Minimum of Two

by Tim Winton

  I saw two pairs of legs. The man’s were hairy, varicose and white. The woman’s were shorter, darker, younger. I tried another space in the drapes and saw a profile of the woman’s face against the hairy white shoulder of a man. She didn’t look twenty years old. Her hair was blonde and cut short. She had full lips and a small jaw. Her eyes were closed. I couldn’t hear what she said when her lips moved. At another space in the curtains I saw the man’s heaving back. I saw him stiffen, roll aside. The man was Fred Blakey. He looked old, with the road-map face of a drinker, and with his greying hair all scuffed up, he looked forlorn.

  I stood in the garden with the claw hammer in my hand and one of Greta’s stockings wrapped round my wrist. I saw that heaving white back on Greta, saw his smooth old hands pushing her head into the concrete, the spittle at the corners of his mouth, her breasts strangling in his fists, those places I knew he dribbled over, the stain of his big white body on me.

  Greta would be in bed now. Her body would be shut tight; she’d be lying there hard and straight in our bed where things used to be whole and sweet. Maybe she’d be scratching her rash, or praying like a scared kid, cold and straight. And in there, twelve hours out of a gaol, was Fred Blakey heaving and lurching on a girl who seemed to enjoy it. He had hair on his shoulders. I turned the hammer over in my hands. I went out to my hired car and waited.

  About midnight the lights went out in the house where Fred Blakey was. At one-thirty the streetlights went out. The radio in the car put me to sleep. I dreamt I was walking down a passage that got narrower and narrower. I ran down it, faster, crazier. When I woke it was 4.30. I switched off the radio. The windows were opaque with condensation and the ceiling of the car was wet. I opened a window, cold air rushed in, my head cleared.

  Suddenly I felt sad, as though something had slipped from my grasp. I sat like that, like a bereaved man, until 6.50 when Fred Blakey and the girl jogged out onto the road with the small dog. They wore red tracksuits.

  I hadn’t planned this. I hadn’t planned anything. My mind was bogged. I just acted.

  When they were out of sight down the hill, I tried to start the car, but it wouldn’t catch. I kept trying. I was calm; I didn’t curse. I let off the handbrake, took the car out of gear and rolled. At the fourth hop, the motor started. I revved it hard and braked. I waited a full minute. I couldn’t have told you my name.

  By the time I caught them up, Fred Blakey and the girl and the dog were at the road by the river. It was the side away from the river. He was on the grass verge. She was on the road. The dog zig-zagged between them. She turned and fell, mouth wide, as I rode up the kerb behind them, but Blakey never turned around. She went under. Something flew off to the side.

  Blakey rose out of the ground and starwheeled up over the bonnet and I felt him thwacking across the roof and down the boot, and then I was around the bend, collecting sprinklers and the edges of parked cars, trying to get back on the road. There was mist on the river and skyscrapers looked like giants rearing from the clouds.

  I went in quiet at home. Greta woke as I crawled in beside her. She rose on an elbow and looked at me through sleep-narrow eyes. The look on her face. She hid her breasts. She got out of bed, pulling on a shaving coat and jerked up the blind. A small sound hicked in her throat. The morning light flattened me.

  ‘It’s all right, now,’ I murmured.

  ‘No, Madigan,’ she said. ‘It’s not.’

  And in that moment I knew that I had lost my life. I was a dead man.

  Distant Lands

  THE GIRL THEY called Fat Maz worked in her father’s news-agency. Her father had a club foot and he was an angry man because the army had never wanted him. All day he clomped up and down between the racks of magazines keeping an eye out for thieves and making sure people bought things instead of standing and reading for free. The girl’s mother sat all day at the register and watched the cars pass. Once a day the big Greyhound rolled past going north to the city. Only the dull drumming of the old National reminded the girl that her mother was there. She was always relieved when her parents went home for lunch and left the shop to her.

  Every day at the lunch hour, a tall dark man came in, paused for a moment just inside the door as if to adjust his eyes or to get his bearings, before heading straight to the paperback novel called Distant Lands, opened it, and with his foot up on the bottom shelf, read for fifteen minutes. The first time he came in his reading was furtive; he spent as much time looking up to see if he was being watched as he did reading. His eyes showed white and worried over the burst of exotic purple on the cover, and to show that she couldn’t have cared less, the girl smiled at him and shrugged.

  ‘Interesting?’ she asked that first day as he walked out without spending a cent.

  The man said nothing. He just passed the register with his eyes downcast. When he got out into the street, he adjusted his tie, buttoned his jacket against the smelly harbour breeze, and went.

  After that, the man came again, but he did not look at the girl or give any sign of recognition. Her father would have thrown him out. Not only was he freeloading; she guessed he was a Pakistani too. His Nescafé hands were clean and well-manicured. His suit was conservative and cut sharp. When she inspected Distant Lands she saw that he marked his place with a long, black hair. The book looked as though it had never been opened. On the back cover, the blurb said: You will want this book never to finish.

  As weeks passed, the girl wondered whether she should read Distant Lands for herself. The dark man seemed to draw such energy from it; she could see it in the way he buttoned his jacket against the wind each day. But the book was so long and she’d hardly read a book since leaving school, and, besides, she felt somehow as though it might be eavesdropping. For now, it was enough just to look forward to the lunch hour and that strange feeling of comradeship she felt when the dark man was in the shop. She was part of a conspiracy. For an hour, her rules were shop rules. Just watching him up the back with his polished shoe on the lower shelf and the gloss finish of his downpointed brow shining in the fluorescent light gave her pleasure.

  She was not a sporty girl. She did not read. She had no boyfriend. Sometimes she would bicycle out to the edge of town and look along the highway. She felt herself growing fatter every day. She hated the smell of the harbour and she often wondered whether she smelt of it after all these years.

  Several times she almost asked the man how the book was coming along, and once she nearly left the register to confront him, ask him why he read it at all, but even as she opened her mouth or got up from her seat, she knew she might spoil lunch hours for them both. For even though he never even met her gaze after the first day, and even though they’d never really conversed and he’d never actually bought a single item from the newsagency, the girl knew they understood one another. She had never felt this tacit understanding with anyone before.

  Once, the dark man came in late. The girl’s parents had come back from lunch. She felt her arse tighten. She saw the dark man walk down to the back, oblivious. She held her breath. But before he even touched Distant Lands the man seemed to sense the girl’s mother craning over the National, and he left immediately. He was back next day, dead on time.

  There was a more serious crisis. One day, a big red woman in a shiny cardigan brought Distant Lands to the register. At the time, the girl’s mother was out on the pavement dragging in wet bundles of the Daily News.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the girl said. ‘That book’s reserved.’

  ‘What’s this – a libr’y?’ The big red woman deepened a tone.

  ‘It’s on order. Sorry.’ It seemed desperately important to save it for tomorrow’s lunch hour. It might take weeks to get another copy down from the city and the thought of lunch hour without a visit from the stranger sent a gallop of panic through her.

  ‘Haven’t you got more?’ The big woman put a meaty, beringed hand upon the register.

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  The woman
stood there for a moment as though deciding tactics, but in the end she slapped the book down on the glass counter and rolled out. At the sight of the great rump in retreat, the girl felt fear. That could be me, she thought. It wasn’t the fatness so much as the . . . the . . . whatever it was that seemed so patently missing. The woman hadn’t even really wanted the book, she began to suspect. Their little confrontation was just something to do.

  She watched her mother drag in the newspapers. Her father passed, throwing his foot angrily ahead of him. Outside the Greyhound was pulling away empty.

  As she helped close up that night, she felt the oddest seesawing inside her. By dinner it was gone and she watched TV until she slept where she sat.

  Next morning she felt guilty. She had no friends, but her mother and father looked after her. They’d given her a job when she quit school, and jobs were impossible to get in this little town. Maybe things weren’t as bad as all that.

  That day, the dark man came in as usual. Watching him read, she noted that he was not handsome, though she did not object to his colour. His teeth had the look of polished rice. She felt a smile wedge her face as he turned a page. Was that little snapping movement in him excitement? Now she was happy; there was no doubt of it. This was happiness, not everything else.

  The shop was empty. There was only the dark man reading Distant Lands and her peering openly at him over the register. Nothing else but a thousand garish glossy covers. He’s happy, she thought, seeing him turn another page.

  As she watched, the Nescafé coloured man turned what she’d swear looked like the last page. Her throat closed her heart off. She heard him sigh. She saw him shut the book and place it back on the shelf. She saw him coming to the register.

  His small teeth showed in a smile.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  The girl opened her mouth.

  ‘And this is for the bus,’ he said, putting a note on her palm. ‘Goodbye.’

  The girl they called Fat Maz watched him go out into the main street, turn his collar against the harbour wind, and go on his way.

  After a moment, she went down to the back of the shop. She was excited and confused. Distant Lands stood on the shelf. She picked up a long black hair. It was strong enough to wind around her finger like a tourniquet and turn the flesh blue. She stood with her back to the shelf and let out a grunt. The fifty dollar note was starchy-new. She stuffed it down her jumper and into her bra. Leaning against the shelf for a moment, she looked towards the door. When she breathed, the money sounded electric between her breasts.

  She met her parents at the door. She saw shadows in their brows. She fairly crackled.

  Laps

  I

  AFTER SEVEN YEARS, Queenie Cookson began to swim seriously again. Each morning she drove to City Beach and swam up and down between the groynes. Out behind garlands of surfers and waist-deep swimmers, she scored the swells with her strokes. It hurt; she felt as though she was etching herself on the sea. As she tilted her head to breathe, she would often see on the beach her husband and daughter keeping pace. All this time, she thought, they’ve been growing, and I’ve gone to fat. It took her seven years to find will again, to shrug off defeat.

  She had come from her home town a loser, an outcast; she left behind a grave and a crusade and a well of bitterness, and somehow she’d turned her mind to being a mother and relearning how to be married. These things were good shelters. But seven years of softness hadn’t taken all will from her. Queenie Cookson did not like to be beaten. She did not like to cower. Her big, brown body and everything that lived in it was not trained to be that way. In the first month of summer she lost ten kilograms, and she knew she could be hard again.

  Every stroke of her dogged freestyle was a blow, and with each swim she knew she was shifting more than her own weight. Somehow, out there that summer, Queenie changed. Early on, the morning swim was like doing penance, but in time it became a pleasure. She began to feel she belonged in the dawn-brown sea, as she had when she was a girl, when her grandfather was alive, when the world could only be good. The old man had taught Queenie to swim. He threw her out of the dinghy and rowed just ahead, calling, coaxing, hounding her. He was all she had. She’d left him buried on a hill she no longer owned.

  These mornings, Cleve and Dot mooned along the beach indulging her. Sometimes Dot paddled out on her board and Cleve watched her hassling for waves with men twice her size. It made him laugh to see her cut a long bottom turn; she was dwarfed by the most puny wave. She put the men to shame zigging and zagging under the churning weight of water. Cleve stopped joggers and pointed her out. He could not let her go unnoticed.

  Like her mother, Dot swam before she could talk. Her short honey hair was cut and shaped like a mushroom and her skin was the colour of sherry. She had the body of a miniature athlete. She was six years old. Though a strong swimmer, she was lazy like Cleve, and swimming laps bored her motionless. Most mornings, unless the swell was good, she just walked with Cleve, not saying much. Both of them would prefer to be at Scarborough; it was just down the hill from where they lived and the surf was better, but it was safer at City Beach for laps, and besides, the little men with big money were tearing up the beachfront to build hotels for the Americans and neither of them could stand the sight of the cranes and steel skeletons and hardhats and the awful wound in the ground where the burger joints and pinball parlours had been.

  ‘They’re tearing up the fount of my youth,’ Cleve would say and wave his arms like a Shakespearean actor.

  Dot would shove her hands into her pockets and drop her head. ‘They’re making a rotten mess.’

  So out of duty, and with sadness, they went with Queenie to City Beach.

  One morning, near the end of summer, as Cleve handed her a towel, Queenie shook the water from herself and told him she was ready now.

  ‘For what? What are you ready for, more laps?’ He elbowed Dot.

  ‘Ready to go back.’

  ‘Where?’ Dot screwed up her face and sucked on the strap of her bathers. ‘Cor, swimming.’

  ‘Back to Angelus, Cleve.’ The soberness of her tone surprised even her. Weighty. Yes, she thought, there’s a weight to lose.

  ‘A holiday?’ Dot straightened.

  Queenie smiled. ‘A weekend, maybe. You might see a whale. They’re coming back there, these days. It was where we used to live. It’s my home town. We had a different life, then, Dot.’ She noticed Cleve’s old apprehensive habit of kicking the sand. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all summer, Cleve, and I reckon it’s time. We can’t avoid it anymore. We’re older. Places shouldn’t frighten us anymore. We got screwed by the place – okay. But a place can’t screw you forever. It’d help me, Cleve.’

  She saw his face set. Dot looked from her to him. They all walked up the blenching beach to the carpark. The sky and the easterly gave warning of another withering day. Summer: watermelon, flyscreen doors, sleeping on the back lawn in the haze of mosquito coils, the sweet smell of water on dying grass, undisciplined sunsets. It was what they lived for.

  No one spoke on the way home in the rattling Land Rover. The Cooksons lived in a little weatherboard house, thick with passionfruit and grape vines, on the hill above Scarborough Beach. It was a new life they had here. The hurt of seven years before had healed them together in a way they had not expected. It was only lately Queenie had come to notice it. She had been numb for longer than she could recall.

  Dot stomped from room to room, getting ready for school. Cleve fried eggs on the gas range. Queenie fingered the ever-dull West Australian at the table. She didn’t pretend to be happy.

  ‘You don’t agree then,’ she said.

  Her hands before her were big and salt-wrinkled. The kitchen smelled of potted herbs and last night’s fish batter. She looked at Cleve’s peeling shoulders. He was thinking hard, she knew. His legs were too thin for him; it looked as though the bottom half of him went hungry. He didn’t seem afraid of turning thirty-two next week. />
  Dot crashed in and sat down.

  ‘Sunny side, Dad.’

  ‘Why?’

  Queenie prepared herself. Breakfast Banter.

  The little girl replied: ‘Cause I like the big yellow dot.’

  ‘A flaming dot. That’s what we got.’

  ‘A dot. So what?’

  ‘Yeah, could have been worse. Imagine twins. Two dots. A colon. Three, an ellipsis.’

  Dot pouted.

  ‘Not those lips, dill. If you were twenty dots I could get a pair of scissors and cut along the line.’

  She made the sound of a fart with her mouth.

  ‘But all we got was one lousy Dot. A dot with a bot.’

  ‘The whole world is a dot. From a long way.’

  ‘So is an egg. Here, eat it. Actually, an egg is a world, too, for a while.’ But Cleve had lost her. Dot had punctured the yolk and was tamping it with wads of buttered toast.

  Queenie watched him back at the stove. He knew she was watching, but it didn’t spoil the morning’s ritual. Queenie saw him shuffle around the kitchen. He had changed a lot. She liked him so much more since Dot was born and they’d lived here. He was frumpish and good, these days; he’d stopped trying to be someone he never was, now he had no country mettle to prove. She imagined people would like him at the hospital where he lifted them and wheeled them through the labyrinth into the operating room or out the big glass doors to freedom.

  She received her egg and a kiss on the brow.

  ‘You don’t agree, then?’

  Cleve sat down and bit into a big, green capsicum. ‘Yeah, let’s go tomorrow.’

  ‘For the weekend?’ Dot wore a dag of yolk on her chin.

  Cleve nodded. Queenie laughed and was afraid.