Photo courtesy of Jay Laurie
“Where’s home for you guys?” Riley asked.
“Me ‘n Dingo ‘n Tammy are from Ballina… s‘in northern New South Wales… just a bit down the coast from Byron.”
“You got some good surf up there?”
“Yeah it’s a good place for surf… water’s warm and there’s some good point breaks – heard of Lennox Head or Broken Head?”
“Heard of Lennox.”
“It’s gettin’ pretty busy up there now though these days… a bit touristy and all the banana benders flock down on the weekends and in the holidays. There’s quite good beachies around though so if you know where to go you can get some less crowded days.”
“When did you say this happen?” Didier asked Randall.
“What?”
“The shark.”
“Coupla days ago,” Randall said.
“Non… I mean to say… was it early morning or in late afternoon?”
“Nah… think he said it was mid morning sometime. It was a sunny day… I remember that.”
They all stared down into the fire.
“Sorry boys,” Randall said looking at Will and Riley, “pretty full on story for your first day here, eh?”
“Yeah, bloody oath,” Will said.
“But like I said to you this morning, you gotta keep an eye out for the noahs, they’re definitely out there. But ya know that’s the first shark sighting I’ve heard of while I’ve been here so it’s not like it happens every day. They’re out there… like back home… like a lot of places… just gotta hope there’s enough fish for ‘em,” Will said.
Riley looked up and across the campfire and noticed Sabine reach for Didier’s hand. Didier jerked it out of her reach in a slight movement and folded his arms and stared at the fire with a fixed expression on his face.
Dingo got up and still holding his beer in one hand, shoved the ends of a few branches into the flames with his thong and picked an armful up from the pile on the ground behind the circle and threw them on the fire. Riley tilted his head back and took a sip from his beer and glanced at Sabine.
Randall picked up his guitar from beside his chair and strummed it and said: “What about some music?”
“Yeah, for sure,” Ferret said cracking open another can.
The older quiet guy in a blue jumper, with curly greying hair and bushy dark eyebrows, sitting a little apart, skulled the rest of his drink and picked up his empty cans from the dewy dirt. He tucked his chair under his arm and said “Goodnight all” and slipped out of the dim light of the fire and into the darkness. They were the only words he’d said.
They played music and sang along with the flames flickering and shadowing across their faces and coughed and ducked for cover from time to time when the light wind blew the smoke into their eyes. One of the girls clicked spoons, Ferret thumped the esky and Will eeked out some sounds from his harmonica and they all bumbled along through the lyrics with Randall on the guitar. They passed a spliff from hand to hand, some pausing to smoke it and others moving it right along, and another one followed it around when it had became a tiny soggy butt too small to hold and put to the lips for a puff.
They talked about The Point and about other travels. Randall talked about going to Indonesia after West Australia. He said that new waves were being discovered in the islands up there all the time. He asked Will and Riley about West Australia and Will told him a little about some of the waves in the southwest, the small towns and caves and trees down there and the cray fishing fibro shack towns along the coast to the north and talked about the city and the winding river and the islands off the coast. He told him about the red inland and blokes who worked rotations on the mines out there like him. While Will was talking, Riley noticed Didier and Sabine start having a side discussion in strained whispers in French which seemed to be going awkwardly and after it finished Sabine got up and left. Didier stayed slumped down in his chair and looked glumly down at the fire. Riley watched her step into the blackness outside the circle and looked over now and then to follow the light of her torch jumping over the ground until he could no longer see it. Dingo got up as well and told them he’d be back.
“It’s time I christened this little pipe,” he said sitting back down. “Got it from a souvenir shop at a roadhouse on the way over.” He rested one end on the dirt between his knees and held the other end close to his face.
“Never played one before so hold your applause until the end,” he grinned.
He gripped it with his big hands and put his lips down to the end and spluttered and blew and spat into it and got pretty red faced and sweaty while Ferret rolled around in the dust laughing his head off and the others chuckled along, handing around the number. Eventually he conjured up a reverberating deep guttural hum. The sound grew and tingled their skin. As it went on, it seemed to bring together the earth’s hot core and all the layers up to its dry desert crust and the blazing Milky Way overhead and all of the blackness around it, the cool wind off the land and the salt and dirt on their skin and the campfire’s warmth, into a unique unbroken sound which filled the silent night and echoed around The Point until he finally ran out of breath and gasped for air. He looked up and cracked a wide grin under his straw hat and they all packed up again and a few kept going for a long time, tears streaming down aching spliffed cheeks, locked into laughing.
