It turned out that the spyhole was hardly required to prove Loonie's point. The squeak of the bed next door, the slap of meat and the low growls coming through the wall were evidence enough. But that bit of gum was a provocation. I peeled it off, pressed my eye to the gap and let out a grunt of surprise that must have been audible from the other side of the wall. Because what I saw first, not two feet distant, was a woman's lipstick-smeared face turned my way. Her green eyes were open but unfocussed. She had big pores and her skin shone damply beneath her jouncing curls. I recoiled so fast that I impaled myself on Loonie's front teeth. We stumbled
about on the bare boards, hissing and wincing, and there was a pause in proceedings in the next room. We froze, waiting for the door to fly open. The back of my head felt punctured.
After a few very long moments, the chafing bed resumed and a man murmured and beads clacked without rhythm. I stared across at the white eye of the spyhole and when I looked back at Loonie he was laughing silently. I jerked my thumb in the direction of the door but he shook his head. At least half of me was grateful. I gathered my nerve and tiptoed back to the wall.
I pressed my eye up and saw a woman's pink rump and a man's hairy thighs thudding against it. I didn't breathe. I followed the feline curve of the woman's spine to the mass of curls on the pillow only an arm's length away from where I stood, and while I watched, Margaret Myers rose on her elbows in response to some new urgency. Her breasts and beads swung and the golden hoops of her earrings glinted. She tilted her face up and opened her eyes a moment and looked my way. There was a moment — just a flicker — of surprise but I knew she'd seen me. She seemed more interested than outraged. And gradually, with a kind of weary amusement, as the bloke pounded away behind her, she began to smile.
A hot jet ran down the leg of my jeans, and I made a stupid sound as Loonie pulled me aside to see for himself. Right then the man called out to nobody in particular, like a bloke who'd just dropped something in the street, and I didn't need to be watching to know whose voice it was. I stood clear, fully expecting Loonie to reel back out of the room at the sound of his old man right there through the wall, but he stayed where he was, lips pursed, head and palms against the tin, as though he'd seen it all before.
I'm amazed at how long it took me to become properly inquisitive about Sando and Eva. Anybody older might have been more than merely curious about their circumstances. For one thing, they seemed to be free agents. They lived like no other people I'd ever met. It was hardly abnormal in those years for longhairs to avoid all talk of work and money except to condemn them in proper Aquarian terms, but these two never even bothered to bring the subject up. They never spoke about making a living the way locals did; it was as if the concept never occurred to them. They thought and lived and carried themselves differently to other people. There were few townsfolk who lived as comfortably as they did yet I didn't ask why. I was a mere schoolboy. I wouldn't say that I was under anyone's spell exactly, but I did feel that there was something special about Sando and I had no interest in how people paid their bills. Of what importance are the material details of adult life when you're an adolescent? I didn't think to ask how he got what he had or even how he got to be what he was. I put all my efforts into trying to be like him. I could take or leave his prickly wife, but I watched Sando; I hung on his every word. I was content to just be with him. There were afternoons out there with Loonie and Eva and him when we swung in hammocks while the weather piled up towards the forest from the broad sweep of the bay, as roos grazed on the grassy slope and the wind chimes stirred around us, that I had a sense I'd been singled out somehow, chosen.
Then there were those rare days, the times we returned from a session so huge, surf so terrifying as to render us incoherent. Back at the house we ate and drank and lay rocking alongside one another, laughing like stoners. It was hard to find words for the things we'd just seen and done. The events themselves resonated in your limbs. You felt shot full and the sensation burned for hours — for days, sometimes — yet you couldn't make it real for anybody else. You couldn't and you weren't sure you wanted to. But we blathered at each other from sheer excitement and you can imagine the boyish superlatives and the jargon we employed. Eva was impatient with our giggling nonsense. Yet now and then I caught her listening, especially to Sando, in a way that made me wonder about her.
Sando was good at portraying the moment you found yourself at your limit, when things multiplied around you like an hallucination. He could describe the weird, reptilian thing that happened to you: the cold, supercharged certainty which overtook your usually dithering mind, the rest of the world in a slow-motion blur around you, the tunnel vision, the surrender that confidence finally became. And when he talked about the final rush, the sense of release you felt at the end, skittering out to safety in the beautiful deep channel, Eva sometimes sank back with her eyes closed and her teeth bared, as though she understood only too well.
It's like you come pouring back into yourself, said Sando one afternoon. Like you've exploded and all the pieces of you are reassembling themselves. You're new. Shimmering. Alive.
Yes, she said. Exactly.
And I watched her, and wondered how she knew.
Just as I began to find some confidence, all the parameters changed. One rainy afternoon inside by the fire, Sando started talking about a break called the Nautilus. This new wave seemed so far off the scale I thought he was making it up in order to freak us out. It sounded too implausible, too deliberately mysterious. But then he brought out nautical charts and it began to look as though this spot really did exist. Sando had his own detailed sketches of the bombora and its approaches and he drew diagrams to show us the way the swell came onto the reef. He said he'd been studying it for ages, wondering if it could be surfed, certain it was a wave no other surfer had seen, let alone ridden. Despite all the charts and drawings the whole deal still sounded a bit fanciful. This wasn't a deepwater bommie like Old Smoky. The Nautilus was an oceanic lump of rock, a ship-killer barely beneath the surface. It was easy to imagine vicious whitewater in such a place, but not an evenly breaking wave of the sort we needed.
Sando watched our faces. My scepticism must have shown. From his shirt pocket he produced a solitary Polaroid. He'd obviously been saving it for last because he flipped the photo onto the table with a flourish and sat back with a smile. Neither Loonie nor I picked that shiny square up for a moment. But there it was, a thick, purple frown of water, the most impossible wave I'd ever seen.
Oh, man, you're kidding, I said. You can't surf that.
You don't reckon? he said with a grin.
I couldn't believe Sando or anyone else would even consider it. This spot was unlike anything we'd ever heard of, let alone attempted. The Nautilus was three miles out. A sharkpit. It lay seaward of a granite island — a seal colony, no less — and the wave itself broke over a huge rock which actually did look like the upright shell of a nautilus. On the charts it was marked as a navigation hazard with multiple warnings.
You launch here at the cove, he said, tapping the chart.
And you've done this? I asked.
Well, yeah, I've scoped it. Buzzed out in the dinghy a few times.
Loonie turned the Polaroid over in his hands. You took this?