The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  Briefly his voice rallied. ‘For that reason,’ it rang out, and then as swiftly sank away, so that his listeners were obliged to lean with narrowed eyes to catch what he was saying, ‘I ask you to understand the full implications of opposition to the imperialist war in Vietnam. It is not a matter of bourgeois sentiment. It is not a matter of Gandhian pacifism. It is a matter of challenging the status quo right here, in the workplaces and classrooms of our own society. And, in particular, confronting head-on the engine of ideological justification that is this institution.’ He tapped his chin gently and glanced about. ‘Sorry, sorry … And now I’d like to give the floor to my comrade.’

  As, modestly, he stepped aside and Tony took his place, the crowd found their scepticism, the sniping began again with jeer sparking jibe, now here, then over there.

  ‘This is a war,’ Tony declared ringingly over their interjections. ‘This is a war of national liberation and there’s no point trying to duck and weave. The question is on the agenda and you have to make up your mind.’ Tony gathered a loyal core in with his eye. ‘Here’s what we’re saying. They depend on your silence. So what are you going to do? Are you going to be a cog in the military-industrial machine, or are you going to make a stand for freedom?’

  A youth, visibly excited, pushed in from the margin. ‘Call a strike!’ he shouted. ‘We should call a strike! The whole university should go out on strike!’

  A shadow of uncertainty passed over Tony’s face. ‘Well, yeah, but hang on. What we’ve got to do is form –’

  ‘That’d be adventurism,’ one of the activists contributed, glancing at Clive Hennessey, as if for confirmation. ‘It’d –’

  ‘Well it’s my view,’ declared a girl with a bundle of leaflets in her hand, ‘that we should call on the student body to –’

  ‘We? Who’s we?’

  It was a dizzying business, trying to follow who said what and size up their position. Tony raised a hand. ‘This is what we need to do,’ he cried, stepping up to the mark. ‘We need to call for a forum on Australia’s role in Vietnam –’

  A voice came loud in Laurie’s ear. ‘Commie stooge!’

  ‘Give him a go!’ objected another. ‘Let’s see what he’s got to say!’

  ‘Oh, he just likes the sound of his own voice!’ the heckler returned.

  Laurie rounded on him. He was standing behind her in a checked shirt with a buttoned-down collar, his head sunk into his shoulders and his chin raised, grinning, preparing another sally.

  ‘That’s just not true!’ she said. ‘He’s speaking out because he believes he has to!’

  The heckler eyed her, maintaining his grin. ‘And who are you? One of his – cadres?’

  ‘No,’ said Laurie. ‘I’m his sister.’ And the words so warmed her that she hardly heard what followed – Clive Hennessey stepping in, holding up a hand for silence, talk of agents provocateurs, the excited young man elbowing his way to the front, someone yelling, ‘Workers my eye!’

  ‘The question is this,’ Tony shouted. His voice was hoarse. ‘Are we prepared to continue with business as usual while atrocities are committed in our name?’

  But it was time for afternoon lectures and people were starting to drift away. Tony raised his head and it was almost as if he raised a fist. ‘No more business as usual!’ he called, doling out leaflets. ‘Take action! Oppose Australian involvement in Vietnam!’

  One or two others took up the cry: ‘No more business as usual!’ Passing hands reached out from the throng like the hands of children accepting balloons. Laurie edged in to show her allegiance by taking a leaflet, and received from Tony an inflected nod. His eyes surveyed the scene. ‘Take action!’ he called.

  The nod. The call. For the first time she felt as if she might have a place here, as if she was aligned.

  ‘While we’re all trotting off obediently to lectures,’ Tony continued, ‘freedom fighters in Vietnam are being opposed by the full might of our great and powerful ally. With our tacit support!’

  Lectures. She couldn’t afford to miss … Laurie backed away, framed by brilliant archways. Slunk away. Passed into the stony shadow of the cloister. Embarrassed by her own inconstancy, she picked up her pace. A girl fell into step beside her.

  ‘Is Tony Carlyle your brother?’ she breathed. ‘He’s got the courage of his convictions, hasn’t he. He’s got …’ She hunted for the word. ‘He’s got charisma.’

  Laurie stopped. Then she doubled back and grabbed a sheaf of leaflets. She would hand some out at the lecture. A spring came into her step. There was something bracing about coming to see yourself as part of a wider world. What were your own small troubles against the oppression of millions? You were living in history. It was an intoxicating idea. She was not just one among thousands of students, but a student with a certain political orientation, a philosophical disposition, which sharpened the outline of who she felt herself to be.

  She would make a stand.

  Later, over coffee, she and Carol confirmed that on the question of Vietnam they were in broad agreement. The war was being visited on the people of a poor peasant nation, whose only offence was to rise up against oppression.

  Carol leant fervently over the table, her dark hair swinging forward to tip the froth on the coffee. ‘The war’s not a mistake,’ she insisted. ‘The US knows what it’s doing. It’s an integral part of the policy of imperialism.’

  In her mind, Laurie summed it up thus: the power equation was monstrously skewed. Whatever the moral murkiness of revolutionary practice, those black shadows flitting through the palm groves or filing swiftly and silently along earthen embankments, wraith-thin and barefoot, were creatures of the rice paddies and thickets, endemic to the place – and pitted against them was all the robotic might of the vast, inhuman US war machine.

  Laurie was more comfortable at the Primitif now. She was counted among the regulars, and as often as not Carol came with her to keep her company. The waiters knew without asking how she liked her coffee and brought her iced water and cleared her a table near the piano where she could, if she really wanted to, lean across and whisper in Dale’s ear. Sometimes he gave her a reefer to stow in her bag for later, and she felt the thrill of collusion. When they sat together she nestled into him, adapting herself to his angles.

  The art, Laurie counselled herself, was in not showing anxiety.

  Sometimes they were joined by Marian, a freelance intellectual of soft voice and unravelling jumper, and her consort, Rory, third-year med student. Marian had Pocahontas plaits, which made a pale ellipse of her face, and a way of delivering her opinions in full, grammatically impeccable paragraphs.

  ‘Far from being apolitical,’ she was saying one afternoon, and the others paused in the act of sipping or stirring to listen, for it was a matter of watching her lips if she was to be understood against the background chatter and clatter and the cough and hiss of the espresso machine, ‘music is willy-nilly a political act, either supporting or subverting the dominant paradigm. It is never neutral, and it follows, therefore, that it is never harmless. Take that last number, par exemple. What may seem at first hearing to be mere aural doodling invariably has a covert purpose. At the very least, it is a way of keeping the populace amused.’

  Carol nodded. ‘Bread and circuses,’ she said, cradling her mug.

  ‘Well it must have the same root, mustn’t it,’ Laurie replied, hearing a dig in all this. At Dale. She tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. The others looked blank. ‘Music, amused? …’

  Rory noticed her, seemingly for the first time. He trained his eyes on her. ‘What sort of music amuses you, then?’

  She laughed uneasily. If she said baroque or something, she’d sound pretentious; be-bop, too eager to please; if she said pop, they’d think her a dullard; folk, naive. Carol laughed in sympathy, her neat white teeth showing for a moment in the gloom before she bent over her mug and a fall of dark hair swung across and hid her face. Dale was wearing a faint smile, thinking
perhaps of ‘In the Mood’.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about amuses, you know,’ Laurie said at last, striking a note of light irony, ‘but if you mean what music do I like, then I’d have to say that my taste in music is rather catholic.’

  Marian looked attentive. Rory’s eyes, which had been scanning the room as Laurie groped for an answer, returned to her face. He fixed his gaze on her.

  ‘Not crazy about “Onward Christian Soldiers”, then?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that,’ she stammered. Don’t say he’d misunderstood! ‘I don’t mean religious. I mean –’

  But he’d lost interest. ‘I know,’ he said, briefly closing his eyes. And turned away.

  ‘You don’t have to try so hard to impress, Laurie,’ Carol said to her later, gently.

  The heat rose up Laurie’s neck, over her face, to the roots of her barbarous hair.

  The atmosphere at the Primitif was changing. There were more people with guitars and mouth organs, more part-harmonies, more folksy ditties, more old-world ballads and earnestly bitter songs. And altogether more – and more spirited – crowds.

  Laurie couldn’t work out Dale’s attitude towards Carol. He sneeringly dubbed her ‘the doctor’s daughter’ behind her back, and even when they were all together he made fun of her.

  ‘So what was that phrase?’ he’d say, frowning as if with the effort to hear. ‘Cognitive diss– what? Cognitive dissonance?’

  Yet at other times he seemed almost paternal towards her. If she’d lost her bag, he’d remember where she put it; if she was late and the place was crowded, he’d find her a seat. Laurie felt these attentions physically, as a kind of pinch of the heart.

  ‘You like Carol, don’t you,’ Laurie said when they were alone together. She kept her voice light.

  Dale’s hands, groping under Laurie’s top, came to a momentary halt. And then continued.

  ‘Dale?’

  Dale sighed. ‘I’m not interested in talking about Carol,’ he muttered. And her mouth was stopped by his kisses.

  ‘Are you doing Architecture, Dale,’ Miranda asked, ‘or Radical Social Change? Like Tony?’ Miranda was almost as tall as Laurie now. She was a striking-looking girl with a mop of glossy hair, dimpled chin and lynx’s eyes.

  Dale did not look at her. He directed his answer at Tony.

  ‘Architecture is radical,’ he said. ‘It’s the matrix of social relations.’

  ‘Matrix,’ mused Miranda. ‘Is that like aviatrix?’

  ‘Don’t smirk, you,’ said Tony, flicking at her ear. ‘I know what you’re up to!’

  ‘Isn’t it funny how we both wear glasses,’ said Laurie one evening, trying for intimacy. They were walking beside the river.

  ‘Why funny?’

  She paused. Car lights moved in mobs over the Grey Street bridge. ‘Don’t you think it’s funny?’

  They continued to meet whenever they could, and Dale always came swiftly to the point. So often rehearsed, the kissing and groping and chafing of flesh had become a fluent routine. They ended each session with intimacies that took the breath away, but – for want of opportunity and fear of consequences – never quite with consummation.

  Sometimes, when they were quite alone, Dale relaxed his defences enough for his eyes to soften behind his glasses and a zany humour to kindle in him. This, she realised, was François, the Dale that Tony had dug out, and warmed to.

  viii

  August

  Laurie was fortified by principle and Dale by prophylactics on the winter night when Dale borrowed a car and they drove to the foot of Mount Coot-tha; and there, under the scintillating stars, they contrived, despite the contortions forced on them by the cramped conditions, to breach the last barrier between them.

  Alas, it was not hot desire that took hold of Laurie as she shed her pants and parted her legs; not a dissolving of the boundaries of the self as the blunt, insistent organ came up hard against her private infoldings; not a transfiguring, oceanic oneness. It was guardedness, reflex protectiveness. A deep, bodily reluctance.

  Her muscles stiffened. Her pelvic floor contracted and her hips rose off the vinyl seat.

  But Dale, one arm braced against the car door and the other under his body, guiding his penis, was pressing forward. Laurie closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and met him.

  The principle that steeled her resolve was not so much devotion or charity (though both were involved) as the conviction that any coyness now would be cowardly, would dishonour her passion. After so many months of swooning on the brink, she owed it to all that was noble and resplendent to follow through.

  Sharp discomfort, a stinging sensation, and it was over. The irrevocable thing was done.

  The car windows were foggy and the cold stars dimmed.

  Dale fumbled at his groin, let something drop into the darkness of the floor and sank down to close the space between their sticky bodies. They lay for a while tangled in each other’s arms. Laurie’s face was buried in Dale’s neck and she could feel against her collarbone the thick, heavy drumbeat of Dale’s heart. Tenderness for this boy, for his boniness, for the prominence of his Adam’s apple, crept through her veins.

  A trickle of what Laurie knew to be blood stole around the curve of her buttock.

  Principle, yes. But fear, too. Fear that Dale would see into her soul and read the reserve, the schoolgirlish timidity, that had persisted there.

  One night Dale told her about his boyhood. He left off lovemaking and smoked continuously as he talked. He remembered, when he was very small, crunching through the frost with his mother to a paddock somewhere, and breaking the ice in a horse trough, and their breath making clouds.

  Masonry units were going up all along the shore at Baroodibah. They were altering the skyline, introducing verticals where once there’d been just lazy horizontals. The development had crept over the hill from Broody Heads. A smart concrete bridge spanned the Backwater, once black with dumped rubbish, now cleaned up and running clear.

  At first the units seemed out of place along the riverbank, among the crab pots and beached dinghies, the pelicans and gulls squabbling over fish guts, the tide-tilted jetties. But then swimming pools appeared, and coconut palms, and aprons of lawn, and sprinklers turning day and night to keep them green.

  Laurie had not been allowed to stay behind in Brisbane when her parents and Miranda left as usual for the River House. ‘You’re company for Miranda,’ Rosie said firmly.

  During the journey up, Laurie was uncommunicative. In her mind she was reviewing her arguments for remaining in Brisbane, and with each review they seemed to her to have more force. Even when they arrived, and the smell of the bush and the river and the feel of the cool sand under her feet reminded her of another scheme of happiness, she could not entirely resign herself to being there.

  Towards the end of their stay, Laurie sought her mother out.

  She brought the subject up casually. ‘I think I’ll go back now,’ she told her. ‘I can take the bus.’

  Rosie looked at her sharply. ‘I’d rather you didn’t do that, Laurie.’

  ‘Why? Tony’s there. Nothing would happen to me.’

  Her mother’s lips tightened. ‘Let’s just leave arrangements as they are,’ she said.

  Open defiance was a possibility, or a flaming row. But either could lead to disclosure of the state of her heart. Of how it ached for Dale, of how the very ribs that caged it were sore from its pounding.

  ‘Laurie’s sulking,’ she heard Miranda tell her mother.

  Late one evening, to give scope to the boundlessness of her yearning, Laurie went for a long walk.

  There was no moon. Though the path was soft, it was so quiet that Laurie could hear the whisper of her footfalls. Mist lay about in the swamp, gathering to itself, out of the darkness, a sourceless light. Coming through the trees, Laurie saw something from the tail of her eye. It was the faintest greenish light, so dim as to be almost imperceptible, glimmering in the darkness. She stopped and peered
through the gloom, which seemed to have thickened into some material obscurity in front of her eyes. A cold, dim glow. It was assuredly there; no trick of the optic nerve conjuring up visions to fill the nothingness.

  Laurie stepped off the path towards it. The glow was clearer now, and had taken on a fanlike shape. Luminescent fungus. She looked about. Gradually, intimations of light emerged here and there among the trees, as if they had considered and at last chosen to reveal themselves to her. The bush was populated with them.

  All her life she had walked this track without knowing what she passed through, without realising that a secret sorority existed here, which proclaimed itself on dark nights, silently, for eyes other than hers.

  When she carried the rotting wood that held her prize back into the light, she saw an ordinary-looking fungal growth, pale as a dead man’s ear. Miranda and her parents inspected it, and switched off the light so that they could see for themselves its weird glow. It made Doug recall similar experiences.

  ‘Reminds me of the min-min lights,’ he said. ‘Now that’s an extraordinary sight. Have I told you about the time out west …?’

  If only she had a field guide. If only she could get to the library. Or the museum. A longing seized her to understand where these strange emanations came from, and how they grew, and why their simple flesh had acquired the power to shed a faint, unearthly light.