Tim Winton (21 page)

I picked wax from the deck of my battered twin-fin.

Pikelet?

Can I see you? I asked without looking up.

Oh, baby. No.

Just once. Please?

Pikelet.

You owe it to me, I said without properly understanding what kind of threat I'd uttered.

Shit, Pikelet.

I'll leave you alone. Just once.

I never would have blown the whistle on her - I couldn't have done it - but for her at least this must have been real and present danger.

Yeah, she said so bitterly that it felt like a blow. For old times'

sake, right?

On a Thursday while Sando was in Angelus I rode out there and was met by the dog. Eva wouldn't let me upstairs so we went without preamble into the shadows of the undercroft where the smells of soil and wax and fibreglass were all about us. I knelt and lifted her dress and kissed the hard projection of her belly while she ran her hands abstractedly through my hair. Her breasts were long and heavy and between her legs everything felt fat and wet and ripe.

Hurry, she said.

I'm sorry, I murmured.

Yeah, well, we're both sorry now.

She turned and braced against the workbench and we took it slowly and carefully. I held her gorgeous belly and saw the veins stand proud in her neck and the sweat gather on her back and when it was over neither of us pretended to be happy.

I

NEVER SAW THE BABY. In February the old man copped a flying belt at the mill. The initial report made it seem like a let off-it could easily have been a walking blade or worse, and there were no severed limbs. But when Mum and I got to the hospital in Angelus we saw that half his face was mashed and they told us he'd suffered a major skull fracture from the steel beam he'd been thrown against. Nobody's fault, just a freak accident.

He never regained consciousness.

Eva had her baby in the same hospital while Dad was there. A boy, or so I heard. Eva and the child were long gone by the time the old man died. We buried him in the pioneer cemetery back along the river. His mates from the mill came. Frank Loon was there but the Sandersons stayed away. They may have already left town.

My father's death hit me with a force that felt targeted and personal. I felt chastised by it and it really pulled me up. Afterwards, Mum looked at me fearfully, as though I was a stranger.

Now I knew there was no room left in my life for stupid risks.

Death was everywhere -- waiting, welling, undiminished. It would always be coming for me and for mine and I told myself I could no longer afford the thrill of courting it.

Driven by loneliness and remorse and a desire to compensate my mother somehow, I put all my energies into study. I didn't surf much and I kept to myself to the extent of being thought a weirdo. My last two years of school were empty and desperate, but through a regimen that relied more on hard discipline than intellectual curiosity, I dragged myself from the bottom of the class and began to make headway.

Eventually my marks were excellent, but my heart wasn't in it.

People said the old man's death was the beginning of the end for the mill and they were only half wrong - it reeled from crisis to crisis for another decade. Mum got a modest payout, which left her free and clear with the house as well as a pension. She saved enough to put me through university and I did my best to be a dutiful son. She never accused me of having forsaken the old man for Bill Sanderson or abandoned her for Eva, though I couldn't have blamed her if she had. I'd absented myself from their lives so long and the unspoken hurt from it lingered for years.

We tried to find some closeness, Mum and I. I wrote every week from the city and phoned her every few days. I drove home some weekends and at semester breaks I stayed weeks at a time. I tried to show I loved her but our relationship was a polite, undeclared failure - there was tenderness but no intimacy -- and in this regard it could have been a rehearsal for marriage.

At twenty, after years of barely surfing at all, I went to Bali and finally saw the cave at Uluwatu. I climbed down through it to the sea and surfed the big, winding lefthander for an hour, amped but totally out of condition. I had a bad fall, blew a disc in my back.

It took me a week to get home to Perth and when I did I went to pieces. The prolapse sorted itself out soon enough but I had a kind of breakdown. I was only a few weeks from finishing my degree.

I never returned to see it through. Instead I holed up in a caravan on a sheep station and put myself back together as best I knew how.

G,

Trace Andrews loved me. Even after she grew wary, there was that to remember. She taught in the zoology department of the university where I worked as a lab technician. My mother adored her, was overjoyed when we married, and I was euphoric, never happier in my life. We had two daughters, so beautiful I could never stop being anxious for them. And now they're women, old enough to find me more an amusement than a puzzle.

When Grace was pregnant she said I was weird about it. Men, she said, were supposed to be turned off by all that fluid, the gross belly, the big backside and puffy ankles. Thatwas normal.

I laughed. I really thought she was joking.

So you prefer revulsion to reverence?

A girl doesn't mind reverence, she quipped. But reverent lust is another thing.

What can you mean? I asked, still grinning.

Well, it's creepy.

Ah. Yes. Creepy.

There was yet a hint of laughter in our voices but I was unnerved by the exchange. Years later, when it shouldn't have mattered anymore, I made the mistake of returning to this conversation as I dropped the girls home one Sunday afternoon. There'd been a photo of an actress naked and pregnant on the cover of a glamour magazine, which sparked a surprising furore. To my mind it was a rather brave and beautiful image, but I was curious about what Grace might think. She seemed annoyed that I'd even bring it up.

Grotesque, she said, as the girls hauled their bags up the steps to her door. Now they're mainstreaming porn.

Okay, I murmured.

I leant against the car, conscious of the potential for things to go unhelpfully sour. Perhaps it was stupid of me to mention it.

I was no great success as a man but I had been, I thought, a faithful, gentle husband. Never sexually insistent, I steered clear of oddness.

I took no interest in pornography. I made myself quite safe and ordinary - a lab bloke, a threat to nobody. And yet.

I gave a wave and got back in the car.

Nobody wants to be creepy. I was careful, always backing off. And somehow, somewhere along the track, I went numb. I couldn't say what it was and didn't dare try. How do you explain the sense of being made to feel improper? I withdrew into a watchful rectitude, anxious to please, risking nothing. I followed the outline of my life, carefully rehearsing form without conviction, like a bishop who can't see that his faith has become an act.

I started, despite myself, to fool with electricity. A couple of times I came to on the tile floor at work, down beneath the sinks and benches where the odours of agar and disinfectant and formaldehyde brewed like some obscene secret, and the return of consciousness brought with it a sad blankness like the lingering melancholy after sex.

I didn't understand this behaviour. I had no special interest in electricity. Granted, it's a potent, tangible presence in a world that's cast off presences. It was just a moment of righteous sensation, like a blow to the head. It knocked me down. It hurt like hell. But it was something I could feel.

In a dentist's waiting room, during a year I can barely recall, I came upon a photo of Bill Sanderson in a travel magazine. It seems he'd come to preside over quite an empire. Snowboards, alpine apparel - all dripping rebel chic. The interview mentioned his wife Eva and their son Joseph - a good Mormon name. There was much talk of risk in the financial sense. Sando was a kind of investment guru, a motivational speaker of some note. Out on the Aspen slopes he looked like a grizzly, sunbleached Kris Kristofferson, a man arrived.

It was my mother who sent the news clipping about Eva Sanderson. I still don't know why she did. Until that moment I never gave her sufficient credit to imagine she might take some little pleasure in passing it on. But the chances are she simply thought I'd like to know.

Without the slightly lurid details and the connection to Utah wealth, Eva's death might have gone unreported. In any event it earned only two inches of a Reuters column. Eva was found hanging naked from the back of a bathroom door in Portland, Oregon.

A Salvadorean hotel employee discovered her with a belt around her neck. The deceased had been the sole occupant of her five-star room, the cause of death cardiac arrest as a result of asphyxiation.

There was no one I could talk to, least of all my mother.

Grace found the clipping and wanted, with good cause, to know what it signified. But I couldn't say. I wouldn't risk setting off the rolling mass of trouble inside me. I choked it down. At quite some cost.

You couldn't blame Grace for how things went. She just wanted to be happy. She had her career to look to, and she was anxious for the girls. And in the end I wasn't fit. No question about that.

Afterwards I had myself put away for a spell. I only signed myself out to go to my mother's funeral, a day of hard and vivid feeling. I took the burial as a sacrament of my own failure as much as a tribute to my gentle mother's life. My girls were there. They seemed happy to see me and I couldn't hold their wariness against them. Grace left her new bloke at home though she needn't have.

I would have behaved. She seemed wistful but determined and it clearly upset her to see me looking the way I did. I had a few scars by then and I was woozy with pills. I felt the hopeless tug of love as she led the girls towards the car. The mourners around me were careful but not afraid. I have never been a violent man. Just a little creepy, it seems.

I didn't go back to the hospital. I broke an undertaking.

Got in a car and drove east, as far away from the sea and the city as possible.

When I was on the ward there was a tall, reedy bloke who carried a bible with him all day. He had a habit of fixing on things you said during group work and hitting you later with a few pithy verses to be going on with. He had me down as some kind of compulsive - not miles off the mark - but I wanted to pull his ears off when he told me that a man who even thinks about having his neighbour's wife is already an adulterer.

No, Desmond, I told him. Bullshit.

Can't deny it!

You get ideas. We all get ideas. Thoughts. And most of them come and go without causing anybody grief.

Desmond shook his head and I wanted to get him by the hair, squeeze the poison from his head. Wanted to, but didn't. I told him he was sad and dangerous, that he shouldn't say such things, especially not to vulnerable people like us. I was well and truly wigged out at the time, but still sane enough to know there's a world of difference between thinking things and doing them.

You lack morality, he said mildly enough.

You call that morality? I said, trying not to shout. Robbing people of the distinction between thoughts and actions?

Sport, said Desmond, I tell you this out of love. You are a captive of evil.

Talk like that frightened me because in an unsteady moment you could believe it. I was tired and sad and fucked up but I wasn't going to give in to bullshit. I'd been prey to false convictions aplenty and I'd had enough. It is possible to believe that as an idea comes into your mind, an act has been born and there's nothing you can do about it. It's as if thinking something causes it to happen, makes an action inevitable, even necessary. Sometimes it's good to remind yourself it isn't so.

A captive of evil, said Desmond.

No, I said. I'm a voluntary patient.

What I didn't say, because I didn't trust myself not to clock him one, is that nobody should be a slave to their thoughts - this was captivity, this was evil.

All about there were others watching Desmond and me, waiting for a blow-up. There were people in our midst who believed that babies had died and cities burnt because of thoughts they'd had.

Do you lust after your neighbour's wife? asked the girl with the slashed arms. Really, she said drolly, you can tell us.

My wife, I said. My wife is now my neighbour's wife. And my old neighbour's wife is dead.

Man, that's fucked up, said someone.

No lust?

Not much, I said. Not now.

Loonie died in Mexico, shot in a bar in Rosarito, not far from Tijuana. Some kind of drug deal gone bad. Maybe he did business with the wrong cops. For years stories had made their way back to me, sightings on the northern beaches of Sydney or in Peru or the Mentawais. His reputation for fearlessness endured. He surfed hard and lived hard and seemed to finance it all with drug scams and smuggling. It was said he bought his way out of Indonesia several times, that he had contacts in the TNI. I wonder about his apprenticeship to Sando, how much more than just surfing it might have involved - all those side-trips to Thailand, the long, unexplained absences, surfboards arriving from all over the globe - and whether Sando's family money had been augmented by his darker business interests.

I felt a pang when I heard about Loon
ie.
It hardly sent me into a spin the way Eva's death had, but I felt hollow, as though there was suddenly less of me.

From a call box in Wiluna, surrounded by broken glass and red dirt, I called Grace.

I'm sorry to call, I said.

Yeah, you probably are.

Everyone I know is dead. Or gone.

And what are you planning to do?

Put it all behind me, I said like a politician. I'm gunna put it all behind me and move on.

She hung up on me.

For a while I shared a humpy with a defrocked priest. He was an alcoholic and a wise man and for a time I hated him. I'd only come asking for water for my car's boiling radiator but he saw this was the least of my problems. It was obvious he'd never lost his missionary zeal because he hid the keys to my car for three weeks until I climbed back into my own skin.