Tim Winton - The Turning

Back inside, Brakey’s mother is dialling the phone in the dark. Reports like pistol shots sound off from the blazing house. The little boys flinch at the sound. Every wall is crawling with flame now. Brakey can’t believe how fast it’s going up.

He won’t come out, says one of Agnes’s brothers. Brakey, he won’t come out.

Brakey hesitates a moment before threading his way through the boys and past Agnes on the steps. The grass is wet and cold underfoot. He runs a zigzag through the strangely illuminated obstacles between the houses until he’s abreast with Mrs Larwood, who appears to be talking to herself. He’s already past her before it registers on him that she’s praying. Already, even as he runs, his cheeks are scorching. He doesn’t know how she can stand the heat. He backs off a little and skirts around the rear to see if there’s a way in, but as he crosses beneath the clothesline there’s a terrible metallic shriek and a shock that puts him asprawl in the grass. The gas bottles. He lies there a while, his face stinging, the hairs on his arms electric with heat and light, and a second explosion slaps over him. Even the ground is hot now. He feels crisp lawn digging into his shirtless torso. Weatherboards warp and fall into the yard. He sees the garden hose slough off the tap, melting against the laundry wall, and knows there’s nothing he can do for Mr Larwood.

When he gets back around the other side, Agnes’s mother has retreated some distance in her nightie. Her hair is mad with light and her face is calm but she resists his efforts to get her to come across the yard with him to join the others.

Over at his place, Agnes stands on the verandah in her jeans and shirt and boots. The boys crowd against her, tripping over the bags at her feet, while behind them in the unlit house, Brakey’s mother moves from door to window like a flickering memory.

Brakey has the rest of his life to remember Agnes Larwood and the hunger he had for her those weeks the year he turned fifteen. He’ll live to see Cockleshell disappear altogether and the luxury estate, Spinnaker Waters, take its place. Until she dies, his poor lonely mother will punctuate all talk of human affairs with the tart summation that they all leave you in the end. Yet he often wonders about Eric Larwood, the man who wouldn’t leave. They dragged the charred shell of him out on a vinyl sheet. Agnes and her family bedded down one last time at Brakey’s place but nobody slept. Next day the Welfare people came and they were never seen in town again.

Brakey never gets to be much good with women. For the rest of his life he’s awkward around them, aware of his propensity to blurt out the wrong thing at just the right moment, never quite certain of the point at which he’s allowed to make contact. He has learnt not to declare himself. Never again does he reach out uninvited to touch someone lovely. He shudders at the memory of himself at fifteen. What a lurker he must have been, what a creep!

He lives in the city now with a job and a few friends. Everyone, he’s discovered, winds up in the city eventually. Even Agnes Larwood. She’s a surgeon — he’s seen her listed in the phone book. He has no desire to meet her, in fact he dreads the idea for both their sakes. Because part of him still loves her and he couldn’t bear the humiliation. And because her life would unravel as soon as they met.

He fears that one day he’ll be standing at a crosswalk on St George’s Terrace and there, across the road, in the waiting crowd, she’ll be, even and regular and brownish, but older, striding toward him at the change of the light, and he’ll step straight up to her, despite himself, and blurt out the question that’s been waiting in him half his life since that night in Cockleshell, the question she should be spared at all costs. He just knows he’ll say: Agnes, tell me, of all the shabby Larwoods spilling sleepy and dishevelled from the burning house that night, why was it that you were the exception? With all the shaking and screaming and tears, how was it you seemed dressed and ready to go, calm at the sight of the body on the sheet next morning, and so serene when the Welfare came and took you off? It’s Brakey — remember me?

RAELENE COULDN’T STAND being in the caravan another bloody minute. After last night, the girls’d hardly look at her. They just sat out in the annexe on their beanbags watching ‘Sesame Street’ so loud it took the enamel off your teeth. She was crook as a dog and her face hurt. She gobbed a couple more Panadol and started bagging dirty clothes, half of which stank of craybait and bloke sweat and Christ-knows-what. Then she humped the whole lot over to the laundry block, wincing in the light.

The park was almost empty. There were a few tent sites with surfers on them, but apart from those and a few old farts with Winnebagos and pop-ups, it was just the permanents now, the skeleton crew.

Fresh-mown grass felt good beneath her feet and over the green smell of it you could almost taste the sea. It was actually a brilliant autumn day. Sunshine felt pure and silky on her skin; it took her mind off the chipped tooth and her throbbing lip.

In the laundry a woman she didn’t know was pulling clothes from one of those skanky beat-up washers and Raelene sighed. She was sick of conversations with people passing through. Nothing you said to each other mattered a damn because you’d never see them again.

Raelene dumped her stuff on the bench and the other woman looked up. She had long tanned legs and her blonde hair was pulled back in a silver scrunchy. She was good-looking. No, bugger it, she was better than that, she was beautiful.

Boy, said the stranger brightly. That must have hurt.

Raelene put a hand to her mouth. A twinge of shame went through her.

Took me weeks to work up the courage to have my ears done, said the woman, patting the flat brown of her belly. Isn’t it worse there? Didn’t it sting like blazes?

Raelene stared a moment before she understood. She touched the stud in her navel and smiled the best she could. She was suffused with gratitude, a warm rush of feeling that nearly made her bawl.

It was nothin, she murmured. Easier’n gettin a tat.

You’ve got a tattoo as well? I’m such a coward.

Raelene turned around. The tat was in the small of her back, just up from her bumcrack.

Handle With Care , said the woman, reading.

Raelene felt stupid then. She knew what a fuckin irony it was. She blushed for shame.

By the look of her, the look that said leafy suburb, Country Road, briefcase hubby, this woman’d wrinkle her little nose for sure, but she didn’t smirk, didn’t turn a hair.

My name’s Sherry, she said.

Raelene could have hugged her. Sherry. She was no stuck-up bitch. She was a real surprise, out of the ordinary. The whole hour they stood there at the machines or pegging up clothes on the listing hoists outside, Sherry never once mentioned Raelene’s face. Her laundry was all button-down shirts and silk boxers and delicate bras and cottons while Rae’s looked bleached and butchered by comparison — tracky dacks, Yakka shirts, kids’ pants with holes and paint stains. Rubbish. But Sherry didn’t seem to notice. She asked how long they’d lived here and what they did in the off-season and how old the girls were, as if she gave a bugger. She asked about Max’s boat and who his skipper was, and whether there was anywhere in White Point you could buy fresh asparagus. Then she talked about her husband Dan and his new job at the depot. He was the local manager of live export. He dealt with the Japs, mostly. They’d bought a house here. They had a good feeling. They were renting a van while they had the place painted. There was something squeaky clean about Sherry. She was all wrong for White Point and wrong for Raelene but you couldn’t help but like her, love her even. She was too bloody good-looking, for one thing, too beautiful to be believed. But she had something special. She listened. She gave a fuck. There was kindness in her. Straightaway she was a friend.