Girl with a Monkey (6 page)

When he resumed speaking Elsie lay perfectly still, watching the blue spaces washing over the coast, the flocculent clouds, and feeling the hollows in the sand slide more and more into the outline of her body.

“Yes, I can remember it pretty well, looking back.
It was one Sunday night just after the end of the war. We were a pretty hot old place then with the I.W.W. licking the poor mugs into activity. ‘Fellow worker!' they used to say and you felt bloody good, I remember dad saying, as if you was actually somebody. Anyway, this night the dad had a row with mum and round about eight he marched out of the house in a real rage and took me with him to the tree of knowledge in Flinders Street. Now you must of seen that. It's still there.”

“That's so,” assented Elsie. “I catch the bus there every afternoon.”

“Well, when we got there, there was some big bloke addressing the crowd. Giving it to them proper, he was, saying they ought to go up to the lock-up and haul out a couple of fellers who'd been shoved in that morning.”

“Who were they?”

“Kelly was one. I can't think of the other name. Kerry or something. It'll come to me. Well, I didn't know at the time, but later on when the whole family was arguing about the business, us being greatly concerned, you might say, I remember hearing them say these two chaps had been in a spot of bother out at Stewart's Creek Railway Station with a mob of cattle that come in a few days before. Most of the time the people was arguing and shouting at each other, I could only see trouser legs, but by an' by, towards nine o'clock,
the whole crowd moved off up towards the lock-up. There was a plain-clothes cop dad knew kept hanging round the edge of the gathering near us and he must of shot off early to warn 'em up at the jail.”

He picked a fresh grass stalk and peeled off the outer husk.

The evening only came back to him in snatches of violence: the moonlessness, the great procession, nearly a thousand strong, moving like a king tide in the darkness, singing “The Red Flag” down the town streets; and the final convergence and preliminary hush outside the lock-up gates. Lucidly piece after piece of the montage sorted itself out.

“When we got there,” he continued, “somehow or other we must of got pushed right to the front, because I can still remember seeing the coppers in the yard through a crack in the fence, with their big Lee-Enfield rifles, bayonets fixed, and a Webley service revolver in the other hand.”

Strange how he recalled the guns; they were interesting to kids then, because with the war just over most of them collected bits of army gear. Anyway, one reason he remembered so well was the fact that another kid, a pal of his, who lived along the same street, picked up a small revolver half buried in the dust next morning, not far from the lock-up where they had gone to look for bullet holes in the mango-tree trunks. They
had played with it for a bit before their parents made them hand it in.

“Go on,” prompted Elsie.

“There was boos and cheers, and then the crowd started calling out for this bloke Kelly. Carney was the other one, I jus' remembered. And some mug copper who stuck his head over the gate to say Kelly wasn't there got it bashed good and hard by a tall skinny bloke in overalls next to my dad. And then it started! There was shots from all directions and we tried to push to one side but it wasn't no good. The crowd was so mad they started to tear down the fence, yards of it, fighting and shoving each other. And nothing but legs far as I could see and a dreadful splintering going on in the darkness. And shot after shot.”

Even now, vividly he remembered the fear rising to a crazed panic that made him wet his pants, and his father dragging and shouting and then moaning with awful regularity.

“I don't remember much else,” he said. “It only lasted five minutes, I suppose, but I was only pint-size and I thought it was a nightmare. Dad told me later that after the coppers started firing low into the crowd, I screamed and wouldn't stop; and then I don't suppose he noticed after a minute because a bullet got him on the shin and splintered the bone so bad he never walked right again.”

“Is this Townsville?” breathed Elsie. “This quiet, inoffensive little sugar town? What broke it up finally?”

“Oh, the crowd knew when they'd had enough. There must of been six or seven people hurt round us. Lying on the ground, some of them, and a couple limping away with their pals. Dad managed to drag himself off before they started taking any names, and one of his brothers who had his sulky down Stokes Street shoved him in an' took him home. We called the doctor private. Didn't want to say we'd been in that do in case there was trouble.”

He did not embroider his description with the five minutes or so he had been pinned beneath his father's leg, both of them trampled by the cattle crowd, and feeling the blood soaking, oozing through his clothes; or that, when he reached home and saw his hands and shirt vermilion in the veranda light, he had fainted straight into his mother's arms.

Minutes, which heard the harsh croak of gull and marsh bird, which tempered the blue of the sky meridian with a waning sun's indifference, slipped away while they searched the uneven planes of each other's countenances. Sand grains sprinkled eyebrow and eyelash, sugared jawline and temple. Harry's lower lip thrust forward and then stretched insolently into a grin.

“Go on,” he said softly, about to find here the
summation of his day, “you teachers don't know everythink.”

Very swiftly he reached up and, pulling her head down, kissed her hair. The informality of love bound her, unexpectedly, and him, calculatedly, in each other's arms for some time, argument propounded reasonably enough by the somnolence of the late afternoon. There was also the convention that requires male isolated with female, other things being equal, to go through the motions of passion, if not to their logical conclusion, then at least so far that each would be left with a sense of inquiry and unfulfilment. She burrowed child-like within the sun-warmed hollow of his arm. Now and again the white paper that was gull circled away in lovely geometry, drew tangents to the water, the remnant of the moon, or ran awkwardly on orange feet along the very fringe of the foam. Being not only a sentimentalist and a genuine lover of the external world, but also by a hair's breadth adjusted to the expectancy of any situation, Elsie felt an overwhelming desire to crown this temporary ecstasy with poetry, preferably her own, for nothing filled her with such venial pleasure as the exposure of her own emotions.

This is a day for birds to cut with arcs
Wind-shifting geometry in upper sky,
Tangent upon a dried-out shell of moon
Unsolved at four o'clock by wing or eye
.

The mental image propelled the words. Sleepily she evoked the same landscape for him and then wondered at the tiny silence suspended between them. She wondered how he normally reacted to poetry, by “normally” meaning those occasions when sentiment might not be his undoing, for the very air between their persons seemed alive with the electricity of imagery, apprehended and enjoyed.

“Who wrote that? Shakespeare?”

The sudden upsurge of anger and hatred surprised her, but nevertheless she was incapable of repressing this impatience with an ignorance which, in the world where he moved, caused all poetry to be classed as Shakespeare, the only name known, just as all music that was not popular in the hit-parade sense was “classical”. Perhaps if she were not angry she would shed bitter tears at the hopelessness of it all. Testily she jerked her head from the shelter of his arm, hoping that by thus severing animal contact her agitation would not communicate itself through the verbose messengers of skin.

Even as she rolled away on the dune she was startled to hear him say through unsounded, unexplored caves of sensitivity, “Go on, Elsie. Say some more. That had a sort of nice sadness about it. I could listen to you say poetry all day.”

She said with some reluctance, “No, it wasn't Shakespeare, Harry. It was mine.”

“You mean you wrote that?”

“Five minutes ago I thought of it. Yes. Why not? It's my one secret pleasure. Poetry or music, I can never make up my mind which I need more of, but I do know that poetry moves me far more than anything else. But then it has to be intensely personal to do that.”

Harry, stretching across the sandy slope, across a lifetime of years to some seed previously undiscovered in his personality, across acres of heaven into the nostalgia of sound, turned her small face to him and looked at her a long time without speaking. Finally he whispered, “Well, go on.”

And for a little while she did, fragments of Donne, of Browning, of Tagore, choosing with care the most tender of love lyrics, occasionally inserting an erotic verse of her own written in another time, another place and for another reason. Harry was as charmed as if someone had seized a handful of stars, crumbled them, and flung them into his dazzled eyes.

He possessed native shrewdness, humour, and a certain cynicism, but he was not aware until this moment that rhythmic words and the image they connoted could stir in him this almost unbearable response. Common sense told him that he was more than half won by the very fact that it was Elsie who was speaking. For many moments after her words had
ceased their soft
arpeggio
on the afternoon air he did not, could not, speak. When at last he did so, Elsie knew a large cold triumph, a painful success.

“I tell you, Elsie, if this ends, you an' me, I mean, there'll never be anyone else. Not ever, do you hear? So don't fool about with me. I think I'd kill you for it if you did.”

He bent over her and, seizing her by the shoulders, shook her roughly, forcing her to look at him, as if by physical strength he could pin down that elusive spirit. As well try to step on the head of one's own shadow. Alongside them two crushed yellow flowers gave off a cloying scent, which bathed their broken grey leaves. Air textured like canvas with salt and wind turned all the grass and all the trees away from the sea to break in a foam of blades and leaves upon the land. Quite suddenly, feeling his hands imperative upon her slender shoulders, conscious of the lonely stretching of beach, the tarred road unhoused for miles, and sensing in the man savagery a mere skin away, quite suddenly Elsie was afraid. She stiffened in his grasp, her mind racing like a train, but the anger, if it were that, passed away and he removed his fingers, gazing at her with a kind of innocent wonder.

“Where do all the thoughts come from? Out of that funny little head?” he said, twisting one plait. “I've never wrote a thing. I couldn't.”

“Written, Harry,” said Elsie, purist to the last. Prompted by what devil of madness?

She thought for a minute that he would hit her, but instead, swinging over abruptly, he jumped to his feet and began slapping the sand off the seat of his pants. Without a word he picked the bikes up, shaking them lightly also, and pushed one across to her.

They cycled along the coast road in silence for a mile, passing the water tower where a week before they had reined in their horses to discover the view and each other's mouths. Stringy-barks and iron-barks grew thickly here and wattles shook freckled lightning onto the turf. The road vanished before and behind into the silent corridor of trees; the sky arched a motionless blue.

Harry had been pricked in the worst possible way; he had been made little of at a time when he was only anxious to display emotion and appreciation. Reprisal loomed tremendous in his mind.

“I've a notion I can write if I really want to,” he said unexpectedly, “but, like you, I got to feel really moved about it.”

Elsie did not take her eyes off the road; but she was glad he had spoken; the silence was unbearable. Her mind was distracted from its project of cycling directly over fallen leaves, though there were few enough of them to make the game interesting, by hearing:

“I love and hate you. Strange to tell
  I don't know why. It hurts like hell.”

The glance he was throwing her was pregnant with malice and triumph. A rhyme if it be our own always affects us that way. Elsie, untaught by her first blunder, puzzled over a familiar ring in the couplet.

“That reminds me of something.”

Mockingly—“Shakespeare?”

“No. Long before him. A Roman called Catullus.
Odi et amo
. Do you know, I believe you must be his reincarnation, a cyclist saying his verse in the vernacular.”

But he refused to be charmed. As a matter of fact he was no longer listening, having made his point and, good humour regained, was singing in a most exaggerated cockney:

“In jest a yer,
  Or reven less,
  Wot can be wrawng,
  Or carn't you guess?
  She feels negleck-ted,
  An' he's suspeck-ted
  Of makin' whoopee 
. . .”

She did not press her argument, for it was useless, and so they rode back to the town, their bicycles
pedalled in time with their singing, swerving dangerously to give an illusion of dancing.

“De doo de doo
,
  
Ti ta tee ta
,
  
Da da de da
,
  
Doh doh doo doo
,
  
La dum di didi
,
  
Tee too ti tata
,
  
La da ti too too
 . . .”

August

T
HE USUAL
salad had run its course through the desperate hungers of permanent residents and now, their bellies faintly sigillate from lettuce leaves, shredded carrot and pineapple, they had fled back to banks, warehouses and schools. In the upstairs sitting-room, which looked down on the island gardens of Flinders Street, Elsie and tedium waited side by side, filling in time at the piano. Behind her along one wall was a sofa so swollen it appeared poisoned from its own deadly dyes. Dark and unfathomable prints hung trapped in ornate frames wherever there was a space. Elsie played a Glière prelude, shuddering each time her finger struck middle B only to sound a wooden click. The ivory was missing from three notes as well.