by Tim Winton
New streets appeared even while the bush burned. In the phone box, which stank of cigarettes, I listened to the man from 1194 and knew that he was making the time up as he went along.
I saw the rainbow mist of the market garden sprinklers and felt uneasy. I thought of Alan Mannering in that mist. He’d have been liquid long ago. I was eleven now, I knew this sort of thing.
As our neighbourhood became a suburb, and the bush was heaved back even further on itself, there was talk of using the swamp for landfill, making it a dump so that in time it could be reclaimed. But the market gardeners were furious. Their water came from the swamp, after all. Water was no longer cheap.
The van Gelders divorced. Wally Burniston was taken somewhere, I never found out where. One Sunday afternoon I found myself in the van Gelders’ backyard scrounging for a companion when I came upon Mrs van Gelder at the back step. I coasted over to her on my Dragstar to ask where her son might be but the sight of her struck me dumb. She had kohl around her eyes and a haircut that made her look like Cleopatra as played by Elizabeth Taylor. Her dress was short and half her buttons were undone. I stared at the reservoir of shade between her breasts and she raised her chin at me, took a great drag on her cigarette with her eyes narrowed, and gave me a confounding smile. She blew smoke across my handlebars. I popped an involuntary wheelstand in my hurry to get away. I hurtled back out into the street, didn’t even see the car coming, but its slipstream tugged at my shirt as it swerved to miss me. Tyres bawled on the fresh-laid bitumen. When I wheeled around, someone threw open the car door and began to shout and cry. And then people came into the street. I pedalled past them and coasted down our driveway to hide in the shed. Months later I woke from a dream in which Mrs van Gelder leant in towards me with her blouse undone and I peered into her cleavage as though into a well. Then I sat up in bed as wet as a Catholic.
From one summer to the next water restrictions grew more drastic and people in our neighbourhood began to sink bores to get water. The Englishman next door was the first and then everyone drilled and I thought of Alan Mannering raining silently down upon the lawns of our street. I thought of him in lettuce and tomatoes, on our roses. Like blood and bone. I considered him bearing mosquito larvae – even being in mosquito larvae. I thought of him in frogs’ blood, and of tadpoles toiling through the muddy depths of Alan Mannering. On autumn evenings I sat outside for barbecues and felt the unsettling chill of dew. At night I woke in a sweat and turned on the bedside light to examine the moisture on my palm where I wiped my brow. My neighbour had gotten into everything; he was artesian.
At the age of twelve I contemplated the others who might have drowned in our swamp. Explorers, maybe. Car thieves who drove too close to the edge. Even, startlingly, people like the Joneses before they became working class like us. The more I let myself think about it the less new everything seemed. The houses weren’t old but the remnants of the bush, the swamp itself, that was another thing altogether. Sometimes the land beyond the straight lines seemed not merely shabby but grizzled. I imagined a hundred years, then a thousand and a million. I surveyed the zeroes of a million. Birds, fish, animals, plants were drowned in our swamp. On every zero I drew a squiggly tadpole tail and shuddered. All those creatures living and dying, born to be reclaimed, all sinking back into the earth to rise again and again: evaporated, precipitated, percolated. Every time a mosquito bit I thought involuntarily of some queasy transaction with fair, silent, awful Alan Mannering. If I’m honest about it, I think I still do even now.
I knew even at ten that I hadn’t willed him to die, good teeth or bad. I pulled down my tee-shirt and saw him slip sideways and go without a sound, without a word. I faced the idea that he did it deliberately to spite me but he looked neither casual nor determined as he slipped into the dark. It was unexpected.
The brown land, I figured, wasn’t just wide but deep too. All that dust on the surface, the powder of ash and bones, bark and skin. Out west here, when the easterly blows, the air sometimes turns pink with the flying dirt of the deserts, pink and corporeal. And beneath the crust, rising and falling with the tide, the soup, the juice of things filters down strong and pure and mobile as time itself finding its own level. I chewed on these things in classroom daydreams until the idea was no longer terrifying all of the time. In fact at moments it was strangely comforting. All the dead alive in the land, all the lost who bank up, mounting in layers of silt and humus, all the creatures and plants making thermoclynes in seas and rivers and estuaries. I wasn’t responsible for their coming and going either but I felt them in the lake and on the breeze. I have, boy and man, felt the dead in my very water. Maybe that’s why my wife finds me so often staring across the Cockleshell mudflats at the end of a grim day’s teaching.
Not long after my thirteenth birthday we left the neighbourhood. We sold the house to a man who soon married and then divorced Mrs van Gelder. News of the street trickled back to me over the years. I met people in malls, airports, waiting rooms. The man next door murdered his wife. Up the road, near the ridge, a man invented the orbital engine and the Americans tried to ruin him. Bruno went back to Serbia to burn Albanians out of their homes; someone saw him on television. One of the Box kids became a celebrity priest. Girls got pregnant. Families began to buy second cars and electrical appliances that stood like trophies on Formica shelves. The suburb straightened the bush out.
Years went by. So they say. For the past five the state has endured a historic drought. The metropolitan dams look like rockpools at ebb tide and it has long been forbidden to wash a car with a running hose. Unless they have sunk bores people’s gardens have crisped and died. With all that pumping the water table has sunk and artesian water has begun to stink and leave gory stains on fences and walls. And our old swamp is all but dry. I saw it on the news because of the bones that have been revealed in the newly exposed mud. All around the swamp the ground is hardening in folds and wrinkles. The mud is veinous and cracks open to the sun. I saw it for myself when I pulled up, stunned from the long drive.
From the moment I arrived in my airconditioned Korean car I began to feel sheepish. Police were pulling down their tape barriers and a few news trucks wheeled away. The action was over. I sat behind the little steering wheel feeling the grit of fatigue in my eyes. I didn’t even get out. What had I been expecting to see, more bones, the bones perhaps, have them handed over for my close inspection? Would that suddenly make me sanguine about Alan Mannering?
The swamp has a cycleway around it now and even a bird hide. Around the perimeter, where the wild oats are slashed flat, signs bristle with civic exhortations. Behind the pine log barriers the straight lines give way to the scruffiness of natural Australia. The sun drove in through the windscreen and the dash began to cook and give off a chemical smell. Down at the swamp’s receding edge the scrofulous melaleucas looked fat and solid as though they’d see off another five years of drought. I pulled away and drove up our old street running a few laps of the neighbourhood in low gear. I took in the gardens whose European ornamentals were blanching. Only a few people were about, women and children I didn’t recognize. They stood before bloody mineral stains on parapet walls with a kind of stunned look that I wondered about. A man with rounded shoulders stood in front of my old house. The jacaranda was gone. Somebody had paved where it stood to make room for a hulking great fibreglass boat. No one looked my way more than a moment and part of me, some reptilian piece of me, was disappointed that no one looked up, saw right through the tinted glass and recognized me as the kid who was with Alan Mannering the day he drowned down there on the swamp. It’s as though I craved discovery, even accusation. There he is! He was there! No one said it when it happened and nobody mentioned it since. People were always oddly incurious about him. He was gone; time, as they say, moves on. They all went on without him while he rose and fell, came and went regardless. And they had no idea.
It’s kind of plush-looking, the old neighbourhood, despite the drought: houses remodelle
d, exotic trees grown against second-storey extensions. Middle class, I suppose, which is a shock until you remember that everyone’s middle class in this country now. Except for the unemployed and the dead. The city has swept past our old outpost. The bush has peeled back like the sea before Moses. Progress has made straight the way until terracotta roofs shimmer as far as the eye can see.
As I left I noticed furniture on the sandy roadside verge around the corner. Some black kids hauled things across the yard in Woolworths bags under the frank and hostile gaze of neighbours either side. An Aboriginal woman raised her fist at a man with a mobile phone and clipboard. I pulled over a moment, transfixed. Another man with a mobile phone and aviator glasses came over and asked me to move on. They were expecting a truck, he said; I complied, obedient as ever, but as I gathered speed and found the freeway entry I thought of the Joneses being evicted like that. I was right to doubt the 1194 man on the telephone. Time doesn’t click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has travelled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the water. Perhaps time moves through us and not us through it. Seeing the Joneses out on the street, the only people I recognized from the old days, just confirmed what I’ve thought since Alan Mannering circled me as his own, pointed me out with his jagged paling and left, that the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.
Damaged Goods
MY HUSBAND HAD THIS THING about a girl with a birthmark. It began when he was almost fourteen and went on all through high school like a fever that wouldn’t break. It’s a story he used to tell against himself in a kind of wistful tone, and to be honest it was one of the things about him that charmed me, that and his earnest demeanour. He told the story so many times that I feel like I was there, that I lived it with him. He didn’t just rattle these memories off – he’s never been that kind of bore – I had to wheedle them out of him.
Vic refuses to visit the town he grew up in but lately I find myself driving down alone for two or three days at a time. I took a friend once but she was restless inside twenty-four hours. She said I’m like some biographer sniffing around in vain for one final, telling detail that will complete the psychological puzzle at the centre of Vic’s life, but the truth is that I go out of loneliness and, pathetic as it is, I sometimes feel closer to him there knowing that it was the place that formed him. Anyway, it’s a nice little harbour town and this winter I’ve acquired an unexpected passion for whale watching. Now I know the difference between a southern right whale and a humpback. Believe me, I’ve had plenty of weekends to fill.
I suppose the sources of obsession are at once mundane and mysterious. If it wasn’t for my sister’s own fixation I’d be less forgiving about Vic and the weight of his past. I wouldn’t understand at all. I’d be long gone.
When she was six my sister won a doll in a school raffle. It was almost as big as her, the most ravishing thing we girls had ever seen, but it was a cause of great conflict and shame in our house because, like lotteries and cards and horseracing, raffles were a form of gambling and therefore the work of the Devil. Our father was furious. My sister couldn’t even remember buying the ticket – she was a devout girl and no rebel – but when she came home with the prize she begged to be allowed to keep it. She already loved it like a woman smitten by her newborn. Even our mother saw this and pleaded her case, but when our father could convince neither my sister nor my mother to take the doll back to school, it was boxed up and consigned to the top of the linen press where it lay, like a child in a cardboard and cellophane coffin, for fifteen years. In rare moments when the coast was clear my sister snuck to the linen press and climbed the shelves to peer in at the bright, cherubic cheeks and the lace gown and the dimples. It became her lost child. It was the only thing she took with her when she grew up and left home and for the rest of her life it has stood between her and other people, a kind of solace, really, but also a barrier to human intimacy. She has a senior position in the tax office. She’s a highly rational and competent person. Except when it comes to that doll which lies in state in her livingroom like an embalmed child bride.
I always assumed Vic’s infatuation with Strawberry Alison was all in the past, just a mortifying memory, but only last week I found him in the workshop, weeping over an old photograph and a poem and it gave me a chill.
The first time he saw that girl Alison he was horrified. Her birthmark was lurid crimson; it covered half her face and neck, like a mask incompletely removed. Against that splash of colour her thick long hair was blonder, and her eyes bluer than seemed possible. She was newly arrived in town. At first glance her face looked burnt, as though she’d suffered a terrible scorching. Vic’s imagination already brimmed with these flarings, for in those days the news was all napalm flashes and looming thermonuclear disaster. Standing speechless on the school verandah, with his bag sliding from his shoulder, Vic’s horror turned to fascination as he saw that the passing girl’s skin was not bubbled with scar-tissue but perfectly smooth. Her mark was all colour. It was obviously congenital yet he still thought of conflagration, as though she’d survived a fire whose heat had never left her face.
Vic says he loved Alison from that first encounter. Not only could he pick her out in a crowd but he sought glimpses of her all over town. The trouble was, she was a year older and therefore perpetually out of bounds. Any dealings between year-levels were socially forbidden, and to make things worse Alison soon became surrounded by tougher, plainer girls who worked out their repulsion and fascination by forming a protective posse around her. There was just no way past them. It wasn’t as if there weren’t spunky girls his own age but they became dim presences. All the pert, hair-flicking embodiments of perfection who had only days before caused him to sweat with lust and dread simply dropped from his mind.
When she first arrived, people talked about Strawberry Alison as a shop-soiled beauty. Such a pity, they said about her birthmark. If only. Could have been a stunner. What a shame she’s damaged goods.
To Vic it was no shame at all. He wanted her, mark or no mark. He told himself he saw past it, that he was the only one who did. Though in time he came to admit to himself that he loved Alison because of the mark, not just despite it. This, when it came down to it, was the root of his obsession and he’s never completely explained it to me. I doubt he understands it himself, least of all now. In any dispute Vic will instinctively seek out a victim to defend. That’s his nature and it’s become his work as a labour lawyer, but I wonder if this impulse can account for his adolescent attraction to the flawed and imperfect. You see, Strawberry Alison was not the only damaged specimen to catch his imagination. Vic’s first love was also older – in fact, quite a lot older – a farm girl whose ring finger ended at the first joint, the result of an accident with a hay baler. The finger that her wedding ring would have to slide on to ended in a stump. At thirteen he was enchanted. By the finger as much as the girl herself. His first kiss. She let him touch her breasts. It only happened the once – the whole thing lasted less than a day, a holiday encounter – but the strange excitement lingered. The Alison business wasn’t so shortlived; it went on for years. I fear it isn’t over yet.
Perhaps you could put Vic’s fascination down to the times, Vietnam in shrieking flames on TV every night. That naked burning girl running down the road over and over again. Or maybe it’s just the ruin and wreckage you’re privy to as a copper’s kid in a country town, the horrible weight of knowledge, all those distorting secrets the rest of us are spared. I used to think he exaggerated this stuff but his mother Carol put me straight. That town, Angelus, wasn’t such a quaint place in those days. It crushed her husband. Something happened there which caused him to lose his way. He began to drink. Bob Lang, the proverbial straightshooter, became a local joke. And then their infant daughter died of meningitis. Vic was fifteen. He never mentione
d a sister, never once said a word. I couldn’t believe it – I was incensed – and when I confronted him about it he told me that he’d forgotten. A sick look came over his face. I pressed him for details but he picked up his keys and backed towards the door. I let him go. Angry as I was, I believed him. He’d blocked her from his mind. He looked as appalled as I was.
For years Vic never even spoke to Strawberry Alison. Until he was sixteen the closest he ever got to her was the library window. One afternoon, while stuck in a carrel, he glanced up to see Alison peering in. She wasn’t looking in at all; she’d just caught sight of herself in the reflective glass and paused a moment in passing. She came closer, right up to the sill, and he was struck by the sadness of her gaze. She was full of longing, anybody could see that, and she was barely an arm’s length away. Vic wanted to touch her face, to tell her that she needn’t pine for a perfection he didn’t want anyway. Her breath fogged the glass. She stepped back, pulled her hair behind her ear and walked on.
Carol told me that Vic was an anxious boy. She was reluctant to blame his father but Bob saw menace at every turn. The cop thing. What Bob didn’t realize was that in addition to keeping him safe, his attempts to protect Vic from accident and injury transmitted fear. Unspoken worries hung over him like the omnipresent stink of the harbour. As a child of rigid fundamentalists I can identify with this, for although God Himself was supposed to have made it and sustained it, and though it seemed so beautiful, the world around us was eternally dangerous. The price of spiritual freedom, we learnt, was eternal vigilance. Such a high price for so long.