by Thea Astley
He stumbled through a paragraph or two, then threw the paper down in disgust with himself. ‘Too hard. Too bloody hard.’
‘That was fine,’ she said. ‘Just fine, Ted. You don’t need my beady eye on you while you do it. Take it up the dunny. If it gets too much you can always wipe your bum on it.’
It became a matter of pride with him. It was pride and an evaluation of his own self that kept him persisting through another month, that kept him printing out words over and over after tea in the evenings. He became faster at the whole business and one day Janet brought him back from Red Plains’ library a copy of On Our Selection and a selected Lawson. ‘Try them,’ she suggested. ‘Take your time. Just bits here and there if you feel like it.’
‘There’s one I really liked,’ he said a week later. ‘About geraniums. “Water Them Geraniums.” I liked that. And I’ve managed another. “Hungerford.” Sounds like here.’
Right through winter.
With the first official day of spring, Ted was managing most of the Red Plains Gazette as well. She had used all kinds of pretexts to get him to read to her. She couldn’t find her glasses. She’d left them in the car somewhere. Her head was aching. She had to get dinner. Could he read her out that bit about the new sewerage scheme – she’d seen the headlines. He fell for these ploys at first, but after he became aware he still good-naturedly plodded on, stumbling, hesitant, yet all the time becoming faster and more assured. She borrowed short westerns and detective stories from the library and was repaid by the joy she felt when she was the first to switch off her reading lamp while Ted, glasses perched on the end of his nose, kept negotiating with gun-slingers in Nevada.
‘I love you, Ted,’ she told him. ‘I’m proud of you, you literate old booger!’
‘I’m proud of me,’ Ted had said, grinning.
She blinked and blinked at intruding memories that threatened to topple her from her stool behind the counter.
STRANGER IN TOWN
Do you remember an inn, Miranda?
Except that wasn’t her name and she felt she had been living on planes and trains non-stop for a year. Howls of frustration for that past week when no one had met her at the airport at the Curry – well, it was six-thirty a.m. – and a kindly sheep farmer who was picking up stores from the light plane on the milk-run, as the locals called it, had offered her a lift into town and dropped her at the ghastly motel with its killer-green walls, dripping shower and greasy bedspread.
Still no one showed and the clock ticked by into mid-morning, the hours broken by a walk through the deserted main street and a lemon squash at one of the two pubs where a row of gummy old men stared resentfully when she breasted the bar, as if they thought she were some superannuated hooker from the coast. And still no one showed, so finally, rankling, she had rung the high-school headmaster who was supposed to be organising the whole thing and he’d said, ‘I’m busy now.’ Not even ‘Drop up to the house and have a cup of tea with the wife.’ So then she had asked the motel manager when the next plane out left and was told not until tomorrow, lady, but there’s a bus.
Caught it.
Missed a gig.
Anyway, anyhow, simply a one-day yap to bored housewives interested in discussion groups – be your own poet laureate in twenty minutes, take a novel apart and rewrite it in forty. I mean! She’d have some explaining to do to the department in Brisbane who’d sent her on the strength of two slim vols – critical essays and travel pieces – to take this culture kick to the underprivileged outback. She thought this and then hated herself for lack of sympathy, for her own barbarous attitude, for… well, excuse me, but that last place! Surely someone could have met her even if it was so early. No taxis in a town that size and the leader of the women’s group was the wife of that surly-voiced headmaster – but no, he taught mathematics. Say no more!
By the time the bus had rolled into Townsville there was a baggage handlers’ strike at the airport, and here she was again riding the night train down to Rockhampton, her bag slung onto the rack above, sitting up, for the railways weren’t interested in sleepers for halfway passengers, only tourists going all the way. Yes, here she was sticking to the programme and filling in for an absent writing-group tutor and heading for a two-cow town unreachable except by another train or another bus.
From the buffet car she bought a cup of tea and a bun and wobbled back between carriages, slops spattering her clothes and the bun skidding off the plate to a murky corner of her seat. How can I stand all this joy? she wondered.
But, ‘Allow me,’ a voice had said while she was smearing at stains, and there he was, an autumnal fellow with flattened grey hair – God! he could give her thirty years if he could give her a week – a Glaswegian accent and the suggestion of a nervous twitch to one side of his mouth.
Evie watched him as he scrabbled for the bun and held the tea for her until she’d become seated, watched him return to his seat across the aisle, unpack an apple and polish it with a crisp hanky and then cut it with a fruit knife into triangular bite-sized pieces. She tried not to look, especially after he proffered her a piece on the end of his knife, but there were only the two of them in this part of the carriage, the landscape was blotted by night and there was nowhere else to look. ‘Care for some?’ he had asked. ‘No,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘No thank you.’ And he had gone on munching and glancing quickly when anyone passed through the carriage, looking back quickly at her, at his own reflection in the darkened glass of the window, and beyond his own reflection to hers.
But the ice had been broken and it was only natural, wasn’t it, that remarks, mere patches of words, desultory of course, should pass between them.
She read. She dozed. She would look up and find his eyes on her, eyes that were quickly shuttered and turned away. But he was never quick enough. She had been thumbing through a collection of Lawrence’s essays and she thought angrily, unfairly, she had never read greater crap. As on Hardy and the dual Will. His capitals! she thought sourly. Those pansy capitals! Their shallow typographical self-importance. ‘The dual Will we call the Will-to-Motion and the Will-to-Inertia… And the Will-to-Motion we call the male will or spirit and the Will-to-Inertia the female.’
‘Crap!’ she said aloud, almost rousing the elderly Scot across the aisle from his dozing. She wouldn’t concede Lawrence’s next philosophic assertion: ‘This will to inertia is not negative and the other positive.’ She looked up and across at her not quite sleeping fellow passenger and decided that women, remembering all the women she had known, excepting those privileged rich bitches and embracing those who might have been colliers’ wives in Eastwood, had solved man’s problem of seeking the source of eternal motion. On the go on the go on the go. The housewife drudging eternally. She wanted to lean across and shake that natty leg into full wakefulness and demand to know who had packed his bag, who had polished that apple, remembered to include the fruit knife. She couldn’t repress what galloped from her mouth. ‘Ah garbage!’ she said, staring down at her selection from Phoenix. ‘Total garbage.’
‘Good book?’ he asked. He was that sort of man.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a literary thriller. You know how they are.’
‘I didn’t think,’ he said, ‘that Lawrence wrote literary thrillers.’
Uh-oh! Boobed! And in any case she knew, in the fair area of her heart, that she wasn’t altogether right about D. H. L., who had his moments of gender generosity – uterus envy almost, to parody that old penis king, Sigmund F.
She bit her lip with surprise and stared past him at the shuddering dark and agreed, well, yes, of course he was right. She was simply cross from having lived out of bags for a week in godawful towns where no one turned up, or if they did they had only the most primitive notions of what she was there for. It was like stepping into a sluggish mire of clones, she explained. Once in the States it had happened, somewhere in Texas, a town full of stetsons, high-heeled cowboy boots and spurs. Even the women. She couldn’t h
elp grinning at the memory, but not at this trim oddball who had perked up at the word ‘Texas’. She explained her employment, the makeshift nature of her cultural forays into the wilderness, and he said that he was rather like that, the last of a dying breed, a rep, a salesman, a drummer (a Willy Loman, he offered with a sly smile), selling oriental napery, et cetera, still using the personal (hear pairrsonal with a fine Scottish skirling of consonants) approach, and no, he wouldn’t have been on the train either except for the misfortune of a breakdown, his car suddenly demanding a gear box replacement. The whole business would take a couple of days, so…
‘So,’ she said, ‘you’re improving the shining hour. You couldn’t face being trapped for a whole weekend in Townsville.’
He munched at a biscuit he had unwrapped from precisely folded greaseproof. ‘I’d done what I could there. Thought I might as well not waste time and follow up some suggestions for sales in Rockhampton.’ His mouth twitched and he turned the twitch into a smile. ‘The plane strike will be over by Sunday or Monday at the latest and I’ll just fly back and pick up the car.’
Yes, she had said. Yes. And there was one of those silences that expanded round the cracking of biscuit like a rotten emptiness and she returned to Phoenix ready to agree with Lawrence on almost everything now and somehow, uncomfortably, finding those bright eyes on her again as she read ‘men only know one another in menace’.
After a while she dozed again, and was half conscious in the half-sleep before oblivion that Phoenix had dropped to the floor. Drowsily she sensed the pressure of another body in the seat beside her, knew somehow that her book had been picked up and replaced in her lap, and knew, too, the stroking measures of a hand on her thigh. In her slumber she brushed the hand away, mumbling something, a protest, a dismissal, but the hand returned persistent about her knee. Yet when the train pulled in to Mackay with a grinding of brakes and door slammings, she snapped awake to find her book on the seat beside her, the salesman looking at her across a chaste diagonal space and asking, ‘Like another cup of tea? I’ll fetch it.’
She inspected those sharp blue eyes, the gentlemanly grey of his hair, the nervous tic, the thin white skin stretched over fastidious bones. She found him unforgivable.
‘No,’ she said, ‘thank you,’ wanting to shout at him, name him a creep, a sleaze, but turning instead to watch the stragglers on the platform heading to the exit, the glare of light under the high iron roof, the ticket collector half asleep as he waved the departing passengers through.
‘Well, I think I will,’ he said.
After he had gone she went to the lavatory, then brushed her untidy hair, staring unforgivingly at her not quite ordinary features that had hardened years ago into a permanent creation of her late twenties and would evolve no further, apart from the scrawled comments of sun, until she was at least fifty. She hoped. She’d see to that. It was the mind, Evie had decided, that must keep its permanent interest in being, with an unflagging curiosity about the world and a capacity to maintain the inquiring wide-eyed wonder of a child. Of course, she thought, brushing angrily at obdurate knots, how does one expunge the cynicism that the simple fact of living imposes?
It was time, she decided, to grab her bag and shift to another compartment, but when she got back to her seat there was her fellow traveller holding at a half-tilt two slopping beakers of tea that dripped down his wrists and onto a paper bag of sandwiches.
‘There.’ He placed the lot on the pull-out table and began a fastidious mopping at hands and shirt front. ‘Would you care to join me?’
Too late! Ungraciously, sulkily, she accepted the proffered tea. And then he said, ‘What else do you read? Do you like Borges? Eco? Grass?’
Jee-sus! she thought, stirring her tea with a wooden spatula, what do we have here? A rep with culture?
‘I get a lot of time,’ he said, enjoying her blinking reaction, ‘in the evenings.’ Pause. ‘In these desperate towns.’ He smiled as if in apology. ‘I wasn’t always in napery. I used to travel for a publishing company years ago.’
‘Quite a change of direction,’ she said, ‘book jackets to table napkins.’
‘It gets me away.’ The tic began working furiously at the corner of his mouth. ‘I get up to Manila, Hong Kong. The trips do me good.’ He smiled again. ‘When I’m home there isn’t much time for reading. My wife isn’t… well, she’s not into books and the little girls are fierce swimmers. Sport. It’s kind of a religion, isn’t it?’
And then he had (why? why?) hauled out a wallet and displayed family photos, dragged down his suitcase and exhibited neatly packed (emblematic patterns, she guessed, of orthodoxy) exotic Eastern wares. She made all the right noises and inwardly longed to muss the prissy rectangular precision. Her own bag was a small hold-all with a change of underwear, two skirts and a couple of tops rammed in beside textbooks and teaching notes. Should she display it for the perfect turn-off? Because by now they had exchanged names and he was beginning to press once more too eagerly forward. The twinsetted wife in the family photo would hardly approve, though Evie doubted whether the small girls with their chlorine-reddened eyes would care.
She submitted to conversation. It could erode the hours.
He’d been a lay preacher, he admitted, in his church in Brisbane, and perhaps, he surmised, that had been the starting point for his interest in reading. She doubted that but did not say, urging the train to greater speeds through the heavy dark. He had begun patting her knee to emphasise the points he made.
‘Well, fancy,’ he said, tapping each word in as if to underscore his statement, ‘meeting a young woman who reads a good book. I do like that!’
She resented both hand and assumption and shifted back in her seat. ‘There’s a lot of us. A lot. In fact, lending library figures show that women are their best customers –’
‘Yes. But what are they reading?’
‘And further,’ ignoring him and the smile that had become fixed under his blue stare, ‘they are not hunched over tinnies gawping at sport on the box. Now, are they?’ And she treated him to what she thought was an enchanting smile with an acidulous edge.
Enchanted only, he gave a nod. ‘Point taken, my dear.’ (My dear!) ‘Now, my wife,’ – he didn’t really want to talk about his wife but the words sprang almost irrepressibly from his tongue – ‘reads light romances when she does read. I wouldn’t call that a nourishing diet.’
‘Perhaps she’s missing something in her own life,’ Evie couldn’t resist saying but he had a capacity to hear only what he wanted to hear. ‘And anyway it’s better than no diet at all. Do you realise that nearly one-third of the population cannot read or are ineffectual readers – and most of them are chaps?’
She leaned back and looked at her watch.
Half an hour to go. Thirty interminable minutes.
Abruptly she stood up and took her bag down from the rack. He was watching her sharply. She could feel his eyes follow every movement she made.
‘I’m getting off too.’
‘Are you?’ She heard the indifference of her voice. ‘Well, I’m catching the rail-motor from Rockhampton, so we probably won’t see each other again.’
Outside the train the countryside was emerging in the pre-dawn light, misty hills and cane fields blurred silver under an uncertain sun blundering its way through clouds. She was back in her corner watching houses and roads take shape through the glass when once more she felt pressure on the seat beside her.
‘Look,’ he was saying. ‘Look. Just a minute.’
‘Yes?’ The curtness in her voice failed to cut him off.
‘Forgive a wee insanity,’ he said pleadingly, leaning forward, ‘but…’ He hesitated and held her eye. ‘Would you marry me if I weren’t married already? Would you?’
Was he mad? What was there to say to this spontaneous idiocy?
The train was slowing down now through the outer sprawl of the town. In a moment they would be pulling in to a platform busy with welcomers and
farewellers. She shook her head, unbelieving. A lay preacher! The modifier made her laugh suddenly in his face and then regret the sound that seemed to swipe him across his opened eager mouth.
Although there was hard sunlight eye-blindingly bright in the dry air, there was a darkness about the town, an ingrown self-sufficiency of secrets. She had been sensible of these emotions before, even alone in bushland – especially there – of being an intruder. A world of gum trees, bark stripping, dangling, their bony limbs rejecting grace, crowded arrogant as beggars in their rags. Once, she recalled, she had been walking alone outside a town like this, filling an hour beyond lunch, when suddenly she found herself wildly running, running, gasping and panting in unidentifiable terror, from the small glade that had delighted her eye and lurching, stumbling through regiments of indifferent trees until she ended up, heaving and winded, near the outlying houses.
At Drylands two middle-aged women had been waiting to take charge of her, whisking her by car to the town’s one hotel. There were introductions – Win Briceland, Paddy Locke. The Lizard’s sign dangled loose from an upstairs verandah. ‘Leave your bag. It’s quite safe. Someone will take it up. There’s only four of us,’ Win apologised. ‘Well, a town this size. Unfortunately it’s the line-dancing week in Red Plains. Otherwise…’ Her voice tailed off. The other, older, woman smiled.
In the school of arts, an architectural survival of the twenties, tables and chairs had been set up by an open side door through which there was an outer view of pepper trees acting as a skirt for the Rock that shoved its ominous finger into the unclouded blue. Evie swallowed disappointment at the lack of takers. Or was it relief? She nodded and smiled at the two younger women sitting almost like schoolkids at the tables.
‘As you can see,’ Win said, ‘there are only a few of us eager for culture.’ She uttered the last word self-mockingly and won smiles from the rest. She was a busty woman with the assurance that comes from living in a small town, of knowing and being known. ‘Lannie. Ro.’
