The Life

by Malcolm Knox

  Where’s me aviators, Father?

  Dennis, bugger the aviators. Just tell me you’re in it. Made for you, it is. On our board.

  Where’s me aviators???

  Dennis, say you’re in it.

  Sweet, sweet, I’m in it Father, but where’s me fricken aviators???

  They’re here, Dennis.

  Had them behind his back the whole time.

  What you want them on for in the night-time anyway?

  You didn’t say nothing. Clapped them straight on.

  After a while you thought about it again:

  You heard about Roddy, Father.

  He was dealing the cards.

  I heard, son. I’m sorry. He was the sweetest little altar boy we ever had. The bishop’s favourite.

  They won’t let me back in there. The pro tour. Since Roddy and that. Pointless.

  But it wasn’t you that . . . Have you ever asked?

  Why would I ask? They’d only say . . . they’re all cleaned up, their image and that, they don’t want me. Not since Roddy and that.

  He looked at his cards.

  You looked at yours. Rubbish. Slapped them down. Start again.

  But you didn’t do anything wrong, son.

  Doesn’t matter, Father. Guilt by association and that.

  But you haven’t asked for an invite, have you.

  No point.

  But you haven’t asked.

  Your deal, Father.

  He dealt. Crappy old Qantas cards. You’d already memorised what was what by the stains and folds and foxing on the backs of them.

  He called his missus out the fibro shack. She was blonde and well-built, type of bird you used to get to help you keep up your name round the traps. You liked her even though you couldn’t look at her when she was looking at you which was a lot of the time. She come out and stood there with her hands on her hips. In nothing but a dirty white sarong.

  Jules, see this? Dennis and I are going up to the Goldie next month to win twenty grand in the Straight Talk Tyres on a Holy Smoke surfboard—a type of board nobody’s ever seen before.

  She put an arm loose round his shoulder and smiled at him like he was her kid. You hooked your head hard away. Only seen this kind of ‘love’ a couple of times before. Weirding you out that it was the priest of St Barnabas. Mo’d have a fit.

  He looks at you deep into you.

  Yeah. Dennis . . . yeah. It’ll be the Second Coming. You bet, babe, it’s the Second Coming. Christ! Dennis?

  Your eyes glanced off him and his poxy sunburnt mug. But he could wait longer than you. And you wanted to play for another fifty cents. You were on a run now.

  Not a priest anymore, his missus said, but he still believes in miracles.

  With her talking, you couldn’t look up.

  When you looked up again, Father A went:

  Dennis? Reckon I can phone your mum to tell her where you are?

  Father, you can tell Mo what I’m doing, sweet. Just as long as you don’t tell her what you’re doing.

  Won’t have a bar of it I won’t.

  Mind games, mind games. Treat me nice treat me bad. Give me food give me none. Take me for walks leave me at home.

  Won’t have a bar of it.

  No matter how many times I read it it still won’t change:

  It was Auntie Jodie who eventually answered my questions about my mother. I’d always known who she was—Lisa Exmire, the folk-rock singer—but my grandparents told me she’d died in childbirth. I know why they did this. When’s a little girl old enough to know the truth? Never, in their eyes. As for my father, they said he was someone they didn’t know, and my mother hadn’t really known him either, so best not to ask. Move on with your life, the new life your grandparents have constructed for you.

  As a kid and a teenager, at this nice all-girls school I went to, I was good at sports—hockey, netball, cricket, swimming, running—but on a holiday to the Sunshine Coast I discovered surfing and got hooked. I went with girlfriends to the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast every weekend and every holiday. My grandparents freaked and tried their best to discourage me. But the more they stood in my way, the more determined I was. I actually thought I was good enough to be a pro, even though there was no money or opportunities in it for girls. I lived and breathed it.

  My grandparents must have been terrified. They wanted me to stop going to the Gold Coast. But I had blinkers on. I wasn’t interested in finding out about my mother, even less my father. I was satisfied with the story I’d been told. I only cared about surfing.

  After I left school, I went in a few contests but soon realised I wasn’t good enough to go further. No-one tried harder but I just didn’t have the talent.

  Still, all I wanted to do with my life was surf and be around the surf, so I worked in surf shops and volunteered when the big contests came and worked in event management and sponsorship and marketing, all the fringe stuff you do, and started doing a bit of writing.

  Because I was writing for the mags, I read them too. I came across mentions of Dennis Keith, the reclusive legend and all that. I was quite curious but not too much. It kind of grew on me, the curiosity. He seemed such a sad case, and there was all this tragedy in his past. I wonder why he was so fascinating to me—maybe it was a message I could hear but not yet understand.

  Soon I was reading everything I could about him. In his old interviews he was all bluster and bragging but you could tell it was a show. What was behind it?

  Once I thought I saw some insight from him, in an interview in Surfer. The interview was titled ‘I Blame Myself’. Now that caught my eye. You never hear a male surfer saying he blames himself. Never! Let alone one who’d been as arrogant as DK. So I thought, here we go, some humility at last, some humanity. I read on:

  ‘I blame myself,’ DK said. ‘I wrecked surfing. Single-handed.’

  ‘How?’ the interviewer asked.

  ‘Made it look too easy,’ DK said. ‘People came to the coast and saw me surf the way I did, and I was so natural they all thought it must be pretty easy. Next thing, every man and his dog’s doing it. I’d have been better off surfing like a kook. Fall off my board. Make it look hard. Nobody would have took it up. So yeah, I blame myself for why it got so popular.’

  Aarrrrrgh! I wanted to scream at him. But then I came across the story that brought my whole world crashing down.

  Yeah no matter how many times you read it it’s still the fricken—

  Yeah, nah, my words exactly: Aaarrrrgh!

  Father Aplin’s shithole in Far South New South deserved the name, you even had to shit in a hole. He’d went o-naturale with his missus, stomping round in the buff half the time, both of them to and from the creek they used as a bath and the surf they used as a shower. Father A was surfing a lot trying out these boards he was shaping and you spent a lot of time alone with Mrs Father A. You tried cracking onto her after one long session over the campfire that they used as an oven but she just brushed you off with a laugh and said, Dennis, I guess I should be flattered but I know you’re not up to it.

  Like, if you were, she might give you a shot. But not really. More like, she never be interested in a billion years and she was trying to think of the nice way of saying thanks but no thanks.

  You could of been kicked out for a stack of other crimes and misdemeanours. Sometimes you shaped boards so hard and got so lost in the planing, planing, planing that you had them down to communion wafers and Father Aplin had to chuck them. Blanks cost fifty bucks and you couldn’t be costing him each time you had a bright idea, but he didn’t say nothing or do his block at you.

  All he cared about was what he called the Skywalker, this idea he had to shape a board with flares and jagged flanges down this cut-in tail. Father A was fixated on it, raved day
and night how it’ll cut through the Gold Coast right-hand point breaks, and he even had new moves in his head, this thing where you jump the board up onto the close-out and ride it down straight, he called it a Big Dipper, and another where you actually take the board into the air.

  All science fiction to you. Father Aplin had went bats down here, bats in the belfry. You nodded along and looked at the Skywalker sketches and wished they could cast the same spell on you they cast on Father Aplin. He was dreaming twenty years into the future and all you could see was tricky planing and a stack of wasted blanks.

  Not that you cared. You had a roof over your head and some food in your belly for a few nights. What would be would be. You got into reading books now, hard core, whatever he had you’d read. Even the fricken Bible, that’s how much you were into reading. It all come back from confirmation classes, you liked the Old Testy most. You had to get some words in you. You didn’t have your heart as set on the Straight Talk Tyres as Father Aplin and there was times you wished he’d just enter it on his Skywalker himself. And leave you down here to cuddle with Mrs Father A:

  All you were ever up for, cuddling—

  But he was on and on and on getting you out of bed every day and sometimes in the waves, you going one day at a time.

  Dave was in his element with the toy mutts and you owed it to him to stay a few days longer.

  You were off the Harry Hammerhead down there you couldn’t find no one to score off and if you left the shaping bay for half an hour Father or Mrs Father be on you like a ton of bricks and hurl your stuff in the creek, they were that nuts. You was a bit scared of them to be honest. They were on some religion trip but without the religion, all nature and storms and God is in this tree and God is in this rock and God is in this hole here, look down you can see him with all your turds getting steamy in the sun.

  You tried to steer clear of most of it. One time you had a go at them, told them they were mad as cut snakes and totally psycho, and Mrs Father A shot back:

  You’re a drying-out washed-up junkie with no friends and no money and a big chip on your shoulder because of what happened with your brother and fair enough, but we’re not judging you, man, and you’re here sleeping on a patch of dirt dreaming about waves you caught five years ago and you’re saying we’re fucked up, you’re doing the judging?

  Thing was she had this way with a big smile and a line down the middle of her forehead so even when she was heaping crap on you you couldn’t help feeling she wanted the best for you.

  You went quiet, then:

  Ya reckon I should give it a go?

  She couldn’t stop laughing, for a minute or two.

  What’s so funny?

  You, Dennis—give religion a go?

  What, yers reckon yers can find God in a fricken seashell but yers can’t find it in me?

  I was peed off at her so didn’t say nothing more.

  She wiped her eyes and felt sorry for you again.

  Dennis, it’s not that I think your soul isn’t open to a higher plane. It is. Of course it is.

  She went soft and serious again.

  It takes work, that’s all. Spirituality takes discipline and belief but most of all it takes work. And there’s one thing all you surfers have in common: you wouldn’t work in an iron lung. Even Aplin. None of you can stand the sight of hard work.

  Kind of true it was but. True about surfers true about you. You never thought of it before. You never known a decent surfer who worked, not since the early seventies anyway, not since your mob.

  All you’ll ever commit yourselves to working for, she said, is a half-decent wave.

  The Aplins did acupuncture: needles, matches, flame, candle wax.

  Eased the pain.

  She taught you how to do it to yourself.

  Shove in them needles.

  Mrs Father A caught you reading your books. You tried to hide them but she got you.

  Doesn’t surprise me, she said, leaning against her tree watching you pretending to fumble with your gear. That’s the tragedy about you, Dennis. You’ve been starved of intellectual company. The only conversation you ever knew up there was if it’s high tide or low tide or east or south or offshore or whatever. You let yourself go dry, man. You needed more than that, didn’t you? That’s why you needed dope. So you could have someone to talk to. Pity the only person who was up to talking with you was you yourself.

  She knew too much and not enough, Mrs Father A.

  With no smack you got by on Far South New South grass, which Father A handed out in strict rations three times a day. It was like some kind of methadone program: you lined up at the kitchen table, he hand you your morning spliff and shoo you off to the shaping bay. Then you’re back again after lunch for the afternoon’s work and back again after dinner to get buzzed for cards and reading.

  Three spliffs a day handed out at the kitchen table. He was making it boring for you.

  And down Far South New South, loads of onshores blowing all day. Waves got split into pieces: you see the lines forming and but then they disappear. Currents, chop. You try to paddle for a wave but it’s here now gone the next.

  Confused waves, no clear mechanical lines.

  It wasn’t making sense.

  Some days them waves got so confused, you got confused too and before you knew it you were sitting there on your board bawling your eyes out.

  You couldn’t make sense of it. Gibberish waves.

  And they these people these waves cracked you open and night-times you’d start to think:

  A very big fat black man—

  Baby Face—

  Betting at cards to be the one to get out of washing Basil—

  Hell.

  They’re in the kitchen as usual do women talk anywhere else? The way they’re facing each other like two parts of a mirror makes me think maybe Mo could be the BFO’s nan, which is what she would be if

  yeah

  and why is it they spend so long talking? What can there be to talk about?

  And so but yeah I go in the kitchen and push my aviators up my nose and clear my throat and they look at me with this identical irritated face, like I’m some kid they been lumped with, some invalid, and you take about eight stone and fifty years off my Mo and it’s in the eyes, in the eyes, the pair of them, and it’s making me want to puke and making me want to pike so I’m so nervous I just spit it out:

  ‘I wanna go see him. I want yers to take me to the Road.’

  And nothing, I swear, not a skerrick, changes in either of their expressions. The pair of them. Just gawking at stupid fat old Den.

  ‘Took your time, didn’t ya?’ says Mo.

  ‘Famous for your timing,’ goes the BFO.

  I look at them angry now, like Didn’t yous two hear what I said? I said I want to go see my brother at Boggo Road! He’s in danger! I gotta warn him!

  But Mo just shakes her head.

  ‘It’s too late, Den.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s too late,’ says Little Miss Echo.

  ‘Come again?’

  All them years Mo been seeing him and not telling me and letting me think we’re never talking to him again and me finally waking up to it and it’s too late, too late she cried, too late she cried—

  But she’s not crying. She’s kind of grimacing. Both of them. Same face.

  ‘Yeah.’ It’s left to the BFO. Mo’s got her big meaty face down between her big sausage fingers, her big inflatable elbows on the melamine table. ‘Yeah, Dennis,’ the bird goes. ‘Too late for going to the Road. Rodney’s being let out tomorrow. You can see him right here.’

  Back to me room and shut door hard as it goes.

  It took a long time for me to digest, and I still don’t know if I have. I spent weeks in librari
es and government archives, finding out what I could.

  I’d sit with the old stories in front of me, staring into space for hours. Dead numb, or bursting into tears, never in the middle, one extreme chasing the other.

  The bombshell sort of exploded in my head and kept exploding for months. I was often in tears. I kept it all to myself for as long as I could, but eventually told my Auntie Jodie, who of course went totally spare. She sat us all down, me and my grandparents, and it came out. Or sort of, bit by bit. They told me how they had lost contact with my mother in the early seventies. They’d had a big falling-out when they’d met Dennis Keith and demanded she break up with him. She refused, and they became estranged from her. That was their biggest regret.

  My grandparents—they were parents, too.

  They’d heard how her music career was going well, in America and around Australia, and she was putting records out, and she was still with that Dennis Keith character. They heard rumours of drugs but this was the seventies and they were bewildered and sad and possibly angry but felt there was nothing they could do.

  In 1974, they thought she was still travelling around doing her music and hanging out on the surf scene. They heard she’d been in America. Then she turned up, literally on their doorstep, with a baby—a baby girl. She wouldn’t tell them who the father was. They assumed it was Dennis Keith. Lisa, they were sure, was high on drugs. She was, in their words, ‘off with the fairies’ and didn’t make any sense. She stayed with them a few days over Christmas, then said she was going off on a tour, and asked them to look after the baby for a couple of weeks.

  This was how I came to be raised by my grandparents. They never saw Lisa again. It was Christmas, 1974.

  Lisa hadn’t been reported as a missing person until the middle of 1975. This is one of the things that gets me most. I guess my grandparents were at their wits’ end. It was just like Lisa to go off, do her own thing, leave her baby with them. They had their hands full with me. Maybe also I was better off with them anyway, so the longer my mum stayed away, the better for me.