by Thea Astley
Evie sat down with them. All watched with expectant eyes and waited. Why had they come? What did they expect? She was beginning to understand the isolation of these places that drove people to seize any opportunity for escape from humdrummery. These four – these pleasant four – were playing truant from husbands who regarded their activity as female folly. They were fighting the darkness.
The start of it.
Evie spoke for a few minutes, outlining the programme for the next day. She watched their eager faces, noted the worn hands, the care with which they had dressed for this, and her sympathy brought on a dreadful urge to cry. They were here to help each other, she told them. Destructive comments were out. Constructive was what was wanted. She hit the first syllable and smiled. They all smiled back.
Tentatively she asked about background. Win wrote up reports for the CWA. Paddy had been a stringer for a north-coast paper. Lannie and Ro simply wagged their heads. Evie understood. She thought she understood. ‘First,’ she said, apologetic eyelids the teeniest flutter down, fringed fingers shaking the possibility of unpleasantness away, ‘don’t expect too much from me. No miracles.’ They laughed dutifully. ‘I can’t make you creative. But I know you know that. No one can do that except God. But that’s another matter. You see,’ and her eyes pleaded with them to see, ‘you could learn everything possible about musical composition, say, harmony, counterpoint. You could know all your chords, intervals, time patterns, the lot, and yes, you could probably, perhaps probably, put together a sonata or a symphony simply by following the rules. But would it be Mozart or Beethoven? Nothing could give you their gift of invention or melody. That’s the divine gift. And I might add, I don’t have it either.’ A self-deprecating grin. ‘We’ll work at it together. Are you with me?’
They all said they were with her. She was hating herself. These weary expectant faces!
‘And so all I can suggest or all we can suggest together,’ (bugger prolixity, she thought, and packed a radiance like any pistol-packin tutor) ‘are ideas about structure, character development, variations in sentence form, ways to sharpen dialogue without a plethora of he saids, she saids. That sort of thing. Little tricks. Are you with me?’
They were still with her. And she saw their eyes light up with possibility because this day was different with the pleasure of simply cutting loose from the ordinariness of the other-day grind in even this simplest of ways. And while someone made tea and others produced scones and cake, she hated herself and what she was supposed to be doing, floundering between their hope and their hopelessness.
The Lizard was roaring when she returned late that afternoon, the bar racketing with the desperate grogships formed after the third glass, sustained by a matiness of tired old catchwords but waiting for the peril of the imagined insult, the disagreements after the sixth or seventh.
She walked along the one street and found a café still open where she picked at a chop and salad under the flicker-eye of the waitress. She kept thinking of a woman she had met in the last coastal town a week back, a handsome, wry-mouthed blonde who was teaching in the boondocks and had come in for a weekend break. She was filling in time, she confessed, enduring the teaching and on the threshold of marrying.
‘That’s some threshold,’ Evie had said. ‘That’s certainly some threshold. Is he a teacher too?’
The blonde had been enormously amused. ‘He’s an itinerant pineapple picker.’
‘But do you, well, have much in common?’ Evie couldn’t hold back the question.
‘Just about everything.’
That was a stopper!
Later she thought it might have been more a comment on teaching.
They’d met again at the home of a local who was giving a polite farewell party for Evie. The blonde was an expert – is diseuse the word? – who had plumped herself down at the living-room piano mid-drinks and begun reciting as she played heart-rending old folklore, bush ballads – whatever – with a polish and style that belonged to an alien time, say sixty years ago. Her voice was husky with emotion mimed for laughs.
Would her skewed talent survive the pineapples? Evie couldn’t gauge the parameters of desperation.
She walked back to the pub and started up the stairs to her room. A figure blocked the ill-lit landing and there he was again, the traveller from the night train, watching her ascent, his whole body eager for recognition. There came a babble of words: he’d hired a car on the coast, done some business in Red Plains, he had to see her, he was off the next day, he couldn’t get her out of his mind, he…
Perhaps his persistence was for laughs too.
He appeared to be blocking her doorway.
She shoved past him.
‘Not my threshold!’ she said, irrelevantly for him and not caring if she hurt, and closed the door.
Next morning the class began its readings.
Win, Paddy, Lannie, Ro.
She had set the simplest of assignments, unsure what their regular tutor suggested. Working blind.
With the exception of Paddy Locke, the oldest group member, who described her willing exile in Drylands with a kind of amused zest, they read small pieces so polite, so tentative they became mounds of indistinguishable dullness – bushfires, floods, trips to the coast. Yet every now and again there would be a light, dry moment that hinted at a cynicism, a humour, an eye for the odd. A sentence here, a sentence there that Evie felt – no, knew – pointed to a sensitivity that was being repressed in case it transgressed the boundaries of what the writer was supposed to feel, that broke through those sanctions imposed by the conventions of thinking acceptable for small-town bush wives.
One hour. Two. At tea-break she said, unable to hold back any longer, ‘Don’t any of you hate anyone? Love anyone? Aren’t there any scandals, adulteries, generosities, shy kindnesses or petty meannesses, reprobates, criminals, heroes even? Anything? Anything that creates conflict, brings tears? Isn’t this town…’ pause… ‘a normal hotbed of jealousies, loyalties, goodwill?’
Shocked, they stared at her, then two or three of the women began to laugh.
‘Nothing we could talk about.’
‘Or write about.’
‘There’d be a reckoning.’
‘What sort of reckoning?’
‘Violence,’ Lannie whispered.
She looked at them: Win, Paddy, Lannie, Ro.
There was a silence that stretched a glassy film across the old hall with its dusty stage, its uncleaned windows, its notices of the dance before the dance before last, the screamer poster of a rock band that failed to show with a ‘cancelled’ strip pasted across, a noticeboard with typed memos of CWA meetings.
‘They don’t like it,’ Lannie said. ‘Our coming to classes. My old man didn’t want me to come. Thought it might give me ideas. He seems to think we’re trying to be something we haven’t any right to be.’
‘Maybe. Maybe.’ Evie smiled through a mouthful of scone. ‘Perhaps he’s frightened you’ll write about him. Frightened he’ll feature in a blockbuster!’
‘Blockbuster’s the word,’ someone whispered and they all laughed then and the bonds strengthened. It was like feeling muscle grow, expand, attach to other muscle and fuse without tissue rejection. ‘Do it, love,’ a voice urged. ‘There’s a lot of us could do it.’ And Evie was aware as she had not been aware of certain giveaway lines about mouths and eyes, a tightening of lips despite that country-woman calm that spoke of baked dinners and hefty breakfasts and, between the dinners and breakfasts and the morning and afternoon scones and pikelets, hours spent on tractors or hay-balers or early evening milkings, interspersed with washing and ironing and carting the kids miles to the nearest school bus and fetching them back, all wedged in before a spot of mending or clothes-making and grubbing around the vegetable plot.
‘And after all that,’ Lannie said as if Evie had listed their husbands’ demands aloud, ‘we help the kids with their homework while the men go off to the pub for their quiet time.’
/> That broke them up. Their yelps of laughter restored lost confidence. There they all were, Win, Paddy, Lannie, Ro, calm again but tight with that underlay of resentment surfacing above the neat starched cottons, the shampooed hair, the vestige of makeup that reassured them they were not simply milkers, tractor drivers, cleaners and cooks.
‘Blockbuster,’ Ro repeated. ‘That’s the word!’
Evie looked at her with interest. Ro bore the dying thundercloud of a blackened eye. There was still swelling across one cheekbone. Her left arm was in a sling. The rest of the group saw Evie wonder and were embarrassed and knowing.
‘The thing is to write about what you know, what you really know.’ Evie turned her gaze deliberately away from bruised flesh. ‘What you feel.’
The morning moved on towards midday. ‘After lunch I’ll get you to write a few hundred words or so, as I said, about what you really feel. The things that mean most to you.’ And she offered to take their material with her if there wasn’t time to go through it with them that afternoon. She promised to return the material with comments. ‘Helpful, I hope,’ she said and watched them smile at each other, still united by laughter. She handed out photocopies of stories by Chekhov, Hemingway, Carver, Updike. ‘We’ll look at these now. They’ll show you, tell you lots of things.’
During the lunch-break one of the women manned the tea urn and the rest of them took cups and sandwiches out onto the lawn and sat in the shade of the pepper trees.
They had only begun to pass plates around when a truck pulled up on the road with an angry screech of rubber and two men got out, slammed car doors and started towards the group. ‘See that man,’ Win, the group leader, said softly to Evie and pointing to the plumper, shorter fellow, ‘that’s my husband. He is the cultural desert.’ She smiled into her cup.
The two walked with a bushman’s roll and halted, legs wide apart, a few paces from the women, threat and animosity in their stance. Win’s husband briefly touched his hat brim before both hands vanished into pockets. Again Evie sensed darkness in the bright air.
Words came in chunks.
‘Need the wives,’ the other man said. He was tall and sinewy, his face carved sharp as an axe-blade. He looked at and through them all. ‘Need a hand back at the farm.’ He stared brazenly at Evie. ‘Didn’t know the missus was goin in for this sort of stuff. Okay, Ro, pack it in now and let’s get goin.’
Ro dropped her blackened eyelids and shuffled papers and handbag together. Evie went over to her and whispered, ‘You don’t have to go. Remember what I said.’
Ro nodded without once looking up.
‘Shake it up there!’ the man ordered. ‘Right now, mate. You must of forgot lunch, eh?’
His horrible joviality fell into a flattened moment. He was hurling words at his shrinking wife like clods or bricks and she was not dodging but receiving like a willing saint, enduring abuse as a terrible balm.
‘God, Howie,’ Win complained, ‘you said you’d be okay. I left your lunch in the fridge. Can’t you open the door, eh?’
‘It’s not that, Win,’ the other man interjected. His grin didn’t reach his eyes. ‘He’s comin over to me and there’s the hands to feed, the two boys helpin with the yarding, eh. Come on, Ro. Look snappy!’
Ro shrank back against the tree as if she might burrow into its sheltering bark. The rest of the women looked down at their untouched plates. ‘Well, I’m not coming,’ Win said firmly to her husband. ‘I arranged this day weeks back and you knew about it.’ There were bright spots of red on her cheeks. ‘And I don’t think Ro should have to go either.’
‘Mind your own business, love,’ Ro’s husband said. ‘I don’t give a stuff what you do. That’s Howie’s problem. But Ro comes now. Come on, woman! Do I have to bloody drag you out?’
Evie stood up and went forward till she was close enough to smell sweat and beer and the unpleasant stink of withheld rage.
‘How dare you burst in like this! The class is taking a lunch-break before the afternoon session. I need them all here this afternoon.’
The man swivelled and stared.
‘And who the fuck are you? Some two-bit bitch teacher from the city out to see how the other half lives. Get out of my way!’
His mouth was soured from failure and a need to bully. He elbowed Evie to one side and trod brutishly through the little group towards his wife whose face, white and tight with humiliation, bulged with tears that she pinched back. Dragging at her arm he jerked her up roughly.
‘That’s assault!’ Evie shouted. ‘I’ll get the police!’
Win’s husband was backing off. ‘Okay, Wal, give it a rest. We’ll take the crew down to the pub.’
‘Jesus! You gonna be pushed round by some fuckin woman?’ Wal pulled Ro forward and gave her a hefty whack across the back. ‘Get goin, love, before I have to hand you one.’
‘I’m not coming,’ Ro whispered.
‘What? What you say?’
‘I’m not coming.’
The man drew his arm back like a paddle and swung his palm forward in one savage movement that cracked the bone of her cheek. She let out a small scream and fell forward, her hands digging at the grass.
‘Want some more?’ he asked. ‘Or you got the message yet? You always was slow to get the message.’ His boot nudged her shoulder as she lay, nudged, drew back and drove in harder.
‘For God’s sake!’ Win cried and her voice broke into her husband’s inertia so that, shamed, he ran forward and wrestled Wal away. The two men struggled for a moment, and then as suddenly as the tussle had begun it ended with Wal stalking off towards the truck. ‘Okay,’ he shouted back over his shoulder. ‘Okay. But you know what’ll be waiting for you later. God, I can’t wait!’
The truck roared off in explosions of bulldust but the whole weather of the day had darkened. No one knew what to say. Nothing could muffle the little gasps and whimpers of Ro who had been so demeaned.
Someone had fetched ice from the esky and was holding it to Ro’s cheek. Another was helping her sip hot tea. ‘It’s all right,’ Win kept assuring. ‘It’s all right, love. We all knew.’
Evie couldn’t repress the words that fell out of her mouth almost unwilled. ‘Well, I hate to say it but that was something – something to write about.’
The group looked at her, shocked.
She couldn’t explain what had made her say that. She was shaking. ‘It’s a help,’ Evie argued. ‘You’d be surprised at what a help it is.’ Could she explain her own lost marriage to them, the months of disillusion with a gambler’s broken promises, the poverty, the debts, the emptied bank accounts – until she finally walked out? It had hardened her. She knew that and detested it.
‘We help,’ Win said. ‘We try to help.’
‘Well,’ Evie persisted with the impertinence of an outsider, a blow-in. She looked at the ruins of the day, the discarded lunch, the injured woman, the broken but loving attempts to assuage, and decided to say what she felt must be said. ‘Ro can’t stay with that bastard. There’s a refuge on the coast. She’s got to do something. He’ll end up killing her.’
‘It’s the kids,’ Ro mumbled. ‘Can’t leave the kids. They’re still in primary.’
The group nodded as if one.
‘Take them with you,’ Evie said. ‘Think of yourself for a change.’ She could have wept for them. ‘It was just an idea. I’m single now. I was married, but, well, you know how it is. I’ve forgotten.’
They told her she didn’t understand. They told her how small the town was. They told her the police wouldn’t act. The police always took the husband’s side in these matters. The police drank with them. They wouldn’t do anything to upset a mate.
Back at the pub she showered and changed into fresh clothes. Two hours before the rail-motor pulled out. She kept seeing Ro’s battered face, kept hearing her whimpers as she was dragged up from the grass. No more, she thought. I can’t come to these places any more.
She lay back on her bed and
began reading through the papers she had collected from the women and would later post back with comments. Outside the sun settled in a blaze of yellow behind the Rock. From below came the steady hum of the early drinkers. She was packed. She was ready to leave. She put the papers aside and wondered whether she should head up the street for another dreary meal at the local café, with the flies drumming against the window and the moths rushing to death on the light bulbs.
There was a slight noise at her half-opened door, a cough, a token tapping, and she swung about to see him once more – she couldn’t believe it! – the man from the train, the traveller in soft goods, still light, still bouncy, peering foggily from behind his glasses. He wore his assurance like a flower behind the ear.
‘Ah,’ he said, entering, ‘there you are! I’ve been hanging around all day, shuffling between Red Plains and here. What a town!’
‘Please leave,’ she said. ‘Please.’
She rose and walked across the room but he stood firm and resisted her push with a stolidity that held a wiry threat. Suddenly she was afraid.
‘Why did you wait?’ she asked him. He had rented a car. There was nothing to stay for. But he regarded her with his sweetly ascetic smile and tried holding her eyes meaningfully, so that she felt sorry for him at the same time, for his stupidity, for that mordant puritanism looking for a quick lay he could excuse on the grounds of irresistible attraction or love. Deprivation? It meant nothing. Later he would confess to his wife and pass on the burden. A moment! Just like that! It meant nothing, he would tell her. Nothing. And he would feel good and go outside and water the garden.
‘I thought you might like a lift.’
Evie found herself thinking, in the middle of her fright, like a filmic five-second grab, Now, here’s a story my little group could have fantasised about, approximately two thousand words, double-spaced, leave a two-inch margin.