Breath

by Tim Winton

It’s funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it’s all you ever think about.

THERE WAS ALWAYS a manic energy about Loonie, some strange hotwired spirit that made you laugh with shock. He hurled himself at the world.

I liked books – the respite and privacy of them – books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

Ah, said Sando. Old Smoky. That’s what it’s called. Has anyone surfed it? I asked. Sando studied me a moment. Well, he murmured. That’d be telling, wouldn’t it. It must have been twenty feet, said Loonie.

Within a few minutes I began to recognize a familiar stance, a silhouette I knew very well. Shit, I said. Look! Loonie leant over and didn’t really need to follow the caption beneath my finger. Billy Sanderson, styling at Rocky Point. Jesus!

But even when they showed up, more surfers watched from the beach than actually paddled out. Especially after the spring morning when Barney surfaced like a sub in the channel, rolled over beside Loonie and fixed him with one terrible, black eye before sliding away again. That eye, said Loonie, was like a fuckin hole in the universe. It was as close as he got to poetry. I envied him the moment and the story that went with it.

How does it feel? I murmured. How does what feel? When it’s that serious. You’ll find out. Like, I mean, twenty feet, said Loonie subdued now. Well, you’re glad there’s no stupid photo. When you make it, when you’re still alive and standin at the end, you get this tingly-electric rush. You feel alive, completely awake and in your body. Man, it’s like you’ve felt the hand of God. The rest of it’s just sport’n recreation, mate. Give me the hand of God any day.

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

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

But he set a new mark that day, no question about it. He did more than prove himself. He surfed like someone who didn’t believe in death. The manic grin was gone. He clawed hungrily into the line-up and gave no quarter. It was twenty feet out there, maybe more, and he went later and deeper than either of us, never once begging off. He ploughed down those black-bellied monsters in a low crouch, his feet planted wide, while Sando and I sat in the channel and hooted in disbelief. Whatever we did that day, Loonie did it harder. I can’t believe he wasn’t afraid, but he had the cold determination of a boy completely overtaken by an idea.

He was fifteen years old. He hadn’t simply taken Old Smoky on – he’d taken it over. From that day forward it was Loonie who set the benchmark. Sando and I could only watch in awe. And there, when we came in, was the Angelus crew, misted in on the cliff, uncertain of what it was they’d seen.

And when he talked about the final rush, the sense of release you felt at the end, skittering out to safety in the beautiful deep channel, Eva sometimes sank back with her eyes closed and her teeth bared, as though she understood only too well. It’s like you come pouring back into yourself, said Sando one afternoon. Like you’ve exploded and all the pieces of you are reassembling themselves. You’re new. Shimmering. Alive. Yes, she said. Exactly. And I watched her, and wondered how she knew.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

My father’s death hit me with a force that felt targeted and personal. I felt chastised by it and it really pulled me up. Afterwards, Mum looked at me fearfully, as though I was a stranger. Now I knew there was no room left in my life for stupid risks. Death was everywhere – waiting, welling, undiminished. It would always be coming for me and for mine and I told myself I could no longer afford the thrill of courting it.

Without the slightly lurid details and the connection to Utah wealth, Eva’s death might have gone unreported. In any event it earned only two inches of a Reuters column. Eva was found hanging naked from the back of a bathroom door in Portland, Oregon. A Salvadorean hotel employee discovered her with a belt around her neck. The deceased had been the sole occupant of her five-star room, the cause of death cardiac arrest as a result of asphyxiation.

I had a few scars by then and I was woozy with pills. I felt the hopeless tug of love as she led the girls towards the car. The mourners around me were careful but not afraid. I have never been a violent man. Just a little creepy, it seems. I didn’t go back to the hospital. I broke an undertaking. Got in a car and drove east, as far away from the sea and the city as possible.

I felt a pang when I heard about Loonie. It hardly sent me into a spin the way Eva’s death had, but I felt hollow, as though there was suddenly less of me. From a call box in Wiluna, surrounded by broken glass and red dirt, I called Grace. I’m sorry to call, I said. Yeah, you probably are. Everyone I know is dead. Or gone. And what are you planning to do? Put it all behind me, I said like a politician. I’m gunna put it all behind me and move on. She hung up on me.

For a good while I feared excitement. But I found ways through that. I discovered something I was good at, something I could make my own. I am hell’s own paramedic. When the shit hits the fan, I’m on, and people are glad to see me. They see the uniform and trust me, and that makes me happy. And it’s all go, all adrenaline, fast and filthy.

I suppose I’m celibate, which sounds kind of high-minded but it’s been mostly a process of learning to make do. Which is a bit like married life, from what people tell me.

Meanwhile nearly everyone is terrified that this, whatever life has become, is it. And what’s worse is, it’ll be over soon. That kind of fear – like toothache – can be accommodated. Well, most of the time.

I’m not there to prove anything – I’m nearly fifty years old. I’ve got arthritis and a dud shoulder. But I can still maintain a bit of style. I slide down the long green walls into the bay to feel what I started out with, what I lost so quickly and for so long: the sweet momentum, the turning force underfoot, and those brief, rare moments of grace. I’m dancing, the way I saw blokes dance down the line forty years ago.

My favourite time is when we’re all at the Point, because when they see me out on the water I don’t have to be cautious and I’m never ashamed. Out there I’m free. I don’t require management. They probably don’t understand this, but it’s important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances – who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful, and in this at least he should need no explanation.