Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  Then he gives his head a little shake and seems to bring himself to.

  “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I was trying to remember. There’s a box of stuff out in the shed and I thought maybe … no … you’re right. My word, Bonnie, what a sharp one, eh!”

  He fumbles about, sugaring his own coffee, slopping it over the sides and stirring endlessly. “Very sharp,” he keeps muttering. “Very sharp.”

  I feel he is upset and that somehow I have offended.

  “Play us something,” Bonnie urges, to distract while frowning at me to be nice. “Go on, Stanley, play us something.”

  He clicks back into the present. “What would you like?”

  “Anything dear.” (Dear!) “Whatever you pick will be lovely.”

  “‘Rustle of Spring,’” I suggest brightly, ignoring mother’s eye.

  Stanley’s baby orbs graze across mine. “I’ve half a dozen versions,” he says, “including a tape taken off one made by Claudio Arrau nearly thirty years ago in New York. It’s not official,” Stanley continues. “Someone made it at a private party. A friend of mine took a copy when he was in the States five years back. It’s quite a collector’s piece.”

  Bonnie is gulping her coffee noisily and angrily.

  “That should be interesting,” I say watching him move without hesitation to the exact spot on the right shelf on the right wall. What a cataloguer! “But any will do. Really. By the way, I once made a list of …”

  “That will do!” mother interrupts exerting authority for a rare once.

  “You said any,” Stanley says. To my horror he is winding up one of the portable players, the one with the exponential horn, checking the pickup arm and lowering it onto a biscuit-thick spinning disk. “Played by the composer,” he says. “This is even rarer.”

  And Stanley is even rarer, I think, looking out the window to escape the horrible sounds coming from the player. Outside there is one sad cow in the home paddock, more of a pet than a milk giver. From where I sit trying not to hear spring rustle cracklingly and tinnily through the back Kilcoy landscape, I can see the cow’s bleak face as it bends to munch shrubbery along the fenceline. There is no other evidence of agrarian intent although Bonnie assures me later that there is a fowl run that keeps her supplied in eggs. She plays barter with bottle upon bottle of blackberry conserve, an effortless production as most of her hillside and Stanley’s valley have been invaded by the pest.

  All through the performance mother frowns while Stanley watches both of us with his unblinking crystal eyes and I plait fingers hoping not to laugh. When the old machine creaks to a stop, “Rustle” dying away several tones lower than when it opened, Bonnie is beyond forming enthusiastic phrases and Stanley, an interesting smile on his face, becomes high-priestly at the machine, removes the record, wipes it reverently with a tissue, replaces it and turns from the shelves with what I was to come to know as his gift for non sequitur.

  “This was a farm once,” he says accusingly, swinging round on me. “My grandfather took up land here, my parents endured it and I have more or less given the whole idea of farming away. Not the place. I love the place. But I spent an early lifetime in cracking dawns, milking before breakfast and then cycling twelve miles to school to be crammed with a little Latin, a little French, a little mathematics, and enough is enough.”

  “Of course it is, Stanley,” Bonnie soothes. “Of course it is. There comes a stage in one’s life.” She pauses to let us imagine what that stage might be. “It will come to you, Belle, super confident though you are in what you’re doing. Mark me, there’ll come a time.”

  Stanley lowers himself foot by foot (he is remarkably tall) into a slouching rattan chair and proceeds to roll a cigarette. His movements are finicky and precise. He looks at neither of us but inspects the narrow cylinder forming between his fingers. “It does seem, I agree, as if I’m punishing the land that punished me. Maybe I was when I first started to ignore it but it’s not like that anymore. I’m just tired of bending to its will. I refuse to let it dominate.”

  He finally lights his cigarette and draws on it with patent pleasure, leans back in his old recliner and says, looking directly at me, “It’s come already for you, hasn’t it? Time for a change.”

  Whump!

  What is there to say in reply to this un-nosy prober? Who is right. Unexpectedly I find myself, hear myself, launched into a passionate long-winded gust of sound explaining why I had switched careers before I had really got started on one, abandoning teaching for something so solipsistic, so passive, it takes my breath away. Bonnie’s name keeps cropping up, tossed like driftwood on this flood, and out of the corner of my self-justifying eye, I can see her looking woundedly at me, blocked from inserting any refutation, any excuse or vindication of herself by my torrent of wild arguments.

  “I love you, mother.” I finish abruptly. “And I understand. Now.”

  We’re both tear-shot by the time Stanley finishes his cigarette and kills it neatly in the ashtray. He is smiling peacefully, staring at me with those fixed china doll eyes.

  “But I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t referring to that.”

  “Mean what?”

  “Your career. Your job.”

  I rise and go over to the table to refill my cup, needing time before I come to grips with this. Levelly I ask, “What did you mean?” watching the coffee bubble into my mug, adding milk, stirring in sugar, too much of it.

  Stanley’s eyes should have been brazen to match the words he offers me when I turn at last and meet his gaze. But they aren’t. They aren’t.

  “I meant your marriage.”

  “Oh Stanley,” Bonnie protests, shocked. Is this a Judas protest? “Stanley, really!” Then she casts me a look.

  Later she insists she has told him nothing beyond the bare fact that I am married. I believe her and the perceptions of this stranger shake loose the last assurances I have in my precarious relationship with Seb.

  I drink my coffee looking stonily past both of them.

  I will not be drawn. My mind has been a nest of worms for weeks.

  There is a rider to Euclid’s ninth proposition in Book III which states that the locus of the middle points of two parallel chords of a circle passes through the circle’s center.

  Philosophically, I suppose, there is little difference between the human center that I seek and the abstract. Modern self-indulgent psychology proposes that one’s self is one’s center but I find the theory unsatisfying. I need a center in which I can merge. An alter-ego center. Isn’t that what we all look for?

  Let me tell you something.

  I am looking for a one-storey town

  with trees

  river

  hills

  and a population of under two thousand

  one of whom must be called Gaden Lockyer.

  I have been looking for nearly a year now, mentally, I suppose, but looking. Specifically looking, that is, though the research parameters of my work, any friendly alienist would have told me, had started long before from the moment child/girl fingers began to pause in turning pages of old family albums planked down by grandmother as pacifiers in the desperate evenings of Drenchings’ holiday boredom; of history books with photographic reproductions, courtesy the Bowen Gazette, the Charco Herald; and now of eighty-year-old newspapers in library reference rooms where, yellowing pages spread out on the desk, I dissect and turn as delicately as a neurosurgeon, cutting through the flesh of the past; of museum photographs of mining townsfolk, cattle-station verandas, cow-cocky huts—the whole work-team, family, whatever, in their overdressed best for the hooded man behind the tripod. I am intoxicated by photos of old Chevy trucks stuck on bump roads being rope-hauled by teams of straining bullocks; of estuary ferries carrying Model-T Fords from south bank to north, wagons dragging through river shallows, squatter gardens whose rich shrubbery mocks the unpaid black labor that has created them, farewelling streamer-clutching crowds on wharves at the most outlandi
sh landfalls in the country and little desolate groups (even the kids’ hoops are stilled) watching trains pulling out to nowhere.

  The sun whacks everything aslant.

  Looking and looking, I hear the mournful bloot of train and boat yowling protest in defiance of the wilderness. And I see in my mind’s eye, despite mother and Stanley and the insane room, a blotched photograph of the wharf at Portland Roads, three men by the shed standing on the blue rim of tropic waters in the defiant way only pioneers stand, their relaxed yet arrogant posture a giveaway, a residue of impudence there that doesn’t give a damn for the resentment of landscape.

  I close my eyes against Stanley and Bonnie and the room and allow my besotted brain cells to whip up a computer program of wedlock fantasies designed to ease over the hard parts. Naively I wonder about the therapeutic effects of travel. The blotched photo had turned up in a primitively written autobiography published in 1920 called Backblock Battlers. The accompanying text gave me a sideways glimpse of my obsession: Mr Gaden Lockyer, grazier, Mr Sam Turton and author await the arrival of the mail packet at Portland Roads Wharf. So much for the explanatory note to the photograph. Mr Gaden Lockyer, the author of Backblock Battlers went on to write, has been visiting the area with cattlemen of the peninsula. He and his companions travelled overland as far as Somerset by packhorse on a journey that took the best part of three months. Mr Lockyer, the State member for Walla, now returned to his home in Mackay, spoke glowingly of the potential of the region and of the men and women who have pioneered the more isolated parts of the country. “Distance,” he said, “was a continuing problem, especially for the wives and children.” (My God, I think, as I snuffle in the dust of seven decades, he actually gives a thought to the wives. He must have been an unusual man for the times.)

  My magnifying glass had revealed little but enlarged speckling.

  It was that particular photo coupling itself cunningly with the younger features outside the Jericho Flats Joint Stock Bank that was to become the idée fixe. For in the middle of Seb’s rare and hasty embraces I had found myself speculating on the sexual manners and appetites of long-gone Mr. Lockyer. Seb had hovered over me observing my speculations.

  “Penny for them?”

  And I would blush.

  How explain that I am living out my latest reading matter, a childhood habit carried on through adulthood (is the word “adultery”?), of nudging off to sleep with any spy coming in from the cold, planning my own plagiarized escapes that ranged from Valjean’s Paris sewers and Man Friday islets to perilous train and plane flights from agency operatives of east and west?

  I have always liked to make fantasy practical.

  “Why the train guide?” Seb would ask, peering across the pillow. “Why the airline schedule? Are you planning on leaving me?”

  “Not yet.” Smile.

  “Sure?”

  “Look, Seb, God, this is crazy. You won’t believe me but I’m trying to work out how to get from Augsburg to Lucerne with a very large sum of money in unused notes, bank it, convert it into untraceable traveler’s checks and get out to Oz without leaving a footprint.” That should throw him. It really is what I’m doing.

  He says, “Don’t put me on!”

  Irritated, I say tartly, “There are operatives everywhere.”

  “Operatives! Operatives! My God, sweetie, you’re talking crazy.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Call you what? Crazy?”

  “Sweetie, for God’s sake. It’s so patronizing. Such a put-down.”

  “What do you expect me to be when you go on as if you’re losing your marbles.”

  He told me later that I had stared at him sulkily for a full half minute (it really is a long time, conversationally speaking) before I replied, “I’m getting tired of the present. I want to get out of it.”

  He had no idea what I meant.

  *

  Bonnie is singing I danced with a ghoul who danced with a ghoul who danced with the Prince of Wales. When your mother is a lot more entertaining than your husband is, it gets you down to analyzing the pith of matrimony.

  Stanley is smoking contentedly and radiating delight for mother has coaxed him back to her shack and fed him vegetable pie and baked pawpaws. As she washes dishes and sings, he taps one foot happily.

  “I enjoy political comment,” he says. “Are you a republican, Belle, or do you regard your mother as nationally blasphemous?”

  Mother, I must say, is one of those lucky ones who, while exhibiting all the stigmata of the screwball, retain the distanced sense of what eccentricity is about. She can stand off, as it were, and contemplate the figure she cuts drumming or singing or simply being and can laugh at herself with genuine delight.

  I envy that.

  “My problem,” I whisper to Stanley so as not to mar mother’s rhythm and cheer, “is that I am fundamentally conventional. Maybe,” I say, “I take after my father. Really, though, I am beginning to take after my husband. I feel it happening.”

  “No you don’t,” Bonnie cuts in, interrupting herself mid-song, “not your father. Definitely not. For the brief time we knew each other, I can only say he was not, repeat not, boring. Maddening but not boring. You take after your grandparents, Belle dear. Poor pets. There they are, Stanley—well, there mother is, but so wrapped up in husband memories I always feel father’s presence, sitting out her days in a horrid little unit on the Gold Coast, watching the breakers bore in from the twenty-third floor, frightened of being mugged in Cavill Avenue, and spending her evenings playing bridge with three other frightened widows behind dead-locked doors with bolts, screamer alarm systems and all. As Belle said once, God’s waiting room.”

  “And what’s this that we have?” Stanley asks mildly, his baby eyes wide. “God’s privy?”

  Bonnie rolls about at the sink.

  There is something a little unhinged about mother’s laughter. I think she must be the only menopausal dope-smoker in these parts, for when she comes back from the chores patting oil into her hands (“Lissom for the drums, dears!”) before settling down in front of the fire, I am not surprised to see her take the makings of crumbled leaf from a plastic bag hanging over the mantelpiece and start rolling herself a joint.

  But she is unable to tempt me despite her insistence that it would relax me. We are not parallel chords in any circle, really. Screwballs give birth to conformists. Conformity is our only defense. “You’re so square,” Seb kept accusing me over the paltry years of our marriage. “So damn square!” As promotion, naturally enough, eased the necessity to please work colleagues, he told me this more and more often, and somewhere near the top of the ladder he also began to assume the foibles of the head librarian and could be seen summoning junior desk attendants and reading-room staff with a snap of the fingers. Sometimes he forgot and practiced his rudeness on departmental heads.

  “Don’t you dare summon me that way!” snapped elderly Miss Choate, who had ignored his doggy summons for so long he was forced to cross the room to her desk. Grinning faces bent assiduously above index cards while Seb flushed deeply but more with anger than shame as Miss Choate, bolstered by a seniority of twenty years, proceeded to point out flaws in his boyish manners.

  At the end of a week I return to Brisbane by a series of local buses and train and I think of Stanley and his remarkable percipience and also of Seb, but with a distance rather than yearning that strengthened in inverse ratio as the distance between us shortened.

  V

  I now have a blow-up photograph of Gaden Lockyer five feet by three.

  A poster firm in South Brisbane has made it for me. In this airless March afternoon with the threat of late-summer storm I sit before it, Buddha-like in the spare room. I have moved into the spare room and feel enormous freedom despite the narrowness of the cubicle and the drab view of Brisbane over the wilting shrubs in the backyard.

  When I made my move Seb was furious, not because he missed my presence in the boudoir but that rum
ors of our geographic alienation might become gossip in the library stacks.

  I have moved all my clothing there, too, my books, a typewriter and a small desk.

  Mr. Lockyer broods over the room as if he, too, finds it rather small.

  Seb lies alone in the double bed with his enchanting smile.

  We drive to the same workplace in separate cars. I still rattle about the kitchen and cynically cook enough dinner for two but more often than not Seb’s meal becomes a dried montage warming in the oven. After a month of this I begin eating out regularly.

  I have started compiling a research diary and file on Gaden Lockyer, a private project since the research on Jericho Flats finished some time ago. I am involved in correspondence with the historical societies of at least six country towns, parliamentary record departments, three coastal newspapers whose morgues I wish to mine and, on a more personal level, an eighty-year-old shearer from Dingo who has eye-witness anecdotes. These are soon exhausted. It seems there are no surviving direct descendants though I am prepared to doubt this and will shortly institute my own investigation in this matter. A line is to be drawn connecting the middle points of our parallel chords.

  Why? I ask the earnestly amused face of Mr. Lockyer, now an almost life-sized bank clerk in the spare room this steamy morning in March. Why am I doing this?

  Outside Seb has been driven by the height of the grass into hacking and mowing and he is dragging the mower resentfully beneath the jacaranda trees. He is determined to domesticate something and just for a moment when he pauses to mop sweat from his scarlet face, I feel a spasm of compassion. For one pure second of abstraction he forgets the mower is still running and is hauled wretchedly into the present as it ambles down the slope and begins nuzzling the paling fence. Amused, I resume my contemplation.

  Should there be oblatory candles?

  The clucking telephone unites us in the living room and I eavesdrop beside Seb on hearing Bonnie’s strident voice as if she is attempting vocally to bridge the three hundred miles between us. Fragments of sentences come through. But what? Seb officiously ignores my grab for the receiver, waving me off arrogantly, and turns his back so that he cuddles Bonnie’s words to himself.