Drylands

by Thea Astley

  ‘I don’t think so. I’m going out to eat. Let me past.’

  ‘I’ll join you.’

  ‘No.’

  She thrust by him and ran quickly down the stairs into the desolation of the main street. A light still showed in the newsagency across the road and she caught a glimpse of a woman on the balcony above. For the briefest of moments their eyes met and she saw the woman’s head move in a negating fashion. Then she was gone and Evie walked along the street to the café and pushed in through dangling fly-hazard and sat at a corner table. He darted in quickly behind her and sat opposite, watching while she pretended to read the menu.

  ‘Go away.’ She could hear herself hissing.

  ‘I don’t think so. Not yet. Not now. You mustn’t make a scene, my dear.’

  Behind the counter the waitress regarded them indifferently, resting her weight on one foot. She walked slowly to their table. It was the end of the day and she’d had it. She was a heartbreakingly pretty fifteen-year-old who hadn’t yet thought of escape. The evening’s date was sufficient to look forward to. Evie gave her order and saw the man run his eyes over the girl, inspecting swiftly, assessingly, before saying, ‘Just tea.’

  Evie was conscious of irrational and ferocious pique. She should leave. She should ignore him. She should remain silent. But, ‘Why did you wait?’

  ‘I had to.’

  ‘Had to?’

  ‘Had.’ He forgot the waitress for a moment and gave her another of his infinitely sad, infinitely hypocritical smiles.

  ‘There’s never “had to”,’ Evie said. ‘There’s never compulsion. We’re free as air.’

  ‘Ah. You don’t understand, do you, the force of a once-in-a-million… chance of it… of meeting. The fact that out of all… that train… the way we talked… the car breakdown… The… well… all those imponderables.’

  This was dated stuff. It could have come from a late-night forties movie. Of course, she admitted to herself as she munched her salad, it was verbally more attractive than ‘How about a fuck?’ But less honest.

  His light blue eyes, Evie realised, could not decide between her and the waitress, but when she had finished her meal and gathered up her shoulder bag he insisted on walking her back to the hotel.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Get away.’

  But there he was beside her hurrying feet, beside her as she sped up the stairs to collect the rest of her luggage, and there, inside the room once more, the door slammed to, his back against it.

  ‘We’ve got to talk.’

  ‘We’ve done that. Get out! Get away from that door!’

  He took it like a champ with punches in reserve, that smile still on his flattened face. ‘Not yet,’ he said, barring her way. ‘I’ve got problems. Problems.’ His voice began to rise and become shrill. ‘My wife. My kids. You don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh, I bloody understand!’ she shouted. ‘I certainly do that. Let me past! Let me bloody past.’

  He grabbed her and waltzed her over towards the bed, throwing her backwards onto the sheets. His strength shocked. She was too terrified to scream, too busy fighting his mauling hands, writhing, shoving, finally clawing one side of his face as she tumbled from the narrow bed, striking her cheek against the corner of the bedside table. She yelled out in pain, feeling blood run between her fingers, watching his face become suddenly appalled as he stood up and stepped back.

  ‘You shit!’ she screeched, mopping at her face. ‘You shit shit shit!’

  She was deaf to his protests, his iterated apologies. She grabbed her bags and slammed into the passageway, almost falling down the stairs and out through the front door beyond the rising cries of the drinkers. Ro’s husband was standing in the bar doorway, the centre of drunken laughter, and she saw him see her as she stumbled past. He mock-toasted her with his schooner glass slopping over but she ignored the salute, the howl of amusement, and dodged round the rear of his parked truck. Blood kept trickling down her cheek while she half strode, half ran to the railway station. She scrubbed her face with her arm, smearing it, not caring. She did not once look back.

  The train was in and waiting. This was indeed the end of the line.

  She took a seat in the last carriage as close as she could to the guard’s cubicle, glancing around quickly to see if she was alone, but across the aisle a huddled group was watching as she slung her bags onto the rack.

  The swollen cheek, the bruised eye, two small kids in pyjamas half asleep. Ro looked defiantly at her for a moment, then managed a half-smile. Evie threw her hands apart in a nothing-to-declare fashion and moved her head slowly from left to right, left to right, as the woman above the newsagency had done. The train let out its own dingo cry as it started up and shuddered along the track. Beyond the shaken windows the world was black on black.

  Two of a kind.

  She would write a story, she decided, about a woman in an upstairs room above a main street in a country town, writing a story about a woman writing a story.

  MEANWHILE…

  ‘Is it a boy or a drudge?’ her mother had asked the matron in the cottage hospital delivery room.

  ‘A drudge, dear,’ the matron said. And winked.

  The story was repeated all over town.

  Mother was a goer, a bit of a dasher in that small coastal village. Her outspokenness caused raised eyebrows and pursed lips. The daughter of a mill owner in the sugar belt, she was an only child who received a boarding-school education and had gained a formidable matriculation pass at the outbreak of World War II. A maths freak. Despite her father’s objections to higher education for women she went to university and graduated in science the year of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Then she had attended teachers’ college for a year and at the end of that time found herself appointed to a high school at a liberating distance from her home.

  With most of the male staff enlisted or conscripted she took all the senior forms in physics, chemistry and maths for a salary sixty percent of the male rate. She didn’t like that. She didn’t like being charged the same amount as the bank clerks for board at the hotel where she spent her evenings marking assignments. She didn’t like paying the same fare on buses to get to work. In fact, she insisted early on that she would pay only sixty percent of the fare. This caused some difficulty but the bus driver’s son was in his final year at high school and hoped to matriculate into a reserved course at university, like engineering or medicine, and so avoid the draft. His bus-driver daddy allowed her to win the argument.

  Mother was almost beautiful, a poised, calm young woman with symmetrical features and a rush of long black hair that she wore pulled back into a loose but entrancing knob. Its wafting insecurity offered many opportunities for her to raise her arms in a careless balletic style to pin it up. She appeared unaware of the attractiveness of this.

  She had been teaching for two years when the war ended and in an unguarded moment married a returned soldier whose sheer stupidity had ensured his commission. In the swiftness of courtship she failed to notice this also. After a brief honeymoon in Sydney they returned to the coastal town where he was assistant manager at another sugar mill. The woman accountant who had been filling in for him was sacked immediately and life proceeded, for him at least, as it had always done, but this time in a hot rented house not far from the mill.

  Robert was a what’s-for-dinner and there’s-a-button-missing-on-my-shirt man. She noticed those things very quickly. Her world, at that point, tilted on its axis. Within the year she was pregnant. ‘No more teaching for you,’ her husband said. ‘You’ll have two of us to look after. That’ll take all your time.’ He seemed rather glad to be saying this. After all it was conservative 1947. In a town that size it was not done to have a working wife.

  ‘What do they call this stuff, then?’ she had asked, pointing to a large basket of dirty linen, waving a hand towards the oven and its half-roasted leg of lamb.

  ‘That’s different,’ he said. ‘That’s what wives are expected to do.’
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  ‘I’ve been at school all day.’

  ‘Well, now that’s all going to end.’ He smiled. She was beginning to hate his smile.

  When Janet was four the local high school pleaded with her mother to return, at least for the matriculation class, suggesting regular part-time work five mornings a week. Mother jumped at it and there followed days, weeks of terrible argument based mainly on the premise that the house and its demands would be neglected.

  ‘You mean your demands,’ she heard her mother say.

  Janet became very busy with colouring in. By making herself as unobtrusive as possible – there were many corners – she learned a lot about the eternal warfare of married couples. It rather put her off.

  ‘Never mind, dear,’ her mother said to her as they started out for school that first week, Janet having been taken into kindergarten class a year early as a special favour, ‘things will improve.’

  They didn’t. But she learnt to read in that first year and learnt also to move quietly outside to her swing under the strangler fig when words began flying like gravel.

  The gravel flew for a year, and then one morning her mother packed several bags and enlisted the help of the bus driver’s wife whose son had not only won a scholarship to university but had completed a dazzling final year in engineering. ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ his mother said as she dropped the runaway pair at the railway station in Rockhampton. ‘Good luck, my dears, and if there’s anything …’ Et cetera, et cetera.

  Father didn’t bother to pursue. Within the month he simply filed for divorce on the grounds of abandonment. ‘A misuse of the word,’ Janet’s mother said. ‘You will understand later.’ Janet barely glanced up from a badly thumbed copy of The Magic Pudding. ‘Always remember,’ Mother said, watching her absorbed child, ‘that being unable to read is being crippled for life.’ Janet sucked her thumb, nodded and turned the page.

  Funny how some phrases stick, she thought now, going back fifty-odd years to that moment in the Rockhampton Mail. She moved away from the window of her living-room where she had been watching a young woman hurry past the chiackings of early drinkers at the Lizard. Life had been easier after that, she remembered. Mother had resumed teaching. What else could she do? They rented a small house in South Brisbane and formed a jolly relationship unjuggled by the difference in years. Janet was six going on forty.

  These days the futility of it all made her feel six.

  LETTING THE LAVE GO BY

  After the fifth dry year, after that, what with his age, his sixth decade peaking at the height of summer, he decided to give it away. Letting the lave go by, except that out here it was all tumbleweed and dust.

  His thousand-acre patch – he had never allowed himself to toy with the metrics of space – was worthless, unable to sustain the small holding of stock that tottered to starvation bones on lack of pasture. He was in debt to the bank for fodder, for fencing, for veterinary services; and he had had enough. Even the lease of the block down by the creek to that out-of-towner, Massig, had only held the bank at bay for a short time. The creek that bounded his paddocks ran thin as his spirit – both now a series of waterholes choked by weed.

  Pulling out, he told everyone in his countable town. I’m pulling out.

  He sold off everything except the home paddock where the timber house groaned in the rainless air, creaked and shrank in the vertical summers. There was a shed behind the house that he needed and a further acre or two along the creek with Massig’s shack. No point in turning him off. The minimum rent kept him in groceries.

  I’m pulling out, he told the lot of them down at the pub.

  The weather turns round, Jim, they all warned, old-hand prognosticators. ‘It turns around,’ Howie Briceland agreed, but happily adding another five hundred acres, even if useless, to his empire. He was a man who believed in the sorcery of large numbers. ‘You’re a bit of a fool. The climate’s got to take a turn.’

  ‘I’ll let you wait for that,’ he’d replied. ‘I’ll let you enjoy it when it happens. There’s something I’ve got to do.’

  And what’s that? they had all asked.

  But Randler wouldn’t say.

  Yet how he remembered that other time, that earlier time, and how the memory plagued him. And how he lusted. That was it. Lusted.

  He was ten, a scraggy bit of a kid and the war over. Old philanthropies fell back into place and the far west scheme for underprivileged children who’d never been to the coast had plucked him up with half a dozen others for a week’s holiday by the sea, straight through on the Western Mail and then a rackety road coach to a house on a beach outside Rockhampton where, for the first time in his ten years, his eyes were shocked by that moving world of aquamarine whose surface shook in repeated patterns of yeasty invitation.

  The vastness frightened him at first. The immensity. It wasn’t like the pictures he’d seen. No painting, no photograph could lift itself from a final flatness. This monster crawled. It threatened. It munched the sand stretch where he stood. ‘What is it?’ he’d asked the man and woman who ran the place. ‘What’s out there?’

  ‘That’s the sea, love,’ the plump, good-natured woman said. Neither she nor her husband laughed. He was glad of that, he remembered. And then she’d ruffled his hair. ‘It’s real beautiful, isn’t it. Look.’

  None of the other kids seemed to want to know – or maybe they did know. They’d headed straight off across the sand and were splashing about at the edge of that swinging blue floor, shrieking as their pants and shirts got wet and racing back out to stand shy and scared before all this fluid power.

  ‘What’s past that, mister?’ he’d asked the man.

  ‘Past what?’

  ‘Past all that water?’

  The man had smiled then and his hands moved to touch briefly Jim’s thin tense shoulders. ‘If you swam straight across you’d reach America. South America. You heard of that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He’d seen it on a globe at school.

  ‘But it’d be a long swim!’ The man laughed. ‘You’d need a boat.’

  Young Jim was a loner, not quite a misfit, but one who preferred his own company to the pack of eight-year-olds who had made the trip with him. They were from places even farther out than his own town and he didn’t know any of them. He felt almost grandfatherly looking at them digging and kicking in the sand.

  Then, ‘Lunch, boys,’ the motherly woman had said, clucky, smiling wider. And they trooped up to the house and he’d never seen so much food, all set out on a long table on the verandah, great piles of sandwiches and cakes and fruit on each plate, and the man said, mock fierce, ‘Tuck in, you kids. Gotta clean the lot up now, or you’ll hurt me wife’s feelings, eh!’ And they had giggled and tucked in, and he could still remember the happiness he’d felt, the relaxation of it all, though he didn’t know the word then; and afterwards, the bunk beds made up for them in the three spare rooms and pegs to hang their clothes and everything. God, everything, he remembered. And never a scowl, a yell, a cry of anger or displeasure.

  The next day, the big man, Mr Watters, seeing him mooning along the beach on his own while the smaller kids watched by his wife splashed about in the water, asked him if he’d like to go for a row in the small inlet that licked in to the beach from the south, a green creek-fed tongue of backwater separated from the sea at low tide by a sandbar. A small jetty ran out and three or four hire-dinghies were beached.

  ‘I can’t row,’ he said. He’d read that word.

  ‘Never mind,’ the man said. ‘It won’t take you long at all.’ He pulled a funny face. ‘You’ve got the best teacher on the coast right here.’

  Mr Watters went up to the boatshed and fetched oars and rowlocks then strolled over to one of the dinghies, hauled the killick from its mooring behind a lump of coral and tossed it and its rope into the belly of the boat. ‘Give us a hand, mate,’ he said to Jim, and began dragging the boat down to the water. Mate, the boy thought, pleased, and raced to hel
p and then watched as the boat began to bounce and bob in the shallows.

  ‘It’s a dancer!’ he cried, delighted.

  ‘Sure is,’ the man said. ‘Hop in. She’ll take us for a waltz, eh. Now, you just watch what I do.’

  Jim perched up in the stern and watched the big man brace his feet against the thwart while he slipped the rowlocks into place and slid the oars into position. ‘See. Like so. You got to watch them, mate. Mustn’t lose your rowlocks.’ He shoved one oar into the sand and pushed the boat out. ‘Now, here’s the crazy bit, eh, I row with me back to the way we’re going.’ And he grinned and Jim, tense with watching, with learning, laughed; and the day was hot and blue and the air smelt of salt and he’d never known anything like this, this nimble butting over water with the shore slipping behind and the gulls crying and the smaller kids who’d come up from the beach to watch waving as they slid back and back and away.

  ‘Watch how I dip ’em,’ the man said. ‘Back, dip the edge of the blades, pull against the water as you lean back, then raise ’em, turning your hands so that when you reach the end of your swing they go down again clean and straight.’

  They were in the centre of the lagoon now and Jim was beside himself with delight, with movement, with the lapping slap, with a brilliance of transparency. Over the side of the dinghy he could see through clear water the ribbed sand below and a moving cloud of tiny delicate fish. He wanted to ask a hundred questions but the big man said, shipping his oars, ‘We’re going to change places, mate. Fancy a young codger like you, eh, letting an old buffer like me row! Steady, now, gently does it or you’ll tip us over.’

  The dinghy wobbled crazily as Mr Watters shifted back to the stern. Jim was too excited to be nervous. He edged into place and took hold of the oars as he’d seen the man do. He was hungry to learn.

  ‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘Now. Dip, pull, and swing.’

  The boy was over-eager. The blades flattened.

  ‘Never mind,’ the man said, grinning. ‘That’s what we call catching crabs. Keep them edges sharp.’