Tim Winton (11 page)

Well, he said with a grin. That one rang your bell.

He pulled me onto his Brewer and said nothing about my bare arse. My board lay bright in the distance. He let me lie there a while before he swam off to get it and when he came back he called it a day.

I paddled in after him and hoped there had been no witnesses.

We didn't go looking for Loonie that afternoon, but we knew he'd show up eventually. Eva fed us fish burgers and let us prattle until fatigue overtook us and we lapsed into stupefied silence. As the storm-front darkened the sky, we hung in hammocks on the verandah where the wind was eerie-warm. I was sore and so drowsy I kept falling asleep. The sound of magpies and wattlebirds was a conversation going over my head, a kind of chatter I felt I'd understand if only I kept swimming up from sleep towards wakefulness.

Later in the day the dog barked and Loonie came stumping along the rutted drive. It was raining by then. He pushed the dog away and hesitated before coming across the yard to the verandah steps.

The plaster cast was slung like a weapon across his chest.

Come on, called Sando. Get outta the rain.

Loonie just stood there.

Don't be such a goddamn punk, said Eva, swinging out of her hammock.

She stared at him a moment, hands on hips, before limping inside, and only then did Loonie come upstairs to stand against the verandah rail. His sunbleached hair was flat on his skull and the calico sling wet through.

Eva came back with a towel. He took it without acknowledging her.

Well? he said.

Eva snorted and went inside. She closed the French doors a tad too firmly. Sando considered Loonie for some moments and then lay back to swing a bit. Loonie glanced at me. I averted my eyes.

All this time, said Sando. Surfing the place on my own. Watching it, biding my time, keeping my little secret. Funny, you know, but it was nice to share. A real surprise but it felt good. So maybe the best part about having a secret is letting someone in on it. Eh, Pikelet?

I shrugged, unable to keep from smiling.

How big?

Sando sighed. Big enough to make it interesting, he said. Big enough to rip the boy-wonder's shorts off.

Twenty foot, I said.

Fifteen, maybe. You rode it at fifteen, Pikelet, eighteen tops.

Well, he got waves, said Loonie dully.

Yeah, he made two. He did good.

Loonie stood there and took it in.

I shat meself, I said. I took the worst floggin. I freaked.

But he did the deed, said Sando. Made himself a little bit of history.

It took me a moment to absorb what he'd said. For if Sando was the first to have ridden Old Smoky, then I was surely the youngest.

I could see Loonie thinking it through right there in front of me.

He flapped the soggy hems of his jeans. The gesture was nonchalant, but I knew him better than that.

Your time'll come, said Sando.

Loonie shrugged, as if it was no big deal to him. But he was already making plans, I was sure of it. He'd seen what he had to do. He couldn't be the first or the youngest, so he'd have to go the hardest. He'd push it all the way.

There were only two more go-outs at Old Smoky that autumn, days when Loonie watched bitterly from the cliff, but by mid-winter he finally got his chance. He came with us on a grey, windless morning during a huge south-easterly swell when a skein of mist lay across the cliffs. Climbing down towards the water I heard voices and after leaping out and paddling clear I saw that a few of the Angelus crew had followed us. Loonie wanted an audience - he'd tipped them off-- and although Sando said nothing as we stroked seaward, his anger was palpable. Loonie had really set himself a task.

But he set a new mark that day, no question about it. He did more than prove himself. He surfed like someone who didn't believe in death. The manic grin was gone. He clawed hungrily into the line-up and gave no quarter. It was twenty feet out there, maybe more, and he went later and deeper than either of us, never once begging off. He ploughed down those black-bellied monsters in a low crouch, his feet planted wide, while Sando and I sat in the channel and hooted in disbelief. Whatever we did that day, Loonie did it harder. I can't believe he wasn't afraid, but he had the cold determination of a boy completely overtaken by an idea. It wasn't that he was invulnerable or even particularly graceful, because he took some terrible beatings in attempting the impossible, but for every wave that nailed him he'd squeak clear of two others just as gnarly. He was fifteen years old. He hadn't simply taken Old Smoky on - he'd taken it over. From that day forward it was Loonie who set the benchmark. Sando and I could only watch in awe. And there, when we came in, was the Angelus crew, misted in on the cliff, uncertain of what it was they'd seen.

Oo there we were, this unlikely trio. A select and peculiar club, a tiny circle of friends, a cult, no less. Sando and his maniacal apprentices. Very few people ever really knew what we did out there along the cliffs; it was, after all, behaviour beyond the realms of logic. But within the tiny surfing fraternity along that part of the coast in those years we had a certain underground reputation.

Bit by bit a special aura settled upon us and in our way we were rather solemn about what we did. Under Sando's tutelage we ate carefully and worked on our fitness. He taught us yoga. We grew stronger and more competent, expected more of ourselves and forsook almost everything else for the sake of the shared obsession.

Years before people started speaking about extreme sports, we spurned the word extreme as unworthy. What we did and what we were after, we told ourselves, was the extraordinary.

Yet some reserve had set in alongside all this grand feeling. In the water with Sando, Loonie and I were part of a team so thoroughly coached and briefed that in big waves we could anticipate every move the other made. We saw bad falls coming and were ready to effect a rescue in a hold-down or in the event of injury, and this was comforting to know when you found yourself hurtling along beneath a thousand tons of whitewater, rag-dolling across the reef with your lungs near to bursting. In our boyish way we thought of it as a war zone out there on the bommies and we styled ourselves as comrades-under-fire. We were proud of our maverick status, even if it was semi-secret; we were into things that ordinary townsfolk could barely imagine. Sando was big on discretion. He did his best to instil in us a quiet sense of modesty. His hippified warrior spirit, so hard to grasp at this remove, was for a boy like me, basking in the glow of his authority, a code as tangible as it was heady.

Meanwhile a gap opened between Loonie and me. Those weeks he spent in plaster did the damage. His long, brooding wait as Sando and I surfed Old Smoky without him had curdled things between us, and it couldn't be undone. It was never sufficient for me to acknowledge his superior courage. He was the duck's nuts and I told him so. I didn't compete with him anymore because it was an unequal contest and I didn't need the grief. Yet I did secretly believe I had a style he lacked. Never a pretty surfer, Loonie was often a triumph of guts over technique. I didn't challenge him, but the struggle between us was never-ending, and out of the water things were definitely cooler.

Loonie's devotion to Sando grew more intense. For all his surliness and tough-guy scepticism, Loonie hurled himself at Sando like a son putting himself in his father's path. He became mulish about it; he liked to make things awkward. He often rode out to Sando's without me and routinely forgot to pass on his messages.

On the surface things appeared normal enough. In big surf we were still solid, but elsewhere, when Sando wasn't present to temper him, Loonie became less fun to be around. I didn't exactly avoid him; he often had other fish to fry. Between swells he ran with an older crew of Ag School boys, kids with stubbly chins and smokers'

coughs. They bought the grog he swiped from the pub and they sold him detonators, .303 cartridges and stick mags in return. I knew he kept a kero tin full of contraband buried in the forest. He had the makings of pipe bombs out there, and money he looted from guest rooms and passed-out drunks. All winter he bristled and burned with a fury I didn't understand. Everything seemed to be my fault, so I didn't mind being out of his way.

„

There came a spring morning, a dark, rain-misted day on the Angelus road, when the school bus shuddered to an unscheduled halt. I stirred from my travelling stupor and looked up to see a hellish mess on the bend ahead. The bus chugged and rattled at the shoulder of the highway. The driver seemed to hesitate between backing up and jumping down to render aid. On the road before us a cattle truck lay on its side with the remains of a small car pressed into its underbelly. Steers writhed on the bitumen, bellowing, kicking, lashing their heads against the road. One hauled itself into the ditch, a hind leg trailing lifeless behind it. Blood ran thin and copious in the rain; it seemed to make the culvert weeds greener than they were and it trickled downhill towards us as the bus filled with murmurs and sobs.

A farm vehicle eased up behind the wreck and a man got out.

The vehicle pulled away again in the direction of Angelus while the newly arrived man dodged scrabbling beasts to crawl up into the underbelly of the truck. Finally the bus driver cranked the door open and went out to help. I watched him go, hunching in the rain, pulling up his collar. There was something about the slack pace of his stride that inflamed me. I got to my feet and plunged down the steps and sprinted past him toward the twisted shambles. The bus driver shouted above the noise of maimed animals. The toad was an obstacle course of lurching bodies, dark tongues, and lolling eyes.

There was a horrible scrape of hoofs on the tarmac. The air stank of Oxo cubes and shit and spilled diesel.

When I reached the farmer he was tugging at the car door in his town clothes and all he could say was Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, on and on, over and over. I saw that the driver was dead. The way her head tilted back on her forward-thrust body was all wrong.

She was so hard up against the steering column that all my senses recoiled. Beside her, the man in the passenger seat licked his lips in slow motion. His eyes were tarred shut by blood oozing from a gouge in his forehead.

Then the bus driver came up behind us, saying: The truckie, The truckie's stuck.

I climbed the frame of the trailer chassis and groped along the wet, slippery bars of the cattle-cage towards the cab. I didn't trust the sagging front wheel for a perch, so I bellied out on the door and peered into the window beneath me like a diver looking into a reef hole. Barely a foot away, shivering in an army surplus jumper, and hanging in his seatbelt, was a big bloke with a beard and gold fillings. The window between us fogged up. I called down to him to open it, but he didn't seem to hear me. He just shook there, slowly obscured beneath the fogging, rain-pelted glass while I yelled until I was hoarse, and then the cops arrived with a rifle, and the fire truck was there, and someone much bigger hauled me down and gave me a steaming mug of Milo that I couldn't drink for the life of me.

That same night the old man drove me back into Angelus for the school social. Even though I'd asked Queenie Cookson I really didn't want to go anymore, but my mother insisted that I show for the girl's sake, to save her the shame of being stood up. So in I went, scrubbed up in a yellow bodyshirt and flared corduroys, while the old man whiled away the hours fishing for skippy off the town jetty.

On the drive over, even at the bend with its hail of windscreen glass and crushed vegetation, neither of us said a thing. When we got to the school gym in Angelus I mumbled thanks for the ride and sloped in.

Inside a band from the city played songs by The Sweet and Status Quo. The dim lights, the music and the sight of all my classmates in their best duds made everything unreal. I felt as though I wasn't properly there. The cavernous hall was full of competing perfumes. There was so much glitter and lipstick that everybody looked like strangers and it took me ten minutes to find Queenie over by the basement stairs.

Why didn't you tell me about this morning? she shouted close to my ear.

I shrugged.

I had to get it from Polly Morgan.

I shrugged again.

Is it true they both died?

That's what they're sayin on the radio.

You looked shocking today, she said. Why didn't you say anything?

You should have told me. I don't get you.

There was nothing I could think to say in reply so I shrugged once more. She scowled. I put my arm around her and this seemed to placate her somewhat. Later we danced to Sherbert and AC/DC tunes and the conversations we had with others were mostly lip-reading. We wound up in the deep shadows of the basement stairwell, clinching and kissing abstractedly until the lights flickered and it was all over.

When I got in the car the old man looked haggard.

You stink offish, I said.

And you smell like a girl.

We drove home in such a silence that I found myself fiddling noisily and pointlessly with the radio knobs. It annoyed the old man, but the agitation kept him from falling asleep at the wheel.

Back home my mother was still awake in her candlewick dressing gown.

You look handsome, love, she said.

I stood away from the sink while the old man wearily cleaned his fish. The stares of all those dead eyes made my gut flutter in a way that was new to me. When he opened their silver bellies I went to my room and did not sleep.

At school Queenie Cookson passed a note, via intermediaries, to outline my many flaws (I was moody, selfish and inattentive) and notify me that I was, forthwith, relieved of my duties as boyfriend.

I did my best to take it badly but in truth I was relieved.

In the troughs between big days, Loonie was infinitely more resourceful than me. Having been addicted to danger all his life he could always find a pulse-raising challenge. That year he drilled a peephole in the pressed-tin wall of the pub's storeroom and forged an entirely new means of putting himself in peril.