Too Close to the Wind

by Richard Attree

  I couldn’t hold back my snort of derision.

  “I’m sorry Alejandro, but that’s a ridiculous idea. Why on earth would I want ...”

  Again he held up his hand to interrupt me.

  “Hear me out, please. I think you will change your mind when you appreciate what this could mean for you.”

  I shrugged—what else could I do?

  “Shortly, I will ask you to show me you are ready for this role by confronting the ultimate test—an action that is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, to use Nietzsche’s terminology.”

  I grimaced. For me, an amoral act was an immoral act.

  “If you are capable of this action then you are an ‘Übermensch’ and you will inherit everything: my father’s wealth, the Group, my yacht ... You will be free to go where you like, do what you like, for the rest of your life!”

  Now he had my attention. He pointed to the envelope:

  “Here is my will and all the other documents necessary for you to take control of my estate and the Group. I have already signed everything.”

  He replaced the envelope and the leather-bound journal back in the briefcase.

  “When you have completed this final mission you will return here and sign the documents. Then everything will be yours.”

  I was tempted. Of course I was—who wouldn’t be? I decided to play a waiting game, find out exactly what he wanted me to do, before committing to anything.

  He reached into the briefcase and produced something else. I swallowed hard as I recognised a pipe, identical to the one Mandu had given me, and some familiar brown seed pellets. He crushed the seeds into a powder, filled the pipe, lit it, drew the smoke into his lungs, closed his eyes, and passed it to me. We shared it in silence for a while.

  Sunday, 07:43—dawn at the edge of the world. The effects of the Plant kick in as the sun rises, and I’m living in the present tense again. Time jumps in discrete steps, instead of flowing past like a river. The doors of perception open and I’m flooded with stimuli. I can smell the pink of the sky and hear the green of the grass.

  “Do you still have the gun Pablo gave you?” Alejandro asks.

  I look at him, bewildered. I’d forgotten about it, but I reach for my jacket and reply that yes, it’s still there in my pocket.

  “Good. If you check you will find he has put bullets in it this time, no?”

  My mouth drops open and I’m breathing hard, but I do as he says. There are, indeed, bullets in the gun. I’m trembling now.

  “Alejandro, please ...” I mutter, but he interrupts me:

  “So, put on your jacket and come with me.”

  He picks up his walking stick and gets out of the van. I follow—reluctantly, dragged along by some kind of magnetic force.

  We walk past a sign: ‘The Cliffs of Moher Visitor Centre’. The feeling of déjà vu returns, stronger now. Have I been here before? No, that’s not possible, but something clicks in my memory—a video of someone windsurfing at the base of these cliffs.

  The visitor centre is deserted and it triggers another fragment of memory—arriving at the Pinnacles in WA at dusk, after the tourists had left, and waking up there at dawn, alone. This is another of those empty, desolate spaces—like the volcanic crater at the centre of Tenerife, Nine Mile Beach in Esperance, the Pinnacles … There’s no time to contemplate the solitude though. Alejandro tells me to hurry, in an hour the centre opens and we’ll no longer be alone.

  We walk up the hill towards the cliffs. I’m terrified someone will be waiting for us there, waiting for the assassin: me! I don’t know who I’m expecting—Martyn, perhaps? I desperately want to turn round and walk away, but again a magnet is pulling me irresistibly towards the edge.

  Thankfully there’s nobody there. We’re alone—tiny specks in this vast landscape. I venture to within a metre of the drop and look into the abyss. My mind’s eye plummets down two hundred metres. Far, far below, huge waves are exploding onto massive slabs of rock. Now the magnet is pulling me vertically down. The rocks are beckoning me to join them and I’m fighting the hypnotic pull of vertigo.

  As I gaze down at the waves I remember more about this place. It’s Ireland’s Beachy Head. People come here to end it all, to take that last leap into oblivion. The surf break at the foot of these cliffs is a graveyard for many lost souls. It’s known as: ‘Aileens’. Kamikaze surfers are towed into the waves there by jet-ski, but it’s only been windsurfed once, to my knowledge, by an Irish windsurfing champion. When I read about it and watched the video I remember thinking he was pushing the limits of what’s possible in our sport.

  I feel dizzy standing there, high above those waves, fighting the urge to surrender to gravity ... but thinking about windsurfing reminds me of everything I live for, and returns me to the moment.

  Time jumps. I tear my eyes from the drop, look up, and see that Alejandro is beside me. I stare into those hypnotic eyes, but they’re blank, empty. There’s nobody inside now.

  “It’s time, Nick”

  The voice of a ghost.

  He stumbles to the edge, throws his stick into space, and stands there swaying gently.

  “I am gazing into the abyss and it is gazing back into me!” he mutters.

  He’s going to jump …

  The moment stretches out and splinters into parallel possibilities, confronting me with a dilemma: I must choose which future becomes the present. What should I do? Should I try to stop him?

  “It ends for me here. Now. I reject the slow decline into insanity my father suffered and I refuse his choice: to die like a coward.”

  What does he mean? That he’s not going to jump?

  “Take the gun from your pocket, Nick.”

  Suddenly I understand who I must assassinate.

  “If you can do this, everything is yours.”

  He stands there, on the very edge of the world, waiting …

  Time jumps, again …

  I hand him the gun, turn, and walk away.

  There’s a gunshot.

  I turn round, but he’s no longer there.

  I panic, stumble away from the cliff, run back down the path past the visitor centre to the van, open the door, grab the briefcase and run back up the hill.

  I stand on the edge again, barely able to breathe. My eyes plummet vertically down to the rocks below and I feel the magnet pulling me into the abyss.

  There’s no sign of him. No smashed body down there. He’s vanished into the ocean, like Robo, like Icarus. For a second I think I’m going to join him. The urge to jump is so strong. The magnet has me in its grip.

  I gaze down. Wave after wave peaks, then explodes onto the rocks, dissipating its energy spectacularly. People are like waves: energy on the move, in transit between birth and death. One second there’s energy, and the next it’s gone. The energy that was Alejandro has moved on, just as it does when a wave breaks.

  I feel nothing. All the emotion has been sucked out of me, leaving nothing—no ego, no guilt. The sun rises at the edge of the world and I’m a ghost again, drifting through the dawn, lost in limbo.

  I take the envelope from the briefcase, remove the documents, tear them into small pieces and throw them over the edge, into the void. The wind carries them out to sea.

  “Offshore wind” I think to myself, and a crazy idea occurs to me.

  I run back to the van, get in and drive back down the road, towards the foot of the cliffs, towards the rest of my life.

  24

  To The Edge Of The Earth

  As I drive I remember more about the windsurfer who sailed Aileens. His name is Finn Mullen, a legendary Irish waterman. The story was documented in a magazine, with stunning images and the title: ‘To the Edge of the Earth’1. I read it a few years ago but it made a lasting impression, inspiring and terrifying me, and the details are imprinted on my memory.

  Now I’m going to attempt the same feat. If I drown trying then so be it. I’d just rejected the path the Master chose for me and thrown away his versi
on of my future—literally, chucking the pieces over the cliff. I’m free of him now, free to choose my own mission.

  Of course, molecules of psychoactive cactus are still coursing through my bloodstream, time is jumping in discrete steps and I’m living in the present tense, so that might have something to do with my ‘crazy idea’ ... but I prefer to think that this is a turning point in my life, a defining moment—the moment when I decide to ‘live my dream’ (as reality TV might put it).

  A few minutes later I arrive at the spot where Finn launched. The wind is a stiff ENE breeze, as it was when he sailed here, but thankfully the waves are smaller—perhaps fifteen foot—half the size they were for him.

  I struggle into my wetsuit, rig a 4.7 metre sail and plug it into my wave-board, the friend I trust with my life. Her logo confronts me with that familiar question: “WHY?” This time my answer is immediate: “because I’m here, now, alive, free!”

  I throw the equipment in the water and jump on the board. The run downwind to the cliffs is truly memorable. I’m flying over huge rolling swells with the most dramatic backdrop imaginable, a particle in the ocean, a grain of sand against those giant cliffs. The Plant magnifies all my senses and even if I don’t catch a single wave at Aileens I’ll remember this moment for the rest of my life.

  But I do catch a wave. A single wave, yes, but what a wave!

  For a while I’m cautious, watching from the shoulder, trying to get a feel for how the break works. But the more I watch, the harder it is to get in sync with nature here. The waves don’t peel predictably. They break in multiple, complex sections, sometimes dumping all their energy on the slab at the foot of the cliff. The wind is fluky as it bounces around these towering walls of rock. It’s not exactly chaos—there is order, but it’s an order beyond my comprehension.

  I decide to trust intuition, not over-think it, just wait for a set and choose the one that feels right, the one with my name on it. As I make that decision the horizon shifts upwards.

  The set arrives. I make my choice and pick my swell. It steepens below me as I watch from the top of this mountain of water. It’s the high point of my windsurfing career and I feel like I’m in a video.

  I choose my moment and drop down the slope into the valley. The board and I plummet downwards at an insanely steep angle. We accelerate until I’m planing faster than I thought possible. For an instant I’m terrified the board can’t handle it. She’ll bury the nose and we’ll crash and burn … Then I remind myself: I trust her with my life!

  Now I’m walking on water. Weightless. Silence, except for the hiss of water flowing over the fins. I trim the board with subtle shifts and lean into a flowing bottom-turn. We accelerate up the wave till I’m vertical, hanging under the lip, poised between a sweet top-turn and disaster. As we fly out of the turn I thank Rick, the man who shaped my board and gave me this experience.

  My wave charges towards the cliff like an express train and I feed off its energy, making turn after turn on this monster. In smaller, crowded surf, you have to slash the waves to pieces to stand out. Style is measured by technical tricks. But this ride is not about style. It’s about Flow and Respect. The wave is the star, not me. Inspired by its power, I make a dozen turns (I lose count), taking me hundreds of metres down the line, perilously close to the rocks …

  Then I make a mistake—a minor miscalculation, but here, beneath these cliffs, any mistakes have serious consequences. ‘Pride comes before a fall’, as they say. I leave it a fraction too long before I pull out of the wave and in that fraction of a second the scales of my life are held in balance ...

  On one side of the tipping point: I gybe out of the wave and sail back upwind to the van, elated as never before.

  On the other side: I go for one more turn and the wave closes out onto the slab.

  The moment lasts for a few tenths of a second but there’s a whole lifetime, compressed, right there.

  Time jumps. The balance tips. The wave closes out and dumps its energy onto me. Now instead of pin-sharp high-definition slow-motion, everything happens in an out-of-focus speed-blur of whitewater. I’m tumbled in the washing machine, dizzy and disoriented.

  “Don’t fight it” a voice-in-my head warns. “You’ll only run out of air more quickly.”

  So I begin counting—a mantra to control the panic …

  One, two, three ... I grip the boom, hanging on for dear life as I spin, head over heels.

  Crack! What was that? For a second I think it’s my neck or my back breaking. The contents of my stomach arrive in my throat. But it’s just the mast snapping.

  “Ha! Just the mast snapping?” my voice mocks. “How ya going to sail back now?”

  “Yeah, you’re stuffed, mate” the rest of them gloat.

  I try to ignore the demons, keep counting and focus on clichés: ‘que será, será’, ‘go with the flow,’ ‘feel the craic’ ...

  Eight, nine ten ... The boom is torn from my grasp. Now I have nothing to cling to. I surrender to the forces of nature and count ...

  I reach fifteen and come to the surface, breathless but still relaxed ... until I see the next wave. It’s another monster with my name on it. I’m right in its path. It’s going to smash me like a meteorite smashing into the planet.

  I just have time for a gulp of air then I dive as deep as I can and start counting again—this time backwards from fifteen …

  Fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven ... I hit rock bottom, helpless as tons of water pin me to the slab, crushing the air from my lungs.

  Ten, nine, eight, seven ...

  “This is it—the countdown to your end!” a malevolent voice whispers in my head.

  I’m hypoxic. My vision begins to blur. I’m seeing things—things I shouldn’t see ... ghostly sea creatures ... a broken surfboard (my own?) wedged between the boulders like a tombstone—marking my grave? Is that a skeleton?

  Six, five, four ... I’m seconds from passing out, giving up, joining the lost souls down here ...

  Three, two, one …

  “Zero!” the voices hiss, gleefully. My final moment of consciousness?

  But the ocean releases me. I claw my way to the surface. I’m right under the cliff now, next to the rocks, resigned to be smashed to bits on them.

  “Yeah, you can’t cheat us. There’s no escape” the demons crow.

  I turn over onto my back, stare up at the cliff and glimpse a tiny figure way up there, where the land meets the sky.

  Then the whitewater picks me up and I body surf the surge, bracing for the impact ... but it places me gently onto a smooth ledge. I wait for the next wave to crush me ... but it never comes!

  There’s a lull in the sets. For several minutes Aileens is as flat as a lagoon. The ocean has spared me. My breathing gradually becomes normal. Feeling returns to my numb limbs. The voices have gone. Emotion floods back in to fill the void. I check myself for damage. My wetsuit is shredded. Cut and bruised skin shows through the rips, but nothing is broken.

  What about my friend? I look around, expecting to find her in pieces but miraculously she’s been spared as well. The rig is destroyed but the board is sitting on the ledge beside me, intact, having used up another of her nine lives. I run my hand over her, checking there’s no damage, thanking the gods of the ocean.

  Then I unplug the wrecked rig and throw it into the sea as a peace offering—a sacrifice to appease them. I remember doing the same thing in Geraldton the night I faked my disappearance. That was the end of Malcolm Fraser and the start of my journey here—to the ledge at the edge of the earth. Now this is the end of another chapter and the start of ... what?

  I’m not sure how long I sat there, trying to answer that question—long enough for the effects of the Plant to dissipate and time to return to normality. It was like waking up onboard the Abyss. I’d survived, again, and now I had a future to contemplate.

  The tide was ebbing, leaving my ledge high and dry. The magazine article had mentioned a last resort exit strategy fo
r Finn—a goat track leading back up the cliff. I looked around and there it was, steep and slippery, but definitely climbable.

  I grabbed my board, but those bold, black 3D letters confronted me with the same old question: ‘WHY?’ I couldn’t move on without an answer. I sat down again, gazed at the logo and thought about it.

  I’d been drifting through life when the Master had rescued me. The past two years had been a search for a goal worth pursuing. I’d rejected the path he’d chosen for me and I was in control of my own destiny again … So, what now?

  Well, I quite liked the idea of staying there for a while—not right there on my ledge, but in Ireland. I felt at home in the Emerald Isle. After all, I had family connections—it was in my blood. Spectacular beaches, wind, world-class waves, friendly locals, Guinness, wildly exuberant music, the craic ... What more could you possibly want, Nick?

  Travel maybe? (and perhaps a bit less of the soft rain and troubled politics). I could imagine making Ireland my base for a while, but I’d always be a drifter, permanently in transit. The grass may be greener here but I still had the urge to see the rest of the world and I had unfinished business in El Médano and Cabarete. So, stick around for a while, chase a few storms, ride a few waves, enjoy the craic ... and then hit the road again?

  It was a good plan, but I had to find something more in my life—something, or somebody, to love. I’d been a loner, a ghost, for too long. I’d put things right with Robo but then the bloody eejit had gone and died on me! There was Nicole, of course, and Mandu ... They’d all left an aching hole in me. It was time to find another soulmate, no question about that.

  But it wasn’t the only answer. I needed a dream to follow. My brief experience as an entrepreneur and activist had proved that to me. For a while, back in Australia, I’d been a contender—somebody who mattered, somebody whose energy might not just vanish when their wave broke. Perhaps I could find something similar here in Ireland?