Breath

by Tim Winton

  Long before I even turned in I’d hear him begin to snore, but it was later, in the quiet of the night, when he really got going. I don’t know how my mother endured it, how she ever slept at all, for there were nights when I lay completely and hopelessly awake while he sawed away at the other end of the house. The noise wasn’t the worst of it. It was the pauses that really got to me. When he fell silent I’d lie there waiting, forced to listen to my own breathing which was so steady and involuntary. More than once since then I’ve wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. It’s easy for an old man to look back and see the obvious, how wasted youth and health and safety are on the young who spurn such things, to be dismayed by the risks you took, but as a youth you do sense that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others.

  Loonie and I acted out the impulse without thinking, for dumb larks. We held our breaths and counted. We timed ourselves in the river and the ocean, in the old man’s shed or in the broken autumn light of the forest floor. It takes quite some concentration and willpower to defy the logic of your own body, to take yourself to the shimmering edge. It seems bizarre, looking back, to realize just how hard we worked at this. We were good at it and in our own minds it’s what set us apart from everyone else.

  Deep diving and breath-holding against the clock seemed a more impressive endeavour than the game played by boys at the Ag School. Loonie told me how one kid would spend a minute or so hyperventilating until he was dizzy and when he was seeing spots a mate would hug him from behind so hard and so suddenly that all the air was crushed from his chest. Often as not, the kid simply blacked out and fell to the ground. Some puked and one even had convulsions, though Loonie suspected faking. Loonie and I tried it a few times. When he flat-out fainted I went into a panic. He came to with a strange moan and a stupid look on his face. Then he did it to me and I went down with a curious tunnel vision and the whole frame of my consciousness seemed to melt at the edges before giving way entirely. Afterwards I puked a little and laughed but I felt like an Ag School idiot and wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. The attraction was plain enough – it was cheap weirdness in the days before we knew about drugs – but only later did I understand the physiology of it.

  It was some years before I realized that when the old man paused mid-snore on those nights back in Sawyer and I lay there for long seconds in a mixture of relief and anticipation, he’d done more than simply stop snoring. He’d actually stopped breathing. At the end of those silences he’d let out a kind of braying gasp, like a man who’d just seen a ghost – perhaps the ghost of himself – and this was the sound of his body yanking him back to the surface from the limbo of apnoea, hauling him back to life itself. Mum must have heard dead-halts like this night after night for decades. How did she bear it, lying beside him, abandoned, listening for his return?

  Next time we went to the log house, the VW was there in the shade of the marri tree and the red kelpie shot out from beneath the stairs. I was fending the mutt off when a woman came out onto the verandah above us.

  You boys take a wrong turn?

  Just came to get our boards, said Loonie.

  Duke! she yelled at the dog. Get down, goddammit.

  The dog took one last lick and desisted, and the woman, who looked to be in her twenties, squinted doubtfully at us. She had ropy white plaits and an American accent.

  They’re under the house, I said.

  Are they, now?

  Red and green, I said. A Jacko and a Hawke.

  Bloke said we could, said Loonie.

  She sighed and stared at us another moment before coming barefoot down the stairs. She held the handrail as though she might fall. She wore jeans and a tee-shirt that said FREESTYLIN: WATCH ME FLY.

  You better show me, she said with a tone of weary scepticism.

  We followed her into the cave-like undercroft to point out our modest craft beneath the bench, and as we drew them out their dings and welts and browning contusions seemed magnified. They were sorry bits of junk but they were clearly ours.

  He’s not here, she said.

  Oh? said Loonie in the bright tone he reserved for indulging adults when the mood suited. See, we saw the Vee-dub and thought, well, that he was around.

  No. He’s away.

  Angelus? I asked with the board under my arm, my body already turned for the doorway.

  The islands.

  What islands? said Loonie.

  Indonesia.

  The woman spoke the word as if it had extra syllables. Indonesia. Neither of us even knew with any certainty where Indonesia was.

  Well, I said. Thanks.

  Sure, she said without warmth.

  Orright if we drop em back later? asked Loonie. Cause, we didn’t ask. Your bloke, he offered.

  The woman gave a wan smile and limped out into the light. Her feet were brown and the frayed hems of her Levi’s hung back off her heels. She didn’t answer. She simply waved us away and pulled herself back up the stairs. We bolted while we had the chance.

  The surf at the Point that day was bigger than either of us expected. The steadily rising swell seemed to match the oily cloud pouring in from the south, and the longer we stayed, the bigger and gloomier it got out there on the water. We sat in the line-up with a few of the Angelus crew, who let us have a smaller wave now and then, but by afternoon we were paddling much more than surfing and the pack was moving further and further seaward to meet the hulking sets. Despite the building swell, the older blokes kept up their constant sledging and bantering, but Loonie and I were silent. My skin seemed to tighten on me. I felt the new mood in the group, tried to read something in every sideways glance and raised eyebrow, and each time somebody began to casually stroke seaward I followed for safety’s sake, and found that I was not alone; we all moved out together. It was as though we became one strange beast, like a school of fish moving wordlessly in unison. There was always a moment when a fresh conviction came into our stroke. We put our heads down and paddled for all we were worth, even though more than half of us hadn’t yet seen the chains of swell beginning to warp into the bay. Eventually we’d see the set trundling in, looking for all the world as if the whole rolling column might simply grind past the Point toward the misty smudges of the eastern cliffs in the distance, but then the shoaling underwater ridge of the headland snagged those waves one by one, swinging them in like gates hinged upon the land itself until they turned shoreward in our direction.

  This wasn’t Sawyer Point anymore. This was outside – Outside Sawyer Point, as the older guys called it – and it hadn’t broken like this for a year.

  I was galvanized by fear. I had no intention of surfing these waves – they were way out of my range – but neither did I want to be mown down by them, so I paddled like hell to scrape up and over each in turn before they broke. I felt Loonie nearby doing more or less the same thing, though a tad more coolly, and I remember making it up the spray-torn crest of an absolute smoker just as some goateed hellman dropped blithely down its face. In that instant I turned to see that the tip of the headland was, as I suspected, behind us. We were now beyond the Point, outside the bay. It was only five hundred yards but it truly felt like we were at sea.

  Other more experienced riders caught waves around us. They flew past hooting and screaming until in an eerie lull after a long passage of swells I realized that there were only three of us left out there – Loonie and me and a bloke from Angelus called Slipper. Slipper had a matted ginger Afro and the bloodshot eyes of a stoner. Two of his front teeth were missing and he wore an old beavertail dive suit that looked like a dingo had been at it. He sat up beside us and smiled as if he was having the time of his life. I, i
t must be said, was not nearly as sanguine.

  Take the next one, kid, he said.

  Aw, I dunno, I murmured.

  Can’t walk home from here, he said with a manic leer. May’s well go for it, eh? How bout you, Snowy? You goin? No point bobbin around out here like a bloody teabag.

  Orright, said Loonie rising to the bait. I’ll go.

  The rip that poured seaward from the bay had become a veritable river surging past the rocks of the headland to spew a plume of sand and weed at our backs. We found ourselves forced further and further out by the current. The sea became confused and jumpy. We were in foreign territory now. The coast to the west was a snarl of cliffs and boulders into the murky distance; there was nowhere to land over there. I considered paddling back east across the rip and into the bay to aim for the bar at the rivermouth, but that would put me right in the path of the oncoming sets and I’d be buried in whitewater. I knew that once I lost my board I’d be at the mercy of the current and I didn’t like my chances. There was no way around the fact that I was buggered. I was so frightened I genuinely thought I could shit myself at any moment.

  Slipper called a heads-up as another set began to bear down on us. It was much further seaward of where we were but it looked ready to break even that far out. In such a depth of water the very idea of this was stupefying.

  You’re not gunna pike on me, are youse? Slipper bellowed over his shoulder. You won’t choke now, willya Snow?

  Piss off, said Loonie with a sick grin.

  Just remember, I’m givin youse a wave. Don’t usually hand out freebies to little snot-nose grommets, but I’m in a good mood, so take it while it’s goin.

  The first wave of that set was lumpy and malformed but Loonie turned and went anyway as I knew he would. The soles of his feet looked yellow and small, and his elbows stuck out as he paddled. I sat, rearing a moment, as all that water welled up beneath us. And then he was gone.

  Slipper hooted. But in a moment another wedging peak was upon us.

  Carn, kid. No guts no glory.

  I don’t think so, I said.

  It’s the only way home now.

  I said nothing.

  Ya mate’ll know you’re a sook, a fuckin pussy.

  But I didn’t go. I just barely made it up the face of that wave and freefell out the back so hard I had the wind knocked out of me. Slipper paddled up close and snarled in my ear.

  I take the next one, sport, and you’re out here on yer own. Get it?

  By then I was addled and breathless. Loonie’s wave was spilling itself across the rivermouth already but there was no sign of him.

  The third wave began its slow left turn towards me. It looked as big as the pub and as it began to break the sound rattled my ribs. With Slipper right up beside me I turned my little stubby Hawke around and paddled. I paddled, I must add, without vigour, and in a moment the wave was upon me, its mass overtaking me so fast that it felt as though I was travelling backwards. All about was seething vapour. I hung right up in the boiling nest of foam at its very peak, suspended in noise and unbelief, before I began to fall out and down in a welter of blinding spray. I only got to my feet from instinct, but there I suddenly was, upright and alive, skittering in front of all that jawing mess with my little board chattering underfoot. It was hard to credit the speed, the way the wave hauled itself upright in my path as it found shallower water. All I could do was squat and aim in hope. Yet for all this mad acceleration there was still something ponderous about the movement of the water. On TV I’d seen elephants run beside safari jeeps, pounding along at incredible speed while seeming to move in slow motion, and that’s exactly how it was: hectic noise, immense force driven up through the feet and knees, all in a kind of stoptime.

  For a fatal moment, now that I was unexpectedly on top of things, the whole enterprise seemed too easy. Within three seconds I went from saving myself from certain disaster to believing I was a thirteen-year-old hellman.

  I never did see the great slab of water that cut me off at the knees. Loonie said it came down behind like a landslip and simply flicked me away. I didn’t even get time to draw a breath. I was abruptly in darkness, being poleaxed across the sandy bottom of the bay, holding onto the dregs in my lungs while the grit blasted through my hair and my limbs felt as though they would be wrenched from their sockets. When I burst back to the surface my board was long gone, and before I could begin the swim in another rumbling pile of foam bore down on me so I dived and took another belting. It seemed a good while before I finally came up in a spritzing froth in the shallows, sinuses burning, shorts around my thighs, and by then Loonie was already up on the beach, grinning like a nutter, with my board stuck tail-first into the dry sand beside him.

  Slipper came in on the wave of the day. He wound his way across the bay in long, arrogant swipes, flicked out in front of the rivermouth and walked all the way back up the beach as nonchalant as you like. But as he reached us he gave a gap-toothed leer, tossed his board onto the flatbed truck and motioned for us to throw ours on as well. We didn’t hesitate. We climbed up beside the Angelus crew, basking in their new and grudging respect, and as we ground up the track a monster set closed out the entire bay behind us, shooting foam against the dunes and brown stormscum high across the scrub of the headland. It was carnage. And yet the swell still appeared to be building.

  The truck reached the dirt turnaround where our bikes lay, but it didn’t stop. We veered west into a set of wheel ruts that traversed the ridge of the headland and crossed into heath country – spiky, wild scrub dotted with granite boulders and washouts. Boards and tools and bodies slammed back and forth across the tray until we pulled up a mile or so further on at a basalt knoll above the sea cliffs.

  Everyone stood and leant on the roof of the cab, staring seaward. I didn’t know what we were all looking at. And then I saw the flickering white bombora in the distance.

  When the bay shuts down, said Slipper, it starts to crank out there.

  A mile out, a white smear appeared on the black sea. A moment later the sound of it reached us. It was like a thunderclap; you could feel the vibration in the chassis of the truck.

  How big is that? I asked.

  Everybody laughed.

  Well, I persisted, how big was the Point today?

  Too big for you, sport, said Slipper.

  Eight foot, maybe, said someone. Ten right there at the end.

  So what’s that? I persisted. Out there. What size?

  Slipper shrugged. Can’t tell, he said. Twenty?

  Bigger, said a wiry little bloke.

  Does anyone surf it?

  Nobody spoke.

  Fuck that, said Slipper at last. It’s sharky as shit out there.

  The sea was dark now and the sky even blacker. Vapour hung in shrouds above the cliffs. Quite suddenly and with great force it began to rain. We jounced back towards the Point in the downpour and I looked at Loonie and saw that no amount of rain could spoil the day for him. His lip was split from grinning. He’d ridden his wave all the way to the beach. There was a glory about him. He was untouchable.

  From the shelter of her big verandah the American woman looked down at the pair of us. We stood sodden and shivering in the mud of her yard.

  I guess you better come up, she said.

  We stashed our boards under the house and slopped upstairs to find that she had some old towels out for us and when we were more or less dry she let us in through the French doors.

  Inside the place smelled of incense. A fire snapped in the hearth and there was music playing.

  Coffee?

  We nodded and she told us to stand by the fire.

  It sounds big down there, she said without enthusiasm.

  Ten foot, said Loonie.

  Huh. Too big for you guys.

  We handled it, said Loonie.

  Oh, sure you did.

  We got witnesses.

  She half smiled and poured us mugs of coffee from a glass jug. Through the windows y
ou could see the storm descending on the coast. Sawyer and the forest were obscured by rain.

  You’re from America? I asked.

  California, she said. Before that, Utah, I guess.

  Calafawnya, said Loonie in crude imitation. Yoo-tar. So how come you’re here?

  Hey, I ask myself. Drink up and I’ll drive you back to town.

  We’re orright, said Loonie.

  Sure. But I’m going in anyways. I guess you’re from Sawyer, huh?

  Neither of us said anything to this and I thought about how obviously local we must have looked in our flannel shirts and Blundstones. I took my cue from Loonie and slugged back the coffee as best I could. No amount of sugar could make up for the oily bitterness of it. We Pikes were strictly tea drinkers; this was the first coffee I’d ever drunk.

  We drove into town without speaking. The Volkswagen shuddered with every gust; its wipers were helpless against the deluge. It felt weird being pressed close in that narrow cab with a woman.

  At the end of my drive we both got out but Loonie leaned back in the open door.

  It was ten foot today, he said. And we rode it. Can you tell him?

  Sure, she said. The moment he arrives.

  What’s your name? he said with mortifying familiarity.

  Eva.

  Thanks for the lift, then. Eva.

  She revved up the old eggbeater and I pulled our bikes down while he stood there grinning.

  Close the door, kid.

  But Loonie kept standing there in the rain while the engine sputtered and gulped. His smile was a provocation. The Volkswagen jerked forward. The door slammed shut. We watched her drive on through the downpour.

  She likes me, said Loonie.

  Yeah, right.

  Hey, maybe your Mum’s done scones.

  We pedalled hard for the house.

  There was always a manic energy about Loonie, some strange hotwired spirit that made you laugh with shock. He hurled himself at the world. You could never secondguess him and once he embarked upon something there was no holding him back. Yet the same stuff you marvelled at could really wear you down. Some Mondays I was relieved to be back on the bus to school.