David Malouf: Fly Away Peter

She watched the waves build, hang and fall, one after the other in decades, in centuries, all morning and on into the early afternoon; and was preparing, wearily, to gather up her equipment and start back — had risen in fact, and shouldered the tripod, when she saw something amazing.

A youth was walking — no, running, on the water. Moving fast over the surface. Hanging delicately balanced there with his arms raised and his knees slightly bent as if upheld by invisible strings. She had seen nothing like it. He rode rapidly towards her; then, on the crest of the wave, sharply outlined against the sky, went down fast into the darkening hollow, fell, and she saw a kind of plank flash in the sunlight and go flying up behind him.

She stood there. Fascinated. The youth, retrieving the board among the flurry of white in the shallows, knelt upon it and began paddling out against the waves. Far out, a mere dot on the sunlit water, where the waves gathered and began, she saw him paddle again, then miraculously rise, moving faster now, and the whole performance was repeated: the balance, the still dancing on the surface, the brief etching of his body against the sky at the very moment, on the wave’s lip, when he would slide into its hollows and fall.

That too was an image she would hold in her mind.

Jim , she said to herself, Jim, Jim , and hugged her breast a little, raising her face to the light breeze that had come with afternoon, feeling it cold where the tears ran down. The youth, riding towards her, was blurred in the moment before the fall.

She took up her camera and set the strap to her shoulder. There was a groove. She turned her back to the sea and began climbing the heavy slope, where her boots sank and filled and the grains rolled away softly behind. At the top, among the pigweed that held the dunes together, she turned, and the youth was still there, his arms extended, riding.

It was new. So many things were new. Everything changed. The past would not hold and could not be held. One day soon, she might make a photograph of this new thing. To catch its moment, its brilliant balance up there, of movement and stillness, of tense energy and ease — that would be something.

This eager turning, for a moment, to the future, surprised and hurt her.

Jim , she moaned silently, somewhere deep inside. Jim. Jim. There was in there a mourning woman who rocked eternally back and forth; who would not be seen and was herself.

But before she fell below the crest of the dunes, while the ocean was still in view, she turned and looked again.