by Thea Astley
Since her trip to Brisbane with Mrs. Striebel, Vinny had fed on the memory of it from the moment on Sunday night when her mother asked, ‘Had a good time, lovey?’
She had dumped the old hat box on the top veranda step and returned her mother’s nervous kiss. Electric light from the hall washed right down the steps and halfway along the path to the gate.
‘It was wonderful,’ she replied. ‘The most wonderful week-end I’ve ever had.’
Her mother wanted to be glad, was glad, even though she felt a nagging jealousy. They went down the hall to the sitting-room, uglier than ever now after the expensive furnishings at the Reisbeck house.
‘Where’s the others?’ she asked.
‘Royce’s gone down to the factory. He’s starting night shift this week, and Rene has gone over to Merlie Passent’s place to help her make a frock for the ball next month.’
Vinny wasn’t really interested.
‘You had your tea?’ her mother said.
‘No. I’m not hungry, Mum.’
‘You got to have something. You’ll get ill travelling all that way with nothing in your stomach. What was Mrs. Striebel thinking of?’
Vinny’s loyalty was piqued.
‘We had pies on the way back, and some cakes before we left Brisbane.’
She slumped into a basket chair with her back against one arm and her thin legs dangling over the other. Mrs. Lalor, routine-bound for ever, resumed her darning.
‘I hope you thanked her nicely, Vin. What did you buy?’
Vinny’s eyes glistened reminiscently.
‘Something lovely, Mum. A lovely little china basket, all full of flowers, roses and tiny blue ones and gold on the edges.’
‘Gilt, you mean.’
‘Yes. Gilt. It was cheap too. I saved the change. Two and three.’ She opened the purse. Inside it she still kept the folded docket for the basket. She lifted it with reverence, and took out the money. Her mother watched the withdrawn eyes and the orange-coloured head, fire-kindled in the artificial light.
‘What did you do? All the week-end, I mean?’
So she told her about the trip down, and the rain over the Glasshouses, and the chip-shop steaming through the storm; but she did not mention the singing – she thought it might make Mr. Moller look silly, and after the week-end she liked him a whole lot better. When she came to describe the operetta she found an ally in the older woman who, once a devotee of musical comedy, became in memory the geisha girl our miss gibbs the maid of the mountains was peggylalorneeokeefeinhatslikeplatesandskirtslikesshrubberies. Most unexpectedly for both of them, they found themselves deep in conversation, the first adult one they had ever had.
But of course it could not last, could not withstand the impact of Rene back early from her outing, supercilious under the thick lipstick that halted time upon her sullen luscious mouth. Vinny became the child again, dismissed in a careless hullo, the reject who went truculently to an earlier bed where all the rapture of the last two days played itself over and over against the screen of her closed eyelids.
As she stood beneath the cassias now, two weeks later, the act of the dream with buds and leaves could not hold her interest. She pecked listlessly shifting the shadow patterns across the grass with jerks and pluckings at the springy branches, until after a while there was no fun in it anyway, and she wandered out of the yard down towards the empty back paddock and the road. When she passed the lean-to laundry hanging upon the side of the house she saw her mother through the door bending loverlike over the ironing board. Vinny swung her head smartly so that she would not catch her mother’s eye, and ran down past the acalyphas, climbed through a gap in the paling fence, and was out with an incredible feeling of freedom in the hot Saturday afternoon.
‘Il fait chaud, il fait beau temps,’ she said loudly. She broke into a run and yelled ‘beau temps, beau temps’ over and over, and leapt up to snatch at overhanging branches or paused to fling stones at Gilham’s mangy kelpie. After the yelping and yelling, the stone hurling, the shouting of school-girl French had released some of the resentment she felt, she found herself – involuntarily, surely – walking in the direction of the swimming hole.
Purpose melted the mile into half that distance trodden along the narrow paddock tracks on the town side of the railway line, south through the scrub thickets to the creek. A goods train rumbled north, and long after it had passed her she could still hear it jerking spasmodically and undecidedly at the station. Wondering what made the sound so clear, she looked back from the rise she had climbed to see the township arrow-straight behind her with not a spur or slope to muffle the whistle shrieks. She turned, and to the south the hill swayed down into dense scrub where the track was only kept flattened and clear by the feet of swimmers and picnickers. Two hundred yards away the creek ran west below the tall railway bridge and then moved south again in a series of falls and pools.
Vinny gazed all round her. The track before and behind was empty. The sky was very blue, its fathoms of air craft-crowded with huge masses of cumulus, icy white, rolling in on the trades high up. Now and again the bracken rattled as some invisible creature shuddered away, but otherwise, after the track dipped down and put the hill between herself and the town, the humming silence was absolute. She felt excited, and, better than that, she felt daring. She had never before been to the swimming hole in the summer months except one late afternoon a year ago when she had sneaked off without permission and found it empty. Girls around the town who swam there were considered fast, but Pearl Warburton and Betty Klee had managed to keep quiet the fact that they went there, and if Royce had not let it slip accidentally to her she would never had known.
Her blood throbbed like a drum with distant warning. An unaccountable sensation of impending excitement and a peculiar sort of fear that was so nebulous she could have laughed at it made her turn round once or twice to stare back up the narrow scrub track between the white gums and the ironbarks. Shadows that were dirty rags flapped under the trees and dangled from sunlit flags of leaves softly, softly on the lank grasses. Suddenly everything was freckled with the thinnest of fears, and Vinny broke into a trot which brought her to the thick tea-tree bushes at the top of the first fall. It was not very high, about ten feet at the most and now, because of the dry season, was a lean trickle gabbling into the wide pool below. Drought had shrunken this, too, and recessed it from the shores to leave a narrow sandy beach where the boys lay and baked in the sun. The whole place was sheltered, its privacy locked in like a secret, but shouts and laughter reached Vinny where she stood on the outer fringe of the thicket. Softly she began to move forward, her fear of discovery for the moment completely overriding that other nagging quivering fear that kept tugging at her stomach muscles. There was something about the laughter that made her wary, that made her wriggle on her hands and knees a few inches at a time to a place where the scrub thinned and she could peer down through the trellis of branches upon the pool, the beach and the diving rock.
It was three o’clock.
There were three boys in the water when she looked down, but two of them she knew only as workers from the factory, faces seen guffawing in the front stalls at interval, hands palming the orange drinks in the waxed containers, flicking the straws across seats and plucking proprietorially at their girls. And there was another head, a familiar, untidy head, bobbing some yards away. The brown hands paddled the green surface into waves, and Royce’s face, with a grinning anticipation on it which she had never seen before, stared hungrily across the pool to the big ledge of rock that jutted out from the lantana scrub upon the bank, right over to the foot of the fall.
Vinny saw the lips of one of the factory boys move as he whispered to his companion, who shouted in immediate laughter so meaningly coarse that she felt the whole centre of that peculiar fear focused upon the three figures in the pool. She hardly dared breathe. She knew, as if she had been instr
ucted, that she must make no sound at all, no sound, but wait for the inevitable moment that clutched the landscape in anticipatory stillness.
The lantana fringing the rock was hollowed into a natural tunnel of deepening green twilight, purple with lost light at its farthest parts. A rustling some distance back made the four watchers swing instinctively towards the sound, and Vinny heard Royce shout, ‘C’mon there! Hurry up! We can’t wait!’
Every outline of every twig under her skinny flanks and belly and every stone beneath her pointed elbows was impressed upon her flesh; the stems knuckled her knees; and even as she eased her body slightly she saw the parting of the last confetti’d sprays of lantana across the tunnel mouth.
Out of the diving rock walked Pearl Warburton, stark naked.
Vinny found the centre of her fear refracted like coloured light on water, broken apart and shaking all around her in kaleidoscopic fashion. She saw only breasts and thighs and the full-smiling mouth and the knees fat-dimpled and the shoulders curving roundly and again the breasts and the thighs and with it all a quiet horror. It was the whiteness and the confidence, the assurance of eroticism attempted and achieved in the amused eyes and the crescent curved mouth of the girl on the rock below.
If there had been the catcalls and the whistles that accompanied the weekly film stimulations, Vinny would have understood, for that was as far as her knowledge of sex behaviour extended – to the rudimentary concealments with their primary reactions – but what puzzled, what frightened her now, was the utter silence, that fell upon the three swimmers, as, oblivious to each other, they guzzled with their eyes the curving body stretched above them.
The moment hung over the trees, the water, the watchers, and the watched, and burst in a fountain of green droplets when Pearl sprang up and sent her heavy smiling body in a dive to the pool. Then followed in the tumbled confusion of the spray the laughter, the snatching, the provocation. Vinny buried her face in the leaves and smelt the eucalypt fragrance even in the dead mould. Shame fired her cheeks. She wanted to look; she longed in a frightening, dreadful fashion to watch the drama played out to a conclusion she sensed though she did not know about it; but the animality of the four people below terrified her. She guessed at a climax beyond her bearing, and found herself wriggling back through the bracken towards the track.
Something made her move silently in spite of her panic, but when she reached the path she flung herself along its security like a mad thing, panting, dry-gasping up the hill and then down towards the town. The rail-motor passed her, heading south. The driver waved to her loneliness upon the hill, and everything, train and houses quiet against the Saturday afternoon, seemed more normal than normal, more real than real. All the way she kept putting the pool and its four scrabbling occupants from her mind, but with the huge horror of nightmare the scene returned again and again, and although she counted it away and conjugated verbs in three different tenses said rapidly with the fury of a fanatic in supplicating prayer, she could not banish it with this simple guile.
Throughout the late afternoon she lay under the cassias behind the side fence and heard her family calling her now and again as the dusk washed up from the valley. And after a while it became quite dark and the stars flowered out quickly in the blue-green sky, and it was impossible to tell whether her face was damp from tears or dew.
At almost nine o’clock on that Saturday morning Helen had walked across the wide dirt road in front of the hotel and had gone up the entrance ramp to the station. There were newspapers curled round the lower cross-bars of the opened gates, sun-yellowed, sun-curled; behind her at the door of the pub the morning’s first drinkers, the veterans of high blood-pressure and cirrhosis. The sky bracketed green hills to north and south, enclosed in a loving sweep of blue the township basin. The houses stood without mystery in the high morning sun, boxed-in ochre or brown with white trim, green-blinded verandas all round, or bare as bones and showing the bicycles propped along them and the aged, sagging wire stretchers from the confirmed sleeper out. And they were filled – filled with shopkeepers and their wives, with factory hands or clerks, the women ardent over recipe and preserve, plump and efficient or plump and slatternly or sun-wizened or almost any combination of these things, but present, and for the most part predictable in the behaviour manifestations of the town – in the country women’s meetings, at the church socials, the masonic dances, the school concerts; they cut sandwiches and decorated tables and slouched foot-aching behind stalls and sold tickets and cleaned up after their male partners who boozed and betted and carved out a policy entirely independently. They were rewarded with little titbits of gossip garnered at a lodge meeting or an evening’s snooker, toned down from its rosy informality at the bar to a cosier family conversation piece. (Lunbeck had excused more late homecomings than he knew.)
There was a knot of people on the station, in best prints and going-to-town silks and absurd serge tight under the armpits and in the crotch, stained across backs and bellies and buttocks. And the heads twisted stiffly to nod as Helen came round the end of the little building on to the platform. She felt her guilt rising like a mountain between her nod and the nods of the others; she was relieved they did not know of the act intended, as bad, she told herself, as the act committed. She bought a return ticket to Gympie and, having crammed the piece of cardboard into her purse, drew her very aloneness about her for protection, and walked out and stood by herself at the far end of the platform. It was a pity she had to be so noticed on this particular morning, but she stood bravely in her one good linen suit and carrying an overnight bag.
Around the southern bend of the line the rail-motor rattled its rust-red length. She stepped forward instinctively and when the end carriage stopped in front of her and she saw it was practically empty, she went, as she always did, to sit by the very last window. The Cantwells got in and waved and she waved perfunctorily herself, shrinking against the hard leather seat, dreading sociability, wanting only to see the houses melt into the trees into the hills, without having to barter worn-out phrases. They sat down a few seats away and she lowered the morning paper that she had raised in self-defence. A short hoot blurted from the front car. Gungee slid back into dust and eucalypt patterns, and then the open paddocks came and the lovely risings of the hills. Town after tiny town stamped its station with skinny farmers and dumpy housewives and urinating dogs across the dirty rain-dust-streaked glass. Now and again when they went through a deep cutting she caught a ghostly glimpse of her own face mirrored on the window, staring steadily into her own eyes; saw the white, wide cheek bones and the full, slightly down-curved mouth and the neat hair in its golden bun beneath the wide straw hat. She asked herself if it were the face of a woman about to betray another, and the eyes swung quickly to the cutting’s red walls and the clambering mesembryanthemum and refused to acknowledge the accusation in the eyes. But despite self-recriminations nibbling like tiny fish at the edges of her mind, she was happy at heart beyond belief, so that she hummed quietly to herself below the racketings of the motor.
It was only when the first slag-heaps appeared like dirty scabs upon the Gympie outskirts that she suddenly feared Moller’s meeting her on the platform with Cecily Cantwell’s mock-innocent eyes down-tracking and cornering them and transfixing them against the waiting room walls. Cecily, she felt, would love to see them scuffing like bugs behind the ripped hoardings, concealing their twoness under dentifrice and canned-food advertisements, reducing the arrogance of their loving to the flat sordidity of torn posters and scribbled-on walls. The last curve came in with the branch line west, and then the station, and they pulled in slowly under the iron roof to a world of tea-urns and trolleys and the dripping taps outside the washrooms. Helen felt the Cantwells watching her as she stood up to drag her bag from the overhead rack. She gave them shallow smile for shallow smile and, disciplined towards exposure, pulled open the carriage door and stepped down to the platform in the dried-out sunlight.
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While the front carriages emptied quickly she searched among the groups along the platform for Moller’s bulky form. He was not there, and after the first second of disappointment she could almost have wept at his perception, his anticipation of the predicament of a public meeting in this place. She went into the refreshment room and ordered tea and sandwiches.
The long, stale room was all of a pattern with all the railway waiting-rooms all over the State – the thin and the blowsy girls, hair re-permed over perm, the tired frizz bobbing above the thick china and week-old teacake, the scalding, stewed tea and the slop rings on the counter. She stared, repelled, at yellow buns and silverpapered chocolate slabs, safe and sanitary, and the flies lethargic from too much food crawling over the sandwich piles. Yet with an idiotic determination to extract glamour from detail she felt that even these things would fix the day.
The man on the stool next to hers leant over dangerously and jolted her elbow.
‘Sorry,’ he said, not meaning it, and leered purple and liquor-scented across the steamy air. ‘Going far? Awful stuff, this tea, i’n’t it?’
Helen drew back from the network of veins hovering as if to trap her.
‘Yes, dreadful.’