by Tim Winton
I shrugged, crosslegged on the boards. I sipped the coffee without pleasure. I was still a tea man. It was quiet for a while and when I looked over she was staring out across the roo paddock. There were dark smudges around her eyes and her hair was greasy. The suture line on her knee was vivid.
How did the operation go? I asked.
No dice. I guess it was worth a shot.
I saw that photo of you. It’s radical.
Well, she said too brightly. That’s one for the archives now, isn’t it?
I didn’t know how to respond. The only things you could say were stupid.
Well, here we are, Pikelet. We’re both abandoned.
He didn’t tell you anything?
He left a note.
But he knew when you’d be back?
She nodded. Way to go, Sando.
So, what’ll you do?
Oh, she said. I’ll sit here and be pissed at him. What else am I gonna do? A few weeks he’ll be back, all smiles, full of stories. Normally I wouldn’t care so much, you know. But I could have done with some . . . well, some help. And you?
Me?
The lone musketeer.
I shrugged again, reminded of my humiliation.
You couldn’t have gone anyway, she said. You got school and stuff. What are you, fifteen?
In a few weeks.
Your time’ll come.
He coulda told me, I said. I was here every day and he coulda said.
Guru shit and bad manners are pretty much the same thing, Pikelet.
I guess, I murmured, but I didn’t really know what she meant. I sat there long enough to drain the mug but I was anxious to go.
You need help with stuff? I asked, hoping that she didn’t.
No, I’m fine. But thanks.
I was halfway down the stairs when she called out that some fresh fish would be nice, if I ever went spearing. I said I’d keep it in mind, but I had no plans to be back.
The dog followed me all the way out to the road and stood in the drive while I pedalled off. It looked at me dolefully, as though I’d abandoned it to its grim mistress.
For weeks I smarted with a feeling of having been overlooked – forsaken, unchosen – and the shock of it was all the greater because of how much I’d lately come to imagine an advantage over Loonie. I thought Sando and I had a special bond, a kind of intellectual interest, something Loonie, for all his animal energy, couldn’t match. And now I felt like such an idiot.
I left for school and returned again sullen enough to irritate the old folks. At night in bed I conjured up the knowing smile Margaret Myers shot me that day in the pub and I jerked off morosely while the wind poured through the trees and the house creaked on its stumps.
Queenie took up with the captain of the school football team. He had a car, and sideburns like Peter Fonda.
At day’s end I slumped in the bus, overcome by ordinariness.
Some evenings I swam in the river where the primaryschoolers bombed off the old plank. Once or twice I clung to roots on the bottom and deluded myself into thinking that up on the surface the little kids’ wonder was turning to panic, but I doubt anybody even remembered I was there.
The next Saturday, I surfed the Point with the Angelus crew who seemed a little leery of me, but Sunday was hot and the sea mirror-flat so I spent the hours spearing fish behind the headland. I filled a hessian sack with queenies, harlequins and boarfish, and it was some business humping it back with my gear to the bike. Well before I drew up at the Sandersons’ drive I knew I had no hope of riding the full bag home. I didn’t want to go up there. But I couldn’t bring myself to start slinging good fish into the bush.
Eva seemed unusually pleased to see me. While I filleted the snapper in the shade of the killing tree she came downstairs with Cokes. Her leg was strapped and her limp was still severe, but she seemed more sanguine than I’d seen her for a while. I cut the red meat from the fish’s shoulder and gave it to the dog. Eva sat in the shade and passed me a glass.
I had Loonie’s father out here today, she said. Man, is he pissed.
Pissed? I asked. Like, drunk?
No, pissed as in pissed off. He expected Loonie back Friday.
Friday? Is that when Sando said he’d be back?
Oh, who knows. When he’s away the schedule’s kind of open-ended. Seems the old man wasn’t so happy about Loonie going anyways. Man, you can see the son in the father, huh?
I shrugged.
They have a way of looking at you, she said. Like you’re some kind of . . . abomination.
Because you’re American?
Naw, because I’m a fee-male.
Oh.
He’s on his own, huh?
Um, I dunno, I said, tempted to broach the subject of Margaret Myers.
Guess I should feel sorry for him. But I don’t.
I figured that my knowledge of the publican and Margaret Myers might include some awkward details, so I left it alone.
Do you miss it? I asked.
She looked at me. Miss what, exactly?
The snow. Sando told me about freestyling.
Of course I miss it, she said. Kinda dumbass question is that?
She drank her Coke and banged the glass down on the plank beside me. I trimmed the fillets and set them on the plate for her, determined to clean up and leave as quickly as I could.
How can you get em back on the farm once they’ve seen Paree.
Sorry? I wiped blood and scales from the knife.
Once you’ve had a taste of something different, something kind of out there, then it’s hard to give it up. Gets its hooks in you. Afterwards nothing else can make you feel the same.
I nodded, understanding finally.
I guess I miss the buzz, she said. Boy, we did some scary shit up on the mountain. But, you know how it is, time wounds all heels. Your moment arrives and just slips away. Kinda cruel, huh.
Maybe it’ll just get better on its own.
Yeah, and maybe Santy Clause is a Jew.
Stung, I slunk across to the watertank to wash my hands. The dog licked the salt off my legs.
I’ve never seen snow, I said.
White, she said. And cold. Thanks for the fish.
She had a way of making you feel small and stupid, even when she was in a good mood. I remembered again how little I liked her.
The week before Sando and Loonie finally returned, brown and shiny-eyed from Bali, I went back to see Eva. I had no fish; I was bored and lonely, fed up and spoiling for a blue. I was ready to tell that fancy Yank what I thought of her.
Months previous, Sando had rigged an exercise contraption on the verandah, an arrangement of weights and pulleys for Eva to use to strengthen her leg. I’d never known her to use it, but when I mounted the stairs she was cranking the thing without let-up. She saw me but didn’t stop. She was mottled, slick with sweat, so fierce in her pain that it took me aback. I felt a chill of apprehension. But I stood there, trapped by her gaze, all the wind gone from my sails. I felt I’d stumbled into something private. It was awkward but I didn’t dare leave. She went on a full five minutes before pitching back, totally spent.
Throw me a towel!
I was affronted but hapless.
Gimme. The fucking. Towel!
I saw that a towel hung from the verandah rail beside me. I pulled it free and bunched it a moment, then hurled it with more force than was necessary. She caught the thing and buried her face in it. Her chest heaved so sharply I wondered if she was weeping, but I was more curious than sympathetic.
A breeze stirred the chimes around us. I didn’t know why I stood there; it was my chance to bolt.
Oh, she said at last, wiping her boiled-looking face. I need a shower.
I’m off, then.
Stay, she said. I’ll make coffee.
I don’t bloody drink coffee.
Okay, Coke. We’ll talk. Hey, I haven’t fed the dog. The sack’s still in the car. D’you mind?
I went down
into the yard with the dog and found the big pack of dog food and poured out a dish on the ground. When she came out onto the verandah, Eva’s hair was slicked back and her eyes were bright. Barefoot, in a sleeveless cotton dress, she seemed calm. It was as though the storm of pain had passed. She flopped into a hammock and swung there.
I’m hungry, she said. Can you cook?
I shook my head.
Didn’t think so. C’mon, let’s make burgers. I got supplies this morning.
For an hour or so she bossed me about in the kitchen and eventually we ate in silence off the benchtop. We sat on the stools Sando had made from bushwood. It was odd, this making-do. Neither of us was the other’s first preference for company. We were stuck with each other.
Once she’d eaten, Eva became unusually talkative. We went back out onto the verandah and slouched into hammocks and she told me about growing up in Salt Lake City, about Mormons and mountains and her dead mother. Wryly, she explained the business of college scholarships and the startling advent of the angel Moroni. She told me stuff about new religion and new money that I couldn’t quite grasp, and the longer she went on, the stranger America seemed to be.
On TV Americans were so soft and sentimental, all happy-go-lucky and forever safely at home. But the way Eva told it, her countrymen were restless, nomadic, clogging freeways and airports in their fevered search for action. She said they were driven by ambition in a way that no Australian could possibly understand. They wanted fresh angles, better service, perfect mobility. I tried to picture what she meant. She made her own people sound vicious. Yet God was in everything – all the talk, all the music, even on their money. Ambition, she said. Aspiration and mortal anxiety.
It was hard to negotiate the tangled crosscurrents of pride and disgust in Eva’s rambling account, but it gave me plenty to think about. Here in Sawyer people seemed settled – rusted on, in fact. They liked to be ordinary. They were uncomfortable with ambition and avoided any kind of unpredictability or risk. There was a certain muted grandeur in our landscape but it seemed that power and destiny did not adhere to bare plains and dank forest. There were no mighty canyons and mile-wide rivers here. Without soaring peaks and snow, angels seemed unlikely and God barely possible.
I don’t know how long I lay there in my hammock, ruminating on all this, before I realized that Eva had long since stopped talking. A light drizzle began to fall. Hauling up onto an elbow I saw she was asleep. Her hair had dried in a snarl beneath her. The tightness was gone from her face. Now and then her eyelids twitched and fluttered. She gave out a light, intermittent snore. Where her dress rode up her legs were pale.
It seemed wrong to stare at Eva like this, but I’d never been able to properly look at her before. I’d only ever known her in glances, from glimpses snatched in moments when I thought I was safe from her scalding glare. I eased myself out of the hammock and crept up beside her. She smelled of shampoo and fried onions. I studied the scars on her misshapen knee. The freshest suture line was fat and angry, a centipede imbedded in her flesh; it overlaid its predecessors, a silvery nest of them like a fossil record. There was stubble on her shins. For a moment, while she slept, she had gooseflesh on her arms.
I had the sudden and perilous urge to touch her. I wanted to feel her ruined knee and I didn’t know why. I reached out.
Don’t hurt me, she said.
I flinched and stepped back, knocking a chair against the wall. Eva sat up, confused and awake.
What is it?
I shook my head. I gotta go.
Loonie showed up one night while I was failing to do my homework. I could see the mixed look on my mother’s face as she ushered him into my room. She was fond of Loonie but her old wariness was back. She pulled at his strawy hair a moment and squeezed his shoulder as she left.
Did I miss anythin? he asked. No swell?
I shook my head.
Far out, he said abstractedly. He sat on my bed and flipped through the social studies book lying there.
So, I said. How was it?
He put the book down and pursed his lips. Fuckin unbelievable.
When’d you get back?
Last night. The old man’s gone spastic. Hey, cop this.
Loonie pushed up the sleeve of his windcheater to reveal a long, pulpy wound.
Uluwatu, he murmured. It’s insane.
What happened?
Just the reef. That coral rips the shit outta you.
For half an hour he told me stories of lonely waves and temples and paddies, of monkeys and offerings and incense smoke; how Sando and he ate turtle meat and coconuts and rode out to reefs on outrigger canoes. I felt a stubborn refusal to be impressed. The more Loonie talked, the less I responded. I could see it puzzling him. He reached for bigger stories, wilder moments, to little avail.
I brought you this, he said, setting a tamped wad of foil on the desk beside me. It was no bigger than a .22 rifle cartridge.
What is it?
Hash, mate.
Jesus, I murmured.
Well, don’t have a baby.
I heard the old girl coming before she had time to open the door. The little foil bullet fell into the drawer and Loonie met her on his way out.
Things were different after Sando and Loonie returned from the islands. If there was a swell big enough they might come by on weekends. We all surfed Barney’s several times in late summer and even saw its terrible namesake, but for the most part I found myself on the outside of whatever it was the other two had going. Loonie’s time in Indonesia had granted him a new kind of seniority. He’d seen animal sacrifices and shamans and walked on black, volcanic beaches. He’d climbed down the legendary cave at Uluwatu and paddled out, bombed to the gills on hash. Yet here I was, still a schoolboy.
Sando was distant now, preoccupied. He seemed suddenly closed off from me. I began to sense that there were secrets between him and Loonie, things they kept from me with grins and furtive glances. When we surfed they gave off a physical arrogance that might simply have been confidence born of experience, but I felt cowed by it. Now I understood the looks that the Angelus crew shot me. It was how they saw us – the little Brahman circle.
I didn’t see much of Eva, but when I did she was drawn and unhappy. A new current of antagonism flashed between her and Sando. She did her best to act as though Loonie didn’t exist.
A monster storm showed up before autumn even arrived. On the forecast maps it looked like a tumour on the sea between us and the southern iceshelf. The moment he saw it Sando began planning our attempt on the Nautilus. On the Saturday and Sunday before the front arrived the swell in its path hadn’t yet gathered momentum. We’d have to wait for the passage of the storm and catch the swell in its wake. Which meant I’d have to wag school if I wanted to make the trip.
Before the wind had even stirred the trees I knew I wasn’t ready for the Nautilus. On the night the storm descended I lay in bed feeling the roof quake, wondering how I could plausibly avoid the whole endeavour. For two days black squalls ripped in from the sea and rain strafed the roads and paddocks and forest. On the morning of the third day, while it was still full dark and spookily still, I woke to a rumble that caused the house stumps to vibrate. If you didn’t know any better you’d have thought a convoy of tanks was advancing up our drive and into the forest behind us. It was a low, grinding noise, a menacing pulse that didn’t let up for a moment. I got out of bed feeling queasy. I packed a towel and wetsuit into my school bag, ate a couple of cold sausages from the fridge and waited for the dawn.
I got to the bus stop outside the butcher’s about a halfhour early, figuring that if Sando didn’t come then I’d just go ahead and take the bus to school. This morning school was an attractive option. But a few moments later, Loonie showed up blowing steamy breath on his hands, and before we’d even begun to speak the VW with its trailer and dinghy pulled in.
It was quite a drive west through the forest and then out along fishing tracks to the lonely little beach in
shore of the island. All the way over Sando and Loonie psyched themselves up, each feeding off the other’s nervous energy, while I sat pressed to the window, silent and afraid.
For any soul with a taste for excitement the mere business of launching Sando’s dinghy should have been thrill enough for one day. The cove was a maelstrom with waves breaking end to end across it and the shorebreak heaved down with such force it sent broken kelp and shell-slurry into the air. We hauled the boat bow-out, timed our launch between waves and got the motor going, but we almost came to grief as a rogue set rumbled into the bay. By that stage there was nowhere for us to go but out, so we headed straight at those looming broken lines of foam with the throttle wide open in the hope they’d green up again before we reached them. We grabbed any handhold we could find. I felt the wind rip at my hair. And somehow we made it. As we slammed up each in turn we were airborne and the prop bawled before we landed again with a shattering thump. Loonie hooted like a rodeo rider; he’d have flapped a hat had there been one available. We found safe water, but it wasn’t a good start to my day at the Nautilus. I rode the rest of the way rattled and sweating in my wetsuit. The granite island and its clump of seals were awash. The sea beyond was black and agitated.
We pulled up near the break during a lull and stood off in deep water to landward just to wait and watch before anchoring. There wasn’t much to see at first except a scum of spent foam on the surface. Ocean and air seemed hyperoxygenated; everything fizzed and spritzed as if long after the passage of previous waves there was energy yet to be dissipated. The land behind us was partly obscured by the island and a low, cold vapour the morning sun failed to penetrate. Nothing shone. The sea looked bottomless.
Only when the first new wave arrived did I see what really lay before us. It came in at an angle, just a hard ridge of swell, but within a few seconds, as it found shallow water, it became so engorged as to triple in volume. And there at its feet lay the great hump of rock that gave the place its name. The mass of water foundered a moment, distorting as it hit the submerged obstacle. The wave reared as though climbing the obstruction and then sagged drastically at each end before the yawning lip pitched forward with a sound that made me want to shit.