Tim Winton - The Turning

Leaper sat in the spray with a bitter laugh. He watched Max’s progress by the occasional flash of board or upflung arm that showed above the steady bending wave. Max still surfed with an angry intensity, a kind of misery Leaper saw in some footballers. It was the scrapping spirit of the bloke who played the percentages. No style, no natural flash, all power and no beauty. Max reminded him of the journeymen he’d played on, the ugly scramblers, disciplined triers. They were the ones who vented their frustration on the likes of him.

They weren’t alike, him and Max. All their efforts were in opposite directions; it was what each of them needed to try for that caused the trouble. Trying. The very word was a provocation between them.

He hadn’t missed Max. He stayed away from the old man’s funeral; given the home-and-away schedule, he’d had excuses enough for not being there, but he didn’t offer them.

Another wave reared from the deep. It seemed to stagger a moment as it confronted the shoaling reef, and a creaturely shiver ran along it as Leaper spun and paddled into his path. In a moment there was the old sense of being overtaken, of having been snatched up by something mighty, and he rose to his feet grinning. But before he’d even taken the drop and leant into his first turn, the wave was twisting on itself, hurling him out across the bubbling reef without the board underfoot. He hit the bottom hard and bounced across the coral reef in a welter of foam. When he surfaced, the board was tombstoning at the end of its leash and he could feel that he’d lost skin off his knees and elbows.

That was choice, said Max paddling by.

Stunned and winded, Leaper pulled himself onto the board and followed his brother back out to the break. He was surprised at the sudden flicker of anger that passed through him.

Some things are best left to the men, said Max when they sat up in the calm water outside.

Yeah, said Leaper. Whatever.

You never had the steel for it.

What? Football?

It’s a man’s game.

It’s just a business, Max. You’re so naïve.

Max glared at him, his beard streaming water, and Leaper felt his face flush with unholy pleasure.

You were soft, said Max with new feeling. You were a fuckin coward.

Leaper said nothing. He conceded that he was a lazy trainer and a lukewarm clubman, but he didn’t shirk the hard stuff; it just never found him. He wasn’t afraid of anything until the very end and even then, in the last awful, mid-season weeks, it was the very sudden and novel prospect of failure that scared him. The violence of the game didn’t really register because Leaper had never been injured. There was all that talk of him being too thick to fear getting hurt — Max’s old smear spreading beyond White Point — but it wasn’t about being stupid because even when the rest of his game went to shit, when the ball felt like a sandbag and his legs like pot ballast, he still had a kind of spatial genius, his instinct for evasion.

So, what the fuck happened? Max asked, as if despite himself. There was an exasperation in his voice that surprised Leaper.

I couldn’t do it anymore.

And what the bloody hell does that mean?

I don’t really know.

That you wouldn’t do it anymore. That’s what it looked like.

Watching, were you?

Christ, you moron! You play for my team; of course I was watchin. Tearin my fuckin hair out. You just bloody stopped.

Leaper smiled. Max grasped at the water now, the tendons rigid in his neck.

I gotta live here, said Max. You’re a bloody embarrassment.

But you hated it when I was good.

Fuck off.

Admit it.

Fuck off out of it.

Poor old Max.

You come here to blue with me? said Max with his pit-bull leer.

I dunno, said Leaper, noticing now that both his hands were bleeding.

You’re a fuck-up.

Leaper could hardly deny it. Only a few months ago he was still the prodigy. But come March he was hot and cold — enigmatic , in the words of the commentators — and in April he’d become first a disappointment and then a travesty . There was no obvious source of trouble to point to, no knee reconstructions to endure, no contentious overpayments or distracting sex scandal. He was a mystery. His demise was as puzzling as his emergence. One week he kicked ten at a canter and the next he couldn’t have earned a kick in a stampede. It just got worse. The crowd called him ordinary. The coach said he was rubbish. Players shunned him. Word was he wasn’t trying and that was the biggest laugh of all.

Geez, Max, I thought you’d finally be happy. For once the whole world sees it your way. Vindicated, that’s what you should be feeling.

You stupid little bastard. People dream of havin what you had. It makes em sick to see a spoilt prick like you walk away from what they couldn’t have.

Just you, Max. Why don’t you admit it? You’re talkin about yourself.

You didn’t try—

But that’s what you don’t get, mate. That’s the whole problem.

You were more arse than class.

Fair enough. But I just played for fun, Max. I loved playing the game. Remember? Shit, you should remember. You hated my guts for it. Jesus, I was the only person you ever hated more than the old woman; it was like I was responsible for her pissing off as well as everything else. I was like some insect you had to squash.

You think you can take me? Max said, sculling closer. You reckon you can?

I dunno, mate. What’s the point?

Won’t or can’t?

Aw, that again?

Why the fuck are you here?

I’m not sure. Maybe I wanted to say some things. There’s nowhere to go.

You just walked off the fuckin ground. Up the race. In front of thirty-five thousand people and the TV. The country, you dumb cunt!

I couldn’t play anymore. I told you. It was like the magic was gone.

Aw, and ya just dunno why.

Leaper washed the blood from the heel of one palm and looked at the cut a moment. It was nastier than he’d first thought.

Oh, I know why. It’s no mystery to me, mate.

Fuck this, said Max, paddling for a wave after they’d let several roll through unridden.

Leaper turned and watched him go. For a long moment his brother’s body was visible through the wall of water. The sound of all those tons of water falling was as huge as a stadium crowd. As he watched Max go, he wondered if he could take him now. Years of weight training had bulked him up; he was strong and quick and two years younger. And there’d be a certain satisfaction in dishing out a little of what Max had given him all through the years, the bullying bastard.

Leaper didn’t catch any wave that came through. He was too churned up with thinking. Everything was arse-up again; it was just plain perverse. He’d had years to get past all this family shit and for a good while there he really had got beyond caring. He’d felt liberated. Those first two seasons he felt like an animal out of his cage. He played football unselfconsciously and lived the same way. Until news of the old man’s death. The business of the funeral, and not going. It was about showing Max he didn’t care. That was what poisoned him; it got into everything, this business of showing them. One ordinary game and then he wanted to show them he wasn’t ordinary. Then he was showing the coach that he was trying. Jesus, it was all the showing and trying that ruined him. Because when he ran out onto the park not giving a shit, just excited to get a kick, to fly high and feel the mindless thwack of the ball against his chest, he was something inexplicable, something that delighted him as much as the fans. That’s what left him when he played to prove every balding, wheezy lard-arse commentator wrong. The magic evaporated.