Breath

by Tim Winton

  Nothing would have made me own up to this at the time but I actually liked being in school. There was a soothing dullness in the classroom, a calm in which part of me thrived. Could be it was the orderly home I grew up in, the safety of always knowing what came next. In any case my experience of school was not at all like Loonie’s. For me there was no constant locking of horns, no dangerous visibility. I liked books – the respite and privacy of them – books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free. If Loonie wasn’t around I tended to go unnoticed and I suppose that in earlier years this had made me lonely, but now a bit of solitude was welcome.

  After school sometimes, if there was light enough, I walked up into the state forest to wander about alone. I knew that somewhere in there, near an old sawpit, the Ag School boys had hell’s own flying fox. Loonie boasted of shots across the river through the swaying crowns of trees. He talked up the roar of the cable, the sensation of your arms almost coming out of their sockets. He was forever at me to go out with him before the rangers finally found where it was and cut it down, but I was leery of the Ag School crowd and in truth I preferred to be out in the forest alone.

  Whenever I went up through that timber country I made sure to keep the fact from my parents. It was another deception that became routine, for they were like all the other old folks in town in that the forest made them as uneasy as the sea. Locals might venture out in gangs for felling, but no one seemed to like to go alone, and certainly not without a practical reason to be there. Nobody ever said they were scared, but that’s all it was and I could understand it, for there was stuff out there that creaked and thwacked and groaned. Any kind of breeze up in those karris and tingles made a roar that set the hair up on the back of your neck. You walked around in that crowded landscape and some part of your brain refused to accept the fact you were alone. I liked to wind my way up the ridges until Sawyer was obscured by trees and not even the distant sea was visible. Then I’d plunge over into the back-country where only the morning sun penetrated and I never saw a soul. I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet.

  We rode out to the coast one sunny morning in spring and climbed the drive at the hippy house to get our boards and saw that Sando was back. In those days we still didn’t even know his name. He looked up from the board he was buffing across two sawhorses. He was bareback in the mild sun. He let the machine hang by its cord at his side. His dog charged across the clearing towards us.

  Well, he said. If it isn’t Heckle and Jeckle.

  Eva limped out onto the verandah long enough to see who it was before going back in again.

  You timed it perfect for a lift, he said running a hand across the glossy gel-coat of the new board. Just going down to try this out.

  He turned the board over. It was small and disc-shaped with twin keels. He’d tinted it banana yellow.

  Wax this up for me, willya? Be back in a minute.

  Loonie and I found blocks of wax beneath the house. We returned to the sawhorses and stood each side of the spanking-new board, speechless with wonder. All we could do was run our hands down its shiny-smooth rails. It seemed improper to soil such a beautiful thing with wax and when Sando came back downstairs with his wetsuit we were still standing there awestruck.

  There was only a small swell running that day and nobody was out at the Point except us. We took waves in turns. The water was clear and the rip was mild. Sando skated around on his little yellow disc, pushing it about, experimenting in the waist-high waves. There was a casual authority in the way he surfed, a grace that made all our moves look jerky and hesitant. He was a big, strong man. The tight wetsuit showed every contour of his body, the width of his shoulders, the meat in his thighs. Water shone in his beard. His eyes were steely in the glare. In the long lulls we bobbed either side of him, our feet pedalling idly. We were bashful in his presence.

  The missus says you blokes had a bit of a swell while I was gone.

  Loonie filled him in about the storm and those waves cranking in from outside the headland. He talked about the Angelus crew and our epic rides across the bay. Once he got going there was no turning him; everything in his telling got bigger and gnarlier – our courage was unfathomable, our style in the face of danger something to behold. Sando laughed indulgently, sceptical. He said Loonie talked a good game and this only drove Loonie on to telling him that we’d driven out along the ridges and cliffs to see the bombora breaking.

  Ah, said Sando. Old Smoky. That’s what it’s called.

  Has anyone surfed it? I asked.

  Sando studied me a moment. Well, he murmured. That’d be telling, wouldn’t it.

  It must have been twenty feet, said Loonie.

  It’s a big, wild coast out that way, said Sando. All kinds of surprises out there. Fun and games, for the discreet gentleman.

  He had an odd, dreamy way of speaking and we sat alongside him mesmerized until a small wave popped into view and Sando whipped around and dropped in without even paddling. I watched the yellow blur of his board through the glassy back of the wave. I saw the flash of his hands, his arms cast up. He was dancing.

  Loonie and I were out at Sando’s a lot that spring. We came and went with our boards, hoping he was home or down at the Point, but often as not his place was deserted. If he was around and in the mood, he showed us how to read weather maps and predict swell conditions, or he’d teach us to use fibreglass and resin to repair the dings in our boards. Yet there were days out at the Point when he wouldn’t even acknowledge our presence, especially if the Angelus crew was over. He sat out beyond everybody, waiting for the intermittent sneaker, the wave of the hour, and when he caught one he came flying by the rest of us, his big, prehensile feet spread across the deck like something strange and immoveable. On those days his eyes were glassy and distant, with not a flicker of recognition.

  Some afternoons in the shade beneath his house he told quiet stories of the islands: treks through paddies and palm groves to cliff villages and caves; the smells of incense and drying fish and coconut oil; reefs that villagers paddled him out to in outrigger canoes, and waves that wound perfectly across acres of coral.

  Sando made some boards for himself, planing them into shape out there in the yard, though now and then new boards were delivered to him wrapped in the cardboard of old fridge boxes and bound with gaffer tape. He wouldn’t tell us what the deal was or who sent them, and on more than one occasion I slipped behind the shed where he stacked the packaging before he shredded it all for compost, and furtively scanned the senders’ addresses in Perth, Sydney, San Francisco and Maui. There was one from Peru, another from Mauritius. Boards came and boards went. He rode some and others simply disappeared.

  In November we began to cut weeds for him and plugged holes in his drive with buckets of gravel. Sometimes he paid us, but mostly we were glad of the chance to be around him. Sando was quite unlike other men we knew. There were a couple teachers I didn’t mind, but you could never forget the fact that they were being paid to seem interested in you. Sando wasn’t nearly so eager. He simply consented, when it suited him, to have us about the place. He was often aloof and he could be fickle. At times there was a palpable restraint in his manner, a sense that he could say a good deal more than he did.

  Those rare times we were invited into the house proper, I noted the masks and carvings on the walls, the woven hangings and bone artefacts from places I could only guess at. The wall opposite the fireplace was loaded with books: Jack London, Conrad, Melville, Hans Hass, Cousteau, Lao Tzu, Carlos Castaneda. Abalone shells lay polished on a coffee table, and there were brass oil lamps, his didjeridu and the vertebra of a right whale like a big, pockmarked stool.

  In those early days, whenever Eva was around, Sando was formal with us, even a little circumspect. Eva was often tired and only seemed to tolerate our presence for his sake. The few times I considered her for more than a moment she struck me as a brooder, an unhappy soul.
I caught the faces she made at callow things we said; she could give the most neutral turn of phrase a sarcastic edge, so I did my best to avoid her. All my attention was on Sando anyway. I loved being around that huge, bearded, coiled-up presence. His body was a map of where he’d been. He had great bumps on his knees and feet from old-school surfing, his forearms were pulpy with reef-scars and years of sun had bleached his hair and beard. He was, for us, a delicious enigma. He never quite did what we might expect him to do and there wasn’t a man in Sawyer or Angelus in his league.

  During the last good swell of the season, on a Saturday at the Point when the Angelus crew was over and Loonie and I were out trading waves with them at the very end of the headland, taking drops so steep that our guts rose to the back of our throats, Sando turned up on the beach without a board, pulled on a pair of fins and swam out in his Speedos to bodysurf the biggest sets of the day. He never even nodded in our direction. Between waves he bobbed in the rip like a seal, as though he didn’t share our DNA, let alone our language. Ten of us sat there in the noise and spray doing our best not to stare at him, because even without a board he outsurfed us all. Nobody dared paddle for a wave that Sando showed interest in. For the first time as surfers we found ourselves – man and boy – deferring to a mere swimmer. When he shot in to the beach one last time and flicked off his fins and walked up into the trees, I think most of us were disappointed to see him go.

  I was pedalling alone on the coast road one day in December when I saw Sando’s VW pulled up askew on the gravel shoulder. Dark smudges of rubber stretched back along the bitumen and when I arrived he was standing over a crippled roo. I saw the jack handle at his side. He looked miserable and angry. The intensity of his gaze scared me.

  This is what you get, he said. This is what happens. And isn’t it lovely.

  He killed the animal with a couple of blows to the head, then hoisted it onto the tray of the Volkswagen and looked back up the road to where it must have leapt out. It was a western grey and not a big one. I wondered what he was doing with it. Other people just dragged a carcass off the road and out of the way; some didn’t even go to that much trouble. On the varnished pine flatbed, the roo’s blood was impossibly bright.

  Well, said Sando. Come if you’re comin.

  I threw my bike up beside the roadkill and climbed in beside him. He smelled of sweat and animal. He didn’t speak and I didn’t dare ask questions. When we got to his place he got out and tied up the dog. He went into a shed and came back with a meat hook and a length of rope. I stood by while he strung the roo up by the tail. Then he stalked off to the house and left me there beneath the marri tree. From up at the house there was muffled shouting. Eva sounded upset but I couldn’t hear what she said. The dog whined, tugged at its chain.

  The roo twisted on the rope and blood dripped slower and slower from its snout to the leaf litter below. With its forepaws outstretched, the animal looked as though it was caught in a perpetual earthward dive. I stared at it a long time. The roo aimed and aimed and never arrived. Only its blood made the journey. I thought of it at the roadside, in the heavy thicket, gathering itself to leap across the bitumen. I wondered if kangaroos had thoughts. Because if they did, then it seemed to me that this roo’s intentions might have made it across the road, landing ahead of it the way its blood did even now. The idea made me a bit giddy. I’d never thought something like this before.

  Sando came back with a knife and steel. He was agitated, but honing the blade seemed to calm him.

  It’s the least we can do, he said. Waste of life, waste of protein.

  Yeah, I said uncertainly.

  Lean meat, he said.

  I didn’t reply. I watched him skin the carcass and then open it up so that its entrails poured out onto the ground.

  I gotta go, I said.

  Wait, he said. Take some home to your oldies.

  I stood there grimly, shrinking from him a little. He seemed to know how to butcher a beast but it was obvious that he was from the city. Otherwise he’d have known that my oldies wouldn’t eat roo meat in a million years. We didn’t even have a dog we could feed it to. Kangaroo was like rabbit; it was what you ate when you were poor and hopeless, and you sure as hell didn’t eat roadkill of any description.

  Eventually Sando sent me on my way with two cordlike fillets in a flourbag that I hoiked into the bushes on the ride back to Sawyer.

  Summer came and the holidays with it, but the sea was mostly flat. One surfless afternoon Loonie and I pushed our bikes up Sando’s drive in search of something to do, but he and Eva were out. The sheds were locked and the car gone. Only the dog was there. We waited around in the hope that Sando would show up but it was clear that we’d made the long ride for nothing.

  For a while we sat on the steps pinging bits of gravel at the tree where the hook and rope still hung. I didn’t tell Loonie about the roo business; I didn’t know how to represent the peculiarity of it to him without making Sando seem ridiculous. Loonie was a harsh judge of people and talking about the roo would have made me feel disloyal. Besides, I’d gone riding alone that day in the hope of finding Sando and having him to myself for a bit, and I didn’t want Loonie to know. After we got bored throwing rocks we started prowling about in the cool shade beneath the house, looking at all the boards hanging in their racks, and it was there that we found the banana box full of surf magazines that somebody had left on top of our own boards beneath the workbench. I was annoyed to find a box dumped on our gear. I yanked it out and dropped it on the benchtop. Loonie snatched a magazine off the stack and flicked through. It was an old number from the sixties with black and white photos that featured riders with short hair and boards like planks. I rifled through the box and found others of more recent vintage that were printed in colour. They were American magazines, lavish and confident in their production, with a welter of ads and products and images of famous riders at Hawaiian breaks like Sunset Beach and Pipeline and Makaha. Within a few minutes I began to recognize a familiar stance, a silhouette I knew very well.

  Shit, I said. Look!

  Loonie leant over and didn’t really need to follow the caption beneath my finger.

  Billy Sanderson, styling at Rocky Point. Jesus!

  Look. There’s more.

  We strewed the contents of the box across the bench and clawed through them to find other images of Sando. There he was, in Maui in 1970, in Morocco in the winter of ’68, and at the Hollister Ranch in ’71. I found him in aviator shades and a Billy Jack hat in a full-page ad for Dewey Weber boards. There was even an old picture of him as a jug-eared kid in sandshoes, noseriding a longboard with his back arched and his arm and head thrown back like a matador: The urchin and the urchins – Australia’s Bill Sanderson, Spiny Reef.

  For an hour and more Loonie and I tried to piece together a story from all these disparate captions and photos, but all we could really glean was the fact that Sando – for a time, and in places that were legendary to the likes of us – had briefly been somebody. I felt stupid for not having known, and somehow the shame of this, and the realization that Sando had kept it from us, dampened the excitement of the discovery.

  Then the dog mysteriously deserted us and a moment later the VW lurched up into the clearing. We hurled everything back into the cardboard box but before we had it stowed beneath the bench Sando was in the doorway. The smile slipped sideways from his face.

  Loonie and I spent half an hour sitting on the bottom step while Eva and Sando bickered and squalled up in the house. We looked dolefully at our bikes, longing to escape this scene, but neither of us had the nerve to defy Sando whose request for us to stay and wait was delivered with the gravity of an order.

  What game are you playing? he yelled at her. What was the fucking point of that?

  Well, you’re their guru, aren’t you? Eva screamed. Don’t they get to touch your holy relics, read your scriptures? Deep down, didn’t you secretly want me to reveal you to your disciples?

  You kno
w what I think about that shit. I don’t understand you.

  Well, right on, Billy. You finally got there on your own; you don’t understand me at all.

  Don’t be bitter.

  You don’t have the goddamn right to tell me not to be bitter.

  You’re only like this —

  Like what, honey? Nasty? Don’t you like nasty no more?

  Jealous isn’t just nasty, Eva. It’s sad.

  Then she was crying. A tap began to run and when it stopped the pipes clanked. In the fresh quiet, the dog came back downstairs to sniff at us and spread its rank meatbreath around. I couldn’t help but think of the roo.

  Shit, said Loonie. They’re gunna kiss’n make up. Let’s go.

  No, I murmured. Wait.

  I thought of the look on Sando’s face, how instantly he’d read us. Before he’d even seen the mags he’d sensed something different in the way we looked at him. It was hard to believe that we’d been so obvious. But it was true. Our admiration for him had enlarged; it had metastasized. I remembered how we leapt out of his way as he lunged for the box. He stood back with it under his arm like a man holding something dangerous and unstable and I had the queerest feeling of having transgressed. His gaze was more wounded than fierce, not unlike the queasy misunderstood look old soldiers gave you from the pub verandah.

  But when he came back downstairs he’d lost that look. He just seemed exhausted and stood there a moment while the dog licked his big bony feet.

  Didn’t mean to piss anyone off, said Loonie.

  Oh, it’s just old crap, he murmured. Forget it. Load up and I’ll drive you back into town.

  For a good mile on the way home there was no talk. The cab always felt pretty snug but now it seemed way too small for the three of us. I was conscious of Sando’s clean animal scent and the size of his fist on the gearstick.