At lunchtimes we didn’t hang out so much as maintain a steady orbit in the library and even if we didn’t have much to say we were never far away from one another. About a month into term, when the class had decided, as these things went in those days, that Queenie and I were an official couple, two army cadets from the year ahead of us made the general announcement, at full military volume, to the entire non-fiction section of the library, that Queenie Cookson had great tits. Whereupon the poor kid bolted to the toilet, leaving me in the care of a book about Helen Keller. I felt my face go hot – from recognition rather than shame – for those pillocks were, in their brutal way, completely correct about something I’d barely noticed. Yes, Queenie Cookson did have great tits and this was news confounding enough in itself, but how was I meant to react to it being broadcast like this in the library? Should I stand up and defend the girl’s honour and then fight my way to the door, or kick back and leer in the reflected glory? Neither was really my style. I just sat there, blushing, while it slowly became evident that Queenie wouldn’t be back soon. Even as I set aside Helen Keller and returned as casually as I could to the legless exploits of Douglas Bader, I knew I’d failed a test whose rules I didn’t yet understand.
In the early autumn, just as the first good southerly swells arrived, Loonie broke his arm. We were farting about at a place called the Holes which was halfway along the cliffs to Old Smoky, and Loonie had spent the morning daring me to dare him to have himself shot from a blowhole like some mad adventurer from one of my books. He’d perfected his badgering technique. He worked on you so long and so consistently that out of rage and frustration you’d find yourself challenging him to do something you had no interest in him doing. Moreover, you ended up daring him with a passion that was, by this late stage, real enough to cause him genuine offence and so his indignation spurred him on to be even more stupid and dangerous than he intended.
Having yourself blasted from a blowhole is more silly than perilous and ours was a pretty naff effort. Thankfully, there weren’t openings out there large enough for Loonie to climb right into; he had to settle for sitting across a foot-wide aperture to see what happened. All along that basalt shelf above the sea the blowholes sucked and gurgled around us, and each time a wave slammed in at the base of the cliffs there was an ominous lull before every crack and hole began to moan. When a good set hit the underbelly of the cliff the sudden blasts of spume could set you back in your tracks. The vapour had a nightmare stink. I kept well clear, fearful of the backdraught. I couldn’t bear to think of being sucked down a black throat into the pounding guts of the caves below. I figured I’d rather be eaten alive by Barney.
In the end, Loonie’s misadventure was more undignified than death-defying. He saddled up with a sick grin and instead of being hoisted skyward, he was spat across the rocks horizontally. He came directly at me, legs pedalling, shirt blown fat as a lifejacket, and with all that snowy hair in his eyes he couldn’t see where he was headed. I dropped. He caught his foot in the leg of my shorts and slammed down on the rock with twice the force he’d begun with. When he got up his arm was all wrong. It was a hard trek back to the Point.
We were lucky Eva was home. She saved me from having to wheel Loonie all the way back to town on my bike. He fainted twice in the cab of the VW and Eva tried not to appear as though she was enjoying his spells.
Barely three weeks later it was this fracture that prevented him from surfing Old Smoky. It changed things between us in ways we could neither foresee nor understand.
During the summer just gone, while we’d chafed at the chance to prove ourselves, the ocean went flat. We dived with Sando more than we got to surf with him. On breathless-hot days he took us out around the Point to remote groper holes along the cliffs. These trips were designed to test our lung capacity more than anything but we loved to hunt for food. We swam into deep granite crevices to pull abalone with Sando at our side, deeper with every dive, and often as not we outlasted him. I couldn’t tell if Sando was simply letting us best him for reasons of his own, but Loonie and I had trained ourselves to really soak the goodness from a lungful of air. When it came to freediving we knew what we were doing, and going for abalone was infinitely more fun than lying on the black bottom of the river with your arms wrapped around a slimy tree root. The sea was brimming with stuff to help you forget the pain in your chest. It was worth the spotted vision and the roar in your skull to be able to chase a big blue groper into its lair. Some days we’d hike back across the ridge with a fifty-pound fish and a bag of abalone and spend the afternoon filleting and shucking in the shade of Sando’s killing tree. While we worked we pestered him into telling us about Old Smoky. At first he was evasive about the bombora, but we kept at him until he gave up tidbits of information in his cagey, elliptical way; it was maddening, but it charmed us.
Right from the get-go Loonie was desperate to surf Old Smoky. He believed he was ready. I wasn’t so sure I was up to it. The reef was a mile out to sea on a lonely, wild bit of coast, and from what I’d seen the wave itself was huge. Whenever there was a swell big enough to make it break properly you couldn’t launch a boat within twenty miles, so the only approach was to bash out across the bush track from the Point to the cliffs, and crab your way down the rock-face until you got within jumping range. We were supposed to launch ourselves off the storm-swept cliff. And then you began the mile-long paddle out to sea. I dreaded it, was tantalized by the prospect, and the worse Sando made it sound, the harder it was to resist the thought.
When he knew we were hooked Sando stopped being coy. He brought out marine charts of the area to show how the seabed rose from the continental shelf, how drastic the bathymetry was at Old Smoky where water simply reared up on the shoal and turned itself inside out. He drew diagrams of the set-up for us, the landmarks to navigate by to find the impact zone and the safety of the deep channel beside it. It’s a pretty simple affair, really, he told us. Once you choose the right wave you’re halfway home, but if you judge wrong, if you take off from too far across the reef, then you’re in more trouble than the early settlers.
Then he took us out there. It was a baking February day. The ocean was a mirror. From just beneath Sando’s place we boated down the estuary, hauled the dinghy up over the bar and launched out into the placid bay where we skated around the Point and headed west to the cliff-coast beyond. The sea-torn footings of the bluffs were tranquil, the blowholes dormant.
When we got out to Old Smoky conditions were so calm there wasn’t much to see from the boat. Sando confirmed the landmarks for us – the way the trees inland matched up with a streak of lime down the cliff inshore. The reef itself was only a dim shadow below.
Deep, I murmured.
Won’t seem so deep from the top of a twenty-footer, said Sando. Let’s see how deep. May as well do our homework.
We dropped the anchor in the purple water of the channel and ten fathoms of rope snaked out before it found bottom. We had only masks and no fins. We watched Sando plunge in and swim over to the reef. Loonie and I hit the water a moment later.
Rising sharply from the seabed the shoal at Old Smoky was like a sunken building, windows open, teeming with blue morwongs, harlequins and boarfish. In the water column above, schools of buffalo bream churned restless circles. Because Sando was watching and because we could, we speared past him for the bottom, to make solid the idea of the place and the stories we fed on. We kicked down barefoot and shaped ourselves to glide, purging as we went. In the mouths of caves were lobsters the size of cattle dogs. At thirty feet I took a handhold in the rock and rolled over to see Sando as a black star up there at the surface. Loonie slid down beside me and hooked on.
We hung there for the longest time, the two of us, locked in the old rivalry, smiling madly, around our snorkels while the sea clicked and rattled around us. Fish arrived, curious at first and then anxious when we showed no sign of moving on. In time they fled into the blips and specks at the edges of my vision.
&n
bsp; The first big cold fronts arrived while the water was still warm. For the best part of a fortnight we pored over forecast maps, watching a chain of sub-Antarctic storms, hoping one might wander north towards us, or that two might converge and peel away in our direction to bring the sort of weather required to make Old Smoky break. Sando told us that the best of the groundswell would arrive before the storm-fronts themselves, that waves were little more than lines of energy from events beyond the horizon. I tried to imagine them, these radiating shocks, as they rolled toward us like harbingers of a trouble we couldn’t yet see. Along with Loonie I was excited and jittery, though there was still something unreal about the rigmarole of preparation when the storms themselves seemed so abstract.
In these weeks before Easter Sando was solemn and pensive. We’d pedal out to his place only to sit on the steps for an hour while he went through his yoga routine and Eva glowered at us from the open doorway. We did our best not to pester him. We knew that he drove out along the ridges with his binoculars every day, that he was watching and waiting while we were in school, and we saw that he had huge, pointed big-wave boards laid out in readiness beneath the house. There was nothing left to do but wait.
My parents wouldn’t have had any idea about what I was preparing for. I can only assume that they accepted my story about Sando, who was, I said, just a bloke who gave Loonie and me a lift now and then, someone for whom we did odd jobs. Whether or not they believed this story, they never challenged me over it. They were not suspicious like Loonie’s old man. He had Sando and Eva pegged as layabouts and drug-addled hippies and he’d already forbidden his son from going out to their place, but Loonie – who was always good at covering his tracks and an excellent liar besides – had never been the sort of boy who felt compelled to do as he was told. He regularly slept at our place on weekends. For all his sly grins I knew he liked the homely manner in which my parents did things. He even liked the mortifying way my mother would come into my room some nights to try to tuck us into our beds. It was, I suppose, a taste of the domestic life he’d missed out on, though at times he seemed to be play-acting. Being with us a few days a week meant he could escape his father’s brutal moods, but it was also a means of avoiding surveillance, for Sando had long been in the habit of picking us both up from my house.
Had my parents known what Sando was actually getting me into, I doubt they would have been so trusting. Back then, the idea of a grown man spending so much time with teenaged boys wouldn’t have troubled them or anybody else, for all that sort of fear and panic was far in the future, but knowing that he was training us to go to sea to leap from the cliffs in a storm swell and put ourselves in harm’s way would have been something else entirely. Perhaps it was irresponsible of Sando to lead us into such a situation. At that age we were physically undeveloped, too small to safely manage what we set out to do, and he did it without our parents’ consent. I have no doubt that in a later era he’d have been seen as reckless and foolhardy, yet when you consider the period and the sorts of activities that schools and governments sanctioned, Sando’s excursions seem like small beer. We could have been staying back at school as army cadets, learning to fire mortars and machine-guns, to lay booby traps and to kill strangers in hand-to-hand combat like other boys we knew, in preparation for a manhood that could barely credit the end of the war in Vietnam. Sando appealed to one set of boyish fantasies and the state exploited others. Eva was right – we were Sando’s wide-eyed disciples – but in the sixties and seventies when we were kids there were plenty of other cults to join, cults abounding.
As it happened Sando came for us while Loonie’s arm was still in plaster.
We woke in the night to the booming swell but neither of us said anything. If tomorrow was the day then only one of us would be paddling out with Sando. Once awake we lay silent for hours and when we heard the VW come threshing up the inlet road, we dressed quickly and crept from the house. But at the end of the boggy drive where the Kombi sputtered and chugged, Loonie veered off into the dark street.
What’s he up to? yelled Sando, cranking a window down.
I shrugged, but I already knew.
Doesn’t he even wanna watch?
No, I said. He doesn’t.
Here, get in.
We puttered up behind Loonie with the windows down. The air was freezing and nobody in Sawyer seemed to be up.
Hey, Loonie, said Sando as we eased alongside to keep pace with him. Aren’t you gonna come and watch out for your mate?
What for? said Loonie. Spoil ya secret hippy moment?
Don’t be a dickhead. C’mon, watch and learn.
Oh, no fuckin worries. I’d love that.
Least you could show your mate a bit of support.
What for? He’s chicken.
Jesus, son. Don’t be an arsehole.
Fuck off, coach.
Sando gave a bitter, disappointed laugh, but Loonie kept walking. I thought Sando might persist a little, cajole him, but he wound the window up and pulled away. At first I was stunned but after a few moments the humiliation of it sank in. Loonie was right. He knew I wasn’t up to it. Still, I couldn’t believe he’d come out and say it like that, in front of Sando. I craned back for a glimpse of his white hair, but he was gone in the gloom. There were three boards strapped to the rear tray. They were Brewers, huge beautiful things. Three of them. As though Sando had brought an extra as a gesture for Loonie’s sake.
I am chicken, I said.
Oh, fuck, said Sando. Everyone’s chicken. That’s why we do this silly shit.
You reckon?
Yeah, to face it down, mate. To feel it, eat it. And shit it out with a big hallelujah.
He laughed. And I laughed because he did, to hide my fear.
When we hauled up past the Point the bay was awash with foam and shrouded with vapour. The surge of the shorebreak overran the ramparts of the bar and spewed into the estuary. The ocean sounded like a battlefield; the unceasing roar was audible even above the sound of the Volkswagen.
Sando nursed the vehicle up the tracks and out to the last ridge. It was slow going but I wasn’t in a hurry. When he switched the engine off the noise of the sea was frightening. He took up the binoculars while I peered southward through the dawn light. Beyond the turmoil at the base of the cliffs the ocean was strangely smooth. There was still a faint offshore breeze at our backs, meaning the storms themselves were still a day away. The first sun gave the water a benign sheen and for a few minutes there was nothing much to see, little enough for a swoon of relief to course through me. I was, I thought, off the hook. And then a mile out I saw the sudden white flare. A plume of spray lifted off the bommie like the dust kicked up by a convoy of log-trucks and after a second’s delay the sound of it reached us. Now that was a noise to snap a boy out of his dreamy sense of wellbeing.
Well, Pikelet, said Sando. Looks like we’ll get wet this morning.
I could barely carry that yellow Brewer. It was ten feet long and wouldn’t fit under my skinny arm so I balanced it on my head the way the old-timers did in the days of balsa boards and Gidget and D-fins. The heath around us was filled with peppery smells and alive with the nip and dash of honeyeaters. We hiked west to where all the boulders were whiskered with lichen. I followed Sando. We didn’t say much. I watched the muscles flex in his bare back. The wetsuit was shucked down to his waist and its neoprene arms flapped against his thighs.
It was a half-hour walk. I was so troubled about Loonie that for whole minutes at a time I forgot to be afraid. Had it been me with the busted arm I’d have come to watch, out of gratitude for the let-off as much as from comradely feeling, and I certainly wouldn’t have gone around calling anyone a chicken – nobody, not friend nor foe. I wasn’t old enough then to know that you only call someone a coward from safe ground, fortified by the certainty of your own courage or by your deluded faith in it. But Loonie always had absolute self-assurance. There have been times since when I’ve thought of him as an endless and rath
er aimless reservoir of physical bravery, and that this defining characteristic distorted him somehow, keeping him from subtler feelings. In middle age I look back on Loonie with sad wonder. He was real enough, but less of a friend than I’d imagined, and perhaps that morning marked the beginning of my disaffection, for although I was in awe of him I hated him for saying what he said. Yet maybe I owed him a debt that day, for the longer I brooded on his outburst, hiking along the clifftops in Sando’s wake, the angrier I got. It was this fury and little else that hardened my resolve and kept me from running away.
We picked our way down a scrubby, windswept slope where sea-mist rose in our faces and at a steep cliff we passed the boards down in stages until finally we stood on a tongue of rock above a surging gap. We shoved our sneakers into clefts above us, and all the time Sando spoke to me quietly, like a horse-breaker. Between incoming waves the gully beneath us emptied out to reveal a hanging garden of kelp and limpets. When the water returned, it surged green to just below where we stood. Now and then a wave sprawled right up the rock to explode in a mess of foam.
Getting off ’s the easy part, said Sando. Coming back in you’ll have to concentrate. Time the surge and pick the biggest. Come in on the back of it. If you don’t make it all the way up here you’ll be stuck halfway and the next wave’ll splatter you against the cliff. You gotta be patient, Pikelet. If it takes half an hour, that’s what it takes, you hear?
I nodded. My right leg shook; it felt unconnected to the rest of my body. The size of the waves, the length of the paddle, the monumental shadow of the cliff – everything was beyond imagining.