Authors: Breath
He began to take me along when I was seven. I liked the creak of the oars in their rowlocks, the disembodied shadows of pelicans rushing over the mottled flats. The big wooden dories held three or four men each, and it was quiet out there with them on the water.
The other men were always tired and hungover, but my old man was just naturally subdued. When any of them spoke up they had the barking tone of the industrial deaf. They had fags-and-sawdust coughs, those men. Their jungle hats stank of prawns and fishblood.
They were bachelors and returned soldiers and bank-beaten farmers who seemed oddly solicitous of my father even if they did mock him for his teetotal ways. He was a greengrocer's boy from a village in Kent who never told me stories about his old life. But he was no mystery to his workmates. He was, simply put, a steady hand and as far as I could see this was all they required of him.
We fished with handlines and sinkers moulded from lead roof-flashing, and while we filled hessian sacks and wiped slime and scales off on the scarred wooden thwarts, the surf bumped the high, white levee of the bar. Manes of spray hung above the rivermouth and flagged back in the breeze. When the bite was slow and I grew bored and restless, the old man consented to row me across to where I could get out and climb up onto the sandy wall and watch the great seas roll in.
I was a lone child and solitary by nature. Somewhere along the way I became aware that my parents were old people with codgers'
interests. They pottered about with their vegetables and poultry.
They smoked their own fish and mended and embroidered. Of an evening they listened to the radio, or the wireless, as they called it.
Although they weren't quite grandparent age, they were definitely of a different order to the parents of other kids, and I felt that their singularity marked me out somehow. I felt protective of them, even if I was, in truth, a little embarrassed. Like them I didn't care much for football or cricket. I avoided teams of any kind and the prospect of organized sport was a misery. I did like to hike and climb but it was only in swimming that I really excelled and this must have been quite a surprise to my emigrant parents, neither of whom could swim to save themselves.
At the first signs of spring giving way to summer townie kids gathered after school near the bridge at the riverbank to dive off the crude springboard. The river was brown with tannin and cold as hell but it was very slow-flowing and safe to swim in. It was there that Loonie and I became friends.
Ivan Loon was twelve and a whole year older than me. He was the publican's son and although we'd been at school together half our lives we never had the remotest thing in common. That is, before we realized that we'd each independently perfected the art of causing riverside panic.
One November afternoon I coasted down to the river on my bike to have a jump off the plank but when I got there four girls and somebody's mother were slithering up and down the bank, yanking at their own ears and screaming that there was a boy in the water, that he was drowning right beneath them. Naturally they didn't know which boy because they were from out of town, but they knew he was a boy for he'd been there a minute ago and simply hadn't come up from a dive and were there sharks and couldn't I for God's sake stop asking questions and just get on with doing something.
Sun blazed down in rods through the big old gums. There were dragonflies in the air above us. I saw a towel near the diving plank and beside it a grubby pair of thongs, so I had no reason to doubt there was a crisis. Only the sluggish water seemed harmless and these females, who were making a frightful noise, looked so strangely out of place. I should have twigged. But I went into action on their behalf. As I bolted out to the sagging end of the springboard the wood was hot and familiar underfoot. I looked down at the wind-ruffled surface of the river and tried to think. I decided that it would be best to wade in from the bank, to work my way out by feel, and just keep diving and groping in the hope of touching something human. There wasn't time to go looking for help. I was it. I felt myself rise to the moment - put-upon but taller all of a sudden -- and before I could embark upon my mission, or even pull my shirt off, Ivan Loon burst from the water. He came up so close to shore with such a feral shriek the woman fell back on the mud as if shot.
I stood bouncing on the plank while she lay in the muck. Then she reared up on her elbows. Loonie started to laugh, which didn't really help her mood. I had never in my life seen a woman so angry.
She charged into the water, lunging and swiping to no avail, while Loonie just ducked and feinted and giggled. He was a freckly sort of kid but he went so red with pleasure and exertion all his freckles disappeared. The poor woman never got close to him. Her frock ballooned about her. She made tanty noises like a toddler. Loonie sculled himself out of range, bobbed provocatively for a bit, then stroked off to the shadows of the far bank. Left alone with her once again, I realized it was more fun to pull this prank than it was to stand by while someone else did it. I began to feel more guilt than glee. Two Dr Scholl's sandals floated upstream in the breeze and I watched until I could bear it no longer and dived dutifully after them. As I snared them and sidestroked back to the bank they clunked together like firewood. It was embarrassing to see this grown woman standing there in her clinging dress with her dimpled knees and chubby legs all muddy.
There's tree roots down there, I told her. You just dive down and hold on. It's easy.
She never said a thing, just snatched her shoes and scrambled back to the girls higher up the bank, and while I lay in the water trying to decide how to feel about her she smoothed herself back into some kind of authority and led the others up through the trees and out of sight. I felt sympathy and contempt all at once. Car doors slammed and there was the stammer of a starter motor.
Easy, is it? said a voice hot and close in my ear.
I jerked aside with a shout. Loonie bawled with laughter.
Brucie Pike, he said. You're all talk.
Am not.
Are so.
Am not.
Well, then, Pikelet, you better prove it.
So I showed him what I had. We dived all the rest of that day, kicking down time and again to the opaque depths of the Sawyer River to hold our breaths so long that our heads were full of stars, and when we finally climbed out, spent and queasy, the bank plunged and canted beneath us in the evening twilight. That was the first of many such days and we were friends and rivals from then on. It was the beginning of something. We scared people, pushing each other harder and further until often as not we scared ourselves.
My parents didn't quite approve of Loon
ie.
He was a mouthy urchin who roamed the town at will. He lived at the pub and my oldies were not pub-going folk. The fact that Mrs Loon was not Loonie's actual mother seemed to cause Mum some discomfort, but she tried not to let on. My parents were discreet and kindly people. Loonie seemed to provoke more anxiety in them than antipathy. They were so quiet and orderly that only a few years after they were both dead and buried few Sawyer locals could remember much about them, whereas Loonie was a creature of an entirely different sort. Now and again you'll still run into someone in Perth or Kuta with a story about Loonie's old antics, and although the tales are almost always apocryphal they still bear the essential elements of his wildness. Someone as solitary and feral as he was could naturally be expected to be a little simple and naive but Loonie was neither. At twelve he was more worldly than either of my parents and in a queer way they were intimidated by him. He started out patronizing them. He was amused by their innocence, by their English clothes and the brogues they wore in the garden.
He mimicked the old man's pottering walk and chafed his hands the way my mother did. Before I ever thought to bring him over to our place he began turning up of his own accord. He appeared at the front fence like a stray, just hanging about at the end of the long, rutted drive, a restless figure seeming to await or even silently demand an invitation to cross the cow paddock. When he was in our yard or, later, at the lunch table, the old folks were nervous and diffident. He batted his big green eyes and joshed them gently in his loaded, mocking tone, smiling until his sun-split lower lip bled against his teeth.
After a week or two, having made an effort to disguise his reluctance, the old boy finally consented to my bringing Loonie out in the boat with us. Loonie was so jovial that first time, so full of larks and noises of appreciation, that he gave us all a headache and even I thought it an act of mercy on the old man's part to have him back again. I think he saw how dearly Loonie loved it, how eager he was to help, how keen he was to please. Despite their primness I think my parents recognized some greater loneliness in my new friend, and they sensed that for all his derisory swagger he respected and even loved them in his way. He often crouched alongside my father at the smoker while the fish were racked and he was forever seizing a teatowel whenever he found himself in my mother's kitchen. Early that summer, when we fell in together without discussion, he was at our place most of the day and into the evening. He always overstayed, yet somehow knew to leave before someone finally dropped a hint.
On Sundays we fished the inlet with the mill men and in late December, when the holidays arrived, we spent weekdays at the river making picnickers nervous. We salvaged junk from the tip so we could augment our bikes with weirdly extended forks and handlebars. We tilted our banana seats and sissy bars until we were virtually riding uphill on any gradient. Out on the highway Loonie played chicken with log trucks while I hid in the bracken at the edge of the forest, willing him to desist and urging him on all at once. We had escape tracks that wound back through the regrowth and spoil ground toward town, so that by the time a rattled truckie pulled over and backed up laboriously, we were long gone. It was a boyhood that now seems so far away I can understand why people doubt such days ever existed. If you tried to talk about it you'd be howled down as some kind of nostalgia freak, called a liar before you even got started. So I don't discuss it much. In this I suppose I am my father's son, a bad communicator, a closed book. I've bored people in bars and lost a marriage to silence. I don't want to join anybody's misery club, to be adopted as a fellow victim of whatever syndrome is doing the rounds this week. I'll talk if no one's listening. It's like blowing the didjeridu, cycling air through and through, doing little more than explaining yourself to your self while you're still sane enough to do it. I'm not a nostalgic man.
I can go for weeks without thinking about my boyhood and Sawyer and Loonie, but in my line of work you're going to see things like tonight's asphyxiation and get a cold feeling you're not likely to explain to some kid in a crisp new uniform, someone who's already decided that you're a piece of work.
AS A BOY IN SAWYER I yearned to swim in the ocean but the old man was firmly against it. If I asked him on fishing days he refused on the grounds that I would need watching and this meant he'd have to leave the boat and his lines and his workmates on his only day off and it was too much to ask of him. I knew deep down he'd have gladly sacrificed an hour for my pleasure if only he'd been able to swim enough to save me if I got into strife, but his impotence was beyond admitting. When I asked if I could just ride out to the rivermouth with Loonie he shook his head. Too rough, too far, no way. But I wanted to swim where I could see the bottom, to be where those long, creaming breakers trundled in from the south so I could dive down and see them pass overhead. I hankered after the sea as I'd never done for anything else before. I'd always been such a compliant, respectful child and until that point I was usually content. But being denied access to the ocean was intolerable. Even without Loonie's influence, I would probably have defied the old man in time - I figured I was almost a teenager, after all - but that summer I was emboldened by my new friend's indifference to authority, and though I asked and begged and pleaded beforehand, I eventually set out with Loonie one Saturday and rode to the coast without my father's blessing.
It began with a l
ie.
I said we were headed for the river but as we coasted through town and past the servo we simply doubled back behind the pub.
You know why it is, Loonie said as we rolled down the turnoff.
You know why your old man's scared, don't you?
Yeah, I said after too long a pause. I didn't want to talk about the fact that my father couldn't swim. I wasn't that disloyal yet.
You're lyin, Pikelet.
I stood on my pedals, wary of being seen by someone from the mill.
Snowy Muir, said Loon
ie.
Who's he?
Bloke from the mill. Fishin off the Point when they opened the bar. All the snapper was runnin. King wave got him. Just ran up the rock and hauled him in. Found him three days later out at the Holes.
The stony bitumen made my teeth chatter. Wattlebirds buzzed us from the thicket edges.
And your old boy was there, Pikelet. He saw him go.
When was this? I asked, trying to sound sceptical.
1965.
How . . . how do you know?
I live at the pub, you dick. Only thing flows faster'n beer is talk.
It bothered me not to have known this precious detail about my father. I rode on in silence.
We freewheeled downhill a mile or so until we came to the long, flat stretch where the estuary meandered into shoals on our left and the boggy horse paddocks opposite rose to steep timbered hills. The sun was on our shoulders and already, over the whirr and clatter of our bikes, you could hear the ocean.
On the last uphill stretch a flatbed truck wallowed off the saltpan onto the tar ahead of us. Without a word, Loonie put on a spurt and chased it. There were people on the back of the truck who laughed and cheered as he caught up and grabbed onto the tie-rail. The old banger went up through the gears, making speed against the incline.