by Tim Winton
The children did not play with each other. The Phillips children were wary of the McCullochs and thought the boys were ‘a bit slow’ because they did not speak much. The McCulloch boys did not seem to have an opinion of the Phillipses, they paid attention to no one.
For her twenty-second birthday, Ruth gave Rosemary a hardcovered edition of Anna Karenina which cost a great deal and so seemed to her to be a good book. Rosemary read it slowly at first, then quickly towards the end, and when she had finished, lent it back to Ruth who struggled through the first half, left it for nine weeks, and finished it quickly on a holiday at Dunsborough. Neither of them understood everything in the big, unwieldy book, but the scenes and some of the dialogue became a secret between them. Phillips read Time and National Geographic, McCulloch read Phantom and Man.
Rosemary’s mother died of cancer and to Rosemary it seemed to happen very quickly. She was quiet and introverted, brooding for several months afterwards. The next year, McCulloch’s father suicided, but nothing was ever said about it. The Phillipses, and the others in Playne Street were not told.
Soon after, a smartly dressed man and woman went to all the doors in the street speaking to people about ‘Spiritual Existence’ and ‘The Sin in What You Eat’, selling subscriptions to or stuffing into letterboxes copies of a glossy magazine called Pure Metaphysical Knowledge, which some people browsed through as if it was a sales catalogue, and others read carefully for a few pages, then tossed into the rubbish as soon as Sin and Death and Eternal Life appeared in the columns.
Ruth and Rosemary never discussed the magazine, though both read it through independently. Things had already been uneasy between them for months since Phillips had sprayed a hose into McCulloch’s carport at two o’clock in the morning a few months before. McCulloch had been tuning his motorcycle. The McCullochs began to behave ‘differently’. They were never seen outdoors from Friday night until Sunday morning. No lights were seen in the house. The children became more sullen.
The Phillipses did not know that each Friday morning a new issue of Pure Metaphysical Knowledge appeared in the McCullochs’ letterbox. The Phillipses puzzled about the strange weekend behaviour of their neighbours and were even more surprised when Rosemary McCulloch asked them to water their lawns and feed their cat for a week.
Rosemary McCulloch did not tell them that they were going to Sydney. Ruth did not ask, and Phillips would rather not have known.
While they were gone, the cat had kittens in the baby’s cot. It rained in an unseasonal manner all week. The Phillips children went next door to feed the cats and look at the Man magazines in the loungeroom. It was an adventurous week for them.
7
At the window, he sees a woman come off the street past the banks of letterboxes. She pauses at the foot of the stairs and looks up. Her face is lit in the afternoon sun. It is unfamiliar to him. Her face contracts as if in fear, her lips move, and she turns and walks briskly away.
McCulloch waits two minutes. He hears noises through the walls, other people cooking. As he leaves, he slowly tears a poster from the wall. Fragments of cheesecloth and flesh stare at him.
She is working late, he thinks.
He shifts the weight of the weapon from one arm to the other as he moves to the door.
8
He is thinking about her. It bubbles hot within. Crooked notes from her guitar; those first awkward tunes. ‘I am learning,’ her mouth says. ‘No, no,’ he is firm. His fingers knot . . . he sings along, stumbling. She smiles. Is it encouragement? Or ridicule? She is laughing!
His brother is a state cricketer!
Her fingers learn to caress the strings. They furrow delicately through dark-backed books that he hates and fears.
He hears the notes as they begin to link with each other, then a gentle strumming, a purring of strings and she is singing.
Please release me, let go,
For I don’t love you anymore . . .
The voice is cracked and horrible to him.
But his brother is a state cricketer! It warms him for a moment.
9
When the taxi stops outside the agency she bounces across the pavement on her heels and decides that tonight she will ring her sons. Rosemary has not spoken with them for two weeks. She remembers her last conversation with Robbie. How can I explain it? she thinks. She has nothing to tell them, only a twinge of fear, like pain. And sometimes a nauseous guilt she does not understand. Like steamy nights lying awake in the damp sheets, aching, afraid of the blackness that loomed above.
Her son’s voice:
Why don’t you live here anymore?
What’s wrong with Dad?
I hate you.
Dad bought me a surfboard today. A six-foot-six Cordingley.
No, Simmy doesn’t wanna talk.
Yer lying. He never hurt us.
Yes, the toothpaste thing was good. It didn’t look like you.
No, I don’t wanna talk to you anymore; you’re tricking me.
10
The carved chest in Ruth Phillips’s unsteady hands is made of fragrant wood. She sits on a cardboard carton and opens the lid. Inside, there is a tangle of pearls, beads, balls, bangles.
The pearls untangle themselves first. They are strange to her, their faces like the skin of the moon, mapped with miniscule marks that might be the landmarks of another world. She lays them aside.
She turns a bangle over in her hands. Its tarnished surface gleams dully; there is a smell of incense.
An ugly pair of clip-on earrings with jade settings. Why would someone keep these? she thinks. Oh, Lord, Rosie, she chuckles.
Amid the twisted, blackening chains crouches a red, shapeless stone like a clot of blood. She rolls it in her palms. Yes, had all the best, our Rosie, she thinks.
‘The best, Rosie,’ she says aloud with a hardness in her voice.
11
The gushing roar as she spins, a perforated hand flung against the wall. Plaster falls like confetti.
12
McCulloch weaves through the suburban streets, past his house and joins the afternoon traffic on the artery that leads to the city.
The engine of the Fairlane vibrates slowly. He owes a large amount on this car that he will never pay.
He switches the radio on. The news is over; it is ten minutes after four.
He catches his eye in the mirror and acknowledges it with a wink. He senses his brown arm on the sill of the door.
Tie a yellow ribbon ‘round the old oak tree,
If you still want me,
If you still want me . . .
He switches the radio off.
‘. . . ’round the old oak tree,’ he sings brokenly.
13
So what’s an E-type Jag? Stuff the bloody Jag! Had enough! Enough filth and greed and stupid talk. Feel this thing corner! Maybe Bilbert (you bastard!) was right . . . Oh, those days of doin’ all the right things . . . the way it was supposed to happen . . . Yeah, that was better. But the kids, they still wanted to come over. Still gotta live, you know. And her bloody whingeing.
Stupid, rotten car. Knew it would bust the family up. So, what’s it matter? She should know better. Oh, a hard, hard, hard heart. Rotten bitch.
It was that miserable little tit next door what did it in the beginning, asking all them stinking questions – ALL THAT TALK AND BOOKS! – looking through the fence, doin’ filth in the baby’s cot. Turned her black inside, she did. Ah, but she went to piss just lookin’ at me. Never had it properly in her whole life. And Sidney-kidney-blidney. Agh!
Suddenly the Fairlane feels cumbersome in his hands. He grinds his palm into the centre of the wheel and the horn squeals.
14
There are more photographs to be taken. Rosemary McCulloch smiles the ‘oh, you big man, you!’ smile and leans on the dummy in the three-piece suit. Later in the afternoon her face will ache from the forced tightening of her lips. She will slick her teeth with Vaseline to keep her mouth from dryin
g out. Her veins will ache from standing.
Cameras chew film.
‘C’mon, Rose,’ the photographer says smoothly, ‘this isn’t the old “I did it for Smirnoff” girl I used to know.’
‘No?’ she says. ‘Where did you know her from?’
‘C’mon, let’s have some life, eh? You know what life is, don’t you? Life! Show them you have life, they want to buy you! They want to eat you!’
‘Shit, Charlie, that’s sick.’
‘Yeah,’ says the photographer, sheepishly.
‘Anyhow, I don’t taste good.’
‘No?’
Rosemary tilts her head and catches the mannequin by the pink chin.
‘C’mon people, buy me, eat me.’
‘Yes, yes,’ mutters Charlie.
15
The phone rings. It has not yet been disconnected. It is the executor. Ruth speaks to him for a while. No, he cannot come yet. She needs more time. No, nothing of value, really. Later in the afternoon, yes. She hangs up.
The boxes of cosmetics are open before her, swirling up a foul, sweet odour. She does not touch anything.
The first time Ruth noticed Rosemary wearing cosmetics was when she needed it to cover lovebites and bruises. Why was it such a show of prowess, she thinks, to show me her big, battered breasts in the privacy of her room? ‘This is what he does to me,’ she would say with her tongue on her lip.
Then, later, powder and make-up base to cover the welts.
Ruth Phillips remembers the times she ran into her own room, sobbing at the horrible things.
The last year, the plush tones and textures of cosmetics were all that kept her on the billboards.
. . . Much later, no attempt at make-up. No viewing, only a screwed-down lid.
16
Corner from her mouth. Choir of thunder singing.
17
Monoxide fumes ascend in the slanting light. McCulloch fixes his stare on a long, high billboard towering over the intersection. Pedestrians flood across the road. He sees the slit fabric of the dress and the dark recesses of cleavage, bare, smooth skin of the small of the back – and satin, folds and folds of lascivious satin.
I DID IT FOR SMIRNOFF . . .
‘And how many others,’ he says quietly to his speedometer.
18
During those bare, safe years, McCulloch was torn between the security that Bilbert Kann gave them in delivering to them the Truth, and hatred of the man (he had filed a law-suit against him which was later withdrawn) for inflicting upon them the poverty and despair of his Knowledge.
To keep the Sabbath, the house was locked at dusk on Friday nights. They sat and slept and thought, and the children brooded and fought, and the McCullochs read from Pure Metaphysical Knowledge:
. . . For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose or anything superfluous . . .
and spoke words at the ceiling and the slick covers of the source of Truth, and cried and hated and hated and hated.
Meanwhile, the Phillips children called through the pickets to come and play, safe from answers, safe from playing with ‘the horrible McCullochs’ who were both ‘twice as slow as their old man’.
McCulloch painted signs for the Knowledge Fellowship for a pittance and they gave him specifications, forbade him some images, compelled him to others. Some nights McCulloch sat in the semi-darkness of his workshop and slashed with the brushes at things for himself that he kept under padlock. He threw foreign substances onto the tin flats that he daubed – honey, chocolate, gelatine crystals, chunks of lipstick, petroleum jelly – things that sent the paints into chaos, running out of control, or coagulating stubbornly, or merely losing their colour. The paintings had a dark, uneven terrain, livid – even in twilight – whilst wet, but as dull as dried blood when left to stand a while.
After painting, he would clean off, then go to the blackboard and check off the sins at random. The sins were gleaned from a multiplicity of sources, half-sentences, snippets from the Koran, the Book of Mormon, The Himalayas of the Soul, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and many personal inspired insertions from Bilbert Kann himself. McCulloch comprehended the literal meanings of few of them, and did not for a second imagine the textual significance or origins of any.
Be thou to me as thy mother’s back . . .
19
Rosemary McCulloch’s children were a great disappointment to her; her sons were rough replicas of her husband, and, looking into their wooden faces, she wondered whether or not, in giving birth to them, she had done something wrong. They bit and whined and had the animal instincts of their father, and she pretended to be proud of them as she pretended to be proud of him. But she saw them under his spell, as if the very odours he gave off stunned them into a trance. As they did her.
And she was aware of a vacancy inside her.
She read to them from a Pure Metaphysical Truth, ‘Recite thou in the name of thy Lord who created; created man from clots of blood: Recite thou!’ It arrived each Friday from the other side of the continent, from across the desert. Monday they would put the cheque in the mail (THOU SHALT NOT STEAL!). She read from the Truth and was sometimes ashamed. ‘Or are ye sure that He who is in Heaven will not send against you a stone-charged whirlwind?’ For herself ? For not believing? For believing? ‘Woe on that day to those charged with imposture!’
20
The wallhangings are mostly photographs by David Hamilton; furtive, voyeuristic, but tranquil. Their apparent innocence puzzles Ruth Phillips. She cannot tell if they are pornographic or beautiful. In one place on the wall there is only a corner, a triangle of paper held to the plaster by a dob of putty. She tries to peel it away, but it sticks to her hands; she cannot rid herself of it and she dirties her dress and leaves smudges on the wall. A feeling of nausea comes upon her.
On a table is a smaller photograph in a light frame. It is Rosemary; she is wearing the cheesecloth blouse and the sensuous pout, brightened by waxy sunlight, like the children in the Hamilton pieces. But this woman is thirty-four years old.
Ruth Phillips puts a hand to her face in confusion.
21
A furrow appears diagonal to the serrated edge of her spine as she slides down, facing, and defacing the discoloured wall.
Thunder has become numbness.
People pass in the street below. No one moves in the corridors. Each shot has no time to cannon off into the distance of silence before it is overtaken by the next.
22
At four twenty McCulloch parks the Fairlane carefully in the midst of the city. His heart moves at a set pace.
He has counted again the sins of the Smirnoff advertisement. He has found seven, though more will come to mind later.
This city has grown with the years since the Beatles came. He is unsure if this is a good thing or a bad thing; no one has yet told him.
23
School has been out for an hour. Bag-swinging children dawdle along footpaths.
McCulloch is proud of his children; if they are in pain he feels it himself. Since babyhood they have played in his paint-tins, fingering the dried, gummy edges; they sprayed their pedal-cars before they could speak properly.
Now they are schoolboys. Robbie truants from school – all classes except Art where he buries himself in a mute world of colours and viscous materials. Simmy, the younger boy, wants to be a weight-lifter. He is thin and asthmatic. McCulloch has encouraged him in his ambition, despite, or perhaps because of, the opposition from his wife.
Teachers worry about Robbie McCulloch’s paintings. The distorted figures are unsettling; they are framed – all of them – by arch-like shadows, or the images are visible through foliage or lace curtains. The Art teachers say they are passionate and surrealistic; other teachers say ‘Yes, but . . .’ Notes home are ignored. The headmaster, a weak little man, has ‘gathered some information’. Yes, the boys are disturbed, he has been told by a teacher of Social Studi
es; their mother has left them only recently. The headmaster has some paintings in his office. He covers them with his academic gown in the corner.
24
Twice today Rosemary has thought of Ruth Phillips. She has not seen her for nine months. It is a year since she left her home. For a few months she dropped in to see Ruth when she knew there would be no one at home next door, and they talked over cups of well-brewed tea. It was difficult to speak in the end; they were so different, and Rosemary was part of a new world.
‘Not bad, eh?’ she had said, pointing through the little kitchen window to the pink Jaguar poised in the driveway. ‘Not bad for a mother of two, my age,’ she said, half-congratulating herself, wanting, at least, confirmation from Ruth.
‘Yes,’ said Ruth, uncertain, intimidated. ‘Yes, you’ve reached the top, alright.’ She said it into the collar of her dowdy gown.
The second time Rosemary went back they tried to talk about the past, but Rosemary was embracing what Ruth feared the most; the future.
The last visit, Rosemary was drunk. She slewed the Jaguar into the drive, crushing the heads of the roses growing along the edge.
‘You’ve gotta help me, Ruthie,’ she said. ‘He’s after me. I think he’s gonna kill me.’
‘Calm down, Rosemary,’ Ruth said.
‘He’s got a gun.’ This was true; he had an American service weapon. A number of people living on Playne Street knew that he had it. He told people about it; it brought him a great deal of respect.
But Ruth Phillips was irritated.
‘Go back to your flat,’ she almost spat the last word, ‘and get yourself a good sleep.’ She deplored drunkenness; it made people say things they didn’t mean.
Rosemary decides that she will ring Ruth. She yearns for her soft, reassuring voice from the other world. She wishes she could tell Ruth some things. She’s a good stick, she thinks.
Sometimes it occurs to her that she is older than Ruth. Despite herself, she longs for the days when they were both new brides and new friends. She wonders if those times were so good because she did not know certain things.
