Tim Winton - Breath

One evening when I thought I heard the chatter of the Volkswagen at the end of the drive, I put down my book and lay very still on the bed. I thought first of Sando, though he'd hardly been gone a fortnight. If it was him, what would he want of me at ten o'clock at night? Unless he knew something. I tried not to think of that, of him here and angry and twice as big as me. Eva wouldn't drive in to try to see me, would she? With my parents asleep in the house? Waiting for me to come out and down the long drive to meet her by the road? The idea was too crazy, too beautiful, too frightening. I snapped off the bed lamp and after a while the engine noise pulled away. I knew well enough what a VW sounded like. Five minutes, it'd been there. It could have been nothing more than a couple of lost Margaret River hippies consulting their map in the mouth of our driveway. Still, I waited to hear it return, barely moved a limb. At the thought of her waiting out in the Kombi my cock began to ache. And then, through the thin wall, the fridge motor kicked in again and I couldn't be sure that I hadn't imagined the entire thing.

I held off for a whole week. But the next Saturday I rode out in the pelting rain. I felt mad, reckless, doomed.

The dog announced my arrival. Eva came out onto the verandah and didn't say hello. She unzipped my sodden jeans with a determination that bordered on violence, and she took me in her mouth while the dog and the swollen estuary and the whole teeming sky seemed to look on. I held her hair and shivered and cried from relief.

It was over in moments. Eva got up, wiped her face, pulled off the rest of my clothes and took them inside. I followed her to the dryer, saw her sling my stuff in. She wore an old pullover and bellbottom jeans with rainbow-coloured toe-socks. When I reached around to hold her I felt her breasts swinging loose under the wool. The dog sidled in to stare at us.

Thought I told you to stay away, she said.

I pressed myself against her so that she could feel I was still hard. She turned and kissed me. Her mouth tasted starchy. She ran her hands down my back and held me by the buttocks.

Well, she said. Now that you're here.

And so began a pattern. Eva always seemed more vindicated than pleased to see me. Sex was a hungry, impatient business, more urgent for the looming possibility of Sando's unscheduled return. The house had no curtains and few partitions so it was hard not to feel insecure. Sando's dog was a constant and mostly silent witness; it saw me eager, clumsy, exultant, furtive, anxious. That Saturday, it followed us up to the bedroom and watched from the corner as Eva lowered herself on me. Rain drummed on the roof. I was trembling.

You're scared, she said.

No.

Bullshit.

Just cold, I said.

That's okay. Being scared is half the fun. You should know that by now.

But I wasn't sure what I knew except that she was silky-hot inside, and strong enough to hold me by the muscles of her pelvis and pin my arms to the bed so that I couldn't have fought her off if I'd wanted to.

We stayed in bed all day as the rain fell and the dog sighed disconsolately. Some time in the afternoon I woke, startled to have slept at all. Eva was watching me. She held my cock as though it was a small bird. With her free hand she stroked my cheek.

I love you, I murmured.

You love getting laid.

No, I mean it.

You don't know what you mean.

I lay there, smarting.

I got a postcard from Thailand, she said.

Thailand? Sando.

He's been in Bangkok.

The thought of him now was like a blow. Aren't they in Java? I said, trying to seem breezy.

Something about supplies, she said. Who knows. Now he's talking about the eastern islands.

Which islands?

He didn't say. Lombok, I guess.

Could be any eastern islands.

Yeah, she said with a snort. The Philippines, maybe. Even Hawaii has eastern islands. What an asshole.

So he won't be back straight away.

He's scared of growing old. That's what this shit's about.

The travelling.

All of it. Having his little deputy along for the ride. Loonie's too young and too stupid to be afraid. And Sando loves that, feeds off it. He hates being old.

How old is he?

Sando? Thirty-six.

Hell.

You're surprised?

Well, yeah. I mean, he's real fit.

Fit, she said. And lucky.

I reached over to touch her messy knee but she swatted my hand away.

Leave it, she muttered.

Sorry.

We both stared at her scars in silence.

Look at this, she said at last. Can you believe a whole life can come down to a few hunks of fucking bone and gristle?

She got up and limped to the window. Light caught the fine hair of her limbs. I stared at the silhouette-curve of her buttocks.

Why do you let him go? I asked. I don't get it.

Because he needs it, she said.

What about what you need?

He knows what I need, she said with a matter-of-factness that brooked no inquiry. She looked back at me sourly and it seemed to be my cue to leave.

I got out of bed, hoping she'd follow me down to the laundry, but she didn't. I pulled on my still-warm clothes and went back out into the rain.

For a long and ruinous period of my later life I raged against Eva Sanderson, even as I grieved for her. In the spirit of the times I held her morally accountable for all my grown-up troubles. Yet had things proceeded only a little differently — had she been in less pain perhaps, and more clearheaded as a result — maybe we would have wound up friends, made our blunder and let it go, to look upon it afterwards as just another lumpy bit of history. In the seventies the ground seemed to continually slip and change beneath our feet, but Eva knew better than to console herself with a pimply schoolboy. I just wish she'd shown more of an interest in the particular kid she took to bed. God knows, I understand lapses of judgement, the surrender to vanity, the weight of loneliness, for we were both lonely beyond the glow of Sando's attention, and in Sawyer there were so few opportunities for companionship, mutual feeling, shared confidence. But if that's all it had been, a lapse of judgement, one moment of reaching out for comfort, then there might have been so much less to regret.

Although Eva was twenty-five and I was jailbait, I was certain I understood her better than anyone ever would. This was a woman not in the least bit ordinary. As an athlete she'd had very few peers. Like Sando she'd lived at the radical margin of her own sport. There was a warrior spirit in her, an implacable need to win the day. Even if it scared me a little, I understood the contempt she felt for those who withdrew from the fray or settled for something modest or reasonable. It was this conviction, I saw in time, that lay at the heart of her battle with Sando, who'd taken another tack, a mystical path she now said was bullshit. She relished opposition, yet her only real opponents had been the facts of life: gravity, fear, and the limits of endurance. She loved snow the way I loved water — so much it hurt. She didn't want to see snow anymore and most of the time she wouldn't speak of it. But for the best years of her life, years she believed were gone for keeps, she'd trained to fly over it. That was the simple objective, being airborne, up longer, higher, more casually and with more fuckoff elegance than anyone else in the world. I never understood the rules or the science of it but I recognized the singlemindedness it took to match risk with nerve come what may. Such endeavours require a kind of egotism, a near-autistic narrowness. Everything conspires against you — the habits of physics, the impulse to flee — and you're weighed down by every dollop of commonsense ever dished up. Everyone will tell you your goal is impossible, pointless, stupid, wasteful. So you hang tough. You back yourself and only yourself. This idiot resolve is all you have.