by Malcolm Knox
Rod.
Mr Paterson.
Tink.
FJ.
Everyone else.
The butchers.
The plumbers.
The chippies.
The newsagent.
Chook Draper of Drape’s Shapes.
Michael Peterson, the local choir boy.
Everyone was out there, except Father A.
And her.
You sliced through them like Alexander the Fricken Great through a guard of honour.
They didn’t know where you come from.
The wonder.
Paddling over the shoulder, their faces on you.
Rod was the only one who stopped paddling.
Rod stopped paddling and sit up on his board and raised his arms in two fists above his head and screamed:
Yeeeuuuuuuuuuwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!
You drop in the pocket and bottom turn up to the lip.
The last you saw of Rod is him getting sucked over the falls and nailed by that lip—
—cos he stopped paddling to watch you go through.
The wave went on and on.
As it entered the bay it turned into a normal wave, like others you caught, like something out of a machine. You must of ridden it, turning up, turning down, turning up, turning down, your knees and thighs turning to fire, but you don’t remember that.
You just remember the beginning when you come out from behind the black granite when you cut through that guard of honour . . .
It could be done.
Yeah . . .
You could take off in deep behind the lava rock.
They said Father A was still on the beach that day, getting ready to come out. He been late cos he given up on praying for waves and was running a normal Mass. Then he drops the chasuble when he heard the sets come in and now he was on the sand getting rubbered up.
When he saw you come out from behind the black granite, they said he rolled around on the sand half mad, half laughing his head off and gibbering, Miracle! Miracle! Nobody does that! It’s a miracle!
They said.
Your first thought, once you flicked off the wave, was the same first thought whenever you got a real real real good one:
You wanted to finish.
You wanted to take that wave up onto the hill and show it to her cupped in your hands, just look at it, look at it with love and stop it melting away.
It was so good, all you wanted to do was finish.
Prolong that.
With her.
•
Your second thought was the opposite. Took over the first:
Only way to prolong the feeling was to do it again.
You paddled back out behind the granite.
You wrote words for her on the waves. Poems. Songs.
You wouldn’t look up see was she watching.
You surfed two hours, only caught eight or nine waves, every one a song you wrote for her.
You run back up Greenmount Hill.
See if she’d read your music.
She wasn’t there.
She wasn’t there.
She wasn’t there.
Summer’s almost went. The BFO’s went, with her sly deposits. The tourists went.
Only dragging Mo out on our morning drives if the conditions are promising:
Rain, wind, chop, onshore, run-off pollution.
They’re the only days we’ll try the secret spots now.
Then it happens. Driving rain against the windows, against the diagonals in the steel door grille, rain that springs a leak in the bathroom. Devil wind is onshore, due east. Been raining all night so the stormwater drains are gushers.
Yeah . . .
Stand in my sleeping boardies and my sleeping T-shirt with my aviators on and I push them up my nose (they’re still there) and I’ve washed my hands and mixed a bowl of muesli and milk and ready now to sit at the head of the melamine table and Mo walks into the kitchen and:
‘You got a big smile on your mug this morning my boy.’
You nod. You sit down and start in on your muesli. You feel the short-period wind chop in your thighs, in your waters . . .
‘Today the day?’
You nod. Your mouth is full.
‘Taken your green and your white? Your blue?’
You nod. Your mouth runneth over.
‘You’re the champion of the world, Den. Just remember that.’
Into the Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange, the DK gun between you, no second or fourth, out through the toy roundabouts but no smell of planted flowers today, the rain and the wind drive too hard.
Mouth opens and closes round the driveways. Out of town, over the causeway to The Other Side. Down past the bush where your poor poor chopper lives, Rest in Peace. Turn off the highway onto a bush track turned to glue. Your Mo handling the Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange like a pro rally ace. So proud of her you could cry. The buzzing ball in your stomach is raging. You need to do a poo. You will do a poo in the bushes.
You get there. Mo pulls up in the sandy parking area. It’s a bog with all the rain.
The secret spot where someone is always out.
The wind belts in from the east. The waves are choppy, disorganised, all over the shop. There’s brown water running off into a big stinking slick wrapping round the point. The rip is sweeping out along the rocks. The tide is all wrong. There is so much rain you can’t see far beyond the point but you can see far enough.
You turn your head hard away from Mo. You love her too much.
‘Nobody out today, Mo.’
Summer ’68–69, you was cooking. After the Big Flat was the Big Summer —cyclones queuing up in the Coral Sea churning out swell event after swell event. It was all-time out there.
This was the sixties and you pretty much declared yourself a self-governing nation. You could do that in them days. You was good at maths, pure natural genius at business. You done ding repairs for fifty cents. You sold your rebirthed boards to groms on hire purchase, a dollar a week for fifty weeks. You repo them when they missed a payment. Quick smart. Keiths Surf Boards was ruthless. Businesslike.
You didn’t need to enforce payments. Everyone knew who you were. Seen you out in the water. Everyone talk about DK.
When groms couldn’t pay—and we know this for sure, cos we know their families, we’d eaten steak and chops at their houses, we know who they were—when they deadset couldn’t pay, we put them to work in the rat cellar: the dirty work, the sanding and planing and glassing. They was getting their education. You never showed them no designs or shared your ideas. That was old Chook Draper’s mistake. You kept tight-lipped. Instead you broke up the production line so one kid did one part of the job: some sanding, some planing, some glassing. And you kept control of the big picture. Most of all the designs.
You never done no drawings.
Kept the drawings in your head.
Ran the tests, experiments, stored the results and the learnings, all in your head.
Pure natural genius.
So businesslike, you figured out you could avoid paying tax if you sponsored a surfer with your profits—so you come upon the idea of sponsoring yourself! Keiths Surf Boards paid DK twenty bucks a month to surf their boards. You couldn’t believe someone pay you to surf! You couldn’t believe you could pay you to surf! Right on! Then you upped your retainer to twenty bucks a week, cos that was what Wayne Lynch was getting. You were up there!
There was this conness going on down at Newcastle, New South Wales juniors or something, and you was already going as the Queensland junior champion and marquee surfer for Keiths Surf Boards, but Rod wasn’t. Meanwhile Tink at school was
organising these Casual Clothes Days, where everyone bring in 20c to fund him going to Newcastle on the bus and stay the night in a motel. You couldn’t believe it, how low the guy would go when his parents could of afforded to probably buy the motel if they wanted. You saw the whole racket as organised theft.
One day Kinky Tinky come cycling down the hill at Greenmount his red hair shining and a great big jingle, like he had fifty bucks worth of 20c pieces in his schoolbag. He just ripped off the entire school. You couldn’t stand for it. Rod set up an ambush, cast a fishing line across the road and took Tink out. It was like you were the Kelly Gang, Robin Hood and his merry men, bailing him up.
Hand over yer cash ya thief!
Tinky’s mouth flapping away.
We’re robbing the rich and giving to the poor! Rod bellowed.
Tink handed over the money, grizzling.
Turned out Rod was able to go to the Newcastle conness with you, late entry. Mo was gunna come down with you when it was only you, but now Rod was in it she said she wouldn’t be bothered. Rod was spewing but got a big bag of mull for the trip, helped him over his disappointment. He didn’t do no good in the event but you won it and these things are always best when you can share your victory with your fam.
Ooh yeah, you were cooking in the business world.
You put in new electrical wiring, laid down tarps on the earth floor of the rat cellar so it wouldn’t pile too high with glass dust. Basil sit and watch while you relaid the lino upstairs, above your shaping bay, so glass dust won’t blow up through the floorboards. You accept payment in resin, in blanks, in old loggers fallen off the back of a truck . . . You reinvest all your earnings in the business. Keiths Surf Boards. You liked that name now, it’d grew on you. Three words better than two.
You changed the scroty logo into something more elegant, classical.
There was this shape you seen somewhere—cool shape, bit like a spinning firecracker inside a circle. You got Rod to put it on your board and you took it out a few times till Father Aplin saw you out the back pulling a big sweeping cutback and he absolutely did his nana.
Mate, you’ve got to get that off your board.
Too cool for school eh! You and your big mouth.
Father Aplin shook his head, looking real sad and old.
You couldn’t work it out. You hadn’t ripped off someone else’s logo had you?
Finally Father A got his head standing still long enough to say:
What on earth possessed you to put a swastika on your board?
A what sticker? you said.
You had no idea. You just seen it somewhere. You didn’t want to cause offence. Once Father Aplin explained, you were happy to change it again, though Rod was a bit whingey. The painting and glassing had took him all day.
You didn’t want to cause offence.
You were smart as Einstein. But you didn’t pay attention in history.
You then did ‘DK’ in a Superman shield.
More like it.
Other ones followed you out behind the black lava rock, watched you taking off there. Many tried. Not many succeeded. The ones succeeded, you targeted them, shadowed them, snaked them . . .
You wouldn’t drop in on them, not there, be as good as killing them, they come off a deep wave in behind and end up mincemeat on the granite. Though it might net you a new board to take back to Keiths Surf Boards. Tempting, but no, no dropping in there.
There was rules.
But you paddle about and make them think you was going to. You surfed full-on, hassling and snaking, like every session was the final of a conness and you needed the next wave to win and’d take it at any cost.
If they saw you, they be so scared you was gunna drop in on them they pull back and leave the wave for you.
All working nicely now.
•
You done your own design testing. You take a new board out for an hour and ride a few waves and bring it back home and narrow down the rail or carve up the tail or change the fin position or glass in a new fin . . . Then you cycle back to the beach and paddle out on it again, test it again.
No-one in the whole world was testing surfboards the way you were. You were ahead of the whole wide world.
Yeah . . .
At age eighteen.
Not that you knew that.
Not that you cared.
And you made sure you never looked for her, never asked about her—
You made sure nobody saw you looking for her, thinking about her—
You kept riding and making and designing and making and riding and refining. Loggers was designed for grown men. Groms surfed cut-downs, butchered versions of their dads’ boards. But you developed whole new designs that could come down shorter. So how short could you make it? Six ten? Six six?
Right down to six three or six four?
How short?
You went below six foot. Rode all right.
You went down to five eight.
Five seven.
Five six.
You and Rod cut a couple of boards at four eleven, with massive plywood raked fins.
You took your tiny cut-downs out to Big Kirra one day and got smashed, totalled, Rod come in and cried, he thought he was gunna drown.
Maybe under five foot was too short.
It wasn’t just length. You made them fat, you made them sleek, you made them thick, you made them toothpick-thin. You made the rails boxy and round and razor-sharp. You cut pin tails and round tails and swallow tails and square tails, and every tail in between. You used a long fin, a short fin, a hard fin, a whippy fin, you moved the fin position up and down the tail. You even tried a central fin. You tried flexible fins copied from a tuna’s tail, thought about Father Aplin and his gibberish about hydrodynamics and the energy stored by fish. Suddenly it was making sense.
You tried two fins then three, but they didn’t give the same as a single fin so you dumped that idea. More than one fin, it’d never catch on.
Your boards were mostly shit but. For the clients. You tested them for yourself, with your skills, and yeah they worked good for you. But then you hand it to its owner, and he’d look at it like it had come from Mars, and he take it out and not be able to paddle it, not be able to stand up on it, not be able to do anything with it but bring it back to you and ask for a trade-in.
Turned out to be a good business decision, earnt you a bulk on trade-ins. Then you get your hands on the unsurfable surfboard, ride it a bit yourself, then turn it into something else you can sell.
Sweet.
Frank Johnson didn’t need to buy his boards from you. FJ’s family had money, heaps of coin for pies, drinks and lollies at Bob’s. FJ was a golden boy. Golden hair, golden nuts, rainbow up his arse. When he been in the surf lifesaving club, FJ saved someone and told the local paper, which was totally bad form. He’d went in after an American tourist’s kid who sunk to the bottom of Rainbow Bay, helped drag the kid out, then pumped the whole heart-massage mouth-to-mouth jag even though the kid’s face was blue and purple, and FJ they said was going bananas screaming at everyone, screaming at the kid to Come back! Come back! And everyone given up the ghost but FJ the hero still pumping away, the kid was the same age as us and Frank must of seen something scary in him lying dead there, and finally the kid threw up into FJ’s mouth. He was alive eh. But totally gross, disgusting. Imagine someone vomiting in your mouth, someone you didn’t even know. Sure, everyone said how brave and super-duper FJ was but you never got over it. They gave FJ a bravery award but you could smell American ralph on his breath.
FJ, bona fide golden boy of the Gold Coast. He was a publicity machine before they invented publicity. After he won the local juniors (you were a month over-age, but free surfed that day and would of smashed him), FJ’s mum and dad bought him a boar
d from Joe Larkin up the coast. Keiths Surf Boards boards sold for fifty bucks. A Joe Larkin sell for three hundred. Top of the line. FJ’s had ‘FJ’ painted into the glass.
Wow, Rod said as you sat out the back. Must be hot shit that FJ, he’s got his own name on his Joe Larkin board!
You wanted a Joe Larkin with ‘DK’ on it. To go with all your DKs with ‘DK’ on them. Suddenly they didn’t count for much.
Even though all the kids had ‘DK’ on their Keith boards, you wanted a Joe Larkin with ‘DK’ on it.
Or better, you wanted FJ to surf a DK.
So you paddled round behind the black granite on a day when it wasn’t breaking right, it was sucky up too close behind the rocks. FJ newly crowned local junior champ on his brand new Joe Larkin stick paddled round with you.
A set come. You steamed in, your big bucket hands.
It reared up close to the rocks. You pulled off it.
FJ looked at you. His golden skin, his golden hair, his pearly teeth. You looked at him, shrugged.
Better paddle back in the bay where it’s safe, champ, you said.
FJ noticed:
Champ.
Touch of glimmer come off him.
Bit of a wait for the next set, but when it come FJ paddled like mad to get inside you. You pretended to race him, but let him get in there.
He was right in behind the granite lava rock, turning and paddling into the wave.
You got out on the shoulder and started paddling like a maniac.
Just as FJ was on his feet, he saw you on the shoulder outside him, cutting him off.
He thought you were about to drop in on him.
You didn’t. But you paddled hard enough, before pulling off, that you distracted him.
Wasn’t a wave to mess with.
FJ got out of it sweet. Kept his life at least.
Not his Larkin board, his ‘FJ’.
Shame, you said when he swum out after a nasty little spell in the impact zone on the black granite. He was heaving breaths, dry-spewing, doing his best to not cry from the stress of it. He freestyled over and hung on the nose of your board.
Thought you were dropping in on me, he panted.
