Scission

by Tim Winton

  Rosemary’s attention is distracted from her work. She is hearing her voice and Ruth’s voice: ‘. . . you’ve got a lovely shoulder to cry on, Ruth love,’ pulling down her mini. ‘You too, love,’ Ruth says, dripping tears that smudge the polish of her floorboards.

  25

  Ruth Phillips lingers over the furniture in the flat. Rosemary’s chairs are delicate, with soft curves and cushions and dark, rich wood, not the strong vinyl and wipe-clean surfaces of the stuff in her own house. In her place things are cheap and useful, and nothing has changed since 1964. Tasteless old Ruth, she thinks, flopping into an armchair. She sits a while, becoming dispirited, before getting up to stack it all by the door.

  26

  An arm lifts as it is struck, the wall vibrates. And the endless thunder.

  People are screaming, but their voices are smothered in the roar.

  27

  Office workers streaming out of shadowy buildings do not notice the automatic rifle that McCulloch is carrying by his side in the rush, even though it enters and leaves the vision of scores of them. It is twenty-five minutes past four and they are going home. McCulloch pushes against the surge and enters the sleek glass doors. Inside, carpet muffles all movement, and seems to exude a narcotic breath which tempts him to lie down and go to sleep in its burgundy pile.

  Young women, some of whom he recognizes from places he cannot recall, walk past him from the lift. One woman, a tall, black, lithe creature, turns her head in surprise.

  Weep ye that lie down with other tribes and with animals . . .

  McCulloch walks towards the potted palms near the lift.

  28

  Billboards, plaques, all signs attract McCulloch’s attention. He has been a signwriter since the age of sixteen. He was a signwriter when he was married. He is a signwriter now: it says so in the telephone directory below his name, though he has not had a client for almost eight months. No one recommends him; he is lazy, they say, late, they say, and he does not always paint what he is asked.

  The most recent thing he has painted is on the wall at home in Playne Street. It is a long piece of masonite with a white background and big, red, gothic letters. It says:

  GOD IS LOVE

  The staccato words puzzle him. He put them there to remind his children and himself. Beneath the bold letters, niggled pencil lines show through. Even though he had not thought of God or Love for some time, he had suddenly been seized by the idea after his wife left him. She left a note:

  I do not love Bilbert Kann’s God. I do not know him. I never knew him. I don’t love you, either, though I know you only too well. I don’t think I’ve ever loved you, really. I have spent my whole life pretending. No more pretending. I have finished pretending. I have. You can’t even pretend. That’s what you are like.

  He crushed it in his fist and brought his hand down onto the Laminex with some force. He went to work quickly, in fright, splashing on the primer.

  29

  The session is finished. Rosemary sits with some other girls in the studio drinking coffee, listening to their talk of cruises to Noumea and jobs on television quiz shows. Some even talk about getting married, though they are wary around Rosemary. They treat her with a respect for her position, the most enviable in the business at the moment, and resentment for her age and her sudden ascent.

  Rosemary is in great demand. People want to see a woman who has had children, who has married and experienced life, who is both homely and glamorous, voluptuous in her ripeness.

  As a new wife Rosemary was an object of interest, to herself, her husband, and her husband’s friends. She lived an endless procession of Sunday afternoons when her husband ‘had the boys over’. They drank beer and ogled her, McCulloch displaying her like a sleek new road-machine, fanning their heat, their stares and catcalls, coaxing them to stay longer, to come again. He knew they liked to come to his place. After all, they were his best mates. In later years, they began to lose interest, when McCulloch began to mutter about the Meaning of Life and the Tithing of Time, so he asked her, begged her, sometimes, to wear clothes that were more daring. He dressed her to look like Nancy Sinatra. They patted her and they were all great friends. She loved those beery afternoons because they gave her an outlet after the dreary Sabbath, and she enjoyed the attention. Afterwards she was always left with an elusive nausea, as if she might throw up something that lurked deep inside her, and she took a sleeping tablet and dreamed till morning whereupon she rose with a clear head and not even a dim memory of what she had dreamt.

  She listens to the girls’ self-conscious talk.

  Rosemary McCulloch is a model. She is the woman-model. She gives life to clothes, libido to car bonnets, meaning to vodka. She sets the pace for mothers and daughters who want to be like her.

  Her husband is haunted by her reproductions, and her sons have learnt to hate her.

  30

  The wardrobes are fragrant with the smell of Rosemary’s perfumes and the odours of her body. Ruth Phillips recalls the smells from when they gardened and jogged together. They tried hard, then, to disguise and dispel their body odours. They tried roll-ons, spray-ons, dab-ons, and stick-ons. As she grew older, Ruth tired of trying, and she spent less time worrying about her appearance. Phillips grew accustomed to her odour, and had said, once, that he even liked it, so she saw no need to bother.

  Rosemary pursued deodorants; she could not afford to have a smell of her own. But she had one, nevertheless. Ruth recognizes and remembers it.

  ‘Funny thing to think of,’ she says aloud.

  She feels the fabrics of pullovers and cardigans, lingering over the older, less fashionable things that smell of dowdy innocence. Chenille brushes between her fingers. Old jeans, faded and patched, are difficult to fold into the box.

  Ruth Phillips feels old.

  31

  The bullet that enters the chest sounds like an old football being kicked two doors away.

  32

  McCulloch is light-headed with the feeling of ascent. Lighted numbers pop and ping above his head. If he was alone in the lift he would jump to see if the floor would overtake him.

  He is soaring.

  The woman beside him is more alarmed by his breathing than by the stock of the weapon brushing against her thick hip.

  33

  On a summer evening McCulloch came home with a trunk full of costumes. He dressed up and faked magic tricks for his boys who were thrilled at the colours, half-believing. He pulled caps from false-walled boxes and knitting needles from handkerchiefs. His wife acted along with him, despite herself. She could see it was good for the children and for him. He had been upset of late, despairing at the admonishments they had received in the mail from Sydney. They had no money and their faith had weakened. Kann was calling them to the half-completed Opera House and they refused. McCulloch had nightmares.

  She played along with the games. The boys made costumes. There were others in the trunk.

  34

  As she sips coffee in the hubbub, Rosemary thinks also of her eldest son, Robbie. She loves him; he is her own flesh and blood, like a piece cut from her, but she has never liked him. She is honest about this. So honest that she once told Ruth Phillips whose face darkened with confusion and discomfort.

  ‘Look, it’s just the way it is,’ she said. ‘I can’t explain it properly. You know what he’s like.’

  ‘But he’s your child,’ Ruth said, always grateful that Robbie McCulloch was not hers.

  Robbie McCulloch has a ‘speech problem’. He hardly spoke until his second year at school. He shows no affection. Sometimes he smiles at his father.

  There were times when Rosemary believed that she had been cursed with such a son because of the manner in which he had been conceived. McCulloch copulated with her as if she was a carcase from an abattoir. At first she wept at the sounds he made and the things he made her do when sex was something new to her, something frightening and exciting. But she soon learned the techniques of sex h
e taught her: endurance, agility, and a measure of dramatic exaggeration. She loved to shock ‘poor Ruthie Phillips’ who understood little of sexual matters. Ruth sometimes introduced The Right Thing and God to their discussions about sex which she endured. But she knew less about God than she did about sex, and cared still less. She had a home to take care of and had little time for either. She also spoke of Love, but it was a puzzling subject.

  35

  Ruth Phillips, when she notices something odd about the underwear she is refolding, suddenly puts it down and sits on the floor. A cry escapes her. She sits, mute, for a few minutes until her mind clears. Then she gets up again and stuffs all the torn, soiled, alien garments into a box and runs to the bathroom to wash her hands and splash her face.

  It leaves her with a light head. Her stomach tolls.

  36

  He aims where it gives him most pleasure and the lower half quivers again. He is alone in the room with her and the choir in his ears.

  37

  There is no one in the corridor down which he is stalking. He feels as though his feet are not even touching the ground, though they leave heavy prints in the pile. Photographs on the walls. Pieces of her float by. They shower him, spurring him so he glides faster.

  38

  In 1969 McCulloch’s father committed suicide. He was a big man, like his son, who often spent hours, days even, contemplating, brooding about things that mattered to him but of which he never spoke. He was a cattleman who owned big land in the North. Regularly, he left the staff at the station homestead (his wife, an ex-barmaid from Boulder, had died some years before) and spent two or three days in the bush. On his last day he drove out into the heartlands and shot himself. Birds and animals gradually robbed him of his flesh and he was identified, months later, by his yellow teeth. He was a lapsed Methodist. He grieved constantly over his son’s becoming ‘a half-Jehov-wit-Latter-Day-Saturday-Cultist’, and he thought that worse even than the ‘useless, ignorant nothing’ his son had been before the cultists had knocked on his door. He had never ceased to grieve for his wife who had died suddenly of a stroke. Also, he was bored and scared. He felt bad things about his son, though he did not believe too strongly in omens because, even if lapsed, he was still a Methodist.

  The station staff buried his shabby remains after the inquest, on the station, and he was bought along with the place when his son quickly sold it.

  39

  Pieces fly at him. He is flying. Into pieces.

  40

  Her second son, Simmy, is as much of a disappointment to Rosemary as Robbie. He has a prominent brow that divides above his nose like the swelling from a boxing blow. He speaks without difficulty but he is totally expressionless; his words are like the monosyllables of a plastic doll. His cheeks are bright, as if rouged; his teeth are sturdy and white, like his father’s. When he uses barbells he wheezes, a clicking hiss deep in his chest. He will never lift weights properly.

  Rosemary remembers the first words he spoke. The da-da-da-da-da was as accentless and unremitting as a heartbeat.

  Simmy is a product of the 1965 Multiplication for the End. But there has been no End, thus far.

  During her second pregnancy, Rosemary often stood naked before the mirror to see the evidence of her swelling. She watched each day, minutely aware that she was becoming two people. She knew very little of either of them. Afterwards her flaccid torso revolted her. Her baby disappointed her, and the image of an unkempt, dumpy woman before her in the mirror added to her depression.

  Her second son gained his name from the author of a book Rosemary and her friend had read years ago: Red Lights. He has never been told this. It is unlikely that he would understand or show interest.

  She cannot help but see Neanderthal in him.

  41

  Stalks through the carpet . . .

  42

  Ruth opens the trunk with a gasp. Slowly, she draws out the top garment. In a few moments she understands what it is.

  ‘Spiderman,’ she says, remembering her children’s comics. It is sparking something in her memory; a stone striking metal. Snakeskin, long strips of it, comes out. It is smooth and evil-looking. A schoolcap. A pair of grey shorts like her sons wear; she shudders. She digs into the voluminous box. Moons; a magician’s outfit. A horse’s head, creased and rubbery, bares its teeth. Her hand touches something coarse. She pulls gingerly and what she pulls out she cannot identify for a few seconds until she comes to the head and the hands; it is an ape suit.

  ‘Oh,’ she murmurs, half in recognition, half in fright. She is not angry yet, because she is not allowing herself the pain of understanding. Somewhere in her mind is a vivid memory she refuses to see.

  She stands at the broken window watching traffic easing out of the city into the suburbs.

  Spiderman, spiderman,

  does whatever a spider can . . .

  She remembers it from television, glad she is remembering that which is of limited importance. Ruth Phillips refuses to recall forty-five seconds of her life. It is this:

  . . . She is looking through the pickets, idly. She sees a man dressed gaudily in red, white and blue with knee-length boots and a cape. He has a helmet on his head. Stars cling to all his garments. On the concrete paving there is another figure sprawled, in bountiful skirts, with a hat and white wooden clogs like a china doll. Above the squirming doll is the man with his shield brandished . . . then there is nothing as the pickets recede.

  ‘Captain America waves his mighty shield,’ she says. She puts the winged helmet aside, gazes at the righteous pyramid the ‘A’ makes, embossed on the brow. Her mind convulses, free of her. She sobs, remembering. He’s polluted her, she thinks, it’s in her now, she’s tainted even now when she’s dead. Can’t she be free of him?

  Everywhere she smells sickness and she is hopeless, perfectly ineffectual. God, I’ve always been useless to her, useless to myself, she thinks through a falling curtain of tears. She remembers, irrational with guilt and hysteria, that she and her brothers pulled the limbs from dolls and inverted their puckers with a thumb inside their heads. They always reassembled them, later, though. But the thought ceases to comfort her.

  ‘Waves his mighty bloody shield.’

  43

  Four twenty-nine . . .

  44

  A shoulder strap dematerializes as the flesh beneath it shatters into white pieces that quickly shade over.

  Rosemary is in the burgundy carpet, broken face buried in its scent. Once, she might have imagined this roar to be the God of Bilbert Kann descending on the Opera House with his business associates. But it is a roar of vacancy and vacuum, and, in any case, she does not hear it.

  45

  . . . and fifty-eight seconds.

  46

  At exactly four-thirty by the not-always-defective clock in the corridor (a joke shared by the models who work here; they often wish it was defective more often), McCulloch confronts the glass doors and watches them open obediently without his touching them. He feels as if he is expected and welcome. A hero’s welcome, he thinks. The glass clicks together in frigid union behind him.

  47

  Bilbert Kann left the United States of America after a scandal involving his advertising company and certain members of the Senate. He resurfaced in Australia soon afterwards to take part in the optimistic new growth of the early 1960s.

  Many who knew him then described him as a prophetic businessman. He understood the nature of people. With this understanding he discovered and developed a marketable god which he promoted in a glossy magazine, Pure Metaphysical Knowledge. His god, as the market-culture demanded, was a low-profile, uninterfering one. People observed certain codes and legalities and Kann’s god kept out of their way. No one but Kann ever met this god. He had a blueprint for him in his safe, a patent, an artist’s impression, and a volume of inspired writings. Kann’s disciples were grateful for a mediator; it spared them a great deal of effort and discomfort to have a go-between.


  Kann aimed at the Lowest Common Denominator. He borrowed and patched until he came up with a vague but versatile image.

  Since 63 AD, he maintained, no True Religion had been preached. ‘God has revealed himself to me,’ he said on 24 December 1959. Ten years, fifteen years later, he had begun to believe it himself. It was a logical thing to happen.

  In the first national issue of his magazine he gave ten or more commandments, and mated these with clipped phrases from fashionable and forgotten religious canons. He found that Australians were naturally legalistic and therefore eager to subscribe to the Worldwide Fellowship and pay tithes.

  In a very few years, the Fellowship was truly worldwide. In 1971 when he had five hundred thousand subscribers in Australia alone, he predicted the End of the World within the year, and located the Divine Appearance at the yet incomplete Opera House in Sydney. Fifteen thousand people gathered, many of them staying in hotels operated by Kann’s syndicate. The crowd included many entertained spectators. The sun rose and set. At length, the scoffing crowds went home or to the airport to fly home. As the hotdog stands were dismantled, Bilbert Kann and his son Macabee-Dowell told the press and television reporters that God had seen the leaden hearts of his people and rebuked Earth by postponing his Coming.

  The next year Macabee-Dowell slipped the country with one of his father’s wives and a considerable fortune and was publicly denounced. After two more false second comings and a tightening of monetary rules, subscriptions waned and many ex-disciples sought legal advice. Late in 1974, Kann shifted his assets to European banks. In 1975 he moved to South Africa where his racial legalities were highly marketable. He was assassinated by black youths during a tour of an industrial township in the same year. In 1976 his son founded a syndicate of drive-in churches across the United States of America. He foresaw a great resurgence of profitable legalism in the country within years. He died of cancer in Utah during the presidency of Jimmy Carter in 1979.