The Life

by Malcolm Knox

  She swim up to you and popped jiggling out the water.

  Oh my God, she said. Clapped her hand over her mouth, like something really bad had happened but was too funny to tell.

  What?

  Den, you’re all . . . blue . . .

  You don’t know what happened or what you looked like but Lisa swore you must of lost all the oxygen out of your bloodstream or something . . .

  . . . yeah . . .

  But anyway yous got it together and romped round the sandhills finding blue things: berries, flowers, chip packets. The sky. The sea. It was all blue.

  Nineteen seventy.

  Lisa loved mushies and loved tripping. It was a bit much for you, at least you enjoyed it with her but it didn’t help your surfing. It wasn’t like dope, which focused you. Acid and mushies sent you into spirals of thoughts and laughter and mazes and puzzles and if you went surfing on it you didn’t find the surf all that interesting. You’d read Nat saying surfing on acid, he saw new colours in the water, like wearing polarised sunglasses, or rainbow oil patterns in the waves, surfing on acid was the best thing he done in his whole life, like carving curves on clouds, but you couldn’t see it. You gobble some mushies with Lisa and go paddle out the back and sit staring at the patterns of the clouds in the sky or dive off your board and swim round looking at your hand and the way the sunlight reflected off it underwater. Inside your head it was calm and ordinary, everyday. Quiet.

  That sort of thing. You was the only person you heard of who said LSD and mushies made you normal.

  But you was only interested in gear if it improved your surfing.

  You tried whiz which was all round Coolie those years and that didn’t agree with you too good. It sped you up too fast and you get paranoid and agitated. You had to agree to disagree with Lisa on whiz. She loved it. Said it was her fave. But no, yeah, for you, speed too zippy and acid too spacey. What you liked was mull.

  When Lisa come to bed on whiz, she went funny on you—like she wasn’t into cuddling, more like wrestling and then edgier, like real cage fighting. Yous were mucking round this one night and you were laughing along and kidding round and all of a sudden you got this clout on your ear and your head was ringing like you been wiped out bottom of a six-foot wave with a board in your head.

  ‘What’s that for?’ you go, stopping to rub your ear which is throbbing like a gong.

  Then she went you again—smack! Right hook across the jaw.

  ‘Oi!’

  She had this look of devil in her, crawling round the bed on all fours. Dimple right down to the bone. Whizzy eyes.

  ‘Carn,’ she goes. ‘Show us what yer made of, DK.’

  Then she come up and cuddle your head against her chest, and while you’re taking a deep breath there’s this thump again and you’re seeing stars, she’s crow-pecked you on the top of your head.

  ‘Sthat for?’ You felt like crying. It really hurt.

  ‘Carn,’ she goes again. She’s spoiling for a fight. Not that you got nothing to fight over. She’s just whizzy and when she’s like that she only wants to root after you’ve fooled a bit, usually it’s tumbling cuddles, this time it’s got to go a bit harder, got to see some bruises or blood running. Like she gets off on it. All she wants is for you to belt her, give her a black eye, then she’ll go off like a firecracker.

  ‘Nah.’ You rubbed all the places your head hurt. ‘Not into that.’

  Lisa sort of accepted it, pretended not to be too disappointed in you. But you could tell she was. Cos every time she got too whizzy and come to bed, she’d sneak in a bit of a whack or a hard pinch or a bite, like she’s goading you into full-bore pain, see if you’ll be in it, and but you won’t be in it. It’s not you. And when she gets that message, some of the air goes out of her.

  Only when she was over-whizzed but. Other times she was normal.

  •

  What Rod liked was smack. It broke Mo’s heart when she found him passed out in his room, needle at his bedside baggie on his drawer. He tried to deny it, but Mo worked in hospitals, almost a nurse, she wasn’t swallowing his story that he become a diabetic and was injecting insulin.

  One night you were up late with Rod and Lisa, and Bas come in the kitchen. Beagle blown up to twice his size and lumpy like he been stuffed with potatoes. His eyes black and the size of dishes, and pissing uncontrollable. Skating round the lino floor like it was ice.

  Fark, said Rod who was on his smack that night.

  Fark, said DK who was stoned on weed.

  Oh my Gawd, racing round the kitchen cleaning up was Lisa who was on the whiz.

  Yous couldn’t get Bas to drink or calm down and yous didn’t know what it was so Lisa ring a vet. Told the bloke yous had a freaking beagle who was freaking out. Yous took him in and left him overnight. When yous got back home, yous all had to have a dose to settle. Lisa needed a doob to take the edge off her speed downer. You were boiling a pot of tea when Rod come in the kitchen and goes:

  Eh where’d ya leave yer stash?

  Which stash, Lisa said, the mull, the whiz or your shit?

  The mull, said Rod.

  Taped to the tree like always, you said. You always taped your bags of weed to a palm tree out the backyard. In case the cops come with the Black Maria. Your idea.

  Well it’s not there eh.

  When you added two and two it was cacksville. Least Bas wasn’t gunna die. Just ripped off his noggin. Serve the little bugger right for not controlling his appetite.

  Next day we told the vet what it was.

  Yeah right, bloke said. Thought it might’ve been something like that. And looking at us like it wasn’t the dog that needed treatment.

  Not that Mo was all that wised up. She thought you was doing so well running the business, the shop and that, you wouldn’t need to do anything stupid like for instance:

  Decided to grow some dope plants in the long grass out in the graveyard. One day you come in from your morning sesh and found six plants lined up on the melamine kitchen table.

  Mo with red eyes dripping in the sink.

  Nothing much you could say.

  You stood there and went to the fridge and found something to eat.

  Mo rounded on you, screamed:

  But why, Den? Why do you want to smoke heroin?

  Poor Mo. Clear on the big picture, knew her boys was doing drugs and she didn’t want nothing to do with it, not so accurate on the smaller details. Poor Mo.

  Poor Rod. He offered you his baggie mate, but it was the one thing you weren’t game for. You’d tried ether and morning glory and datura and angel dust but good old doctor green was the only one you really loved. That really loved you. Mutual respect. Love.

  Rod was getting into smack just when you were gearing up to hit comps again. You walked in his room one day, after he come back from Victoria late with Bas, must of been mid-’70, and he’s squatting there with these skanky Vicco friends of his, all black jeans and black T-shirts and that Victorian thing of skin greyer than their grey hair, hadn’t seen sunshine in about a decade, and they were smoking cigarettes and shooting up.

  Rod motioned you to pull up a beanbag.

  You sat down and punched a C-1.

  He held out his rubber tie for you. You shook your head.

  Rod said to his friends:

  Fucken women.

  They sat there sniggering like schoolkids.

  They thought Rod was calling you a woman.

  They didn’t know who he was talking about.

  Mo loved you till the end of time. Do anything for you, lay down her life, that sort of thing. Would Lisa do that? Would Lisa lay down her life? Mo blamed Lisa for leading you into drugs. Mo blamed Lisa for leading Rod into smack. Her reasoning being, if Lisa hadn’t took me away, Rod would of been surf
ing more with me and the way she saw it, me and Rod was always gunna be the same two harmless mischief-makers we were as kids, and if it wasn’t turning out that way that wasn’t Rod’s fault or my fault or the fault of us both growing up a tiny bit different from each other, but Lisa’s fault.

  Lisa might as well of plugged it into Rod’s arm herself. Far as Mo was concerned.

  Lisa was ropable. One night while we’re lying in bed she goes off:

  You know, it’s good that I’m so convenient for your mother.

  How so? I was falling asleep.

  I come in handy for lots of things.

  Eh?

  Like diverting the blame. Like she can blame me, by whatever reasoning she can work out, for Rod being on smack. Which makes it easy for her to forget what she’s done to Rod.

  What she’s done?

  Oh, Den, you don’t see it, do you?

  Lisa held my face in her hands and tried to read me like she was looking at this music score sheet for the fiftieth time for some note that wasn’t there, and she couldn’t believe that no matter how many times she read it it still wasn’t there.

  Oh my love, you just don’t see it eh.

  Then Lisa’s sister come up to stay a night. Like sent up as a spy by the Mr and the Mrs Exmire. But before she even got through the front door she was having a fainting fit seeing what her sister had landed in: you looking like the Wild Man of Borneo, Lisa wandering round with her guitar round her neck and a head full of mushies, Rod bombed out to Black Sabbath, a bunch of groms covered in fibreglass dust, Basil running round like a feral hunting dog, and somewhere among this Mo storming round in her pale floral house dress looking for someone to tell her why the garden hose wasn’t reaching her flowerbeds at the back fence no more.

  And then there was the graveyard. You saw how this bird saw all the tombstones and whatnot, ticking over in her head, haunted house and all that, zombies and undead, and she’s freaked as a bunch of bananas before she’s took two steps into Saga.

  Late that night, you was down the rat cellar with your sander full bore when you heard the screaming and that.

  Lisa all over again.

  Her sister crying and whimpering about ghosts, something in the sleepout stroking her hair, she was sure it was there but when she turned on the lights there was nothing.

  Lisa didn’t say nothing. She didn’t want the cops, they’d drag her home.

  Mo tut-tutted about these girls waking her up.

  Rod was out of his room in his undies.

  He looked at you.

  You didn’t look at him. You had your aviators on. Pushed them up me nose. Still there.

  The sister reported back home. We lived in a haunted house in a graveyard, that was all the Exmires needed to know. We never heard a peep from the Mr and the Mrs.

  I don’t never sleep in, not since I was fifteen and found out what the dawn had for me. Never even if I was up all night doing who knows what, that type of thing. If I was up till dawn, I’d be up at dawn. If need be, cut out the middleman: sleep.

  Mo never sleeps in, not since she was a kid and found out what the night had for her. Never even if she was in bed early and tuckered out after raising her children all on her own, that type of thing. If she was up and down all night, she still couldn’t sleep in. If need be, cut out the doctor: sleep.

  We was up at the same time now.

  My eye: yellow.

  My eye from the inside: yellow.

  Me and me Mo, surfing buddies.

  The old lady with her white hair brushing the droopy vinyl ceiling of the Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange. Her oversize boy, fifty-eight years and eighteen stone packed into the seat beside her. Not a panel of vinyl in the car without a crack in it. His gun down the middle: no second, no fourth. First and third only.

  . . . out the toy roundabouts, over the causeway, out The Other Side, down the dirt track, up the dunes to the secret spot . . .

  Watch that mouth there . . .

  First and third only.

  Surfing buddies.

  In her pale floral house dress. Green, pink, yellow, grey, blue. All the pastels of the rainbow.

  And now, this one morning: The Thing.

  She been up during the night. Over the voices of National Public Radio and BBC World Service I heard her. Through the voices. Under the voices. Round the sides of the voices.

  •

  Stood there in sleeping boardies, sleeping T-shirt, scratching me head. Pushed up the aviators (still there).

  Looking at it. Looking away from it. Looking back at it. Can’t help looking. Squeezed in the living room of this place, crossing six or seven different diagonals, all wrong, wrong and evil, wrong and crossed.

  Yellow, white, black. Disgusting, evil, abomination.

  What?

  What??

  Mo beside it, in its shadow, pretending it wasn’t her that got it for me.

  Mo, she’d do anything for me.

  Even insult me.

  Even break me heart.

  Don’t say nothing. Can’t say nothing. What can I?

  My Mo loves me.

  Here’s what she’s got for me. These things cost a grand. Unless she got a deal. But she could only have got a deal if she . . .

  No.

  The Thing.

  Her red eyes about to drip onto her house dress.

  She looks at me with a question, the only question:

  Ready to go then love?

  I need a bowl of muesli.

  Nineteen seventy-one. Nineteen seventy-two. You liked them years, the shape of the numbers.

  DK: the Gold Coast’s newest tourist attraction.

  They come to Coolie to buy your boards, your boardshorts, your imported shirts. You used the till as your personal bank. Soon as it come in you took it out. You paid the glassers in hemp seeds: something to invest for the future. Doing them a favour: you’d paid in coin, they spend it.

  They come to Coolie to scope you surf. They sit on their boards in the channel and scoped you. They got out your way and sit on the black granite to scope you.

  Hawaiians come to Coolangatta airport and the taxi drivers looked at their boards and said:

  Surfer are ya?

  Sure, brah.

  We got a surfer. Dennis Keith. Heard of him? Course ya have eh.

  I’m surfing in the pro-am, brah.

  Course y’are. He’d smack yer bum, mate. But he couldn’t be buggered going in the comp eh!

  To the Hawaiian gods . . .

  Birds come up to you, fell to pieces. Not taking the mickey no more. If they ever had been.

  You hugging the corner sucking a lemonade wishing you wasn’t there. In your fancy velour suit and frilled white shirt. Bad dress sense again DK. You had no idea. Didn’t want nobody to see you, wanted to run and run, but instead:

  Are you really Dennis Keith do you stand up on the wave or inside it are you on the water or under it are you scared of sharks does it hurt if you fall off my brother is in love with you can you sign my tummy what are you doing after is it really that fun do you think I should try it?

  Well yeah . . . but no.

  Rod’d turned Saga into this all-time surf hostel. During cyclone season there was nights thirty surfers sleeping in the Queenslander, in the rat cellar, in the yard. Sixty boards lying round. Plenty of pickings for the early bird, first up, took your choice. Nobody argued.

  Rod set the house rules. House rule:

  No rent but clean up after yous.

  Lisa set the other house rule:

  DK is God.

  The Keiths Surf Boards shop was going gangbusters though management was a challenge. You leave instructions for the shapers written with your fingerti
p in the wood dust on the walls. When bills come you thought they was fan letters and threw them out. When the supplier turned up you paid him in cash or dope.

  But you wasn’t a businessman, no matter how successful. DK was a surfer. Lisa said you DK was ready to have another crack. At comps. Surfing was dying without you, she said. They were aching for you. Begging for you. They were talking about a genuine world surfing tour, Australia, California, Hawaii. You been the outlaw two years, doing your own thing, thumbing your nose at them.

  Now they caught up with you. They needed you.

  Pure natural genius eh. Lisa’s words, not yours. They can’t carry on a world surfing championship without the world’s best surfer.

  You’d won. The pair of you, you and Lisa. Before you strapped on your leg rope for your first heat of your first event you’d already won.

  You had a letter inviting you to the Queensland Open, then the Aussie Open down in Sydney. Then Huntington Beach for the US Open.

  You hadn’t done nothing to deserve it except ignore them.

  You hadn’t done nothing except surfed on another planet, Planet Keith.

  You’d won.

  You’d lost the lot.

  Your first start was ’72 Queensland Open titles, up the road at Burleigh.

  Their break.

  The northerners. All in there, as well as you and the Coolie kids: FJ, Townend, Peterson, the rest.

  The prize was a $150 money order for a menswear store.

  Northerners, Hawaiians, Californians, all there for a good time. They didn’t know how to value winning. They didn’t know you done a thousand club comps school comps comps with Rod states under-ages nationals under-ages trials pro-ams comps comps comps in your head . . .

  Yeah they didn’t know that for DK, even when he was sitting on the sidelines refusing to go up before the judges, every single surf session was a fricken conness. They didn’t know DK could suck all the energy out of any wave, no matter how small or scrappy or big and hollow, any wave, and turn into a mad cyclone of energy wild as the ocean itself. Destructive and unbeatable yeah but

  but you can’t

  nah

  yeah

  he could be in the water with a retired carpenter, two groms and a girl, and all he wanted was to smash them into submission.