wrong—

  Yeah this is where he’s living.

  Depends what you mean

  by living.

  Yeah and so then this day you come in the kitchen and Mo sitting there with her and it’s a bird, and you see Mo hates her cos Mo’s blue pouchy pebbles are bright with charm but dull too, eyes like used Christmas glitter, and she’s serving Arnott’s Assorted and real leaf tea and acting like the bird’s here to marry her boy.

  How you know Mo hates the BFO:

  Her bright friendly eyes: if looks could kill.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The Great Man just come in from a walk to the milk bar. Pine-lime Splice and Burger Rings. Morning tea. Got asked for an autograph. Told the grom I wasn’t Dennis Keith, though people pick me for him all the time.

  How’s about ya do his autograph and be him anyway, the kid’s gone.

  And why would I want to do that? I’ve gone. I wouldn’t want to be him even if I was him, so why would I want to be him when I’m not?

  He’s a legend, the kid goes.

  Yeah, I go. Like King Arthur.

  You are him eh.

  Nah, some other kid come up drag his mate away. DK died yonks back.

  ‘I’m from Surfer,’ this bird goes. ‘The mag.’

  We’re sitting at the melamine kitchen table in the retirement home unit. I am fifty-eight years old and eighteen stone. I am Dennis Keith, still

  sort of.

  ‘Right,’ I go. ‘Surfer.’

  Girl looks at Mo. Mo looks at her biscuits.

  ‘Not Surfing?’ I go. Sitting in the middle of the kitchen at the end of the melamine table from the old house, DK’s last sea anchor.

  ‘No,’ the girl almost laughs, nervy. ‘Not Surfing. Surfer. Why, has Surfing got you lined up for a feature interview as well?’

  Get up wash hands in the kitchen sink. You don’t like the diagonals of this sink.

  Grunt: ‘Have you got me lined up for an interview?’

  Have you, interview? Vyou, intervyou? Stop it DK wash your hands siddown.

  Mo just squats there like Buddha her end of the melamine table and explains. How I should remember, Surfer called and called and begged and begged, it’s the thirtieth anniversary of the Straight Talk Tyres, the famous day of days, and they know DK don’t give interviews but they begged and begged and when all was lost they begged again . . .

  ‘What’s in it for us?’ I drop in on her

  yeah as if I’d remember and she knows that

  Mo knows the score: we don’t give our story away. We say no polite: no thanks. Then they ask again we don’t say it polite. Keeps things simpler. In the early days back in them late eighties when people was starting up all that Where Is DK Now?, I wasn’t available to say no. I was ‘incapacitated’, she meant to say, except what she said was, I was ‘decapitated’. When they come knocking—them magazines, biographers, movie scouts, so-called TV producers—Mo tell them ‘speak to our solicitors’. Then she give them a solicitor which don’t exist. T
hat sent the right message sent it real well.

  Their image: The Great DK, this big mysto figure: enigmatic, elusive. For a little while they dig that. But when the little while got long they stopped digging it. You weren’t an enigma, you were just unreliable. No good for film. Mercurial: good. Compulsive liar: bad. Like if you’d just had a Tarax to drink, right in front of them, you’d swear you’d had a Fanta. Your own amusement, pulling their legs. Pulling their legs right off, like insects. You saw an interview with this movie guy who been on your tail a while, had copped one of Mo’s ‘solicitor’ letters.

  Not an enigma as such, this guy said about you. More like a dickhead.

  By the middle nineties they stop asking.

  These days nobody asks. They know our stance. We don’t want Hollywood or such to exploit us, our story. We ain’t interested. We’re permanently decapitated.

  Not that they’re asking.

  Now out of nowhere this bird, this magazine.

  ‘Not a brass razoo for our story,’ Mo goes. ‘But they’re kindly paying us five hundred for the tea and bickies.’

  Money’s on the table. Ten of them puke-coloured ones. I give a shrug. Mo’s money. Mo takes care of the coin. Mo’s broken thirty years of silence and let in this girl she doesn’t like. Strange but who am I to go against my Mo.

  Sometimes when they asked me to sign a contract or an autograph I do it in this magic ink pen I got from a magic set, which the ink fade out and disappear five minutes after I signed. I never hung round to see their faces when they found out, but got cacks to imagine.

  ‘So.’

  Fussing round the kitchen pretending I’m doing stuff, fixing food or cleaning up but just fussing round really, putting off sitting down with her. Got the aviators pressed down hard on the nose. Wash hands again.

  I sneak-peek the bird. She’s sunburnt, used to be brown hair now pineapple yellow. Plain face but honest. Meaty round shoulders. Pineapple shoulders. She surfs. About twenty. Or thirty. Or forty. How would I know females. Poor kid realise she’s not gunna make a living from surfing so the back door is work for the industry or write for mags and surf as much as she can, same diff in the end, industry pays for everything, calling the tune and paying the piper, and five hundred so we can’t complain eh.

  In a bikini under her yellow sponsor T-shirt and cut-off jeans. So there she is

  My biographer/My oh my/my bi/my buy/My bi dog walker/My bi log roller/Bugger, spit it out DK. Can’t do it.

  ‘So you’re my Bi Fricken Ographer.’

  Sneak-peek the awe. Brown eyes, an ore of awe. White rings of awe round black and brown donuts. She’s trying to hide it, be cool girl, be cool with DK. Many moons ago The Great Man get jack of the awe.

  ‘Just cos you’re a pretty young bird don’t think you’re gunna crack me.’

  And she likes me straight-up eh I called her pretty and nobody ever calls this pineapple-shoulder girl pretty: strong yeah, tough yeah, determined yeah, but never pretty. Gritty not pretty. She’s nuggety and tough and determined but not so nuggety and tough and determined she can’t be flattered by an eighteen-stone moustached aviator-wearing cap-wearing fifty-eight-year-old lives with his Mo in a two-bed unit in a retirement village and will never have a conversation with her when his eyes aren’t on the horizon, checking the waves, the waves, half the time forgetting what he’s saying or been asked. That will be every conversation she ever has with him: he’s not there. He wants her to know that now. But he can still colour her up.

  Mo sitting there, hating the girl. Mo her poor old face stretched into her hospitality smile.

  Copied from something she saw on the box.

  But she’s the one let this BFO in. For five hundred. Things must be tight.

  He gives her more razzing, this BFO. Does his Weird Ole DK the crazy bones legend. Oh she might crack him yeah.

  ‘Why don’t you both go for a walk,’ Mo cuts in all cheery like you’re shy lovebirds. ‘It’s walk time anyway, Den. Go on.’

  Clock the clock. Eleven thirty. No choice. It’s walk time.

  Down the hill. In my kingdom. Marine Parade. Centre of the surfing universe, Billabong and Globe and Rip Curl and Quiksilver and Roxy and who knows what, greatest concentration of breaks in the known world, greatest concentration of rip-off merchants and sunglasses salesmen and the streets of gold brick lay down their red carpet every day The Great DK come down for his constitutional.

  Don’t say much just taking in the sights.

  ‘This where you’ve always lived?’ she goes.

  I take her two more blocks before I speak.

  ‘Live in the tube. Always did. Yeah.’

  ‘In the tube, right.’

  ‘The ones wondering what I was doing when I wasn’t in the tube, they made up stories about me.’

  ‘Made up stories.’

  ‘They couldn’t handle me. I left it all in the water. And so but they needed more from me, so they made up their stories. The myths. The Great DK. The Legend. All bull. Here. This place. Where it all began. But didn’t really.’

  The DK guided tour: take her down Rainbow Bay, palm trees and grassy verges and concrete canyons of holiday units. Streets you follow, streets you avoid, you’re on automatic. She wants to go left at the bottle shop but a certain corner got its own forcefield and you head off other way. The kerb gutter’s been done over with crazy paving. Agave trees everywhere, remind me of me: sharp leaves, roots stripped bare, public display, what you see is what he’s got.

  The boulder at the mouth of the path between the car park and Snapper Rocks. Locals’ boulder. Used to be The Pit. Used to be spraypainted with a locals’ warning.

  Now spraypainted:

  She sees me back home. Hand on me elbow work me up the steps. Cos I won’t grab that rail . . .

  Her questions she won’t ask about the unit, the retirement village.

  The diagonal security grilles buggerising me diagonals. Plastic rails on the steps, plastic rails in the bathroom, plastic rails in the shower.

  Never, Dennis, never grab your rails, first rule of . . .

  BFO don’t ask him nothing about The House, so he doesn’t hate her. Let her back next time.

  Day me and Mo moved into this unit was the day I started waking up at three in the morning and riding to The Other Side.

  He can’t remember being a kook. Fifty years ago. Or maybe he never was. Maybe he just turned up one day and . . . yeah . . .

  Every night he’s out there. Every morning two hours before dawn. Nobody sees him. He tries not to see himself, lumbering fat old kook.

  Goes out there every night or

  or morning yeah that black cold hour too late for night too early for dawn.

  Hour when the cops come drag you off.

  Out in the dark his chopper in the garage with the Daihatsu Charades and Toyota Camrys and Mazda 3s and Hyundais them safe little toy cars, then yeah this one Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange . . .

  Grabs his chopper by the throat walks it up the driveway, rode it when he was twelve years old and eight stone, rides it now he’s fifty-eight and eighteen.

  Never lost this one. Never loses nothing.

  His fat legs, knee-free tubes fold round the wheels and he’s off in the dark out the gates, away, he’s out, busted free, breakout! Thongs pump through the retirement roads and roundabouts, his mouth opens and shuts round each cross street, he’s on his highway and zips through shops and past servo and on causeway and out of town, out of here, over the river and now his nostrils open to the night-time stink of onshore salt and mangroves and frogs, life at last, he can smell frogs and it’s deeper than dark, the darkest dark where nobody won’t never see him . . .

  The lights of town a long way behind, The Great One doesn’t throw no shadow in the shadows, big b
lob on a pushbike in his sleeping T-shirt and his sleeping boardshorts and his thongs, and he’s off scot-free

  yeah.

  He homes in on the stick hidden in trees, the stick in the sticks. The nest.

  Parks the Malvern Star, leans it in the scrub and pulls out stick.

  Moonlight on fibreglass.

  A bird scoots.

  Tinkle behind him as the chopper falls on a root.

  Yeah but

  but what he hears is tomorrow’s swell through the scrub over the dune, through the sea grass, over the dune down the path across the open stretch, up the channel . . .

  He’s here. On The Other Side. Where no-one come.

  Only way he can do it. Only way he can get them off his tail, stop them watching.

  The way it has to be, has to be, whatever will be, no—

  He will make it what it will be.

  Yeah . . .

  But he can’t be watched.

  Steps into the ink.

  Creatures blindness fear.

  No:

  memories.

  Paddles into yesterdays.

  Makes ripples with his hands and sees Hawaii, North Shore, Sunset, waves the same no matter how big or small.

  Or like Lisa said: you see waves you see music . . .

  Beneath him the board half sinks, poor old stick wondering what’s it done wrong to end up here under an eighteen-stone kook.

  Puts his fat hands under his big round boobs, should get a bra, wonder the boys don’t wolf-whistle him down the beach, or maybe they do.

  Maybe they do yeah.

  Pushes up to sit and for a sec thinks he’s got it at last, but nah not this time, over we go, a wobble and a check and over we go . . .

  Can’t even sit on his board in the water. Can’t balance: glug, not even a splash.

  Weeks of nights he spends paddling trying to sit up but over he goes.

  Brings him to tears.

  Stick squirts out towards the bank. He wades over, bungs it under his chest paddles back in water so shallow his toes scrape on the slimy bottom . . .