by Thea Astley
‘Never mind,’ he says, interrupting me. ‘Maybe you were right.’ He smiles again. ‘A cautious girl.’
There is something about his smile. He watches me steadily as I wait, a challenge implicit. ‘Some other time,’ he suggests or not suggests. Then he struts past me, roughly brushing my loaded arms and stalks to a motorbike propped near the kerb across the road, throws a muscular leg over and kicks the machine into horrendous life. I watch as he pulls goggles down but he doesn’t look once in my direction. And then he swings the racketing bike out from the gutter and speeds off, swerving between pedestrians and army jeeps, down towards the front, the blue, the blue. Have I failed or won? And what?
Thomas returns, jovial and sated.
‘Listen to this, ’cushla,’ he says to me two mornings later, looking up from his breakfast paper which he absorbs like cereal and peering lovably over his bifocals, ‘there’s been another attack, assailant unknown.’
‘What do you mean, another?’
‘They don’t print everything, you know. This is the fifth I’m aware of. Official policy is don’t frighten the locals. It could be one of our God-given Yankee saviours. It could be one of ours. Mustn’t offend the troops. Maybe they feel by now things have gone a little far.’
I wait until he has left for the surgery before I open the paper. I am filled with misgiving. I make domestic excuses to postpone reading. My hands puddling dishes in soapy water develop an uncontrollable shaking. My knees buckle. I make beds and sweep leaves off the verandah and watch the hands of the clock move on to nine.
The house rings like an empty shell placed to my ear. As if I am placing the house. I bolt back and front doors before I finally confront what I know I will read.
There is a picture of Kissing Point and the blurred, print-distorted face of a young woman watching as I read. ‘The badly battered body of an unknown woman was discovered late yesterday afternoon on the sand at Kissing Point. If anyone can identify…’
I stop reading. I see superimposed on that drab little snapshot eyes without a smile, lips stretched into the lineaments of a smile. And I shudder as if someone has stepped on my grave.
In our living-room the Church committee meets informally to discuss the establishment of a home for fallen girls. (My libido has been curbed by certain events but Tinker screeches with vulgar laughter when I tell her the committee’s endearing plans.) Thomas bustles about with drinks for the banker, another doctor, and the bishop’s assistant, Father Brimstone—now translated to higher things.
I am barred from the discussion, banished to the kitchen for supper-making: (‘That won’t be any trouble at all, ’cushla. Just a sandwich, a biscuit or two!’)
Sitting there reading, confined to barracks as it were, I can hear that important male mumble going on and on and on with an occasional laugh brought to boardroom order by Father Brimstone’s authority to speak dogmatically. Around ten I go in and smile politely, adding a social comma to a periodic clerical sentence. I am irritable with heat, mosquitoes and, above all, a sense of exclusion.
‘Why fallen?’ I demand abruptly. ‘Why must men regard pregnancy as a fall, for God’s sake! Why do you use that term? I thought the Church taught motherhood was woman’s noblest function, in fact her only function. One big yawning uterus!’ (I am turning into Tinker.) ‘Aren’t men fallen, too, for Chrissake, or is there a special dispensation for male sins of the flesh? How about,’ I add, ‘a home for risen men! That’s the nub of the matter, isn’t it?’
But they are not disturbed, that’s the rub. They are disgusted. Thomas rises and says, ‘My dear, the supper…’ Banker Gilham lights a cigar, puffs languidly and gives a smile whose tolerance maddens while Father Brimstone’s lips pinch briefly and relax. His fingers keep playing with his fountain-pen.
‘Now, now,’ he says soothingly after a long silence, ‘we can’t have you giving opinions like that. Not on such a serious matter.’ He seems to have lost that nervousness that dogged him in his weekly confrontations with the senior religion class. ‘You just be off, like a good woman, and attend to those matters that concern you in the kitchen, my dear.’
Neutered! Checkmate!
There is an even longer silence. Banker Gilham coughs gently. The men refuse to lower their eyes, and watch me. I watch them back. My anger is choking me. Finally I say, ‘It’s like talking to apes.’ Then I turn, slam the supper into the trash bin and bang the door behind me, hoping they will hear the outside door crash as I leave the house, running scared and unsafe through the blackout to Tinker’s. Perhaps Thomas attended to supper.
I sleep that evening on a stretcher on Tinker’s side verandah, anaesthetised by the smell of damprot.
‘Of course,’ Tinker says, pouring tea next morning, ‘you must realise that most men never have to prepare a meal from birth to death. That’s why they marry, for Heaven’s sake!’ She grins wickedly. ‘Leave mother and find another charley to set food in front of them. It’s why they’re paid more in case they don’t marry. The extra money’s for eating out.’
Tinker trots out memories of family Christmases: mother sweating in a 90 degree kitchen over the roast chicken, the steamed pudding, the stirred custard, the washing-up (the men have their quiet time then, with beer, to discuss races and football), and then on to preparing the evening meal while the men go off to the pub for their loud time to return drink-sodden, argumentative, picky and chair-prone while mother and the girls serve food, watch them gorge, then clear up to sag back wilted and exhausted listening to the snores.
Happy Christmas, everyone!
Tinker—a tenor sax sounds at left—has a greatly enlarged photo of Doebin black boys carrying the bishop on a litter, the sedia gestatoria. She has this record of class distinctions hanging on the wall above her dining-table where we sit drinking our tea. The natives are barefoot with their trousers rolled up. The bishop is wearing a pith helmet above his canonical garb in tropical concession. The litter is followed by admiring lay Sugarville gentlemen, also barefoot and with trousers rolled up. One of them is suckass Gilham. Tinker thinks it is the funniest thing she has ever seen. ‘Couldn’t he fuckin walk?’ she screeches. Language, Tinker! These days she’s practically an outcast from the stuffier town groupings but still cuts a swathe through GIs. The Church needs her every now and again to perform at fundraising concerts, for she is still a captivating violinist, the best in these parts. Billed as the big number for a St Patrick’s evening, she was stopped by the bishop’s secretary as she was about to go on stage. Father Brimstone’s late revenge! ‘Excuse me,’ the embarrassed but maliciously delighted priest said, looking everywhere else but, ‘the bishop thinks your…um…dress is a trifle…um…immodest.’
Tinker’s basic black was dashingly scooped. She glanced down at her sumptuous décolletage and snapped her violin back in its case. ‘Tell the bishop,’ she said with her most ravishing smile, ‘to play his own shitty sonatas.’ She walked out the stage door.
Olé, Tinker!
We fortify ourselves by recalling that moment. I feel better every minute.
‘More tea?’ Tinker asks.
After that supper contretemps, Thomas and I are teetering on the brink of marital wreck. Thomas spreads his charm over the female population of Sugarville—ancient, middle-ageing, sprouting, toddling. What a nice…! Isn’t Doctor Quigley a…! I bend forward and crush my moan. He spreads it more particularly in ways I don’t care to think about with at least two other women who are or were patients. One is actually the wife of banker Gilham. (Doesn’t he know? Or care?) The other is a nubile buddy of Tinker’s.
I have reached that stage where I can’t even be bothered talking about it, though for his last birthday I gave him a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal inscribed with his favourite sentimentality, ‘On n’aime qu’une fois.’
‘Darling girl…’ unwrapping the gift, ‘’cushla!’ And he began to sing, ‘“She was just the sort of craytur, bhoys, that nature did intend!”’ I wish this were a music
roll, this paper, like the old pianola munches, and then you’d get—we’d all get—the tune if you don’t know it already, you and me singing along with a chorus of adulterous husbands. A cappella shrilling from the double-bed club.
Only this morning in a shopping arcade I was passed by a strolling couple, tall, elegant, legs stretching from here to there. He was bearded, sailor-capped. She was a grey-blonde stunner. They glided, carnally, casually between the grocery aisles, talking and holding hands, for God’s sake, her right swinging in his left, easy, easy, and they emanated—it was coming out like gamma rays—sexuality, and sated sexuality at that and my God they’re fifty-plus if they’re a minute. Envy glued my feet to the floor. Then I heard what he was saying: ‘He’ll piss himself when he finds out about us!’
Do I need help, the expensive therapy of some zestful Freudian with his psychoanalytic drivel?
I remember Mrs Brodie and her gentle servitude. I remember Mother and the coolness with which she severed herself from Gerald Morrow. I think of Thomas and wonder if this is to be for life. My daughter Annette will understand if I flee south, scoop her from her dormitory nightmares and start making a life for us both. Throw ourselves on Claire’s mercy, perhaps. Start the same old cycle.
Shall I?
In the meantime I have Tinker to sustain me while I work this out. I don’t need a psychiatrist.
Tinker’s cheaper!
Tinker doesn’t cost!
Tinker’s motif—a sax in the wings—driving its lonely aching beat even as we sip tea, cuts in with its heavy four-four!
All them years, eh? Still rememberin Uncle Boss. And now this new man he cause real trouble.
Twenty years gone since then. More maybe.
Normie goin to make strike. He talk about it all the time. Normie he educated two years at that inland school where they bully him, eh, bein blackskin despite all that white he got. Like they bully here.
Normie good speaker. He talk and talk to them. Twelve-hour day, he say, for rations!
Separate schools, he say, for whites and blacks!
Areas for whites only! he say.
White boozers, he say, spewin up the drink we help unload. Then we clean up the vomit!
No good, he say, all that! There more of us!
Normie goin to make trouble. He mad bout everythin. Got wife, got kids. Talk all the time bout unfair.
Don’t say nothin, Manny, he tell. Somethin big goin to happen here. And soon. The world changin out there. It goin to change for us too.
THERE WERE PATTERNS TO FOLLOW
There were patterns to follow. There were always patterns, Matthew Vine knew, Normie Cooktown knew, each of them understanding the predictability of things, the lack of real variance in the human span.
After fourteen years to meet again on home ground. Or was it that?
See them. See the players lined up for the final curtain. Offstage: Quigley, Tullman, Curthoys and her daughters, schoolmaster Vine and Morrow. Dustily behind dusty scenery move Misses Starck and Weber. Enter stage right: Normie Cooktown and Vine’s son.
There were links everywhere.
Young Vine kept remembering his father’s disappointment at his decision to use his law degree working on Doebin as one of the government officials he had himself learned to loathe. ‘Thrown away’ was the phrase. He thought of his father, a dour retiree barely managing on the pension, sad and uncertain; he thought of his mother grown powerful as a rock, risen from that long-broken marriage and for years, until her retirement, running a country hospital hundreds of miles away from the bleak dustbowl of the Taws. He tried to blink away memory.
But why? his father had asked. Why?
I’m there to buck the system, Dad.
But are you? Are you bucking or submitting?
No. Not that. Not submitting. Never that.
You’ll find it impossible, Matt.
In a small way, his idealism had argued, in a small way I can do something. I’ve made friends with a lot of the families. Normie Cooktown’s, of course. The Ombas. The Fridays.
Then you won’t last long.
I’ve been threatened with dismissal twice, he had said with ferocious pride.
And then what happens?
Who knows, he said. I’ll move on. Up the Cape or out to the Kimberleys. There’s work to be done.
Then you’ll be classed as a paternalistic do-gooder. You’ll lose both ways.
At least I’ll have tried. At least I’ll be learning to decline the gumleaf, conjugate the seasons.
As here, he thought. Now, he thought. Treading in my old man’s shoes. The pattern.
Normie and Matthew, excited by encounter, had squatted under the trees near the jetty to talk over old times.
‘I won’t have this,’ the director told new hand Matthew. ‘There must be no fraternising with the natives, do you understand?’
‘We were at school together,’ Matthew protested. ‘He’s a good chap.’
‘No more,’ the director said. ‘I want to hear no more. Is that clear?’
What was clear were the links between them, however tenuous, sorted over in secret evenings at Normie Cooktown’s house. He was married to Cassie Friday and had a son and daughter. He was big and strong and filled with a sense of his own worth given him by those missionary ladies so long ago.
‘Where are they now?’ he asked. ‘Still preachin?’
Matthew smiled remembering. ‘Miss Weber died two years ago. Miss Starck’s in a retirement home in Brisbane.’
‘And Missus Curthoys?’ Normie asked. ‘Them Jesus ladies,’ he grinned, ‘took me to see her couple of times. Not long after that Leonie married the doctor. She was a good lady, all right. Looked after my brother Billy for a while.’
See them, still on the proscenium, the lights going down, the hall emptying. Father Donellan is praying in the wings. Oh God, young Matthew Vine thought. His father here first, now rotting his days away in a rented flat in Townsville, disappointed into silence. His mother retired at last to a unit on the Gold Coast, still plump with officiousness, irritable with lost authority.
All the players on stage, in the wings, yet paradoxically scattered.
His connection to all of it went through Annette Quigley as well, whom he had known at university, fresh-faced Annette who had vowed never to return to the north and was working as a dogsbody in a Brisbane legal firm, trying not to know, not to remember, even if obligation demanded that now and then she should visit her mother and Aunt Claire, sitting their days out in a south-western country town. ‘Things are changing,’ Annette had insisted. ‘God, I can’t tell you how tired I got of Father—jocular of course and worse since he’s given up practising, that’s how he got away with it!—constantly battering me with the feminine principles. A suitable marriage. Appropriate boredom.’
Matthew had to laugh and stuffed away any ideas he might have had about pursuing Annette. Irresistibly the north had drawn him back to a public service job on Doebin and a burning sense of sacrifice that might have pleased a missionary. At night on his bedside radio he heard the well-bred tones of Gerald Morrow still enriching news histories of the area. He would burrow his fury at the palliative lies beneath the sheet.
The islanders’ restlessness was increasing. There were constant complaints of mistreatment to which no one listened.
‘I’m gunna call a strike,’ Normie Cooktown said.
Normie Cooktown brooded over old hurts.
But it was the present that stuck sharper barbs than those humiliations he’d felt at twelve.
After all, they didn’t matter, they didn’t matter at all, Normie had decided all those years ago, watching in that dry inland an eagle stroking through immeasurable gulfs of air and spinnakers of cloud caught on the high winds.
He had been swooped on, picked up and deposited by letters and recommendations from schoolmaster Wesley to Anglican Church dignitaries—whose clout was more than the director on Doebin could deal with—at that school in clayp
an country where somehow or other his skin, his cultural disabilities eventually found a way of coping. ‘You move,’ one of the teachers, Clinger Vine, had advised him, ‘your emotional colour to another tense.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t you?’ Clinger’s face was all thin and wrinkled and worried and gentle. ‘Don’t you? Well, it’s like this. Take all your certainties from Dreamtime—is that what you call it?—past imperfect, past finite, whatever, and make it present continuous.’
Normie didn’t know what the old bugger was on about, but he looked kind. He asked the master’s son.
‘I think Dad meant,’ Matthew said, measuring up for a practice goal on the frost-dried oval, ‘you take all the confidence you would have in your own surroundings—I mean your natural ones, I guess—and use it in your present. Get me?’
Normie made vague gestures with his head and scuttled in front of the other boy to kick a bullet shot straight between the posts.
‘Bull’s-eye!’ Matthew commented without resentment. ‘Selfish sod!’ and gave him a friendly shove and rival hoot.
Days carved in dust so that they lost their shape instantly: classwork, games, friendlessness, friends—of a sort. How strong? How loyal to a half-caste? He had scraped through the junior examination with six Cs. His mumma wept with pleasure. And the war was over with no jobs for a brownskin, only a return to Doebin to help his old man, getting older quicker and his mumma fading. Helping the old man catch turtles, sometimes twelve, fourteen, to sell to the rest of the settlement who needed the meat. And working. Mainly that.
He’d married with the director’s permission. He’d had kids. ‘Wonder I didn’t have to ask for permission for that,’ he would say bitterly to Freddie Sweetwater, to Hector Fourmile.
Nothing had changed. There were still the dormitories, the ration lines, the bells, the segregation.
White staff came and went. One bully director was like another. There was electricity now but mainly to the houses of the whites. There was piped water—to the whites. There was a mission school, a new church, a government school, another store.