Tim Winton - Breath

Meanwhile a gap opened between Loonie and me. Those weeks he spent in plaster did the damage. His long, brooding wait as Sando and I surfed Old Smoky without him had curdled things between us, and it couldn't be undone. It was never sufficient for me to acknowledge his superior courage. He was the duck's nuts and I told him so. I didn't compete with him anymore because it was an unequal contest and I didn't need the grief. Yet I did secretly believe I had a style he lacked. Never a pretty surfer, Loonie was often a triumph of guts over technique. I didn't challenge him, but the struggle between us was never-ending, and out of the water things were definitely cooler.

Loonie's devotion to Sando grew more intense. For all his surliness and tough-guy scepticism, Loonie hurled himself at Sando like a son putting himself in his father's path. He became mulish about it; he liked to make things awkward. He often rode out to Sando's without me and routinely forgot to pass on his messages.

On the surface things appeared normal enough. In big surf we were still solid, but elsewhere, when Sando wasn't present to temper him, Loonie became less fun to be around. I didn't exactly avoid him; he often had other fish to fry. Between swells he ran with an older crew of Ag School boys, kids with stubbly chins and smokers' coughs. They bought the grog he swiped from the pub and they sold him detonators, 303 cartridges and stick mags in return. I knew he kept a kero tin full of contraband buried in the forest. He had the makings of pipe bombs out there, and money he looted from guest rooms and passed-out drunks. All winter he bristled and burned with a fury I didn't understand. Everything seemed to be my fault, so I didn't mind being out of his way.

There came a spring morning, a dark, rain-misted day on the Angelus road, when the school bus shuddered to an unscheduled halt. I stirred from my travelling stupor and looked up to see a hellish mess on the bend ahead. The bus chugged and rattled at the shoulder of the highway. The driver seemed to hesitate between backing up and jumping down to render aid. On the road before us a cattle truck lay on its side with the remains of a small car pressed into its underbelly. Steers writhed on the bitumen, bellowing, kicking, lashing their heads against the road. One hauled itself into the ditch, a hind leg trailing lifeless behind it. Blood ran thin and copious in the rain; it seemed to make the culvert weeds greener than they were and it trickled downhill towards us as the bus filled with murmurs and sobs.

A farm vehicle eased up behind the wreck and a man got out. The vehicle pulled away again in the direction of Angelus while the newly arrived man dodged scrabbling beasts to crawl up into the underbelly of the truck. Finally the bus driver cranked the door open and went out to help. I watched him go, hunching in the rain, pulling up his collar. There was something about the slack pace of his stride that inflamed me. I got to my feet and plunged down the steps and sprinted past him toward the twisted shambles. The bus driver shouted above the noise of maimed animals. The road was an obstacle course of lurching bodies, dark tongues, and lolling eyes. There was a horrible scrape of hoofs on the tarmac. The air stank of Oxo cubes and shit and spilled diesel.

When I reached the farmer he was tugging at the car door in his town clothes and all he could say was Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, on and on, over and over. I saw that the driver was dead. The way her head tilted back on her forward-thrust body was all wrong. She was so hard up against the steering column that all my senses recoiled. Beside her, the man in the passenger seat licked his lips in slow motion. His eyes were tarred shut by blood oozing from a gouge in his forehead.

Then the bus driver came up behind us, saying: The truckie, the truckle's stuck.

I climbed the frame of the trailer chassis and groped along the wet, slippery bars of the cattle-cage towards the cab. I didn't trust the sagging front wheel for a perch, so I bellied out on the door and peered into the window beneath me like a diver looking into a reef hole. Barely a foot away, shivering in an army surplus jumper, and hanging in his seatbelt, was a big bloke with a beard and gold fillings. The window between us fogged up. I called down to him to open it, but he didn't seem to hear me. He just shook there, slowly obscured beneath the fogging, rain-pelted glass while I yelled until I was hoarse, and then the cops arrived with a rifle, and the fire truck was there, and someone much bigger hauled me down and gave me a steaming mug of Milo that I couldn't drink for the life of me.

That same night the old man drove me back into Angelus for the school social. Even though I'd asked Queenie Cookson I really didn't want to go anymore, but rny mother insisted that I show for the girl's sake, to save her the shame of being stood up. So in I went, scrubbed up in a yellow bodyshirt and flared corduroys, while the old man whiled away the hours fishing for skippy off the town jetty.

On the drive over, even at the bend with its hail of windscreen glass and crushed vegetation, neither of us said a thing. When we got to the school gym in Angelus I mumbled thanks for the ride and sloped in.

Inside a band from the city played songs by The Sweet and Status Quo. The dim lights, the music and the sight of all my classmates in their best duds made everything unreal. I felt as though I wasn't properly there. The cavernous hall was full of competing perfumes. There was so much glitter and lipstick that everybody looked like strangers and it took me ten minutes to find Queenie over by the basement stairs.

Why didn't you tell me about this morning? she shouted close to my ear.

I shrugged.

I had to get it from Polly Morgan.

I shrugged again.

Is it true they both died?

That's what they're sayin on the radio.

You looked shocking today, she said. Why didn't you say anything? You should have told me. I don't get you.

There was nothing I could think to say in reply so I shrugged once more. She scowled. I put my arm around her and this seemed to placate her somewhat. Later we danced to Sherbert and AC/DC tunes and the conversations we had with others were mostly lip-reading. We wound up in the deep shadows of the basement stairwell, clinching and kissing abstractedly until the lights flickered and it was all over.

When I got in the car the old man looked haggard.

You stink offish, I said.

And you smell like a girl.

We drove home in such a silence that I found myself fiddling noisily and pointlessly with the radio knobs. It annoyed the old man, but the agitation kept him from falling asleep at the wheel.

Back home my mother was still awake in her candlewick dressing gown.

You look handsome, love, she said.

I stood away from the sink while the old man wearily cleaned his fish. The stares of all those dead eyes made my gut flutter in a way that was new to me. When he opened their silver bellies I went to my room and did not sleep.

At school Queenie Cookson passed a note, via intermediaries, to outline my many flaws (I was moody, selfish and inattentive) and notify me that I was, forthwith, relieved of my duties as boyfriend. I did my best to take it badly but in truth I was relieved.

In the troughs between big days, Loonie was infinitely more resourceful than me. Having been addicted to danger all his life he could always find a pulse-raising challenge. That year he drilled a peephole in the pressed-tin wall of the pub's storeroom and forged an entirely new means of putting himself in peril.

There were several major swells that year as big lows rode up out of the Roaring Forties, but we spent more time waiting for them, discussing them, imagining them, than riding them. Winter had its many interludes when for weeks on end the wind turned sideshore and brought swell in at hopeless angles, and there were days and days of dark, squally chop when the sea was a misery to behold.