by Tim Winton
Ugly buggers aren’t they? he murmurs.
I spose.
Any time he tries to make even the quietest conversation he finds himself slipping against the glassy intensity of her concentration. His stomach is growling now. The light southerly freshens a little. The ripples on the surface make it harder to see fish on the weedy bottom. Rigging pings against masts above them and mooring lines begin to groan. The slop of water against a hundred hulls makes him think of people eating. Back at the clubhouse there’s music. The smoke of a barbecue streams from one of the sleek brick houses of the new subdivision.
The seagrass feels both slippery and gritty underfoot and between his toes. Brakey thinks of all those times Agnes and her family sought refuge at his place in the middle of the night. He supposes it’s why Agnes and he haven’t really spoken for years. It must be kind of embarrassing for her. He walks close to her. He can hear her breathing now. Moths plop against the light in his hand. It surprises him that the Larwoods are so broke that Agnes has to spear fish every night to keep them going. He doesn’t know how much the dole is and can’t recall Mrs Larwood ever going out to work. Old Eric hardly leaves the house these days, as far as Brakey can tell, but when you do see him sitting out on an old kitchen chair under the flame tree, he looks like a man beaten beyond saving. Brakey wants to ask her so many things. He wants to eat something too, or at least run his hand through the stubble of Agnes’s hair.
Then there’s a sudden shock up his leg. He lurches sideways. The hot glass of the lamp kisses his bare thigh for a moment and he yelps shamefully and staggers shoreward without even waiting for Agnes. The pain is like having a rusty nail driven into the ball of his foot. He flings himself down on the damp sand and draws the light close so he can examine the puncture and the swelling white flesh around it. He’s heard of old men having heart attacks and ladies having pethidine injections to beat the pain but he just wants to shit all of a sudden and have the luxury of writhing about for a while and swearing his head off. Agnes slops in out of the dark. On the jetty above them someone laughs and he’s filled with sudden hatred for all these poncy new bastards overtaking Cockleshell day by day.
It was only a matter of time, says Agnes. You okay?
I’m bloody wonderful, he spits.
He gets up, flailing a moment to keep his balance.
Hot water, they reckon, says Agnes.
I’ll stick it in me tea then, he says. See ya later.
Brakey hobbles off in steaming humiliation, half hoping Agnes will come after him. But she doesn’t.
When he finally stumps up onto the verandah his mother comes out with a tea-towel in her hand.
Your dinner’s cold.
Good!
He goes straight to the table, lifts the plate covering from his meal and bolts the food in a hot frenzy that feels as ridiculous as it looks.
Are you on drugs? his mother asks with uncharacteristic timidity.
Not yet, he says.
She steps aside as he heads for the bathroom.
Sitting on the edge of the tub to examine his throbbing foot, he wonders what his mother might make of him and Agnes Larwood as a pair. The Brakeys have always had an air of gentle superiority about the Larwoods. Ten-pound Poms and not just English but the kind with that awful accent. And the old man, Eric. In his day he was a professional rabble-rouser, a drunk, a basher. The Larwoods were always shabby. Since the old man abandoned them, Brakey and his mother have done it hard. The house is beginning to shed paint and timber around them. There’s never enough money. They’re pretty shabby themselves but he doubts that his mother will see herself yet on a level with the Larwoods.
He scans the shelves for something that might relieve the pain. Amidst the powders and unguents he finds some balm which looks promising for a moment until he realizes that it’s the stuff his mother applies to her cracked feet every summer’s evening. Examining the tube, he’s appalled and excited to discover that the ointment’s active constituent is urea. He knows what that is. Piss! His mother bastes her heels in piss every night and he’s anxious about her feelings about Agnes Larwood?
He sits in the bath with the shower pelting his head from on high. His foot hurts like buggery but he’s not going to say a word.
Long before morning, he wakes from a dream in which the body of Mr Benson from the bank washes in from the Big Hole. Somehow it’s found its way around the granite bluffs and headlands to the harbour entrance and come all the way in to Cockleshell on some unholy tide. Brakey’s there in the shallows with Agnes beside him. Her face shines with sunlight. Together they roll the banker over in his beige suit and the swollen face that confronts them is his father’s.
Brakey lies awake until morning, remembering the week in the city last winter with the old man and his girlfriend, a handsome woman not much older than him. It was a trial, an attempt at beginning to close the gap somehow, to reacquaint themselves. But the week was a misery. What can you ever do to get past the feeling that your father’s chosen somebody else ahead of you? The only thing worse than that week was the aftermath when his mother pumped him and primed him for details and he remained sullen and mute. He’ll never do it again.
By evening Brakey’s limp is gone and the confusion of the school day has left with it. He’s waiting amongst the peppermints when Agnes comes along the shore, and when she stoops to light her lamp in the twilight, he strides out so abruptly in his ancient Adidas that she gives a startled cry.
You’re a lunatic, she says when he reaches her.
I know.
Mind if I come along?
I have a choice then?
Course.
Least you’ve got shoes tonight.
They wade for an hour while Brakey tries to ask questions and she stalks the shallows too preoccupied to answer. She doesn’t speak to him about anything besides the angle at which he’s holding the lamp. Finally they’re back ashore, tipping water from their shoes, with six cobbler in the bag. The water smells soupy tonight and the air is thick with mosquitoes. Brakey looks at the lamplight on Agnes’s thin arms.
Remember that old canoe someone had here when we were kids? he asks.
She smiles and laces her shoes again.
I wonder what happened to it, he says. We used to pile into it, five or six of us. And I remember the time you caught that big mullet with your bare hands. You stood up holding it like it was some kinda trophy. We couldn’t believe it.
Agnes stands up. She gathers her bag and gidgie.
That mullet didn’t know what hit it, Brakey says, unable to stop talking now. He feels the words come up out of him like a sort of panic. He blathers on about how that mullet must have been a foot long and what a natural she was when it came to hunting fish. He keeps talking even after she sets off down the narrow beach leaving him to fumble at his laces and scramble in her wake. Everything he says shames him and confirms the awful fact that he doesn’t know a thing about her after the age of eleven. In his childhood memories she’s everywhere, but after a certain point it’s almost as if she’d moved away. He doesn’t know what she thinks now, what she likes, who her friends are. Nothing. Worse, he doesn’t understand why he suddenly needs to know everything about her.
By the time he’s caught up with her she’s past his place and hers. He doesn’t say a thing until they’re beyond the music teacher’s house.
Where’re we goin? he asks.
I’m going to the Beasley sisters’, she murmurs. You better wait down on the beach. You’ll give em a fright.
Oh. Okay.
Or you can just go home.
I’ll wait, okay?
If you like.
Brakey waits in the warm darkness. He hears a long, sad note in the distance. A cow? A seabird, maybe. He cocks his head and catches it again – a saxophone. Water laps against the shore and some seabird calls across the estuary. He scuffs the white sand underfoot to make sparks and he’s so absorbed by the little flashes of static electricity that he d
oesn’t realize Agnes has returned until she touches his shoulder in the dark and he gives out a yelp of fright.
Sorry, she says. Didn’t mean to scare you.
You didn’t, he lies.
They head back up the beach in an awkward silence. Brakey smells the kero fumes of her extinguished lamp. He’s still tingling from her touch. He wants to reach across the dark gap between them and feel her skin. But he speaks instead.
Do the Beasley sisters pay orright? he blurts.
Agnes says nothing.
I don’t even know what cobbler’s worth, he says with his heart halfway up his neck.
Agnes kicks a few sparks up.
It’s gotta be worth more’n mullet, eh.
Jesus, Brakey.
Not that there’s anything wrong with mullet, he rambles, but she cuts him off.
Look, spare me the pity, willya, she says angrily.
Brakey stops in his tracks, stammering.
Listen! she hisses so close to his face that he can feel the heat of her breath on him. I don’t sell the fish, orright? For your information, we don’t need the money that bad. I’m not out here every night feedin the family, if it’s any of your business.
Okay, he murmurs.
Call it a hobby, she says. Stickin fish, it’s a stupid bloody hobby.
Brakey wonders if she’ll cry. He panics a little at the thought, but she doesn’t cry. Agnes just sighs. A dog begins to bark a long way down the bay.
I don’t even like it, she says after a moment.
But you’re good at it.
Oh, Brakey, you’re thick.
He stands there. The lights of the yacht club are visible through the trees. The sandspit out the front of their houses glows white. They walk a little way until the shadows of the old net posts loom up on the grass.
You’re gonna ask anyway, she says. So I’ll tell you. I do it to get away. Simple as that. These days, it’s like the house is dead inside, like everything’s gone, like even the air is dead.
I thought . . . I thought things were better over there.
The drinking, you mean. You know the story of the drinking? Mum’s miracle? Her church and her, they prayed. Every day for six months they were on a prayer chain. And then, one day, he just packs it in, he gives it away. Hallelujah.
Well, that is pretty amazing, says Brakey, thinking to himself that anything that stopped Eric Larwood drinking had to be a miracle.
Yeah, maybe. But it’s weird, you know. There’s nothing left. It’s like there’s nothing left of him at all. And Mum’s too blind to see it. You can see this puzzled look on her face sometimes, like she can’t quite figure out how come everything isn’t alright now. She’s had her miracle – everything should be sweet. And I can’t stand it.
Brakey sits on the remains of the old net rack whose smooth, silvery wood gives a little beneath him.
He doesn’t bash her anymore, and there’s no screaming and smashing and all the rest of it. You know what I mean. I don’t have to tell you what it was like. But there’s nothing left. The works, the union, Margaret, and now the drink. He’s like a ghost. I mean, that doesn’t bother me, you know, I like him like that. He’s harmless. But she wants more. For Mum it was always the drink. Blame the booze for everything. It was never him. Well, now she’s got him and she’s miserable.
You miss Margaret?
Not anymore, she says. Margaret was Dad’s favourite. He loved her more than Mum, not that Mum saw it. I don’t blame her for going. But it’s better without her. Except it’s like a cemetery in there.
You ever think of taking off? Brakey asks. When you finish school, I mean.
Agnes is still standing. The prongs of her gidgie catch the light from somewhere far off.
My brothers, she says. I can’t leave them. I’d never leave them.
Brakey longs to reach up and take her hand. He’s almost sick with feeling. And then he just does it. He leans out and grabs her arm and feels for her hand and Agnes drops the gidgie in surprise and clouts him one before shaking him off. She steps back and finds the spear in the grass.
Sorry, he mumbles.
Doesn’t matter, she says.
Shit.
I’ll see you later, Brakey.
He’s too flattened even to say goodnight. He sits there for a while. A shag or something flies past over the water unseen but for the way it blots out clusters of harbour lights a mile away. He thinks about Agnes and her hot breath in his face. Did he ever long for his father the way he does for her? He can’t remember if it hurt this much.
Walking home through the last of the peppermints, he brushes hair from his eyes and as he does he smells fish on his fingers, and much later that night, in the last long hour that he lies awake in bed, he sniffs his hand now and then, full of regret, sensing that the smell of fish will be all that he’ll ever have of Agnes Larwood and that it would have been better to have nothing of her at all.
He wakes to screams from next door. It’s like the old days. His room is swarming with weird lights. The splash of breaking glass. Somebody’s thumping on the door, rattling the boards of the verandah. Brakey reels out of bed and sees the hot pink glow through the curtain. The Larwood place is on fire.
He pulls on some shorts and collides with his mother in the hallway. Before she can even get up off the floor, he’s opening the door to the Larwood boys in their pyjamas. Their faces shine with light and tears. Behind them, down on the steps, Agnes stands with her back to him to watch her mother, a motionless silhouette, before the flames.
Back inside, Brakey’s mother is dialling the phone in the dark. Reports like pistol shots sound off from the blazing house. The little boys flinch at the sound. Every wall is crawling with flame now. Brakey can’t believe how fast it’s going up.
He won’t come out, says one of Agnes’s brothers. Brakey, he won’t come out.
Brakey hesitates a moment before threading his way through the boys and past Agnes on the steps. The grass is wet and cold underfoot. He runs a zigzag through the strangely illuminated obstacles between the houses until he’s abreast with Mrs Larwood, who appears to be talking to herself. He’s already past her before it registers on him that she’s praying. Already, even as he runs, his cheeks are scorching. He doesn’t know how she can stand the heat. He backs off a little and skirts around the rear to see if there’s a way in, but as he crosses beneath the clothesline there’s a terrible metallic shriek and a shock that puts him asprawl in the grass. The gas bottles. He lies there a while, his face stinging, the hairs on his arms electric with heat and light, and a second explosion slaps over him. Even the ground is hot now. He feels crisp lawn digging into his shirtless torso. Weatherboards warp and fall into the yard. He sees the garden hose slough off the tap, melting against the laundry wall, and knows there’s nothing he can do for Mr Larwood.
When he gets back around the other side, Agnes’s mother has retreated some distance in her nightie. Her hair is mad with light and her face is calm but she resists his efforts to get her to come across the yard with him to join the others.
Over at his place, Agnes stands on the verandah in her jeans and shirt and boots. The boys crowd against her, tripping over the bags at her feet, while behind them in the unlit house, Brakey’s mother moves from door to window like a flickering memory.
Brakey has the rest of his life to remember Agnes Larwood and the hunger he had for her those weeks the year he turned fifteen. He’ll live to see Cockleshell disappear altogether and the luxury estate, Spinnaker Waters, take its place. Until she dies, his poor lonely mother will punctuate all talk of human affairs with the tart summation that they all leave you in the end. Yet he often wonders about Eric Larwood, the man who wouldn’t leave. They dragged the charred shell of him out on a vinyl sheet. Agnes and her family bedded down one last time at Brakey’s place but nobody slept. Next day the Welfare people came and they were never seen in town again.
Brakey never gets to be much good with women. For the rest
of his life he’s awkward around them, aware of his propensity to blurt out the wrong thing at just the right moment, never quite certain of the point at which he’s allowed to make contact. He has learnt not to declare himself. Never again does he reach out uninvited to touch someone lovely. He shudders at the memory of himself at fifteen. What a lurker he must have been, what a creep!
He lives in the city now with a job and a few friends. Everyone, he’s discovered, winds up in the city eventually. Even Agnes Larwood. She’s a surgeon – he’s seen her listed in the phone book. He has no desire to meet her, in fact he dreads the idea for both their sakes. Because part of him still loves her and he couldn’t bear the humiliation. And because her life would unravel as soon as they met.
He fears that one day he’ll be standing at a crosswalk on St George’s Terrace and there, across the road, in the waiting crowd, she’ll be, even and regular and brownish, but older, striding toward him at the change of the light, and he’ll step straight up to her, despite himself, and blurt out the question that’s been waiting in him half his life since that night in Cockleshell, the question she should be spared at all costs. He just knows he’ll say: Agnes, tell me, of all the shabby Larwoods spilling sleepy and dishevelled from the burning house that night, why was it that you were the exception? With all the shaking and screaming and tears, how was it you seemed dressed and ready to go, calm at the sight of the body on the sheet next morning, and so serene when the Welfare came and took you off? It’s Brakey – remember me?