by James Barlow
They were boisterous, with eighteen empty beer cans, six upon six upon six, on the table, and they welcomed Stella effusively, with genuine eagerness, as if the female voice in the darkness had a particular property, completed the party. They made a joke of everything anyone said, especially of what Diane said, and Stella sensed Roy’s tension, an angry proprietorial silence, as if he was brooding: This is my girl; I had her company all night, she came to my cabin; now I see she is available to everyone . . .
Stella, too, was stiff with agitation, aware of how difficult it would be to get away from such company so soon after arrival.
The steward was co-operative, part of a conspiracy.
‘John, John!’ the men called, and he came, part of them; the other people, under illumination in the bar, fools to attend to, defraud of coins. ‘What is it, my darlings?’ – ‘Diane’s arrived’ – ‘Well! Now the party really gets going! Seven cans of Victoria bitter?’ – ‘No, John. Listen. Don’t go. This is Stella. What do you want, Stella?’ And John said, ‘What we all want, eh?’ which aroused mirth. ‘Don’t be sexy,’ a man said, and Stella felt a wowser, damping this down with a dull plea for ‘Lemonade,’ ‘You stick to it, darling, and keep your honour intact among these gentleman,’ urged John, but, of course, Stella felt, flushing, stung, he thinks that would be silly.
Diane said, ‘He’s a marvel, John is. He’ll go on serving us long after they’ve closed the bar. He’ll do anything for you except hop into bed. You know what I mean?’
‘No.’ Admitted Stella, feeling gauche.
‘He’s one of them,’ Diane explained, but it still meant nothing to Stella. John was merely a voice in the darkness, a faint smell of sweat.
She sipped lemonade, worried about how to leave, and then stood up. ‘They said I’ve got to go back straightaway,’ she reminded Diane, although she was so nervous she wanted to leave anyway. A little of this sort of company would last a long time and give her plenty to analyze and think about. She changed her position to say this, embarrassed, for it was not a situation Dr. de Haan had yet covered. It felt silly and immature. Dr. de Haan had pointed out how evil necking was, and all that stuff, but he had never instructed on how to get out of a room, leave a party once you were in it . . .
Diane argued, ‘We’ll have to do something about your people,’ and Stella agreed ‘Yes’ meaninglessly.
It was as if she had accepted that her parents were people she wanted to deceive, and once that condition of deception had been obtained, the whole wide world of dancing, drinking, necking and other unknown pleasures would be hers to enjoy.
Chapter Six
Miss Irene Wearne, sixty-six, weight ninety-eight pounds, height five feet, had been a school teacher in an outer suburb of Melbourne. She had a long horsey face, rough-textured, blue eyes and, until the operation on the side of her head to relieve the pressure, she’d had gray hair which in certain lights had appeared green. She seemed weightless, with arms like pale twigs in the sun, and her flesh the colour and texture of suet. Her small blue eyes were humorous and her glasses magnified the exhaustions of the illness so much that people meeting her flinched slightly.
She had been very realistic. They’d shaved her hair off before the operation and afterwards Miss Wearne had purchased a wig. She had been very practical, quite without vanity, and had sought a wig of exactly the same gray and white texture as the hair she had lost.
Miss Wearne lived a life of aching loneliness. No one came to see her. The school at which she had taught for thirty years had been glad to see her go. ‘Too old; too conservative,’ had been the headmaster’s bigoted view. He was both right and wrong. For Miss Wearne had been a teacher for many years and belonged to a generation which, according to the new fast thinking, had been incredibly ignorant and almost limited to the three R’s. She belonged to the Australia which had been part of the vast red areas of maps of the world: the British Empire.
Not that it seemed to make any difference. Generation after generation of youths and girls had come to the school. She had seen them grow up and fail. One or two went to Canberra and a few won medals in various wars. But most of the male faces could be seen later in local stores, second-hand car sales rooms, or, worse, in local headlines: six years for gang rape; two killed in head-on collision; girl stripped in telephone box . . . They looked at Miss Wearne, and if they identified her at all, sneered in superiority. For they had left her behind and discovered a world of vulgarity and money and learned to worship it.
It was as if all life was a failure and a waste of time . . . The suburb was a conviction of failure. Litter, broken glass, men dead drunk on pavements, even the taxi drivers’ cars wobbled on Saturday nights. Mongrel dogs ran about the streets. A gutter press told of rape and nudity at parties, and a small army of wowsers tried to put the world to right, to what it had been in 1914, or 1939, or 1947, and their defeat was bitter before the pressures of the world outside, which flooded the bookstalls and beat at the retina of the eyes in the square box in the gloom of suburban rooms . . .
She lived in a dull avenue half a mile from a main road, a tiny house but her own. It had been her parents’. There was no hope of living anywhere else. She could sell the house, but it would not fetch the amount of money that could transfer her to a better suburb. For this one had gone down in thirty years, from extreme middle-class respectability to a kind of place for people to drive through, very fast, on their way to somewhere better. Her house was next to a concrete yard, with only that and a brick wall five feet high between her and a boarding house. Here half a dozen youths from tax offices, electric companies and builders’ offices lived: there was the inevitable litter of beer cans in the yard, a hotted-up automobile that disturbed the night, pop records and tarty girls who came and sometimes stayed the night. There was a rumour where a girl of fourteen lay naked on the bed and was, over an hour or two, raped (if that was the word for so willing a victim) by all of them. It was quite believable. The vicious, lean, hard woman who ran the place wouldn’t be bothered, and was often away whole weekends. There had been visits by the police, but these had been about the thefts of radios and complaints about noise.
Miss Wearne was a little scared of it, but had the Australian sense of humour which expects disaster and views it with sardonic acceptance as the norm.
She had never lived anywhere else but Melbourne. The clank of its trams and the noises of road drills and bulldozers expanding the vast sprawl were part of life. She supposed it must be an ugly city, and certainly photographs of Paris Rome, Cape Town, Oxford and so on made these cities seem very beautiful, always supposing you could believe the photography. (For she had seen books about a Melbourne which, for her, didn’t exist.) She therefore accepted Melbourne’s suburbia as a kind of dull joke to which she was superior: the houses of liverish red brick or wood and their tin roofs; concrete gnomes in arid little gardens; pieces of string where hedges should be; a dog howling in a yard; gum threes which remained half gray whatever the season; meat pies saturated in tomato sauce; the radio commercials and the platitudes of disc jockeys.
Each year she watched the bush fires a few miles away approaching to destroy this suburbia, and sometimes the flames came close enough for hot ash to set on fire a few nearby gum trees. Twice people had died in fires within half a mile, and these were days to remember, when she hated and feared Australia, the stifling atmosphere and an oppressive temperature of 106.
On these summer days a furnace wind blew from the north, from the vast overheated land mass, and even breathing was laborious. Dust swirled and to teach children was ridiculous. Hours or even days past the point where it was unbearable some voice would cry, ‘She’s turning round!’ and the Union Jack on the school office and the Christmas or Moomba tinsel on the supermarket and city buildings would flutter and turn as the wind reversed and cooled, approaching with rain from Tasmania and the South Pole.
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On Anzac Day she wept a little, for she had had a brother who had died in that war. And she’d look out of the window, or stand before a flagpole with children as ordinary men marched unsteadily through the dull city streets and scruffy suburbia to remember a disaster, and then drank themselves stupid and laughed about it.
It was part of the Australian emphasis on ordinary people, carried too far so that extraordinary people were disliked more than elsewhere. They in any case fled from this aggressive equality, this two million square miles in which nearly everybody lived in half a dozen cities. Ugly cities of boxes up and down slopes, with the trees slaughtered, and no privacy except where fingers of bush poked into the outer suburbs. Cities of veneer, tin roofs and cardboard, hosepipes running in vain in the great heat; wrought-iron hotels and public buildings like lavatories; dull supermarkets full of aggressive shapeless women with acid tongues pushing carts laden with cans; miles of stinking dustbins; vehicles heading out of suburbia with surfboards and little boats strapped to overloaded cars, on their way to the suburbia of the beaches, scores of thousands of sweaty bodies and eyes staring out to sea.
Until recently Miss Wearne had gone to church regularly – tarted up and scented with the best of them – and had never doubted that God was an Australian.
And so it now seemed.
A God with a malicious humour could only be Australian and Miss Wearne accepted the joke in sardonic resignation, Australian style.
Miss Wearne had taught geography for nearly forty years, but had never been anywhere except around the State of Victoria with parties of school kids, or to Tasmania’s mountains. She belonged to a generation which, when young, had been poor and not in receipt of handouts.
She had always wanted to go by ship (planes did it too quickly) around the Asia she had told children about, to Singapore, Hong Kong, and to North American, England, Italy, Paris . . .
Now, at sixty-six, she could go, for she had won a competition in a woman’s magazine and the prize was a ticket on a round-the-world trip aboard the liner Areopagus – Bali, Singapore, Hong Kong, Guam, San Francisco, Panama, London, Italy . . .
It was a good joke, very Australian.
For Miss Wearne was doing to die, and knew it.
She had about two or, with luck, three months to live. Already she had the occasional dizzy turns which were very frightening, but these, they assured her, had no significance in regard to the position. The headaches? Well, even those were only a result of her condition, not the aggravation of it . . .
Two days after they told her she was going to die the letter came informing her that she’d won the ticket for the world cruise.
Miss Wearne thought about it and decided to go. She even worked up an enthusiasm and decided it could be a good joke.
She wanted to die at sea. She wished for a few hundred people aboard to be shaken and to know of her existence. The persons she encountered in the Melbourne suburb never really saw her. She knew, because she was too intelligent not to know, that she was a kind of nothing. People exchanged postage stamps if she handed them coins or notes. They gave her a newspaper for five cents and acknowledged ‘Good morning,’ providing she said it first. But really they didn’t see her at all except as a customer, a nuisance, a nothing . . . And she wanted a few score people stand nervously and witness her remains being tipped into the sea.
She wanted a small feature in the ship’s newspaper and a slightly larger one on the woman’s pages of the Melbourne newspapers among the news of the smart people dining and the descriptions of what Mrs. Ogilvy-Daylight was wearing for her daughter Beryl’s engagement party at the skyscraper hotel where a room for two hundred guests cost at least $1,000 before anyone sat down to eat or lifted a glass . . . And the radio officer aboard the Areopagus would have to tap it out, the news of her death, in Morse code, or did he talk into some microphone? There would be another grim, small, very Australian joke when the woman’s magazine had to admit that the winner of its prize ticket had died between Panama and Southampton . . .
All her life Miss Wearne had been nothing – for she’d never been beautiful – in the suburbia of tin roofs, slanting telegraph poles, aggressive youths and promiscuous barefoot big girls, too vain to learn from books; the dull men from Masonic lodges and the Returned Servicemen’s League, and the great army of people who could do things she was unable to – drive big automobiles, water-ski, surf, drink . . . She had never had the money to get away from them. Her escape now from suburbia was a bitter one, but she savoured it. She bought six new dresses and a camera – the latter so that she could send back colour slides to her one friend, a Mrs. Boyd, Eileen Boyd, a widow, an aggressive sour woman who lived half a mile away.
These two women knew they had nothing but each other, and at times they resented it. Miss Wearne was glad that she would die first. That’d give the old hag something to worry about. She’d be missed – as would the cakes she cooked and the bottle of wine shared in front of the TV set.
Miss Wearne guessed that geography lessons didn’t convey the reality, the smells, the humidity or the beauty of foreign places, and she presumed that the travel brochures were far too optimistic. She decided that there would be unpleasant moments for anyone as weak as she now was.
She hadn’t anticipated that they would begin before and with the arrival of the taxi at the door. For it was impossible to be calm. She hadn’t moved out of the State of Victoria for eleven years, nor outside the Melbourne suburb for three. So she slept badly and was tired before the taxi came.
This, too, was worrying and tiresome. Melbourne taxi drivers are cheerful souls: they do not expect tips; they like passengers to sit in the front seat beside them and will thereupon discuss the merits of certain horses, boxers and footballers. But they do not come to a house to carry the cases out. Some even remain seated and open the automobile trunk automatically from inside the taxi. Miss Wearne had two heavy cases. She struggled out with one. The driver asked, ‘That the lot, missus?’ and Miss Wearne had to plead, ‘No. There’s another one. I wonder if you’d mind?’
It was worse at the Victoria Pier because she had to carry the two cases to that end of the Customs Hall where the passengers would have to pass through. If she stood with her cases she could be first aboard, but there was an hour to pass and she was horribly tired and wished to sit down.
After a while the cases were taken away, to her great relief. She stumbled a few yards to sit down, but the benches had all been occupied and faces stared at her with indifference or hostility, or avoided her exhausted eyes altogether. A lady with an English accent took pity on her and instructed a child, ‘Patricia, stand up so this lady can sit down.’
For this, Miss Wearne was grateful and would have talked to the lady, but something about her expression suggested that Miss Wearne’s dialogue wouldn’t be wanted.
After a while Miss Wearne felt a little better and went to stand in a position which would allow her to be first in the queue. It would be a very long queue, she decided in trepidation, for hundreds of people hovered about. Somewhere people were cheering and singing.
A few Customs officers strolled on duty, in no hurry; they just didn’t see the milling people. They went to the kiosk and stood sipping tea and talked to other uniformed people. They never looked at the big clocks, and it was five past eight before they began to do something about the queue. ‘Typical,’ she heard the English woman complain. ‘They could have let us on at half past seven. Stupid, they are.’
Miss Wearne didn’t understand why she had to stand in front of two desks before she was allowed on board. She became confused and doubled back from the second desk to the first. And then a few officers sat at a trestle on the deck itself and they wanted to ask questions. A crowd already seethed on board, shoving her out of the way. Youths shouted and threw empty beer cans, a girl put a garland of flowers around Miss W
earne’s neck, men bellowed with laughter; everybody seemed to know what they were doing except herself. She felt deadly tired. Four hours had passed since the taxi had called and taken her away from suburbia. She had the wretched sensation that suburbia was coming with her; the passengers seemed just the same rude, aggressive sort of people she’d encountered in the supermarkets.
The woman’s magazine had not mentioned this tediousness. And when a boy steward at last conducted her to a cabin she had another shock. She should have expected it, but the wording of the competition, the letters which had come from the magazine and the shipping company had implied, somehow, that she was to have a cabin to herself. There had even been a faint suggestion that she would be waited on hand and foot.
But she was taken to a cabin in which were three middle-aged women. They were standing in a dull light, likely to be the permanent condition of the cabin, for there was no porthole, and they were not pleased to see her.
They were Sydney loudmouths, she saw at once in dejection, and every citizen of Melbourne despises these.
They stood around as if she wasn’t there, and as they were women of bulk Miss Wearne couldn’t move. As soon as she sat wearily on a lower bunk they noticed her quickly enough.
‘Not there, missus,’ one told her, and not expecting any discussion about it. ‘Up there’s yours.’
Miss Wearne was at once terrified of sleeping in an upper bunk. She said, ‘I don’t think I can climb up there.’
‘You’ll have to,’ they told her pitilessly. ‘There’s clean sheets up there.’