Tim Winton - The Turning

Oh, look at you, said Daisy. You poor love.

He’s looking so much better, said Gail. But it was frightening. Especially when it got close to his eye.

Nasty, said Fenn. You can go blind.

They know that, Fenn.

I was thinking aloud. I had a cousin with shingles once.

Thanks for the cuppa, said Vic. You mind if I duck up to the cabin for a bit of a lie-down?

I’ll drive you up, said Gail.

No, I’ll be right.

Bed’s made, love, said Daisy. Listen to me, I sound like my mother.

When Vic was gone, Gail made herself another cup of tea and watched Fenn go out to the kids again.

What a goose, said Daisy settling in beside her, resting her head against her shoulder.

They’re so lucky to have a father like him.

Yeah, murmured Daisy. I suppose they are.

Fenn climbed into the trough. Only his gut and his horny, white feet were visible as the kids climbed on him.

You must see the other sort too much, said Daisy. At work.

Yeah. But I was thinking about what it would be like. Being a little girl again, with a dad like that.

Speaking of fathers, tell me about this priest you’re seeing. What’s he like?

It’s a she, actually. She’s very unremarkable.

What’s remarkable is you seeing her. After everything they did to you. Please tell me it’s not just guilt that’s sent you back.

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it was at first. It’s been so awful, Daise. I’ve felt so horrible about it.

Well, you should have told him earlier.

He was a wreck. His parents had just died. After God knows how long, he sees them together in the same room again only to bury them both within a few weeks.

Telling him would have pulled him up, said Daisy. It would have given him something more immediate to think of.

Maybe. I dunno. I mean it’s just so grotty. The bloke was the motel manager. He was such a sleaze. I kind of sank into it.

Well, Christ, you were lonely.

Stop defending me. You’re worse than Vic.

He’s making excuses for you?

You know him. Circling the wagons on everyone else’s behalf.

It’s endearing, said Daisy, swishing the dregs in the pot.

And it’s a problem, Daise, a curse. You can’t compensate for everyone all your life. In the end you have to demand something of people.

Listen to you, Daisy said. She got up to tip the tealeaves into a slopbucket beside the ancient wood range. Isn’t that your story, too?

Gail smiled, conceding it. She thought of the long year past, of Vic finding his father after so much time and the way his past seemed to assail him. She’d tried so hard to understand his obsession that she all but entered into it. She drove to his home town and trudged its streets and beaches like a researcher imagining herself into his world and the slow wreck of his teenage years. In the end it was a kind of indulgence. There was nothing to show for it but more damage, more complication.

Vic’s problem, said Daisy, is he’s still the dutiful boy. Doing the right thing by his poor mother. Letting himself get screwed by the labour movement year in year out without a squeak. How long can you keep that shit up without a little bit of bad faith creeping in?

Yes, said Gail. But I suppose I could see myself in the same light. At what point are you just pretending?

Well, you’ve already blown your good-girl credentials.

Gail put a hand to her temple and managed a smile.

Will you stay together?

I don’t know, she said. I love him.

Well, said Daisy, flapping her sweaty dress. He’s probably worth it. All things considered.

Vic lay in the guesthouse with the windows open and the cries of birds and children drifting up the ridge. The cabin was built of corrugated iron and clad inside with local timber. There was a slate floor, a wood heater, a little bathroom. He liked it. But he was sure that Fenn and Daisy couldn’t really afford it. The debts would eat them alive and the thought made his head race. Their bucolic existence was precarious. They were good people, yea-sayers to life, but they exhausted him. He supposed it was rude getting up like that, ten minutes after arriving, but he’d felt so sapped by everybody’s solicitude that he had to go before he became too enfeebled to move at all. And they knew about Gail. She’d told them first. It made him more of an invalid than he could bear.

The neuralgia rattled him. It was usually the precursor to a relapse. And, God, he didn’t want to return to how he was at Christmas — the searing headaches, the blisters. Gail was right to be afraid. It frightened him too, this total collapse, because he felt his mind teetering at its limit. He’d been this close before but he’d never told her. At this great distance he could still see himself, the boy behind the curtain, cradling death in his arms. He was forty-four years old but he felt just as helpless. He knew what the boy didn’t, that you couldn’t keep soldiering on indefinitely. But beyond that, even at this age, he still didn’t know the first thing about saving himself.

When Vic woke it was the middle of the afternoon and all the shadows had moved so far across the room that it seemed he’d woken in a different cabin. The ghostly pain in his face was gone. He got up, put on his shoes and some sunglasses, and went out onto the little terrace of slates and river rocks. But for a solitary child bumping up and down on the trampoline, there was nobody visible down at the main house.

He walked out into the orchard. The air was cool. He knew he should probably go back for a jacket but he pressed on through the sloping lines of trees not wanting to interrupt this feeling of freshness, of respite.

But within a minute he was reviewing the morning’s conversation in the car. His blathering about basketball. Gail’s forbearance. His needling. Then her sudden news, the awful smarting shock of it. There was only the faintest trace left now. Did it mean that, deep down, he expected it, even thought he deserved it? That he forgave her already? Or that he felt so little because he was so abstracted, as far gone from her as she feared? He knew it was completely absurd, yet what had festered in his mind wasn’t the adultery at all, but something Gail said before that. When he told her about the Aboriginal teacher. Her reaction to his confession that he’d wanted to take the bloke for a drink but baulked.

Even though he was used to Gail’s exasperation, he’d never heard such raw dismay from her before. She thought he was a racist.

He knew it was bizarre that he could bear being cuckolded — yes, in time he probably could — but for your wife to think that of you? No, he couldn’t take it; it was too much. Yet, Christ, what kind of a stiff did that make him? It was sort of funny, in a sick way, and so typical of him. At a time like this, still anxious about his good name. He knew what other lawyers called him behind his back. The Redeemer.

He wanted to have it out now, to explain himself, clear it up, but he knew what a self-absorbed lunatic he’d look. It would prove Gail’s point that he was ensnared in the past. It would make things worse.

Anyhow he probably was a racist in other ways. He had an involuntary reaction against white South Africans. He didn’t care for the shape of Slavs’ heads — they tended to be flat at the back.

With his thoughts bolting away from him now, Vic tramped through regiments of trees until a child stepped out from behind a trunk and caused him to shriek.

Fenn and Daisy’s little girl stumbled back onto her bum and began to cry without a sound. After some hesitation he patted her fine blonde hair that stuck out at all angles from her head. He tried to hold the child’s hand but she wasn’t having any of it.