Coda

by Thea Astley

  Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.

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  Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925 and studied at the University of Queensland. She taught in schools in Queensland and New South Wales, then at Macquarie University in Sydney between 1968 and 1980. The author of fourteen novels, two novellas and two short-story collections, she won the Miles Franklin Award four times, for The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), The Slow Natives (1965), The Acolyte (1972) and Drylands (2000), which was also nominated for the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow was nominated for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award, and in 1989 she was awarded the Patrick White Award for services to Australian literature. In 1992 she became an Officer in the Order of Australia, and received a special award at the 2002 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for lifetime achievement. She died in 2004.

  THEA

  ASTLEY

  Coda

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by William Heinemann, Melbourne, in 1993

  Copyright © Thea Astley 1993

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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  ISBN 978 1 74331 238 4 (pbk)

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  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part One

  A representative for an electronics firm travelling between Condamine and Cunnamulla last Monday noticed an elderly couple sitting beside the highway midway between Moonie and St George, apparently having a picnic lunch. On his return two days later, he observed the same couple still seated beside their spread rug. He stopped his car to ask if he could be of assistance as they appeared to have no means of transport.

  Our good Samaritan, Mr Bob Trugrove of Condamine Electronics, managed to get both of them into his car, whereupon he drove them immediately to hospital.

  The couple, he reported later to police in Condamine, were extremely old and did not seem to understand what he said to them. They were obviously distressed. Their water flask was empty and the only food remaining was a small packet of crackers.

  There was evidence, too, of distress of a personal nature and their clothes were soiled and in need of changing. The woman insisted they were waiting for the return of their son-in-law. Inquiries are under way.

  Police state that there has been an alarming increase in so-called ‘granny dumping’ throughout the country.

  Condamine Examiner, 16 January 1992

  I’M LOSING MY NOUNS, she admitted.

  God knows she was losing other things as well. Hearing. Sight. Tenses. Moods. A grammarian’s funeral! But the nouns worried her most, proper nouns especially—names of people and places. Proper and common. Oh yes, it was not all there. And it was those nouns from the present tense or the past perfect—yes, that!—she’d lost grips with. Try her out on a preterite or a pluperfect of forty, fifty years ago and everything flowed like syrup, filling each crevice of memory.

  A funny thing about all this: she was starting to think of herself in the third person when she went back to where the nouns and the verbs all stayed in place in the sweetest logical sequence, as if she were some other. Which she was, the body replenishing its cell structure every seven years.

  Was that me?

  The wrapping’s changed!

  The me of me rattles on, nounless.

  It had been a bad few months.

  You know, Tolstoy was wrong with that little aphorism he tossed off in the Austen manner about families: All unhappy families are the same in their wretchedness. There are no grading lines in un-happiness. Most, as far as she could see or remember, simply blundered about in a kind of economic fog, groping the walls of their caves with daylight-seeking palms. Lucky if they landed on a bit of bat dung.

  ‘When you want to stop moving,’ Daisy had said, ‘you’re dead.’

  Those were prognostic words.

  Daisy was her friend. She was all wrinkles with brooches everywhere. For four—was it five?—years, they used to meet at a bus stop near the town hall to do the caffs in the big stores and have a nose around. What a survivor! Hot diggety, Daisy! ‘I’ve got me shack,’ she used to say, ‘and me radio and me telly.’ (Ruining her possessive adjectives!) ‘I’ve got everything I need. Can’t need much more at seventy-eight, can I?’

  She had her nouns, too, those days, proper and common. Could run through a list of recalled people, places and objects, no sweat, never missing a beat. Daisy, I miss you.

  She was the link, the tie, the anchorage of flat-voiced comfort over endless cups of tea.

  There’s more to this story, she said to her. It will be pointillist. A spot here. A dab there. As it comes. Hang in there!

  But she wanted to stop moving. She’d had the moving. She longed for the slack of the wind.

  That’s Shamrock and Brain, Kathleen remembered, pausing in the town mall, humping her bag between the schoolkids taking the morning off and bargain hunters at the summer sales. Her thoughts were angular, sharpened to that horrible moment of wounded antagonism where she could wipe her hands free of both. Unwanted and unwanting. No, that wasn’t strictly true. She found herself shaking her head, unsure of anything except that she was there and on her own. ‘Face it, lady,’ she said aloud. ‘This is it.’

  She could afford a cuppa as the morning heat swelled, needed a cuppa, needed time to think of Shamrock obliterated in her own fizzle of spit and howl, of recriminations puling across the grievances of decades.

  ‘It’s impossible, Mum,’ her daughter had told her. ‘Can’t you see that? You can’t go on living there, not the way you are now, forgetting every damn thing. And there’s no way you can possibly fit in at our place. Apart from the smallness.’

  Is it small? Kathleen had asked, looking at what seemed acres of tile and wall-to-wall. Is it?

  Shamrock had crimped her mouth into refusals and after a long pause had said, ‘Well, it’s too late now. It’s all arranged. There’s this retirement place. Come and see it. Just see, for God’s sake. You know it’s better. You can’t always depend on neighbours. If you’d only try to remember and not wander off the way you’ve been doing lately. I can’t cope with that. None of us can. You have to try to remember.’

  Up north in this steaming no-count town wh
ere she had been born, grown up and lived so long ago now, there had been too much to remember, drunk with youth, especially in those years of early marriage, seeking the idyll yet somehow missing it. Solitariness, despite people, shops, work-mates, friends. Inexplicable. Solitariness nibbling away even in the middle of parties, dances, pillow-talk. Her parents had moved south when the war ended but were killed within the year by a vigorous semitrailer insisting on its right of way, and Daisy had become a scrawled signature on infrequent letters from Melbourne.

  Although she had Ronald and later the children, she was involved in clutter at the store through red-rimmed evenings wrestling the accounts into shape, chasing overdue and often never-paid bills. At night, lying sleepless in the scratch of weather, she wondered about the meridian of marriage, the peak point from where everything began its descent into the chafe of ordinariness.

  She might have asked the frizzy waitress this, did ask, When is the meridian of marriage? to a sideways look that dragged her into now.

  How long had she been squatting at this plastic table under the fig tree in the mall? Her elbow had stopped bleeding but there were rusty stains on the front of her skirt. She licked a finger and rubbed at them absent-mindedly. Mugged in Brisbane, she decided. Patched and peeled in Townsville.

  Coffee, she recalled suddenly. And milk. A twitch of skirt vanished with her demand for what had become a communion ichor.

  The pecking order. Life was dominated by a pecking order in town, suburb, home, an order against which everyone fought: she and the waitress, she and Ronald, she and the kids.

  Remembering.

  Then.

  There had been all the stage props of a low-rent production of South Pacific: rattling palms, sagging shacks eaten out by woodworm and salt, a sharp wind combing the water onto the cooling sand as the sky darkened, and the endless biting of midges where they huddled by a fire under the rocks of the headland. The last ferry was lurching across Cleveland Bay to the island.

  ‘Miss it,’ he had pleaded, his face young and unsure in the dark-light dark-light of the jumping flames. His ill-fitting khakis hung like sacking. She was aware how thin his wrists were as he reached over to stoke the fire with pieces of driftwood that sputtered blue.

  ‘No,’ she had said and saw the word bite into his mouth. ‘No. I’ve got to get to work in the morning.’ The bones of his working hands stuck innocently out, sharpened by firelight.

  ‘Please.’ He looked across at her and then at the riding light of the drunken boat as it rocked across water. ‘Don’t make me plead. Please.’

  She didn’t intend to be brutal but she found herself saying, ‘It’s time we doused this,’ and began throwing handfuls of sand onto the fire. ‘I can’t. I simply can’t.’

  They had met a fortnight before on the island five miles across the water. She and Daisy had gone across for the weekend and after dinner had wandered into the cavernous lounge room of the pub where a small group of soldiers, time-filling before they were demobbed, were taking their leave in this down-home version of island hells they had left to the north. Daisy urged her and within minutes she was sitting at the out-of-tune upright angled across one corner of the room, while the soldiers clustered around as she banged out sentimental wartime ballads. Wind and palm-rattle came in vertical slices through the wooden louvres that acted as walls, and the young men’s voices strained seawards while outside the sea gabbled answers as it nuzzled the beach, its watery descant dragged by an egg-frail moon. Fireflies sparked messages.

  Did she? Had she?

  Even later that evening she found herself strolling with this young man along a windy beach, moving away from the pub and stumbling up the rocky knoblands of the front until they were turned back by a coast-watcher.

  ‘The war’s over, anyway,’ the young man had argued with the over-zealous fellow.

  ‘Orders,’ the coastguard said, straining to catch their features in his torch, ‘until the treaty’s finally signed. You’re lucky, mate. You’ve missed out on Wewak.’

  ‘I’m coming back, not going.’

  His thin face was earnest under its ochre patina from Atebrin, and he gripped Kathleen’s arm so fiercely she felt his fingers digging at bone.

  ‘Well, you’ll be demobbed soon, mate.’

  ‘And I can’t wait,’ he said bitterly. ‘King and country! Shit!’

  ‘Now, now,’ the coastguard said. ‘That’s not nice.’

  Kathleen saw the tense profile beside her sketched briefly in torchlight, the eye a straining blue.

  ‘Oh shut up!’ she had said suddenly. ‘Just shut up!’ The fingers on her arm squeezed their thanks.

  They didn’t miss the ferry that weekend. When she returned a week later, hoping that he too might have managed leave from the army barracks outside the town, the reunion, the recognition of something shared, established a harmony deeper than either believed in, if either had thought about it. They hiked through the scrub away from the old hotel and the jetty, climbing down the granite boulders of Rocky Bay. Isolation was complete. Gulls screamed across the dipping waves that were so clean in their shocking blue, there might be no memory of flesh mangle and stink of the dying and already dead on those other lyric islands. They swam in the rubbery tide of the inlet, splashing like kids, to stagger back to the beach-line gasping and spluttering with draughts of sea.

  ‘I could stay here for ever,’ he had said, lying back on the whitest and most burning of sand, remembering the Solomons and Tulagi and his father’s store. Nothing left now, he had told her, after the civilians had been evacuated before the raids that had destroyed everything his father had built up.‘For ever.’ He lingered over the repeated words that were part of another dream.

  She was more of a realist.

  ‘You couldn’t. Only for a little while. You’d get bored.’

  He jerked up, swinging round to face her, jamming his fingers deeply into the shell grit so that they vanished to the knuckles. ‘You don’t know about islands, do you? You don’t understand. How could you?’

  She repeated stubbornly, ‘Everyone gets fed up, needs change. You’d get bored, I tell you.’

  He was silent so long she began to suspect sulks, but he was looking at her so intently she found herself turning away, watching her toes as she dug them in and out, in and out of the shingle.

  At last he asked, ‘Is that a prompt? Should I say not with you? Never bored with you?’

  ‘Oh no!’ she had cried. ‘Oh no! It wasn’t intended.’

  Embarrassed, she began tracing doubtful lines in the sand, erasing then tracing again. She scribbled arabesques of nothing and the sea scrawled its own messages of shell and kelp on the tide edge.

  He had been idiotically rash, she realised now, fifty years on.

  ‘Let’s give it a try,’ he said, only half joking. ‘How about it?’

  Everyone was doing foolish things those years, racing impulsively to ruin.

  ‘How about what?’ As if she hadn’t known! As if!

  ‘Us. My heart aches,’ he said and touched his groin with simple candour.

  Us. We. Us. We. Us. We.

  Uswe.

  It was as simple as that.

  Although there were patterns in the past, she conceded, relationships had blurred and now there were only these brilliant sharp-edged pictures smashing against memory, bringing surf-whack aches.

  Before Ronald? Had there been a before?

  There had been encounters, some momentary, some promising definition and a hope of endurance. They belonged to some other life, not hers. Sweltering in the mall, her third coffee steaming at her elbow, there sprang onto the mind-screen, uncalled, a curly office relief clerk who played drums, a sombre traveller in electrical goods, a too good-looking airforce officer who flew out before she could fly in, and the almost forgotten face of a merchant skipper on a British cargo ship that had resumed trading in the last month of the Pacific war. (Down by the breakwater on the turgid river came the long-drawn wail o
f a boat.)

  ‘Background music,’ she said aloud.

  How had they met? she asked herself, wrestling with memory.

  She had stepped accidentally into his hotel room and briefly into his mind, in Sydney where she had gone for a holiday with an older girl from the typing pool. ‘Daisy?’ she had asked the thickening air.

  The door, which was opened fully onto the darkness beyond, offered no sense of welcome but suggested all the hollowness of an empty theatre (the cast late, the technicians on strike, the audience turned away). Behind, the corridor stretched, an empty laneway of hard yellow.

  Outlined by reflected glow from buildings across George Street, a bulkiness by the window stirred and loomed. A lamp was switched on. Involuntarily she stepped back a pace from this huge fellow, a bland round-faced towerer with a built-in curve to the mouth, almost but not quite clown-like, giving the impression of continuing mirth.

  ‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘no.’

  Despite his amusement she had continued standing puzzled in the doorway, embarrassed by her night attire, fingers pleating her dressing-gown tie.

  But this was her room, she explained. They had arranged to meet.

  He dropped his past tense like a stone, Kathleen remembered. ‘Was.’ The flat thud of the syllable hit her arrested feet. ‘I believe she has been elevated, moved up a floor. Promoted to the bridge.’

  He was a man who dealt in final decisions, she could tell.

  The shot-blue silk of his smoking jacket, its almost ecclesiastical bravura, overwhelmed her. He was brimming with liquor and loneliness. From the next room came the sound of a radio, Satchelmouth drooling through ‘A Kiss to Build a Dream on’, a chocolate flow that permeated the air of this drab upstairs stage.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she remembered saying, foxed by the inanity of words.

  ‘Not at all.’ Infinitesimally the bulk of him appeared to move closer. ‘Not—at—all.’ He laughed, an abrupt bark of a laugh, and said, ‘Do stay. All very proper. Do have a small drink with me in this God-forsaken town. I can offer Scotch …’ he began an untidy rummaging in a drawer ‘… or Scotch. Not terribly exciting, I’m afraid.’