Tim Winton - The Turning

The cray season wound down into the last lean days of May. It hadn’t been much of a season to begin with but now, with four weeks left and the water cold and the swell up most days, Max came in shitty. He was on two-day pulls; he should have been mellow but Rae could see he’d be looking for work in the off-season and the prospect made him nasty. He snarled at her, turned his nose up at her cooking and pissed his pay away at the pub. In the first week of June his brother quit football, just walked. It was a scandal. Max put a bloke through the window of the pub. There was talk of him pressing charges. He pushed Rae’s face into the fridge door and her eye came up something awful.

While her shiner was still puffy Raelene drove Sherry to Perth with the girls for a day. The country was green again, the light soft and grey. The girls slept.

You know you should leave him, Rae, said Sherry. I have to say it. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t say it.

Raelene was shocked. She put a hand to her eye. She’d really bogged the make-up on but it hadn’t fooled anybody. Having Sherry say this — it was like a betrayal. She’d never once judged Rae before.

I’m saying it as your friend, Rae. I mean it. We could get you somewhere today, someplace safe.

I’ve got no money.

I’ll give you money.

You’re paying me to leave him?

Rae.

What about love conquers all?

Nobody has to put up with—

And commitment? And forgiveness? All that stuff you talk, it’s just talk then?

No, Rae.

Raelene suddenly felt like shit. It was worse than being hit. But she refused to give in and howl. She looked out at the road. This was her day in town.

In the city they trolled through boutiques and sat in cafés and let the kids arse about on escalators in department stores. They were careful with each other, subdued, but Raelene enjoyed herself. She came upon a shop that sold only religious stuff, books and crosses and statues of Mary. Sherry was amused by its gaudy window display but surprisingly reluctant to go inside.

A shop full of holy hardware, Rae. It’s not really me.

I don’t get you, said Rae. C’mon, it’ll be fun.

I’ll buy the girls an icecream, said Sherry.

Annoyed and bewildered, Raelene agreed to meet outside in ten minutes. She went in and checked out the books on prayer and the beads and the photos of the Pope in his bubble car. There was a whole table of statues, mostly Mary and the baby Jesus, and some with Christ holding his heart half out of his chest. Lying flat were several crucifixes with a suffering body on them. Always the crown of thorns, dabs of blood, a big, tanned, manly chest, a loincloth. Beside all these were snow-domes, the kind of thing you shook to make snow. They featured nativity scenes, mostly, but one in particular caught her eye. It was Christ walking on water. She knew the story. Yet it wasn’t the setting that captivated her, nor was it the fact that the blizzard you created when you shook the little dome was not snow but a descending cloud of tiny white doves. She was seized by the look of him, his hair flying in the wind, the robe pulled back from his chest. He was all man.

She bought it and when she saw it Sherry gave a wry smile and just shook her head.

On the drive home they relaxed with one another again. Sherry talked about her old job as a legal secretary, told her how the drink had cost Dan the biggest job of his life, how humiliating it was, what it was like to see a man reduced to an incontinent, screaming mess.

And you didn’t leave him, said Rae.

No, Sherry conceded. I never left him.

They drove in silence for a bit, the girls exhausted and dozing, the paddocks falling by, rolling green beneath a haze of rain.

The born-again business, asked Raelene. What’s it like?

Sherry sighed thoughtfully. Well, she said, it’s about getting into—

I don’t mean what it’s about, Rae interrupted. I mean, what it feels like.

Sherry glanced at her, confused.

The moment you suddenly got it, when it clicked, said Rae. You know, the change. When you turned, or whatever you call it.

Oh, murmured Sherry, that.

Yeah, said Raelene half laughing. That.

Well, it was a moment, actually.

Just curious how it felt.

Like a hot knife going into me, murmured Sherry sounding all foggy, a woman with her pillow voice on. Like. . like I was butter and here was this knife opening me up. That’s the best way I can describe it.

Raelene could only nod, saddened but somehow fortified in the knowledge, the confirmation this gave her, that she didn’t believe. She’d come near, she was sure. From desperation, from outright need. Times when she and Sherry and Dan talked she felt tantalizingly close to some kind of breakthrough. True, she was often overwhelmed by emotion at their place, but that was, she now realized, just friendship, mere love. And once, walking home, there were the stars, that heady moment. That was the closest she felt. For a few days she’d thought she was only an arm’s length, a breath away from copping something. But there was no piercing moment, no sudden unmistakable feeling .

You’re happy, then? she asked. You and Dan?

Lucky, said Sherry. Grateful. Very happy.

Rae thought of them, doomed to drink orange juice and endless cups of tea with awful secrets and lost careers behind them, childless and peculiar, stuck in a shitty little joint like White Point after what they’d done and where they’d been. Still happy. Unless they were fakers. But she doubted it. She’d watched them too long, too closely. She was, finally and indisputably, jealous.

By the end of that week there was no heat left in the June sun. Raelene dug the warm clothes from the bottom of the closet, all the sexless shrouding gear she hated, the girls’ nylon dressing gowns, their winceyette pyjamas, the whole lot stinking of mothballs bad enough to make your eyes water. The sea was up so often Max hardly went and when he did the catch was never enough to cover fuel and bait; they were losing money. He was around all the time and with the rain thrashing the roof and walls day after day, the caravan felt like a 44-gallon drum they were all crammed into.

The few days Max went surfing he came home sated, almost content, but the rest of the time he was just simmering. Rae was glad when he had ropework to do at his skipper’s shed, even relieved when he drifted over to the Cesspit to get wasted all day with the single blokes.

After her trip to the city Raelene didn’t see as much of Sherry and Dan. She knew they were puzzled but she felt a distance between her and them, something she couldn’t bridge. Only rarely did she drop by on a Tuesday night. More often she rugged up in her mothbally coat and walked the beach alone. She looked at stars when they were out but never felt any dizzy moments again. She thought about her father once or twice, wondered where he was. He was just a hole in her life now, no more than a shape, something she wanted but couldn’t really remember. By her bed she kept the little cheap-arse snowdome of Jesus walking on the water. She liked the dinky birds and his rock star hair and how his chest looked, bared by the billowing robe. He had real pecs and a six-pack. Like a bodybuilder. He was ripped. After a few Bundy-and-Cokes she liked to think of him in his little dome and her in her little aluminium box, both of them trapped.

She was painting her toenails one afternoon, half watching the girls arrange their smelly cuttle collection on the old car seat they used as a sofa, when through the open flap of the annexe Raelene saw Max striding purposefully across the grass. Her skin tingled with alarm. She’d thought he was at the pub.

She got up to meet him, went out into the dull day, but he seized her by the arms and bullocked her back into the annexe. She felt the van slam into her back and head and he pinned her there.