by Malcolm Knox
Wouldn’t do that eh, you went. What ya think I am? Uncivilised?
FJ panted and burped and lay his head on the nose of your board.
You nodded towards the rocks. A piece of his Joe Larkin was trying to climb up the granite.
Don’t really hold together, them Larkins, you said. I’ll make you a nice new Keiths stick.
You made FJ a nice new DK. You give it to him for sixty bucks. It was bright purple and it had three cockroaches from your rat cellar glassed into the deck. It was a total shocker and he was ashamed to be seen with it, but even more afraid of paddling out there and some heavy type like Rod seeing him without it. So he had to use it.
You made him a board only you could surf.
But FJ figured it out. In time. Worked his arse off. Learnt to surf all over again from scratch. Had to, with that heap of unrideable crap you made for him.
Called it his ‘Magic Board’. Said it was the board that turned him into a bona fide shortboard surfer. He loved that board. It made him into a world champion.
Still talks about it.
See, you weren’t such a bad bloke.
You didn’t see her the rest of that summer. You scoped the bill posters for bands. All them names but no Lisa Exmire.
You tried to forget and surf. Your surfing grew a new edge. You didn’t think about what you done with her. It hurt. You didn’t tell nobody, not even Mo.
You just surfed.
They said, Dennis Keith lets his surfing do his talking for him.
Lost count of the number of ones wrote that.
Only truly accurate thing you ever saw in the surfing press.
Most of all didn’t tell Mo.
•
You done a deal with the world:
You had nothing else to say till she come back. No words. Just your writing on water.
Like it could bring her.
Stand in the shore break with stick in hand and wait for a gap, Mo up behind me in the Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange in the bog car park. My poo hot in the scrub.
Mo: reading a Tracks. Keep up with the world tour news. Brought it for my benefit. Not wanting me to think she’s watching.
Maybe she’s not. Maybe she don’t care.
A gap come. I lunge forward on me belly. Thrash out in the brown froth. Arms seem to be working. Legs move. Chop’s throwing the nose of me board all over the shop but I haven’t fallen off yet, haven’t embarrassed myself in the first ten seconds.
A chop rises up and throws the nose. I fall off.
I climb back on like a shipwrecked sailor. Who can’t swim.
Keep on paddling. No lulls: onshore chop just keeps on punching, light combinations. I keep paddling. Can’t see any calm out the back.
Chop rises, smashes down unpredictable, you never know where it’s coming from, left, right, cross-waves, backwash.
A bigger one: duck dive.
Lose me board behind me. Leash keeps it on.
Climb back on in about six movements.
Keep paddling.
This is shit. This is total shit.
Keep paddling, chop after chop after chop, awful, not remotely surfable waves, what are you doing.
Keep paddling.
After an hour or ten minutes I get out to where it’s more grey-brown than brown-white. Beyond the break, if you can call it a break.
This is shit. This is total shit.
I sit up on the board to take a breather.
I fall off.
Shit. Total shit.
I lie on the board. Wind swell throws us. I sit up again. Wobble about. Throw an arm to one side to stop falling over.
Kind of a wave?
I turn, fall on me belly, paddle.
Not strong enough. Wave doesn’t break anyway.
Now I turn. Caught inside. Duck dive. Lose the board again.
This is shit. This is total shit.
Keep paddling.
Been out here fifteen minutes and totally rooted. Can hardly breathe. Don’t dare look up to the Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange.
Paddle for a wave in. It picks me up!
The old stick is surfing but me on me belly still.
I push up . . .
Nothing.
No strength.
Noodle arms.
Wave washes me in on me belly.
I’ve bellied a wave in to shore.
I’m rooted. Rain pinging against me fat old face.
This is shit. This was total shit.
I get up to the car. Put the aviators on. Towel down.
Mo makes like she hasn’t stopped reading her Tracks.
Ready to go home then love? she says.
I don’t say a word. Wrap the towel round me and shove the stick between the seats.
When we are passing the bush where my poor poor chopper rests in peace, I go:
Have to do that again soon.
Mo changes gear from third down to first and pulls up at the causeway. Her face so old it has red spiders in her cheeks.
Bells at Easter, she goes. Big comeback, they won’t know what hit them.
I don’t say nothing.
Or, she goes, not looking at me, letting her mouth do the talking, wait till December. Hawaii. Triple Crown.
My Mo. Man, if that woman had surfed she’d of cleared the water.
I go:
Can we go to church now?
Mo says, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, Have to get you showered and changed first.
She drives us back through the toy roundabouts into the garage. We go up the stairs. I don’t grab the rail. Security grille makes me nervous. I blurt out:
I was the best in the world Mo.
Me and Mo standing in the little hallway area where the diagonals are all wrong for me, all wrong, I can’t stand still. Push the aviators up my nose (still there).
Mo doesn’t let her face break.
Go and have yer shower, get changed and we’ll go to church. We’ll get a Splice afterwards. It’s cold, I don’t want ya getting sick.
She goes off with her Tracks rolled up in her hand like a torch.
I wonder if I said it, or thought it.
Mo don’t give me no clues neither way.
Until we’re about to head inside St Barnabas and she whispers:
Den?
Yeah?
Look.
I follow her eyes and we’re scoping the old J-man, the old surf dog overlooking the waves from his high possie, arms outstretched, feet pinned together, crown of thorns, and a look on his face like it’s onshore slop third day in a row.
Thirty years, Mo goes, looking at the J-man but talking to you, and still to this day none of them surfing within a bull’s roar of you.
Now she looks at you direct. You look away. Aviators still there.
Den, and they thought three days was a miracle! What’re they gunna say when the resurrection comes after thirty years?
And leads me elbow down the aisle to the front pews, and I get a flash: I’m the invalid old man and she’s the daughter gone crazy looking after me.
End of the sixties, the Goldie becoming an interesting place and not in a good way. More tower blocks mushrooming at Surfers. Developers cruising Coolie, licking their chops at all that fibro. They ate fibro and shat out bricks and concrete. Turned one storey into ten, must of thought they were Gawd. Queensland politicians squiring them in govt cars. Deals done, cut taxes, encourage investment. One winter, a row of Queenslanders was knocked down at Rainbow Bay and a block of brand new brick holiday units got bunged up in a month. American-style, hotel motel. Parking lot behind it. Interesting times.
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nbsp; You sit out in the waves and scope the building site. Half the surfers round that time working as brickies’ labourers.
Something coming.
But you DK was coming. Father Aplin called you the Messiah after you won the state opens in ’68. You would live forever.
The awe in their faces.
Your hands like buckets like a waterwheel scooping gallons, paddling away from the pack to where the next set was going to break.
Inside a barrel.
Where they couldn’t see you.
Your best year then. Dennis Keith, eighteen, self-made businessman, self-governing nation. Full-time surfer and shaper, part-time school student. Keiths Surf Boards—now known as KSB—off its head. Costs nil. Revenues growing. This was the Gold Coast, the new California: pineapples, bananas, straw hats. Drive-ins, drive-throughs. Dennis shaping all night while Rod partied upstairs. Mo off at the Rissole Club handing out change. Then in the morning, Dennis took the new board out and everyone else had to wait till he’d had his go, caught the best of the dawn glass-off.
Then some muesli and a lie-down, then maybe school. But not much strain before the afternoon surf.
Mo peeling prawns and working night shifts at the hospital. Lugging buckets of old people’s poo.
Mo hardly ever had time to come watch him surf connesses. But one day she’s standing there at D-Bah in the rain under her umbrella, big broad-shouldered lady the only one on the sand watching. Crowd of one. The wind turned, the sun arrived. He surfed his brain out, won easy in three-footers combed straight as an altar boy’s hair.
When he come in but, Mo wasn’t smiling.
She goes:
Ya should be surfing in rubbish waves like it was earlier, these nice ones ain’t no good for ya. Nobody ever gets good in perfect waves.
Took the wind out of his sails. But while they walked home together, Mo first, DK trailing behind her his board under his arm, he thought about it. Not another word spoken between them but he knew she was right. Without knowing a thing about it, Mo knew everything.
But she didn’t know how good Keiths Surf Boards was doing.
That Christmas, she said she buy him a brand new Joe Larkin. She thought he’d dig a new board, instead of the cut-downs and crack-ups and waterlogged loggers he drug in and rebirthed downstairs.
She cut a deal. She gave him a choice. She give him a new Larkin surfboard if he:
Passed his leaving exams.
Got a job. Any job.
Went to church with her now and then.
Mo, she was good to him. Held out her hand to shake on the deal.
Dennis wouldn’t come at it.
Not even for your old Mo? Mo said. Eyes wetter than the rest of her.
Dennis said nothing.
Instead went down the rat cellar and took some cash out of the old resin tin where he kept the new $$$ all rolled up and neat. Cycled to the bank. Left his chopper and fresh experiment, a Coolite with glassed-in fins, on the footpath. Six foot that day, cranking at Kirra but wild and woolly with onshores. Went into the bank, asked the manager could he pay the mortgage on Shaga. The bank manager looked at this kid with dark blond hair down past his shoulders, two-surf-a-day tan, hands like buckets, holey T-shirt, reek of chemicals. Would of thought twice about his sea-green eyes except for the aviators.
Dennis pushed them up his nose. Still there.
Bank manager took his cash. It come to two weeks of the mortgage.
Then Dennis cycled to church and told Father Aplin he wanted to enrol in youth leadership group.
Father Aplin scratched his nose and patted down his comb-over and winced: Swell’s gunna have more south in it on Sunday, offshores, clean it right up.
Dennis: I’ll start the Sunday after then.
Father Aplin: Deal.
Dennis went back outside, good works done, ready to take on wild Kirra. But the glass has melted and eaten away the foam of the Coolite. Some reaction between resin and Coolite foam. All that’s there next to his chopper is half a board and a pile of evil chemicals bubbling on the footpath.
Father A standing next to him. No good deed goes unpunished, Den.
You just shook your head, staring at what was left of your board.
I thought God’d look after me after all I done.
You tried to glass fins into a Coolite for six-foot Kirra? Father A give you a look like you got shit for brains and there isn’t much any God can do about that.
You shrug one shoulder. We’re just battlers, Father A. Make do with what we can. I thought God was meant to respect that. He’s meant to be on my side eh?
Father A looked at the melted board and give a sniff. You thought you could go out on that? In six-foot Kirra? What makes you think God’s sending you a bad sign?
Once he walked off you kind of got what he was saying.
So Mo had her Christmas present for that year. Dennis wouldn’t let her get him the Larkin surfboard.
Said his KSBs were better anyway.
•
Joe Larkin offered him his boards to ride for free, as advertising. Joe wanted the famous DK to be seen on his sticks.
DK took them out and sold them instead.
Had them all spooked in the comps. Whenever he needed a wave he seemed to get one, no matter where he was sitting he was right spot right time.
They said he had a magical connection with the sea . . .
Yeah . . .
The Big Secret . . .
It happened so often, when he looked like he was out of the conness, this wave come right at the end, the perfect peeler peaking just where he was sitting, they were all spooked said he could murmur what he needed into the ocean’s ear . . .
When the truth was, he was always ready. Every moment, every second. Ready for the wave to come. Always. Not an instant excepted. Ready.
Nobody did ask.
They preferred to believe he had The Secret.
Even the ones he beat.
They preferred to believe in The Great DK.
Even them. Most of all them. Made them feel better about losing.
There was weekend comps at the different points: Snapper, Greenmount, Kirra, Burleigh. You were only allowed to join one boardriders’ club, cos they competed against each other. He joined Snapper. Then he joined Greenmount. Then he joined Kirra. Kirra was the best: had the most connesses. He went up and down the coast surfing for Kirra.
Zone championships, he come second to Peter Drouyn, grown man, national open champ. DK brought the trophy home: gold-painted plastic man on a board, on a wave. Couldn’t wait to tell Mo.
Mo, Mo, look what I won!
Mo looked at the trophy which already had bits of gold paint coming off it.
Second, eh?
Yeah Mo, second in the zone! Second to the Australian open champion!
She walked up and took his face in her hands.
Nobody remembers who come second, love. Nobody. Not a sausage.
You stared at her till you fell in her bloodshot green eyes and drowned.
Then Mo smiled and ruffled your hair. Since you stopped having nightmares, stayed in your own room, you didn’t know as good as before where you stood with her. Like where she was coming from eh.
Just make sure ya come first next time, eh?
Mo?
Yeah, love?
I got enough money downstairs so ya don’t have to peel no more prawns.
When he wasn’t surfing he was shaping: for himself, for Chook Draper at Drape’s Shapes. They never seen anyone could take a blank and knock it into a finished stick so fast. He was a blur. Give him a hunk of wood, he saw the board move in the wave. Something programmed inside of him.
His hand was the wave. His brain the God.
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br /> Sometimes overdone it: shaved blanks so thin they had to be thrown out. Glassed boards so thick they wouldn’t flex.
His designs were so special, when anyone come in his bay he’d stop working and hide his things.
It got so he rigged a shower curtain round his bay.
Then hid his stuff when he left.
No-one could see.
No-one.
Paid half of Mo’s mortgage. Said he’d do her a deal:
Ya stop working peeling prawns, I’ll win a state championship for ya.
I dunno love, it’s a nice thought but them conness judges, they got it in for you and it won’t be your fault if you don’t . . .
He pushed his aviators up his nose. Still there.
Don’t argue Mo. It’s done.
Mo was able to quit her job peeling prawns. But she didn’t come home more. She just worked more hours carting poo at the hospital and handing out change at Funland and the Rissole.
•
No Mo, no her. Just winning comps in the day and Rod’s crew at night.
You tried alcohol and it made you sick, you vomited and woke up with a headache and worst of all couldn’t surf.
But the dope was instant love:
Your fourth love.
It slowed you down, it helped you concentrate and appreciate the music on the stereo or the flower in the palm of your hand. Normally you were racing, too much to do, too little time . . . But when you smoked weed that ball of nerves in your stomach went all caramel.
First time you smoked it, you realised that buzzing ball had been in your stomach your whole life. And now you made it warm and calm.
Mo must of had that buzzing ball too. For some reason that thought come to you.
This was another thing: the thoughts that come to you. The way you’d analyse them and see where they come from and even though you forget what you were saying you could remember all the thoughts in a line-up that led up to that point, so you could go back and fetch it again.
Rod and the others, on the green they laughed to break the mouth and danced and cacked themselves silly. If one of his mates passed out from smoking too much, Rod load him into a wheelbarrow, glue his eyes shut with board resin, and dump him in the bone yard behind Shaga. There was this one kid who when he woke up couldn’t see anything and thought he was dead, in the cemetery. Rod and that pissed themself.
