by Malcolm Knox
And like I’d fallen for Mo, I’d fallen for you too. It’s something in the blood, Den. We can’t help falling for you. And you and I, we have too much in common. We both surf. We both don’t know where we come from. We both don’t exist.
I went after information about the Vietnam draft. You’d said Mo got you excused from the draft. It seemed strange to me that she could do something like that, in her position. Mothers can’t just get their sons out of the draft. But when I went into the records, there was nothing. Understand? Not just that Dennis Keith wasn’t drafted. There was no Dennis Keith at all, either in the draft or out of it. Rodney’s name was there, but he’d been exempted from the draft for unspecified medical reasons. Your name wasn’t there at all.
I went into electoral rolls. Mo’s name was there, and Rodney at the same address, but no Dennis.
I went to births deaths and marriages. And guess what . . .
I went to immigration and found out that the first time you left Australia, to go to the US Open, there were a lot of delays in getting your passport. Mo had handled it all, but had provided no birth certificates, no other identification. She had a great deal of trouble obtaining authorisation to act on your behalf. That would be strange, wouldn’t it—the difficulty of a mother proving her son is hers?
But you were adopted, of course, so I went to the family services registry. I couldn’t pin down exactly what year you’d been adopted, when Mo established that you were effectively a foundling and an orphan.
And you know what I found?
Well, you know I found nothing. You weren’t there. Nothing. You don’t exist. But I guess you know that.
What you mightn’t know was that they keep records of whoever else has been searching the same files. It’s not hard. These hadn’t been touched since 1974. When they’re looked at, they’re stamped like library books.
The files I’m speaking of are where someone would go if they’re trying to ascertain your existence—where you came from before Mo adopted you, how and when she adopted you, all the relevant documents. These archived government files, it’s the only place to look.
The stamps on when the documents were last searched were dated December 1974. And the member of the public who was doing the searching had had to do what I’d done, and identify herself.
Yes, Dennis. You know who’d been running down the same dead end that I was?
Lisa Marie Exmire. Only time I’ve ever seen her signature. It’s just like mine. Now that’s weird.
She’d found out, Dennis, that you didn’t exist. Or if you did exist, you’d been picked up and hidden from the state. In December 1974, when she was figuring out what to do with her baby—who she wanted to make your baby—Lisa went to family services to get your birth certificate and details of your adoption, and she found nothing. You might as well have been made up.
When Mo and Rod found you in the cemetery, Dennis, she never took you to family services. She never adopted you. She took you. And Lisa found out about it. Were there missing children nearby? None that I could find in the police records. None that fitted your age. Everyone has to come from somewhere, but you didn’t, Dennis. It’s like you say, you were born out of the ocean.
But Mo—she has a past all right.
I can see why she would want to keep that secret. You were world champion, or sort of. You were headed for the stars. You were hers. She didn’t want any questions about that.
She loves you to death.
Rod too. God knows why, but we all do.
You’re up and on the run.
‘Mo! Moey!’
She’s in the kitchen. Diagonals burn your feet but you don’t—
‘Calm down love, what is it?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Who?’ All innocent, her pleasant smile. ‘Who’s that, love?’
‘Mo? What’ve you done with her?’
‘Ah Den, she’s in a better place. And Rodney’s home today, so why don’t you calm down. Greens first, blues, whites, and I’ll fix you some of your muesli.’
Father Aplin didn’t want the twenty thousands of dollars you won for the Straight Talk Tyres. Couldn’t of took tainted coin. He knew like you knew you didn’t deserve it. Knew something gone badly wrong with the judging. Tink was better. Some ugly evil spirit come along and hijacked the event and stolen it for you.
Injustice, the curse of comp surfing.
Father A took his Skywalker and three grand for you winning the semifinal, cos that was the last one you deserved he said, and then he says he’s gunna do his best down Far South New South. And he done his best, he did. His shapes went all right for a while till Mrs Father A got mixed up with some grommet and that was the last news you heard of them till a few years later when someone said he gone back to the priesthood but was still shaping Holy Smoke boards with a crucifix logo.
The skin cancer never got him, far as you knew anyway.
Dave stayed down there with Father A for his retirement. You never had another dog after the Straight Talk Tyres.
You give the seventeen grand left to Mo instead.
She quit her last job.
She took on her biggest job:
You.
Said it beat peeling prawns.
There was hospitals.
Coloured pills, electro shocko.
Invalid pension keep you ticking over.
Another two decades lost lost lost. Only bits remain.
Only hospitals and the legends of DK and the posters on your bedroom walls.
The books: you found the good stuff.
One good thing come of it:
Don’t you call me an uneducated man.
Meanwhile Tink become head of an academy of junior surfers and head coach of Australian surfing
meanwhile FJ become head of the world professional surfing body.
A Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange.
The aviators.
Your muesli, your diagonals.
You washed your hands; you stopped shaping; you stayed out the light. You live on chops and chicken and chips and muesli and pine-lime Splices from Bob’s. No more trips, no more Harry Hammerhead, no more wanderings. Just home safe with Mo, radio, some books for education and a brain that remembered everything, the filter busted, the doors wide wide open . . .
Peace . . .
They wrote that you didn’t surf no more cos all them poisons and whatnot caught up with you. They wrote that surfing was your keystone, and when the keystone got pulled out the whole arch come down. They wrote that you didn’t surf no more cos you were too scared someone might see you getting old and wobbly and no good. They wrote that you didn’t surf no more cos you wanted your surfing to die young and stay beautiful, beautiful corpse for everyone else to remember.
Like you was always doing things for everyone else, even spending twenty years not surfing for everyone else.
Went out on top in a blaze like some final act in a stage show.
When the truth was you didn’t surf no more cos the thought of it made you sick. In all them lost years when you even thought of the idea of going surfing you started sweating and shaking and bugging out. The weirdest part of all them years of weird was life got easier for you and safer and more peaceful and happier when you stopped surfing.
The Straight Talk Tyres killed it for you: winning when you wasn’t meant to win. And when you stopped surfing you were close to the fridge an extra five hours a day. And your greens and whites and blues. And when you got big the thought of surfing made you even sicker. You thought of all them things you done when you DK was surfing and who you been in the water and you want to puke, you want to kill yourselves so
so everything nicer and safer when you was with Mo, where she knew where you was, on land stubbing your
big toes.
You got your grand prize:
Diagnosis, names for what it was was wrong, names that come with pills, names telling you there’s something skewiff about you all along.
They couldn’t explain if it was the drugs that brought it on or a knock on the head from a surfboard or being drop-kicked into the sandbank at Rainbow Bay when you was fifteen, or anything, or Lisa, or Rod, or too much muesli, or some chemical in the shaping bay, or too much pine-lime flavouring, or anything what happened. Or if the disease was the bit what happened first and everything else followed in line, like the waves have to come first and everything else has to follow in a certain order and there’s nothing you can do, nothing you ever could of did, it was all just there whether you DK was in it or not, like the waves which keep coming now you’re dead.
They couldn’t explain was it the sickness that made you good, the sickness that give you your genius.
Nobody really knew did they. Nobody ever does.
Then Mo and you both went in the retirement village.
Then you stopped taking your greens and whites and blues.
The colours of pain come back—
Red, yellow, black, blue, purple, brown pain—
But so did the waves.
Come back.
So did the waves.
And you plotted your comeback:
Waves and waves.
None wasted now.
If you ever had something to confess, you could of told my Mo. That’s what I could never confess to Father A. Next to Mo, he was a rank amateur. She could keep a secret till judgment day. She would of been a ripper of a priest.
Three decades I never been past it. Rainbow Bay is a small place and it’s hard to take walks for thirty years and avoid the same corner of the same street, but that was it, I couldn’t bear seeing the QUEENSLANDER, broke me heart when we left it, it’ll break me heart to see it again. I never laid an eye on it since we moved out. It had a force field. I thought we’d sold it anyway, for my hospital bills and that. Turns out Mo wasn’t telling me something.
And so yeah we park up the hill, past Bob’s, up the road where they’ve filled in all the drains with crazy paving, the road I never walk up, to the top of Rainbow, where nearly every QUEENSLANDER’s been ironed out and turned into a block of holiday units. We get out and Mo’s holding me elbow for balance and puffing out another of her fricken secrets, one breath at a time.
And yeah but: this other secret:
She’d never sold it.
Eh?
Back then, 1980, after the Straight Talk Tyres, she’d owned it outright. All them prawns, all that poo, and a little help from DK’s winnings. She didn’t owe nothing on it.
With Roddy in but, she transferred the title to his name. It been his from then on. Still had renters in it, still has now.
‘Least I could do,’ Mo goes. ‘Rent money from all them years, he’s got something to start him up again.’
DK you are floating up that hill
and she
nah but
‘And that’s where you sent her?’
Mo sort of nods. She’s shaking but. Shaking fit to fall over. Hanging onto me arm for dear life. Dunno why cos I’m shaking even more.
‘Tenants have stepped out for the day. Very considerate, I thought.’
There it is and me heart goes over the falls, that instant of floating and then bam down she goes. A real QUEENSLANDER. Falling to pieces. Nobody’s done a thing to it. Stilts holding it up like the way they chair a winning surfer out of the water. Victory! Cream-coloured slats, busted shutters, rusting red-painted corrugated iron roof. Steep cracked driveway going up. Black metal sign, fancy written: Shangrila. Banana trees without bananas, mango trees without mangoes. Cemetery still next door. All the tightness goes out of me, floods like blood into the grass under me feet. DK you are turning into a pool of salt water, ocean meet ocean.
QUEENSLANDER! All me diagonals. Can feel them right, good, right, from here on the footpath.
Yeah nah, they done one thing to it: the letters on the name, all back. Shangrila.
Up there, girl-shaped shadow moving away from the window.
Mo can’t make it up the steps so we stay down near the bottom of the drive.
‘Mo?’
‘Yes love?’
‘You really told her you did it?’
‘I did love.’
‘And Mo?’
‘Yes love?’
‘Did you?’
‘I’d do anything for you, love. And so did your brother.’
‘Did you?’
‘That’s what I told her, love. So now she can meet her dad.’
‘But did you?’
‘Course I did, love. She’ll put it in black and white one day, and that’ll make it true.’
•
So that’s where we’re at.
Mid-morning and we wait. Flies buzz round your face and you can count them as you swat:
Three of the bastards.
BFO doesn’t come down. Mo wheezes like she wants to say something but can’t bring herself to.
Understandable in the circumstances.
The tension.
Not quite a happy tension.
Not quite sad.
Not quite angry.
Tense tension.
Mo crushing my free hand.
‘And so but we kept taking her coin?’ I go.
Mo nods. ‘Gotta eat, Den.’
His shadow first, creeps round the corner before he does.
Then him:
His shadow is bigger than him and healthier.
All them stones I put on in these thirty-odd years, Rod’s lost. Like I stole them. He’s a long smear of pigeon shit now. Him and me’ll fit together like two pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and when we are put together we will be what we once were.
Stupid bugger. And the years we stole them too. Maybe we can put them back together.
A piece been missing from a jigsaw puzzle that long, there’s nothing to say it can’t still fit.
Yeah.
His legs don’t seem to be moving but he’s getting closer. Got a beaten-up leather carry-all in his right hand. Wearing this faded black singlet and skinny black jeans and GP boots. Still walks with the right-side limp from smashing his leg up all them years ago. Looks like he could be in surfing shape in no time.
Rod got a tight smile could be a grimace of pain. Mo’s sniffing.
I can’t see Rod’s eyes, is he looking at his mother or me or up behind us, his daughter. Or whatever she is.
•
She’s come down the drive, walks out ahead to meet him first. Blanks us like we’re rubbish, pieces of garbage left out here on the kerb be picked up by the council trucks. We’re nothing to her now.
Face like she’s going to the gallows. As hangman or victim, what’s the diff.
It’s sunny, Queensland mid-morning sun, the hottest there is.
Rod’s wearing aviators.
I am a surfer. I have ridden a wave in the darkness. I have flown.
Put that in Rod’s pipe he can smoke it:
Rod, you been in the Road thirty-odd years, I been surfing.
He wanted to surf so bad, he tried to bust out a year before his head sentence finished. They bunged on a couple of years more.
He wanted to surf so bad he tried to escape again a year before his parole come up. They give him more.
Maybe he don’t want to surf so bad no more.
He will when I tell him what I can do.
I sling an arm round my Mo. Strange, her shoulder: she’s smaller than me now. Last time I put my arm round her she was bigger than me. Always bigger than me, my Mo
was.
My Mo:
Do anything for me.
Did anything for me.
Done everything for us.
But not worth it, you know?
She leans in my side. Us two big people watching skinny Rod stop and face up to this tough little bundle of girl. They stop there on the street, right out where a car could knock them over.
Both sort of sway inwards. Hands hanging by their sides. Rod’s carry-all on the ground. Look Mo, no arms. In the space between them I can see right down to Greenmount. It’s offshore, low tide.
Rod and her, all along. Bloody dark horse he was but he
but he paid the price
he done the crime he served his time but
he yeah
he done a crime maybe not the
who’s arguing anyway—
My voice crackles like all-night news radio turned low, in my Mo’s ear.
I get it now, Mo. I get it.
She leans into me a little harder, pressing like her world’s took a tilt, like she’s on water, a wave walling up, pulling into a critical turn.
Anyone familiar with surfing in Australia over the last forty years may recognise a number of similarities with parts of the fictional character Dennis Keith and some of the personalities in Australian surfing over that period.
However, Lisa Exmire is a creature entirely of the author’s imagining, as are Megan and other members of the Keith family. Most importantly, no part of this book alleges or infers that any real person committed any criminal act. The story of the murder of Lisa is totally fictional and has therefore no connection with any real person, whether still living or not.
Also, although a number of real people’s names are thrown into this book, their participation is fictitious.
The author acknowledges the following books in the construction of Dennis Keith’s story: All for a Few Perfect Waves: Miki Dora by David Rensin; Bustin’ Down the Door by Wayne Bartholomew with Tim Baker; Occy: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Mark Occhilupo by Mark Occhilupo and Tim Baker; Nat’s Nat and That’s That by Nat Young; Zero Break: An illustrated collection of surf writing 1777–2004 by Matt Warshaw (ed.); Eddie Would Go: The story of Eddie Aikau, Hawaiian Hero by Stuart Holmes Coleman; Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn; The Dogs of Winter by Kem Nunn; Stealing the Wave by Andy Martin; Breath by Tim Winton; Some Days by Will Swanton; High Surf by Tim Baker (ed.); Layne Beachley: Beneath the waves by Michael Gordon with Layne Beachley; North Shore Chronicles: Big-wave surfing in Hawaii by Bruce Jenkins; Best of Surfer by Steve Hawk, Chris Mauro and Dave Parmenter (eds); Stoked: A history of surf culture by Drew Kampion; Pipe Dreams: A surfer’s journey by Kelly Slater with Jason Borte; Gidget by Frederick Kohner; In Search of Captain Zero by Allan Weisbecker; The Tribes of Palos Verdes by Joy Nicholson; Caught Inside: A surfer’s year on the California coast by Daniel Duane; Da Bull by Greg Noll; MP: The Life of Michael Peterson by Sean Doherty (the best book on Australian surfing yet written, in this author’s opinion).
