Tim (5 page)

Mrs. Parker disregarded the last part of Mary's statement. "If that ain't typical of them rotten buggers!" she snarled. "Not content to make the poor little blighter's life a misery during the day, but scooted off to the pub and left him to do their dirty work! They had the hide to tell me they was all coming back to clean up! I've a good mind to knock a couple of hundred quid off Mr. Harry Markham's bill!"

Mary put down her teacup and stared at Mrs. Parker, puzzled. "What makes you so indignant, Mrs. Parker?"

The yellow and purple pansies swathing Mrs. Parker's ample bosom heaved. "Well, wouldn't you be? Oh, I forgot, I didn't see youse last night to tell youse what those miserable bastards did to the poor little bloke, did I? Sometimes I swear I could kill every man that was ever born! They don't seem to have a skerick of sympathy or understanding for the underdog, unless of course he's a drunk or a no-hoper like themselves. But someone like Tim, what does a decent day's work and keeps his end up, they don't feel any pity for him at all. He's their butt, their whipping boy, and the poor little coot's too dill-brained to realize it! He can't help it if he was born simple, now can he? A terrible shame, though, ain't it? Fancy a boy what looks like him not being the full quid! I could cry! Well, anyway, wait until I tell you what they did to him yestiddy morning at smoke-oh ..."

Mrs. Parker's nasal, common voice whined on as she told Mary her horrible little story, but Mary only half-listened, her eyes riveted on the bent golden head at the bottom of the yard.

Last night before she had gone to bed she had culled the shelves of her library, searching for a face that looked like his. Botticelli? she wondered, and finding some of his reproductions in a book she dismissed the artist contemptuously. Those faces were too soft, too feminine, too subtly cunning and feline. In the end she had given up the search, quite unsatisfied. Only in the ancient Greek and Roman statues had she found some hint of Tim, perhaps because his kind of beauty was better illustrated in stone than on canvas. He was a three-dimensional creature. And she had wished bitterly that in her ungifted hands there had resided the skill to immortalize him.

She was conscious of a terrible, crushing disappointment, a desire to weep: Mrs. Parker's presence had faded to the back of her thoughts. It was a kind of ironic anti-climax to discover now that Tim's tragic mouth and wistful, wondering eyes led inward to a nothing, that his spark had been snuffed out of existence long before there could possibly have been tragedy or loss. He was no better than a dog or a cat, which one kept because it was good to look upon and blindly, lovingly faithful. But it could not think, it could never answer intelligently and draw out a shivering response in another questing mind. All the beast did was sit there, smiling and loving. As did Tim, Tim the simpleton. Tricked into eating excrement, he had not vomited it as any thinking being must; he had cried instead, as a dog would have howled, and been cajoled back into smiling again by the prospect of something good to eat.

Childless, loveless, destitute of any humanizing influence, Mary Horton had no emotional yardstick whereby to measure this new, frightening concept of a mindless Tim. As retarded emotionally as he was intellectually, she did not know that Tim could be loved because of his stunted mental growth, let alone in spite of it. She had thought of him the way Socrates must have thought of Alci-biades, the aging, unlovely philosopher confronted with a youth of surpassing physical and intellectual beauty. She had imagined herself introducing him to Beethoven and Proust, expanding his careless young mind until it encompassed music and literature and art, until he was as beautiful within as he was without. But he was a simpleton, a poor, silly half-wit.

They had a pungently evocative way of expressing it, smacking of the earthy callousness so typical of the Australian; they translated intelligence into money, and expressed the one in terms of the other. He who was poorly equipped mentally was "not the full quid"; a value was set upon his intellectual powers, expressed in parts of the dollar or in the vernacular,
quid.
He might be worth as much as ninety cents or as little as nine cents, and still be not the full quid.

Mrs. Parker was not aware that she held only a small part of Mary's attention, and chattered on happily about the insensitivity of the average male, drank several cups of tea, and answered her own queries when Mary did not. At length she heaved herself to her feet and took her leave.

"Cheery-bye, pet, and thanks for the cuppa tea. If you don't have anything he'd fancy in yer fridge, send him across to me and I'll feed him."

Mary nodded absently. Her visitor disappeared down the steps, while she returned to her contemplation of Tim. Glancing at her watch she saw the time was creeping on toward nine, and remembered that these outdoor workmen liked their morning tea around nine. She went inside and made a fresh pot, thawed a frozen chocolate cake and covered it with freshly whipped cream.

"Tim!" she called, putting down her tray on the table under the vines; the sun was stealing across the ridge of the roof, and the table by the steps was getting too hot for comfort.

He looked up, waved to her and stopped the tractor immediately to hear what she was saying.

"Tim, come and have a cup of tea!"

His face lit up with puppyish eagerness; he bounded off the tractor and up the yard, dived into the little fern-house, reappeared with a brown paper bag, and took the back steps two at a time.

"Gee, thanks for calling me, Miss Horton, I wasn't caught up with the time," he said happily, sitting down in the chair she indicated and waiting docilely until she told him he might begin.

"Can you tell the time, Tim?" she asked gently, amazed that she could ask gently.

"Oh, no, not really. I sort of know when it's time to go home, that's when the big hand's at the top and the little hand is three thingies behind it. Three o'clock. But I don't have a watch of my own, because Pop says I'd lose it. I don't worry. Someone always tells me the time, like when it's time to make the tea for smoke-oh or break for lunch or go home. I'm not the full quid, but everyone knows I'm not, so it doesn't matter."

"No, I suppose it doesn't," she answered sadly "Eat up, Tim, the cake's all for you."

"Oh, goody! I love choccy cake, especially witr lots of cream on it like this one! Thanks, Miss Horton! "

"How do you like your tea, Tim?"

"No milk and lots of sugar."

"Lots of sugar? How much is that?"

He looked up at her, frowning, cream ail over his face. "Gosh, I can't remember. I just sort of fill it up until it spills into the saucer, then I know it's all right."

"Did you ever go to school, Tim?" she probed, beginning to be interested in him again.

"For a little while. But I couldn't learn, so they didn't make me keep on going. I stayed home and looked after Mum."

"But you do grasp what's said to you, and you did cope with the tractor all by yourself."

"Some things are real easy, but reading and writing's awful hard, Miss Horton."

Much surprised at herself, she patted his head as she stood stirring his tea. "Well, Tim, it doesn't matter."

"That's what Mum says."

He finished all the cake, then remembered he had a sandwich from home and ate that as well, washing the repast down with three big cups of tea.

"Struth, Miss Horton, that was super!" he sighed, smiling at her blissfully.

"My name is Mary, and it's much easier to say Mary than Miss Horton, don't you think? Why don't you call me Mary?"

He looked at her doubtfully. "Are you sure it's all right? Pop says I mustn't call old people anything but Mister or Missus or Miss."

"Sometimes it's permissible, as between friends."

"Eh?"

She tried again, mentally expunging all polysyllables from her vocabulary. "I'm not really all that old, Tim, it's just this white hair of mine that makes me seem so old. I don't think your Pop would mind if you called me Mary."

"Doesn't your hair mean you're old, Mary? I always thought it did! Pop's hair is white and so is Mum's, and I know they're old."

"He's twenty-five," she thought, "so his Pop and Mum are probably only slightly older than I am," but she said, "Well, I'm younger than they are, so I'm not quite old yet."

He got to his feet. "It's time for me to go back to work. You've got an awful lot of lawn, Mary. I hope I finish it in time."

"Well, if you don't there are plenty of other days. You can come some other time and finish it, if you'd like to."

He considered the problem gravely. "I think I'd like to come back, as long as Pop says I can." He smiled at her. "I like you, Mary, I like you better than Mick and Harry and Jim and Bill and Curly and Dave. I like you better than anyone except Pop and Mum and my Dawnie. You're pretty, you've got such lovely white hair."

Mary struggled with a hundred indefinable emotions rushing in on her from all sides, and managed to smile. "Why, thank you, Tim, that's very nice of you."

"Oh, think nothing of it," he said nonchalantly, and hopped down the stairs with his hands flapping at each side of his head and his behind poking out. "That was my special imitation of a rabbit!" he called from the lawn.

"It was very good, Tim, I knew you were a rabbit the minute you started hopping," she replied.

She gathered up the tea things and carried them inside.

She found it terribly hard to alter her conversation to a toddler level, for Mary Horton had never had anything to do with children since she ceased being a child herself, and she had never really been young anyway. But she was perceptive enough to sense that Tim could be easily hurt, that she had to mind what she said to him, control her temper and her exasperation, that if she let him feel the sting of her tongue he would divine the tenor of the statement if not the actual words. Remembering how she had snapped at him the previous day when he had been, as she thought at the time, deliberately obtuse, she was mortified. Poor Tim, so utterly unaware of the nuances and undercurrents of adult conversation, and so completely vulnerable. He liked her; he thought she was pretty because she had white hair, as did his mother and father.

How could his mouth be so sad, when he knew so little and functioned on such a limited scale?

She got her car out and went down to the supermarket to shop before lunch, since she had nothing in the house that would appeal to him. The chocolate cake was her emergency entertaining fund, the cream a fortuitous mistake on her milkman's part. Tim had brought his lunch with him, she knew, but perhaps he hadn't enough, or could be charmed by the production of something like hamburgers or hot dogs, children's party fare.

"Have you ever been fishing, Tim?"- she asked him over lunch.

"Oh, yes, I love fishing," he replied, beginning on his third hot dog. "Pop takes me fishing sometimes, when he isn't too busy."

"How often is he busy?"

"Well, he goes to the races and the cricket and the football and things like that. I don't go with him because I get sick in crowds, the noise and all the people make my head ache and my tummy go all queer."

"I must take you fishing, then," she said, and left it at that.

By the middle of the afternoon he had finished the backyard and came to ask about the front. She looked at her watch.

"I don't think we'll bother about the front today, Tim, it's nearly time for you to go home. Why don't you come back next Saturday and do the front for me then, if your Pop will let you?"

He nodded happily. "All right, Mary."

"Go and fetch your bag from the fern-house, Tim. You can change in my bathroom, then you'll be able to see if you have everything on properly."

The interior of her house, so chaste and austere, fascinated him. He roamed about the gray-toned living room in his bare feet, digging his toes into the deep wool carpet with an expression of near-ecstasy on his face, and stroking the pearl-gray crushed velvet upholstery.

"Gosh, Mary, I love your house!" he enthused. "It all feels so soft and sort of cool!"

"Come and see my library," she said, wanting to show him her pride and joy so badly that she took him by the hand.

But the library did not impress him in the least; it made him frightened and inclined to be tearful. "All those books!" he shuddered, and would not stay even when he saw that his reaction had disappointed her.

It took her several minutes to coax him out of his odd dread of the library, and she took care not to repeat the mistake by showing him anything else intellectual.

Once recovered from his initial delight and confusion, he evinced a critical faculty, and took her to task for not having any color in the house.

"It feels so lovely, Mary, but it's all the same color!" he protested. "Why isn't there any red? I love red!"

"Can you tell me which color this is?" she asked, holding up a red silk bookmark.

"It's red, of course," he answered scornfully.

"Then I'll see what I can do," she promised.

She gave him an envelope with thirty dollars in it, a much higher wage than any laborer could command in Sydney. "My address and telephone number are written on a piece of paper inside," she instructed him, "and I want you to give it to your father when you get home, so that he'll know where I am and how to get in touch with me. Now don't forget to give it to him, will you?"

He gazed at her, hurt. "I never forget anything when I'm told properly," he said.

"I'm sorry, Tim, I didn't mean to hurt you," said Mary Horton, who had never cared whether what she said hurt anyone. Not that she habitually said hurtful things; but Mary Horton avoided saying hurtful things from motives of tact, diplomacy, and good manners, not because she wanted to avoid giving another being pain.

She waved him goodbye from her front stoop, after he had refused to let her drive him to the railway station. Once he had gone a few yards down the street she walked to the* front gate and leaned over it to watch him until he disappeared around the corner.

To anyone else in the street watching, he would have seemed an amazingly handsome young man striding along the road at the height of his health and looks, the world his to command. It was like some divine jest, she thought, the kind of joke the Greek immortals had loved to play on their creation, man, when he got conceited or forgot what was owed to them. The gargantuan laughter Tim Melville must provoke!