Photo courtesy of Jay Laurie
“Righto… there’s a dunny and a shower over near the washing up shed over there… can’t drink the water… it’s bore water.”
“Ok, thanks… how long have you been here for?” Will asked.
“A bloody long time mate.” He waved his arm to the south. “My place is over the hill. There’s a shop there but we don’t have too much stuff in it usually… unless we do a trip to the big smoke… got some fishing gear if you need any and some drinks and a bit of other stuff.”
“Ok, we’ll come and check it out later on.”
“I’d better be off… waves are looking good for a few days… see yah round,” he said as he turned and walked over towards his dusty truck.
“Yep no worries… see yah.”
He whistled for his dog and patted the tray at the back of the truck as it trotted over towards him and said: “Git up.”
****
Around the campfire at Randall’s place later that night, after the daylight had faded and the night desert sky had started to blaze magically overhead, the flames of the fire lit up the faces of the small gang gathered around it with a gentle glow and they shone deep with colour from the sun. It was an unlikely bunch having a drink out in the desert, keeping warm from the cool night, brought together by surfing. Everyone had about them an earthy disheveled crustiness from living in the dust and salt water. Clothes had taken on the colours of the desert and hung down stiffly on frames faded and skinnied from long days in the water and the heat.
The gang was listening to Randall talking and staring at the flames when Will and Riley wandered over, each with a beer in one hand and a chair in the other. He stopped: “Hi guys, pull up a pew… everyone this is Will and Riley from West Oz… got in yesterday, introduce yourselves.”
Will and Riley said G’day and recognised the Frenchies who smiled and nodded and said they were Didier and Sabine. The others said their names as they reached over to shake hands: “Ferret, Dingo, Tammy, Scott.”
Ferret got up off the esky and got some beers out. He was a small lean guy with dark hair sticking out on all sides like a trimmed echidna, patchy facial growth and a roasted peeling forehead. He grinned almost permanently. Next to Ferret, Dingo was a big bloke, wide shouldered, still wearing a straw hat. Tammy was sitting side on across Dingo’s legs with her arm around his shoulders. She had freckled skin and wavy strawberry blond hair.
Ferret sat back down and leaned forward looking at Randall: “Yeah… so what happened?”
“Right… yeah… well as I was saying, I was talking to this local bloke in the car park at the right hander after a surf this morning and he was saying how his mate… another local, Lucky they’re calling ‘im now… had been out at the break across the deep channel from the right a couple of days ago… the other guy out there with him had just caught a wave and Lucky was sitting on his board waiting for one when he saw a dark shape moving in the water below him off to one side… said he watched it move around in front of him still a couple of metres below… reckons it was so massive he could’ve counted a few seconds to himself while it swam slowly past. Then it disappeared for a few seconds… went deeper or further away or something for a bit… bloke said his mate was so frigging terrified he couldn’t move, said he was just sitting there, frozen stiff, waiting to be attacked… bloody hell imagine that… and then he saw its dorsal fin break through the top of the water a little way away in front of him and then grow as it glided up closer to the surface, said his mate reckons in the end the fin was higher than his bloody shoulder when he was sitting on his board… Said it swam straight towards him… but slowly slowly… when it got to only a few meters away, pushing water in front and its fin huge and gashed in places, it turned a bit to one side and rolled and he saw its dark eye looking straight at him above the surface of the water and rows of exposed teeth and gums and then part of its white underbelly as it drifted alongside and then past him. Said the thing looked so vicious… massive… and wide and thick… as big as some of the ones in the photos down on the walls in the pub down the coast at The Bay, like a bloody sub… Reckons he could smell it… seaweed and fish, strong, all the way from the bottom of the ocean… Said it all happened in slow motion… it started to swim down after it went past him and then he lost sight of it in the darker deeper water and then, while he was looking everywhere below him shifting around on his board with his feet up on the deck not knowing what to do – whether to stay there and hope like hell it went away or lie down on his board and start paddling but that’d mean his arms would be in the water and his head’d be down low – a set suddenly loomed up and he paddled like a maniac for it and kicked like a bastard and misjudged it and got too far in front and the lip of the wave landed on him and drilled him but there was no way in hell he was letting go of his board and so he bounced and wrestled his board in the whitewash and got in a fair way… then the whitewash of the next wave in the set picked him up and took him all the way into shore on his stomach. Bloke said Lucky started bawling when he got to the beach and limped up the sand with his board dragging on the ground behind him and didn’t stop bawling for hours after. The other bloke out there who had just had a wave also went in straight away. Said he knew something major must’ve been up as Lucky never bellied in. They packed him a cone in the car park and that calmed him down a bit… he hasn’t stopped pulling cones since… practically hasn’t moved from the couch in his shack.”
The campfire was quiet and still.
“Struth… that’s heavy,” Dingo said finally.
“Yeah, makes you think twice about going out in the water over ‘ere,” Ferret said. “We’ve got a few sharks back home but nothing like the sound of that.”
