Scission

by Tim Winton

  But they had not planned on a pregnancy. It stunned them to be made parents so early. Their friends did not have children until several years after being married – if at all. The young woman arranged for maternity leave. The young man ploughed on with his thesis on the twentieth-century novel.

  The Polish widower began to build. In the late spring dawns, he sank posts and poured cement and began to use his wood. The young couple turned in their bed, cursed him behind his back. The young husband, at times, suspected that the widower was deliberately antagonizing them. The young wife threw up in the mornings. Hay fever began to wear him down.

  Before long the young couple realized that the whole neighbourhood knew of the pregnancy. People smiled tirelessly at them. The man in the deli gave her small presents of chocolates and him packets of cigarettes that he stored at home, not being a smoker. In the summer, Italian women began to offer names. Greek women stopped the young woman in the street, pulled her skirt up and felt her belly, telling her it was bound to be a boy. By late summer the woman next door had knitted the baby a suit, complete with booties and beanie. The young woman felt flattered, claustrophobic, grateful, peeved.

  By late summer, the Polish widower next door had almost finished his two-car garage. The young man could not believe that a man without a car would do such a thing, and one evening as he was considering making a complaint about the noise, the Polish man came over with barrowfuls of woodscraps for their fire.

  Labour came abruptly. The young man abandoned the twentieth century novel for the telephone. His wife began to black the stove. The midwife came and helped her finish the job while he ran about making statements that sounded like queries. His wife hoisted her belly about the house, supervising his movements. Going outside for more wood, he saw, in the last light of the day, the faces at each fence. He counted twelve faces. The Macedonian family waved and called out what sounded like their best wishes.

  As the night deepened, the young woman dozed between contractions, sometimes walking, sometimes shouting. She had a hot bath and began to eat ice and demand liverwurst. Her belly rose, uterus flexing downward. Her sweat sparkled, the gossamer highlit by movement and firelight. The night grew older. The midwife crooned. The young man rubbed his wife’s back, fed her ice and rubbed her lips with oil.

  And then came the pushing. He caressed and stared and tried not to shout. The floor trembled as the young woman bore down in a squat. He felt the power of her, the sophistication of her. She strained. Her face mottled. She kept at it, push after push, assaulting some unseen barrier, until suddenly it was smashed and she was through. It took his wind away to see the look on the baby’s face as it was suddenly passed up to the breast. It had one eye on him. It found the nipple. It trailed cord and vernix smears and its mother’s own sweat. She gasped and covered the tiny buttocks with a hand. A boy, she said. For a second, the child lost the nipple and began to cry. The young man heard shouting outside. He went to the back door. On the Macedonian side of the fence, a small queue of bleary faces looked up, cheering, and the young man began to weep. The twentieth-century novel had not prepared him for this.

  A Measure of Eloquence

  ALONG the clay cliff-edge the sagging old radio wires cut the wind with a yawl. The young man and woman saw that down on the point in the grove of trees were two tents and a caravan.

  ‘Jena told us this place was deserted,’ said Ann, looking down at the campfires.

  Philip paused, hand on the door of the hut, and looked down to the beach and the trails of footprints that looked so tiny from up there. He said nothing; there was nothing he could say. The exultancy had receded and disquiet had come upon them, the kind of restless anxiety which visits people in the wake of momentous actions. They had been married for two days.

  Before last night in the motel room, they had never slept together in a bed. Now, in this rough hut on the cliff, they found themselves straightening blankets too hastily, tucking the corners with awkward, terribly casual movements. The big iron bed consumed most of the space in the single room. Ann slotted a cassette into the tape recorder and the music helped diffuse some tension. The interior of the hut, with its patchwork of tin and asbestos and pine packing-cases, seemed more benign in the light of the Tilley lamp. There was a deal table, two chairs, a bench with a bucket set into it, a few shelves fastened to each wall, and an oblong strip of linoleum on the floor. The hut belonged to the father of a friend. Their friend had lived here for a year after a nervous breakdown. There was no sign of his occupancy except for a few books on the shelf by the bed: The Coral Island, Under the Volcano, Reach For the Sky, The Sun Also Rises. Philip pulled down The Coral Island. The dust made him sneeze. Ann turned from the window and smiled.

  ‘Did you read it as a boy?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You were never a boy, though,’ he said, trying to shrug the heaviness from him.

  ‘Sometimes I was.’

  ‘This marriage could be embarrassing, then.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said with a grin, ‘I won’t tell.’

  He put the book back on the rough shelf and sat on the bed. It sagged in the middle like a hammock. Rain started to fall and the tin roof chattered.

  ‘You want some tea, something to eat before bed?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. She drew the salt-stiff curtain.

  Ann woke to the sound of the camera shutter. Pink light made the blankets and the linoleum floor and the bedstead blush. Philip, elbows on the windowsill, focussed the zoom lens. She saw the dawn in his hair, on his bare shoulders, on his right cheek.

  ‘The sea,’ he said.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The sea. The sea.’ The camera plunked. He wound on.

  ‘What about it?’ She bunched the pillow beneath her neck.

  ‘Nothing. Just . . . the sea.’

  ‘Now you sound like Jerra. You don’t even like the sea. You hate fishing. You even hate people telling stories about shipwrecks. You don’t even go to the beach in summer.’

  ‘Yes I do,’ he said. He was conscious of his untanned nakedness.

  The day came out of the sea at them. Birds hovered on the updraughts before the cliffs. The gas stove hissed. The smell of eggs overpowered the dust and the mildew and the last scent of sex on their bodies.

  Neither mentioned last night as they wandered along the beach with the cliffs and the hut and the old radio wires high above. Ann held her folio hard against her hip to keep the wind from having it. Philip’s camera swung from his neck like a grotesque charm. Rain had pummelled the roof in the dark last night, drowning their cries. In those first moments after waking, Ann had a feeling of having flown. Philip recalled her boyish shoulders against his teeth, and the taste of talcum. Both, even now as they kicked up sand and saw the distorted shadows of gulls on the beach ahead, had the sensation of having come somewhere, the night traveller’s disorientation upon arriving, at dawn, at a town which bears no recognizable features, no signs, no immediate relation to the last stop.

  A mile up that endless beach they stopped and Ann sat to sketch. She sketched poorly and they both knew it; though it remained a tacit secret. Philip watched her work from a distance, close to the shore where the sea ate at the sand.

  ‘How does it feel to be married?’ he called.

  She did not answer; it seemed as though she had not heard. How does it feel? she was thinking. It feels like waking up on your twenty-first birthday and realizing that there’s no change, that you don’t feel an ounce older. That’s how it feels. So why ask me? You know how it feels, it’s written all over you.

  Through the zoom lens Philip saw that she was not drawing at all; she was thinking. He snapped that sad expression on her lips and the thread of hair in the corner of her mouth, and wound the film on with a sigh. We shouldn’t have come here, he thought.

  On the cliffs at dusk, just at the soft edge where run-off wore steep veins in the clay, they found a
pair of brogues, toes pointed out towards the sea. In each shoe was a sock. They were still warm. Footprints embossed the clay surface near the brink. Behind them, the sun was far gone in the hills. It took Ann a moment to realize that she was alone. She saw Philip running along the brow of the cliff towards the safe path to the beach. She did not call him; her throat was swollen with dread. She stood at the edge peering over. She could see nothing; even the beach and the vegetation at the bottom was dissolving rapidly into night.

  When finally he joined her again, wheezing and wet with exertion, his embrace told her that he had found nothing.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘It might be a joke.’

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured, ‘a joke.’

  They could not find the shoes again in the darkness. They went back to the hut where they had left the lantern burning.

  That night, a storm bore down and the little hut quivered in the wind. They picked at their food and drank too much wine and lay in the big hammocky bed, listening, unable to shed the sensation that enclosed them. The wine had fuelled their sadness and apprehension. They touched each other; their nakedness seemed frivolous; their bodies felt ludicrous.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry . . . I can’t.’

  She turned her head into his chest in the dark.

  ‘No, neither can I.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have come here,’ Philip said. ‘It was a mistake, it was my fault.’

  ‘We were both there when he offered it to us.’

  ‘It just doesn’t feel right. Like sleeping in a morgue, or on a deathbed.’

  ‘You’re exaggerating,’ she murmured. ‘Anyway, it should be the opposite. It’s where he came to get well. It’s a haven, a refuge.’ But all the time she was thinking of Jerra’s tears, his tossing and twisting, his great sadness in this single room. And the shoes, the shoes would not leave her mind.

  ‘You know, if we were fishermen, fisherpersons,’ he said with a shallow cheerfulness, as pieces of dust were forced from the cracks in the wall by the force of the wind, ‘we’d be up planning for the morning’s fishing, making lines and putting hooks and things on them, telling tall tales, not getting depressed. We’d be —’

  ‘But we’re not,’ Ann said without expression, and immediately he regretted having sounded so desperately light-hearted. The wind in the falling old radio wires that had once linked boats and crews to their families ashore gave out a cry that made him think of boats lost at sea, families grieving – even the out-of-work shearers over on the point with their campfires and their taffy-haired children and the piles of beer bottles by their tents. And he thought of those shoes and the warm socks inside and wondered whether it was a sick joke or whether he would find a broken body on the beach in the light of dawn.

  An hour before dawn Ann woke, weeping. She saw only darkness and felt Philip close beside her.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, half-conscious.

  ‘I had a dream,’ she said. All her limbs restrained a sob.

  Philip sat up. The air was sharp. It was beginning to rain again.

  ‘I dreamt that this hut fell off the cliff and we were killed. Someone found us with our feet cut off. We were dead, all bloody, without clothes, and there were people all around.’

  He put his hand to her cheek, felt her wet face in the dark. ‘Well, we’re not dead.’

  After a long silence she said: ‘Have you ever seen a dead person?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have. When I was thirteen my aunt died and before the funeral started my parents made me go in and look at her. She was . . . like something out of a sideshow. They made me.’

  ‘One of my friends’,’ Philip said quickly, ‘father was killed when we were in high school. He was a road worker. A carload of kids ran him down. My old man was the local copper. He had to take my friend to identify the body. His mother was in hospital having her appendix out or something. Dad brought him home to our place after the morgue and he was weeping like a baby. Dad left us in my room. I put my arm around him and then we were both really embarrassed so I took it away. I think I was expected to say something, but I’m not like my old man, I don’t have those kinds of things to say. Fine bloke, my Dad. I always wanted to be him. I still want to be like him, I suppose.’

  ‘What? Dead?’

  He smiled after a moment, thinking her comment a desperate joke, but in the half-light he saw her face in her hands and he was wounded. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want you to die.’

  ‘People die,’ he said hopelessly.

  She gave him a traitorous look. Now they could see the rain on the window, long cords of it torn out of plumb by the wind. They slept and woke spasmodically, watched the weather through the window, heard the linoleum flap and the wires wail until late in the morning. They spoke little.

  When they rose, they ate thick squares of bread daubed with honey and drank the Irish Breakfast tea they had brought specially. The other treats and specialities they had brought for this week were still on the shelves: spanish olives, ambrosia cheese, chocolate, pecans, kiwi fruit, things they had gloated over on their way south that seemed so unappealing now.

  ‘Let’s see if we can walk to the end of the beach,’ he said. He had honey on his chin.

  ‘Which way? Towards the point?’

  ‘The other way.’

  ‘It’s miles.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She shrugged. ‘I had thought of reading.’ She pointed to the book at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Don’t bother. I’ve read it. About that legless pilot —’

  ‘Douglas Bader.’

  ‘Well, I thought you’d rather walk than read about artificial limbs.’ Then he laughed. ‘Has this got anything to do with your dream?’

  She scraped the honey from his chin with her index finger. ‘Let’s go then.’

  It took them ninety minutes to come to the end of the seemingly infinite white curve of the beach. There was a headland, some rocks, and a half-exposed reef. They climbed along the rocks to the reef and saw nests of cockles along the waterline. Philip lowered himself feet first to where the water surged in, and filled with cockles the bag they had brought for shells.

  ‘I suppose you can eat them,’ he said as they walked back in the afternoon sun.

  ‘Jerra says they’re like mussels or oysters.’

  ‘Poor ol’ Jerra.’

  Halfway back they noticed two figures moving towards them on the beach. It annoyed them and made them walk faster to reach the path up the cliff and regain their seclusion. But it was further than they thought and they soon tired. Before long, they saw the figures were the old couple they had seen arriving with their caravan on the first day.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Ann muttered when she realized they were going to meet.

  The two couples met. They exchanged pleasantries and the old man asked them what they had in the cloth bag. Philip told him.

  ‘Cockles,’ the old man said. ‘Lovely things. Where’d you get ’em?’ They told him. He seemed disappointed. ‘Give my right arm for a feed of cockles.’

  His wife agreed. She was a small woman with her white hair braided and pinned to the side of her head.

  ‘You want some?’ Philip offered, annoyed.

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘It’s a long walk,’ Ann said, ‘and it’s pretty precarious down on the rocks.’

  ‘Oh, Jim couldn’t do anything like —’

  The old mail seemed to cut her off with his grimace.

  ‘Here, take half these,’ Philip said, pouring cockles into the old man’s doffed hat. Ann looked as surprised as the old man. Philip felt a secret pleasure.

  ‘Jim has a marvellous recipe for them,’ the small woman said. ‘We’ll trade you.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the old man. ‘We’ll trade you. And I’ll give you a cup of sauterne to marinate them in.’

  Twenty minutes later the four o
f them were sitting in the caravan. The old man poured Philip a beer and the women lemonade.

  ‘Lovely set-up you have,’ Ann said. She felt trapped in this over-furnished mobile home.

  ‘Oh, you’ll have one like it, someday,’ the small old woman said. ‘Always nice to start small.’ She then went on to talk about her five daughters and their weddings. Philip observed her husband across the table. The old man had a tremulous air about him, little hair, gold rimmed spectacles, a good suntan, and moist eyes. Philip wondered whether he was an alcoholic.

  ‘Of course,’ the woman continued, ‘Jim would have liked a son. Fathers like to have sons. But he had his work.’ She told Philip and Ann how her husband had taught at the technical school for thirty-five years, and of his recent retirement and the sale of their house, her husband all the time moved his spectacles about on his tanned nose as if graciously allowing himself to be spoken about. ‘He got tired of those boys. They had no home discipline.’

  ‘But some of them could really work with wood,’ he said. He was assuming control of his story. ‘And I liked them, tried to get them on side for thirty-five years. I just didn’t have the tongue for it. Not a good enough tradesman to be a carpenter, and not good enough talker to be a teacher. Wanted most of all to be a teacher.’

  ‘But you were a teacher, dear,’ his wife said with a worried glance.

  ‘But not a teacher with his class in the palm of his hand. All I needed was that little measure of . . . eloquence.’

  ‘His last class put in together to buy him a gold-plated drill-bit.’

  ‘Their little joke.’ He smiled thinly.

  Philip looked at his watch. It was late. The cockles in his bag had begun to smell.