Tim Winton: Breath

I didn't like the tone of her voice. I figured I'd better go.

But I stayed. We took a bath together like people in the movies. We smoked a little hash and climbed into bed and when her plastic bag came out I did my best to please her.

For a week or two Eva came by the school or I wagged classes and met her on the wharf so we could drive out to lonely beaches. We grew more reckless and impulsive and so tired that when we weren't at each other we were bitching like married people. And on weekends, despite myself, I strangled her.

I hated it. In time I saw that for her everything else was mere courting, payment for what she really wanted. I hated the evil, crinkly sound of the bag and the smeary film of her breath inside it. I came to hate all masks and hoods and drawn faces without features and in retrospect I see that I probably hated Eva as well.

By the time we got to her place I was spent. The sky was black with impending rain. The dog trailed us listlessly into the yard and slumped into the undercroft while I levered Eva the last few feet up the stairs.

She snatched her pills and the hash pipe and lay back on the sofa until she could speak again.

You're right, she said. Right to expect it all to be snatched away from you, Pikelet. Because it will be. It can be. And hey, maybe it should be.

Somebody once told me I was a classical addictive personality. I laughed at her. She threw a plastic cup of water in my face and I sat there smiling at the thousand cuts down the inside of her arms. Staff appeared around us crisp and silent as ghosts.

When I was born, I said, I took a breath and wanted more.

I found my mother's nipple and sucked. I liked that. I wanted more. That's called being human.

I know what you are, the woman murmured.

Yes, I said. You're the expert.

They led her away to dinner and I sat there alone with my sneer as the tears leaked out of me.

The last sucking bubble of consciousness. The rising gorge of panic. Yes, a delicious ricochet of sparks.

I suppose I knew well enough what it felt like. It was intense, consuming, and it could be beautiful. That far out at the edge of things you get to a point where all that stands between you and oblivion is the roulette of body-memory, the last desperate jerks of your system trying to restart itself. You feel exalted, invincible, angelic because you're totally fucking poisoned. Inside it's great, feels brilliant. But on the outside it's squalid beyond imagining.

As a kid I didn't know what respiratory acidosis was, nor could I even begin to comprehend the sheer unpredictability of premature ventricular contractions and the manner in which they can shunt a body into cardiac arrest. I was as dim and horny as any other schoolboy, a sucker for excitement, and I'd been scaring the shit out of myself since primary school, but each time I let go Eva's throat and ripped the slimy bag off her face I didn't see rapture. What I saw was death ringing her like a bell.

So I began to deceive her. I had to. I'd come to resent Eva Sanderson but I didn't want her to die. And I certainly didn't want to be the patsy left behind, the fool calling the ambulance, the one whose fingermarks were up and down her neck like hickeys. I was scared to the point where I couldn't even get it up anymore, so I began to fake it. In the end I was faking it all. She saw to herself anyway; she was on automatic by then.

When she wanted me to choke her I learnt that I could brace myself on my elbows, give her a sense of my body on hers, without letting my full weight down. When I held her throat I made all the noise of exertion while applying less and less pressure. I slipped my fingers under the bag to break the seal. I blew air across her face while pretending to shout at her. Sometimes I didn't even touch her throat at all. I held my palms over her neck and asked her could she feel it, could she feel it, and she felt it because she expected it, because I was there and she expected it. She was blind in her foggy bag, intoxicated by the idea of what she was doing, and I hovered, palms down, like some kind of boy-shaman, willing life into her, holding off the shivering darkness.

I wonder if she ever knew. She did become more and more irritable, as if sex no longer satisfied her. Once when I began to giggle at how stupid we looked, how ludicrous it was to be lurching and growling about like this while the dog scratched at the door, she slapped me so hard that I rode home and lay on my narrow bed and shouted at my mother to please turn the bloody vacuum off and get a life.

I faked it. I wanted her, wanted to be free of her. Yet I was afraid of her. And afraid for her. I was trapped. It was as if some mighty turbulence had hold of me, and nothing — not even Sando's return — would ever rescue me.

But something did come. A bolt of indigo lightning. The livid vein that had begun to fork across Eva's tight belly. You couldn't mistake it. Not even I was so dense as to miss it.

I was on the bed one afternoon, spent and full of loathing, when she limped up naked from the steaming bathroom, a towel coiled on her head. It was right there in front of me.

Eva, I said. You're pregnant.

Something in her face gave way. She ricked the towel down and tied it about her waist. In a few more weeks she'd need a bigger towel.

I was fixing to tell you.

Really?

Go home, she murmured. The fun's over now.

Fuck, I said. Fuck you.

C'mon, she murmured. You knew it had to stop somewhere. I can't do this shit with a baby coming.

Is it mine?

Don't be absurd.

I tried to count back but I didn't even know which numbers I required.

I can't believe it.

Well, believe it. It's true.

Even as I lay there I felt my shock becoming relief. Not so much that the child was not mine, but that I'd been delivered. A new force had stepped in to present her with a defining choice.

Eva went back down to the bathroom and wiped the steam-fog from the mirror and brushed out her hair while I stood in the doorway to watch. I considered her wide shoulders and broad back, her narrow waist, the square, womanly buttocks and the way she favoured one leg even while dragging a brush through her long, wet hair. I felt strangely bashful, as though we'd been restored to our proper roles. Here I was again, a visitor in her house, a schoolboy standing unbidden in the doorway to a grown woman's bathroom. The plain light of Saturday afternoon was everywhere in the house.

You want me to chop some wood?

No, she said. Thank you. Go home.

On Sunday I surprised my father by joining him at the back fence to slash the winter weeds and burn what couldn't be hacked down. He seemed hesitant, almost fearful in my company. At day's end as we tended the smouldering edges of the firebreak with bag and hose he cleared his throat and spoke.

I had Loonie's old man here yesterday.

Oh, yeah? I said.

You know he's not my sort of fella.

I know what you mean.

But he's been talking about the people you see out the coast. Says Loonie's gone off the deep end. Won't listen to reason. Son, he used to be your mate.

Yes, I said.

I don't understand it. But I don't think you should go out there anymore.

I nodded. If you like.

He smiled and I felt cheap about how easy this was to concede to him when a month ago I would have told him to mind his own business.

Good boy, he said, wiping ash across his stubbled chin. Good lad.

Little more than a week later Sando returned. He came running out from the BP servo in Sawyer and I nearly shat myself. He looked dark and grizzled and happy.

Hey, he said. I'm gunna be a father.

Far out, I said. I thought she looked different.

Incredible, eh.

Yeah. Man, congratulations.

We shook hands awkwardly.