The Turning (15 page)

He pulls on some shorts and collides with his mother in the hallway. Before she can even get up off the floor, he’s opening the door to the Larwood boys in their pyjamas. Their faces shine
with light and tears. Behind them, down on the steps, Agnes stands with her back to him to watch her mother, a motionless silhouette, before the flames.

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?

R
AELENE 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.

That month, while Sherry and Dan rented the twenty-eight-footer beside the windmill, Raelene saw her new friend almost every day and when she didn’t she missed her. Some
mornings they walked over the dune to play on the beach with the girls or lie with them in the warm shallows of the lagoon. Sherry told the kids stories or helped them build sandcastles. She wrote
their names for them, did things Rae was often too slack to bother with. While Raelene worked on her tan out of the wind, Sherry plaited the girls’ hair and read to them. Rae lay there
listening, laughing, basking in the company as much as the sun. She hadn’t had such a friend since school and even then her friends were backstabbing bitches.

Sherry changed the mood of the van park. You could feel the atmosphere shift around her and it wasn’t just that every man within coo-ee wanted to get into her pants. It was something deep.
Some extra life to her.

Sherry’s bloke Dan worked office hours which is why he and Max never met that month. When Raelene finally met him his face lit up with recognition. Sherry, he said, never stopped talking
about her. He had short, dark hair and a square jaw like a swarthy Ken doll. That was it. The two of them. They
were
a bit Barbie and Ken. He was very handsome but a bit too well-groomed for
Rae’s taste. Max was a slob but at least he didn’t have girly-smooth hands. In fact they were a different species. Dan was funny but polite. He was attentive without staring at your
tits the whole time. He was comfortable with himself. Maybe, thought Rae, being the boss does that to you.

Max got up at three or four or five to go fishing. He spent afternoons down the pub or over at the clump of vans everybody called the Cesspit. He’d heard of Dan because his boat fished for
the company and he knew about Sherry because nobody could stop talking about her. But he never asked about either of them. He wanted to know where his thermos was and what was for dinner and when
the fuck his luck would change.

He’d always been Raelene’s kind of bloke, the sort of man her sisters always had, the kind their mother flirted with, blowing smoke and wisecracks from the side of her mouth. Rae
didn’t go men who dressed fancy or slapped on aftershave. She was a bit suss about TV men who talked about their feelings all the time and men who cried gave her the screaming creeps. Right
from the start Max was a bloke who didn’t muck around. He never pretended to be what he wasn’t. The night they met, at a twenty-first, he stared at her like a hungry man, like she was
food, and it made her feel powerful. All night she had tingles knowing he wanted her. During the speeches she led him behind the pool shed and with his cold belt buckle flapping against her thigh
and his hands strong beneath her she knew she had what she wanted. She couldn’t keep him a secret more than a few days. He was twenty and loaded with cash from fishing and he bought them both
tickets to Bali where they got trashed for a week and screwed themselves silly. When she brought him home her mother made a fool of herself and her sisters were jealous. Raelene didn’t hold
it against them – it was only natural.

But Max was getting a gut now. After years of slinging craypots his back was stuffed. There was no way he’d be able to hold her up against a pool shed anymore. His teeth weren’t
great and under his new beard his mouth was turning down at the sides like a man disappointed. Raelene couldn’t pin down when it was that Max turned sour. Maybe when the girls came along. Or
when he saw deckhands younger than him getting jobs as skippers. He said he wasn’t the brown-nosing sort, that you had to know the right people and there was some truth in that, but Rae knew
that Max pissed people off. In the pub they called him Aggro Max. He often came home bloody and sore, especially after a live game on the big screen. His brother Frank was a footballer and
you’d think he’d be proud but he wasn’t. Just the sight of Frank loping out onto the ground made him scowl and the slightest fumble turned Max into a maniac. At first people
thought it was funny to hear him call his brother a fairy, a retard, a waste of skin, but Frank was a star, a local, and White Pointers loved him.

Raelene imagined that she still loved Max. When they made love the whole van rocked. Whatever kind of bastard he was, he still needed her. After all these years he had that hungry look, staring
at her arse and thighs when she got dressed, and the feeling that gave her was something she couldn’t explain, not even to Sherry.

Sherry wasn’t the nosy type, yet she was a good listener and now and then, lulled by the sun and the lapping water, Rae let on a little about Max and her. There was something neat about
Sherry, something prim, so she tried to shock her with talk about Max and her in bed. Sherry surprised her by laughing and countering with stories of her own, what Dan liked, what she let him do.
Sex is a blessing, she said. She was unshockable. Even when Raelene told her about Max’s temper Sherry seemed more thoughtful than disgusted. Rae held back a lot of details but Sherry’d
seen her face. She knew.

Love conquers all, said Sherry.

I dunno, she said doubtfully. Sometimes I don’t think so.

You just need a little faith to see you through, Rae. You’re a good wife, a good mother. Everything happens for a purpose, you know. You’ll be alright, I just know it.

Talk like that heartened Raelene. She came away feeling good about herself and she stood in front of the narrow mirror and saw that she was still pretty. Smoking had left pucker lines around her
mouth but her tummy was flat and her skin was clear and tanned. She was the same dress size she’d always been. She was no Sherry, though the boys from the Cesspit still paid her close
attention whenever she walked by, and compared to some other women in town, like the girls in the Tuesday night darts team, she was a deadset trophy.