by Thea Astley
Pension day. All the dinosaurs in town buying their mince steak and bread, their pathetic tins of canned food.
‘Where’s old Benny?’ Briceland had asked her. Testing. ‘You know where he is, don’t you?’
She had looked at him coolly. ‘Why should I know?’
‘Had an idea you were mates. Well, lady, you’re not the only one with secrets.’
‘Why can’t you drop it?’ she said. ‘You got what you wanted. You forced him out of his home. Isn’t that enough?’ She stumped away and went into the newsagency.
Now she stood in front of the men, intractable, glaring at the furniture piled on the ranger’s truck. She lied ferociously. ‘That’s my stuff you’ve got there,’ she snapped. ‘I lent it to Benny. You can put it straight back onto my truck and I’ll take it home. Benny’s coming with me for a while till I find him a place somewhere else.’
They didn’t believe her.
‘Now!’ she shouted. ‘Now!’
Benny was restless in Paddy’s back verandah sleepout. Each day the silence he carried within deepened. Something will turn up, Paddy kept assuring him. Something.
He would nod and amble out to the garden and work till the midday heat drove him back to sit in the shade of the awnings.
Towards the end of his second week with her, Paddy announced that she was driving into Red Plains that evening for a council meeting that was open to the locals for public comment on the new development.
‘I think I’ll come,’ Benny said. His desire for payback surprised him.
The council chambers were filled that night with Red Plains dwellers who resented the water pipes running out of Drylands when the town badly needed a swimming-pool. There was a sprinkling of Drylands graziers, the local member, and an advisory engineer who had come in from the coast.
Benny sat next to Paddy near the front of the room where he could watch the seated councillors as they dealt with various matters before public discussion began. He could not take his eyes from Howie Briceland who had abandoned his man-of-the-people gear and sported a sharp two-piecer and jazzy tie.
The moment the meeting was thrown open, Benny rose and pushed his way past Paddy to the aisle. He ignored yells telling him to sit. He strode down until he was facing the councillors where they sat, smug, he thought, he hated, at the long table. But he could see only Howie Briceland. Behind Benny the packed seats rustled with interest.
‘Why?’ Benny demanded, voice raised, looking directly at Briceland. ‘Why did you do that to me?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate,’ Briceland said. He whispered to the man next to him, ‘Get someone to get that bastard out of here.’
‘Why?’ Benny cried loudly. ‘I’m your brother.’
The room was stilled.
Benny stepped into shadow as he drew close to the table. ‘Same father,’ the shadowed man called, again loudly and clearly, moving nearer until his face thrust its tired bones towards Briceland, so dangerously threateningly intimate the other man leant back in his chair. ‘Your half-brother.’
‘Bullshit!’ Briceland yelled, pressing down the truth he had known for years. ‘Bloody prove it!’
The breaths of both men were audible rasps in the shocked air. Already the councillors were nudging, grinning. There were sniggers from the audience.
It was one no-count man’s word against his, Briceland thought confusedly. But the lingering stink of accusation? Public censure? Would there be that? There were weather changes, these days, in popular attitudes. Mentally his mind bluffed around with words like ‘national park’, ‘public interest’, ‘trespass’. Their implied excuse rang like a dud coin even he could hear. He rose and leaned across the table blathering meaninglessly.
A slow clapping began.
Watching, Paddy stiffened as she saw two self-appointed bouncers run across from the side. Her stomach clenched. Her hands began to shake. Other people around her began standing, shoving to reach whatever mêlée might occur, their faces lit with anticipatory malice.
Arms wound about Benny Shoforth’s shoulders. Hands dragged his slight body back from the table. The ancient resentments rose in his mouth like bile before he could discover obliteration.
He turned his face to the buzzing crowd now moving in and shouted into the night, ‘I’m Kanolu tribe, you hear? His brother! His brother! Kanolu! Kanolu!’
The words wouldn’t stop vomiting from his mouth.
MEANWHILE…
If she could open up one word only and watch it expand from bud to fully formed calyx, sepals, corolla, biologically perfect, would she be satisfied with that?
A word could have a whole fiction buried within. One word, monosyllabic or polysyllabic – take your pick – opened up a worldscape of ideas that could laze in bliss under summer soothings or become a maelstrom of conflict.
Tap and tap.
She thought this, she thought about the shadows of the shadows of words – hopeless! – and slammed the cover back on her typewriter, overcome by the illusion of what she was doing. Was illusion the wrong word? The difficulty, perhaps.
Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of. She had closed the shop and gone upstairs for a cup of tea. Through her window looking down on the main street she could see the cars and trucks moving in to park outside the pub. Clem had recently installed a satellite dish and linked up to a sports channel. It was, Janet thought, a symbol of male religion: there they all were, yappings stilled as they attended League mass, quaffing their communion Tooheys, joining in the votive prayers of groan, chiack, cheer.
Beaudy, Clem!
As she watched, sipping her tea, hearing the television boom through the open verandah doors of the Legless Lizard, someone who had just parked a little way beyond the pub looked up and saw her watching. A hand waved. She waved back. Then she saw the waving hand give her the finger.
Quickly she drew back, slopping tea and confusion, sprung as some sort of nosey-bob spy. Indignant. Angry. Embarrassed.
She remembered the disturbance on her desk, the merest of flutter-probe that alerted her to the fact that she was being discussed, talked about. Lately there had been the stray question cloaked in sympathetic interest: ‘Janet, wotcher do in the evening, love? Must get lonely, eh?’
There was that one night two weeks ago when she had yielded to an invitation from Paddy Locke and trotted across for a shandy in the ladies’ lounge. The noise inside had cracked her head apart. Conversation was impossible. Clem winked at her sympathetically when he brought in their drinks and managed to howl in her ear, ‘Have to do it. It’s part of the ambience!’
Ambience! Shambience!
It was the shire clerk who had given her the finger, a sallow streak of a man who had come back freaked out by the Vietnam War, married a cheerful personnel girl from a commercial radio station and efficiently immobilised her by siring six sons in as many years. He used phrases like ‘the lady wife’ and ‘the little woman’ and believed in football codes as if they were the Mosaic Law. Clem’s sports channel drew him nightly to the Lizard like a magnet.
This street. This town. The four shops.
Her business wasn’t doing well, hadn’t been doing well for the last three years. Own up! It was dying. Newspapers, trinkets and toys for the kids at Christmas, the occasional greeting card. Her stock of stationery had lowered barely an inch in two years. No one wrote. No one read except Paddy Locke. Even the westerns and thrillers had turned yellow on the racks. Their foxing became hers. Sighing, she looked at her hands and inspected the mildew of time.
She was beginning to think that some corrupt and deliberate policy was behind the system that produced school leavers and even university graduates barely literate in their own tongue. Was there a plot to take the whole economy back five hundred years to a kind of feudalism in which the minority wealthy had control of a population that was employable only for the most menial of occupations and would be grateful for pittances, serf-style?
She poure
d herself a fresh cup of tea and went back to the front window. The television boom was rockfall, avalanche, erratic billow. While she watched a lilac dusk settle on the street and lights pick out their half-mile of council concern, she saw the small runabout of Mrs Shire Clerk pull in and the shire clerk’s wife, followed by her two chunky youngest, now twelve and thirteen, poke her head dispiritedly around the bar-room door. In the sudden blaze of light, with her dragging kids, she had less the appearance of a fury than a wretched mendicant come to plead the case for an over-warmed dinner-wilting, a beggar wanting to get done the last chores of the day.
All the way to Canossa, Janet murmured. Practically on her knees!
The shire clerk’s wife reappeared, a kid each side of her narrow body, and behind, chivvying, her husband in full verbal spate, hurling words as she almost ran back to the car and hustled the boys in. Under the streetlight her face was distorted by – chagrin? tears? humiliation? rage?
Janet finished her tea and returned to the table where her typewriter stood and began dispelling loneliness with the sound of keys clacking over visitants who were not and yet were at the same time wholly within these dingy walls.
Pull out, Ted advised as she typed away. Pull out while you still have the energy.
‘I can’t,’ she whispered aloud. ‘Not yet. Something ties me to this place. Anyway, nothing’s selling. Where would the money come from, even if I wanted to make the break?’
Leave it, Ted’s voice kept urging. Leave leave leave.
His voice became the leaf sound on the back wall, the cockroach scuttle under the sink, the silence of silverfish along the shelves.
TAKING FIVE
It was as Lannie Cunneen was fixing her nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-eighth school lunch that she suddenly downed tools and scribbled on the kitchen notepad I can’t do this any more. I can’t bear it and went out to her small car and drove off, still in her dressing-gown and slippers.
She drove all morning and well into the afternoon until she brought herself and the car to a stop on a small knoll overlooking Emu Park beach. Bemused, she sat there staring at blue water. She was beyond thought and had merely a sense of catharsis and, after that, of escape. Bliss! She didn’t even feel the pangs of hunger. It was only towards five o’clock that thirst overtook her and she realised she had gone off without her purse. She rooted around in the glovebox and found a few dollars in small change under a tangle of supermarket dockets. She blinked and turned her eyes away from the mesmeric sea, put the car into gear and drove along the front to a shop.
It was full of kids buying icecream and milkshakes. They all stared, nudged and sniggered. She had forgotten the dressing-gown. ‘Versace,’ she said. ‘The latest. A glass of milk, please.’
The shoplady served her while her husband went to the phone to report a nutter. Then she took her milk in its plastic tumbler out to the car, drank it and drove back to the headland where, deliciously freed, oblivious almost to any nagging concerns about what lay behind, she fell asleep lulled by the steady rhythm of water breaking on the sand below.
Two hours later she was woken by torch-dance jazzing through the windscreen and a blue-uniformed man beating his hand on the locked door. Obligingly she flicked the lock and opened it, dazzled by flashlight and wondering for a moment where she was.
‘Yes?’ she asked.
‘You okay, lady?’ the policeman said. His offsider was standing back near the police car, its blue lights pulsating, its engine throbbing.
Lannie found she couldn’t answer. She simply gaped.
‘Your husband got in touch,’ the copper went on. ‘He’s been worried sick. You’d better come back with us to the station. He’s driving down to fetch you.’
Still no words came. She decided suddenly that it was better not to speak. She leaned back in her seat, her hands clutching the worn edges.
‘All right now, lady. Step on out and we’ll lock the car up and everything will be okay.’
But it wouldn’t. Nothing was okay. She gripped the edges of her seat more tightly.
‘Look!’ The copper was becoming impatient. ‘You’ve gotta step out, right? Otherwise I’ll have to arrest you.’
She heard herself mutter, ‘Seven thousand, three hundred approximately.’
‘What’s that? What’s that you’re saying?’
‘Three thousand and twenty.’
‘Lissen, lady, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Come on now, hop out. I don’t want to have to use force.’
‘Nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight. There were two more to go.’
The copper leant forward, put muscular arms about her shoulders and half lifted, half dragged Lannie Cunneen from the driving seat. She stood in the colder night air from the sea, shivering in her dressing-gown but remaining dignified.
‘Car keys,’ the copper demanded.
She handed them over in silence and he kicked the door shut and locked it. He couldn’t cope with this stuff. His offsider was trying not to laugh. Lannie closed her eyes as they frogmarched her to the police car and drove back to the station where someone organised a chair, a cup of tea, and left her sitting alone in an interview room.
She dozed, walked, sat, dozed. There was a permanent pain up the back of her neck and between her shoulders. She thought of nothing.
At about four in the morning they brought her husband in, angry and exhausted from an all-night drive. His eyes were puffed and there was a large smear of oil down one cheek.
‘Now, what’s all this about?’ he asked irritably. ‘Jesus, Lannie, have you led me a dance!’
He smiled, a part-smile, somehow bitter, somehow unplacating. Halfway across the room it dropped to the lino tiles.
‘We have to go back. Now.’
She looked up at him. She couldn’t, wouldn’t drive. Not back. Perhaps she could be taken, but she was not going voluntarily. Attempting a soother, he would get someone to pick up her car, he told her. Then, half pushing, half dragging, he got her back to his own car parked outside. The town wore the expectant stippled grey of pre-dawn, as if maybe this one, this now-morrow, could hold answers. It wouldn’t.
The duty sergeant stood on the lighted verandah of the police station and watched them leave. He didn’t know which one to feel sorrier for.
‘Why?’ her husband asked. She said nothing.
He drove grimly, exhausted, furious, his back to the sunrise, scooping mile after mile from the distance between here and there. She leaned against the passenger window and slept in broken passages of numbness. Occasionally when she woke and shifted her head into a more comfortable position he said, ‘Why?’ but she hardly heard the monosyllable and couldn’t have given a reason. She gave him numbers. In thousands.
‘Look at me,’ she said to the pudgy psychiatrist in a dreary room of medical offices in Rockhampton, ‘nudging forty, married for twenty years, six boys, all at school, and an endless…’ Her silence lengthened and coiled about the whole room, the appalling landscapes done by local artists, the fake leather couch she had refused to use, the important desk.
‘Yes?’ the psychiatrist prodded.
‘After twenty years you hardly know what sex you are.’
The psychiatrist brightened at this. He was balding, had the beginnings of a luncheon gut, and an all-consuming weariness with the endless petty problems of neurotics. He had also, one patient had told him with annoyance, the habit of glancing at his watch halfway through each session, with even more furtive timekeepings as the expensive half-hour neared its end. He kept his eyes on the woman opposite and waited. Unfortunately she didn’t appear anxious to fill the terrible gaps.
He glanced at his notes. ‘Your husband tells me you keep mentioning numbers. Um, why is that?’
She looked at him. ‘Are you married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘Three.’ He rather resented this but thought he had better humour her.
‘Have you ever had sole care of them for, say, even a week? Have you?’
‘Is that relevant?’
‘Have you?’
‘No, I must admit. But –’
‘I have six,’ she said, ‘ all school age. I have made rough estimates of the numbers of dinners, breakfasts, lunches, washings and ironings over twenty years of bliss.’
The psychiatrist was irritated by her ironic tone. Another of these feminist whingers!
‘But surely the boys give a hand?’
‘My husband won’t allow it. He says it’s women’s work. He believes a woman’s place is in the home. Permanently. He’s keen for the boys to be footballers and drinkers. That’s manly.’ She paused. ‘Three hundred and sixty,’ she said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m just totting up the number of football shorts and jerseys I wash and iron in a season.’
The psychiatrist allowed himself a small smile.
‘But other interests? Surely there are women’s groups, club activities, holidays?’
‘Holidays!’ She gave a grimace. ‘One.’
It was terrible and funny at the same time to remember.
She supposed it was a honeymoon.
Whirlwind was the spurious word applied to rapid courtships. Well, yes. A fortnight of dates with this lanky veteran who had been a volunteer rather than conscript for the Vietnam massacres. That should have told her something!
They had met on the deck of a launch going over to Stradbroke and perhaps the salt of bay air, perhaps the whipped-cream quality of bay waves reduced her usually acute perceptions. He had interrupted a law course to enlist, he told her. He believed in the domino theory and the threat of communism. She responded with a description of her work at a commercial radio station, researching for mouth-jocks on a teenage pop programme. She wasn’t crazy about it but hoped for advancement to something better. He had laughed in a generous and understanding way. They met again. And again. He was tinkering with the idea of giving up law and trying for a position in local government. His background, he said solemnly, should give him an edge. Vietnam had spoiled him for study. He wanted a job, an income, a settled background.