by James Barlow
But it was hardly the beautiful part of Australia. It was a hick town two hundred miles from anywhere. It was so small that ten minutes’ walk brought her to a horizon so flat and featureless it daunted the heart. And to get anywhere meant hours of travel over roads which had until recently been used by camels. A tree was a rarity, like a monument. The town was a mess of cream-painted bungalows with green or red iron roofs and rows of salmon-coloured doors. There were no fences, no privacy, no gardens except a few square yards of earth baked hard. Along the two roads out of town was a litter of smashed or abandoned cars, and the inevitable thousands of beer cans. The main street had a few verandahed shops, but the rest were plaster and wood. The one hotel seemed to come out of a Western film. Women would sit in cars outside its bars on a Saturday night, not being allowed inside. The men within grew rowdier and rowdier, and spilled out onto the dirt veranda, drinking straight from stubby bottles of beer or directly out of cans. The flies buzzed tirelessly in thousands.
Marion had been acutely shy of such people – rough, honest and direct as they were. She learned very quickly that to compare this place with anything in England was unforgiveable, and to complain aroused outright scorn. At first she felt acute nostalgia for cosiness, a fire in the grate on a cold Christmas Day; she ached to see rain. For a long time she felt she’d never belong here, but she was busy enough for it not to matter. There were the kids to attend to, the washing to do, half an inch of dust which she removed from the bungalow each day . . .
She recognized with amusement that women here were regarded by the men as definitely inferior. There was a different kind of relationship. Men ordered their wives about, and equally expected them to cope entirely with the domestic duties and problems. Mike was the only husband, she guessed, for a thousand miles around, who washed up for his wife or cared for the baby when it came.
Mike said that it was the same among the men. They had an old-fashioned and often admirable masculinity which they didn’t dare drop for a moment. They spoke in a nasal, slow, indifferent taciturnity, sure of their own perfection in their own environment, brutally frank in their analyses of whether you were yet as good as them. They were very sensitive and insular: nothing quite equalled this small edge of the desert. When Mike pointed out habitual errors they still committed – actions which killed men – they weren’t interested: his opinion was not yet valuable. They spoke of these pointless deaths and accidents in a sardonic self-denigrating manner.
Marion’s big disadvantage was that, like so many women of her age and status in England, she could not drive a car. Even Mike had never owned an automobile until he came here. But this mattered less to her as she made friends, some of whom were Pommies, others who admitted they had no intention of learning to drive. With friends it was easy to withstand the vulgarity of women who shoved her aside in the supermarket, and to laugh at the sign over the counter: “In God We Trust – All Others Pay Cash.” There was another notice in the wooden post office for the first hours of the day: “Don’t interrupt, I’m sorting mail.” The lady who put up this notice was small, fierce and incorrigibly nosy. She knew everyone’s business. ‘Here’s that cheque you were waiting for,’ she’d tell the schoolmaster. ‘Looks like your mum’s writing,’ she’d say to Marion. Marion read the corny local newspaper with relish. She pushed the pram up slopes of shale in a temperature of 115 degrees. She who couldn’t swim, and was self-conscious about her body, paraded around in shorts or a swimming costume. She drank beer for the first time in her life because here you’d die if you didn’t, and it had to be cooled in the fridge for an hour. She even admired a house built out of 11,000 beer bottles cemented together. Nothing cured her dislike of the big spiders and she feared snakes, although Mike battered a big one to death easily enough.
Mike was away, often, driving the truck for days on end, and he never really earned that $150 a week. The kids thrived, grew brown and lively and learned to swim and ride a horse. Marion never quite let go of England, but as the fourth year went by she had passed the point of no return and didn’t want to go ‘home’; rather she wanted her mum to come out here and see how good a life they lived, contemptuous of cities and soft living . . .
Her eyes moistened now in the feeble light of a cabin of the Areopagus. With hands that trembled she picked up the brochures they’d received right there on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain. The answer to the very first inquiry had come in an envelope with Greco-Australian Merchant and Passenger Line printed on it, giving the game away to the woman at the post office. ‘Going back to England?’ she’d asked outright, and Marion had countered, ‘About time we went for a trip.’ The brochure’s reassurances mocked her now unaccountably: “One of the most efficient systems of propulsion devised by man and guided largely by automatic devices . . . Captain Vafiadis knows that his vessel is virtually unsinkable . . . the elaborate communications system by which the Areopagus can instantly be in touch with any part of the world . . . heat sensors will automatically detect any rise in temperature and report it at once to the officers on the bridge . . . divided into watertight compartments; if the hull were punctured, twenty-three steel doors would clang shut at the touch of a button on the bridge . . .’ And what, she thought cynically, having seen this exercise carried out with creaking efficiency, if I happen to be passing through one of those watertight doors at the time?
‘Leisurely days and gracious evenings,’ the brochure had forecast. ‘No less than three quarters of the crew are employed with solely your comfort in mind. The finest hotels in the world are no better . . . Ten thousand bottles of wine . . . Telephones in every room . . . stewards, launderers, bootblacks . . . Nothing pleases the dining-room staff more than to learn of some trifling personal fancy, whether for Melba toast or particularly strong coffee, and once requested it is remembered for the rest of your journey . . .’
The family already had a private joke about this for the contrast between the promise of the brochure and the reality was startling. The menu was long and in itself aroused appetite. The steward was cheerful and energetic: he had to be, he served so many tables. At breakfast he was hopelessly confused over eggs, tomatoes, fruit juices, and toast meant nothing to him. The sauces – apple, red currant and mint – were never on the table and when they were desired the steward would be rushing around the next table but with two on the cheese tray. . . .
‘An electronic log ensures that the captain and his officers know exactly what speed the ship is moving at . . . radar sweeps a radius of forty-eight miles . . . two ultrasonic devices measure the depth of the sea. A navigational radio aid picks up signals from the shore and instantly plots the ship’s position. Fog, darkness, rain and storm mean nothing to the captain of the Areopagus, which always reaches its destination within minutes of its planned time of arrival. . . .’
Such apparent perfection seemed too good for such unworthy passengers as the Burstons, Marion decided sourly. She recalled the hours taking the kids to the doctor’s for their jabs, and their whimpers, tears and analyses. And the stares from other patients, the orange peel thrown on the carpet which was thick with dust. Later, in another corridor, waiting, ignored, the kids fingering through dirty copies of Life. ‘Will you stamp these health documents?’ and the sister’s face full of disapproval as she probed, ‘Going one way?’ Her silent criticism when Marion admitted starkly, without justification, or excuses, ‘Yes.’ ‘So we Australians are not good enough for you?’ the sister’s expression had challenged.
Mike had admitted it four months ago. He was on drugs. Marion was shocked and very frightened when he told her, but Mike had qualified strongly. ‘We all take them. Kid, if we’re on a seven-hundred mile run and we’re falling asleep at the wheel, what else can we do? It’s not habitual, honestly; I could drop them tomorrow. Do I look ill? I sleep all right, don’t I? What else can I do?’
‘Get another job,’ she said simply.
‘Doing what? I’m thirty-nine, kid. And it brings in money, doesn’t it? Ninety-seven dollars last week, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t care, Mike. Quit the job or the pep pills.’
‘They don’t seem to do any harm and they just see me over the hump. Some of the boys have been taking ‘em for five years.’
‘Mike, I’m scared. Five years! What will they look like in ten? You’re using yourself too hard. And for what?’
That had hurt him, she had seen. He pointed out in justification, ‘All these things’ – and waved a hand at the fridge, washing machine, TV, the estate car under the carport. ‘They’re paid for.’
‘I don’t want to be a widow.’
Mike had laughed.
‘Hell, it’s not that bad. A pill a week maybe. Not like these kids at college, you know, on amphetamines for kicks. You take a pill for a headache, don’t you? Once in a fortnight. It’s the same . . .’
‘Mike, start looking for another job, will you?’
‘I’ll keep my ears open, kid.’
It was on that day that Marion had begun to dislike Australia, not, at first as somewhere to flee from, but simply because Mike had had to resort to drugs to do his seventy and eighty hour week. She watched him to see if he looked ill or tired, or lost weight, but he didn’t seem to alter.
Anxiety made her resentful and especially of the environment, which was too tough and too big. She began to think of England as somewhere where they’d been happy before coming here. And she began to see things with a critical eye and mind and without good humour. Especially she despised the people who drove vehicles. For these people, she felt angrily, were not tough or skilful: they were stupid and selfish in their driving, and she read the paper every Monday in particular with grim satisfaction, righteous in proof – the dead youths and girls thrown against trees and poles for no reason except carelessness, stupidity and drunkenness. She began to resent being shoved out of the way by fat women with curlers still in their hair at 11 A.M. in the supermarket. She was habitually, even painfully polite usually, and held doors open for people heavily laden. They never thanked her. Now she began to call after them tartly, ‘Don’t mind me. I spend all day doing this.’ When some youth threw a bottle out of a moving car she took it around to his home and told his mother: Wally threw this out of his car. I thought maybe it was something he wanted.’ And she’d gone before the startled mother could open her mouth. Next time she saw that woman, Marion was stared through and didn’t give a damn.
She began to say repeatedly, ‘They’re stupid’ and ‘they’ meant specifically Australians. ‘Just horses and beer,’ she said in contempt. ‘That’s all they think about.’
It seemed to be true. The radio had nothing to offer but pop music, advertisements and analyses, descriptions or post-mortems of horse racing or trotting five hundred miles away. The small town had its annual picnic race meeting and Marion took the kids reluctantly. The first thing erected was a temporary bar, sheltered from the sun by a bulrush-covered frame. The inevitable hundreds of bottles and empty cans littered a hundred square yards before the first race. Flies buzzed by the thousand the dust stirred as the horses paraded down the dirt track and cantered across the shimmering claypan which stretched away to a horizon that was absolutely flat and marked by only a few trees.
People had come from hundreds of miles around; a few had arrived in airplanes. The crowd lined the rails and there were at times ten false starts; then off the horses galloped with their jockeys of drovers, enthusiasts, even a few Abos. They returned in a cloud of dust and a nasal Australian accent announced the winner over a public address system. The men shouted and groaned and dispersed to the beer hut. The women and kids traipsed to the shelter for tea, soft drinks, hamburgers and hot dogs.
It went on for two days, and men lay dead drunk in the street amidst dust, tin cans and dogs which sniffed at them. The usual stupid youths drove their cars in their usual reckless fashion, tires screeching on every corner of the town’s streets, and girls shrieked on the back seats as they were driven off to where the town ended. Marion despised them and knew there’d soon be the usual annual crop of pregnant fifteen-year-olds. ‘They’re stupid,’ she told Stella, who was hungry for some fun, a dance, admiration. ‘The worst drivers in the world because they’ve got no imagination or feelings for other people.’
Then they came to tell her what Mike had done and this was the worst thing of all. She knew then that they had to leave Australia. You couldn’t live in the same town as this. Not unless you were one of them, stupid and without conscience. It tore her to pieces to see him suffer so, and she began to snarl at him, because she couldn’t help it, but also to sting some anger into him so that he would fight back.
“Singapore, instant Asia,” the brochure assured her, “where Chinese, Malay and Eurasian live side by side in harmony in this great city of apartment blocks, temples and kampongs . . .” “Hong Kong for festivals and fun . . . extends to the fifteenth day of the first moon when the ancient Lantern Festival is celebrated . . . thousands of coloured Chinese lanterns of all shapes and sizes . . . the scent of burning joss sticks . . . Dine aboard a cruising sampan while Chinese musicians serenade you both . . . it will raise her blood pressure five points at least . . . Floor shows, hot from swinging Europe . . . Mongolian Hot-Pot . . .”
But there was no escape from yourself. Place had no relevance. She had the bitter sensation of a whole life – several lives – slightly wrong, one strategic error compounding another. Australia or Europe, what difference would it make?
Love. She wanted him back the way he had been before that day, and in sorrow knew that his punishment was that he would never be that man again.
The sea was rough as the Areopagus went across the Great Australian Bight, but the old lady and the crippled gentleman at their table still ate heavily. Mike strolled around an empty deck and watched from the bows as the stern rose up to an angle of perhaps forty degrees. Marion and the kids felt sick and he was miserable with responsibility, as if he’d been buying happiness for them and wasn’t getting his money’s worth. He wondered in alarm if the sea would be like this for fifty days. Or was it a relatively calm sea and the Areopagus which wasn’t a stable ship? They had come to Australia in a liner twice the size, so large that it had smashed its way heedlessly through the one bad storm and maintained its twenty-seven knots.
Mike’s spirit rather than his body was filled with seediness. He dreaded talking to people. Anything they might ask would involve a dishonest reply. But no one bothered him. It was as if they knew and kept clear of him. Already twos and fours of old people welcomed each other in the library and lounges and in the dining room he heard them ask each other with concern in the morning how the other had slept and what was his or her condition now. They cheered whoever at their table had a birthday, when the ship’s orchestra, a quartet, approached that particular table and played ‘Happy Birthday to You,’ and the chief steward handed over an elaborately patterned cake and a photographer took a photograph with flash and the whole dining room applauded. But it was as if the Burston family, contaminated by him, were determinedly alone. ‘Are those beautiful girls yours?’ a woman asked him in the elevator, and Mike was startled, as if, belonging to him, they must be painted with failure.
Marion took the lifeboat drill seriously, tying useless bits of tape around the girls’ stomachs and rushing them to the Lounge for instruction. Mike half listened to the analyses of their own improbable survival. Women chattered to each other while a fat young officer with three stripes on his sleeve, conscious of their indifference, the disbelief that anything could happen to them, urged, ‘You must take it seriously,’ as if he understood some weakness of the ship they had not been told about.
Mike knew they’d all fail in an emergency. One only had to see them, a few days out, still hopelessly confused about directions, decks
and stairways. The watertight doors might clang shut and delay things, but water could rush up the elevator shafts. There’d be panic. Even Australians panicked in the end, Mike decided grimly. What would they do, how would they behave under stress – the entertainments officer, a blond queer in a pink suit; the pale attractive girls who looked after the children’s games and the trips ashore; the purser’s girls who played with forms and foreign stamps and smiled disarmingly when they didn’t know the answer? Even a passenger could see that they were as new to the ship as himself. And what of the stewards who stood around in gloomy passages coughing with obvious tuberculosis? And the conceited big blonde≠≠– girl at the Midships Bar, who went on reading a book and let Mike stand five minutes and be ignored rather than explain the system of this bar, which was that he bought a chit like a bus ticket from her and then moved three or four feet to the right to find the barman and repeat his order. This man was vain and often stood facing the mirror behind the bar. It was obviously an effort for him to serve people like Mike. As with the girl, smiles and attention were reserved for other, more interesting people, the heavy drinkers careless about currency, the show business people, officers, youths with muscle. All these would fail in disaster, Mike knew, as he might fail himself.
‘Relax and Never Worry,’ was the Thought for the Day. ‘You have paid your fare. Enjoy yourself. There is nothing to worry about now.’ But Mike couldn’t unwind. He sat in a deck chair, very alone, on the Sun Deck, while hundreds strolled and talked on the Parade Deck ten feet beneath him. Half a dozen people, young and middle-aged, ran up and down the Sun Deck behind a big young man who had been a surfer in Queensland. ‘Run a Mile with Peter’ – and as they came the second time, some already trailing the field, a man with glasses and a nice sort of ordinary girl grinned at him. The girl told Mike, ‘I’m cutting the corners,’ and smiled in camaraderie, and he was touched, momentarily involved; but that passed and only served to emphasize the isolation, the distance he was from them, from normality.