Tim Winton - Breath

Loonie and I acted out the impulse without thinking, for dumb larks. We held our breaths and counted. We timed ourselves in the river and the ocean, in the old man's shed or in the broken autumn light of the forest floor. It takes quite some concentration and willpower to defy the logic of your own body, to take yourself to the shimmering edge. It seems bizarre, looking back, to realize just how hard we worked at this. We were good at it and in our own minds it's what set us apart from everyone else.

Deep diving and breath-holding against the clock seemed a more impressive endeavour than the game played by boys at the Ag School. Loonie told me how one kid would spend a minute or so hyperventilating until he was dizzy and when he was seeing spots a mate would hug him from behind so hard and so suddenly that all the air was crushed from his chest. Often as not, the kid simply blacked out and fell to the ground. Some puked and one even had convulsions, though Loonie suspected faking. Loonie and I tried it a few times. When he flat-out fainted I went into a panic. He came to with a strange moan and a stupid look on his face. Then he did it to me and I went down with a curious tunnel vision and the whole frame of my consciousness seemed to melt at the edges before giving way entirely. Afterwards I puked a little and laughed but I felt like an Ag School idiot and wasn't keen to repeat the experience. The attraction was plain enough — it was cheap weirdness in the days before we knew about drugs — but only later did I understand the physiology of it.

It was some years before I realized that when the old man paused mid-snore on those nights back in Sawyer and I lay there for long seconds in a mixture of relief and anticipation, he'd done more than simply stop snoring. He'd actually stopped breathing. At the end of those silences he'd let out a kind of braying gasp, like a man who'd just seen a ghost — perhaps the ghost of himself — and this was the sound of his body yanking him back to the surface from the limbo of apnoea, hauling him back to life itself. Mum must have heard dead-halts like this night after night for decades. How did she bear it, lying beside him, abandoned, listening for his return?

Next time we went to the log house, the VW was there in the shade of the marri tree and the red kelpie shot out from beneath the stairs. I was fending the mutt off when a woman came out onto the verandah above us.

You boys take a wrong turn?

Just came to get our boards, said Loonie.

Duke! she yelled at the dog. Get down, goddammit.

The dog took one last lick and desisted, and the woman, who looked to be in her twenties, squinted doubtfully at us. She had ropy white plaits and an American accent.

They're under the house, I said.

Are they, now?

Red and green, I said. A Jacko and a Hawke.

Bloke said we could, said Loonie.

She sighed and stared at us another moment before coming barefoot down the stairs. She held the handrail as though she might fall. She wore jeans and a tee-shirt that said FREESTYLIN: WATCH ME FLY.

You better show me, she said with a tone of weary scepticism.

We followed her into the cave-like undercroft to point out our modest craft beneath the bench, and as we drew them out their dings and welts and browning contusions seemed magnified. They were sorry bits of junk but they were clearly ours.

He's not here, she said.

Oh? said Loonie in the bright tone he reserved for indulging adults when the mood suited. See, we saw the Vee-dub and thought, well, that he was around.

No. He's away.

Angelus? I asked with the board under my arm, my body already turned for the doorway.

The islands.

What islands? said Loonie.

Indonesia.

The woman spoke the word as if it had extra syllables. Indonesia. Neither of us even knew with any certainty where Indonesia was.

Well, I said. Thanks.

Sure, she said without warmth.

Orright if we drop em back later? asked Loonie. Cause, we didn't ask. Your bloke, he offered.

The woman gave a wan smile and limped out into the light. Her feet were brown and the frayed hems of her Levi's hung back off her heels. She didn't answer. She simply waved us away and pulled herself back up the stairs. We bolted while we had the chance.

The surf at the Point that day was bigger than either of us expected. The steadily rising swell seemed to match the oily cloud pouring in from the south, and the longer we stayed, the bigger and gloomier it got out there on the water. We sat in the line-up with a few of the Angelus crew, who let us have a smaller wave now and then, but by afternoon we were paddling much more than surfing and the pack was moving further and further seaward to meet the hulking sets. Despite the building swell, the older blokes kept up their constant sledging and bantering, but Loonie and I were silent. My skin seemed to tighten on me. I felt the new mood in the group, tried to read something in every sideways glance and raised eyebrow, and each time somebody began to casually stroke seaward I followed for safety's sake, and found that I was not alone; we all moved out together. It was as though we became one strange beast, like a school offish moving wordlessly in unison. There was always a moment when a fresh conviction came into our stroke. We put our heads down and paddled for all we were worth, even though more than half of us hadn't yet seen the chains of swell beginning to warp into the bay. Eventually we'd see the set trundling in, looking for all the world as if the whole rolling column might simply grind past the Point toward the misty smudges of the eastern cliffs in the distance, but then the shoaling underwater ridge of the headland snagged those waves one by one, swinging them in like gates hinged upon the land itself until they turned shoreward in our direction.

This wasn't Sawyer Point anymore. This was outside — Outside Sawyer Point, as the older guys called it — and it hadn't broken like this for a year.

I was galvanized by fear. I had no intention of surfing these waves — they were way out of my range — but neither did I want to be mown down by them, so I paddled like hell to scrape up and over each in turn before they broke. I felt Loonie nearby doing more or less the same thing, though a tad more coolly, and I remember making it up the spray-torn crest of an absolute smoker just as some goateed hellman dropped blithely down its face. In that instant I turned to see that the tip of the headland was, as I suspected, behind us. We were now beyond the Point, outside the bay. It was only five hundred yards but it truly felt like we were at sea.

Other more experienced riders caught waves around us. They flew past hooting and screaming until in an eerie lull after a long passage of swells I realized that there were only three of us left out there — Loonie and me and a bloke from Angelus called Slipper. Slipper had a matted ginger Afro and the bloodshot eyes of a stoner. Two of his front teeth were missing and he wore an old beavertail dive suit that looked like a dingo had been at it. He sat up beside us and smiled as if he was having the time of his life. I, it must be said, was not nearly as sanguine.

Take the next one, kid, he said.

Aw, I dunno, I murmured.

Can't walk home from here, he said with a manic leer. May's well go for it, eh? How bout you, Snowy? You goin? No point bobbin around out here like a bloody teabag.

Orright, said Loonie rising to the bait. I'll go.

The rip that poured seaward from the bay had become a veritable river surging past the rocks of the headland to spew a plume of sand and weed at our backs. We found ourselves forced further and further out by the current. The sea became confused and jumpy. We were in foreign territory now. The coast to the west was a snarl of cliffs and boulders into the murky distance; there was nowhere to land over there. I considered paddling back east across