Tim Winton by Breath

Author:Breath [Breath]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-03-02T22:00:00+00:00

I

only remember the dream.

I was deep. The whole sea boiled overhead. White streaks of turbulence drove down like tracer fire and rocket trails, a free-fire zone in dim and shuddering green.

And I'm plummeting, a projectile. When it comes rushing at me, black as death, the reef is shot full of holes and I slam into one, headlong.

Next, I see myself, from outside my flailing, panicked body.

Headfirst. Wedged in the rock. While my lungs turn to sponge and the ocean inside me flickers with cruel light.

Drowning.

Drowning.

Fighting it.

But drowning.

There was, for a while, I'm certain, a woman at the bedside.

I thought it was Eva Sanderson but it was more likely a nurse or my mother or Queenie Cookson. Whoever it was, she held my hand and spoke for a long time. But her words made no more sense than birdsong. And then she was gone.

I woke up and my parents were in the room, anxious and exhausted, still bearing on their faces the unmistakeable look of disappointment that I was to see again a few weeks later when my school report came home.

LOONIE QUIT SCHOOL. He was jack of it; he just wanted to go surfing, but his old man was having none of that and he sent him up to the mill. Loonie hated everything about it. My old man said he wouldn't last a fortnight, said Loonie wouldn't work in an iron lung, said the kid was lazy and plain dangerous as a result.

Those summer holidays I went out to Sando's nearly every day.

Eva had gone to the States for a few weeks and with Loonie in the workforce I had Sando to myself. I did more than seize the opportunity; I drank it up.

On flat-calm days we dived, and if there was the slightest swell we fooled about at the Point with boards he dug out from the far recesses of the undercroft - logs from the sixties, pig-boards and weird, tear-shaped things with psychedelic sprayjobs. There were days when we just hung out, when he'd sit crosslegged on the verandah carving a piece of cypress and I'd watch in silence. That summer he taught me how to play the didjeridu, to sustain the circular breathing necessary to keep up the low, growling drone you could send down the valley from his front steps. The noise of it made the dog go bush. I liked the way it sucked energy from me and drew hard feelings up the way only a good tantrum could when I was little. I blew till I saw stars, till a puddle of drool appeared on the step below or until Sando took the thing off me.

Sometimes you didn't bother to engage Sando in conversation.

When he got into a mood I left him to his own thoughts and consoled myself down in the roo paddock alone with the didj. For me, Eva's absence was a boon, but I could see how agitated it often made him. Still, most afternoons he was mellow, even expansive. When he gave you his full attention you could feel yourself quicken, like a tree finding water.

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