A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  “That looks rather like my hand,” he said.

  “Yes,” Johnny said gravely agreeing and looking with him. “Yes. I am keeping it to remember.”

  Lake turned smartly at this but there was no insolence he could discern and only a fool would at this point have weighted the words more heavily. He offered his hand and the boy took it for a minute in the white-man gesture that he found decadent and meaningless. Lake found his head shaking from side to side as if beating against threads. Ginger-pop watched from the safety of one hundred yards.

  “Go now,” Lake said. “Go.”

  And in the centre of it all, like the red heart of a monstrous volcanic cone, his own blazoned guilt.

  The plane’s shadow raced over the strip.

  All the discs, white and black, swung round, up, goggled. After disaster this incoming had the freshness of invention. The trees became rapt along the edges of the shell road. The ground waited. It was cargo day for all.

  Platinum surfaces broke loose on the lagoon and zoned messages of respect or exhilaration pranced outwards from a sea that was sucking the last of the Malekula and Miss Trumper.

  Lake scuffed gravel and remembered Greely lost in sanctimony during the agnus dei. The old lamb in his wolf’s pelt. And watched the white flecks spring out from his muddy shoes. They sprang in spurts like hard rain until the plane lurched down, landing badly and bumping too fast, then too slow. Hands everywhere tightened on something.

  The others had been skulking in the Glare Bar, huddled over the counter with their inner griefs held tight for comfort while the wild sky outside tidied itself and prepared to send them off. Kathleen held hers like a child in the womb while Gerald could not meet her positive eye, though his furtive glances were capable of going everywhere else. Her pain beat limply against the prisoning walls and she remembered the later months of pregnancy when she would place her welcoming mother hand on the drum of her belly to interpret the answering throb of the child within. Hullo, little pet, little pet, she used to whisper. How’s your funny little face? All crushed up? Like mine now, she knew.

  Yes, they were waiting at the Glare Bar and this postcard had not altered a jot, for the plantations had held the wind away from the low glass building. They were waiting and they held their grief and they watched the sky.

  “Any time now,” Gerald kept saying. Miss Paradise was nibbling the edge of the lemon that had propped up her gin. The mantle of her friend had descended and fitted too closely. They had swapped party pretties once but never hair shirts. In her aloneness she had trailed after Father Lake who refused to comfort, so absorbed was he in his corrupt revival. Kathleen kept looking away from the husband she could no longer bear to observe, wishing he had been a basher rather than a verbal killer. The more she had pleaded with him the more stubborn his revenge. When she said after love-making, “I want to go to sleep now. Say something nice”, there would be a long pause, then, “I want to go to sleep, too.” There had been those electric moments she recalled almost with amusement when his only words had been, “Are you ready?” or in the pause afterwards, “Did you know they’re asking six and a half for their house?” She was tired of the burnt offerings of self she had made to his gratitudeless face. Thick-skin would never notice, but he bent across to speak.

  “That’s the one I’m sorry for.”

  “What one?”

  “The priest.”

  “Why?”

  “Where have you been these last two days? You must have heard the talk. They’ll tolerate any sort of heterosexual nonsense in these places but none of the other.”

  She stared away above the trees. The plane doors were being opened and a pretty hostess was farewelling with her face caught in commercial rapture. I will walk sideways or crab-wise, she decided, after this, to avoid the lilt and fall and the rhythm that men create in me.

  She said coldly to Gerald, “If I threw myself off a building it wouldn’t make any impression on you unless I landed on you.”

  “That’s the sort of absurdity you should reserve for a lover. Come on. It’s time to go.”

  He was thinking of Miss Latimer, brownly and coldly amused at his advances which she had repulsed with a directness he had never before endured. He would punish Kathleen in due course, but with niceness and negativity. Pad, pad, pad. They walked out to join the priest and Miss Paradise followed, trying to catch up in spirit though her tongue was congealed in a glue of words.

  Kathleen Seabrook, urging her legs, went ahead of all of them remembering and resenting. There was this man and that: the one who had asked if he could take his teeth out first (Why, for God’s sake? It’s better. That’s why). And there was the one who had taken her after he had pleaded and pleaded to a sleazy motel on the Windsor Road and had been incapable. (It’s first time nerves, he said. Let’s get out of here, she sobbed.) And there was the one she loved who wanted her only on his own playboy terms.

  And here they were now like a row of penitents strung out behind each other with their grips (twelve coloured snaps, a tape recorder and two watches, a length of silk never to be made up, two addresses, a toy ship that the mast kept dropping from) and they were all with good-bye, stern under the smile faces moving onto the stairs and into the brightness of the hostess.

  “Here you are,” Gerald said, clutching her arm from habit, but he was diverted by the impersonal communication of the hostie and forgot the brown body in Erromango Street.

  “It was fun knowing you,” he had said fatuously to her that morning before he had left the broken house, but could not breach Marie’s boredom that propped itself on elbows and stared ahead. This made him touch her unemotional arm with an eager finger that sought confirmation at least of the words. But she gave nothing away and to a man who also gave nothing this was an excitement.

  “Wasn’t it?” he urged rather pitifully.

  “Ah, for God’s sake!” she had cried. “Give us a light, will you?”

  He was hurt and lifted his head high, looking down his nose, a lump not built for superiority.

  “It’s funny how things go,” he mused after a while. “I came on this trip undecided—Kathleen was becoming—insistent, I suppose you’d call it. There was a sort of impasse. I couldn’t bring myself to hurt her.”

  “Chum,” Marie said. “Chum! You are so thick. I mean you deny any woman’s right to be insistent. They have it. I have it. I don’t exercise it because I happen never to have been moved that way. But, believe me, should all the cadences of human relationship play the sort of tune that might make me, I would. But not with you.”

  “Go,” Bishop Deladier was saying at the precise moment of hostile rapture between spouses, “go. The Mass is ended.”

  While Stevenson sat involved with his painful guest in the backroom of the Port Lena Co-operative; while Lake shot, without a backward glance, up the plane steps, and the Seabrooks and Miss Paradise followed like acolytes; while Greely made a burping post-communion thanks beside a grovelling Mulgrave and the natives, touched only on the very fringes of their souls by the mystery, shuffled to their feet; while Miss Trumper was wallowing in oblivion, host and victim, captured by the green strands of sea that gave her flesh now more comfort than human hands ever had; while all these things drew into their oneness and aloofness, Deladier had turned to the congregation with his hands forming a blessing that should embrace them all and unite.

  This is the last postcard of all:

  They mount the steps; the door closes.

  A native on the shellstrip spins the blades and, as the motors threaten, hands flutter black and white in front of the customs block and the Glare Bar.

  Miss Paradise does not want to talk as the plane swoops over the lagoon cocoon that clutches her friend and Lake obliges by swigging from his whisky flask. Miss Paradise is having her first swigs of guilt. She will be addicted for life, now, and cannot bear the sullen rocking water below that beds down the once-lovely Trumper. Refusing to think, the Seabrooks stuff themselves wit
h magazines.

  The Bishop is captured et in aeternam in this final flick of the shutter, with his hands raised, bony, veined, trembling, over the black and white faces, all troubled by disaster and mollified by ritual, that have already begun to turn away.

  “Go,” he says, “go. The Mass is ended.”