Authors: Tim Winton
I was with half a dozen Box kids when I saw Alan and Bruno out on the lake a hundred yards apart sculling along with fence pickets. Those Box kids crowded against me, straining, big and small,
to see. I can still remember the smell of them pressed in like that, their scent of warm milk and wet sheets. The two bigger boys drifted in silhouette out on the ruffled water. One of the Boxes
went back for their old man’s axe and we went to work on the scorched remains of an old FJ Holden with nasty green upholstery. One of them came upon a used condom. The entire Box posse was
horrified. I had no idea what it was and figured that you needed to be a Catholic to understand. Before dark we had our roof on the water. We kept close to shore and quickly discovered that two
passengers was all it could carry. Several Boxes went home wet. I doubt that anybody noticed. They were always wet.
Next day was Saturday. I got down to the swamp early in order to have the raft to myself a while and had only pulled it from its nest of reeds when Alan Mannering appeared beside me. He never
said a word. I actually cannot remember that boy ever uttering a word meant for me. He lived over the road for ten years. He all but walked me home from school for five of those, poking me from
behind, sometimes peppering my calves with gravel. I was in his house once, I remember the airless indoor smell. But he never spoke to me at any time.
Alan Mannering lifted the jarrah picket he’d ripped from someone’s fence and pressed the point of it into my chest. I tried to bat it away but he managed to twist it into my shirt
and catch the flesh beneath so that I yielded a few steps. He stepped toward me casually, his downy legs graceful.
You’re shit, I said, surprising myself.
Alan Mannering smiled. I saw cavities in his teeth and a hot rush of gratitude burned my cheeks, my fingertips. Somehow the glimpse of his teeth made it bearable to see him drag our FJ Holden
roof to the water and pole out into the shimmering distance without even a growl of triumph, let alone a word. I lifted my tee-shirt to inspect the little graze on my chest and when I looked up
again he was in trouble.
When he went down, sliding sideways like a banking aircraft out there in the ruffled shimmer of the swamp’s eye, I really didn’t think that my smug feeling, my satisfied pity about
his English teeth, had caused the capsize. He didn’t come up. I never even hated him, though I’d never called anyone shit before. After the water settled back and shook itself smooth
again like hung washing, there wasn’t a movement. No sign.
I went home and said nothing.
Police dragged the swamp, found the car roof but no body. Across the road the Mannerings’ lawn grew long and cries louder than any mower drifted over day and night.
That Christmas we drove the Falcon across the Nullarbor Plain to visit the Eastern States which is what we still call the remainder of Australia. The old man sealed the doors with masking tape
and the four of us sat for days breathing white dust. The limestone road was marked only with blown tyres and blown roos. Near the South Australian border we stopped at the great blowhole that runs
all the way to the distant sea. Its rising gorge made me queasy. I thought of things sucked in, of all that surging, sucking water beneath the crust of the wide brown land.
Back home, though they did not find his body, I knew that Alan Mannering was in the swamp. I thought of him silent, fair, awful, encased in the black cake-mix of sediment down there.
The next year, come winter, the night air was musky with smoke and sparks hung in the sky like eyes. Bulldozers towing great chains and steel balls mowed down tuart trees and banksias.
I learned to spell aquifer.
Three doors up, Wally Burniston came home drunk night after night. His wife Beryl locked him out and if he couldn’t smash his way in he lay bawling on the verandah until he passed out.
Some school mornings I passed his place and saw him lying there beside the delivered milk, his greasy rocker’s haircut awry, his mouth open, shoes gone.
New streets appeared even while the bush burned. In the phone box, which stank of cigarettes, I listened to the man from 1194 and knew that he was making the time up as he went along.
I saw the rainbow mist of the market garden sprinklers and felt uneasy. I thought of Alan Mannering in that mist. He’d have been liquid long ago. I was eleven now, I knew this sort of
thing.
As our neighbourhood became a suburb, and the bush was heaved back even further on itself, there was talk of using the swamp for landfill, making it a dump so that in time it could be reclaimed.
But the market gardeners were furious. Their water came from the swamp, after all. Water was no longer cheap.
The van Gelders divorced. Wally Burniston was taken somewhere, I never found out where. One Sunday afternoon I found myself in the van Gelders’ backyard scrounging for a companion when I
came upon Mrs van Gelder at the back step. I coasted over to her on my Dragstar to ask where her son might be but the sight of her struck me dumb. She had kohl around her eyes and a haircut that
made her look like Cleopatra as played by Elizabeth Taylor. Her dress was short and half her buttons were undone. I stared at the reservoir of shade between her breasts and she raised her chin at
me, took a great drag on her cigarette with her eyes narrowed, and gave me a confounding smile. She blew smoke across my handlebars. I popped an involuntary wheelstand in my hurry to get away. I
hurtled back out into the street, didn’t even see the car coming, but its slipstream tugged at my shirt as it swerved to miss me. Tyres bawled on the fresh-laid bitumen. When I wheeled
around, someone threw open the car door and began to shout and cry. And then people came into the street. I pedalled past them and coasted down our driveway to hide in the shed. Months later I woke
from a dream in which Mrs van Gelder leant in towards me with her blouse undone and I peered into her cleavage as though into a well. Then I sat up in bed as wet as a Catholic.
From one summer to the next water restrictions grew more drastic and people in our neighbourhood began to sink bores to get water. The Englishman next door was the first and then everyone
drilled and I thought of Alan Mannering raining silently down upon the lawns of our street. I thought of him in lettuce and tomatoes, on our roses. Like blood and bone. I considered him bearing
mosquito larvae – even being
in
mosquito larvae. I thought of him in frogs’ blood, and of tadpoles toiling through the muddy depths of Alan Mannering. On autumn evenings I sat
outside for barbecues and felt the unsettling chill of dew. At night I woke in a sweat and turned on the bedside light to examine the moisture on my palm where I wiped my brow. My neighbour had
gotten into everything; he was artesian.
At the age of twelve I contemplated the others who might have drowned in our swamp. Explorers, maybe. Car thieves who drove too close to the edge. Even, startlingly, people like the Joneses
before they became working class like us. The more I let myself think about it the less new everything seemed. The houses weren’t old but the remnants of the bush, the swamp itself, that was
another thing altogether. Sometimes the land beyond the straight lines seemed not merely shabby but grizzled. I imagined a hundred years, then a thousand and a million. I surveyed the zeroes of a
million. Birds, fish, animals, plants were drowned in our swamp. On every zero I drew a squiggly tadpole tail and shuddered. All those creatures living and dying, born to be reclaimed, all sinking
back into the earth to rise again and again: evaporated, precipitated, percolated. Every time a mosquito bit I thought involuntarily of some queasy transaction with fair, silent, awful Alan
Mannering. If I’m honest about it, I think I still do even now.
I knew even at ten that I hadn’t willed him to die, good teeth or bad. I pulled down my tee-shirt and saw him slip sideways and go without a sound, without a word. I faced the idea that he
did it deliberately to spite me but he looked neither casual nor determined as he slipped into the dark. It was unexpected.
The brown land, I figured, wasn’t just wide but deep too. All that dust on the surface, the powder of ash and bones, bark and skin. Out west here, when the easterly blows, the air
sometimes turns pink with the flying dirt of the deserts, pink and corporeal. And beneath the crust, rising and falling with the tide, the soup, the juice of things filters down strong and pure and
mobile as time itself finding its own level. I chewed on these things in classroom daydreams until the idea was no longer terrifying all of the time. In fact at moments it was strangely comforting.
All the dead alive in the land, all the lost who bank up, mounting in layers of silt and humus, all the creatures and plants making thermoclynes in seas and rivers and estuaries. I wasn’t
responsible for
their
coming and going either but I felt them in the lake and on the breeze. I have, boy and man, felt the dead in my very water. Maybe that’s why my wife finds me so
often staring across the Cockleshell mudflats at the end of a grim day’s teaching.
Not long after my thirteenth birthday we left the neighbourhood. We sold the house to a man who soon married and then divorced Mrs van Gelder. News of the street trickled back to me over the
years. I met people in malls, airports, waiting rooms. The man next door murdered his wife. Up the road, near the ridge, a man invented the orbital engine and the Americans tried to ruin him. Bruno
went back to Serbia to burn Albanians out of their homes; someone saw him on television. One of the Box kids became a celebrity priest. Girls got pregnant. Families began to buy second cars and
electrical appliances that stood like trophies on Formica shelves. The suburb straightened the bush out.
Years went by. So they say. For the past five the state has endured a historic drought. The metropolitan dams look like rockpools at ebb tide and it has long been forbidden to wash a car with a
running hose. Unless they have sunk bores people’s gardens have crisped and died. With all that pumping the water table has sunk and artesian water has begun to stink and leave gory stains on
fences and walls. And our old swamp is all but dry. I saw it on the news because of the bones that have been revealed in the newly exposed mud. All around the swamp the ground is hardening in folds
and wrinkles. The mud is veinous and cracks open to the sun. I saw it for myself when I pulled up, stunned from the long drive.
From the moment I arrived in my airconditioned Korean car I began to feel sheepish. Police were pulling down their tape barriers and a few news trucks wheeled away. The action was over. I sat
behind the little steering wheel feeling the grit of fatigue in my eyes. I didn’t even get out. What had I been expecting to see, more bones,
the
bones perhaps, have them handed over
for my close inspection? Would that suddenly make me sanguine about Alan Mannering?
The swamp has a cycleway around it now and even a bird hide. Around the perimeter, where the wild oats are slashed flat, signs bristle with civic exhortations. Behind the pine log barriers the
straight lines give way to the scruffiness of natural Australia. The sun drove in through the windscreen and the dash began to cook and give off a chemical smell. Down at the swamp’s receding
edge the scrofulous melaleucas looked fat and solid as though they’d see off another five years of drought. I pulled away and drove up our old street running a few laps of the neighbourhood
in low gear. I took in the gardens whose European ornamentals were blanching. Only a few people were about, women and children I didn’t recognize. They stood before bloody mineral stains on
parapet walls with a kind of stunned look that I wondered about. A man with rounded shoulders stood in front of my old house. The jacaranda was gone. Somebody had paved where it stood to make room
for a hulking great fibreglass boat. No one looked my way more than a moment and part of me, some reptilian piece of me, was disappointed that no one looked up, saw right through the tinted glass
and recognized me as the kid who was with Alan Mannering the day he drowned down there on the swamp. It’s as though I craved discovery, even accusation. There he is! He was there! No one said
it when it happened and nobody mentioned it since. People were always oddly incurious about him. He was gone; time, as they say, moves on. They all went on without him while he rose and fell, came
and went regardless. And they had no idea.
It’s kind of plush-looking, the old neighbourhood, despite the drought: houses remodelled, exotic trees grown against second-storey extensions. Middle class, I suppose, which is a shock
until you remember that everyone’s middle class in this country now. Except for the unemployed and the dead. The city has swept past our old outpost. The bush has peeled back like the sea
before Moses. Progress has made straight the way until terracotta roofs shimmer as far as the eye can see.
As I left I noticed furniture on the sandy roadside verge around the corner. Some black kids hauled things across the yard in Woolworths bags under the frank and hostile gaze of neighbours
either side. An Aboriginal woman raised her fist at a man with a mobile phone and clipboard. I pulled over a moment, transfixed. Another man with a mobile phone and aviator glasses came over and
asked me to move on. They were expecting a truck, he said; I complied, obedient as ever, but as I gathered speed and found the freeway entry I thought of the Joneses being evicted like that. I was
right to doubt the 1194 man on the telephone. Time doesn’t click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows,
falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has travelled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the water. Perhaps time moves through us and not us
through it. Seeing the Joneses out on the street, the only people I recognized from the old days, just confirmed what I’ve thought since Alan Mannering circled me as his own, pointed me out
with his jagged paling and left, that the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.