The Turning

Damaged Goods

MY HUSBAND HAD THIS THING about a girl with a birthmark. It began when he was almost fourteen and went on all through high school like a fever that wouldn’t break. It’s a story he used to tell against himself in a kind of wistful tone, and to be honest it was one of the things about him that charmed me, that and his earnest demeanour. He told the story so many times that I feel like I was there, that I lived it with him. He didn’t just rattle these memories off — he’s never been that kind of bore — I had to wheedle them out of him.

Vic refuses to visit the town he grew up in but lately I find myself driving down alone for two or three days at a time. I took a friend once but she was restless inside twenty-four hours. She said I’m like some biographer sniffing around in vain for one final, telling detail that will complete the psychological puzzle at the centre of Vic’s life, but the truth is that I go out of loneliness and, pathetic as it is, I sometimes feel closer to him there knowing that it was the place that formed him. Anyway, it’s a nice little harbour town and this winter I’ve acquired an unexpected passion for whale watching. Now I know the difference between a southern right whale and a humpback. Believe me, I’ve had plenty of weekends to fill.

I suppose the sources of obsession are at once mundane and mysterious. If it wasn’t for my sister’s own fixation I’d be less forgiving about Vic and the weight of his past. I wouldn’t understand at all. I’d be long gone.

When she was six my sister won a doll in a school raffle. It was almost as big as her, the most ravishing thing we girls had ever seen, but it was a cause of great conflict and shame in our house because, like lotteries and cards and horseracing, raffles were a form of gambling and therefore the work of the Devil. Our father was furious. My sister couldn’t even remember buying the ticket — she was a devout girl and no rebel — but when she came home with the prize she begged to be allowed to keep it. She already loved it like a woman smitten by her newborn. Even our mother saw this and pleaded her case, but when our father could convince neither my sister nor my mother to take the doll back to school, it was boxed up and consigned to the top of the linen press where it lay, like a child in a cardboard and cellophane coffin, for fifteen years. In rare moments when the coast was clear my sister snuck to the linen press and climbed the shelves to peer in at the bright, cherubic cheeks and the lace gown and the dimples. It became her lost child. It was the only thing she took with her when she grew up and left home and for the rest of her life it has stood between her and other people, a kind of solace, really, but also a barrier to human intimacy. She has a senior position in the tax office. She’s a highly rational and competent person. Except when it comes to that doll which lies in state in her livingroom like an embalmed child bride.

I always assumed Vic’s infatuation with Strawberry Alison was all in the past, just a mortifying memory, but only last week I found him in the workshop, weeping over an old photograph and a poem and it gave me a chill.

The first time he saw that girl Alison he was horrified. Her birthmark was lurid crimson; it covered half her face and neck, like a mask incompletely removed. Against that splash of colour her thick long hair was blonder, and her eyes bluer than seemed possible. She was newly arrived in town. At first glance her face looked burnt, as though she’d suffered a terrible scorching. Vic’s imagination already brimmed with these flarings, for in those days the news was all napalm flashes and looming thermonuclear disaster. Standing speechless on the school verandah, with his bag sliding from his shoulder, Vic’s horror turned to fascination as he saw that the passing girl’s skin was not bubbled with scar-tissue but perfectly smooth. Her mark was all colour. It was obviously congenital yet he still thought of conflagration, as though she’d survived a fire whose heat had never left her face.

Vic says he loved Alison from that first encounter. Not only could he pick her out in a crowd but he sought glimpses of her all over town. The trouble was, she was a year older and therefore perpetually out of bounds. Any dealings between year-levels were socially forbidden, and to make things worse Alison soon became surrounded by tougher, plainer girls who worked out their repulsion and fascination by forming a protective posse around her. There was just no way past them. It wasn’t as if there weren’t spunky girls his own age but they became dim presences. All the pert, hair-flicking embodiments of perfection who had only days before caused him to sweat with lust and dread simply dropped from his mind.

When she first arrived, people talked about Strawberry Alison as a shop-soiled beauty. Such a pity, they said about her birthmark. If only. Could have been a stunner. What a shame she’s damaged goods.

To Vic it was no shame at all. He wanted her, mark or no mark. He told himself he saw past it, that he was the only one who did. Though in time he came to admit to himself that he loved Alison because of the mark, not just despite it. This, when it came down to it, was the root of his obsession and he’s never completely explained it to me. I doubt he understands it himself, least of all now. In any dispute Vic will instinctively seek out a victim to defend. That’s his nature and it’s become his work as a labour lawyer, but I wonder if this impulse can account for his adolescent attraction to the flawed and imperfect. You see, Strawberry Alison was not the only damaged specimen to catch his imagination. Vic’s first love was also older — in fact, quite a lot older — a farm girl whose ring finger ended at the first joint, the result of an accident with a hay baler. The finger that her wedding ring would have to slide on to ended in a stump. At thirteen he was enchanted. By the finger as much as the girl herself. His first kiss. She let him touch her breasts. It only happened the once — the whole thing lasted less than a day, a holiday encounter — but the strange excitement lingered. The Alison business wasn’t so shortlived; it went on for years. I fear it isn’t over yet.

Perhaps you could put Vic’s fascination down to the times, Vietnam in shrieking flames on TV every night. That naked burning girl running down the road over and over again. Or maybe it’s just the ruin and wreckage you’re privy to as a copper’s kid in a country town, the horrible weight of knowledge, all those distorting secrets the rest of us are spared. I used to think he exaggerated this stuff but his mother Carol put me straight. That town, Angelus, wasn’t such a quaint place in those days. It crushed her husband. Something happened there which caused him to lose his way. He began to drink. Bob Lang, the proverbial straightshooter, became a local joke. And then their infant daughter died of meningitis. Vic was fifteen. He never mentioned a sister, never once said a word. I couldn’t believe it — I was incensed — and when I confronted him about it he told me that he’d forgotten. A sick look came over his face. I pressed him for details but he picked up his keys and backed towards the door. I let him go. Angry as I was, I believed him. He’d blocked her from his mind. He looked as appalled as I was.

For years Vic never even spoke to Strawberry Alison. Until he was sixteen the closest he ever got to her was the library window. One afternoon, while stuck in a carrel, he glanced up to see Alison peering in. She wasn’t looking in at all; she’d just caught sight of herself in the reflective glass and paused a moment in passing. She came closer, right up to the sill, and he was struck by the sadness of her gaze. She was full of longing, anybody could see that, and she was barely an arm’s length away. Vic wanted to touch her face, to tell her that she needn’t pine for a perfection he didn’t want anyway. Her breath fogged the glass. She stepped back, pulled her hair behind her ear and walked on.

Carol told me that Vic was an anxious boy. She was reluctant to blame his father but Bob saw menace at every turn. The cop thing. What Bob didn’t realize was that in addition to keeping him safe, his attempts to protect Vic from accident and injury transmitted fear. Unspoken worries hung over him like the omnipresent stink of the harbour. As a child of rigid fundamentalists I can identify with this, for although God Himself was supposed to have made it and sustained it, and though it seemed so beautiful, the world around us was eternally dangerous. The price of spiritual freedom, we learnt, was eternal vigilance. Such a high price for so long.

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.