“Mate, you look f-ing ridiculous, but at least you’re looping more like a kangaroo than a koala these days.”
“Robo, what can I say ...?” I spluttered, choking with emotion as well as salt water and seaweed.
“You could start by giving me my money.”
“For sure. No worries. It’s in the van.”
We sat in the splitty, dripping seawater everywhere, and cracked open a tinny. It was just like the old days; just like I’d never ran off with his drugs and his wife; just like we were still mates—except that we weren’t. Not right away at least.
Robo was a lot happier once I’d given him back the five grand, but it took a while for the rest of the wounds to heal. It was difficult talking about Alison, but at least now I understood what he’d been through. I’d been taught my own lesson in love, loyalty and betrayal and it forced me to face up to what I’d done to him.
I told him I was desperately sorry for betraying him. The blame was all mine. I’d never be free of the guilt unless he could forgive me. That was what I told him, and it was all true, but it wasn’t the whole story …
I hadn’t simply stolen her from him like I had the drugs. There are three sides to every triangle. Our friendship had deteriorated, their relationship had turned sour, and she’d been more than willing. The plan to skedaddle with his stash had actually been hers and she’d worked hard to persuade me. But I didn’t expect him to believe that, so I kept it to myself.
Later it turned out she’d confessed everything and he’d eventually forgiven her. Their relationship survived and now they had a daughter approaching her first birthday. Perhaps Alison’s fling with me was the catalyst they needed … but I kept that thought to myself again, and instead told him I was really happy he’d patched things up with her.
Robo wasn’t one for hanging on to a grudge and letting it fester. We both knew he couldn’t hate me for ever. We’d been like brothers before I screwed it all up. I’m not talking about my actual brothers who were wasting away in my hometown—we’d always loathed each other. No, Robo and me had the kind of bond that can only exist between brothers-in-arms, the kind of love that goes deeper than blood ties. We trusted each other as only those who’ve gone into combat together do. We’d faced so many sketchy situations, survived close shaves with the law and the Mob, saved each other from drowning ... I’d betrayed that bond but eventually he forgave me, and I loved him for it.
It took a while—a few road trips, beers, joints, truth and reconciliation sessions, but we got there in the end. The breakthrough came when I gave him the manuscript of ‘Too Close to the Wind’—the story of our adventures together, a memoir of my mistakes, a confession of the betrayals. When Robo read my survival story, how I’d drifted around the Atlantic for a day and a night, he was moved to admit that however much of tosser I’d been, he’d miss me if I disappeared for ever. We embraced and I knew that I’d finally put things right with him, at least.
I still didn’t know what the Master’s role in all this was, what game he was playing with me, but if he did order Nicole to disappear to teach me a lesson, then perhaps it had worked.
Of course, there were still a few other people after me. Alison was far from happy to hear of my return. She’d never forgiven me for abandoning her when the fizz went out of our fling. Her pride had been hurt when I chose the wind and surf over her company. Now she was worried I was going to steal Rob away from her—ironic really. She knew how much our windsurfing trips meant to him and she wanted me out of their lives for good.
I never managed to put things right with her but we negotiated a truce, as I’d done with my family. As long as Robo did his time with her and the baby, she allowed him time off for good behaviour.
Perth University was also looking for me. I’d quit without telling anyone and left the country without paying my fees. Eventually, they told the police I was a missing person. The cops started a halfhearted search, but they were quite happy for me to stay missing.
My other pursuers were the bad guys: the Great White drug sharks. Robo had told them I’d done a runner with the drugs and that he was as keen to find me as they were. He’d cut a deal with them, paid off his share, and he was no longer on their hit list. Not so me.
To be honest I didn’t lose sleep over it. Sure I’d have to watch my back but I wasn’t unduly worried. Nick Kelly was a missing person and my false ID protected me. I had no intention of getting back into dealing drugs and they certainly weren’t clued up enough to know where to find me: at the coast, wherever the conditions were firing. You had to be one of my tribe, chasing the wind, to know where that was. I reckoned that as Malcolm Fraser, nomadic surf bum of no fixed address, I could evade them indefinitely.
So, now I was an outlaw like my namesake, Ned Kelly. I was a missing person, but no longer a ghost. I was on the road, but no longer on the run. Robo and I were brothers again, gone with the wind.
12
Brothers In Arms
That season in WA was exceptional. The Fremantle Doctor blew consistently from November 2016 into April 2017. Those five months were some of the happiest of my life (along with the year I’d spent with Nicole). Robo and I were on the road again, like Kerouac’s beats, chasing the wind and escaping from normality—from Alison and shitty nappies, academic expectations, job prospects, failed drug deals, brown paper packages, gun-toting Mafia sharks, and all the rest of life’s humdrum hassles.
The Doctor laid his healing hands on us and our friendship was repaired. We were brothers-in-arms again, with a bond that was forged in the vastness of the ocean and the emptiness of the outback. A bond that could withstand the forces of nature, let alone the trivial pursuits of society. We were nature’s outlaws, defying her formidable power, facing whatever she could throw at us, day after day. We existed in our own bubble, like a rock band on tour, and nothing could harm us—for a while …
One night in March we were in a pub way up north—a hangout for blackfellas—a place where the people I shared half my genes with spent half their lives; where they went to get drunk and forget how hopeless the other half was. A sad pub that made the morose crayfish workers in my dad’s tavern seem full of the joys of spring.
Robo and I were tolerated because of my genetic credentials and because our tribe were the only tourists who ever made it up there. We weren’t included in the locals’ conversations, but we weren’t explicitly excluded either. So I was keeping a polite distance, while half listening to their conversation about a political storm that was brewing over some aboriginal land up in the Purnululu national park. When I heard Mandu’s name mentioned I sidled up to the group of blackfellas and asked them who he was and how he was involved—was he well known around there?
“Yeah mate, he’s like a tribal elder. Y’know, the bloke who protects the traditions and lays down the law.”
I nodded. The old fella I’d met in the library fitted that role perfectly. I asked them what the problem was.
“The White Man wants their land. Word is the Plant grows there, but the land is sacred.”
“The Plant?” I asked, intrigued now. My curiosity was met with stony looks and sullen mutters. We were outsiders after all.
I brought a round of beers and introduced myself and Robo. I told them where I was from, down south. A few of them had worked on the cray boats down there and one bloke even knew my old man. Then I mentioned I’d met this Mandu bloke, briefly, in my hometown and that seemed to break the ice. I asked them, again, to tell me about this plant growing out in the desert. What was it and why was it so important to Mandu’s people?
“Well mate, it’s a cactus. They cut it open and take the seeds. Then you see things different. Y’know, like magic mushrooms or somethin’. And it works like med’cine. It can fix yer head straight when you got roos loose in the upper paddock. The tribe up there’s bin usin’ it for centuries. Now the Whitefella’s heard about it and he wants it.”
I nodded. I was no stranger to mental states like
that and had been known to use ‘medicinal plants’ myself to ‘fix my head straight’. I remembered the night Nicole and I camped out in the rainforest above Haiti. I still had vivid flashbacks from that night.
“The park’s ‘sposed to be protected, but when the White Man wants land he just takes it. Don’t make no difference if it’s sacred and they’ve bin buryin’ ancestors on it fer thousands of years. The tribe aint got no way to stop ‘im. No money and no leader.”
“What about this Mandu bloke?” I asked. “He seemed to know a thing or two when I met him.”
Robo glanced at me. I hadn’t mentioned anything to him about meeting the strange old fella in the library.
“Mandu? He’s like a shaman y’know, but he don’t know Whitefella politics.”
I nodded again. Yes, that made sense. He’d seemed wise, but it was the wisdom of a tribal elder, a shaman, rather than a charismatic leader. I told them the tribe would need to involve the media, get themselves on TV and in the newspapers, start local and then go national; get themselves a lawyer who specialised in land rights; win over the liberal white politicians who supported their cause; organise protest marches, hunger strikes, whatever it took to stop the White Man from stealing their land ...
“Yeah mate. You tell Mandu when you see ‘im. Maybe you should be their Main Man?”
I shrugged and replied that politics wasn’t really my thing.
Robo told me not to be so modest—I had just the right qualifications to lead their campaign. The blackfella agreed:
“I mean you’re a ‘domino dingo’ ain’t ya?”
“That’s right mate” Robo said, laughing. “But is he black with white spots, or white with black spots?”
The blackfella held his hand up, embarrassed now.
“No offence meant, mate” he added quickly.
“ ... and none taken” I replied, raising my glass to him. I was used to a whole range of racial slang and slurs, this was one of the mildest.
“Na. I just meant that you got a foot in each camp, like. So you could work good for everyone. Plus you seem like you got y’self educated. And good on ya for it!” he added quickly.
I shrugged modestly.
“Ain’t no way any of us lot are goin’ nowhere ‘cept this dump!”
He made an expansive gesture taking in the pub and his fellow drinkers, to general grunts of agreement.
Robo made a sarcastic comment along the lines of: “... and look where education gets you—a surf bum living rough in the outback.”
We all had a laugh, but the conversation had got the cogs in my brain turning.
The windy season was nearly over when I decided the time was right to open Mandu’s package. I hadn’t touched it for five months, but I’d been thinking about it since the conversation in the pub up north. It was late March and the Fremantle Doctor was thinking about shutting his clinic for the winter. I was sitting in the van on my own, smoking a spliff and gazing at the Windguru website on my tablet, hoping for one last session before we mothballed the equipment. There was a pulse of long period swell heading our way from the Southern Ocean, and a hint that the pressure systems might just bring some wind if we managed to be in the right place at the right time, but it was a long shot.
I was feeling bored, lethargic—the onset of a seasonal depression that only the Doctor could fix when he reappeared in the spring. I wondered how I was going to get through the next six months without my fix of adrenaline. I was a wind junkie and without windsurfing life was drab, monochrome, meaningless.
On impulse I grabbed Mandu’s package from my rucksack, put it on the table, and continued surfing the online weather sites, obsessively searching for the most optimistic forecast. I needed something, anything, to get me out of this rut and I kept glancing from the tablet to the parcel, wondering if now was the time to open it.
Eventually, the lack of wind on the internet became too depressing, so I put down the tablet and picked up the package. I shook it, listening to the dry maracas-like rattle, smelt it, noting the musky aroma, and finally ripped off the plain brown wrapping paper.
Inside was a plastic medicine bottle containing a number of brown pellets. They looked like beans, or large seeds, rather than any kind of drug you could get in a pharmacy.
I wasn’t surprised by the contents of Mandu’s package—the bloke in the pub up north had given me the clues, but I certainly hadn’t expected it to be capable of altering the weather forecast! That came as something of a bonus. When I refreshed Windguru for one last look I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The forecast had improved—dramatically!
The small pulse of swell had become a dark red blob of waves heading straight at the south coast of WA and the gentle sea breeze had turned into a three-star hoolie! I checked the map for a beach that would be exposed to the swell and lined up with the wind direction—it looked like Esperance would be the place to be.
It would almost certainly be our last road trip of the season, but it looked like it could be epic. Hopefully, the season would end with a bang rather than a whimper. I fired off a text to Robo: Esperance going off. Get your arse in gear. We leave tomorrow pronto.
As I sat there, feeling the familiar knot in my stomach: anticipation, adrenaline, nervous energy, I stared at Mandu’s medicine bottle. It had a label, but rather than medical information there was simply a graphic symbol: a set of six lines. I recognised it as another of the ‘I Ching’ hexagrams.
I opened Wikipedia on the tablet and looked it up. The knot in my stomach tightened when I discovered it was number twenty-nine: ‘The Abyss’. I accessed the Master’s website, logged in with my username: ‘Close2TheWind’, entered the name of his yacht as the password, and was again taken to a scanned page of his father’s journal. I typed Dr Langer’s handwritten German text into Google and was presented with this English translation:
In 1933 I travelled to a remote region of Western Australia to study with an Aboriginal shaman. Of all the mythologies I have researched, their’s is the most fascinating. They call it the ‘Dreamtime’.
The shaman introduced me to a potent psychoactive substance: the seeds of a cactus growing in the desert, on land that is sacred for his tribe. I do not know the scientific name for it—the shaman referred to it simply as ‘The Plant’, but I would hypothesise that it might be related to the peyote genus of cactus seed we obtained from Mexico. I took a photograph of this mind-altering cactus and brought back some samples to share with The Group.
The ‘Plant’ is an irregular brown seed pellet that can be ingested or smoked in a pipe. The effects are similar, but less intense, when smoked. If ingested it is very important that the dosage is correct. The shaman warned me that it may be dangerous to take too much—especially if the subject has underlying psychological issues.
The indigenous Aboriginal people use it as a treatment for adverse mental conditions such as depression, and even (I suspect) schizophrenia. So the effects are beneficial, as long the correct dosage is not exceeded.
My own experiments with this Plant have included some extremely powerful experiences in which all my senses were enhanced and it seemed as if I was ‘seeing reality’ for the first time. These experiences are undoubtably amongst the most creative and spiritual of my entire life.
I believe that mind-altering substances such as the Plant may one day be seen as powerful medicines, leading to the eradication of mental disorders, and perhaps even the evolution of mankind.
Following this extract, there were a few black and white photographs of the cactus plant and some closeups of the seeds. I looked from the image on my tablet to the medicine bottle next to it, emptied a few of Mandu’s brown pellets into my hand, and compared them. They were identical. Dr Langer’s ‘mind-altering substance’ was clearly the same plant the blackfella in the pub had been talking about.
Now I realised I’d seen these seeds before—the night I’d camped out with Nicole, on the hillside above Haiti—we’d taken some of them together
! The Plant had opened the ‘Doors of Perception’ for me that night, and now I held some in my hand. I felt like Alice when she found the bottle labelled ‘DRINK ME!’ I was tempted to follow her and the White Rabbit into Wonderland there and then, but the next day we had an early start and a long drive south. So I put the cactus pellets back in the bottle and stashed it in my rucksack, until the time was right, as the ancient shaman had advised.
Saturday, April 1, 2017. It was our third morning in Esperance when I opened Mandu’s medicine bottle again. We needed time to recover after the twelve-hour drive in my ageing camper-van and then to get used to the conditions down there.
Esperance is a beautiful place: wild, rugged, remote, with one of the best beach breaks on the planet. The waves that explode on Nine Mile Beach have come thousands of miles from the deep Southern Ocean and are not to be taken lightly … but it was April Fool’s Day and as the expression goes: ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’
The forecast was good for one more day of wind and it might well be the last of the season, so I decided to make it special. It wasn’t the first time Robo and I had windsurfed while stoned, drunk, or high on something other than adrenaline. Many times we’d smoked some weed, even done a bit of coke, and the sessions were always interesting, often exhilarating.
This was different. The Plant was more than a mood-enhancing stimulant, it was a gateway to a state of altered consciousness, an alternative reality. We were about to open the ‘Doors of Perception’ and follow Dr Langer’s path into the unknown—pioneers, exploring the limits of mind and body. This would be ‘Extreme Sport’ at its most extreme!
Nicole and I had smoked the Plant and I knew roughly what to expect. This time we were planning to swallow some seeds, but I had no idea how many to take. Dr Langer warned about the importance of ingesting the ‘correct dosage’ but he hadn’t specified what that was. It was pure guesswork. So, in a state of blissful ignorance, we crushed several of the cactus pellets into a powder and washed them down with a tinny. Then we drove along the beach for a few miles until we found a spot where the waves were peeling nicely and we went windsurfing.
Too Close to the Wind Page 15