Drylands

by Thea Astley

  Bingo! she realised now. She was to be that. She was careless about the ripple effect of words. How could she not be at twenty and working on popular radio where the depth of analysis plummeted in direct ratio to the high-pitched screech of commentator indignation.

  They married within the month.

  ‘I don’t want my wife working,’ he announced with memories of female Asian compliance.

  She gave up her job. They went on a honeymoon to India.

  India! she had marvelled. Another country and culture! She grabbed brochures, borrowed books, gawped at deliciously coloured and thoughtfully edited photographs of the subcontinent. Only Fred would think of something so exotic.

  Why India? Was he missing the East?

  They stayed for three nights at a two-star hotel in Bombay where they walked almost everywhere. They ate at street stalls. She suspected him of stinginess, a suspicion underlined when he suggested they see the country by staying at backpacker hostels for the next fortnight. They had already moved into one that was stunningly uncomfortable, grimy and overcrowded with hippies and would-be gurus in search of nirvana.

  Why?

  ‘I want to go home,’ she whimpered, stupefied by heat and stomach upset. ‘Please, Fred.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ He gave her a little hug. ‘What’s happened to that keen adventurer eager for new experiences I met back in Brisbane? Where’s she gone?’

  He told her he knew members of a small commune of Australians living on the beach near Goa. They would bus or train or hitch.

  Was this why?

  He told her this while they were trudging along Victoria Road on their way to the gardens. Not far from the gates there was a beggar, legless, blind, bundled over his tray, arms flapping into the thick air as he begged for alms.

  ‘Please?’ she had beseeched Fred. ‘Please give him something.’ Fred was in charge of all the funds.

  ‘I can’t get at my wallet,’ he said testily. ‘It’s in my money belt.’ He groped in one pocket after another and came up with a handful of boiled sweets. ‘There,’ he said heartily, dropping them on the tray beside the few coins already there. ‘Enjoy.’

  She had seen the sweets were still wrapped in paper. ‘He’s blind. He won’t be able to unwrap them.’

  ‘Oh,’ Fred had said, pausing, considering. Then he bent down to take them back and there was a frightful scene as the blind man dropped forward to protect his wealth, his arms wrestling with Fred’s as they tussled for the lollies. There were disgusting grunting sounds. In no time a crowd had gathered and she walked away, away from the gardens and back towards the dingy backpackers, into the screech of car horns, the clogged gasoline-filled air, the thrusting crowds.

  Fred caught up with her a block farther on. He was red with indignation. A policeman had questioned him and moved him on.

  For hours Lannie felt she couldn’t speak to him, and they never did attempt heading down the coast but had wilted away in a fortnight of armed truce. And anyway, when the time came to board the plane, she suspected she was pregnant.

  This is the way it goes, she told herself. This is the way.

  Nineteen years on a property sixteen kilometres out of Red Plains and Drylands, the apex of a triangle created by gravel roads and spinifex whose hypotenuse led directly to the Legless Lizard. Legless lizards have rudimentary limbs. Well, that’s about right, she decided with a wry smile. A dried-out creek and dams little more than quagmires, a few sheep that Fred kept tottering around as a tax lurk and six bouncing boys – the eldest was repeating final year high school – whose sole interest was football.

  For most of those nineteen years Fred had worked in a clerical position at the Red Plains council chambers, allowing the farm to fall apart while he strove for promotion and eventually the position of shire clerk.

  Goal!

  The psychiatrist – Dr Kyle – ran a small and expensive therapy clinic as an adjunct to a private hospital. He had few takers. Most of the nutters roamed harmlessly about the streets of coastal towns or languished in places so far inland locals learned to live with them, underscoring the legend of idiosyncrasy monopolised by the north. But he managed to persuade Fred that his wife needed a month of treatment. ‘And then we’ll see how things are,’ he added, smiling. ‘Rest. Medication. A complete change of scene. But rest above all.’

  ‘How will I cope?’

  ‘Have you thought of employing a housekeeper? Surely the boys are old enough now to look after themselves. Why your youngest is – let me see – eleven? Twelve?’

  Fred grunted. The cost was getting to him. Lannie sat indifferent in her chair, one foot tapping the packed bag her husband had brought in. Fred kissed her goodbye and the kiss, like his earlier smile, also dropped to the floor and fragmented.

  She enjoyed the rest. She enjoyed having meals brought on trays. She read sometimes but mostly sat in the small courtyard of the clinic and stared into space. Every week Fred came to visit and to urge her back home but she was revelling in that very intermission Fred had allocated himself during the breakfast frenzy each morning. (‘Fred, for Chrissake can you watch the toast while I do the eggs?’ ‘Sorry, love, I’m having my quiet time.’)

  He had trouble finding a housekeeper.

  He had advertised the job as live-in, two hundred a week, all found. The first applicant who had gone out to the farm summed up the workload in minutes. ‘Are you mad?’ she said, and left. Grudgingly he raised the salary offered and persuaded an elderly widowed pensioner. She lasted a week.

  ‘You’ll have to come back, Lannie,’ Fred said on his next weekend visit. ‘We just can’t cope.’

  ‘A clinic is a lovesome thing, God wot!’ Lannie said.

  ‘What? What’s that?’

  ‘Never mind. I’m not coming back.’

  ‘Stop your nonsense, love,’ Fred said. He got up from the one easychair and walked about the small room painted depression blue. Outside on the tiny lawn an elderly woman was walking up and down talking to herself. She appeared to be amused by what she was saying and every now and again gave a chuckle. She waved happily to Fred’s nosey face looking through the window and vanished into a side door.

  ‘Let’s go outside and talk this thing over,’ Fred suggested.

  ‘Must we?’

  ‘Yes. Come on now. It’s nicer outside.’

  The heat was stunning. It hugged them in great clammy arms. Overhead clouds boiled up in giant clots that presaged the Wet, threatened and then rolled on out to sea while the sun struck again with venom. Fred led his wife to a table and chairs set under a mango tree. They were barely seated when an old man leaning heavily on a stick tottered out from the clinic and over to them.

  ‘That’s Mr Hartigan,’ Lannie said. ‘Hello, Mr Hartigan!’

  Mr Hartigan smiled, a sad wisp of a smile that slid about his lips as if unsure of direction. He came closer to Lannie, removed his teeth and placed them gently on her lap like an offering. Then he fluttered a hand at her and limped away across the grass.

  ‘Jesus God!’ Fred cried. ‘I’m taking you out of here. Look. You’ve had a rest. It’s time you came home.’

  ‘Sixty,’ Lannie said. She stared straight past him.

  ‘Sixty? What do you mean, bloody sixty?’

  ‘The lunches I haven’t had to cut for the last fortnight.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Fred said. He dropped his head in his hands. ‘Would you like to talk to Father O’Shea? It couldn’t be more unproductive than what’s happening here.’

  ‘Yes it could.’

  Fred ignored the remark. ‘And anyway, what’s that with the teeth?’

  ‘Poor old boy,’ Lannie said. ‘He gives them to everyone.’ She folded the dentures into a hanky.

  ‘Why, for God’s sake?’

  ‘They don’t fucken fit. That’s why! He kept leaving them on the reception desk at his dentist’s and the dentist had him committed. Harassment, the dentist said. Fair world, isn’t it?’

  She looked p
ast Fred and waved to the old lady, who had come outside once more and was sidling up to them. ‘Hello, Mrs B,’ Lannie said. ‘Come over here and meet my husband.’

  ‘I don’t like husbands, dear,’ the old lady said. She spun suddenly and turned away.

  ‘Pack your bag,’ Fred ordered, standing up, hands clenched in irritation, ‘and I’ll see Dr Kyle about checking you out of this place.’

  ‘No. I’m starting to like it here.’

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ Fred’s voice rose in the steamy heat of the small garden and his words hung above them like nimbus.

  ‘I want a job.’

  ‘You’ve got a job. Looking after your family.’

  ‘Not that sort of job. A change of job. A change of direction. You know, Fred, you sound just like Father O’Shea! Look, I’ve spent twenty years of my life cooking washing ironing cleaning and I want something else. You don’t understand, do you? The boys are quite old enough to cut their own lunches, wash their own daggy football shorts, help get meals. I’m sick to death of your telling them that’s women’s work. You make that simple fallacy all men make – you’re physically more powerful, therefore you have total power and because you have total power you assume you are more intelligent! That’s your mistake, jumping from muscles to brains. A mistake or cunning. So you proceed to shove and bully and treat wives like peasants. Well, this wife anyway. I’m sick to death of doing nothing but clean up after you all. I don’t want more babies. I want a job that pays me something. I don’t want to talk to that old fool O’Shea who’s barely heard of Vatican II and who believes women should breed till they drop.’ She bunged on a brogue. ‘“The hosband has roights, me dear.”’

  She glared at Fred. ‘And what’s more, the old bugger has a housekeeper to cook his chops. He understands nothing. Why don’t you go, Fred, and leave me be.’

  Fred’s fingers curled and uncurled. He could hardly drag her, chair and all, out to the car. Someone might be watching.

  ‘You are mad,’ he said. ‘The things you’re saying. Bloody mad. One more week.’ His anger was a giant lump in his throat. ‘One. I’ll be over next Sunday evening.’

  On the Friday morning very early before the rattle of teacups, Lannie packed her bag and left the clinic without seeing the matron, any of the day nurses or silky Dr Kyle. She booked herself into a bloodhouse hotel in town and set about job seeking. The heat might have squeezed out hope as she stepped along the Tropic that cut the town in half.

  Twenty years out of the workforce. It was impossible, she judged, but she persisted. She approached the local radio station and after thirty minutes achieved an interview with the personnel manager who was having a boring day anyway and listened with half an ear as she outlined her background in commercial broadcasting.

  ‘You weren’t in it long,’ he said. He looked at her critically. ‘This isn’t a good time to be job hunting. Everyone wants to be a radio jock.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said. She would push through layers of indifference. ‘I’ll do anything. Make tea, clear up back clerical work, answer telephones, organise appointments, do research. I can handle a computer. And I’ll do it for a junior wage.’

  ‘We can’t do that,’ he said. But his eyes brightened. ‘General dogsbody, is that what you want?’

  ‘That’s what I want,’ she lied, crossing fingers on her lap. Better things would come. She felt it in her bones.

  He looked at her. He saw a slender, not young not old woman, neatly dressed, speaking confidently. He wouldn’t mind a dash of efficiency about the place. And she appeared malleable. Malleability was all! The latest front-office appointee could barely read, forgot to take down messages and, when she did, her sub-literacy caused terrible problems with days of the week and appointment times. She spent hours on the phone talking to her boyfriend.

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ he said.

  Four other firms said they’d be in touch. She was on the point of despairing decision. She would have to return to the farm. She missed the boys. She loved them. But she craved mobility, another identity than that of slave.

  She took herself and what she felt was a wasted morning into a small coffee shop near the river and sipped moodily at her tea under a moodily turning fan. Flies buzzed and hurtled to death against the purple circle of light above the counter bar. She watched them. Me, she thought. Me.

  She remembered Fred’s first two visits to the clinic. He had brought the kids with him, the eldest driving half of them in her little runabout. They were curious and embarrassed. They had been bored. They had asked her to come back. She had said, ‘I will if you’ll help me.’ And Fred had said, ‘Now, now, Lannie, you know I won’t have the boys turned into housewives.’ The youngest, who was nearly twelve and already taller than his mother, had begged his father to let them go look round the town and find a hamburger and a video arcade. When they had gone Fred said, ‘You can see how they miss you.’

  ‘Not really,’ she replied, watching her husband’s eyes shift.

  ‘Don’t you love them?’

  ‘Of course I love them.’

  ‘Then why don’t you come home?’

  ‘I don’t think they love me. They just miss what I do for them. I want a life. Just a bit of a life outside kitchen and the wash-house.’

  ‘Not much wash-house.’ It was a grim piece of jocularity. ‘The tanks are just about empty.’

  Peeved Lannie lost it. She began to yell.

  ‘Then you’d want me to go down to the creekhole and beat the bloody clothes on rocks while I utter little orgastic cries of pleasure and the other wives look on and say, I want to do what she’s doing?’

  ‘Jesus, you’re disgusting!’ Fred said. ‘Bloody disgusting. You’re not being like the other wives now. They don’t make unreasonable demands.’

  ‘You’re the problem,’ she told him.

  But he couldn’t see it.

  ‘Okay,’ the personnel manager at the radio station said when she went back there on Monday after three days of silence. ‘You can start tomorrow.’ That morning he had been forced to sack the girl on the front desk when he surprised her making a lengthy overseas call to Los Angeles where her boyfriend was taking time off to find himself. Baby-doll sumptuousness wasn’t worth it, he decided.

  ‘I can start right now,’ Lannie said, full of zeal.

  Through the window she could see the busy streets of the town, slow-moving shoppers, cars cruising, cars angled in to the kerb. There was a glimpse of sluggish green-brown river and a man in a rowing boat pulling across to the north shore. She thought for a moment she recognised the stoop, the white thatch of hair.

  Blink! Drylands! Blink!

  ‘Fine,’ the personnel manager was saying. ‘Come out front and I’ll give you a run-through. Can you handle a switchboard?’

  ‘I’m a quick learner,’ she assured him.

  And she was.

  That night she rang Fred from a pay phone at the post office to tell him she’d be back at the weekend. But when he said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she hung up.

  They had to talk this through.

  She caught a bus back to Drylands late on Friday and hitched a lift out to the farm with Paddy Locke. Strangely enough, the house was not nearly as chaotic as she had expected, though Fred sulked and was inclined to whine. He had spent a fortune at the laundrette in Red Plains and another small fortune in bribing the boys to organise evening meals. The kitchen was a mess of striving.

  ‘I’m not giving up this job,’ she told him. ‘But I’ll be back each weekend to see how you and the boys are getting on. I need my car.’

  Fred was appalled by a new businesslike quality in his wife’s manner. He had been cramming his six sons into the panel van and running them in to Red Plains High each school day. He couldn’t wait for the holidays a fortnight off. The afternoons were the worst, he explained almost tearfully to his wife, who sat and smiled and watched him. He had the choice, he said, of letting them hang round
the town until he finished work at the council chambers or having them get the bus back to Drylands and wait about there. He’d tried organising a lift for them out to the farm each afternoon, but no one was willing to make it a regular chore. And the endless sports practices after school! His wife had timetabled her life around those. He felt he was going crazy. ‘I need you, Lannie,’ he half whimpered and surprisingly burst into tears.

  She let him sob for a little. She felt it might calm him and perhaps they could discuss the whole thing rationally.

  There was no discussion.

  Tears weren’t enough.

  Fred had had her runabout driven back soon after she was admitted to the clinic. Now she drove its friendly clutter to the coast late on Sunday, having left the family two enormous casseroles and a batch of biscuits she had whipped up that morning. The boys had seemed indifferent to her presence but livened considerably when she explained she intended renting a house when things got established and that they could drive over on sport-free weekends and stay with her. Johnnie, the eldest, now had his licence and perhaps Dad would lend him the van. ‘Cool,’ they said at the thought of hanging out in the milk bars, malls, video arcades. And, ‘See you!’ they cried without a tear. ‘See you!’ Chappie, the youngest, was banging a basketball about and forgot to wave.

  It was Lannie who drove back unable to see the road properly through her own grief. ‘I was an automaton nothing,’ she whispered. A nothing. Just something that supplied and supplied for the scrappiest of thanks, if ever. Even the rare holidays when Fred had rented the cheapest possible house at the beach had been a replay of the action back in Drylands.

  ‘Makes a change, doesn’t it?’ Fred would cry proudly, surveying the narrow bedrooms with their stained mattresses, the kitchen with the blocked sink and the stove whose oven didn’t work, the rusting fridge, the broken vacuum cleaner.

  For a fortnight she cooked washed cleaned while the seven chaps headed off to surf fish sunbake, leaving her wrestling with idiosyncratic stove and washing machine, and returning glistening with salt and health to cry, ‘Hey, when’s lunch/tea/supper?’