Tide Read Online Free Page B

he wasn’t. There was nothing more we could do or say to make it happen. We just waited.
    Then he said, or intoned, Launching from low places, and sea level is the epitome, it is as interesting as from high places. Though falling is not part of the take-off, of course, and that’s a negative. But the kindling of will-power, the sheer energy to launch, is more than compensation.
    My mates were silent – which is a rare thing. Transfixed on this filthy vagrant who’d found us under the wharf and made the afternoon pass faster than any afternoon of our lives. Even the grog had worn off, and we were much higher than it could ever have made us. Then I realised I’d not even asked him a thing about his life. How did he survive? Had he worked? He was what my mother called ‘well-spoken’, if a bit ragged around the verbal edges. And he had a way of being in your head without being invasive, of hanging around without being intrusive. I could learn from this guy, and so could my mates.
    I could see they were thinking the same thing. After all, we’d stayed in town, but the action was four hundred k’s down the coast, and maybe much further away than that. What kept me in town, really, what kept me – us – from flying? My mind was racing as I fixed on his silhouette, the sun now setting.
    And then he was gone. He’d flown. I can’t tell you how it happened, or what happened. I barely remember, or don’t remember at all. I was lost in my thoughts, gazing, gazing, gazing, and then when I snapped to, he was gone.
    Did he walk off? I asked my mates. I was annoyed.
    What? Uh? Na … nup. No. They were as bemused as I was.
    He was there. I was watching him. He didn’t walk anywhere. He just wasn’t there. Did he fly?

    Flight is elevation. That’s a truism. Mostly, rather than soaring through the firmament, ranging the globe, I hover – I tread water in the sky, hang in the air. Strangely, I’ve never been much of a swimmer and am not fond of the water. Some of you might blame the shark and my sisters, but I don’t. I just don’t like the sensation of liquid on my skin. I like air. I try to avoid flying in rain, though I will if needs be. But then, clouds are a different thing. The water vapour clings rather than washes. And I want all my sins, all my positives, to stick to my skin. I carry them with me and would not like to think they’d spill down over those I fly above. It’s a gross thought. Each flight is a tattoo, speech written into my skin. The silence is a book of flesh. Sun, ‘look not so fierce on me’! It burns to fly. Though I cannot help myself.

    She’s only eight years older than me. Her kid is five. We’re driving all the way to Sydney, the other side of the country. Four thousand kilometres from here. My mates have already left. One is in London working in a pub – his dream, he tells me – and the other is at TAFE in Perth. I’d like to tell you I am training to be a pilot, but I am not remotely interested. Flying in a plane is not flying at all.
    When I saw her downtown one day, I had to ask. I said, You won’t remember me …
    I do, she said.
    You whispered something in his ear, before you insulted him. What was it?
    I said to him, ‘Faustus is gone. Regard his hellish fall …’
    What on earth does that mean? I asked. And she said, Fuck me and you’ll fly.

    Terminat hora diem; terminat auctor opus.

DUMPERS
    On Long Beach, which ran down one side of the peninsula town, the waves were considered temperamental. Serious surfers rarely bothered, but beginners mingled with bodysurfers and boogie-boarders most days whether the surf was ‘pumping’ or not. It was a wind-driven shore break, without a spot of reef around, so the direction of the wind made all the difference to the shape of the waves. And when it wasn’t ‘working’, Long Beach was a washing machine,