by Thea Astley
“How could they do that?” I asked.
“Easily, dear,” they said. “Easily. Threatened to make trouble with customs. Didn’t want the place given a bad name.”
At that point the younger of the two sprang into action parodying Club Med exercises organized to relax newcomers and get them into the spirit of the thing while his companion swung into the Club Med welcome song. They did malicious clapping action in unison. I began to feel the holiday improve.
“Then how did you get here?”
“Walked out,” they said. “Late at night. My dear, we hadn’t seen fresh fruit for six days. Everything was canned. We were getting scurvy. So we snuck out, walked into Newmea, as the Aussie tourists say, and booked into a scruffy hotel, which at least had authentic French grime, in the Rue Sebastopol and caught the bus up here next morning.”
“But this place is bloody awful too,” Seb said. “La plus ça change …”
“No dear,” they said. “No. Not compared with.”
We had dinner together. There were two kinds of steak: au poivre and aux champignons (canned), a pretentiously named beef stew, a reef fish (“Mmmmm!” the proprietor who doubled as waiter said, kissing fingers. “Exquise!”) which smelt and a spoonful of melting ice cream on a coulis of tinned pineapple.
“Jesus!” cried ravenous Seb. “I don’t believe this! Where are the native feasts, the grass skirts, the dancing girls, the island bands?”
“Not here, dear,” the two fags said. “But it’s a change. We don’t have to do exercises.”
As the sun dropped like a rock into the sea (“It can’t bear the menu!” the younger man whispered), the sandflies stopped biting and the mosquitoes multiplied.
“There’s no telly, no radio and the only telephone is in the proprietor’s office which closes at five,” they told us, “should we not survive the fish.”
Seb decided to get drunk.
In the morning I left the bure before him and strolled north along the coast road for a mile, the sun clamped round me like a coat. The sea was gently eroding all edges of thought with the sort of hypnotic insistence that must have rendered inebriate those lost gulls of sailors who winged the Pacific in search of the ultimate landfall, the ultimate island, atoll, motu. By the time I crawled back, the music had been switched on in the bar and they were playing through their second tape. They had only two tapes and the evening before we had heard both of them four times.
In the storeroom behind the bar Monsieur Hulot was fondling the caramel brown flesh of the bargirl who shrieked with giggles as she observed me over his unaware shoulder while I waited to put in my breakfast order. The high-pitched nature of her amusement drowned my warning throat clearings and told his groping fingers nothing and I saw there the colonial emblem of the islands—white man rampant on black girl suppliant. Gaden, I wonder, did you ever … ?
Three days of this. The amusing stories of the refugees from Club Med provided the only relief. I achieved morning four.
When I came back from the beach to the bure glued down by heat behind the coconut palms, I found Seb etc. etc.
Who can really blame him? How did Mr. Gaden Lockyer behave when visiting outposts of the electorate? Did Betsy worry or was she entirely relieved by the thought that he might be making someone else pregnant? Places can breed desperation and I have an afflicting vision of my fourteen-year-old self cavorting before Mr. Renouf’s rheumy eyes on the lawn in front of Villa Marina. Yet though I mentally gave Seb absolution, unfairly I used his behavior as a surface excuse for doing what I had considered doing for the last two years.
Out.
Out beyond the circumference.
I was on a home-bound plane before Seb could even blink and begin worrying about the possibility of gonorrhea, or worse, and in a rush of whipped-up outrage, had packed all my possessions into three suitcases and driven off to a Villa Marina clone somewhere in Red Hill.
As I struggled to make myself feel wounded instead of freed, I combed the jobs columns, wrote letters of application, made phone appointments for interviews. It was easier than I could have believed to transfer my minimal talents to a newspaper library where my archival skills were an asset. Graciously, private enterprise gave me three days’ grace before I had to take up my position and I spent them driving up to visit mother’s leaning shack.
Clarity of intent foundered as I pulled into the drive that was gradually roughing itself out in front of the house. The place was rocking with walloper music and, without even seeing, I recognized Aunt Marie’s limited pianistic gambols and mother whacking away on drums as if the sticks had never been out of her hands.
I am about to present her with father’s late-remembered gift.
How does Stanley like the racket one valley away?
Why was I worried about mother?
Why think she needed me? I’m the one in need.
The two old girls were radiant when I edged through the door and didn’t even miss a beat as they waved one-handed welcomes. The piano, I observed in passing on my way to brew tea, was a beat-up Lipp with two ivories missing. Bonnie had moved up technologically from wood-stove to primus, but even that took so long I dragged a bottle of brandy from my bag, a gift I had brought along for her, and poured myself a double. I also took out the leather drumstick case and placed it on the table beside the brandy bottle where she couldn’t fail to see it.
The two of them crashed into the tonic chord. Whump whump a whumpeta whump.
Kisses hugs cries. More glasses, more pourings, and
“What’s this, darling?” Bonnie asked me, picking up the cylinder and opening the flap. “What’s—”
I should have done it more gently.
Her heart must have given a terrific flutter for she turned a sickening white and groped for a chair.
“Where did you get these?” she asked.
“Dad,” I said.
VI
I have to admit Seb made little effort to draw me back even though it gnaws my self-esteem to admit this. A few angry phone calls, one glitteringly rational letter setting out the reasons for my recanting (reasons which were, au fond, sordidly financial) and after that, silence.
Loneliness bothers me. I’m a natural yacker. God, Seb would complain, you talk to anybody. It’s true. I talk to old ladies at bus stops, waitresses, plumbers, delivery men, shop assistants, fellow travelers on planes and trains and even diners at adjacent tables if I can. The only people I am unable to talk to, although I feel it incumbent on me to try, are doctors and psychiatrists who feel their time is worth money. Even when you pay, they still feel it isn’t enough.
Yet, yet … after a month or so in a fusty boardinghouse from where, in bishop’s swoop, I move to a bed-sitter near the river at New Farm, and after several giggle sessions with female colleagues in the newspaper morgue, I discover that I barely think of Seb, that the absence of his sporadic and selfish sexual attention was a fresh argument for celibacy and that I delight in the obligationless nature of my new domesticity. One egg or none? Shall I gulp my wedge of cheese and biscuit standing up at the kitchen counter or slumped before the telly? Eat in or out? Bliss.
Happiness is the ruined chop with no recriminatory comments.
There is time, too, for my obsessions. In the non-rarefied air of morning newspaper demands they normally have little time to flourish but I gain a reputation for industry as I appear early or stay late to pursue my own manic itch.
I make discoveries.
Mr. Gaden Lockyer, not to put too fine a point on it, was a crook. A political crook—which has a respectability this country has learned to tolerate. Now occupying an entire wall in my small flat, he watches me as I sift through take-home notes sufficient in volume to nourish the most spurious of doctoral theses. The newspaper files to which I have access contain information on public figures that pre-and post-date the year Queensland achieved autonomy. I take refreshing plunges into the deeps of the decades before and after separation even though thos
e years hold little that is pertinent to the nub of my search. Moving forward, further unknown morsels on Gaden Lockyer surface. He had mining interests in a failed operation near Chillagoe which, taken over by a new company, was sold to the government. Mr. Lockyer and a Cabinet Colleague had pecuniary interests in the transaction. A Royal Commission was mooted. Take this: here’s a studio photograph of Mackay worthies, circa 1919, sweating in their best dark suits in the non-air-conditioned fanless council chambers. It is a blueprint for all the pompous machismo of town halls and parliamentary side-rooms of the period.
I gloat. Mr. Lockyer has developed a horrible importance along with a goatee. I can hardly trace the once-amused quirk to the lips. I am tracking his career with accuracy. But what of the man?
On the surface, believe me, I am quite normal. I am punctual, efficient, polite to everyone but
“She’s kind of abstracted,” I overhear. “‘Distanced.’ Is that the word?”
In the cubicle shelter of the washroom, I hear one cadet reporter say to the editor of the women’s section as they reconstruct their faces, “She’s up herself.”
That’s one view of it.
I live modestly within my means making no demands on Seb. I visit mother, and now Aunt Marie, dutifully every few months. Seb has long since ceased to make even shadow-play on the screen of my interest. Sometimes, but not often, I accept invitations to race meetings or Gold Coast barbecues by youthful reporters whose interest in me wanes as I fail to respond to their front-seat grapplings.
Word gets around.
I write to father in New York.
He doesn’t reply.
I write again. He sends me a three-line card.
If I want male companionship it will have to be drawn from beyond the work-walls. But by now, six months after the marital schism, I am so concerned with Mr. Lockyer, who does, I admit, accompany me spiritually to concerts, theater, restaurants and sometimes in the car as far as Bonnie’s hideout (he’s really at his relaxed best in the country, stalking off from family whoopee on piano and drums) that I have little need for anyone else. I still talk to old ladies at bus stops, waitresses, plumbers, delivery men and even diners at adjacent booths.
I am a suitable case for treatment.
Mind you, I don’t believe that but others would.
I have drawn a map.
I have plotted a course.
I intend plugging in to that map, under landscape, under time, swimming with my researcher’s easy freestyle stroke until I surface, gasping, clutching my long-dead beau by the arm.
The morning I pack the trunk of my car at the beginning of a month’s annual leave, the car radio is belting out “Sentimental Journey.”
Would you believe this?
I’m a sucker for omens.
For a long time I had debated with myself the notional purity of train travel as opposed to car—it should be train to clamber into the spirit of the business—but some of the townlets, or their ghosts upon my map, are unreachable by public transport and I have no bullock driver’s license. A month would be scarcely long enough though I have a flowering consciencelessness about the nature of my annual leave: rubber time, as they say in Malaysia. Jam karet. Rubber time.
I skirt Gungee on my way north, perhaps because Bonnie and Marie have gone public again and have a weekend engagement at a cowdown hoedown in the valleys there, and to the harmonics of “Chattanooga Choo-choo” I drive into Saturday noontime and head for Gin Gin where Boobs McAvoy, classmate of ’72 and an ardent exponent of “The Rustle of Spring,” has settled down with her itinerant pineapple picker. I ring from a town callbox, depending on the element of surprise for hospitality and later, welcome achieved, discover as I stand at the bottom of her veranda steps that we barely recognize each other for those first few flashing seconds, searching underyear for the face behind the present.
“Belle!” Boobs shrieks between little joy sobs. “Oh God, Belle!”
“Dah dah de dah dah, de dah dah!” I sing for her, my “Rustle of Spring” monstrously parodied, and she hugs me to her breasty laughter and drags me inside.
Is it too early for a drink? I wonder.
“It’s never too early,” Boobs says, anticipating me and choking vermouth with ice. Small nets of capillary veins on Boobs’ jolly cheeks are explained.
We sit and sip and look at each other.
Her face is resuming the expected contours that once confronted me in dormitory, across the tennis net, two rows away in class, in the washroom at Slagheap railway station, surfacing, as I hope mine is.
Age, I moan inwardly. Age. If time past is irrelevant, surely Mr. Lockyer’s lost decades will become void. The flash-ins! Suddenly I glimpse Clarence Renouf, Rose Burgoyne and Gaden Lockyer in three age-differentiated portraits; and the discordance of memory flings up quick snapshots of all of them—and us—tottering and aggressive, ten degrees from the vertical, cross, sour and rotting in condominiums or boardinghouses or retirement homes.
“Oh Boobs,” I cry, “where’s the time gone? Where’s it gone to?”
Even as I lament, I suppose, my antennae are locating the manifestations of Boobs’ worldly success. I know it doesn’t mean happiness but nothing explains the speedy refills of vermouth. The house has a suffocatingly relaxed air culled from magazine gloss. The bottom-dented sofas are of leather. The cane loungers are upholstered in impractical white linen. Floors are polished wood of a sheen so dazzling I can see the reflection of my inelegantly crossed legs. The large and rambling house has the ability to shrink a guest and to sustain the impact of scattered expensive toys without minimizing space. From the garden comes the chatter of sprinklers tossing water on leaves. I tell her the place is lovely and she agrees with a complacency I find infuriating.
When Boobs asks me where I am heading, I am vague and indirect. She never did have an ear for the abstract. Nor an eye. Euclid routed her. But I confess to a broken marriage whose tiny island is almost submerged by the waves of months washing over that sharpest coral.
“Eight years,” Boobs says. Maybe her chest has something to do with lasting the distance but another glance at her mouth informs me that time doesn’t measure success. There’s an edge of boredom and I remember the last occasion we met on that racketing rail-motor and I had asked her what she had in common with her pineapple picker. “Everything,” silly Boobs had said.
How the splendor of this—this—estate?
“A wealthy aunt,” she tells me. “Mine. Who died.”
We find, after an hour, that dormitory and playing-field gossip has dried up. If my bosom companion of earlier days is troubled by possessions and regrets, she no longer finds me her confidential center. I stand on the farewelling veranda having rejected offers of lunch, dinner, the overnight stay, moved doubtless by a tiny nagging jealousy of Mr. Itinerant who has managed to entrap and successfully subdue what had always been pure ebullience, and admire the vast green acres stretching like shagpile to the purple hill-line. Inwardly the worm of search is urging me on. All Boobs has been left with is the despair of lushness.
“As far as you can see,” she says, interpreting my eye and waving modestly at horizons. “It gives you a good feeling, a feeling of security, if you know what I mean.”
I don’t know at all what she means, except for the hopes I am pinning on my search for Gaden Lockyer.
“Something has to,” I reply unkindly and instantly rue my words for her mouth wavers on admission and then shuts tight.
I am distressed for both of us. Disperse, scatter, divest. Could this mean discarding even the center?
Our final embrace has less enthusiasm. Does she detect my discoveries?
I let in the clutch and see Boobs through my rear vision mirror, for one reverse image moment shrunken to a teenage kid in a skimpy tunic quaffing the temporariness of worldly possessions through the pores of her disillusioned skin.
The afternoon absorbs me as I drive through my mental and actual map to a town where I may h
ole up for the night like any general to consider strategy. A diversion is called for a sideways—knight’s gambit—excursion to Mr. Lockyer’s childhood farm near Hornet Bank, a chilling atrocity site where for once the native owners of the land turned the table on white invaders. Gaden’s daddy, so my nit-picking research had revealed, had been an active member of punitive expeditions. How had that affected the small boy watching his father ride off to shoot black men like crows? Official biography of Mr. Lockyer senior had obliterated this piece of information that I discovered only by nosing through the preserved letters of settlers on the Upper Dawson.
I must stand by those wind-whistled walls of rotting log and slab and sniff out the earliest presence of the child before his family moved to the Condamine.
This side trip, my mind and petrol tank tell me, is folly.
Must I do this?
What are relationships between men and women intended to be?
My view of Boobs has unsettled me. What does society really want?
My mind wanders as I drive. On my zoom return from visiting my own lost daddy, I was waiting in La Guardia for my flight to Los Angeles watching another wilting pair of travelers weaving their own enclosed space. They were young but not too young. Late twenties. I related to that. I looked up from dropping a chocolate wrapper in a bin to surprise them in an eye-dive with each other that was embarrassing in its depth. I say embarrassing but then, somehow, it became comforting in its exposure of tenderness. It was genuine, wasn’t it, if only for that half minute? It hit the center didn’t it, if only for one second? Like Huck’s sudden smile in the all-night diner or the feel of my mouth on his cheek? One moment of sincerity can pose itself proudly beside years of hypocrisy and gain grace.
The two. She was mousy, drab. Her skirt was an impossible muddy blue and too long. Her shoes were flat, and brown. The cardigan that looked home-knitted (Bonnie, you would have loved it) was in synthetic lavender fiber, cable stitch. Her eyes clung the longer. Oh how they clung! He was patting her hand, tender at this point of departure, and when I saw this I had to look away. It was hard to look away. When I dared return my eyes to them, and they were still oblivious of me, his patting paw had removed itself from hers and now rested on and encircled his other wrist which he held with such heartbreaking tenderness I feared for that drab skirt and cardigan. He had a gently tortured face, like my father’s I kept thinking, a face that would move women to excesses of sentiment.