by Tim Winton
Oh, please, I can’t.
She began to cry. He felt a flush of anger.
Don’t leave me here. Please.
Lang considered his handkerchief but was delivered once again when she fished out her own. He squatted beside the climber whose name he’d already forgotten and smoothed the twigs and grit from his blond beard. The fellow’s fingernails were torn and he stank of sweat. Why couldn’t you have stayed home today, sport? he thought. Why couldn’t you have stuck to the track and let me be?
Marie, he asked as soft and warmly as he could. Can you do something for me? Can you yell?
Yes, said the girl, mopping at her eyes.
Get up on the rock and give it your best. Big loud voice.
Lang hunkered beside the bloke while the girl shrieked and squawked and coo-eed into the fog. He felt sick now and needy. He patted the bottle flat inside his tunic. He thought about the chances of taking a slug while the girl was occupied and more or less out of view. He eased the thing out and looked at it a moment. A rush of heat came to his face. The need, the shame, the awful fact of it glinting in the meagre light. God Almighty, what was he thinking? With a journalist an arm’s-length away. In a community this small. It was five kinds of suicide he was courting, as if this whole search and rescue wasn’t cock-up enough. Printed or whispered, news of Senior Constable Lang and his work-hour brandy on the mountain would be a fire nobody could put out.
The girl bellowed on and on, her voice breaking tearfully. He turned the bottle in his hands. He thought of shoving the thing into the hiker’s fancy jacket. But it went too much against the grain. It felt like planting evidence, like falsifying the record. He’d made a mess of things these past months but he’d not fallen that far. Even looking at the booze caused his throat to tighten. He flung it uphill so hard he saw stars.
What was that? said the girl. I heard something.
A rock, he murmured. I chucked a rock.
Oh.
You see anything?
No.
Give it a few more minutes.
Lang knew they were here for the night now but he felt better for ditching the brandy. He listened to the girl’s voice burn and then break and when it was dark he called her down. They sat in silence for a while until he began to shiver.
Maybe you should put your coat back on, she murmured.
Best keep him warm, said Lang.
But you’re wet.
Can’t get any wetter then.
In the long quiet that ensued, rain dripped from foliage overhead and small creatures rustled unseen around them. A car horn sounded three times. Macklin was calling the stragglers in. Lang clicked the transmit button on the walkie-talkie. He tried spelling out his name in Morse but made a meal of it. He settled for a group of three clicks every few minutes.
The hurt climber began to mutter.
I have a banana, said the girl. You want half?
You have it, said Lang.
I can only eat half.
It’ll keep you warm, he said.
I’m not cold, she said. Just . . . scared.
They’ll find us. We might be here a while but they’ll find us eventually.
This is my first week. I’m no good at this.
Well, he said kindly, you got the story.
Hell, I’m in the story now.
Yeah, we’re both in it now.
What about him? Will he be alright?
I don’t know. There’s nothing we can do.
I can’t bear it – we’ve found him but we can’t help.
Exactly.
She noticed the resignation in his voice. She even seemed to bristle a little.
You sound like you’re used to it, she said.
You never get used to it.
The climber began to murmur and whimper. Lang kept the man’s head as still as he could.
I hate this, said the girl.
Lang levered himself upright and his leg burned with pins and needles. He scrambled up the small stone plinth to see what he could make out in the valley below. The fog was complete. He couldn’t see any lights but for a moment he thought he heard the faint thrum of an engine, a generator maybe.
He got down. The cold was right in him now. The climber was motionless but breathing. Lang thought of the long, bitter night ahead of them.
I honestly thought I was tougher than this, said the girl.
You’re doing fine, he said.
You start with these ideas about yourself.
Yep.
You wouldn’t know.
Tell you a story, he said.
If you like.
Coupla months back I got called out to a prang. Farmkid was riding his trailbike behind the school bus. That awful twisty stretch through the karri forest. He’s muckin around for the benefit of the girls at the back window. Fun and games, you know. Then suddenly he’s at his place and just swerves away, pulls out from behind the bus into the path of a car coming the other way. I was pretty close when I got the call. Had twelve kids looking on while we waited for the ambulance. Just kneeling with him. Waiting.
I heard about this.
I tell you, it was a long time to wait. You’re in uniform. People expect you to do something. But you can only wait. He was conscious, you know. I was talking to him. He knew why we were waiting. There wasn’t a mark on him.
That’s enough, she said. Don’t tell me any more.
Died in my arms.
Stop.
And then I had to walk up the hill and tell his parents.
Lang let her blow her nose.
Got a boy like that myself, he said. He’s a good kid.
Sorry. I thought I was tougher than this.
You’ll be fine, he said. He felt all warm, like he’d just had a quick slug. He felt good.
The girl blew her nose. Lang caught his breath a little. Such talk made him lightheaded. It was hard to pull back. He had an urge to keep going, to explain himself, to blurt out everything he’d been stewing over all year; he could already taste the relief of it – Christ, he needed to, he was burning up with it – but even as he steeled himself and tried to think where to start, the girl began to cry. She lunged across the climber and grabbed him by the sleeve of his tunic and he saw just how close he’d come to total disaster.
She was too young, too rattled. You couldn’t put your life into the hands of someone like this. Jesus, she was a kid, a cadet they’d sent out for a lost dog story. What the hell had he been thinking? And what, in the end, could he give her that would stack up? Hunches, irregularities, misgivings from a cop who wasn’t a team player, an officer considered flaky and unreliable. They’d boil him alive.
You believe in God? she whispered.
Wish I didn’t.
That’s a strange thing to say.
Lang said nothing. A kind of cold anger sank through him at the thought that he’d almost gushed everything to this child. He wished he hadn’t passed up half the banana, that he hadn’t chucked the brandy when he so badly needed it now.
I said that’s a strange thing to say, she said.
Why don’t you try and sleep?
I can’t.
We should keep warm, said Lang. Let’s lie either side of him and pull my poncho over all of us.
If you like.
She seemed reluctant to let go his tunic, even more reluctant to lie beside the injured man. He could hear the talk in the crib room now: Lang cosied up on the hill with the fresh little chick from the paper.
Where’s your camera? he asked before they arranged themselves.
Here, she said fishing in her jacket.
Leave it out, he said. I’ve got an idea.
He couldn’t see her face in the dark but she seemed hesitant about handing over the camera. He sensed her loss of confidence in him and it stung. He tucked the thing as far into his tunic as he could and lay back with the hiker beneath the partial cover of his dripping poncho.
Before long the girl began to sob quietly. Be
neath the poncho the cocktail of their sweat and breath and the odours of perfume and wet wool became more discomforting to Lang than the cold or the damp or the stones beneath his hip. He had neither the words nor the will to console her. In fact he came to dislike her as much as he did the stale-smelling man between them, the idiot who’d caused all this trouble.
No, he decided. He’d say nothing. It was what he was best at now. When you’ve lost your pride there’s nothing left to say.
He lay there to wait it out. At the first break in the fog he’d take the camera up the rock and set the flash off at regular intervals. Eventually he’d guide the vollies up to where he was. It’d come out alright. They wouldn’t freeze to death. The girl, Marie, would forget her blubbering fear because she’d get her rescue piece on the front page. She’d have her victim, her ordeal, her stoic hero. It’d be a great story, a triumph, and none of it would be true.
Boner McPharlin’s Moll
TO SAY THAT I WENT TO SCHOOL with Boner McPharlin is stretching things a bit because he was expelled halfway through my first year at high school. That would make it 1970, I suppose. I doubt that I saw him more than five times in his grotty hybrid uniform but I was awestruck when I did. We’d all heard about him back in primary school. The local bad boy, a legendary figure. And suddenly, there he was, fifteen and feral-looking, with grey eyes and dirty-blond hair past his shoulders. In his Levi’s and thongs he had that truckin stride, like a skater’s wade, swaying hip to hip with his elbows flung and his chest out. He had fuzz on his chin and an enigmatic smirk. His whole body gave off a current of sexy insouciance. To me, a girl barely thirteen, he was the embodiment of rebellion. I wanted that – yes, right from the first glance I wanted it. I wanted him. I wanted to be his.
I watched him swing by, right along the lower-school verandah with a bunch of boys in his wake – kids who seemed more enthralled by him than attached to him – and I must have been pretty obvious about it because my best friend, Erin, stood beside me with her hands on her hips and gave me a withering look.
No way, she said. Jackie, no way.
Erin and I went back forever. We were at a cruel age when we clung fiercely to girlhood yet yearned to be women, and everything excited and disgusted us in equal measure. Sophistication was out of reach yet we could no longer remember how to be children. So we faked it. Everything we did was imitation and play-acting. We lived in a state of barely suppressed panic.
I was only looking, I said.
Don’t even look, said Erin.
But I did look. I was appalled and enchanted.
Boner McPharlin was the solitary rough boy that country towns produce, or perhaps require. The sullen, smouldering kid at the back of the class. The boy too brave or stupid to fear punishment, whose feats become folklore. When he strutted by that day I knew nothing about him, really. Only the legend. He was just a posture, an attitude, a type. He represented everything a girl like me was supposed to avoid. He posed some unspecified moral hazard. And I sensed from Erin that he was a peril to friendship as well, so I said nothing about him. I went on being thirteen – practised shaving my legs with the old man’s bladeless razor, threw myself into netball, tore down my Johnny Farnham posters and put David Bowie in his place. I had a best friend – I shared secrets with her – yet they felt inconsequential once I saw Boner. Boner was my new secret and I did not share him.
I don’t know what it was that finally got Boner expelled from school. He did set off pipe bombs in the nearby quarry. And there was, of course, the teacher’s Volkswagen left on blocks in the staff carpark and the condoms full of pig blood that strafed the quadrangle in the lead-up to Easter, but there were plenty of atrocities he didn’t commit, incidents he may have only inspired by example, yet he took the rap for all of it. With hindsight, when you consider what happened later in the seventies when drugs ripped through our town, Boner’s hijinks seem rather innocent. But teachers were afraid of him. They despised his swagger, his silence. When he was hauled in he confessed nothing, denied nothing. He wore his smirk like a battlemask. And then one Monday he was gone.
The rest of us heard it all at a great remove. Everybody embellished the stories they were told and the less we saw of Boner the more we talked. Much later, when there was a fire at the school, he was taken in for questioning but never charged. I heard he went to the meatworks where his old man worked in the boning room. That was where the name came from, how it was passed from father to son. On Saturdays Boner lurked in the lee of the town hall or sometimes you’d see his mangy lumberjacket wending through cars parked around the boundary at the football.
At fourteen Erin and I began to be dogged by boys, ordinary farmboys whose fringes were plastered across their brows by built-up grease and a licked finger, and townies in Adidas and checked shirts whose hair didn’t touch their collars. They were lumpy creatures whose voices squawked and their Brut 33 made your eyes water. We were more alert to their brothers who drove Monaros and Chargers. But we weren’t even sure we were interested in boys. We were caught in a nasty dance in which we lured them only to send them packing.
The drive-in was the social hub of the town. My parents never went but they let me walk there with Erin and we sat in the rank old deckchairs beside the kiosk to watch Airport and M*A*S*H and The Poseidon Adventure. We wore Levi cords, Dr Scholls and 4711 ice cologne. Neither of us would admit it, but in our chaste luring and repelling of boys, Erin and I were locked in competition. There was a tacit score being kept and because she was so pretty, in an Ali McGraw kind of way, I was doomed to trail in her wake. I kept an eye out for Boner McPharlin and was always thrilled to see him truckin up toward the kiosk with a rolly paper on his lip. I kept my enthusiasm to myself, though there were times on the long walk home when I thought aloud about him. I was careful not to sound breathless. I did my best to be wry. I aped the new women teachers we had and adopted the cool, contemptuous tone they reserved for the discussion of males. I was ironic, tried to sound bemused, and while I waxed sociological, Erin lapsed into wary silence.
At about fourteen and a half Erin started letting a few boys through the net. Then they became a steady stream. Our friendship seemed to survive them. I tagged along as though I was required for distance, contrast and the passing of messages. She made it clear she wasn’t easy. Nothing below the waist. Friendship rings were acceptable. No Italians. And she did not climb into vehicles.
I must have been fifteen when Boner McPharlin got his driver’s licence. Suddenly he was everywhere. He wheeled around town in an HT van with spoked fats and a half-finished sprayjob in metallic blue. That kind of car was trouble. It was a sin-bin, a shaggin-wagon, a slut-hut, and as he did bog-laps of the main drag – from the memorial roundabout to the railway tracks at the harbour’s-edge – the rumble of his V-8 was menacing and hypnotic. Sometimes he cruised by the school, his arm down the door, stereo thumping.
Erin and I walked everywhere. Outside of school there was nothing else to do but traipse to the wharf or the beach or down the drab strip of shops where the unchanging window displays and familiar faces made me feel desperate.
I wish something would happen, I often said.
Things are happening all around us, said Erin.
I didn’t mean photosynthesis, I muttered.
By the time anything’s happened, it’s over.
Well, I said. I look forward to having something to remember.
We were in the midst of one of these ritual discussions when Boner pulled up beside us. It was a Saturday morning. We stood outside the Wildflower Café. I had just bought a Led Zeppelin record. In the rack it had been slotted between Lanza and Liberace. Over at Reece’s Fleeces people were buying ugg boots and sheepskin jackets. The passenger side window of Boner’s van was down.
Jackie, said Erin.
Nothing wrong with saying hello, I said.
Even as I turned toward the mud-spattered car growling and gulping at the kerb, Erin was walking away. I saw the black flag of
her hair as she disappeared into Chalky’s hardware. Then I stepped over and leaned in. Boner’s smirk was visible behind a haze of cigarette smoke. I felt a pulse in the roof of my mouth.
Ride? he said, just audible over the motor.
I shook my head but he wasn’t even looking my way. He squinted into the distance like a stunted version of Clint Eastwood. Yet he must have felt something because he was already putting the car into gear and looking into his side mirror when I opened the door and slid in. He seemed completely unsurprised. He peeled out. Heads turned. I clutched the LP to my chest.
Boner and I drove a lap of town in silence. We idled past the pubs on the waterfront, the cannery, the meatworks, the silos. We passed grain ships on the wharf, the whalers on the town jetty and eased up by the convict-built churches on the ridge where the road wound down again toward the main beach.
I tried to seem cool, to make him be the one to break the silence, but he seemed disinclined to speak. The van was everything you’d expect, from the mattress and esky in the back to the empty Bacardi bottle rolling about my feet. Feathers and fish bones hung from the rear-view mirror. Between us on the bench seat was a nest of cassettes, tools, and packets of Drum tobacco. I knew I’d done something reckless by climbing in beside Boner McPharlin. I’d made something happen. What frightened me was that I didn’t know what it was.
We didn’t stay at the beach – didn’t even pull into its infamous carpark – but wheeled around beneath the Norfolk Island pines and headed back to the main street of town. We slid into a space outside the Wildflower and a dozen faces lifted in the window. The big tricked-up Chevy motor idled away, drumming through the soles of my denim sneakers.
So, I said. How’s things at the meatworks?
He shrugged and looked up the street. Erin stood in the door of the café, her hair ensnared by a rainbow of flystrips. Her face was clouded with rage. I wanted to prolong the moment with Boner but could think of nothing to say.
Well, I chirped. Thanks for the ride.
