The Life

by Malcolm Knox

  Bar DK.

  ‘So what am I then?’

  She reckons she’s playing me. Flirting. But DK seen this before. DK been played before. Like a guitar.

  ‘That’s for you to know and me to find out.’

  She laughs again. You know that laugh.

  You watch the kids shredding every wave off Snapper Rocks down the Superbank. Super Bloody Bank.

  Nothing wasted. The crowds! Be careful what you wish for.

  ‘DK would have eaten them alive,’ she says.

  ‘Ya reckon ya can read me mind?’ I poke a finger at her.

  Then just as she’s looking shaky DK flashes her half a grin and holds out the licked end of his pine-lime Splice stick.

  ‘This what ya came for?’ I go.

  Her brow furrows.

  ‘I knew ya from the start,’ I go.

  She looks at the wooden stick I’m holding out. She takes it in her fingers. In Coolangatta, you do what DK says. Even if you don’t know what to do next.

  ‘That’s all they need these days eh?’ I nod at the stick. ‘I’ve heard all about these tests on the radio. DN Fricken A, that sort of thing.’

  Fricken A right!

  She looks at the stick like it’s going to tell her, like a preg test stick.

  ‘That’s what you came for, isn’t it love? What it’s all about? DN fricken A right! Right?’

  And she sits there staring at it and what’s wrong with you you’re feeling sorry for her you put her on the spot and so—

  ‘Yeah you’re right it doesn’t mean nothing,’ you go. ‘All of it.’ With half a heart you wave your hand at the ocean. Dismiss it.

  She don’t speak.

  ‘Spend twenty years thinking you’re surfing but really you’re on your feet, on a wave, for what, add it all up, all them waves, years and years of them, and what do they add up to, one hour? Hour and a half? All that hoo-ha, all that life and purpose, for five seconds at a time? Ten seconds in a tube? Yeah you’re right love, add it all up it boils down to nothing, and you try to tell someone about it and who cares eh. It’s like telling them about a dream you had, it’s got no story, no human interest, who cares. You’re right. Waste of a life, yeah, and for what.’

  She’s staring at the Splice stick. A flashing line from her face. Spot of wet on her knee. No tears, love. Not for DK.

  Shaking her head now.

  ‘I never said that.’

  Looks up at me.

  —yeah but you thought it.

  ‘I never said that, Dennis. Never even thought it.’

  Nineteen seventy-four. Watergate: you didn’t know much about that, thought it was some new kind of wave park.

  The world surfing tour had nine rounds: three in Australia, three in California, three in Hawaii. After Bells, the next Australian leg was Margaret River.

  You’d never been to the wild west. All you could think about when you flew to Perth with your prize money (most of the other boys were stretching the Nullarbor in kombi vans, so long, suckers) was sharks. Southern Indian Ocean was seventy percent sharks. You were so nervous you dropped a tab of acid to tide you over the five-hour flight. You got picked up by a world tour sponsor’s car and driven the four hours south to Margs. You dropped another tab to make the drive interesting. You had the jitters. You had the boogie-woogies. Every time you glimpsed the water you saw a great white. It was whitecapping with whites. Freaked you out.

  The swell at the river mouth was everything it was cracked up to be: twelve foot on a big meaty A-frame, faster on the right. You looked down on it from the embankment, saw sharks.

  You’d shaped a board, a gift, for Tink. Poor little redhead, he copped it from you over the years. His eyes were teary when you handed it to him: a lightning-fast six-footer. You were on a much longer, heavier eight-footer and with a tab of acid to quiet your worries about the great whites, you smashed him in the first round.

  In the semifinal you thought you were surfing waves with the sharks.

  In the final you thought you were a shark.

  Two rounds, two wins. The Americans, the Hawaiians were in awe. This was the DK they heard about. Forget Huntington. Tink was blueing over his board.

  The lengths you go to.

  Nobody listening to him.

  DK two rounds, two wins.

  Third round was back home, Kirra the week after Christmas. Cyclone season. After a year dormant the Big Groyne was breaking. It needed fifteen foot of nor’-east swell, but when them cyclones come it’s massive, walling up vertical and tapering off into a beautiful fast shoulder. It was more Hawaiian than Snapper, bigger and gnarlier. When the swell dropped a little it worked as a left.

  Who’da thought it. They got it right with the rocks and that.

  Kirra was on.

  You, King Keith I of Kirra.

  World tour caravan parked in your backyard: sponsors, radio, journalists, surfers, groupies. Cyclones lined up in the Coral Sea like cows at milking time, and it was home, home your beloved Goldie, you had the collywobbles when you were anywhere else but sleeping in Saga with Mo round the corner and all the diagonals working just right for you, you were safe.

  Heaven.

  Hell.

  No Lisa.

  You hatched an idea to do some serious promotion of Keiths Surf Boards. But when you got back from Margaret River, Rod had turned the workshop into Dr Bloody Frankenstein’s bloody lab. There was boards shaped like fish, like dinosaurs, like burritos, like bloody onions. Rod had let his imagination get the better of him. He’d glassed all manner of stuff into the decks: not just bugs, but pencils, picture hooks, notepads, chip packets, even human turds were glassed into surfboards. You couldn’t tell what was purpose and what was accident. Bloody no accident the throttling you give him when you found him. And it wasn’t just the boards he shaped. There was grot and mess and sheets of glass and hard piles of resin and catalyst and who knew what chemicals. A hot mix had burnt down one of the piles and maybe the whole house was about to fall in on it. There was rubbish and refuse and half-eaten meals and half-full bottles of soft drink, it was just disgusting and you’d had enough.

  Rod, nowhere to be found.

  According to Mo, he was off ‘working’. More like scoring and selling, scoring and selling, running himself out of cash till he come back with his tail between his legs.

  His ‘friends’ drop in all hours and sniff about the graveyard for something—buried treasures. You’d had enough of these skin-and-bone junkies, you chased them off the premises.

  The shop was locked up, out of business.

  And no money.

  Keiths Surf Boards coin, gone gone gone.

  Day before the comp started you get a key from the locksmith’s and went to the shop.

  You walked in and Rod was there, zonked out behind the counter. The lights were off, place covered in dust, and all there was for stock was a couple of dinged second-hand sticks, a few pairs of boardshorts and some cakes of wax. Ghost museum in a ghost town.

  Rod looked up at you. Pinprick eyes.

  Whatcha think of me shop then? he had the hair to say.

  You looked round. KSB: this was all it was now. Your dream.

  Looking like nobody had been in for donkey’s. Crash pad for your junkie brother.

  Well Rod, it’s got potential.

  Didn’t have the spark to whale out on him. You just turned on your heel and left him there to stew in it.

  Back at the shaping bay you done a full inventory check. Rod had destroyed Keith Surf Boards, decimated it, left nothing but a heap of monstrosities no-one could use for nothing cept table tops. Not a sausage could be ridden as a surfboard. You be better off riding a car door than them things he shaped.

  He’d went mad.

&n
bsp; Keiths Surf Boards. Defunct. Should of been Keith Surfs Boards. Only one Keith left as far as you were concerned.

  And so yeah, while all this was going on they were gearing up for the third round of the world tour, in your backyard.

  And . . . yeah . . . and then Lisa.

  •

  She showed up her usual way: swaggering along, straight hair swinging, walk like a bloke’s. Her strong shoulders under denim cut-off sleeves. Her muso mates mooning along like they wanted to have a crack but didn’t know where to start.

  She rocked up at Sanga. Someone’d found the ‘n’ and put it back in. You were in what was left of the shaping bay. Heard voices upstairs. Mo and someone. The starch in Mo’s voice: pleasant and hateful.

  Mo: pleasant when hateful.

  A creak in the stairs and you didn’t look round cos even when you knew it was her you thought if you looked it turn out to be a hallucination.

  Holey moley, DK, it’s worse than I thought.

  Back after half a year. LA, at the airport car park, under that weird spaceship thing. Restaurant.

  You couldn’t turn round to look at her. In case you made her disappear.

  She sat on an upturned crate. You knew her legs were spread, like she wanted to rest her guitar on her knees and start playing to you.

  Singing her songs in Sanga.

  You couldn’t look. In case she was a mirage.

  You left your brother to look after the shop. Phew, man.

  You still couldn’t look. In case you were dreaming her.

  Something I been wondering Den, she says all casual, starting up a new line of conversation.

  You didn’t look.

  How old did you say you were when Mo adopted you?

  You didn’t look. She’d pestered you about this before. Had it in her head that you wanted her to find your real parents. At least their names. She reckoned it was important to you. Even if they was dead. Lisa said you can’t know who you are if you don’t know who you are.

  I’ve been to the children’s services registry, up in Briso, she goes. Still casual like we’re discussing the swell forecast. Trying to pick up the trail, you know? But nobody could find anything. I figured I must’ve got the year wrong.

  I know who I am. I am DK. I am The Man.

  A long silence. You sweeping up Rod’s crap. A destroyed sawhorse.

  Okay, if that’s the way it’s gunna be. Have your sulk. I’m playing at The Patch tonight. Eight pm. Be there or be cubic eh.

  The stairs creaking again. The pleasantness and hate in Mo’s voice. The front door.

  She come back and you made her disappear. She was a hallucination. You dreamt her.

  You was at The Patch: two tabs of acid, a few doobs, glass of lemonade. Aviators on the nose. A smile other surfers took as being smug, mysto, superior. To you it was just the way your face was stretched when your teeth locked.

  Watching Lisa. Her scoping herself in the mirrored lens of your aviators. Her eyes meeting her own across a crowded room.

  Wheeling out her dimple.

  Big night it was, few weirdos took too much acid and ended up running down the main street in the buff and getting took away by the Black Maria. You just hung at the back. Finally the crowd melted and no words was needed, you walked out The Patch and Lisa followed you up Greenmount.

  Where it all started:

  Where it all ended.

  Giving you a pep talk.

  How you never got too close to the surfing in-crowd anyway; how in HB you got too close to them and things spiralled out of control. How you should be thankful that the shaping operations had fallen in a heap. How you could make more money as a pro surfer now, how you could give more to Mo so she could stop the poo-carting and the prawn-peeling and the bingo-calling, the handing-out-change at Funland. How if you won the worlds, Mo’d own Sanga and pay her own medical bills. How KSB was never going to achieve that for her. How it was DK who’d do it, DK alone, DK in the waves. How you were a surfer, not a businessman. Not a shaper. You were a surfer. A professional surfer. The best in the world.

  Then:

  So you can’t remember what year it was when Mo adopted you?

  •

  Not really listening to her. You was looking at her and wondering if you could possibly ever go to bed with her. Had you done it before? You weren’t sure. Wild eh.

  This happened a lot: you’d be with Lisa, and it’s like you’ve never got off with her and you’re wondering if you can, if you can get that lucky, and you’re so nerved out but then you remind yourself yeah, we done it heaps, and that brings a great flood of relief, so you know you can do it. Amazing. But then the next minute it happens all over again: you’re just in the car with her or sitting across a table sucking back smoothies and you wonder if you can ever strike it lucky enough to sleep with this amazing long-haired bird, you’re no chance you think, cos you can’t remember, that’s the thing, being with her is like being on a wave, you know it’s happened but you can’t remember it, you know the facts and such around it, there’s proof sort of, but you can’t remember it, not the actual thing itself, you’ve lost it somewhere in there, and so what do you do when you can’t remember this great thing you get off on—you do it again. And again. Like if you do it a million times, you might start to remember it. But each time you’ve written it on water and it won’t come back.

  She was something that Lisa. Had the entire crowd heaving at The Patch one minute, the next crowning you on Greenmount.

  Where you and she had laid that first night.

  By the park bench you and Rod burnt down.

  On the whole headland you and Rod burnt down.

  Where it all started:

  Where it all ended.

  The way she touched you that night, she packed in a whole lot of new moves.

  Too many new moves.

  Good moves, but too new.

  Like she wasn’t her no more; you was DK and she was Lisa Exmire, big stars the pair of yous.

  She never said nothing never a word about what happened. Why she dumped you in LA. Why she never come home. Why you never heard from her till she just blew in like it was yesterday and started running your life again.

  Said not a word.

  You, too scared to ask.

  She can talk about you not knowing who you are. Like knowing your mother’s and father’s names is more important than knowing what she was doing in LA.

  She can talk.

  You’re you. But who was she?

  Next morning you surfed with red eyes of fire. Keith Surfs Boards! Fuck Tink (you got in his face and nearly killed him before the first heat; you saw fear in his eyes; you never had to lay a hand on him). Fuck them all. There was another fifteen hundred bucks waiting at the end of that cyclone right-hander off the Big Groyne, it was Your Kirra, you were King, you were gunna take them apart.

  That first day of heats they were all beaten before you even got out of the sack.

  Christmastime, 1974. Cyclone Fricken Tracy. Darwin looking like Sanga after a big night. The second morning, Lisa kept you in bed past your up time, too late for your heat. You come to your senses, Mo rapping at the door shouting your heat’s starting in five minutes. Lisa rolled you a doob as you piled in your muesli. You smoked together as you took a shortcut down Rainbow Bay, jumped in the water and paddled straight out north round the points. A half-mile paddle, but quicker than fighting your way through the tents and crowds. It was a sunny morning and if they looked out to sea they were blinded by the glare.

  Your heat’s already started when you arrive in the line-up, only fifteen minutes left. You paddle in the first set and bounce round like a pinball. You paddle back out and jag the last wave of the same set. Tear it to pieces.

  In your heat, some
of the top Americans and Hawaiians. You didn’t know them real well yet. But it was the story, the legend, that’s always the thing to them. When you paddled in at the end of the heat, the Americans were shaking like a tree in the tradewind.

  He come out of nowhere.

  We thought he wasn’t gonna show.

  One minute he wasn’t there—and the next he was!

  He’s never more dangerous than when you don’t know where he is.

  You won the heat easy, even though you missed half of it. You was interviewed on the podium about ‘the legend of DK’.

  You pushed your aviators up your nose. Still there.

  Well yeah . . . but no!

  Lisa was blown away. She said you proved that the best warm-up was a sleep-in. She said you could mess with those guys’ heads by hiding out, keeping them guessing. By exploiting their paranoia. By not showing up.

  The enigma. The mystery. The genius.

  You looked at her and thought: Where were you.

  And but she

  Lisa Exmire was harder than DK

  your looks just bounced off her white smile.

  Lisa was getting to enjoy stories too. For you it was all about the board you were riding and the next wave, but for her it was all about the ‘Legend of DK’ and the mind games. She was American, singing American, working for an American record label and selling to an American audience.

  She was full of the buzz, Lisa. Filled the Queenslander with it.

  Mo just stood back, all broad smiles and hate. She didn’t care about stories. She wanted you to win. Nobody remembers who finishes second.

  Mo bumped into Kinky Tinky at the Commonwealth Bank in Coolie. When she was near enough behind him in the queue, she started the Keith murmur, real low, almost sub-audible:

  You’re not good enough, Tink.

  At first he didn’t turn round.

  Not up to it kid, never was.

  Tink screwed his finger in his ear, like it was bugging him.

  Your style’s old hat, you’re past it, may’s well just quit now Tink.

  Then he turned round.