You went out to Old Smoky on your own, he said.
I shrugged and hoisted the bag onto my shoulder.
Fuck, he murmured. He's pissed off about the board.
You broke two already yourself, I said. Anyway, who told you?
She did.
Eva? She told you?
Nah. I heard em bluin and bitchin. She sorta blurted it out. Said you went on your own. And the board's gone, isn't it?
Swam in.
Fuck.
Did you do Nautilus? I asked despite myself.
Man, it was bullshit. I got three. Barrelled every time.
Him?
He got one. But he's fuckin scared of it.
I blinked at this.
Old, said Loonie.
There was something pitiless in his smirk.
And he's takin you to Java, I said.
Who told you that?
Eva, I said with a hot flash of satisfaction.
He grunted and rolled himself a fag and I realized that we were no longer friends. At the intersection, where the pub loomed over the servo across the road, we each veered in our own direction without even saying goodbye. Neither of us could have known that we'd never meet again.
Sando pulled up at the school oval one lunch hour while I was kicking a football with a bunch of kids I barely knew. It was the old sound of the VW that caught my attention. I saw him parked over behind the goalposts but didn't go across right away. By the time I relented there were only a few minutes before the bell went again.
He sprawled over the wheel like a bus driver. He had a denim jacket on, and a silk shirt of some kind of shimmering green, and his hair and beard and earrings shone in the early winter light. He raised his eyebrows as if surprised to see me. I stood there in my grisly brown uniform.
You're off, then.
Yeah, he said. Tomorrow.
I nodded and looked out across the rooftops of Angelus.
Thought you might come out for a send-off. We don't see you much anymore.
I glanced back at the kids punting the pill from pack to pack.
I can't, I said. The oldies wouldn't let me.
He nodded, scratched in his beard pensively.
Hey, someone found the yellow Brewer.
Really?
Tuna fisherman. Twenty-five mile out, he reckons.
He give it back?
Sando nodded. I kept the flood of relief and amazement to myself.
Eva said you looked pretty shabby when you got back.
It was big, I said. It's a tough swim.
Gutsy effort, he said. All of it. You should know that. It's right up there.
I shrugged.
No, I mean it, Pikelet. Hats off.
I shoved my hands into my pockets in the effort to resist his approval. There was a long, potent silence between us and then the school bell went. Sando cranked up the Kombi.
Seeya, then.
Okay, I said.
When I got home the yellow Brewer was standing up against the shed with its big black fin jutting out like a crow's wing.
He said you could have it, said my mother. The gypsy-looking fella. Said you'd earned it.
I nodded as I took it down and held it under my arm. It was a beautiful thing, made by a master.
What job were you doing? she asked.
The usual, I said. Choppin wood.
Ah, she said. And I could see how badly she needed to believe it.
week or so after Sando and Loonie left, I rode out to the coast in a funk. I was sick of the hangdog looks the oldies were giving me. I was bored and angry — as lonely as I'd been in my life.
The sea was its usual wintry mess, the beach empty. I didn't particularly want to see Eva. I half thought she'd be gone anyway, as threatened. There was nowhere else to go.
The Volkswagen was parked under cover. The dog bounced out to meet me as if it'd been starved of company. I squatted with it for a while, ruffling its ears, basking in its adoration. Maybe it's an old man's delusion but it occurs to me now that a dog like that might have been good for me as a teenager. As I hunkered there, scratching the dog's belly, I thought about taking it for a ramble up the paddocks into the forest, to let it dart in and out of the shadows chasing rabbits while I talked a load of shit to it and got things off my chest. And I wish I had. Instead I went on up the stairs.
Eva was in the livingroom behind the glass doors. I saw her watching me from where she sprawled on the sofa. She wasn't quite right, the way she lay with her mouth slightly ajar and her hair mussed. I stood in the cold until she motioned me in.
The house smelled of woodsmoke and fried bacon and hash. Supertramp played quietly on the stereo. Eva wore old track pants and a Yale tee-shirt with bright yellow stains on it.
Gonna rain again, she murmured.
Yeah, I said. Wait five minutes. New weather.
I been waiting five minutes all my life. Only thing changes is the freakin weather.
I had nothing to say to this. I was already getting set to leave.
Pikelet, she said. Where can you get ground turkey in this country?
Ground what?
Turkey mincemeat. Where do I go?
Hell, I muttered. How would I know?
She snorted as if I was a simpleton, but I'd never heard of people eating minced turkey. At our place we didn't even have turkey at Christmas — it was no better than roadkill.
Sit down a minute.
It's hot in here, I said, perching beside her on the couch.
So take off your coat.
I saw that she had hell's own blaze going in the hearth.
Come to that, take off your shirt.
What?
You heard me.
You're stoned, I said.
But you want to. You'll do it anyway.
I thought about what might happen. It was like being in a shed with Loonie and something sharp. My body thrilled to the danger in the room.
I began to get up. She grabbed a fistful of my tee-shirt and twisted it with a kind of sneer and I looked at her in confused anger before I shrugged her off. I shucked the shirt anyway and held it gormlessly in my lap. The sneer melted from her face then and she looked almost sad. She touched my belly with her knuckles. There was a kind of disinterest in the way she held them against me and ran them slowly up my chest. I was unprepared for the painful force with which she grabbed my nipple, but she kissed my neck so softly my whole scalp flushed with something like gooseflesh. She kissed me on the neck again and again, unbuckling my Levi's all the while, and when I came she laughed in my ear like someone who'd won a bet.
I followed her to the loft. She kicked off her clothes, fell onto the unmade bed and smiled at me with something like tenderness. I felt a great force rising behind me, pressing me on.