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.
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 Loonies 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 Loonies 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.