by Thea Astley
He listed survival possibilities: a few tins of food, a waterbottle, a lamp filched from the boi-haus, matches and a copy of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Another night before rowing on? He could not bear the loss of face that returning to Doebin would mean. For the rest of the day he tracked the loathsome Rim’s inefficiency as beachcomber, checked his failed gardens, wells, even uncovered lost pieces of manuscript damp with the tears of wife and child hauled off to placate a madman’s dream. Was he less mad? He totted up the pluses of wilderness that cancelled fog and damp and bedsitters and cold-water walk-ups run by landladies with pursed lips. The addition tottered when he realised he had no can-opener. ‘No,’ he said aloud to the patron saint of editors and that vanished portly author forever poncing through the swing doors of a Los Angeles hotel. ‘No no no no! Not yet!’
He attacked one of the tins with a rock and prised open a congealed mess of mince and vegetable. To be eaten with fingers. And as the evening rolled in he was driven mad by sandflies and later mosquitoes that droned in the recesses of the hut. No wonder Rim fled. Moths drummed against the lamp under rain-shout on iron as he lay sleepless waiting for the squall to pass, only to be offered another, a kind of epiphany, when he walked out into a night noisy with water and filled with a surf of stars.
From across the channel came an explosion, and by the time he ran to the sand-spit there was a burst of flame on Doebin, fire hurdling towards that louring hump of mountain, palms black and ragged against orange light.
Crazily he thought of the Strip.
Silence for a moment as he watched, and then the crack of a rifle shot, murderously clear. And then another.
An excuse, he argued within. A reason to row back, offer help, expunge his pigheaded flight. Resentment and pride and the comfortlessness of what he had done all taunted him on that lonely beach and even as he debated, his self-interest was ruptured by more shots and a second detonation that bucked the shoreline. Other fires flared in the settlement, and across the water came screams and cries and then, more terrifyingly, a stabbing and total silence as if everyone were bolted up in some kind of vacuum. While he watched, the flames rose higher in five separate biblical pillars.
Useless, he convinced himself. You would be useless. A craven’s plea.
His conscience, jerked this way and that, wouldn’t let him wait for dawn. Back in the hut he scrambled his few possessions together, filled the waterbottle at the tank and took the lot down to the boat. Oh God, he kept apologising as he tripped and stumbled on coral lumps, as he fumbled rowlocks and oars into position and dragged the dinghy across the shallows to the deeper water. He was running away again.
Was there no end to the running?
There was certainly a story in this: fleeing fires, fleeing rifle shots, constantly rationalising his guilt-panic as he pulled away south, trusting to the archipelagic nature of these land lumps to provide resting places. Thirty-five miles if he could do it, stupidly refusing to doubt he could cover those blinding rocking miles down the coast with the sun all day clobbering his neck. You don’t have a choice, Bosco told him. The tide and the currents were with him and the relative coolness of the night while he swung dipped pulled, waiting for Havannah Island to loom through the dark.
The rain started again, heavy marbles of water that blinded and confused. Breather to bail with the jagged mince tin. He plastered thoughts of Phoenicians and Vikings like medallions on his mind-screen, watched long-running silents of the triremes pitching across the Mediterranean or the longboats slicing the waters of the North Sea. A change of programme. He thought of Bligh. How many miles to Batavia? Three thousand from Tofua with only a compass? (He didn’t have a compass.) And he was flinching at the thought of a mere thirty. (But only one set of clerkly hands and shoulders. No lower-deck swabbers here to share the burden.)
The tide was running him in towards Havannah. Should he let the dinghy drift on the south-east-bearing current or work with it to get beyond that point before daybreak and the enemy of sun? Body muscle against water muscle. Swing dip drag. Tale of an anti-hero.
At first he had been surprised at the ease with which current and boat wedded and at how smoothly he slipped through darkness. In his first fever he had wanted to head directly for the coast opposite, a shorter distance by half, but he knew his chances of landing near a settlement were remote on this unpeopled seaboard. A country without resonance, he said aloud. Or with too much. He looked back to Doebin, now a distant shadow, and the pillars of fire had sagged to red glints.
When the dinghy slid in towards shore at Havannah he was afraid to rest, knowing he had only three hours of tide with him riding the current, racing the dawn. He shipped oars briefly, uncapped the waterbottle and took a gulp. He opened his mouth to the rain and let it drive into him. Then he started rowing again, his skinned palms screaming with every drag of the oars.
After another two hours he could see the bony ridge of Rattlesnake Island watching his folly. The horizon grew a bloody rim through storm cloud. His watch had stopped. Tristram and Uncle Toby paddled for their lives in the water-slop (where’s the good doctor?) in the belly of the boat. As the rain eased, the light hardened and he kept pulling on the oars, pulling, bracing himself with chants, with muttered shanties that robbed his breath. To go back, he knew, were tedious as to go o’er.
O blow the man down bullies, he croaked, blow the man down, to me way hey, et cetera. Moving into, There’s fire in the cabin and in the fo’c’sle too, to me way hey hee hi ho, accented with each plunge of the blades. Capstan songs. Songs for lowering the sheets. Work songs. But the effort of pitting his voice against the void exhausted, though irony helped.
Deliberately he thought of that fool Rim and his quarter tip. Rage kept him going through an agony of back and shoulders, the screaming tendons of his neck, the blistered hands now bandaged in pieces of torn shirt. There was little time left before the tide swung around to nudge his boat back the way it had come. Nature’s malice. Swing dip drag with the tide turning, his whole body an automaton of pain. Overhead clouds spread canvas without effort, sometimes obscuring the sun and offering a blind to the dazzle of moving waters. He closed his eyes and pulled.
In the late afternoon his boat washed in to a beach at Rattlesnake. Here the mainland was so close but offered only a line of scrub miles from anywhere. He’d never make it on foot. An hour before, he had seen a busybody launch (checking catastrophe?) bouncing north towards Doebin, too far away in the roadstead for his wavings and shoutings that disintegrated in air. Syllables fragmented. The book he was writing, should be writing, broke into chapters, paragraphs, phrases, a litter of unconnected consonants and vowels.
On the beach he dragged the dinghy up above the tide line, drank another two inches from his waterbottle, upturned the boat and crept underneath to sleep.
Soldier crabs crawling across his legs woke him in the early dark. Sandflies worked over exposed sunburned skin, even nagging through the stubble of his jaws. Where, he marvelled, was that otherworld sifter of manuscripts, courted by untalented hacks at cocktail parties and book launchings? Here here here, being nibbled by the real cannibals, unshaven, stinking, peeling, with graveyard breath. At the sea edge he sluiced his head and rinsed out his mouth, ear cocked to tide crash and suck. He thought of them back at the settlement: the whites he barely knew, the blacks he had been dissuaded from knowing. Once he had asked the schoolmaster, Vine, about the families of those he struggled to teach in his makeshift classroom. Vine was a silent man who kept his counsel at boarding-house meals, a book propped open beside his plate. He had mumbled vaguenesses in reply. He avoided friendly gestures, often neglected to appear at those semi-compulsory sundowners (lying, I never drink!) and retreated into some inner abscess of the soul. Like me, Morrow had decided, but was unable to probe beyond.
And there’s a book in him too, he said to himself.
He rebound his hands with dry strips of shirt, shoved the dinghy into the water and began row
ing again.
He swung the prow towards the mainland, a mere few miles away, determined to follow the coastline closely to the first light, the first welcoming glint of roof. But there was nothing except interminable green shuddering into darkness, the bump of small waves and a sickly quarter-moon lost suddenly in rain.
Swing dip pull.
He heard himself sobbing as he dragged the boat south. Dreamt of hot food, soft beds. He was rowing towards a well-set table, starched napery, cut glass, quacking out what was meant to be laughter. He was no mug pioneer like Rim, determined on hunting copy for his dangling participles and lifestyle. But right at that moment he could, he fancied—swing dip pull—face a sherry party, a bit of a shindig with basso women and soprano males, all vowels impeccable, condemning in sly asides his firm’s latest offering while the author, hit with the old print fever, the incandescence of the launch, pranced just out of earshot, courting critics.
But the afterbirth!
That sniffing phoney praise from reviewer pals; the bitcheries from the jealous, the offended. Those sheer resenters!
And then the fade-out. As his own boat was blotted by squall.
Everything fluid, sky and earth. He sensed his littleness, his cork-bob unimportance in unharnessable tides. By ten that night—measuring hours in pain-lengths—the tide was on the turn but now he was in sight of Magnetic’s hummock, shadowy as a stage-prop, and his bobbing craft was nudged inevitably away from shore-comfort towards that looming shadow, shoved out to sea by the gutters near Pallarenda and the speeding shallows on the southern side of the point.
Had he slept, despite his raging hands?
He had rowed through the night under a sky black with storm, the sea chopping viciously at the boat, breaking over the gunwales, the bailing tin afloat. He was drifting along the west coast of Magnetic, hacked at by busy water that kept driving him in towards mangroves near Cockle Bay. Through rain and salt came the smell of sand, earth, leaves. And there he was weeping. Him! Laughing with relief. Journey’s end. If he could just round that granite spur he would be in shelter, he knew.
The sky was lightening, revealing shapes. He saw he was too close to the point. Waves smashed themselves apart in black and white on the rocks. Black fangs snapped from the sea. Pulling frantically away, thrusting an oar at shelves that threatened in the scurry of tide and current, he thought cravenly of nothing but survival. Even publishing parties became luridly precious as he gasped for the synthetics he had left behind in London. After all this! To be denied so close!
Swinging about on his seat he faced the prow, using his oars like punt poles, shoving and driving and panting as he wrestled water for a glimpse of beach, a slice of sand-white against darkness. The long jetty down which he had strolled, day tripper, two months before, was a mere few hundred yards away and there was a man fishing. He could make out the hunched figure against sky.
Morrow let out what he thought was a yell, was merely a craark. Closer. The man’s back was turned. Curses and yells in whispers, frightened of washing past the jetty as his arms refused to match the drubbing waves. He closed his eyes and let the dinghy ride the swell. He was sobbing without knowing, his dried mouth hacking out terrible sounds. He couldn’t see, couldn’t think. One oar fell from his hand and washed away and he bent forward uselessly after it to pitch giddily into the belly of the boat, floating with Shandy in the bilge. The dinghy thudded against a pile, swung about, cracked, and wedged beneath salt-stinking timbers as green sea washed over.
He was beyond caring.
Someone had dragged him out. The fisherman?
Voices making no sense gabbed in gull cries round his water-blocked ears. He was plastered on sand, a wordless bit of sea-wrack, while a rough stranger paw propped his head and a beaker trickled water between his split lips. There were gobbling sounds. His? Arms hoisted. Carried.
He woke on the verandah of the Dagoombah pub, crusted eyelids first opening on the narrow edges of solidity: the cot, the floorboards, a door leading back to voices; then his eyes glanced towards railing and beyond, blinking at a storm-streaked sky and palm fronds nagged by rain. Between the trees mist dangled like cotton candy.
Someone had placed his dried clothes on a chair.
He absorbed these things, closed his eyes, opened them, tested his feet against the sheet, peeled that back and creaked upright, his entire body stiffened with pain. Even dragging on a shirt made him whimper. He limped his way along the inside courtyard verandah to a bathroom and leaned exhausted against the closed door. From across the room his mirrored face frightened him. Years had piled up.
He had slept all day, he discovered, but at supper that evening the pub was full of speculation, the shootings on Doebin, his own bit of jetsam spewed up by the sea. He shoved mashed potato moistened with gravy between ruined lips, avoiding eyes bright with some kind of noxious interest. Doebin? they asked slyly. He said he wasn’t there. You’re lucky to be here, eh mate? they said. They examined him as if he were a fugitive while he denied any knowledge. Sure, mate, they said. She’s right. The police launch had gone over the day before. Pity they hadn’t spotted him, eh? Saved him a bit of sweat.
Morrow sucked painfully at his tea, nodding and nodding. He suspected his accent irritated rather than impressed. Could he flatten vowels to match spirits?
The dining-room was a vast bare space fronting the palms, the beach, the turmoil of darkening waters scored by white. Against one wall a piano, its varnish flaking, exhausted by salt air. A barrier of vertical wooden shutters, open to night and wind, sliced the world into rectangles, sliced the conversation about him.
‘No ferry till morning,’ the pub owner commented. He leant too close, one pally hand on Morrow’s anguished shoulder. ‘You be right to go back?’ Morrow nodded. ‘You can stay on if you want,’ the pub owner insisted, sturdily curious. ‘No trouble. Plenty of spare rooms this time of the year.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No thank you.’
He went back upstairs and lay down once more on the verandah stretcher. His bag had been lugged up as well from the wrecked dinghy and the contents spread to dry. Shandy was a block of soggy pulp that might never cure. It would take weeks for the Coral Sea to dry out. He rolled to the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette, seeing himself reduced to a wraith of that editorial cog who once sifted adventure yarns for dreamers who could never, not ever, touch the actuality of what he had just lived through. The real thing, he thought with stupid pride. He had experienced the real thing. The thought nourished his bones and he dismissed those London years as abstractions, pointless as the words the fronds beyond the railing were scribbling on wind.
Back in his old room next day at the Exchange there he was, a bruised paper-stuffed man who once peddled whodunnits now absorbing fragments of whodunnit speculation at communal mealtimes: shot the lot…No, only the doc and his lady friend…Cooked his kids, would you believe?…Not true…He got his, shot in the guts by some trigger-happy boong, told to do it, all the whites pissing their pants with fright, even the dep.
He walked away from these words, and finally found a job at a local radio station (they liked his accent—touch of class!) where he spent his days broadcasting assumptions to a gob-open town of listeners crouched by wireless sets. The irony of it tickled him. His copy of Shandy eventually dried out. And in the fourth week as he walked along Flinders Street to work, he was surprised to encounter his late landlady flanked by her limpidly beautiful daughters. ‘Aha,’ she said over-dramatically while the daughters smiled and smiled, ‘this is some kind of fate!’
Replies clotted.
As they had clotted his few weeks on Doebin with Mrs Curthoys amicably bullying, genteel above that underlying grain of coarseness, eyeing the doctor eyeing her girls, utterly happy, Morrow presumed, to have her finger laid ‘upon the place’—or that of her eldest daughter!
Yet later that week, taking Sterne’s suggestion to heart, he paused at Chapter 38, Book VI, took pen and ink, and on the approve
d blank page of Shandy drew his own version of widow Wadman, as unlike his wife as resentment would allow. Something took over. Lines flowed from his pen: sensual curves, concealed mirth. There was a rich swag of hair swept into a high roll, wide absorbing eyes, a mouth with crinkled corners below a straight but impressive nose.
He looked at what he had sketched. It was Mrs Curthoys.
He grow bigger.
Young man now, nineteen, he think.
He come back from turtle fishin with his dadda, Thomas Cooktown, and he see this girl, pretty, all brown shinin, who came over under the Act. She part migaloo, like him. The gubbamin they hate them, these part-whites, most. It remind them what they did to the black women, to his grandma Rosie. Murru! Shame. Shame. There that girl under the coco palms behind the jetty, gatherin somethin, puttin it in her dah-loon. He call out, Hey, you workin hard, eh? and she too shy. She hide her smile. But he see all the same.
So sometime, those days Uncle Boss let them, he take her out to sit in the long grass and the woman in charge she watch them and she cry, No touchin! No touchin now! So at night Jeannie sneak out from the girls’ dormitory and he take her up mountain and he touch. An even those days when the woman cry out no touchin he manage to wander off with Jeannie and gammon hunt for witchetties under the gidgee trees.
Hunt hunt hunt.
Jeannie she soon expectin and they marry them in a hurry. Big party. All new dresses and trousers. Some visitin preacher Uncle Boss bring over those times and now there’s three of them. He call his son Joshua. Big family now, all family. Grandma Rosie, dadda Thomas, mumma Lou and Jericho, Billy and Normie. House too small all right. But happy.
Happy don’t last long, mumma say.
I LOVE THE BLACK BUGGERS
I love the black buggers, he was fond of saying. I love their simplicity, their friendliness, eh? And when you get to know them, their loyalty, their unquestioning loyalty. I love that.
