It was whiteout down there. The water was mad with current. It was like diving blind into a crowd, and I groped, hauled off at angles until I saw the bluish contours of the seabed below. I dived again and got nowhere. I hit the surface, saw Sando — still yards off- hauling himself my way, and then I heard Loonies gasp and turned to see his upraised arm. He was twenty yards behind me, even closer to the boat than I was.
When I got there I swept him up onto my board and listened to him puke and breathe and puke some more. The back was out of his wetsuit and there was skin off his shoulders. His nose bled, his legs trembled, but by the time Sando reached us he was laughing.
I was gutted by that day at the Nautilus. A small, cool part of me knew it was stupid to have been out there trying to surf a wave so unlikely, so dangerous, so perverse. What would success there really mean — perhaps three or four or even five seconds of upright travel on a wave as ugly as a civic monument? You could barely call such a mad scramble surfing. Surely there were better and bigger waves to ride than that deformity. Yet nothing could assuage the lingering sense of failure I was left with.
The others didn't mention it. All three of us celebrated Loonie's moment of defiance, but the gap had widened between them and me. He who hesitates, as I discovered, is lost indeed. I began to feel that their delicacy on the subject of my cowardice only made things worse. At first I was grateful, but soon I wished they'd just come out and call me yellow and have done with it. I hated the coy looks, the sudden gaps in conversation that reinforced my sense of relegation.
Loonie and Sando planned new assaults on the Nautilus using shorter boards — two only — shaped for the purpose. We never broached the subject of whether I'd accompany them. God knows, I should have been relieved, but I was inconsolable. I knew any reasonable person would have done what I did out there that day. Which was exactly the problem: I was, after all, ordinary.
For a few years as a teenager in Sawyer, it seemed I had control of my own life. I didn't understand everything going on around me, but for a brief period I had something special that afforded me a private sense of power. It let me feel bigger, more vivid than I'd been before. Although I was no leper at school I never really made much social headway. Classmates thought I was standoffish. Some said I was up myself and none of it worried me because for a couple of years I went home from Angelus every day harbouring a consoling secret. I did stuff other people couldn't do, things they wouldn't dream of. I belonged to an exclusive club, drove around with a full-grown man and a mate who spooked people.
Even among surfers we had enigmatic status. When we deigned to paddle out at the Point you could sense everyone else's deferral. Older, vaguely threatening blokes like Slipper were grudgingly respectful, especially in the presence of our mentor. Whenever some mouthy grommet started quizzing us about Sando he would be quickly silenced by one of the older crew. They knew by now that he'd surfed Old Smoky on his own for years. He was in his own league; we'd all sensed it instinctively. Sando radiated gravitas. And I got used to the power of association.
But when Sando first took Loonie to the islands, he left me behind in more than a literal sense. Somehow I stayed behind. I lost confidence in my place and value. It's possible some of my sense of relegation was imaginary or the result of shame, but I was convinced that Sando no longer took me seriously, that Loonie didn't regard me as an equal anymore, and the rich feeling of being in charge of myself evaporated. For the first time in my life I was not so much solitary as plain lonely.
Not long after Easter, in the first week of the term break, an unexpectedly vicious cold front burst upon the coast. Wind tore trees from the ground and blew roofing iron deep into the forest, and when the storm was spent it left the kind of booming swell that kept me awake half the night with that old mix of excitement and apprehension.
I waited for the sound of the Volkswagen but Loonie and Sando didn't show. About eight o'clock, while the oldies were off in town, I got on my bike and rode out to the coast.
From way across the estuary curtains of spray were visible at the rivermouth.
At Sando's the boat and the Kombi were gone; they'd opted for the Nautilus. I could hardly blame them for blowing me off but it provoked something in me. The dog didn't bark as it trotted down and I was relieved because I wanted to get in and go without waking Eva. It followed me into the undercroft where I pulled out the big yellow Brewer I'd disgraced myself with a few weeks before. I waxed the board with a block from the Milo tin on the bench and walked back down the drive with it. There was no way I could ride a bike and carry that great spear of a thing, so I hoofed it out to the headland and by the time I'd hiked across the ridges to the clifftop overlooking Old Smoky, the sun had broken through and I was clammy with sweat. My right arm felt wrenched from carrying the board so far. I did some stretches while the bombora cracked and flared out on the sunlit sea.
I don't know why I paddled out there on my own. I was hurt and angry. And I suppose I felt there was a point to prove. I knew Old Smoky had been surfed solo before. But not by a fifteen-year-old. At this distance it seems like an act of desperation — or worse — a lunge toward oblivion. Even now I can barely believe I did it.
Before I got halfway out to the bommie, it dawned on me that Old Smoky was breaking much bigger than I'd seen it before. Between long, deceptive lulls, waves angled in to stand up twenty feet and more, and by the time I got close I knew I'd seriously underestimated the size of the swell. At this scale, it was a wonder the wave still broke cleanly.
I hummed. I spoke aloud to myself. I manoeuvred into position over the reef and checked and rechecked my bearings as I'd been taught. The offshore breeze fanned up a steady chop and beneath the surface the water was busy.
I was right on the lump when a new set of swells wheeled in from the south-west. They quickened as they got a footing on the shoal and soon I was labouring uphill time and again to get beyond them. Each seemed bigger than the one before and every time I squeaked over and tumbled down into the trough behind, I was blinded by spray. In all that stinging white confusion I failed to see the third wave until it was too late. It was already seething, beginning to break, and by then it was a matter of riding it or wearing it, so I turned and went.
All the way down the big board chattered against the surface chop; I could hear the giggle and natter of it over the thunder behind me. When the wave drew itself up to its full height, walling a hundred yards ahead as I swept down, it seemed to create its own weather. There was suddenly no wind at all and the lower I got, the smoother the water became. The whole rolling edifice glistened. For a moment — just a brief second of enchantment — I felt weightless, a moth riding light. Then I leant into a turn and accelerated and the force of it slammed through my knees, thighs, bladder, and I came lofting back to the crest to feel the land breeze in my face and catch a smudge of cliffs before sailing down the line again. With each turn, each stalling fade, I grew in confidence. By the wave's last section I was styling. I scudded out into the channel, so addled by joy I had to sit a while to clear my head.