by Thea Astley
‘What did you mean,’ Pearl asked, ‘by threatening me last week?’
Vinny’s fingers tightened nervously round the library book. Out of anger she sought desperately the courage that had carried her over the wild rapids of bravado and challenge that other day. Her eyes flickered from Pearl’s face to Betty Klee’s malicious doughy one. Her stomach quivered with sickness as it had always done when she was being attacked. She tried to flesh within her mind the shadowy figures of Mrs. Striebel and Mr. Moller to stimulate her crusading urge. Nothing came, nothing but Pearl’s voice niggling at the same question.
‘Nothing,’ Vinny said sullenly. ‘Nothing. Nothing.’ There was nothing she would do to harm anyone, could or would do.
‘That’s good,’ Pearl said. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ She turned to her friend. Their faces seemed enormous, ballooned in the heat. ‘From what we hear, we could tell a few things about you.’
‘What things?’
‘Ah! That’s just what I asked you, and you wouldn’t say. Why should I?’
Betty Klee became the apostle bound by indissoluble ties of envy.
‘Yes, why?’ she asked, she echoed.
‘I’ve never done a thing,’ Vinny protested, her skinny body trembling with pique. ‘Never. You and your boy friends. I’ve seen you at the pool, do you hear me? Seen you. So there’s nothing you can say about me.’
‘Oh yes, there is.’
‘There isn’t!’ Vinny shook her head. She felt oddly uncertain. ‘There isn’t. There isn’t.’
‘What about last night?’ Pearl asked. ‘After the school dance? What about that?’
It was the raping of privacy, the shattering of personal stillness into laciniated fragments of the intruded self that shocked Vinny most. Without being aware of doing it, she had sprung to her feet to stand with her back pressed against the rough slip-rail fence. Her school-case fell open on the ground, the lid hanging askew to reveal the grease-spotted interior with its brown paper lunch bag and grubby textbooks. Looking down at it she was ashamed, even in this moment of anger and fear, and she tried to kick the lid shut.
They could only know Tommy had kissed her because Tommy had told them.
The same tide of despair that flooded her mind when she knew of Pearl’s intimacy with Royce swept her away again, floundering and plucking at air. Everything around her had a liquescence, was melting away.
‘Nothing happened after the dance. I jus’ went home.’
She could not help denying. The situation was compulsive to denial. She saw Betty Klee move forward, saw her lips shape words, and with an effort made out her question:
‘You just went home with somebody, didn’t you?’
‘Who?’ Vinny asked, challenging her.
‘Tommy Peters, that’s who.’
Nothing had any importance any longer. The dance, the day’s contentment fell away like leaves from the branches of her mind. Her blood beat faster along its rivers and she felt the sweat-beads star her forehead.
‘What if I did?’
‘Ooh!’ said Betty. ‘What if you did! I hope your mother doesn’t find out what you did!’
Pearl watched them both intently, still smiling slightly.
‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘That’s not what Tommy says!’
Vinny sensed the tears trembling under her eyelids.
‘You’re all a lot of liars,’ she whispered. ‘A lot of liars.’
Betty Klee giggled and swung her arm through Pearl’s.
‘We’re not, are we, Pearl? You just ought to behave.’ She was struck by a sudden delicious thought. ‘You’ll have a baby,’ she giggled. ‘That’s what’ll happen to you. You’ll have a baby.’
Vinny’s bright-white face, dark-stippled by ginger freckles, shone its horror back across the little space between the three of them. Her stomach felt as if someone were squeezing it up very small. The arteries in the crook of each elbow tingled in a loose uncontrolled way as if they had no purpose of flow. Her mind exploded into dozens of thoughts tiny as matchflares, huge as neons, that said ‘nonsense’ and ‘perhaps’ and remembered her mother’s sweating eight-month pregnancy and the fat-bellied, child-heavy woman in Brisbane. A tiny squeezed-out sound came from her throat and fluttered uselessly as a white moth over the heads of the other two.
‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘Oh, I won’t! I can’t. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Betty Klee was delighted. Quite by accident she had discovered a very fine torture. She called Pearl in for support.
‘Yes, you will. And your stomach will get big and you’ll vomit. Oh, you were silly, wasn’t she, Pearl?’
Pearl, with the eye of the practised voluptuary, took in the undeveloped body retreated against the fence, laid her glance in an unflattering caress upon the breastlessness, the no-thighs, the uncurved mouth.
‘You’ll have to leave school,’ she said deliberately. ‘Everyone will know. You’ll have to leave before people start talking about you.’
Vinny searched their faces uselessly for some relenting, a seed of kindness, perhaps, and found none. With the strange irrelevance that comes to the mind confronted with a dangerous situation, she remembered dandelions yolk-yellow in paddock morning grasses and the oleander bushes at one side of the house double-puffed pink above their poisoned leaves and the darkened theatre with the orchestra-pit glowing like a camp fire below the moving peopled stage – all the lovely things – and the basket wobbling with the tenderness of giving – and none of these things had any importance anymore. The giant hideous accusation towered over the day, spread across the sky to meet the angry nimbus piling up in the east. The motionless air around them shivered suddenly into wavelets amongst the branches of the pepper-trees in the swift chill breeze that moves in before a storm. On the ground at her feet one of her exercise books rustled open in the wind and they all looked down as page after page riffled back through careless ink-working and scarlet correction symbols.
Vinny could not force out a reply to their charge. Trapped in this cocoon of time, she would prefer to remain statue-still watching the days, the weeks, whipped back like films in the moving air that coursed her arithmetic book. The other two watched her, neither annoyed by her silence nor satisfied. Something instinctive assured them that they had achieved the effect of shock, but the more sadistic sides of their natures desired protestation, ripe panic burgeoning in tears, the wild white flower of hysteria.
‘Don’t you care?’ Pearl asked.
The bell rang with a surprising loudness. Vinny bent down automatically and began stuffing books and papers back into the bag. Then she banged the lid shut. She had trouble with the catches and while she struggled to press the levers into place tears rolled from her eyes down the gentle curve of her cheek.
‘Don’t you care?’ Pearl persisted. ‘Don’t you?’
She could not bear to look at them any more, and she picked up her bag and pushed past them unseeingly. She ran through blindness and deafness down the slope of the yard to the marshalling lines.
But the matter did not end there.
All the afternoon Vinny sat uncomfortably in class imagining the others were staring, were whispering the hideous thing, were broadcasting it in notes passed behind book-covers or palmed stickily along forms. Several times during the last period she caught Betty Klee and Pearl Warburton watching her, and Tommy Peters looked her way, but she immediately lowered her eyes to her text.
Outside the sky was bruised with storm-cloud rainblack and pressing down upon the mountain and the town in indigo seas ready to break into torrents of streaming water. An unnatural radiance, yellow as sand, hung over paddocks and trees, washing them into a brilliant green; the houses stood cubed, projecting uncannily from the normally flat landscape. Depth made everything appear much closer. In the darkening classroom Mr. Mo
ller lounged gloomily beside the window, staring with a kind of dispassionate curiosity at the storm moving towards them. Towards the coast the first thin wires and fringings of lightning danced above and along the horizon, and definite as drums the thunder tumbled in over the town. The first rain droplets were heavy and scattered, tapping berries of water upon the tree foliage the resonant iron roof of the school and the dusty yard. After a while the class-room became so dark they could scarcely see the blackboard, and all down the length of the school buildings the lights were switched on and the bare bulbs glimmered as uselessly as stars.
The down-burst of the rain came from a dramatic crash upon the roof, leaping upon the iron like gravel, bounding sharp as rock-pellets from window-sills, veranda rails. At three the school surged out of the rooms in noisy hordes along the wet verandas and down the dripping steps. In a jostling press of damp clothing and hot perspiring bodies they packed the cloakrooms where their hats were hung, waiting for the rain to slow and the school buses to come in from the coast run.
Vinny shrank back in a corner and squatted on her bag. All about her the artificial camaraderie induced by the situation played itself out in giggles and chatter and jocular horse-play. It was twenty minutes before the initial violence of the storm passed over, and after the crowd had thinned Vinny squeezed past the others to the steps. Stumbling, her head down, her hat held flat against her chest, she raced to the shopping block, springing across the gutter freshets to halt panting in front of the chemist’s. In a slice of mirror let in behind the carton displays she saw herself with red hair flattened and darkened by rain. Her pale double stared back at her and for a second she wondered if she did look different, if she were.
‘What are you going to call it, Vinny?’
The Welch girls moved in behind her out of the rain. The older one laughed.
‘Tommy of course.’ She leant and whispered in her sister’s ear. They both shrieked with unpleasant laughter. Vinny felt trapped and quite hopeless. She kept running her broken pocket-comb nervously through her hair. The very faintest of tremblings had begun in her hands.
‘Ooh you are awful, Rhonda,’ the younger one said. She lowered her voice. ‘Rhonda says it will be company for Mrs. Striebel’s.’
They both collapsed with laughter, holding on to each other to support their mirth. The nightmare quality of the day began to obsess Vinny. In an effort to cling to the substantiality of things about her she watched the gutters jammed with paper flotillas, the trees in the little lozenge of park where the war memorial stood, weeping steadily down the honour roll. The Welch girls eyed her as she looked beyond them learning the detail of the rain-swept curb. If they knew they were hurting her they were determined not to show it.
‘Will you nurse it yourself?’ the older girl asked with imitative sophistication. She and her sister had to hold each other’s hands to tolerate the exquisite daring of the question.
‘Stop it!’ Vinny shouted suddenly. ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’
She was not certain what they meant. She felt sure it must be something unpleasant, something not spoken of. For the second time that day she was driven into flight, out from the shelter of the shop awnings, out into the stripes of rain. The vertical shutters of water closed in round her and she did not care.
When she arrived home her soaked clothes pressed a second skin against her thin body. Sullenly she changed and then stayed in her room fidgeting with her homework, her few books. Her mother thought she seemed pale and more glum than usual, but Vinny often had moods like that. So she asked no questions and after tea lay back in the drab settee where sleep took her away from house chores into dreams of even larger wash-ups all tangled with visions of the luxury-hotel holidays she would never experience.
Vinny went back to her room, twisting her huge knot of unhappiness and worry within herself, and after she had undressed and switched off the light she lay on the bed trying to probe, not her unpopularity, for she had learnt to accept that years ago, but the terrifying future that had been flung at her. She knew nothing of the physiology of sex, and her mother, tired beyond belief from child-bearing and rearing, had become too cynical, perhaps, or too weary to see that any form of sex education was given to her youngest child. All the others had found out, some way or other, and she herself had added veiled and puritanical hints to the collated hotch-potch of physiology and eroticism and sheer nonsense that they had built up from conversations with their friends. Of the three children still at home, Rene had seemed wise even in the womb, and boys … well, she consoled herself with the age-old misinformation that boys always managed somehow.
Vinny knew nothing, nothing at all beyond the baldest fact that the baby grew inside the mother. She associated this with all forms of spiritual and physical unpleasantness, with family rows and vomiting and fathers leaving home and great swollen bellies and adult hatred. How the baby came to be inside the mother she had no idea. She had thought vaguely that it was just something that happened when you got married – automatically, like wearing veils and having rice and confetti and glory boxes and best men and bridesmaids. Now she wasn’t so sure that you had to be married. She recalled dimly the hearing of scandalous fragments about the various girls in the town who had ‘had to go to Brisbane to have it’, little snippets – ‘they never said who the father was’. At the back of her mind swinging like a pendulum was the foreboding that this thing could also happen to her.
She twisted over on the rumpled eiderdown and tried to push the thought away by burying her face in the stuffy, sneeze-filled kapok pillow. But it was horribly persistent. It would not leave her. She kept telling herself that it could not possibly be true, but the tiny fear remained. Perhaps kissing gives you babies, she thought wildly. Or perhaps it’s how you feel when you kiss that does it. If you feel love or tenderness. That might make it marriage. Illogicality took over the panic-routed remnants of her sense and she wept gently and steadily into the made-to-receive-tears softness of the pillow. Down the hall the pendulum clock keeping time regularly fifteen minutes ahead struck nine-fifteen. She heard her mother creak slipper-comforted and stayless out of the cane-settee and shuffle to the kitchen to make the supper chocolate. She felt she could not discuss her tragedy with anyone: if it were true the shame would be unbearable. Certainly she could not face speaking to her mother. The mutual embarrassment that often makes frank discussion between parent and child virtually an impossibility was here so great, augmented by the unhappy home-life of her parents, that she could not bear her mother to get even the slightest hint of it.
It was her loneliness that made her so afraid.
In the darkness she placed a hand upon her stomach. Was it any larger? She ran fearful fingers across it, palpating the hard little belly. It was the same. Or would one know? How long was it before the swelling made the old ladies turn and boys on bikes yiack to each other? The very thought caused her to prickle with fright. She curled up on her side, knees drawn up to her chin in the eternal position of the embryo. The bed kennelled her in its warmth.
Her sobbing was less now. Fatigue closed her pale lashes over her pale eyes. Outside, the rain puttered steadily on the tank roof and all the time there was the trickle from the guttering emptying into the tank.
Rene opened her door to call her out to supper, but she pulled the sheet up quickly over her head and pretended to be asleep.
Ten
Somehow next morning Vinny felt a nagging reluctance to go to school.
When the first skins of sleep peeled onion-like away from her mind, she was conscious of nothing but bedwarmth and the ease of legs stretched out relaxed under the sheets. Half awake, she rubbed one foot lazily along the shin of her other leg, feeling the scabs of a recent graze, and watched the trembling lights on the unpainted pine ceiling.
Then suddenly the memory of yesterday hit her. Her stomach knotted in fright and she sat up, pulling aside the bed-clothes to inspect h
er flat belly. It looked exactly the same. She felt the same. She pushed her red hair away from her face and slid out of bed. But the thought accompanied her to the mirror, and through her dressing, and all through breakfast it chased around with a phrase she had heard somewhere – ‘eating enough for two’ – and she could hardly eat a thing. ‘I am the same,’ she informed herself, sulkily pulling at cold toast. ‘The same.’ And the little doubt persisted, winding in and out the half-heard conversation of the others until everything was confusion in her mind.
Although she would have liked to pretend illness, she left as she always did, turning slowly down the road past the casuarina. There was still a drizzle of rain, fine as cotton, from the cloud-covered sky, that flecked her face, her hands, her shiny black raincoat that had been Rene’s and the sou’wester that was actually her own. Some yards beyond the crest of the hill a track led off into the bush fringe before the paddocks of Rhodes grass swept away to Pratten’s farm. Facing the track, Gilham’s gaunt timber home stared with its over-polished windows at the monotony of the ironbarks. She could hear Ray Gilham practising the same piece. It was a keen edge to her unhappiness hearing that melodic line with its inevitable discordant mistake, reminding, thrusting in the daytime dream of two evenings ago. ‘No,’ she said aloud, and pushed her worry away. But it bounced back with rubbery insistence and she found herself glancing down at her stomach, suddenly afraid it might be bulging below her tunic belt.
Standing in the shelter of the dripping leaves, she paused at the entrance to the track, hearing across the road the piano whimpering untuned over its twenty-note treadmill. If I sat a long time by myself, she argued, if I didn’t go near the school, perhaps I might be able to think this thing out better. She thought of the nineteen other faces of the class asking her about the baby, telling her about it, threatening it, and she knew she could not go near the school that day. Instead she went quickly down the path packed with sodden earth-smelling leaves, her tunic brushed by the wet bushes. Irresponsibility flooded her mind so much that she overcame completely her fear of the punishment that went with truanting and her apprehension that the pretended reasons she offered the next day might be found out. In fact, she pushed next day as far away as next year, and lost herself under the trees and rain. After some time she found she had come up from the north upon one of the outer and now disused sheds belonging to the farm. The door hung askew on its shrunken timbers, revealing the trodden earth floor, and opened in on a small dark place of cobwebs and heaps of broken boxes. She went in pulling the door wide open so that she could see over the paddock undulations to the farmhouse cresting the green wave of the hills, flung down under a foam of trees. She propped the door open with one box and sat upon another. And so for a while did nothing but stare, unthinkingly at last, across the paddocks and the fences. Often when the mind endeavours to determine its problem, and remains, as it were, still, thrusting aside everything extraneous in order to see this one thing in a blaze of light, all the extraneous things keep creeping back so insidiously that the primary problem is obliterated entirely. It is like a man trying to photograph his family in a public park – constantly across the eye of his camera, cutting the corners, streaming between him and his object, come the lovers, the ball-chasing children and the dogs.