by Thea Astley
‘Look at this,’ Mother said, producing a small photograph.
I see a draggle-line of chained Aborigines being driven through scrub by a gentleman on a horse. No! Look closer! Two gentlemen. The blacks are tethered by the neck. Neck to neck. If one jerks away, the rest suffer. Abominable! Behind them, equally hopeless, trail their wives. The desolation and acceptance of white vileness is scribbled over the faces of the women. One of them is holding a baby, close, close.
Suddenly, I wanted to cry. But worse, I recognised one of the men.
‘That’s Jericho Cooktown, Billy’s brother! Why are they doing this?’
Starck and Weber nodded in the hot twilight created by the shutters. Flies buzzed and whined outside the windows.
‘That’s right,’ Miss Starck said. ‘But don’t ask me why. No “why” will ever explain hatred, will it? It’s true you never forgive the people you have treated badly.’ She shook her head. ‘This could go on and on.’ She looked from the photo to me and smiled. ‘We need people of goodwill. And there are so few.’
Miss Weber interrupted, her hands knotted in an earnest lump on her faded skirt. ‘If they have a job, you see, a home, the Act will give them an exemption.’
‘But where are they going? Where are they being taken?’
‘Back to Doebin.’
‘Is that so terrible?’ I asked.
‘You don’t understand,’ Miss Weber said. ‘They go there. It’s little better than a prison. You know that. What’s the latest word from Europe? Concentration camp? They know no one. They’re separated from their own tribe. These are Kuku-Yalanji. Except for Jericho whom they took in when he ran away. They won’t be able to speak the language of the others. They certainly won’t understand whiteman talk. When they don’t understand they do things wrongly. They’re punished and still they don’t understand.’
She hesitated and dropped her eyes to watch those weaving fingers. ‘I need your help.’
‘How?’ Mother asked, knowing.
‘Even if only one,’ Miss Starck pleaded. ‘Even one can make a difference.’
‘I don’t know,’ Mother said. ‘Is it Jericho you mean? Or his young brother Billy?’
She worried about that. What school could he attend if she took him? The black–white laws were rigorous. The social codes more rigorous still. Billy was once boxed soundly by Mr Leggat when we were on Doebin for playing with a piece of stick on Coconut Avenue. He’d run snotty and yowling into my arms, screeching for his mum and quivering with terror.
‘Put him down, you stupid girl!’ Mr Leggat ordered. ‘Do you want to catch something?’
I remember my reply. I had continued rubbing my nose across Billy’s taffy curls. ‘I hope I don’t catch what you have, Mr Leggat.’ And I’d walked off cuddling Billy, walking him back to the girls’ dormitory to hand him to his mother. How was it, I wondered now, Jericho had run away from family responsibility?
‘That’s not his moodja,’ Miss Weber said, pointing to the woman at the end of the sad little line. ‘Not number one, you understand. That’s not Jericho’s child. He paddled from island to island, he told me, in a bark canoe along with Jimmy Friday. But the canoe fell apart. So they swam. It took them a week, resting up on the islands. And then they walked, walked all the way, first back to the Waluwara tribe and the tribe moved on. And then they found some people of the Kuku who took them in. And all that time, the bullimen hunted them down. You mightn’t remember Jimmy. He worked all day on the sawmill at Doebin and lived on the other side of the island.’
A silence fell. Then Miss Weber said, ‘Annie took the photo.’
Mother stared beyond the cracks in the louvres and was back in the boarding house at Shippers Vale. So that I was the one in the present hearing the afternoon footsteps along the footpath outside, the coughing of trucks, the smack of a ball bounced by kids playing. It was Mother who kept a supply of old but clean shirts and trousers for the men travelling through. Mother who made sure they had a filled tuckerbag and a few shillings to put in their pockets when they left. And Mother who sighed finally and said, ‘Of course, Mitzi. Annie. Of course.’
‘Ngayu bambay,’ Mitzi Weber said, her face all smiles, ‘yurra nganya ngulkurrduku kujin.’
‘And what does that mean?’ Mother asked, smiling back.
‘I was sick and you looked after me.’
There followed what I can only call a litany of poor blacks whom Mother helped and nurtured.
Ruby Fourmile and her little boy. Pray for them.
Tommy Sweetcreek. Pray for him.
Esau Friday. Pray for him.
Billy Cooktown. Pray for him.
The years they had with Mother gave them respite from Doebin, the chance to save their small wages which were normally taken over by government officials, and a minimal education that made Billy Cooktown, at least, literate. Claire worked with him at weekends and wasn’t happy until at last he could pick up the Sugarville Bulletin and read news items aloud to her. On his return to the island he became a teacher’s assistant at the native school.
During the litany I married and did all the expected things. I visited other doctors’ wives, gave morning teas, played tennis and watched Claire matriculate and then vanish south to teachers’ college and university. Would, I thought, passing around sandwiches and badly made butter cake, that I had done the same. (‘Just because I have a uterus it doesn’t mean I can cook!’ I told Thomas. He smiled slyly. ‘No. But it means you have to.’) Illusion. Disillusion. Thomas’s obsession with me receded in direct ratio to possession. No one, but no one, tells us these things.
Nor did it occur to any of us that we were waiting for war.
Thomas ceased visiting the Taws the moment we married. Someone else took over his honorary medical visitations to the school. I think he imagined I was unaware of his attachment to Matron Tullman and it was only through Dennis that I heard she had married one of the staff and had a child of her own. Or of Thomas’s. (Let me tell you about le Comte d’Espinay!) Perhaps I was ageing too rapidly for a man who took pleasure in the soft nubility of youth.
One year. Two.
Once he had fussed over what I wore, how I dressed my hair. Now he seemed much too busy in his practice and his work at the hospital to notice whether I painted my nose blue.
I painted my nose blue and presented myself at breakfast like a clown. He was plunged in newsprint, his hand automatically extending his cup for a refill.
‘This is pretty boring,’ I commented.
‘What is?’ He refused to look my way. I knew he had seen my nose.
‘Marriage.’
‘No one ever pretended it wasn’t, ’cushla. It’s boring for all parties. You need a child.’
Three years. Four.
Sometimes we went south for holidays: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, cities so different it was as if their founding fathers had markedly different cultural genes. Or was it the climate in each place that made the hearts of cities strangers? We were in Melbourne for the state’s centenary celebrations and joined the crowd on St Kilda Beach to watch the large ship bringing a sottish member of the royal family to give his ducal imprimatur to the festival. We were crushed by unmoving mobs on Princes Bridge. We just managed to jump clear from a sinking overcrowded houseboat on the Yarra as gogglers rushed starboard to ooh and ah at fireworks. We visited relatives of Thomas, and I remember his fiery sister knocking off a man’s hat during a Eucharistic procession near St Patrick’s. ‘Show respect!’ she shouted, face and accent twisted with anger. ‘Show some respect, you great oaf!’ Thomas sidled back into the crowd, drawing me with him, doing a Saint Peter, rejecting kinship, until brogue and working-class rage faded. We took the train to Ferntree Gully. We sat in Wattle Park with a cut lunch. We visited Williamstown and ate fish in a bayside café.
‘I like it here,’ Thomas told me. ‘I like the weather. It’s a bit on the Irish side. “Il pleure dans mon coeur”. Do you think we should move south?’
&nb
sp; ‘What about Mother?’
Thomas sighed. The sound came deep from the gut.
‘She could join us. She must be tired of raw-boned northerners by now.’
‘And what made you choose the north then?’ I hid from his answer by picking out bones from my lunch.
Thomas hesitated and joggled one knee while he looked across the grey waters.
‘Now, that’s a different story altogether.’
He never did tell me.
And the next year, Brisbane.
The overgrown bush town was populated by women in floral dresses and men in braces and stinking serge suits. The sun. The trams. The coil of river under the high cliffs of Kangaroo Point. We trailed past a miniature zoo, pausing to inspect the wretched monkeys. One of them reached a skinny rubber arm through the wire and snatched Thomas’s ice-cream cone. I removed myself from outrage and mired tweed and wandered off to sit by the river until Thomas tottered back with another ice.
I was pregnant but had not yet informed him.
Strangely, as I sat being absorbed by those orange cliffs across the water struggling towards sky and plunging into their river doubles, I found myself wondering if I still loved Thomas—the ferry beetled across the waterway and herons strode through immeasurable gulfs of air above the gardens and their secret pockets of palms—and if, between pastoral interludes, he loved me. I watched his portly but impressive figure pace back from the kiosk down the sloping lawns. In seven months he would be a father. This third person would bind us even more tightly.
What else was there?
Pal Tinker had announced one day to Father Brimstone during a religious discussion class that she thought marriage an unnatural relationship.
‘What’s all this,’ Tinker asked, ‘about a woman being subject to her husband? Say if he’s a moron? You mean she’s got to do what some pinbrain tells her?’
Bubbles of the purest excitement rose in all of us, floated their perfect blue spheres into our bemused noddles and held us on the edge of our seats.
‘Look, Father,’ horrible smile, ‘why is it that the sex which commits 90 per cent of the crime—murder, rape, bashings, to say nothing of legalised killing in war—has the right to lay down all the rules on moral behaviour? Bit much, eh? Teeny bit illogical?’
Father Brimstone quickly summed up the fallacy she was committing, that of arguing from the particular to the general—speaking fussily, the flustered old dear, through our unuttered derisory hootings. But Tinker came back to the attack just as Sister Assumpta entered at the end of the period.
‘At least women should have some representation on panels of moral jurists, don’t you think?’ She offered her most winning eye-flap and smirk. ‘After all, we’re the persecuted ones, told what to do by men, punished by men, bullied by men. And never a voice! Now Father, is that Christian?’
‘Leave the room!’ Sister Assumpta said softly, swishing down the passage between the desks. Rosary beads rattled. Habit shushed and shushed. Sister Assumpta must surely have had sympathy for those words. The diocesan bishop bullied his curates and couldn’t tolerate nuns having opinions at all.
Tinker was expelled.
Mentally I step down the slope into the river that merely mirrors those stunning blue northern waters and flounder in the empty spaces Tinker left behind. Three years later when she had returned north after her hectic southern rites of passage we met again. I had been walking along the Strand, a newly married confidence, so I believed, to my step, and had sat for a while on a bench near the grassed foreshore in the late afternoon to read more of Alice, which I hadn’t opened since I was eight. Through my own looking-glass and eleven years later I was still frightened by the Red Queen even though I smiled and read and turned pages and smiled and read and smiled, being adult now, initiated now. A series of laminations.
My hat brim hid me then from the outer heated world and left me alone on the far side of the mirror. But not stranded.
‘Off with her head! Off with her head!’ a mocking voice shrilled above me and I looked up to find Tinker staring, amused. ‘What! Reading that old closet child-molester? Really!’
Where? I asked. How? Why?
A lover, she explained briefly. Abandoned. Her grammar fazed me. Her or him? I didn’t like to ask as I crashed through glass barriers to the present. Tinker was looking older, the prettiness worn at the edges. Her hair was cropped into a shingle and her shoulders were still slightly hunched in violinistic stoop. Hugs. Kisses.
‘Come on home,’ she urged. ‘I’ve got a flat just round the corner and Jerry can drive you home.’
Jerry?
There were bedraggled others asleep in the sun along the front, sprawled on benches, on grass, thin pallid men with three-day beards. Their roped blueys lay on the turf and served as pillows. Their hats tipped over their eyes.
‘Who’s Jerry?’
‘Ah well,’ Tinker said.
Thomas settled heavily beside me, finishing the last of his ice. Carefully he licked each creamed finger. I watched him lick, reminded of the fastidiousness of a cat.
‘I’m pregnant,’ I told him. For a moment all the trees stood still.
‘Ah well,’ Thomas said.
All these things engaged me in those days: my newly acquired conservatism, Tinker’s dashing post-flapper (in a scrubber of a township like ours) rebellion. Even Mother had escaped the dominating prejudices and constrictions that were applied to female behaviour. She developed a casual admirer in Gerald Morrow, broadcaster, Voice of the North. He became her lover, I discovered on a steamy afternoon during the Wet when I popped into her bedroom to borrow a trinket. We were all shocked. Outside the invaded boudoir, rain suddenly collapsed on the town in a solid block. ‘A purge,’ Mr Morrow said elegantly from his prone position. Mother refused to marry despite Mr Morrow’s request (he had reached the age where he needed to be looked after!), despite gossip, despite confessional autocracy, despite…
No one, she said one evening not long after she learnt of my pregnancy, was going to intrude on her lifestyle or her financial security, such as it was. She’d worked hard. She’d paid off the bank despite those hard times. She owned the building and it was something to leave for her ungrateful daughters.
Once I would have pleaded with her not to destroy her reputation or her happiness because of me or my sister. I was changing. I admired her stand.
‘Maternal care means more to me than a tumble in the hay,’ Mother continued tartly. ‘That is simply a diversion to stave off loneliness. The heart…’
She stopped there but I knew, I knew she was going to say ‘the heart isn’t involved’ or ‘the heart doesn’t come into it’. And now I wonder about myself. ‘Since when,’ Tinker once asked a horrified Father Brimstone, ‘have women been trained to be anything but economic whores?’
She always did have a nice turn of phrase.
*
Now I sit in Tinker’s awful living-room with the Genoa velvet bagging and the cane furniture coming apart on the tatty rattan matting, waiting for her to emerge from the shower. The years. The years. Mother cast out lover-man some time back in a genial parting and settled to late middle-aged respectability and grandma duties when my daughter was born. As the war struck our shores she became a Red Cross stalwart, working in canteens, hosting the Church’s Evenings for the Boys. I think of her as I sit in this unloved room of Tinker’s and wonder what she would advise if she knew my adulterous strategies.
On Tinker’s radio someone is singing mournfully:
Aint got the change of a nickel,
Aint got no bounce in my shoes,
Aint got no fancy to tickle,
Aint got nothin but the blues.
‘You and me, baby,’ I say aloud while apprehension grows, watching the door, waiting for Tinker, watching the clock hands creep on to my trysting hour.
I decide not to wait and shout goodbyes at the bathroom where the shower has now stopped pumping. ‘Don’t do it!’ shouts the unbeli
evably non-reckless Tinker. Outside my folly consumes the whole town.
At home I make myself a scrap meal (Thomas is still away) and settle down to listen to heavily censored war news from the Pacific front. I watch the clock. The hands stagger to six. To seven. I begin to dress, to paint my lips, brush my hair and organise it into a captivating series of rolls. I look through this looking-glass, another Alice, and my restless eyes are seared unexpectedly by orange blaze, by an island alight, my husband staggering through pallid moonshine pursued by a prancing maniac. These are memories I have resolutely thrust down into some dusty box, resolutely never spoken or thought about. I open the box and dust those memories off.
I used to be a sassy girl. Years have taught me something about the unmoored behaviour of humans.
Beyond the shutters night rattles its clamps and trees conspire at the windows. A watery, fluctuating ledger of debits and credits swims across the glass. I am twenty-nine. I have a husband, a seven-year-old daughter now dumped (‘Protected!’ roars Thomas) at his protective insistence in a southern boarding school where we both whimper ourselves to sleep at nights. And a desperate case of boredom.
This world, my world, is now so dark even the hump of the island has vanished. I am frightened of the dark. Play your hunches, someone once advised me. Was it Tinker? It’s always safest.
I play mine.
I scrub the paint from my mouth, brush out those provocative starlet rolls. Irrationally I find myself tense with fear and lock all doors and windows. Branches tap and try to force an entry. I lie huddled on the other side of that looking-glass in a fiery glare of fright and sweat waiting for daylight.
The week crawls by. While I wait for a bus in town I hear my name called and turn into the glass eyes of that curly boy. He has a smile that never reaches those eyes. In fact, it barely touches the planes of his cheeks.
‘I waited.’ It is an accusation.
I fumble parcels and excuses.
