by Tim Winton
Geez, Max, I thought you’d finally be happy. For once the whole world sees it your way. Vindicated, that’s what you should be feeling.
You stupid little bastard. People dream of havin what you had. It makes em sick to see a spoilt prick like you walk away from what they couldn’t have.
Just you, Max. Why don’t you admit it? You’re talkin about yourself.
You didn’t try—
But that’s what you don’t get, mate. That’s the whole problem.
You were more arse than class.
Fair enough. But I just played for fun, Max. I loved playing the game. Remember? Shit, you should remember. You hated my guts for it. Jesus, I was the only person you ever hated more than the old woman; it was like I was responsible for her pissing off as well as everything else. I was like some insect you had to squash.
You think you can take me? Max said, sculling closer. You reckon you can?
I dunno, mate. What’s the point?
Won’t or can’t?
Aw, that again?
Why the fuck are you here?
I’m not sure. Maybe I wanted to say some things. There’s nowhere to go.
You just walked off the fuckin ground. Up the race. In front of thirty-five thousand people and the TV. The country, you dumb cunt!
I couldn’t play anymore. I told you. It was like the magic was gone.
Aw, and ya just dunno why.
Leaper washed the blood from the heel of one palm and looked at the cut a moment. It was nastier than he’d first thought.
Oh, I know why. It’s no mystery to me, mate.
Fuck this, said Max, paddling for a wave after they’d let several roll through unridden.
Leaper turned and watched him go. For a long moment his brother’s body was visible through the wall of water. The sound of all those tons of water falling was as huge as a stadium crowd. As he watched Max go, he wondered if he could take him now. Years of weight training had bulked him up; he was strong and quick and two years younger. And there’d be a certain satisfaction in dishing out a little of what Max had given him all through the years, the bullying bastard.
Leaper didn’t catch any wave that came through. He was too churned up with thinking. Everything was arse-up again; it was just plain perverse. He’d had years to get past all this family shit and for a good while there he really had got beyond caring. He’d felt liberated. Those first two seasons he felt like an animal out of his cage. He played football unselfconsciously and lived the same way. Until news of the old man’s death. The business of the funeral, and not going. It was about showing Max he didn’t care. That was what poisoned him; it got into everything, this business of showing them. One ordinary game and then he wanted to show them he wasn’t ordinary. Then he was showing the coach that he was trying. Jesus, it was all the showing and trying that ruined him. Because when he ran out onto the park not giving a shit, just excited to get a kick, to fly high and feel the mindless thwack of the ball against his chest, he was something inexplicable, something that delighted him as much as the fans. That’s what left him when he played to prove every balding, wheezy lard-arse commentator wrong. The magic evaporated.
Wasn’t that all he was doing here, hungry and tired and a bit chilled now at White Point – getting into Max’s face, showing him he didn’t care when it just wasn’t true? Just having Max within arm’s reach made him boil with memories. The time Max had tried to suffocate him in the dunes, bury him alive. The day at school when he shat himself and was locked in the dunnies while Max marshalled the laughing mob outside. Christ, if Max was shamed by last week’s fiasco then why not enjoy his discomfort? But it felt poisonous. It took too much effort to keep it up. What he felt like was a cup of tea and about fifteen doughnuts in the warmth of Max’s van. He wanted to see his girls. They were small, still; they’d smell of clean pyjamas and honey on toast.
Max paddled up beside him and cleared his nose horribly.
Won’t surf either, eh? You’re a case, Frank.
You still in the old man’s van?
Took it to the tip.
Keep anything out of it?
Not much. What, did you want something from it?
No. Nothing. Hey, tell me about your missus.
Max scowled.
Raelene, that her name?
His brother nodded.
I was thinking of dropping over.
Don’t, said Max.
It wasn’t my fault I could play footy, Max. It wasn’t my fault Mum did what she did. This is just stuff that happened to us.
You make me sick.
How come you’re not working today? The cray season’s not finished.
I got put off the boat.
Shit.
That’s women for ya.
I really wanna meet her.
Don’t come over.
Relax. I won’t say a thing about you. Just had this urge to connect. You know?
Don’t come. You can’t come.
There was a strange note of urgency in Max’s voice. Along with the fury there was a kind of pleading that Leaper couldn’t believe.
Max?
Fuck off. Leave me alone.
Max paddled away a few yards as the dark lines of another set piled up in the distance. Leaper followed him out of habit, a reversion to old ways, until he caught himself and sat up. He was too tired for this, there was no point talking to him. Maybe he should just paddle in and go see Raelene despite him. But why bother? He didn’t even understand the compulsion to meet her. Was it just to piss Max off or was he really curious about meeting the woman who’d married the bastard and was now family?
A surge of turbulence passed between Max and him, a sudden fattening of the water that caused Leaper to blink. His brother had his back to him, was still paddling away, when a bronze flash jerked him sideways on the board and drove him high in the water, spinning him round so that Leaper saw his open mouth within the streaming beard and the shark moiling beneath him. A second later he was all flailing arms that went under a moment until he surfaced in a pink smear.
Leaper didn’t move. Max’s teeth were tobacco-stained. His eyes were white. The straining cartilage of his nose was white. He sucked in a breath – it was as though he’d only just remembered how – and began to shudder before the whaler broke off and twisted away.
Leaper sat there.
Max groped for his board. It looked too short; it was half a board. Leaper saw the rest of it drift up the face of a wave that rose, tottered, and rolled past them unbroken.
You fuckin pansy! screamed Max. What’re you waitin for?
Leaper hesitated.
Frank?
Leaper paddled into the spoiled water and took Max by the beard, tried to haul him onto his own board, but Max wouldn’t be parted from the remains of his own, so Leaper towed him a way by whatever handful he could get of him, trying to get him into a stretch of clean water, but Max jerked and lashed so much that the sea churned with whorls and streamers of blood.
Frank?
Jesus, Max.
Leaper made himself get off his board and into the soup that Max was making.
Let go, he said. Max, let go of your board.
But Max wouldn’t let go, couldn’t let go. Leaper took his own board and wedged it beneath his brother. When he turned him shoreward he saw that one leg was too long and kicking out of sync, that below the knee it was hanging off him by a hank of neoprene. The wetsuit was slippery with blood.
Stop kicking! Stay still.
Leaper unstrapped his board leash and seized Max’s thigh. While the rest of the leg went pendulous and heavy and half in the way, Leaper tied the thigh off as tight as the urethane cord would go.
Frank.
Just hold on, he said. I’ll get you there.
Frank.
The shark’s gone. We’ll belly in across the reef.
Leaper held him by the buttocks and began to kick them shoreward. Max’s head rose once, twice on his neck as if he
was trying to look back.
I can do it, said Leaper. You’ll be right now, you’ll see. I’ll show you.
Leaper saw Max’s head ease down on the board. His brother’s body shook beneath his own and he felt sick with triumph, with anger, from love. The water was thick as sand. Out past Max’s head the tower showed through the spray of breaking waves. Swells overtook them. The tank was bleary, unblinking, above the dune.
Max trembled like a spiked snapper.
It was you, said Leaper.
Max said nothing.
You, he thought. When the grass went suddenly hard underfoot, and the ball forever out of reach, it was you lurking at the back of my mind. That’s what fucked it, that’s why I started to care. There you were, bro. Just the thought of you was a weight in my legs, and the more I cared the worse it was.
A bigger wave came upon them. Before Leaper could surrender to it he had to earn it. He kicked so hard he felt poison in his legs. But he got them the wave. Max’s head was loose on his neck.
They bellied down the long, smooth face and beneath them the reef flickered all motley and dappled, weaves of current and colour and darting things that were buried with Max and him as a thundering cloud of whitewater overtook them. The blast of water ripped through Leaper’s hair and pounded in his ears. The reef was all over him but he held fast to his brother, hugging him to the board, hanging on with all the strength left in his fingers, for as long as he could, and for longer than he should have.
Long, Clear View
YOU LIE AWAKE AND LISTEN to the rumble of talk through the fibro wall as it thins out into pent-up whispering. From the old man’s sighs and your mother’s patient murmur, you know that nothing’s going right. The job, the town, the transfer, everything’s off somehow. At school there are new boundaries you can’t even see, lines between farmkids and townies, black-fellas and whites, boys and girls, gestures you just don’t get. And they’re all looking at you, the new copper’s kid, as if you already know too much.
You pine for the city, the spill of suburbs you left behind and the way they absorb you, render you ordinary and invisible. But then you pull yourself up, knowing that longings like that are useless, as weak as wishing you’d never left primary school. You’re not a baby. If you don’t try to make a go of it then things will be worse for everybody. So you shut up and stop bawling. You go to school without whining and afterwards you walk alone to the beach or the harbour and try to keep an open mind.
But town is full of looks and nods and elbows in the ribs as though the place is too small to contain a surfeit of information. Locals have a way of talking across you, rather than to you. Adults raise their eyebrows and ruffle your hair with their teeth showing. You can feel their curiosity, their wariness, and it sets you on edge.
From the house at the crest of the hill you can see the whole town at a glance: the harbour, meatworks, cannery, grain silos and the twisted net of streets with their chimney-plumed houses. The longer you look out on it the more you sense it all staring right back at you.
It doesn’t happen often but there are times when you have the house to yourself. That’s when you go into your parents’ room and take the rifle from the wardrobe. You just sit with it across your lap, there on the soft, wide bed.
The old Savage isn’t much of a weapon, an old single-shot .22 with a battered stock and tarnished gunmetal, but you like the weight of it in your arms and the way its curves and contours feel shaped by many hands, much holding. It calms you down, that rifle. When you sight along the barrel the wood against your cheek is smooth. You narrow your vision to a piece of space the size of a fingernail and things and people enter and leave that little patch of light as you will them to.
You’re not an idiot – you know all about firearms safety. Every time the old man is free he drives you out to some farm or other, and when you’ve filled the boot of the car with mallee roots for the kitchen stove, he brings the rifle out and you take turns knocking cans off a stump. The whole time he’s drilling you about safety. You know about ricochets over water, about climbing through the fence with a loaded weapon. He’s shown you grisly black and white photos of self-inflicted wounds, of gunshot corpses streaked with blood the colour of tar. Clear the breech. Check and check and check again. The safety catch is a fool’s idea of safety. And you know from experience what a .22 hollowpoint does to a living creature. There’s no such thing as a clean shot or an easy death. You’ve shot rabbits for the dog and killed foxes for farmers but you’ve got no more stomach for it than the old man.
Still, you love that rifle. But you take it seriously, and the gravity of a loaded, cocked weapon makes your hands tremble. You know it’s old and ugly, yet you care about it the way you care for your dog, the kind of ravaged mongrel strangers will cross the street to avoid. You love it because it’s yours.
You try to fit in but for weeks it’s useless. You’re nervous all day and at night you just lie there hearing more than you want to. Your little sister howls with colic across the hallway and even though you know she’s stuffing her mouth with a pillow, you hear the old girl’s muffled sobs through the wall. The mutt farts and groans outside your window. And at the change of shift there’s the car in the drive and the creak of the stove door and the old man’s shoes grinding on the kitchen lino. So, to keep yourself from being a baby, you think of that rifle in its naphthalene fog behind the coats in the wardrobe.
The old man keeps the breech-bolt hidden separately from the rifle. Without a firing mechanism the rifle is a dog without teeth. It’s not even a weapon. Although you know where the bolt is stashed you don’t go near it; you can’t do anything stupid.
A few really bad days you sit at the window to watch people come and go. You can see anyone moving a mile away, so you track them in the sights as they make their way uphill. Like that wild-looking kid in the sheepskin jacket who’s always around. Or the station wagons full of Aborigines on pension day. You contain them a little while. But you can’t see trouble coming. You don’t know what to look for.
And then, somehow, you forget to keep watch. You don’t think of the rifle. You’re overwhelmed by schoolwork, you sleep at night, and, without noticing, you become familiar. Although the town still seems temporary it feels normal for longer and longer stretches. You fall in love with an older girl. You learn to play basketball and even though you’re rubbish at it you like the way the game takes you over. You play against blackfellas who whip you and then get you to walk them home to the hostel because they’re afraid of the dark. You register the old man’s sense of disappointment in Aborigines but that’s a cop thing. You’re in love with a girl who’s out of reach. Just to pass her house you ride to the wharf where grain ships load and tuna boats disgorge icy bluefin. The wharfies and sailors and fishermen are scarred and broken-toothed and you ride past them, invisible.
On the wharf you find a battered foreign-language nudie magazine in which all the women’s breasts are the size of pumpkins. You take it home and stash it in the cavity beneath the drawer in your desk. You consult it frequently, especially the swarthy centrefold who cradles her breasts like an armload of fruit. Eventually you notice how her eyes follow you. You try to concentrate on the dark splash of hair between her legs but she’s looking back at you. One afternoon you ride down to the water and shove the rolled magazine through the planks of the whalers’ jetty.
You watch the girl you love playing netball and wish you were visible again.
You blunder into the bathroom to find your mother with her breasts in her hands.
They’re sore, she says. I’m weaning your sister.
Oh, you murmur. Right.
Afterwards, stroking the dog on the back step, you think of the twelve-year gap between you and the baby, wondering what it was that took the oldies so long.
When the old man gets a weekend off, he drives you all out to a salmon camp along the coast where you set up in an empty tin hut with a box of groceries and some sleeping bags. The aut
umn air is cool and salty, spiced with the tang of peppermint trees which spill down the dune to the empty beach. Together you catch herring from the stony headland and sit out by a bonfire telling jokes. Your mother is bright and girlish. Your father’s quiet laugh makes you sleepy, and in the morning you mind your sister while the oldies walk the beach hand in hand. Before they return the baby has taken her first unaided steps and only you’re there to see it.
The night you get back to town you wake to the scream of sirens. Lights crawl the wall and the phone rings in the hallway. From the kitchen window you see the school in flames. The old man is out the door and you’re left there in a fizz of excitement you’re careful to conceal from your mother. In the morning you stand around on the oval with everybody else while the drizzle comes down and the gossip goes around about the kid recently expelled, the one who made bombs and filled condoms with bulls’ blood and jacked up teachers’ cars. You know who they mean – it’s the dishevelled boy in the sheepskin jacket, the one you see everywhere – and kids are coming to you now, needling you for information because you’re the copper’s kid and you should know. Every time you shrug they take it as confirmation. And then it’s in the local paper, the boy helping police with inquiries.
The rest of the week, with the old man on afternoon shift, you get home to find him sipping Nescafé with his baton and cuffs on the sink. He runs his thumbnail across the ribs of the draining board with a clouded look on his face. You want to ask but you know he’ll tell you nothing and you respect him for it.
Demountable classrooms arrive at school. The wild boy is released without being charged. Somehow the old man seems mollified.
For the school social you gargle with Listerine, spray your hair with VO-5 and try to work up the guts to speak to the girl with the spoiled face, the one you haven’t stopped thinking about for weeks. The music is awful. A bunch of blackfellas on special release from the prison farm play Status Quo and AC/DC like it’s country and western and there’s a strange current in the gym that saps your resolve. Kids are acting weird. Someone sets off a rotten egg bomb and an hour later, when the air has cleared, two ambulancemen and your own father burst in as news rolls in a swell across the dancefloor that there’s a girl dead in the toilet. The lights come up. The band witters to a halt. As you file out with the others you see the old man emerge from the basement, cap askew, to search the crowd for you, and when he sees you his nod is curt and he’s gone again. Out in the carpark detectives pull in. You recognize the swagger. Your basketball mates are gone already, so you head home.