Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  The old man says, “You’re going back a long ways, miss. Quite aways back. But I remember—well—some things. Where you say you’re from again?”

  “Australia.”

  “Thought you said that. That’s a helluva way. I was there for a bit during the war. Place called Townsville. You know it?”

  I nod.

  “And you came all this way to check out your dad? Well, I call that a real nice thing to do now. A real nice thing.”

  He’s smiling at me and he says “Sure, I remember Huck real well. Didn’t want to say too much in front of that gate-man. He’s a real snoop. But sure I remember. Used to drive me nuts when he and his buddies practiced at the van. We had a few words in our day. His trailer was just over there under that last fig. That’s not it now. His fell apart a few years back and management bought a new one. But that was it, right there.”

  The sun is vertical. It’s pressing me down into the earth’s center where I have no shadow.

  I ask if the van owners would mind if I walked over there.

  “Don’t see why they would,” the old man says. “Not when they hear you came all that way. Hang on a minute while I get my stick and I’ll walk over with you.”

  Lowering himself painfully down the trailer steps, he hobbles beside me along the path to the last trailer. I don’t even see it. It’s the space it occupies I see with my eye for emptiness. And I don’t really hear him knock. It’s the answering silence I hear, the silence behind the drawn blinds and the absent car.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I only wanted to walk round this place. You see, I was conceived here, right here, under that fig, I suppose.”

  I walk away from him to the back of the trailer and look up at the trees and the sky through the trees. My feet are printed on mother’s invisible tracks, dusted out by time, grassed over but still here in essence. Mum, I say softly, I’m here where I started. No one answers. I am lumpy with unshed tears.

  The old man is waiting patiently when I come round the end of the van site. “Not much to see,” he says.

  “It’s the feel,” I tell him. “Can you understand?”

  “Sure,” he says. “Sure I understand. My wife was with me fifteen years then she up and left with some smartass hardware drummer who was passing through. But I still feel her around. I know what you mean.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “It’s a long time ago now.” He runs a hand through his thin hair and gives a crooked grin that is largely gum. “You like a coffee? Maybe I can dig around in my memory for Huck.”

  His trailer is scrape-clean and apart from half a dozen paperbacks and a vase with three plastic daisies, holds only the essentials: table, two chairs, a cot made up with the precision of a hospital bed. I concentrate on the daisies and observing me he says, “Never wither. I just dunk ’em under the tap. Here. How do you take it? Cream? Sugar?”

  I stir in silence while he watches me. The whole noon is tinged with the surreal.

  “So you want to know about your dad,” he says finally. “Can’t recall when I last heard from him. Ten, maybe twelve, years since he wrote what you could call a letter. You know, after your mother left, he stayed on here a few years. She was a nice kid, your mum. Bit crazy but nice. Huck used to show me snaps of you and her. When he got a card he’d tell me. It’s hard to explain how he felt.” He hesitates then gets up and goes over to the stove to heat up more coffee. “It was like he was happy to be a free agent,” he goes on, his back turned to my probing eyes, “if you don’t mind me saying that. But like he missed her as well. You know what I mean? Having it both ways, I guess, but that’s human nature for you. He wasn’t a bad guy, Huck. Just a bit irresponsible, maybe, and finding it hard to keep ahead of the game. He could play all right, but there weren’t the jobs and there was a helluva lot of competition. Anyway, one morning about three years after your ma left he came by and said he was going up to L.A. He sent me a card now and then. And then, just last Thanksgiving, way out of the blue, I got one from him in New York. Had to work at it to remember who he was.”

  “Did you keep it?”

  “I don’t keep anything,” he says. “Guess you noticed. But there was an address, somewhere in the west fifties. Not that that’s much help. But I can remember this.” He comes back with the coffeepot. “Like another?”

  “Please,” I say anxious not to hurry him.

  “Well, he did mention a place he was getting gigs. Name kinda stuck—The Village Line. Maybe you could track him down.”

  My head is swimming. I feel I should write it down. I say the name over a few times.

  I don’t really want the second coffee but I feel I owe it to him and we sit there talking about nothing much. I can only repeat what I heard or I think I heard. His emptied trailer is crowded with shadows, a profusion of nothing. I leave him my name and address, aware he would keep neither, promising I’ll let him know how I go, and then he walks me back to the office where I ring for a cab to take me to the airport.

  My exhaustion is developing a baroque quality similar to being drugged. The fatigue grapples me into a kind of rigid paralysis that destroys memory of the flight east though I seem to recall an automaton-like changing of planes and coming into La Guardia in the evening dark, still Saturday, and finding myself a small hotel room on the east side.

  Look, this isn’t a detective story. I refuse to display the minutiae of search, the marginalia of tracking here and there, though perhaps the method and determination that fueled me were a by-product of my archival peerings. In any case, round midnight, revitalized by a brief doze, a hot bath and several coffees, I find myself confronting a sad stranger in a midtown jazz bar and settling for the approach abrupt between sets.

  “Hullo,” I say, skipping the hogwash of introduction and explanation, “I’m your daughter, Belle.”

  Poor man. Poor dad.

  He’s a spare sort of fellow with a sandy head of hair, a late-night face and gray eyes that refuse to believe me. Does he imagine I’m an aging groupie, a desperate pickup with a down-under twang that hits his ears like a foreign tongue? The rest of the band exchange winks but there’s no erotic zip in my approach. I have a photo of my mother as she was and another more or less as she is tucked into my passport wallet and the belief and disbelief on his sprung face are only natural. He asks me to wait. There’s one more set. I get a seat close to the group and sip a gin and lime. All through the changes, the heartbreak of those last three numbers, he is eyeing me as he plays, the voice of his trumpet illusory and cryptic. I watch him, eyes unblinking.

  One hour later we are facing each other in an all-night diner. He has tucked his instrument case under his feet and forty years of not quite making it stare bleakly at me from across the vinyl. Neither of us can fumble the right phrases together. He’s knocked all awry with sudden parenthood and I think I’ve managed to convince him of the oneness of our blood with my dozens of Bonnie and Clyde stories, the marriage legends mother poured into my unchildlike ears and a “say hello” message from his old neighbor in the San Diego trailer park.

  I have his nose, I have his mouth. I don’t mean to be rude but I am treating his face like a map on which I search for recognizable features. The gumchewer with the high surf behind him has gone.

  “God!” Huck keeps saying. “Jesus God, what a thing! Out of the blue.” Every now and then he rubs both hands across his face and knuckles his eyes as if trying to clear them, shaking memory into focus.

  “Dad,” I say, dropping the monosyllable so cautiously it thunks between us, “dad, this is only a sentimental journey. I don’t want anything. I only wanted to know who you are. I need—needed—to know.”

  His eyes blink rapidly. I am terrified he might suspect me of a wild impersonation despite seeming acceptance. I am terrified he might weep.

  “It’s such a shock,” he keeps saying. “Such a shock. Jesus! A brand-new grown-up kid straight out of the sky. Jesus!”

  “I’m nearl
y thirty,” I tell him. “You’ll have to forgive my curiosity. I just wanted to see you.”

  “Did Bon put you up to this?”

  “No.”

  He doesn’t believe me. I repeat my denial. “Never.”

  “Well,” he says, “now you’ve seen me.” He makes a face. “It’s not much, is it?”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “Absolutely fine.”

  We are so awkward with each other I decide that blood relationships are unnatural. We look at each other a long time without speaking and the waiter comes across and tops up our coffees and we simply sit and stare and then unexpectedly he smiles, not forced, not suspicious, but easy and open as if the whole situation is a joke.

  I give him a smile back.

  “You sent me a toy bison when I was four,” I say. “Remember?”

  “Sure,” he lies gamely. “Sure I remember.”

  “I trailed that bison all over the sheepyards till it just about fell apart,” I tell him. “Mother kept washing it and it got more and more faded and the stuffing lost its kick.”

  “Like me.”

  I shake my head at him. “I’ve still got it,” I say. “Back in Brisbane. It’s become a kind of—well, talisman. A good-luck mascot. I can’t bear to let it go.”

  “Lay off, Belle,” he says unexpectedly. “Don’t pile it on.”

  “I’m not. I’m just telling.”

  “You’re making me feel a real shit,” he says.

  That isn’t what I want to do at all. I had thought I was merely piling up the evidence for this brand-new stranger father whom I rather liked the look of. I wanted him to believe in my authenticity, even though it eluded me. I fumble with my purse and look away.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  I tell him about my marriage, setting it out like some comic snack for two. I draw a primitive of mother’s lifestyle. I say, “Why don’t you come for a visit.”

  “I can’t do that,” he says. “Hell, Bonnie’d hate that.”

  We argue that one for quite a while and I ask, “Are you married?” And, “Hell, no,” he says. “I’m still married to Bon. There’s been … well …”—he does hand-rolls—“a few things this way and that. You’re a grown lady. I can say that. But nothing too deep. No.”

  We talk until three in the morning and my eyes are falling out of my head. It’s minimalist stuff. Euclid was minimalist. The sheer brevity of his explication has always taken my breath away. I tell father I have to leave the next night and as I say this I cannot bear to look at him for fear of detecting relief but in the taxi going back to my hotel he turns to me sadly and says, “Can you see me for a minute before you leave? There’s something I’d like to give you to take back to Bon. Just say where and I’ll be there. God, Belle, this has been one hell of a night.”

  On impulse I lean across and kiss his weathered cheek. He smells of cheap after-shave and bourbon and this smell moves me more than anything else. I start to cry and he pats me clumsily on the shoulder as I pull the cab door open. “Hey,” he says. “Hey. Don’t do that. God!”

  There are still people about on Fifty-fourth but New York gives one a kind of invisibility and I walk into my hotel doorway unashamedly howling.

  The next afternoon we meet briefly at the Rockefeller Plaza. I’m sitting there eating a BLT and working through my third black coffee when father comes up to my table and hands me this leather cylinder. “They’re Bonnie’s,” he says. “She forgot to take them with her. I kept them all these years. Wondered now and again if maybe I should give them back personally, you know. You’ve solved it for me.”

  I look at him. His face has been remolded by sleep and I don’t think he cares one way or another about Bonnie or me or the world beyond Manhattan. Did Euclid ever theorize about a circle with no center at all?

  “Dad,” I say, and he winces, “come over. Come on over and give them to her yourself.”

  He shakes his head. He’s restless. He won’t sit with me but stands edging about as if he’s ready to rush for a train a bus a plane. I don’t think I’ve meant a thing. Or perhaps I’ve meant too much. That’s the way I’ll read it. I can only write down what I hope, or think I hope.

  “Please,” I urge.

  He looks at me and his eyes shift away, only microscopically, but they shift, they shift from the center and “No,” he says. “Sorry Belle. No. I can’t do that. But give her my love.”

  Then he’s gone, dematerialized, in the Sunday afternoon crowd before I can even catch at his arm.

  At work I concentrate on Gaden Lockyer as a hoist, a rig, a solid structure in the dissolution of my spirit world.

  Seb tries amendment tactics. In a last-ditch attempt at marital reconstruction he flashes airline tickets to romantic places junked by Frank Hassler. Stevenson once wrote that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive and he should know, given his South Pacific days. I shall depart like du Bellay’s Ulysse, hoping to return home at last after un beau voyage but

  When I come back to the bure on the beach at Poindimié, I find Seb trying to hump the housegirl. I say trying.

  It was a rushed job. He hadn’t bothered to remove his shirt or sandals and the sadly comic aspect of his rump, that utter featurelessness of the behind, only roused me to a state of exasperation.

  “Don’t stop,” I apologized to the flurried clothes-pawing bodies. “Please keep going. I’m so sorry.”

  I quite liked the housegirl. Several times over the last few days we had talked together. She was a bright good-looking Melanesian who had come down from Ouvea for the job and was saving to take money home for her family. Her shiny giggling face peered up at me from the bed as Seb flung himself off.

  Calmly I began taking clothes from hangers, folding them and packing them into my bag. Not even the sound of the door clicking shut behind the sidling Rosella made me turn. Through the shuttered window of the bure I could see the sparse shadows beneath the coconut palms explode under her running feet.

  This had all been a terrible mistake. Motivated by that barbecue talk and Frank Hassler’s challenge to the world, the febrility of this attempt to re-establish or recapture impossibilities was patent. We had stopped for the first three nights in Noumea, exploring the exotic possibilities of the town. The heat was appalling and everywhere our ears were assailed by the accents of home. There was no escape. The package tour, as Frank Hassler stated, was dominating the planet. “I don’t want,” I told Seb crossly, “to sit in a French restaurant a thousand miles away and listen to people from Melbourne whining for the Barrier Reef.” “C’est la vie,” Seb said in what he assumed to be a French accent.

  When we reached our resort some hundreds of miles up the eastern coast on the fourth day, the indifference of the Gallic proprietor who watched us lug our bags from the coastal bus was stunning. With only the vaguest of directions he sent us off to search out our bure, sauntering after us in order to explain that because the power was generator produced, all lights would be switched off by eleven each evening. His command of English was splendid.

  “What if we want to read?” Seb demanded in his best French, determined to extract multiculturalism if it killed him, furious already with the blinding sea-dazzle and the scalding quality of the sun. “Si on veut lire?” he kept trying.

  “Ah,” the manager said, stroking his mustache. “Do speak English. I understand English. I don’t understand your French.”

  “Read,” Seb said crossly. “If we want to read.”

  The manager threw out his hands in a delectable gesture that denied all responsibility. “Not possible.”

  There were no fly screens either and the sandflies and mosquitoes were already attacking without waiting for the dark. The manager pointed out a stack of mosquito coils on the wall bench.

  “Pour les terroristes,” he suggested, making his little joke. “Every comfort. Allumettes. Matches, you say. Restaurant over there. Everything.” His smile broadened and he waved vaguely in the direction
of the beach where I had already glimpsed a large open thatched deck set out with tables and chairs. Pop music bucketing from speakers was vomitously audible, even here. The gelatinous blue sea rolled to the throb of a bass guitar.

  “There is no key,” the manager added as a bonus. “Valuables in my safe, eh? Passports in my safe.”

  “What do you mean no key?” Seb cried.

  The manager shrugged. “There is no key. None of the bures has a key. We do not think it necessary. You’re in France now. Everything is amical.” He smiled and backed to the door. “Don’t forget. Passports in my safe.”

  “Like bloody hell,” Seb muttered.

  He had dumped his bag and was sitting hunched and waspish on one of the two narrow divans. He waited until the manager faded away between the palms. “Monsieur bloody Hulot!” he said. “Christ! When I think of what we’re paying. It makes you wonder what the cheaper places are like.” It was impossible they could be worse.

  “For God’s sake let’s get a drink,” Seb said. “I don’t think I’ll last the prescribed seven days in this paradise.” Already his face and arms were coming up in small red lumps.

  We put on our bathers and, coated with insect repellent and clutching passports and traveler’s checks, went to investigate the bar and the beach. The sand strip at high water in the lagoon was so narrow, a prone sunbaker would extend from dune grass to water. The sea itself was a maze of coral shelves that precluded swimming and stretched shallowly for half a mile to the reef.

  Seb kept scowling and scratching. “At least we can drink ourselves into a stupor.” He went straight up to the bar where he ordered and drank three screwdrivers without a pause.

  There were no other guests except two very pretty homosexuals who were easing their sunburn under the overwhelming shadow of the longhouse roof and gearing themselves up to face lunch.

  “Delicious,” one warned. “Le hamburger. Le grand Mac. You’ll really feel you’re in foreign parts.”

  They had run away from Club Med, they told us. For the second time. The first time an airline steward they knew in Sydney smuggled them out to the airport when he returned on his next run to the island, but a Club Med joy leader on a Club Med bus waiting for the next package group had spotted them and made them go back.