Tim Winton - Breath

That week I slipped away at every opportunity from whichever character-building group activity we'd been wrangled into, and made my way to the cemetery or the little beach below it. From there I could gaze across to the distant wharf at Angelus whose cranes and silos looked too small to be real. It was like seeing the familiar world at a twofold remove, from another time as much as another direction, for it felt that I was in an outpost of a different era. It wasn't only the colonial buildings that gave me such a sense, but also the land they were built on. Each headstone and every gnarled grasstree spoke of a past forever present, ever-pressing, and for the first time in my life I began to feel, plain as gravity, not only was life short, but there had been so much of it.

Queenie found me feverish one afternoon in the old mortuary room. It was a derelict place full of webs and bird nests and flickering shadows and the eeriness of it distracted us from our awkwardness. We stood looking at the raised slab with its gruesome gutters and drains.

Creepy, she murmured.

Yeah, I said honking into my handkerchief. And sad.

All the waiting around they did. The people stuck here. All that sitting around to be declared clean, or whatever. Just to end up on this, some of them.

I looked at her. She was sucking thoughtfully on a hank of hair and staring at the morgue slab. I'd forgotten how smart she was, how much I liked her.

You think there's ghosts? I asked offhandedly.

Probably.

You believe all that stuff? I asked, surprised.

Yes, actually. Out on the farm, she said. Down on our beach, you hear things at night.

Yeah? I sniggered. What things?

Well, people's voices. And whales. You know, singing.

Well, that's not ghosts, obviously.

I don't know about that, she said. Whales are more or less extinct on this coast.

I've seen whales around.

Yeah? Alive? How many?

I shrugged. In truth I could only think of a single sighting since primary school. It was a miserable thought.

Whale ghosts.

Go ahead and laugh, she said.

I laughed. She thumped my arm. My laugh turned into a horrible cough. I was hot and clammy, but I wanted to keep her talking.

Kind of childish, don't you think?

Really? she said bridling. Maybe we'll see about that.

It transpired that I was not, after all, immune to a dare. Queenie and I spent the night in a sleeping bag on the mortuary slab. The joint we passed back and forth was damp and so stale it tasted like smouldering compost, which didn't exactly help my cough. We told each other ghoulish stories and tried to ignore the impossible chill of the channelled block beneath us. All night the corrugated-iron walls warped and flapped in the southerly and I coughed like a wild dog.

Queenie's hair crowded the single pillow we shared and despite my cold we kissed with a desperate cheerfulness. Her mouth had the vegetable taste of pot about it but it was soft and warm and I don't really know if we kissed with any purpose other than warding off the chill and whatever else lurked in the night around us. I was conscious of her limbs against mine but more aware of the cadaver slab against my back and although I felt one of her notable breasts through her woollen jumper we never quite got into the swing of things. Eventually she fell asleep to leave me suspended in a state of excruciating alertness. The hut sighed and moaned. My heart raced. I tried not to cough for fear of waking her. My skin felt too tight and I began to sweat.

It was dark in that hut, black as a dog's guts, and the night got away from me.

Queenie and I were sent home from camp.

Three days later I was in hospital in Angelus with pneumonia.

I only remember the dream.

I was deep. The whole sea boiled overhead. White streaks of turbulence drove down like tracer fire and rocket trails, a free-fire zone in dim and shuddering green.

And I'm plummeting, a projectile. When it comes rushing at me, black as death, the reef is shot full of holes and I slam into one, headlong.

Next, I see myself, from outside my flailing, panicked body. Headfirst. Wedged in the rock. While my lungs turn to sponge and the ocean inside me flickers with cruel light.

Drowning.

Drowning.

Fighting it.

But drowning.

There was, for a while, I'm certain, a woman at the bedside. I thought it was Eva Sanderson but it was more likely a nurse or my mother or Queenie Cookson. Whoever it was, she held my hand and spoke for a long time. But her words made no more sense than birdsong. And then she was gone.

I woke up and my parents were in the room, anxious and exhausted, still bearing on their faces the unmistakeable look of disappointment that I was to see again a few weeks later when my school report came home.

LOONIE QUIT SCHOOL. He was jack of it; he just wanted to go surfing, but his old man was having none of that and he sent him up to the mill. Loonie hated everything about it. My old man said he wouldn't last a fortnight, said Loonie wouldn't work in an iron lung, said the kid was lazy and plain dangerous as a result.

Those summer holidays I went out to Sando's nearly every day. Eva had gone to the States for a few weeks and with Loonie in the workforce I had Sando to myself. I did more than seize the opportunity; I drank it up.

On flat-calm days we dived, and if there was the slightest swell we fooled about at the Point with boards he dug out from the far recesses of the undercroft — logs from the sixties, pig-boards and weird, tear-shaped things with psychedelic sprayjobs. There were days when we just hung out, when he'd sit crosslegged on the verandah carving a piece of cypress and I'd watch in silence. That summer he taught me how to play the didjeridu, to sustain the circular breathing necessary to keep up the low, growling drone you could send down the valley from his front steps. The noise of it made the dog go bush. I liked the way it sucked energy from me and drew hard feelings up the way only a good tantrum could when I was little. I blew till I saw stars, till a puddle of drool appeared on the step below or until Sando took the thing off me.

Sometimes you didn't bother to engage Sando in conversation. When he got into a mood I left him to his own thoughts and consoled myself down in the roo paddock alone with the didj. For me, Eva's absence was a boon, but I could see how agitated it often made him. Still, most afternoons he was mellow, even expansive. When he gave you his full attention you could feel yourself quicken, like a tree finding water.

It was different having Sando to myself. With only the two of us around, the talk got away from swells and surfspots. Sometimes he launched into raves about the Spartans or Gauguin. He told me about Herman Melville in Tahiti and the death of James Cook. When I told him I'd read Jack London and tried Hemingway, he lit up. From his shelves he took down Men and Sharks by Hans Hass, an old hardcover edition with black and white photos.

Take it, he said, it's a present.

He told me about the dolphin meat that Javanese fishermen had given him, how he ate it to avoid insult. He said he would eat human flesh if necessary, but hoped he'd never need to, and this was all he could think of while he ate the dolphin. We talked about the oil crisis, the prospect of nuclear annihilation. He spoke of the survivalists he'd met in Oregon and, speaking of survival, I told him of Loonie's conviction that during a wipeout he could sieve oxygen from sea-foam, suck it through his teeth to stay alive. We laughed at the loopiness of this, at Loonie's lovable denseness.

I basked in Sando's attention and treasured these brief moments of esteem. Sometimes he hugged me as I left, but more often he sent me on my way with a good-natured whack on the head.