Tim Winton - The Turning

He flipped up the rear window and dragged out his dusty board and laid it on the sand while he rooted around for the wetsuit. He didn’t know if it was the cold or fatigue or simple nerves that caused him to shake so much but he had trouble getting the wetty on, and when he finally did he realized that he needed a piss, and because he was leery of sharks out on the reef and too cold to haul the suit off again, he just stood there and let go where he was. The hot flush down his legs brought an unexpected twinge of shame, a flash of the schoolyard that he buried in the business of waxing the board.

From where he knelt Leaper noticed that an osprey had built a nest on the water tower. It was new to him but the bird’s guano-plastered wall of sticks was so well established that he suddenly sensed how long he’d been gone, just how many years stood between him and the boy he was when he learnt to play football on this very sandflat. Barefoot and bare-backed, he was the youngest of a feral mob of kids who roamed the town on their treddlies, haunted the jetty and played marathon games of footy with the sea and dunes as boundaries and only piled shirts for goalposts. Back then, the sandcrusted ball tore skin off his feet without him even feeling it. He ducked and weaved through the big kids and hung on the shoulders of grown men who laughed and said that he had springs in his feet. He was a natural. He had no idea that he was a freak. He only knew that Max hated it and he was late to the party on that front too. Leaper was so innocent that White Pointers thought he was dim, and looking back he wondered if maybe they were right.

With the board under his arm, Leaper jogged the few steps to the water and plunged in with a shout. For the first few moments he just put his head down and paddled to distract himself from the cold but after a few minutes he was comfortable enough to enjoy the dappled seagrass, the green sandy holes passing beneath him, the rhythm and repetition of the stroke, and the easy grace of his own body. There was something beautifully mindless in a long paddle or run or swim, a spaciousness he embroidered with whatever silly ditty came to mind to keep time. After the giddy relief from training, the muscles of his arms and back felt hungry for it again.

When he reached the inside reef he sat on his board a moment to find the passage through the limestone and coral. Whitewater pounded across the shelf and the gap was narrow. When he was through he began the business of duckdiving under broken waves until he reached the channel. There was a lot of water moving out here. He was five hundred yards from shore. The swell seemed to be picking up. He returned to the jittery feeling he had before he hit the water.

As he paddled, a lone surfer dropped down the face of a big, reeling right-hander with the kind of confidence that marked him out as a local. He jammed a turn hard up towards the falling lip and then seemed to hang in the wave’s churning guts for a few seconds before a rush of trapped air spat him out. Leaper sat up in the channel to watch the rider come on in short, brutal signature turns until he slewed off the wave to settle in the quiet water beside him.

Thought I’d find you here, said Leaper with a grin he hadn’t expected.

Well, I’ll be fucked, said the other man without warmth.

How’s it goin, Max?

Don’t need a walkin frame yet.

So I see.

Long time since that board saw any saltwater.

Leaper nodded. A wetsuit did little to hide the fact that Max had stacked on some pudding, yet he still had his big deckie shoulders and his neck was like a straining-post. Max’s hair was buzz-cut and he’d grown a biker beard that gave him a fearsome look and blurred his resemblance to the old man. Nobody would mistake Max for one of the friendly hippies who’d taught them to surf here in their early teens. His big brother looked savage and battleworn. There were pulpy scars on his eyebrows and a fresh dint in his forehead.

They sat there in the calm a few moments, turning their feet in the light-shafted water with the reef shadowy beneath them. Max regarded him with that sour, doubtful look of his.

So what’s the story?

Leaper shrugged. I haven’t been back for a while.

Christ, you haven’t been anywhere for a while, from what I hear. The paper’s full of it. They sack you?

I walked.

Fucksake.

Leaper smiled, but the skin felt tight on his face.

Frank Leaper. The White Point jack-in-the-box. A two-season wonder.

So it seems.

Jesus Christ.

Both brothers sensed the fresh set of waves that trundled in toward them. They swung around and paddled seaward in a response that was automatic. After the years they’d spent out here on the reef their sudden animation was instinctive; their bodies thought for them. Several big waves broke outside. They took them on the head, duckdiving with their boards to escape the worst of the impact. Leaper relished the sluicing concussion across his back; he loved the way the force of the water prised his eyelids apart and raked through his hair like a gale. He surfaced from each explosion of turbulence and paddled hard and fast, his limbs and ligaments lulled into some kind of boyhood recognition, until he reached the calm deep beyond the break and sat up blowing a little. He was lightheaded and gripey with hunger but he felt unaccountably content, even at the prospect of dealing with Max.

His brother paddled past and sat some distance away. Leaper looked shoreward at the pink blob of the water tank above the dunes. He observed Max who fingered the water and stared out to sea. How would he talk to him, explain what had happened? And why should he bother; why did it matter? He’d spent his boyhood vainly trying to get Max’s attention. He aped his older brother, adored him, followed him at school and on the beach, blind to the fact that Max was contemptuous of him and had been from the moment he was born.

It was Max who introduced and fed the idea that his little brother was a bit simple. The fact that it wasn’t true was obscured by Leaper’s capacity to absorb and endure such meanness out of love, as though that’s all it was, his cruelty, a mere test of brotherly love. He was, without doubt, naïve. Leaper instinctively believed the best of people, beginning with his family. In his mind Max was only ever joking. As a boy of eight, he really did think that their mother was only going on holiday when she brought them here to the old man one summer, never to return. And he was almost twenty before he saw that, instead of hiding his feelings toward him, his father had no feelings at all.

Leaper wasn’t so naïve anymore; he’d seen plenty in his two seasons of glory. But he didn’t feel better or stronger for having been wised up. If anything he yearned for the unselfconscious part of him because, looking back, it was the only bit that felt authentic. This vigilant, grown-up version he’d been living was mostly an act. It was the reason he’d come unstuck this year in front of the whole country. He was certain of that; he’d had time enough to think about it. But what he thought might be achieved by talking to Max about it was a lot less clear. Even as he sat here he knew that his brother was part of the mess he’d made of himself — every minute in the water reminded him of something more that confirmed it — yet what did he expect from Max but the usual spitting disdain? You’d have to be a bit simple to persist with Max. And yet there were things to say. There was nothing to lose by saying them. Except maybe a few teeth and a bed for the night.

Another set bore down on the reef. This time they were ready. The brothers hustled and jockeyed for position and Leaper felt himself smiling with real pleasure at this instant reversion to form. He wasn’t as strong as Max, but he was so much fitter that it should have been no contest except for the fact that he was out of practice. He pulled back and gave his brother the wave and Max launched into it with an expression that said it’d always been his. The old conviction.