A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  He went back to the other bed again and very delicately drew away the blanket and then, as an afterthought and recalling the girl in the blue dress years away, kissed the cold forehead of the old woman.

  “It should have happened oftener,” he said aloud. “Perhaps then you would not be here.”

  “Or me,” he added honestly. “I should have kissed that girl in blue and resolved my celibate squeamishness and hoped for cure.” Ah, he wondered. Ah.

  The air moved again into wind outside. He fought his way back to the corridor as the sea began munching at the last retaining wall. Roof-beams hung like stiff foliage over what was left of the bar-room and its repudiated furniture, and even as he went through this perturbed landscape the second enormous wave struck while he ran like something insane up the hill towards the church. Behind him water pushed the last of the timber across the road and later sucked the whole building terrifyingly back to sea.

  In the morning, only the bar-rail was left.

  After Lake reached what should have been structure, he found an aching gap. There were chunks, of course, of wall and roof and immense spaces filled with thrown trees. A statue of Our Lady of Sion lay face down among the grasses. The whiteness of it was like light. It all seemed amusingly symbolic though he had not the heart to see it thus while custom nudged him past towards the presbytery, now only a flattened jumble of timber walls and passion-vine streamers torn out in the high wind. They flew steadily and crazily over the rubble, over the banana-trees that had once stood in a grove near the front door. As Lake went by he picked at a frond of these whose suave leaves lay in his hand without emotion and added to his sense of aloneness. The rain was cutting his skin like bullets, pasting his hair across his eyes. But he opened his mouth to the rain the way he used to do as a boy and felt the tearing of it across his tongue. Automatically he groped in his pocket for a handkerchief and felt behind that for his rosary beads which he remembered with a start had gone, flung into a disposal bin at the Glare Bar. He trod on subsiding timbers where his room used to be, and called “Terry, Terry” through the toothy house. Somewhere in the direction of the kitchen he heard scraping and grating even through the wind and the rain and, leaning against them, lurching into pits and tripping over crushed furniture that had once borne the prelatical bottoms at poker, he made discovery of Father Greely cramped under a larder and, by strange juxtaposition, a low-down suite. He was conscious, unhurt and immovable.

  “Who’s that?” he hissed.

  Lake held streaming arms above his skull.

  “Lake.”

  The pause pulsed.

  “Can you shift whatever this is?”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Lake bent closer and peered at him. “Actually it’s a kitchen cupboard and the lav.” This he patted. Then he pushed at it rather stupidly. “I can’t seem to shift it,” he confessed. “You can always chuck up in it.”

  He squatted beside Greely and leant over close, observing the eyeball glister in the dark. There was no compassion in either man and Lake, still drunken, began to hum softly, “Where have all the flowers gone?”

  “It was terrible,” he said after a while. “Wasn’t it?”

  Father Greely controlled himself but his throat was swelling.

  “I am not in pain,” he stated, “and that might disconcert you. But I am in great discomfort. If your lack of charity extends to this sort of petty nonsense, I’d be obliged if you’d go away.”

  “But I was going to try again in a moment. When I’d got my strength back.” He wanted badly to giggle. “When it rains above it rains . . .” he started to carol and stopped and said sorry and smeared the water across his face and shivered in his soaking clothes. “Here we go,” he said. “Who is the patron saint of wedged johns? St Didimus?”

  “Why don’t you get a stick or pole or something and lever the bloody thing?”

  “That’s why I’m a failure. I’ve never had resourcefulness. Not ever,” Lake said. He foraged around in the perimeter and dragged up a length of joist. “Where’s Mulgrave, anyhow?”

  “He drove up to the hill mission this afternoon.”

  “Oh.”

  “Can’t you hurry, father?”

  “I could,” Lake agreed. “I could. But I might make it worse. You’ll have to be patient.”

  Wedging the pole beneath the larder and leaning heavily on it he managed to raise it an inch or two but Greely missed his first opportunity and the bulky cupboard swung back heavily onto his legs. There was a thin scream at which Lake was tempted to say “Offer it up.” Instead he levered again and Greely managed to pull his legs aside before the lot crashed back into place. Blood began to run down both shins.

  “That ought to be worth a plenary,” Father Lake remarked as he sat back on his skinny haunches. He rubbed a finger under his nose.

  “Don’t you ever stop?” snarled the other, gripping his wounded legs in agony.

  “Stop what?”

  “The flippancy.”

  “I’d die if I wasn’t flippant. I’d want to howl like an animal. You’d hate that with your stoicism and your endurance.”

  “Yes. I’d hate it all right.” He held out his hands. “Help me up, will you? Yes. I’d hate that indeed. But I don’t know what I’m to do with you, you’re so bloody frank.”

  “I find it hard to lie.”

  He was confessing thus through the groans of the older priest who had propped against a resisting up-right of the rinsed-out house. They leant together.

  “I don’t know what we can do now,” Lake admitted. “There’s nothing we can do until it’s light.” He saw his watch’s face utter an unemotional three forty, greenly omniscient and creeping toward the revelation of the morning. The old lady came into his mind and he jumped at the clarity of conscience announcing that he had sent her unshriven to the next world.

  “Cock!” he cried aloud. “Utter cock and nonsense!”

  Nevertheless his conscience persisted, and in the fighting dark as they staggered to what should have been the hospital he could not obliterate the plea and the face. Everything else was nothing, he knew, the drunken consecration of the bread, the failed seduction, those seductions he had achieved. But he had refused kindness and it was too late to repay.

  “Oh my God,” he cried involuntarily. And he knew it was how murderers feel. “Look,” he pleaded in the shaking air which was beginning to streak open with early light. “I want to tell you something.”

  “Can’t it wait,” Greely said unsympathetically, “until we reach the hospital or whatever we reach?”

  Lake stood still in the drenching dawnlight. “No.”

  “This is what you should have done yesterday, you know. It shouldn’t take a manifestum dei to bring you to consciousness.”

  “It doesn’t concern yesterday.”

  “Oh?”

  “No. You see. . .” he stopped.

  “Can’t we get under some shelter somewhere, for God’s sake?” pleaded Greely. They were tottering together in a fantastic pas de deux. The hospital buildings were still shouldering the wind in part, though there was no one near to call to. Under the remnants of the natives’ surgery they huddled against the wind and the rain. Through the gash that had been a door and along a ward were the shapes of beds. Lake walked part of the way along. They were empty. The rain drummed in, on and on.

  “Where do you suppose the sisters took them?” Greely asked.

  “Into the prison. It’s the only stone building in the town. It’s double storeyed too, and there’s a tiled roof on top of that.”

  “Let’s go there, then, and see if we can help. Or be helped,” he added selfishly, feeling his legs. He dreaded some youthful expunging drivel from this red-hot-headed fellow. But Lake had taken his arm and, clutching it between a beggar’s fingers, was offering the sore fruit that was his soul. It is your most prized possession, he had been warned. It was to be kept glowingly white under pain of for
ever and ever and he had, had, had.

  Father Greely regarded him steadily through the wilting greys of leaves that had intruded into the wreck of the room.

  “What really is worrying you? Is it. . . .” “Your old trouble” was the old-maidish phrase he felt inclined to use. Lake declined aid.

  “Is it what?”

  “Is it about the boy?”

  “That!” Lake laughed terribly. “That means nothing, you know. Nothing at all in the large sense of things undone or neglected. No. It was this thing last night. But seeing you regard the other as grave you might regard this as trivial. And this is the real wrong I have done.”

  “I don’t know whether I want to hear.”

  “My God! You rotten Judas! Don’t you even know your bloody duty? Don’t you?” Lake raised his fist to push into the aseptic face in the shadow. “I won’t have you act like me, do you hear? Once is enough for any place and even if I deserve inattention I shall bang attention out of you.”

  Greely had begun to stumble away down the steps and into the rain once more, but Lake kept after him, tugging at his arm.

  “I’m going across there,” Greely said doggedly, pointing to the prison bulk down the slope.

  The wind seemed to bend him in two, but he managed to push at the younger man who capered crab-wise beside him, threatening and pleading. Like lovers quarrelling, they went through the now opened gates together and the untended front door into the oily uncertainty of lamps and patients groaning on blankets and the hopeless tending of half a dozen sisters.

  “Where are the prisoners?” Greely asked.

  “There.” Lake pointed to three natives dragging a bed across the corridor.

  “Oh. What was their trouble?”

  “Wife-stealing and theft. Whichever is the lesser. Would you care, anyway? Would your sanctimonious, dogma-clouded mind care a scrap? Rest easy. They aren’t dangerous. Now will you listen to me?”

  “No,” Greely said. His jaw thrust penitents back.

  Lake wandered away to one of the nuns. “I can’t help,” he apologized. “I’m too sick. Do you mind if I doss down here for a bit?” She only nodded at him, absorbed in rolling a patient across onto dry bedding.

  In the dimmer end of the jail, some ante-room with bars, three scabby patients slept on a pile of mattresses. Lake crawled in beside one of them, moving carefully not to disturb.

  It was only when the sun and his head split apart next day that he saw the face beside him was gnawed open by the rage of disease.

  XII

  3 a.m., 11th December

  TAKE this scene now. Another postcard from latitude sixteen degrees south and longitude one hundred and fifty eight degrees east. The five of them in the dark. A hurricane lamp spatters lemon light around while outside flat 2 Erromango Street the night is belting the blackness into strips through which, for the first two hours of violence, lightning is reaching, and thunder.

  In the slippery shadow Kathleen keeps watching Stevenson’s bony face that seems to be moved by pain. She cannot be sure. But for hers and Gerald’s, eyes are all closed and Gerald has already stripped the other younger woman to her essentials and even conversationally discovered something to his liking. Outside the wind is thrashing and whacking like a maniac.

  They had been half-sleeping, mumbling exchanges now and then in the dark, ever since Stevenson had returned to the Lantana and persuaded them to go back to Erromango Street. Miss Paradise was troubled at first. She had not wanted to leave her friend, but the priest had dropped asleep beside the bar and Fricotte assured them he would look after them both. Now, having gasped out her last agitation, Miss Paradise had collapsed suddenly in a chair, her head back, her paintless mouth gaping open, and snores bubbling softly out. They all nod towards and away from each other.

  At two minutes past twelve a tree crashes across the end veranda and opens up a wound in the roof.

  This was the beginning of their personal frenzies, for the hollowed-out house was taking in great gusts of wind, leaves and rain, and forced them to shelter huddled in the room just off the kitchen. Gerald began to complain, ever so lightly, about being hungry, and Marie, selfishly, wanted only to doze through the final damage. But he touched her arm and, in the enduring and persuasive dimness, the pausing of his fingers upon her flesh was so brief it might have been accidental. Baldie. Baldie. When this man, whom she could assess in the brutality of five minutes, became insistent, with the petulant authority of one whose wife had risen to every occasion, that there was nothing to be gained by merely sitting, she found herself becoming coldly furious and nudged the mad old lady at her side into wakefulness. Miss Paradise was very angry. The wind’s crazy coughing punched her. She turned a face reshaped by sleep towards the other.

  “What is it?”

  “They want,” Marie hissed, “they want food. Come and help.”

  “I’ll come,” Mrs Seabrook whispered across the dark, afraid to wake the head that had plunged its face onto her shoulder. Miss Latimer observed this new coupling. “No,” she said at last. “You’ll wake Steve. Just sit there a bit longer. He isn’t too good today.”

  Kathleen eased her cardigan up into a pad and pushed it gently under the mumbling head. It ground its way into the warmth. Involuntarily her arm went about him and for a minute, under shelter of movement, held his bony body against her and felt the terrible fever of his flesh right through her cotton frock. His illness shocked her. She could only cling to him and hold the rib cage that contained a stirring enemy, and wonder.

  Miss Paradise was being pushed ahead into the gutted kitchenette where the food cupboard, still in a piece, was soaked with rain and crawling with leaves. She was filled with enormous hate. She stared while Miss Latimer got a spirit lamp going and watched the stupid little flame jerk even behind the shelter they made from cornflake packets.

  “I can’t find much,” Miss Latimer was complaining. “I’m not a great cook.”

  “Leave me,” Miss Paradise said coldly. “You disturbed me. I might as well suffer fully.” She recalled in a visionary’s spasm her dear friend pal buddy Miss Kitty Trumper late Condamine. Late? She swerved like a crazy cyclist from that! Said “No” aloud to Miss Latimer’s baffled face and bent above a bottle of milk and a saucepan she found hurtled under the table. Miss Latimer went away then and said “Well, rather you” and returned through the wind-woven house to where perhaps an arm might await and caress. She did not really care. She was bored.

  Miss Paradise, meanwhile, did a small witch brew which turned out to be a harmless white sauce, the only thing possible in the denuded kitchen. There was nothing in the refrigerator except five bottles of beer. She found an empty weeties packet in the cupboard and contemplated it for a moment as the spirit lamp tussled with beating wind. Baldie and his furtive hand flashed before her and the poor anguish of the sleeper and the foolishly trusting face of the deceived Mrs Seabrook who had endured at sea. She discovered no pity for any of them, not even for herself. Slowly she began to tear the cardboard packet into appetizing bite-sized pieces and dropped them gently into the hot sauce where they swelled as gently as her meditation. As she was dropping the last bits of cardboard in, Gerald Seabrook, wolfish and bonhomous, leant into the doorway and in the half-dark he watched beside her as the pieces swelled and moved in the sauce, and he became flippant, giving even her arm a big brother squeeze.

  “Looks good,” he said. “Can I stir?”

  “I think not,” Miss Paradise replied coldly. She poked as many below surface as she could and they drowned for the moment and later came up shaped differently.

  “Domestic as well,” Gerald said who was not to be rebuffed.

  As well as what, she wanted to ask acidly but could afford to wait as her meal would expose him: she wanted to make him munch folly. And as she stirred she wondered if this were brutal or comic or even a final exposure of herself. This potential poisoner added salt and pepper and longed to grate a little cheese.

 
“Yumm-ee!” exclaimed Gerald, deciding on boyish enthusiasm. “What is it?”

  “It’s a panacea,” she said, repressing a spasm of guilt. I am not joking, she assured herself inwardly. I am expressing my disgust. “It should cure—a lot of things.”

  “Can I help now?” The diffidence took her by surprise, and together they managed to scorch some toast from the hacked end of a loaf Gerald found on top of the refrigerator. The lamp blackened it in a variety of poignant places over which Miss Paradise heaped the balm of her sauce with its swollen brown bodies. The rain lunged in still through the lacerated walls and spat all over the table and the floor.

  “This is the difference,” Gerald pronounced fatuously, “between animals and us. That we make attempts to survive. Plates and so on.”

  The wall collapsed behind them and Miss Paradise’s shock emptied the last of the saucepan onto the floor. Its white splodge glimmered in the darkness.

  It should have been comic, but they became at once so involved with the behaviour of the wind upon inanimate objects that they could not have laughed. Miss Paradise tottered sideways in the blast, holding plates of food in a wild balance intercepted by Miss Latimer rushing out at the thunder of the wall and Kathleen Seabrook silk-pale peering past her into the opened up night.

  “Eat!” ordered Miss Paradise tightly. “Eat! We must keep our nerve!” She juggled the plates and the automatic responders took them and went away from the ruin into the now shuddering living-room where Stevenson, disturbed by the noise within his body as much as the outer pandemonium, had staggered up against the wall and was fumbling stupidly for the light switch. As his fingers scrambled over the fibrous plaster, his mind sorted things into proper shape and automatically, too, he took his communion from priestess Paradise who watched, spooning herself, her punishment shared about. She was castigating folly, she told herself, and her own complex and composite reasons for hating mankind.