Authors: Tim Winton
Frank?
Jesus, Max.
Leaper made himself get off his board and into the soup that Max was making.
Let go, he said. Max, let go of your board.
But Max wouldn’t let go, couldn’t let go. Leaper took his own board and wedged it beneath his brother. When he turned him shoreward he saw that one leg was too long and kicking out
of sync, that below the knee it was hanging off him by a hank of neoprene. The wetsuit was slippery with blood.
Stop kicking! Stay still.
Leaper unstrapped his board leash and seized Max’s thigh. While the rest of the leg went pendulous and heavy and half in the way, Leaper tied the thigh off as tight as the urethane cord
would go.
Frank.
Just hold on, he said. I’ll get you there.
Frank.
The shark’s gone. We’ll belly in across the reef.
Leaper held him by the buttocks and began to kick them shoreward. Max’s head rose once, twice on his neck as if he was trying to look back.
I can do it, said Leaper. You’ll be right now, you’ll see. I’ll show you.
Leaper saw Max’s head ease down on the board. His brother’s body shook beneath his own and he felt sick with triumph, with anger, from love. The water was thick as sand. Out past
Max’s head the tower showed through the spray of breaking waves. Swells overtook them. The tank was bleary, unblinking, above the dune.
Max trembled like a spiked snapper.
It was you, said Leaper.
Max said nothing.
You, he thought. When the grass went suddenly hard underfoot, and the ball forever out of reach, it was you lurking at the back of my mind. That’s what fucked it, that’s why I
started to care. There you were, bro. Just the thought of you was a weight in my legs, and the more I cared the worse it was.
A bigger wave came upon them. Before Leaper could surrender to it he had to earn it. He kicked so hard he felt poison in his legs. But he got them the wave. Max’s head was loose on his
neck.
They bellied down the long, smooth face and beneath them the reef flickered all motley and dappled, weaves of current and colour and darting things that were buried with Max and him as a
thundering cloud of whitewater overtook them. The blast of water ripped through Leaper’s hair and pounded in his ears. The reef was all over him but he held fast to his brother, hugging him
to the board, hanging on with all the strength left in his fingers, for as long as he could, and for longer than he should have.
Y
OU LIE AWAKE AND LISTEN
to the rumble of talk through the fibro wall as it thins out into pent-up whispering. From the old man’s sighs and your
mother’s patient murmur, you know that nothing’s going right. The job, the town, the transfer, everything’s off somehow. At school there are new boundaries you can’t even
see, lines between farmkids and townies, black-fellas and whites, boys and girls, gestures you just don’t get. And they’re all looking at you, the new copper’s kid, as if you
already know too much.
You pine for the city, the spill of suburbs you left behind and the way they absorb you, render you ordinary and invisible. But then you pull yourself up, knowing that longings like that are
useless, as weak as wishing you’d never left primary school. You’re not a baby. If you don’t try to make a go of it then things will be worse for everybody. So you shut up and
stop bawling. You go to school without whining and afterwards you walk alone to the beach or the harbour and try to keep an open mind.
But town is full of looks and nods and elbows in the ribs as though the place is too small to contain a surfeit of information. Locals have a way of talking across you, rather than to you.
Adults raise their eyebrows and ruffle your hair with their teeth showing. You can feel their curiosity, their wariness, and it sets you on edge.
From the house at the crest of the hill you can see the whole town at a glance: the harbour, meatworks, cannery, grain silos and the twisted net of streets with their chimney-plumed houses. The
longer you look out on it the more you sense it all staring right back at you.
It doesn’t happen often but there are times when you have the house to yourself. That’s when you go into your parents’ room and take the rifle from the wardrobe. You just sit
with it across your lap, there on the soft, wide bed.
The old Savage isn’t much of a weapon, an old single-shot .22 with a battered stock and tarnished gunmetal, but you like the weight of it in your arms and the way its curves and contours
feel shaped by many hands, much holding. It calms you down, that rifle. When you sight along the barrel the wood against your cheek is smooth. You narrow your vision to a piece of space the size of
a fingernail and things and people enter and leave that little patch of light as you will them to.
You’re not an idiot – you know all about firearms safety. Every time the old man is free he drives you out to some farm or other, and when you’ve filled the boot of the car
with mallee roots for the kitchen stove, he brings the rifle out and you take turns knocking cans off a stump. The whole time he’s drilling you about safety. You know about ricochets over
water, about climbing through the fence with a loaded weapon. He’s shown you grisly black and white photos of self-inflicted wounds, of gunshot corpses streaked with blood the colour of tar.
Clear the breech. Check and check and check again. The safety catch is a fool’s idea of safety. And you know from experience what a .22 hollowpoint does to a living creature. There’s no
such thing as a clean shot or an easy death. You’ve shot rabbits for the dog and killed foxes for farmers but you’ve got no more stomach for it than the old man.
Still, you love that rifle. But you take it seriously, and the gravity of a loaded, cocked weapon makes your hands tremble. You know it’s old and ugly, yet you care about it the way you
care for your dog, the kind of ravaged mongrel strangers will cross the street to avoid. You love it because it’s yours.
You try to fit in but for weeks it’s useless. You’re nervous all day and at night you just lie there hearing more than you want to. Your little sister howls with
colic across the hallway and even though you know she’s stuffing her mouth with a pillow, you hear the old girl’s muffled sobs through the wall. The mutt farts and groans outside your
window. And at the change of shift there’s the car in the drive and the creak of the stove door and the old man’s shoes grinding on the kitchen lino. So, to keep yourself from being a
baby, you think of that rifle in its naphthalene fog behind the coats in the wardrobe.
The old man keeps the breech-bolt hidden separately from the rifle. Without a firing mechanism the rifle is a dog without teeth. It’s not even a weapon. Although you know where the bolt is
stashed you don’t go near it; you can’t do anything stupid.
A few really bad days you sit at the window to watch people come and go. You can see anyone moving a mile away, so you track them in the sights as they make their way uphill. Like that
wild-looking kid in the sheepskin jacket who’s always around. Or the station wagons full of Aborigines on pension day. You contain them a little while. But you can’t see trouble coming.
You don’t know what to look for.
And then, somehow, you forget to keep watch. You don’t think of the rifle. You’re overwhelmed by schoolwork, you sleep at night, and, without noticing, you become familiar. Although
the town still seems temporary it feels normal for longer and longer stretches. You fall in love with an older girl. You learn to play basketball and even though you’re rubbish at it you like
the way the game takes you over. You play against blackfellas who whip you and then get you to walk them home to the hostel because they’re afraid of the dark. You register the old
man’s sense of disappointment in Aborigines but that’s a cop thing. You’re in love with a girl who’s out of reach. Just to pass her house you ride to the wharf where grain
ships load and tuna boats disgorge icy bluefin. The wharfies and sailors and fishermen are scarred and broken-toothed and you ride past them, invisible.
On the wharf you find a battered foreign-language nudie magazine in which all the women’s breasts are the size of pumpkins. You take it home and stash it in the cavity beneath the drawer
in your desk. You consult it frequently, especially the swarthy centrefold who cradles her breasts like an armload of fruit. Eventually you notice how her eyes follow you. You try to concentrate on
the dark splash of hair between her legs but she’s looking back at you. One afternoon you ride down to the water and shove the rolled magazine through the planks of the whalers’
jetty.
You watch the girl you love playing netball and wish you were visible again.
You blunder into the bathroom to find your mother with her breasts in her hands.
They’re sore, she says. I’m weaning your sister.
Oh, you murmur. Right.
Afterwards, stroking the dog on the back step, you think of the twelve-year gap between you and the baby, wondering what it was that took the oldies so long.
When the old man gets a weekend off, he drives you all out to a salmon camp along the coast where you set up in an empty tin hut with a box of groceries and some sleeping
bags. The autumn air is cool and salty, spiced with the tang of peppermint trees which spill down the dune to the empty beach. Together you catch herring from the stony headland and sit out by a
bonfire telling jokes. Your mother is bright and girlish. Your father’s quiet laugh makes you sleepy, and in the morning you mind your sister while the oldies walk the beach hand in hand.
Before they return the baby has taken her first unaided steps and only you’re there to see it.
The night you get back to town you wake to the scream of sirens. Lights crawl the wall and the phone rings in the hallway. From the kitchen window you see the school in flames. The old man is
out the door and you’re left there in a fizz of excitement you’re careful to conceal from your mother. In the morning you stand around on the oval with everybody else while the drizzle
comes down and the gossip goes around about the kid recently expelled, the one who made bombs and filled condoms with bulls’ blood and jacked up teachers’ cars. You know who they mean
– it’s the dishevelled boy in the sheepskin jacket, the one you see everywhere – and kids are coming to you now, needling you for information because you’re the
copper’s kid and you should know. Every time you shrug they take it as confirmation. And then it’s in the local paper, the boy helping police with inquiries.
The rest of the week, with the old man on afternoon shift, you get home to find him sipping Nescafé with his baton and cuffs on the sink. He runs his thumbnail across the ribs of the
draining board with a clouded look on his face. You want to ask but you know he’ll tell you nothing and you respect him for it.
Demountable classrooms arrive at school. The wild boy is released without being charged. Somehow the old man seems mollified.
For the school social you gargle with Listerine, spray your hair with VO-5 and try to work up the guts to speak to the girl with the spoiled face, the one you haven’t
stopped thinking about for weeks. The music is awful. A bunch of blackfellas on special release from the prison farm play Status Quo and AC/DC like it’s country and western and there’s
a strange current in the gym that saps your resolve. Kids are acting weird. Someone sets off a rotten egg bomb and an hour later, when the air has cleared, two ambulancemen and your own father
burst in as news rolls in a swell across the dancefloor that there’s a girl dead in the toilet. The lights come up. The band witters to a halt. As you file out with the others you see the old
man emerge from the basement, cap askew, to search the crowd for you, and when he sees you his nod is curt and he’s gone again. Out in the carpark detectives pull in. You recognize the
swagger. Your basketball mates are gone already, so you head home.
Down on the corner at the unlit Esso station a match flares in a panel van as you pass. It’s the wild boy, the one they call the bomber, slouched behind the wheel, just a shadow again
behind a heat-ticking engine.
By morning someone else is dead. At breakfast, still in his tunic, smelling of sweat and smoke and Dettol, the old man tells about the boy found hanging in his own wardrobe. You don’t know
what to say. When he gets up from the table, leaving you and your mother blinking at each other, he empties his cup into the sink. On the way to the shower he stops a moment to run his fingers
through your hair that’s still tacky with spray, and you know quite suddenly and certainly that he’s had the dead boy in his arms, that he’s seen things he can’t ever
explain.
At school a kind of hysteria goes through the class. Girls weep ostentatiously outside the library and kids are pulled left and right from the classroom. A teacher takes you aside to quiz you
about syringes at the gym but you just blink, speechless with confusion. You must know something, she says in exasperation. You of all people. But you don’t know anything and there’s
something about her look that sets you against her.
You go back to lying awake at night, wondering what you do know, listening hard again at the wall for something to explain your disquiet. They talk in whispers in the other room. It’s a
kind of torture, like a dripping tap that you wish would stop, but you find yourself straining for it in anticipation. You know you’re waiting so intently for trouble that you’re making
trouble happen.
The things you hear solve nothing; they’re just nasty bits of information you could have done without, specks and splashes of dirt that puddle and pool in your head, things about the
parents of kids you know, news of teachers, things you aren’t meant to hear, stuff you shouldn’t be listening to. Adulteries, bashings, robberies, a trawler fire, the boy hit by the
school bus, and that kid’s name over and over again, the one you still see now and then in his sheepskin coat and his Holden van. Not him. It’s always him. The old man whispers it in
the kitchen. Not him, I know it, I just feel it.
The old man looks blue around the gills. Your mother’s face is closed. There’s a creamy scum at the corners of his mouth. Their tea goes cold. Your mother peels potatoes almost
vengefully.