Authors: Tim Winton
The empty house was in disarray and afternoon light lay in blocks on the livingroom carpet. She went unsteadily to the window to find that Luther Fox’s truck and trailer were gone. She looked about for the keys to her rented car. Downstairs the garage was empty. She came back lightheaded and jittery and stood in the livingroom a while.
It took her a few moments to see the weird smudge on the glass door. Right there at eye level. The greasy imprint of a pair of lips. Georgie shuffled over to the sliding door and stared. With the filthy sleeve of her housecoat she tried to rub it off and when nothing happened she grew panicky until it dawned on her that the mark was on the other side of the glass. She stepped out into the heat and hurriedly did the job.
Then she showered and put herself together as best she could. She knew she needed to eat but she was queasy and her throat so sore she could only manage vitamins and a can of Sprite. Back on the wards a big toke of 02 might have done the job; it was God’s own pick-me-up. She thought about the cops but decided against it.
Not while there was a sniff of hope.
Back in the garage she pulled her bike from the tangle of weightlifting gear and reticulation pipe. The seat felt like a fist between her buttocks. She thought of the supermarket, the post office and the school she’d need to pass. She pedalled feebly out into the hard light of day.
To say you look shithouse would be brown-nosin, said Beaver as she pulled up beside him at the pump.
Sell me a car?
Mate, there’s nothin to sell ya.
I’ll rent something.
Jesus, George. I gotta live here.
Just some old banger from out the back.
You sober enough?
Yes.
You bloody promise?
I bloody promise.
He wiped his hands and glanced at her critically. I need me truck, he said. You can take the EH. But— I’ll be careful.
Yeah, one day, George.
I really appreciate it, she said. I can’t tell you.
No, he murmured. Best if you don’t.
Fox wakes at dawn to see that White Point is only a mile or so behind him. He doesn’t even remember lying down and now he has to walk on in the heat of the day. So slow, so weak and sleepy. He presses on along the soft, empty beach with the roar of surf in his head. The sand is white, blinding, endless. Figures ten miles, no fifteen to go. Now and then he comes upon a bit of vegetation hanging from a blown-out dune and he lies in the precious shade a while to take sips from the plastic bottle he scored from a bin last night and filled from a yard tap.
At the lonely cove beneath the old Buckridge boundary he stares at footprints until he realizes they’re his own. And Georgie’s too—so small. When was this—two days ago? Longer?
He follows his own tyre tracks a short distance up into the hinterland before it occurs to him to keep wide of firebreaks and bush tracks, but the scrub here is savage underfoot. Heady smell of saltbush. The insect hum of acacia. The only trees are rare huddles of coastal morts whose bark hangs like torn bandages. Heat shudders upon the land. A fenceline. Then a nasty belt of banksia country—all sharkskin trunks and serrated leaves —and it’s like wading through barbed wire.
And finally the highway, quartzy as a river. He can’t walk down it in the open. He’ll have to come around the back way. As he limps across he sees a dead roo with its legs in the air on the gravel shoulder. The stench pursues him across the road and into the capstone country and grasstrees beyond.
Drinks the last of his water. Comes into pasture and remnant clumps of tuart trees. A few startled sheep that must belong to a new neighbour he hasn’t even met. And at last there is the strangling ditch of the brackish river. Paperbarks within whose shadows are wagtails, wattlebirds, honeyeaters.
How they flutter and scream and loop; they net the sky across him, stitch him in. He creeps south in shade. Emus step away solemn as yuppie bushwalkers.
At the home bend, where the tyre still hangs from the tilted tree, he soaks his feet. His shadow falls across the water. Past noon. No smoke nor smell of ashes. Eventually he climbs the rutted bank to look.
Prostrate on the baked earth, with wild oats rasping dead at his ears, he clocks the vehicle parked in the yard amidst the puzzling flutter of feeding hens. A 1964 EH Holden utility all buffed in gleaming monkeyshit brown. Tonneau cover and spoke wheels. A real lair’s wagon. And familiar. But he can’t place it.
Can only wait and see. Half expects the dog to come bounding down any moment.
Retreats to the shade of the riverbank whose open veins are ropy with shadow. Feels bound to the earth by them. They pull his cheek to the soil.
When he wakes it’s dusk already. There’s light across the farm but behind him it’s dirty dim. Shadows flit across the sandbar below. It takes a few moments for his eyes to adjust. Figures.
Boys. Two. One stoops at the water’s edge, commotion at his feet.
Suddenly he stands with something silver in his hands, something that flickers and shakes. The earth vibrates.
Fox scrambles up the bank toward the house.
Georgie saw the movement in the trees and stood ready. She was afraid; no use pretending otherwise. She hadn’t heard a vehicle.
She had nothing but a blackened firepoker to see them off with.
The house phone looked like it’d been ripped from the wall some time ago. Could be a dog, she told herself, some stray cur from a farm across the river. But too upright.
I can see you! she yelled. It sounded prissy, the voice of an eldest sister at hide-and-seek.
He limped up to the steps like a flogged animal.
Me, he said wheeling skittishly as she dropped the poker.
Georgie?
Yes.
And who else?
Just me.
I…
Only me, Lu. Come inside.
He stood there a while, his face obscured in the gloom, until Georgie realized that he needed help. When she touched him he recoiled. He felt jammy with blood and sweat. He smelled terrible.
There’s food, she said leading him up the steps. He had a geriatric tremor and the sleepwalker gait of the post-op patient.
At the threshold his eyes glittered.
Georgie sat him at the kitchen table and tried to assume the old professional mask in order to conceal her horror at the state he was in. Lacerated, sunburnt, crusty with salt and dirt, his lips split, his eyes red above bruises of exhaustion. His hair was full of grass seeds and cobwebs. His flayed thighs and feet shook. She took his pulse surreptitiously and thought about an ice bath to bring his body temperature down, but his heartbeat was regular and strong and she was afraid to leave him alone to go in search of ice.
You fed the chooks, he said beatifically.
Yeah.
Was that today?
Couple of hours ago. Here, drink.
She got water into him. He swallowed methodically. It struck her as maddeningly characteristic; it made her eyes sting with tears.
There’s food, she said. I cooked some things. The potatoes were here. The chicken I had to borrow. I’ll run a bath. You’ll stay?
Luther Fox looked at her in complete incomprehension. She left him reaching for a cold baked potato and when she returned from the bathroom he had hiccups. He tried to smile but they sounded painful, sob-like.
Drink, she said.
They comin?
I don’t know.
No fire.
No.
He tore a drumstick from the chicken she’d roasted and ate it haltingly. He struggled to get it down his neck. He seemed puzzled.
The EH?
Beaver’s. It’s his chook, too. I’m stretching the friendship.
Georgie felt his brow and neck for clamminess, for any change of temperature. He seemed stable enough.
I’m gone, he said with a tone that sounded to Georgie like satisfaction.
In the bathroom he was dazed enough to let her strip the shorts and shirt from him. She sat him in the old clawfoot tub and sponged his wounds. He had ticks on his arms and neck. He sighed as she washed him down and Georgie wondered how long it had been since anyone had knelt here and bathed him. When he closed his eyes the lids were translucent.
After ten minutes or so he seemed to revive a little. He told her what he’d done, where he’d been, what it took to get home, and she was thankful he wasn’t alert enough to ask her how she’d spent the intervening period.
When it came time to get him out she braced herself for the lift but he got up under his own power. Georgie thought of the swabbing and bathing she’d engaged in over the years. The men she’d kneeled to comfort, to clean, to save. This impulse she had. God, she thought, is it any different to the feeling you had looking at Jim the first time and seeing someone bereft, in need of saving? She’d quit the job but it was still Nurse Georgie to the rescue.
She wrapped him in a towel and walked him to the kitchen where she burnt the ticks out of him with a safety pin heated in a gas flame. She felt, she said, like the Grand Inquisitor torturing him for heretical secrets. He smiled drowsily. All secrets, he murmured, are heresies. Georgie painted him with antiseptic cream and rubbed oil into his sunburn. She put him to bed and sat a while, trying to figure out where to go from here.
The car first. Somehow she needed to find one of her own.
You don’t have any secrets? he asked, eyes fluttering.
You’re my secret, she said trying not to think of Mrs Jubail.
He smiled. Well, we’ve blown that out of the water.
Yes.
I didn’t tell you. About Bird. That she lived for a while. On machines. They kept shovin all these forms into my hands. I wasn’t gonna do it. I stayed and stayed. Think I just got tired, you know. They wore me down.
It was mercy.
He shook his head. A convenience.
No, Lu.
You don’t understand, he murmured.
Believe me, she said, I do.
He sighed.
Do you have an atlas? she asked.
In the library, he said. Why?
Show you my other secret. My island.
By the time she returned with the great dusty tome Luther Fox was asleep. Those eyelids were petal-like, marbled with capillaries like those of a child. She kissed his brow and drank his chickeny breath a moment before pulling the curtains.
Georgie thought of herself a couple of days ago sprawled on this bed, languid as a duchess. With his hand in her, warm and startling.
She stooped and took his hand. Held it to her cheek. Listened to the night beyond the insect screen.
Swims in a winy sea. All around him, in a mist, the piping breaths of the dead; they surge and swirl and fin beneath, roundabout, alongside him. It smells of soil, their breath, of soil and creekmud and melons. He hauls himself along with his face out, his limbs butted and glanced by slick bodies, one insistent at his hip knocking again and again in bunting enquiry as he goes on like a metronome, a beat without a melody. The water grows thick with limbs, too tangled to swim through and streams of kelp-like hair snag in his teeth, catch in his throat.
He wakes in the dark room. Curtains spill against the dado wall.
Ah. Here.
He pushes the sheet back and winces at the tightness of his hamstrings. He shuffles to the bathroom and then to the kitchen.
The house feels emptier than it ever has.
Georgie?
When he turns on the light he finds the atlas on the table. A grubby envelope protrudes from it and he opens the book to read the message written neatly on it.
Promised to return the car.
LOVE, G.
He slides Georgie’s note onto the table. It sticks to his damp fingers but his eye is drawn to the page between his hands.
Australia. The continent is a craggy frown and half that frown is Western Australia. He’s never left the state, never crossed even that lowly a frontier. He traces the faintly mottled deserts that separate his coast from the remainder of the country. It makes for a pretty austere chart. Compared to Asia or the Americas it looks short of names. White Point does not appear; there’s a nip of satisfaction in that. Fox anchors his thumb where he estimates himself to be and considers the vast space around him. Such isolation on the page when every bugger in the world is breathing down your neck. He checks the scale and out of boyhood habit lays the short side of the envelope along the map’s key to measure units of two hundred miles. South, there’s only four hundred or so to the rainy granite coast. Forests, fresh water, people. And to the north? Well, it’s all north, isn’t it. A thousand miles of the same state. Mostly empty. Until it peters out in the tropic swamps.
Fox follows the coast all the way. The far north looks fractured.
So many bays and islands. And he gives a little snort of surprise to see it named. Yes, right at the top near the Timor Sea.
Coronation Gulf.
He turns the light out and goes back to bed but he doesn’t sleep.
II
Beaver came to the door wiping his mouth and beard on a hank of toilet paper. The service station was shut and dimly lit and from somewhere in his lair behind the office a forties showtune surged and eddied. Beaver’s overalls were open to the navel to reveal the droop of his breasts beneath a thin-stretched teeshirt. He unlocked the glass door and opened it enough to poke his head out.
Who’s singing? asked Georgie.
Ethel Merman.
You’re a mystery, Beaver.
I am at that.
Sure you won’t sell this car? she said handing him the keys to the EH ute.
Written in stone.
I’m desperate, you know.
You’d better go home, George.
Jesus, where’s that? she muttered.
Jim’s been round twice this arvo already. Says he’s got bad news.
You should go.
Beaver, he is bad news. You don’t know him.
Oh, I know him.
The evening air was heavy with the iodine stink of seagrass. A few gulls skirled in Beaver’s forecourt lights. The sea sounded like nothing so much as steady traffic. Georgie thought of her modest box of chattels up at the house.
Here, said Beaver holding out a hairy fist. Keep the keys a few days. I’ll look around for somethin you can buy.