by Thea Astley
We-ra, Danny Tombo was shouting to him. Wind. Big wind come soon. The superintendent shrank beneath leaves and watched the boy shrug. He knew. Uncle Boss knew. Migaloo bored these people, frightened them. Migaloo bullied, sponged, patronised—everything. The blacks took refuge in their own indifference. They were happy not to be the crazy ones.
The superintendent lay flat in the scrub and tossed fitfully until the dawn.
‘Time!’ rapped out the superintendent, remembering the Somme. He stood ridiculously to attention on the empty beach, presenting arms in his long, shapeless bathing-suit. He blinked and found Danny gone, the beach empty except for the dot-pictures painted by rain. He stalked down to the boat, militarily correct, one eye on the northern sky. Above him clouds began their slow grumble. He wondered if the racket came from Goon-yah, the first black man speaking on behalf of Da-lore, the good spirit. He shuddered despite heat, despite the bullets of rain which had begun to bite.
‘In!’ he shouted to no one at all. ‘In! In!’
The motor sputtered alive.
He was the motor.
The boat curled out and away, plugging across churned waters to Doebin through rain, through wind-toss.
He was the boat.
He was the motor, the boat, the wind, the rifle, the revolver. He was the punitive avenging force. He sat upright, hardened by the ramrod of his rage.
There was unexplained music in his head.
He remembered times of devastating sweetness.
Listening to Puccini on the gramophone and the doctor joining in with his high Irish tenor. Mrs Curthoys would sit bemused, flanked by her exquisite daughters, his own wife happy with it all. Those were the days before he suspected treachery. Rubbish! Admit it! He had suspected it from the moment he had shaken that plump Gaelic paw damp with sweat. Pulling rank: I’m the new doctor. (Read: you are a mere ex-military bully!) He could still hear the harmonics of that first rich ‘Good day to you.’
The blankness of seascape and sheetings of rain that had trapped him on Noogoo to huddle for a wretched night beneath the trees now trapped him tightly within himself. Perhaps he had slept. He couldn’t remember as he steered the runabout in the dawn grey, the rain easing back as he chased Goon-yah, the clouds taking their cumbersome load south. He was pursuing storm.
Doebin moved closer. Between body-rack and head-split he could not think beyond carnage. His inner tumult met only silence when finally the runabout grated on sand near the landing-place where the launch and the bulk of the Koonawarra moored alongside still gave out small gasps of smoke. He could feel Doebin waiting for him, waiting, despite the seemingly deserted cove.
Stepping out of the boat he waded to the beach, rifle cocked against whatever lay behind the scrub. Sea-rustle behind. Leaf-rustle ahead. Then Manny Cooktown, his fishing-boy, hunter and shooter, pride of his football team, stepped cautiously from behind the trees and yelled his predigested migaloo command, ‘Put your gun down, Uncle Boss, or I fire.’
The words meant nothing in the half-lit morning.
He laughed as the pain hammered for escape inside the bony walls of his head. He heard the words again and shouted back across them, tearing them apart, ‘They have to get my boys to kill me!’ He strode forward hearing other voices behind that screen of leaves, the muzzle of his gun wobbling uncertainly on its target, to receive a terrible blow in the region of his gut and see the wetness of his own scarlet gush onto that of his bathers.
Surprise took him one step more before he staggered and fell face forward into morning.
That night, eh? No one talk about that much.
But he remember. Manny Cooktown remember all right.
Uncle Boss gone crazy they all say. Burn house. Burn store. Burn school. Them whites they runnin scared.
All the island quiet like fish and they wait in huts, wait wait, all day in the hot and no wind and that Leggat, that bagga bones he keep runnin round fussin and givin orders and handin out guns to the police boys and he say, Boss gone now, but he come back soon. You wait down by jetty, eh. You wait and when you see him, you take his guns.
He got guns? he ask.
Leggat nod. He nod and shake.
Why don’t you wait? he ask.
I have to look after the women and children, he say. He all importan. There things to do.
What about that Mister Cole, eh? He got no store now. He could come down.
Don’t argue with me, boy, Leggat say. And he shove rifle hard at him and say, Take other boys with you. Take Billy and Willie Omba, he big enough now. I’m givin you big responsibility.
Then that Leggat he walk away, quick quick and he keep watchin and see him run.
And then the little boat come in across the water and Uncle Boss standin in the prow, holdin tiller, look crazy fella, in bathin suit with belt and gun and rifle tuck under arm.
He and Billy wait under mango trees back from the beach and when the boat come into jetty, Billy scramble up into branches with Willie and hide. Don’t blame them none. All hot and still everywhere and Uncle Boss step outa boat and he come down jetty and when he see Manny he raise rifle and point it straight at him, laughin.
Hey, Uncle Boss, he call. Don’t do that. You put down gun, eh.
He always like Uncle Boss. They go fishin sometime. They share tucker. But Uncle Boss he keep laughin.
Gotta get my boys to kill me, he yell. Staff scared, eh? Yellow buggers.
Manny remember the word he was supposed to say.
He call, Surrender. He call, Put down your gun.
Then Uncle Boss laugh like mad thing and aim the rifle first time up at Billy who shakin them branches then at him. An he scared too an he fire. He fire an Uncle Boss drop down as he run up and see big red blotch on Boss’s belly and the blood spreadin and he cry and say, Sorry Uncle Boss. Real sorry. And Uncle Boss he say, That all right, Manny. Those bastards made you do it.
Then Billy run screamin up to Coconut Avenue and the whites come down and Leggat push him one side and say, The police will want to talk to you about this.
Can’t stop thinkin bout it, bout what he done. And what that Leggat done. They carry Uncle Boss up to the settlement but he die and next day they put him on board the police launch long with doctor and matron and take them to mainland.
He keep seein that blood, hearin them words, Why they use you to do their dirty work, Manny?
He keep askin himself why why why.
Two days later more bullimen come back to Doebin to get him and Willie Omba. They say be witnesses. Then they take them both to watch-house and shove Manny in lockup.
One week. Two.
He get angry then at havin to fight whiteman’s quarrel. Do their dirty work. An every night he keep seein Uncle Boss’s face, see him lyin there. He cry. Didn’t know whether he cry for Uncle Boss or himself.
The bullimen tell him he coulda been killed. Brodie’s gun jam twice, they say. He was out to get you, mate. You were lucky, eh? Then later he hear in court that little boat loaded with two boxes dynamite. But still they charge him, Manny, an months go by an he worry bout Jeannie an his little boy an he keep havin that dream.
An then they try him for murder even though he save all them others, do what Leggat tell.
He hardly hear when they say not guilty.
‘CAN’T SEE YOU NEXT WEEK, ‘CUSHLA!’
‘Can’t see you next week, ’cushla!’ Doctor Quigley said breezily to his mistress and Vine’s wall-flapping ears. ‘I’m getting married. But I’ll be down the week after for sure.’
Vine had put aside the essays he had been marking and sat at his table barely daring to breathe, waiting for the hearty cheerie-bye at Marcia Tullman’s gulping door.
Twelve years ago, it had all started there. At that moment.
Playing a last Beethoven quartet now in the breezeless inland afternoon he was transported from memories that still nagged or nibbled, lifted up during the alla marcia by a threnodic, tidal quality of strings. He wondered how the c
omposer had felt when he’d stabbed down the final note, alone and deaf in his dirty rooms. Just that. At that moment. Like God?
Beside Vine lay another heap of unmarked essays on the spiritual isolation of the Ancient Mariner. (No less than three pages. Quote from the text to support your observations.) ‘Le marin, c’est moi,’ he said bitterly. And Marcia his albatross. In the kitchenette attached to his senior master’s flat he could hear his wife scouring the burnt bellies of saucepans. No black help here as once on Doebin. Really, he preferred eating stew-slop with the boarders because Marcia, resentful about housekeeping on top of being matron to twenty boarders at the school, made a surly production of the simplest meal despite multiple certificates in caring for the sick. (Delicate broths, jellies, tender pieces of chicken in aromatic gravy?)
‘I tend the body,’ his wife had said stubbornly, ‘not the gastronomic whims of teenage boys or, for that matter, Samuel, middle-aged schoolmasters. I can’t do everything.’
Point taken. She was above the bedpan, the preparation of invalid diets. But lately when dining-room duty was rostered for him he fled there with relief. Twenty more or less cheerful faces bent over Sunday cold-cuts, forking in shredded lettuce and stringy mutton. Twenty faces, most of which had never seen the sea, let alone understood the superstitions of sailors alone in a riot of blue water. He ringed another misspelling in red ink, laid down his pen and sighed.
Twelve years here. Married for eleven. One two three four, et cetera, et cetera, when fundamentally he was not, he realised, the marrying type. Had he simply yielded to the embarrassed despair of that long-gone conversation winnowed through the thin walls of Matron Tullman’s flat to his own timber-quaking room? Doom-shoved by a specious gallantry?
Those pulpy memories.
He had found his nemesis crouched on an inland dust bowl, with its few score of pupils a mixture of idiot snobbery uneasily coupled with a veneer of practicality. ‘Our students,’ stated the falsetto brochure sent out to prospective parents, ‘combine study of literature and the classics with classes in agriculture and animal husbandry.’ Pause here to examine a dying vegetable plot and three stringy cows. ‘All boys are expected to join a sporting team. The school has facilities for football, cricket, gymnastic and athletic work. A swimming pool is planned.’ The pool was still planned. And the classics (mensa, mensa, mensam) proved splendidly unpopular. ‘The school endeavours to instil firm Christian principles in its students, and boys are required to attend a weekly service within the church of which they are members.’
Well, that was telling them!
Vine had travelled out to the Taws on the western mail, the narrow gauge running parallel to the beef road, his heart sinking a little lower with each arrival at whistlestop hamlets scattered along the briefly tarred road that led to further sprawls moated by loneliness, by distance. The crummiest of ballads. His ultimate destination was a barmy conglomerate of mining-town illusion, the quick-prop scenery of a temporary theatre run that had somehow managed to outlast its popularity: stilt-and-verandah houses lined streets whose business premises had grandiose notions of nineteenth-century classic revival, with an Italianate clock-tower and renaissance banks and city hall. It was the most populous town on the line and a central trading post for the vast sheep and cattle runs that spread north and west to the Gulf and Channel country. Locals fondly called it the World.
(Ah, he breathed now over the unmarked essays, the red-ink scrawls, had I but world enough, and time!)
He had tottered stiffly and sootily into dry sunny air, hauling his suitcase and already worrying about his boxes of books sent ahead a week before. There was no one to meet him. Outside the station he found a ramshackle taxi, one of two that serviced train arrivals. The driver sucked on a pipe and watched speculatively as Vine flung his suitcase onto the back seat. He suggested Vine would be new here and called him mate. ‘Where to?’
Vine told him but asked could he see the town first. The driver nodded and the cab rattled away from the station along Enterprise Road and then swung in towards the township. There was a park with a bell-topped bandstand. They passed it and turned into what was clearly the main street. Where now were the tens of thousands of diggers, wives and children who once jostled to buy stores, visit travelling tent shows, cheer for Federation? Jobless men had moved out and on. Others came through humping their swags, driven by poverty and despair. Years later, he would wonder about the long-gone readers in the newspaper room of the Labour Exchange.
The cab was idling past women shoving prams, honking at slow buggies and post-proppers outside the Lucky Chance Hotel. And then it left the shops behind—a moment of a town really—and they were bumping over a dirt road towards his future home? Purgatory? Limbo?
He couldn’t discover even now.
He went into the bathroom and stared at his noncommittal face in the basin mirror. The flesh was time-thinned, shrunken from back-country summers, but the weathered grey eyes stared steadily out from spotted glass and examined the disappointed mouth, the fastidious nose, the still thick but grey-shot hair. Clinger Vine. That’s what the boys called him behind his back. An unoriginal bit of metaphor but it had stuck through all those years at the place, this place, seen through the window that gave him a corner of the playing field and the back end of the gymnasium. He could see the distant figures of small boys tussling near the football oval and watched the ghost of Tony Shell, that too handsome sports master and junior-school dogsbody, emerge with cheerful shouts from the change-rooms. Vine felt hollowness all through his frame.
That first sight of the school: the haphazard spread of converted homestead set in its would-be park behind struggling she-oaks, presenting a simulacrum of St Jim’s, the crack of willow on leather (he was still grabbing at fictional exemplars) at the pitch beside a creek, and—lucky!—willows and weeping casuarinas to provide side drops for alfresco afternoon teas after politely cheered matches; the scattered out-buildings—for what? Masters? Dormitories? Domestic staff? How describe now what he recalled? A blur of poetry rushing across his mind-screen: ‘a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost/and I look through my tears’—yes, tears—‘on a soundless clapping host/As the run-stealers flicker to and fro’. And there was, if not a tear, a sentimental moisture that appalled. The stupidity of it!
Clinger! He lashed himself with the name. Clinger!
The taxi had abandoned him in a spatter of gravel, his luggage dumped at the foot of steps leading to the wide verandahs where two rangy lads in school blazers were eyeing him. ‘Need a hand, sir?’ Indeed. But Doctor Parsons? Your headmaster? ‘We’ll tell him you’re here, sir. Would you come this…’ Yes, yes of course.
The wide hallway lit by sun at the far end and the classrooms, he guessed, leading off. There was the buzz of voices, a smell of chalk, and an overlying reek of boiled mutton and cabbage from the rear of the building. The familiarity of it all. Recognition in a strange land. Nothing changed, he decided as he was led to a room at the far end of the building, even though hemispheres might.
‘Oh yes!’ he had murmured aloud in that flash of affirmation. His guides looked at him curiously. ‘Yes!’ He had come home.
Had he ever expected such a death’s head of a headmaster, such a bag of righteous bones, nose and mouth corners inevitably seeking the nadir of wilful behaviour: the tentacled probings of a God man—yes, he had to use that word—after schoolboy sin? Doctor Parsons—was he still known as Reverend?—had been a missionary in the islands, in the Territory and the Gulf. He was, the redneck board of directors decided, a suitable appointment. Even the name gave confidence. And he had been with the school for five years, a lustrum that appeared to endorse a sense of ownership.
The highly polished table between them gave back reflections of chin, fingers, the worn academic gown assumed to impress this new man, this Samuel Vine, who had, after all, been chosen by the board in his absence at an annual education seminar in Brisbane.
Neither, having observed,
really liked what he saw. There was little generosity of spirit in that wax-pale face eyeing Vine, assessing, totting up, but a kind of mulish obsessiveness in the speckled eyes. Behind the headmaster the windows looked out on an ill-cared for garden fenced off from the cricket field. Two boys, supervised by a spectacularly good-looking young man, were rolling the pitch. Vine had a dotty vision of cucumber sandwiches and iced lemonade set out on trestles under elms and could not repress a smile-twitch.
The headmaster’s head creaked round to seek the source of the smile.
‘Are you a cricketing man, Mr Vine?’
‘A what?’
‘A cricketing man? We do believe in the moral worth of team games here. Most important.’
Over the headmaster’s shoulders, Vine watched the young man ruffle the blond thatch of one of the boys in what seemed an over-zealous encouragement. The hand appeared to linger.
‘In moderation,’ he lied gallantly. ‘I’m fundamentally a grammarian, I suppose. Very dull. Poetry, the novel. My field is English literature.’
The headmaster stared. He suspected an unsuitable flippancy. ‘Well, yes of course. Of course. Your degree seems sound enough.’ He fiddled with papers on his desk and glanced through Vine’s folder of application. ‘But there are other things in a school like this as I’m sure you realise from your…er…experience at previous establishments.’ He went on to explain the obligations of a resident master, priorities with regard to study duty, refectory attendance and supervision, the…um…alertness needed for dormitory control.
‘Could you clarify?’ Vine asked, deciding he might as well be disliked fully. ‘Specify exactly?’
Outside, clouds without rain skulked over the oval from which the master (a jocular arm around each laddie’s shoulder) and boys were now walking away. Doctor Parsons began an imbecile pencil-tapping on the gleaming wood of his desk—tuh-tuh tuh-tuh tuh-tuh—signalling impatience and playing for time as he fossicked for the right euphemism, humming and huffing through ‘Er…friendships of a special…um…nature,’ avoiding all mention of the flesh. Vine refused to help and looked non-comprehendingly beyond the empty playing fields to those damp stone walls of his own English public school—the hissed demands of prefects, the rustlings in the dormitory at night, the furtive callisthenics in the showers.
