Authors: Tim Winton
That’s how it started. A single decisive act of violence that joined me to Biggie forever. If you believe him on the subject he acted more out of animal irritation than charity. But I felt
like somebody ransomed and set free. Until that moment I was disappearing. School, home, the new town, they were all misery. If Biggie hadn’t come along I don’t know what would have
become of me. Exam week, five years later, wasn’t the first time I thought of necking myself. Biggie became my mate, my constant companion, and Tony Macoli was suddenly landscape.
For a while my mother thought Biggie and me were gay. She did a big
tolerance
routine that dried up when she realized we weren’t poofs.
Back on the road again I’m thinking boab trees and red dirt, girls in sarongs, cold beer, parking the Vee Dub on some endless beach to sleep. And mangoes. Is there anything sexier than a
mango?
I suppose we’re all wrong for each other, Biggie and me. He’s not a very introspective bloke. Sometimes he makes me restless. But we get along pretty well most of the time. We go
camping a lot, hike out to all sorts of places and set up on our own. Biggie loves all the practical stuff, reading maps, trying survival techniques, learning bushcraft. I’m more into the
birds and plants and stars and things. Some mornings out in the misty ranges the world looks like it means something, some simple thing just out of my reach, but there anyway. That’s why I
go. And both of us dig the fact that nobody else is out there pursing their lips at us or taking a swing.
Biggie truly is a funny bugger. He can do Elvis with his belly-button –
thank you very much
– a toothless King sprouting manky black hairs in a face made of fat. He can fart
whole sentences, a skill St Augustine admired in others. He’s not much for hygiene. His hair’s always greasy and that navel smells like toejam. He doesn’t swim. He couldn’t
carry a tune in a bucket but he can find true north by instinct. On his day he’s a frightening fast bowler but most days he can’t hit the pitch for love or money. He once surfed a
school bus thirty miles. He caught nineteen herring with the same single green pea and an unweighted hook. And he was the only one in the class brave enough to hold the bin for the student teacher
while she puked so hard it came out her nose. His sole academic success was his essay on the demise of Led Zeppelin, but then I wrote that for him.
Friendship, I suppose, comes at a price. There have been girls I’ve disqualified myself from because of Biggie. Not everyone wants to have him tagging along everywhere, though in the days
before we get our licences there are those who don’t mind walking out with us to the drive-ins. I figure we’re not glamorous but we’re entertaining in our way. Right through high
school I have occasional moments, evenings, encounters with girls but no real girlfriend and mostly I don’t regret it. Except for Briony Nevis. For two years we’re sort of watching each
other from a distance. Sidelong glances. She’s flat-out beautiful, long black hair like some kind of Indian. Glossy skin, dark eyes. She’s funny in a wry, hurt kind of way, and smart.
In class she goads me, says I’m not as stupid as I make out. I kiss her once at a party. Well, maybe she kisses me. Hair like a satin pillowslip. Body all sprung as though she’s ready
to bolt. A long, long kiss, deep and playful as a conversation. But there at the corner of my eye is Biggie alone on the smoky verandah, waiting to go home. I don’t go to him straight up. I
do make him wait a fair old while but I don’t go on with Briony Nevis the way I badly want to because I know Biggie will be left behind for good. Not that I don’t think about her. Hell,
I write poems to her, draw pictures of her, construct filthy elaborate fantasies she’ll never know about. But I never touch her again. Out of loyalty. Briony isn’t exactly crushed. If
anything she seems amused. She sees how things are.
And she’s right, you know, I’m not as stupid as I make out. It’s a survival thing, making yourself a small target. But even now, feeling kind of euphoric, buzzing up the
highway, I know I’m stuck in something that I can’t figure my way out of.
You see, back in first year, right at the beginning when Biggie was my saviour and still doing his two weeks’ suspension for busting Tony Macoli’s nose, I kept notes for the full
fortnight and more or less wrote Biggie’s essays for him when he got back. He didn’t care if he passed or failed but I wanted to do it for him, and so what began as a gesture of
gratitude became a pattern for the rest of our schooling. I made him look brighter than he was and me a little dimmer. His old man preferred him to be a dolt. My mother expected me to be an
academic suckhole. Most of the time Biggie couldn’t give a damn but sometimes I think he really got his hopes up. I feel responsible, like my ghost work stopped him from learning. In a way I
ruined his chances. For five years I worked my arse off. I really did all our work. Out of loyalty, yeah, but also from sheer vanity. And the fact is, I blew it. I got us both to the finish line
but ensured that neither of us got across it. Biggie hadn’t learnt anything that he could display in an exam and I was too worn out and cocky to make sense. We fried. We’re idiots of a
different species but we are both bloody idiots.
At New Norcia we pull in to fuel up and use the phone. Biggie decides that he’s not calling home so he sits in the VW while I reverse the charges and get an earful. My mother wails and
cries. I’m vague about my whereabouts and look out at the monastery and church spires and whitewashed walls of the town while she tells me I’m throwing my future away. I hang up and
find Biggie talking to a chick with a backpack the size of an elephant saddle. She’s tall and not very beautiful with long, shiny brown hair and big knees. She thinks she’s on the coast
road north and she’s mortified to discover otherwise. Biggie explains that this is the inland route, shows her on the map. She wants to get to Exmouth, she says. I can see Biggie falling in
love with her moment by moment. My heart sinks.
There isn’t really even much consultation. We just pull out with this chick in the back. Meg is her name. I know it’s hot and she’s had a tough day but she’s on the nose.
She’s got a purple tanktop on and every time she lifts an arm there’s a blast of BO that could kill a wildebeest. Biggie doesn’t seem to notice. He’s twisted around in his
seat laughing and chatting and pointing and listening while I drive in something close to a sullen silence.
Meg is as thick as a box of hammers. It’s alarming to see how enthralled Biggie is. He goes right ahead and tells her about life in the salmon camp every season when all the huts are full
and the tractors are hauling nets up the beach and trucks pull down to the water’s edge to load up for the cannery. All the drinking and fighting, the sharks and the jetboats, the great green
masses of fish pressed inside the headlands. He doesn’t tell Meg that it’s all for petfood, that his mother cries every night, that he’s given up defending her, not even urging
her to leave now, but nobody could hold that against him. Meg, this mouth-breathing moron, is staring at Biggie like he’s a guru, and I just drive and try to avoid the rear-view mirror.
I get to thinking about the last night of school and the bonfire at Massacre Point, the beginning of that short period of grace when my very limbs tingled with relief and the dread of failure
had yet to set in. Someone had a kite in the air and its tail was on fire, looping and spiralling orange and pink against the night sky, so beautiful I almost cried. I was smashed and exhausted; I
suppose any little thing would have seemed poignant and beautiful. But I really felt that I’d reached the edge of something. I had a power and a promise I’d never sensed before. The
fact that the burning kite consumed its own tail and fluttered down into the sea didn’t really register. I didn’t see it as an omen. Biggie and I drank Bacardi and Coke and watched some
lunatic fishing for sharks with a Land Rover. Briony Nevis was there, teeth flashing in the firelight. I was too pissed to go over to her. I fell asleep trying to work up the nerve.
We woke by a huge lake of glowing embers, our sleeping bags damp, the tide out and our heads pounding, but it was the smiling that hurt the most. Biggie wanted to stay a while in that tangle of
blankets and swags but I convinced him to get up with me and swim bare-arsed in the cold clear water inside the rocky promontory before we stole back through the sleeping crowd towards my
mother’s car. That was a great feeling, tingling, awake, up first, seeing everybody sprawled in hilarious and unlikely pairings and postures. The air was soupy, salty, and as we padded up the
sand track with birds in the mint-scented scrub all round, I just couldn’t imagine disappointment. The world felt new, specially made for us. It was only on the drive back to town that our
hangovers caught up.
While I’m thinking about all of this Biggie’s gone and climbed over into the back and Meg’s lit up a number and they’re toking away on it with their feet up like
I’m some kind of chauffeur. The country is all low and spare now and the further we go the redder it gets. Biggie’s never had much luck with girls. I should be glad for him. But
I’m totally pissed off.
In the mirror Biggie has this big wonky grin going. He sits back with his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, his Blundstones poking through the gap in the seats at my elbow. Meg
murmurs and exclaims at the beauty of the country and Biggie just nods slit-eyed with smoke and anticipation while I boil.
Late in the day, when Biggie and Meg are quizzing each other on the theme tunes to TV sitcoms, we come upon a maze of salt lakes that blaze silver and pearly in the sun and stretch to the
horizon in every direction. I begin to have the panicky feeling that the land and this very afternoon might go on forever. Biggie’s really enjoying himself back there and I slowly understand
why. There’s the obvious thing of course, the fact that he’s in with a big chance with Meg come nightfall. But something else, the thing that eats at me, is the way he’s enjoying
being brighter than her, being a step ahead, feeling somehow senior and secure in himself. It’s me all over. It’s how I am with him and it’s not pretty.
The Kombi fills with smoke again but this time it’s bitter and metallic and I’m halfway to asking them to leave off and open a bloody window when I see the plume trailing us down the
highway and I understand that we’re on fire. I pull over into a tottery skid in the gravel at the roadside and jump out to see just how much grey smoke is pouring out of the rear grille. When
Biggie and Meg join me we stand there a few moments before it dawns on us that the whole thing could blow at any moment and everything we own is inside. So we fall over each other digging our stuff
free, tossing it as far into the samphire edges of the saltpan as we can. Without an extinguisher there’s not much else we can do once we’re standing back out there in the litter of our
belongings waiting for the VW to explode. But it just smoulders and hisses a while as the sun sinks behind us. In the end, with the smoke almost gone and the wiring cooked, it’s obvious
we’re not going anywhere. We turn our attention to the sunset. Meg rolls another spliff and we share it standing there taking in the vast, shimmering pink lake that suddenly looks full of
rippling water. We don’t say anything. The sun flattens itself against the saltpan and disappears. The sky goes all acid blue and there’s just this huge silence. It’s like the
world’s stopped.
Right then I can’t imagine an end to the quiet. The horizon fades. Everything looks impossibly far off. In two hours I’ll hear Biggie and Meg in his sleeping bag and she’ll cry
out like a bird and become so beautiful, so desirable in the total dark that I’ll begin to cry. In a week Biggie and Meg will blow me off in Broome and I’ll be on the bus south for a
second chance at the exams. In a year Biggie will be dead in a mining accident in the Pilbara and I’ll be reading Robert Louis Stevenson at his funeral while his relatives shuffle and mutter
with contempt. Meg won’t show. I’ll grow up and have a family of my own and see Briony Nevis, tired and lined in a supermarket queue, and wonder what all the fuss was about. And one
night I’ll turn on the TV to discover the fact that Tony Macoli, the little man with the nose that could sniff round corners, is Australia’s richest merchant banker. All of it
unimaginable. Right now, standing with Biggie on the salt lake at sunset, each of us still in our southern-boy uniform of boots, jeans and flannel shirt, I don’t care what happens beyond this
moment. In the hot northern dusk, the world suddenly gets big around us, so big we just give in and watch.
I
T WAS DARK
when the Langs rolled into White Point and nobody had anything to say. They were hours late and everyone knew why but with Nanna in the Jeep
nobody was game to say a thing. Vic squirmed in his seat and sighed again, despite himself.
You must have worms, said his grandmother sternly.
I always bring my own bait, he said.
Vic, said his mother with a note of warning.
Sorry, he mumbled.
But he wasn’t sorry. If the others hadn’t kept them waiting half the afternoon they’d be there by now. They’d be set up on the beach with a fire going. It was the usual
Uncle Ernie balls-up. When they arrived at his place at noon all Vic’s girl-cousins were packed and ready in the Land Rover out on the hot street, their faces as red as their hair, while
their parents were inside having a blue. The Landy’s motor was running, the dinghy was hitched to it with the rods and mattresses and eskies strapped aboard in a bristling pile, but Ernie and
Cleo were still in the house with the door locked. When Vic’s old man banged on the window, nothing happened. He rattled the door, rang the bell. He got Vic’s cousins out of the vehicle
and sat them in the shade. They were the sorriest-looking bunch of girls you’d ever see, freckly as all get-out, with needle teeth and big nostrils. He’d seen carpet sharks prettier
than them. Uncle Ernie was a ginger banty-rooster of a bloke and Auntie Cleo let everyone know she was too good for him. She was blonde. She had the looks of an old-timey movie star gone to fat.
She had cleavage that damn-near made an echo when she spoke.