Tim Winton (20 page)

I didn't like the tone of her voice. I figured I'd better go.

But I stayed. We took a bath together like people in the movies.

We smoked a little hash and climbed into bed and when her plastic bag came out I did my best to please her.

For a week or two Eva came by the school or I wagged classes and met her on the wharf so we could drive out to lonely beaches. We grew more reckless and impulsive and so tired that when we weren't at each other we were bitching like married people. And on weekends, despite myself, I strangled her.

I hated it. In time I saw that for her everything else was mere courting, payment for what she really wanted. I hated the evil, crinkly sound of the bag and the smeary film of her breath inside it. I came to hate all masks and hoods and drawn faces without features and in retrospect I see that I probably hated Eva as well.

By the time we got to her place I was spent. The sky was black with impending rain. The dog trailed us listlessly into the yard and slumped into the undercroft while I levered Eva the last few feet up the stairs.

She snatched her pills and the hash pipe and lay back on the sofa until she could speak again.

You're right, she said. Right to expect it all to be snatched away from you, Pikelet. Because it will be. It can be. And hey, maybe it should be.

Somebody once told me I was a classical addictive personality.

I laughed at her. She threw a plastic cup of water in my face and I sat there smiling at the thousand cuts down the inside of her arms.

Staff appeared around us crisp and silent as ghosts.

When I was born, I said, I took a breath and wanted more.

I found my mother's nipple and sucked. I liked that. I wanted more.

That's called being human.

I know what you are, the woman murmured.

Yes, I said. You're the expert.

They led her away to dinner and I sat there alone with my sneer as the tears leaked out of me.

The last sucking bubble of consciousness. The rising gorge of panic. Yes, a delicious ricochet of sparks.

I suppose I knew well enough what it felt like. It was intense, consuming, and it could be beautiful. That far out at the edge of things you get to a point where all that stands between you and oblivion is the roulette of body-memory, the last desperate jerks of your system trying to restart itself. You feel exalted, invincible, angelic because you're totally fucking poisoned. Inside it's great, feels brilliant. But on the outside it's squalid beyond imagining.

As a kid I didn't know what respiratory acidosis was, nor could I even begin to comprehend the sheer unpredictability of premature ventricular contractions and the manner in which they can shunt a body into cardiac arrest. I was as dim and horny as any other schoolboy, a sucker for excitement, and I'd been scaring the shit out of myself since primary school, but each time I let go Eva's throat BREATH

and ripped the slimy bag off her face I didn't see rapture. What I saw was death ringing her like a bell.

So I began to deceive her. I had to. I'd come to resent Eva Sanderson but I didn't want her to d
ie.
And I certainly didn't want to be the patsy left behind, the fool calling the ambulance, the one whose fingermarks were up and down her neck like hickeys. I was scared to the point where I couldn't even get it up anymore, so I began to fake it. In the end I was faking it all. She saw to herself anyway; she was on automatic by then.

When she wanted me to choke her I learnt that I could brace myself on my elbows, give her a sense of my body on hers, without letting my full weight down. When I held her throat I made all the noise of exertion while applying less and less pressure. I slipped my fingers under the bag to break the seal. I blew air across her face while pretending to shout at her. Sometimes I didn't even touch her throat at all. I held my palms over her neck and asked her could she feel it, could she feel it, and she felt it because she expected it, because I was there and she expected it. She was blind in her foggy bag, intoxicated by the idea of what she was doing, and I hovered, palms down, like some kind of boy-shaman, willing life into her, holding off the shivering darkness.

I wonder if she ever knew. She did become more and more irritable, as if sex no longer satisfied her. Once when I began to giggle at how stupid we looked, how ludicrous it was to be lurching and growling about like this while the dog scratched at the door, she slapped me so hard that I rode home and lay on my narrow bed and shouted at my mother to please turn the bloody vacuum off and get a life.

I faked it. I wanted her, wanted to be free of her. Yet I was afraid of her. And afraid for her. I was trapped. It was as if some mighty turbulence had hold of me, and nothing - not even Sando's return -- would ever rescue me.

But something did come. A bolt of indigo lightning. The livid vein that had begun to fork across Eva's tight belly. You couldn't mistake it. Not even I was so dense as to miss it.

I was on the bed one afternoon, spent and full of loathing, when she limped up naked from the steaming bathroom, a towel coiled on her head. It was right there in front of me.

Eva, I said. You're pregnant.

Something in her face gave way. She ricked the towel down and tied it about her waist. In a few more weeks she'd need a bigger towel.

I was fixing to tell you.

Really?

Go home, she murmured. The fun's over now.

Fuck, I said. Fuck you.

C'mon, she murmured. You knew it had to stop somewhere.

I can't do this shit with a baby coming.

Is it mine?

Don't be absurd.

I tried to count back but I didn't even know which numbers I required.

I can't believe it.

Well, believe it. It's true.

Even as I lay there I felt my shock becoming relief. Not so much that the child was not mine, but that I'd been delivered. A new force had stepped in to present her with a defining choice.

Eva went back down to the bathroom and wiped the steam-fog from the mirror and brushed out her hair while I stood in the doorway to watch. I considered her wide shoulders and broad back, her narrow waist, the square, womanly buttocks and the way she favoured one leg even while dragging a brush through her long, wet hair.

I felt strangely bashful, as though we'd been restored to our proper roles. Here I was again, a visitor in her house, a schoolboy standing unbidden in the doorway to a grown woman's bathroom. The plain light of Saturday afternoon was everywhere in the house.

You want me to chop some wood?

No, she said. Thank you. Go home.

On Sunday I surprised my father by joining him at the back fence to slash the winter weeds and burn what couldn't be hacked down.

He seemed hesitant, almost fearful in my company. At day's end as we tended the smouldering edges of the firebreak with bag and hose he cleared his throat and spoke.

I had Loonie's old man here yesterday.

Oh, yeah? I said.

You know he's not my sort of fella.

I know what you mean.

But he's been talking about the people you see out the coast.

Says Loonie's gone off the deep end. Won't listen to reason. Son, he used to be your mate.

Yes, I said.

I don't understand it. But I don't think you should go out there anymore.

I nodded. If you like.

He smiled and I felt cheap about how easy this was to concede to him when a month ago I would have told him to mind his own business.

Good boy, he said, wiping ash across his stubbled chin. Good lad.

Little more than a week later Sando returned. He came running out from the BP servo in Sawyer and I nearly shat myself. He looked dark and grizzled and happy.

Hey, he said. I'm gunna be a father.

Far out, I said. I thought she looked different.

Incredible, eh.

Yeah. Man, congratulations.

We shook hands awkwardly.

Shit, he said, holding my hand with a grip just short of painful.

You chopped a bloody lot of wood out there, mate.

Well, I said. Not much swell.

Didn't want you to think I don't notice these things.

I laughed uncertainly. I couldn't read him. I wondered if the smudgy bruises on Eva's neck had lingered, or if I'd left something out there to give myself away. It occurred to me later they could have fessed up to one another about their weeks apart, and perhaps this was their way.

Hey, how was the trip? I stammered.

Lively.

Did you get waves?

Jesus, we got everything. Seasick, shot at, seen off, spiderbitten, infected, deported. And yeah, honkin waves.

Haven't seen Loonie, I said.

You and me both.

You mean he's not back?

Little prick blew me off. Took a boat to Nias.

What happened?

Didn't wanna come home, I spose.

Man.

Wilful little bastard, isn't he? Fuckin nuts, actually.

At that moment Fat Bob the mechanic sidled out from the shadows of his workshop. Sando slapped me on the shoulder.

Hey, keep an eye on the weather. We'll do Old Smoky, eh?

Orright.

Gotta go. Come out sometime.

Okay, I'll do that.

But we never surfed Old Smoky together again. Nor did I visit his place while he was there. I did my best to stay away.

There are spring days down south when all the acacias are pumping out yellow blooms and heady pollen and the honeyeaters and wattlebirds are manic with their pillaging and the wet ground steams underfoot in the sunshine and you feel fresher and stronger than you are. Yes, the restorative force of nature. I can vouch for its value -- right up to the point of complete delusion. I go down sometimes on leave to cut the weeds and burn off the way my father did, to surf the Point and collect my frazzled wits. But I've learnt not to surrender to swooning spring. In spring you can really ease off on yourself, and when that happens you'll believe anything at all. You start feeling safe.

And then pretty soon you feel immune. Winters are long in Sawyer.

A bit of sunshine and nectar goes straight to your head.

I saw Eva in the general store. It was October and she was in a long skirt and sandals. She stood in the narrow aisle considering a bin full of mousetraps. She was fuller in the face and her hair was held back with barrettes. At the sight of her pot belly I felt a tiny stab of lust. I wheeled around and heard her say my name as I slipped out of the shop and into the sleepy street.

In November Frank Loon confronted Sando in the street and took a swing at him but the younger man was too quick. There was a bit of push and shove outside the bank during which Mister Loon uttered threats. From then on it seemed that Sando and Eva did their shopping thirty miles away in Angelus.

I wasn't sleeping much. Some nights I got up and slipped out to the old man's shed to sharpen his tools. One morning my mother found me asleep out there with the axe at my feet. She asked me if I had some troubles but I said that I didn't. I probably thought I was telling her the truth.

I rode out to the coast some weekends to surf. Several times I hiked up behind Sando's place to hide in the peppy scrub and watch the house. I stayed downwind for fear of alerting the dog and though it found me one time it didn't give me away. I saw Eva pegging out laundry in the sun, saw the shine of her bare belly, saw the bras and undies she was hanging up and felt like a dirty schoolboy for watching. I had an urge to wait a while until no one was about and then creep down to press my face into her damp underthings or slip beneath the house and beat off at the thought of her swollen breasts. But I never did.

I all but failed that year of school and I was shamed by the haunted look on my mother's face. The school report recommended that I leave and seek a trade apprenticeship, but I told her I'd stay on and get my act right. Over the Christmas holidays I found every book on next year's syllabus and read late into the night while the old man snored and stopped, snored and stopped, like a man grinding away with a blade at a whetstone.

The new year was weeks old when I found myself surfing beside Sando one morning at the Point. Bareback in nothing but his Speedos, he was noseriding an old tanker from the fifties. He looked fit and tanned as he kicked the board out of the wave and settled down beside me.

Pikelet, he said.

What's with the budgie-smugglers? I asked.

Dog ate the arse out of my boardies. Anyway, what's wrong with Speedos? Son, they made this nation what it is.

You're scarin people.

Well, he said. They need a little scarin round here.

We paddled out together and waited for a set.

How you been? he asked.

Yeah, good, I lied.

Startin to think you're avoidin us.

Well, I said. School and stuff.

You heard from Loonie? he asked, kind enough not to point out that we were in the midst of the summer holidays.

No, I said. Not a word.

Man, what a disappointment he turned out to be.

I spose.

Mate, I thought he was the real deal, y'know? The man not-ordinary.

Maybe ordinary's not so bad, I offered.

Pikelet, you gotta get outta this fuckin town.

I shrugged.

Come and see us, you dick.

I caught a wave in and walked up the hot sand to where Eva lay in the sun with a book. She wore a ragged straw hat and her hair was glossy and her skin was tanned as I'd never seen before. She cut quite a figure in a polka dot bikini. Her breasts were huge and her belly shone. Her distended navel was like a fruit stalk. When she saw me she hoisted herself to her feet. I took in the lavish sway of her back and smiled.

Gross, huh?

No, I said, conscious of passing bathers. No, it's beautiful.

Jesus.

No, honest.

You really are a pervert, she said with unexpected tenderness.

Takes one to know, I said, grinning sadly.

We're leaving, Pikelet. After the baby comes.

Oh, I said. I should have been relieved but I felt a twist of panic and it must have shown.

D'you really mind so much?