by Daniel Mason
Spencer says, ‘This is the ultimate moment. It’s a moment you share with the earth. It’s just you and the space of the fall. Nothing else exists. Nothing else matters.’
Spencer says, ‘It’s the only moment you know you’re truly alive.’
Juliet turns to me and says, ‘He’s so melodramatic.’ Then she takes her run and throws herself over the cliff, just like that. I see her for a moment as if she is lingering in open air, and then she’s gone.
Spencer has enough time to say, ‘Show-off,’ before he’s gone, leaping at the same moment as his companion.
It seems to happen instantaneously. They twist through the air, shooting like bullets toward the earth. Then they pull open their chutes and drop at a less rapid rate, and then they’re gone far below.
After a jump Spencer is like a man who’s just received a shot of testosterone. He suggests we go and get some beers. It’s only ten-thirty in the morning. Spencer works as a parachute instructor four days a week to make enough money to fund his BASE jumps. Juliet works for a private health clinic. I don’t ask any more than this, because she’s not the one I’m interested in.
I could ask her about my blackouts, but I keep that to myself. The doctor told me they were likely to happen somewhere along the line. It’s like, don’t drive a car because a tumour is swallowing your brain and sooner or later you’re going to start blacking out for several minutes at a time. It’ll be like narcolepsy. You wake up and won’t remember how you got somewhere because you’ve blacked out. Like sleepwalking.
Don’t walk a tightrope. Don’t operate heavy machinery. Don’t offer to spot somebody when they’re lifting weights.
My first blackout came a few weeks ago, when I first came to the country. I was getting undressed, ready to go to bed. I woke up on the floor with my shirt open and my pants around my ankles and I couldn’t remember what had happened. I knew instantly what it had to be.
Spencer takes us to this pub in Newtown. By one o’clock in the afternoon I’ve had a half dozen beers and maybe six hundred cigarettes. When I get up to go to the bathroom, I’m definitely unsteady on my feet. We’ve been sitting there for hours, just me and Juliet and Spencer. I feel a little out of place when the two of them start with ‘remember the time?’ conversations.
In the bathroom I’m at the sink washing my hands and splashing water on my face. It’s here that I look into the mirror and then I don’t remember what, but I’m waking up on the soiled bathroom floor with blood around me. I’ve hit my head on the sink during the fall and split open my brow. It’s a wound that will probably require stitches, and there’s a lot of blood leaking into my eye.
Back outside, with a wad of increasingly bloodied hand-towels to my forehead, Spencer raises his eyebrows and Juliet gasps and says, ‘What happened to you?’
I say, ‘There was a big guy in the bathroom and he wanted to use the stall before me.’
Spencer says, ‘What? Where is he?’ He’s moving to get up, fists clenched, when Juliet stops him and says, ‘He’s joking.’ She looks to me. ‘You’re joking, right?’
I give a nod, feeling particularly drained of energy. I light a cigarette and explain, ‘I slipped and hit my head. Nothing special.’
Juliet is pulling away the wad of towels and she frowns and says, ‘Shit, that’s really going to need stitches.’ She sucks on her thumb and pulls it from her mouth, leaving it dripping with saliva, and then she wipes at the cut on my forehead, just like that. She’s careful in the way that she does it and the pain is minimal.
With one hand cradling the side of my head and the other wiping at my cut, she says, ‘We should get you to the hospital right away.’
Juliet drives me to the hospital and Spencer takes a taxi home. My blood has mostly clotted before the nurse pulls my wound open and I wince as she sticks a needle in. This is for tetanus. Then a doctor gives me six stitches, sewing like an old maid. He grins when he’s finished and admires his handiwork. ‘Not bad, even if I say so myself.’
With a handful of painkillers working their useless magic I sit dazed in the passenger seat of Juliet’s car and she drives with Van Morrison in the tape player. There is a spreading numbness across my face; I wiggle my eyebrows and I feel as if I could stab pins in my forehead and feel nothing.
Juliet is saying, ‘Do you have plans for tonight?’
I tell her, ‘I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. I want to sleep but the doctor told me I might have a concussion.’
She drives silently.
Eventually I say, ‘It’s hard to believe that you were jumping off a cliff this morning.’
She gives a shrug. ‘It’s nothing out of the ordinary, for me.’
I ask, ‘Why do you do it?’
Everybody seems to have their own sorts of reasons for these kinds of things. Not everyone has an answer, either. There’s not always a justification for an action. If somebody asked me why I would ever choose to put a gun to my head, I wouldn’t be able to give a coherent answer.
It’s like …
And the three dots are my best answer.
‘I guess …’ she starts, before trailing to silence. I listen to the song about the brown-eyed girl a little more before Juliet can form the words, sighing. ‘I don’t know any better. I was raised into this sport. Spencer, he has his reasons for the crazy things he does. I just do it because he taught me how. I work all week, I’m normal and nobody would think I’m the sort of person who does this kind of thing. But by the end of the week, all I’m thinking about is the next jump. It’s like a fix. I guess it’s the same for anybody who plays a weekend sport, you know? That’s all this is. It’s just a sport.’
She isn’t looking at me as she says this. She seems maybe drained by the events of the day. This morning she had been brimming with energy.
She says, ‘It’s not like anybody asks a swimmer why they feel the compulsion to swim.’
She says, ‘You do something because you can. You have that ability and the knowledge of how to use it. We’re pushing the boundaries of our physical selves and our minds.’
I could tell her she’s pushing the boundaries of bullshit, but then again, so am I.
Juliet won’t let me smoke. She says, ‘Those things will kill you.’
I retort, ‘And jumping off cliffs won’t?’
She says, ‘Not if I do it right.’
When Juliet drops me at the hostel one of the parachutists from earlier in the week is hanging around outside smoking a cigarette, and like a ghost he says, ‘My friend, you look like shit.’
For a minute he looks like Hayes, and I reply, ‘For fuck’s sake, get some new material.’ But I know my mind is playing tricks again.
It’s the next morning and the café across the road from the hostel is abuzz with travellers talking over one another, waving newspapers above their coffees. Nobody is concerned with the article about the bartender found bound, gagged and executed with a bullet in his head. What they are waving around and talking excitedly about is the shark attack article.
There are two pictures on the front page of the paper. One of them shows the remote stretch of coastline where the attack occurred. The other shows what remains of the victim’s surfboard. If you look carefully you can discern the individual teethmarks and see where the blood has soaked into the board. The headline in bold reads simply SHARK TERROR.
The article continues inside the paper and there’s a picture of a great white shark and in close-up you can clearly see the black eyes, the jaws wide open and spanning the width of a human body. If the photograph was clearer you’d be able to see almost all the way down into its belly.
What you’ll notice about this photo is the blood smeared over the dark tip of the nose and jaw, showing something like a pink wash over the teeth. It’s good that they print this photo in colour. How they get these photos is they fill the water with blood and entrails. The sharks, apparently, come in droves. As the surface of the water is filled with a cloud of blood
and sinking meat, two men will sit in a cage under the surface of the water in their scuba gear with cameras ready, safely tucked away from the approaching vessels of death, and they take photos.
Every year in Australia there will be one, maybe two, recorded fatal shark attacks. Surfers, divers, swimmers, fishermen … it varies. This year it’s a surfer. He was a New Zealand man on a backpacking holiday and now he’s dead, being digested in a stomach somewhere. Maybe when, or if, they finally catch the shark, somebody will find his wristwatch, still ticking. Your watch will keep on ticking even after your heart has stopped.
The newspaper has quotes from his companions, who saw the attack: ‘It was like, one minute he was there, and the next he was gone. I couldn’t believe it. He was just paddling in from the break and then something seemed to hit him and he was gone. I didn’t even get a glimpse of the shark.’
I’m walking into the café for breakfast when an American backpacker, I think his name is Lukas, shows me the paper and says, ‘Dude, have you seen this?’
I stare through the newspaper because I don’t really care.
Lukas is telling me, ‘This is some supremely fucked-up shit, man.’
I need coffee.
Lukas is saying, ‘Like, fuck, man, I was surfing up the coast just yesterday.’
I resist the urge to tell him that the attack occurred off the coast of South Australia, a thousand miles away.
Just as I manage to escape to a corner alone where I can sip my coffee and read the article myself, Spencer comes wandering into the café. I wonder what he’s doing here. He’s standing in the entrance to the courtyard with his palm shielding the sun from his eyes, surveying the crowd. When he spies me hiding in the shaded corner he comes straight over.
‘Figured I’d find you here,’ he says. ‘How’s that cut?’ He’s crinkling his brow as he stares at my stitches poking like bristles from my skin.
I resist the urge to touch the wound. ‘It’ll heal.’
Spencer says, ‘Yeah, they have a habit of doing that.’
I’m suddenly thinking of the hundreds of stitches it took to sew Spencer together after his own shark attack. I’m wondering if his insides were hanging loose and had to be carefully packed inside his body before the needle and thread.
Reading my thoughts, Spencer says, ‘A shark attack isn’t such a bad thing. People think it’s so painful.’
He’s saying, ‘In the event of shock induced by serious injury, the body will release endorphins from the pituitary gland in the brain. This is sort of like morphine; it’ll block the pain. Your body will be flooded with endorphins at the first rush of pain. Your nervous system will also release adrenaline to the bloodstream, stemming the blood flow to your skin and internal organs. The surge of adrenaline results in a rush of blood to the brain, heart and lungs. This is why you might feel suddenly energised. It’s like your survival instinct.’
Spencer is an adrenaline junkie in the same way that Hayes was a testosterone junkie.
He says, ‘You hit your head, cut yourself, get bitten by a shark, and endorphins are released with the pain.’
The newspaper is open on the table where it says ‘New Zealand Traveller Killed in Shark Attack’ in a small headline.
Spencer puts his finger on the paper. ‘This,’ he says, ‘excites me.’ His finger is resting on the shark’s open maw, smudging ink. It looks like he’s forcing his finger down its throat, and the shark is choking, eyes bulging.
Spencer says, ‘I’m going down there today. It’s like this ritual I have. Surf the attack spots. I even flew to Western Australia once to make a break the day after an attack.’
I ask him, ‘What’s the attraction?’
His reaction is strangely coy. He shrugs and says, ‘I dunno. Tempting fate, I guess.’ It’s like he’s already distracted by the thought of something else. This seems to be how Spencer’s mind works, leaping swiftly from one thing to the next, never settling for long.
He’s out of his seat when he says, ‘C’mon, are you ready or what? I booked two seats.’
The plane is small and sits eight people. You can feel the wind shaking the frame, like a fat kid is jumping up and down on the wing. The other passengers are journalists rushing to the scene of the attack, some freelance and others on assignment. Everybody is listening to Spencer; this is his classroom and he is the teacher, and class is in session.
Spencer is saying, ‘For a surfer there’s a lot of excitement in being bumped by a shark. Basically, you’re shitting yourself at the time. Anybody who says otherwise is a born liar. But when you get in to the shore, you’re bragging to your mates. “I was bumped by a shark.” It’s not a sensation you’re going to forget. It’s like brushing death.’
One of the girls toward the back of the plane is taking note of everything that Spencer says with a pen and pad.
Next, Spencer is saying, ‘This beach where the attack took place, it’s renowned as a feeding ground for seals. Ideal for a white pointer shark. There are a lot of deep channels in the reef, and sharks love deep channels that they can sneak up from. They’ll shoot up like bullets and seize their prey. They get the light in their eyes, and their vision is poor anyway. It’s hard to discern if it’s a seal they’re about to eat, or a man on a board. Sharks are known to spit out a man after the first bite because they aren’t really fond of us. Humans have so many bones. It’s like a human eating fish, picking all of the tiny bones out, one at a time.’
Spencer seems to tire of talking and he turns to watch the world slide by below us. I can’t be sure, but I’d bet money that he’s thinking about the drop, about a dive.
The landing is shaky and I’m thinking that maybe this is how I die. A fiery death in a metal tube filled with people I don’t really know. The airport is nothing more than a short runway in a field, a series of sheds and a small building near a road leading seemingly into nowhere. This, apparently, is somewhere in South Australia.
Spencer rents a car and we take the highway to the coast. There are two surfboards strapped to the roof.
As he drives, Spencer is saying, ‘In all likelihood, the same shark isn’t hanging around. So it’s not like the shark is going to attack again, strike right after. But you can hope.’
He says, ‘During the first few days the breaks will be quiet. Nobody is game to go out. There will be a big fuss between the conservationists and the fishermen. Professional hunters will say that once the shark has a taste for human blood it has to be stopped. Conservationists argue that the surfers know the risk once they enter the domain of the shark.’
I ask him what his take on all of this is.
Spencer sighs and says, ‘I think it’s nature running its course. Survival of the fittest, no matter the circumstances.’ There’s a beat before he says, ‘What I enjoy is defying nature.’
The beach is officially closed when we get there, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s just like a warning. There aren’t security guards trying to stop you, as if The Beatles were out there surfing and you wanted to interrupt for their autograph.
It’s not like trying to talk a man off a ledge. ‘Think about what you’re doing, how selfish you are.’
Basically, it’s not like anybody is going to stop you.
For Spencer, it’s like, ‘Man, we’re going surfing.’
It doesn’t matter that I don’t know how to surf and I’ve never done it before in my life. To Spencer, these are the kinds of details that are irrelevant. He’s more interested in the sharks than he is in the waves.
The waves break off a reef about fifty yards from the base of a series of cliffs. To get to the beach we have to follow an unsteady trail of rocks to the cliff base. This is one of the most isolated surfing spots in the country. The coastline would be abandoned if it wasn’t for people in parked cars, spectators hoping for a glimpse of The Shark, or newspaper photographers taking pictures to send back to home base.
On my board I wish that cigarettes were waterproof. The we
tsuit Spencer has given me is too large and doesn’t keep the cold at bay. I lie flat on my stomach with the smell of salt and wax in my nose, bobbing up and down on the choppy water. Conditions are less than ideal and the sky is clouded over with grey.
Spencer calls across to me from where he straddles his board. His hair hangs loose and wet around his shoulders. ‘I can almost smell death on the water.’
I assure him, ‘It’s an olfactory illusion.’
Around us the water is dark and offers no reflection. I imagine some great shape below the surface, circling us, rising slowly and biding its time. My question is who the shark is more likely to take. I wonder if there’s any real pain, or if it’s so sudden that it won’t matter. How long does it really take those endorphins to kick in?
Spencer can tell me these sorts of things, but he’s too busy assessing the sets. The swell is maybe three feet. I watch him move, almost forgetting that I’m possible shark-fodder. The statistics are basically that you’re more likely to be hit by lightning than eaten by a shark. My problem with that statistic is it’s usually quoted by conservationists.
It’s a right-handed reef break and Spencer moves gracefully. He’s been in the water for over twenty years. Earth, air, water; anywhere is his territory.
My first reaction when he tumbles from his board is that a shark has taken him, but it’s just him rolling forward. When Spencer pulls himself back onto the board and faces the next set of waves, he’s clearly not concerned by the possibility of sharks. Maybe it’s just the knowledge that he’s out here tempting them, and he’s secure enough in that.
After maybe an hour of surfing—him taking waves and me on my board, either lying flat or sitting with a leg over each side as shark bait—Spencer pulls a knife from I don’t know where. The knife is sleek, looks brand new. It’s one of those hunting knives.
Spencer holds out his palm and slices deep across it. Blood drips in streams over the sides of his palm before he’s even finished drawing the blade. He winces as he does this, but then he smiles. He holds his hand up for me to see, pouring blood down his wrist and dripping it into the water. He is completely lucid as he does this.
