An Open Swimmer

by Tim Winton

  The old man stopped dead and turned to Jerra, eyes wide.

  ‘Yes.’ His eyes shrank, withdrawing into his head. ‘Yer got a fish, boy.’ He kicked a black lump of dirt into the fire and left. Jerra didn’t watch him go down to the beach.

  He heard the seagulls screeching until well after dark. He would have jumped into the fire, but he was too cold to burn.

  The fire almost out, Jerra brought from the van the bundle of letters he had brought with him. He flicked through the envelopes addressed to him without opening any of them, least of all the last in the bundle, the one about the Guy Fawkes night he now knew so well he might have lived it himself. He had been on a fishing boat six hundred miles away from her. By then the letters were not love letters, nor insane poetical screams, but long, sad, friendly letters – kindly, almost – full of her hopeless advice and explanations and reassurances. He read some of it:

  . . . was a beautiful craft, Jerra. Your father would have loved it. And I loved it as much as Jim. I can’t deny that I convinced myself to love it, but I thought such an hypocrisy worthwhile . . . well, because of Sean and the hope with the new child. I thought that the only important thing, regardless of how I did it, was to be loved.

  And the party. Well, the party. We were drunk, drunk with pretence and enthusiasm and reunion and optimism and much fear, no doubt. I was highly regarded by all as the recovered woman, even though I looked repulsively expectant. Expectant. Such a word, dear Jerra. Take note of it. One must always be expectant, but one must not be stupid and mess it up. You only have a right to be expectant if you are doing true things. Do you understand this? I’m not sure I do myself, though I know I have wanted things the wrong way, pretending too much. Oh, we’ve all cheated so much! It’s the way you go about it. And I can say that all too safely now, because I have nothing else to go about. And I have an inkling I will not even go about that properly.

  Please excuse this silly talk from an old lady you are (I know) dearly tired of. I wrote this to clear up the matter of Guy Fawkes night because I know Sean believes I lost the baby on purpose. As I started telling you, we were all very drunk – the Watsons, the Courts, all of ’em – and Jim wanted to show off the new boat, and it was after midnight. We went out without a crew. Too far. It was black. I was helplessly burdened, and drunk – I will not pretend I wasn’t – and we kept drinking . . .

  Jerra did not read on. He knew it well enough. He saw her, heavy and turgid on the deck of the brilliant white vessel and felt for himself the grinding, shrieking collision with the reef, the settling, the jarring rattling her as if to make her spill her burden onto the boards. It was as if he was there. He saw the red lights in the sky, fizzers and rockets cartwheeling red, red, red up into the vast blackness with their spent, smoking carcasses hitting the water with quiet smacks. And Jim calling ‘Ohgodogodogod!’ as if he believed in one other than himself. Jerra felt her breaking up from within, short razors of pain shredding her as she watched the house lights on the beach. The hull shuddering with her. And the screaming. He saw her stricken, pulling on the long bottle shoved in her face for the pain and to shut her up. Eating on the glass . . . The tide rose, edging them off the reef and into the deep, sinking quickly as Jim fired flares up into the sky with all the other gay lights, and was, for once in his life, perfectly ineffectual. Hurrahs and hoots on the beach . . .

  Jerra had lived those scenes in his imagination innumerable times. How they reached the beach was beyond imagination and, apparently, beyond her recall.

  Jerra rebound the envelopes with the elastic band.

  With all her silly talk, all the stupid advice, he thought, all the insane things she dreamt, I’ll believe that part for ever. Jerra hated. And he would not forgive – not even her – that grinning slit that cleaved open the skin of her throat which was cracked, black and green, with her seaweed clump of a head half-buried in the sand that the storm had heaved up. On the same beach.

  ‘Didn’t they know she would?’ he called out to the darkness. ‘She was gonna go back all the time!’

  Green plastic peeled back to show her grins.

  ‘Been in the water a long time,’ said the man next to him.

  Jim, up the beach in front of the summer house, wept into Jerra’s old man’s duffel coat. A crowd gathered on the sandhills, perched on the horizon, waiting for the news.

  Jerra looked down at the naked legs and scarred, slack belly. A jade tinge to the blown fingers.

  ‘Slit herself and went for a swim,’ said the man beside him, adjusting his coat in the drizzle. ‘Crazy.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jerra. ‘They reckon.’

  ‘Know her?’

  ‘No,’ said Jerra.

  Gulls hovered. The other man cocked his head at him.

  ‘Not personally, no,’ said Jerra at the man. He kept talking after the man went further up the beach where seagulls flagged in the breeze. ‘No,’ Jerra said, more than once.

  He dropped the bundle onto the smoking coals, and until – at length – it ignited, he did not regret it.

  the sea-winds

  RAIN FELL all night. Out over the ocean, a thunderstorm cracked and clashed. Lightning lit the inside of the van as Jerra lay awake, shivering under the blankets. The leaves were still chattering at dawn when the sky was dark as wet soil. His hands were fishy, and blood had dried brown under his fingernails. He lay under the blankets all day, getting up only once to leak in the fireplace. The stinking steam rose and made him sick. He wondered again for the first time in a while, why? Was it Jimbo? The booze? Sean? Or was it him? ‘No,’ he said once, listening to it in the dark. ‘She was crazy.’ And he knew someone else who was crazy. The old man was, he just knew it.

  Just before dark, the rain cleared and he cooked a damper in the coals he rekindled. The damper was doughy and burnt on the outside, but it was hot and it cleared the taste from his mouth.

  He slept in bits, chased down into the pale depths by schools of roe, wriggling mucus, green and leering, calling verses he didn’t remember.

  Dawn, another grey. More damper in the slow fire. The wet ground was almost frozen in places. Still hungry, he put sandshoes on and walked up the track to where the prints of rabbits were most obvious, droppings showing in the damp. He veered into the bush for a warren. If that old fool can do it, he thought . . .

  Gathering his snares, he made his way back to camp, holding the rabbit by its ears as he and his father had, letting the stuff run out as he walked. There was sand in its eyes.

  With the brown-stained diving knife, he slit the rabbit up from the anus and pulled back the skin, trying to ignore the putrid steam. He drained off some blood, cut the head and paws off, and hung it with a cord from the fork of a tree where the ringbolt hung. Then he collected some firewood and shoved it under the VW to dry. He sat by the fire all morning, drinking tea and pussy-looking soup from a packet, looking up occasionally to the slow drip from the carcass.

  Midday. He stoked up the fire and took the skinned carcass down from the tree. He took a stiff piece of fencing wire and ran it up the vent to where the neck had been. He secured it, bending the ends, and sat waiting for the fire to die. On either side of the fire, he sank a forked stick. Waited.

  When the fire was ready, the carcass was no longer a rabbit. It had curled pink on the spit, naked and unformed. Coals clucked and hissed as he took it in his hands, running, running in case it whimpered.

  Morning was hard and brittle with frost. The stillness of dawn was buffeted by a sharp wind off the ocean. The bay, as Jerra crunched across the sand, was beginning to roughen like gooseflesh, tiny bumps rising from the smooth grey. Horizon and sea were dark, hard to separate.

  N O in the sand.

  Jerra listened to the shells under his shoes. The wind was making his nose run. His sleeve was rough. His hair, stiff, weedy, rubbed against his neck. He saw handprints, flat knee-marks.

  N O again, wobbly and hurried.

  Half-way along the beach, ash-white,
perched on the bleached beam sticking out of the sand, the old man sat naked and shuddering. As Jerra neared, he saw that the old man’s buttocks and feet were blue, and that there were brown stains in his beard, sand all over his body.

  ‘Hey,’ cried Jerra. ‘What’re you doing out here in the cold? You’ll bloody freeze to death.’

  The old man stared out into the prickling ocean, knuckles bleached, his penis and testicles shrivelled and grey with cold. A shoulder twitched.

  ‘No good sittin’ out here. Gonna rain. Go back to your place.’

  ‘Can hear ’em, you know.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Both of ’em blisterin’. An’ the boat before . . . never seen anything like it, swimmin’ around in the bits ’n’ pieces of yer life. An’ it’s always the junk that floats. Real things’re ’eavy. She was racin’ me in. She wanted the truck. She wasn’t comin’ back. I got in first. Gawd yer swim like a bloody fish when yer desp’rate. An’ I knocked the livin’ crap out of her when she told me ’er . . . condition. Man’s a bugger at times, a bugger. She was leavin’ in the morning. I give in to her after what I did. An’ hit the grog plenty. Can never do the things wanted of yer. Gawd, but she was orright, me Annie . . .’

  ‘Come on!’ Jerra tried taking the bony arm, but the old man would not be moved. ‘Come on up to the fire, eh?’

  ‘An’ I wus burnin’ inside . . . I couldn’t let ’er go! I loved! But . . . she laughed. An’ as she wus down there on the beach in that little shack makin’ ready for town, I wus up the hill, drinkin’ and thinkin’ hard . . .’

  ‘Come on up to the fire, eh?’

  Creased and shabby in his greying skin, the old man was immovable. Rain began to fall lightly, opening up tiny pores in the sand. Jerra left him there. He’ll come up when it really begins to rain, he thought.

  He was uncertain how long the old man had sat in the rain. It had been unbearable to watch. Jerra dug himself into the blankets after covering the fire with a piece of tin in case the old man should come up. Rain spattered, sussing on the hot tin in sharp breaths. When the rain finally stopped, Jerra went down to see; but there was no sign, only a windblown set of footprints wobbling all the way to the rocks at the end of the beach.

  The wind was much stronger as he trudged through the sand, doing what he could to keep his hair out of his eyes. The sea was the colour of spit, bubbling and foaming. He followed the staggering prints to the pile of granite and began to climb around, the spray from the lumbering waves stinging his cheek, leaving little trickles that ran down the back of his neck under the collar of the coat.

  From the top of the rocks he could see smoke from the wobbling chimney. Flecks of weed and dried sponge blew up across the sand, and some were pinned to the walls of the humpy.

  Hunched over a drum, the old man wore the cracked oilskin and a black cloth cap. Jerra watched from a few yards away as the old man ladled some of the slush onto the dark, turned soil. Gulls fought in the trees. Jerra was upwind and didn’t smell it much. The stuff slopped onto the ground and was largely absorbed, leaving small mallee root turds on top of the soil.

  The old man looked up. He dropped the ladle, an old saucepan. He came forward a step, squinting at him, then spat and backed away to the drum.

  ‘Won’t give me peace. I smelt yer cracklin’. I knew. She tol’ me. That’s why, not just ’cause o’ the boat. Could o’ forgiven her, but she never will. An’ you?’

  No use this time, either, he knew. It was the same.

  ‘Just thought I’d come over and give you a hand with the vegies.’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘I said —’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘Geez.’ Jerra sighed.

  ‘Arr, yer can’t spook me, any more. Yer can piss off, whosever’s yer are! Go on!’ He reached into the drum.

  Something landed in the sand next to Jerra’s foot. Another splattered further away. He could smell it, even in the wind. As he walked away he felt one burst on his back. The stink followed him. Back at the camp he scraped it off, but the smell would not go away.

  He looked between the gnarled railway sleepers of the jetty down into the dredged green, green that went for ever down. The pearl was there, somewhere at the bottom. He felt his father’s breath in his ear; they were both looking and neither said anything.

  It was dark and the wind was too strong for him to keep the fire going. He went inside, listening to the canvas rippling and snapping, the flurries of leaves falling onto the roof of the VW. Rain came and he heard gulls floating over, going inland with the wind. Rain pattered, then sprayed and pelted the canvas and Jerra moved what he could into the van, seeing trickles creeping inward from the ground edges of the canvas. He sat by the blue flame of the Primus, heating spaghetti in a can, bleached every now and then by bursts of light from the sky.

  Surf thundered above the tearing sound of wind; the creaks of trees and leaves plastered themselves to car and annexe. Before going to bed, he went outside to the angry night and secured all ropes and some loose gear that was out in the open. Rain showed, driving down steeply, in the light of the torch. Ropes sung in the wind, taut and wet. A dark rivulet was coming down the track into the clearing, black pools appearing on the ground.

  Jerra went inside and dried. Already the annexe roof was bowed heavy with water that failed to run off. He left it, knowing that the pores in the cloth would open if he touched it. The rain must ease off soon, he thought. The beach would be being eaten by surf. He wondered how the old man’s humpy was faring. Jerra pictured him by the fire, babbling wildly, the ply walls shuddering in the storm.

  The little notebook opened in his palm: All the severed men . . .

  It looked at him. He scribbled, stopping occasionally to listen to the wind and rain, surveying what he had written.

  All the severed men

  Clutching themselves

  Butchering

  – And the guilt.

  He wondered what the stuff it was supposed to be, closed it to have another go tomorrow. It seemed a waste of time.

  Warm inside the blankets. He slept a little.

  C. J. Dennis, his bird-like grandfather, and a mealy-mouthed Sentimental Bloke pursued him into the depths with lines he only recalled in his sleep.

  What is the matter wiv me? . . . I dunno.

  I got a sorter thing that won’t let go

  Or be denied –

  A feelin’ like I want to do a break,

  An’ stoush creation for some woman’s sake.

  It must have been after midnight when he heard the tent-poles collapse. He sat up and saw the roof of the annexe sagging to the ground. Outside in the wind there was the sound of rain on water. Lightning crackled. A lot of water on the ground.

  There was no use doing anything until morning. In the distance there was the creaking, grinding sound of a tree falling, falling. He pulled the blanket round. He felt his head going through things, crashing in his ears, a pinging, slapping surge of sounds that drove his head deeper, further under grey water out of the rain and the noise; and he was laughing, singing and finding strings of words that were never strong enough to stay together pinging around in his brain. Deep – of ’ope an’ joy an’ forchin destichoot – and he tasted the bitterness of beer.

  The surface returned in choppy waves, bringing the whipping of cloth and wood back into his ears. Breathing hard in struggling gulps, and he spat things before going down again, feeling the sappy weed stroking his face, eating into his cheeks.

  Gulping up into the grey again he heard the shrill whistle of wind and the rabbit squeaks of boughs on the paintwork. Morning soon and he would have to clean up the mess.

  Jerra saw a lot that night. He sprinted in the dark with screaming in his ears and lights bursting green around him until his vision was reduced to a mottled opaque green like dense foliage. He smelt the bush. It made him drunk, drunk and floating until he was soaring between vast gorges and over water like a great sea-bird. He f
lew like this for some time before his wings began to fail him, tearing with the pressure of wind. He began to sink. He saw pollard-gloved hands pierced with hooks, and arms outstretched calling ‘Jerra!’, reaching up through the mottled webbing of net. ‘You can’t chuck it in!’ the old man said, rolling over and over with his tongue out. Flares burst around, forcing Jerra down to the water, green water, and he slid in and cruised like a shark, savaging, feeding off a struggling creature that swam out to sea leaving a red chalk-line like a diligent Gretel. Excited, he plunged his head into weed, plaited, matted strands, found a slit, and furrowed greedily down into the warm sap-green until sated and ashamed. Then in retreat and revulsion, he saw the shredded corpse jaded under plastic and the Sentimental Bloke called out:

  . . . I’m sick

  Of that cheap tart

  ’Oo chucks ’er carkis at a fella’s ’ead

  An’ mauls ’im . . . Ar! I wish’t . . .

  ‘No!’ Jerra cried.

  . . . that I wus dead! . . .

  He bit his tail turning perfect, frenzied circles, ripping pieces away from himself in fury and frustration and he came to pieces, each tiny piece stabbing the other with knives and safety-pins and eyes and words and cactus spines. Something swam slowly past making for the rarified deep – a muscular diamond – secreting tears of grief that became solidified gems encrusting the outside of its skull like the boil-cased face of Job.

  His head went tight between his knees as he retracted, wishing for escape, speed, a bigger engine. Blood between his knees, on his legs. A coughing gout. He hugged the beautiful, sleek, dead creature, afraid to follow the muscular diamond into the depths to see. He cried, left with the dead and dying.

  ‘Don’t let them make you old before you’re young, Jerra,’ she said, trembling as he went back down the corridor. ‘Don’t let them make you give up. You don’t have time to get that way.’