A Boat Load of Home Folk (10 page)

The nothingness closed round the crayfish, and Miss Trumper, compelled at last by her own dreadful aloneness, asked of anyone. “Are those blue bits its eyes?”

The native girl next to her giggled.

“It's mascara,” she said.

“Hullo. I see you, crayfish!” called one of the boys.

Everyone began to laugh and then the boy who had not spoken eased a big cray into a container and waggled it under another man's face while the shrieks of delight sliced right through barriers of race or age or sex. Miss Trumper, omitted because of some indefinable disability, receded, a lost last wave of this human sea, and turning went out slowly along the road to an official-looking building that seemed to be a tourist bureau.

Here she found herself more directionless than ever, sitting below vast coloured posters of the Tongoa crater which flamed above luscious littorals of beach and oblique palm. Something in its force and ashen sterile curves attracted her like God, attracted her enough to ask how she might—while the sloppy old boy in soiled whites regarded her in silence for a moment as if she were crazy and then a little longer in sympathy and told her she would have to walk, that there was no bus until the next day. But it was only two miles and well worth it.

She held out one aged and shaky hand to the air as if to test its temperature. She held it and tested and returned it to her lap.

I am sixty, she thought, and wiry, and tied to life by long strings of memory and guilt and I will walk.

She thanked him and went out past the native carvings with their enormous accusatory genitals, past the
plaited baskets, the small reproductions of canoes, and two middle-aged men drinking beer at a small table near the steps. She did not see them as she had not seen for a long time all the sad seedy men with their limp manhood between varicose thighs, still grandiose because of being male. And first citizens, too, because of this, and so unsure some watchers might incline to tears. But not Miss Trumper in her gay yellow shift, her crazy sandals and her checkered head scarf. She looked only down the streak of coast road that soon lost the houses round a hill lump and, walking very slowly, followed this under the shadow of her parasol.

Back in—back in Condamine? Surfers? Brisbane? Melbourne for one summer was it?—back where you name it, anyhow, and you'll have Kitty Trumper about fifty or fifty-five (but coy of exactitude) still mulling over the stewed guilts of her last decades. She had been a timorous girl under the razamataz of the twenties and, raised to the nth by the ploys of tangential males, an even more timorous thirty-year-old. Her forties and fifties scarcely bear describing. Thrown back on her own sex for comfort and largely upon her girlhood pal, Miss Verna Paradise, she became dependent for a number of things: for coffee and tea pauses; shopping sprees; for talk; for silence; and for what passes as love—comfort. They held bony hands sometimes. Or laughed in short aching silences. Or sat together in cinema shows with their angular shoulders touching in
sympathy during the climactic moments of film. Miss Trumper needed Miss Paradise more than Miss Paradise needed her.

Kitty Trumper was apprehensive of mortality.

“Do you think—?” she would begin.

“Think what?” Miss Paradise was becoming increasingly testy with age.

“That there is such a thing as eternal punishment?”

The old question. The old unsureness.

“It's what you want, isn't it?” demanded Miss Paradise. “I mean you are really longing to be punished, aren't you, for real or imagined sin? So you can't lose, whatever happens.”

At brutality like this Kitty Trumper's eyes would swell with tears.

“I know what I deserve,” she would say. “But you always make fun. I've often wondered if there is a hell, if it's the place the Old Testament would have us believe. Fire. Burning. It's hard to believe a God of kindness would—”

“Who says he's kind! Look at us. Kind! And whatever he is he's a man for sure!” She cackled at her own remark and the blue glass baubles twinkled from the heavy side-table under the forage cap. “You should have been a nun, Kitty. One of God's call-girls. You are born to it. How did you ever miss?”

In between these tiny spats there was the union of need.

Early in the year they had decided on a holiday
together, bonded for days at a time in perspiring shopping expeditions, tottering on throbbing feet into downstairs Brisbane coffee shops where the half-light aroused nostalgias better put aside.

They were not certain where to go until Miss Trumper said dreamily over her long black, “I wonder what a volcano's like, Verna? I never did get to see one on my overseas jaunt.”

“It probably wouldn't perform if you wanted it.”

“Yes. But imagine. All hot and sulphurating. Infernal, I suppose.”

Miss Paradise's grey eyes and mind that missed nothing at all instantly attached to this throw-away comment monstrous significance. She reached for her cigarettes, tremblingly inserted one in her long holder and examined its unlit tip for some seconds. The eyes, dilated, raced away down the narrow distance of white cylinder as if it were some elongated telescope at whose distant end could be seen the wary, god-frightened figure of her friend, cowering before imagined divine wraths and counting her sins on her fingers.

She struck a match.

Miss Trumper's eyes grew wide in its spasmodic flare.

“I think,” Verna Paradise pronounced slowly, “that you have solved our problem.”

“What problem?”

“Where to go.”

In the arcade coffee shop gloom they regarded each
other with absorption. Miss Trumper felt for the sandal from which she had removed her foot. For one panicking second she could not find it and it symbolized all the other lost things that she had reached fumblingly for and missed.

“Stop kicking me!” Miss Paradise said quite sharply.

“I'm not really. It's my shoe. I can't find it.”

She creaked downward into the dark and groped. “There.”

All manner of contortion while she thrust her pulpy foot in.

“We will find you a volcano,” Miss Paradise said. “And you will be able to go right up the top and look in. How about that?”

Kitty Trumper rightly suspected mockery.

“How could anyone get to the top?”

“Oh, cable car or tram or little buses. Rickshaws maybe. It depends where we go. But I think we should do it, Kitty. You'll
get
your first glimpse of hell.” She laughed and laughed at this, but her friend sat on staring into the coffee and could not find it funny at all.

9.20 a.m., 10th December

After she had left the houses behind the sound of the sea vanished and she became aware on her right hand of greater spaces between trees and of bright air washing through like water. The ground was rising with a delicacy her feet approved and now and again near the
road and along the edges of the ash plain she saw rough wooden crosses painted red that the cargo cult men had thrust into the crumbling earth. Her watch ticked her forward at one mile per hour neither holding her back nor pressing her towards some obsessional goal she now had to reach, sensing for the first time on the whole trip an expected and long awaited destiny.

She began to wobble.

Just off the track were two deserted native huts, one of which had a rudimentary veranda stacked with old packing-cases. On one of these she sat, took off her crushing sandals, wiped some sparse elderly perspiration from her face and neck and fanned herself with her carry-all. Although it did not occur to her to glance into the room behind, its emptiness reached out and touched her in only a friendly way while the other hut crouched and watched, its packing-case door hanging from one hinge, its eyes half-shuttered against the light. For no reason she sensed movement rather than saw, was aware of eyes though she did not see a soul, the total culminating in the first creeping tendrils of fear. They were like hair about her neck, not the elderly wispy stuff she had tucked untidily beneath her head scarf, but the richly healthy, slender and curling tresses of a wild fright. She told herself at once it was nonsense and on the word remembered the other times her intuition had ripened into fruits of crisis: the lonely hotel corridor in Melbourne filled with silence and the man behind the darkened bathroom door; the six-feet-high
breathing of another waiting in the corridor of her boarding-house, and the two of them trapped by tension, one each side of the thin wall, listening.

She looked about her now and, apart from the thick rain forest that ran back behind the hut and the scattered and straggling growth along the margin of the ash slopes, the world presented its bland aspect. But despite the assurance her eyes demanded and received, the chill remained and she slipped her feet back into their sandals and went away from the houses quickly. Nothing sounded behind her, but she was conscious of sound even as her withered heart pumped suddenly and savagely a primitive disturbance in the blood.

After half a mile uphill beyond the native houses, Miss Trumper began to think of the heat as a personal enemy that intended paring her to the bone. Beneath her parasol and between the palm alcoves she paced, small, wizened and strange. Each step was an effort, but her hurt feelings compelled flesh and she had tramped another few hundred yards of this calvary before she became aware of a native boy following her under the shadow of the buri hedge. She had not seen him come, but he was so close she could make out his youngly handsome but sullen features in the thickening of early manhood.

They walked in file. Her movements were so slow it puzzled her that he did not catch up and after some minutes she began to find his closeness unbearable. At a turn-off she hesitated and made pretence of adjusting
her sandal, allowing time for him to overtake and pass. But he loitered as well and shifted his banana-leaf basket from shoulder to shoulder, waiting.

There was nothing to do but walk on. Ahead the road slid into rain forest and somewhere behind its ramparts Tongoa loomed with its cone puffing occasionally the most innocent of messages. There were no cars and no other people and, in the light-flash instant knowledge that this boy was following her, unease raced shock into her nerves.

It is nonsense, she told herself, and set her feet and her heart to the north. He is only a child. And then she recalled his face, remote, expressionless and dark, and tried to hurry. He cannot be much more than thirteen, she kept reasoning with the fluttering questioner within. And even then. . . . Even what?

Abruptly she crossed the road.

For quite some time she determined not to look back and certainly she could hear nothing from the naked feet of the lad; but when she did swing her head at last, she saw he had crossed the road too and was moving gently along, thirty paces behind.

She knew she could walk no faster. There was no one to appeal to, so she stopped and turned. He stopped as well, and they watched each other and then she said, “I can't bear anyone following me. I'm sorry.”

He stared so blandly she was not sure if he understood. Was he knowing and aware or were her words a gabble of sound he could not understand? Her forehead
creased with vexation and their eyes inspected each other for weakness, an examination in which hers gave way suddenly and fled.

Unexpectedly he walked past her, even while she was watching him, but so slowly their tiny procession became bizarre, and when she loitered near an abandoned roadside stall with a rain-eaten roof he lingered as well, observing her sometimes from his flat brown eyes, so that her ruse to allow him to get ahead was useless. After a while she crossed the road again and he managed within the next hundred yards, as they moved forward almost parallel, to drop back so that finally he was behind her and once more crossed the road to join pace behind.

Panic painted its abstracts in increasing variety on the cracked old screen of Miss Trumper's brain, and she remembered something she tried never to remember; and even when the first few drops of rain fell they did not manage to remove the garishness. Feet padded without sense but with an over-all agony of sweat and weariness in the too-new, too-smart shoes. Despite the rain, the heat had crescendoed to incredible climaxes of clamping violence that obliterated thought or even the trembling beginning of reason. She stopped at the road fork before one twist led on to the crater and the ash plain and the other to the Bay of the Saints, and near a crumpled timber shack she turned and said, “Are you following me?”

“No, laydee,” the boy said. His face was expressionless.

He shook his head. “Not follow.”

Miss Trumper turned her baffled face away to the shack where dogs and children tangled near a Coke sign that spelled help. There was a rough sort of counter on the footpath and just behind that, gleaming above the squalor of rag curtains and dirt floor, a refrigerator. A native woman looked at her and smiled and said nothing at all. Then she managed “Yes?” several times.

This happened to be all she could say, for after a moment Miss Trumper made her wishes known by gesture and was handed a bottle of orange drink that, because of the filth everywhere, she was then afraid to drink. Yet she could not snuff her fear or explain that she was afraid of the boy who had now sauntered up to the corner of the building, and, leaning against the splintered frame, was regarding her with sombre eyes. Bigger than she had thought. Handsome in an almost girlish way. His body curved like a dancer's. His arms were slender and still unformed. He said something quick in his native tongue to the woman who giggled crazily. Offended but impotent, Miss Trumper stalked out of the stall, emptied her drink in a silly sticky trail as she walked and, looking straight ahead, moved along the red dust. She did not have to look to know that he was still with her, softly, steadily, with her.

Half a mile past the store a truck belted up with
flamboyant horn-shrieks and a quacking of native voices that made her stop and turn into a blast of smiles while she waved her parasol pleadingly and streaked the damp air. They had only slowed down to grin and wave, and with ultimate cries and laughs flashed off again while tears of annoyance filled her faded eyes as involuntarily she waved back, suppliantly, not socially.