Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  “Half a million,” he says lightly.

  The three of us laugh nicely.

  Their gross speculative presence has exorcised the very spirit of the place and threatens as well to engulf the tender fabric of my mood. The fusion I require can only come, paradoxically enough, with solitude. Or so I hope. This whole globe is patchworked with pieces of past that refuse decay. Or glitter with it.

  Should I break in at some timely moment when they have left the house to its murmuring self?

  I drive off into heat and fantastic speculation. It was not in that sumptuous garden that Gaden Lockyer ended his days. The house was burdened with his rise to power, his exposure and the terrible weeks of accusation and disgrace until his resignation. The years of retirement withered. Mr. Lockyer eased them out in a nursing home on the coast, enduring, so I believe, what St. Augustine deemed man’s fall from grace—flatulence. As well, I don’t doubt, there were problems with teeth, continence, the shakes, misty vision and faltering thinking. A classic case, as any medical man might say. A classic case.

  It is another sixty miles to the last stop, last resting-place, landfall of Gaden Lockyer, bank clerk, farmer, local councillor, state Member, father of four, husband.

  Descendants?

  His line has died out more or less. I have met grandson and great-grandniece. Circumferences are disappointing. Anyway, familiarity breeds distance, have you noticed? A too-close involvement with a watered-down bloodline obsessed by mammon middens of the eighties would teach me nothing. I have a sizzling vision of archeologists hundreds of years from now unearthing a cache of Walk-mans, digital watches, designer sunglasses, Italian jogging shoes, espresso machines and vertical grills. Who? his great-great-grandkids would ask. Who? Him? Yeah, well. Maybe. Don’t know all that much about him. Yeah. I believe he was my grandfather, great-grandfather, great-uncle, whatever. Bit of a scandal, wasn’t there? Misappropriation of funds? Hell, they all do it! Old bastard, eh? Crummy photo, isn’t it? God, all those hairies looked the same. Pity they didn’t have Polaroids in those days, eh, then they could have seen how godawful they looked within minutes. Anyway, that would have been on mother’s grandmother’s great-aunt’s side. Hell, it’s a hassle getting across town to the job. Don’t see so much of the olds. Sorry.

  No. I didn’t want that. I was not anxious for question and answer (Socrates, you didn’t know the half of it, either) to a background of monster post-teen stereo full blast by the barbie pit. No no no.

  VIII

  I reach the little beach town of Tin River by two that afternoon.

  It’s a townlet of terminal attractiveness. White sand. Blue water. One street of small shops and an esplanade strip of park, coconut palms backed by a tatty line of holiday shacks, the artificial grass of a bowling club, an ice-cream parlor now closed, groves of mature she-oaks and small headlands north and south like brackets.

  Tin River is a parenthetic statement.

  There are, as well, two blocks of holiday rental flats with beach towels dangling over railings and a six-unit motel with doors painted an ominous red.

  I check in. Unhesitatingly I sign the register as Lockyer. I am convinced of my identity. My room smells of sadness and the sea and the hollow moments of people in transit who pulled in, stayed one night and moved on. I can only write what I feel or I think I feel. This place is so out of the way—a true funkhole for notoriety—the motel is still placing that “sanitized for your protection” strip across the lavatory seat, a strip I snap apart with a hoon’s carelessness and crumple into the trashbin. There is a double bed with a faded tropic spread, an open wardrobe space with four bent wire-hangers, a television set bolted to the wall and curtains that match the bedspread and are even more faded. (I examine my face in the wall mirror and discover I have vanished.) My motel guide booklet has given the place two stars. Can’t they count? I root around in the bathroom cupboards and find an electric jug and what the natives call “tea-making facilities.” I tea-make, taking my brew onto the small terrace outside my room and sip away listening to sea-talk. Later I stroll along the main street in the screamer heat of afternoon, downtown one way, then back the other, half a mile each way. In a country with only a nomadic makeshift history there are few monuments beyond Returned Services League clubs and football fields, and here there aren’t even these. There’s a fish shop-café, a mixed grocery store and a newsagency.

  In the newsagency, which also sells hardware, toys, beach gear and patent medicines, the management leans his fifty years against the counter as if he knows everything about this town.

  “No,” he tells me when I ask about the retirement home that used to be along the front. “Not anymore. Hasn’t been run as one for years. Too awkward for the relatives to get down here with that gravel road in. Ruined their cars.”

  I ask when it closed.

  “Late thirties I reckon. I don’t remember too much. I was only a nipper. But the granddad moved into it round about then. The war changed everything. They shut it down when war broke out. As a retirement home that is. Couldn’t spare the nurses, see. Most of the old folk were shipped back to Rockhampton. That’s how it was.”

  “Is the building still standing?” I ask.

  He looks curiously at me.

  “You would have driven in past it. Big rambling place, two storeys, right down the northern end in a sort of cul-de-sac just as you swing in. It’s easy to miss. It’s a boardinghouse now. Not doing too good, I hear. The old girl who runs it depends on family trade in the school holidays. But there’s a couple of regulars. Two old chaps. In a way it’s much like it was, except the regulars don’t get nursing care. Where you staying?”

  I tell him.

  “Yeah.” I watch him computing this. “Well, that’s a bit more up-to-date, I reckon.”

  “Everything is sanitized for my protection,” I say and he looks sharply at me and asks, “What? What’s that?”

  “It’s very comfortable,” I lie. This is a small town. I must be verbally discreet. I might stay here longer than I planned. I might stay here. I might stay. “Very comfortable.”

  To placate him I buy a stack of postcards and a paperback I’m doomed never to read.

  I cross the road and go down to the beach. Now I am here I can take my time. And his. It’s a gently shelving strip of extraordinarily white sand at which the reef waters merely nibble as they did at Poindimié. Fifty yards out a lone fisherman is rocking quietly in a dinghy. So I sit on the sand, Gaden beside me, and look across the Pacific to South America. I have never been there but its dream quality is no less affecting than that of the elderly presence fidgeting on the dune slope beside me.

  “How’s Betsy?” I ask. “And the kids?”

  But he doesn’t answer.

  “We’re glum today,” I say, shifting naturally into the nursing home jargon plural. “Don’t we like it here?”

  Turning diary pages. They are with me all the time now in a tote bag.

  Look, it was true for Euclid and it’s still true for me and every geometry freak who lived since then. I am struggling to lay out a proposition that the past remains within the present, not even out of focus, the fragments simply repositioned by the disturbance of new presents and new pasts, everything jumbled and shuffled but extant: knowledge established remains, even if untapped.

  I turn the pages of Gaden Lockyer’s third little journal.

  The year is 1922.

  October 9th, he had written, the writing more spidery and tentative than I cared to see. Written at Tin River. Unbearably hot today. Everyone says it is cyclone weather but it’s too early in the season for that. Matron said I could take a walk along the front provided I wore my hat. My God! Telling me! Like a child. There was a time… . But it’s quiet here in the four o’clock sun. I’m sitting under a patch of banksia scrub at the southern end of the little bay. Just to be free of those dinner smells and the smells of the other old and dying and the clackety clack of the nurses’ tongues, chivvying like she
ep-dogs, jollying us along. How I miss Betsy and Betsy’s cooking. I think she died of my broken pride. Betsy could make a bare bone tasty. (Well, good for you, Betsy!) This home smells eternally of boiled beef.

  If I’m late back I’ll miss tea. Not that it matters any more. They serve tea early so they can get us into bed and off their hands. God knows what the young nurses do when they’ve got us settled for the night. Go back to their cane farms and flirt with the cutters? There are only four of them and the matron. I long for some intelligent conversation but the only chance I have is when the doctor makes his monthly round from Mackay. He drives all the way down in his brand new Ford and I’m afraid he’s not too bright either. Not as bright as his car.

  Have I come to this, beached on nowhere, the stink of sugar and burning behind me simmering round the hills. The children never visit now. It’s too far for them, too far from Brisbane. When our boy was wounded in the Dardanelles everything seemed to go wrong. He was never the same. And neither were we. They write. Oh the girls write, dutifully enough. But it was Betsy they cared for. It was Betsy they really worried about.

  Perhaps I should have been seeking Betsy. After all, it is a center I crave. Does it have to be male? I think of mother and swim drunkenly in self-pity.

  I leaf on, turning pages. There are a few entries for the next year, his last.

  March 20th. I read the date and narrow my eyes into the sun skating across the waters of the reef. It is today’s date. My body holds itself tense. I’m on the beach again. There have been electric storms every day for a week now and flurries of rain that have done nothing to ease the heat and oppressiveness. This is my only escape, putting down what I know or think I know. (That phrase jerks me upright. My hands tremble.) If matron sees me writing, she’ll want to know what I’m up to. Secret thoughts are like a disease to her. I do have the feeling someone has been looking through this notebook when I’m asleep. The pages feel touched. Matron treats me with that puritan righteousness the victim of a public scandal merits.

  She’s back, that young woman, the girl I wrote about all those years ago. Today. This afternoon. As I sit here in my madness in the banksia shade, my eyes squinting against sea glare, she comes towards me from the other end of the beach even as I write, dragging her bare feet through water, digging a channel with her toes. Matron’s husband is out there throwing a line for some retirement home dinner, on the first sunny day for a fortnight. Good luck to him. I wonder if he can see her. She’s outrageously dressed, the way she was on that very first occasion, like a boy. I’m learning not only to live with this folly but to look forward—the paddocks, the tea-room in Rockhampton, watching from behind the fence in a Mackay dawn. (But it was evening, Gaden, evening for me!) It’s the same young woman. I’m used to that odd garb now. I’m ceasing to find it outrageous at all. It suits that boyish walk and look.

  Here she comes, swinging a straw hat by its strings and strolling up from the water, right up to where I’m sitting and I say good afternoon and she doesn’t even turn her head. Her eyes go right through me as if I’m not here in a way that makes me blink and when I focus again she’s gone. The encounter shocks me. I can feel my heart thumping too fast under this tough old hide. I’m imagining things, I know, yet why is it when I walk down to the water myself I find the tide already filling in her footprints?

  Gaden, my dear, you’re haunted.

  What about me?

  Beaches, I think, scuffing sand between my toes and trying not to remember Poindimié. Beaches.

  Bonnie and Marie used to be taken to the coast once a year when they were small because grandma insisted they have a fortnight away from the inland heat. Grandpa left the head stockman in charge and they always rented the same house at Kirra, high on the dunes with only a fifty-yard sprint to the water. Those were the years just after war broke out. Every afternoon the family sunbaked while speakers fixed to the shark-watch tower spewed out popular music. Oh Johnnie oh Johnnie, lisped Bonnie Baker, decibel ten, how you can love, while oiled kids worked themselves into a frenzy for the sandgarden competitions, making designs with shell and pebble and weed. Or young women paraded each week on a rigged platform to see who would be Miss Kirrabelle.

  No one played “The Rustle of Spring” over the speakers. Big bands challenged the firmament. Grandpa enlisted.

  Grandma took the girls away each year on her own for the next three years. They sat on the sand and watched the beach-girl entrants.

  “I want to enter,” Marie said.

  “I want to enter too,” Bonnie said.

  “Don’t talk nonsense, you babies,” grandma said. “You’re far too young. But you’re good looking enough,” she added consolingly and a passing man winked at them on his way to the roped-off platform where he would wink at the beach-girls.

  Grandma had laughed, twirling her sunshade.

  “Men,” she said. “Silly young fool. But if it gives him pleasure.”

  Years later I would say to Bonnie, “I want to enter.”

  The beach-girl competitions had moved from the sand to the clubs. Bonnie and Marie would be playing saccharine numbers to a mob of poker-machine-playing deaf mutes.

  And Bonnie would say, “Darling, they’re starting to look like tarts. No.”

  In the leeringly lit interiors of Leagues and Returned Services club halls the entrants were judged by elderly men with even bigger breasts than the competitors and certainly larger guts. I was appalled and fascinated by the obscenity of contrast.

  I’m not your average beach-girl, am I, Gaden, sprawled out in the cruelty of reef-reflected sunlight and the coarse shade of dune scrub? But you keep seeing me as what? Some nagging intruder pilgrim from another time determined to haul you into the corruption of the eighties? Could we show you a thing or two on graft! Would you be worse or different?

  I am asleep before I realize, a candidate for sunstroke, and wake an irritable hour later with my legs badly burned, a rocking headache, outward symptoms that return me to my honeymoon. Shadows lie low on the cooling sand. Creakily I haul myself up, shake the grains from my clothing and limp back along the beach to the northern end, coming out to the roadway where the old boardinghouse squats in its rambler garden also staring at South America through weeping casuarinas.

  A plump motherly woman is hosing fern clumps beside the front steps and beyond her I can see a kind of shadowy hallway and the rail of a second flight of stairs leading to the upper rooms. When I hesitate by the gate she looks up, nods pleasantly and makes some comment on the heat but I am too sun-drained to pursue inquiries and nod and smile back as I limp past and down the road to my beach-wrack motel which serves me dinner in my room. I can’t eat. Television fails to distract. I am at the center—is it?—of my obsessional search, and there is no center. Or if there is, it shifts position, moves away as I clutch, eludes.

  I still remember the definition of locus: the curve or surface generated by a point or line moving according to specified conditions. More simply, the locus of a point is the path traced out by it when it moves in accordance with some given law.

  Problem: plot the locus of the point that represents Mr. Gaden Lockyer, MP. The locus must be restricted to those central issues that made up his life and must not concern itself with marginalia.

  I ignore the steak chips lettuce and thawed-out slice of cream cheese pie and on my clipboard write out the following problem as I see it: Find the locus of the intersection of straight lines which pass through two fixed points on a circle (Gaden, we do share a circumference of sorts!) and intercept on its circumference an arc of constant length.

  I fiddle round with this for twenty minutes. I reword my problem another way: G and B are two fixed points on the circumference of a circle and PQ is any diameter. Find the locus of the intersection of PG and QB. (And having found it, will my car, will I, manage the distance to be traveled?)

  The mechanics of quod erat demonstrandum are simple enough.

  It’s the quality of my assumpti
on that worries me.

  I place my uneaten dinner back on the tray and put the tray outside my door. Not even one star for the dinner.

  The journal in one hand. Geometric hieroglyphs in the other.

  Oh god oh god oh god.

  Since leaving Seb I have become a talented insomniac. Relief in life-styles has made no difference. At one, three, five a.m. I am to be found any night making coffee and staring into space. I am to be found now in the three a.m. depression zone, body flow at its lowest like the sea seen through my nighttime door, the curtains on my window drawn back to let in the phosphorescent light of water whose breaking lines look like radiant tubes in the dark. Desolation. I need party time, cheer, goodoh, how y’goin, where y’been—all that whacko stuff.

  And where have I been?

  I refuse the answers.

  Seb was a rotten party man. He liked the small intellectual half-dozen he could dominate.

  I keep remembering.

  Six years ago, Bonnie, in the first flush of alternative rustic living, decided to throw a birthday party for Stanley. His aged relations and cronies from coastal towns as far away as Cooktown were contacted but only one group replied. Bonnie filled in gaps with fellow-feelers from the valley. The relatives from Brisbane were expected at lunchtime for this day-long fest. Mother had gone to a lot of trouble. She had been working for a week. The place groaned with vegetarian dishes. To cope with the overflow of guests, as it were, she had a cesspit dug well back of the house (“Belle, dear I almost prefer it to the press-button!”) surmounted by a stout timber lavatory seat, the whole convenience concealed by hessian walls tacked onto bush poles. A tin of lime and a bowl of water for hand-rinsing were placed with designer flair on a stump next to the lavatory. “Who needs the furry toilet cover with musical toilet roll?” Bonnie demanded of the sky. “Let’s give those townies a taste of the real thing!” There was even a fire-pit for cooking the meat she felt she had to offer carnivores and bush tables knocked together by Stanley.