I'm hungry, she said. Can you cook?
I shook my head.
Didn't think so. C'mon, let's make burgers. I got supplies this morning.
For an hour or so she bossed me about in the kitchen and eventually we ate in silence off the benchtop. We sat on the stools Sando had made from bushwood. It was odd, this making-do. Neither of us was the other's first preference for company. We were stuck with each other.
Once she'd eaten, Eva became unusually talkative. We went back out onto the verandah and slouched into hammocks and she told me about growing up in Salt Lake City, about Mormons and mountains and her dead mother. Wryly, she explained the business of college scholarships and the starding advent of the angel Moroni. She told me stuff about new religion and new money that I couldn't quite grasp, and the longer she went on, die stranger America seemed to be.
On TV Americans were so soft and sentimental, all happy-go-lucky and forever safely at home. But the way Eva told it, her countrymen were restless, nomadic, clogging freeways and airports in their fevered search for action. She said they were driven by ambition in a way that no Australian could possibly understand. They wanted fresh angles, better service, perfect mobility. I tried to picture what she meant. She made her own people sound vicious. Yet God was in everything — all the talk, all the music, even on their money. Ambition, she said. Aspiration and mortal anxiety.
It was hard to negotiate the tangled crosscurrents of pride and disgust in Eva's rambling account, but it gave me plenty to think about. Here in Sawyer people seemed settled — rusted on, in fact. They liked to be ordinary. They were uncomfortable with ambition and avoided any kind of unpredictability or risk. There was a certain muted grandeur in our landscape but it seemed that power and destiny did not adhere to bare plains and dank forest. There were no mighty canyons and mile-wide rivers here. Without soaring peaks and snow, angels seemed unlikely and God barely possible.
I don't know how long I lay there in my hammock, ruminating on all this, before I realized that Eva had long since stopped talking. A light drizzle began to fall. Hauling up onto an elbow I saw she was asleep. Her hair had dried in a snarl beneath her. The tightness was gone from her face. Now and then her eyelids twitched and fluttered. She gave out a light, intermittent snore. Where her dress rode up her legs were pale.
It seemed wrong to stare at Eva like this, but I'd never been able to properly look at her before. I'd only ever known her in glances, from glimpses snatched in moments when I thought I was safe from her scalding glare. I eased myself out of the hammock and crept up beside her. She smelled of shampoo and fried onions. I studied the scars on her misshapen knee. The freshest suture line was fat and angry, a centipede imbedded in her flesh; it overlaid its predecessors, a silvery nest of them like a fossil record. There was stubble on her shins. For a moment, while she slept, she had gooseflesh on her arms.
I had the sudden and perilous urge to touch her. I wanted to feel her ruined knee and I didn't know why. I reached out. Don't hurt me, she said.
I flinched and stepped back, knocking a chair against the wall. Eva sat up, confused and awake.
What is it?
I shook my head. I gotta go.
Loonie showed up one night while I was failing to do my homework. I could see the mixed look on my mother's face as she ushered him into my room. She was fond of Loonie but her old wariness was back. She pulled at his strawy hair a moment and squeezed his shoulder as she left.
Did I miss anythin? he asked. No swell?
I shook my head.
Far out, he said abstractedly. He sat on my bed and flipped through the social studies book lying there.
So, I said. How was it?
He put the book down and pursed his lips. Fuckin unbelievable.
When'd you get back?
Last night. The old man's gone spastic. Hey, cop this.
Loonie pushed up the sleeve of his windcheater to reveal a long, pulpy wound.
Uluwatu, he murmured. It's insane.
What happened?
Just the reef. That coral rips the shit outta you.
For half an hour he told me stories of lonely waves and temples
and paddies, of monkeys and offerings and incense smoke; how Sando and he ate turtle meat and coconuts and rode out to reefs on outrigger canoes. I felt a stubborn refusal to be impressed. The more Loonie talked, the less I responded. I could see it puzzling him. He reached for bigger stories, wilder moments, to little avail.
I brought you this, he said, setting a tamped wad of foil on the desk beside me. It was no bigger than a.22 rifle cartridge.
What is it?
Hash, mate.
Jesus, I murmured.
Well, don't have a baby.
I heard the old girl coming before she had time to open the door. The little foil bullet fell into the drawer and Loonie met her on his way out.
Things were different after Sando and Loonie returned from the islands. If there was a swell big enough they might come by on weekends. We all surfed Barney's several times in late summer and even saw its terrible namesake, but for the most part I found myself on the outside of whatever it was the other two had going. Loonies time in Indonesia had granted him a new kind of seniority. He'd seen animal sacrifices and shamans and walked on black, volcanic beaches. He'd climbed down the legendary cave at Uluwatu and paddled out, bombed to the gills on hash. Yet here I was, still a schoolboy.
Sando was distant now, preoccupied. He seemed suddenly closed off from me. I began to sense that there were secrets between him and Loonie, things they kept from me with grins and furtive glances. When we surfed they gave off a physical arrogance that might simply have been confidence born of experience, but I felt cowed by it. Now I understood the looks that the Angelus crew shot me. It was how they saw us — the little Brahman circle.
I didn't see much of Eva, but when I did she was drawn and unhappy. A new current of antagonism flashed between her and Sando. She did her best to act as though Loonie didn't exist.
I woke to a rumble that caused the house stumps to vibrate. If you didn't know any better you'd have thought a convoy of tanks was advancing up our drive and into the forest behind us. It was a low, grinding noise, a menacing pulse that didn't let up for a moment. I got out of bed feeling queasy. I packed a towel and wetsuit into my school bag, ate a couple of cold sausages from the fridge and waited for the dawn.
A monster storm showed up before autumn even arrived. On the forecast maps it looked like a tumour on the sea between us and the southern iceshelf. The moment he saw it Sando began planning our attempt on the Nautilus. On the Saturday and Sunday before the front arrived the swell in its path hadn't yet gathered momentum. We'd have to wait for the passage of the storm and catch the swell in its wake. Which meant I'd have to wag school if I wanted to make the trip.
Before the wind had even stirred the trees I knew I wasn't ready for the Nautilus. On the night the storm descended I lay in bed feeling the roof quake, wondering how I could plausibly avoid the whole endeavour. For two days black squalls ripped in from the sea and rain strafed the roads and paddocks and forest. On the morning of the third day, while it was still full dark and spookily still,