Tim Winton - Breath

Sando paddled up and held my hand like a brother or a father and I was babbling. I felt immortal and he just laughed. But already I wanted more. I was hankering for a third ride, something to make it real.

I sat for a few minutes while Sando took the next wave. He made it look easy and suddenly it did feel easy. I couldn't even wait for him to paddle back over. I paddled up to the impact zone and in a moment of overblown confidence put myself in the path of something the size of the Angelus town hall. I didn't understand how wildly I'd overreached until the moment I got to my feet and felt the whole edifice bulge and mutate beneath me.

For half a second I saw the shadow of the reef far below. The heavy board fell from under me like a leaf and I sprawled down the hard, unyielding face without it, bouncing from hip to hip, unable to break the skin of the water. I was falling down a staircase — one that never seemed to end, which collapsed on me and shot me skyward before snatching me down again so its rubble-spill might drive me headlong across the reef, rattling and wracking me all the way. I bounced and pinged and shot, winded and half blind, across the shoal, and when the reef fell away the turbulence ploughed me so deep and so fast I barely had a chance to equalize to save my eardrums. I knew not to fight it, but I was nearly gone when the sea let me go. I came up choking, sobbing, kicking at the surface as though I could climb into purer oxygen.

By the time Sando reached me I'd regained some composure but he'd seen it all. I was two hundred yards from where I'd caught the wave and my shorts were gone entirely.

Well, he said with a grin. That one rang your bell.

He pulled me onto his Brewer and said nothing about my bare arse. My board lay bright in the distance. He let me lie there a while before he swam off to get it and when he came back he called it a day. I paddled in after him and hoped there had been no witnesses.

We didn't go looking for Loonie that afternoon, but we knew he'd show up eventually. Eva fed us fish burgers and let us prattle until fatigue overtook us and we lapsed into stupefied silence. As the storm-front darkened the sky, we hung in hammocks on the verandah where the wind was eerie-warm. I was sore and so drowsy I kept falling asleep. The sound of magpies and wattlebirds was a conversation going over my head, a kind of chatter I felt I'd understand if only I kept swimming up from sleep towards wakefulness.

Later in the day the dog barked and Loonie came stumping along the rutted drive. It was raining by then. He pushed the dog away and hesitated before coming across the yard to the verandah steps. The plaster cast was slung like a weapon across his chest.

Come on, called Sando. Get outta the rain.

Loonie just stood there.

Don't be such a goddamn punk, said Eva, swinging out of her

hammock.

She stared at him a moment, hands on hips, before limping inside, and only then did Loonie come upstairs to stand against the verandah rail. His sunbleached hair was flat on his skull and the calico sling wet through.

Eva came back with a towel. He took it without acknowledging her.

Well? he said.

Eva snorted and went inside. She closed the French doors a tad too firmly. Sando considered Loonie for some moments and then lay back to swing a bit. Loonie glanced at me. I averted my eyes.

All this time, said Sando. Surfing the place on my own. Watching it, biding my time, keeping my little secret. Funny, you know, but it was nice to share. A real surprise but it felt good. So maybe the best part about having a secret is letting someone in on it. Eh, Pikelet?

I shrugged, unable to keep from smiling.

How big?

Sando sighed. Big enough to make it interesting, he said. Big enough to rip the boy-wonder's shorts off.

Twenty foot, I said.

Fifteen, maybe. You rode it at fifteen, Pikelet, eighteen tops.

Well, he got waves, said Loonie dully.

Yeah, he made two. He did good.

Loonie stood there and took it in.

I shat meself, I said. I took the worst floggin. I freaked.

But he did the deed, said Sando. Made himself a. little bit of history.

It took me a moment to absorb what he'd said. For if Sando was the first to have ridden Old Smoky, then I was surely the youngest. I could see Loonie thinking it through right there in front of me.

He flapped the soggy hems of his jeans. The gesture was nonchalant, but I knew him better than that.

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.

There were only two more go-outs at Old Smoky that autumn, days when Loonie watched bitterly from the cliff, but by mid-winter he finally got his chance. He came with us on a grey, windless morning during a huge south-easterly swell when a skein of mist lay across the cliffs. Climbing down towards the water I heard voices and after leaping out and paddling clear I saw that a few of the Angelus crew had followed us. Loonie wanted an audience — he'd tipped them off- and although Sando said nothing as we stroked seaward, his anger was palpable. Loonie had really set himself a task.

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. It wasn't that he was invulnerable or even particularly graceful, because he took some terrible beatings in attempting the impossible, but for every wave that nailed him he'd squeak clear of two others just as gnarly. 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.

So there we were, this unlikely trio. A select and peculiar club, a tiny circle of friends, a cult, no less. Sando and his maniacal apprentices. Very few people ever really knew what we did out there along the cliffs; it was, after all, behaviour beyond the realms of logic. But within the tiny surfing fraternity along that part of the coast in those years we had a certain underground reputation. Bit by bit a special aura settled upon us and in our way we were rather solemn about what we did. Under Sando's tutelage we ate carefully and worked on our fitness. He taught us yoga. We grew stronger and more competent, expected more of ourselves and forsook almost everything else for the sake of the shared obsession. Years before people started speaking about extreme sports, we spurned the word extreme as unworthy. What we did and what we were after, we told ourselves, was the extraordinary.

Yet some reserve had set in alongside all this grand feeling. In the water with Sando, Loonie and I were part of a team so thoroughly coached and briefed that in big waves we could anticipate every move the other made. We saw bad falls coming and were ready to effect a rescue in a hold-down or in the event of injury, and this was comforting to know when you found yourself hurtling along beneath a thousand tons of whitewater, rag-dolling across the reef with your lungs near to bursting. In our boyish way we thought of it as a war zone out there on the bommies and we styled ourselves as comrades-under-fire. We were proud of our maverick status, even if it was semi-secret; we were into things that ordinary townsfolk could barely imagine. Sando was big on discretion. He did his best to instil in us a quiet sense of modesty. His hippified warrior spirit, so hard to grasp at this remove, was for a boy like me, basking in the glow of his authority, a code as tangible as it was heady.