Gatherers and Hunters

by Thomas Shapcott

  They were not twenty yards away, perhaps less. After a while the others went back into the water but Beatrice remained. After a few minutes, without bothering to look round to scrutinise the dunes she undid the top of her bikini. She lay with her face in the shade of the umbrella and the rest of her out in the open.

  Charlie did not move. Initially he had determined that this was the moment to go up to her and ask his simple question. But once he saw that she had armed herself with that exposure he hesitated. He did not want to be thought a voyeur. He remained where he was. He mopped his face. He adjusted his spectacles. He was sweating.

  How long he remained like that was not the question, time in a sense had been stilled. But he was suddenly and abruptly grabbed on the shoulder. With a wrench that nearly unbalanced him he was twisted round.

  ‘Bloody old pervert!’ The young man had sprung over the little retaining fence and, wearing only swimming gear, his muscles were conspicuous and tensed. ‘You miserable old bastard, get right outa here or I’ll get the cops. Or the Beach Inspector.’ He shoved Charlie backwards without releasing his grip. ‘Or, better still, some of the blokes at the Lifesavers, they’ll teach you a lesson!’

  It was the young man of the white sports car. He was ­carrying in one hand two ice-cream buckets. His other hand still like a vice upon Charlie’s shoulder, he shook him with each word.

  ‘I saw you. All the way back from the kiosk I was watching you perving on her.’ He gave Charlie another shove so that he almost unbalanced. ‘I know it was Trish you were perving, you’ve been sniffing around her for ages now, don’t think I haven’t seen you.’ He released his grip and the older man shuffled involuntarily to regain his footing, aware that this gave him a further disadvantage. ‘What do you think you’re up to, an old man like you? You should be ashamed.’

  He was looking at Charlie more closely, with more quizzical curiosity, rather than anger. The ice cream buckets were clearly melting and he made as if to move onto the dunes toward the umbrella.

  ‘You’ve got me wrong,’ Charlie finally exclaimed, and his voice sounded strangely high and broken, as if he had a frog in his throat. He grunted, and then began again, this time pitching his words from the lower register.

  ‘Do you think at my age I want to ogle young women? I’m a grandfather myself, godsake, I was just waiting until she got herself dressed a bit more respectably …’

  ‘Bloody hypocrite, that’s what you are! I saw you, I tell you. Not only here on the beach this morning. Or at the supermarket earlier on, don’t think we didn’t see you the other day, sneaking after us into the pictures, and the day before that, further along this very beach, when we were surfing and sunbaking, don’t think we didn’t all see you sitting in your car and perving, stood out like a beacon.’

  ‘I wasn’t on the beach.’

  ‘Wearing those reflector sunglasses; couldn’t get enough from the car, you walked right out onto the beach, with your shoes and socks, looking like a bloody South Right Whale, drooling over all the nice young flesh.’

  ‘That wasn’t me.’

  ‘Everyone on the beach saw you, not that you took any notice, perving and drooling.’

  ‘One moment. Look, that girl reminds me of …’

  ‘Your granddaughter, oh yes, all of that, tell me another.’ The young man cast a glance at the sodden containers, and began to stride onto the sand dune, but he called out, ‘Just clear out or I really will lose my temper and it will be more than soggy ice cream I shove into your face and rub it in.’

  ‘I once knew somebody …’

  ‘Off!’

  ‘Somebody she reminds me of …’

  ‘OK. That’s it. Here, you come along with me and we’ll soon sort this out.’

  ‘Very well, I will leave. But ask your friend if she is related to someone who was once called Beatrice Linton …’

  ‘Never heard of her, and Trish is my sister. Now move! Move, I tell you.’

  But the young girl herself had come over, her bikini top now adjusted. Charlie had not noticed as she came up behind him.

  ‘Peter, what on earth is it? Oh, my ice cream! Peter, you’ve let it all melt! Oh!’

  Then her voice changed. ‘Oh, it’s you again.’

  She looked Charlie up and down quite frankly, her face screwing up with distaste. How could he possibly ask her the question now?

  ‘This your grandpa, Trish? That’s what he claims he is.’ And the young man gave loud chortle as he passed over the bucket. ‘Sorry about the ice cream. Come on, another.’ He put his arm around her waist. ‘Beatrice Linton, that’s the name he said, you heard of a Beatrice Linton?’

  ‘Peter don’t be silly. Isn’t this … aren’t you the old man we helped this morning, over at the supermarket?’

  Charlie nodded but his opportunity was lost. ‘You look like someone …’

  ‘Off, I said. Leave the lady alone.’ Peter now assumed genuine command and moved back to Charlie and gave him a shove on the chest. ‘And don’t keep tailing us around like you have been. You’re a marked man, know that? We’ve got you tabbed. Did I tell you, Trish, I saw him down at the picnic grounds on Bulcock Beach two or three weeks back, talking to your uncle Bernard? He’s been hanging around like a bad smell.’

  ‘Really? Look, old man, I don’t like being followed. Everywhere I go, everything I do. Especially if Uncle Bernie is around …’

  ‘This is ridiculous. I only wanted to catch you because you look so remarkably like …’

  ‘Someone’s granddaughter. That gives you no excuse to stand perving on my girlfriend while she is tanning herself.’

  ‘I thought you said …’

  ‘Off! I mean it this time. Off.’

  ‘You’re not the one Peter said had been sitting with ­binoculars up the beach there wetting himself to perve on all the girls? That’s disgusting.’

  ‘That was not me. This is the first time I have even come onto this beach.’

  ‘I’ve seen him everywhere. After that first time, I’ve kept an eye out, we don’t like people like you hanging around taking advantage.’

  ‘Just let him go, Peter. I’ll come up with you for that ice cream, this one’s ruined.’ And she threw it without a thought over the crest of the dune, among marram grass, and dragged him away. As they went off she said to Peter, ‘My grandmother? Can you believe it, Grannie’s a hundred and the only thing Grannie looks like is the Simpson Desert! And Grannie lives in Gladstone anyway.’

  Charlie was already back on bitumen. His face was flushed and he found himself erratic, he had to hold onto things. From here the route back to his flat was steeply uphill.

  +++++

  Anger is a complicated process, it finds its target but the target moves and becomes displaced, or it stays rigid while your feelings swirl like tides through the narrow channel, scouring a new passage and churning up everything in its way, cutting and distorting while at the same time seemingly intent on absolute directness.

  Charlie took a long time to cool down. His apartment was like a prison and for the first time he felt the invisible bars. He paced the length of it, from the back bedroom past the two other bedrooms, none of them used, out to the living area and to the kitchen as if food or refrigeration might deflect some of his turbulence.

  A dozen times he must have done this before he pulled himself up. He was drenched. He ripped off his clothes and marched to the shower.

  He dabbed himself dry and strode to the bedroom to find himself something. Everything he looked at seemed to have the sly look of old men who sat with binoculars behind the wheels of expensive cars and studied the nubile young bodies so flagrantly conspicuous everywhere.

  They flaunt themselves on purpose!

  But he corrected himself. He found a plain white shirt, remnant of the Melbourne years.

  There was enough food in the place to last several days. He felt a huge reluctance to go outside.

  At a certain stage he conceded that the young man,
Peter, was probably acting nobly, protectively. It was simply that he was utterly wrong. And Charlie realised that there was no way he could prove that. These things do not depend upon facts, they depend upon feelings.

  The anger became self-directed, then it became surly and Peter, Trish, everyone he could think of became his enemies. And of course, inevitably, he began to question why he had come to Caloundra, this haunted place, as a way of remaking his life.

  ‘You don’t have to take it lying down. Where’s that old canniness …?’ His own words seemed to sneer back at him. What was the alternative? Melbourne? Hadn’t he gone to all the effort of cleaning out everything there? He couldn’t go back. He just had to be patient. He could not afford to upset himself over trifles. Think of it that way: trifles.

  Two days.

  Finally, he had to make the decision: This was ridiculous! Why allow himself to be bullied in this way? He found his sun hat and decided to walk down to the village. He had not even bought his regular newspaper. He would, almost defiantly, have a coffee and croissant in the little café where he had started to become a regular.

  He paused in the foyer and then reached for his car keys. He drove down.

  And it did feel better, getting out and about. The young Italian waiter was not there. Why should that be a sort of relief? Bronco had been no threat – he had even shown a willingness to help. It was Charlie’s own fault that he had felt rubbed up the wrong way. Young people were all like that. It was not Bronco particularly. All of them.

  Charlie was served by a middle-aged soul with vivid red hair and sagging, freckly skin, a sure candidate for skin cancer, he thought. He vaguely recalled her at other tables. Not appealing. But he had his coffee and even the croissant, greasy with butter and thawed, flaky pastry which nevertheless seemed rubbery. Raisin toast was no longer a possibility.

  He looked around. There, down the end of the street, was the picnic table where he had encountered Bernie O’Connor.

  The girl, Trish, could not possibly be related to that red-neck old bully, surely? Look at him there, arrogant and proprietorial, shoving his jaundiced views down the craws of everybody in hearing distance. Her Uncle? And of course he had to admit such a thing could be possible.

  Uncle Bernie O’Connor? The old man was dressed in his habitual gear and, sure enough he had a small crowd of young people around him. He was holding forth so loudly Charlie could catch some of the exclamations from here. The listeners were laughing and it almost seemed they were good-heartedly teasing him. Urging him, rather. For just one second Charlie felt a surge of protective annoyance at them, the young baiting the old, but it passed. Perhaps they had a better technique to defuse the old man’s assertiveness? Perhaps they were not really listening at all, merely indulging him, making him a toy to their all too self-confident superiority.

  He was so engrossed in the spectacle – there were three young women, all with large straw hats and protective long sleeves –that he let his coffee grow cold. As he turned round to catch the eye of the waitress he saw, standing quite close behind him, the muscular young man, Peter. He was ­glowering.

  There was a pause. Both seemed taken aback, Charlie at being so blatantly the subject of such intent gaze; Peter at being caught out before he had worked out his tactics.

  ‘I’m watching. I’m keeping an eye on you,’ Peter said, in a hoarse whisper, as he picked up his knapsack from between his feet and walked down the concrete verge, past Charlie and towards the end of the street.

  ‘Don’t you threaten me,’ said Charlie before he so much as thought. ‘I have a perfect right …’

  ‘What’s that?’ Peter turned round and took a pace back. ‘What’s that you say? You’re the one needs to understand what threatening means. You’re a stalker. And I’ve got my eyes on you. Don’t think you can stalk Trish, or anybody else for that matter. You don’t stalk people round here with impunity.’ He swung the haversack as if it would make a useful weapon. ‘You’re being watched, Stalker. You understand that? You’re being watched every time you poke your nose outside the Westaway Towers.’

  Even his home was tagged? Charlie half rose, but sensibly decided on silence. He had his rights. He did not have to quarrel with some young thug about those. If necessary, he would go to the police himself, lay a complaint.

  The young man had marched off, shoulders almost pathetically straight so that Charlie was reminded of Young British Chaps of Impossible Virtue. Except that this young man had a broad accent and the matter of virtue was probably something he didn’t even understand. He had lied before. He had dented his own credibility pretty powerfully, then. He had … but there was no point in pursuing the subject, all the self-justifying speeches counted for nothing, in the event.

  As he gathered up his newspaper and his hat, Charlie did look down towards the Front. The virtuous Peter was standing, one foot on one of the park benches, and with his hand on the shoulder of one of the young women listening to the monologue of that old bigot O’Connor. Just as he looked more closely at her she took off the hat. Beatrice. Trish. Whoever.

  It was the first time for two days that the name ‘Beatrice’, in its specific resonance, had crossed his mind. It had been displaced so that ‘Trish’ now occupied that territory where once so much sweet and painful memory had gathered itself. Trish, who threw ice cream containers thoughtlessly onto the sandhill and who laughed, he recalled, with a sort of implicit spite and carelessness that belonged to herself entirely, of that he was certain. More than certain. Oh yes. The niece.

  It was not exorcism. But it was the tatters of anger, without regret or conditions. Anger, even in its dregs, carries its own sense of virtue about it. It is the most untrustworthy of ­passions.

  +++++

  To get to his car he would have to walk down to Bulcock Street and pass that little coven of witches and wizards. They looked settled for a long sitting, from the way their laughter and joking continued. Charlie tried to prevent himself, but he was pretty sure he was in their firing line, as well as any passing refugees or non-Irish strangers.

  This was impossible. He couldn’t allow himself to be tyranised by nonsense of that sort. But he did not move. He ordered another coffee.

  These standover tactics were Hollywood movie, not normal Caloundra laissez-faire and goodwill. Oh, if they really thought he had been stalking, it was the sort of thing that had been in the news down in Melbourne only recently, yes he could understand a sort of rancour, but what he had done was entirely innocent, it was ridiculous to compare it with that sort of business. Though what really rankled was the realisation that she clearly had no intention of letting him approach her again. Not to mention her watchdog, that Peter. He had to relinquish the thought of ever uncovering the mystery and coincidence of her uncanny resemblance. Though, as he had been realising more and more clearly, this Trish, close up, was not at all like Beatrice, not the voice, not the texture of her skin, not the real colour of her eyes. It was just a more general sense of shape, of hair – that still uncannily reminded him of her – the youthful bounciness of her body in action. Even the way Trish had grabbed at Peter’s arm as they raced off to the kiosk, that had echoes. But they now had become ironic, almost parodies.

  He thought once more of the way Trish had tossed that ice cream container. Something about it both irritated him, and intrigued him. It was like an echo of something forgotten. Had Beatrice ever done something like that, on the beach, up along the dunes? In those days they were pretty careless about littering. No. Nothing he could recall.

  His second coffee was finished and out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the picnic bench was now empty. Thank God. Was he to spend the rest of his life skirting and evading? No way.

  He reached for his belongings and eased himself of the metal chair. Halfway down the footpath he was hailed loudly by that Camberwell woman, Thelma Jennings. She was still here.

  ‘Charles Brosnan, over here. Yoo Hoo. I’m so glad I caught up with you again Cha
rles. I have been coming down to this café with its dreadful coffee and absolutely despicable croissants every day just in the hope of seeing you. Look. Look what I’ve got, I had to hand it to you I knew you would be thrilled.’ And she scrabbled amongst the things in her capacious purse and drew out a coloured photograph, studio size. It was of Miriam and herself, in some rather grand function judging by the table decorations. They were hugging each other and both of them laughing boisterously.

  ‘See! That’s me, in my Thai silk. Miriam always said she envied me that. And isn’t Miriam so gorgeous? Simply gorgeous! Miriam was a star. But of course you know it. You knew it. Look, I’ve had a copy so you can keep this one. I just thought you must have it. It is the best one of Miriam, of both of us. Here, I’ll wrap it in a Kleenex so it doesn’t get smeared. Now go, run off, my duty is done, promise delivered. I am not going to detain you, I know you are busy. And after our meeting the other week, well I was weepy all afternoon, and that does nothing for my skin texture I can tell you. A big kiss and a hug, then? Ah, Charles, Charlie. Now go.’

  In the hot inner bubble of his car Charlie did study the photograph.

  Everything had become activated by hidden trip wires. The Miriam in the photograph was at most a stranger. She was a Miriam from another life. A Miriam with another life. The self seemed to stretch endlessly

  When Miriam smiled for the camera with Charlie, she always took off her glasses and composed her features, it was a habit. Here, her spectacles made a sort of mask of her face. Except this mask wore a different expression. Unburdened. No, that was not the word. He looked at it again, and then carefully placed it in the seat beside himself, and drove off.

  Westaway Towers was the only place to return to.

  When he opened the door he was looking into a tomb.