Free Tim Winton by Breath Page B

said Sando indulgently.
    Orright for you. You got plenty of shots to prove what you done.
    Honolua Bay, man. Fuckin A.
    All that's just horseshit, said Sando. It's wallpaper.
    Easy for you to say.
    Sando was quiet for a moment. You'll learn, he said in the end.
    Loonie beat his chest there in the confines of the Kombi cab.
    Learn? Mate, I bloody know]
    I laughed but Sando was unmoved.
    Son, he said. Eventually there's just you and it. You're too busy stayin alive to give a damn about who's watchin.
    Mate, said Loonie, straining to maintain his bravado. I don't know what language you're talkin.
    You'll be out there, thinkin: am I gunna die? Am I fit enough for this? Do I know what I'm doin? Am I solid? Or am I just. . . ordinary?
    I stared, breathless, through the broken light of trees.
    That's what you deal with in the end, said Sando. When it's gnarly.
    How does it feel? I murmured.
    How does what feel?
    When it's that serious.
    You'll find out.
    Like, I mean, twenty feet, said Loonie subdued now.
    Well, you're glad there's no stupid photo. When you make it, when you're still alive and standin at the end, you get this tingly electric rush. You feel alive, completely awake and in your body.
    Man, it's like you've felt the hand of God. The rest of it's just sport'n recreation, mate. Give me the hand of God any day.
    Shoulder to shoulder in the cab, Loonie and I exchanged furtive looks. There was something of the classroom about Sando, the stink of chalk on him when he got going, but my mind was racing. I'd already begun to pose those questions to myself and feel the undertow of their logic. Was I serious? Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? I'll bet my life that despite his scorn Loonie was doing likewise. We didn't know it yet, but we'd already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. Our minds had already gone out to meet it and we'd left the ordinary in our wake.

I
    DID MY SHARE of whining when the new school year began, but in truth I didn't really mind going back. There was no more swell that summer, no opportunity to test myself any further, and the days began to hang heavy. Within a week of the term commencing, I rediscovered the aisles and recesses of the Angelus school library. There was nothing like it in Sawyer and the only other collection of books I'd seen was out at Sando's. During my first year of high school I'd turned to reading as a kind of refuge, but that second year it became a pleasure in its own right.
    I started with Jack London because I recognized the name from Sando's shelves. After I saw Gregory Peck gimping across the poop deck on telly I tried Moby Dick, though I can't say I got far. I found books on Mawson and Shackleton and Scott. I read accounts of Amundsen's race south against the English and the ruthlessness that made all the difference. I tried to imagine the Norwegian eating the very dogs that hauled him to the Pole - something harsh and bracing about the idea appealed to me. I read about British commandos, the French Resistance, about the specialized task of bomb disposal. I found Cousteau and then mariner-authors who recreated the voyages of the ancients in craft of leather and bamboo. I read about Houdini and men who had themselves shot from cannons or tipped in barrels over Niagara Falls. I fed on lives that were not at all ordinary, about men who in normal domestic circumstances might be viewed as strange, reckless, unbalanced.
    When I failed to get more than sixteen pages into The Seven Pillars of Wisdom I thought the failure was mine.
    It was there in the stacks that I met the girl who decided without consultation that I was her boyfriend. She was a farm girl from further out east and she boarded at the dreaded hostel.
    Like me, she came to the library to escape, but she was already bookish. Her name was Queen ie. She was handsome and wheat haired, with the slightly