by Tim Winton
No. Well, part of me thinks so, but I know that’s not fair.
Well, Jesus.
Gail gripped the wheel until her hands burned. She hadn’t meant to tell him yet and not nearly as bluntly. For someone in his condition the timing was about as bad as she could have managed. She’d wanted to tell him so she’d be free of it, not to spit it up in a moment of anger.
He opened the door and got out. The forest sighed. There was a mineral whiff of gravel. For a moment she thought of him bolting out into the blur of trees and leaving her there by the roadside. Could it be that she wanted it? A scene? An end, even?
But he went no further than the drainage ditch, round-shouldered, hands in pockets, blowing like a man who’d already run a good distance.
When they bounced up the long winding drive and came to the house, Fenn was out on the grass with the hose and the kids were in an old cattle trough, squealing as he sprayed them down. Capering about in his floral boardshorts, the ginger beard dripping, that chest hair plastered awry, Fenn looked so huge and ungainly, so unselfconscious in his foolery, that Gail and Vic exchanged glances and smiled despite themselves.
God, she said. Look at that.
Daisy came down off the verandah. She was barefoot and her cotton dress only contained her breasts intermittently.
Don’t mind my husband, she said pulling open the driver’s-side door. His idea of farming is to water the children.
We were just admiring his movements, said Gail.
Ever seen such a physique?
Like a Greek god, said Gail.
How are you, Daisy? said Vic.
Better than you two by the looks of things.
How do things look, then? he said.
That poor face of yours? Like she dragged you behind the car the first fifty miles.
What about my face, Daise? asked Gail.
Like you drove the second fifty miles feeling guilty about it.
Vic and Gail caught each other’s eye a second time. Daisy saw it. He realized then that Fenn and Daisy were already privy to Gail’s secret.
C’mon, said Daisy. Or do I have to haul you both out?
Daisy made an enormous pot of tea and set down a tray of anzacs by the window from which they could keep an eye on the children. Fenn weighed a biscuit on his upturned palm and raised his impossible eyebrows.
Anzac, he said. Now there’s a biscuit with the ballast of history.
They’re perfectly good biscuits, said Gail. She’s getting good at them.
And even if I’m not, said Daisy, he still eats them. Behold, Vic, the weight of loyalty.
Yeah, said Fenn, slapping his belly. The waist of loyalty.
Daisy and Fenn were both vets. They’d sold a thriving suburban practice to come here. Daisy had grown up on the place and took it on when her father grew too frail to keep up with the orchards. Vic looked out at the hard noon light on the hills and the almost shadowless lines of trees and he wondered how Fenn and Daisy would manage here. Fenn was alarmingly impractical. Animals and children loved him but he knew nothing about horticulture or even simple gardening. Daisy, who’d been away from the place since she was seventeen, had plans for an organic operation and maybe biodynamic poultry as well, but they seemed out of reach at present. There had been hidden debts, unforeseen expenses. Vic thought there was something manic about Fenn and Daisy’s optimism. At times they struck him as just plain careless with their energies. Still, he admired them for striking out in a new direction, for having dreams. They were barely ten years his junior. So why did they seem so fresh?
Oh, look at you, said Daisy. You poor love.
He’s looking so much better, said Gail. But it was frightening. Especially when it got close to his eye.
Nasty, said Fenn. You can go blind.
They know that, Fenn.
I was thinking aloud. I had a cousin with shingles once.
Thanks for the cuppa, said Vic. You mind if I duck up to the cabin for a bit of a lie-down?
I’ll drive you up, said Gail.
No, I’ll be right.
Bed’s made, love, said Daisy. Listen to me, I sound like my mother.
When Vic was gone, Gail made herself another cup of tea and watched Fenn go out to the kids again.
What a goose, said Daisy settling in beside her, resting her head against her shoulder.
They’re so lucky to have a father like him.
Yeah, murmured Daisy. I suppose they are.
Fenn climbed into the trough. Only his gut and his horny, white feet were visible as the kids climbed on him.
You must see the other sort too much, said Daisy. At work.
Yeah. But I was thinking about what it would be like. Being a little girl again, with a dad like that.
Speaking of fathers, tell me about this priest you’re seeing. What’s he like?
It’s a she, actually. She’s very unremarkable.
What’s remarkable is you seeing her. After everything they did to you. Please tell me it’s not just guilt that’s sent you back.
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it was at first. It’s been so awful, Daise. I’ve felt so horrible about it.
Well, you should have told him earlier.
He was a wreck. His parents had just died. After God knows how long, he sees them together in the same room again only to bury them both within a few weeks.
Telling him would have pulled him up, said Daisy. It would have given him something more immediate to think of.
Maybe. I dunno. I mean it’s just so grotty. The bloke was the motel manager. He was such a sleaze. I kind of sank into it.
Well, Christ, you were lonely.
Stop defending me. You’re worse than Vic.
He’s making excuses for you?
You know him. Circling the wagons on everyone else’s behalf.
It’s endearing, said Daisy, swishing the dregs in the pot.
And it’s a problem, Daise, a curse. You can’t compensate for everyone all your life. In the end you have to demand something of people.
Listen to you, Daisy said. She got up to tip the tealeaves into a slopbucket beside the ancient wood range. Isn’t that your story, too?
Gail smiled, conceding it. She thought of the long year past, of Vic finding his father after so much time and the way his past seemed to assail him. She’d tried so hard to understand his obsession that she all but entered into it. She drove to his home town and trudged its streets and beaches like a researcher imagining herself into his world and the slow wreck of his teenage years. In the end it was a kind of indulgence. There was nothing to show for it but more damage, more complication.
Vic’s problem, said Daisy, is he’s still the dutiful boy. Doing the right thing by his poor mother. Letting himself get screwed by the labour movement year in year out without a squeak. How long can you keep that shit up without a little bit of bad faith creeping in?
Yes, said Gail. But I suppose I could see myself in the same light. At what point are you just pretending?
Well, you’ve already blown your good-girl credentials.
Gail put a hand to her temple and managed a smile.
Will you stay together?
I don’t know, she said. I love him.
Well, said Daisy, flapping her sweaty dress. He’s probably worth it. All things considered.
Vic lay in the guesthouse with the windows open and the cries of birds and children drifting up the ridge. The cabin was built of corrugated iron and clad inside with local timber. There was a slate floor, a wood heater, a little bathroom. He liked it. But he was sure that Fenn and Daisy couldn’t really afford it. The debts would eat them alive and the thought made his head race. Their bucolic existence was precarious. They were good people, yea-sayers to life, but they exhausted him. He supposed it was rude getting up like that, ten minutes after arriving, but he’d felt so sapped by everybody’s solicitude that he had to go before he became too enfeebled to move at all. And they knew about Gail. She’d told them fir
st. It made him more of an invalid than he could bear.
The neuralgia rattled him. It was usually the precursor to a relapse. And, God, he didn’t want to return to how he was at Christmas – the searing headaches, the blisters. Gail was right to be afraid. It frightened him too, this total collapse, because he felt his mind teetering at its limit. He’d been this close before but he’d never told her. At this great distance he could still see himself, the boy behind the curtain, cradling death in his arms. He was forty-four years old but he felt just as helpless. He knew what the boy didn’t, that you couldn’t keep soldiering on indefinitely. But beyond that, even at this age, he still didn’t know the first thing about saving himself.
When Vic woke it was the middle of the afternoon and all the shadows had moved so far across the room that it seemed he’d woken in a different cabin. The ghostly pain in his face was gone. He got up, put on his shoes and some sunglasses, and went out onto the little terrace of slates and river rocks. But for a solitary child bumping up and down on the trampoline, there was nobody visible down at the main house.
He walked out into the orchard. The air was cool. He knew he should probably go back for a jacket but he pressed on through the sloping lines of trees not wanting to interrupt this feeling of freshness, of respite.
But within a minute he was reviewing the morning’s conversation in the car. His blathering about basketball. Gail’s forbearance. His needling. Then her sudden news, the awful smarting shock of it. There was only the faintest trace left now. Did it mean that, deep down, he expected it, even thought he deserved it? That he forgave her already? Or that he felt so little because he was so abstracted, as far gone from her as she feared? He knew it was completely absurd, yet what had festered in his mind wasn’t the adultery at all, but something Gail said before that. When he told her about the Aboriginal teacher. Her reaction to his confession that he’d wanted to take the bloke for a drink but baulked.
Even though he was used to Gail’s exasperation, he’d never heard such raw dismay from her before. She thought he was a racist.
He knew it was bizarre that he could bear being cuckolded – yes, in time he probably could – but for your wife to think that of you? No, he couldn’t take it; it was too much. Yet, Christ, what kind of a stiff did that make him? It was sort of funny, in a sick way, and so typical of him. At a time like this, still anxious about his good name. He knew what other lawyers called him behind his back. The Redeemer.
He wanted to have it out now, to explain himself, clear it up, but he knew what a self-absorbed lunatic he’d look. It would prove Gail’s point that he was ensnared in the past. It would make things worse.
Anyhow he probably was a racist in other ways. He had an involuntary reaction against white South Africans. He didn’t care for the shape of Slavs’ heads – they tended to be flat at the back.
With his thoughts bolting away from him now, Vic tramped through regiments of trees until a child stepped out from behind a trunk and caused him to shriek.
Fenn and Daisy’s little girl stumbled back onto her bum and began to cry without a sound. After some hesitation he patted her fine blonde hair that stuck out at all angles from her head. He tried to hold the child’s hand but she wasn’t having any of it.
We both got a fright, he said, trying to remember her name. I’m such a duffer. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you coming.
She was three – no, four – years old. She took such a long time to take a breath and make a sound.
The child’s name was Keira. Eventually she took his hand and they walked through the orchard in the dreamy latticework of shadows. A hundred yards away on a parallel course across the slope Daisy and Gail walked hand-in-hand along a separate row.
Are you looking forward to school? Vic asked.
I don’t know, said Keira.
I suppose you’ll go on a bus?
Or Daisy will drive me.
Yeah, or Daisy’ll drive you.
He realized he had no idea what to say to a child. Gail had nieces but he never saw them.
What happened to your face? said the girl. Did you fall off your bike?
Yes, he lied. I came a cropper.
What’s a cropper?
I . . . I really fell off bad. I stacked it. I came a cropper.
Fenn’s fat, you know, said Keira. But it doesn’t matter.
No, he said, his voice catching. Nothing like that matters.
He wanted to hug her but he would only frighten her.
At the end of the ridge they waited for Daisy and Gail. Daisy took the child downhill in a long tumbling run toward the house.
You should have seen the pair of you, said Gail. You looked like Charles Windsor on a meet and greet.
She held my hand, he murmured.
Maybe she thought you’d get lost.
You ever regret not having them?
Ask me when I’m too old to have them. I’m not quite thirty-four, Vic. The door hasn’t shut yet.
He nodded and she saw that she’d surprised him. Something had got through. She just couldn’t be sure what it was.
I want to explain about that Aboriginal bloke.
What?
The bloke I knew as a kid.
Oh, yes, she said, wearily.
And he told her again about the basketball and the walks to the hostel and how the blackfellas bounced balls off the arses of their defeated escorts. And the confusion he felt, seeing their cheerful, cocky ringleader as a grown man. It wasn’t race, he said. Not quite. It was the jangling memory of a long drive to Perth when he was fourteen and not yet aware that his old man was beginning to go to pieces. There was the cough medicine he swigged and the rash of odd errands like this one, delivering a juvenile offender to Longmore. The prisoner was a dark, smouldering boy who pretended not to know Vic. His record was, according to Vic’s father, as long and spattered as a painter’s ladder. For five hours Vic sat beside him. The boy was uncuffed – unreachable, it seemed. And Vic was anxious, conflicted, afraid the whole time, long before the boy bolted at the last moment, at the very gate, whereupon he had to chase him down himself, dogging him like a fullback through a pine plantation until he got a tackle in and sprawled with him onto the bed of needles. The boy called him five kinds of fucking cunt while Vic held him there, not knowing what else to do until his father limped up, weeping with relief.
We never spoke about it, said Vic, and I never told Mum. I knew that I’d saved the old man’s bacon somehow. That time, anyway.
You shouldn’t have had to.
But the point is that when I saw that bloke again, this big lanky bugger, and he’s slapping his thigh and I’m trying to remember his name and all I can see is myself at fourteen, picking pine needles off my shirt and leading his little brother in cuffs to prison, I just felt sick. I couldn’t deal with it.
Vic, you are the fucking Book of Lamentations.
Oh. Yeah. Is Job in that?
She looked at his scabby face and grimaced. She didn’t know whether her rage was for him or against him.
I just needed to tell you, he said. That’s all I had to say.
Good, she said curtly, despite herself.
You know, our basketball coach was a Mormon.
Vic.
Actually there were two of them, Elder Harley and Elder Wendell. Yanks, of course. We hated them. They just turned up and wouldn’t go. In the end we burnt their bikes and hung them on a fence.
Hm. Novel.
Yeah, I spose it was.
Gail headed downhill at a pace she knew was uncompanionable. It was perverse to be disappointed by a lack of drama, the tears and screams and recriminations she’d dreaded, but she was strangely deflated. She would have preferred a burning bicycle, come to think of it, some straightforward conflagration.
They didn’t speak. All the way back to the house he hung at her elbow, kicking stones, panting a little, not quite matching her step for step.
On the lawn Fenn had a skeet trap set up. There w
as a shotgun broken over his arm. What’s this? said Gail.
Dad’s stuff, said Daisy. There’s boxes of those clay pigeon thingies in the shed.
I’m not much good, said Fenn. But, by God, it’s a lark.
Vic and Gail looked at one another.
You used to shoot, said Fenn. Didn’t you, Vic?
Vic looked at Keira who lay on a warped garden bench with an Archie comic. Daisy held the other child, a boy, who fished out one of her breasts and began feeding. He looked too big, too old, to be breastfed. Daisy sat on the bench beside Keira whose grubby feet rested against her little brother’s head.
Weren’t you in the army cadets? asked Daisy.
Yeah, said Vic. Believe it or not.
You want a go? asked Fenn who looked incongruous in his floral boardshorts and khaki disposal shirt.
I haven’t fired a weapon for thirty years, he said nervously. To tell you the truth I was a little creepy about it, once.
Vic remembered that Tasmanian kid a few years back, the way he calmly strolled about shooting tourists like they were some kind of sport. The chill of recognition he felt seeing the poor dumb kid’s face on TV. The dull eyes, the shoulder-length hair, the total confusion. It might have been him at fourteen or fifteen, gun-happy and afraid.
Dad used to shoot birds, said Daisy. The fruit, you know.
Is that thing still registered? asked Gail.
Love, you look horrified, said Fenn heartily.
There’s a rifle, too, said Daisy. Vet work, it’s different in the country.
We’ve never had to use it, yet, said Fenn. Thank God. You wouldn’t want to be the local RSPCA officer, though.
One side of the valley was dark now but the sun still lit the eastern slopes, bronzing the trees in their staggered lines.
But this, said Fenn. Trap-shooting. Nothing gets hurt but your eardrums.
You go ahead, said Vic.
Can I pull? said Keira.
Yeah, said Daisy. But you know the rules.
The little girl slid off the bench and rooted around in a box for a moment before pulling out a couple of pairs of earmuffs. She passed a set to her father and pulled some on herself. Vic felt Gail take his hand as Fenn loaded up from a carton on a rickety card table and faced out across the valley bottom.
