Breath

4

I DID MY SHARE of whining when the new school year began, but in truth I didn't really mind going back. There was no more swell that summer, no opportunity to test myself any further, and the days began to hang heavy. Within a week of the term commencing, I rediscovered the aisles and recesses of the Angelus school library. There was nothing like it in Sawyer and the only other collection of books I'd seen was out at Sando's. During my first year of high school I'd turned to reading as a kind of refuge, but that second year it became a pleasure in its own right.

I started with Jack London because I recognized the name from Sando's shelves. After I saw Gregory Peck gimping across the poop deck on telly I tried Moby Dick, though I can't say I got far. I found books on Mawson and Shackleton and Scott. I read accounts of Amundsen's race south against the English and the ruthlessness that made all the difference. I tried to imagine the Norwegian eating the very dogs that hauled him to the Pole — something harsh and bracing about the idea appealed to me. I read about British commandos, the French Resistance, about the specialized task of bomb disposal. I found Cousteau and then mariner-authors who recreated the voyages of the ancients in craft of leather and bamboo. I read about Houdini and men who had themselves shot from cannons or tipped in barrels over Niagara Falls. I fed on lives that were not at all ordinary, about men who in normal domestic circumstances might be viewed as strange, reckless, unbalanced. When I failed to get more than sixteen pages into The Seven Pillars of Wisdom I thought the failure was mine.

It was there in the stacks that I met the girl who decided without consultation that I was her boyfriend. She was a farm girl from further out east and she boarded at the dreaded hostel. Like me, she came to the library to escape, but she was already bookish. Her name was Queenie. She was handsome and wheat-haired, with the slightly intimidating shoulders of a competitive swimmer, and there was plenty about her to like, yet I suspect I only really liked her because she liked me first. Although I did very little to encourage such baffling interest, I somehow got used to it, and even came to expect it. She slagged off at my books of manly derring-do while I razzed her for her taste in stories about crippled girls overcoming cruel odds with the aid of improbably gifted animals.

At lunchtimes we didn't hang out so much as maintain a steady orbit in the library and even if we didn't have much to say we were never far away from one another. About a month into term, when the class had decided, as these things went in those days, that Queenie and I were an official couple, two army cadets from the year ahead of us made the general announcement, at full military volume, to

the entire non-fiction section of the library, that Queenie Cookson had great tits. Whereupon the poor kid bolted to the toilet, leaving me in the care of a book about Helen Keller. I felt my face go hot — from recognition rather than shame — for those pillocks were, in their brutal way, completely correct about something I'd barely noticed. Yes, Queenie Cookson did have great tits and this was news confounding enough in itself, but how was I meant to react to it being broadcast like this in the library? Should I stand up and defend the girl's honour and then fight my way to the door, or kick back and leer in the reflected glory? Neither was really my style. I just sat there, blushing, while it slowly became evident that Queenie wouldn't be back soon. Even as I set aside Helen Keller and returned as casually as I could to the legless exploits of Douglas Bader, I knew I'd failed a test whose rules I didn't yet understand.

In the early autumn, just as the first good southerly swells arrived, Loonie broke his arm. We were farting about at a place called the Holes which was halfway along the cliffs to Old Smoky, and Loonie had spent the morning daring me to dare him to have himself shot from a blowhole like some mad adventurer from one of my books. He'd perfected his badgering technique. He worked on you so long and so consistently that out of rage and frustration you'd find yourself challenging him to do something you had no interest in him doing. Moreover, you ended up daring him with a passion that was, by this late stage, real enough to cause him genuine offence and so his indignation spurred him on to be even more stupid and dangerous than he intended.

Having yourself blasted from a blowhole is more silly than perilous and ours was a pretty naff effort. Thankfully, there weren't openings out there large enough for Loonie to climb right into; he had to settle for sitting across a foot-wide aperture to see what happened. All along that basalt shelf above the sea the blowholes sucked and gurgled around us, and each time a wave slammed in at the base of the cliffs there was an ominous lull before every crack and hole began to moan. When a good set hit the underbelly of the cliff the sudden blasts of spume could set you back in your tracks. The vapour had a nightmare stink. I kept well clear, fearful of the backdraught. I couldn't bear to think of being sucked down a black throat into the pounding guts of the caves below. I figured I'd rather be eaten alive by Barney.

In the end, Loonies misadventure was more undignified than death-defying. He saddled up with a sick grin and instead of being hoisted skyward, he was spat across the rocks horizontally. He came directly at me, legs pedalling, shirt blown fat as a lifejacket, and with all that snowy hair in his eyes he couldn't see where he was headed. I dropped. He caught his foot in the leg of my shorts and slammed down on the rock with twice the force he'd begun with. When he got up his arm was all wrong. It was a hard trek back to the Point.

We were lucky Eva was home. She saved me from having to wheel Loonie all the way back to town on my bike. He fainted twice in the cab of the VW and Eva tried not to appear as though she was enjoying his spells.

Barely three weeks later it was this fracture that prevented him from surfing Old Smoky. It changed things between us in ways we could neither foresee nor understand.

During the summer just gone, while we'd chafed at the chance to prove ourselves, the ocean went flat. We dived with Sando more than we got to surf with him. On breathless-hot days he took us out around the Point to remote groper holes along the cliffs. These trips were designed to test our lung capacity more than anything but we loved to hunt for food. We swam into deep granite crevices to pull abalone with Sando at our side, deeper with every dive, and often as not we outlasted him. I couldn't tell if Sando was simply letting us best him for reasons of his own, but Loonie and I had trained ourselves to really soak the goodness from a lungful of air. When it came to freediving we knew what we were doing, and going for abalone was infinitely more fun than lying on the black bottom of the river with your arms wrapped around a slimy tree root. The sea was brimming with stuff to help you forget the pain in your chest. It was worth the spotted vision and the roar in your skull to be able to chase a big blue groper into its lair. Some days we'd hike back across the ridge with a fifty-pound fish and a bag of abalone and spend the afternoon filleting and shucking in the shade of Sando's killing tree. While we worked we pestered him into telling us about Old Smoky. At first he was evasive about the bombora, but we kept at him until he gave up tidbits of information in his cagey, elliptical way; it was maddening, but it charmed us.

Right from the get-go Loonie was desperate to surf Old Smoky. He believed he was ready. I wasn't so sure I was up to it. The reef was a mile out to sea on a lonely, wild bit of coast, and from what I'd seen the wave itself was huge. Whenever there was a swell big enough to make it break properly you couldn't launch a boat within twenty miles, so the only approach was to bash out across the bush track from the Point to the cliffs, and crab your way down the rock-face until you got within jumping range. We were supposed to launch ourselves off the storm-swept cliff. And then you began the mile-long paddle out to sea. I dreaded it, was tantalized by the prospect, and the worse Sando made it sound, the harder it was to resist the thought.

When he knew we were hooked Sando stopped being coy. He brought out marine charts of the area to show how the seabed rose from the continental shelf, how drastic the bathymetry was at Old Smoky where water simply reared up on the shoal and turned itself inside out. He drew diagrams of the set-up for us, the landmarks to navigate by to find the impact zone and the safety of the deep channel beside it. It's a pretty simple affair, really, he told us. Once you choose the right wave you're halfway home, but if you judge wrong, if you take off from too far across the reef, then you're in more trouble than the early settlers.

Then he took us out there. It was a baking February day. The ocean was a mirror. From just beneath Sando s place we boated down the estuary, hauled the dinghy up over the bar and launched out into the placid bay where we skated around the Point and headed west to the cliff-coast beyond. The sea-torn footings of the bluffs were tranquil, the blowholes dormant.

When we got out to Old Smoky conditions were so calm there wasn't much to see from the boat. Sando confirmed the landmarks for us — the way the trees inland matched up with a streak of lime down the cliff inshore. The reef itself was only a dim shadow below.

Deep, I murmured.

Won't seem so deep from the top of a twenty-footer, said Sando. Let's see how deep. May as well do our homework.

We dropped the anchor in the purple water of the channel and ten fathoms of rope snaked out before it found bottom. We had only masks and no fins. We watched Sando plunge in and swim over to the reef. Loonie and I hit the water a moment later.

Rising sharply from the seabed the shoal at Old Smoky was like a sunken building, windows open, teeming with blue morwongs, harlequins and boarfish. In the water column above, schools of buffalo bream churned restless circles. Because Sando was watching and because we could, we speared past him for the bottom, to make solid the idea of the place and the stories we fed on. We kicked down barefoot and shaped ourselves to glide, purging as we went. In the mouths of caves were lobsters the size of cattle dogs. At thirty feet I took a handhold in the rock and rolled over to see Sando as a black star up there at the surface. Loonie slid down beside me and hooked on.

We hung there for the longest time, the two of us, locked in the old rivalry, smiling madly, around our snorkels while the sea clicked and rattled around us. Fish arrived, curious at first and then anxious when we showed no sign of moving on. In time they fled into the blips and specks at the edges of my vision.

The first big cold fronts arrived while the water was still warm. For the best part of a fortnight we pored over forecast maps, watching a chain of sub-Antarctic storms, hoping one might wander north towards us, or that two might converge and peel away in our direction to bring the sort of weather required to make Old Smoky break. Sando told us that the best of the groundswell would arrive before the storm-fronts themselves, that waves were little more than lines of energy from events beyond the horizon. I tried to imagine them, these radiating shocks, as they rolled toward us like harbingers of a trouble we couldn't yet see. Along with Loonie I was excited and jittery, though there was still something unreal about the rigmarole of preparation when the storms themselves seemed so abstract.

In these weeks before Easter Sando was solemn and pensive. We'd pedal out to his place only to sit on the steps for an hour while he went through his yoga routine and Eva glowered at us from the open doorway. We did our best not to pester him. We knew that he drove out along the ridges with his binoculars every day, that he was watching and waiting while we were in school, and we saw that he had huge, pointed big-wave boards laid out in. readiness beneath the house. There was nothing left to do but wait.

My parents wouldn't have had any idea about what I was preparing for. I can only assume that they accepted my story about Sando, who was, I said, just a bloke who gave Loonie and me a lift now and then, someone for whom we did odd jobs. Whether or not they believed this story, they never challenged me over it. They were not suspicious like Loonies old man. He had Sando and Eva pegged as layabouts and drug-addled hippies and he'd already forbidden his son from going out to their place, but Loonie — who was always good at covering his tracks and an excellent liar besides — had never been the sort of boy who felt compelled to do as he was told. He regularly slept at our place on weekends. For all his sly grins I knew he liked the homely manner in which my parents did things. He even liked the mortifying way my mother would come into my room some nights to try to tuck us into our beds. It was, I suppose, a taste of the domestic life he'd missed out on, though at times he seemed to be play-acting. Being with us a few days a week meant he could escape his father's brutal moods, but it was also a means of avoiding surveillance, for Sando had long been in the habit of picking us both up from my house.

Had my parents known what Sando was actually getting me into, I doubt they would have been so trusting. Back then, the idea of a grown man spending so much time with teenaged boys wouldn't have troubled them or anybody else, for all that sort of fear and panic was far in the future, but knowing that he was training us to go to sea to leap from the cliffs in a storm swell and put ourselves in harm's way would have been something else entirely. Perhaps it was irresponsible of Sando to lead us into such a situation. At that age we were physically undeveloped, too small to safely manage what we set out to do, and he did it without our parents' consent. I have no doubt that in a later era he'd have been seen as reckless and foolhardy, yet when you consider the period and the sorts of activities that schools and governments sanctioned, Sando's excursions seem like small beer. We could have been staying back at school as army cadets, learning to fire mortars and machine-guns, to lay booby traps and to kill strangers in hand-to-hand combat like other boys we knew, in preparation for a manhood that could barely credit the end of the war in Vietnam. Sando appealed to one set of boyish fantasies and the state exploited others. Eva was right — we were Sando's wide-eyed disciples — but in the sixties and seventies when we were kids there were plenty of other cults to join, cults abounding.

As it happened Sando came for us while Loonies arm was still in plaster.

We woke in the night to the booming swell but neither of us said anything. If tomorrow was the day then only one of us would be paddling out with Sando. Once awake we lay silent for hours and when we heard the VW come threshing up the inlet road, we dressed quickly and crept from the house. But at the end of the boggy drive where the Kombi sputtered and chugged, Loonie veered off into the dark street.

What's he up to? yelled Sando, cranking a window down.

I shrugged, but I already knew.

Doesn't he even wanna watch?

No, I said. He doesn't.

Here, get in.

We puttered up behind Loonie with the windows down. The air was freezing and nobody in Sawyer seemed to be up.

Hey, Loonie, said Sando as we eased alongside to keep pace with him. Aren't you gonna come and watch out for your mate?

What for? said Loonie. Spoil ya secret hippy moment?

Don't be a dickhead. C'mon, watch and learn.

Oh, no fuckin worries. I'd love that.

Least you could show your mate a bit of support.

What for? He's chicken.

Jesus, son. Don't be an arsehole.

Fuck off, coach.

Sando gave a bitter, disappointed laugh, but Loonie kept walking. I thought Sando might persist a little, cajole him, but he wound the window up and pulled away. At first I was stunned but after a few moments the humiliation of it sank in. Loonie was right. He knew I wasn't up to it. Still, I couldn't believe he'd come out and say it like that, in front of Sando. I craned back for a glimpse of his white hair, but he was gone in the gloom. There were three boards strapped to the rear tray. They were Brewers, huge beautiful things. Three of them. As though Sando had brought an extra as a gesture for Loonie's sake.

I am chicken, I said.

Oh, fuck, said Sando. Everyone's chicken. That's why we do this silly shit.

You reckon?

Yeah, to face it down, mate. To feel it, eat it. And shit it out with a big hallelujah.

He laughed. And I laughed because he did, to hide my fear.

When we hauled up past the Point the bay was awash with foam and shrouded with vapour. The surge of the shorebreak overran the ramparts of the bar and spewed into the estuary. The ocean sounded like a battlefield; the unceasing roar was audible even above the sound of the Volkswagen.

Sando nursed the vehicle up the tracks and out to the last ridge. It was slow going but I wasn't in a hurry. When he switched the engine off the noise of the sea was frightening. He took up the binoculars while I peered southward through the dawn light. Beyond the turmoil at the base of the cliffs the ocean was strangely smooth. There was still a faint offshore breeze at our backs, meaning the storms themselves were still a day away. The first sun gave the water a benign sheen and for a few minutes there was nothing much to see, little enough for a swoon of relief to course through me. I was, I thought, off the hook. And then a mile out I saw the sudden white flare. A plume of spray lifted off the bommie like the dust kicked up by a convoy of log-trucks and after a second's delay the sound of it reached us. Now that was a noise to snap a boy out of his dreamy sense of wellbeing.

Well, Pikelet, said Sando. Looks like we'll get wet this morning.

I could barely carry that yellow Brewer. It was ten feet long and wouldn't fit under my skinny arm so I balanced it on my head the way the old-timers did in the days of balsa boards and Gidget and D-fins. The heath around us was filled with peppery smells and alive with the nip and dash of honeyeaters. We hiked west to where all the boulders were whiskered with lichen. I followed Sando. We didn't say much. I watched the muscles flex in his bare back. The wetsuit was shucked down to his waist and its neoprene arms flapped against his thighs.

It was a half-hour walk. I was so troubled about Loonie that for whole minutes at a time I forgot to be afraid. Had it been me with the busted arm I'd have come to watch, out of gratitude for the let-off as much as from comradely feeling, and I certainly wouldn't have gone around calling anyone a chicken — nobody, not friend nor foe. I wasn't old enough then to know that you only call someone a coward from safe ground, fortified by the certainty of your own courage or by your deluded faith in it. But Loonie always had absolute self-assurance. There have been times since when I've thought of him as an endless and rather aimless reservoir of physical bravery, and that this defining characteristic distorted him somehow, keeping him from subtler feelings. In middle age I look back on Loonie with sad wonder. He was real enough, but less of a friend than I'd imagined, and perhaps that morning marked the beginning of my disaffection, for although I was in awe of him I hated him for saying what he said. Yet maybe I owed him a debt that day, for the longer I brooded on his outburst, hiking along the clifftops in Sando's wake, the angrier I got. It was this fury and little else that hardened my resolve and kept me from running away.

We picked our way down a scrubby, windswept slope where sea-mist rose in our faces and at a steep cliff we passed the boards down in stages until finally we stood on a tongue of rock above a surging gap. We shoved our sneakers into clefts above us, and all the time Sando spoke to me quietly, like a horse-breaker. Between incoming waves the gully beneath us emptied out to reveal a hanging garden of kelp and limpets. When the water returned, it surged green to just below where we stood. Now and then a wave sprawled right up the rock to explode in a mess of foam.

Getting off's the easy part, said Sando. Coming back in you'll have to concentrate. Time the surge and pick the biggest. Come in on the back of it. If you don't make it all the way up here you'll be stuck halfway and the next wave'll splatter you against the cliff. You gotta be patient, Pikelet. If it takes half an hour, that's what it takes, you hear?

I nodded. My right leg shook; it felt unconnected to the rest of my body. The size of the waves, the length of the paddle, the monumental shadow of the cliff- everything was beyond imagining.

I watched Sando shrug into the top half of his wetsuit and take up his big orange Brewer. He pinched my cheek and grinned. The sun shone in his beard and in his eyes, and his teeth were strong and white.

You still wanna do this?

I no longer trusted myself to speak. I just took up my board beside him and stood shivering in my shorts.

Shit, he said as a great, green glut of water poured up at our feet. I wonder what the ordinary people are doin today.

With that, while the sea was all but upon us, he launched out with his board like a shield before him and landed smoothly and paddled briskly with the receding surge. In a moment he was out in deep water beyond the turbulence.

I looked down into the maw and waited for the surge to return. Sando sat up to wait. Birds shrieked behind me. The rocks streamed with fizz. Every crack spilled rivulets and streams and sheets until suddenly the sea came back and Sando started yelling and then I braced and jumped.

The paddle out was so long and disorientating that it became kind of abstract. I followed the cheesy, yellow soles of Sando's feet and fell into a rhythm. Half an hour later, still two hundred yards shy of the reef itself, I sat up beside him in a dreamy calm. Perhaps it was the warm sun and the exertion and the fact that we'd paddled out during a long lull, but I began to feel safe and happy. When the first wave broke over Old Smoky, all that equanimity simply evaporated.

We were in deep water, safe enough in the scheme of things, and I hadn't yet understood the scale of what I was seeing, but the sight of the thing pitching out across the bommie drove a blade of fear right through me. Just the sound of spray hissing back off the crest inspired terror; it was the sound of sheetmetal shearing itself to pieces. The wave drove onto the shoal and the report cannoned across the water and slapped against my chest.

Sando hooted. He raised his arms to it and tossed his head back. The wave sprawled and growled and finally spat its wind into the pacifying depth of the channel so that by the time it reached us it was just a massive current with a trailing scum of spindrift.

Got your bearings?

Yeah, I lied.

Had I the slightest idea of where to go, I would have paddled straight back to the cliffs and climbed out right then. But behind me the land was featureless, just a grey-black slab which disappeared between swells.

Sando paddled on up to the channel in tight to the reef where the swells humped prodigiously but did not quite break. At a loss and scared of being alone, I followed. He paddled and propped, paddled and propped, checking and adjusting his position all the time. He motioned me closer as a fresh set lumbered in. At first all I saw was a series of dark lines in the distance and then these swells became a convoy, bearing down on us, increasing in size and speed with every passing moment until they became distinct waves that warped and wedged so massively that I found myself looking uphill into great sunstruck ridges. You could feel the whole skin of the ocean being drawn outward to meet them, and it was impossible to resist the conviction that we were about to be mown down, even here in the safe depth of the channel.

We sat tight while four waves went by. Then Sando paddled over and put himself in harm's way. I stayed out wide; I wasn't going anywhere. He rose, still sitting, over the next wave, lifted into the sky without expression, and for a long time afterwards he was obscured by spray. When I saw him next he was stroking into the path of the biggest wave I'd ever seen. As the thing drew itself up onto the reef, he seemed, for all his beetling, to be sucked back up its lumpy slope. A moment later the wave broke, spangled and streaked and pluming vapour behind him, and he was up, falling bent-legged into the pit below. Despite the surface chop he kept his feet to come sweeping down from three storeys high and when he ploughed by I caught a jaunty flash of teeth and saw he was okay.

When he paddled back out Sando was singing. He slapped water my way and did his best to unseat me. His eyes glittered; he was as lit up as I'd ever seen him.

Jesus, he said laughing. God! You gotta get some of that.

Just watchin, I said, panting with anxiety.

Aw!

Yeah, I said. Really.

Doesn't come around every week, mate.

No.

Never forgive yourself.

Maybe, I said breathless.

I think you're ready, Pikelet.

Hm.

I shook my head and bobbed dumbly out there in the purple-deep ocean with a bitter taste in my mouth.

Mountains of water rose from the south; they rumbled by, gnawing at themselves, spilling tons of foam, and the half-spent force of them tore at my dangling legs. There was just so much water moving out there, such an overload of noise and vibration; everything was at a scale I couldn't credit. I began to hyperventilate. Only later could I appreciate how alert Sando was that morning. Though he sensed my panic he did not touch me. Had he even got up close, or tried to grab my board and reassure me I'd have lashed out. I was wild with fear and we were a mile out to sea, the two of us, and now things had really gotten dangerous. But he knew what he was doing.

Tell you what, he said. Let's take a break. We don't have to do this. We'll try something different.

I didn't look at him. I couldn't shift my gaze from the horizon. We were in a lull now, but that was no comfort. I sensed him paddling east but I kept looking south as though my neck was locked in position. He was gone; he was nowhere near the reef. And I was alone. On my own. The body understood before my mind caught up. I forced myself to snatch a glimpse. Sando was more than fifty yards off. He was right over in the safe deep away from the reef and he was waving and calling. There was nothing urgent in his tone. He sounded positively languid. I heard a calming authority in his voice, a familiarity that tugged at me. He looked so secure and comfortable sitting up with his hands on his thighs and his elbows out like muttonbird wings, and I felt doubly exposed out there by the break. I was caught. I stared back out to sea. I doubted I could move. Sando kept up some sort of banter across the distance, while the fear boiled up in me. I heard how nasty and ragged my breathing had become. I was lightheaded. And then, quite suddenly, I was too afraid to stay there. It was as if I'd pitched up against my own panic and bounced back. I swung the board his way, dropped flat and began to paddle. When I got there I was gasping.

Let's dive, he said casually. I'll beat you to the bottom.

Without another word he stood up on his Brewer and speared into the water between us. I sat up in a funk, alone again. I couldn't bear it; he must have known I'd follow him.

It was too deep out there to see the sandy bottom, especially without a mask, but I could dimly make out the soles of Sando's feet as he kicked down. I clawed after him and, after a few moments, settled into a steep, calming glide. I was already oxygen-soaked from all the hyperventilation and I didn't have the buoyancy of a wetsuit to contend with, so I caught up with him quickly enough, and within a few seconds I overtook him. Blood drummed at my temples. My chest felt as if it would implode. Every bubble tore at me. I felt like a dying comet. When I finally ran out of speed and conviction I levelled off, and when I looked up I saw Sando's blurry outline at some distance. Down here the sea was its usual quiet self, all sleepy-dim and familiar. Some kind of animal recognition jolted me back into myself. It was only the sea, the water. Didn't I know what to do underwater? Slowly, returning with the burning need to breathe, came the old confidence. I knew what I was doing. I had control. I saw Sando's hazy thumbs-up and pumped back toward the surface. We rose together in our cauls of fizz and light and when we hit the air a few yards from our floating boards a surge of heat went through me and I knew I was okay.

That day I went back across to the bombora and rode two waves. Together those rides wouldn't add up to more than half a minute of experience, of which I can only recall a fraction: flickering moments, odd details. Like the staccato chat of water against the board. A momentary illusion of being at the same level as the distant cliffs. The angelic relief of gliding out onto the shoulder of the wave in a mist of spray and adrenaline. Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water.

Sando paddled up and held my hand like a brother or a father and I was babbling. I felt immortal and he just laughed. But already I wanted more. I was hankering for a third ride, something to make it real.

I sat for a few minutes while Sando took the next wave. He made it look easy and suddenly it did feel easy. I couldn't even wait for him to paddle back over. I paddled up to the impact zone and in a moment of overblown confidence put myself in the path of something the size of the Angelus town hall. I didn't understand how wildly I'd overreached until the moment I got to my feet and felt the whole edifice bulge and mutate beneath me.

For half a second I saw the shadow of the reef far below. The heavy board fell from under me like a leaf and I sprawled down the hard, unyielding face without it, bouncing from hip to hip, unable to break the skin of the water. I was falling down a staircase — one that never seemed to end, which collapsed on me and shot me skyward before snatching me down again so its rubble-spill might drive me headlong across the reef, rattling and wracking me all the way. I bounced and pinged and shot, winded and half blind, across the shoal, and when the reef fell away the turbulence ploughed me so deep and so fast I barely had a chance to equalize to save my eardrums. I knew not to fight it, but I was nearly gone when the sea let me go. I came up choking, sobbing, kicking at the surface as though I could climb into purer oxygen.

By the time Sando reached me I'd regained some composure but he'd seen it all. I was two hundred yards from where I'd caught the wave and my shorts were gone entirely.

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.

So 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 road 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 truckle'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 rny 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.

There were several major swells that year as big lows rode up out of the Roaring Forties, but we spent more time waiting for them, discussing them, imagining them, than riding them. Winter had its many interludes when for weeks on end the wind turned sideshore and brought swell in at hopeless angles, and there were days and days of dark, squally chop when the sea was a misery to behold.

I watched the weather maps and waited for Sando, perpetually in a state of anguished anticipation. Somehow I'd gotten used to a certain underlying level of fear. When it was gone I missed it. After a huge day at Barney's or a rare session at Old Smoky I came home charged — the euphoria lasted for days. But when it dissipated I became restless, even anxious. I couldn't concentrate at school. Whenever I condescended to go fishing on the estuary, the old man complained that I twitched and jiggled like an alky, that I wrecked a good morning out.

I took to running in the forest. I rode out to the rivermouth and back flat-strap. I did what I could to wear myself out, but at night I still lay awake, turning, sighing, waiting.

A woman called Margaret Myers began staying weekends in the pub. Reputedly from Sydney, she was about forty and rather tall. She was dark-haired and curvy, wore kaftans and beads and smoked clove cigarettes. She was all out of sync for Sawyer, but she quickly became a regular. Loonie thought she was the most sociable woman he'd ever met, though this was before he realized that she was making a living upstairs in Room 6. During the hectic hours of the Sunday session, when it seemed that all hell was breaking loose down in the bar, he took to watching through his spyhole as she entertained her guests. He said he'd witnessed things that made his eyes sore, stuff you could barely credit. I took in every lurid detail, but I didn't really believe him. In this instance the facts didn't matter to me at all. Margaret Myers was such a fabulous creation and Loonie such a great bullshitter that the telling and the idea were satisfaction enough.

But Loonie, in his uncanny way, seemed to sense my unbelief. God knows, I never called him a liar — I wasn't stupid enough to fall for that. I didn't even press him for the more prosaic details of corroboration, stuff about the spyhole, the angle of view, the convenience of her using the same room each time, yet he called me on it anyway, for just as he had a native genius for manufacturing a physical challenge where there was none, Loonie could find an accusation in any endorsement, and before long, with barely a word on your part, he'd have himself wound into an indignant fury and you'd find you'd somehow dared him to prove himself. In the case of Room 6 there was only one way for Loonie to feel himself vindicated.

Which is how I came to be in that storeroom one day lifting a grey scab of Juicy Fruit from the pressed-tin wall with Loonie's breath hot and sour in my ear. I didn't really want to be there. The entire operation of getting from woodshed to laundry and then making the fraught bolt upstairs hardly seemed worth the risk. The room stank of mops and damp cardboard and my heart beat so hard it made me queasy. I was breathless and sweating and when I first leant against the metal wall my forehead slid off the mission-brown paint.

It turned out that the spyhole was hardly required to prove Loonie's point. The squeak of the bed next door, the slap of meat and the low growls coming through the wall were evidence enough. But that bit of gum was a provocation. I peeled it off, pressed my eye to the gap and let out a grunt of surprise that must have been audible from the other side of the wall. Because what I saw first, not two feet distant, was a woman's lipstick-smeared face turned my way. Her green eyes were open but unfocussed. She had big pores and her skin shone damply beneath her jouncing curls. I recoiled so fast that I impaled myself on Loonie's front teeth. We stumbled

about on the bare boards, hissing and wincing, and there was a pause in proceedings in the next room. We froze, waiting for the door to fly open. The back of my head felt punctured.

After a few very long moments, the chafing bed resumed and a man murmured and beads clacked without rhythm. I stared across at the white eye of the spyhole and when I looked back at Loonie he was laughing silently. I jerked my thumb in the direction of the door but he shook his head. At least half of me was grateful. I gathered my nerve and tiptoed back to the wall.

I pressed my eye up and saw a woman's pink rump and a man's hairy thighs thudding against it. I didn't breathe. I followed the feline curve of the woman's spine to the mass of curls on the pillow only an arm's length away from where I stood, and while I watched, Margaret Myers rose on her elbows in response to some new urgency. Her breasts and beads swung and the golden hoops of her earrings glinted. She tilted her face up and opened her eyes a moment and looked my way. There was a moment — just a flicker — of surprise but I knew she'd seen me. She seemed more interested than outraged. And gradually, with a kind of weary amusement, as the bloke pounded away behind her, she began to smile.

A hot jet ran down the leg of my jeans, and I made a stupid sound as Loonie pulled me aside to see for himself. Right then the man called out to nobody in particular, like a bloke who'd just dropped something in the street, and I didn't need to be watching to know whose voice it was. I stood clear, fully expecting Loonie to reel back out of the room at the sound of his old man right there through the wall, but he stayed where he was, lips pursed, head and palms against the tin, as though he'd seen it all before.

I'm amazed at how long it took me to become properly inquisitive about Sando and Eva. Anybody older might have been more than merely curious about their circumstances. For one thing, they seemed to be free agents. They lived like no other people I'd ever met. It was hardly abnormal in those years for longhairs to avoid all talk of work and money except to condemn them in proper Aquarian terms, but these two never even bothered to bring the subject up. They never spoke about making a living the way locals did; it was as if the concept never occurred to them. They thought and lived and carried themselves differently to other people. There were few townsfolk who lived as comfortably as they did yet I didn't ask why. I was a mere schoolboy. I wouldn't say that I was under anyone's spell exactly, but I did feel that there was something special about Sando and I had no interest in how people paid their bills. Of what importance are the material details of adult life when you're an adolescent? I didn't think to ask how he got what he had or even how he got to be what he was. I put all my efforts into trying to be like him. I could take or leave his prickly wife, but I watched Sando; I hung on his every word. I was content to just be with him. There were afternoons out there with Loonie and Eva and him when we swung in hammocks while the weather piled up towards the forest from the broad sweep of the bay, as roos grazed on the grassy slope and the wind chimes stirred around us, that I had a sense I'd been singled out somehow, chosen.

Then there were those rare days, the times we returned from a session so huge, surf so terrifying as to render us incoherent. Back at the house we ate and drank and lay rocking alongside one another, laughing like stoners. It was hard to find words for the things we'd just seen and done. The events themselves resonated in your limbs. You felt shot full and the sensation burned for hours — for days, sometimes — yet you couldn't make it real for anybody else. You couldn't and you weren't sure you wanted to. But we blathered at each other from sheer excitement and you can imagine the boyish superlatives and the jargon we employed. Eva was impatient with our giggling nonsense. Yet now and then I caught her listening, especially to Sando, in a way that made me wonder about her.

Sando was good at portraying the moment you found yourself at your limit, when things multiplied around you like an hallucination. He could describe the weird, reptilian thing that happened to you: the cold, supercharged certainty which overtook your usually dithering mind, the rest of the world in a slow-motion blur around you, the tunnel vision, the surrender that confidence finally became. And when he talked about the final rush, the sense of release you felt at the end, skittering out to safety in the beautiful deep channel, Eva sometimes sank back with her eyes closed and her teeth bared, as though she understood only too well.

It's like you come pouring back into yourself, said Sando one afternoon. Like you've exploded and all the pieces of you are reassembling themselves. You're new. Shimmering. Alive.

Yes, she said. Exactly.

And I watched her, and wondered how she knew.

Just as I began to find some confidence, all the parameters changed. One rainy afternoon inside by the fire, Sando started talking about a break called the Nautilus. This new wave seemed so far off the scale I thought he was making it up in order to freak us out. It sounded too implausible, too deliberately mysterious. But then he brought out nautical charts and it began to look as though this spot really did exist. Sando had his own detailed sketches of the bombora and its approaches and he drew diagrams to show us the way the swell came onto the reef. He said he'd been studying it for ages, wondering if it could be surfed, certain it was a wave no other surfer had seen, let alone ridden. Despite all the charts and drawings the whole deal still sounded a bit fanciful. This wasn't a deepwater bommie like Old Smoky. The Nautilus was an oceanic lump of rock, a ship-killer barely beneath the surface. It was easy to imagine vicious whitewater in such a place, but not an evenly breaking wave of the sort we needed.

Sando watched our faces. My scepticism must have shown. From his shirt pocket he produced a solitary Polaroid. He'd obviously been saving it for last because he flipped the photo onto the table with a flourish and sat back with a smile. Neither Loonie nor I picked that shiny square up for a moment. But there it was, a thick, purple frown of water, the most impossible wave I'd ever seen.

Oh, man, you're kidding, I said. You can't surf that.

You don't reckon? he said with a grin.

I couldn't believe Sando or anyone else would even consider it. This spot was unlike anything we'd ever heard of, let alone attempted. The Nautilus was three miles out. A sharkpit. It lay seaward of a granite island — a seal colony, no less — and the wave itself broke over a huge rock which actually did look like the upright shell of a nautilus. On the charts it was marked as a navigation hazard with multiple warnings.

You launch here at the cove, he said, tapping the chart.

And you've done this? I asked.

Well, yeah, I've scoped it. Buzzed out in the dinghy a few times.

Loonie turned the Polaroid over in his hands. You took this?

Yep. Needs a lot of west in the swell.

Fuck, said Loonie. Look at this thing. How big is that?

Twenty feet, I spose.

No way!

And it's breakin square.

The reef's half outta the water, I said. It's nuts.

Yeah, said Sando with a laugh. Horrible, innit?

Aw, man, said Loonie.

The next frontier, said Sando.

I knew he'd surfed some big waves in his time. He spoke of Mexico often enough, of Indonesia and various Pacific atolls, and back here he'd taken on Old Smoky alone, paddled out time and again without a soul to watch or help. He was a pioneer; I couldn't doubt his experience or his courage. But this was something else. And I didn't know whether to feel honoured or angry that he might expect us to attempt it with him.

You think it's really possible? I asked, trying not to sound feeble. I mean, what do you really think? Honestly.

Honestly? he said. Mate, I need a shit just looking at it.

I laughed with him but Loonie turned on us.

You mean you're scared of it?

Sando looked a little taken aback. He shrugged. Well, a man'd be stupid not to be scared. I mean, look at this thing.

I'm scared talkin about it, I muttered.

But Loonie only scowled in disapproval.

Fear's natural, mate, said Sando. There's no shame in it.

Loonie rolled his eyes, but he stopped short of contradicting him.

Being afraid, said Sando. Proves you're alive and awake.

Whatever you reckon, said Loonie, not relishing the prospect of another of Sando's little seminars.

Animals react out of instinct, Sando continued. Like they're always on automatic. We've got plenty of that, too. But our minds complicate things, slow us down. We're always calculating the odds, measuring the consequences. But you can train your mind to live with fear and deal with the anticipation.

Aw, boys, said Eva coming into the room, where the fire smoked away untended. Now you got him going.

Every day, said Sando, making an elaborate show of ignoring her. Every day, people face down their own fears. They make calculations, bargains with God, strategic manoeuvres. That's how we first crossed oceans and learnt to fly and split the atom, how we found the nerve to give up on all the old superstitions. Sando gestured grandly at the books against the wall. That's mankind for you, he said. Our higher side. We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.

I cleared my throat uncertainly and he looked at me with unexpected fondness.

But that doesn't mean you don't feel fear, he continued. You can't lie about that. Denying fear, well, that's. . unmanly. And if you're a woman? asked Eva.

We all looked at her blankly.

I'm sure you mean unworthy, she said.

Sando blinked. Yeah, he murmured. Dishonourable. Dishonest. Whatever.

Husband and wife exchanged glances I couldn't interpret. I sat there trying to take all this in, only faintly consoled by the knowledge that Sando could look at that Polaroid and be afraid like me.

Of course, he said mischievously, we don't have to try it on. We could always go back to riding the Point when it's two foot and sunny. What d'you reckon?

He looked at us with a kind of comradely warmth that made me want to not disappoint him.

No harm lookin, I said. I guess.

Piece a piss, said Loonie.

We laughed and poked the fire and threw cushions, but underneath all the smiles and cheers I had a sick feeling. This winter I'd seen and done stuff I never could have imagined previously. Things had borne down so quickly on me that it was brain-shaking. For the past few months I'd been an outrider, a trailblazer, and the excitement and strangeness of it had changed me. There was such an intoxicating power to be had from doing things that no one else dared try. But once we started talking about the Nautilus I got the creeping sense that I'd begun something I didn't know how to finish.

Storms continued to come late that winter and into spring, but none big or westerly enough to make it worth our while giving the Nautilus a try. On the mildest October swell Sando took us out to reconnoitre the place, and it was everything he said it was. Even though it only humped up and broke intermittently while we were alongside it made me anxious to watch and I can't say I was heartbroken to be denied the chance to test myself there that year. But without swell I was overtaken by restlessness and by a boredom from which there seemed to be no relief. At school I was in freefall and at home my new lassitude set the oldies on edge. The old girl tried to broach the subject with me but I cut her dead every time. Everything around me seemed so pointless and puny. The locals in the street looked cowed and weak and ordinary. Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room of sleepers. Little wonder my parents seemed so relieved when it came time for school camp.

Angelus High sent its students to stay at the old quarantine station in the bush at the harbour entrance. You could make it out a mile across the water from town but it seemed more remote than it was. I went without enthusiasm. I had a cold and I suppose in retrospect I was mildly depressed, so it was a surprise to be as struck as I was by the peculiar atmosphere of the place. The settlement itself was little more than a cluster of Victorian barracks and cottages on a patch of level ground beyond the highwater mark. The decommissioned buildings seemed hunkered down, besieged by sky and sea and landscape. The steep isthmus behind them was choked with thickets of coastal heath from which granite tors stood up at mad angles. Every human element, from the slumping rooftops to the sad little graveyard, seemed older and more forlorn than the ancient country beyond. The scrub might have been low and wizened and the stones badly weathered, but after every shower of rain they all shone; they stood up new and fresh, as though they'd only moments ago heaved themselves from the skin of the earth.

That week I slipped away at every opportunity from whichever character-building group activity we'd been wrangled into, and made my way to the cemetery or the little beach below it. From there I could gaze across to the distant wharf at Angelus whose cranes and silos looked too small to be real. It was like seeing the familiar world at a twofold remove, from another time as much as another direction, for it felt that I was in an outpost of a different era. It wasn't only the colonial buildings that gave me such a sense, but also the land they were built on. Each headstone and every gnarled grasstree spoke of a past forever present, ever-pressing, and for the first time in my life I began to feel, plain as gravity, not only was life short, but there had been so much of it.

Queenie found me feverish one afternoon in the old mortuary room. It was a derelict place full of webs and bird nests and flickering shadows and the eeriness of it distracted us from our awkwardness. We stood looking at the raised slab with its gruesome gutters and drains.

Creepy, she murmured.

Yeah, I said honking into my handkerchief. And sad.

All the waiting around they did. The people stuck here. All that sitting around to be declared clean, or whatever. Just to end up on this, some of them.

I looked at her. She was sucking thoughtfully on a hank of hair and staring at the morgue slab. I'd forgotten how smart she was, how much I liked her.

You think there's ghosts? I asked offhandedly.

Probably.

You believe all that stuff? I asked, surprised.

Yes, actually. Out on the farm, she said. Down on our beach, you hear things at night.

Yeah? I sniggered. What things?

Well, people's voices. And whales. You know, singing.

Well, that's not ghosts, obviously.

I don't know about that, she said. Whales are more or less extinct on this coast.

I've seen whales around.

Yeah? Alive? How many?

I shrugged. In truth I could only think of a single sighting since primary school. It was a miserable thought.

Whale ghosts.

Go ahead and laugh, she said.

I laughed. She thumped my arm. My laugh turned into a horrible cough. I was hot and clammy, but I wanted to keep her talking.

Kind of childish, don't you think?

Really? she said bridling. Maybe we'll see about that.

It transpired that I was not, after all, immune to a dare. Queenie and I spent the night in a sleeping bag on the mortuary slab. The joint we passed back and forth was damp and so stale it tasted like smouldering compost, which didn't exactly help my cough. We told each other ghoulish stories and tried to ignore the impossible chill of the channelled block beneath us. All night the corrugated-iron walls warped and flapped in the southerly and I coughed like a wild dog.

Queenie's hair crowded the single pillow we shared and despite my cold we kissed with a desperate cheerfulness. Her mouth had the vegetable taste of pot about it but it was soft and warm and I don't really know if we kissed with any purpose other than warding off the chill and whatever else lurked in the night around us. I was conscious of her limbs against mine but more aware of the cadaver slab against my back and although I felt one of her notable breasts through her woollen jumper we never quite got into the swing of things. Eventually she fell asleep to leave me suspended in a state of excruciating alertness. The hut sighed and moaned. My heart raced. I tried not to cough for fear of waking her. My skin felt too tight and I began to sweat.

It was dark in that hut, black as a dog's guts, and the night got away from me.

Queenie and I were sent home from camp.

Three days later I was in hospital in Angelus with pneumonia.

I only remember the dream.

I was deep. The whole sea boiled overhead. White streaks of turbulence drove down like tracer fire and rocket trails, a free-fire zone in dim and shuddering green.

And I'm plummeting, a projectile. When it comes rushing at me, black as death, the reef is shot full of holes and I slam into one, headlong.

Next, I see myself, from outside my flailing, panicked body. Headfirst. Wedged in the rock. While my lungs turn to sponge and the ocean inside me flickers with cruel light.

Drowning.

Drowning.

Fighting it.

But drowning.

There was, for a while, I'm certain, a woman at the bedside. I thought it was Eva Sanderson but it was more likely a nurse or my mother or Queenie Cookson. Whoever it was, she held my hand and spoke for a long time. But her words made no more sense than birdsong. And then she was gone.

I woke up and my parents were in the room, anxious and exhausted, still bearing on their faces the unmistakeable look of disappointment that I was to see again a few weeks later when my school report came home.