Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

The stack of liquor amazed even Seb.

  “Bring the kids,” Bonnie had invited expansively. “Everyone’s welcome.”

  By midday things were going with a zing, all the guests so far being farming or pot-smoking neighbors and their gate-crashers. At one, after all the dishes had been mangled and most of the meat devoured by lip-servicing vegetarians, a sleek BMW rolled up the track and a pair of denim clad swingers with two nose-pickers in tow climbed out and introduced themselves as Stanley’s nephew and wife from Brisbane.

  Bonnie exclaimed with pleasure greetings even as her eyes made reservations but she rushed about filling glasses and plates and making sure Stanley took the newcomers under his care. By this time food supplies were running low so she went back to the shack and returned with a couple of dishes she had been keeping in reserve for latecomers. Mr. and Mrs. Denim accepted graciously, their children whined and demanded ice cream (“I’m sorry, darlings, no ice cream!”) and started whacking at plants with sticks.

  “Please don’t do that,” Bonnie asked nicely.

  “Why?” the boy demanded swinging blindly with his stick. It caught Bonnie on the shin.

  “Naughty, darling,” Mrs. Denim reproved.

  Mr. Denim asked, “Could I have some more wine? And another glass. This one’s dirty.”

  “Help yourself,” Bonnie snapped. “Your child has just broken my leg.”

  “Well!” Mrs. Denim said. “Well! I mean really!”

  Later, on the point of departure, Mr. Denim took Bonnie to one side. “Look,” he said, “if you’re going to do this sort of thing professionally, you’ll have to do a lot better than this. Catering is a specialized industry. And the lavatory is atrocious! Atrocious! My God, you can’t take kids in to that!”

  At that point Seb had moved in on him with his beatific smile and supreme vowels and hissed softly, “Listen, you mean-faced bastard, Bonnie is not a servant. She’s your hostess. She’s worked all week to get this thing going for your uncle, all bloody week. As a friend. Why don’t you try to set your loathsome kids an example, say thanks and then piss off.”

  I think that was the only time I genuinely loved Seb. These days I unwillingly recall that party and admit Seb has his points.

  Later that evening, the party evening, her legs stretched out to the fire, one shin dabbed brown with iodine, Bonnie became forgiving. “Townies, dear,” she kept saying. “Townies. Never been off the bitumen.”

  Then the real party got under way. Those wonderful fag-end stayers. We delighted each other over the vision of the defeated Denims leaving the scene in bursts of dust and carbon monoxide, and a doped-out young male from the valley told us how he had streaked across Europe. “Lecce to Alborg,” he said modestly. Georgio was a muscular marijuana grower and professional protester whom Bonnie had met when they were both lying down in front of bulldozers. He had been arrested, he told us, in Naples, Assisi, Rome, Milan and Lausanne where he cheated a little and took to the leafier sides of the highway.

  “Why were you doing this?” Seb wanted to know.

  “No reason, man,” Georgio said. “Just for kicks.”

  By Frankfurt his fines totaled thousands but by then, too, a sympathy faction had formed and was paying them. He also cheated by not being entirely naked but wearing Reeboks. The Black Forest was a disappointment because of dieback and he was arrested six more times before reaching Hamburg. By then he’d made the newspapers and achieved such amused fan support there were cheer-on headlines: Streaker reaches Vejle! He was getting bored with his own fame. The danger had slipped away and he was condemned to run naked right up into Denmark with the weather beginning to bite. But he was modest about his notoriety, denying he wanted help, preferring those days when his flight from motorcycle police who were only halfhearted about it anyway, forced him to swim canals, streams, rivers. Near Alborg he came down with a severe cold but ran sneezing and naked into the central square to the woolen-clad hurrahs of youth. “It was a first for Australia,” he said, hogging more of Bonnie’s claret. “A little something for the bicentennial. I had a flag painted on my bum.”

  I think of this. I think of my own crazy flight backwards. I think of Seb, his mouth curved in delight, listening to Georgio, and I am still awake by four.

  The moon has floated beyond the zenith and is like a huge communion bread, chaste in the navy blue air. During the afternoon someone must have checked in to the room next to mine for through the thin walls I hear coughing and the noise of their toilet. At this moment even the heavy breathing of a body in a bed right next to the wall is audible. I try not to clatter as I make myself more coffee and sit, a bedraggled Euclid neophyte, examining a muddle of journey-lines no more emphatic and as content-less as the streaker’s, a journey that has achieved nothing. I admit it. Q.E.D. Perhaps sanity is returning after an obsession that has endured a foundered marriage (or that I used as an excuse to scuttle it), a change of jobs and what appears to be a fruitless search for the other half.

  Other half?

  Center?

  Whatever.

  Huck, father, shriveled with fright perhaps, after my discovery of him, had written once. He wrote also to mother but both communications displayed no more affection than that of a penfriend.

  The other half? The imagined other half? Horace, you too, I say classically joking, you didn’t know the half of it, and the joke, limp as it is, blows through my mind like some cleansing salt stiffened wind and I roll over on the tangled hot sheets and inexplicably fall asleep.

  It is nearly six when I snap awake and sit waiting for the sun’s red stain to spread all along the eastern rim. Palms, shrubs, dune-banksia are rags against dawnlight. If I were dumped suddenly, I wonder, eyes peeled of bandage, how would I know immediately whether it were night or day without waiting to see light wax or wane?

  As I wane.

  An hour passes and breakfast is delivered and after, when I open my motel door on the beach side, the gulls clatter in from the water screeching and propping, eyeing the scraps on the plate in my hand.

  Behind the gulls, the bay lies flat as another plate.

  I pick up the uneaten bacon, shred it and flip the pieces into an excited weaving of wings and stabbing beaks. The squawking of the birds rips the morning air like paper and a small girl comes out of the unit next door in her pajamas and stands staring. There must be sixty gulls by now, a terror flock. The food gone, the birds fall silent, watching, jerking closer to the tiny patio with its plastic mold furniture, one of them flapping cheekily onto the table.

  I am reminded of me.

  I pick up the last pieces of toast and toss untidy lumps skywards. The shrieking begins again and the small girl shoves a finger in each ear in an exaggerated way and makes a yuk face. Her freckled nose is critical. “Mummy can’t sleep,” she says.

  “No one can,” I reply, my eyes on one bird at the front of the flock, so like me, so like me, that jumps, automatically paralleling each upward swing of my arm and the hopping of the other birds, and always misses. Out.

  It always misses. It can never get into the picture. Not like those crows of the mind whose offstage raspings dominate and shred landscapes empty of everything except the family outside the settler shack, the clerks outside the bank, the one-storey towns huddled beside slow coastal rivers.

  “Here,” I say, kind, aiming toast directly at this gull. “Here.” And I feel that personal wrench each time it jumps and fails to catch the bread as another gull swoops in.

  There is nothing more to do, nothing more I can do. The bayside township sits along its only road, still half asleep, damped down by rain during the night. The trees along the front drip from their needlelike leaves, blurring the picture, blurring the mind. Broader leaves make hand-prints across the sky. My eyes are the camera shutter now but the film doesn’t roll. I snap the same scene over and over.

  There is no center to this circle. And if I construct or try to construct radii from where I stand I will find there is no circumference o
r, if there is, its margins are so mistily distant they can never be reached.

  Back inside I pack my night gown, camera and spare underwear and slinging the canvas carryall over my shoulder walk into the morning, ignoring my car as it noses affectionately up to the motel doorway and, resisting the temptation to fling my car keys into the sea, walk south past the shops until I come to a small seafront reserve where there are two benches and a table facing the water. I sit there, the sun well up now, and already I am perspiring in the eight o’clock weather stew, sensing damp from the wooden slats seeping into my clothes. But it is more than perspiration that damps my forehead, a kind of fever at crack point. I can only describe what I suffer or imagine I suffer.

  Across pewter water a fishing boat crawls in to the co-op store by the pier. This might be my last throw, I decide, the last place I can bear to tread the stubborn rituals of search. Or bear to be. That is what frightens me. “You’re crazy,” Seb had remarked softly and in such a kindly and dispassionate way on the morning I left him, I am inclined to believe him. “You’re a monomaniac bitch.”

  The slammed front door failed to obliterate his last words.

  “Arms,” she had begged the empty air of River Terrace. “If only arms, yours, Seb, or someone’s, genuinely clasping. Safety.”

  Can I put the blame for my failure to prove the riders of self-evident truths on the clichés of convention—those stereotypes presented as the prose of living? Once they maddened me. For years I had attempted to counter them, especially with Seb and especially with his superior macho pals. Everything about my dim existence strengthened my resolve to eschew feminine strategy. Tough as his buddies. Swapping vile joke for vile joke. Searching for the aggressive male simile with the same energy as an ad man, especially in what we call the months of spring as the girls in their summer dresses devastated Seb’s roving and particular eye with the same boring repetitiveness of male poets discovering breasts thighs vulvae in the most banal of landscapes. Gritting the teeth of my mind.

  “I don’t like this,” Seb had said. “I don’t like it at all. What are you trying to prove? You’re making yourself conspicuous,” he adds in his old-fashioned way.

  “I thought you liked a bit of intellectual dash.”

  “Is this intellectual? This shadow boxing?”

  I become louder, to irritate. Inwardly I am hugging my solitariness for comfort, like sucking a thumb. Once Seb tried to run away from me as we argued our way through Brisbane town, springing onto a bus that took him away from home rather than toward. Later, he pleaded with me, acknowledging defeat. “Give it a rest, will you? You’re way ahead on points.”

  Behind the thinnest of smiles I had replied, “Your lot never give it a rest. Can’t you take it? I’m only just starting. Only starting.”

  Now it’s ending. This is it, the vernal aphrodite commencement of day. And realization.

  I wriggle stiff limbs on the hard seat and stand up, stamping my feet to get the blood moving. The sea’s blood, too, is on the turn and beginning to ripple in bar-lines across the sand, the same old tune. Mournfully I find myself humming, tempo maestoso, “The Rustle of Spring,” which, Bonnie once admitted, was the piece she played for Huck just before he proposed. I think of this and turn my musical offering to the day into a marche funèbre, for that is what it is.

  As I walk back down the main street, the township is yawning and stretching. Dogs and children and old men are out. The early risers. The newsagent is hosing down the footpath and I go in and buy the paper of the day before, which is the latest news of the outside world to reach Tin River, and nod to his recognition and walk out and on, uncomfortable in my damp clothes, along past the fish café, the closed ice cream parlor, past the bowling green, the motel with my car still snoozing outside unit five, the boutique some wit has called Get Frocked, the mixed grocery with real estate notices in the window, the weatherboard church of uniting denomination.

  The town ends imperceptibly like so many towns in this part of the world, and becomes a scatter of beach shacks tailing along the road to the northern arm where the old boardinghouse waits for me.

  I am back at Villa Marina. I am back.

  The plump landlady whom I spotted yesterday is packing odds and ends into her car trunk. There is that unmistakable landlady look. What is it? Mrs. Moody had it. It’s the confidence of ownership combined with the anxiety of one always fearful of a tenant’s moonlight flit. As I draw closer I can hear her calling advice and orders to someone inside and whoever it is emerges, another middle-aged woman geared for a day’s shopping in town nearly sixty miles away.

  Even as I draw level with the driveway gate, they have creaked jokily into the car, buckled their seat belts and begun to reverse and turn. The driver is watching me in her rear vision mirror but I conceal my oddness and my anxiety and my knowledge of failure under a bright fixed smile to which she suddenly responds and I keep walking past the building towards a narrow bush track into the seafront scrub until the station wagon fades along the curve of the road.

  I walk back.

  The big sprawler of a place seems empty.

  I wait—one minute, two—then go through the gate and up the path between casuarinas, up the steps onto the veranda and knock on the still open door. This knock is phony. It’s soft. I don’t want anyone to answer. I want, last fling of the dice, to go through into that shadowy vestibule and hallway which will have the reassuring familiarity of all rented houses, the dusty half-life of all the rooms I have ever lived in, with only my few mobile possessions to establish identity.

  Silence falls from the air.

  I go in.

  A staircase with polished worn treads leads to a half landing, performs a dogleg turn and mounts to the upstairs corridor. The landing is lit by a window of clear glass panes through which I can see the unmoving leaves and florets of a flame tree. In the hall there is a bench more appropriate to a church, a darkly varnished occasional table with a bowl of hibiscus and two rattan chairs.

  I sit.

  I am not sitting to plan my next move.

  There is no next move.

  As far as I can ascertain or with chewed pencil stub worry at the ramifications of theorems 27 and 28, Euclid Book I, I have reached a point of no return and from now on can only absorb.

  The whole place feels rinsed out but I am wrong for there’s the sound of someone tramping in from the backyard. Rooms away a door shuts with a thud and feet plod down the corridor right-angled to where I am sitting, my back to the wall.

  He’s a yardman of sorts. Or a wilting guest. He’s in rubber boots and old gray twill trousers muddied at the knees and he smells of grease trap. He looks gently withered and fifty or sixty or even two hundred. Perhaps he is the husband of the landlady. His face is not suspicious, simply tired.

  “Hello,” he says. “What can I do for you?”

  This is a metaphysical question. I know there is nothing anyone can do for me. I must deliver a mollifying lie. Or half lie.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” I say.

  You see, I have not lied.

  “She’s just left,” he says. “You missed her. Gone up to town for the day. She won’t be back until late.”

  “That’s all right,” I say.

  In this dusky vestibule my shocking fairness must make me the very essence of a negative. He is peering as if trying to adjust focus.

  “Were you wanting a room?”

  I had thought of this. It is probable I will want a room, a berth in Gaden Lockyer’s last port. Oddly, at this moment, I find I am weary of the search. Its poignancy vanished during the night and that absence was reinforced by the sight of my alter-ego gull swooping for food and missing. I am conscious of emptiness and exhaustion as if the ardor with which I became a hunter has burnt down to a little fine ash.

  Irrelevantly I recall—was it two years ago? three?—Frank Hassler expansive at party time putting forward his theory that man came closest to solving the problem of perpetual
motion by using women. He had waved one explanatory hand with a stuffed olive in it while he told the rapt group how his eighty-year-old dad had gone into shock after his wife died. No, not grief, Frank explained. He simply didn’t know how the stove worked. Imagine—and we all imagined—he’d been an industrial chemist for fifty years and the mystique behind the browned chop and the creamed potato eluded him. The women’s laughter, I remember, was tinged with sourness. I sit here understanding my own whirling motion—the kind of detail-craving mania that makes women the natural choice for any nit-picking job (Hassler: Forgive us, my dear. The male brain is too large to cope!)—was running on worn cogs.

  The yardman waits patiently for answers.

  “Possibly,” I admit. I am very tired. “As I said, I’m waiting.”

  He regards me with an odd sideways turn of the eye. He grins.

  “So are most of us.”

  I look past him down the corridor Gaden Lockyer knew.

  The old man persists. “Anyone in particular? You’ve got to be waiting for someone.”

  I cannot possibly say, can I? Or can I? I will offer a name and it will mean nothing. Lockyer, I tell him. He gives his head a shake and farther down the passageway at his back a door creaks open and I see an elderly woman flitter towards what might be the kitchen. I am reminded of Mrs. Burgoyne.

  “No one of that name. Not living here.”

  “I wouldn’t actually call it living,” I reply with surprising energy and he looks at me as if I have been offensive. Surely exhaustion has rendered me harmless enough.

  “Everyone’s out bar old Mrs. Luck and me. The wife’s up the coast like I said. No one’s due back till later.”

  I drop my eyes. He’s not the yardman. I would have taken a bet that he was a nosy resident whose empire had extended beyond his rented room to a garden kingdom, but I’m dealing with authority here.

  “Don’t mind me,” I say. “If it’s all right, I’ll just wait here. I’ll be all right.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not? Mr. Lockyer has—has booked in. They’ll know about it, you’ll see. Your wife will know.”