You're a pair of hellmen, you two, he said through the cab window.
Why's that? said Loonie.
Surfih bareback in all weather. You're either stupid or broke.
Both, I said.
How old are you?
Thirteen, said Loonie.
Almost thirteen, I said, stretching things a bit.
The bloke had a mass of curly bleached hair and his beard was of the same stuff. He was a big man and muscular, with grey eyes. It was hard to tell his age but he had to be thirty or more and that made him a genuinely old guy. His dog panted and whined beside him but the moment he glared at it the mutt lay silent.
You get tired of haulin your boards out from town, you can leave em at our place.
Neither Loonie nor I said anything to this; we didn't know how to respond.
I'm away a bit, said the bloke. But you can shove em under the house. The missus won't mind.
Geez, I said. Thanks,
No worries.
First driveway. Just up here.
Okay.
He drove off and we looked at one another with a dumb shrug.
I wasn't ready to leave my precious board at anyone's place but my own, yet I was flushed warm from the attention. On our way back, weaving up the bitumen one-handed, with our boards yawing and straining under our arms, we pedalled by the turnoff we'd never paid any mind to before. It was marked with an old green-painted fridge and the dirt track in was rutted and steep. From the road there was no sign of a house, only a wall of karri trees on the ridge. The land was fenced but this wasn't any sort of farm.
Hippies, said Loonie.
We coasted down to the swampy flats and caught our breaths for the hard uphill plug into town.
I never suspected I'd be sent to school thirty miles away in Angelus, and I'm not even sure why my parents enrolled me there. At the time they said it was to give me stability, a high school where I could go right through to my senior year, but I had an inkling it was a manoeuvre to limit Loonies influence. They waited until after New Year's to spring the news, and I was so stunned that I didn't even put up a fight. I was just glad they hadn't sent me to board at the hostel, though I'm certain they'd have been unable to endure the separation. Still, such tenderness condemned me to years of bussing, and the bus ride is my chief memory of high school — the smells of vinyl and diesel and toothpaste, corrugated-iron shelters out by the highway, rain-soaked farmkids, the funk of wet wool and greasy scalps, the staccato rattle of the perspex emergency window, the silent feuds and the low-gear labouring behind pig trucks, the spidery handwriting of homework done in your lap, and the heartbreaking winter dusk that greeted you as the bus rolled back across the bridge into Sawyer. The bus dropped me into a kind of limbo. Until I'd hooked up with Loonie I'd been a loner, and now that I finally had a mate I'd been turned into a dayboy. I could never expect to belong in a big town like Angelus — I was a total stranger there — but now I wouldn't even fit properly into my hometown. Everyone knew proper locals went to the Ag School, while kids who caught the bus to Angelus, dags like me and the banker's daughter, were of some indeterminate species. We were so uncertain of our new status, we never spoke to one another from one term to the next.
Angelus with its harbour and shops and railhead was a regional hub. The department store and silos and ships gave it gravity but I refused to be impressed. Even so, with the passage of time a kind of contempt for Sawyer crept up on me as I saw how tiny and static and insignificant it really was. Like my parents, it was so drab and fixed that it became embarrassing. During the school holidays, in the years before every failing dairy farm was bought up and turned into a winery or a yuppie bed-and-breakfast, people drove down from the city in their Triumphs and Mercs to look at our little timber houses and shop verandahs and the shambolic superstructure of the mill. They trickled in from their romantic drives through the karri forests and the remnant stands of giant tingle to fuel up and amuse themselves at the pub and bakery.
Every time I heard the word quaint I was caught between shame and fury.
During school term I only saw Loonie on weekends. When conditions were good we rode out to the coast to surf but the ride seemed to get longer and harder the more we did it and in the end we gave up humping our boards all the way and took up the offer to stash them at the house close by. That was how we got to know Sando, how our lives took such a turn.
We didn't actually see the big, woolly-headed bloke much the first summer that I was in high school. Whenever a big sou'west swell kicked up, we looked for him. Those were the days when the Angelus crew came out in their panel vans and utes. They were tradies and potheads who kept an eye on the weather map and took sickies every time there was surf, but the most we saw of the bloke with the flat-tray Volkswagen were the times we caught a glimpse of him far down the bay, just a silhouette paddling a surfski and trolling for early salmon.
The first time we stumped up the drive to his house the place was deserted. No dog came barrelling out of the shadows and no one emerged when we called from the bottom of the steps. We stood in the leaf-littered clearing and just stared at the joint. There was a big, fenced vegetable garden and some odd-looking outbuildings and though the house was built from local timber it was like no home I'd ever seen. It stood high off the ground on log-poles, surrounded by spacious verandahs where hammocks and mobiles and shell-chains hung twisting in the breeze. None of the wood was painted and all those timbers had gone their own shades of weathered grey and khaki. Later I thought of the house as a kind of elevated safari tent, a tent whose every pole was an old-growth log that three men could barely link arms around.
Jesus, said Loonie.
We better go, I murmured, but Loonie was already halfway up the front stairs.
Bloody hell, he said from up there. Cam, Pikelet, check it out.
I hesitated until he started gobbing over the rail. I went up full of misgivings. From the verandah you could see the ocean and the eastern cliffs toward Angelus. Closer in, the estuary was like a wide, shining gut that was fed by the river as it coiled back and back on itself into the blue-green blur of the forest beyond the town. I'd never thought of the river as an intestine but then I'd never viewed the country from this angle before and seen just how shaggy and animal its contours were. The house sat behind a snarl of karri regrowth that hid it from the coast road a couple of hundred yards below. The properly had some lumpy pasture on its eastern side, a steep and hopeless paddock that looked as if it fed only roos and rabbits. The rest of it was peppermint thicket and wattles that ran right up to the forest ridges.
Behind the French doors, the interior of the house seemed to be mostly one enormous room with rugs on the floor, a stone fireplace and a table as big as a lifeboat. Above this, set against the far gable, was a broad, open sleeping loft. There were no blinds or curtains anywhere, only a few sarongs that hung like flags from beams. Not even Loonie had the nerve to check if the doors were locked, but it looked as if the place had been empty for weeks. We gazed out again at the watertank, at the wood-slab sheds and our bikes and boards propped in the dappled light beneath the solitary marri tree. We looked for somewhere to store our boards.