The Turning

by Tim Winton

  The Turning

  RAELENE COULDN’T STAND being in the caravan another bloody minute. After last night, the girls’d hardly look at her. They just sat out in the annexe on their beanbags watching ‘Sesame Street’ so loud it took the enamel off your teeth. She was crook as a dog and her face hurt. She gobbed a couple more Panadol and started bagging dirty clothes, half of which stank of craybait and bloke sweat and Christ-knows-what. Then she humped the whole lot over to the laundry block, wincing in the light.

  The park was almost empty. There were a few tent sites with surfers on them, but apart from those and a few old farts with Winnebagos and pop-ups, it was just the permanents now, the skeleton crew.

  Fresh-mown grass felt good beneath her feet and over the green smell of it you could almost taste the sea. It was actually a brilliant autumn day. Sunshine felt pure and silky on her skin; it took her mind off the chipped tooth and her throbbing lip.

  In the laundry a woman she didn’t know was pulling clothes from one of those skanky beat-up washers and Raelene sighed. She was sick of conversations with people passing through. Nothing you said to each other mattered a damn because you’d never see them again.

  Raelene dumped her stuff on the bench and the other woman looked up. She had long tanned legs and her blonde hair was pulled back in a silver scrunchy. She was good-looking. No, bugger it, she was better than that, she was beautiful.

  Boy, said the stranger brightly. That must have hurt.

  Raelene put a hand to her mouth. A twinge of shame went through her.

  Took me weeks to work up the courage to have my ears done, said the woman, patting the flat brown of her belly. Isn’t it worse there? Didn’t it sting like blazes?

  Raelene stared a moment before she understood. She touched the stud in her navel and smiled the best she could. She was suffused with gratitude, a warm rush of feeling that nearly made her bawl.

  It was nothin, she murmured. Easier’n gettin a tat.

  You’ve got a tattoo as well? I’m such a coward.

  Raelene turned around. The tat was in the small of her back, just up from her bumcrack.

  Handle With Care, said the woman, reading.

  Raelene felt stupid then. She knew what a fuckin irony it was. She blushed for shame.

  By the look of her, the look that said leafy suburb, Country Road, briefcase hubby, this woman’d wrinkle her little nose for sure, but she didn’t smirk, didn’t turn a hair.

  My name’s Sherry, she said.

  Raelene could have hugged her. Sherry. She was no stuck-up bitch. She was a real surprise, out of the ordinary. The whole hour they stood there at the machines or pegging up clothes on the listing hoists outside, Sherry never once mentioned Raelene’s face. Her laundry was all button-down shirts and silk boxers and delicate bras and cottons while Rae’s looked bleached and butchered by comparison – tracky dacks, Yakka shirts, kids’ pants with holes and paint stains. Rubbish. But Sherry didn’t seem to notice. She asked how long they’d lived here and what they did in the off-season and how old the girls were, as if she gave a bugger. She asked about Max’s boat and who his skipper was, and whether there was anywhere in White Point you could buy fresh asparagus. Then she talked about her husband Dan and his new job at the depot. He was the local manager of live export. He dealt with the Japs, mostly. They’d bought a house here. They had a good feeling. They were renting a van while they had the place painted. There was something squeaky clean about Sherry. She was all wrong for White Point and wrong for Raelene but you couldn’t help but like her, love her even. She was too bloody good-looking, for one thing, too beautiful to be believed. But she had something special. She listened. She gave a fuck. There was kindness in her. Straightaway she was a friend.

  That month, while Sherry and Dan rented the twenty-eight-footer beside the windmill, Raelene saw her new friend almost every day and when she didn’t she missed her. Some mornings they walked over the dune to play on the beach with the girls or lie with them in the warm shallows of the lagoon. Sherry told the kids stories or helped them build sandcastles. She wrote their names for them, did things Rae was often too slack to bother with. While Raelene worked on her tan out of the wind, Sherry plaited the girls’ hair and read to them. Rae lay there listening, laughing, basking in the company as much as the sun. She hadn’t had such a friend since school and even then her friends were backstabbing bitches.

  Sherry changed the mood of the van park. You could feel the atmosphere shift around her and it wasn’t just that every man within coo-ee wanted to get into her pants. It was something deep. Some extra life to her.

  Sherry’s bloke Dan worked office hours which is why he and Max never met that month. When Raelene finally met him his face lit up with recognition. Sherry, he said, never stopped talking about her. He had short, dark hair and a square jaw like a swarthy Ken doll. That was it. The two of them. They were a bit Barbie and Ken. He was very handsome but a bit too well-groomed for Rae’s taste. Max was a slob but at least he didn’t have girly-smooth hands. In fact they were a different species. Dan was funny but polite. He was attentive without staring at your tits the whole time. He was comfortable with himself. Maybe, thought Rae, being the boss does that to you.

  Max got up at three or four or five to go fishing. He spent afternoons down the pub or over at the clump of vans everybody called the Cesspit. He’d heard of Dan because his boat fished for the company and he knew about Sherry because nobody could stop talking about her. But he never asked about either of them. He wanted to know where his thermos was and what was for dinner and when the fuck his luck would change.

  He’d always been Raelene’s kind of bloke, the sort of man her sisters always had, the kind their mother flirted with, blowing smoke and wisecracks from the side of her mouth. Rae didn’t go men who dressed fancy or slapped on aftershave. She was a bit suss about TV men who talked about their feelings all the time and men who cried gave her the screaming creeps. Right from the start Max was a bloke who didn’t muck around. He never pretended to be what he wasn’t. The night they met, at a twenty-first, he stared at her like a hungry man, like she was food, and it made her feel powerful. All night she had tingles knowing he wanted her. During the speeches she led him behind the pool shed and with his cold belt buckle flapping against her thigh and his hands strong beneath her she knew she had what she wanted. She couldn’t keep him a secret more than a few days. He was twenty and loaded with cash from fishing and he bought them both tickets to Bali where they got trashed for a week and screwed themselves silly. When she brought him home her mother made a fool of herself and her sisters were jealous. Raelene didn’t hold it against them – it was only natural.

  But Max was getting a gut now. After years of slinging craypots his back was stuffed. There was no way he’d be able to hold her up against a pool shed anymore. His teeth weren’t great and under his new beard his mouth was turning down at the sides like a man disappointed. Raelene couldn’t pin down when it was that Max turned sour. Maybe when the girls came along. Or when he saw deckhands younger than him getting jobs as skippers. He said he wasn’t the brown-nosing sort, that you had to know the right people and there was some truth in that, but Rae knew that Max pissed people off. In the pub they called him Aggro Max. He often came home bloody and sore, especially after a live game on the big screen. His brother Frank was a footballer and you’d think he’d be proud but he wasn’t. Just the sight of Frank loping out onto the ground made him scowl and the slightest fumble turned Max into a maniac. At first people thought it was funny to hear him call his brother a fairy, a retard, a waste of skin, but Frank was a star, a local, and White Pointers loved him.

  Raelene imagined that she still loved Max. When they made love the whole van rocked. Whatever kind of bastard he was, he still needed her. After all these years he had that hungry look, staring at her arse and thighs when she got dressed, and the feeling that gave her was something she couldn’t explain, not even to Sherry.

  Sherry wasn�
�t the nosy type, yet she was a good listener and now and then, lulled by the sun and the lapping water, Rae let on a little about Max and her. There was something neat about Sherry, something prim, so she tried to shock her with talk about Max and her in bed. Sherry surprised her by laughing and countering with stories of her own, what Dan liked, what she let him do. Sex is a blessing, she said. She was unshockable. Even when Raelene told her about Max’s temper Sherry seemed more thoughtful than disgusted. Rae held back a lot of details but Sherry’d seen her face. She knew.

  Love conquers all, said Sherry.

  I dunno, she said doubtfully. Sometimes I don’t think so.

  You just need a little faith to see you through, Rae. You’re a good wife, a good mother. Everything happens for a purpose, you know. You’ll be alright, I just know it.

  Talk like that heartened Raelene. She came away feeling good about herself and she stood in front of the narrow mirror and saw that she was still pretty. Smoking had left pucker lines around her mouth but her tummy was flat and her skin was clear and tanned. She was the same dress size she’d always been. She was no Sherry, though the boys from the Cesspit still paid her close attention whenever she walked by, and compared to some other women in town, like the girls in the Tuesday night darts team, she was a deadset trophy.

  Raelene never did convince Sherry to come along to darts night and in a way she was glad because it meant that she didn’t have to share her with the others. Rae didn’t give a bugger about darts. Tuesdays were just a night out in a town where there was nothing else to do. Her teammates were rough old boilers in tracky dacks and stretchknit tops. They were good for a laugh once a week but they weren’t really friends. They were proof that the further you let yourself go, the better you needed to be at darts. Rae was just making up the numbers. It was fun to imagine Sherry there, even if it was better that she didn’t come.

  When Sherry’s place was ready and the removal truck had come and gone, Raelene spent three days helping her move in properly. The house was a big, brick joint, the sort that a middling kind of owner-skipper would build. Sherry and Dan had nice things – a glass table, white leather couches and a kingsize bed. While she and Sherry chatted and worked from room to room, the girls played in bubblewrap. They chased Sherry’s cat and climbed in and out of boxes. They begged Sherry to tell them more of her stories, and she obliged them as she could. The girls always wanted David and Goliath or Jonah and the Whale. Sherry held them spellbound.

  When Raelene got home from the third day the caravan was a mess and so was Max. He’d kicked the mirror out and there was blood all over the floor. The whole time she was washing and dressing his cut foot he pissed and moaned about coming back to an empty home and having to heat up his own lunch again and when Rae laughed at him for being so bloody stupid he clouted her in front of the kids. When he was gone, limping off toward the Cesspit, she settled the girls down, cooked them spaghetti on toast and bathed them in the sink before bed.

  She was asleep when Max came home. She woke with his finger in her. He stank of beer and bait and sweat and, tired as she was, she opened up to him out of sadness. She could have shrugged him off but she couldn’t be bothered. At least he was gentle and with his hands on her breasts and his belly against hers there was no harm in it and even a shadow of original feeling, a faint and momentary comfort that didn’t claim her attention long. She lapsed back towards sleep and in that softened, dreamy state she felt like a kid again, lying in the back of a station wagon on a night drive home, the roar of the surf from the other side of the dune like the roadnoise in the wheel-arches, and the light flashing on Max’s head as he rocked in her so like the blink of streetlights falling by. Raelene surrendered to the feeling. She floated warm and safe in something familiar, almost asleep again until she surfaced with a jolt and a cry and realized that she was coming despite herself and the sensation was like the mild shocks you sometimes got from the badly earthed taps in the shower block, and when the spasms passed and Max continued to labour away on his own behalf, there was such a wash of relief that she lay back immune, vaguely hearing but not taking in anything he said through his clenched teeth as sleep consumed her.

  When she woke it was five o’clock and Max was gone. She stretched, luxuriating in the sudden spaciousness of the bed, and slept on until old man Harrison’s mower came by at ten.

  Sherry came by at noon and said nothing about the pancake foundation on her face. Rae knew she looked like a bad job from the panel beater. You could see it in the girls’ faces. Sherry just hugged her and helped her pick up around the van before Max’s boat got in.

  In the afternoon, while Max ate his steak and eggs in weatherbeaten silence, still in his singlet and shorts and seaboots, Rae wondered about Sherry, what it was, apart from looks, that she had. It was a bit of a mystery.

  On darts night Raelene left an hour early to drop by Sherry’s on the way home. When Sherry came to the door she seemed alarmed. She held Rae by the shoulders and inspected her face, and it was only when she satisfied herself that there was nothing wrong that she relaxed and asked her in. Dan got up from the couch and offered her coffee, went and made it himself. For an hour or so Rae regaled them with tales of the darts girls. She stank of beer, she knew, and she smoked her Benson & Hedges and they gave her a saucer as an ashtray and were too decent to wave the smoke away. She wondered if it was money that made them different. But plenty of fishermen made loads more than Dan; it couldn’t be that. She went home happy but puzzled.

  Raelene made a habit of dropping by on darts night. Dan and Sherry were usually still up, watching TV. Some nights she was weaving a bit when she arrived but they didn’t seem to mind. There were times when she knew she was pestering them, when she really was a pain in the arse, and once or twice, when she was completely pissed, she felt herself trying to provoke them like a bloody teenage daughter, but they remained unfailingly polite and courteous. Deep down Rae sensed that she wanted something from them. She just didn’t know what it was.

  One Tuesday she came by late. It was after eleven and the lights were out. When Dan came to the door he was only in his boxers. He looked startled, embarrassed. He said her name so loudly that Sherry appeared in the hall behind him with her lipstick awry and her hair all rumpled.

  You’ve been at it! she yelled.

  Would you like to come in, Rae? asked Dan.

  Don’t think so, said Raelene. It wouldn’t be fair.

  Sherry began to laugh. She tossed her gorgeous hair and stood there in her lace teddy a second before clapping a hand on Dan’s shoulder and drawing him back from the door, smiling all the while at Rae and wiggling her fingers goodbye. For Raelene there was nothing for it but to pull the door to and walk back out into the quiet street laughing. But by the time she got home she felt desolate. She wanted what they had, that special something, and when she looked down at the outline of Max snoring in her bed she bawled quietly and the effort to keep silent hurt worse than a beating.

  When Sherry didn’t come over for a couple of days Raelene felt frantic. The first real cold front of the season came through and rain drove in off the sea. The swell spewed mounds of stinking kelp and seagrass onto the beach and all the boats stayed in, shaking and lurching at their moorings like chained dogs. Max was around the whole time, scratching his beard, eating and farting and sulking, and the girls got on Rae’s wick, whingeing about going outside and needing the toilet, while all day every day the rain pissed down.

  Why can’t we have a bloody house? she screamed over the TV and the wind and the squalling girls. With a toilet, for fucksake, so we don’t have to walk a hundred yards to have a shit! I mean, how bloody hard is it?

  Max didn’t even answer.

  She trudged across puddles with the girls and bowed before the rain. While each of them sat in a cubicle swinging their legs she tried to light a little joint she’d been saving but the bastard of a thing was too damp to catch so she ate it instead and five minutes later puked it back up.<
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  Raelene couldn’t stop thinking about Sherry and Dan. She was hooked now. Maybe even in love with them. The weird thing was that she felt no envy, not the hot green bilious envy you’d expect when you saw their stuff and their doll-like looks and what they had going between them. When she was with them they didn’t make her feel low, they didn’t rub her nose in the mess she was. They lifted her up somehow. They were kind of straight and maybe they wouldn’t last long in White Point but she felt different with them.

  There came a Tuesday when Raelene blew off darts night altogether and just went straight to Dan and Sherry’s. When they let her in, surprised to see her so early but not at all reluctant to greet her, she saw that beside the empty plates and glasses on the dining table there were books open. Not just books – they were Bibles.

  Raelene began to laugh. She heard herself, she sounded like a bloody madwoman and she wished she was drunk.

  No darts tonight? asked Dan, putting the kettle on. His black hair was just too fuckin perfect.

  Cancelled, she lied.

  Feel like some gnocchi, Rae? asked Sherry. There’s plenty left.

  No, said Raelene, unable to settle, to sit, to look them in the eye.

  She knew things about them, what they did in bed, what labels they wore, the kind of towels they bought and the sort of fabric softener they used and even, having laid the paper in them herself, how their bloody bathroom drawers were set out, but she suddenly realized that she didn’t know them at all. She blinked like an idiot and thought about it. All the stories Sherry told the girls. Rae’d thought of them, if she’d noticed them at all, as old-timey tales, adventure stories. But it was church stuff.

  So it’s this, she murmured.

  This? said Sherry, sitting and crossing her lovely legs and raking her fingers through her hair.

  This! said Rae. She slapped a hand down on one of the Bibles.

  Oh. That! said Sherry with a laugh.