by Malcolm Knox
Father A could get through Mass in world record speed. Nor’-east swell already showing up at Currumbin? Ten-minute Mass. Glassy and building? Five-minute Mass.
Father Aplin had his boards on a rack in the vestry, all built on same lines: nine-footer, three stringer, big raked glassed-in white pine fin. Hawaiian.
Me and Rod wore boardies to Mass. Father A tied up the drawstring of his boardies under his cassock. He knew it was a nine o’clock low tide better than a nine o’clock Mass. Priorities. You go, When’s the evening service, Father? And he’d go, Dennis, I can’t say exactly, but I do know that it’ll be a pretty low low tide and offshore at six thirty-five. Nothing odd about that at all. Mass could be moved to any time, didn’t matter. But you couldn’t shift the tide round to suit your routine. God had his schedule and he set it with tides and winds and swells, not with the fricken clock on the wall.
But if it was onshore and small, mushburgers, Father A give Mass the full treatment, all the bells and whistles and incense and holy water sprinkles and calls and responses and Peace Be With Yous, took it serious as the Pope himself, like he was catching up, making up to the Big Fella . . .
. . . yeah religion . . .
The first morning I sleep in till dawn yeah Mo’s wake-up time. Breakfast together. I wash hands at kitchen sink, make big bowl of muesli and milk.
In the Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange, Mo in a pale yellow house dress.
Push up my aviators. They’re there.
We drive out through the toy roundabouts, away from the camellias and the azaleas out through the town over the causeway to The Other Side . . .
I don’t tell her where my poor poor chopper is.
R—
I—
Fricken—
P.
We go to the bush where my stick is. I get it out the bush and throw it in back of the Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange.
We drive a long way down The Other Side.
—Hours—
Can’t talk. Have to have my mouth open when we drive past a cross street—
Any opening in the curb have to have my mouth open.
Have to have it closed in between.
Lips working away like a guppy
way it’s always been.
‘How much further, Den love?’
We go hours. There’s this break I know. Today it’s perfect, tiny, no wind, mid-tide.
Beginner wave.
Hours down The Other Side.
Silence.
Finally we get there.
Someone’s out on a Mal.
We sit ten minutes. Him catching a few.
‘Well?’
Push up the aviators. They’re there.
Shake me head.
‘That guy on that Mal he’s gunna be there a while.’
We go home.
Me, Mo and the stick in the Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange.
Open lips when we go past the sandy scrub where I left the poor poor chopper.
Out of respect.
There was other kids from school from the area, doing what we were. In my class this blond rich kid, Frank Johnson. FJ. There was Glenn Tinkler. Tink. Kinky Tinky, stumpy redheaded bastard. In Rod’s class bunch of others. The Peterson brothers, Peter Townend, Wayne Bartholomew—handy surfers, keen as, but never destined for the top. Happy to run round in a mob after me and Rod. Skiving off from club patrol, tooling about on the Surfoplanes, the Coolites, having a crack on the loggers
yeah but not
not just me and Rod. Me and Rod was top of the pecking order. Just you wait.
None of them as poor as us. We were called the zombies on account of living by a graveyard. Rod even earnt coin digging graves when the regular gravies skived off. Five for digging a new hole, two for digging someone out of an old one. Quid. Sometimes he had to dig a new grave for a dead ’un. Sometimes he dig up some Chinese bones. Part of the graveyard was Chinese and the Chinese dig up their dead uncles after a while and stash their bones in a big dish in their bone house. Their relatives come visit play with the bones or whatever. It all smelt sweet of the incense they burnt there. I reckoned if I ever had to die I’d convert to Chinese before I went.
Rod had friends, mates and whatnot, he’d invite them for sleepovers to spin them out at night. Rod knew how to break into the bone house and he grab a skull or a couple of shoulder blades, come up behind his mate and tap him on the shoulder. Or let his mate fall asleep in one of the bedrooms and when they were out cold Rod and me hoist the bed, lug it through the back gate and put it in the Chinese bone house. Then they wake up and see all these bones on shelves round them and well, it was Rod’s job to clean the bedsheets afterwards, that’s all I’m gunna say.
•
It might of been fun living by a graveyard but you wouldn’t live there if you had any coin and we were the poorest kids on the whole Goldie. There’d be nights
ar there’d be nights yeah
be nights Mo bung a pile of chokoes on the table, fry them in lard and enjoy herself, saying she had that stuff as a kid and good enough for her then it was good enough for us now. Chokoes made us spew and we only keep them down cos we knew if we were having chokoes there wasn’t gunna be nothing else that night.
Once Rod had a mate over without warning for dinner and Mo had toast and this one tin of sardines for us. Turned out she only had enough for three people and so she snuck away from the table. Rod and his mate didn’t notice, they’re wolfing down their sardines in tomato sauce. I looked out the back and saw Mo go in the graveyard and pick some bananas and passionfruit. She sat on a gravestone eating them for dinner. I felt so bad I could of killed Rod’s mate. I promised I never let my Mo go hungry again, I’ll swipe people’s wallets from the beach like Roddy so she won’t have to eat fruit from the graveyard ever again.
Gary Trounson’s monster loggers, best boards to ride, cost thirty quid new so there was no way we could ever buy one. But one summer this huge cyclone washed away most of the beach, me and Rod beachcombed all the sand on the road and people’s yards and scored a good bag of bread been lost over the years. Rod said we picked up twenty years worth of loose change and they should do cyclones more often.
Mo scored me a Coolite for my twelfth birthday. It cost two quid. I lived on it for a summer. I looked like a skinned fricken rabbit all year, polystyrene ripped my chest to mincemeat. Rod called me the pizza man, cos I looked like an uncooked Supreme.
I was so hot on that Coolite, sometimes at the turn of the tide I ride a wave in till it hit the backwash coming back out, fly up on the bump of the collision, twist in the air, land it, and then ride the backwash back out. Nobody ever seen nothing like it.
But we couldn’t afford a logger. Tink could. FJ could. These kids had two parents each. More than they knew what to do with. More than enough to go round. You’d think. They lived in bigger houses closer to the beach. They hung out in this Hawaiian theme beach hut called the Jungle Hut where they had the best milkshakes. Me and Rod was banned, don’t ask me why.
Coppertop Kinky Tinky learnt to surf on a plank swing he had in his backyard, one of them long ones go like a pendulum. He ride it up real high and took zero-gravity drops from the top of the arc. Taught himself to walk up and down the plank and nose ride and everything without even going in the water.
As for FJ his family had a swimming pool. He get dressed for school in the morning and while he was waiting to leave he lay a Coolite in the pool and run at it and jump on it and surf it across to the far edge. He done that back and forward for half an hour till his mum’s ready to drive him to school. He said he’d of got a pasting from her if he ever got wet in his uniform but he never did, never fell off once.
I never believed FJ’s old lady would past
e him. The ones like him and Tink, their folks was always looking after them. But it wasn’t the done thing to be well-off so FJ and Tink played poor, getting money from their olds and then blow it all on hamburgers and steak sandwiches and ice creams for their mates so they end up dirt poor like like like say me and Rod. I took a lot of cacks in giving FJ and Tink orders to go buy me a sundae from the Jungle Hut and help their get poor quick scheme. Win-win.
And no harm pinching their boards so me and Rod creep in their garages during me paper round and nick their loggers so we could be first out for the early
early bird catches the wave
FJ got this pretty ten-foot logger in solid balsa, the grain of the wood magnified by the fibreglass, I got lost looking into the wood before Rod give me a clout over the ear and reminds me what we’re there for.
Down the beach. We were still too little to get our arms fully round them things so we held on the nose and drug them along behind us.
We were out before the sun. Only blokes on the beach before us was the garbos.
We never beat the garbos.
But we beat all the other surfers. Come sunrise Tink and FJ was down on the rocks screaming at us riding waves on their balsa sticks. We give them the big finger.
When they got them back, they hid their boards inside their houses.
So if they hid their boards we get them in the surf: paddle over on Gary Trounson’s waterlogged planks, push FJ off, thank you very much, nice knowing you. Have to be polite in this world eh.
They had more than enough to go round.
Rod suggested an arrangement:
We pinch your boards, you tell your olds they been pinched, they get you new ones.
Tink and FJ spewing. But we was bigger than them and way better surfers and hassled them in the waves so after a few weeks they give in, and their folks scored them new boards and we had the old ones, and then hey presto they tell their folks how they found their old nicked boards again but lost the new ones . . .
More than enough to go round.
Except for waves. Never enough.
Me, them years:
Walking along the street seeing a low wall in front of a house and thinking how if it pitched up this high I could drive up vertical on my forehand side, right up onto the lip, then turn on a brick and fly down again . . .
Riding up hedges and trees . . .
Figure-eight turns off chainlink fences . . .
Smashing the lip of a billboard . . .
Opening and closing me mouth when I crossed a driveway or a street.
Sam was on the way out by then and Mo got us a new mutt. We were hooked on beagles now, infectious, and she got another: mad little bugger, lighter tan colour than Sam, name of Basil. Basil the beagle. Totally mad energy that bloke. Poor old Sam, pretty old and grey by then, didn’t know what hit him. Basil always mounting him and shooting all over his back. First thing we knew about all that business: not birds and bees, but beagles and beagles. Basil was a sex maniac. It’s no way for a family beagle to grow old, being molested by another dog. But Basil wasn’t just mad he was cunning. He didn’t do it in front of Mo, like he knew it’d offend her. So Mo never knew about it. When she was going on about how Basil ‘kept Sam young’, she didn’t have a clue what we were thinking.
The other thing you learnt: It was a war out there.
Every week a few more, a few more out, and now there was guys out full time, living on the dole, not going off to jobs at eight thirty and coming back at five, nah these new guys all day paddling round getting deeper, getting inside everyone else, making the take-offs.
Nobody going behind the granite yet where it sucked up vertical, pure madness, you’ll get smashed if you paddle into waves behind the lava rock.
Nobody yet.
But a matter of time. And when someone did others will follow. It was competitive. There was hassling. There was racing. There was snaking. There was dropping in. There was kicking boards. Rod sanded down the rails of his boards so they could draw blood when he kicked them at someone’s ankles. Rod got so good at it he could walk down the nose of his board and kick the tail, fins and all, backwards at someone behind him on the wave. If there was competition points for using boards as weapons Rodney Keith Keith would of been world champ.
Rod was so good at it he could kick his board at someone and intentionally miss their face by a couple of inches.
Usually that was enough.
We weren’t the only ones doing it. We were just the maddest. It wasn’t beautiful or tranquil or bloody oneness with nature.
It was a war.
And you had to be in a fury, every fricken wave, to be good enough to get onto them.
And you had to be the most psycho crackpot out there, or at least make everyone else think you are.
Then half the battle’s won.
So sayeth Father A.
There was blackfellas at school and cos you were long and lean with a heavy brow and a tan deeper than the sun this rumour started that your old man had been a boong. You didn’t mind it too much: you were like a flash of Black Lightning on the water. No Abos surfed and you didn’t mind them thinking you were the only one in the whole wide world. The Surfing Aboriginal. Black Lightning on the wave. Freak them all out they think you have black magic yeah
nah but you could see it, way back in the fifties, them mad post-war years: pack of them, young blokes, laughing and joking the way they always was, passing round a bottle in a brown paper bag. Sitting outside the pub bastard publican wouldn’t let them in to drink with whities. Teach him a lesson they sit right there on the street outside his pub and make an exhibition of themself.
Laughing, arguing, laughing again.
Then this tough young bird walks out the pub. Been inside with her girlfriends. Sipping her lemonade. She and drink agree to disagree. But yeah there’s one of the Abos she was eyeing off through the window and he saw her too and a lot of eye contact going on while he’s pretending to drink and laugh and joke with his mates.
And then the young bird’s looked right at him as she come out of the pub, the challenging half of a smile, and she swings off round the corner.
And the bloke, the good-looking one, the funniest one, the one that’s less pissed than the others, he wants to follow. Thinks she’s shot him an invitation with that look.
But he don’t have the hair to get up and leave his mates.
They ask questions.
They won’t let him leave on his own.
So he’s got this problem: damn sure he wants to follow her but no chance of going up on his own and saying hello and walking her home. On his own. Which is what he wants. So what’s he to do, leave her be and let the chance slip?
He gets up. His mates get up too. They leave their spot in front of the pub and swing off round the corner. Joking, laughing. No arguing.
One of them, maybe the good-looking one, maybe one of them others.
Him.
Malvern Star, big dippy handlebars, big spangly sparkly seat. Rod called it a girl’s bike but Dennis was in love with it.
Just the right size for him at twelve, thirteen, fourteen.
Then he grew.
Been storing all that food he been eating, all them meat and chips and ice cream and soup and spag bol and meat and meat and meat and even the chokoes in lard, for donkeys it been going nowhere but down in his hollow legs, and then kaboom, one day Dennis grew . . .
But not in order.
First his feet: into flippers.
Then his hands: into buckets.
Then his shoulders: into pistons.
He was a weed with perfect surfing parts, the surfing machine, feet for kicking and controlling the board, hands for paddling and pressing up, shoulders for paddle and twist in turns. Nothing much e
lse grew, only the parts he needed.
Then, one at a time, the rest of him:
Nose.
Mouth.
Backbone.
Legs.
Ears.
Cept the chest, which never grew, just stayed a bony ridge, no pecs, no chest, flat as a tack. His legs and arms stayed short and his centre of gravity low, good for whipping his turns. Surfers built like tortoises, low to the ground and laughable when they weren’t on a wave, like bandy-leg race jockeys.
He was the strongest grom and intimidating. Had good ears in the water:
Is that Dennis Keith?
Is that him over there?
Is that the guy?
That DK?
They didn’t need to ask.
He was the stringy intimidator, hands like buckets and feet like flippers and always on the move, always paddling, always hassling, imposing order and etiquette as taught by Mr Paterson and Father Aplin, going round them, under them, over them, pushing them off waves, his waves, kicking his board at them, the sheriff of the waves yeah
nothing go to waste.
You rode whatever you could: loggers, eggs, Coolites, Surfoplanes, Hawaiian three-stringers, antique boards, orphan boards, cut-downs.
Whatever you could get your hands on.
Whatever you could get your hands on.
In wartime—
Wartime measures.
You paddled round Snapper and Rainbow and Greenmount and Kirra and learnt the waves, learnt where to sit and where not to, learnt how to line yourself up against which agave tree, which rock, which of the blocks of units popping up on the waterfront, which crane, which streetlight. Had names in your head for all of them landmarks: Golden Towers, Blocky-Block, Mary Greenhouse, Nuthead Rock, The Garage, The Boobs, Hair Tree. So on. You lined yourself up and paddled like hell, only needed to think one thing: Paddle like hell. Work yourself up into the state, the state, to keep up your energy, your aggro, to paddle like hell and commit yourself you needed to be in a certain state to throw yourself face first down an open wall: