A Boat Load of Home Folk (9 page)

“Brinkman?”

“Yes.”

“Can you?”

“I'll have a damn good try. He's under government contract. But something ought to be done. After every trip I come back with my ulcer like a beacon flare. Perhaps they ought to put me off.”

She smiled. He did not really mean it.

Outside by the houses under a gluttonous growth of allamanda, the Tucker-Browns' dog was worrying a bird that still flapped feebly.

“God! Look at that!” he cried, and half rose. “Shoo! Shoo, you brute!” He flapped his arms and clapped.

“Of course, I shouldn't tolerate it. His quiet insolence. There'll have to be a written report.” As his voice rose, he wondered if it were true or if he were imagining the lot. Everyone was beginning to think him neurotic. He talked too much of his persecutors. People were starting to laugh. A line ran through his mind—

Every face seems to have lost its features.

Some inner quake has flattened out the maps.

He had to pull himself to with a jerk of his sandy skull and found Marie had put her pen down to regard him with some concern. He heard his voice continuing to say, “But I don't have the time. Simply don't have the time. The map is flattened—” He paused. He was
thinking out loud the wrong things that should be kept private. He was sure he must be ill in some way.

Marie's luminous brown eyes took every bit of his uncertain mouth in.

“I have to go to Dravuni,” he fumbled on. “Young Woodsall has to be taken up. There's been petty theft at the asbestos plant. They think it's one of the packers who comes down here. Oh God! It's all so petty and pointless and I'm so tired I hardly know what I'm doing. I don't know what the hell we colonize for, do you?”

The noise of someone knocking around near the inner door distracted Miss Latimer who left abruptly, the fragments of their talk scattered about in air. Stevenson could hear her just beyond the room, but could not see. His irritability threatened him with pain again and when she returned he was bent over in his chair, holding his enduring belly.

Unmoved, she went straight past him to the corner locker where the fan staggered round above the table and chair. She opened the locker door and watched herself in the mirror, not pleased, not unpleased. Her confidence overtook her in waves as she ran a comb through her short hair. Even the way in which she cold-bloodedly applied paint to her mouth and barely stayed to check the end result was alarming, Stevenson felt suddenly as he watched.

“What's up?” she asked, sensing his misery but not looking at him.

“I've told you. I'm sick.”

“Very?”

“Jesus!”

“Well, I just asked. How about having a small drink?” She pulled a brandy flask from the top shelf and a couple of glasses. “P.R. they call this. I keep it for the paying customers.”

He was trying to smile.

“Lake's off,” she said. “I'm keeping you posted.”

He tapped his fingers in some protective rhythm. “Poor buggar,” he said. “Don't let's dissect.”

“He was weak.”

“So are we all. Let's leave him alone now. He's had enough. I brought back a great fat prelate to roast him.”

“They've been saying he was going for days. It was only that you've been away for a fortnight.”

Stevenson felt too tired at that moment to relate the outside world with this haphazard word-design; too tired even to move out of his puddle of self-pity that he could feel pulsing into a wave crescendo. He began to nibble his thumb, then the wet end of his cigarette, and regard with the anxiety that was natural to him what he imagined to be the vanishing shape of love. A tired vagueness, he supposed, in the most penumbral of lilacs and blues that waited constantly at the end of hot colonnades or tree aisles or beyond blinding dune curves, so that infuriatingly, amid stereotyped landscapes
with predictable figures, it might vanish into some arrangement of shadow or curve.

“You're too soft,” she was saying.

“I? I'm hard as nails.” He offered for inspection the bitten down jagged end of one finger. “And d-dangerous.” He stuttered on the word and made her laugh.

“You sympathize with everyone. Anyone at all. It doesn't matter who. You have this soft-mouthed approach that forgives all the time. There are times when it's a weakness to forgive. You have to learn not to.”

As she went on and on he asked himself if she were trying to satisfy some need for explanation of her own intolerance, for at fifty he knew that all frailties can be justified. He would say that it was her Englishness, and all those accumulated shade patches that were a kind of social dark ages became darkened more in this contrasting tropic vigour where there was not the same standard indifference of human for human.

He was adding another line or two to his poem and hardly heard, anyway.

The stranger-friends are voiced with double-truths . . . .

He couldn't go on. Double-truths. And then he said those very words aloud and looked apologetic.

“We must concern ourselves,” he said, trying to cover up. “I have to or there'll be nothing at all except a hardening right through the cardiac muscle.”

“Are you coming tonight then?” Was she as bored as she sounded?

“I want to.”

“I was having a drink with Daph Woodsall at the Lantana.”

“Well, after that? I'm going to be late, probably. They'll ask me for tea at Dravuni.”

“Afterwards, then. If you're not too late.”

After all, he said to himself. After all, something must be done for my happiness. And for a minute he saw her with a kind of pride and love as saviour in this heat which was slowly becoming so swollen and monstrous he wondered if he would live through the afternoon.

“I haven't known it so hot for years,” he offered as some sort of excuse. “If the old boy wants a report on the trip he can have it tomorrow. There's a cyclone on the way, but I think it'll give us a miss. Brinkman thinks it will, but I suppose that's a good enough reason for believing we'll get it bang. Isn't it still?”

“Be careful,” she advised.

He was startled by her concern and had one of those moments of irrelevance—seeing the ingenuous curve of his son's throat as he guzzled a gob-stopping bottle of soft, his pink lips glued to the orifice while he sucked joy out of the glass and the sunshine and the stupid sugary liquid. In memory he smiled. That was four, five years ago—but the woman caught the glance of it.

“I mean about the trip,” she said. “Driving up there.”

“Yes, of course I will. Because of tonight.”

He wandered out of the door not touching her again from the most perverse of motives. She watched his thin troubled back. He had always held himself too straight.

O
UTSIDE
the laneway where the Chinese stores had edged in with the banks and bakery, Verna Paradise hesitated before a curio-filled shop window and looking in saw nothing at all. There was herself, of course, duplicate on glass, but apart from this non-reassuring shadow she had a moment of prescient emptiness that filled her with terror. After she had blinked her eyes into focus she became aware of strings of melon seeds dyed and strung like beads and shell necklets and lacquered containers that she could have sworn were not Eastern. And behind her again, behind her wearied battered overpainted self, right on the margin of the glittering window face, Kitty Trumper wavered and broke to pieces. She was shattered by something she was going to say.

“My feet are killing me!” she gasped.

It was so ludicrous.

“Imagine eating all that pumpkin,” Verna Paradise
said, ignoring her. “To make all those miles of beads. Don't whine, Kitty. You'll ruin the trip if you do nothing but complain.”

“I don't often.”

“My dear!”

Miss Paradise was eaten up with the need to regain possession of herself; she wished desperately that she could see something in the sense of apprehending and, having done that, want to possess. For thirty frustrating years it had been men, but she was beyond that now, she hoped and even prayed at night when the thought might take her; and the wolf in her loins lay mangily still and blinked at passers-by.

“I'm sorry I came,” Miss Trumper said pettishly.

“You mean now, ashore, to this place?”

“No. The whole trip.”

Her once-guilts had withered and with their going she seemed to be left with nothing at all, for at least her sense of wrong-doing used to keep her completely absorbed. But that was a false assumption, she realized, recalling those days when, riddled with the anxieties of commission, she was incapable of liberating herself in some simple sensuousness, the light sketching the profile of a tree or the abrasion of wind on skin. These days she was empty of sins as well and she wanted perhaps to die.

Miss Paradise also was too old to want to hit out, but the dregs of exasperation flavoured her tongue like bile and she could have spat.

“What about a little excursion? There must be little excursions. To the volcano crater, say, or the asbestos mines or the lagoon villages. You see, Kitty darling, I am a tattered old travel bag chock-a-block with facts.”

Miss Trumper eased her feet and dangled her sandals one by one allowing her engorged toes to wriggle in the heat. The sun had an aggressive quality that made her quail.

“You are making fun,” she said. “But it is sensible fun, I suppose. It's just that I don't really seem to want anything any more.”

“Nor me. But I try. Oh, yes, I try.”

“I try, too.” Miss Trumper was inclined to whimper.

Miss Paradise measured her best and only friend, her last and respected friend standing limply under the heavy blue sky. Her shadow was a grey nothing in the vertical light.

She said slowly and deliberately, “Kitty, my dear, you've been a bore for years. Try! That's the very word! But it was not yourself. It was me. All your friends. You tried the lot of us beyond bearing. So now put your shoes back on and make a further effort.”

Miss Trumper sagged from the punch, her frail cheeks hollowing while she stared, appalled.

“It's not—” she protested, “it's not true.”

“Yes, it is true.” Gladiator Paradise raised the trident. “I have pampered you and listened to you for years and nothing I did or said made any difference. Only time.
And God knows how I have regretted those wasted placatory hours.”

Miss Trumper was beyond tears. If only she could have wept. She shoved her feet back into the too-smart shoes and tottered off without once turning a supplicating face. Her aloneness horrified her, but she went ahead along the street with the fanatic ocean on her left and fought and fought the rising desire to look back for her friend. She had come all through life for this moment. It took her in great sweeps of self-pity and blocked her mind off to sense or reason, even to physical discomfort which she could reject more easily than this exposure of herself, the most brutal photograph only a friend could take. In a haze of wild hurt she wandered to a store and blindly and deafly bought herself a bag of sweets, gelatinous and sticky. Her mouth derived comfort from one of them and, still without awareness, she rounded a corner so that with saved pride she might turn hungrily about to see if her friend were following. The emptiness of the road made her heart stop.

Instead, instead, there was a child, dark, curly, coiled in the spring of its own youth, waiting on the bench.

They looked at each other and the child dropped its eyes and smiled secretly and shyly.

“Have one,” Miss Trumper suggested automatically, offering the paper bag.

Keeping her eyes fixed on Miss Trumper's, the child
extended a hand to the lollies, withdrew one but, unable to thank, smiled only and clutched the sweet in her bunched fingers. Eat it, eat it, Miss Trumper wanted to cry to the child, eat it as a signal of trust. But she shook her head instead and the trembling that afflicted her these days seemed to magnify so that when she moved off her movements were crablike. From a distance she looked back and could see the child had crammed the lolly into her mouth and was chewing her shyness as well.

Natives walked past and the hill rose to buildings in a kind of red and white and green blur. Behind that the volcano muzzle snarled at the sky. Fascinated by its necrotic tip she watched and watched and became aware of self only when a small gathering of people jostled her as they crowded about two native boys who had a cluster of crayfish. These were crawling beneath their nimbuses of flies with awful lurching crustacean aimlessness. The little girl had wandered along by now and stood sucking and watching while a man and woman from the hotel began to haggle about price. Miss Trumper thought she might be sick but could not take her eyes from one crayfish which, blue-lidded like a chorus girl, dragged its claws and waved a multiplicity of feelers in the air as if reaching out for its lost element. Verna, she thought.