Tim Winton - The Turning

I can take a hint, Dan. I’m goin, orright?

Don’t be silly, said Sherry.

But Rae was on her feet now and her blood was up. She shook Sherry off and waved her arms at whatever it was that Dan was saying and launched out into the yard and the street where there was no one, only a salty wind.

Because it was still early, and she’d been bawling till her eyes felt lumpy and swollen as balls of sago, she could hardly waltz into the pub or just give up and slink home with Max still awake. So she went to the beach anyway, walked out along the great white sandspit that bordered the lagoon. Dan was right, the moon was up. It washed everything ghostly-bright. The air had a real winter sting to it. She was way under-dressed. Breaking waves flashed on the reef, flickered like her thoughts.

She was tired, yet it wasn’t ordinary fatigue. It was a deeper exhaustion. She was sick of herself, appalled at what she’d been thinking only minutes ago, ashamed of what she was, a mother who didn’t much care. Maybe someone like her didn’t deserve better than Max. She didn’t love him at all. But she was too scared to leave him, and not just because she was afraid of what he’d do to her or the girls if she did. No, she was really more frightened of being alone. The girls’d never be enough for her. She needed a bloke, she hadn’t been without one since she was thirteen years old and now it was just unthinkable. The only way she’d leave Max was in the protection of another man. She needed a rescuer. She couldn’t go alone. And in a town like this the available men were fat-gutted skippers whose wives had already left them or the adolescent deckies in the Cesspit across the van park. There was nobody. And now she’d have to endure it without even the comfort of friends.

When she got home, shivering and heartsick, Max was out to it and the girls needed extra blankets. She sat between their bunks and felt the contours of their bodies under her hands. She felt so low it almost hurt to breathe. She wondered if one day she’d ever work up the guts to top herself.

Late next morning Sherry dropped by but Rae saw her coming and retreated with the girls into the van. While the other woman knocked and called, Rae lay under the table with her hands over the girls’ mouths. When Sherry was gone Rae went into a cleaning frenzy, scrubbing and scouring until her hands burned. The girls looked on bewildered. She roasted a chicken for Max’s lunch and wore her sluttiest little dress, despite the weather.

The sun came out next day and Sherry found her making Play-Doh with the girls. She seemed uncomfortable, anxious, and several times tried to shift their stilted conversation away from the good weather or the comings and goings of people in the park but Rae cut her off. For half an hour or so they just played with the kids and said nothing at all.

Raelene watched Sherry closely, saw the attention she lavished on the girls, how she always had her hands on them. She wondered if Sherry and Dan were able to have kids. Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe that’s why she befriended her, to get hold of her girls. They weren’t your ordinary people, that’s for sure. Maybe they were from some kind of cult that preyed on people like her. But then she caught herself. Jesus, she was sounding nuts now. Only yesterday she was crawling around in her own caravan, lying on the floor, hiding from her own best friend.

Sherry didn’t come by the next day, nor the days afterwards. Raelene felt herself sinking. Her recent efforts to please Max fell away. She bought a fifty-cent Bible at the junkshop next to the bakery and spent the rest of the week reading in fits and bursts that made her head ache and caused her to grind her teeth in frustration. She found a couple of stories the girls liked but they were buried under whole avalanches of stuff so boring, so impossible, you could scream. The whole business made her wild.

On Tuesday she gave darts the flick again and went over to Dan and Sherry’s. They seemed surprised and relieved to see her and they’d barely let her in the doorway before she launched into them about religion, about how she didn’t believe a word of it and how sick of bloody hypocrites she was. She gave it to them about the Pope and George W. Bush and the priests who abused children and it just didn’t help matters that they kept nodding and agreeing. She ran out of puff. Dan put the kettle on.

You never have any booze in this house, said Raelene, laughing to mask her awful embarrassment.

That’s. . there’s a reason for that, said Sherry, smoothing down her skirt.

Because you’re churchy, right?

Actually, said Dan, it’s because I’m an alcoholic.

Oh. Jesus. Sorry.

Dan smiled, folded his arms.

White Point’s a kind of second chance for Dan, said Sherry. For us.

That’s why you don’t work, Sherry?

Sherry shrugged.

And that’s why the religious stuff?

Partly, said Dan. Booze leaves a pretty big hole.

A higher power? That kinda thing?

More or less.

We’re kind of finding our way, said Sherry.

Shit. Raelene began to laugh again.

What?

I thought. . I thought you were gonna kidnap me. It’s so stupid.

Well, said Sherry, we had considered it.

Raelene fell into fits and Dan made the tea. They talked until midnight and Rae left restless, ashamed, full of yearning.

Raelene kept up the charade of heading off to darts night but she never actually went. In addition to spending every other morning with Sherry she put in a whole evening with Dan and her on Tuesdays. It was something to look forward to because what they talked about — argued about, most of the time — made her mind race. They prattled on about whether people were basically good or evil at heart. For a whole night they talked about souls and Dan confessed that he believed animals had them. Homosexuals were a troublesome topic. Raelene found herself arguing against their being consigned to Hell, even though she didn’t much care for poofs, whereupon Sherry expressed doubts about Hell itself and Dan brought his Bible out and there they got bogged down.

Raelene warmed to the idea of Jesus and the business of forgiveness. The word sacrifice gave her goosebumps, reminding her of gory midday movies from childhood. She could see for herself what all this guff had done for Sherry and Dan; it was the thing that lit them up and she leaned toward it, even pined for it. If they’d been plain, homely people you’d have to dismiss everything they believed as weakness, as consolation, but they were beautiful. When someone as sexy as Sherry talked about becoming whole you had to take notice. Yet for all her yearning Raelene was not convinced of the details. She appreciated the sense of it — well, some of it — but she didn’t feel anything.

Even so there was a time on one of those walks home along the stormy beach when there was no moon out and you could sense the heavy cloud but not see it racing inland and you only had the pale, vague strip of sand to navigate by. Rae found herself walking with her hands outstretched, overcome by the apprehension that she was about to stumble into something on the smooth, empty beach. She became breathless, panicky, and just as she’d started muttering aloud, talking herself down from this queer spin she was getting herself into, a patch of stars opened up low in the sky ahead of her and stopped her in her tracks. At first she thought of a shimmering bit of cloth, like a piece of the dress her mother once got from a bloke she almost married, but the image didn’t last because she went on to thinking of candles and lamps and campfires and she felt woozy for a moment as if she was in the clouds herself and looking down through a gap to see the fires of a thousand desert camps. There were lights impossible to count and around them, in her mind’s eye, people huddled, all of them searching like herself, afraid, wondering, looking into their fires, with the sky a blank over them. She didn’t know why she thought of deserts and campfires except for the reading she’d been doing, all those name-strangled stories from the Old Testament that left her cold. That night in bed, still rattled by the dizzy moment on the beach, while Max honked and farted beside her, she remembered a night from childhood. Other fires. A long, flat estuary and the shadows of trees and the smell of prawns cooking. Crabs on the boil. The smell of mud. Mosquitoes. The whole beach strung with lamps and campfires, so many families out there in the dark dragging nets through the water and laughing. And out of the darkness a man singing. A high, lovely voice. So slowly around it, like the tide rising, the sound of others joining in, men’s voices, children, women, the whole night singing. But still at the core of it, that high sweet voice, her father’s, faceless forever in the dark.