Tim Winton - Breath

But when Sando first took Loonie to the islands, he left me behind in more than a literal sense. Somehow I stayed behind. I lost confidence in my place and value. It's possible some of my sense of relegation was imaginary or the result of shame, but I was convinced that Sando no longer took me seriously, that Loonie didn't regard me as an equal anymore, and the rich feeling of being in charge of myself evaporated. For the first time in my life I was not so much solitary as plain lonely.

Not long after Easter, in the first week of the term break, an unexpectedly vicious cold front burst upon the coast. Wind tore trees from the ground and blew roofing iron deep into the forest, and when the storm was spent it left the kind of booming swell that kept me awake half the night with that old mix of excitement and apprehension.

I waited for the sound of the Volkswagen but Loonie and Sando didn't show. About eight o'clock, while the oldies were off in town, I got on my bike and rode out to the coast.

From way across the estuary curtains of spray were visible at the rivermouth.

At Sando's the boat and the Kombi were gone; they'd opted for the Nautilus. I could hardly blame them for blowing me off but it provoked something in me. The dog didn't bark as it trotted down and I was relieved because I wanted to get in and go without waking Eva. It followed me into the undercroft where I pulled out the big yellow Brewer I'd disgraced myself with a few weeks before. I waxed the board with a block from the Milo tin on the bench and walked back down the drive with it. There was no way I could ride a bike and carry that great spear of a thing, so I hoofed it out to the headland and by the time I'd hiked across the ridges to the clifftop overlooking Old Smoky, the sun had broken through and I was clammy with sweat. My right arm felt wrenched from carrying the board so far. I did some stretches while the bombora cracked and flared out on the sunlit sea.

I don't know why I paddled out there on my own. I was hurt and angry. And I suppose I felt there was a point to prove. I knew Old Smoky had been surfed solo before. But not by a fifteen-year-old. At this distance it seems like an act of desperation — or worse — a lunge toward oblivion. Even now I can barely believe I did it.

Before I got halfway out to the bommie, it dawned on me that Old Smoky was breaking much bigger than I'd seen it before. Between long, deceptive lulls, waves angled in to stand up twenty feet and more, and by the time I got close I knew I'd seriously underestimated the size of the swell. At this scale, it was a wonder the wave still broke cleanly.

I hummed. I spoke aloud to myself. I manoeuvred into position over the reef and checked and rechecked my bearings as I'd been taught. The offshore breeze fanned up a steady chop and beneath the surface the water was busy.

I was right on the lump when a new set of swells wheeled in from the south-west. They quickened as they got a footing on the shoal and soon I was labouring uphill time and again to get beyond them. Each seemed bigger than the one before and every time I squeaked over and tumbled down into the trough behind, I was blinded by spray. In all that stinging white confusion I failed to see the third wave until it was too late. It was already seething, beginning to break, and by then it was a matter of riding it or wearing it, so I turned and went.

All the way down the big board chattered against the surface chop; I could hear the giggle and natter of it over the thunder behind me. When the wave drew itself up to its full height, walling a hundred yards ahead as I swept down, it seemed to create its own weather. There was suddenly no wind at all and the lower I got, the smoother the water became. The whole rolling edifice glistened. For a moment — just a brief second of enchantment — I felt weightless, a moth riding light. Then I leant into a turn and accelerated and the force of it slammed through my knees, thighs, bladder, and I came lofting back to the crest to feel the land breeze in my face and catch a smudge of cliffs before sailing down the line again. With each turn, each stalling fade, I grew in confidence. By the wave's last section I was styling. I scudded out into the channel, so addled by joy I had to sit a while to clear my head.

I felt fabulous, completely charged. I was not a coward or a kook. I knew what I was doing and it wasn't within a bull's roar of being ordinary.

In retrospect I know I should have sat there glorying a bit longer, given myself a full soak of fuckoff vindication until I got over myself and had a laugh at my own expense. Then I could have gone about the business of putting the act back together, gathering my thoughts, returning to some method. But I was so amped and eager I just wheeled about, paddled back into the impact zone and picked off the first wave of the next set. Compounding the first mistake with a second, I rushed at the thing instead of letting it come to me, and so I never quite got into position and had to scramble to get momentum. As the wave peaked I dug hard and felt myself pitch forward, teetering at the crest, surging for a few yards only to feel the wave forge ahead without me.

I knew before I even sat up and looked back over my shoulder that I was in strife. I'd left myself bang in the path of the following wave — which was bigger again and already breaking. In the seconds left I sprinted for the channel but I knew I'd never get there. I pumped myself full of air, hyperventilating hurriedly, and at the last possible moment, as the crashing white wall came down, I stood on my stationary board and speared deep as I could get. I kicked hard but in an instant the whitewater smashed in, blasting me sideways, hurling me down. I saw hazy outlines of rocks. Kelp flew by. My ears hurt badly but I couldn't equalize, and then I was pitching end over end across the bottom, glancing off things hard and soft until slowly, like a storm petering out, the water slackened around me and I floundered up toward the light.

I broke the surface in a drift of foamscum and barely got a breath before another tower of whitewater crashed over, and this second hold-down was worse. I'd started with less air and got worked harder, longer. When I kicked up it was into the path of a third wave, and then there was a fourth. Each breath was more hurried, each dive just a bit shallower than the last. I got so strung out and disoriented I ploughed headfirst into the seabed, thinking I was headed for the surface. Burns and tingles shot up my legs. I saw light where there was no light. My gut began to twitch. Things went narrow — it was like looking out through a letterbox — and out there, at the other end of the slot, the white world was trying to kill me.

But when the sea let go and the water cleared I clawed up into the sky. For a moment, at the surface, it seemed my throat was jammed shut. I couldn't make myself breathe. And then wretching spasms overtook me and bile and seawater poured out and the air burnt down sharp as any regret.

There was no sign of the yellow Brewer. Once I got control of myself I saw I'd been bulldozed, mostly underwater, for four hundred yards. The only way home from here was to swim.

It took me an hour or so to reach the cliffs and maybe another thirty minutes to make it up them. I got seasick treading water in the moiling backwash. And at the end, when I wondered if I had the strength to hold out much longer, I came in on the back of a huge, blunt roller which set me down on a ledge from which I could crawl, very slowly, to safety.

When I got back to Sando's I tried to keep clear of the house but I so badly needed a drink. Eva caught me gulping from the rainwater tank.

Pikelet?

I'm just goin, I croaked.

Saw your bike. Where you been?

I shrugged, but I was standing there in my wetsuit and my knees were crusted with blood.