A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  John Terope laughed. “They are for the doctor,” he said. “Big boss longa hill makum inside glad.”

  “You one cheeky fella,” Lake said. They both laughed and regarded each other with interest.

  Lake’s feet in their sandals itched and sweated. “’Tis me consecrated feet that worry me, yer grace,” he imagined himself explaining fatuously to the bishop. But here he was with his ailing toes and his boiling body pressed like rice into vine leaves between layers of God and mammon at the middle point of the earth.

  “Johnny?”

  “Father?”

  “Oh—nothing. Nothing I can put into words, anyhow.”

  He placed one ginger-haired chrismed paw on the young arm and inwardly shuddered. The reaction that came with flesh upon flesh was too violent and stirred the man not the priest.

  “Nothing,” he repeated. “Nothing.” And took his hand away quickly although the young boy, alerted by some inward perception, gazed down at the place where the hand had been.

  “Could you,” he began again, “could you”—conscious of some clerical diffidence—“call on me with some fruit? A little offering to placate the gods?” He grinned. “Make big white boss happy alonga mangoes?” He made the corners of his eyes crinkle the way they do in the films, the handsome, sincere, twin-triggered jokers in whom one can place a world of confidence.

  This boy was more sophisticated than he revealed, and now glanced up, opening his eyes widely, limpidly, frankly. He rubbed the long toes of his right foot along the shiny calf of the other leg.

  “Yes, father. Right away. Maybe come teatime.”

  Father Lake slit the whole presbytery down the centre with the crash of his opening and slamming door, hoping to wake Father Terry Mulgrave from his afternoon siesta, for he disliked Mulgrave who was a heavy football playing thug and divine centre forward. But Mulgrave was already up and out working at the end of the precincts lopping the bougainvillea and sweating sacrificially into the last of the afternoon. Sunset would slice down out of the sky like a garish stage drop and lop him off too with a spray of purple bracts.

  In the dying part of the evening after Office, having decided to eschew Tucker-Brown, after a quick poker game for matches (“Let’s have a bash at the Mission Funds!” suggested Lake crazily), disconsolate with heat and flesh, Lake solitary in his room blinked down the airless track from presbytery to school to main road to harbour, debating whether to hurl himself from the window four feet to the geraniums below would be an act of such grotesque quality he would be removed there and then. I could lie spread-eagled on tropic leaves gazing up into my bishop’s face, he thought, and call for a blessing.

  He did fumbling things with books—three thrillers, a biography, a text on card tricks—shifted ash-tray, writing-paper. Writing-paper? On it, three weeks before, he had written expectantly, “Diary of an Outsider. Part 2.” He had thought the Part 2 a witty application. And underneath he had begun six or seven lost sentences which would never complete themselves.

  “This is the middle of the world,” he had written, “the ripe, seedy, pulpy middle, and I am the maggot.” He re-read this and smiled because, although he really and sincerely believed he was a maggot, his own honesty vitalized him and its comic aspect invigorated his flabby spirituality.

  So when the light fingering came at the door he was a jerky nervous fellow trapped in self-admission and confession to be made public, for he had the sinner’s need to bag ears and pummel them with his guilt. “Oh, give it a rest,” he had once been advised by his nagged and beaten-down confessor. “Give it a rest for God’s sake! Think of others for a change. Practise a little charity.”

  “Come in!” he called, loathing the invitation in his voice, the spider-like waving of the verbal arms.

  John Terope had a basket of mangoes, short plump pink ones the shape of large strawberries, sensuously lying among leaves. The brown hands caressed one of the fruit and the brown eyes met those of the priest with indelicate directness.

  He is laughing at me, suspected Lake. (And he was right.) But nevertheless took the basket from the boy and touched the arm where down was beginning to harden into hair.

  “Tea?” he asked. “I can make tea here. There’s a jug, you see, and my own water basin and so on.” I sound mad, he thought. Mad.

  Johnny giggled, repressed the sound.

  “Yes, father,” he said demurely. Like a girl.

  Lake filled his electric jug, set out his cup and saucer and the glass in which he kept his partial denture afloat after lights out.

  “Tell me,” Lake said over the mumbling of the jug, “what will you be doing at the end of the year? For work, I mean.”

  Johnny shrugged. “Fish, maybe, or go Suva for office job. My uncle is a big man in Suva.”

  The jug was becoming angry. “Is he now?” Lake said. “What does he do?”

  “He runs a clothing business. He sells native cloth to the men and ladies from the boats. Lots of money.”

  Johnny Terope smiled so widely his teeth, wet from saliva, batted back light. Lake could only nod, wishing to God he’d been born black and underprivileged so that contentment could be found in the simplicity of the fish runs off the lagoon, the monsoonal imprisonments, the lounging days of sprawling against palm bole and lazily shaping wood with curved knives.

  “What I should be saying,” he said to himself with priestly candour, “is come up to my room and see my—Holy Pictures? My etchings from lives of the great saints?” But he only put his interpreting fingers on the boy’s arm and touched the not-resisting, not-yielding flesh and thought, how should I suborn this innocence or that knowingness; and he thought of all the murderers and thieves and rapers who had lain once in rows quietly, joyously sucking their plastic shielded dummies; once unblinking in day or electric glare, glassy round-eyed, innocently sucking and staring, rubber cheeks, pudgy hands, all of it, all—and then the disruption of the first act and the crinkling of the surface.

  He shuddered.

  In the rictus of movement his seeking hand sprang back from the house boy’s arm. He saw from this year in this hot box of a room thirty years back the hot box of the railway lavatory and the warning notice on the wall. “Venereal disease,” it stated dramatically, “causes insanity, paralysis, blindness, heart disease, aneurysm, premature senility, abortions, birth of blind and deaf children.” After this some wit had pencilled “and Communism”. He began to laugh through the rains of his despair. “Here,” he said, “here is a book I wanted to lend you.”

  He picked up a glossy traveller’s guide to New York, a guide that sparkled with hotel and restaurant lists and maps and trips and a synthetic representation of joy. It cost many bucks.

  “Don’t ask me,” he sighed. “I have never been. Never likely.”

  Johnny Terope glanced slyly at him and at the narrow bed that like a coffin trapped his celibacy and held it rigid on damp tropical sheets.

  “The jug, father.” It had spluttered all over the table.

  During the tea ceremony Johnny Terope stood uncomfortably by while Lake sprawled in his cane chair. He seemed to be waiting for something, but he only received the testiness of Lake telling him to sit down. The priest was looking through the window at the lost purple sky that was shattered by too many stars.

  “But where?”

  “Oh, here will do.” Their eyes met, touched the bed, swerved.

  The boy, delicate as a Blake tiger, moved across the narrow room and perched his lithe rump at the foot of the bed, his back in easy conversation with the iron rail while his eyes, his eyes. . . .

  “Oh my God,” thought, then prayed, Lake. “Help me. Help.”

  The words of a short poem . . . somewhere . . . the tennis ball bounced whitely across an ill-remembered line. What was it? Not drowning but waving? No. That was the wrong implication. Not waving, but drowning.

  “I have been far, too far out all my life,” he began to misquote, “and not waving but drowning.”

&n
bsp; “Father?” Johnny Terope asked.

  “Oh, nothing. Just a poem. Not mine. I’ve no talents like that at all.”

  The dark was plunging all over the sky and the stars rocked round while in the outer harbour beyond the line of Tucker-Brown’s roof he could see the small bouncing port light of the mail-boat taking away his formal application for leave to the provincial.

  The boy was gulping his tea greedily and flicking with avid teen-age fore-finger the highly glazed flesh-pots of Manhattan.

  “Tucker-Brown

  Went to town

  Upon a Melanesian,” Lake began to rhyme to himself,

  “Stripped the bastard,

  Whipped the bastard,

  Gave himself a lesion.”

  His smile came and went and came and he remembered to grin his shy grin, his fake Yank buddy grin at brown boy, and almost without being able to help it began to warble:

  “Oh, how I love you Tucker-Brown!

  Tee tum tee tum you knock me down.

  I hear weddin’ chimes,

  I’m countin’ my dimes,

  My sweet, my lovely Tucker-Brown.”

  “More tea?” he asked the surprised boy who suddenly got the message in its ironic message-stick and began to giggle. (Of course the laddie had a transistor!)

  Something changed within the room. The good and evil air coalesced and their cups rattled harmonies so that it was natural enough when Lake, avoiding the sad withdrawn face on the crucifix on the wall, avoiding his mother’s eye from the small framed photo standing beside his bed, put his arm around Johnny’s shoulder and began to press him to his own, still-fighting-and-resisting and unwilling to be betrayed, flesh.

  At first the other resisted too; then obliquely, tangentially and without passion, he was raising his brown fruit face for some unspeakable caress when Mulgrave opened the whole corridor, the world and the wrath of God upon them.

  III

  8 a.m., 10th December

  AT the wharf they managed to separate themselves into their accustomed pairs and Kathleen Seabrook, not so conjugally devoted this morning with the humidity unsticking scales from her eyes, appeared to be attempting to reduce this coupling further by walking a few paces ahead of Gerald with Stevenson. Gerald kept clicking at boats and islanders with his over-active camera and unexpectedly she thought God damn him and his everlasting boyish keenness. It made her drag her heels, hunching a little, as if to elude his affection which reached out the minute she avoided him. She was amused, waiting for her husband to pounce after some quizzical hurt glances (eyebrows up, lips curling) and small boy twinkles. Then she would be back again enfolded and then ignored.

  “Are you staying long?” asked Stevenson.

  “Only the two days we’re in port.”

  “We should take you around.” He hoped his reluctance didn’t show. “Now the children are no longer with us.”

  “Do you like children?” she asked.

  “Very much. Have you any yourself?” He had forgotten already.

  “Only one. He’s twenty now.”

  “You look too young to have a son that age.”

  She wanted to say oh spare me spare me, but at that moment Gerald caught up and thrust his arm through hers, staking his old claim.

  The heat banged away at them from the dirt road between the stores and the few office buildings. Roofs showed red between leaves. Poinsettia repeated the design.

  “It’s pretty,” she said hopelessly.

  “Yes. Like you.” Gerald agreed so easily she bit her tongue to nip phrases that were urging to be uttered.

  “Oh please!” she protested and wiped the back of her rather elegant hand across her forehead, pushing at escaping strands of dark hair. Stevenson moved discreetly away with a wave and a threat or promise of seeing them before they went. Frangipanni and oleander bickered all about verandas and fences of the buildings where the staff were already at work timing the minutes until siesta, their biros flowing juicily over lading bills and manifests. Natives sprawled with their backs against shop fronts, legs thrust into the sun, their woven banana-leaf baskets piled with fruit and fish beside them. The flies hovered in clouds.

  “Already,” Gerald said, watching the progress of a Chinese girl, “already I could do with a drink.”

  Lost in the strangeness of this geographically simple place, they hesitated, looked east and west and back to the harbour. There were three small islands within its green arms, one of which was a rash of white buildings. Beyond that again the hulk of a deserted boat leant against its backdrop of unmoving green. In the town the buildings were countable—a side-street of Chinese shops staggering up-hill towards a church and school; a score or so of houses; a patch of government offices. Near them on the front a sign that said “Bar des Sportifs” and below the sign an enamelled placard proclaimed that Tout va mieux avec le Coke. Plastic strips of fly hazard dangled across the entrance.

  “Par ici,” Gerald said, laughing quite nicely at himself. “That’s French. I wonder what the froggies are doing here.” He squeezed his wife’s arm.

  Please don’t be so kind, Kathleen was crying within. Please. Something inside me will burst into vicious shouts of ingratitude and, the softer your mouth becomes, the harder will mine be. She tried then to remember only his gentleness which disarmed, for truly she loved him, and licked at her bottom lip to make it fuller in its glister.

  Chairs watched them from the margins of the room. Two love birds twittered in a cage.

  “French accents!” Gerald said. “Notice?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “They’re saying aime-moi, aime-moi, over and over. Very disturbing for an elderly man like me.”

  He patted his baldness. The patronne leant heavily against her counter and scowled.

  “Two beers,” Gerald said. She grunted.

  “We’re not proper French,” she said. “That sign was put up by my dad. He was French. Thought it gave the place character. I haven’t spoken a word of it since he died.”

  She opened cans of Dutch ale for them and they carried their glasses onto the back veranda where they could sit and watch the harbour and the sticky blue of the sky fragmented by washing.

  “It’s always the way,” Gerald said. “The instant you think you’re onto a bit of colour or local character, it’s dashed to pieces.”

  He drank very slowly and after a while became aware of his wife’s abstracted eyes.

  “It must be eighty in here,” he said. “You’d forget about God even in weather like this. Or He wouldn’t be able to find you in the heat, you’d be so crisped up like a brandy snap.”

  Kathleen drank without speaking.

  “What’s up?” Gerald asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure? You look solemn.”

  He did raised eyebrows at her and made her smile.

  “Wistful then?”

  “Yes. I suppose I am. Like a nasty little girl.” She pulled a face.

  “That’s better,” he said. “I thought it was going to be one of those moods.”

  “One of what moods?”

  His face creased in annoyance then. He was easily upset.

  “You know perfectly well.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I like that ship over there,” he said. “It must be a trader.”

  “What mood?”

  “Oh for God’s sake!”

  They were both angry now. The beer was ruined. Each was reflecting bitterly on the increased frequency, the spatial diminution between engagements that left them tense and often dejected. Despite that, the woman at least was ready to rush sobbing into the animal comfort of his familiar coat. Their love-making soothed for a while, though marriage had eaten away at that too. But they believed it found solutions, and across their rested faces would come momentary trust and conviction of rightness and their hands would lie together in the dark, touching, each believed, more than flesh, touching companionship and love that was of the mi
nd.

  “Please?” she said.

  He snapped, “Please what?”

  Her mouth felt its length grow to enclose every wound for miles.

  “Nothing.” That was it. She always seemed to be saying it. Nothing nothing nothing nothing. And after a while, “Finished?” he would ask as if nothing at all had happened. As he asked oftener and oftener. What ever happened, Kathleen wondered, to that delightful couple the Seabrooks? Let’s ask Gerald and Kathleen, they’re always so nice. Except with each other, she wanted to add. Oh, she could have expounded on this at some acid length many years ago, but now their domestic selves escaped and made scratch marks in living-rooms and on patios around barbecue pits. People were becoming aware.

  I should leave, if I had pride, she advised herself. (I have none, she would admit comically.) But the caution of age, of lack, of need, these intervened always at this point and she would smile somehow at him and pretend that nothing had taken place although her armour was shot through with holes.

  She rose and left him, walking down the veranda steps to the grass strip along the harbour wall where wasted masonry chunks were the relics of a private wharf. Two dinghies flopped against the oyster crust of concrete. The heat dropped like weighted blankets onto the trees and the trees hung heavily along the shuttered walls of the buildings to her right. Watching these things, she sensed the indicator of crisis about to quiver onto zero and an apprehension of nothing at all pulled her stomach muscles into a hard knot of ganglia. She could easily have been sick, so that when Gerald came up behind her and rested his eyes, too, on the long white building beside the shipping stores she had an impulse to pull him back, back into the room or along the harbour front to where the Malekula, white and sharp as fever, was pulling in towards the wharf for unloading. In the richness of the tropic light the red and blue barrels leapt forward. A native boy, his head pitched at an angle to the sun, lounged for that moment beside them. Ropes dangled.

  “Gerald,” she said anxiously, “I want to go back.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  “No. Really. I feel something awful is going to happen.”