The Slow Natives

by Thea Astley

  Throughout his instant porridge, Keith said “duffle-coat” approximately fifteen times. Bernard had almost ceased to hear it by now, but Iris poured acid into the breakfast compounds, witchily hexed them both, nerves on edge, and watched her own edges curl over and crisp. When I pray, she decided, the saints cease to be flesh and become plaster. They turn bland plaster saintly smiles towards me, calm as the Inquisitors and as unmoved by others’ endurance. Let someone, anyone, love me, she prayed, burning the toast. . . . But half a mile away Gerald curled up behind his newspaper and wondered anxiously how he could extricate himself. Keith watched her with amused hatred and Bernard for once failed to notice anything.

  “Turn te turn, turn tee turn, turn tee ti ti” he sang absently marmalading his blackened bread. “Now your days of philandering are over!”

  And Keith left without apology and gathered up his school-bag.

  But he did not go there. Normally he picked up with Tommy Seabrook at the Edward Street ferry and together they loafed over to High through the Gardens and down again. But this time he went straight towards the Bridge and came up into the city through the Valley, prowling round Anzac Square and mesmerizing the goldfish in the fonts—“‘the gold fin in the porphyry font,” he quoted dreamily to the rhythm of trams and out loud, startling the old ladies or the early shoppers, not caring either, and wondering if he could have written it better. In the state in which his emotions daily rested he was half drugged—intermediate between nothing and fantasy, with ideal parents who drove long cars and flirted and were gay but intelligent, who kept him in his place and said no often and firmly.

  Oh, how they said no and how often and how firmly.

  But the big tower rang and, prompt on the final hurly-burly of the bells, he slipped, a knowing minnow, into the open doors of the store. Everywhere the black-clad girls primped goods and clicked cash-registers and patted their hair-dos—but there weren’t nearly enough customers, so he went back to the square again and, taking off his school blazer, folded it neatly, tightly, and packed it into his bag. Then he bought himself a slow peppermint-flavoured julep to be sucked through a lingering straw minute after minute. He was boxed a bit by the morning’s crossword, but filled in half the blanks untidily though accurately before he went back to the store and up the escalator to men’s wear.

  There were plenty of shoppers now. Keith slid unnoticed into the mob, sidled along a rack of jackets, and selected the one he fancied long before obsequiousness tottered up, all iron-grey and florid.

  “Yes, sir?” it said—because it was certainly desexed and dehumanized by the sanctions of its employment. “Can I help you?”

  Keith put on his open blond urchin smile that worked so well in tight spots.

  “Could I try on a couple of these coats?” he asked. He was at his most engaging.

  “Any particular colour?”

  “Well, I can’t quite make up my mind.”

  “What size would you be? Youth’s?”

  “Oh, about thirty-six, I think. My mother told me to get thirty-six,” he added dazzlingly.

  “Then this rack over here. Anything along here would do. Just select a couple and I’ll be with you in a minute. There. That’s a nice bit of camel-hair. Pricey but good. And that worsted is imported.”

  “May I use a dressing-room?” Keith asked.

  “Through over there.”

  “Right.”

  Keith did not hurry. Casualness was the thing. He selected four coats from the rack and managed to hold them as if he had three; then, sauntering easy as could be, he went into the dressing-room block, the confessional, and it didn’t take him more than half a minute to swap coat for blazer and be found casually and elegantly admiring his back view when the salesman poked his head round the curtain.

  “How’s that, sir?” he inquired. Pretending he cares, Keith thought savagely. I’ll fix him.

  “I think it’s a little too big across the shoulders.” He pivoted slowly.

  It was balletic. As he divested himself of one, the older man stood poised with the next garment outstretched for him to slip into. They proceeded with the farce. Somewhere an orchestra should have been playing pizzicato. Excuses came so easily from the boy it might have been assumed the salesman wanted them too for when Keith finally sorted his blazer from under the discards, both were glad.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I’ve always been hard to fit.”

  “That’s all right, sir.” The salesman had barely looked at him or seen the straw bright hair, the blue eye, the rose tan of skin. He hated his job and he hated the customers who were faceless shapes with voices persistent or nagging. Some chaps blew smoke and some shifted false teeth but most never wanted to buy at all, just kid themselves along a little, and he was prepared to oblige so long as not much effort was expected, the minimum that kept the departmental head’s eye off him and left him alone to brood among the hand-woven tweeds and the shoddy.

  Sauntering for the heck of it, stopping to take in a few suits on the way out, you’d swear this kid was an old hand at the game. Far too late for school, he headed for a phone booth at the Post Office, dialled the principal, and pulled off another purler of deception that made his toes curl with pleasure.

  “Leverson speaking.” He could take off the old boy like a dream.

  “Oh yes, Mr Leverson.” The fawning wasn’t what some of the wealthier lads got, but there was enough. The teachers are frightened of the head, the head of the inspector, the inspector of the local member, the local member of the parents, the parents of the kids, and the kids of nobody.

  “The boy’s a bit off colour today. I thought we’d keep him home.”

  “Indeed. I’m sorry to hear that.” Distance emasculated the keep-a-straight-bat voice of the pompous old bugger who preened it round on speech days with his pass-degree silk dangling showily over his humped shoulders.

  “I think he’ll be in tomorrow. Sorry, Hendrix.” That omission of the “mister” was especially pleasing.

  They clicked each other into silence, and Keith wandered into a newsreel and then a support film in the after-lunch period, so that he arrived home in nice coincidence with the local ferry, his round face innocent as goosegogs, round as johnny-cake. This guileless mask he bent over a late-evening forgery that said dear sir Keith has been absent because of an intestinal upset, please excuse him yours sincerely Iris Leverson. It was pleasant to have both parents display such concern and he could just imagine Slugs writing it up on his blue record card—“Parents over-interested in their son’s health. Appears coddled.” It took him quite a time achieving a passable likeness in hands, and by eleven his mother was fretting at his door for him to get to bed, while he, active as a cartoon character, rammed the note under a blotter. Maybe he’d keep this for another time.

  For two weeks now he had avoided communication. She questioned, but he did not answer. Whore, he accused her as he walked over to the door and unturned the key.

  “Why did you lock yourself in, silly?”

  He shrugged.

  “Do get your light out.” Iris’s eyes begged and begged of him to relent. He thought of the duffle-coat and smiled—but not at her, so that she winced, a wince that like some small pool’s throb spread ripples to the farthest margin. Her adultery had not been a success. Half the fun would have been in having Bernard care and the other half in having Gerald—“tortured by desire” was the phrase she knew from her usual reading. But one did not care and the other was not tortured. The indifference of one she could have endured after the inadequacy of marriage for twenty years—stamina parties, they used to call them—but the reluctant lover turned the whole thing into a farce. Gerald must feel like Byron, she reflected, raped oftener than anyone since the Trojan Wars. And without much amusement, for she was a humourless woman. I am not as shallow as I seem, Iris would have prayed or exhorted anyone to believe. The nightmare is the daytime stay-awake one. I move into normality through sleep and wake to unending diss
atisfaction.

  Keith shut his door again. The house was like a set of interlocking boxes, absorbed Bernard being closeted in his study battered by Parsifal Please God, prayed Iris to some faceless power, and did the only thing she could think of, which was to run a long hot bath.

  Keith wore his duffle-coat at school the next day, sweltering it out for vanity until one of the other boys made a pertinent remark about a certain sloppiness of fit and an extra length that appeared undesirable. So, having dumped the garment in his locker, Keith did some practical brooding over failure and achievement, and at the end of the week returned with it to the shop to attain the real climax. Seeking out a different assistant, Keith managed to exchange the coat for one of sharper cut.

  “Keen!” Keith admitted, admiring himself in a three-way mirror. “Sharply elegant!—I’m sorry, but I seem to have lost the docket.”

  But this big store had said for years it aimed to please.

  “That’s quite all right, sir. That’s one of our special lines.”

  Keith felt as elated as a first-time drunk, even nodding pleasantly to his former salesman when he passed him on the way out between suits and après-swim wear at the top of the escalator. But his blank eyes did not remember a thing, Keith knew, and he literally pranced to the lifts in his trim new skin, rode to the basement, and absorbed his guilt and victory through a long vanilla milk-shake. Five minutes later, pursuing victory past the tape, he gave a jovial smack to a cringing cigarette machine as he passed and was rewarded by its spewing out a packet of twenty and taped-on change.

  “Just for a handful of silver he left them,

  Just for a riband to stick in his duffle-coat,”

  parodied cultured Keith and went out at a half-skip from the arcade to take in the morning.

  Gardens. River tawniness. On the other side of the water a raised swimming pool with port-holes for voyeurs, across which flashed the ochre limbs of swimmers. The park was pimpled with mums and ice-creamed children and newspapered old men who slept in the near-summer sun with the headlines pulled down over their eyes to keep out the brighter glare. Behind the groves of Chamaerops excelsa, braces and flatties and flapping dirndl skirts—the town was always six fashions behind.

  Chookie Mumberson, anybody’s meat, good ole Chookie, sneakered and flapped down the tar path from the kiosk where he’d been looking over the field for residual deposits. The Technical College boys floated in at recess and grubbed up pies and cokes and left propelling pencils and cheap pens behind, and sometimes fought over or dropped the change that was scuffed accidentally beneath the tables and chairs, filthy with tea dribbles and fizzy drinks.

  Chookie ambled along by the artificial waterfalls and sent some twigs downstream with messages to all relatives: Am having a bonzer time, love, Chookie. Sorry, Miss Trumper. Wish you was here, yours respectfully (Jesus! respect!), Chookie. Cheerio pop you drunken old sot, Chook. He watched the little girls for a while, weighed himself at the gates, then came back again along by the river on the path above the water. Just to his left a ferry beetled backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, and the typists and the business types piled out and a bundle of kids in uniform, all lugging cases, the mugs, before they headed up town. Two hundred yards away in the direction of the gardens was another of them, heading wrong way round the point to the domain. He was a tubby blond in school greys, gripping in one hand a plump and glossy leather brief-case that even at that distance glinted expensively, and in the other a thumbed-open book.

  “Poon!” Chookie said bitterly while moving up casual as Friday nights to get a closer look. This bait settled on a sunny bench beyond the greenhouses, removed his coat, and folded it carefully over the back of the seat while from his case he extracted a lunch packet and a blazer that he re-rolled tightly before ramming it back amongst the books. Sybaritic in sun, he began to chew and to read.

  From a grove of exotics, Chookie observed for a while, rolled himself a snappy fag, and counted his small change, twice because he had always been superstitious and then once more because he discovered unexpectedly a shilling in the back pocket of his jeans. It had some sort of relationship with two theatre pass-outs and a few packaged food coupons he couldn’t bring himself to throw away. They had all the magic of folding money.

  As the sun became more garrulous the midday voices receded, the families trailing off for tea and scones that they could share with the flies of the unwashed kiosk, and Chookie, patient as a crab and just as oblique, moved in.

  Perhaps it was his shadow that first touched Keith or came between the sunlight and flesh to make him start.

  “Good book?” Chookie inquired, trying a friendly grin. You bleeding fool, he told himself. Something in it twisted.

  Keith hated chummy strangers, but when he looked up and saw a spotty red-head he was too bored even to feel annoyance. This would be no trouble to handle. That accent! It was the persistent drunk or the too smooth fifty-year-old he found hardest to push off.

  “Not bad,” he replied, letting his eyes drop back to the page he ravished but could no longer read. Chookie leant against the back of the seat and kicked gently.

  “What’s it about?” Not that he cared.

  But this fat chump didn’t answer, like dad on a drunk when his mum had asked and asked and asked about the housekeeping and it was as if suddenly the ole man had gone deaf as a post with determination not to tell.

  “I said what’s it about?” Chookie’s voice took on a few more decibels.

  With the deliberate finger of one bored to extinction Keith marked his place and stared stiffly behind.

  “You wouldn’t be the least interested, and I want to read, if you don’t mind.” He put on his snootiest tone.

  Dirty rotten nancy, thought Chookie, but he grinned and scuffed the dirt at his feet and said, “How d’you know? Y’ might be surprised.” Like Brother Bernard the day he caught him reading that story by the Italian bloke, Mor—somethin’ or other, that the kids had been passing around.

  “Why, Chookie? A culture bug? How surprising! Show me now. I always like to share my pupils’ pleasures.” I’ll bet, wretched Chookie agreed silently handing it across. “Oh, I see. What’s this? ‘Conjugal . . .’ really, Mumberson, have you time to spare from your studies for this sort of thing? Later, surely. Now cut along to my room and we’ll see if we can find something a little more suitable, shall we?” It had taken him three days to copy out the great slab of the Imitation that was given him for punishment and he never found out what happened to the book.

  Long silence.

  “I said y’ might be surprised. Looks like a diary.”

  “It is a diary.”

  “Them things are okay to read if they’re someone’s y’ know. I keep a diary.”

  O God, Keith prayed, make him go away.

  “Got some pretty funny things in it, too. Things I bet you wouldn’t’ve heard before.”

  This was all planned and practical, a gambit that took him closer, breathing nasally, with his freckled paws resting a grab away from the coat, the piggy bank he longed for, the cover-up he had forgotten to take in his flight from the town. If he wasn’t careful this other chap might get up and—bingo!—there it would go, this winged security, roosting on another bench, and he’d be back where he started.

  Ferociously ostentatious, Keith turned an unread page as cold-blooded Chookie smiled nervously at his back.

  “Bittuva snob,” Chookie suggested, keeping it casual.

  Very gently, like kindness to animals week, Chookie lifted the duffle-coat and stepped lightly back on to the lawn, standing still again on its muffling green to reassure.

  Then his speed, the lightning dash, surprised even Arch Mumberson—“Run with it, Mumberson, run, you silly drongo! Oh pass, you idiot, idiot.” “Sorry, Brother Bernard!”—and he was back in the palm groves before you could say rape and running up the hill towards the kiosk and the college buildings.

  Keith had read the same sentence
twice before he sensed he was alone, and the first thing his eye apprehended was the bland emptiness of the long park bench and the burst bubble of his sin.

  Premonitions had always played an enormous part in Iris Leverson’s salt-over-the-shoulder, touching-wood life. She gorged herself on astrological forecasts, read “Personal and Missing Friends” in the hope that . . ., had a lucky colour which never seemed to bring her anything but disaster, and an aversion to opal jewellery. “Darling,” Bernard used to remonstrate in earlier days when the term meant something, “you are so mad you would cross the street only when the lights turned red!” And, of course, it became a legend about her. But although she laughed lightly, chromatically, disclaiming all this nonsense, she had secret belief in faith-healers who would create circles of patients clutching coloured strings to test the oscillations of disaster, would tie cords of a certain red round taps (the vibrations are right!), and indulge in all sorts of eccentricities that were private, harmless, and gave her day a lift.

  Now she had premonitions.

  Gerald. Yes. On the way out. The second week Bernard had gone to Condamine she had been casually munching her marmalade toast when eye and heart both leapt as they read in the agony column:

  Take notice Iris, and be warned. Even though you may be observed by no earthly beholder, God is watching you. He alone may decide to completely alter this.—LADDIE.

  “My God!” said Iris, putting her toast down. “Oh my God!”

  Quietly during the day she managed to show the clipping to Gerald.

  “He’s split his infinitive,” he said.

  “Not you, is it?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Not I, my dear. Not I.”

  “Then who could it be? Could it be Bernard being funny?”