Tirra Lirra by the River

by Jessica Anderson

  ‘I am not straining forward. I am waiting, and occupying myself while I wait. Which is quite a different matter. And besides,’ I said, to turn the conversation, ‘I don’t want to live in a climate where they can’t grow oranges.’

  But although in my determination to go home I showed no outward faltering, my memories of Sydney were becoming less precise. Daydreaming of home while I worked, I would feel myself in a long quiet room, depersonalized by a completeness of physical comfort, my body fused into the atmosphere, into the warmth of the sun and the drone of an eternal noon. Going home, though I did not realize it at the time, had become a project urged less by my mind than my body, which needed sun.

  ‘I bet you never go back,’ said David.

  ‘I will. I must. Or I’ll become a pommiefied Aussie.’

  I booked my passage at last, in March 1939, on a ship that was to sail in November. It did sail, in spite of the declaration of war, but I was in hospital at the time, with the first of my severe bouts of bronchitis.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t go,’ said David. ‘You got sick on purpose.’

  The winter of 1939–40 was extremely severe. Every time I got on my feet, down I would go again, to lie in bed coughing. Pleurisy set in, and by the time I got out of hospital, weakened and considerably poorer, there were no more passenger ships out.

  And so another period of waiting began, but this time I did not wait alone, for who did not live out those war years in the larger context of ‘when it is over’? My mother died during the war, and so did Ida Mayo, and so did Grace’s husband. David Snow was killed at Dunkirk, and several of my work companions were killed in the raids on London. For four years I made military uniforms, and for six winters I was ill with bronchitis. Some people are strengthened by the trials of war. Olive, who elected to stay with her man in Vienna, was one of them, as is evident from her later books. Perhaps if something else had been required of me than to make military uniforms, I would have been one of them, too. However, it was a time when one did what was required of one, and that was what they required of me.

  It was the gentle watercolourist who wrote and told me of Ida Mayo’s death. I know his name now. I saw him in a photograph, wearing what looked like the same long dustcoat, in a magazine Betty Cust brought me the other day. It seems that posthumously his work has achieved a small fame. He survived, alone in a cottage in the Blue Mountains, until 1960. His last paintings, said the writer of this article, were lyrical and happy, like the work of a marvellous child.

  ‘Has Lyn Wilmot been this afternoon?’ asks Betty Cust.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘thank you.’

  ‘You’re being very patient about it.’

  ‘About Mrs Wilmot?’

  ‘About not being allowed up.’

  I make a vague murmur to cover my guilt, because of course it is easy to be patient about Doctor Rainbow’s embargo on getting up when one has already disobeyed it, and intends to keep on doing so.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ says Betty, ‘there’s some good news as well. The mail strike’s settled.’

  ‘Oh. Wonderful. When may I expect letters?’

  ‘In a day or two, I should think.’

  ‘Then I must start to write some.’

  I look through the window and begin to compose a letter to Hilda and Liza.

  My dears, there are telegraph poles on one side of this street, and from these poles long black wires extend to the houses, two or three to each pole, for all the world like a small pack of dogs tethered to a post. When I first arrived the visual impression made by all these black wires was horrible, but now …

  ‘Here is Jack,’ says Betty. ‘He has been hosing at the back. The water board only lets us hose twice a day, because of the drought.’

  Jack comes in, carrying a bunch of chives.

  ‘Anything dead?’ asks Betty.

  ‘Nothing. Everything’s as good as gold. Which is more than we can say.’

  ‘We think one of our poinciana trees is dying,’ says Betty to me.

  ‘Never mind,’ says Jack. ‘If they all die, the whole darned lot of them, the jacarandas too, then we can go on that trip to Europe. She can’t go,’ he explains to me, ‘because if she goes from October to November, inclusive, she misses the jacaranda in bloom, and if she goes from December to January, inclusive, she misses the poinciana.’

  ‘But,’ I say, ‘that still leaves most of the year.’

  ‘Well,’ says Jack, ‘you might be able to persuade her. I can’t.’

  ‘Something or other always happens,’ murmurs Betty, with a vagueness similar to mine of a few minutes ago. ‘One of the children has a baby, or is just about to have one …’

  ‘Or one of the babies is just about to walk or talk,’ says Jack. ‘Or someone has hurt their little toe.’

  ‘I’ll go one day,’ says Betty.

  ‘Like heck you will,’ says Jack.

  ‘Do you want to go?’ I ask Jack.

  He becomes serious at once. ‘I wouldn’t mind going,’ he says cautiously.

  Betty gives me a smile, as if to say, ‘You see?’ She looks up at Jack sideways. ‘Jack is going to get your dinner tonight, Nora.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Jack, ‘because she’s going to see someone who’s hurt their toe.’

  Betty, who is standing with her arms folded, buffets Jack sideways with one hip. ‘He’s a wonderful cook, Nora.’

  ‘I’m only a snacks cook,’ says Jack.

  As soon as Betty goes there is a clash of intentions reminiscent of the day of my arrival. He wants to cook a fillet steak, and I want an omelette flavoured with the chives he is holding. I win, and get the omelette, which turns out to be perfect. The chives, he tells me, grow at the foot of the back steps. He gave a few plants to Grace twenty years ago.

  ‘They’ve just got to the picking stage again. They die back for a couple of months each year.’

  ‘Only a couple of months!’

  I am thinking of my little pot of chives at number six. When pondering reasons for returning, I never once thought of the food, the sensuous tropical fruits, and the plentiful vegetable products of the warm earth. I am partly thinking aloud when I say, ‘There are compensations in coming back, after all.’

  He looks amazed that I should even have doubted it.

  I mop up the buttery remains of the omelette with a crust of bread. He watches me with pleasure.

  ‘You are a good cook,’ I say, as I hand him the plate.

  ‘I wish you had had the steak,’ he says wistfully.

  ‘And you like cooking, I can tell.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I like doing all kinds of things.’

  ‘Gardening? Everyone here seems to like gardening.’

  ‘Yes. But Bet’s the real gardener. I hope to God,’ he says with sudden intensity, ‘that poinciana doesn’t die. She’ll be upset. I will, too. It was one of the first things Mum planted.’

  I think of Mrs Cust, washing her hands with sugar and soap at the kitchen sink, and speaking of what the garden is doing to her hands, while I, with my head sunk to my forearms …

  ‘Why did I cry,’ I ask Jack Cust, ‘in the kitchen at the back of your shop?’

  ‘I don’t know why, exactly. But I remember you did. Because I was there.’

  ‘Not in the kitchen?’

  ‘Yes. Until Mum shoo’ed me away.’

  ‘Then if it wasn’t you playing scales in the sitting room above the shop, who was it?’

  ‘That would have been Arch.’

  ‘Arch?’ Again I feel that uneasiness, that sense of danger. ‘Was Arch your brother?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jack picks up my tray. ‘I don’t remember exactly, but I think it must have been Arch made you cry. Because I remember afterwards, Dad hauling him over the coals, telling him he wasn’t to tease Miss Roche any more. Oh yes,’ says Jack, making for the door, ‘Arch was a real handful in those days.’

  ‘Wait!’ I say. My globe of memory has given one of its lightning spins, and I am
dumbfounded not only by what it shows, but by the fact that it has remained on the dark side for so long. Jack has turned back from the door and is looking at me with enquiry.

  ‘You must have been very young then,’ I say cautiously.

  ‘I would have been nine.’

  ‘And how old’—I am fearful, but inclined to laugh as well—‘how old was Arch?’

  ‘If I was nine, Arch was thirteen.’

  Thirteen!

  ‘I don’t remember much about Arch,’ I say rather curtly.

  ‘I daresay he will come back.’

  ‘Not with my memory.’ But of course, he already has. ‘Are you sure you were only nine?’

  ‘Sure. Because it was the year we moved from over the shop.’

  He leaves with my tray, and from the kitchen I presently hear the sounds of washing up. Thirteen! I was twenty when I used to hear those scales from the sitting room above the shop. The recollection, as if it has gathered strength during its long quiescence in the dark, flows out with amazing clarity and speed, so that my mind must race to grasp it, to hold it down. It was always in the drowsy middle part of the hot days that I used to hear that piano. I see myself prowling about the shop, restless, waiting in suspense for the piano notes to stop and the silence begin to create its own, more painful suspense. The shop was big and darkish and in the hot glare of the wide doorway a customer would occasionally appear and bring me the relief of speech, but I was usually alone, for in the quiet hours from twelve to two the Custs would leave me in charge while they went to work on their new house, the ‘big white corner house’ to which they were about to move. They took the quiet little boy with the long chin, whom I can identify now as Jack, and left Arch at home to practise in the sitting room above the shop.

  To ease my wait I tidied the stock. I made the piles of comics and exercise books as neat as blocks. I picked out broken slate pencils and pieces of chalk and put them in an old shoe box, and inserting my hands into the glass display cases I swung aside the lids of pencil cases to reveal their long interior compartments. The scales ascended and descended, even and impersonal, mocking my angry waiting, my trembling hands. I re-graded pencils displaced by the morning’s customers and scrabbled among pen nibs to find and extract the odd-men-out. The scales are becoming less even. I hear the thump, the heavy touch of the thumb. More and more uneven. Up and down the keyboard, up and down, hands rock like crabs. I purse my lips. The stock must be made utterly neat. The pen holders, the tin pencil holders, the crayons, the coloured pencils, all must go in rows. The stiff dimpled paper must be laid again across the baths of watercolour in the black tin paintboxes examined that morning. The scales stop. The blood floods my pink face and sweat flows into my armpits and the palms of my hands. Between my teeth I mutter that he had better not, better not. I am furious in advance, my eyes suffused with tears. The silence extends. I know him! He is sitting on the piano stool, listening to me listening, and grinning. I put a hand over my mouth, pressing firmly on the lips that would grin in response. But when I hear, picked out with one hand, the first six notes of ‘Cherry Ripe’, laughter spurts out from behind the hand. I give a stifled crow. Laughter is building up in me, up and up, and when I am intolerably crammed with it, I run, bent double, my shoulders jolting, into the back of the shop. The piano stool crashes to the floor above me as I reach the kitchen door, and then I hear the thud of bare feet on the narrow wooden steps, not running, but setting down each foot with a thump of eloquent deliberation. As I turn against the opposite wall of the kitchen, he appears at the turn of the stairs. Exultantly grinning, he bounds from there on to a kitchen chair, and from the chair to the table, where he stands poised to dive on me.

  I stand with one hand extended like a policeman’s and the other spread over my face, while fury and laughter contend agonizingly within me. Arch is said to be ugly, but like Dorothy Irey, he seems exotic to me. He is broad and squat, his mouth is huge, and his shining white teeth are big and concave. His forehead is low, his cheekbones high, and his eyes mere slits. But his nose, short and delicate, is from quite another type of face.

  He leaps. I give a shout of laughter and anger as his arms grip me, and then begins our shuffling panting speechless struggle. He is strong, cunning, and shameless, shepherd boy or young satyr. But we are not in Arcady, and I have long ago been spoilt for or saved from nymphean uses. And besides, he is too young.

  Too young. Though succeeding at last in pinning my arms with his, and immobilizing me, he does not quite know what to do next, but rocks me to and fro as if to say, ‘Come on! Move! Struggle!’ And as soon as I do, he lets me escape, and bounds on the table again, and jumps down again, and makes a few hilarious feints at me, a few tickling rushes, before flopping into a chair and saying in his high sweet voice, ‘Hey, Miss Roche, look at your hair. Say if someone came into the shop?’

  I am already putting my hair up. ‘All right, Arch,’ I say in a shaking voice, ‘you’ve had your last chance.’

  ‘You won’t pimp,’ he says with confidence.

  ‘The moment your father gets home.’

  He laughs.

  ‘I mean it,’ I say. ‘I have asked you and asked you, but you take no notice.’

  ‘Then why do you come running into the back?’

  ‘How can I stay in the front, laughing like that?’

  ‘What makes you laugh?’

  I don’t remind him of how it all began, of how he used to stop practising, and creep silently down the stairs, and through the kitchen, and into the shop, and leap on me from behind. It is beneath my dignity to explain the nervous expectation this trick has implanted in me. ‘I am not discussing it any more, Arch,’ I say. ‘This time I am acting.’

  ‘Jeez,’ says Arch, ‘all I do is stop for a bit of a rest. It’s you who starts it. You run in here because you want me to come down.’

  ‘Oh!’ I am furious. He has gone too far. He has breached an unspoken rule. ‘How dare you!’

  He bursts into laughter, jumps up, and comes at me again with his feinting, slapping, prodding, tickling. But I can no longer allow mirth to modify my anger. If my anger remains strong and real, it will give me back my dignity. I await my chance, get past his guard, and slap him like a mother. I am reinforcing the weak shield of my anger by humiliating him.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I say with adult contempt. ‘You! A boy in short pants!’

  He continues to dodge about me, laughing and flicking me with blows, but now something cruel and serious is taking place between us. No longer disabled by laughter, quick and watchful, I make my way past him and run into the shop. I hear him race up the stairs. The piano stool grates across the floor, and the first notes are struck. I run to my purse, take out my handkerchief, and hold it to my face. Steadily and silently, I weep for relief and shame, while the notes, regular again, sound in my ears as alternately impudent and pathetic.

  ‘See! You didn’t tell,’ he would say next day.

  ‘I am giving you one last chance.’

  One day he tickled me in the presence of his mother. ‘Arch, Arch,’ she said absently. She was counting and balancing the money, a job quite rightly considered outside my scope. I hit him. ‘It’s only his fun, Nora. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four … Stop that at once, Arch. How do you expect me to count?’

  These public teasings were his insurance, I knew, in case I should reveal his private ones. ‘It’s only his fun, Nora,’ his mother could then continue to say. And that is almost exactly what happened. One day in our wrestling he butted his face against my breast and at the same time held me so tightly that I could not make him let go. The top of his head was beneath my chin. His black curls had been cut off long ago, but I was familiar with the whorls that remained, and in a moment of tender dazed silence I set my cheek against his head to trace on my skin the base of those absent curls. He immediately pulled my blouse apart, set his curved teeth in my shoulder, and gave a man’s groan, and I then gave a great tearing sob, which rose to a
scream, and frightened him, and made him let me go.

  Tears were my only legitimate alleviation, and this time I gave way to them completely. With my forearms on the kitchen table, and my forehead pressed on to them, I sobbed and sobbed, while he stood at my side, my little Arcadian lover, pushing a glass of water against my arm and saying respectfully, ‘Drink this. Drink this. Drink this.’

  When the shop bell rang, and he ran out to serve the customer, I staggered from my chair, shut both doors between myself and the shop, and returned to continue my crying. This action gave him the mistaken idea that my crying was wholly voluntary. ‘Well,’ he said awkwardly, ‘it’s two o’clock. You’re all right now, so I’ll go back up.’ Through my quieter sobs I heard the receding thud of his feet on the stairs, but when I heard the ascending scale of piano notes, so impersonal, so remote, I was driven into the deeper paroxysm in which Mr and Mrs Cust discovered me. It was Arch, I sobbed, banging the table with my forehead. Arch, Arch, Arch. ‘Oh, now then, Nora,’ said Mrs Cust in reproach, ‘it’s only his fun.’

  ‘Arch does tease, though,’ she said to her husband.

  ‘You’re right, he does. I’ll speak to him.’

  To soothe me, they spoke soothingly to each other. While letting me ‘have my cry out’, they discussed in lullaby tones the planting of trees at the new house, and when the notes upstairs began to stumble and thump, Mrs Cust gave a crooning discourse on Arch’s heavy thumb, and Mr Cust replied with tranquility that it was high time she damn well realized it was a waste of money, and that he was too old to learn. The scales stopped at last, Arch ran down the stairs and out of the back door to join a group of friends, and I stopped crying, got up, and said dully, ‘I’m sorry.’

  When I rejoined Olive in the abortionist’s waiting room I told her he had been very nice, very kind. When I rose to face the Custs I kept a hand over the torn buttonholes of my blouse. But not to spare Arch. I spare nobody or nothing but my own pride. The springs of my shame were not in morality. A boy in short pants! On the following day Arch was enlisted to help with the moving. The move was over in two days, I left the shop to work in town, and I never saw him at close quarters again. In fact, I remember seeing him so seldom, even in the distance, that I am looking for another explanation than that I slammed a door on the incident, and sent my shame into hiding, though I certainly did that as well. I wait with impatience for Jack Cust to finish washing up in the kitchen, and as soon as he appears in the doorway, rolling down his sleeves, I ask him what became of Arch.