by Thea Astley
They walked in file. Her movements were so slow it puzzled her that he did not catch up and after some minutes she began to find his closeness unbearable. At a turn-off she hesitated and made pretence of adjusting her sandal, allowing time for him to overtake and pass. But he loitered as well and shifted his banana-leaf basket from shoulder to shoulder, waiting.
There was nothing to do but walk on. Ahead the road slid into rain forest and somewhere behind its ramparts Tongoa loomed with its cone puffing occasionally the most innocent of messages. There were no cars and no other people and, in the light-flash instant knowledge that this boy was following her, unease raced shock into her nerves.
It is nonsense, she told herself, and set her feet and her heart to the north. He is only a child. And then she recalled his face, remote, expressionless and dark, and tried to hurry. He cannot be much more than thirteen, she kept reasoning with the fluttering questioner within. And even then. . . . Even what?
Abruptly she crossed the road.
For quite some time she determined not to look back and certainly she could hear nothing from the naked feet of the lad; but when she did swing her head at last, she saw he had crossed the road too and was moving gently along, thirty paces behind.
She knew she could walk no faster. There was no one to appeal to, so she stopped and turned. He stopped as well, and they watched each other and then she said, “I can’t bear anyone following me. I’m sorry.”
He stared so blandly she was not sure if he understood. Was he knowing and aware or were her words a gabble of sound he could not understand? Her forehead creased with vexation and their eyes inspected each other for weakness, an examination in which hers gave way suddenly and fled.
Unexpectedly he walked past her, even while she was watching him, but so slowly their tiny procession became bizarre, and when she loitered near an abandoned roadside stall with a rain-eaten roof he lingered as well, observing her sometimes from his flat brown eyes, so that her ruse to allow him to get ahead was useless. After a while she crossed the road again and he managed within the next hundred yards, as they moved forward almost parallel, to drop back so that finally he was behind her and once more crossed the road to join pace behind.
Panic painted its abstracts in increasing variety on the cracked old screen of Miss Trumper’s brain, and she remembered something she tried never to remember; and even when the first few drops of rain fell they did not manage to remove the garishness. Feet padded without sense but with an over-all agony of sweat and weariness in the too-new, too-smart shoes. Despite the rain, the heat had crescendoed to incredible climaxes of clamping violence that obliterated thought or even the trembling beginning of reason. She stopped at the road fork before one twist led on to the crater and the ash plain and the other to the Bay of the Saints, and near a crumpled timber shack she turned and said, “Are you following me?”
“No, laydee,” the boy said. His face was expressionless.
He shook his head. “Not follow.”
Miss Trumper turned her baffled face away to the shack where dogs and children tangled near a Coke sign that spelled help. There was a rough sort of counter on the footpath and just behind that, gleaming above the squalor of rag curtains and dirt floor, a refrigerator. A native woman looked at her and smiled and said nothing at all. Then she managed “Yes?” several times.
This happened to be all she could say, for after a moment Miss Trumper made her wishes known by gesture and was handed a bottle of orange drink that, because of the filth everywhere, she was then afraid to drink. Yet she could not snuff her fear or explain that she was afraid of the boy who had now sauntered up to the corner of the building, and, leaning against the splintered frame, was regarding her with sombre eyes. Bigger than she had thought. Handsome in an almost girlish way. His body curved like a dancer’s. His arms were slender and still unformed. He said something quick in his native tongue to the woman who giggled crazily. Offended but impotent, Miss Trumper stalked out of the stall, emptied her drink in a silly sticky trail as she walked and, looking straight ahead, moved along the red dust. She did not have to look to know that he was still with her, softly, steadily, with her.
Half a mile past the store a truck belted up with flamboyant horn-shrieks and a quacking of native voices that made her stop and turn into a blast of smiles while she waved her parasol pleadingly and streaked the damp air. They had only slowed down to grin and wave, and with ultimate cries and laughs flashed off again while tears of annoyance filled her faded eyes as involuntarily she waved back, suppliantly, not socially.
The boy was not waving, she noticed, merely smiling in an impassive way with a world of unexpected something behind the blackness and the whiteness, and she remembered another time and another boy and wondered if this were the punishment at last.
They moved on together, foot in rhythm with foot, although she was tottering now and Tongoa’s slopes grew blackly closer until they were on the track itself that wound up to the crater. At this moment the rain shook more heavily onto the dust and the wind began to toss it about like white confetti. There was no time to waver or look or turn, only the obsession to reach the crater’s grey lip and watch the downpour dissipating itself on the heaving core. Sharply the insanity of it all struck her as she bent through the heavier fall of water and felt her cotton dress become skin and her skin peel away, leaving her a crazy old bag of bones stumbling towards the island’s angry boil. Why do I do this? she kept on asking herself and the inner voice replied, Because you must, because you have come a long way for this very thing and until you have done it you will be obsessed. There is also your hurt. And she saw again Verna Paradise’s face twisted the wrong way from an irritation forty years old, at last intolerant of restraint, and she heard the voice rasp and felt it rip down the tender places, the soft green lawns of friendship; and her eyes filled with tears and rain made her stop once more and appeal to the boy behind. But when she looked around her, he was gone.
Monstrously this frightened her even more, for the darkness of rain forest hemmed her in, in this last stretch before the scraped landstrips where the lava stream had moved down great jungle lanes. Thus in new-blinding rain and with wind pummelling she stumbled at last to the lagoon in front of the fissured edges of the Tongoa crater and saw no vision of the hell she had half expected but a turmoil that matched in its contained surgings the inward gusts of guilt that had been her terrible sea for half a lifetime. This was empty of even rafts. And during the moment as she stood, somehow unimpressed after all this above the tree line in vicious rain-pelt, she was filled with terror at the thought of turning back as she had to, and awash with premonitory fear of the sudden dark, the mania of palm repeating palm, the boy and the emptiness of it all.
When she had suffered another hundred yards, the disturbed glitter of water between herself and the crater lip became part of this necessary journey. She ploughed right up to the lagoon strip across the dried ash crust until she was standing with her feet in the shallows letting the water wash over her sandals, uncaring. The water was a quarter of a mile long but very narrow and once it was crossed the crater lip was accessible. She could see at a glance it wasn’t deep, about two feet at the most, like a sand-soak. So she hoisted up her skirt and tucked it into the legs of her bloomers, looking for all the world like a frayed gym teacher.
As her fear spent itself after she had entered the lagoon, drawn into false safety, wild suggestions tapped away at her and she wondered if she really dared do it.
Yet she did.
She waded steadily across the lagoon to the far bank, stood on the sodden edge, and slowly and ritualistically began to undress. She pulled off her shift and stood in the rain wearing only her rather soiled white slip which she then removed. The flesh began to pray. It whitened and curdled about her thighs, and left sad hollows between the ribs and the delicate knobs of her shoulder bones. It wept in blue runnels behind the knees. When she took off the last remaining garments, she was a Modigliani fig
ure with drooping flattened breasts and wistful haunches.
She lay down in the water.
It was warmer than she had expected and after a while her nervous shivering subsided, and she watched the sky across which large cumulus clouds were pushing. Their shadows drooped over the crater that mumbled quietly like a sleeping animal beside her. Strangely its rumblings comforted so greatly she could easily have gone to sleep with her head resting on the shelving sand edge. The rain stopped as sharply as it had begun. Trees remained still, watching her, while she splashed her old toes and dug a little at the bottom to stir up funnels of dirt and ash. The sun’s hand was more than half way across the sky but when she stood up to dry herself she had no shadow at all.
She moved back down the slope to the first trees and sat shaking on the matted grass. All round her were coconuts eaten away by the sand crabs, hollow and drum-empty when she tapped. Her eyes closed against the outward dark and the darkness moved a fraction away.
“Laydee!” came the cry from below in the trees, the cry she had come all this way to hear. “Laydee!”
VII
1 p.m., 10th December
THE gloss of leaves outside the residency glass reflected a great deal of Sylvia Tucker-Brown’s lunch-time agitation when, girls together, Daph Woodsall and she sipped coffee with Marie Latimer. The chief difficulty about small places like the Port was that the social permutations were not infinite and, after a certain time, conversational device, scandal, even lies, had their limits. These three had absorbed each other for too long. Mrs Tucker-Brown all blonde, lean, cold-eyed and charged with the importance of her husband’s position, sat in her shift (the white woman’s Mother Hubbard) and waited with Mrs Woodsall in her shift for a spark from heaven to ignite a conversational barbecue.
“It’s sad about Father Lake,” Daph Woodsall said, and pursed her lips reflectively and critically and sadly. “But necessary of course. Bobby says.” And she quoted her husband whom she was for ever quoting, and by this method gained a reputation for dutiful subservience that was not exactly true. Like her hostess, she wanted a man—a different one—and was prepared for anything.
The Resident’s wife did little ahems. It had never needed to become a civil matter had not Johnny complained to her husband. That embarrassed everybody. Lake was not yet gone from the colony and the basic rule she had learnt in her first years on the island—in the Colonial Surface, her husband called it amid shrieks of applause—was never to calumniate while the victim was still with one.
But Daph Woodsall was not actually content. “Holly Stevenson is due back next week,” she said, adding the sugar her intention lacked to her coffee. “It will do Jim good to have regular meals.”
Marie was afflicted then with the image of him bent painfully over his boots, his skinny buttocks and flanks straining on the bed, herself wondering sadly at the beauty demanded by the male while offering so little in return, strutting, slightly bandy but cocky, across bedrooms and council rooms, ridiculous but unaware.
“That’s good,” she said smoothly. “He isn’t very well. I think he takes the job more seriously than it takes him.”
Her fingers groped in the pocket of her dress and touched his last offering, a nebulous poem whose adorations wound through the brownly autumnal laments of all lovers, and along its creased passion her bright fingernail barely scratched the surface of what the words were trying to contain. There were recollections then of the jealousy that nagged him and his questionings about other lovers he could never know yet sought to examine under the polished lens of his despair. No answer could satisfy his gigantic lust for detail except for the briefest moment, and the clogging choking mania would absorb him in between-drink pauses until the aftermath of liquor left him open to the real pain that troubled his belly. They would wrestle with his perturbation and each other, and after bouts of genuine distress that left him, so she thought, incapable of further anguish, he would return to it like a dog. It made her hate him.
“Do you think of him now?”
“Of course not.”
“Truly?”
“Oh my God! Truly.”
When he perceived her anger, she used to turn away on domestic pretext that involved glasses or food in jars or something requiring a physical effort.
So now she could not touch the chocolate mints that Sylvia Tucker-Brown was handing around on a small bamboo plate, but she sipped more coffee and tasted through the ersatz flavouring the spuriousness of her own feelings.
She heard Daph Woodsall saying something wildly improper to her hostess, but heard in the vaguest way, and then focused as the words of Daph’s next remark emerged like magic painting. (Spread folks with liquor and all sorts of things show up!)
“I think the only fun in it, of course, is because you’re doing something obscene with a stranger. Or a near-stranger. I mean otherwise it’s such a fag and a bore.”
Her face was maliciously bright and fractured with frustration. She kept glancing at Marie for some confirmation of the thrusts.
“I am fond of him,” Marie stated as if answering a challenge from one of the others, who had not spoken but now registered polite and fatuous surprise. Something delectable was being played on the radio through a trellis of static, sweeping serenade curves of string with Dvorakian folk-tone that could have, if she had allowed it, made her released breath-gasp like the love-cry that to her was physical but never spiritual. I deserve the pain. Not him. She admitted this. But selfishly looked away between the breakers of sound or surf to the passion-vine jungle of the Tucker-Browns’ that barricaded them in. Why, she wondered, were her eyes always dry and incapable of tears?
“We know that, my dear,” Mrs Tucker-Brown said somewhat plaintively, fiddling with standard phrases and unable to sort out the best. “We worry about it, you know. Wondering. I mean. When Holly. . . .”
Lass of the Limberlost, thought Marie, hideously accurate. She wanders down ever-fading trails of non sequiturs and is nothing but a blue blur, the flap of a rudimentary skirt against the verticals of too-definite trees.
“You must not be concerned on my account,” she suggested strongly. “You have enough to do yourselves.” Remembering the last cocktail party and Bobby Woodsall’s urgency in the kitchen.
The heat and stillness were cloaking her like plastic beyond the translucency of whose envelope she could perceive more than mere sea, mere houses. The players, small, truncated by distance, were making gesture without meaning to each other but pertinent to self, and all about them, in a non-violent way, wind curved.
These luncheon parties at the Tucker-Browns had become fortnightly ritual that were in turn obligation to those in senior positions. Marie wished to refuse but found the alternative of lunching with her office workmates tedious, as this had become. Mr Tucker-Brown arrived always as they were about to leave and, managing always to make his tropic whites seem a trifle flamboyant, would bounce in from the veranda trailed by a house boy. Today he was obviously burning to spit out some fact which he repressed on observing the two women in their easy-chairs. Daph Woodsall’s eyes had gone beady.
“No plane,” he said to Miss Latimer who was gathering a bag and hat. “And threats of a hurricane on the way. Off now? They work you to death at that place. You’ll have to capture a civil servant like Daphne’s and learn to fill in the long day with domestic blisses.”
He poured himself a deadly Scotch. “And what’s more the mail is gummed up and I won’t get the Ossian I was waiting for. Not that I expected to lend it around, you know. But still. One can only try.”
Marie began to laugh. “Your Malory never really hit the deck at the lending library, did it?”
“My dear!” He made wide eyes at her. “No ground-work in the schools.” He grimaced at Mrs Woodsall. “We’ll have to get someone working seriously on this. A modified pidgin, I think.”
“That’s what all the academics speak now,” Marie said.
“The idea,” said Tucker-Brown, leanin
g back against the wall, “carries me away. Imagine whole teams of natives slaving to Arthurian chant.”
He had once worked hard at being amusing, having been warned that it paid diplomatic dividends, but now was resigned to being nothing more than a senior public servant who skulked behind anthologies and books of belles lettres which he guzzled, annotated, and finally sent down to the central library—Kultur Zentrum, he jocularly called it—where they were borrowed once or twice by the sycophantic or the curious and then gathered tropic mould.
“You’re a wee bit late,” Sylvia accused—but lightly.
“I’ve been with the bishop,” he said. “The top-side piecee heaven pidgin man.”
He began to slash the social climate with his nervous cough describing such distress that even Daph Woodsall started to gather up her sun-glasses and purse.
“At cards,” she insisted. “See you at cards on Saturday. After dinner. Bobby has a new recording of Guys and Dolls.”
Tucker-Brown winced but she did not notice, and even if he had said “delicious” she would still have been unaware. His right eye went glassy as if it had a monacle affixed, although there was nothing there but an orb of speculating blue not nearly as unthinking as it appeared.
The guests were sped. Marie came back momentarily for a parasol she had left in the hall. Outside, the smallest disturbance of the leaves.
“Tell me,” Sylvia said, watching their guests’ stubborn backs disappearing towards the harbour, “who hates who?”
Her husband’s face became suddenly hard.
“I hate you, you bitch,” he said, “for making me crucify Lake.”
“You don’t have to do what I say,” Sylvia protested.
“Jesus, don’t I!” her husband exclaimed. “You drove me nearly crazy till I did. Why did you hate him so much, poor bastard. Did he knock you back?”