Tim Winton - The Turning

I have a choice then?

Course.

Least you’ve got shoes tonight.

They wade for an hour while Brakey tries to ask questions and she stalks the shallows too preoccupied to answer. She doesn’t speak to him about anything besides the angle at which he’s holding the lamp. Finally they’re back ashore, tipping water from their shoes, with six cobbler in the bag. The water smells soupy tonight and the air is thick with mosquitoes. Brakey looks at the lamplight on Agnes’s thin arms.

Remember that old canoe someone had here when we were kids? he asks.

She smiles and laces her shoes again.

I wonder what happened to it, he says. We used to pile into it, five or six of us. And I remember the time you caught that big mullet with your bare hands. You stood up holding it like it was some kinda trophy. We couldn’t believe it.

Agnes stands up. She gathers her bag and gidgie.

That mullet didn’t know what hit it, Brakey says, unable to stop talking now. He feels the words come up out of him like a sort of panic. He blathers on about how that mullet must have been a foot long and what a natural she was when it came to hunting fish. He keeps talking even after she sets off down the narrow beach leaving him to fumble at his laces and scramble in her wake. Everything he says shames him and confirms the awful fact that he doesn’t know a thing about her after the age of eleven. In his childhood memories she’s everywhere, but after a certain point it’s almost as if she’d moved away. He doesn’t know what she thinks now, what she likes, who her friends are. Nothing. Worse, he doesn’t understand why he suddenly needs to know everything about her.

By the time he’s caught up with her she’s past his place and hers. He doesn’t say a thing until they’re beyond the music teacher’s house.

Where’re we goin? he asks.

I’m going to the Beasley sisters’, she murmurs. You better wait down on the beach. You’ll give em a fright.

Oh. Okay.

Or you can just go home.

I’ll wait, okay?

If you like.

Brakey waits in the warm darkness. He hears a long, sad note in the distance. A cow? A seabird, maybe. He cocks his head and catches it again — a saxophone. Water laps against the shore and some seabird calls across the estuary. He scuffs the white sand underfoot to make sparks and he’s so absorbed by the little flashes of static electricity that he doesn’t realize Agnes has returned until she touches his shoulder in the dark and he gives out a yelp of fright.

Sorry, she says. Didn’t mean to scare you.

You didn’t, he lies.

They head back up the beach in an awkward silence. Brakey smells the kero fumes of her extinguished lamp. He’s still tingling from her touch. He wants to reach across the dark gap between them and feel her skin. But he speaks instead.

Do the Beasley sisters pay orright? he blurts.

Agnes says nothing.

I don’t even know what cobbler’s worth, he says with his heart halfway up his neck.

Agnes kicks a few sparks up.

It’s gotta be worth more’n mullet, eh.

Jesus, Brakey.

Not that there’s anything wrong with mullet, he rambles, but she cuts him off.

Look, spare me the pity, willya, she says angrily.

Brakey stops in his tracks, stammering.

Listen! she hisses so close to his face that he can feel the heat of her breath on him. I don’t sell the fish, orright? For your information, we don’t need the money that bad. I’m not out here every night feedin the family, if it’s any of your business.

Okay, he murmurs.

Call it a hobby, she says. Stickin fish, it’s a stupid bloody hobby.

Brakey wonders if she’ll cry. He panics a little at the thought, but she doesn’t cry. Agnes just sighs. A dog begins to bark a long way down the bay.

I don’t even like it, she says after a moment.

But you’re good at it.

Oh, Brakey, you’re thick.

He stands there. The lights of the yacht club are visible through the trees. The sandspit out the front of their houses glows white. They walk a little way until the shadows of the old net posts loom up on the grass.

You’re gonna ask anyway, she says. So I’ll tell you. I do it to get away. Simple as that. These days, it’s like the house is dead inside, like everything’s gone, like even the air is dead.

I thought. . I thought things were better over there.

The drinking, you mean. You know the story of the drinking? Mum’s miracle? Her church and her, they prayed. Every day for six months they were on a prayer chain. And then, one day, he just packs it in, he gives it away. Hallelujah.

Well, that is pretty amazing, says Brakey, thinking to himself that anything that stopped Eric Larwood drinking had to be a miracle.

Yeah, maybe. But it’s weird, you know. There’s nothing left. It’s like there’s nothing left of him at all. And Mum’s too blind to see it. You can see this puzzled look on her face sometimes, like she can’t quite figure out how come everything isn’t alright now. She’s had her miracle — everything should be sweet. And I can’t stand it.

Brakey sits on the remains of the old net rack whose smooth, silvery wood gives a little beneath him.

He doesn’t bash her anymore, and there’s no screaming and smashing and all the rest of it. You know what I mean. I don’t have to tell you what it was like. But there’s nothing left. The works, the union, Margaret, and now the drink. He’s like a ghost. I mean, that doesn’t bother me, you know, I like him like that. He’s harmless. But she wants more. For Mum it was always the drink. Blame the booze for everything. It was never him. Well, now she’s got him and she’s miserable.

You miss Margaret?

Not anymore, she says. Margaret was Dad’s favourite. He loved her more than Mum, not that Mum saw it. I don’t blame her for going. But it’s better without her. Except it’s like a cemetery in there.

You ever think of taking off? Brakey asks. When you finish school, I mean.

Agnes is still standing. The prongs of her gidgie catch the light from somewhere far off.

My brothers, she says. I can’t leave them. I’d never leave them.

Brakey longs to reach up and take her hand. He’s almost sick with feeling. And then he just does it. He leans out and grabs her arm and feels for her hand and Agnes drops the gidgie in surprise and clouts him one before shaking him off. She steps back and finds the spear in the grass.

Sorry, he mumbles.

Doesn’t matter, she says.

Shit.

I’ll see you later, Brakey.

He’s too flattened even to say goodnight. He sits there for a while. A shag or something flies past over the water unseen but for the way it blots out clusters of harbour lights a mile away. He thinks about Agnes and her hot breath in his face. Did he ever long for his father the way he does for her? He can’t remember if it hurt this much.

Walking home through the last of the peppermints, he brushes hair from his eyes and as he does he smells fish on his fingers, and much later that night, in the last long hour that he lies awake in bed, he sniffs his hand now and then, full of regret, sensing that the smell of fish will be all that he’ll ever have of Agnes Larwood and that it would have been better to have nothing of her at all.

He wakes to screams from next door. It’s like the old days. His room is swarming with weird lights. The splash of breaking glass. Somebody’s thumping on the door, rattling the boards of the verandah. Brakey reels out of bed and sees the hot pink glow through the curtain. The Larwood place is on fire.

He pulls on some shorts and collides with his mother in the hallway. Before she can even get up off the floor, he’s opening the door to the Larwood boys in their pyjamas. Their faces shine with light and tears. Behind them, down on the steps, Agnes stands with her back to him to watch her mother, a motionless silhouette, before the flames.