You're scarin people.
Well, he said. They need a little scarin round here.
We paddled out together and waited for a set.
How you been? he asked.
Yeah, good, I lied.
Startin to think you're avoidin us.
Well, I said. School and stuff.
You heard from Loonie? he asked, kind enough not to point out that we were in the midst of the summer holidays.
No, I said. Not a word.
Man, what a disappointment he turned out to be.
I spose.
Mate, I thought he was the real deal, y'know? The man not-ordinary.
Maybe ordinary's not so bad, I offered.
Pikelet, you gotta get outta this fuckin town.
I shrugged.
Come and see us, you dick.
I caught a wave in and walked up the hot sand to where Eva lay in the sun with a book. She wore a ragged straw hat and her hair was glossy and her skin was tanned as I'd never seen before. She cut quite a figure in a polka dot bikini. Her breasts were huge and her belly shone. Her distended navel was like a fruit stalk. When she saw me she hoisted herself to her feet. I took in the lavish sway of her back and smiled.
Gross, huh?
No, I said, conscious of passing bathers. No, it's beautiful.
Jesus.
No, honest.
You really are a pervert, she said with unexpected tenderness.
Takes one to know, I said, grinning sadly.
We're leaving, Pikelet. After the baby comes.
Oh, I said. I should have been relieved but I felt a twist of panic and it must have shown.
D'you really mind so much?
I picked wax from the deck of my battered twin-fin.
Pikelet?
Can I see you? I asked without looking up.
Oh, baby. No.
Just once. Please?
Pikelet.
You owe it to me, I said without properly understanding what kind of threat I'd uttered.
Shit, Pikelet.
I'll leave you alone. Just once.
I never would have blown the whistle on her — I couldn't have done it — but for her at least this must have been real and present danger.
Yeah, she said so bitterly that it felt like a blow. For old times'
sake, right?
On a Thursday while Sando was in Angelus I rode out there and was met by the dog. Eva wouldn't let me upstairs so we went without preamble into the shadows of the undercroft where the smells of soil and wax and fibreglass were all about us. I knelt and lifted her dress and kissed the hard projection of her belly while she ran her hands abstractedly through my hair. Her breasts were long and heavy and between her legs everything felt fat and wet and ripe.
Hurry, she said.
I'm sorry, I murmured.
Yeah, well, we're both sorry now.
She turned and braced against the workbench and we took it slowly and carefully. I held her gorgeous belly and saw the veins stand proud in her neck and the sweat gather on her back and when it was over neither of us pretended to be happy.
6
NEVER SAW THE BABY. In February the old man copped a flying belt at the mill. The initial report made it seem like a let-off — it could easily have been a walking blade or worse, and there were no severed limbs. But when Mum and I got to the hospital in Angelus we saw that half his face was mashed and they told us he'd suffered a major skull fracture from the steel beam he'd been thrown against. Nobody's fault, just a freak accident.
He never regained consciousness.
Eva had her baby in the same hospital while Dad was there. A boy, or so I heard. Eva and the child were long gone by the time the old man died. We buried him in the pioneer cemetery back along the river. His mates from the mill came. Frank Loon was there but the Sandersons stayed away. They may have already left town.
My father's death hit me with a force that felt targeted and personal. I felt chastised by it and it really pulled me up. Afterwards, Mum looked at me fearfully, as though I was a stranger. Now I knew there was no room left in my life for stupid risks. Death was everywhere — waiting, welling, undiminished. It would always be coming for me and for mine and I told myself I could no longer afford the thrill of courting it.
Driven by loneliness and remorse and a desire to compensate my mother somehow, I put all my energies into study. I didn't surf much and I kept to myself to the extent of being thought a weirdo. My last two years of school were empty and desperate, but through a regimen that relied more on hard discipline than intellectual curiosity, I dragged myself from the bottom of the class and began to make headway. Eventually my marks were excellent, but my heart wasn't in it.
People said the old man's death was the beginning of the end for the mill and they were only half wrong — it reeled from crisis to crisis for another decade. Mum got a modest payout, which left her free and clear with the house as well as a pension. She saved enough to put me through university and I did my best to be a dutiful son. She never accused me of having forsaken the old man for Bill Sanderson or abandoned her for Eva, though I couldn't have blamed her if she had. I'd absented myself from their lives so long and the unspoken hurt from it lingered for years.
We tried to find some closeness, Mum and 1.1 wrote every week from the city and phoned her every few days. I drove home some weekends and at semester breaks I stayed weeks at a time. I tried to show I loved her but our relationship was a polite, undeclared failure — there was tenderness but no intimacy — and in this regard it could have been a rehearsal for marriage.
At twenty, after years of barely surfing at all, I went to Bali and finally saw the cave at Uluwatu. I climbed down through it to the sea and surfed the big, winding lefthander for an hour, amped but totally out of condition. I had a bad fall, blew a disc in my back. It took me a week to get home to Perth and when I did I went to pieces. The prolapse sorted itself out soon enough but I had a kind of breakdown. I was only a few weeks from finishing my degree. I never returned to see it through. Instead I holed up in a caravan on a sheep station and put myself back together as best I knew how.
Trace Andrews loved me. Even after she grew wary, there was that to remember. She taught in the zoology department of the university where I worked as a lab technician. My mother adored her, was overjoyed when we married, and I was euphoric, never happier in my life. We had two daughters, so beautiful I could never stop being anxious for them. And now they're women, old enough to find me more an amusement than a puzzle.
When Grace was pregnant she said I was weird about it. Men, she said, were supposed to be turned off by all that fluid, the gross belly, the big backside and puffy ankles. That was normal. I laughed. I really thought she was joking.
So you prefer revulsion to reverence?
A girl doesn't mind reverence, she quipped. But reverent lust is another thing.