Tim Winton - Breath

Yes, we had some things in common, Eva and I. At twenty-five she was as solipsistic as any teenager, not much better at considering the higher physics than I was. And there was something careless about her that I mistook for courage in the same way I misread Sando's vanity as wisdom. Maybe she was harsh and angry, and hard to like, but I respected her impatience with niceties. Life was too short for rules and obligations. She was all about going hard or going home and if that required cruelty then so be it. At fifteen you can buy such a philosophy.

No, Eva was not ordinary. And neither was the form of consolation she preferred. Given my time over I would not do it all again. People talk such a storm of crap about the things they've done, had done to them. The deluded bullshit I've endured in circled chairs on lino floors. She had no business doing what she did, but I'm through hating and blaming. People are fools, not monsters.

Eva had a particular kind of rueful stare, a look she often gave at the end of an afternoon like this rainy Saturday that made me think she'd wearied of me. I always took it as dismissal, as I did this day. I got up and went. But the longer things went on between us, the further we got into our mess, the more frequent and intense those doleful glances became. They were expressions of disgust. I dreaded them. Nowadays, with the distance of the years, I wonder if I misread her. That disgust might have been reserved for herself.

Weeks went by without further word from Sando and Loonie. A couple of good fronts bore in. I thought about Old Smoky but didn't go. The Brewer stayed in the rain outside the old man's shed. I surfed the Point a couple of times on my stubby little twin-fin and when the Angelus crew nodded or smiled I paddled past with a hauteur as counterfeit as it was unnecessary.

I spent all my free time out at the house with Eva: in the woodshed, the bathtub, the bed. I helped with her rehab exercises and carried shopping up the stairs. In the sack or out in the yard she gave the orders and I was glad to be told. She was spiky and restive yet we still had our laughs. One day we drove out into the forest and ate chicken and drank champagne and made love in the bracken beneath the karris. We played backgammon by the stove on stormy afternoons and fooled with the dog. We made silly paper hats and listened to Captain Beefheart records. A few times I went down on her to the sound of whale songs or Ravi Shankar — it was all the same to me. Now and then she cried for an hour and wouldn't let me touch her. I told her I loved her and I believed it. She pushed me away, drew me back. I was elated, miserable, greedy, grateful. There were afternoons when I retreated to the verandah sick with guilt and an hour later I'd be labouring over Eva's shining back with her hair in my fists. I cowered at the thought of Sando. I uttered his name as a curse in his own bed and she liked it.

During those Saturdays and Sundays with Eva, as autumn quickly became winter, I told my parents the old lies, that I was surfing at the coast or doing jobs for Bill Sanderson and his wife. I was careful to come and go as usual but I'll never know how well I really concealed myself from them. There were moments when I was certain they suspected something amiss, when a glance passed between them at the mention of Sando's name, but I always put it down to my own paranoia and the fact that Loonies old man had been bitching around town. My absences, after all, were hardly out of the ordinary. I came home on weekend evenings damp-haired and dead tired as ever. I tried not to seem distracted. I refrained from carping about their strange, dowdy habits. I was anxious to make myself inconspicuous. Whether I came home morose or elated I found I could manufacture a deceptively even demeanour. I believed I was alert to their moods, but really my concentration was elsewhere. My mother and father became figures in the background. They'd always been quiet and solicitous but throughout my adolescence and especially during this period they became so insubstantial that I hardly knew them anymore. I didn't know what they thought, what they suspected, what their lives had become. I could only think about Eva.

Eva. I watched her when she was present and conjured her when she was not. She was no longer a girl, but not a woman in the way that my mother was a woman. And I simply couldn't stop looking. At times she basked in the attention, though at other moments she refused to indulge me. When she complained about my dog-eyed stare and waved me away I found ways to watch her without her knowledge. I particularly loved to watch her sleep, for then she was the picture of a body smitten. In sleep she looked thrown down by passion and fatigue. She drooled a little and the tiny thread that glistened on her cheek was like the silver tracks of moisture inside her thighs.

She was taller than me, heavier, stronger. Her bad knee was hotter to the touch than the uninjured one. Her tongue often tasted of cornflakes or the brassiness of painkillers. When she wound her hair into a braid it was a shining hawser, heavy yet supple in my hands. If she was excited or angry there was a wheezy edge to her breath. When she hyperventilated this wheeze of hers had shadow-sounds in it, a multiplicity of breaths.

I watched her so long that I saw her body was a sequence of squares and cubes. Her teeth were square, so were her ears. Her breasts and buttocks were block-like. Even her calf muscles, which squirmed beneath my fingers, had corners. She had wide, blunt hands with square nails and deep ruts at the joints, and her feet were the same. I thought about her shape as I painted her toenails cool green. She pressed one cubic heel against my heart while the other lay playfully in my lap. How I watched her, what a catalogue I made of her movements. I saw her pee, watched her shave her armpits. She said I was a pervert and I wondered if I was.

I knew Eva had a Utah driver's licence and a sheaf of family snaps in her shoulder bag she refused to show me. I was curious about her family, about Salt Lake City, but she was reluctant to talk about any of it. Although I was tempted I never touched her bag or went through her cupboards. I was content to wait until she relented, convinced that she would, and in this, at least, my instincts were vindicated. She told me everything. Indeed there came a time when, to my great consternation, Eva preferred to talk rather than fuck.

Eva told me how one summer she met Sando on the North Shore of Oahu. She was out from college in California and he was shaping boards for an outfit that shipped them back to the west coast. There was a party at some ramshackle plantation and she liked the look of him, loved the accent, and they got bombed on Maui Wowie and left together. They spent the entire week in her hotel room at Waikiki, which got him sacked from his shaping job, so he followed her to San Francisco until the winter.

Sando didn't much like the cold, and the sea made Eva uneasy but each instinctively recognized the other's obsession. He was older but so strong and lovely. He was glamorous in his sunbleached way. The sex, she felt obliged to tell me, was sensational.

When winter arrived and the Pacific swells returned his surfer friends began to call, and she knew it would only be a matter of time before he flew back to Oahu. Eva tried not to take it hard. It'd been fun, but she had her own season to look to. Snow was falling in the Rockies; every fresh report got her jangly, and before Sando could leave her she caught a plane east. But she couldn't believe how much she missed him. Late that winter, drunk on peppermint schnapps, she phoned him from New Hampshire. Next morning Sando packed a duffle and went to her.

From Hawaii to the snow. It was quite a move for Sando. She taught him to ski — downhill and cross-country — which kept him fit and sane, and she even found him a Snurfer, the closest thing to a surfboard she could offer him up there in the mountains, but she never expected to win him away from the sea for long. They made love and drank hard and dropped acid, never talking about his own stalled career until the season was over, and by then she said he'd gone all Van Morrison on her.