Tim Winton: Breath

I didn't go back to the hospital. I broke an undertaking. Got in a car and drove east, as far away from the sea and the city as possible.

When I was on the ward there was a tall, reedy bloke who carried a bible with him all day. He had a habit of fixing on things you said during group work and hitting you later with a few pithy verses to be going on with. He had me down as some kind of compulsive — not miles off die mark — but I wanted to pull his ears off when he told me that a man who even thinks about having his neighbour's wife is already an adulterer.

No, Desmond, I told him. Bullshit.

Can't deny it!

You get ideas. We all get ideas. Thoughts. And most of them come and go without causing anybody grief.

Desmond shook his head and I wanted to get him by the hair, squeeze the poison from his head. Wanted to, but didn't. I told him he was sad and dangerous, that he shouldn't say such things, especially not to vulnerable people like us. I was well and truly wigged out at the time, but still sane enough to know there's a world of difference between thinking things and doing them.

You lack morality, he said mildly enough.

You call that morality? I said, trying not to shout. Robbing people of the distinction between thoughts and actions?

Sport, said Desmond, I tell you this out of love. You are a captive of evil.

Talk like that frightened me because in an unsteady moment you could believe it. I was tired and sad and fucked up but I wasn't going to give in to bullshit. I'd been prey to false convictions aplenty and I'd had enough. It is possible to believe that as an idea comes into your mind, an act has been born and there's nothing you can do about it. It's as if thinking something causes it to happen, makes an action inevitable, even necessary. Sometimes it's good to remind yourself it isn't so.

A captive of evil, said Desmond.

No, I said. I'm a voluntary patient.

What I didn't say, because I didn't trust myself not to clock him one, is that nobody should be a slave to their thoughts — this was captivity, this was evil.

All about there were others watching Desmond and me, waiting for a blow-up. There were people in our midst who believed that babies had died and cities burnt because of thoughts they'd had.

Do you lust after your neighbour's wife? asked the girl with the slashed arms. Really, she said drolly, you can tell us.

My wife, I said. My wife is now my neighbour's wife. And my old neighbour's wife is dead.

Man, that's fucked up, said someone.

No lust?

Not much, I said. Not now.

Loonie died in Mexico, shot in a bar in Rosarito, not far from Tijuana. Some kind of drug deal gone bad. Maybe he did business with the wrong cops. For years stories had made their way back to me, sightings on the northern beaches of Sydney or in Peru or the Mentawais. His reputation for fearlessness endured. He surfed hard and lived hard and seemed to finance it all with drug scams and smuggling. It was said he bought his way out of Indonesia several times, that he had contacts in the TNI. I wonder about his apprenticeship to Sando, how much more than just surfing it might have involved — all those side-trips to Thailand, the long, unexplained absences, surfboards arriving from all over the globe — and whether Sandos family money had been augmented by his darker business interests.

I felt a pang when I heard about Loonie. It hardly sent me into a spin the way Eva's death had, but I felt hollow, as though there was suddenly less of me.

From a call box in Wiluna, surrounded by broken glass and red dirt, I called Grace.

I'm sorry to call, I said.

Yeah, you probably are.

Everyone I know is dead. Or gone.

And what are you planning to do?

Put it all behind me, I said like a politician. I'm gunna put it all behind me and move on.

She hung up on me.

For a while I shared a humpy with a defrocked priest. He was an alcoholic and a wise man and for a time I hated him. I'd only come asking for water for my car's boiling radiator but he saw this was the least of my problems. It was obvious he'd never lost his missionary zeal because he hid the keys to my car for three weeks until I climbed back into my own skin.

We lived beside a dry salt lake that rippled and swam against itself all day. Parched and cracked as it was, it seemed the lake was always full, never really empty at all. Long after I straightened out and he gave me back my keys, I stayed on — six months in

the end. The old man slept inside on a steel cot and I rolled out my swag under the pulsing stars on the dry lakebed. During the day we sat in the ragged shade of his verandah while things rose up off the salt before us. We laughed at every shimmering mirage in shared disbelief. The priest said he hadn't touched a drop in fifteen years, that he'd gotten beyond magical thinking. But the salt lake kept him on his toes. And I saw what he meant. It was full of surprises.

I didn't exactly pull myself together — I got past such notions — but bits of me did come around again, as flies or memories or subatomic particles will for reasons of their own. Bit by bit I congregated, I suppose you could say, and then somehow I cohered. I went on and had another life. Or went ahead and made the best of the old one.

For a good while I feared excitement. But I found ways through that. I discovered something I was good at, something I could make my own. I am hell's own paramedic. When the shit hits the fan, I'm on, and people are glad to see me. They see the uniform and trust me, and that makes me happy. And it's all go, all adrenaline, fast and filthy.

When the girls were in school I stayed around for weekends and annual leave but now they're older I travel more. I go to wild places to surf or raft or hike. I've surfed over sunken warplanes in New Guinea and caught waves on the beach where Ollie North's bandits landed weapons. I've met plenty of nice people, men and women.

I suppose I'm celibate, which sounds kind of high-minded but it's been mostly a process of learning to make do. Which is a bit like married life, from what people tell me.

At the 2002 Winter Olympics an Australian aerial skier won a gold medal and became a national hero overnight to a largely snowless country. Suddenly she was all over the TV, this pretty blonde kid, spruiking for cereal and gum and God-knows-what. I thought of Eva.

More recently I was in an airport lounge where oppressively large video screens showed highlights from the winter games in Turin. For ten minutes or so we had to watch replays of an aerial skier coming unstuck. The high, twisting trajectory. The quarter rotation too far. You could see the brute fact of her ruined knee as she landed. We got close-ups to confirm it, and there was something ghoulishly excitable about the commentary intoned over the footage as it played time and again. Passengers around me barely stirred. They were tired and this highwire ski stuff was old hat already. Yet there she was, this girl, careering down the mountain on her back in a scouring spray, trying to hold her leg together. Howling. Over and again. It was as if she might be forced to spend eternity doing nothing else but skitter, failed and lame, downhill. I had to get up with my bags and move away, take myself through the miserable repeated franchises of the terminal in an effort to stay calm. It wasn't Eva this nightmare repetition reminded me of- it was the memory of my former self- and the slow-motion replay an illustration of how my mind had worked for too long.

Apparently there is nothing to fear in life but fear itself. This is the sort of shit you hear in the pub or at handover at the ambulance depot. Much talk about fear, as it happens. Along with chat about celebrities and weight loss and the award rate.