by Thea Astley
As she went on and on he asked himself if she were trying to satisfy some need for explanation of her own intolerance, for at fifty he knew that all frailties can be justified. He would say that it was her Englishness, and all those accumulated shade patches that were a kind of social dark ages became darkened more in this contrasting tropic vigour where there was not the same standard indifference of human for human.
He was adding another line or two to his poem and hardly heard, anyway.
The stranger-friends are voiced with double-truths . . . .
He couldn’t go on. Double-truths. And then he said those very words aloud and looked apologetic.
“We must concern ourselves,” he said, trying to cover up. “I have to or there’ll be nothing at all except a hardening right through the cardiac muscle.”
“Are you coming tonight then?” Was she as bored as she sounded?
“I want to.”
“I was having a drink with Daph Woodsall at the Lantana.”
“Well, after that? I’m going to be late, probably. They’ll ask me for tea at Dravuni.”
“Afterwards, then. If you’re not too late.”
After all, he said to himself. After all, something must be done for my happiness. And for a minute he saw her with a kind of pride and love as saviour in this heat which was slowly becoming so swollen and monstrous he wondered if he would live through the afternoon.
“I haven’t known it so hot for years,” he offered as some sort of excuse. “If the old boy wants a report on the trip he can have it tomorrow. There’s a cyclone on the way, but I think it’ll give us a miss. Brinkman thinks it will, but I suppose that’s a good enough reason for believing we’ll get it bang. Isn’t it still?”
“Be careful,” she advised.
He was startled by her concern and had one of those moments of irrelevance—seeing the ingenuous curve of his son’s throat as he guzzled a gob-stopping bottle of soft, his pink lips glued to the orifice while he sucked joy out of the glass and the sunshine and the stupid sugary liquid. In memory he smiled. That was four, five years ago—but the woman caught the glance of it.
“I mean about the trip,” she said. “Driving up there.”
“Yes, of course I will. Because of tonight.”
He wandered out of the door not touching her again from the most perverse of motives. She watched his thin troubled back. He had always held himself too straight.
VI
8.15 a.m., 10th December
OUTSIDE the laneway where the Chinese stores had edged in with the banks and bakery, Verna Paradise hesitated before a curio-filled shop window and looking in saw nothing at all. There was herself, of course, duplicate on glass, but apart from this non-reassuring shadow she had a moment of prescient emptiness that filled her with terror. After she had blinked her eyes into focus she became aware of strings of melon seeds dyed and strung like beads and shell necklets and lacquered containers that she could have sworn were not Eastern. And behind her again, behind her wearied battered overpainted self, right on the margin of the glittering window face, Kitty Trumper wavered and broke to pieces. She was shattered by something she was going to say.
“My feet are killing me!” she gasped.
It was so ludicrous.
“Imagine eating all that pumpkin,” Verna Paradise said, ignoring her. “To make all those miles of beads. Don’t whine, Kitty. You’ll ruin the trip if you do nothing but complain.”
“I don’t often.”
“My dear!”
Miss Paradise was eaten up with the need to regain possession of herself; she wished desperately that she could see something in the sense of apprehending and, having done that, want to possess. For thirty frustrating years it had been men, but she was beyond that now, she hoped and even prayed at night when the thought might take her; and the wolf in her loins lay mangily still and blinked at passers-by.
“I’m sorry I came,” Miss Trumper said pettishly.
“You mean now, ashore, to this place?”
“No. The whole trip.”
Her once-guilts had withered and with their going she seemed to be left with nothing at all, for at least her sense of wrong-doing used to keep her completely absorbed. But that was a false assumption, she realized, recalling those days when, riddled with the anxieties of commission, she was incapable of liberating herself in some simple sensuousness, the light sketching the profile of a tree or the abrasion of wind on skin. These days she was empty of sins as well and she wanted perhaps to die.
Miss Paradise also was too old to want to hit out, but the dregs of exasperation flavoured her tongue like bile and she could have spat.
“What about a little excursion? There must be little excursions. To the volcano crater, say, or the asbestos mines or the lagoon villages. You see, Kitty darling, I am a tattered old travel bag chock-a-block with facts.”
Miss Trumper eased her feet and dangled her sandals one by one allowing her engorged toes to wriggle in the heat. The sun had an aggressive quality that made her quail.
“You are making fun,” she said. “But it is sensible fun, I suppose. It’s just that I don’t really seem to want anything any more.”
“Nor me. But I try. Oh, yes, I try.”
“I try, too.” Miss Trumper was inclined to whimper.
Miss Paradise measured her best and only friend, her last and respected friend standing limply under the heavy blue sky. Her shadow was a grey nothing in the vertical light.
She said slowly and deliberately, “Kitty, my dear, you’ve been a bore for years. Try! That’s the very word! But it was not yourself. It was me. All your friends. You tried the lot of us beyond bearing. So now put your shoes back on and make a further effort.”
Miss Trumper sagged from the punch, her frail cheeks hollowing while she stared, appalled.
“It’s not—” she protested, “it’s not true.”
“Yes, it is true.” Gladiator Paradise raised the trident. “I have pampered you and listened to you for years and nothing I did or said made any difference. Only time. And God knows how I have regretted those wasted placatory hours.”
Miss Trumper was beyond tears. If only she could have wept. She shoved her feet back into the too-smart shoes and tottered off without once turning a supplicating face. Her aloneness horrified her, but she went ahead along the street with the fanatic ocean on her left and fought and fought the rising desire to look back for her friend. She had come all through life for this moment. It took her in great sweeps of self-pity and blocked her mind off to sense or reason, even to physical discomfort which she could reject more easily than this exposure of herself, the most brutal photograph only a friend could take. In a haze of wild hurt she wandered to a store and blindly and deafly bought herself a bag of sweets, gelatinous and sticky. Her mouth derived comfort from one of them and, still without awareness, she rounded a corner so that with saved pride she might turn hungrily about to see if her friend were following. The emptiness of the road made her heart stop.
Instead, instead, there was a child, dark, curly, coiled in the spring of its own youth, waiting on the bench.
They looked at each other and the child dropped its eyes and smiled secretly and shyly.
“Have one,” Miss Trumper suggested automatically, offering the paper bag.
Keeping her eyes fixed on Miss Trumper’s, the child extended a hand to the lollies, withdrew one but, unable to thank, smiled only and clutched the sweet in her bunched fingers. Eat it, eat it, Miss Trumper wanted to cry to the child, eat it as a signal of trust. But she shook her head instead and the trembling that afflicted her these days seemed to magnify so that when she moved off her movements were crablike. From a distance she looked back and could see the child had crammed the lolly into her mouth and was chewing her shyness as well.
Natives walked past and the hill rose to buildings in a kind of red and white and green blur. Behind that the volcano muzzle snarled at the sky. Fascinated by its necrotic tip she watche
d and watched and became aware of self only when a small gathering of people jostled her as they crowded about two native boys who had a cluster of crayfish. These were crawling beneath their nimbuses of flies with awful lurching crustacean aimlessness. The little girl had wandered along by now and stood sucking and watching while a man and woman from the hotel began to haggle about price. Miss Trumper thought she might be sick but could not take her eyes from one crayfish which, blue-lidded like a chorus girl, dragged its claws and waved a multiplicity of feelers in the air as if reaching out for its lost element. Verna, she thought.
The nothingness closed round the crayfish, and Miss Trumper, compelled at last by her own dreadful aloneness, asked of anyone. “Are those blue bits its eyes?”
The native girl next to her giggled.
“It’s mascara,” she said.
“Hullo. I see you, crayfish!” called one of the boys.
Everyone began to laugh and then the boy who had not spoken eased a big cray into a container and waggled it under another man’s face while the shrieks of delight sliced right through barriers of race or age or sex. Miss Trumper, omitted because of some indefinable disability, receded, a lost last wave of this human sea, and turning went out slowly along the road to an official-looking building that seemed to be a tourist bureau.
Here she found herself more directionless than ever, sitting below vast coloured posters of the Tongoa crater which flamed above luscious littorals of beach and oblique palm. Something in its force and ashen sterile curves attracted her like God, attracted her enough to ask how she might—while the sloppy old boy in soiled whites regarded her in silence for a moment as if she were crazy and then a little longer in sympathy and told her she would have to walk, that there was no bus until the next day. But it was only two miles and well worth it.
She held out one aged and shaky hand to the air as if to test its temperature. She held it and tested and returned it to her lap.
I am sixty, she thought, and wiry, and tied to life by long strings of memory and guilt and I will walk.
She thanked him and went out past the native carvings with their enormous accusatory genitals, past the plaited baskets, the small reproductions of canoes, and two middle-aged men drinking beer at a small table near the steps. She did not see them as she had not seen for a long time all the sad seedy men with their limp manhood between varicose thighs, still grandiose because of being male. And first citizens, too, because of this, and so unsure some watchers might incline to tears. But not Miss Trumper in her gay yellow shift, her crazy sandals and her checkered head scarf. She looked only down the streak of coast road that soon lost the houses round a hill lump and, walking very slowly, followed this under the shadow of her parasol.
Back in—back in Condamine? Surfers? Brisbane? Melbourne for one summer was it?—back where you name it, anyhow, and you’ll have Kitty Trumper about fifty or fifty-five (but coy of exactitude) still mulling over the stewed guilts of her last decades. She had been a timorous girl under the razamataz of the twenties and, raised to the nth by the ploys of tangential males, an even more timorous thirty-year-old. Her forties and fifties scarcely bear describing. Thrown back on her own sex for comfort and largely upon her girlhood pal, Miss Verna Paradise, she became dependent for a number of things: for coffee and tea pauses; shopping sprees; for talk; for silence; and for what passes as love—comfort. They held bony hands sometimes. Or laughed in short aching silences. Or sat together in cinema shows with their angular shoulders touching in sympathy during the climactic moments of film. Miss Trumper needed Miss Paradise more than Miss Paradise needed her.
Kitty Trumper was apprehensive of mortality.
“Do you think—?” she would begin.
“Think what?” Miss Paradise was becoming increasingly testy with age.
“That there is such a thing as eternal punishment?”
The old question. The old unsureness.
“It’s what you want, isn’t it?” demanded Miss Paradise. “I mean you are really longing to be punished, aren’t you, for real or imagined sin? So you can’t lose, whatever happens.”
At brutality like this Kitty Trumper’s eyes would swell with tears.
“I know what I deserve,” she would say. “But you always make fun. I’ve often wondered if there is a hell, if it’s the place the Old Testament would have us believe. Fire. Burning. It’s hard to believe a God of kindness would—”
“Who says he’s kind! Look at us. Kind! And whatever he is he’s a man for sure!” She cackled at her own remark and the blue glass baubles twinkled from the heavy side-table under the forage cap. “You should have been a nun, Kitty. One of God’s call-girls. You are born to it. How did you ever miss?”
In between these tiny spats there was the union of need.
Early in the year they had decided on a holiday together, bonded for days at a time in perspiring shopping expeditions, tottering on throbbing feet into downstairs Brisbane coffee shops where the half-light aroused nostalgias better put aside.
They were not certain where to go until Miss Trumper said dreamily over her long black, “I wonder what a volcano’s like, Verna? I never did get to see one on my overseas jaunt.”
“It probably wouldn’t perform if you wanted it.”
“Yes. But imagine. All hot and sulphurating. Infernal, I suppose.”
Miss Paradise’s grey eyes and mind that missed nothing at all instantly attached to this throw-away comment monstrous significance. She reached for her cigarettes, tremblingly inserted one in her long holder and examined its unlit tip for some seconds. The eyes, dilated, raced away down the narrow distance of white cylinder as if it were some elongated telescope at whose distant end could be seen the wary, god-frightened figure of her friend, cowering before imagined divine wraths and counting her sins on her fingers.
She struck a match.
Miss Trumper’s eyes grew wide in its spasmodic flare.
“I think,” Verna Paradise pronounced slowly, “that you have solved our problem.”
“What problem?”
“Where to go.”
In the arcade coffee shop gloom they regarded each other with absorption. Miss Trumper felt for the sandal from which she had removed her foot. For one panicking second she could not find it and it symbolized all the other lost things that she had reached fumblingly for and missed.
“Stop kicking me!” Miss Paradise said quite sharply.
“I’m not really. It’s my shoe. I can’t find it.”
She creaked downward into the dark and groped. “There.”
All manner of contortion while she thrust her pulpy foot in.
“We will find you a volcano,” Miss Paradise said. “And you will be able to go right up the top and look in. How about that?”
Kitty Trumper rightly suspected mockery.
“How could anyone get to the top?”
“Oh, cable car or tram or little buses. Rickshaws maybe. It depends where we go. But I think we should do it, Kitty. You’ll get your first glimpse of hell.” She laughed and laughed at this, but her friend sat on staring into the coffee and could not find it funny at all.
9.20 a.m., 10th December
After she had left the houses behind the sound of the sea vanished and she became aware on her right hand of greater spaces between trees and of bright air washing through like water. The ground was rising with a delicacy her feet approved and now and again near the road and along the edges of the ash plain she saw rough wooden crosses painted red that the cargo cult men had thrust into the crumbling earth. Her watch ticked her forward at one mile per hour neither holding her back nor pressing her towards some obsessional goal she now had to reach, sensing for the first time on the whole trip an expected and long awaited destiny.
She began to wobble.
Just off the track were two deserted native huts, one of which had a rudimentary veranda stacked with old packing-cases. On one of these she sat, took off her crushing sandals, wiped some sparse elderl
y perspiration from her face and neck and fanned herself with her carry-all. Although it did not occur to her to glance into the room behind, its emptiness reached out and touched her in only a friendly way while the other hut crouched and watched, its packing-case door hanging from one hinge, its eyes half-shuttered against the light. For no reason she sensed movement rather than saw, was aware of eyes though she did not see a soul, the total culminating in the first creeping tendrils of fear. They were like hair about her neck, not the elderly wispy stuff she had tucked untidily beneath her head scarf, but the richly healthy, slender and curling tresses of a wild fright. She told herself at once it was nonsense and on the word remembered the other times her intuition had ripened into fruits of crisis: the lonely hotel corridor in Melbourne filled with silence and the man behind the darkened bathroom door; the six-feet-high breathing of another waiting in the corridor of her boarding-house, and the two of them trapped by tension, one each side of the thin wall, listening.
She looked about her now and, apart from the thick rain forest that ran back behind the hut and the scattered and straggling growth along the margin of the ash slopes, the world presented its bland aspect. But despite the assurance her eyes demanded and received, the chill remained and she slipped her feet back into their sandals and went away from the houses quickly. Nothing sounded behind her, but she was conscious of sound even as her withered heart pumped suddenly and savagely a primitive disturbance in the blood.
After half a mile uphill beyond the native houses, Miss Trumper began to think of the heat as a personal enemy that intended paring her to the bone. Beneath her parasol and between the palm alcoves she paced, small, wizened and strange. Each step was an effort, but her hurt feelings compelled flesh and she had tramped another few hundred yards of this calvary before she became aware of a native boy following her under the shadow of the buri hedge. She had not seen him come, but he was so close she could make out his youngly handsome but sullen features in the thickening of early manhood.