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 rather 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.
I watched Sando shrug into the top half of his wetsuit and take up his big orange Brewer. He pinched my cheek and grinned. The sun shone in his beard and in his eyes, and his teeth were strong and white.
You still wanna do this?
I no longer trusted myself to speak. I just took up my board beside him and stood shivering in my shorts.
Shit, he said as a great, green glut of water poured up at our feet. I wonder what the ordinary people are doin today.
With that, while the sea was all but upon us, he launched out with his board like a shield before him and landed smoothly and paddled briskly with the receding surge. In a moment he was out in deep water beyond the turbulence.
I looked down into the maw and waited for the surge to return. Sando sat up to wait. Birds shrieked behind me. The rocks streamed with fizz. Every crack spilled rivulets and streams and sheets until suddenly the sea came back and Sando started yelling and then I braced and jumped.
The paddle out was so long and disorientating that it became kind of abstract. I followed the cheesy, yellow soles of Sando's feet and fell into a rhythm. Half an hour later, still two hundred yards shy of the reef itself, I sat up beside him in a dreamy calm. Perhaps it was the warm sun and the exertion and the fact that we'd paddled out during a long lull, but I began to feel safe and happy. When the first wave broke over Old Smoky, all that equanimity simply evaporated.
We were in deep water, safe enough in the scheme of things, and I hadn't yet understood the scale of what I was seeing, but the sight of the thing pitching out across the bommie drove a blade of fear right through me. Just the sound of spray hissing back off the crest inspired terror; it was the sound of sheetmetal shearing itself to pieces. The wave drove onto the shoal and the report cannoned across the water and slapped against my chest.
Sando hooted. He raised his arms to it and tossed his head back. The wave sprawled and growled and finally spat its wind into the pacifying depth of the channel so that by the time it reached us it was just a massive current with a trailing scum of spindrift.
Got your bearings?
Yeah, I lied.
Had I the slightest idea of where to go, I would have paddled straight back to the cliffs and climbed out right then. But behind me the land was featureless, just a grey-black slab which disappeared between swells.
Sando paddled on up to the channel in tight to the reef where the swells humped prodigiously but did not quite break. At a loss and scared of being alone, I followed. He paddled and propped, paddled and propped, checking and adjusting his position all the time. He motioned me closer as a fresh set lumbered in. At first all I saw was a series of dark lines in the distance and then these swells became a convoy, bearing down on us, increasing in size and speed with every passing moment until they became distinct waves that warped and wedged so massively that I found myself looking uphill into great sunstruck ridges. You could feel the whole skin of the ocean being drawn outward to meet them, and it was impossible to resist the conviction that we were about to be mown down, even here in the safe depth of the channel.
We sat tight while four waves went by. Then Sando paddled over and put himself in harm's way. I stayed out wide; I wasn't going anywhere. He rose, still sitting, over the next wave, lifted into the sky without expression, and for a long time afterwards he was obscured by spray. When I saw him next he was stroking into the path of the biggest wave I'd ever seen. As the thing drew itself up onto the reef, he seemed, for all his beetling, to be sucked back up its lumpy slope. A moment later the wave broke, spangled and streaked and pluming vapour behind him, and he was up, falling bent-legged into the pit below. Despite the surface chop he kept his feet to come sweeping down from three storeys high and when he ploughed by I caught a jaunty flash of teeth and saw he was okay.
When he paddled back out Sando was singing. He slapped water my way and did his best to unseat me. His eyes glittered; he was as lit up as I'd ever seen him.
Jesus, he said laughing. God! You gotta get some of that.
Just watchin, I said, panting with anxiety.
Aw!
Yeah, I said. Really.
Doesn't come around every week, mate.
No.
Never forgive yourself.
Maybe, I said breathless.
I think you're ready, Pikelet.
Hm.
I shook my head and bobbed dumbly out there in the purple-deep ocean with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Mountains of water rose from the south; they rumbled by, gnawing at themselves, spilling tons of foam, and the half-spent force of them tore at my dangling legs. There was just so much water moving out there, such an overload of noise and vibration; everything was at a scale I couldn't credit. I began to hyperventilate. Only later could I appreciate how alert Sando was that morning. Though he sensed my panic he did not touch me. Had he even got up close, or tried to grab my board and reassure me I'd have lashed out. I was wild with fear and we were a mile out to sea, the two of us, and now things had really gotten dangerous. But he knew what he was doing.