Tim Winton Read Online Free PDF Page A

outfit that flew in English. Mr Loon was a big, square bloke with a boxy head. He might have been Polish once or maybe a Croat - you'd have to listen hard to hear it. The wool of his coat collar was as yellow as a nicotine stain. His hair was oiled and parted on the side and even though this was the first time I'd ever seen him in the outdoors, he always looked sunburnt.
    And now you burnin green wood, he said. No wonder youse can't get warm.
    We're orright, said Loonie sullenly.
    Chop me some wood for the pub and I'll let youse have some for here. What d'you reckon? I got five ton in just now and no one to split it.
    Loonie hugged himself and shook his head.
    Youse got something better to do?
    We'll do it for money, said Loon ie.
    How much?
    Ten bucks a ton.
    His old man laughed.
    Each! said Loon ie.
    You can git to buggery, said the publican, walking away.
    But it turned out that we did split the wood, and we did the job for a fiver a ton each. We chopped in the rain for days out in the long yard behind the Riverside, amidst a wasteland of weeds and lines of washing, broken sofas and stone troughs. An old fella with a humpback and a drooping fag sat and watched us from beside the glittering ranks of empties as we split those sappy mill-ends and sucked at our splinters and stacked the cut wood in the lean-to by the pub laundry. Before we'd even finished our five tons we had offers of similar work all over town. Drinkers either took pity on us, or saw us as a means of getting the missus off their backs, but any way you looked at it, we were in business.
    Loonie liked anything with an edge on it. There were grindstones in some of the sheds where we worked, and he used them to sharpen our axes and the pocketknife he always carried. Whenever we took a break, when the lady of the house brought us mugs of tea and a few lamingtons, he'd want to play chicken. Most often we used the knife. We spread our hands on the pulpy chopping block, jabbing the blade faster and faster between our fingers - first looking and later blind - until one of us begged off or began to bleed. Some sheds had dartboards, so we played William Tell. A lamington, said Loonie, was just as good as an apple. He invented games involving axes and feet, axes and anything, really. Any game would do as long as it was dangerous.
    At each perilous undertaking - and with Loonie there were plenty of them - he always volunteered to go first. For a while I thought it was about honour, that it was his way of taking responsibility for whatever stupid idea he'd come up with - something gentlemanly, perhaps, a mark of friendship -- but eventually I saw that Loonie went first out of need; he was greedy about risk. He absolutely loved a dare. He would actually dare you to dare him. This wasn't optional. He required it of you, insisted on it. When it came to things like this he was completely compulsive. Being with him was like standing near a lethal electric current. The hairs on your arms literally stood up and you were afraid and mesmerized, always drawn to connect.
    That winter we chopped enough wood to buy ourselves real surfboards. They were dinged-up and obsolete, the cast-offs of the Angelus crew or somebody's sister's boyfriend, but they were proper foam and fibreglass and they were tokens of our arrival. We scraped the hard, dirty wax from their decks and rubbed them down afresh.
    We stood them in the old man's shed to admire their leaf-like outlines and the sharky rake of their fins. The old man wasn't at all happy about the fact that I'd been working at the pub but he didn't toss the boards out into the weeds as he'd done with the Coolites.
    He'd seen the calluses and divots in my hands. He knew I'd earned that surfboard with a bent back and once again, after the longest time, I felt the distant glow of his respect.
    momentum in my ears. I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray.