by Tim Winton
In the bedroom I worked in a frenzy. Every sill and architrave, each lamp and mirror got a grinding wipe. I Windexed the glass, waxed the girly dressing table. When it was done I went out for the vacuum, cranked it up and ploughed my way through the whole place. At one point, when the old girl glanced up from the kitchen floor, I averted my eyes.
The thought kept returning to me. Why would someone not report the theft of a pair of five-hundred-dollar earrings? Even to claim the insurance you’d have to report it. Perhaps it was my own uneasiness at having overstepped the boundaries, at having gone through somebody’s stuff, which made me consider the chance that this woman might know about me, be aware that I’d helped here before. Could she have suspected me rather than Mum? Worse still, did she know who I was, that I was an undergraduate at her own campus? And then could it be possible that her failure to report a theft to the cops was an act of kindness towards my mother, an act of mercy toward me?
I vacuumed and raked feverishly. When I got to the bedroom, the cats who’d thus far evaded us leapt out from behind the curtains. They were sulking great Persians. I threw down the nozzle and chased them out of the room.
My mother was still in the kitchen.
Mum, I said. What did the note say?
Did you leave that machine going?
Was it about me? Does she suspect me?
You? Don’t be stupid.
I haven’t been here for months.
Turn that thing off.
No, I said feeling ridiculous. It doesn’t matter, I’m going back.
Don’t forget those curtains!
I gave the bedroom curtains a good going over. I could never understand how so much cat hair could accumulate in a week.
Mum came in while I was on my knees still vacuuming the flounces and folds of the patchwork quilt.
Windex? she said.
I pointed to the dressing table. She lingered. I turned the machine off.
What were you on about before?
Honestly, Mum, why didn’t we just give the place a light go through? Or better, just take the dough and split.
Because it would look like an admission of guilt.
Shit.
Language.
But this won’t convince her, Mum.
No, probably not.
You should report them missing yourself. Ask them to search our place. Force the issue. There’s nothing that can come of it.
Except talk. Imagine the talk. I’d lose the rest of my jobs.
She was shining with sweat. Her hair had tightened into damp poodle curls. She had been so pretty once.
So you’re stuffed either way.
Love, we grin and bear it.
I shook my head. I hit the button on the vac and blitzed the carpet beneath the bed. I could sense her still behind me, waiting to say something but I pretended to be absorbed in the work. Up at the head of the bed there was a nest of Red Tulip chocolate wrappers. They made a slurping noise as they were sucked into the machine. I only had half of them up when the ping of something hard racketing along the pipe made me turn my head.
Mum stepped on the button. The machine wound down to silence.
Money, probably, I murmured.
Let’s open it up.
I cracked the hatch and felt around in the horrible gullet of the dustbag. From wads of lint and hair and dirt came an earring.
Five hundred dollars? she muttered. That’s rich.
I didn’t know anything about jewellery. I shrugged, gave it to her.
Look under there. The other one’s bound to be close by.
I found it hard up against the skirting board.
She’s left them on the pillow, she said. Forgotten about them. She’s come in and swept them off as she got into bed. She hasn’t even looked. That’s all it was, just carelessness.
All this fake outrage. She couldn’t be bothered going to the cops because they’re cheap? Is that it?
I don’t know.
It wasn’t important.
It was important to me.
Well, you’ve cleared your name. That’s something.
She shook her head with a furious smile.
Why not? I asked. Show her what we found, what she was too lazy to look for. Show her where they were.
All she has to say is that she made me guilty enough to give them back. That I just wanted to keep the job. To save my good name. Vic, that’s all I’ve got – my good name. These people, they can say anything they like. You can’t fight back.
I looked away at the floor. I heard her blow her nose. I was powerless to defend her. It was the lowest feeling.
I’ll finish the kitchen, she said. Ten minutes.
I vacuumed the rest of the bedroom. The earrings lay on the bed. I looked at them. They were pretty enough but I was no judge. Perhaps their real value was sentimental. I snatched them up from the quilt and took them into the laundry. I chucked them into the cat tray. Let her find them there if she cared to look.
In the kitchen Mum was ready to go. The rags and bottles were in the bucket. She walked a towel across the floor and that was it.
What about the money? I said, looking at the scrubbed bench.
I’m worth more, she said.
You’re not taking it?
No.
I smiled and shook my head.
You forgot the vacuum, she said.
Oh, yeah. Right.
I went back to the laundry, knelt at the catbox and picked out the earrings. I dusted them off on my sweaty shirt. In my palm they weighed nothing. I grabbed the Electrolux from the bedroom and made my way out again. In the kitchen I put the earrings beside the unstrung key and the thin envelope of money.
My mother stood silhouetted in the open doorway. It seemed that the very light of day was pouring out through her limbs. I had my breath back. I followed her into the hot afternoon.
Cockleshell
IT TAKES A WEEK OR MORE before Brakey admits it to himself – he’s watching her. The only reason he comes down here amongst the peppermints at sundown is to see Agnes Larwood light her kero lamp onshore, take up her gidgie and begin wading the shallows in search of cobbler. Some evenings she digs for cockles if the tide is low enough, and he has seen her scooping crabs over on the flats, but mostly she’s out here with the gidgie looking for cobbler to spear.
He lurks back in the gloom of the trees, the last of the sun in the hills behind him, while she moves slowly through the water with the lantern held away from her, out to the side and slightly ahead. Orange light glows on her calves. She wears a tank top and boardshorts. Her tennis shoes look huge and white underwater. She travels so cautiously that the water folds away from her shins in silence. Behind her, as darkness falls, the lights of town show up across the broad harbour and her silhouette becomes more golden and less flat in the light of her lamp. Now and then she goes all still and he observes the barely perceptible drawing back of her arm, the spear almost invisible in her hand. Suddenly the water erupts at her feet and a second later the sound of the splash carries to him. In the lampglow the writhing catfish comes up skewered shiny-black and she slops to shore to kill it and pull the venomous spines from its head with pliers. She slips the fish into the bag slung across her shoulder, looks up a moment so that her face is illuminated and her eyes seem to be looking straight into his, before straightening and turning back to the water, lamp in hand.
Same as every other night Brakey stops following when the peppermint grove peters into a tangle of teatrees and bamboo. To keep a parallel course with her through that lot would be a noisy and perilous business in the dark, so he squats to watch her work her way from view, a silhouette for a time, then a bud of light and then she’s gone behind the curve of the point. He feels a pang of loss. He just can’t believe this is happening to him. He’s known Agnes Larwood all his life and now he can’t keep his eyes off her. It’s as though he’s turned into some sort of perv. He sat next to Agnes a whole year in primary school. She lives thirty y
ards away. They’re on the same damn bus every morning and now he’s noticing her. She’s not beautiful, not like her older sister, Margaret, the one who ran away to the city with the bloke from the superworks. Maybe you could call Agnes pretty but what does that really mean? It doesn’t explain the sudden hunger, this terrible fascination. A fortnight ago she was bog-ordinary. Agnes bloody Larwood. But tonight his blood is charging, it whacks in him like something trapped and it’s been this way for a solid week.
He hunkers down in the dark to wait. Leaf litter from the peppermints smells medicinal. Way out across the water a car whines along the Angelus shore.
Agnes. Agnes? Agnes.
While she’s gone he pictures her in his head. Thin arms and legs, brown from summer. Short hair, also brown. Or brownish. An even sort of face with, yes, regular teeth from the few recent memories of her smiling or even speaking. Somehow in his mind she still has her milk teeth, for that’s when he recalls her most vividly when they were younger. Even. Regular. Brownish. Pretty. Ish.
In the old days, when they were kids, they played together off and on, the way you do when there are plenty of kids about and you find yourself falling in with someone for an hour or so. Cockleshell was bigger then and much more lively. With the meatworks and the whaling station still operating, the string of houses along the shore here was full. It seemed that there were kids everywhere and they ran in a loose mob, roaming the bush and the estuarine flats in search of entertainment. Their hamlet had its own sign out on the bay road back then. Cockle Shoal. But then as now people called the place Cockleshell and that’s what Brakey knows it as.
He wonders how long he should wait. His mother gets anxious. All week she’s been testy because he’s come home long after dark. She spends most of her time feeling abandoned or preparing to be so and it’s wearing him out. He crouches there a few more minutes, persecuted by midges and mosquitoes, and when there’s no sign of Agnes coming back his way, he gives up and heads home. In the moonless dark, he feels his way with bare feet on the sand track and puts an arm out to fend off lurking branches. In a couple of minutes he sees the house lights, his place and hers. At this angle they’re close enough to be a single glow but by the time he’s clear of the peppermint grove they’re distinct. Two weatherboard houses. Church music from the Larwood place, the smell of frying onions from his.
Inside his mother is silent at the stove. Her face is shut down. It’s nothing new. The table’s set. He washes his hands and, newly protected by his thoughts, settles himself into the silence she’s prepared for him. He already knows what his mother thinks. To her, the world is a treacherous place. Nothing lasts. People cheat. They leave. They just up and go. Sooner or later they all bolt and you’re left on your own, and the look of reproach she gives him now is but a variation on her whole demeanour, the assumption in every glance, every sigh, every mute chink of cutlery, is that he too will leave her high and dry, just as the old man did three years ago. He’s fifteen and it’s old news. He feels sorry for her, protective still, but he’s had a gutful. He wants her to get over it but he senses that it’s beyond her.
Don’t worry about the dishes, she says when they finish eating.
It’s orright.
I said leave them.
He shrugs and goes to his room. Through the louvres he can still hear the holy roller music from the Larwoods’. In the old days it was only ever screaming that you heard. The sound of breaking glass, the thud of feet on the floorboards. Eric Larwood, smashed out of his head, lurching from room to room. Some mornings Mrs Larwood hung the washing out with shaking hands, her bruises plain from Brakey’s place. There were times when she came across the rough grass at night with a sobbing trail of kids in tow, and they bedded down in the lounge while Brakey’s old man got his trousers on and went over to pacify the mad bugger.
The Larwoods were Poms. In the early days, when they were more migrants than locals, their whiny accent was stronger. Their house smelled of piss and fags and kero as though they never opened the windows, as if it was winter all year. It’s been a long time since Brakey was inside that house. He wonders if the Larwood kids still wet the bed. He tries to imagine Agnes Larwood as a bedwetter. He doesn’t even know the colour of her eyes; she’s always looking down or sideways. Brownish, at a guess. He wonders if she still has that Larwood smell of cigarette smoke and bacon and kero. He can’t recall the last time he was close enough to tell.
Old Eric was shop steward at the meatworks. Now the union’s collapsed and the meatworks is gone, and he’s nobody. He’s quiet nowadays. It’s been years since he’s been on a rampage of the sort that anybody else can hear. Brakey’s mother used to have a lot to say about the Larwoods but when Agnes’s big sister Margaret took off at sixteen she did nothing more than sigh knowingly, as though this was merely confirmation of all her suspicions.
Brakey lies all evening on his bed. The TV murmurs through the wall. Church music wafts across the yard. He thinks of the two houses as becalmed, subdued, as though the life is mostly gone from them. He imagines the Larwoods sitting around in silence with only the strange chuckle of the kero heater between them when the music gives out.
He neglects his homework and falls asleep reading about Spartacus and six thousand crucifixions.
At the bus stop next morning, in the shade of the red flowering gum, he feels her looking at him. She’s a few feet away, separate from her little brothers and the snooty little private schoolers from round the yacht club, and she looks up scowling from her book again to drill him with her gaze. Brown. Her eyes are brown. He looks away as the bus creaks in off the bay road and the small crowd stirs. They climb aboard.
Brakey, she says so close behind him that he grunts in startled surprise. Brakey, what’re you doing?
What? I’m on the bus.
This week. At night. Why’re you following me around?
He half turns to her. She smells milky. Her teeth are grownup teeth. There’s sun in the short spikes of her hair.
It’s bugging me, she says.
He licks his lips, considers denying it. Even plans to ignore her now that, across the aisle, a couple of heads have turned their way.
Sorry, he croaks.
Did you do your maths?
Nah.
Bugger. Thought you might—
Agnes doesn’t finish because the next stop is up and Brakey’s mate Slater is getting on. She sits back – he feels her retract – as Slater slouches down the aisle. Slater is a sex maniac. He blew up his mother’s vacuum cleaner in the kind of experiment that a sane person would never have thought of. Half the school still calls him the Electrolux Man. He knows all kinds of stuff about porn but girls are a total mystery to him. Slater is fun sometimes but he is not a bloke to confide in. Agnes Larwood will have to be a secret. At school she’s not a complete tragic, but she’s not exactly popular either. Brakey knows he’ll have to be careful.
School happens in a kind of fog. He doesn’t really take anything in, not even the fact that Agnes sits two rows from him in maths. Nor does he see anything unusual in the cops turning up during English and taking Brad Benson out and not returning him to class.
It was that man from the bank, says his mother. He jumped off at the Big Hole. Everyone’s talking about it.
Brad Benson’s dad?
Found his car and his shoes. Still looking for the body.
Hell, he says, standing there on the verandah with the orange juice sweating in his hand. Cicadas chip away at the warm afternoon air.
They all run away in the end, says his mother, going inside and letting the screen door slap to.
Hot with sudden anger, Brakey throws the juice, glass and all, out onto the unmowed grass and slopes off. One day, he thinks. One day I’ll be one of em, Mum, and you’ll be happy.
He walks aimlessly up the bay and after the best part of two hours he finds himself, hot and dry-mouthed, heading back past the yacht club with the sun low on the hills behind him, his outbound footp
rints heading at him all the way along the shore. He sees that the marks from his heels are deep and the big toe of his left foot drags a gouge at every step. A few small boats are out. He sees old Percy the commercial netter in his long dory, head down over his oars. Some kids are sailing out past the flats but there’s not much breeze. He hears clunks and shouts and laughter across the water. On the sand at his feet, left by the outgoing tide, blowfish and jellies glisten in death. He kicks them aside spitefully. He’s tired now but wild still and pent up.
In the lee of the yacht club, where the bush gives way to the posh new housing estate, he comes upon Agnes Larwood as she sits on the sand to pull on her old tennis shoes.
You’re early, he says.
So are you.
With his bare foot Brakey nudges the gidgie lying in the sand beside her. It’s little more than a broomstick with a five-pronged head. The barbs are rusty but the points are sharp enough.
Hear about Mr Benson?
He nods.
Terrible, eh.
Yeah.
Poor Brad.
I don’t like him, says Brakey.
Me neither, but it’s still awful.
Yes, he murmurs, suddenly ashamed of himself.
He watches her tie the laces of her old Dunlop Volleys.
What did you used to call them again? he says. In the old days.
These? Plimsolls.
That’s it. Plimsolls.
You all laughed.
Yeah.
We were fresh off the boat, I spose, she says, pulling the hessian bag to her and slipping the cotton strap over her bare shoulder. The rank odour of it rises between them.
Real Poms, he murmurs.
Agnes gets to her feet. She brushes the sand from her shorts. The light is dirty now; it’s much later than he’s realized.
Mind if I . . . come along?
She shrugs. You’ve got no shoes.
I’ll be right. You’ve got a lamp.
Suit yourself.
For a long time they wade the clear, sandy flats without speaking. Eventually she lets him hold the little kero lamp so that he doesn’t feel so useless. It means he needn’t trail along behind her for fear of stepping on anything or spoiling her shots. There are a few crabs about but no cobbler until they work their way back to the seagrass alongside the boatpens. Now he wishes fervently that he had shoes. The seagrass is dark brown, almost black in the lamplight, and the whiskery little catfish are hard to detect against it. As Agnes spears three in quick succession, and he watches while she pulls the poisonous spines off them with the pliers, he wonders how many more they’re walking past without seeing at all.