Less than a year after the child died, Bob Lang did a runner, quit the Force and disappeared. Vic has a compensatory element to his character. When he talks about his pro bono clients you can see the earnest teenager in him. You can picture him battling on with his mother, feeling responsible for her as the only man, the only child in her life. And then I think of Strawberry Alison and his boyhood conviction that he alone understood her trouble, that only he saw the true face behind the mask. So endearing until you think of it turned your way. It’s no fun wondering if your husband’s love could be another act of kindness, whether there’s something about you he feels you need to be compensated for, as if you too qualify as his sort of damaged goods. Trust me, these weekends aren’t all whales and bracing sea-mist. Some days I stay in and get plastered. Several times now the motel manager has come to the door to ask me to keep the racket down.
During his school years Vic maintained a kind of adoring surveillance of Alison, though he made sure he only followed her brazenly once a week. More than this, he knew, would be creepy. He hated the way other girls finished her sentences for her, how they patronized her by pretending to be envious of her long, smooth legs and ran their fingers through her glossy hair until he wanted to shove them into the lockers and shout in their faces. Yet he had to concede that some of their envy might be genuine because Alison did have fantastic legs and her hair was lustrous to the point of causing physical pain. Although he loved her face above all else, Vic grew more and more aware of her body. He was just a stick, a boy, and day by day as she grew more womanly, she became less attainable. Yet something in him refused to let go. During the day he dreamt of piling her into a car and tearing out of town. They’d go north. He’d rescue her, love her, marry her. White dress. Definitely no veil. He worked himself up into a romantic fantasy. But at night he got himself into far simpler turmoil thinking of her long legs around him and her breasts in his hands.
He found that the only legitimate way to watch Alison was on the netball court, where he could be part of a crowd, even if it struck some people as unusual. Here nobody patronized her. When she played centre she drew no pity; she was a fearsome thing, a cutthroat player with a temperament to match her face. In the exertion of the game both her cheeks and all of her neck grew red. Vic stood back a little or even watched through the chain-link fence as Alison cut them up. Whenever he stood near the half-time huddle he swore he felt the heat off her.
As a boy Vic was not the confiding sort. Nothing’s changed in that regard. He never told his mates about his thing for Alison but his obsession must have been hard to conceal. The others were onto him. They thought it was funny. Who cares about the mantelpiece, they said, when you’re busy stoking the fire? He didn’t bother to explain himself. He just watched Alison and kept his ear to the ground. It was a small enough town for news to travel quickly and Vic knew who took her to the drive-ins and who claimed to have gone all the way, but he dismissed most of it as wishful thinking. Not every girl at the drives was like the legendary Slack Jackie. The stories about Alison didn’t bear scrutiny.
You could say that Vic grew up in Alison’s shadow. He had a few girlfriends in high school but he was inattentive. The girls assumed his distraction was the usual male malaise but in his case it wasn’t his mates who were constantly hovering at the edge of his mind.
In her final year of school as the netball captain, as a girl thought by most to have overcome a cruel twist of fate, Alison published a short but puzzling poem in the school magazine. As far as anybody could tell the poem was about two girls in flames. Vic overheard some teachers discussing the image in the library. What a shame it was, they said, that the girl hadn’t conquered her defect after all. Despite everything we’ve done for her. It’s indulgent. You just can’t let yourself be defined by these things.
Indulgent or not, Vic liked the poem. The teachers’ talk outraged him. He found himself suddenly emboldened. With a copy of the school magazine under his arm Vic marched down to the changerooms to confront Alison as she emerged for training. She looked startled. Right off the mark he declared that he loved her poem and then, to his own horror, he went on to testify to his love for her. She burst into tears and retreated to the changeroom. Vic stood there a moment before he thought of the posse of girls inside. He fled.
And then Alison graduated, got on the Westrail bus and headed for the city.
I’m ten years younger than Vic. I was brought up in the suburbs. So much of his youth seems to have taken place in an altogether different country – the teenage pregnancies, the roll-call of who died or went to jail before they reached majority – and the soundtrack of his youth is different from mine, but we do share a sense of having lived under siege. We each knew about the transmission of fear, and the fatigue associated with living in a circumscribed world. For me it was the church and for him the town, and for both of us the weird culture of family. When Vic and I met we were emerging from lives of vigilance and I think we liberated each other. Which is why I don’t give up on him. We’re part of each other’s survival. But it’s gone awry since his parents died. He’s frozen over, shut down. And there’s this unsettling reversion to thinking about Strawberry Alison, as though he’s not just mourning his parents and his newly-remembered sister, but his whole boyhood, the gauche lad that he was. I’m always trying to convince him to come with me to the old place and face down a few ghosts. I keep thinking we should buy a panel van and cruise the beaches for a month. But he’s not having any of it and I’m sick of waiting. I don’t feel it but, for God sake, I’m still young. Some Fridays I’m tempted to quit him altogether. These past few weekends I’ve come close.
His mother died of cancer. His father was there for it. Out of the blue, after twenty-something years. Two days of family and then the old man went back out bush and fell down a disused mineshaft. I only met him the once at poor Carol’s bedside. He was so thin and proud. And sober. Like a man from another era. His dying wife was incandescent. Rage, love, forgiveness. The feeling between them was so strong I could barely stay in the room.
In his last year of school Vic did what all country boys did. He rode around in cars and saved for one of his own. He went to parties and got smashed on Brandovino and Blackberry Nip. Out at salmon camps along the coast he smoked dope and lost his virginity. He felt what it was like to get a Holden airborne at a hundred miles an hour. He studied hard and thought about being a lawyer. He looked after his mother. He heard the rumours about Strawberry Alison at university and he tried to keep an open mind.
Word came back to town that Alison was a born-again lesbian. It was something she picked up at uni, like vegetarianism. Vic found it hard to believe. For him she was still the epitome of regular sex, real sex, normal sex. Those long legs, her downy arms and white teeth, the swing of blonde hair and the crimson veil across her face. And yet, re-reading that old poem, he began to wonder. Two girls in flames. What longing had he really seen in Alison’s eyes?
At year’s end, with the final exams behind him, Vic drove out with his classmates to Massacre Point where somebody had a bonfire going and a keg open. He’d barely been there five minutes when a little green Renault pulled up and two girls got out. One of them had black curls thick and long as a cape and the other, the one with the crewcut, might have gone unrecognized if it hadn’t been for the birthmark vivid in the firelight as she strode up. There was a moment of suspension. Music but no talk. Kids looked across the fire at each other as if gauging the mood, and then they all surged forward to greet Strawberry Alison. Except for Vic who was left with her girlfriend, the Italian beauty. For half an hour he drank beer and asked polite questions about university when all he wanted to know was what it was like to make love to Alison. What did it feel like to have her cheek against yours on the pillow? The dark-haired girl was witty and gorgeous. She made Alison finally impossible. But to his surprise he felt no envy.
When Alison joined them he jerked like a startled horse.
I still love your poem, he
heard himself say.
And I still love you for loving it, said Strawberry Alison.
There was, for Vic, nothing else to say. He went home early and missed the best and worst of the party. When he woke, his mother told him that two girls had hit a tree out on the coastal highway. The car exploded on impact and incinerated them both.
Around noon Vic drove back out toward Massacre Point and found the big gouged marri tree on the bend and he walked out with the others across the blackened paddock and thought of the crimson splash of flame Alison had sent forth and wondered if she had foreseen her own death.
I’ve been out there myself more than once. The tree is still scarred. The white crosses are gone. This winter the paddock is swimming with green hay. I’ve seen photos of the girl and read her poem and both seem unremarkable except for the fact that they entranced the boy who became my husband. I sit in a motel like a woman waiting for a man to show up. I go out to the cliffs with binoculars to see whales find their way in from the southern mist and I walk here in this paddock, stubbornly, wondering at the heat each of us leaves in our wake.
Small Mercies
PETER DYSON CAME HOME ONE DAY to find his wife dead in the garage. He’d only been gone an hour, kicking a ball in the park with their four-year-old son. The Ford’s motor was still running, its doors locked, and even before he knew it for certain, before he put the sledge-hammer through the window, before the ambulance crew confirmed it, he was grateful to her for sparing the boy.
He held himself together until the funeral and then for a few weeks he lost his mind. His mates avoided him, but their wives rallied to save him. He drank alone until he blacked out. When he bothered to eat he forked up food straight from the casserole dishes his friends’ wives left him when they dropped Ricky back in the evenings. One morning he woke beside one of those wives and she was weeping.
Thereafter Dyson endeavoured, for the sake of his son, to lead a decent, stable, predictable existence, something as close to normal as a ruined man could manage. Though he hated the house now and the city around it, he was determined to stay on in Fremantle for Ricky’s sake, so that his year of kindergarten might proceed uninterrupted.
And somehow the better part of a year fell by. Ricky smiled, unbidden, and seemed to forget his mother for weeks at a time. It was a mercy. Dyson worked a couple of days a week. He did not see friends, he wasn’t sure he had any left. His life was not joyless yet its pleasures were close to theoretical. He appreciated more than he felt. Still, he believed that he was making progress. He was not reconciled but he was recovering.
What undid him was not the approaching anniversary of his wife’s death but the onset of winter. He was, quite suddenly, overtaken by disgust.
All it took was a change in the wind. He hated winter. The first major cold front of the season was heralded by the usual blustering nor’wester, a wind that always seemed used up and clammy, too eerily warm for what lay behind it, but this gusting breeze was especially dirty because Dyson woke early to the terrible stink of sheep. Being a country boy, he wasn’t particularly sensitive to the smell of livestock. But this was the concentrated urinal stench of thousands of merinos being stacked in a floating high-rise. Down on the docks they were loading live cargo for the Saudis. Rising to pull down the window sash he found that the odour was in the curtains already. Outside on the line, the damp washing was tainted. The whole town was overtaken.
At breakfast Ricky wanted to know where the stink came from. There was no point in keeping the sordid details from him. They’d have to pass the ships on the way to kindy anyway and he’d see for himself how they jammed them in tier upon tier. He told the boy about the weeks the animals spent at sea and the awful heat and the mortality rates and how the knives awaiting them at the other end must come as cruel relief after such an ordeal. Ricky grew silent. Dyson regretted his frankness. Neither of them could finish breakfast for the smell of death in the house. Dyson helped the boy dress and afterwards, trying to shave, he began to shake. He suddenly knew there was no way he was going down into that garage this morning. Even if he could make himself roll up the door and start the car, the smell of monoxide would set him off. You couldn’t trust yourself to drive in that sort of state, not with a child in the car. The whole business was suddenly at the back of his throat; he was brimming.
Ricky enjoyed the taxi ride. Dyson smiled for him despite the sick smell of the driver’s sweat and the oppressive babble of FM radio blasting into him from behind. When the boy was safely delivered, Dyson got out at the public pool whose sun-shades and pennants snapped and lurched in the mounting gale.
The pool was a grim morning ritual. The point was supposed to be to lose weight and regain some fitness but the real benefit lay in the monotony of swimming laps. For half an hour every morning, while he hauled himself through the water, he went mercifully blank. He preferred this time of day because the initial rush was over, the wiry execs and hairy machos were gone and the average lap speed was less frenetic. Mothers, retirees and a few shy students swam without hounding each other up the lanes.
But this morning the changerooms seemed unaccountably damp. Their pungent cocktail of bleach and mildew made his head spin. Even the pool water felt wrong; it was soupy and the chlorine made him gag. On his first lap every breath tasted of sheep piss. It was a relief to feel the distracting chill of wind-driven rain on his back.
He always liked the way the pool rendered the plainest body handsome. It cheered him to see the fat become stately and the aged graceful. Today, in an effort to break this dangerous mood, he concentrated on the feet kicking ahead of him and the pearly bubbles that trailed in their wake. Lap after lap he found himself behind a woman whose toenails were lacquered a kind of burgundy. It was the colour that initially caught his attention. There was something luscious about it. He became mesmerized by the symmetry of the woman’s toes and then by the delicate veins that stood out in the high arches of her feet which, against the chemical blue of the pool, were as white and comely as those of any classical statue.
He crawled along, bewitched in the woman’s wake. She was a good swimmer. Her legs were strong. As she churned through the water ahead of him he watched the movement of her calves, her working thighs and the mound of her buttocks. She was beautiful. He loved her belly in the nylon sheath of her Speedo suit and the way her breasts moulded to her. The water he swam in became turbulent. Without realizing it, he’d sped up until the woman’s feet were almost striking him in the face and when he backed off he lost rhythm. Dyson tried to shift his attention from the swimmer ahead by taking an interest in people passing in other lanes, but it was no better. They were, all of them, lithe and delicious. He had a perilous urge to reach out and touch smooth limbs, to lay his cheek, his ear, his lips against every firm belly. Each new swimmer, male and female, was more beautiful than the one before and he swam without really breathing for fear of interrupting this view of perfection until his stroke became ragged and the air he was forced to gulp tasted foul. Blots and sparks rose behind his eyes and he blundered, gagging, against the lane rope to hang there like a piece of snagged trash.
When he had recovered somewhat, the sky was dirty-dark above him. As they climbed from the pool his fellow swimmers regained their varicose veins and moles and hanging guts. The sudden ugliness of everything was crushing. He felt a poisonous surge of revulsion towards everything around him but nothing disgusted him more than himself.
During his final punitive sprint to the wall, the water around him was all Band-Aids, floating scabs and hanks of hair. He was roiling through sweat and spit and other people’s piss and when he hoisted himself out, the air was just as brothy.
On all fours, dripping and panting until he began to sob and cause people to step around him in consternation, he knew that things were wrong, that he had to make a change. Everything here was tainted now. Continuing to pretend otherwise was simply and finally beyond him.
In the spring Dyson packed up and moved south
. He took possession of his mother’s house on the hill above the harbour in Angelus. He knocked out a wall and painted the rest in colours that would have made his mother blanch. The roof was fair, the foundations good and being home gave him a sense of satisfaction that might once have alarmed him. He was not blind to the irony of starting over in a house and a community he’d long ago left behind, but it was a ready and practical option and it was the least disruptive for Ricky who seemed to love the place. Right at the outset Dyson sensed how much less force of will it took for him to be himself in front of his son and this new ease seemed to relax the boy. He’d never seen so clearly how this worked, how the boy took his emotional cues from him. He couldn’t imagine what he’d done to the kid already without realizing it. He had to think of the future and to seem happy with their new start.
Although Ricky was enrolled at a kindergarten an easy walk from the house, Dyson kept him home for the first week of term so they could explore the old town together and he could give the kid his bearings. They walked the white beaches and hiked over the granite bluffs that dominated the harbour. From a windswept lookout, staring south across the whitecapped open ocean, they tried to picture the ice, the penguins, the very bottom of the world. Back at home Ricky passed nails while Dyson built him a cubbyhouse between the peppermints in the backyard. In the evenings, for as long as they could stand the cold, clean wind, they watched the lights of ships track through the narrow entrance to the encircling harbour. Rain chattered on the roof at night as father and son lay spooned together in bed.
For a day or so Ricky was fascinated by the idea that this was once his grandmother’s house. He was so young when she died that he didn’t really remember her but he insisted on seeing photographs, especially those few with him and his grandmother together. Dyson dreaded the photo albums but let the boy thumb through them, enthralled. Within the hour, Ricky had moved on to some fresh enthusiasm. He was small for his age, a serious dark-eyed child, curious and rarely fearful. Dyson himself had been, he gathered, much like him. He treasured the boy for selfish reasons. Ricky was the only thing that offered his life any meaning. He couldn’t bear to think what damage the past year had done him.