Beneath the house was a kind of wood-louvred undercroft stacked with surfboards and wave-skis and a kayak. The ground was leafy underfoot and there was a cave smell about everything. Further in stood a weights bench and dumbbells, a stool or two and a long worktable neatly piled with tools and papers and sound cassettes.
Far out, said Loonie. This is bloody paradise.
We stood openmouthed before the racks of boards. There was every type and shape and vintage, some with fins like scythes and others with twin keels. One board, which had to be twelve feet long, was made of solid wood. Beside it, propped against the wall and made of something like the same stuff, was a didjeridu with such a twist in the shaft it looked like a hollow tree root.
Don't touch anything, I said, expecting someone to arrive at any moment. Let's just get our boards and stick em somewhere and rack off.
Don't be so uptight, Pikelet. The bloke said it was okay.
To leave our boards here, I said. Not to hang around.
Loonie laughed at my anxious propriety, but he helped me stow our boards beneath the worktable and a few minutes later we were bouncing down the track half afraid and half hoping the VW would come wallowing up to intercept us. But nobody came. We rode back into Sawyer with a glow on, as though by simply having stashed our boards beneath such a house, we'd moved up in the world.
Honking away on my old didj, I think about the one I first saw nestled against the boards under that big hippy house. I hardly knew what it was. Now the wind comes through me in circles, like a memory, one breath, without pause, hot and long. It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about. I consider the startled look on the faces of my girls in the moments after each of them was born and suctioned and forced to draw air in for the first time. I've done the job myself on more than one occasion, pulled over on the side of an ill-lit street, improvising in someone's driveway. Always the same puzzled look, the rude shock of respiration, as though the child's drawn in a gutful of fire. Yet within a moment or two the whole procedure is normalized, automatic. In a whole lifetime you might rarely give it another thought. Until you have your first asthma attack or come upon some stranger trying to drag air into himself with such effort that the stuff could be as thick and heavy as honey. Or you may be like me and think about breathing often enough for people to have their doubts about you.
I've been thinking about the enigma of respiration as long as I can remember, since I was old enough to be aware of the old man coming home with his stink of grease and sweat and wood-sap at the end of another day at the mill. Every weekday evening after he washed his face and hands he'd settle at the table and look about with eyes bloodshot from sawdust while Mum whacked the handle of the oven with a length of split karri and drew out whatever she'd been baking or roasting or warming while we waited for him. Mostly we ate in silence. Afterwards I'd go to my room to do my homework and when I came back later to watch a bit of TV, the old man'd still be there, asleep in his chair, with the wireless on softly. Mum and I would wash the dishes before she helped him to bed, and I'd sit down for an hour in front of the box.
Long before I even turned in I'd hear him begin to snore, but it was later, in the quiet of the night, when he really got going. I don't know how my mother endured it, how she ever slept at all, for there were nights when I lay completely and hopelessly awake while he sawed away at the other end of the house. The noise wasn't the worst of it. It was the pauses that really got to me. When he fell silent I'd lie there waiting, forced to listen to my own breathing which was so steady and involuntary. More than once since then I've wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. It's easy for an old man to look back and see the obvious, how wasted youth and health and safety are on the young who spurn such things, to be dismayed by the risks you took, but as a youth you do sense that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others.
Loonie and I acted out the impulse without thinking, for dumb larks. We held our breaths and counted. We timed ourselves in the river and the ocean, in the old man's shed or in the broken autumn light of the forest floor. It takes quite some concentration and willpower to defy the logic of your own body, to take yourself to the shimmering edge. It seems bizarre, looking back, to realize just how hard we worked at this. We were good at it and in our own minds it's what set us apart from everyone else.
Deep diving and breath-holding against the clock seemed a more impressive endeavour than the game played by boys at the Ag School. Loonie told me how one kid would spend a minute or so hyperventilating until he was dizzy and when he was seeing spots a mate would hug him from behind so hard and so suddenly that all the air was crushed from his chest. Often as not, the kid simply blacked out and fell to the ground. Some puked and one even had convulsions, though Loonie suspected faking. Loonie and I tried it a few times. When he flat-out fainted I went into a panic. He came to with a strange moan and a stupid look on his face. Then he did it to me and I went down with a curious tunnel vision and the whole frame of my consciousness seemed to melt at the edges before giving way entirely. Afterwards I puked a little and laughed but I felt like an Ag School idiot and wasn't keen to repeat the experience. The attraction was plain enough — it was cheap weirdness in the days before we knew about drugs — but only later did I understand the physiology of it.
It was some years before I realized that when the old man paused mid-snore on those nights back in Sawyer and I lay there for long seconds in a mixture of relief and anticipation, he'd done more than simply stop snoring. He'd actually stopped breathing. At the end of those silences he'd let out a kind of braying gasp, like a man who'd just seen a ghost — perhaps the ghost of himself — and this was the sound of his body yanking him back to the surface from the limbo of apnoea, hauling him back to life itself. Mum must have heard dead-halts like this night after night for decades. How did she bear it, lying beside him, abandoned, listening for his return?
Next time we went to the log house, the VW was there in the shade of the marri tree and the red kelpie shot out from beneath the stairs. I was fending the mutt off when a woman came out onto the verandah above us.
You boys take a wrong turn?
Just came to get our boards, said Loonie.
Duke! she yelled at the dog. Get down, goddammit.
The dog took one last lick and desisted, and the woman, who looked to be in her twenties, squinted doubtfully at us. She had ropy white plaits and an American accent.
They're under the house, I said.
Are they, now?
Red and green, I said. A Jacko and a Hawke.
Bloke said we could, said Loonie.
She sighed and stared at us another moment before coming barefoot down the stairs. She held the handrail as though she might fall. She wore jeans and a tee-shirt that said FREESTYLIN: WATCH ME FLY.
You better show me, she said with a tone of weary scepticism.
We followed her into the cave-like undercroft to point out our modest craft beneath the bench, and as we drew them out their dings and welts and browning contusions seemed magnified. They were sorry bits of junk but they were clearly ours.