Tim Winton (22 page)

We lived beside a dry salt lake that rippled and swam against itself all day. Parched and cracked as it was, it seemed the lake was always full, never really empty at all. Long after I straightened out and he gave me back my keys, I stayed on -- six months in the end. The old man slept inside on a steel cot and I rolled out my swag under the pulsing stars on the dry lakebed. During the day we sat in the ragged shade of his verandah while things rose up off the salt before us. We laughed at every shimmering mirage in shared disbelief. The priest said he hadn't touched a drop in fifteen years, that he'd gotten beyond magical thinking. But the salt lake kept him on his toes. And I saw what he meant. It was full of surprises.

I didn't exactly pull myself together - I got past such notions - but bits of me did come around again, as flies or memories or subatomic particles will for reasons of their own. Bit by bit I congregated, I suppose you could say, and then somehow I cohered. I went on and had another life. Or went ahead and made the best of the old one.

For a good while I feared excitement. But I found ways through that. I discovered something I was good at, something I could make my own. I am hell's own paramedic. When the shit hits the fan, I'm on, and people are glad to see me. They see the uniform and trust me, and that makes me happy. And it's all go, all adrenaline, fast and filthy.

When the girls were in school I stayed around for weekends and annual leave but now they're older I travel more. I go to wild places to surf or raft or hike. I've surfed over sunken warplanes in New Guinea and caught waves on the beach where Ollie North's bandits landed weapons. I've met plenty of nice people, men and women.

I suppose I'm celibate, which sounds kind of high-minded but it's been mostly a process of learning to make do. Which is a bit like married life, from what people tell me.

At the 2002 Winter Olympics an Australian aerial skier won a gold medal and became a national hero overnight to a largely snowless country. Suddenly she was all over the TV, this pretty blonde kid, spruiking for cereal and gum and God-knows-what. I thought of Eva.

More recently I was in an airport lounge where oppressively large video screens showed highlights from the winter games in Turin. For ten minutes or so we had to watch replays of an aerial skier coming unstuck. The high, twisting trajectory. The quarter rotation too far. You could see the brute fact of her ruined knee as she landed. We got close-ups to confirm it, and there was something ghoulishly excitable about the commentary intoned over the footage as it played time and again. Passengers around me barely stirred.

They were tired and this highwire ski stuff was old hat already. Yet there she was, this girl, careering down the mountain on her back in a scouring spray, trying to hold her leg together. Howling. Over and again. It was as if she might be forced to spend eternity doing nothing else but skitter, failed and lame, downhill. I had to get up with my bags and move away, take myself through the miserable repeated franchises of the terminal in an effort to stay calm. It wasn't Eva this nightmare repetition reminded me of-it was the memory of my former self-and the slow-motion replay an illustration of how my mind had worked for too long.

Apparently there is nothing to fear in life but fear itself. This is the sort of shit you hear in the pub or at handover at the ambulance depot. Much talk about fear, as it happens. Along with chat about celebrities and weight loss and the award rate.

Most people don't like being afraid. You can hardly blame them.

Thriving on risk is perverse - unless you're in business. Entrepreneurs are valiant but base jumpers are reckless fools. Solo sailors are a waste of rescue resources and snowboarders who leap from helicopters are suicidal showponies. War correspondents, as we all know, are creeps. Some risks, it would seem, are beyond respecting. Meanwhile nearly everyone is terrified that this, whatever life has become, is it. And what's worse is, it'll be over soon. That kind of fear - like toothache - can be accommodated. Well, most of the time.

Such is the sort of thing I mull over in my corner of the crib room while the youngsters are watching Idol and texting their loved ones. It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

But the moment a call comes, I'm up and out, laughing, afraid -- and happy as a dog with two dicks.

The received wisdom in our game is that paramedics are either angels or cowboys and apparently I'm the last living example of the latter. Mostly I'm not offended. The people I work with and work on have either been mad or are going mad, so I usually feel at home.

I do a good job. When the siren's wailing I'm fully present; I am the best of me. I'm charged to the eyelids yet inside there's a still, quiet place like the middle of a cyclone. I like the priestly authority of the uniform, vehicle and lights, the reassurance they offer people as we arrive. When punters see the tunic and the resus bag they calm down a little and find faith and while I work, my faith meets theirs.

I'm there to save, to improve the odds, to make good.

You win some jobs and you lose others.

There are nights like last night when you're always going to be too late, where you're just holding people's hands. I tried not to take it personally but it set me back, that call-out to the burbs.

Just a rush of wind from the past, like a window momentarily slid aside. I know the difference between teenage suicide and a fatal abundance of confidence. I know what a boy looks like when he's strangled himself for fun.

I blow the didj until it hurts, until my lips are numb, until some old lady across the way gives me the finger.

A few weeks of the year I drive south to Sawyer with the honest intention of fixing up the old house. The mill is gone and the cow paddocks are planted with vines. The town is all wineries and bed-and-breakfast joints. A couple of lesbians make cheese on the property next door. They're like a comedy routine, The Two Ronnies, and they're good neighbours.

I don't see anyone I used to know, except Slipper from the Angelus crew who's bald and paddles a surfski out at the Point some days. Sando and Eva's place is gone and the property has been subdivided. Lawyers and architects from the city have built ostentatious weekenders all over it.

The old Brewer is still in Dad's shed. It's not been ridden since the day I lost it at Old Smoky. Nowadays out there at the bommie, surfers have themselves towed into the wave with jetskis. You can only imagine the noise and the stink of petrol. Barney's is still surfed but not often. The resident great white seems to linger, and now he has protected status as an endangered species. As far as I know, the Nautilus remains undiscovered by the new generation.

I never actually get around to doing much to the house when I'm down in Sawyer. Time's too precious. I have an old ten-footer, a real clunker from the sixties, like something Gidget would ride.

I shove it into the ute, drive down to the Point and paddle it out through the knots of scab-nosed bodyboarders to pick off a wave from every second set.

I'm not there to prove anything - I'm nearly fifty years old.

I've got arthritis and a dud shoulder. But I can still maintain a bit of style. I slide down the long green walls into the bay to feel what I started out with, what I lost so quickly and for so long: the sweet momentum, the turning force underfoot, and those brief, rare moments of grace. I'm dancing, the way I saw blokes dance down the line forty years ago.

My girls stay with me now and then. Sometimes they bring their blokes; I don't mind so much. I tidy the house for a week before they arrive. They've seen chaos at first hand so they value order. My job reassures them, I think, lets them see I have a purpose in the world. The work and their interest help me manage myself. I toil at it. For them it's been important to know I'm not useless. I think they understand how tough the gig is, that I save lives and try to be kind. I've done my best to explain my troubles without resorting to indelicacy. They're adults now yet I'm still vigilant, careful not to startle, because there's been so much damage, too much shame.

My favourite time is when we're all at the Point, because when they see me out on the water I don't have to be cautious and I'm never ashamed. Out there I'm free. I don't require management.

They probably don't understand this, but it's important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances -- who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful, and in this at least he should need no explanation.

The End.