Belonging and Escape Theme Analysis

After five years of high school the final November arrives and leaves as suddenly as a spring storm. Exams. Graduation. Huge beach parties. Biggie and me, we’re feverish with anticipation; we steel ourselves for a season of pandemonium. But after the initial celebrations, nothing really happens, not even summer itself. Week after week an endless drizzle wafts in from the sea. It beads in our hair and hangs from the tips of our noses while we trudge around town in the vain hope of scaring up some action. The southern sky presses down and the beaches and bays turn the colour of dirty tin. Somehow our crappy Saturday job at the meatworks becomes full-time and then Christmas comes and so do the dreaded exam results. The news is not good.

Right then I can’t imagine and end to the quiet. The horizon fades. Everything looks impossibly far off. In two hours I’ll hear Biggie and Meg in his sleeping bag and she’ll cry out like a bird and become so beautiful, so desirable in the total dark that I’ll begin to cry. In a week Biggie and Meg will blow me off in Broome and I’ll be on the bus south for a second chance at the exams. In a year Biggie will be dead in a mining accident in the Pilbara and I’ll be reading Robert Louis Stevenson at his funeral while his relatives shuffle and mutter with contempt. Meg won’t show. I’ll grow up and have a family of my own and see Briony Nevis, tired and lined in a supermarket queue, and wonder what all the fuss was about. And one night I’ll turn on the TV to discover the fact that Tony Macoli, the little man with the nose that could sniff round corners, is Australia’s richest merchant banker. All of it is unimaginable.

But the blitz truck was gone and the tractor, too. A great mound of coals smouldered on the sand. Where the big tent had been there were bottles and cans and the smooth imprints of mattresses and bodies. The harvest, he thought. There must be rain on the way. He took the hook from his pocket. It was blunt and misshapen. It shone in the sun. Vic’s leg throbbed and burned. He looked out across the sea for the first sign of cloud, for any kind of signal of a change in the weather, but the sea and the sky were as pale and blue and blank as sleep, as empty as he felt standing there on the lapping shore.

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.

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.

My mother had a kind of stiff-necked working class pride. After the old man bolted she became a stickler for order. She believed in hygiene, insisted upon rigour. She was discreet and deadly honest, and those lofty standards, that very rigidity, set her apart. Carol Lang went through a house like a dose of salts. She earned a reputation in the riverside suburbs where, in time, she became the domestic benchmark. She probably cleaned the houses of some of my wealthy classmates without any of us being the wiser.

In the old days, when they were kids, they played together off and on, the way you do when there are plenty of kids about and you find yourself falling in with someone for an hour or so. Cockleshell was bigger then and much more lively. With the meatworks and the whaling station still operating, the string of houses along the shore was full. It seemed that there were kids everywhere and they ran in a loose mob, roaming the bush and the estuarine flats in search of entertainment. Their hamlet had its own sign out on the bay road back then. Cockle Shoal. But then as now people called the place Cockleshell and that’s what Brakey knows it as.

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 in 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.

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.

In the spill of light at the bedside she saw the little dome and her man upon the waves. She said his name, too, said it aloud with love enough to send a shudder through Max as he pushed her down. She knew she was safe from him now, not safe from tonight but gone from him altogether. He smelt of death already, of burning, of bile and acid. He was crying and she did not pity him. He was gone and it didn’t matter when. Everything was new. In her dome it snowed birds as the van rocked, birds like stars. The moment Max speared into her and tore open her insides she was full of hot and certain feeling. She was free. She had already outlived him.

His brother rolled over. A fat red moon emerged from behind the highest, farthest dune. Frank felt sand in his shorts. His undies sagged, full and bulky with it, the way they were the day he pooped his pants at school. He remembered the way he had to wide-leg it to the toilets. With all the kids laughing. And how he locked himself inside to wait for his mother. How Max came in and said he’d kill him if he didn’t stop bawling and clean himself up. You’re adopted, he said, they found you on the tip, in a kennel. The day went on forever and their mother never came.

You can’t leave the window. You’re not sure what to look for but you know you have to be ready. From here you have a long, clear view. Responsibility is on you now, formless and implacable as gravity. You’re just waiting for them to make a move. Let them. Yes, let them try.

The stock of the weapon warms your cheek, keeps you steady. You can’t look at the bed for fear that you’ll lie down and sleep. You can do this. You can hold out for as long as it takes to have everyone home safe, returned to themselves and how things used to be. You cock you weapon.

Drugs, I spose. Never really understood it. Just that he’d fallen foul of em. And any question, any witness account died on the vine, didn’t matter who it came to. Felt like, whatever was going on I was the only bloke not in on it. And the city blokes were in on it; it was bigger than that little town, that’s for sure. So who do you talk to? Even if you’ve got the balls, who can you trust? It ate me alive. Ulcers, everything. I should have quit but I didn’t even have the courage to do that. Would have saved us all a lot of pain. But it’s all I ever wanted to do, you see, be a cop. And I hung on till there was nothing left of me, nothing left of any of us. Cowardice, it’s a way of life. It’s not natural, you learn it.

No, he decided. He’d say nothing. It was what he was best at now. When you’ve lost your pride there’s nothing left to say.

He lay there to wait it out. At the first break in the fog he’d take the camera up the rock and set the flash off at regular intervals. Eventually he’d guide the vollies up to where he was. It’d come out alright. They wouldn’t freeze to death. The girl, Marie, would forget her blubbering fear because she’d get her rescue piece on the front page. She’d have her victim, her ordeal, her stoic hero. It’d be a great story, a triumph, and none of it would be true.

All I knew was this, that I hadn’t been Boner’s friend at all. Hadn’t been for years. A friend paid attention, showed a modicum of curiosity, made a bit of an effort. A friend didn’t believe the worst without checking. A friend didn’t keep her eyes shut and walk away. Just the outline now, but I was beginning to see.

They’d turned me. They played with me, set me against him to isolate him completely. Boner was their creature. All that driving, the silence, the leeway, it had to be drugs. He was driving their smack. Or something. Whatever it was he was their creature and they broke him.

I sat in the car beneath the lighthouse and thought of how I’d looked on and seen nothing. I was no different to my parents. Yet I always believed I’d come so far, surpassed so much. At fifteen I would have annihilated myself for love, but over the years something had happened, something I hadn’t bothered to notice, as though in all that leaving, in the rush to outgrow the small-town girl I was, I’d left more of myself behind than the journey required.

Pull!

He led but did not fire. He thought of the boy lurking behind the curtain. The skeet hummed off into the twilight. It was important to know he could resist the urge.

Again? Called Fenn.

Yeah, said Vic. Pull.

He hit both targets and felt his face crease into a smile that tested every scab. This was different. It was strangely untroubling in its pointlessness. Fenn was right. Nothing got hurt.

He stood there firing until Keira went inside and the smell of roasting lamb wafted across the grass. He blasted away, pull after pull after pull, until he was covered in sweat and they were out of ammo and he realized that darkness had fallen around him and he was happy.