It takes a week or more before Brakey admits it to himself - he's watching her. The only reason he comes down here among the peppermints at sundown is to see Agnes Larwood light her kero lamp onshore, take up her gidgie and begin wading the shallows in search of cobbler. Some evenings she digs for cockles if the tide is low enough, and he has seen her scooping crabs over on the flat, but mostly she's out there with the gidgie looking for cobbler to spear.
He lurks back in the gloom of the trees, the last of the sun in the hills behind him, while she moves slowly through the water with the lantern held away from her. Orange light glows on her calves. She travels so cautiously that the water folds away from her shins in silence. Now and then she goes all still and he observes the barely perceptible drawing back of her arm, the spear almost invisible in her hand. Suddenly the water erupts at her feet and a second later the sound of the splash carries to him. In the lampglow, the writhing catfish comes up skewered shiny-black and she slops to shore to kill it and pull the venomous spines from its head with pliers. She slips the fish into the bag slung across her shoulder, looks up a moment so that her face is illuminated and her eyes seem to be looking straight into his, before straightening and turning back to the water, lamp in hand.
Same as every other night Brakey stops following when the peppermint grove peters into a tangle of teatrees and bamboo. To keep a parallel course with her through that lot would be a noisy and perilous business in the dark, so he squats to watch her work her way from view, a silhouette for a time, then a bud of light and then she's lost behind the curve of the point. He feels a pang of loss. He can't believe he's feeling any of this. He's known Agnes Larwood all of his life and now he can't keep his eyes off her. It's as though he's turned into some sort of perv. He sat next to Agnes a whole year in primary school. She lives fifty metres away. They're on the same damn bus every morning and now he's noticing her. She's not beautiful, not like her older sister, Margaret, the one who ran away to the city with the bloke from the superworks. Maybe you could call Agnes pretty, but what does that mean? It doesn't explain the sudden hunger, this terrible fascination. A fortnight ago she was bog-ordinary. Agnes bloody Larwood. But tonight his blood is charging, it whacks in him like something trapped and it's been this way for a solid week.
He hunkers down to wait. Leaf litter from the peppermints smells medicinal. Out across the water a car whines in the distance.
Agnes. Agnes? Agnes.
While she's gone he pictures her in his head. Thin arms and legs, brown from summer. Short hair, also brown. Or brownish. An even sort of face with, yes, regular teeth from the few recent memories of her smiling or speaking. Somehow, in his mind she still has her milk teeth, for that's when he recalls her most vividly when they were younger. Even. Regular. Brownish. Pretty. Ish.
In the old days, 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.
He wonders how long he should wait. His mother gets anxious. All week she's been testy because he's come home long after dark. She spends most of her time feeling abandoned or preparing to be so and it's wearing him out. He crouches there a few more minutes, persecuted by mosquitoes, and when there's no sign of Agnes coming back his way, he gives up. In the moonless dark, he feels his way with bare feet and puts an arm out to fend off lurking branches. In a couple of minutes he sees the house lights, his place and hers. At this angle they're close enough to be a single glow but by the time he's clear of the peppermint grove they're distinct. Two weatherboard houses. Church music from the Larwood place, the smell of frying onions from his.
Inside, his mother is silent at the stove. The table's set. He washes his hands and settles himself into the silence she's prepared for him. He already knows what his mother thinks. To her, the world is a treacherous place. Nothing lasts. People cheat. They leave. They just up and leave. The look of reproach she gives him now is but a variation on her whole demeanour; the assumption in every glance, every sigh, every mute chink of cutlery, is that he too will leave her high and dry, just as the old man did three years ago. He's fifteen and it's old news. He feels sorry for her, protective still, but he's had a gutful. He wants her to get over it but he senses that it's beyond her.
Leave the dishes, she says when they finish eating.
It's orright.
I said leave them.
He shrugs and goes to his room. Through the louvres he can still hear the holy roller music from the Larwoods. In the old days it was only ever screaming that you heard. The sound of breaking glass, the thud of feet on the floorboards. Eric Larwood, smashed out of his head, lurching from room to room. Some mornings Mrs Larwood hung the washing out with shaking hands, her bruises plain from Brakey's place. There were times when she came across the grass at night with a trail of sobbing kids in tow, and they bedded down in the lounge while Brakey's old man got his trousers on and went over to pacify the mad bugger.
The Larwoods were Poms. In the early days, when they were more migrants than locals, their whiny accent was stronger. Their house smelled of piss and fags and kero as though they never opened the windows. It's been a long time since Brakey was inside that house. He wonders if the Larwood kids still wet the bed. He tries to imagine Agnes Larwood as a bedwetter. He doesn't even know the colour of her eyes; she's always looking down or away. Brownish, at a guess. He wonders if she still has that Larwood smell of cigarette smoke and cabbage and kero.
Old Eric was shop steward at the meatworks in the busy days. Now the meatworks is gone and the union's collapsed and he's nobody. He's quiet nowadays. It's been years since he's been on a rampage. Brakey's mother used to have a lot to say about the Larwoods but when Agnes's big sister Margaret took off at sixteen she did nothing more than sigh knowingly.
Brakey lies all evening on his bed. The television murmurs through the wall. Church music wafts across the yard. He thinks of the two houses as becalmed, subdued, as though the life is mostly gone from them. He imagines the Larwoods sitting around in silence with only the chuckle of the kero heater between them when the music gives out.
At the bus stop next morning, in the shade of the red flowering gum, he feels her looking at him. She's metres away, separate from her little brothers and the snooty private schoolers from round the yacht club, and she looks up scowling from her book again to drill him with her gaze. Brown. Her eyes are brown. He looks away as the bus creaks in off the bay road and the small crowd stirs.
Brakey, she says, so close behind him that he grunts in startled surprise. Brakey, what're you doing?
What? I'm on the bus.
This week. At night. Why're you following me?
He half turns to her. She smells milky. Her teeth are grown-up teeth. There's sun in the short spikes of her hair.
It's bugging me, she says.
He licks his lips, considers denying it. Even plans to ignore her now that, across the aisle, a couple of heads have turned their way.
Sorry, he croaks.
Did you do your maths?
Nah.
Bugger. Thought you might -
Agnes doesn't finish because the next stop is up and Brakey's mate Slater is getting on. She sits back - he feels her retract - as Slater slouches down the aisle. Slater is a sex maniac. He blew up his mother's vacuum cleaner in an experiment no sane person would have thought of. Half the school still calls him the Electrolux Man. He knows all kinds of stuff about porn but girls are a total mystery to him. Slater is fun sometimes but he is not a bloke to confide in. Agnes Larwood will have to be a secret. At school she's not a complete tragic, but she's not exactly popular either. Brakey knows he'll have to be careful.
School happens in a kind of fog. He doesn't really take anything in, not even the fact that Agnes sits two rows from him in maths. Nor does he see anything unusual in the cops turning up during English and taking Brad Benson out.
It was that man from the bank, says his mother. He jumped off at the Big Hole. Everyone's talking about it.
Brad Benson's dad?
Found his car and shoes. Still looking for the body.
Hell, he says standing there on the verandah with the orange juice sweating in his hand.
They all run away in the end, says his mother going inside and letting the screen door slap to.
Hot with sudden anger, Brakey throws the juice, glass and all, out on to the unmowed grass and slopes off. One day, he thinks. One day I'll be one of em, Mum, and you'll be happy.
He walks aimlessly up the bay and after the best part of two hours he finds himself heading back past the yacht club with the sun low on the hills behind him, his outbound footprints heading at him all the way along the shore. He sees that the marks from his heels are deep and the big toe of his left foot drags a gouge at every step. A few small boats are out. He sees old Percy the commercial netter in his long dory, head down over his oars. Some kids are sailing out past the flats but there's not much breeze. On the sand at his feet, left by the outgoing tide, blowfish and jellies glisten in death. He kicks them aside spitefully. He's tired now but wild still and pent up.
In the lee of the yacht club, where the bush gives way to the posh new housing estate, he comes upon Agnes Larwood as she sits on the sand to pull on her old tennis shoes.
You're early, he says.
So are you.
With his bare foot Brakey nudges the gidgie lying in the sand beside her. It's little more than a broomstick with a five-pronged head. The barbs are rusty.
Hear about Mr Benson?
He nods.
Terrible, eh.
Yeah.
Poor Brad.
I don't like him, says Brakey.
Me neither, but it's still awful.
Yes, he murmurs, suddenly ashamed of himself.
He watches her tie the laces of her old Dunlop Volleys.
What did you used to call them again? he says. In the old days.
These? Plimsolls.
That's it. Plimsolls.
You all laughed.
Yeah.
We were fresh off the boat, I spose, she says pulling the hessian bag to her and slipping the cotton strap over her bare shoulder. The rank odour of it rises between them.
Real Poms, he murmurs.
Agnes gets to her feet. She brushes the sand from her shorts. The light is dirty now; it's much later than he's realised.
Mind if I... come along?
She shrugs. You've got no shoes.
I'll be right. You've got a lamp.
Suit yourself.
For a long time they wade the clear, sandy flats without speaking. Eventually she lets him hold the little kero lamp so that he doesn't feel so useless. It means he needn't trail along behind her for fear of stepping on anything or spoiling her shots. There are a few crabs about but no cobbler until they work their way back to the seagrass alongside the boatpens. Now he wishes fervently that he had shoes. The seagrass is dark brown, almost black in the lamplight, and the whiskery little catfish are hard to detect against it. As Agnes spears three in quick succession, and he watches while she pulls the poisonous spines off them with the pliers, he wonders how many more they're walking past without seeing at all.
Ugly buggers aren't they? he murmurs.
I spose.
Anytime he tries to make even the quietest conversation he finds himself slipping against the glassy intensity of her concentration. His stomach is growling now. The light southerly freshens a little. The ripples on the surface make it harder to see fish on the weedy bottom. Rigging pings against masts above them and mooring lines begin to groan. The slop of water against a hundred hulls makes him think of people eating. Back at the clubhouse there's music. The smoke of a barbecue streams from one of the sleek brick houses of the new subdivision.
The seagrass feels both slippery and gritty underfoot. Brakey thinks of all those times Agnes and her family sought refuge at his place in the middle of the night. He supposes it's why Agnes and he haven't spoken for years. It must be kind of embarrassing for her. He walks close to her. He can hear her breathing. Moths plop against the light in his hand. It surprises him that the Larwoods are so broke that Agnes has to spear fish every night to keep them going. He doesn't know how much the dole is and can't recall Mrs Larwood ever going out to work. Old Eric hardly leaves the house these days, as far as Brakey can tell, but when you do see him sitting out on an old kitchen chair under the flame tree, he looks like a man beaten beyond saving. Brakey wants to ask her so many things. He wants to eat something too, or at least run his hand through the stubble of Agnes's hair.
Then there's a sudden shock up his leg. He lurches sideways. The hot glass of the lamp kisses his bare thigh for a moment and he yelps shamefully and staggers shoreward without even waiting for Agnes. The pain is like having a rusty nail driven into the ball of his foot. He flings himself down on the damp sand and draws the light to himself so he can examine the puncture and the swelling white flesh around it. He's heard of old men having heart attacks and ladies having pethidine injections to beat the pain but he just wants to shit all of a sudden and have the luxury of writhing about and swearing his head off. Agnes slops in out of the dark. On the jetty above them someone laughs and he's filled with sudden hatred for all these poncy new bastards overtaking Cockleshell day by day.
It was only a matter of time, says Agnes. You okay?
I'm bloody wonderful, he spits.
He gets up, flailing a moment to keep his balance.
Hot water, they reckon, says Agnes.
I'll stick it in me tea then, he says. See ya later.
Brakey hobbles off in steaming humiliation, half hoping Agnes will come after him. But she doesn't.
When he finally stumps up on to the verandah his mother comes out with a tea towel in her hand.
Your dinner's cold.
Good!
He goes straight to the table, lifts the plate covering his meal and bolts the food in a hot frenzy that feels as ridiculous as it looks.
Are you on drugs? his mother asks with uncharacteristic timidity.
Not yet, he says.
She steps aside as he heads for the bathroom.
Sitting on the edge of the tub to examine his throbbing foot, he wonders what his mother might make of him and Agnes as a pair. The Brakeys have always had an air of gentle superiority about the Larwoods. Ten-pound Poms and not just English but the kind with that awful accent. And the old man, Eric. In his day he was a professional rabble-rouser, a drunk, a basher. The Larwoods were always shabby. Since the old man abandoned them, Brakey and his mother have done it hard. The house is beginning to shed paint and timber around them. They're pretty shabby themselves but he doubts that his mother will see herself yet on a level with the Larwoods.
He scans the shelves for something that might relieve the pain. Amid the powders and unguents he finds some balm which looks promising for a moment until he realises that it's the stuff his mother applies to her cracked feet every summer's evening. Examining the tube, he's appalled and excited to discover that the ointment's active constituent is urea. He knows what that is. Piss! His mother bastes her heels in piss every night and he's anxious about her feelings about Agnes Larwood?
He sits in the bath with the shower pelting his head from on high. His foot hurts like buggery but he's not going to say a word.
Long before morning, he wakes from a dream in which the body of Mr Benson from the bank washes in from the Big Hole. Somehow it's found its way around the bluffs and headlands to the harbour entrance and come all the way into Cockleshell on some unholy tide. Brakey's there in the shallows with Agnes beside him. Her face shines with sunlight. Together they roll the banker over in his beige suit and the swollen face that confronts them is his father's.
Brakey lies awake until morning remembering the week in the city last winter with the old man and his girlfriend, a handsome woman not much older than him. It was a trial, an attempt at beginning to close the gap somehow, to reacquaint themselves. But the week was a misery. What can you ever do to get past that feeling that your father's chosen somebody else ahead of you? The only thing worse than the week was the aftermath when his mother pumped him and primed him for details and he remained sullen and mute. He'll never do it again. He knows that now.
By evening Brakey's limp is gone and the confusion of the school day has left with it. He's waiting among the peppermints when Agnes comes along the shore, and when she stoops to light her lamp in the twilight, he strides out so abruptly in his ancient Adidas that she gives a startled cry.
You're a lunatic, she says when he reaches her.
I know.
Mind if I come along?
I have a choice then?
Course.
Least you've got shoes tonight.
They wade for an hour while Brakey tries to ask questions and she stalks the shallows too preoccupied to answer. She doesn't speak to him about anything besides the angle at which he's holding the lamp. Finally they're back ashore, tipping water from their shoes with six cobbler in the bag. Brakey looks at the lamplight on Agnes's thin arms.
Remember that old canoe someone had here when we were kids? he asks.
She smiles and laces her shoes again.
I wonder what happened to it, he says. We used to pile into it, five or six of us. And I remember the time you caught that big mullet with your bare hands. You stood up holding it like it was some kinda trophy. We couldn't believe it.
Agnes stands up. She gathers her bag and gidgie.
That mullet didn't know what hit it, Brakey says, unable to stop talking now. He feels the words come up out of him like a sort of panic. He blathers on about how that mullet must have been a foot long and what a natural she was when it came to hunting fish. He keeps talking even after she sets off down the narrow beach leaving him to fumble at his laces and scramble in her wake. Everything he says shames him and confirms the awful fact that he doesn't know a thing about her after the age of eleven. In his childhood memories she's everywhere, but after a certain point it's almost as if she'd moved away. He doesn't know what she thinks now, what she likes, who her friends are. Nothing. Worse, he doesn't understand why he suddenly needs to know everything about her.
By the time he's caught up with her, she's past his house and hers.
Where're we goin? he asks.
I'm going to the Beasley sisters', she murmurs. You better wait down on the beach.
Oh. Okay.
Or you can just go home.
I'll wait, okay?
If you like.
Brakey waits in the warm darkness. Water laps against the shore and some seabird calls across the estuary. He scuffs the white sand underfoot to make sparks and he's so absorbed by the little flashes of static electricity that he doesn't realise Agnes has returned until she touches his shoulder in the dark and he gives out a yelp of fright.
Sorry, she says. Didn't mean to scare you.
You didn't, he lies.
They head back up the beach in an awkward silence. Brakey smells the kero fumes of her extinguished lamp. He's still tingling from her touch. He wants to reach across the dark gap between them and feel her skin. But he speaks instead.
Do the Beasley sisters pay orright? he blurts.
Agnes says nothing.
I don't even know what cobbler's worth, he says with his heart halfway up his neck.
Agnes kicks a few sparks up.
It's gotta be worth more'n mullet, eh.
Jesus, Brakey.
Not that there's anything wrong with mullet, he rambles, but she cuts him off.
Look, spare me the pity, willya, she says angrily.
Brakey stops in his tracks, stammering.
Listen! she hisses so close to his face that he can feel the heat of her breath on him. I don't sell the fish, orright? For your information, we don't need the money that bad. I'm not out here every night feedin the family, if it's any of your business.
Okay, he murmurs.
Call it a hobby, she says. Stickin fish, it's a stupid bloody hobby.
Brakey wonders if she'll cry. He panics a little at the thought, but she doesn't cry. Agnes just sighs. A dog begins to bark a long way down the bay.
I don't even like it, she says after a moment.
But you're good at it.
Oh, Brakey, you're thick.
The sandspit out the front of their houses glows white. They walk a little way until the shadows of the old net posts loom up on the grass.
You're gonna ask anyway, she says. So I'll tell you. I do it to get away. Simple as that. These days, it's like the house is dead inside, like everything's gone, like even the air is dead.
I thought... I thought things were better.
The drinking, you mean. You know the story of the drinking? Mum's miracle? Her church and her, they prayed. Every day for six months they were on a prayer chain. And then, one day, he just packs it in, he gives it away. Hallelujah.
Well, that is pretty amazing, says Brakey, thinking to himself that anything that stopped Eric Larwood drinking had to be a miracle.
Yeah, maybe. But it's weird, you know. There's nothing left. It's like there's nothing left of him at all. And Mum's too blind to see it. You can see this puzzled look on her face sometimes, like she can't quite figure out how come everything isn't alright now.
Brakey sits on the remains of the old net rack.
He doesn't bash her anymore, and there's no screaming and smashing and all the rest of it. You know what I mean. I don't have to tell you what it was like. But there's nothing left. The works, the union, Margaret, and now the drink. He's like a ghost. I mean, that doesn't bother me. He's harmless. But she wants more. For Mum it was always the drink. Blame the booze for everything. It was never him. Well, now she's got him and she's miserable.
You miss Margaret?
Not any more, she says. Margaret was Dad's favourite. He loved her more than Mum, not that Mum saw it. I don't blame her for going. But it's better without her. Except it's like a cemetery in there.
You ever think of taking off? Brakey asks.
Agnes is still standing. The prongs of her gidgie catch the light from somewhere far off.
My brothers, she says. I can't leave them.
Brakey longs to reach up and take her hand. He's almost sick with feeling. And then he just does it, Brakey leans out and grabs her arm and feels for her hand and Agnes drops the gidgie in surprise and clouts him one before shaking him off. She steps back and finds the spear in the grass.
Sorry, he mumbles.
Doesn't matter, she says.
Shit.
I'll see you later, Brakey.
He's too flattened even to say goodnight. He sits there for a while. A shag or something flies past over the water. He thinks about Agnes and her hot breath in his face. Did he ever long for his father the way he does for her? He can't remember if it hurt this much.
Walking home through the last of the peppermints, he brushes hair from his eyes and as he does he smells fish on his fingers, and much later that night, in the last long hour that he lies awake in bed, he sniffs his hand now and then, full of regret, sensing that the smell of fish will be all that he'll ever have of Agnes Larwood and that it would have been better to have nothing of her at all.
He wakes to screams from next door. It's like the old days. His room is swarming with weird lights. The splash of breaking glass. Somebody's thumping on the door, trampling the boards of the verandah. Brakey reels out of bed and sees the hot pink glow through the curtain. The Larwood place is on fire.
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. 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. 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 clothes line 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. 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, 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. 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 the Terrace and there, across the road, in the waiting crowd she'll be, even and regular and brownish but older, striding towards 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?
