The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow

by Thea Astley

  Other factors suggested themselves. Bachelorhood could be suspect. Tony Shell was dismissed. One of the second-formers spilled the beans, exposing what Vine had suspected since day one. Snap!—Mr Shell strolling off the oval, a bronzed arm carelessly slung about Danny Chalk’s shoulders, the pair of them walking like film stars into the twilight of the toolshed. Snap!—Mr Shell prowling the dormitory and showers on weekend duty, acting silly buggers with wet towels, checking lights-out, too long, too lingeringly: ‘I say, young Chalk, a brief word.’

  ‘He is sailing,’ Oscar Pretorius commented one morning at tea-break, ‘too close to the wind. Should one make a complaint purely on supposition?’ Vine had shrugged indifferently. The place was speeding downhill. ‘If Shell goes that will be one salary saved. Let’s be cynical. He won’t be replaced. We’ll all have to muck in. Now, there’s financial wizardry for you. Poor little Somerdew will have to take over.’

  It was Mrs Parson’s parsimony that undid Shell. A small light burning late in the dormitory washrooms took her insomnia snooping to discover teacher and student locked in sexual oblivion in the communal shower stall. She did the only thing that occurred. She turned on the cold water full blast.

  Shell departed, his shame screened by the bland faces of po-mouthed boys. Danny Chalk was recalled to his father’s cattle station. Doctor Parsons made no reference to this sudden gap in staff. From his study window Vine watched the wretched Shell, sacked without wages, shoving his few possessions ahead of him in a wheel-barrow, heading out along the road to the coast.

  *

  Even as he walked from a Taws kirk with the pulsating Marcia Tullman on his arm he wondered how it had all happened.

  Returned to the school late one evening from a local historical society meeting in the town, he had found Matron Tullman in his bed. She resisted his schoolmasterly protests, scoring victory with racking sobs (he had his soft spots!), and after preliminary solace she began to devour him. He was stunned to find what he believed to be his natural asceticism vanish as, after that first recoil, he returned her hunger.

  ‘I will marry you of course,’ he proposed next morning over an omelette of exceptional lightness that she whipped up in her kitchenette.

  He’d never seen such melting.

  ‘Things will be easier,’ Marcia Tullman said, ‘for both of us. Two incomes are better than one.’

  But only minimally as the country staggered through depression towards recovery in bloodshed.

  To give Marcia her due she was, in those first years, an obliging partner: meals, clothes, everything attended to with goodwill and even taste. He knew now why men got married. Yet he marvelled, in his more honest moments, why women would fall for such a poor bargain. Well, yes, they were kicked along that path by poverty wages, few jobs and the sugar tunes of Hollywood manipulation now crackling over his little mantel radio, loneliness and a carefully organised social stigma that applied most heavily to single females.

  Wowee! Marcia might have cried, signing her name for the first time as Mrs V.

  Well, bless you, Marcia, you’ve earned it!

  And she gave him a son.

  The attentiveness of the first year or so was modified for each of them by this new arrival. Both felt pride in Matthew—cuddles, chuckles, yowls, feeding dramas—but at the same time they perceived their own relationship slip into a dutiful politeness from which Vine hid behind teacherly obligations. He gave extra classes at weekends to those cramming for university entrance. Clinger’s boys. Never more than three or four, though the numbers picked up at the outbreak of war. Several of his students were more entertaining companions than his wife. He could talk to them about things that interested him but remembering the fate of Tony Shell he was always careful to maintain a distance. The boys thought him an oddball, an aloof dryasbones.

  And the itch in the groin?

  Even that diminished as he watched his Marcia swagger her full-busted authority as wife of the deputy headmaster at public meetings, especially delighted when she ran into Doctor Quigley on those occasions. The doctor was unmoved and once he and Vine even exchanged complicit smiles. To complete their domestic bliss, Doctor Parsons extended their living quarters by opening up that paper-thin scandal-filled wall between the once separate rooms. ‘There now,’ the idiot had said while his own admiring wife looked on, ‘a proper little apartment. Room to move.’

  For twelve years.

  That Billy, he the bright one, and Normie. Clever like mamma, like the teacher almost. Billy and Normie they read faster, think faster than any of them others. That teacher who come after the killins, ole Pop Wesley, he say it because they got these white bits, genes he say, tucked into them through grandma and her white husban.

  Maybe.

  An through his other grandma, too. Your mamma’s mother Nellie, his dadda tell him. She small girl, bout nine, ten, say. She taken from one of them camps outside Charco by one of them lugger captains, big Scot, he got more blacks all over the north than you can count, eh? Anyway, she taken, see, an he parade her through the streets of Charco to be busted.

  What busted? he ask. What busted say?

  It mean raped, Manny, his dadda tell him. You big boy now. It mean she taken by any of the crew drinkin along them pubs in Charlotte Street. Them animals. They all laugh, see. Anyway she grow up. She called Nellie, don’t know no other name. Lou, she Nellie’s girl. You plenty white all right. An me. Son of Rosie and big whiteman own half north, eh? English bugger.

  Yeah. Plenty white.

  He didn’t like that much. Bitzer. But the island was full of bitzers. They took comfort in each other.

  OTHER KINDS OF WAR

  Other kinds of war.

  A sort of war.

  ‘I’d like you to knock before you come in,’ old Pop Wesley said one morning to Doebin’s new director who had barged straight into the classroom and begun ranting.

  Forty pairs of horrified eyes.

  Those days. Old Pop Wesley sailed smoothly through them, content to be surrounded by kids, unanxious for past or future, taking each day as it came, ploughing through the page-curled finger-stained readers, chanting tables, taking the boys for games in his own time in the late afternoon. All the kids loved him. He wasn’t too strict but he wasn’t lax, either. Above all he was fair and, what pleased the kids and their parents most, he took no nonsense from the new boss.

  ‘What? What was that, man? I beg your pardon!’

  Pop Wesley smiled. ‘Accepted. Now what did you want? I’m busy.’

  Normie Cooktown sat watching, quick to assimilate the structures of power. He was twelve. He was to be the first and only student who had gone beyond the fourth grade, and was so eager he was allowed to prepare for the scholarship exam. The director disapproved. He believed in the caste system. He believed in people knowing their place. He had obstructed the attendance at a mainland high school of the first few students Pop Wesley had proposed. Inevitably the director’s fanatic eyes turned to Normie Cooktown, who was the tallest and oldest pupil in the room. As far as the blacks were concerned, the director equated learning with trouble-making. He had never forgotten that old chestnut of Pope’s and was particularly impressed by the sequential line no one ever quoted: ‘There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain.’ He was determined that somehow he should thwart this lad whose older brother Billy was a loudmouth, a critic of the system. A complainer. A black who argued. My God, he couldn’t bear blacks who argued.

  ‘Stand up, that boy!’ Pointing.

  Normie stood.

  ‘So you intend taking the scholarship examination next week?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And are you well prepared?’

  Normie rolled his eyes helplessly at his teacher.

  ‘Answer me, boy.’

  Normie mumbled yes.

  ‘What was that? I couldn’t hear.’ The director did a whimsical feigning of deafness, one hand cupped to
an ear.

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Normie shouted, goaded beyond self-control. Some kids at the back of the room giggled nervously.

  The director’s face flushed slowly from neck to forehead. His mouth shook.

  ‘How dare you, boy! How dare you speak in that tone! Outside.’

  The classroom with its shabby charts, its gecko-specked picture of the king and queen, its meaningless map of the world, was so still Pop Wesley thought perhaps all breathing had ceased. His own small sigh fluttered out like a moth.

  ‘That will be all,’ the director snapped. He felt he had lost control and he hated that. ‘Back to your work.’ He nodded abruptly to Wesley and stalked out of the room to find Normie defiant on the verandah.

  ‘You’re confined to the dormitory for a month,’ he told him. He smiled. ‘You may not attend school. You may not see your family.’

  ‘But the exam?’

  ‘You’ll have to miss that. It will teach you not to be insolent. You would have failed anyway.’

  The director’s starched back jerked boardlike down the school steps. ‘Take him,’ he ordered the native police boys who accompanied him on all his little official visits, and he stalked past their scowls into a mid-morning bright with his own bile.

  *

  In the beginning of the new school year after war in the Pacific broke out, an Aboriginal boy appeared at Vine’s school. ‘We have,’ the headmaster announced at morning assembly and making heavy weather of it, ‘a new boy in first year.’ Fifty pairs of eyes inspected Normie Cooktown who was shuddering in his strange uniform that didn’t fully conceal the difference between his skin and all those other skins. His small body quivered and he dropped his eyes in terrible anguish and scuffed the toe of one boot across the floor. He wasn’t used to shoes. There were suppressed sniggers.

  The missionary zeal that had sustained Doctor Parsons in his apostolate at the Cape and on the islands was prodded by egotism. Tracking a peculiar logical sorites he attached the infallibility of the Lord to himself. He was never wrong. He was determined that his attempt at scholastic aid for the blacks would extend the influence of the Good Book which he had preached to bemused natives in the Kimberleys and on the coastal fringes of the Gulf. They were gentle with him. They had impeccable manners—they didn’t want to offend a bore. And more than that, accession to the rules he had laid down meant blankets, tucker, and occasionally nikki-nikki even though he preached against the vice of tobacco.

  ‘Those boys misbehaving will see me at the end of assembly.’ He raised his voice, permitting an oratorical richness to vibrate through the hall. ‘I cannot and will not tolerate unchristian antics.’

  Behind the headmaster the seated staff stirred uncomfortably in their seedy gowns. Little Graph released a hideous sigh he covered with assumed coughs. There were waxen smiles. (Memories here of recent unchristian protests from Church elders and parents, of white tribal grunts.) Fifty voices rose in a variety of cracked trebles announcing that the Lord was their shepherd and they would not want. Then they saved the king and were dismissed to classes.

  It was as if the chalk dust had entered not only Vine’s lungs but his veins. And the clogging of familiar smells: boarding-school meals, packed lunches from the day boys’ satchels—bananas, orange peel, pencil shavings, erasers, ink. He could know nothing else. This was his desert peopled by—what? Half-humans? Part-people? Later that day, doing playground duty at the rear of the toilet block, he came upon a knot of shrilling lads and to the muted hisses of ‘Here comes Clinger!’ he parted brawling arms to discover Normie Cooktown dribbling mucus and tears. His new shirt was torn and someone had plastered a mudball on the side of his face.

  At a staff meeting some weeks later, ‘There should have been two lads from Doebin,’ the headmaster admitted. ‘Two. At least friendship, you know, a commonalty of culture and experience.’ The sententious old bugger wagged a regretful head.

  ‘The lad’s a great little runner,’ Clarrie Somerdew said flatly. ‘He’ll make out.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  Mr Pretorius interrupted, his voice harsh. ‘Of course. There’s enough patriotic hatred occupying all their minds these days without their having to waste time loathing the indigenes.’

  ‘Oh, I hope you’re right,’ the headmaster said. ‘I do hope so.’

  War had reached the Taws. School windows were blacked out with brown paper. Slit trenches had been dug on the perimeter of the football field. There was air-raid practice every week. And every week, day after day, American planes droned overhead, taking off from the coastal air base for the Coral Sea or for the strips on the Cape. Townsville filled with GIs, and those boys who had managed a weekend in town with parents who had not fled south resumed school with fake Yank accents, chewed gum and called each other bud.

  Vine found himself taking as much interest in the progress of Normie Cooktown as in that of his own son, now a second-former and top of his class. After Normie bloodied the noses of two classmates who persisted in calling him Darkie, he enjoyed a passive acceptance and was avoided until his agility on the sportsfield and in the gymnasium where he quickly outstripped the lot of them won their admiration. Watching that skinny fluidity on the vaulting horse and parallel bars, his form-mates became fair-minded at last. They had to admire. How could they not when he treated his skill with such indifference? ‘It’s easy,’ he’d say, grinning at achievement. ‘I’ll show you. Look.’ And he would bounce off the springboard, double somersault and end up facing them, eyes glinting. Or shin up the ropes and twist himself into knots on the rings, swinging easily. Do triple backflips on the bars. Classwork was too hard for him but the others rather liked that. He was a facile sketcher and his quick cartoons of staff members made him an underground hero.

  Now and again Misses Weber and Starck who had moved their mission to an Aboriginal fringe settlement outside the Taws called at the school and took Normie off for the weekend. Clarrie Somerdew noticed an improvement in his reading and upon probing discovered the two women were giving patient coaching.

  ‘You should have asked me,’ he said to the boy. ‘It’s what I’m here for.’

  Normie stared at his feet.

  ‘Would you like an extra half-hour each day?’

  Normie’s eyes looked up and sought the grey distances of the plains.

  ‘Well, would you?’

  There was some kind of chewed mumble.

  ‘I’ll take it that’s yes, then. Heavens, Normie, after a few weeks you’ll leave the rest of the class behind.’

  But he didn’t, though he was running faster than ever, played hooker in the junior football team and beat the senior boys in the mile. He was turning into a kind of glamorous mascot.

  ‘Well, that’s better than nothing,’ Vine remarked to Clarrie Somerdew after a burning sports afternoon in October. The field day had been rounded off with air-raid practice that was suddenly prelude to reality. As the boarders got ready in the change-rooms for tea there was horrible excitement when the town sirens hooted out over the streets and roofs of the Taws.

  Trembling with schadenfreude, the lot of them, on the edge of possible disaster.

  In the blazing sunset two small wasp-fast planes flew over the score of boys crouched in air-raid trenches. The planes skimmed to the horizon, circled and returned.

  ‘Heads down!’ roared Clarrie Somerdew who had taken over command from a mysteriously absent headmaster. There was suppressed giggling. The stink of deliberate farting. ‘Peugh, Darkie! Urk, you stinking pewk!’

  ‘Quiet!’

  The two fighter planes buzzed them once more and then vanished towards the coast while the boys crouched, heads between knees, waiting for the all-clear. Terror? Disappointment?

  Vine marched them back to the schoolhouse, watching his son from the corner of his eye as he made a point of walking with Normie Cooktown. Matthew, he decided, was more of a Christian than he could ever be. Could ever, ever…

  He thought of Normi
e’s latest assignment, passed on to him by Clarrie Somerdew. ‘How do I handle this?’ baffled Clarrie, already braced for enlistment, had asked. The essay lay on Vine’s desk, a network of red pencillings. ‘My peeple joyn the army,’ Normie had written, ‘but they dont get payed as much. My peeple are the onlie reel Australians.’

  ‘He has a point,’ Vine said. ‘There’s a fighting political spirit there not altogether fashionable.’

  Later he had taken the essay and read it aloud to his senior history group and called for comments. Grudgingly the class admitted that Aborigines should be paid as much as the rest of the troops. ‘But they go walkabout, sir!’ On Normie’s second statement they were silent. Vine knew he shouldn’t have done it, but, ‘Hands up,’ he had asked mildly, unwisely, ‘those boys whose fathers are in the forces.’

  Only three hands out of fifteen rose. ‘We’re necessary industry, sir,’ one of the graziers’ kids explained patiently as if soothing a numbskull. ‘Just about all of us. We’re feeding the troops.’

  ‘My dad’s in parliament,’ another said with sly emphasis. ‘He tells the country what to do, how to do it. I don’t think he’d like those remarks much. Sir.’

  Warned.

  ‘What’s a boong like you,’ one of them asked Normie Cooktown that afternoon, ‘doing at a school like this, eh?’ Vine overheard this question on his way to duty in the shower-rooms. He saw Normie, plumped out by boarding-school stodge and the bravery that came with being the fastest runner, stick out his lower lip and he paused by the half-open door.

  ‘My grandad…’ Normie said. And stopped.

  ‘Your grandad what? Witchetty George? Wurley Wille?’