Tim Winton - Breath

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

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

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

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

I shrugged, but I already knew.

Doesn't he even wanna watch?

No, I said. He doesn't.

Here, get in.

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

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

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

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

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

Least you could show your mate a bit of support.

What for? He's chicken.

Jesus, son. Don't be an arsehole.

Fuck off, coach.

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

I am chicken, I said.

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

You reckon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You still wanna do this?

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