by Thea Astley
Had she but world enough and time, she reflected in the peopled barrenness of the mall, she would invent the ultimate preservative for those makeshift, rough and ready, short-lived moments.
Instinctively she put her hand to her face, touching the remnants of what time had left her.
She was falling apart.
Cutting loose.
Doing the unexpected.
Kathleen craved some moment of consequence in what had become a treadmill existence as she steered her children through adolescence. I don’t count, she had written to Daisy still sweating it out in Charco, those childhood traumas of measles, mumps and chicken-pox. Or the mindless food-hunt, the cooking, eating and expelling the stuff just so the whole damn cycle can start again. (Hey, that’s a laugh, isn’t it?) I don’t place much stress on rows at the office, promotion, retirement. Where’s the buzz?
She had made room for one of those moments the year after Ronald died, tugged by sentiment, perhaps, or simply the need to flee the mundane while her children were safe in boarding school. Amazing herself, she took a week’s leave and went back to the town of the east wind, flying in where once, eleven years before, she had arrived by inter-island trader. When the plane came down over Guadalcanal, the jungled heights of the island, fold upon fold of uncontrolled vegetable growth, seized and choked her mind. She saw Ronald, or imagined she could see him, clambering, hacking, crawling through implacable forest to sate an obsession. His thin white figure in starched drill and toupee, all the tropic duds, kept vanishing and reappearing, heading ever towards what she guessed to be the summit of Mount Makarakombou.
Nothing had changed. A lot had changed.
In the still familiar bar of the hotel on Mendana Avenue the past swept in. She had told no one she was going, not even the children, and now layer upon layer of time peeled her naked.
In the harbour, in the islands, in the Spanish seas, Ronald’s voice sang in the highest reaches of her skull as she walked during each of the next few days past Government House and the Secretariat to the Guadalcanal Club, where she rediscovered the junior administrative officer, redder, stouter, and now an assistant secretary. There was not a kiss in sight.
‘Have I changed that much?’ She resented the bleating sound as she jogged his memory.
‘Married man these days,’ he countered, self-protectively. ‘Three beaut kids. You’ll meet the wife later on. She’s dropping by for a drink. God, Kathleen, what a turn up, eh? Why didn’t you let anyone know you were coming? We could have turned it on for you.’ He was convivial with a gin sling. ‘Not many of the old team left, I’m one of the few who stayed on.’
‘You knew about Ronald, I suppose.’
‘Yes. Sorry, Kath. Always liked the old boy. Do you know … just a few days before you left, after the store was sold, he told me what happened that time he went missing.’
Kathleen found herself staring into her glass, afraid to urge.
‘Yes,’ the assistant secretary said, ‘he reached the top all right. And he managed to cut his name and the date on a boulder up there. It’s true. Went up to see it for myself a year later. It was on the way back he got bushed. Bad show, really. All of it.’
Crazily she believed then that it was Ronald she had seen from the spy-hole of the descending plane, living and reliving his moment of glory in that steaming wilderness of tree and vine. Nostalgia made her want to weep again, even after a year, especially after a year, grabbed by the stupidity of his pluckiness, whose driving folly she had never understood.
She finished her drink, leaving the assistant secretary sitting there, and walked up the hill to the house on the ridge. The temptation to knock, to court invitation, jabbed as she surveyed the familiar lines of veranda, the garden denser but much the same, brilliant with scarlet blossom on the poinciana trees. She turned and looked across to Savo Island, unchanged in unchanging waters, her back exposed now to the pointed words that still flew about those rooms. She winced under ghost barbs.
If she could, she would have redrawn the maps of those lost times, overcome by sadness and its high dingo howl across emptied, flattened desert-scapes. She thought of her children and their kid faces became mnemonics for domestic detail she now dug up, gently sifting earth and sand, to lay each moment out as if it were a bowl, vase, tile, of simple but searing beauty.
History was more nostalgia than facet. Correction, than fact: an aggregation of personal moments with their sickening lurches of love and hate.
As she sat alone that night in the dining room of the Hotel Mendana, the black waiter asked curiously and, she imagined, reprovingly, ‘Where is your husband?’
She looked up and smiled and took her time responding. ‘Where is your wife?’
Giggling, he backed away, all stumbling feet and flaphands, from this cheeky waite.
She went on picking at her omelette, wondering if, for Ronald’s sake, she should have mentioned he had left his mark on the summit of one of their highest peaks.
Where, after all, was her husband?
The best thing, she supposed, about that week was knowing no one knew where she was. The boundary lines of protocol were still drawn on the island, though by shakier hands, and the supper party the assistant secretary organised for her at his home was a terrible mix of stiff and hearty, through all of which the secretary’s wife regarded her with sharp and curious eyes nourished by the gossip that still, after all this time, gave transfusions of energy. Nothing, should she explain loudly over the canapés, beyond sweat and arms and unwanted kisses in the sticky afternoons of those three lost weeks?
The temptation to say loudly, clearly, ‘There was no pus-pus, my dear,’ shocking with the unacceptable pidgin obscenity, almost overcame her. A nauseous wave swept her up and out to the bathroom where she was noisily sick for quite some time.
I’ve cut and run, she wrote on a card for Daisy. The card showed native huts and women in brightly coloured Mother Hubbards. Wasn’t going to tell a soul but I’ve decided cutting and running is what it’s all about. I think the kids have inherited that gene from me!
Got your card, Daisy remembered when they next met years later. You old devil, you.
Daisy was without envy, never said ‘half your luck’ or ‘wish I’d been there’, never stained the moment.
‘I’m lucky,’ she always said. ‘You’re lucky. Watched any telly lately? If you have you’ll know you’re lucky.’
Daisy put her right, letting her see the brevity of the programme, the limited number of items, the transience of applause.
Here’s to you, Daise! Cheers!
‘Let’s go back a little,’ she said to Daisy, mumbling away to herself in the mall. ‘I want to tell you about them, about the kids. Your turn next week. That Brain!’ she said. ‘That Shamrock!’
Now yearning for the confidences, the shared comfort of age, she would write Daisy long letters full of plaint. Goodbye. Goodbye to those years in which she huddled in the same house, always the same, while son and daughter flap-doodled their way through Mickey Mouse humanities courses on straight C’s.
Herself unsurprised, still on the secretarial game but translated, now she also had put a course or two behind her, into something a little more meaningful as a parliamentary worker, learning to keep her too ready lips closed, ploughing ahead to retirement down the track with only the occasional flirtation in sight. Dollops of carelessly dropped, scented dross, she told herself and also another elderly prospective escort who promptly, promptly … and, my God, there was a further not so fragrant deposit littering the fence marge.
So who cares? cared? She had the kids, no longer kids, to worry about in the bleak evenings, wondering how straight C’s and humanities establish themselves and their holders in the expanding early sixties except in protest flings with mounted police or in baton-beaten greenie marches. There had been narrow squeaks with alternative communes seductively beckoning. Shamrock had taken a year off to find herself.
‘Where will you look
, dear?’ Kathleen had asked mildly.
‘Oh Jesus, you do crap me off!’
I lived through that, Kathleen admitted, through all that sulky acrimony, that impudent flouncing, until Shamrock hitched her way to a commune outside Mackay, an outwardly decorously run family group that, according to a chastened and returned daughter, was organised to punishment point by a failed law student with stunning connections in the state judiciary. Daddy had funded the farmlet, a pre-postmodernist remittance gesture. There was much regimentation her unaccommodating daughter had resisted. The male/female balance was preserved by rostered swapping. A kind of tremor, Sham insisted, ran through the group every Monday when the new copulation schedule was pinned to the breakfast-room notice board. Culture, too, was regulated. You will learn oboe. You will play bassoon. You will mould pots, paint, weave, wood-carve. But above all you will sleep with James, with Trevor, with Russell. You will help build the hayshed and do the washing and cooking every third day. (Hey, don’t the men get a go?) You will learn ballet, sleep with Shark, do the … Shamrock lasted only two months and revealed these things to her mother in later dribbles of self-pitying confession. Her small face seemed permanently morose. There was a poignant squalor about her and about the disciples she described, whose earnings on regular week-day jobs and/or unemployment benefits vanished into an unaudited bank account for the failed law student, who did at least know dollars and which way to butter his bread.
In the seventh week she had announced rudely that she was utterly tired of beansprouts and would, she swore, remember to her last breath the crocodile-eyed law failure (I mean, mother, how can you fail at law?) making hip roofs of his tapering unworked fingers and saying, ‘I’m not sure, Shamrock, whether you fit in with the ideology of our little family, whether you have assimilated the philosophic concepts of the group. Some of your partners … that is, your sexual partners … have complained about a lack of enthusiasm, of an … how shall I put it? … inert compliance.’
She had said, ‘I will truly vomit if I don’t get my jaws round a hunk of steak, medium rare.’
Shamrock had married before the necessity to work had claimed her, ironically enough, another lawyer who had given up his practice to enter parliament and whom Kathleen immediately dubbed the minister for transports.
‘This makes me wonder about the ultimate charity of fate,’ Kathleen whispered to Brain as they stood with fixed smiles in Cathedral gloom waiting for Shamrock to be legally joined to her ambitious backbencher. Despite the many junctions before the religious ceremony, Shamrock flaunted herself in glaring white, tossed bouquets to prismatic bridesmaids, caught Brain’s mocking eye and fast-bowled him with a posy. Blush. Giggle. At the city hotel reception, in a spate of clichéd well wishes and lewd telegrams, she kissed her mother sparingly on the cheek and then vanished on a Barrier Reef honeymoon without a word of thanks.
‘For what?’ she might have asked if prodded. ‘For this pagan mockery?’ Now Kathleen merely writhed uneasily, trapped in a clawing landscape.
She was paying off the loan for the wedding for the next three years. That girl, she told herself, can’t even spell matrimony without an ‘e’.
‘Can’t seem to get my act right, Mum,’ Brain moaned. ‘What the hell goes wrong?’
‘Don’t look at me!’ his mother said.
After university he had been offered the management of a motel in the far north by a friend of a friend. The motel closed a year later. He became a working partner on a prawn boat and was deckhand, odd-jobber and maintenance johnny. He had to keep assuring himself he was expanding his abilities, stretching his limits. One burning, slashing day in the Gulf at the height of the season, the refrigeration plant failed. Nothing he did could save the catch, not even red-eyed panic. The stench around the body. The business lost over fifty thousand dollars on that one disastrous trip.
He moved to Townsville where, brooding in the choking air of a Belgian Gardens flat during a strike by sanitary workers, he mentally perfected the notion of solidifying dunny contents in a kind of Araldite so that the entire pan appeared as some exotic dish set in aspic. He found no backers. Peughh! Urk! Nutter!
People were beginning to laugh at each new proposal. He had lost nearly all his small savings.
The minidepression.
The boom.
Nascent charm saved him.
Bosie was an accident, a fleshing of the fantasies of sweat-filled solitary nights, a come-by-chance at a luncheon in a very expensive seafood restaurant in Brisbane where he had returned to complain to Kathleen and lick his financial wounds. The restaurant was the latest trendy place to be seen. Diners were neither put off nor rendered vomitous by the window’s street decoration of a monster two-foot carp floating listlessly in a tank six inches longer than its body and suppurating slowly in its own juices, despite the languid efforts of a pump and a few strings of watergrass.
From the table behind. Bosie managed to spray her future husband with a laughter-disgorged mouthful of peppery riesling. Apologies, little wipings, flutterings. Vowels so rounded they almost, but only almost, came out flat. It was too tedious, Brain—for the name started not long after that, snapped up by mother with crude guffaws—decided in later years. And horribly inevitable. My God! he often murmured to himself. Crook wine at midday! We both had it coming.
She was the daughter of a speculator who had made a killing selling swamplands for housing estates near the Gold Coast and who had conveniently died, leaving everything to his doted-upon child. For a time his financial agonies were eased. But he had reckoned without his wife’s spending abilities. Bosie (after two years he had forgotten her birth name) had private-school assumptions as well as desperate elocution. Within three years they had two pouting, aggressive, indulged boys who were later rendered semiliterate under the new tolerance curricula promoted by academic refugees from the classroom.
That was all it took. (Was that all it took?)
Marriage was the dangled worm that hooked women. Women were the dangled worms that hooked men. Both ways it was a bad deal, a lousy deal. Who was trapped the most? He found awe-inspiring those decades of small miscalculations, the trifles on which monstrous disasters depended: the struggle for home ownership—but the right sort of home!—the home that would bring Bosie’s ultimately suburban approval; the children—those beaking birds querulous with demand; the school fees; the debts; the overdraft. That never-ending overdraft. The pretence, at gatherings of friends who were also engaged in pretending, that everything was jake, hunky-dory, keen, cool, a total gas. Cheap laughter around the unpaid-for pools with the cheap wine flowing and in the back of every mind, thrust back but there, the tick of the plastic card meter, tocking over.
Hey, what a party!
Great bash, man!
Jesus, Brain, do I have a hangover!
Smashing, Bosie darling. Absolutely smashing. We had a ball! Just loved those thingummies en croûte. You must tell me how you did them.
Make it our place next time.
And ours.
And ours.
And ours and ours and ours and …
In the red. In the mood and in the red. A frieze of unpally bank managers. In the red but still in the mood. Failed projects one after another. Even failed despair. In the syncopated pauses Brain pondered suicide, thoughts flippant enough of cutting out without a trace; of leaps from buildings, train hurlings, boat plungings. He couldn’t crack even those and Bosie’s Oh Brain, must you! Bims and Chaps are at boarding school. Think of them. changed to Thank God Bims and Chaps are at boarding school. Thank God they’re spared seeing their father … (But seeing his father, that grotesque scene in the specialist’s rooms on the Terrace as a horrible entr’acte before he too moved on to the next scheme, to collapse in a torpor of weather when the induced lassitude of Brisbane’s streets threatened to choke.)
He was not really serious, Bosie assured telephoning friends who had heard of his latest financial misadventure, a disco called Heart of
Darkness with shares largely owned by the minister for transports and closed down after three months by the police, who wanted more protection money. If he were truly serious, she babbled, then he would achieve oblivion. Listen, why don’t we meet for coffee?
Huh?
Bosie punished him.
‘I’ve booked it up,’ she would say challengingly to his outraged face (there were no cheapskate kisses these days!) as he glared at a new dishwasher, freezer, airconditioner, inflatable swimming-pool table, entire new summer wardrobe.
‘You’ve bloody what?’
Shit! Head between hands. Oh shit!
It felt, Brain decided in his saner moments, like the Hundred Years War. And the protagonists never changed. The woods decay, he quoted softly and sullenly to himself, pouring fibre bran into his breakfast bowl, the woods decay and fall, the vapours weep (pouring the milk) their burthen to the ground … Me only cruel immortality consumes. ‘ “I wither,” ’ he suddenly shouted at the heavenly morning glittering on the impeccable surface of the pool, ‘ “slowly in thine arms, here at the quiet limit of the worlds!” ’
‘Brain, the neighbours!’ Bosie cried, coming out to the kitchen.
Yet, ‘“And thee returning on thy silver heels,” ’ he mischanted impertinently to her after one particularly trying evening with a failed avocado grower from the Tablelands.
‘What?’ Bosie snapped. ‘What? I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
‘No matter. No matter at all.’
He knew and Alfred Lord T. knew exactly what he meant.
He would observe Bimbo and Chaps home for what Bosie called the hols or later, the vac, wincing from her stagey pretentiousness that drove them inevitably into displays of boorish retroaction. Yet I am a natural lout, he would admit after sottish evenings. The boys have my genes. Or half of them. You didn’t will their gawky insolence or sullen response to the best-will-in-the-world inquiries. You simply watched the bad manners prickle out like acne.