Minimum of Two by Tim Winton

Author:Tim Winton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742537351
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia

II

As soon as Dot was home from school, the Cooksons left for Angelus.

Just after sunset, near the town of Williams, they hit a kangaroo and Cleve had to get out and kill it with the wheelbrace. It took five hours driving to get to the small town on the south coast. When the lights of the town rose from the dark like a new galaxy, Cleve woke Dot and she watched dumbly.

Angelus was no longer a whaling town. These days it lived by farm produce and traded hard on its English climate. Tourists came to see its awesome cliffs and beaches, the wildflowers in their season, the museums, the relics. Angelus had learnt to live off its dying. No one mentioned the protest any more. It was a town looking bright-faced into the future.

The motel Queenie checked them into had a spouting concrete whale in its floodlit forecourt. Their room stale, drab. It stank of cigarette smoke and Pine-O-Cleen. Dot fiddled with the TV and the motel notepaper, flicked through the Gideon Bible without enthusiasm and went to sleep. Cleve and Queenie turned the light out for her and sat in the dark. Cleve pulled some cans from the smelly little refrigerator and they drank beer in silence.

Pubs closed. They listened to the sound of men weaving up the street to their wives.

‘Nothing’s changed.’ Queenie whispered.

‘We have.’

‘Are we any better, do you think?’

‘We try harder,’ said Cleve.

‘I suppose we should see everything.’

‘I guess it’s the point of the exercise. Exorcise.’

‘I just want to come back and see the place and be normal in it. And maybe see Poppa’s grave. I want to . . . confirm things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like us growing up. Like us being properly together. Like this town being the past.’

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