Breath

5

LOONIE QUIT SCHOOL. He was jack of it; he just wanted to go surfing, but his old man was having none of that and he sent him up to the mill. Loonie hated everything about it. My old man said he wouldn't last a fortnight, said Loonie wouldn't work in an iron lung, said the kid was lazy and plain dangerous as a result.

Those summer holidays I went out to Sando's nearly every day. Eva had gone to the States for a few weeks and with Loonie in the workforce I had Sando to myself. I did more than seize the opportunity; I drank it up.

On flat-calm days we dived, and if there was the slightest swell we fooled about at the Point with boards he dug out from the far recesses of the undercroft — logs from the sixties, pig-boards and weird, tear-shaped things with psychedelic sprayjobs. There were days when we just hung out, when he'd sit crosslegged on the verandah carving a piece of cypress and I'd watch in silence. That summer he taught me how to play the didjeridu, to sustain the circular breathing necessary to keep up the low, growling drone you could send down the valley from his front steps. The noise of it made the dog go bush. I liked the way it sucked energy from me and drew hard feelings up the way only a good tantrum could when I was little. I blew till I saw stars, till a puddle of drool appeared on the step below or until Sando took the thing off me.

Sometimes you didn't bother to engage Sando in conversation. When he got into a mood I left him to his own thoughts and consoled myself down in the roo paddock alone with the didj. For me, Eva's absence was a boon, but I could see how agitated it often made him. Still, most afternoons he was mellow, even expansive. When he gave you his full attention you could feel yourself quicken, like a tree finding water.

It was different having Sando to myself. With only the two of us around, the talk got away from swells and surfspots. Sometimes he launched into raves about the Spartans or Gauguin. He told me about Herman Melville in Tahiti and the death of James Cook. When I told him I'd read Jack London and tried Hemingway, he lit up. From his shelves he took down Men and Sharks by Hans Hass, an old hardcover edition with black and white photos.

Take it, he said, it's a present.

He told me about the dolphin meat that Javanese fishermen had given him, how he ate it to avoid insult. He said he would eat human flesh if necessary, but hoped he'd never need to, and this was all he could think of while he ate the dolphin. We talked about the oil crisis, the prospect of nuclear annihilation. He spoke of the survivalists he'd met in Oregon and, speaking of survival, I told him of Loonie's conviction that during a wipeout he could sieve oxygen from sea-foam, suck it through his teeth to stay alive. We laughed at the loopiness of this, at Loonie's lovable denseness.

I basked in Sando's attention and treasured these brief moments of esteem. Sometimes he hugged me as I left, but more often he sent me on my way with a good-natured whack on the head.

We were in the kitchen one day, as Sando ground the spices for his special fish curry, when I saw a photo that I'd never noticed before. It hung in a sheoak frame on the dado beside the stove and its glass was speckled with oil stains. The image was a figure in a red snowsuit, a skier more or less upside down against the whiteness of a mountain. In the background were pointed trees like something from a TV Christmas.

Hey, I said. What's this?

Sando paused a moment with the mortar and pestle. The smells of coriander and cumin and turmeric were not the sort of thing that ever came from my mother's kitchen. My eyes were already itching from the vapour of crushed chillies.

That, Pikelet, is my wife.

You're shittin me.

I peered closer. Between goggles and hood there was a tuft of blonde hair. Her whole body was inverted, with her skis in the sky and her face tilted toward the ground somewhere below.

I shit you not.

Far out!

Yeah, I guess that about covers it. Pretty heavy-duty, eh.

How did she do it?

Off a jump. Big downhill run and up the ramp. Full 360.

And lands on her feet.

Well, that's the plan.

She's done it more than once, then?

Mate, she's pretty well known. It's freestyle. It's a whole other scene. They're the bad boys and girls of skiing. That's Utah in '71. She's there now.

Skiing?

Jesus, no — not with that knee. Nah, they're trying another operation.

Ah, I murmured, beginning to see.

She's been out three years now. More.

I thought about the pills, the limp, those bleak moods.

She's had other operations?

Sando nodded grimly.

Maybe this time it'll work.

Yeah, but it's a long shot.

There's no snow here, I murmured. How can she stand it?

Sando rammed the pestle against the grist of spices. I rested my chin on the benchtop and I could feel the force of his arms pulsing in the wood.

I think she prefers it here. I mean, if you couldn't surf anymore, would you want to live by the sea?

The ocean's beautiful. That'd be enough for me.

Bullshit.

No, really, I said. It'd be enough just to see it.

Believe me, you're talkin shit.

I stood up, stung by his casual certainty. It seems odd to have remembered it but in later life I had cause to recall the moment.

I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have.

Don't sulk, he said.

I'm not, I muttered.

She's got guts, that girl.

Yes, I agreed, seeing that I'd underestimated her. Eva's photo was on the wall but none of him could be shown. I didn't get it. They had so much in common. She'd been thwarted, but as far as I could tell he'd pretty much walked away. I wondered which had required most guts.

You're not from here, I said.

Nah, Melbourne originally, he said, ignoring my peevish tone.

So, why here?

Forest. Empty beaches. Waves nobody's ridden. Came here in the sixties for a while. Had a hut up there in the trees. I was after something pure, I guess.

Pure, I said.

Yeah, I know. Is anything really that pure?

I shrugged and there was a kind of detente between us again while he ground the spices and heated the skillet and fried them slowly until the house filled with smells enough to nearly lift the place off its poles.

Loonie was sacked from the mill before he could quit. In the new year his old man told him to get work in Angelus at the cannery or the meatworks, but it was a thirty-mile drive each way and without a driver's licence there was only the school bus to get him there, so he wound up washing glasses and sweeping up at the pub. He bought an old trail bike and started riding unlicensed out to Sando's along the back tracks. Whenever he blasted up the drive in a gust of dirt and two-stroke fumes he changed the atmosphere. He came more and more often those holidays and before long my interlude with Sando was over.

Sando never said a thing about the trip to Indonesia. He certainly didn't tell me that he planned to take Loonie with him. I didn't know Loonie even had a passport or how he'd conned his old man into letting him go. Maybe he had something on him; it was the only way I could see him getting his way. I didn't know a thing. They were just, quite suddenly, gone.

The dog was left with only a pink dune of dried food and a water bowl replenished by the tap dripping at the watertank, but Sando must have known I'd keep coming out there to check on it. I sat with the dog several days in bitter silence. One afternoon I went out to find that Eva was back. She was on crutches and as pissed off as I'd ever seen her. I asked her what was going on and she called me fifty kinds of fucking bastard and told me to piss off and never come back.

It took me a week to work up the nerve to go out and claim my board from beneath the Sandersons' house. I had hoped that Eva might be away again, but when I pushed my bike up into the clearing she was out on the verandah with the dog which barked and came skittering down to see me. She climbed awkwardly to her feet. She wore cut-off Levi's. Even from down there I could see the colour of her knee.

I just came for me twin-fin, I said, still clutching the bike.

There's coffee, she said.

Nah. I'll just get me board.

Pikelet, you don'rhave to take the goddamn board.

But I'm gunna.

Oh, whatever, she said, bracing herself against the verandah rail.

Look, I'm sorry I chewed you out. It was a shitty thing to do.

I stood there.

Come on, have coffee. Peace.

I hesitated. The breeze had swung onshore anyway and I didn't really feel like turning around right now to pedal straight back into town. So I relented and went up.

The house was in disarray with empty plates and mugs and bottles everywhere. The sink looked like a salvage yard and everything stank of garbage and pot.

Eva's limp was so painful to see that I went ahead and got the coffee myself. I came back out onto the verandah to sit at a safe distance.

The other day, she said. I was pretty bummed out. I apologize. I shrugged, crosslegged on the boards. I sipped the coffee without pleasure. I was still a tea man. It was quiet for a while and when I looked over she was staring out across the roo paddock. There were dark smudges around her eyes and her hair was greasy. The suture line on her knee was vivid.

How did the operation go? I asked.

No dice. I guess it was worth a shot.

I saw that photo of you. It's radical.

Well, she said too brightly. That's one for the archives now, isn't it?

I didn't know how to respond. The only things you could say were stupid.

Well, here we are, Pikelet. We're both abandoned.

He didn't tell you anything?

He left a note.

But he knew when you'd be back?

She nodded. Way to go, Sando.

So, what'll you do?

Oh, she said. I'll sit here and be pissed at him. What else am I gonna do? A few weeks he'll be back, all smiles, full of stories. Normally I wouldn't care so much, you know. But I could have done with some. . well, some help. And you?

Me?

The lone musketeer.

I shrugged again, reminded of my humiliation.

You couldn't have gone anyway, she said. You got school and stuff. What are you, fifteen?

In a few weeks.

Your time'll come.

He coulda told me, I said. I was here every day and he coulda said.

Guru shit and bad manners are pretty much the same thing,

Pikelet.

I guess, I murmured, but I didn't really know what she meant. I sat there long enough to drain the mug but I was anxious to go.

You need help with stuff? I asked, hoping that she didn't.

No, I'm fine. But thanks.

I was halfway down the stairs when she called out that some fresh fish would be nice, if I ever went spearing. I said I'd keep it in mind, but I had no plans to be back.

The dog followed me all the way out to the road and stood in the drive while I pedalled off. It looked at me dolefully, as though I'd abandoned it to its grim mistress.

For weeks I smarted with a feeling of having been overlooked — forsaken, unchosen — and the shock of it was all the greater because of how much I'd lately come to imagine an advantage over Loonie. I thought Sando and I had a special bond, a kind of intellectual interest, something Loonie, for all his animal energy, couldn't match. And now I felt like such an idiot.

I left for school and returned again sullen enough to irritate the old folks. At night in bed I conjured up the knowing smile Margaret Myers shot me that day in the pub and I jerked off morosely while the wind poured through the trees and the house creaked on its stumps.

Queenie took up with the captain of the school football team. He had a car, and sideburns like Peter Fonda.

At day's end I slumped in the bus, overcome by ordinariness.

Some evenings I swam in the river where the primary-schoolers bombed off the old plank. Once or twice I clung to roots on the bottom and deluded myself into thinking that up on the surface the little kids' wonder was turning to panic, but I doubt anybody even remembered I was there.

The next Saturday, I surfed the Point with the Angelus crew who seemed a little leery of me, but Sunday was hot and the sea mirror-flat so I spent the hours spearing fish behind the headland. I filled a hessian sack with queenies, harlequins and boarfish, and it was some business humping it back with my gear to the bike. Well before I drew up at the Sandersons' drive I knew I had no hope of riding the full bag home. I didn't want to go up there. But I couldn't bring myself to start slinging good fish into the bush.

Eva seemed unusually pleased — to see me. While I filleted the snapper in the shade of the killing tree she came downstairs with Cokes. Her leg was strapped and her limp was still severe, but she seemed more sanguine than I'd seen her for a while. I cut the red meat from the fish's shoulder and gave it to the dog. Eva sat in the shade and passed me a glass.

I had Loonies father out here today, she said. Man, is he pissed.

Pissed? I asked. Like, drunk?

No, pissed as in pissed off. He expected Loonie back Friday.

Friday? Is that when Sando said he'd be back?

Oh, who knows. When he's away the schedule's kind of open-ended. Seems the old man wasn't so happy about Loonie going anyways. Man, you can see the son in the father, huh?

I shrugged.

They have a way of looking at you, she said. Like you're some kind of… abomination.

Because you're American?

Naw, because I'm a fee-male.

Oh.

He's on his own, huh?

Um, I dunno, I said, tempted to broach the subject of Margaret Myers.

Guess I should feel sorry for him. But I don't.

I figured that my knowledge of the publican and Margaret Myers might include some awkward details, so I left it alone.

Do you miss it? I asked.

She looked at me. Miss what, exactly?

The snow. Sando told me about freestyling.

Of course I miss it, she said. Kinda dumbass question is that?

She drank her Coke and banged the glass down on the plank beside me. I trimmed the fillets and set them on the plate for her, determined to clean up and leave as quickly as I could.

How can you get em back on the farm once they've seen Paree.

Sorry? I wiped blood and scales from the knife.

Once you've had a taste of something different, something kind of out there, then it's hard to give it up. Gets its hooks in you. Afterwards nothing else can make you feel the same.

I nodded, understanding finally.

I guess I miss the buzz, she said. Boy, we did some scary shit up on the mountain. But, you know how it is, time wounds all heels. Your moment arrives and just slips away. Kinda cruel, huh.

Maybe it'll just get better on its own.

Yeah, and maybe Santy Clause is a Jew.

Stung, I slunk across to the watertank to wash my hands. The dog licked the salt off my legs.

I've never seen snow, I said.

White, she said. And cold. Thanks for the fish.

She had a way of making you feel small and stupid, even when she was in a good mood. I remembered again how little I liked her.

The week before Sando and Loonie finally returned, brown and shiny-eyed from Bali, I went back to see Eva. I had no fish; I was bored and lonely, fed up and spoiling for a blue. I was ready to tell that fancy Yank what I thought of her.

Months previous, Sando had rigged an exercise contraption on the verandah, an arrangement of weights and pulleys for Eva to use to strengthen her leg. I'd never known her to use it, but when I mounted the stairs she was cranking the thing without let-up. She saw me but didn't stop. She was mottled, slick with sweat, so fierce in her pain that it took me aback. I felt a chill of apprehension.

But I stood there, trapped by her gaze, all the wind gone from my sails. I felt I'd stumbled into something private. It was awkward but I didn't dare leave. She went on a full five minutes before pitching back, totally spent.

Throw me a towel!

I was affronted but hapless.

Gimme. The fucking. Towel!

I saw that a towel hung from the verandah rail beside me. I pulled it free and bunched it a moment, then hurled it with more force than was necessary. She caught the thing and buried her face in it. Her chest heaved so sharply I wondered if she was weeping, but I was more curious than sympathetic.

A breeze stirred the chimes around us. I didn't know why I stood there; it was my chance to bolt.

Oh, she said at last, wiping her boiled-looking face. I need a shower.

I'm off, then.

Stay, she said. I'll make coffee.

I don't bloody drink coffee.

Okay, Coke. We'll talk. Hey, I haven't fed the dog. The sack's still in the car. D'you mind?

I went down into the yard with the dog and found the big pack of dog food and poured out a dish on the ground. When she came out onto the verandah, Eva's hair was slicked back and her eyes were bright. Barefoot, in a sleeveless cotton dress, she seemed calm. It was as though the storm of pain had passed. She flopped into a hammock and swung there.

I'm hungry, she said. Can you cook?

I shook my head.

Didn't think so. C'mon, let's make burgers. I got supplies this morning.

For an hour or so she bossed me about in the kitchen and eventually we ate in silence off the benchtop. We sat on the stools Sando had made from bushwood. It was odd, this making-do. Neither of us was the other's first preference for company. We were stuck with each other.

Once she'd eaten, Eva became unusually talkative. We went back out onto the verandah and slouched into hammocks and she told me about growing up in Salt Lake City, about Mormons and mountains and her dead mother. Wryly, she explained the business of college scholarships and the starding advent of the angel Moroni. She told me stuff about new religion and new money that I couldn't quite grasp, and the longer she went on, die stranger America seemed to be.

On TV Americans were so soft and sentimental, all happy-go-lucky and forever safely at home. But the way Eva told it, her countrymen were restless, nomadic, clogging freeways and airports in their fevered search for action. She said they were driven by ambition in a way that no Australian could possibly understand. They wanted fresh angles, better service, perfect mobility. I tried to picture what she meant. She made her own people sound vicious. Yet God was in everything — all the talk, all the music, even on their money. Ambition, she said. Aspiration and mortal anxiety.

It was hard to negotiate the tangled crosscurrents of pride and disgust in Eva's rambling account, but it gave me plenty to think about. Here in Sawyer people seemed settled — rusted on, in fact. They liked to be ordinary. They were uncomfortable with ambition and avoided any kind of unpredictability or risk. There was a certain muted grandeur in our landscape but it seemed that power and destiny did not adhere to bare plains and dank forest. There were no mighty canyons and mile-wide rivers here. Without soaring peaks and snow, angels seemed unlikely and God barely possible.

I don't know how long I lay there in my hammock, ruminating on all this, before I realized that Eva had long since stopped talking. A light drizzle began to fall. Hauling up onto an elbow I saw she was asleep. Her hair had dried in a snarl beneath her. The tightness was gone from her face. Now and then her eyelids twitched and fluttered. She gave out a light, intermittent snore. Where her dress rode up her legs were pale.

It seemed wrong to stare at Eva like this, but I'd never been able to properly look at her before. I'd only ever known her in glances, from glimpses snatched in moments when I thought I was safe from her scalding glare. I eased myself out of the hammock and crept up beside her. She smelled of shampoo and fried onions. I studied the scars on her misshapen knee. The freshest suture line was fat and angry, a centipede imbedded in her flesh; it overlaid its predecessors, a silvery nest of them like a fossil record. There was stubble on her shins. For a moment, while she slept, she had gooseflesh on her arms.

I had the sudden and perilous urge to touch her. I wanted to feel her ruined knee and I didn't know why. I reached out. Don't hurt me, she said.

I flinched and stepped back, knocking a chair against the wall. Eva sat up, confused and awake.

What is it?

I shook my head. I gotta go.

Loonie showed up one night while I was failing to do my homework. I could see the mixed look on my mother's face as she ushered him into my room. She was fond of Loonie but her old wariness was back. She pulled at his strawy hair a moment and squeezed his shoulder as she left.

Did I miss anythin? he asked. No swell?

I shook my head.

Far out, he said abstractedly. He sat on my bed and flipped through the social studies book lying there.

So, I said. How was it?

He put the book down and pursed his lips. Fuckin unbelievable.

When'd you get back?

Last night. The old man's gone spastic. Hey, cop this.

Loonie pushed up the sleeve of his windcheater to reveal a long, pulpy wound.

Uluwatu, he murmured. It's insane.

What happened?

Just the reef. That coral rips the shit outta you.

For half an hour he told me stories of lonely waves and temples

and paddies, of monkeys and offerings and incense smoke; how Sando and he ate turtle meat and coconuts and rode out to reefs on outrigger canoes. I felt a stubborn refusal to be impressed. The more Loonie talked, the less I responded. I could see it puzzling him. He reached for bigger stories, wilder moments, to little avail.

I brought you this, he said, setting a tamped wad of foil on the desk beside me. It was no bigger than a.22 rifle cartridge.

What is it?

Hash, mate.

Jesus, I murmured.

Well, don't have a baby.

I heard the old girl coming before she had time to open the door. The little foil bullet fell into the drawer and Loonie met her on his way out.

Things were different after Sando and Loonie returned from the islands. If there was a swell big enough they might come by on weekends. We all surfed Barney's several times in late summer and even saw its terrible namesake, but for the most part I found myself on the outside of whatever it was the other two had going. Loonies time in Indonesia had granted him a new kind of seniority. He'd seen animal sacrifices and shamans and walked on black, volcanic beaches. He'd climbed down the legendary cave at Uluwatu and paddled out, bombed to the gills on hash. Yet here I was, still a schoolboy.

Sando was distant now, preoccupied. He seemed suddenly closed off from me. I began to sense that there were secrets between him and Loonie, things they kept from me with grins and furtive glances. When we surfed they gave off a physical arrogance that might simply have been confidence born of experience, but I felt cowed by it. Now I understood the looks that the Angelus crew shot me. It was how they saw us — the little Brahman circle.

I didn't see much of Eva, but when I did she was drawn and unhappy. A new current of antagonism flashed between her and Sando. She did her best to act as though Loonie didn't exist.

I woke to a rumble that caused the house stumps to vibrate. If you didn't know any better you'd have thought a convoy of tanks was advancing up our drive and into the forest behind us. It was a low, grinding noise, a menacing pulse that didn't let up for a moment. I got out of bed feeling queasy. I packed a towel and wetsuit into my school bag, ate a couple of cold sausages from the fridge and waited for the dawn.

A monster storm showed up before autumn even arrived. On the forecast maps it looked like a tumour on the sea between us and the southern iceshelf. The moment he saw it Sando began planning our attempt on the Nautilus. On the Saturday and Sunday before the front arrived the swell in its path hadn't yet gathered momentum. We'd have to wait for the passage of the storm and catch the swell in its wake. Which meant I'd have to wag school if I wanted to make the trip.

Before the wind had even stirred the trees I knew I wasn't ready for the Nautilus. On the night the storm descended I lay in bed feeling the roof quake, wondering how I could plausibly avoid the whole endeavour. For two days black squalls ripped in from the sea and rain strafed the roads and paddocks and forest. On the morning of the third day, while it was still full dark and spookily still,

I got to the bus stop outside the butcher's about a half-hour early, figuring that if Sando didn't come then I'd just go ahead and take the bus to school. This morning school was an attractive option. But a few moments later, Loonie showed up blowing steamy breath on his hands, and before we'd even begun to speak the VW with its trailer and dinghy pulled in.

It was quite a drive west through the forest and then out along fishing tracks to the lonely little beach inshore of the island. All the way over Sando and Loonie psyched themselves up, each feeding off the other's nervous energy, while I sat pressed to the window, silent and afraid.

For any soul with a taste for excitement the mere business of launching Sando's dinghy should have been thrill enough for one day. The cove was a maelstrom with waves breaking end to end across it and the shorebreak heaved down with such force it sent broken kelp and shell-slurry into the air. We hauled the boat bow-out, timed our launch between waves and got the motor going, but we almost came to grief as a rogue set rumbled into the bay. By that stage there was nowhere for us to go but out, so we headed straight at those looming broken lines of foam with the throttle wide open in the hope they'd green up again before we reached them. We grabbed any handhold we could find. I felt the wind rip at my hair. And somehow we made it. As we slammed up each in turn we were airborne and the prop bawled before we landed again with a shattering thump. Loonie hooted like a rodeo rider; he'd have flapped a hat had there been one available. We found safe water, but it wasn't a good start to my day at the Nautilus. I rode the rest of the way rattled and sweating in my wetsuit. The granite island and its clump of seals were awash. The sea beyond was black and agitated.

We pulled up near the break during a lull and stood off in deep water to landward just to wait and watch before anchoring. There wasn't much to see at first except a scum of spent foam on the surface. Ocean and air seemed hyper-oxygenated; everything fizzed and spritzed as if long after the passage of previous waves there was energy yet to be dissipated. The land behind us was partly obscured by the island and a low, cold vapour the morning sun failed to penetrate. Nothing shone. The sea looked bottomless.

Only when the first new wave arrived did I see what really lay before us. It came in at an angle, just a hard ridge of swell, but within a few seconds, as it found shallow water, it became so engorged as to triple in volume. And there at its feet lay the great hump of rock that gave the place its name. The mass of water foundered a moment, distorting as it hit the submerged obstacle.

The wave reared as though climbing the obstruction and then sagged drastically at each end before the yawning lip pitched forward with a sound that made me want to shit.

Fifteen foot, said Loonie.

Yeah, Sando replied. And it's breakin in three feet of water.

In fact there were times when the wave broke over no water at all. Every set brought a smoker that sucked everything before it as it bore down, dragging so much water off the rock as it gathered itself that when it finally keeled over to break the granite dome sat free and clear before it. At these moments the trough of the wave actually sank below sea level. It was a sight I had never imagined, _ the most dangerous wave I'd ever seen.

We watched a couple of sets and then anchored up at a distance before Sando dived in and led us out. All three boards were Brewers — long, heavy Hawaiian-style guns. They were the same equipment we used at Old Smoky and Sando kept saying how good and solid they felt. He kept up the usual inspirational patter, but I was sullen with fright. Every time he tried to make eye contact I looked away, paddling without conviction until he drew ahead with Loonie at his elbow going stroke for stroke.

They sat up together outside the boil while I hung well back in deep water. Behind us the dinghy yanked at its rope, disappearing between swells. Sets came and went but everything passed by unridden. The waves were big but even at half the size I thought they'd be too sudden, way too steep, and the shallow rock beneath made them unthinkable. True, it was an awesome sight but the whole deal only broke for fifty yards or so; it was hardly worth the risk. I watched Sando and Loonie out there, right in the zone, letting wave after wave go by as if they'd come to the same conclusion despite themselves.

Then a wide one swung through and Sando went for it.

I saw the distant flash of his teeth as he fought to get up sufficient speed. A moment later it was vertical and so was he. As he got to his feet it was obvious the board was too long for the contour of the wave; he was perilously slow to turn. The wave hurled itself inside out. Sando staggered a moment, almost falling out of the face altogether. But he kept his feet and cranked the Brewer around with a strength I knew was beyond me. The fin bit. He surged forward as the wave began to lurch and dilate, reef fuming and gurgling below. The lip pitched over him. He was gone a moment, like a bone in the thing's throat. And then a squall of spume belched him free and it was over. He skidded out into the deep, dead water ahead of me and let the board flutter away.

I dug my way across, retrieved the Brewer and steered it back to where he lay with his knees up and his head back.

Jesus, he murmured. Oh Jesus.

I sat beside him, holding the big board between us. He slowly got his breath back but he was wild-eyed.

When you go, he said, go wide and early.

Don't think so, I muttered.

He took his board, checked the fin and got on.

You get half a second, that's all; it's brutal.

I shook my head.

C'mon, Pikelet. You know what's what.

That's why I'm stayin right here.

I didn't bring you here to watch, did I?

I said nothing.

It'll put some fizz in your jizz.

I felt plenty scared but not panicked; this time I knew what I was doing.

Shit, he said. I thought I brought surfers with me. Men above the ordinary.

I shrugged.

Pikelet, mate. We came to play.

He was grinning as he said it but I felt a sort of menace from him then. I didn't give a damn. My mind was made up. He wheeled around in disgust and I watched him paddle back out to where Loonie scratched uncertainly between looming peaks.

When Sando sat up beside him Loonie straightened a little, as if fortified by his presence, and only a few moments later he took the place on. But the wave he set himself for was a shocker. It was wedge-shaped and rearing — butt-ugly — even before he got going. As he leapt to his feet you could see what was about to happen. Yet the next few awful seconds earned Loonie honour in defeat. The wave stood, hesitated, and then foundered with Loonie right at the crest. He'd assumed his desperate crouch, pointed the board to the sanctuary of the channel, but he was going nowhere but down. The wave subsided beneath him, sucked him with it. Great overpiling gouts of whitewater leapt off the reef and the most I could see of Loonie was a threshing arm. Half his board fluttered thirty feet in the air. For a horrible moment the granite dome of the reef was completely bare. Then all that broken water mobbed across the rock, driving Loonie before it, boiling off into the deep ahead of me while I sat there, rigid. The air was hissing, the sea bubbled underfoot, and I knew Loonie was down there somewhere in the white slick having the shit kicked out of him, but I didn't move until I heard Sando's furious yell.

It was whiteout down there. The water was mad with current. It was like diving blind into a crowd, and I groped, hauled off at angles until I saw the bluish contours of the seabed below. I dived again and got nowhere. I hit the surface, saw Sando — still yards off- hauling himself my way, and then I heard Loonies gasp and turned to see his upraised arm. He was twenty yards behind me, even closer to the boat than I was.

When I got there I swept him up onto my board and listened to him puke and breathe and puke some more. The back was out of his wetsuit and there was skin off his shoulders. His nose bled, his legs trembled, but by the time Sando reached us he was laughing.

I was gutted by that day at the Nautilus. A small, cool part of me knew it was stupid to have been out there trying to surf a wave so unlikely, so dangerous, so perverse. What would success there really mean — perhaps three or four or even five seconds of upright travel on a wave as ugly as a civic monument? You could barely call such a mad scramble surfing. Surely there were better and bigger waves to ride than that deformity. Yet nothing could assuage the lingering sense of failure I was left with.

The others didn't mention it. All three of us celebrated Loonie's moment of defiance, but the gap had widened between them and me. He who hesitates, as I discovered, is lost indeed. I began to feel that their delicacy on the subject of my cowardice only made things worse. At first I was grateful, but soon I wished they'd just come out and call me yellow and have done with it. I hated the coy looks, the sudden gaps in conversation that reinforced my sense of relegation.

Loonie and Sando planned new assaults on the Nautilus using shorter boards — two only — shaped for the purpose. We never broached the subject of whether I'd accompany them. God knows, I should have been relieved, but I was inconsolable. I knew any reasonable person would have done what I did out there that day. Which was exactly the problem: I was, after all, ordinary.

For a few years as a teenager in Sawyer, it seemed I had control of my own life. I didn't understand everything going on around me, but for a brief period I had something special that afforded me a private sense of power. It let me feel bigger, more vivid than I'd been before. Although I was no leper at school I never really made much social headway. Classmates thought I was standoffish. Some said I was up myself and none of it worried me because for a couple of years I went home from Angelus every day harbouring a consoling secret. I did stuff other people couldn't do, things they wouldn't dream of. I belonged to an exclusive club, drove around with a full-grown man and a mate who spooked people.

Even among surfers we had enigmatic status. When we deigned to paddle out at the Point you could sense everyone else's deferral. Older, vaguely threatening blokes like Slipper were grudgingly respectful, especially in the presence of our mentor. Whenever some mouthy grommet started quizzing us about Sando he would be quickly silenced by one of the older crew. They knew by now that he'd surfed Old Smoky on his own for years. He was in his own league; we'd all sensed it instinctively. Sando radiated gravitas. And I got used to the power of association.

But when Sando first took Loonie to the islands, he left me behind in more than a literal sense. Somehow I stayed behind. I lost confidence in my place and value. It's possible some of my sense of relegation was imaginary or the result of shame, but I was convinced that Sando no longer took me seriously, that Loonie didn't regard me as an equal anymore, and the rich feeling of being in charge of myself evaporated. For the first time in my life I was not so much solitary as plain lonely.

Not long after Easter, in the first week of the term break, an unexpectedly vicious cold front burst upon the coast. Wind tore trees from the ground and blew roofing iron deep into the forest, and when the storm was spent it left the kind of booming swell that kept me awake half the night with that old mix of excitement and apprehension.

I waited for the sound of the Volkswagen but Loonie and Sando didn't show. About eight o'clock, while the oldies were off in town, I got on my bike and rode out to the coast.

From way across the estuary curtains of spray were visible at the rivermouth.

At Sando's the boat and the Kombi were gone; they'd opted for the Nautilus. I could hardly blame them for blowing me off but it provoked something in me. The dog didn't bark as it trotted down and I was relieved because I wanted to get in and go without waking Eva. It followed me into the undercroft where I pulled out the big yellow Brewer I'd disgraced myself with a few weeks before. I waxed the board with a block from the Milo tin on the bench and walked back down the drive with it. There was no way I could ride a bike and carry that great spear of a thing, so I hoofed it out to the headland and by the time I'd hiked across the ridges to the clifftop overlooking Old Smoky, the sun had broken through and I was clammy with sweat. My right arm felt wrenched from carrying the board so far. I did some stretches while the bombora cracked and flared out on the sunlit sea.

I don't know why I paddled out there on my own. I was hurt and angry. And I suppose I felt there was a point to prove. I knew Old Smoky had been surfed solo before. But not by a fifteen-year-old. At this distance it seems like an act of desperation — or worse — a lunge toward oblivion. Even now I can barely believe I did it.

Before I got halfway out to the bommie, it dawned on me that Old Smoky was breaking much bigger than I'd seen it before. Between long, deceptive lulls, waves angled in to stand up twenty feet and more, and by the time I got close I knew I'd seriously underestimated the size of the swell. At this scale, it was a wonder the wave still broke cleanly.

I hummed. I spoke aloud to myself. I manoeuvred into position over the reef and checked and rechecked my bearings as I'd been taught. The offshore breeze fanned up a steady chop and beneath the surface the water was busy.

I was right on the lump when a new set of swells wheeled in from the south-west. They quickened as they got a footing on the shoal and soon I was labouring uphill time and again to get beyond them. Each seemed bigger than the one before and every time I squeaked over and tumbled down into the trough behind, I was blinded by spray. In all that stinging white confusion I failed to see the third wave until it was too late. It was already seething, beginning to break, and by then it was a matter of riding it or wearing it, so I turned and went.

All the way down the big board chattered against the surface chop; I could hear the giggle and natter of it over the thunder behind me. When the wave drew itself up to its full height, walling a hundred yards ahead as I swept down, it seemed to create its own weather. There was suddenly no wind at all and the lower I got, the smoother the water became. The whole rolling edifice glistened. For a moment — just a brief second of enchantment — I felt weightless, a moth riding light. Then I leant into a turn and accelerated and the force of it slammed through my knees, thighs, bladder, and I came lofting back to the crest to feel the land breeze in my face and catch a smudge of cliffs before sailing down the line again. With each turn, each stalling fade, I grew in confidence. By the wave's last section I was styling. I scudded out into the channel, so addled by joy I had to sit a while to clear my head.

I felt fabulous, completely charged. I was not a coward or a kook. I knew what I was doing and it wasn't within a bull's roar of being ordinary.

In retrospect I know I should have sat there glorying a bit longer, given myself a full soak of fuckoff vindication until I got over myself and had a laugh at my own expense. Then I could have gone about the business of putting the act back together, gathering my thoughts, returning to some method. But I was so amped and eager I just wheeled about, paddled back into the impact zone and picked off the first wave of the next set. Compounding the first mistake with a second, I rushed at the thing instead of letting it come to me, and so I never quite got into position and had to scramble to get momentum. As the wave peaked I dug hard and felt myself pitch forward, teetering at the crest, surging for a few yards only to feel the wave forge ahead without me.

I knew before I even sat up and looked back over my shoulder that I was in strife. I'd left myself bang in the path of the following wave — which was bigger again and already breaking. In the seconds left I sprinted for the channel but I knew I'd never get there. I pumped myself full of air, hyperventilating hurriedly, and at the last possible moment, as the crashing white wall came down, I stood on my stationary board and speared deep as I could get. I kicked hard but in an instant the whitewater smashed in, blasting me sideways, hurling me down. I saw hazy outlines of rocks. Kelp flew by. My ears hurt badly but I couldn't equalize, and then I was pitching end over end across the bottom, glancing off things hard and soft until slowly, like a storm petering out, the water slackened around me and I floundered up toward the light.

I broke the surface in a drift of foamscum and barely got a breath before another tower of whitewater crashed over, and this second hold-down was worse. I'd started with less air and got worked harder, longer. When I kicked up it was into the path of a third wave, and then there was a fourth. Each breath was more hurried, each dive just a bit shallower than the last. I got so strung out and disoriented I ploughed headfirst into the seabed, thinking I was headed for the surface. Burns and tingles shot up my legs. I saw light where there was no light. My gut began to twitch. Things went narrow — it was like looking out through a letterbox — and out there, at the other end of the slot, the white world was trying to kill me.

But when the sea let go and the water cleared I clawed up into the sky. For a moment, at the surface, it seemed my throat was jammed shut. I couldn't make myself breathe. And then wretching spasms overtook me and bile and seawater poured out and the air burnt down sharp as any regret.

There was no sign of the yellow Brewer. Once I got control of myself I saw I'd been bulldozed, mostly underwater, for four hundred yards. The only way home from here was to swim.

It took me an hour or so to reach the cliffs and maybe another thirty minutes to make it up them. I got seasick treading water in the moiling backwash. And at the end, when I wondered if I had the strength to hold out much longer, I came in on the back of a huge, blunt roller which set me down on a ledge from which I could crawl, very slowly, to safety.

When I got back to Sando's I tried to keep clear of the house but I so badly needed a drink. Eva caught me gulping from the rainwater tank.

Pikelet?

I'm just goin, I croaked.

Saw your bike. Where you been?

I shrugged, but I was standing there in my wetsuit and my knees were crusted with blood.

I gotta go.

Come up here.

No, I'm off.

You heard me. Jesus, look at you. Get up here.

I stumped slowly up the stairs and onto the verandah.

You went out there on your own, didn't you?

I lost his Brewer. The yellow one.

You mean you swam in?. Let me look at you.

I'm just thirsty. I feel bad about the board.

Oh, forget the goddamn board. Sit down and I'll get you something.

The moment I sat I felt overcome with fatigue. I must have dozed because when I looked up she was there already with a Coke and a plate of sandwiches. I ate and drank greedily while she watched.

You take him too seriously, she said at last.

Who?

You know who. I'll get something for those gashes. Stay here. But I didn't stay there for fear of falling asleep again. I followed her into the house and propped myself up against the kitchen bench while she rummaged in a cupboard.

Sit down before you fall over, she said. You'll have to wait until they get back. You're in no shape to ride home.

I can ride, I said. I had no intention of still being there when Sando got back.

Will you just sit the fuck down. I did as I was told. Suddenly I was close to tears. He tell you they're heading to Java? I shook my head, unable to speak.

It's just not funny anymore. I don't know if I'll be here when he gets back.

She wielded a fistful of cotton balls and a bottle of something nasty-yellow. I blinked.

Jesus, why'm I tellingj/o «this? I could only shrug.

Hey, she murmured. Pikelet, you won't say anything, will you? No.

She looked at me appraisingly, and when she unscrewed the bottle and poured antiseptic into the cotton her hands shook. She took me by the chin and tilted my head up to press the scouring stuff cold to my brow and I tried not to wince.

She put the bottle down and fingered through my hair a moment to find the divot in my scalp. I looked at the pale hairs around her navel where her windcheater rode up. You'll live.

She was a foot away. She smelled of butter and cucumber and coffee and antiseptic. I wanted to press my face into that belly, to hold her by the hips, but I sat there until she stepped away. And then I got up and left; I didn't care what she said. I rode home slow and sore and raddled.

That evening, while the day's warmth leached into the forest shadow, I sat against an ancient karri tree to smoke the hash Loonie brought me. At dinner I ate my chops with elaborate caution, anxious at every quizzical glance. I felt transparent, light, uncomfortable. In the night I dreamt my drowning dream. There I was again, head jammed tight in the reef, and when I woke, touching the tender parts of my brow and scalp, it took a while to believe it had only been a dream.

You've been in a fight, said the old man at breakfast.

No, I said.

Look at you. You may's well tell me.

It's nothin, Dad.

Face like a bird-pecked apple, said the old girl.

What the hell d'you get up to? he said with more dismay than anger in his voice.

I fell on the rocks, I murmured.

Out the coast?

Yeah.

How many times have I told you —

Tell me about Snowy Muir, I said. The old man snatched up his hat and his workbag. You never told me the story, I said more gently. Some of us have got work to do, he said. He kissed my mother, stuffed his hat on his balding head and made for the door.

i oonie was outside the butcher shop in the drizzle when I got off the school bus. He had the fading remains of a black eye and his lip was split in a whole new way. I didn't need to ask. I knew it'd be his old man. Loonie had told him he was going away again.

You went out to Old Smoky on your own, he said.

I shrugged and hoisted the bag onto my shoulder.

Fuck, he murmured. He's pissed off about the board.

You broke two already yourself, I said. Anyway, who told you?

She did.

Eva? She told you?

Nah. I heard em bluin and bitchin. She sorta blurted it out. Said you went on your own. And the board's gone, isn't it?

Swam in.

Fuck.

Did you do Nautilus? I asked despite myself.

Man, it was bullshit. I got three. Barrelled every time.

Him?

He got one. But he's fuckin scared of it.

I blinked at this.

Old, said Loonie.

There was something pitiless in his smirk.

And he's takin you to Java, I said.

Who told you that?

Eva, I said with a hot flash of satisfaction.

He grunted and rolled himself a fag and I realized that we were no longer friends. At the intersection, where the pub loomed over the servo across the road, we each veered in our own direction without even saying goodbye. Neither of us could have known that we'd never meet again.

Sando pulled up at the school oval one lunch hour while I was kicking a football with a bunch of kids I barely knew. It was the old sound of the VW that caught my attention. I saw him parked over behind the goalposts but didn't go across right away. By the time I relented there were only a few minutes before the bell went again.

He sprawled over the wheel like a bus driver. He had a denim jacket on, and a silk shirt of some kind of shimmering green, and his hair and beard and earrings shone in the early winter light. He raised his eyebrows as if surprised to see me. I stood there in my grisly brown uniform.

You're off, then.

Yeah, he said. Tomorrow.

I nodded and looked out across the rooftops of Angelus.

Thought you might come out for a send-off. We don't see you much anymore.

I glanced back at the kids punting the pill from pack to pack.

I can't, I said. The oldies wouldn't let me.

He nodded, scratched in his beard pensively.

Hey, someone found the yellow Brewer.

Really?

Tuna fisherman. Twenty-five mile out, he reckons.

He give it back?

Sando nodded. I kept the flood of relief and amazement to myself.

Eva said you looked pretty shabby when you got back.

It was big, I said. It's a tough swim.

Gutsy effort, he said. All of it. You should know that. It's right up there.

I shrugged.

No, I mean it, Pikelet. Hats off.

I shoved my hands into my pockets in the effort to resist his approval. There was a long, potent silence between us and then the school bell went. Sando cranked up the Kombi.

Seeya, then.

Okay, I said.

When I got home the yellow Brewer was standing up against the shed with its big black fin jutting out like a crow's wing.

He said you could have it, said my mother. The gypsy-looking fella. Said you'd earned it.

I nodded as I took it down and held it under my arm. It was a beautiful thing, made by a master.

What job were you doing? she asked.

The usual, I said. Choppin wood.

Ah, she said. And I could see how badly she needed to believe it.

week or so after Sando and Loonie left, I rode out to the coast in a funk. I was sick of the hangdog looks the oldies were giving me. I was bored and angry — as lonely as I'd been in my life.

The sea was its usual wintry mess, the beach empty. I didn't particularly want to see Eva. I half thought she'd be gone anyway, as threatened. There was nowhere else to go.

The Volkswagen was parked under cover. The dog bounced out to meet me as if it'd been starved of company. I squatted with it for a while, ruffling its ears, basking in its adoration. Maybe it's an old man's delusion but it occurs to me now that a dog like that might have been good for me as a teenager. As I hunkered there, scratching the dog's belly, I thought about taking it for a ramble up the paddocks into the forest, to let it dart in and out of the shadows chasing rabbits while I talked a load of shit to it and got things off my chest. And I wish I had. Instead I went on up the stairs.

Eva was in the livingroom behind the glass doors. I saw her watching me from where she sprawled on the sofa. She wasn't quite right, the way she lay with her mouth slightly ajar and her hair mussed. I stood in the cold until she motioned me in.

The house smelled of woodsmoke and fried bacon and hash. Supertramp played quietly on the stereo. Eva wore old track pants and a Yale tee-shirt with bright yellow stains on it.

Gonna rain again, she murmured.

Yeah, I said. Wait five minutes. New weather.

I been waiting five minutes all my life. Only thing changes is the freakin weather.

I had nothing to say to this. I was already getting set to leave.

Pikelet, she said. Where can you get ground turkey in this country?

Ground what?

Turkey mincemeat. Where do I go?

Hell, I muttered. How would I know?

She snorted as if I was a simpleton, but I'd never heard of people eating minced turkey. At our place we didn't even have turkey at Christmas — it was no better than roadkill.

Sit down a minute.

It's hot in here, I said, perching beside her on the couch.

So take off your coat.

I saw that she had hell's own blaze going in the hearth.

Come to that, take off your shirt.

What?

You heard me.

You're stoned, I said.

But you want to. You'll do it anyway.

I thought about what might happen. It was like being in a shed with Loonie and something sharp. My body thrilled to the danger in the room.

I began to get up. She grabbed a fistful of my tee-shirt and twisted it with a kind of sneer and I looked at her in confused anger before I shrugged her off. I shucked the shirt anyway and held it gormlessly in my lap. The sneer melted from her face then and she looked almost sad. She touched my belly with her knuckles. There was a kind of disinterest in the way she held them against me and ran them slowly up my chest. I was unprepared for the painful force with which she grabbed my nipple, but she kissed my neck so softly my whole scalp flushed with something like gooseflesh. She kissed me on the neck again and again, unbuckling my Levi's all the while, and when I came she laughed in my ear like someone who'd won a bet.

I followed her to the loft. She kicked off her clothes, fell onto the unmade bed and smiled at me with something like tenderness. I felt a great force rising behind me, pressing me on.

Pikelet, you don't have to.

Oh, I said with false brightness. Maybe I do. Maybe I will. Okay, she said. Now where did I leave those instructions? I shoved off my damp jeans and clambered onto the bed and kissed her inexpertly. Eva's hair was unwashed and her mouth tasted of hash and coffee. Her fingers were stained with turmeric.

She smelled of sweat and fried coconut. She was heavier than me, stronger. Her back was broad and her arms solid. There was nothing thin and girly about her. She did not close her eyes. She did not wait for me to figure things out for myself.

In the afternoon, when we'd eaten her curry and smoked the rest of her hash, she saw me standing in the livingroom, looking at all their stuff. I was stoned and emboldened. I felt older, pleased with myself, and for some reason I was noticing for the first time just how new and choice everything was. One day, I told myself, I want gear like this.

What? she said, cutting up a grapefruit.

Nothin.

Bullshit. You're thinking where does all the money come from.

No. Not really.

Jesus, Pikelet. You're like a book.

I shrugged. She was wrong but I didn't want to look any more stupid than I was.

It's a trust account thing. My father's money.

For Sando too?

She smiled. Yeah, him too. But they don't get along, my dad and him.

But that's how he can —

Surf and travel, yeah. How I could be a skier. Sure.

I was bombed. I didn't really know what a trust fund was but I felt the distance it put between us; it was bigger than the gap in our nationalities, even our ages. Money just showing up in a bank

account. Without work. I said nothing but Eva must have seen it in my face.

The big, bad world, Pikelet. It is what it is.

Wow.

Guess it's not fair, but so what.

I spose.

Nothing's fair, Pikelet. Some guys get balled at your age, and others — poor ugly bastards — wait till they're thirty. I guess we could give it all back. You wanna give up getting laid, in the interests of fairness?

I shook my head, sheepish.

Just be nice to me, Pikelet.

Orright. I am. I mean I will.

Don't brag about me, okay? Not to Loonie, not to anyone.

I wouldn't, I said with my voice breaking. I promise.

But even while I stood there I saw the pleasure and complacency leaching from her face. She looked down at the grapefruit as though she couldn't remember what it was.

Jesus, she said. Maybe you shouldn't come out again.

What?

It's not right. It's not fair on you.

What if I want to? I asked petulantly.

Listen, Sando will be back soon.

I stared at her. How soon?

The rain's stopped, she said. Go home.

I was wired night and day for a week. Before this, beyond the desultory appraisal I gave every female I met, I'd had no particular sexual interest in Eva Sanderson. She wasn't quite the stuff of my erotic imaginings. True, she was blonde and confident in that special American way but there was nothing Playboy or Hollywood about her. My fantasies lurched from Suzi Quatro to Ali McGraw and back in a moment. The rockin chick, the dark waif. But Eva was stocky and blunt. As a blonde she tended toward the agricultural. She lacked rock-and-roll insouciance on one hand, and on the other she failed to give off the faintest aura of fey sensitivity. If anything she was abrupt and suspicious, handsome rather than pretty. Her limbs were shapely enough though tough and scarred. Yet the idea of her had taken hold. The fact of her body overtook me. Eva was suddenly all I could think about.

I didn't ride out there. Nor did I call her from the box outside the pub. I tried to remember every moment: her belly against mine, the briny taste of her skin, the low, incendiary growl she made. For days the sharp smell of her lingered on my hands and every time I yanked myself under the blankets it seemed to return with the heat of my body. I thought about Sando and what a turd I was to have done this. He might be home any day. I felt the impossibility of the situation coming down on me. I'd buggered everything now, lost it all. And yet I thought again of the bitter, smarting sense of rejection I'd been left with. Sando didn't rate me, didn't give a shit at all. He'd cut me loose. The yellow Brewer was just a consolation prize. He was never my friend. Eva let it slip more than once — we were there to flatter him, to make him feel important. The guru. So the hell with him.

At school lunchbreaks I stood in the phone booth beside the basketball courts and stared at Eva's number etched in blue biro inside my wrist. But I didn't dial it; I didn't dare. Maybe she was serious about my never going back. She might be stricken with remorse. Maybe she'd just felt sorry for me, the boy left behind, and taking me to bed had been some stoned moment of kindness she regretted already. God knows, I hadn't been any good at it. And she could get nasty so quick. If she was off me I should be careful because you never knew what she'd say or do. You couldn't trust her. But it was torment like this, thinking she'd cut me off cold. I wanted her.

When I looked at girls now I compared them to Eva — the shape of their legs, the skinniness of their arms, the way they sheltered their breasts with their shoulders. Their perfumes smelt sugary as cordial. I hated all their rattly plastic bangles, and the way they plastered their zits with prosthetic-pink goo and chewed their lips when they thought no one was looking. Unless every single one of them was lying, they were all going out with older blokes, guys with cars and jobs, men who liked their peroxided fringes and bought them stuff. They suddenly looked so… ordinary.

One evening when I thought I heard the chatter of the Volkswagen at the end of the drive, I put down my book and lay very still on the bed. I thought first of Sando, though he'd hardly been gone a fortnight. If it was him, what would he want of me at ten o'clock at night? Unless he knew something. I tried not to think of that, of him here and angry and twice as big as me. Eva wouldn't drive in to try to see me, would she? With my parents asleep in the house? Waiting for me to come out and down the long drive to meet her by the road? The idea was too crazy, too beautiful, too frightening. I snapped off the bed lamp and after a while the engine noise pulled away. I knew well enough what a VW sounded like. Five minutes, it'd been there. It could have been nothing more than a couple of lost Margaret River hippies consulting their map in the mouth of our driveway. Still, I waited to hear it return, barely moved a limb. At the thought of her waiting out in the Kombi my cock began to ache. And then, through the thin wall, the fridge motor kicked in again and I couldn't be sure that I hadn't imagined the entire thing.

I held off for a whole week. But the next Saturday I rode out in the pelting rain. I felt mad, reckless, doomed.

The dog announced my arrival. Eva came out onto the verandah and didn't say hello. She unzipped my sodden jeans with a determination that bordered on violence, and she took me in her mouth while the dog and the swollen estuary and the whole teeming sky seemed to look on. I held her hair and shivered and cried from relief.

It was over in moments. Eva got up, wiped her face, pulled off the rest of my clothes and took them inside. I followed her to the dryer, saw her sling my stuff in. She wore an old pullover and bellbottom jeans with rainbow-coloured toe-socks. When I reached around to hold her I felt her breasts swinging loose under the wool. The dog sidled in to stare at us.

Thought I told you to stay away, she said.

I pressed myself against her so that she could feel I was still hard. She turned and kissed me. Her mouth tasted starchy. She ran her hands down my back and held me by the buttocks.

Well, she said. Now that you're here.

And so began a pattern. Eva always seemed more vindicated than pleased to see me. Sex was a hungry, impatient business, more urgent for the looming possibility of Sando's unscheduled return. The house had no curtains and few partitions so it was hard not to feel insecure. Sando's dog was a constant and mostly silent witness; it saw me eager, clumsy, exultant, furtive, anxious. That Saturday, it followed us up to the bedroom and watched from the corner as Eva lowered herself on me. Rain drummed on the roof. I was trembling.

You're scared, she said.

No.

Bullshit.

Just cold, I said.

That's okay. Being scared is half the fun. You should know that by now.

But I wasn't sure what I knew except that she was silky-hot inside, and strong enough to hold me by the muscles of her pelvis and pin my arms to the bed so that I couldn't have fought her off if I'd wanted to.

We stayed in bed all day as the rain fell and the dog sighed disconsolately. Some time in the afternoon I woke, startled to have slept at all. Eva was watching me. She held my cock as though it was a small bird. With her free hand she stroked my cheek.

I love you, I murmured.

You love getting laid.

No, I mean it.

You don't know what you mean.

I lay there, smarting.

I got a postcard from Thailand, she said.

Thailand? Sando.

He's been in Bangkok.

The thought of him now was like a blow. Aren't they in Java? I said, trying to seem breezy.

Something about supplies, she said. Who knows. Now he's talking about the eastern islands.

Which islands?

He didn't say. Lombok, I guess.

Could be any eastern islands.

Yeah, she said with a snort. The Philippines, maybe. Even Hawaii has eastern islands. What an asshole.

So he won't be back straight away.

He's scared of growing old. That's what this shit's about.

The travelling.

All of it. Having his little deputy along for the ride. Loonie's too young and too stupid to be afraid. And Sando loves that, feeds off it. He hates being old.

How old is he?

Sando? Thirty-six.

Hell.

You're surprised?

Well, yeah. I mean, he's real fit.

Fit, she said. And lucky.

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

Leave it, she muttered.

Sorry.

We both stared at her scars in silence.

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

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

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

Because he needs it, she said.

What about what you need?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next winter he travelled with her as coach as well as lover.

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

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

The same day she fell at the Intermountain, a guy from Montana broke his neck, and although she'd never believed such pain was possible she realized she'd gotten off lightly. Unlike the other guy, she wouldn't be drinking through a straw the rest of her life. You could put a knee back together. But the reconstruction was botched and after the second unsuccessful attempt there was, thanks to her father, a lawsuit. Which was when everything began to unravel.

In Utah new avenues of litigation were plotted, but things got ugly between Sando and the old man and Eva began to feel like a medico-legal experiment. There was a vicious quarrel and the couple flew out to Australia in the hope of some respite. Sando took her west where he'd surfed in the sixties. They bought a piece of coastal bush and he started building a house but before he could finish it Eva convinced herself she was better and they flew back across the Pacific for the new season. But the knee hadn't come right. The first moment she was back in skis she sensed weakness, but told herself she'd manage. Yet it only takes a sliver of doubt to make you vulnerable. When you're fifty feet in the air your only armour is conviction. Regardless of how hard you've trained, the moment your self-belief wavers, you are in danger. And because she was anxious she hurried slightly. That's all it took — rushing the manoeuvre — and she nearly got away with it. But the landing was heavy and unbalanced, so that one leg took the bulk of the impact — wrong angle, wrong leg — and the knee collapsed. She cannoned, wailing, into the crowd. She hadn't skied since.

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

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

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

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

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

What?

Nothing.

I'm puffy, she said.

Nah.

It happens every month.

Really?

Jesus, Pikelet, don't you know anything?

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

Poor baby.

Well, I know you're bored with me. Yeah, she said. But it's not really your fault. I felt tears coming. I clenched my teeth against them. Listen, she said as though offering me a lifeline. I have a game we can play.

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

I don't get it, I said.

I'll show you, she murmured.

What if I don't want to?

Then I'll be disappointed, I guess.

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

So, I said. Show me.

You know how to hyperventilate, right?

I nodded warily.

Well, it's kinda like that.

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

You hang yourself?

Sure. Sometimes.

Fuck. Why?

Because I like it.

But why do you like it?

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

Far out, I muttered.

She smiled. I tried to take it in.

So, how do you know when to stop?

Practice, I guess. You should know.

Me? Gimme a break.

Come on, Pikelet, she said soothingly. I've heard you guys talk. Spots, stars, tunnel vision.

You want me to… hang myself?

No.

Well, there's no way.

Of course not.

So, what then? What d'you want me to do?

Eva became girlish for a moment. She put her fingers through my hair.

I just want you to watch.

Geez, Eva.

It feels better; I can't tell you.

I dunno.

And it's safer. Like having a dive buddy.

I sat up in bed, anxious and revolted. I hated the sharp leather smell already.

I can't, I said. You shouldn't ask me.

She sighed. Okay. Sure.

Eva swept her props off the bed and began to dress. I felt the sudden weight of her disappointment. The day was over already. I'd be home early.

I'm sorry, I said.

Sure, she murmured, pulling on a tee-shirt.

It's just —

I'll make do on my own, Pikelet. I'm a big girl.

But it's not safe.

Well, no guts no glory, huh?

Sensing that I'd been dismissed already, I watched her rake a brush through her hair.

What'll you do?

I have a mirror, she said, misunderstanding me. I can watch myself.

Does Sando do this with you?

She turned back to consider me.

I don't have to answer that.

But how did it start?

I'm not going to answer that either.

She grabbed the end of the rumpled sheet as though she might yank it off me. I caught the ravishing curve of her breasts beneath the tee-shirt and felt a rush of panic at the idea of being cut off from her.

I don't want you to kill yourself, I said.

I won't. Not if you don't let me.

I took a handful of the sheet and jerked it so hard that she staggered a little. Her bad leg gave way and she braced herself against the bed. I reached up beneath her shirt and held her breasts and we stared at each other a moment before she took down her pants and lowered herself to me.

I love you, I whispered.

We'll see.

But not the belt.

Okay, honey. We hardly need it.

She pulled her shirt up and put a nipple to my lips and I fixed on it greedily, certain that I'd won a moral victory. But once we'd raised a sweat Eva disentangled herself, reached down beside the bed and brought up the cellophane bag.

I wasn't much of a partner in her game. I was mostly the audience, little more than a bit of bodyweight and a steady pair of hands. There were whale songs on the stereo now — otherworldly moans and clicks and squeaks. Eva lay on the pillow and pulled me back into her until we were panting again and then she pulled the bag over her face like a hood, twisting it tight against her throat so that it filled and shrank with every breath. The plastic was pink and translucent and behind it Eva's features looked all out of focus. Pretty soon the bag fogged up and I could only see the contours of her nose and chin and the deep indentation of her mouth with each indrawn breath. She worked hard to get air. A sheen of sweat lay across her sternum and her labouring neck and the shine became beads and then runnels while the ghostly whales rumbled and squealed in the house around us. At her signal I did what I'd been told to do. I lay on her chest. And then I gently throttled her.

Before she began to shudder I thought of boys falling to the ground in swoons. Mottled faces. Blue-white lips. The stiffened limbs of the poleaxed. Like steers given the bolt in the killing yard. And I remembered the way all sound and light shrank to the fineness of copper wire.

The muscles of Eva's pelvis twitched and clamped and I came before I saw that she'd lost consciousness, before I tore the bag away, before I even let go her neck. Only the dog stirred me into action. I didn't even hear the poor creature come in but something had roused it from slumber down beside the stove for it was suddenly there on the bed, growling and butting and snapping at my arms.

The bag came away with a hank of Eva's hair. She was white-eyed and drenched. Her neck rippled with tiny tremors and I began to shout over the mad, scrabbling dog.

Eva! Breathe!

I was fifteen years old and afraid. Sex was, once more, a confounding mystery. I didn't understand love or even physiology. I was so far out of my depth it frightens me now to recall it. Yes, I was scared but not nearly scared enough. I didn't understand just how perilous Eva's predicament was. With the dog there I didn't dare slap her or shake her. I simply yelled.

There was, at last, a snagging noise deep in her head. It was not unlike the sound the old man made in the middle of the night. Then there came a gasping spasm. Eva's arms flew out so hard and suddenly that I took a blow to the ear. Her legs jerked. She began to whoop in air.

I. knew Eva was expecting me but I didn't go back next day. Instead I got up early, limp with fatigue, and wandered through the forest in the misting rain. No one was about and I was grateful because I was a mess. The longer I walked and the hungrier and tireder I got, the angrier I became.

I'd been an idiot; I saw it now. It wasn't Eva's fault her life had gone the way it had, and I didn't blame her for whatever it was that she couldn't or wouldn't explain. She was what she was and I loved her. But I couldn't kid myself it was mutual. She might require me now, but she didn't love me. It had only been a matter of weeks but already I couldn't think how it had begun. Had it been an accident, this thing between us, or did she plan it, right down to the advent of the cellophane bag? And why me? Because Sando wouldn't play her game? He was a hellman but maybe there were things he just wouldn't do — and here I was, too young and stupid to refuse her. How could he hold out so long? Eva Sanderson was not an easy person to deny. Did he resist out of love, or from discipline? Either way I admired him for this at least. I loved his wife. And I wished he'd come home and save me from her.

I called her from school on Monday and at first she was peevish and then she cried. I'd rung to say it was over, that I couldn't come out anymore, but I couldn't get it said. By the time I hung up I felt like a bastard for making her cry.

Next day the VW was out on the street at lunchtime in the shade beyond the gym. My heart jerked at the sight of it.

I'm sorry, Eva said when I drew up to her window.

I'm sorry too, I murmured.

Let's go for a drive, huh?

I looked over my shoulder a moment. There were kids kicking a Fanta can across the netball courts.

I've only got half an hour.

Sure. Get in.

We drove to the war memorial and looked out across the sound and all its islands and bays and sat for a time in silence. It seemed to me that she was working her way up to saying something important. And then she reached across and put a hand in my lap.

You're kind to me.

Kind?

Nobody's as kind as you, Pikelet.

Really?

Really.

She unbuttoned my pants and drew out my aching cock and went down on me there in the noonday carpark. Within ten minutes I was back at school.

I didn't call again all week but when Saturday came around I rode straight out to Eva's. The dog seemed leery of me but she was smiling. I feel like walking, she said. You want to hike?

What about your leg?

I want to push it some.

Well, I said. If you reckon.

We hiked out across the wooded hills toward the cliffs with the dog darting ahead. There were no roads. We were unlikely to meet anybody out there but it was careless of us. Eva seemed relaxed. Her limp was only slight when we set out but by the time we got to the ridge overlooking Old Smoky she was in real pain.

You okay?

Fine.

It doesn't look good.

I said it's fine.

But we stopped at the edge of the windswept ridge and went no further. I stared out at the bombora, that day just a dark, intermittent lumping of swells in the distance.

Kinda stupid thing to do, huh?

Walk here, you mean?

No, dummy. Paddle out there a mile to go surfing. Alone.

Yeah.

But I guess you need it.

She was right but I didn't respond. I didn't really want to talk about it.

I understand you, Pikelet. And I understand Sando. But he's never had anything precious taken away.

Eva —

But you, she said taking my hand. You're different. I can see it in your face. You've got this look. Like you're expecting to lose something — everything — every moment.

When she took my hand I felt electrified. I wanted to pull down her jeans and spread her legs and reach into her. I wanted to press her against the stony ground and fuck her until she called out my name. But she kept on talking and nothing happened and I stood there throbbing and half listening until she was yanking my arm and saying c'mon, let's go back.

Halfway home she couldn't walk anymore. Her face was white. For a while she leant against me, bracing, hopping, until even that was too much and I was forced to piggyback her across the wild, uneven country. The first few seconds, when she hitched up and clamped her thighs around my waist and pushed her breasts tight to my back, I was delirious with pride and lust and a stupid sense of triumph. In my mind I was carrying her home like some warrior prince. She rested her hot cheek against my neck and I could smell the pear scent of her hair as I stepped it out. But the feeling only lasted a minute. She was heavy. I remembered how far it was to the house.

I didn't like the tone of her voice. I figured I'd better go.

But I stayed. We took a bath together like people in the movies. We smoked a little hash and climbed into bed and when her plastic bag came out I did my best to please her.

For a week or two Eva came by the school or I wagged classes and met her on the wharf so we could drive out to lonely beaches. We grew more reckless and impulsive and so tired that when we weren't at each other we were bitching like married people. And on weekends, despite myself, I strangled her.

I hated it. In time I saw that for her everything else was mere courting, payment for what she really wanted. I hated the evil, crinkly sound of the bag and the smeary film of her breath inside it. I came to hate all masks and hoods and drawn faces without features and in retrospect I see that I probably hated Eva as well.

By the time we got to her place I was spent. The sky was black with impending rain. The dog trailed us listlessly into the yard and slumped into the undercroft while I levered Eva the last few feet up the stairs.

She snatched her pills and the hash pipe and lay back on the sofa until she could speak again.

You're right, she said. Right to expect it all to be snatched away from you, Pikelet. Because it will be. It can be. And hey, maybe it should be.

Somebody once told me I was a classical addictive personality. I laughed at her. She threw a plastic cup of water in my face and I sat there smiling at the thousand cuts down the inside of her arms. Staff appeared around us crisp and silent as ghosts.

When I was born, I said, I took a breath and wanted more.

I found my mother's nipple and sucked. I liked that. I wanted more. That's called being human.

I know what you are, the woman murmured.

Yes, I said. You're the expert.

They led her away to dinner and I sat there alone with my sneer as the tears leaked out of me.

The last sucking bubble of consciousness. The rising gorge of panic. Yes, a delicious ricochet of sparks.

I suppose I knew well enough what it felt like. It was intense, consuming, and it could be beautiful. That far out at the edge of things you get to a point where all that stands between you and oblivion is the roulette of body-memory, the last desperate jerks of your system trying to restart itself. You feel exalted, invincible, angelic because you're totally fucking poisoned. Inside it's great, feels brilliant. But on the outside it's squalid beyond imagining.

As a kid I didn't know what respiratory acidosis was, nor could I even begin to comprehend the sheer unpredictability of premature ventricular contractions and the manner in which they can shunt a body into cardiac arrest. I was as dim and horny as any other schoolboy, a sucker for excitement, and I'd been scaring the shit out of myself since primary school, but each time I let go Eva's throat and ripped the slimy bag off her face I didn't see rapture. What I saw was death ringing her like a bell.

So I began to deceive her. I had to. I'd come to resent Eva Sanderson but I didn't want her to die. And I certainly didn't want to be the patsy left behind, the fool calling the ambulance, the one whose fingermarks were up and down her neck like hickeys. I was scared to the point where I couldn't even get it up anymore, so I began to fake it. In the end I was faking it all. She saw to herself anyway; she was on automatic by then.

When she wanted me to choke her I learnt that I could brace myself on my elbows, give her a sense of my body on hers, without letting my full weight down. When I held her throat I made all the noise of exertion while applying less and less pressure. I slipped my fingers under the bag to break the seal. I blew air across her face while pretending to shout at her. Sometimes I didn't even touch her throat at all. I held my palms over her neck and asked her could she feel it, could she feel it, and she felt it because she expected it, because I was there and she expected it. She was blind in her foggy bag, intoxicated by the idea of what she was doing, and I hovered, palms down, like some kind of boy-shaman, willing life into her, holding off the shivering darkness.

I wonder if she ever knew. She did become more and more irritable, as if sex no longer satisfied her. Once when I began to giggle at how stupid we looked, how ludicrous it was to be lurching and growling about like this while the dog scratched at the door, she slapped me so hard that I rode home and lay on my narrow bed and shouted at my mother to please turn the bloody vacuum off and get a life.

I faked it. I wanted her, wanted to be free of her. Yet I was afraid of her. And afraid for her. I was trapped. It was as if some mighty turbulence had hold of me, and nothing — not even Sando's return — would ever rescue me.

But something did come. A bolt of indigo lightning. The livid vein that had begun to fork across Eva's tight belly. You couldn't mistake it. Not even I was so dense as to miss it.

I was on the bed one afternoon, spent and full of loathing, when she limped up naked from the steaming bathroom, a towel coiled on her head. It was right there in front of me.

Eva, I said. You're pregnant.

Something in her face gave way. She ricked the towel down and tied it about her waist. In a few more weeks she'd need a bigger towel.

I was fixing to tell you.

Really?

Go home, she murmured. The fun's over now.

Fuck, I said. Fuck you.

C'mon, she murmured. You knew it had to stop somewhere. I can't do this shit with a baby coming.

Is it mine?

Don't be absurd.

I tried to count back but I didn't even know which numbers I required.

I can't believe it.

Well, believe it. It's true.

Even as I lay there I felt my shock becoming relief. Not so much that the child was not mine, but that I'd been delivered. A new force had stepped in to present her with a defining choice.

Eva went back down to the bathroom and wiped the steam-fog from the mirror and brushed out her hair while I stood in the doorway to watch. I considered her wide shoulders and broad back, her narrow waist, the square, womanly buttocks and the way she favoured one leg even while dragging a brush through her long, wet hair. I felt strangely bashful, as though we'd been restored to our proper roles. Here I was again, a visitor in her house, a schoolboy standing unbidden in the doorway to a grown woman's bathroom. The plain light of Saturday afternoon was everywhere in the house.

You want me to chop some wood?

No, she said. Thank you. Go home.

On Sunday I surprised my father by joining him at the back fence to slash the winter weeds and burn what couldn't be hacked down. He seemed hesitant, almost fearful in my company. At day's end as we tended the smouldering edges of the firebreak with bag and hose he cleared his throat and spoke.

I had Loonie's old man here yesterday.

Oh, yeah? I said.

You know he's not my sort of fella.

I know what you mean.

But he's been talking about the people you see out the coast. Says Loonie's gone off the deep end. Won't listen to reason. Son, he used to be your mate.

Yes, I said.

I don't understand it. But I don't think you should go out there anymore.

I nodded. If you like.

He smiled and I felt cheap about how easy this was to concede to him when a month ago I would have told him to mind his own business.

Good boy, he said, wiping ash across his stubbled chin. Good lad.

Little more than a week later Sando returned. He came running out from the BP servo in Sawyer and I nearly shat myself. He looked dark and grizzled and happy.

Hey, he said. I'm gunna be a father.

Far out, I said. I thought she looked different.

Incredible, eh.

Yeah. Man, congratulations.

We shook hands awkwardly.

Shit, he said, holding my hand with a grip just short of painful. You chopped a bloody lot of wood out there, mate.

Well, I said. Not much swell.

Didn't want you to think I don't notice these things.

I laughed uncertainly. I couldn't read him. I wondered if the smudgy bruises on Eva's neck had lingered, or if I'd left something out there to give myself away. It occurred to me later they could have fessed up to one another about their weeks apart, and perhaps this was their way.

Hey, how was the trip? I stammered.

Lively.

Did you get waves?

Jesus, we got everything. Seasick, shot at, seen off, spiderbitten, infected, deported. And yeah, honkin waves.

Haven't seen Loonie, I said.

You and me both.

You mean he's not back?

Little prick blew me off. Took a boat to Nias.

What happened?

Didn't wanna come home, I spose.

Man.

Wilful little bastard, isn't he? Fuckin nuts, actually.

At that moment Fat Bob the mechanic sidled out from the shadows of his workshop. Sando slapped me on the shoulder.

Hey, keep an eye on the weather. We'll do Old Smoky, eh?

Orright.

Gotta go. Come out sometime.

Okay, I'll do that.

But we never surfed Old Smoky together again. Nor did I visit his place while he was there. I did my best to stay away.

There are spring days down south when all the acacias are pumping out yellow blooms and heady pollen and the honeyeaters and wattlebirds are manic with their pillaging and the wet ground steams underfoot in the sunshine and you feel fresher and stronger than you are. Yes, the restorative force of nature. I can vouch for its value — right up to the point of complete delusion. I go down sometimes on leave to cut the weeds and burn off the way my father did, to surf the Point and collect my frazzled wits. But I've learnt not to surrender to swooning spring. In spring you can really ease offon yourself, and when diat happens you'll believe anything at all. You start feeling safe. And then pretty soon you feel immune. Winters are long in Sawyer. A bit of sunshine and nectar goes straight to your head.

I saw Eva in the general store. It was October and she was in a long skirt and sandals. She stood in the narrow aisle considering a bin full of mousetraps. She was fuller in the face and her hair was held back with barrettes. At the sight of her pot belly I felt a tiny stab of lust. I wheeled around and heard her say my name as I slipped out of the shop and into the sleepy street.

In November Frank Loon confronted Sando in the street and took a swing at him but the younger man was too quick. There was a bit of push and shove outside the bank during which Mister Loon uttered threats. From then on it seemed that Sando and Eva did their shopping thirty miles away in Angelus.

I wasn't sleeping much. Some nights I got up and slipped out to the old man's shed to sharpen his tools. One morning my mother found me asleep out there with the axe at my feet. She asked me if I had some troubles but I said that I didn't. I probably thought I was telling her the truth.

I rode out to the coast some weekends to surf. Several times I hiked up behind Sando's place to hide in the peppy scrub and watch the house. I stayed downwind for fear of alerting the dog and though it found me one time it didn't give me away. I saw Eva pegging out laundry in the sun, saw the shine of her bare belly, saw the bras and undies she was hanging up and felt like a dirty schoolboy for watching. I had an urge to wait a while until no one was about and then creep down to press my face into her damp underthings or slip beneath the house and beat off at the thought of her swollen breasts. But I never did.

I all but failed that year of school and I was shamed by the haunted look on my mother's face. The school report recommended that I leave and seek a trade apprenticeship, but I told her I'd stay on and get my act right. Over the Christmas holidays I found every book on next year's syllabus and read late into the night while the old man snored and stopped, snored and stopped, like a man grinding away with a blade at a whetstone.

The new year was weeks old when I found myself surfing beside Sando one morning at the Point. Bareback in nothing but his Speedos, he was noseriding an old tanker from the fifties. He looked fit and tanned as he kicked the board out of the wave and settled down beside me.

Pikelet, he said.

What's with the budgie-smugglers? I asked.

Dog ate the arse out of my boardies. Anyway, what's wrong with Speedos? Son, they made this nation what it is.

You're scarin people.

Well, he said. They need a little scarin round here.

We paddled out together and waited for a set.

How you been? he asked.

Yeah, good, I lied.

Startin to think you're avoidin us.

Well, I said. School and stuff.

You heard from Loonie? he asked, kind enough not to point out that we were in the midst of the summer holidays.

No, I said. Not a word.

Man, what a disappointment he turned out to be.

I spose.

Mate, I thought he was the real deal, y'know? The man not-ordinary.

Maybe ordinary's not so bad, I offered.

Pikelet, you gotta get outta this fuckin town.

I shrugged.

Come and see us, you dick.

I caught a wave in and walked up the hot sand to where Eva lay in the sun with a book. She wore a ragged straw hat and her hair was glossy and her skin was tanned as I'd never seen before. She cut quite a figure in a polka dot bikini. Her breasts were huge and her belly shone. Her distended navel was like a fruit stalk. When she saw me she hoisted herself to her feet. I took in the lavish sway of her back and smiled.

Gross, huh?

No, I said, conscious of passing bathers. No, it's beautiful.

Jesus.

No, honest.

You really are a pervert, she said with unexpected tenderness.

Takes one to know, I said, grinning sadly.

We're leaving, Pikelet. After the baby comes.

Oh, I said. I should have been relieved but I felt a twist of panic and it must have shown.

D'you really mind so much?

I picked wax from the deck of my battered twin-fin.

Pikelet?

Can I see you? I asked without looking up.

Oh, baby. No.

Just once. Please?

Pikelet.

You owe it to me, I said without properly understanding what kind of threat I'd uttered.

Shit, Pikelet.

I'll leave you alone. Just once.

I never would have blown the whistle on her — I couldn't have done it — but for her at least this must have been real and present danger.

Yeah, she said so bitterly that it felt like a blow. For old times'

sake, right?

On a Thursday while Sando was in Angelus I rode out there and was met by the dog. Eva wouldn't let me upstairs so we went without preamble into the shadows of the undercroft where the smells of soil and wax and fibreglass were all about us. I knelt and lifted her dress and kissed the hard projection of her belly while she ran her hands abstractedly through my hair. Her breasts were long and heavy and between her legs everything felt fat and wet and ripe.

Hurry, she said.

I'm sorry, I murmured.

Yeah, well, we're both sorry now.

She turned and braced against the workbench and we took it slowly and carefully. I held her gorgeous belly and saw the veins stand proud in her neck and the sweat gather on her back and when it was over neither of us pretended to be happy.