The Slow Natives

by Thea Astley

  “Oh, come! There must be several thousand Irises in Brisbane. It’s simply coincidence. And when you look into it, mad mad mad.”

  “Have you kept my letters?” Iris demanded.

  “Well, maybe one or two,” he lied, knowing a negative would distress her.

  “Then don’t.”

  “What about you?”

  “No. Not that I know of. Could some have been intercepted?”

  “Well, that’s a point. But I think you’re wasting your time worrying about it.”

  Keith remained bland. Gerald remained aloof. Tremulous Iris scanned columns daily. Other notices appeared—fulsome, pompous, idiotic.

  Iris [cried the printed text one memorable Tuesday a week later], If you are discussing this in any way with daddy, he is acting in direct opposition to my instructions. You are not wanted or welcome in my life and will not be tolerated.

  —LADDIE,

  She did not care to show Bernard.

  “Get a lawyer,” advised wary Gerald. “By the bye, they’ve been appearing in the evening paper, too. Not nearly as pontifical, though. Short and succinct, like ‘Lassie come home’. Only they’re addressed to me. ‘Gerald, this must cease. Signed, Sonny.’”

  “Daddy. Sonny,” reflected Iris. “The boys. Do you think it’s the boys?” Nor did she care to admit Keith’s on target dinner-time insult.

  “Could be,” Gerald said. “But I seriously doubt whether any of it is intended for us. Bookies use this sort of thing as code, you know.”

  But when the letter came Iris felt the pincers squeeze.

  Dear Mrs Leverson,

  I suspect you have been engaged in a sustained and complicated relationship with someone who has duties that must call him elsewhere. Though there is no concrete evidence to support this feeling, it persists, and I do not wish to see you caused hurt and worry by a connection that can only end disastrously. This must not be allowed, and the subsequent difficulties in which you involve all connected with you, only serve to exacebrate the situation and drive one to the limits of endurance.

  Do you want to be hated?

  LADDIE.

  “Exacebrate! Exacebrate!” Gerald exclaimed. “He can’t spell either.”

  “It’s moral victimization,” Iris said indignantly. “That’s what. No, don’t touch me, Gerald.” (He wasn’t going to.) “It’s too risky altogether. From now on we must try to—well—” Gerald knew. He didn’t have to be told. If Iris saw the relief in his eye she pretended not to.

  Their frequent post-four-o’-clock meetings of tea-drinking innocence had frequently been interrupted by Keith, close-buddied with other blond pals, sullen and hilarious in turn, secretive, transistorized, unbearable and adorable despite all that.

  They hated games. They would hang maddeningly about the living-room, sidling and listening in.

  “Are strictly for boneheads,” they would explain, when Gerald suggested a hearty round of football or cricket in the yard. “Crude, man, crude.”

  Sometimes Keith would stalk in as if Gerald and Iris were not there, saying casually to a pal, “Yes, my mother thinks this . . .” or “my mother thinks that”, loudly, as if she were not even in the room. Then they would pour themselves great tumblers of milk, scoop ice-cream into them, and shake them up in a metal beaker like cocktail slickers, all the time looking past the sinful pair on the sofa, yet standing before them, then wandering away to Keith’s veranda to sprawl with their great boots all over the coverlet and chairs.

  “When,” he inquired insolently one afternoon, “is lover-man going to be in absentia? A boy is getting so he doesn’t know his own dad!”

  “Please,” Iris whispered, making silent mouths at him from the hall, and “Please,” his bitter baby face shaped mimicking back at her, merciless and carried away by brazenness he neither wanted to nor could control. And when she begged, “Stop it,” with her eyes welling, he mocked tragedy, too, yet his own eyes remained dry despite the fact that his heart was swimming for its life. If just once she had seized his head and turned him back into the small boy, rubbing his hair and holding him close with nonsense and endearment, he might have succumbed.

  Or he might have thrust her rudely away.

  But he longed for her to take the gamble, yearning for the kiss-it-better-days of childhood that he had wanted, could not bear to leave, and had been forced to resign. Sometimes the preciosity of his pose was almost more than he could maintain: an exhausted Rimbaud duffling in and out the espresso bars at the Valley or the Gabba and absorbing on moonlit nights the shifting leaves shadow-mapped on stone as he strode, hands-pocketed, along River Road up towards Kangaroo Point past Leo’s flat with its sham emotionalism, lights out and Clair de Lune stringing out over the river. He would watch the ferry palpitating like his pulse, hear the clump of water, of cable, of trolley-bus bound for the bright-lights.

  And he was so lonely he could hardly bear it, lounging around the Valley (“For God’s sake, Keith, where do you get to on Saturday afternoons?” “Pitchers, Bernard! Pitchers!”) and watching them drift out of Leo’s coaching-college rooms before he went on up the stairs from the wasted noon.

  “You don’t really need me,” Leo said to him. “You’re simply wasting your father’s money. I’ll be candid, laddie. I know less about calculus than you.”

  “Someone’s got to flog me through matric, Leo. I’d rather it was you. The bird at school tramples all the refinements underfoot and horses around with the stuff like a pro rider. I just can’t follow. Anyway, you’ve done wonders for my Gallic accent! ‘Voulez-vous danser, monsieur?’”

  Mr Varga’s coaching college was a fly-by-night affair. It had started off in a rented room in the centre of town where Leo compensated for the slowness of incoming fees by dossing down on the floor, eating salamis and cheese and washing his socks in the tea-urn. When arrears became intolerable he would move on. He was shifty as sandhills yet always giving the appearance of affluence. He ran a bigger car than he could afford, dressed exquisitely on several credit accounts, oiled his beard and made himself socially acceptable by remembering to bring little gifts that not quite compensated for the money he had borrowed a month before. His beach shack, which he had built himself from concrete blocks and bamboo, was smarter than paint. “Twenty tricksy ways with hessian,” he used to say. “When one is poor. . .”

  Yet it worked.

  Ultimately he made his college pay. It was all puffed-up bluff and the hard work of teachers who wanted to make a little extra in the evenings. Leo would admit lovably, “I’m a cunning old swine!” And they’d all laugh at honest Leo.

  “Keith, dear boy,” he would instruct, “you must learn the gentle art of lying by telling the truth which, when it is outrageous, will never be believed. Never. Never.”

  Iris was not sure of him. And with reason.

  “How’s Gerald?” he would always ask her. And of Sea-brook, “How’s Iris?”

  He inquired continually of each about all.

  “Sweet solicitous Leo,” Bernard snarled one evening at a party. “I’m beginning to hate that bloody malicious pseudo-Christian tenderness.

  Gerald was dancing with Iris in a corner by the gramophone. Professor Geoghegan was smoking and observing with a scientist’s interest from another corner of the room. Abruptly, and killing the crooner’s phrase, Gerald announced, “This has got to be it, Iris. I’m sorry, old dear.”

  In his not too closely gripping arms he felt her sag heavily, weighed down by disaster, and during the clarity of this moment she observed, as Bernard three weeks before had observed, single extraordinarily beautiful gerbera spikes of decorator colours, dusty, off-beat, and behind their reflected selves an open glossy magazine displaying an Emba mink clutching an eye-patch on a tarmac. She’s beautiful, Iris thought with the insane distraction that comes at tragic moments. And what a dish of a coat!

  “Oh my God!” she said. “Why tell me now?”

  “Kathleen.”

  “Knows?” />
  “Yes. Do keep dancing, there’s a dear. Turn tee tee tee tee. That’s it! People will suspect I’m maltreating you. Yes. She knows.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t I what?”

  “Maltreating me.”

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake! Be your age!” That was unforgivable. “Even the placid Bernard must have some idea.”

  “How did she find out?”

  “I’m not sure for certain, but something absolutely crazy happened. Did you see yesterday’s personal? Evening edition?” He laughed suddenly.

  “No. I don’t get it. The ink comes off on my clothes,” she explained crazily.

  “Well, there was another. To me again. ‘Gerald,’ it said, ‘you are disgusting and ridiculous. I shall play kettle to your pot! Signed, Sonny!’”

  “You see,” he explained, “it’s a threat. I’m sorry, Iris, but we never did intend our marriages to collapse.”

  The storm-clouds obscured delight. Iris might have continued to argue or plead her case, but the self-important lawyer of her pride cautioned her against action that she might later not redeem, so she was gay and gallant through the ordeal of finger sandwiches and Yankee lemon pie, not eating a great deal but pretending and cracking gay cross-chat with bamboozled Bernard, who, still in his own ecstatic state of self-discovery, was examining with new interest open pores or dewlaps or unpleasantly rough fingers with chewed nails.

  Within the marital cot that evening from the depths of lost pride she tried to coax; but he no longer cared and turned his yawning face to the wall while she lay awake in the head-aching darkness, taking like powders the recollections of romanticized but stinking little adulteries committed with difficulty in the backs of cars, cheap motels, and on river-banks.

  In his own home, Gerald slept soundly for the first time for weeks.

  VII

  LEO’S BEACH SHACK seemed packed with boys, but there were only two of them horsing about near the radiogram against a window full of acid-blue sea.

  Varga smiled angelically and did a crazy Charleston, swinging yards and yards of imaginary beads while Tommy Sea-brook giggled insanely, sprawled against a backdrop of cushions.

  “Marvellous! Do it again!”

  “I’ve broken me beads,” Leo said. “Can’t do a Charleston without me beads and me bobble fringe.”

  He was so genial above his bristling torpedo—the sort of spy who’d be spotted at once!—it was hard to believe he could ever, ever . . . ever what? Keith asked himself. Ever dish dirt? Ever hand out the hard facts? But he had. Sliced right across his family like one of those keen vegetable peelers that tore carrots to neat red ribbons. Seabrook’s, too. I feel old all of a sudden, Keith hated. Or young. Or what is it? His bafflement hauled him to a pause with an adolescently rushing pillow in one raised hand.

  “Can this!” he ordered.

  “Can what?”

  “This bunk.”

  “Okay. So so. Don’t get your hair off, man!”

  Mr Varga ceased his merry pranks (Call me Till, bud!) and suggested juicily that they get their boards from the garage and tread a few, before tempers, tempers . . . waggling that admonitory jocular forefinger.

  Without a word Keith strode out to the bamboo-slatted lanai Varga had built across the dune side of the shack and found his gun board slouched against a lattice railing. Carelessly he stripped off his shirt and began oiling his shoulders, smacking a greasy palm against the bottle-top as he upended it, and then slapping it even harder against his skin.

  “Can I do that?” Leo questioned from the shelter of his sun-glasses.

  “No thanks.”

  “What’s up? Anything amiss?”

  “No.”

  “Oh? You sound a teensy bit put out, laddie. Here. Let me do it for you.”

  Mr Varga reached confidently for the lotion bottle, his hand rapacious for more than oil, but Keith snatched it back.

  “Oh, come on, you silly young bugger! Give it me. You’ve splashed my shirt.”

  They wrestled silently for half a minute.

  “My, my!” Mr Varga said, getting possession at last and watching the boy warily. “We are in a temper, aren’t we? Something’s surely bitten you. More trouble with the folks?”

  “Leave it!” Keith said slowly. “Just leave it.”

  “Leave what?”

  “That stuff about my family.”

  “Dear boy, you have my sympathy. I’m on your side. I’ll stand in loco parentis, if you’ll pardon the cliché.”

  “I’ll—never mind. Just don’t keep reviving it, will you?”

  “Ah,” queried kind Leo, “does it hurt? I’m sorry, Keithy. Truly. Take it like Seabrook. He stands the pace. His attitude—I hope you won’t mind my saying this, Keith—is more mature than yours. He laughs the whole thing off. Treats it as the nonsense it is. Really, it is time you started to grow up.”

  Wordlessly Keith picked up his board and started off up the sliding dune towards the waiting sky and the watching sea.

  “Wait for us. We’ll be with you.”

  Get lost, get lost, Keith pronounced to his foraging toes.

  From the top of the sandhill he looked down the coast to Burleigh and the spot where, half a mile away, lollipop umbrellas had their colour sucked from them by the sun, spinning their windmills over a score of bathers who fried in noon heat. Voices scrambled breathlessly upwards from the rear, so he stumbled into the dip on the seaward side and sprinted his confusion across the hard strip into the first gnawing line of surf. Dropping to his knees, he began to paddle his fibre-glass prayer mat out beyond the breaking water where purple currents moved along the sleeping coast, weeping purple, violet, cobalt rivers of salt salt tears. On the bosomy swell he knelt easily, holding the surf under him like a beating heart that moved him here and then there, that bucked a little when he shifted his weight, but, like blood, took his impulse for lost horizons farther and farther away from the beach and its puny people. Now and again he flickered his hands under water and steered in towards shore which already had the vague quality of something lost in anger. But this was something. This was a lull, a calm, the space between border fence lines he’d explored as a small boy in a fisherman’s rag hat. (“Look, dad! I’m not in Queensland. I’m not in New South. I’m nowhere, dad!”) Nowhere, he assured himself, lazily riding the world’s blood.

  Two specks that were Leo and Tommy had tottered down to the sand flats and were waving their towels, orange and white, against the green tree-line. They were very small. Leo’s towel had a dirty big bronze Roman gladiator that he’d screen-printed himself, but from here it was all welded into a mucky orange.

  He didn’t bother to wave back, but paddled slowly along the shark-line south towards the umbrellas. Funny, this. He thought of something funny and laughed out loud, but it sounded queer over the hum of the moving sea. Those big sea-riders down at Kirra used to go out so far on their boards they could yell out to each other, “Well, which beach will it be, Turk? Greenmount or Kirra?” Funny, that. Funny if they’d said Tugun. “Get lost, Leo!” he said loudly, and then shouted it. “Get lost, bum!” And paddled his board suddenly a little closer to the rising waves and crouched, waiting for a boomer. When he caught the third he came in, his feet pressing forward, back, with tiny dancing steps, changing the pressure and the pull to keep ahead on this big feller that was trying to get away from under his feet. His arms swung out and he felt pudgy and awkward like a drunk gull, but managed to keep upright until the top broke and he was flung forward into the sandy watery turmoil of the sucking fringe.

  Tommy began running along the beach towards him, but slicker than seaweed Keith was out again, paddling furiously across the current and moving farther down the beach.

  “Let him go,” he imagined Leo saying. “Let the little fool go. He’s having a tiz about something. He’ll calm down by tea-time. That’s certain.”

  But Leo was wrong.

  The boy crossed the dunes an hour later,
a mile away from their bathing spot, and walked back along the road with his board balanced on his head.

  The shack was empty. There was shock in this, but he grabbed his shirt from the lanai rail, took the key out of the meter box, and went into the bathroom where his trousers were hanging on a peg. A clock gobbled seconds while he dressed, while he stuffed his few clothes into his overnight bag.

  Poets, spies, criminals, saints, have just this ecstasy. Cramming the clothes down, zipping his furtiveness and not troubling to leave a note, he swung the door to with a crash, smiling as he remembered he had left the key on the table inside.

  Or like stout Cortez, he told himself. Stout—bloody stout-Cortez.

  The township was a-glitter with clip joints and espresso bars and fake continental dining spots where for twice the price of the local brand you could have the same frozen dinners accompanied by the dreadful whining waltzes that were known as French. Or, for even a little less, Spanish American hot chilli foods would be de-thawed and served to the hot plunking of electric guitars they called Spanish. It was all a matter of taste. Sharp like razor edges, bright, falsely clean, falsely smart in front of their tiny sordid kitchens, ten minutes ahead of now, all down the main highway. Boutiques. Girls in boutique wear. Old girls in better boutique wear. Boys with boards, hamburgers, chips, wide straw sombreros, Okinui shorts and girls. Their souls like spit spazzled and dried on the hot bitumen and what was left promenaded and searched and never found.

  Keith had a coffee and sandwich, and sat to watch the week-end millionaires puddle by towards the ritzy bars and the beach, hardly coping with the heat. He decided—and it was the whip-flash in the blackness—that he would not go home that night. No one would care. Those scenes, those catechisric agonies with Iris and Bernard meant the snap of two fingers to both, he was sure. No one cared. He’d fought them out of love, not hatred, and they were too thick-skulled to see. Not even Keith saw.

  Munching the in-price biscuit, he dangled the tiny paper bag of sugar over his cup and emptied it slowly in, pondering over Leo’s invitation for the Saturday and Sunday. This gave him all Sunday to flick Mister Varga with. Just for kicks, Leo could stew, simmer as delicately with worry as one of those delicious ragouts he was so fond of carrying on about. He wouldn’t go back and they could frighten themselves sick along the beach-fronts looking for him under the weed-heaps, or behind dunes or lost lingering walls of blue water.