Breath

3

AS A BOY IN SAWYER I yearned to swim in the ocean but the old man was firmly against it. If I asked him on fishing days he refused on the grounds that I would need watching and this meant he'd have to leave the boat and his lines and his workmates on his only day off and it was too much to ask of him. I knew deep down he'd have gladly sacrificed an hour for my pleasure if only he'd been able to swim enough to save me if I got into strife, but his impotence was beyond admitting. When I asked if I could just ride out to the rivermouth with Loonie he shook his head. Too rough, too far, no way. But I wanted to swim where I could see the bottom, to be where those long, creaming breakers trundled in from the south so I could dive down and see them pass overhead. I hankered after the sea as I'd never done for anything else before. I'd always been such a compliant, respectful child and until that point I was usually content. But being denied access to the ocean was intolerable. Even without Loonie's influence, I would probably have defied the old man in time — I figured I was almost a teenager, after all — but that summer I was emboldened by my new friend's indifference to authority, and though I asked and begged and pleaded beforehand, I eventually set out with Loonie one Saturday and rode to the coast without my father's blessing. It began with a lie. I said we were headed for the river but as we coasted through town and past the servo we simply doubled back behind the pub.

You know why it is, Loonie said as we rolled down the turnoff. You know why your old man's scared, don't you?

Yeah, I said after too long a pause. I didn't want to talk about the fact that my father couldn't swim. I wasn't that disloyal yet.

You're lyin, Pikelet.

I stood on my pedals, wary of being seen by someone from the mill.

Snowy Muir, said Loonie.

Who's he?

Bloke from the mill. Fishin off the Point when they opened the bar. All the snapper was runnin. King wave got him. Just ran up the rock and hauled him in. Found him three days later out at the Holes.

The stony bitumen made my teeth chatter. Wattlebirds buzzed us from the thicket edges.

And your old boy was there, Pikelet. He saw him go.

When was this? I asked, trying to sound sceptical.

1965.

How. . how do you know?

I live at the pub, you dick. Only thing flows faster'n beer is talk.

It bothered me not to have known this precious detail about my father. I rode on in silence.

We freewheeled downhill a mile or so until we came to the long, flat stretch where the estuary meandered into shoals on our left and the boggy horse paddocks opposite rose to steep timbered hills. The sun was on our shoulders and already, over the whirr and clatter of our bikes, you could hear the ocean.

On the last uphill stretch a flatbed truck wallowed off the saltpan onto the tar ahead of us. Without a word, Loonie put on a spurt and chased it. There were people on the back of the truck who laughed and cheered as he caught up and grabbed onto the tie-rail. The old banger went up through the gears, making speed against the incline. Loonie and his bike drew away and I saw the pink flash of his face as he looked triumphantly back across his shoulder. I doubt the driver even knew Loonie was there, clinging on gamely in the rear, but they surged uphill, leaving me in their wake, until all I could hear was the whining diff and the faint sound of laughter. Eventually speed and one-handedness got the better of Loonie who got the wobbles and let go. He veered wildly onto the gravel edge and was gone through the reeds, a rippling commotion like a blast of wind, and the last thing I saw was the bike shooting riderless from the vegetation before it somersaulted into the shallows.

By the time I finally ground my way up to the crest of the hill Loonie and his crumpled machine were loaded on the bed of the idling truck and the driver seemed to be waiting for me. When I drew alongside I saw that although his knees were stripped and his shirt was in tatters Loonie looked insanely happy. He mugged and winced for the benefit of a girl who looked sixteen and had flowers painted on her jeans. Beside the pair of them was a stack of surfboards and a three-legged dog. From the cab, three blokes with tumbleweed hair told me to climb up, and so we rode like that to the headland until the bitumen gave way to a dirt track that we bounced down through peppermints and wattles to the hard white beach and the overpowering roar of surf.

The blokes piled out of the cab, snatched up their boards and were gone before either of us could climb down or thank them, so we thanked the girl instead. She shrugged and wriggled her toes in the sand. The dog plugged around in circles, competing with Loonie for her attention.

From the granite headland whose rocks were daubed with warnings about the dangerous current, the beach stretched east for miles. "We watched the surfers plunge into a churning rip alongside the rocks and from there they shot out toward the break. Waves ground around the headland, line upon line of them, smooth and turquoise, reeling across the bay to spend themselves in a final mauling rush against the bar at the rivermouth. The air seethed with noise and salt; I was giddy with it.

Loonie had a nice old limp from his prang but it didn't prevent him from clambering out across the rocks with me and the girl and the three-legged-dog to watch the blokes glide by on their boards. They hooted and swooped and raced across the bay until they were like insects twitching in the distance. The girl, who said she was from Angelus, gave us apples from her woven bag. She talked about Iron Butterfly and plenty of other things I knew as little about and I don't know how I kept up my end of the conversation because my mind was firmly elsewhere. I couldn't take my eyes from those plumes of spray, the churning shards of light. Was this what the old man was afraid of? I tried to think of poor dead Snowy Muir but death was hard to imagine when you had these blokes dancing themselves across the bay with smiles on their faces and sun in their hair.

I couldn't have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared. In Sawyer, a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers, with one butcher and a rep from the rural bank beside the BP, men did solid, practical things, mostly with their hands. Perhaps a baker might have had a chance to make something as pretty as it was tasty, but our baker was a woman anyway, a person as dour and blunt as any boy's father and she baked loaves like housebricks. For style we had a couple of local footballers with a nice leap and a tidy torpedo punt, and I would concede that my father rowed a wooden boat as sweetly as I'd seen it done, in a manner that disguised and discounted all effort, but apart from that and those old coves with plastic teeth and necks like turtles who got pissed on Anzac Day and sang sad songs on the verandah of the Riverside before they passed out, there wasn't much room for beauty in the lives of our men. The only exception was the strange Yuri Orlov who carved lovely, old-world toys from stuff he fossicked up from the forest floor. But he didn't like to show his work. He was shy or careful and people said he was half mad anyway. When it came to blokes, his was all the useless beauty the town could manage.

For all those years when Loonie and I surfed together, having caught the bug that first morning at the Point, we never spoke about the business of beauty. We were mates but there were places our conversation simply couldn't go. There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn't know what endorphins were but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching. We talked about skill and courage and luck — we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death — but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.

We sat on the headland with the girl and the dog until the breeze turned and everyone paddled in. We rode into town on the back of their old Bedford, sunburnt and blissed to the gills.

The old man was furious — he saw the truck, caught sight of Loonie hauling his warped bike home and figured it out for himself- but nothing could touch me, no threat, no expression of disappointment, and certainly no gentle appeal to reason. I was hooked.

Loonie and I went back and back and back that summer. We hitched and rode and walked, begging boards from the Angelus crew when they paddled in for lunch or at day's end, and week by week we literally found our feet, wobbling in across the shorebreak, howling and grinning like maniacs. Even now, nearly forty years later, every time I see a kid pop to her feet, arms flailing, all milk-teeth and shining skin, I'm there; I know her, and some spark of early promise returns to me like a moment of grace.

The first boards we got were Coolites, short, boxy styrofoam things which squeaked when you touched them and blew wherever the wind wanted them to go. Because they had no fin they were all but impossible to steer, like a sailboat with neither keel nor rudder, but we thought they were the duck's nuts. Loonie pestered his stepmother into buying him one and I got mine second-hand from a farm kid who'd just returned from a holiday in Queensland that he'd hated. Those boards certainly made the ride out to the coast a fresh challenge. They were too wide to fit neatly under a boy's arm and so light that they lurched and twisted as though they were alive and trying to take flight. A good crosswind gust could put you and your bike into the roadside scrub in a moment. Our early efforts with them could hardly be called surfing. We were little more than animated flotsam. Then we shaped crude fins from plywood and set them into our boards with paraffin wax and everything changed; we had control, we could steer. At last, we were surfing.

That summer Loonie and I surfed until we were sun-cooked, until our arms gave out and the foam chafed our bellies raw. At night my mother dabbed Flavine on the stippled scabs on my chest and sponged vinegar down my sunburnt back. There was no hiding from her what I was doing but she said nothing about it. Whenever the old man found my Coolite propped on its end in his shed he tossed it out into the weeds without a word. I still helped him pluck poultry and turn dirt for the vegetable garden but we didn't fish much together anymore and I knew that he felt forsaken. I'd moved on from him, we both knew it, and try as he might he couldn't hide how much it hurt. He never mentioned the older boys who dropped me at the end of the drive some afternoons. I half expected him to interrogate me about them, but he seemed resigned. He'd always looked old but now he seemed fearful and disappointed. I was only going surfing, but to see his face you'd think I'd left home already.

In the new year Loonie moved across to the Ag School. It was the only junior high in the district and if you wanted to go on and finish the final two years you had to board in Angelus or take the dawn bus every day. That year, during school hours, Loonie and I began to live in slightly different worlds. By his account Ag School was strange and tough. In those days it was boys only and you learnt about wool and crops and insemination. There were fights out by the machinery shed nearly every Friday, and some evenings when he dropped by Loonie had bruises and scrapes all over him. He never backed away from anything or anyone; that was just how he was. He talked about kids who shaved, who had arms like Christmas hams, older blokes who said his mother was a slut, which was why he fought them. I was still a bit vague about what a slut actually was and I was confused about whether the references were aimed at his mother or his stepmother, so I didn't press him for clarification. In July, when Mrs Loon packed up and shot through in the middle of the night, Loonie seemed unmoved. I'd hardly known her. I remember a squat little woman with dark, curly hair and a gold tooth. He never spoke about her again.

Some winter weekends we rode out to the rivermouth with our Coolites, but often as not the swell was so big we never got beyond the thumping shorebreak and over at the Point the rip looked treacherous. Chastened by our failure Loonie and I would towel off and get dressed and scuttle out along the rocks to watch the Angelus crew confront the great, heaving waves that pivoted past the headland to spew into the bay. They sat way outside of where anybody normally surfed, so far off that their silhouettes were only intermittently visible. For long periods nobody did much out there but bob about, scratching seaward every few minutes to avoid the looming sets that threatened to bury them. In such a swell the rocks along the Point were awash so high up that we were forced back into the scrub to stay safe and dry. We hunkered down in our lookout, pulled our coats about ourselves and willed somebody to take off, until eventually one of the Angelus crew would turn and start to paddle. Some of the waves were as high as us in our nest on the headland. Whenever somebody sucked up the courage to go we were beside ourselves; we screamed and hooted for him as he clawed his way over the edge and we groaned and seized our hair when he came unstuck. There'd be a horrible ball of foam, a snarl of limbs, and a board shooting skyward to flip like a tossed penny above the carnage while we searched the water for a head or an upstretched hand. Thrilled and appalled, we could sit there for hours. It was our coliseum.

One surfer seemed to show up on only the very biggest days. He was quite an old guy and his board was so long and thick that he'd carry the thing on his head down through the peppermint scrub to the beach. Then he'd jog to the water and launch himself into the crunching shorebreak and aim straight for the rip, paddling on his knees, always as casual as you like, whatever the conditions. You'd barely see him for half an hour and then a set would break out wide, like a squall rolling into the bay, and you'd suddenly pick out the white squirt of a wake on the grey-brown crags of a wave big and ugly enough to make you shiver. There he would be, that tiny figure, strangely upright and nonchalant, rising and swooping until he was close enough to be more than just a silhouette. His skill was extraordinary. There was something special about his insouciance and the princely manner in which he cross-stepped along his long, old-timey board, how he stalled and feinted and then surged in spurts of acceleration across the shoaling banks, barely ahead of the growling beast at his back, and when the wave fattened toward the deep channel in the middle of the bay, he'd stand at the very tip of the board with his spine arched and his head thrown back as if he'd just finished singing an anthem that nobody else could hear. Neither of us knew who this man was. We reckoned he must be from the city, but when Loonie piped up to ask the Angelus crew about him, they just grinned and ruffled his taffy hair, which made him so mad I had to drag him away before he started a fight I didn't want to be in.

When it was too stormy and vile to go out to the coast, Loonie and I stayed in town and entertained ourselves at the river, paddling bits of junk from bank to bank, leaping from trees, swinging on ropes. We had lungs like camel bladders by then; we sledged each

other mercilessly, each daring the other to break the two-minute limit beneath the diving board. In the summer sea when it was flat-calm and there was nothing else to do but dive down and lie on the clean, ribbed bottom and hold our breaths to count Mississippis we got pretty close to our goal. But trying it at the bottom of the river in winter was another challenge altogether. It was a grim business down there in the dark, clinging to the saurian roots of rivergums, so cold that a minute's worth had us surfacing blue-lipped and dizzy. We climbed up onto the bank too numb and stunned to even feel the fire we'd left burning to warm ourselves by.

Loonie's old man found us shivering like that one drizzling Sunday afternoon in July.

Look at youse two stupid pricks, he muttered. It's rainin and the water's as cold as a witch's bits and you're bloody swimming.

We like swimming, said Loonie without even looking up.

Karl Loon had his flying jacket on, all leather and sheepfleece. Loonie said he'd been in the air force, though from what I could hear of his old man's faint accent it wasn't necessarily the kind of outfit that flew in English. Mr Loon was a big, square bloke with a boxy head. He might have been Polish once or maybe a Croat — you'd have to listen hard to hear it. The wool of his coat collar was as yellow as a nicotine stain. His hair was oiled and parted on the side and even though this was the first time I'd ever seen him in the outdoors, he always looked sunburnt.

And now you burnin green wood, he said. No wonder youse can't get warm.

We're orright, said Loonie sullenly.

Chop me some wood for the pub and I'll let youse have some for here. What d'you reckon? I got five ton in just now and no one to split it.

Loonie hugged himself and shook his head.

Youse got something better to do?

We'll do it for money, said Loonie.

How much?

Ten bucks a ton.

His old man laughed.

Each! said Loonie.

You can git to buggery, said the publican, walking away.

But it turned out that we did split the wood, and we did the job for a fiver a ton each. We chopped in the rain for days out in the long yard behind the Riverside, amidst a wasteland of weeds and lines of washing, broken sofas and stone troughs. An old fella with a humpback and a drooping fag sat and watched us from beside the glittering ranks of empties as we split those sappy mill-ends and sucked at our splinters and stacked the cut wood in the lean-to by the pub laundry. Before we'd even finished our five tons we had offers of similar work all over town. Drinkers either took pity on us, or saw us as a means of getting the missus off their backs, but any way you looked at it, we were in business.

Loonie liked anything with an edge on it. There were grindstones in some of the sheds where we worked, and he used them to sharpen our axes and the pocketknife he always carried. Whenever we took a break, when the lady of the house brought us mugs of tea and a few lamingtons, he'd want to play chicken. Most often we used the knife. We spread our hands on the pulpy chopping block, jabbing the blade faster and faster between our fingers — first looking and later blind — until one of us begged off or began to bleed. Some sheds had dartboards, so we played William Tell. A lamington, said Loonie, was just as good as an apple. He invented games involving axes and feet, axes and anything, really. Any game would do as long as it was dangerous.

At each perilous undertaking — and with Loonie there were plenty of them — he always volunteered to go first. For a while I thought it was about honour, that it was his way of taking responsibility for whatever stupid idea he'd come up with — something gentlemanly, perhaps, a mark of friendship — but eventually I saw that Loonie went first out of need; he was greedy about risk. He absolutely loved a dare. He would actually dare you to dare him. This wasn't optional. He required it of you, insisted on it. When it came to things like this he was completely compulsive. Being with him was like standing near a lethal electric current. The hairs on your arms literally stood up and you were afraid and mesmerized, always drawn to connect.

That winter we chopped enough wood to buy ourselves real Surfboards. They were dinged-up and obsolete, the cast-offs of the Angelus crew or somebody's sister's boyfriend, but they were proper foam and fibreglass and they were tokens of our arrival. We scraped the hard, dirty wax from their decks and rubbed them down afresh. We stood them in the old man's shed to admire their leaf-like outlines and the sharky rake of their fins. The old man wasn't at all happy about the fact that I'd been working at the pub but he didn't toss the boards out into the weeds as he'd done with the Coolites. He'd seen the calluses and divots in my hands. He knew I'd earned that surfboard with a bent back and once again, after the longest time, I felt the distant glow of his respect.

On a still morning in late September, in a lull between cold fronts, Loonie and I pedalled with our boards to the Point where the waves were small and clean and the cold water was as clear as the sky. We sat inside at the mellow edge of the rip and paddled into waist-high rollers that carried us hooting and howling in to the beach. We had the place to ourselves. The sandbanks rippled underfoot, schools of herring swerved and morphed as one in the channel, and across in the bay the breaths of breaching dolphins hung in the air.

I will always remember my first wave that morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears. I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light. I remember the solitary watching figure on the beach and the flash of Loonie's smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated. And though I've lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.

We surfed until we were limp and when we floundered ashore the bloke I'd noticed before was waiting. He sat on the back of a cut-down Kombi with a red dog that sprang down to meet us.

Life on the ocean wave, eh boys? said the bloke with his board-bump knees drawn up to his beard.

My teeth were chattering and I couldn't speak but I nodded. I recognized him as the one who paddled out when the surf was huge, the man with the old-timey board.

You wouldn't be dead for quids, wouldja?

We just shook our heads in agreement and laughed and shuddered while the red dog danced circles around us. The bloke smiled as though we were the funniest sight he'd seen all year. He whistled the dog up and we bolted to where our clothes lay warmed from a day in the sun.

The Volkswagen hawked and sputtered to life. The bloke wheeled it around on the sand and looked at us a moment before offering us a lift. He waited, laughing, while we fumbled numbly with buttons and buckles.

We bounced up the track with the dog lapping at our salty ears. At the top of the hill where our bikes lay in the weeds, he pulled up and we climbed out, burning with pins and needles where the circulation had kicked back in.

You're a pair of hellmen, you two, he said through the cab window.

Why's that? said Loonie.

Surfih bareback in all weather. You're either stupid or broke.

Both, I said.

How old are you?

Thirteen, said Loonie.

Almost thirteen, I said, stretching things a bit.

The bloke had a mass of curly bleached hair and his beard was of the same stuff. He was a big man and muscular, with grey eyes. It was hard to tell his age but he had to be thirty or more and that made him a genuinely old guy. His dog panted and whined beside him but the moment he glared at it the mutt lay silent.

You get tired of haulin your boards out from town, you can leave em at our place.

Neither Loonie nor I said anything to this; we didn't know how to respond.

I'm away a bit, said the bloke. But you can shove em under the house. The missus won't mind.

Geez, I said. Thanks,

No worries.

First driveway. Just up here.

Okay.

He drove off and we looked at one another with a dumb shrug.

I wasn't ready to leave my precious board at anyone's place but my own, yet I was flushed warm from the attention. On our way back, weaving up the bitumen one-handed, with our boards yawing and straining under our arms, we pedalled by the turnoff we'd never paid any mind to before. It was marked with an old green-painted fridge and the dirt track in was rutted and steep. From the road there was no sign of a house, only a wall of karri trees on the ridge. The land was fenced but this wasn't any sort of farm.

Hippies, said Loonie.

We coasted down to the swampy flats and caught our breaths for the hard uphill plug into town.

I never suspected I'd be sent to school thirty miles away in Angelus, and I'm not even sure why my parents enrolled me there. At the time they said it was to give me stability, a high school where I could go right through to my senior year, but I had an inkling it was a manoeuvre to limit Loonies influence. They waited until after New Year's to spring the news, and I was so stunned that I didn't even put up a fight. I was just glad they hadn't sent me to board at the hostel, though I'm certain they'd have been unable to endure the separation. Still, such tenderness condemned me to years of bussing, and the bus ride is my chief memory of high school — the smells of vinyl and diesel and toothpaste, corrugated-iron shelters out by the highway, rain-soaked farmkids, the funk of wet wool and greasy scalps, the staccato rattle of the perspex emergency window, the silent feuds and the low-gear labouring behind pig trucks, the spidery handwriting of homework done in your lap, and the heartbreaking winter dusk that greeted you as the bus rolled back across the bridge into Sawyer. The bus dropped me into a kind of limbo. Until I'd hooked up with Loonie I'd been a loner, and now that I finally had a mate I'd been turned into a dayboy. I could never expect to belong in a big town like Angelus — I was a total stranger there — but now I wouldn't even fit properly into my hometown. Everyone knew proper locals went to the Ag School, while kids who caught the bus to Angelus, dags like me and the banker's daughter, were of some indeterminate species. We were so uncertain of our new status, we never spoke to one another from one term to the next.

Angelus with its harbour and shops and railhead was a regional hub. The department store and silos and ships gave it gravity but I refused to be impressed. Even so, with the passage of time a kind of contempt for Sawyer crept up on me as I saw how tiny and static and insignificant it really was. Like my parents, it was so drab and fixed that it became embarrassing. During the school holidays, in the years before every failing dairy farm was bought up and turned into a winery or a yuppie bed-and-breakfast, people drove down from the city in their Triumphs and Mercs to look at our little timber houses and shop verandahs and the shambolic superstructure of the mill. They trickled in from their romantic drives through the karri forests and the remnant stands of giant tingle to fuel up and amuse themselves at the pub and bakery.

Every time I heard the word quaint I was caught between shame and fury.

During school term I only saw Loonie on weekends. When conditions were good we rode out to the coast to surf but the ride seemed to get longer and harder the more we did it and in the end we gave up humping our boards all the way and took up the offer to stash them at the house close by. That was how we got to know Sando, how our lives took such a turn.

We didn't actually see the big, woolly-headed bloke much the first summer that I was in high school. Whenever a big sou'west swell kicked up, we looked for him. Those were the days when the Angelus crew came out in their panel vans and utes. They were tradies and potheads who kept an eye on the weather map and took sickies every time there was surf, but the most we saw of the bloke with the flat-tray Volkswagen were the times we caught a glimpse of him far down the bay, just a silhouette paddling a surfski and trolling for early salmon.

The first time we stumped up the drive to his house the place was deserted. No dog came barrelling out of the shadows and no one emerged when we called from the bottom of the steps. We stood in the leaf-littered clearing and just stared at the joint. There was a big, fenced vegetable garden and some odd-looking outbuildings and though the house was built from local timber it was like no home I'd ever seen. It stood high off the ground on log-poles, surrounded by spacious verandahs where hammocks and mobiles and shell-chains hung twisting in the breeze. None of the wood was painted and all those timbers had gone their own shades of weathered grey and khaki. Later I thought of the house as a kind of elevated safari tent, a tent whose every pole was an old-growth log that three men could barely link arms around.

Jesus, said Loonie.

We better go, I murmured, but Loonie was already halfway up the front stairs.

Bloody hell, he said from up there. Cam, Pikelet, check it out.

I hesitated until he started gobbing over the rail. I went up full of misgivings. From the verandah you could see the ocean and the eastern cliffs toward Angelus. Closer in, the estuary was like a wide, shining gut that was fed by the river as it coiled back and back on itself into the blue-green blur of the forest beyond the town. I'd never thought of the river as an intestine but then I'd never viewed the country from this angle before and seen just how shaggy and animal its contours were. The house sat behind a snarl of karri regrowth that hid it from the coast road a couple of hundred yards below. The properly had some lumpy pasture on its eastern side, a steep and hopeless paddock that looked as if it fed only roos and rabbits. The rest of it was peppermint thicket and wattles that ran right up to the forest ridges.

Behind the French doors, the interior of the house seemed to be mostly one enormous room with rugs on the floor, a stone fireplace and a table as big as a lifeboat. Above this, set against the far gable, was a broad, open sleeping loft. There were no blinds or curtains anywhere, only a few sarongs that hung like flags from beams. Not even Loonie had the nerve to check if the doors were locked, but it looked as if the place had been empty for weeks. We gazed out again at the watertank, at the wood-slab sheds and our bikes and boards propped in the dappled light beneath the solitary marri tree. We looked for somewhere to store our boards.

Beneath the house was a kind of wood-louvred undercroft stacked with surfboards and wave-skis and a kayak. The ground was leafy underfoot and there was a cave smell about everything. Further in stood a weights bench and dumbbells, a stool or two and a long worktable neatly piled with tools and papers and sound cassettes.

Far out, said Loonie. This is bloody paradise.

We stood openmouthed before the racks of boards. There was every type and shape and vintage, some with fins like scythes and others with twin keels. One board, which had to be twelve feet long, was made of solid wood. Beside it, propped against the wall and made of something like the same stuff, was a didjeridu with such a twist in the shaft it looked like a hollow tree root.

Don't touch anything, I said, expecting someone to arrive at any moment. Let's just get our boards and stick em somewhere and rack off.

Don't be so uptight, Pikelet. The bloke said it was okay.

To leave our boards here, I said. Not to hang around.

Loonie laughed at my anxious propriety, but he helped me stow our boards beneath the worktable and a few minutes later we were bouncing down the track half afraid and half hoping the VW would come wallowing up to intercept us. But nobody came. We rode back into Sawyer with a glow on, as though by simply having stashed our boards beneath such a house, we'd moved up in the world.

Honking away on my old didj, I think about the one I first saw nestled against the boards under that big hippy house. I hardly knew what it was. Now the wind comes through me in circles, like a memory, one breath, without pause, hot and long. It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about. I consider the startled look on the faces of my girls in the moments after each of them was born and suctioned and forced to draw air in for the first time. I've done the job myself on more than one occasion, pulled over on the side of an ill-lit street, improvising in someone's driveway. Always the same puzzled look, the rude shock of respiration, as though the child's drawn in a gutful of fire. Yet within a moment or two the whole procedure is normalized, automatic. In a whole lifetime you might rarely give it another thought. Until you have your first asthma attack or come upon some stranger trying to drag air into himself with such effort that the stuff could be as thick and heavy as honey. Or you may be like me and think about breathing often enough for people to have their doubts about you.

I've been thinking about the enigma of respiration as long as I can remember, since I was old enough to be aware of the old man coming home with his stink of grease and sweat and wood-sap at the end of another day at the mill. Every weekday evening after he washed his face and hands he'd settle at the table and look about with eyes bloodshot from sawdust while Mum whacked the handle of the oven with a length of split karri and drew out whatever she'd been baking or roasting or warming while we waited for him. Mostly we ate in silence. Afterwards I'd go to my room to do my homework and when I came back later to watch a bit of TV, the old man'd still be there, asleep in his chair, with the wireless on softly. Mum and I would wash the dishes before she helped him to bed, and I'd sit down for an hour in front of the box.

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 offish 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, it 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 river-mouth 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 you 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 second-guess 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.

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 diere 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 cord-like 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 know 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 meat-breath around. I couldn't help but think of the too.

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.

Listen, he said at last. Eva's doin it tough, just now. It's a hard time for her.

Neither Loonie nor I knew quite what to say to this.

And I've been away a lot. So.

We puttered along the edge of the estuary where the sloughing white skins of melaleucas spilled onto the road.

Is it the pills? asked Loonie.

I glared at him in surprise. I'd never seen any pills.

She takes pills, said Loonie defiantly. I seen her.

There was a long pause. No, said Sando. It's not really the pills. I sat there in a funk. Loonie hadn't even told me. She's always bloody cranky, said Loonie. I just figured it was them, that's all.

Just shut up, I hissed. It's none of our business. And it's not what you think, anyway, said Sando. Loonie shrugged. The gesture was defiant, so emphatic in that tight space it hoisted my shirt an inch. He was sullen the rest of the way back and when it became clear that he was being dropped off first, his mood darkened further. Outside the pub he got down, pulled his bike off the tray and wheeled it away without a word.

The mags, I said to Sando. They were just there. On our boards.

All in the past, mate. No worries.

How badly I wanted to say something about the photos then, just a gesture of esteem, but it was clear this wouldn't be welcome. There was something about Sando that wasn't settled. He wasn't fixed like my father, and intrigued as I was I found this aspect of him confusing to the point of anxiety. It was as though he wasn't quite as old as he looked, as if he hadn't yet finished with himself. Tell Loonie not to be too uptight about the pills, he said. They're just painkillers.

We can leave our boards somewhere else, I offered. Nah. It's cool. Really. Okay, I said, unconvinced.

And listen, there's a little spurt of swell coming. Day after tomorrow, if it's blowing offshore, get up early.

Early?

Sparrowfart. I'll pick you both up. We'll go somewhere. .

discreet.

Secret.

Yeah. I think you're ready.

We trundled on up to my place and I climbed down and grabbed my bike. As I pedalled up the choppy drive in the last light of day I could hear the VW labouring back out of town towards the coast, and the sound of it still clattered through the trees when I reached the house in its tufty paddock and its aura of roasting smells and radio.

The next day Loonie and I had a job pulling down a shed behind the butcher's, and while we twisted out nails with pinch bars and claw hammers, I tried to engage him in speculation about Eva and Sando. Personally I found the tears and arguments enthralling. Nobody blued like that over at my place and it was as exciting as it was disconcerting. I was curious about what it was between them that set them off, but I couldn't interest Loonie in anything beyond Eva's many shortcomings. He saw the whole scene as evidence that she was nothing but a stuck-up pain in the arse. She was a drag, a bitch, a stupid Yank, and a junkie.

Painkillers, my arse, he said.

But, what about that limp? There's something wrong with her.

Yeah, she's a whingein female.

Still, I said. You notice how she always wears jeans? You reckon people still get polio in America?

Jesus, who cares? I wish she'd go back there.

She's not that bad.

You saw those mags. He was famous, mate, and maybe if it wasn't for her he still would be. Chicks, Pikelet. They drag you down.

I thought you fancied her, I ventured.

You're full of shit.

I let it go and kept working in the grit and mildew of the old shed. I knew I was on dangerous ground here with Loonie, yet his bluster made me smile because I'd seen him look at her — all those sidelong glances, the way he took in the heavy swing of her braid and the solid curve of her breast — but since the day she drove us back in the rain, his dislike had been implacable. It was as if his contempt for her fuelled his devotion to Sando. For in Loonie's mind, Eva would always be the millstone around our hero's neck. Her smooth American skin and blue eyes seemed to enrage him. He hated her acerbic talk and slanting mouth. She was in his way. She always stood between him and Sando and she knew it, came to enjoy the fact.

Eva was right about Sando and us. The box of magazines had surely been some sort of provocation, one of many things that were never really explained. Later I wondered if she'd done it to make him see what was developing between him and two boys less than half his age, to give him pause. I can't pretend to know what effect the gesture had on Sando, or how they settled it between them, if they ever did at all, but I know that those photos only served to increase our awe of him. Years on I had time enough and cause to wonder if she'd really had other, murkier motives, thoughts she didn't admit to or yet understand.

Sando pulled up at dawn with a dinghy hitched to the Volksie. It was the first Saturday of the new year. So began what he called our appointments with the undisclosed. We were, he said in a slightly thespian manner, gentlemen in search of a discreet location, and we understood, without his having to say a word, that we were also now a secret society of three.

He drove us west through miles and miles of forest. Morning light fell across the road in webs and in time we came to a small, unfamiliar bridge where Sando swung off onto a side track which led to the bank of a deep creek. Nonplussed as we were, Loonie and I did what we were told and helped guide the trailer and dinghy to the water's edge. The boat was loaded with fuel and three boards much longer and narrower than our own. When our eyes met across the gunwales Loonie broke into his split-lip grin.

We wound down the creek through a tunnel of overhanging trees until it met a broad estuary whose shores were densely timbered. There were no huts or jetties here, nothing to suggest that people came by at all, and it was obvious that none of this country had ever been logged. The landscape looked primeval.

Sando throttled up and sent us charging across the shallow inlet. When I glanced back at him in the stern, clinging to the tiller with the wind furrowing his hair and beard, his smile was cryptic, even sly.

At the plugged mouth of the river the estuary narrowed to a little cul-de-sac between high, marbled dunes and on the seaward side there was a high bar like the one at Sawyer Point. When Sando killed the motor we heard the rumble of surf but we couldn't yet see the ocean.

Where are we? asked Loonie.

This is Barney's, said Sando, already reaching for his wetsuit. This whole stretch of coast sticks out further south than anywhere, so it picks up every bit of swell.

How come the name? I asked.

Cause Barney lives here, he said with that fey grin.

Loonie and I both looked about. There was still no sign of habitation, no footprints in the sand, not even a vehicle track in the hills beyond.

Only fair to tell you, said Sando.

Lives where? said Loonie scornfully.

Sando cocked his head seaward and stood up in the boat to pull on his suit. He stepped out and we followed his lead. We helped pull the dinghy onto the sand then took up the boards he assigned us and followed him up onto the buttress of the bar where we finally saw the long sweep of the bay.

Oh, man, said Loonie. Far out.

I stared at the clean, blue walls of swell fanning down the empty beach. Each wave broke about two hundred yards out at an angle to the shore and peeled evenly east across the sandbanks into the tiny distance. I couldn't believe how long the wave was, and as if reading my thoughts, Sando explained that it was best to walk back up the beach after each ride. There was not a human mark on the beach, only wheeling birds, seaspray and the white noise of falling water.

And what about Barney? I asked with a misplaced grin, assuming that I was up with the joke.

He's not hungry all the time, said Sando. Which improves the odds.

Fuck, said Loonie. Tell me it's not a shark.

Okay. It's not a shark.

Loonie gave out a wheezy laugh of relief, and I laughed along with him.

Well, said Sando. Not your average shark, put it that way.

The laughter died in our throats.

It's not that big a deal. I've been comin here for years and look at me. Still got all me fingers and toes.

But you've seen it? I croaked.

Oh, yeah. Five, six times.

And what kind of bloody shark is this? said Loonie hotly.

Like I said. Not your average noah.

Stop pissin about and just say it, said Loonie.

He's a white pointer, mate. The great white hunter.

Fuck! Fuckin fuck!

Now you can shit yourself all you want. Pants down, son, knock yourself out.

Sando and Loonie stood there, staring each other down. You just didn't call Loonie out like that. I knew he wouldn't take a backward step now, not for man nor boy. I shrank back, feeling like the bird-chested kid that I was, and waited for something to blow.

How big is this thing? I asked, as if it made a ghost of a difference.

Aw, maybe fourteen foot, said Sando genially enough. He still had Loonie in a steely glare. Hard to tell, Pikelet. Got a big ole head, though, and a grin like Richard-fuckin-Nixon.

So — I was desperate for diversion now — why's he called Barney?

Sando laughed. I named him after Eva's old man; he thinks I'm a waste of skin. He won't eat me outright, the father-in-law, but he likes to show the ivories every now and then, just to remind me who's boss. So, Barney it is. Come on, let's hit it while the tide's in.

Loonie threw down his board. Why the fuck you bring us here for?

Make men of you, said Sando. Thought you had the nads for it. Coupla giant-killers like yourselves. Boys who say they surf Outside Point at eight feet.

We bloody did, said Loonie. And there's witnesses.

So you say. And maybe you did. But, gosh, Loon. Weren't you scared?

Piss off.

Hell, I was, I muttered.

Least you're honest, Pikelet. But scared of what? Water over sand? A bit of a sinus-flush? What's to be scared of out there at the Point?

It was bloody eight foot, said Loonie. Ten!

Sando just snorted. He turned and jogged down to the water's edge and launched himself into the deep, moiling gutter of the rip. We watched him pick his way to the deep channel that ran out to the break, paddling casually, duckdiving spills of whitewater and shaking spray from his hair.

It's all bullshit, said Loonie. He's shittin us.

I shrugged.

He's callin us fuckin sooks.

Maybe, I said.

Thinks we're just gunna sit here like a coupla girls.

Girls or no girls, I was quite prepared to do exactly that, to sit there safe and warm on the beach and watch Sando dice it out with Barney. I was already thinking about what to do if he was eaten, whether I could remember how to start the outboard. Driving the Kombi home presented a few problems, but I figured I'd tackle these lesser obstacles one at a time. But before I could get anything straight in my mind Loonie took up his board with a strangled, angry cry and ran down to the water. A few moments later, hapless and terrified, I followed him.

That's how we surfed Barney's the first time, with Loonie taking on every wave enraged, and me just trailing along, dry-mouthed and shaky, until the exhilaration of the rides themselves inoculated us both against the worst of our fear.

The wave at Barney's wasn't huge but it was long and perfect: blue, pure, and empty. It was like something from a magazine and we were in it. Loonie and I strove to outdo each other, to take off as late as possible, to drop in with the kind of studied nonchalance we copied from Sando, and then steer up into the shimmering cave each wave made of itself. Inside those waves our voices bounced back at us, deeper and larger for all the noise, like the voices of men. We felt strong, older. We came howling from the gullet of wave upon wave and stopped believing in the shark altogether. It was a landmark day.

We surfed Barney's for months with Sando before the secret got out. Some nosy crew from Angelus followed us in, saw the tyre tracks and found the parked VW and trailer. But even when they showed up, more surfers watched from the beach than actually paddled out. Especially after the spring morning when Barney surfaced like a sub in the channel, rolled over beside Loonie and fixed him with one terrible, black eye before sliding away again.

That eye, said Loonie, was like a fuckin hole in the universe.

It was as close as he got to poetry. I envied him the moment and the story that went with it.

Heading home from that first day at Barney's, bone-sore and lit up, we relived the morning wave by wave, shoring it up against our own disbelief. By common assent, Loonie had caught the wave of the day. It was a smoker. I was paddling back out through the channel when he got to his feet. The wave reared up, pitched itself forward and simply swallowed him. I heard him scream for joy or terror and could only see him intermittently as he navigated a path beneath the warping fold of water. He was a blur in there, ghostly. When finally he shot out and passed me, he looked back at the weird, dilating eye of the wave and gave it the finger.

Geez, I wish we had a camera, he said afterwards, as we chugged back through the forest. It was too good. Shoulda got a photo.

Nah, said Sando. You don't need any photo.

But just to show, to prove it, sorta thing.

You don't have to prove it, said Sando. You were there.

Well, least you blokes saw it.

My oath, I said.

But it's not even about us, said Sando. It's about you. You and the sea, you and the planet.

Loonie groaned. Hippy-shit, mate.

Is that right? said Sando indulgently.

Orright for you. You got plenty of shots to prove what you done. Honolua Bay, man. Fuckin A.

All that's just horseshit, said Sando. It's wallpaper.

Easy for you to say.

Sando was quiet for a moment. You'll learn, he said in the

end.

Loonie beat his chest there in the confines of the Kombi cab.

Learn? Mate, I bloody know\

I laughed but Sando was unmoved.

Son, he said. Eventually there's just you and it. You're too busy stayin alive to give a damn about who's watchin.

Mate, said Loonie, straining to maintain his bravado. I don't know what language you're talkin.

You'll be out there, thinkin: am I gunna die? Am I fit enough for this? Do I know what I'm doin? Am I solid? Or am I just. . ordinary?

I stared, breathless, through the broken light of trees.

That's what you deal with in the end, said Sando. When it's gnarly.

How does it feel? I murmured.

How does what feel?

When it's that serious.

You'll find out.

Like, I mean, twenty feet, said Loonie subdued now.

Well, you're glad there's no stupid photo. When you make it, when you're still alive and standin at the end, you get this tingly-electric rush. You feel alive, completely awake and in your body. Man, it's like you've felt the hand of God. The rest of it's just sport'n recreation, mate. Give me the hand of God any day.

Shoulder to shoulder in the cab, Loonie and I exchanged furtive looks. There was something of the classroom about Sando, the stink of chalk on him when he got going, but my mind was racing. I'd already begun to pose those questions to myself and feel the undertow of their logic. Was I serious? Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? I'll bet my life that despite his scorn Loonie was doing likewise. We didn't know it yet, but we'd already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. Our minds had already gone out to meet it and we'd left the ordinary in our wake.