Tim Winton: Breath

Angelus with its harbour and shops and railhead was a regional hub. The department store and silos and ships gave it gravity but I refused to be impressed. Even so, with the passage of time a kind of contempt for Sawyer crept up on me as I saw how tiny and static and insignificant it really was. Like my parents, it was so drab and fixed that it became embarrassing. During the school holidays, in the years before every failing dairy farm was bought up and turned into a winery or a yuppie bed-and-breakfast, people drove down from the city in their Triumphs and Mercs to look at our little timber houses and shop verandahs and the shambolic superstructure of the mill. They trickled in from their romantic drives through the karri forests and the remnant stands of giant tingle to fuel up and amuse themselves at the pub and bakery.

Every time I heard the word quaint I was caught between shame and fury.

During school term I only saw Loonie on weekends. When conditions were good we rode out to the coast to surf but the ride seemed to get longer and harder the more we did it and in the end we gave up humping our boards all the way and took up the offer to stash them at the house close by. That was how we got to know Sando, how our lives took such a turn.

We didn't actually see the big, woolly-headed bloke much the first summer that I was in high school. Whenever a big sou'west swell kicked up, we looked for him. Those were the days when the Angelus crew came out in their panel vans and utes. They were tradies and potheads who kept an eye on the weather map and took sickies every time there was surf, but the most we saw of the bloke with the flat-tray Volkswagen were the times we caught a glimpse of him far down the bay, just a silhouette paddling a surfski and trolling for early salmon.

The first time we stumped up the drive to his house the place was deserted. No dog came barrelling out of the shadows and no one emerged when we called from the bottom of the steps. We stood in the leaf-littered clearing and just stared at the joint. There was a big, fenced vegetable garden and some odd-looking outbuildings and though the house was built from local timber it was like no home I'd ever seen. It stood high off the ground on log-poles, surrounded by spacious verandahs where hammocks and mobiles and shell-chains hung twisting in the breeze. None of the wood was painted and all those timbers had gone their own shades of weathered grey and khaki. Later I thought of the house as a kind of elevated safari tent, a tent whose every pole was an old-growth log that three men could barely link arms around.

Jesus, said Loonie.

We better go, I murmured, but Loonie was already halfway up the front stairs.

Bloody hell, he said from up there. Cam, Pikelet, check it out.

I hesitated until he started gobbing over the rail. I went up full of misgivings. From the verandah you could see the ocean and the eastern cliffs toward Angelus. Closer in, the estuary was like a wide, shining gut that was fed by the river as it coiled back and back on itself into the blue-green blur of the forest beyond the town. I'd never thought of the river as an intestine but then I'd never viewed the country from this angle before and seen just how shaggy and animal its contours were. The house sat behind a snarl of karri regrowth that hid it from the coast road a couple of hundred yards below. The properly had some lumpy pasture on its eastern side, a steep and hopeless paddock that looked as if it fed only roos and rabbits. The rest of it was peppermint thicket and wattles that ran right up to the forest ridges.

Behind the French doors, the interior of the house seemed to be mostly one enormous room with rugs on the floor, a stone fireplace and a table as big as a lifeboat. Above this, set against the far gable, was a broad, open sleeping loft. There were no blinds or curtains anywhere, only a few sarongs that hung like flags from beams. Not even Loonie had the nerve to check if the doors were locked, but it looked as if the place had been empty for weeks. We gazed out again at the watertank, at the wood-slab sheds and our bikes and boards propped in the dappled light beneath the solitary marri tree. We looked for somewhere to store our boards.

Beneath the house was a kind of wood-louvred undercroft stacked with surfboards and wave-skis and a kayak. The ground was leafy underfoot and there was a cave smell about everything. Further in stood a weights bench and dumbbells, a stool or two and a long worktable neatly piled with tools and papers and sound cassettes.

Far out, said Loonie. This is bloody paradise.

We stood openmouthed before the racks of boards. There was every type and shape and vintage, some with fins like scythes and others with twin keels. One board, which had to be twelve feet long, was made of solid wood. Beside it, propped against the wall and made of something like the same stuff, was a didjeridu with such a twist in the shaft it looked like a hollow tree root.

Don't touch anything, I said, expecting someone to arrive at any moment. Let's just get our boards and stick em somewhere and rack off.

Don't be so uptight, Pikelet. The bloke said it was okay.

To leave our boards here, I said. Not to hang around.

Loonie laughed at my anxious propriety, but he helped me stow our boards beneath the worktable and a few minutes later we were bouncing down the track half afraid and half hoping the VW would come wallowing up to intercept us. But nobody came. We rode back into Sawyer with a glow on, as though by simply having stashed our boards beneath such a house, we'd moved up in the world.

Honking away on my old didj, I think about the one I first saw nestled against the boards under that big hippy house. I hardly knew what it was. Now the wind comes through me in circles, like a memory, one breath, without pause, hot and long. It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about. I consider the startled look on the faces of my girls in the moments after each of them was born and suctioned and forced to draw air in for the first time. I've done the job myself on more than one occasion, pulled over on the side of an ill-lit street, improvising in someone's driveway. Always the same puzzled look, the rude shock of respiration, as though the child's drawn in a gutful of fire. Yet within a moment or two the whole procedure is normalized, automatic. In a whole lifetime you might rarely give it another thought. Until you have your first asthma attack or come upon some stranger trying to drag air into himself with such effort that the stuff could be as thick and heavy as honey. Or you may be like me and think about breathing often enough for people to have their doubts about you.

I've been thinking about the enigma of respiration as long as I can remember, since I was old enough to be aware of the old man coming home with his stink of grease and sweat and wood-sap at the end of another day at the mill. Every weekday evening after he washed his face and hands he'd settle at the table and look about with eyes bloodshot from sawdust while Mum whacked the handle of the oven with a length of split karri and drew out whatever she'd been baking or roasting or warming while we waited for him. Mostly we ate in silence. Afterwards I'd go to my room to do my homework and when I came back later to watch a bit of TV, the old man'd still be there, asleep in his chair, with the wireless on softly. Mum and I would wash the dishes before she helped him to bed, and I'd sit down for an hour in front of the box.

Long before I even turned in I'd hear him begin to snore, but it was later, in the quiet of the night, when he really got going. I don't know how my mother endured it, how she ever slept at all, for there were nights when I lay completely and hopelessly awake while he sawed away at the other end of the house. The noise wasn't the worst of it. It was the pauses that really got to me. When he fell silent I'd lie there waiting, forced to listen to my own breathing which was so steady and involuntary. More than once since then I've wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. It's easy for an old man to look back and see the obvious, how wasted youth and health and safety are on the young who spurn such things, to be dismayed by the risks you took, but as a youth you do sense that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others.