Authors: Tim Winton
I saw one of em again last year, said Vic. One of those boys. That school case we did in the Pilbara? He’s a teacher there now. Must be the only blackfella I knew who made it through
school.
That you know of, Gail said.
Teaches phys ed. He saw me and just laughed.
You didn’t tell me about it.
It was kind of awkward. I mean I always liked him. I was glad to see him. God, I almost hugged the guy and congratulated him for being a big success.
You didn’t!
Just think of the odds. In our day, from that town. The others’ll be dead or in jail. Making it to forty’s an achievement. But, no, I didn’t do anything stupid. Still, I wanted
to catch up with him, buy him a drink, but I fudged it. It suddenly got too . . . complicated.
Complicated?
Gail asked. What’re you saying?
Vic felt her looking his way now. She had the wrong idea but he had no confidence in his ability to explain himself. His face began to tingle with a hint of neuralgia. He sank back and closed
his eyes a moment.
They came into the jarrah forest, a wall of grey on either side of the road, and the air was cool and sharp with eucalyptus.
You should go back there some time, said Gail after a long silence.
The Pilbara?
No, the old town. You should deal with these things. God, last year I was down there every month.
The old town, he said bitterly.
Well, you were like a zombie.
My parents died.
Sure. But it was more than that. You know it.
Just small-town shit, Gail.
Which you haven’t dealt with.
He sighed and looked at her long arms draped on the wheel, the hair licking back over her ears in the slipstream.
You should have come with me, she said fiercely. You should have.
For your sake?
Both our sakes. You’re stuck, Vic. You won’t admit it but you are. Which, in case you hadn’t noticed, leaves me stuck alongside you.
Stuck
with
me, you mean.
That’s not what I said, she murmured. You’re like someone under siege. And I know it’s all these sudden memories. But are they coming because you’ve been sick, or are you
sick from remembering? Like you’ve held it out too long.
You’re a fundraiser, not a therapist.
Well, pretty soon you might need both!
What does that mean, Gail?
Do you realize that every vivid experience in your life comes from your adolescence? You should hear yourself talk. You’re trapped in it. Nothing you do now holds your attention like the
past. Not me, not even your work, these days. I feel like I’m getting less real to you by the day, that I’m just part of some long, faded epilogue to your real life. Last year I put up
with it. It was lonely, Vic, but now it’s worse. Shingles, twice in two months. That’s a physical breakdown. How long before you cave in altogether?
She drove. He licked his chapped lips. Each of them sensed the uneasy crossing of a boundary. There was relief in it – they’d been like two people holding their breath so long, but
they were fearful of where this might lead.
Why are we going away this weekend? he asked.
A change of scene.
A change of company?
That too, she said with a sigh.
You’ve started going to church again.
How’d you know?
I found a pew sheet.
Well, last year I went whale watching. This year I thought I’d try the Anglicans.
I’m not sure that’s an evolutionary progression.
I don’t think you’re in a position to talk about progress, Vic.
I thought you’d never go back to all that nonsense.
Well, it’s not quite the same brand of nonsense. And I’m sorry you’re threatened by it.
Vic took a breath but said nothing. He put a hand to the welter of scabs on his face. He could feel the others itching at his scalp and eyelid but he resisted the impulse to claw at them. The
neuralgia was well and truly back. The deep, prickling heat was, he now understood, a warning sign. He took his hand away and looked at his wife. She was crying, blinking furiously, tears streaking
back across her temples in the wind.
Sorry, he said.
Doesn’t matter.
I’m being a dickhead.
I have to pull over.
Gail braked and eased them onto a wedge of pink gravel. She switched the engine off and snatched up a tissue from the box on the dash. She looked away but she sensed him slumped beside her.
Last year, she said. Those weekends in Angelus. I had an affair.
Ah. Right.
It was stupid, and wrong. I didn’t plan it. Lasted a few weeks. I’m so sorry.
That’s why I should have come?
No. Well, part of me thinks so, but I know that’s not fair.
Well, Jesus.
Gail gripped the wheel until her hands burned. She hadn’t meant to tell him yet and not nearly as bluntly. For someone in his condition the timing was about as bad as she could have
managed. She’d wanted to tell him so she’d be free of it, not to spit it up in a moment of anger.
He opened the door and got out. The forest sighed. There was a mineral whiff of gravel. For a moment she thought of him bolting out into the blur of trees and leaving her there by the roadside.
Could it be that she wanted it? A scene? An end, even?
But he went no further than the drainage ditch, round-shouldered, hands in pockets, blowing like a man who’d already run a good distance.
When they bounced up the long winding drive and came to the house, Fenn was out on the grass with the hose and the kids were in an old cattle trough, squealing as he sprayed
them down. Capering about in his floral boardshorts, the ginger beard dripping, that chest hair plastered awry, Fenn looked so huge and ungainly, so unselfconscious in his foolery, that Gail and
Vic exchanged glances and smiled despite themselves.
God, she said. Look at that.
Daisy came down off the verandah. She was barefoot and her cotton dress only contained her breasts intermittently.
Don’t mind my husband, she said pulling open the driver’s-side door. His idea of farming is to water the children.
We were just admiring his movements, said Gail.
Ever seen such a physique?
Like a Greek god, said Gail.
How are you, Daisy? said Vic.
Better than you two by the looks of things.
How do things look, then? he said.
That poor face of yours? Like she dragged you behind the car the first fifty miles.
What about
my
face, Daise? asked Gail.
Like you drove the second fifty miles feeling guilty about it.
Vic and Gail caught each other’s eye a second time. Daisy saw it. He realized then that Fenn and Daisy were already privy to Gail’s secret.
C’mon, said Daisy. Or do I have to haul you both out?
Daisy made an enormous pot of tea and set down a tray of anzacs by the window from which they could keep an eye on the children. Fenn weighed a biscuit on his upturned palm
and raised his impossible eyebrows.
Anzac, he said. Now there’s a biscuit with the ballast of history.
They’re perfectly good biscuits, said Gail. She’s getting good at them.
And even if I’m not, said Daisy, he still eats them. Behold, Vic, the weight of loyalty.
Yeah, said Fenn, slapping his belly. The waist of loyalty.
Daisy and Fenn were both vets. They’d sold a thriving suburban practice to come here. Daisy had grown up on the place and took it on when her father grew too frail to keep up with the
orchards. Vic looked out at the hard noon light on the hills and the almost shadowless lines of trees and he wondered how Fenn and Daisy would manage here. Fenn was alarmingly impractical. Animals
and children loved him but he knew nothing about horticulture or even simple gardening. Daisy, who’d been away from the place since she was seventeen, had plans for an organic operation and
maybe biodynamic poultry as well, but they seemed out of reach at present. There had been hidden debts, unforeseen expenses. Vic thought there was something manic about Fenn and Daisy’s
optimism. At times they struck him as just plain careless with their energies. Still, he admired them for striking out in a new direction, for having dreams. They were barely ten years his junior.
So why did they seem so fresh?
Oh, look at you, said Daisy. You poor love.
He’s looking so much better, said Gail. But it was frightening. Especially when it got close to his eye.
Nasty, said Fenn. You can go blind.
They
know
that, Fenn.
I was thinking aloud. I had a cousin with shingles once.
Thanks for the cuppa, said Vic. You mind if I duck up to the cabin for a bit of a lie-down?
I’ll drive you up, said Gail.
No, I’ll be right.
Bed’s made, love, said Daisy. Listen to me, I sound like my mother.
When Vic was gone, Gail made herself another cup of tea and watched Fenn go out to the kids again.
What a goose, said Daisy settling in beside her, resting her head against her shoulder.
They’re so lucky to have a father like him.
Yeah, murmured Daisy. I suppose they are.
Fenn climbed into the trough. Only his gut and his horny, white feet were visible as the kids climbed on him.
You must see the other sort too much, said Daisy. At work.
Yeah. But I was thinking about what it would be like. Being a little girl again, with a dad like that.
Speaking of fathers, tell me about this priest you’re seeing. What’s he like?
It’s a she, actually. She’s very unremarkable.
What’s remarkable is you seeing her. After everything they did to you. Please tell me it’s not just guilt that’s sent you back.
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it was at first. It’s been so awful, Daise. I’ve felt so horrible about it.
Well, you should have told him earlier.
He was a wreck. His parents had just died. After God knows how long, he sees them together in the same room again only to bury them both within a few weeks.
Telling him would have pulled him up, said Daisy. It would have given him something more immediate to think of.
Maybe. I dunno. I mean it’s just so grotty. The bloke was the motel manager. He was such a sleaze. I kind of sank into it.
Well, Christ, you were lonely.
Stop defending me. You’re worse than Vic.
He’s making excuses for you?
You know him. Circling the wagons on everyone else’s behalf.
It’s endearing, said Daisy, swishing the dregs in the pot.
And it’s a problem, Daise, a curse. You can’t compensate for everyone all your life. In the end you have to demand something of people.
Listen to you, Daisy said. She got up to tip the tealeaves into a slopbucket beside the ancient wood range. Isn’t that your story, too?
Gail smiled, conceding it. She thought of the long year past, of Vic finding his father after so much time and the way his past seemed to assail him. She’d tried so hard to understand his
obsession that she all but entered into it. She drove to his home town and trudged its streets and beaches like a researcher imagining herself into his world and the slow wreck of his teenage
years. In the end it was a kind of indulgence. There was nothing to show for it but more damage, more complication.
Vic’s problem, said Daisy, is he’s still the dutiful boy. Doing the right thing by his poor mother. Letting himself get screwed by the labour movement year in year out without a
squeak. How long can you keep that shit up without a little bit of bad faith creeping in?
Yes, said Gail. But I suppose I could see myself in the same light. At what point are you just pretending?
Well, you’ve already blown
your
good-girl credentials.
Gail put a hand to her temple and managed a smile.
Will you stay together?
I don’t know, she said. I love him.
Well, said Daisy, flapping her sweaty dress. He’s probably worth it. All things considered.
Vic lay in the guesthouse with the windows open and the cries of birds and children drifting up the ridge. The cabin was built of corrugated iron and clad inside with local
timber. There was a slate floor, a wood heater, a little bathroom. He liked it. But he was sure that Fenn and Daisy couldn’t really afford it. The debts would eat them alive and the thought
made his head race. Their bucolic existence was precarious. They were good people, yea-sayers to life, but they exhausted him. He supposed it was rude getting up like that, ten minutes after
arriving, but he’d felt so sapped by everybody’s solicitude that he had to go before he became too enfeebled to move at all. And they knew about Gail. She’d told them first. It
made him more of an invalid than he could bear.
The neuralgia rattled him. It was usually the precursor to a relapse. And, God, he didn’t want to return to how he was at Christmas – the searing headaches, the blisters. Gail was
right to be afraid. It frightened him too, this total collapse, because he felt his mind teetering at its limit. He’d been this close before but he’d never told her. At this great
distance he could still see himself, the boy behind the curtain, cradling death in his arms. He was forty-four years old but he felt just as helpless. He knew what the boy didn’t, that you
couldn’t keep soldiering on indefinitely. But beyond that, even at this age, he still didn’t know the first thing about saving himself.
When Vic woke it was the middle of the afternoon and all the shadows had moved so far across the room that it seemed he’d woken in a different cabin. The ghostly pain in
his face was gone. He got up, put on his shoes and some sunglasses, and went out onto the little terrace of slates and river rocks. But for a solitary child bumping up and down on the trampoline,
there was nobody visible down at the main house.
He walked out into the orchard. The air was cool. He knew he should probably go back for a jacket but he pressed on through the sloping lines of trees not wanting to interrupt this feeling of
freshness, of respite.
But within a minute he was reviewing the morning’s conversation in the car. His blathering about basketball. Gail’s forbearance. His needling. Then her sudden news, the awful
smarting shock of it. There was only the faintest trace left now. Did it mean that, deep down, he expected it, even thought he deserved it? That he forgave her already? Or that he felt so little
because he was so abstracted, as far gone from her as she feared? He knew it was completely absurd, yet what had festered in his mind wasn’t the adultery at all, but something Gail said
before that. When he told her about the Aboriginal teacher. Her reaction to his confession that he’d wanted to take the bloke for a drink but baulked.