Neoprene Dreams

By Charlie Scott

Along a strip of desert coast by the Nullarbor, two surfers try to work out what they have in common beyond a quenchless love of surfing waves. One of them is deluded by a desire for validation and social media fame. The other just wants to be liked. Their mistakes drive them into a world of damaged egos, broken promises, back-breaking waves, gun-toting grandparents and some influencers who believe they are producing a revolutionary surf film called Neoprene Dreams.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charlie Scott
• Release date: Sep 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223277149

Book preview

Prologue

No one could believe the stuff they were seeing down south. From five or six accounts. Little groups with 4K cameras and jet skis and about a thousand kilometres of empty coastline. That’s what it looked like. Just a few out there, alone in the Southern Ocean, mountains of slate water sighing in from the horizon, folding over rock a half-metre beneath the surface.

They were kind of wild, the clips. The land looked barren, desolate. Pockmarked granite headlands under which long waves broke, blue lumps walling up and draining hollow and funnelling away across the bay. Consistent as something machine-made. People were rapt. Footage of sharks in the line-up that looked like muscled busses circling around for a floating passenger, and folks paddling past unfussed. No one got why they muted the clips. There was never any music. Only the images, real classic stuff, strung together. A dingo training in on a running hare. A hare-brained emu in silhouette. A campfire beneath a sunset that dripped like caramel, down towards the flames and the swags stretched out in the dirt.

No one could believe, after the first three or four clips, that they’d never heard of these guys. Showy dudes with names like Clint Clintofferson, studied in that deft-yet-effortless style, faces expressionless even when barrel-blown and hounded out in front of a raw tonnage of ocean. Stupid good in the big stuff, but real nice out of the pocket too. Skinny, spring-loaded kids sticking backhand spins and tail-whips to drench a camera lens.

It was hard to watch if you couldn’t go. Really, everyone thought so. Because no one could believe the circus at home. Hordes pouring over every ripple. Every slop of breaking white water chased full-tilt, sun up to sun down. No sense of etiquette. No sense of history. No longer a pecking order. Just flocks of flashy, splashing scavengers short on everything but the willpower to clock their ten thousandth hour. And ten thousand more every month. It seemed this way. Boards for birthdays and baby showers. Wetsuits for Easter so winter wasn’t wasted. No joke. Some days you’d get out there and try to grab one where you grew up, and not spot a single face you knew. And if you did spot one, you might go and start talking to people you’d been ignoring most of your life. That was true.

Not everyone could get away, but if you could, you might just fill the tank and go. And if you couldn’t, you’d keep scrolling, because no one in the world could believe it, this stuff coming out from down south.

Chapter One

‘I got this wave, it’s mennal boys.’

That was the first thing the kid said. He’d been watching them God knows how long. They were parked in the car wondering how to stay awake. Day again. If they weren’t technically in the desert, they were nearing something like it. The petrol station sat on a biscuit of concrete in reddening plains. They’d barely stopped to rest.

Tins of syrupy caffeine drink slipped around under Eli’s feet, and each time he lolled toward a new dream, his shoes lost traction, and with a jolt, he’d kick and sit up.

He kicked and sat up.

Che, behind the wheel, woke too. He glanced over at Eli’s curly head, and then, beyond it, saw some kid watching them over the top of the petrol pump. Che and Eli had their four boards strapped to the Camry’s roof. Che sighed and looked away. In the boy came; an oversized t-shirt, tiny shorts with pockets that flopped down his thighs. His eyes looked a century old.

‘I got this wave, it’s mennal boys.’ The boy stepped and leant so they could all see each other. ‘Yuz surf?’ Thirteen or fourteen or fifteen. Broad, but ratty. He said, ‘I’m goin home now. Nedurra.’

Che looked the kid up and down. The kid squinted back. Che said, ‘Have you got petrol?’

The boy nodded.

‘You got money, I mean.’

‘Course.’

Eli tapped the skin between his eyebrows, trying to wake himself. He looked neither at Che nor the kid, but out the windscreen, into a glaring distance. The other two talked distance. They’d come from Sydney. So had the kid. They were heading toward the Nullarbor. So was the kid. Eli waited. Che would tell him to suck it. After a silence, the boy said, ‘Favours for favours. I’ll get you barrelled beyond dreams mate.’ Che laughed, and now they both turned to look at the boy.

He looked like he’d been lost out here, subsisting on road-side gravel. The voice was absurd, the mouth it came from nearly lipless. He looked between Eli and Che and smiled. ‘Yuz been out dez before?’

‘Sorry?’ said Eli. 

‘I said yuz surfed the desert before?’

‘No.’

‘No, first time,’ Che said.

He let out a thin whistle. ‘Mate, I’ll take yuz. Got a mennal place. Call it The Sea Saw.’ They nodded. The boy let out a wheezing cough. ‘Can yuz surf proper or not?’

Che looked at Eli, who had, not many years back, been on somewhat of a professional trajectory. They were both good. But they were not good friends, and it was hard to know how to respond to the question.

The boy seemed to like their hesitation. He lowered and took a better look inside. 

Che said, ‘Yeah.’

The boy said, ‘Nah, nah. Nice boys, I knew yuz were from lookin.’

Embarrassed by recent choices, ready for luck and direction, Che wiped his mouth and let the kid inside.

Eli, for his part, never saw any conceding gesture. The kid just took his bag and came sighing through the door like he’d never sat. Che massaged the button on the handbrake, stared in the mirror. Nedurra was a couple of hours on. ‘Give us fifty.’

The boy measured Che in his gaze, winked, fingered through some cash in the front pouch of his bag. He showed Che a yellow note. ‘I’ll get yuz there this arvo. Likely not seen a thing like it.’ He lifted his bag off his lap and put it on the other bags behind Eli. Then he extended his arm. ‘Thing comes pushin outta deep water. Real deep.’ Eli turned. Che was nodding little crumbs of encouragement. The kid carried the arm, with an open palm, in a long, slow, slapping motion across the back seat, and eventually reared it, snake-like. ‘And when the ledge hits it, it jacks and pitches and throws and then wraps it, mate, wraps itself down the whole shelf. Hollow. Thirty, forty, fifty metres. Hollow.’ Che cleared his throat. Soon he’d let the handbrake go. ‘Oath,’ the kid continued. ‘Big sneeze, big sneeze, an you’re sittin in it, thinkin, I’m way too deep here, water gone out under the board. Then one more sneeze an it blows belly into the channel. Mate, yuz’ll be haulin out for another.’

Che told the kid to put his belt on, but there was no movement in the back. The petrol station vanished, then the wheat silos, and the country sank slowly away. Che was exhausted. Low, sun-patched plains in every direction, spare and slouching scrub. He’d never been west of Katoomba. Out the windscreen, the horizon was a canvas of charcoal and moving stratus. To his right, the sky crawled in a fresco of alabaster light, familiar shapes beckoning in the clouds, apparitions morphing and leaning their enormous weight at him. It often took an oncoming road train, heaving out of the rise, sucking his vehicle into its path, to wake his sleeping fingers on the wheel. The wheel tugged away from his fingers, the side mirror trembled, and then again there was nothing to worry about.

Che checked his mirrors. The bleached eyes in the back seat. ‘If youse wanna go straight up, I’ll take you to the spot. City boys, yuv not seen nothin like it. The Sea Saw, mate. Could surf it for months mate – no cunnout.’

‘Put your seatbelt on.’

The kid’s phone had been buzzing and buzzing. Eventually he slid out the belt and clipped in. ‘Not many coppers about at the minute, blokes. Blokes...’ He lost his words and drifted off in muttered breaths. They listened intently. When his voice returned, it was matter-of-fact. ‘Blokes prefer the summertime.’

They processed him, in silence, and then both of them started chuckling.

Eli felt relieved. ‘What’s your name, again?’

‘Thank you, sir. Let’s do it. Bogren. Everyone cept the granna Gwen says Boggy. So, say that.’

They introduced themselves, and Boggy wanted to know about their local waves. He wanted them to say the names of their spots and what swell direction they needed, and what wind they liked, and whether they were better on a rising or a falling tide. They spoke at once, pouring details into the back seat, agreeing on everything bar the degree of east in a south-east swell, and Boggy sat there looking between them, smiling, fingering a scabbing hole beneath his chin. He thought they might have been brothers. They weren’t. He asked, and the older one, Che, said that though they’d grown up on the same beach, there were four years and other things between them.

‘How old?’ Bog asked.

‘Nineteen,’ Eli said.

‘Twenty-three,’ said Che.

‘Yeah. I was thinkin ya had mileage.’ The kid sat there, holding the silence. ‘East Coast. East Coast. I just come from Sydney, but no surfin. Not a second for it. But am I right, then, that for the early, yuz are out there havin to peer dead straight in a risin sun?’ They told him that was correct and he cackled and shook his head. Then he bent to the window and tried to spot the sun. ‘My Lord.’

‘What’s the choice?’ said Che.

‘Mennal. I’d need me Roy-Bans. Ay, do yuz mind if I eat?’ Che said he didn’t mind, and Boggy fished into the pocket where the fifty had come from and leant forward, holding a pair of sunglasses. ‘Father bought heaps back from Indo and give em to me, an I realise two days later they’re not Ray-Bans, they’re fucken Roy-Bans. Look. See the O. Not an A. That’s an O.’

‘Does your dad surf too?’ Eli asked.

‘He’s a legend,’ Bog snarled. Eli watched him unbuckle his seat belt and move into the middle, strapping in again there and lowering his voice. ‘Proper sick now.’

Eli nodded, tried to emit a little note of sympathy. ‘And you just hitchhiked to Sydney and back?’

‘Thanks to you.’

‘What for?’

‘Ay?’

‘What were you doing in Sydney?’

He waved his hand. ‘Paintin houses.’

‘Painting houses,’ Eli repeated. When he turned around to look at the boy again, he saw gun-shaped fingers in his face. 

The kid laughed. ‘Glad that truckie couldn’t take me any further. Bloke smelt foul as a cock. You boys smell nice though. Nice boys, ay. City boys. Good stock, yud say?’

Che asked Eli to tell him the time. All through the night, Eli had watched the clock on the dash move at double speed, the numbers’ lime green legs shapeshifting senselessly fast. He looked at the clock now, tried halving the amount, and saw that helped him none. The clock, Che had told him, was the only thing wrong with the car that had been his mother’s. Eli had met her the previous afternoon, while they packed beneath her balcony. She was thin and brown and looked not much like her thick white son. But she sounded similar, cynical, as she started reading off old news of shark fatalities in the area where they were headed. Che had told her to shut it, and she went inside and came back with Band-Aids and bandages and a small glass bottle of antiseptic that smashed when it landed in the boot.

Eli looked at his phone. ‘Almost ten.’

Low tide at eleven o’clock, their plan had been to drive west to Narla and then turn south, towards the coast. Che had a spot where they could stretch, surf, pitch tents and shut their eyes.

The kid said, ‘There’s a question there.’

Che ran a hand over his shaven, hairless head and yawned. ‘Are we good stock?’

‘Yes,’ Eli said. Che stared at Eli until Eli started to blush. ‘Middle class,’ suggested Eli. ‘Aspirational.’

‘The Good Boys.’ They heard it as a title, not a compliment. ‘How are your parents? Nice ones?’

‘Yeah,’ Eli said.

‘That’s what ya fucken want, ay,’ Bog nodded. ‘Sensational. Aspirational. You might meet the grans. Gwen’s fucken aspirational as they come mate. Does about anything for me. Legend. Head like a calculator. The other two, nah. Bonkers and Bird Brain.’ Bog bashed the top of his backpack. ‘The things...’ In the back the kid slouched and groaned and stretched his hands behind his head, but did not at any point close his eyes. When they neared the Narla turn off, he was watching, ready to keep them on the highway heading west. Che obeyed.

*

Under winter’s noon sun they drove around a town called Nedurra. Tin roofs. Sandy nature strips. One long line of Norfolk pine and a grotto scent, maybe an empty harbour nearby. Around the same block they looped, three, four, five times, before Bog told them to stop outside his house.

‘I’m grabbin my gear. Yuz comin in?’ Eli looked at Che. Che shook his head. ‘Been away a bit long. Gwens won’t be happy.’ Bog opened the car door and let his legs out. ‘She’s not home now though.’ They stared at the home. A tiny front fence. A plantless lawn that was cut like carpet. ‘Yuz won’t fucken drive off, will ya?’ Che laughed, surprised. The boy waited very briefly for an answer, then got out of the car, left his belongings where they were. Eli watched him go, then closed his eyes. ‘I’ve gotta sleep.’

‘We’re almost there.’

‘Are we?’

‘You want to drive again? Could wake you up.’

Eli nodded slowly.

‘Just sleep, then. There’s no competition.’

‘Maybe some water.’ Eli turned to get a bottle from the floor of the back seat.

‘We’re not stopping to piss.’

They sat and passed the bottle between them, glancing at the house every now and then.

Eli, if he was honest, found Che’s eyes unnerving. The way they flicked so quickly around. Now they went from his Instagram feed to the house that the kid