Owls Do Cry (10 page)

and didn’t he drink once but it was hushed up

didn’t he travel round the world in a sailing vessel or was it round and round himself?

The Chalklins were not at home, neither Jim nor Mrs, nor Fay. The blinds were down and an empty milk bottle, patched inside with dust, stood in the box by the gate.

—They must be home, Toby thought. It’s Saturday morning and they’re never out on a Saturday morning.

He went around to the back door and knocked loudly, hearing no movement inside but silence. The chimney had no smoke and the washhouse door was wedged shut with a piece of newspaper. There was a tea-towel hanging on one peg from the clothesline.

A neighbour looked over the fence and saw Toby.

—They’re away for the weekend, she said, glad to possess information and glad to part with it —What a great day, isn’t it?

She smiled at him.

—You’re Toby Withers, aren’t you? I
thought
you looked like Toby Withers. The family’s away for the weekend, Mrs and Mr and Fay, though Fay’s gone to the Crudges’, Albert’s her fiancé you know. Fancy getting married. It’ll be a change from working in the woollen mill all week and every week till she’s tired out.

—Will it? Toby said.

—Yes, you know how pale they get, being inside all day.

—And getting married, Toby said, she will live outside then?

The neighbour looked surprised —How funny of you to say that. She’ll live in a house.

—Oh, said Toby.

—And now, said the neighbour, I must fly. Give my regards to your mother, and now I really must fly.

—My husband’s away in the swamp, shooting for ducks, she said.

And Toby said,
But I came for Fay to take her with me, for her to be my wife and myself to be her husband. I thought we should go down on the beach in the lupins, but sit for a while first and watch the sea coming in and the dark blue waves curled over like the beak of a bird spitting lace, yes I came for Fay, I was going to pull her hair off and float it on the sea like weed and take my rifle shining and new with oil and shoot my little paradise duck and pick the drab tired feathers from her body

and bandage with love the scar upon her neck

her neck that I will twist for her to die

the scar that leather has made, the leather strap of the mill girl day after day, oh yes, I came for my wife
.

—Are you all right, Toby? the neighbour asked.

Toby frowned at her.

—I thought you were gone, he said, to the swamp, to be shot.

The neighbour looked alarmed and hurried away inside to tell someone about queer Toby Withers but there was no one to tell and say
Just imagine
to; which is the worst of living, having no one around at the time to tell.

Toby drove home, slowly. He felt tired. Pictures tonight, he thought. Oh hell. But I mustn’t swear because my mother disapproves. Poor mum, I’ll stand by her.

He parked his truck on the flat and crossed the bridge to the house. The wild ducks, the refugees, sat on the water like decoys. Toby’s footsteps startled them to a tremble of green and blue feather across the brown taut sheet of water that tucked itself into the banks of the creek, amongst the
mint growing tall and the sleeping bulbs of narcissus and jonquil.

—Duck duck duck Toby called, clicking his tongue and feeling in his pocket for crumbs, but what would crumbs be doing in his pocket, never mind, duck duck duck you little beauties.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors

a thousand windows and a thousand doors

not one of them was ours, my dear
,

not one of them was ours
.

He went up the path to the house. It was near lunch time and he could smell the stew with its sunken rocks of potatoes eddied and swum with gravy and shreds of steak clinging together in their drowned and warm world. His mother opened the door,

—Oh Toby, she said. As if he had been away travelling for a hundred or thousand years and had only just returned. She seemed to search him, his heavy weather-beaten face for sign of salt storm from an unknown ocean, his large oil-stained hands for what he might bring in them for her – ivory, peacocks, violets, gold –

—ah gold.

And she greeted him with her old love-invitation to food, as if he had starved on his voyaging.

—Oh Toby, you’ll want something to eat. Come and have your lunch. Did you see the Chalklins?

She said the Chalklins, but she did not mean them, she meant the worlds of people on other islands beyond the Withers island with its huddled Bob and Amy and Toby
and its wild ducks crying out, this morning, beneath the winter clouds.

—Did you see the Chalklins?

—They were out.

—Oh, that’s funny, they’re never out in the weekend.

Was Fay home perhaps?

—No, she was away too.

—Well I’ll get your lunch dished up and call your father, said Amy, in a tone of triumph, like a happy magician about to perform an infallible sleight of hand and heart.

—But, your father’s up the back, he’s been there for half an hour. I tell him to go to the doctor but he just keeps taking those pills.

She leaned to Toby and whispered

—He bleeds.

—He’s a fool not to see about it then.

—Oh, don’t go quarrelling with him, Toby. You know what your father is. Listen, there are the ducks calling out. But they know they’re safe at our place. They have somewhere to go.

—Yes, said Toby, they have somewhere to go.

Have you ever been to the pictures in the town where the Withers live? There are two theatres opposite each other, the Regent and the Miami. At the Regent the prices are higher and the films what are called first-class without any intrusion of moronic cartoon or ride-’em-cowboy serials or half-naked women stranded in rubber plantations and beset upon by perspiring white men in topees and shorts, the acknowledged tropical dress. The toffs, the rich and educated, go to the Regent in their best clothes and furs. There is a fake night sky in the ceiling, covered with stars that are fixed to twinkle realistically in the central-heated air, above the rows of looking and rustling and hushing rich and prosperous people. The lights go out, the stars fade, there is a murmur of pleasure. Oh what luxury even to breathe.

The Miami, especially in winter, is austere and cold
with an icy wind blowing through the heavy velvet curtains at the back. The unenlightened people go there, to whistle and sing out and rustle chocolate papers and blow through their teeth Whe-e-e-e whenever the hero and heroine kiss, or when she throws her clothes from behind a curtain and you know she is either going to bed or about to have a censored bath. The crowd like the kissing and the touching and the fights with pulled hair and slapped faces.

—You brute, how dare you.

—My darling, you are everything in the world to me.

The Miami, because of its lower caste, does not cost as much as the Regent. If you want to look at the stars there, you go outside to see them fretting their light with frost and cold cloud. They cannot be extinguished with a turn of a switch and you do not pay for them.

If you had been at the Miami theatre on the night of the first of May you would have seen Toby Withers sitting by himself in the fourth from the back row. He wore his new tie and his dark blue suit, his best. His shoes were polished and his rough brown hair glistened with hair-cream that he bought in a heart-shaped bottle and kept on the shelf in the bathroom. His hands were red and engrained with dirt and hung ashamed and awkward with no hiding-place. In his pocket, though you could not see them, he was keeping them for when the picture started, there was a sixpenny roll of fruit-flavoured sweets, some orange and raspberry, lemon, strawberry, Toby could not tell which until he opened them, it was always a surprise. Also he had a bar of chocolate. And in his other pocket a copy of the Saturday night Sports Special, a sick yellow colour, where the racing
news was printed, and results of football and shield games; a page of problem letters to Uncle Jamie, a comic strip of travel on the moon, and an article on the Real Inside Life of Hollywood. Toby was keeping the Sports paper till after, when he went home, and then he would draw it from his pocket, and his father, going to bed, would stop in the kitchen doorway,

—Let us look at the sports, he would say, extending his hand.

And Toby would spread it out upon the table,

—I haven’t read it myself, he would say, powerfully holding tight to the sick yellow treasure, not wanting to read it but crying and laughing inside himself at the way his father cringed in the doorway for a drug-drop of the sick magic.

So he sat by himself in the pictures. One time an usher showed a young woman to the seat next to Toby, and he reached to turn it down for her and smiled at her. But her boyfriend was following and he sat down and they drew close and whispered and giggled and ate wine gums, poking their tongues out to see what colour they were

—Mine’s what colour?

—Green, what’s mine?

—Yours is green too.

—They must have both been lemon.

And they thought this astounding deduction very funny and laughed and laughed that they had eaten a lemon sweet.

Toby thought, If they carry on this way, I shan’t be able to hear the picture, it’s just like them to sit next to me and
behave like schoolchildren. Ah, it’s beginning now. Why did I come? Why do I ever do anything? When will I stop taking fits? There’s Mrs Crat and her husband, how old she looks; and he too, I remember when they seemed quite young and she used to stand at her washhouse door and laugh, and no one knew why she laughed, standing there at her washhouse door and looking outside at the world. She used to carry messages home on a Friday, her arm almost bending to touch the ground with the weight of the basket. We borrowed their spade and never gave it back. And there’s Bill Trout and Mary. How funny. We tin-canned them and threw rice at them and they gave us a cream bun that was only half cream. And now he’s one of the heads at the freezing works, with his face like a hunk of meat, and fat, and when he went for his holiday to the city only last week and one of the chaps saw him there, and I said to the chap What was he doing when you saw him he answered,

—Why, looking in the window of a butcher’s shop.

They’ve one little girl who lies down and screams and is spoilt, they say. It seems as if everyone’s here tonight that I know, all crowding in. Some day I will get out of this and go up north perhaps or somewhere to a new place and set up business and be comfortable and rich and loved; but it’s too late.

He unrolled the top sweet of the packet and popped it in his mouth. It was a raspberry sweet. He thought, my tongue will be red now. Is it? But I cannot ask anyone to find out. I think the next sweet will be orange, or it may be another raspberry, sometimes there are two raspberries, one after the other, or lemon, or cherry, it is exciting to guess.

He crumpled the silver paper tight, pounding it close with his fist. His hand shook slightly, and he dropped the paper on the floor. And the cartoon began. He stared at the screen and watched the tiny man growing bigger and bigger and slaying a wild lion.

The audience relaxed and laughed, warm and satisfied.

Toby did not write letters. He was surprised to receive one the following week from Fay Chalklin, who said in neat handwriting, Dear Toby, I was away last week and did not see you but our neighbour said you called with the books for Dad. On Sunday (this next Sunday) Dad is having a birthday tea and would like you to come if you can. Dad has asked me to write this letter for him, as he is hopeless at letters. Yours sincerely Fay Chalklin.

Amy Withers brought the letter up from the box at the gate. She was breathless and holding her hand over her heart and in her hand was the letter. She put it on the mantelpiece, face up, so Toby would see it when he came home, and she sat down on the sofa. Her face was flushed and she felt tired. It’s my heart, she thought, that makes me this way. It’ll give out one of these days or nights. I wonder who the letter’s from. I’ll just lie here and watch
the wax-eyes on top of the old dunny roof, and then I’ll see about making the shortbread for the weekend.

Toby came home tired and cold and with the local paper in his hand. He sat down to read it first before his father came in from the garden.

—Any mail?

—A letter for you, Toby. The mail was late.

—It’s always late these days. Why don’t you ring up about it?

—I will, Toby, if it comes late again.

—But you always say you will and you never do.

—Why don’t you read your letter? It’s probably from your girlfriend, said Amy softly and insinuatingly.

Toby blushed. —Go on, Mum, you know who
my
girlfriend is. He looked at her and smiled. —You look hot, Mum. Sit down and have a rest.

She laughed. —Take off those heavy gumboots, Toby, and get your feet warm. I’ll call your father for a cup of tea. He’s out in the garden. The beans have escaped the frost.

—Have they? It’s from Fay Chalklin, Mum. She wants me to go around on Sunday night for a birthday tea. I’ll have to see whether I’ll be busy or not.

Amy Withers looked afraid. Toby was her only son, and when his fits came, who was it who looked after him and told him to have faith? And ironed his shirts and darned his socks?

Toby opened the evening paper.

—By the way, Mum, I’ve got a contract for pulling down the Peterkin Hotel, so I’ve given up at the Freezing Works. It’ll mean money.

—Will you go to the party, Toby?

—Oh it’s not a party, Mum, just a high tea.

Bob Withers came in the door, glanced suspiciously at Toby and Amy, then sat down in his favourite chair by the fire.

—I’ve beat the frost, Mum, he said.

—Oh Bob, I’m so glad. And are the potatoes in?

—Yes, potatoes and peas and cabbage.

—Oh Bob, isn’t that lovely.

She looked proudly at her husband who had beaten the frost, and then proudly at her son who was going to pull down a hotel, and earn more and more money; but afraid of him she felt, because of the more and more money, and the party, the invitation for next Sunday.