Similarly she forgot for the moment that they must decide something about the boy. The days of autumn in winch she walked were perfect in themselves. The wind dropped at that time of the year. Birds rose indolently and alighted with ease. Quinces fell and rotted after a time; she sat on a doorstep and could not pick them up. All shapes, tree or fence or the merest, tottering skeleton of a shed, were clear-cut and final in that fixed landscape of autumn. Only the human being might still erupt, and assume fresh forms, or disintegrate. She watched her husband walking through the stubble. He had begun to shrivel a bit. His neck was old. What if she should find Stan fallen in the grass with his face lost in an expression she did not know? There was no reason, of course. He had never faltered for a moment. His eyes assured permanence. But she had gone cold, that she could think the thought, and worse, that it could happen.
So she stroked her own strong arms for warmth, inside the old cardigan. There was the Greek, walking with armfuls of corn stalks and withered, twitching corn leaves. He was burning the dead corn in little heaps, on the paddock from which the grain had been stripped. Grey ribbons of smoke unwound. There was a smell of burning. She thought about the Greek, and her ever-present concern for him, that had still taken no positive direction; she could not express for him her sympathy, except in dull gestures of mending and words taught. Children you hold to you, but she could not do that, except once in the darkness, before sleep, released from her conscience, she had held his head in her arms, forming it against her breast, and anticipated the coarseness of his hair. It was a dog’s coarseness. That was it. She was kind to dogs. They came, lolloping and friendly, but did not attach themselves to her with passion, they never became hers. And that was right. So it was a kind and friendly relationship, hers with the young Greek, of dog and mistress. She was glad, she said, it was like that. She was glad he was walking at a distance between the heaps of smouldering corn stalks. That way they exchanged no words, nor fumbled them.
Amy Parker stirred on the step.
‘We should encourage that young man to go about more,’ she said when her husband came up. ‘He’s a human being,’ she said.
‘I’m not stopping him,’ said Stan Parker, who was tired of thinking about the Greek, not a bad lad, but who would not be told. ‘He can take his days, but he won’t. I can’t force him.’
Again she was glad, for some inner devotion that she liked to think did exist.
Still, he did go sometimes. She watched him walk up the road to the bus in his tight, best clothes, to which his body would never reconcile itself, he should not have worn clothes. And he would be gone all that day, and sometimes she failed to hear him return, she had fallen asleep from exhaustion, in the still, white morning where the cock crew, and wooden horses shifted their legs.
Con the Greek went to the city, where he began to have many friends, and relations came, and people from the same island, and the friends of relations, So that Amy Parker knew that it was only a matter of time, as he went silently about his work, or singing softly, but always meditating something. It will have to come, she said, and was glad that the fate of the young man, that she lacked the courage or was powerless to direct, would be taken naturally out of her hands. Still, he persisted in her life, one of the many people she had never spoken to.
From the city he brought presents, bright, childish sweets in sticky little bags, for which the children jostled each other. When he had saved up he bought the guitar. Then in the evenings the kitchen was full of a brittle music, that she could not keep out, much as she frowned. He told her bits of his songs. He told her about his island. Most of the year the men were away diving for sponges, he said; they came back to get drunk, and beat their wives, and make more children, then they went away again. Till she knew the bare island. The women of the island were the hollow-faced dark women of the photographs in Con’s box, but they spoke with her voice as they looked from the islands of their houses. While his muscular hands were tightening the guitar for some further music, she wondered what kind of children she would have made with the Greek. But her courage did not dare pursue this road very far.
‘A fine sort of life those women lead,’ she said in a loud, objective voice.
‘Why not?’ he said, forming his lips into a trumpet, from which the words of a fresh, impatient song were waiting to slip. ‘They dunno no better. It is good.’
‘Everybody knows better,’ she said.
He did not understand this, or else he did not want to hear.
‘This is a love song,’ he said.
‘A love song!’ she whispered with some irony to her husband who had come in, as if she had to punish someone, or herself.
‘Ah dear,’ she sighed, and laughed as she folded the cloth.
When the Greek had finished his song he assumed an awkward position of official announcement and said, ‘Mr Parker, I must go from here very soon. I shall marry one widow. She have a business at Bondi, and this is good opportunity. It is orright for me.’
‘It is all right for us, Con, if you are pleased,’ said Stan Parker.
He was a bit relieved. There were certain objects, particularly an axe and the hacksaw, that he could not bear other people to touch.
‘A widow,’ said Amy Parker. ‘Well, Con, that is interesting.’
‘She have five children,’ said Con. ‘It is many. But plenty hands good for business.’
‘You are certainly provided for’, said Amy Parker, ‘in every way.’
‘Yes.’
What then, was so disturbing about it all? The young man, whose socks she had mended for a while, would leave the house, as was natural. But she might have told him something of herself, any day now, something that nobody else had been told, that she might have told perhaps to the child they had found in the floods, who was that blank sheet of paper which is necessary for such confessions of love, but who had gone while she still fumbled. That was it, she grasped, the young Greek picking at the guitar in the kitchen, and satisfied to smugness by the way his life was shaping, was the same oblivious, escaping child. There were moments when the young Greek’s muscular cheeks relaxed into the innocence of childhood, picking at notes of music, for instance, before or after a song. That is it, or must be, she decided with some tenderness.
‘I hope you will be happy, Con,’ she said.
But her husband was tempted to remark between coughs of tobacco and preparations for bed, ‘It is not a funeral, Amy.’
‘I will be orright,’ said the Greek, picking over the bones of the guitar for some last shred of music, of the love song.
‘Is she nice, Con?’ she asked.
‘She is fat,’ he said, looking up. ‘She cook good.’
He smiled luminously, with the light of innocence or complacency, it was difficult to tell which. There were certain expressions of the Greek’s face, when his complacent flesh was lit by simple joys, that did invite entry into his soul. So that Amy Parker went away, saying she was tired. She bit her lips. As it was time for bed, she took down her hair and began to brush it. That night she could not brush too much, brushing out the long shadows in the mirror. Her hair was shorter than it had been, not grey, but at that stage when hair looks dusty. Now her features seemed to have blurred, when in her own mind she had always felt that what she had of looks was distinct. But she was not beautiful, it was obvious. She brushed back her hair and let it fall loose, apparently in some formal exercise of hair-brushing.
‘Aren’t you coming to bed, Amy?’ her husband asked, from sense of duty, it appeared, not of loss.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am doing my hair.’
But she could not evade the floods of time. She was by now rather a fat woman. She went across the roses of the carpet and got into bed, and in darkness tried to think of her children, of her husband, of a pan of jam, of a field of oats, of the great bounties, in fact. Until she had swum beyond them and, in spite of sinuous strokes and the bristles of her brush that she used as a reminder, was sucked u
nder.
Then her husband touched her, and she woke up and said, ‘Ah, I was drowning.’
She lay there thinking about it with persistent horror.
The day the Greek went was a clear day. There had been some frost early, from which the country leaped out and flaunted. In the clear, still air they could listen to the preparations for departure from the shed across the yard. Then Con came out of the shed. He had a new case with a yellow strap around it, and some things tied up in a sugar bag. He wore his tight clothes.
‘Good-bye, Con,’ Parkers said, eyeing him curiously, almost as if he had never been anything to them.
Their everyday clothes gave them a desire to feel superior to anyone so obviously lifted out of the context of daily life as Con in his best. Ray, in fact, got into positions of some insolence and would have liked to hurt someone.
‘That is a small present,’ said Amy Parker, handing the Greek a scarf that she had made in blue wool, and done up in a piece of tissue paper she had fished out from somewhere, it had a network of electric lines.
She put her hand on her son’s shoulder. The ceremony of presentation had made her sentimental but safe. She was a kind woman. Her motherliness overflowed, both to her son, who did not want it, and to the young man who was going out from their house, and who had been surprised into trembling by the unexpected present.
‘Oh, theng you, theng you, Mrs Parker,’ he said, growing moist-eyed with spontaneous emotion.
She noticed his beauty for the last time, almost casually. In the homely daylight, in her comfortable slippers with the pompoms on them, with her reliable husband beside her, and her brash son, any divergence from the obvious course of her life would have been ludicrous.
‘I will bring my lady,’ said the Greek.
‘Yes. Yes.’ said Mrs Parker.
But she did not expect he would, nor did she want it.
‘Where is Thelma?’ asked the Greek.
‘Saturday morning is her music lesson,’ said the mother, and because she was in the habit of repairing the omissions of her children, added. ‘She asked me to say good-bye.’
‘It is a pity,’ he said.
Then, as there was nothing more for him to do, he went.
He went up the road, and Ray said he would come and muck around for a bit up that way. That morning he was surly, and awkward of body. It seemed to the boy himself that he would never form but remain gangling on a road, and he resented the man his friend who was leaving and whose future was ordained. The man walked with strong, deliberate steps, carrying the heavy, common case and the little, awkward sugar bag. He wanted to talk, so he described the things they passed in stiff, rudimentary language. Till the boy could not bear it any longer.
‘I’m goin down here,’ he said, balanced in his old pair of sandshoes on the edge of the bush. ‘I’m not gonna come any further.
‘Why?’ said the surprised Greek. ‘You no come to the bus?’
‘No,’ said the boy with contempt. ‘There ain’t no point.’
‘Then we must say good-bye,’ said Con, putting down the bags.
He came forward, the sleeves still rucked along his arms from carrying the heavy bags. It was obvious he intended to make a ceremony of this farewell also, so the boy’s courage failed him. He could not very well have hit his friend in the face to prevent his creating this formal but agonizing group at the roadside, so he drained his own face, till it had the texture and thinness of paper, and said, ‘Why can’t people just go without making a song and dance about it?’
The Greek was arrested. He looked stocky and ridiculous. In his injured simplicity he began to wonder what he had done to this boy, to fear some power that he must possess without his knowing. But it would never be explained. The boy’s face gave no clue, and the thin grey leaves hanging from still twigs excluded all possibility of elucidation.
‘Orright then,’ he said, backing.
Ray Parker went off down into the bush. It was thin and grey there, but sympathetic in a way. He did not have to think about it. He had thinned right out, till he was exclusively of that place, as exhalation of leaf or bark, his hanging hands no longer idle, except that they did nothing, otherwise there was purpose enough in being, amongst the grey scraggy trees, So he edged along from rock to rock. He bent down to examine ants that were carrying something, or rather, he performed the act of examining, for he did not see.
He had begun again to think of the man who had gone, and whom he would have kept, he almost trembled to admit, though kept for what. Because if he did not love the Greek, and it was obvious he could not love him, then it was hate. Keep him on a chain perhaps to kick on the quiet, like a dog. The sun was up now above the boy’s head, a bland, dispassionate globe of autumn, as he walked through the bush, peeling off bark in search of some answer, and feeling the swollen misery of those cruelties he was perpetrating, and had still to perpetrate on his memories of the man. This way he would become stronger. Though he did doubt his strength. He was still pinned by the arms of the golden Greek.
After a bit he stopped. It was under a tree. It was a big old banksia full of dead heads, the trunk and branches of the tree tortured into abominable shapes, full of dust and ugliness. All beauty and goodness were excluded from that place, the sky being obliterated for the moment. The boy was shivering that took out the knife, which was, in fact, the one from the Greek’s box. He remembered the Greek’s intent face telling him about the knife and those other things of beauty or interest in his box, or telling him about his family, in difficult sentences, about his mother, who was an old woman in a kind of cap. The boy held the knife. Trembling in anticipation of his act, he took out the photograph of the old black hollow woman. As he stood there, trying to impress her disinterested features on his memory, his hands that held the Greek’s belongings, which he had taken because he wanted them, had become quite possessed. The hands were not his. The hands took the knife. It began to cut through the yellow snapshot, to cut in zigzags, to saw and destroy. When it was done, and he could press the blade no deeper into the heart of his friend, the boy threw away the knife and the shreds of paper somewhere, he did not look.
He had slipped down on to the stones, with which that sour slope was littered. He ground his cheek into the sharp sand. Dry, desperate cries for some lost simplicity that he had himself dispatched racked the boy’s body. It seemed that his daemon would never be exhausted, but it was in time, later that morning, and he even fell asleep for a little, and woke up with a fresh mind.
Chapter 16
STAN PARKER finally decided to apprentice his son to old Jarman the saddler at Bangalay, to see, he said, though what would be seen he was not quite sure; the move was more than anything a lame answer to his own puzzlement. Stan’s mother had had a cousin a saddler, a decent man. Leather was honest. So leather it would be.
‘Ah, why, Dad?’ said the disgusted boy, his throat protesting desperately. ‘Who wants old saddlery? I don’t.’
‘What do you want?’ asked the father.
‘Not that,’ said the boy, because he did not know how to make a more concrete answer.
He turned his head away, not liking to be alone with his father. He was a strong youth by now, handsome at times, with a ruddiness that gave his face a touch of carelessness. Many people would forgive Ray Parker his more detestable acts on account of his bright skin. His admirable hair, which his mother would have liked to touch, was a dark brown. His healthiness of body quite disguised any trace of disease; only the neurotic could have had any misgivings about the corners of his mouth, or found in his rather bold eyes reflections of their own hells.
‘Try it anyway for a bit,’ said the father. ‘There’s always room for a couple of saddlers in a town of any size.’
The boy held his tongue.
Soon he was at Jarman’s in a calico apron, sweeping up the snippets through the too heavy sunlight that always lay on the floor in that shop, together with a heap of cats and an old ruptured terrier. R
ay was learning the trade too. At slacker times Mr Jarman made him sit on a stool at his side, and cut the simpler shapes, and learn to sew with waxed thread. It was heavy in the shop on those afternoons, filled with the smell of wax and new leather. Ray Parker did not think he could endure the full extent of monotony that he had found in place of life, and would go often to the lavatory to escape from the spectacle of becalmed virtue. There then, encased in white-washed boards and vine leaves, that monotony was certainly intensified, but to a point where it became personal, and for that reason regenerating. As he heard time pass, the boy stroked his flat belly and looked at himself. He was confident that he would achieve anything if the opportunity offered itself. But would it?
Sometimes he thought about his father and mother, and doubted that it would.
The father came often to the shop. Nobody would have said it was to see his son, but rather to talk with other men. These men all had scaly hands. They were so slow, anyway, for the moment, the flies stood still on them. They began to tell things and became entangled in their narratives, and when they had made such knots that could not be untied they would return hopefully towards the starting point expecting they would find what they had begun to say. But if it led nowhere, nobody was there for that. It was a communion of sun-light and local history that they celebrated.
Few of the men who were watching the saddler’s hands seemed to realize that Jarman’s apprentice was Parker’s boy, or if they did, they did not let on. Through some shyness the father did not produce his son. It was as much as he dared to think how that straight nose had been detached from his own flesh. Once he did speak to the boy in the presence of other men, but looking ahead, as he was leaving the shop.
He said, ‘That Bella threw twin heifers, Ray.’
But as he went out of the shop. And the boy blushed and looked angry. He made himself feel glad his father was gone.
Ray came home seldom now, only sometimes on a Sunday. He found the house a bit lopsided and, in spite of his childhood, unfamiliar. He poked here and there, feeling the air cold about his ears. The fowls in the yard moved out of his way more precipitately, it seemed. And his mother called him to do little jobs that she had invented, to have him there, to command him, to look into his eyes, to examine the pores of his skin, to break open his sealed mind through the deaf-and-dumb show of gesture that human beings carry on. At this period she treated him with a brisk friendliness, that would not admit he had escaped her but at the same time was rather desperate, trying to establish a relationship that was final, and that other people would believe in. He could feel her disappointment as he sat in the kitchen, unable to help her out as he stared at some object, a cake of yellow soap in a saucer, or a little bunch of hot flowers stuck into a jar in a hurry.
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