by Tim Winton
48
Rosemary is thinking of soft light and the smell of incense. She is thinking of her lover, a woman who is mute. They have been in love for two months. Her lover will sit on the edge of the bed and watch Rosemary perform. Rosemary sings and dances for her, mimes, reads poetry to her, nuzzles her, and lies in bed with her all Saturday, every weekend. This is the most secret thing in her life. Her husband does not know; he will never find out.
At times, in bed with her sleeping mute lover, Rosemary is bound by a weight of melancholy she does not understand. Other times, it is a prickling violence. She gazes out through the open window of her flat at the black awning of sky and feels its inky vastness descending upon her.
Her lover does not know she is a model. This is a novelty for Rosemary; she is entertained by innocence. Her lover stays more nights now. Rosemary is fascinated by her expressive face, the softness of her body, the absence of the brutality Rosemary fears and often feels within herself. She mimes with her lover; the woman is silent as a soft doll.
With some of her heart Rosemary wishes to tell Ruth Phillips about her new friend, but she can no longer tell anyone. And the secrecy is much of the thrill.
Suddenly, jerkily, she puts down her coffee cup and decides she will ring Ruth Phillips, and yes, she will tell her. It would only be . . . right . . . she thinks without conviction.
And tonight, she thinks, I’ll be with my lover who makes no sound.
49
GOD IS LOVE!
It shouts at him; he withholds the urge to run screaming. His biceps quake.
50
Ruth Phillips’ sobbing rises to a moan as she uncovers the alien apparatus. She has never seen a dildo before, but she understands its intent; the straps with it upset her more. She finds oily jars and jellies and some pornographic photographs of women as well as dark, heavy leather garments thick with the concentrated stench of mildew and sweat. The floor is now carpeted with costumes and the odours overcome her. She is driven to her knees and she cries out.
‘No! No! It’s not true!’ But she knows she is mocking herself. She nods, acknowledging something she does not understand. She realizes what she does not know. Have I ever met Rosie McCulloch? she asks herself. She spins inwardly. She is uncertain about who she has ever known.
She collapses in a heap with a photograph in her fist.
51
Clicks together, like a snip.
52
The last image in Rosemary’s conscious existence is a rose enveloping the world with its cool, impenetrable petals. She is gone, but her twisted body is undeniably present, mutilated on the floor. Another eruption gives it a semblance of life, but the deception is momentary as the pelvis quivers. Her body is dead.
53
I swear by the declining day,
Verily, man’s lot is cast amid destruction . . .
He shakes his head. The pink Jaguar knifes into him, long, glistening, sleek.
54
And before him is his wife Rosemary McCulloch of Smirnoff fame who passes the receptionist’s desk and whose eyes recoil as their gazes meet. A sharp intake of her breath. McCulloch has the weapon before him. He brandishes it at her. She does not move. He takes careful aim and triggers its unalterable mechanism.
55
In the last seconds before entering the reception office, McCulloch has discarded all excuses. There is no thought of Sin or God or Truth in his mind. These are things he no longer needs. He can think of nothing but the pink Jaguar roaring, leaving and entering his vision with spurts of speed. He sees his wife in all poses in it. He sees the boys pawing it with sighs of wonder, looking into her face. He sees Rosemary in an aura of pink reflection. ‘Well, look what I got,’ she says sneering. He sees her packing. Things she has paid for. Scribbling in the jotter on the Laminex table. He sees himself. Smashing furniture against the white wall and Paul McCartney.
He could feel her behind him as he ran out with the axe. Felt her breath teeming against his bare back as she clung onto him with her nails and teeth as he smashed the headlights and struck the long, pink nose and skittered windscreen glass and pierced the pouting rouged cheek of the fender and saw steam, and the car expired audibly. The removal men looked on with amusement.
The bloody Jag! he thinks. Aaaaah! It makes him shudder with sickness. Her solid-framed, immovable, luxuriant reproductions beam from the walls and hound him. He flexes forward, aware again, of flight.
His sons hate him for the Jaguar.
He hears the rending of metal and he feels the unused muscles creaking within him. He flexes forward, aware again, of flight.
‘God will —’ he begins, but remembers he has no need of God and he surges on to do some kind of duty.
56
There are times when Rosemary McCulloch can look back on the hardest period of her life with a sort of longing. In the first years of Membership and Fellowship, she spent many hours locked away with her young children. At times they mimicked her; they listened to her stories. They acknowledged her presence when she shared her portion of food with them. They sat with her on the floor without furniture and listened, like her, to McCulloch’s puzzled intonations from the Law. Perhaps they shared a stubbornness. They dozed while McCulloch called with staged enthusiasm and tried to feel his soul move. Perhaps, too, they felt his hate soaking everything, but they were young.
When Rosemary feels these things she is usually alone in her flat and she is half drunk with vodka. It is poor consolation. Even Ruth Phillips seems a spectre to her. She looks for her strong, happy face in the faces of her mute lover, but none of her lover’s masks will fit.
She knows she can never look back on these things for help. She feels the still resilient firmness of her body, feels her lover responding to it, and knows that she still lives. It is my future, she says to her mute lover who caresses her.
She leaves the room. No, I will not ring Ruthie, she muses. She won’t even begin to understand. Anyway, it’s all over between us. Come on, Rosie, don’t be a baby. She is still undecided about a phonecall to the boys. She is waiting for a call from the insurance people to see if her car is worth salvaging.
The buzzer rings. The receptionist is in the toilet. Rosemary knows this, and to help, she goes to the desk for her.
57
The executor of the will is due in an hour and a half. Ruth Phillips has been crying. Now she is in control. She is thinking clearly. She steps outside and looks into the rear courtyard near the half-dozen parked cars of the other tenants. In the corner of the shaded yard is a blackened incinerator. She watches it for a few moments. A snake of smoke escapes it. Somebody is burning something already.
She walks through the boxes she has packed: books, jewellery, cosmetics, curtains, wallhangings, clothing, underwear, costumes and sexual tools. She has stuffed all the repugnant things into one box. She hefts it to her waist and begins towards the door. Before she reaches it, she stops and drops the box at her feet. It seems deceitful, somehow, to burn those things she does not like to remember. Now that she knows a great deal about her friend, Rosemary McCulloch, she is tempted to withdraw to the image she has held previously.
But in a surge of relief and honesty, and thinking of the children that she never liked, she takes the box to the door to fulfil what her mind will do in any case.
58
She sits, truly grieving, waiting for the executor to inspect with expertise and calculation. She takes up Anna Karenina from the box, aware of the smell of plastics burning, and realizes that she remembers nothing of it; not a thing.
Inside the cover is scrawled in pencil:
In a mirror
you can only see your front
and what’s behind you.
She does not remember the inscription. It does not surprise her, though. The book’s musty odour is repulsive to her.
59
The receptionist runs blindly in from the toilet. There has been a long silence. The others are back in
the studio, hiding, but she does not know this.
She screams when she sees the bloodied mess before her and she reels as McCulloch rises from his chair in fright.
The bullet hits the metal frame of a photograph and ricochets.
The receptionist falls as if the burgundy carpet has been pulled from beneath her. Blood issues from a small wound in her ankle. She screams. And screams. And screams.
McCulloch sits again; the thick barrel between his knees. He shifts in his seat and reaches for a fashion magazine.
60
There were ten shots. Police arrived at five o’clock. They pushed through the crowd and made an arrest and called an ambulance.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acknowledgement is made to the publications in which these stories first appeared: ‘Secrets’ in Meanjin, 1983; ‘A Blow, A Kiss’ in Simply Living, 1984; ‘Getting Ahead’ in Island, 1984; ‘My Father’s Axe’ in Australian Playboy, 1983 (also winner of 1983 State of Victoria Award); ‘Wake’ in Quadrant, 1982; ‘Lantern Stalk’ in the Age Monthly Review, 1984; ‘Neighbours’ in Australian Short Stories, 1985; ‘A Measure of Eloquence’ in the Bulletin, 1984; ‘The Oppressed’ in Southern Review, 1982; ‘The Woman at the Well’ in Inprint, 1982; ‘Scission’ in Westerly, 1983.
The author thanks the Literature Board of the Australia Council for fellowships in 1983 and 1984.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Winton has published twenty-one books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). He lives in Western Australia.
ALSO BY TIM WINTON
Novels
An Open Swimmer
Shallows
That Eye, the Sky
In the Winter Dark
Cloudstreet
The Riders
Dirt Music
Breath
Stories
Minimum of Two
The Turning
For younger readers
Jesse
Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo
The Bugalugs Bum Thief
Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster
Lockie Leonard, Legend
Blueback
The Deep
Non-fiction
Land’s Edge
Down to Earth (with Richard Woldendorp)
Smalltown (with Martin Mischkulnig)
Plays
Rising Water
Signs of Life
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England
First published by McPhee Gribble in association with Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1985
This digital edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2012
Copyright © Tim Winton, 1985
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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eISBN: 9781742537009
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