Breath

by Tim Winton

  Sando? Thirty-six.

  Hell.

  You’re surprised?

  Well, yeah. I mean, he’s real fit.

  Fit, she said. And lucky.

  I reached over to touch her messy knee but she swatted my hand away.

  Leave it, she muttered.

  Sorry.

  We both stared at her scars in silence.

  Look at this, she said at last. Can you believe a whole life can come down to a few hunks of fucking bone and gristle?

  She got up and limped to the window. Light caught the fine hair of her limbs. I stared at the silhouette-curve of her buttocks.

  Why do you let him go? I asked. I don’t get it.

  Because he needs it, she said.

  What about what you need?

  He knows what I need, she said with a matter-of-factness that brooked no inquiry. She looked back at me sourly and it seemed to be my cue to leave.

  I got out of bed, hoping she’d follow me down to the laundry, but she didn’t. I pulled on my still-warm clothes and went back out into the rain.

  For a long and ruinous period of my later life I raged against Eva Sanderson, even as I grieved for her. In the spirit of the times I held her morally accountable for all my grown-up troubles. Yet had things proceeded only a little differently – had she been in less pain perhaps, and more clearheaded as a result – maybe we would have wound up friends, made our blunder and let it go, to look upon it afterwards as just another lumpy bit of history. In the seventies the ground seemed to continually slip and change beneath our feet, but Eva knew better than to console herself with a pimply schoolboy. I just wish she’d shown more of an interest in the particular kid she took to bed. God knows, I understand lapses of judgement, the surrender to vanity, the weight of loneliness, for we were both lonely beyond the glow of Sando’s attention, and in Sawyer there were so few opportunities for companionship, mutual feeling, shared confidence. But if that’s all it had been, a lapse of judgement, one moment of reaching out for comfort, then there might have been so much less to regret.

  Although Eva was twenty-five and I was jailbait, I was certain I understood her better than anyone ever would. This was a woman not in the least bit ordinary. As an athlete she’d had very few peers. Like Sando she’d lived at the radical margin of her own sport. There was a warrior spirit in her, an implacable need to win the day. Even if it scared me a little, I understood the contempt she felt for those who withdrew from the fray or settled for something modest or reasonable. It was this conviction, I saw in time, that lay at the heart of her battle with Sando, who’d taken another tack, a mystical path she now said was bullshit. She relished opposition, yet her only real opponents had been the facts of life: gravity, fear, and the limits of endurance. She loved snow the way I loved water – so much it hurt. She didn’t want to see snow anymore and most of the time she wouldn’t speak of it. But for the best years of her life, years she believed were gone for keeps, she’d trained to fly over it. That was the simple objective, being airborne, up longer, higher, more casually and with more fuckoff elegance than anyone else in the world. I never understood the rules or the science of it but I recognized the singlemindedness it took to match risk with nerve come what may. Such endeavours require a kind of egotism, a nearautistic narrowness. Everything conspires against you – the habits of physics, the impulse to flee – and you’re weighed down by every dollop of commonsense ever dished up. Everyone will tell you your goal is impossible, pointless, stupid, wasteful. So you hang tough. You back yourself and only yourself. This idiot resolve is all you have.

  Yes, we had some things in common, Eva and I. At twenty-five she was as solipsistic as any teenager, not much better at considering the higher physics than I was. And there was something careless about her that I mistook for courage in the same way I misread Sando’s vanity as wisdom. Maybe she was harsh and angry, and hard to like, but I respected her impatience with niceties. Life was too short for rules and obligations. She was all about going hard or going home and if that required cruelty then so be it. At fifteen you can buy such a philosophy.

  No, Eva was not ordinary. And neither was the form of consolation she preferred. Given my time over I would not do it all again. People talk such a storm of crap about the things they’ve done, had done to them. The deluded bullshit I’ve endured in circled chairs on lino floors. She had no business doing what she did, but I’m through hating and blaming. People are fools, not monsters.

  Eva had a particular kind of rueful stare, a look she often gave at the end of an afternoon like this rainy Saturday that made me think she’d wearied of me. I always took it as dismissal, as I did this day. I got up and went. But the longer things went on between us, the further we got into our mess, the more frequent and intense those doleful glances became. They were expressions of disgust. I dreaded them. Nowadays, with the distance of the years, I wonder if I mis-read her. That disgust might have been reserved for herself.

  Weeks went by without further word from Sando and Loonie. A couple of good fronts bore in. I thought about Old Smoky but didn’t go. The Brewer stayed in the rain outside the old man’s shed. I surfed the Point a couple of times on my stubby little twin-fin and when the Angelus crew nodded or smiled I paddled past with a hauteur as counterfeit as it was unnecessary.

  I spent all my free time out at the house with Eva: in the woodshed, the bathtub, the bed. I helped with her rehab exercises and carried shopping up the stairs. In the sack or out in the yard she gave the orders and I was glad to be told. She was spiky and restive yet we still had our laughs. One day we drove out into the forest and ate chicken and drank champagne and made love in the bracken beneath the karris. We played backgammon by the stove on stormy afternoons and fooled with the dog. We made silly paper hats and listened to Captain Beefheart records. A few times I went down on her to the sound of whale songs or Ravi Shankar – it was all the same to me. Now and then she cried for an hour and wouldn’t let me touch her. I told her I loved her and I believed it. She pushed me away, drew me back. I was elated, miserable, greedy, grateful. There were afternoons when I retreated to the verandah sick with guilt and an hour later I’d be labouring over Eva’s shining back with her hair in my fists. I cowered at the thought of Sando. I uttered his name as a curse in his own bed and she liked it.

  During those Saturdays and Sundays with Eva, as autumn quickly became winter, I told my parents the old lies, that I was surfing at the coast or doing jobs for Bill Sanderson and his wife. I was careful to come and go as usual but I’ll never know how well I really concealed myself from them. There were moments when I was certain they suspected something amiss, when a glance passed between them at the mention of Sando’s name, but I always put it down to my own paranoia and the fact that Loonie’s old man had been bitching around town. My absences, after all, were hardly out of the ordinary. I came home on weekend evenings damp-haired and dead tired as ever. I tried not to seem distracted. I refrained from carping about their strange, dowdy habits. I was anxious to make myself inconspicuous. Whether I came home morose or elated I found I could manufacture a deceptively even demeanour. I believed I was alert to their moods, but really my concentration was elsewhere. My mother and father became figures in the background. They’d always been quiet and solicitous but throughout my adolescence and especially during this period they became so insubstantial that I hardly knew them anymore. I didn’t know what they thought, what they suspected, what their lives had become. I could only think about Eva.

  Eva. I watched her when she was present and conjured her when she was not. She was no longer a girl, but not a woman in the way that my mother was a woman. And I simply couldn’t stop looking. At times she basked in the attention, though at other moments she refused to indulge me. When she complained about my dog-eyed stare and waved me away I found ways to watch her without her knowledge. I particularly loved to watch her sleep, for then she was the picture of a body smitten. In sleep she looked thrown down by passion and fatigue
. She drooled a little and the tiny thread that glistened on her cheek was like the silver tracks of moisture inside her thighs.

  She was taller than me, heavier, stronger. Her bad knee was hotter to the touch than the uninjured one. Her tongue often tasted of cornflakes or the brassiness of painkillers. When she wound her hair into a braid it was a shining hawser, heavy yet supple in my hands. If she was excited or angry there was a wheezy edge to her breath. When she hyperventilated this wheeze of hers had shadow-sounds in it, a multiplicity of breaths.

  I watched her so long that I saw her body was a sequence of squares and cubes. Her teeth were square, so were her ears. Her breasts and buttocks were block-like. Even her calf muscles, which squirmed beneath my fingers, had corners. She had wide, blunt hands with square nails and deep ruts at the joints, and her feet were the same. I thought about her shape as I painted her toenails cool green. She pressed one cubic heel against my heart while the other lay playfully in my lap. How I watched her, what a catalogue I made of her movements. I saw her pee, watched her shave her armpits. She said I was a pervert and I wondered if I was.

  I knew Eva had a Utah driver’s licence and a sheaf of family snaps in her shoulder bag she refused to show me. I was curious about her family, about Salt Lake City, but she was reluctant to talk about any of it. Although I was tempted I never touched her bag or went through her cupboards. I was content to wait until she relented, convinced that she would, and in this, at least, my instincts were vindicated. She told me everything. Indeed there came a time when, to my great consternation, Eva preferred to talk rather than fuck.

  Eva told me how one summer she met Sando on the North Shore of Oahu. She was out from college in California and he was shaping boards for an outfit that shipped them back to the west coast. There was a party at some ramshackle plantation and she liked the look of him, loved the accent, and they got bombed on Maui Wowie and left together. They spent the entire week in her hotel room at Waikiki, which got him sacked from his shaping job, so he followed her to San Francisco until the winter.

  Sando didn’t much like the cold, and the sea made Eva uneasy but each instinctively recognized the other’s obsession. He was older but so strong and lovely. He was glamorous in his sunbleached way. The sex, she felt obliged to tell me, was sensational.

  When winter arrived and the Pacific swells returned his surfer friends began to call, and she knew it would only be a matter of time before he flew back to Oahu. Eva tried not to take it hard. It’d been fun, but she had her own season to look to. Snow was falling in the Rockies; every fresh report got her jangly, and before Sando could leave her she caught a plane east. But she couldn’t believe how much she missed him. Late that winter, drunk on peppermint schnapps, she phoned him from New Hampshire. Next morning Sando packed a duffle and went to her.

  From Hawaii to the snow. It was quite a move for Sando. She taught him to ski – downhill and cross-country – which kept him fit and sane, and she even found him a Snurfer, the closest thing to a surfboard she could offer him up there in the mountains, but she never expected to win him away from the sea for long. They made love and drank hard and dropped acid, never talking about his own stalled career until the season was over, and by then she said he’d gone all Van Morrison on her.

  They summered in Malibu where half the surfers were junkies and the whole scene made him sick. He got reading and took on new ideas about diet and training regimes and meditation. When it came to training Eva still preferred the party method. Sando said she relied on bravado more than technique. He told her she travelled on pure entitlement, not achievement. There was an almighty blow-up and she threw him out. He slept on the beach, surfed, ran all day. She took him back and got fit. He worked her hard.

  Next winter he travelled with her as coach as well as lover. His mental discipline fortified her. And she flourished. She went from being a gifted but lazy competitor at the fringe, just another moneyed dilettante, to becoming a serious name. Periodically Sando flew to Hawaii or drove down to Baja for waves. She understood how he needed it. He came back brown and scarred and happy. Those days, said Eva, they were the life.

  In those days freestyle skiers were the wild bunch, a scene unto themselves. At night they got drunk and skied off chalet roofs, attempting whole alpine villages, skidding rooftop to rooftop. They skied bridges and the guardrails of mountain roads. They bounced off cars and plummeted down sketchy ravines. In aerial competition they scared the shit out of people. Because nobody would insure them, theirs was still an amateur circuit; they were like mad-dog skateboarders. People dreamed about a World Cup and sanctioned events at the Olympics, but the skiing establishment was welded to tradition. The old-school was about keeping your feet on the ground and looking sophisticated – a European thing; a martini and Ingrid Bergman deal – whereas hotdoggers wanted to rock and roll, to get some air, to be upside down, to be scary-good rather than just pretty. People said they were nuts, brats, wreckers, degenerates. And they were right, said Eva fondly – we kicked ass.

  The same day she fell at the Intermountain, a guy from Montana broke his neck, and although she’d never believed such pain was possible she realized she’d gotten off lightly. Unlike the other guy, she wouldn’t be drinking through a straw the rest of her life. You could put a knee back together. But the reconstruction was botched and after the second unsuccessful attempt there was, thanks to her father, a lawsuit. Which was when everything began to unravel. In Utah new avenues of litigation were plotted, but things got ugly between Sando and the old man and Eva began to feel like a medico-legal experiment. There was a vicious quarrel and the couple flew out to Australia in the hope of some respite. Sando took her west where he’d surfed in the sixties. They bought a piece of coastal bush and he started building a house but before he could finish it Eva convinced herself she was better and they flew back across the Pacific for the new season. But the knee hadn’t come right. The first moment she was back in skis she sensed weakness, but told herself she’d manage. Yet it only takes a sliver of doubt to make you vulnerable. When you’re fifty feet in the air your only armour is conviction. Regardless of how hard you’ve trained, the moment your self-belief wavers, you are in danger. And because she was anxious she hurried slightly. That’s all it took – rushing the manoeuvre – and she nearly got away with it. But the landing was heavy and unbalanced, so that one leg took the bulk of the impact – wrong angle, wrong leg – and the knee collapsed. She cannoned, wailing, into the crowd. She hadn’t skied since.

  Eva said that the moments before she landed were her last happy ones. I didn’t want to believe her, but she was adamant. She wanted me to understand. Being airborne. Sky and snow the same colour. Her skis a defiant cross against the milky blur.

  When she spoke about those ghostly, quiet moments she wasn’t bitter or wistful, but the awe in her voice unnerved me.

  I miss being afraid, she said. That’s the honest truth.

  In time there was neither much sex nor talk to be had at Eva’s. We smoked hash and gazed out at the rain and I wondered if she’d decided that she’d already said too much. For a while there’d been such angry, urgent passion and then a lightness between us, as though Eva’s rage had subsided. It was then that I got to know her better, when she began to tell me about herself; I felt I’d been chosen all over again. I was enlarged by her trust. It felt like love – or friendship at least. But our fellow-feeling grew thin. Eva became restless again, and mean along with it. She needled me, she seethed and provoked. She took more pills, smoked so much hash she seemed absent half the time. If she looked my way she made no effort to disguise her indifference. Those rare occasions when she took me back into her bed she shouted Sando’s name in my face. We fucked until I was in pain and she was in tears.

  One Saturday morning, after such an unhappy encounter, she got out of bed to go to the bathroom and when she returned I saw the shape of her belly. There was a new tilt to her pelvis. She saw me staring.

  What?

&
nbsp; Nothing.

  I’m puffy, she said.

  Nah.

  It happens every month.

  Really?

  Jesus, Pikelet, don’t you know anything?

  No, I conceded miserably. I don’t know anything.

  Poor baby.

  Well, I know you’re bored with me.

  Yeah, she said. But it’s not really your fault.

  I felt tears coming. I clenched my teeth against them.

  Listen, she said as though offering me a lifeline. I have a game we can play.

  From the bottom of the wardrobe she brought out a strap and a pink cellophane bag. The strap had a collar and a sliding brass ring. I snorted nervously, waiting for the joke, but Eva handled these new props with a reverence that brought a falling sensation to the pit of my guts.

  I don’t get it, I said.

  I’ll show you, she murmured.

  What if I don’t want to?

  Then I’ll be disappointed, I guess.

  Eva sat on the bed beside me. She drew the leather across her thigh while I lay there considering the likely ramifications of her disappointment.

  So, I said. Show me.

  You know how to hyperventilate, right?

  I nodded warily.

  Well, it’s kinda like that.

  I looked at the padded collar and the brass ring that did the work of a slipknot. From where I lay I could smell the sweat and perfume in the leather.

  You hang yourself?

  Sure. Sometimes.

  Fuck. Why?

  Because I like it.

  But why do you like it?

  Because, little man, she said flipping it at me playfully. It makes me come like a freight train.

  Far out, I muttered.

  She smiled. I tried to take it in.

  So, how do you know when to stop?

  Practice, I guess. You should know.

  Me? Gimme a break.