by Thea Astley
I wrench the back door open but instead of heading up the lane haul myself over the fence of the house to the rear and crash through its side garden, snapping neglected poinsettia as I run.
I’m pursued by yoicks and shouts. One glance behind tells me they’ve lit up the place like a beach fair, maybe to make sure it’s empty, maybe to aid their trashing. They don’t seem to know I’ve gone. Sometimes drunkenness is a saver. ‘Hey bitch!’ I hear Ray shout as I reach the lane-head and my car. His voice punctures the empty seafront street. ‘Where are you, eh? C’mon, you bitch! We know you’re around!’
Clutch’s cackle pursues over unmowed grass.
This is a replay: the film darkened, the surface scratched. Night instead of day but the sound system repeating the original horror.
My car won’t start. I’m living all the clichés of Mrs McPhee’s thriller. I’ve locked the doors and the damn engine won’t fire and while I wrestle with the ignition key there comes the galumphing pound of hoon hooves that have discovered the laneway, followed by two drunken faces pressed close to the glass of the car windows as they begin to rock the thing, screeching with laughter.
I sit in my tumbril, pitched from side to side, still wrestling with the starter, riding out a terror scenario which is destroyed suddenly by verandah lights across the road and a man’s voice shouting, wanting to know what the hell’s going on.
As the engine fires I spin the wheel and jerk away from those dark drunken shapes, swinging the car round to slow down long enough by the shouter and hear him yell, ‘I’ve rung the police!’
Motel recovery.
Next morning a kindly copper accompanied me back to a wrecked house; they’d urinated on clothes, floor and in the sink. There was a puddle of vomit on the kitchen table.
‘I’m out of here,’ I told Mr McPhee.
‘You poor child,’ he said, ‘they won’t be back. They’re being charged with malicious damage and will be held pending trial. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. You can stay with us if you like. Or I’ll organise something else, closer to the nursery.’
I wavered. I gave in. There was a small cottage two blocks down, also staring seawards. I confronted my own dull inability to forge decisions, waiting for Clem to make a move.
He arrived the next day after a whimper phone call.
The Lizard was up for sale and he showed me a snapshot with a real estate sign hanging from a corner post on the upstairs verandah. It was one of the saddest things I’d seen.
‘But who’ll notice it? Who’ll come by?’
‘Some mug like us,’ Clem suggested with a bitter smile. ‘Briceland’s interested. He’s thinking of turning it into a heritage museum.’
‘Well, let him.’
‘I’ll lose too much.’
‘Then lose it.’
Clem gave a great sigh that appeared to empty him out. He was tired. His thin face was even thinner. He had to drive back that night for he’d been unable to find anyone to take Franzi’s place. The locals were beginning to do the run into Red Plains to get drunk there. Not even the sports channel held them. And anyway there was a bigger screen in the Red Plains tavern and a bank of poker machines.
I watched him worry, all the while remembering that small town on the Atlantic coast with its white clapboard houses and a little café called The Chimes where we had sat and giggled and held hands and wolfed fish tasting of salt, smelling of the sea. Almost there. Almost home. Why did I remember now? Why? And I began to cry.
‘Don’t, honey,’ Clem said. ‘Please don’t.’ He seemed blocked by something he had to say. ‘Look, I have to go back. Back to the States, that is.’
He watched my eyes widen.
‘We have to go.’ He gave me a reassuring squeeze.
I could feel the strength and the fragility of his ribs behind his cotton shirt. Suddenly I wanted to play them like a harp. Play my own mournful tune of loneliness. It was his father, he was telling me. He had been ailing for some time and didn’t want to worry us. I nuzzled my head into Clem’s chest and after a moment he lifted my face up with one finger firmly wedged beneath my chin.
‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘We have to be off by next weekend. I’ve organised everything.’
‘We?’
‘Of course we,’ he said. And then he added that we might stay for a while if that was what I wanted.
What I wanted! Words bubbled up in my mouth, foundered and almost choked me.
Clem eased me back in my chair and leant forward until our faces were almost touching. He raised his right hand and began to trace the bone of my forehead with the tip of his thumb, moving it across and down until it settled on my cheekbone where he paused and rubbed back and forth, back and forth, gently, gently; then slowly, as if he were charting some newly discovered continent, he ran his thumb on down my cheek to describe my jawbone and follow its blubbering outline even more softly, round, round, up to the point where he had started. As his thumb shifted delicately and deliberately to that place where he had tapped in all his own loneliness and unhappiness – I could see that now – and wild optimism, he watched me, his eyes steady.
My own eyes were as steady as I watched back.
Again his hand began its tour.
‘It’s not sex,’ Clem said, halfway through, as it were.
‘It’s amity,’ I said.
It was more. It was tenderness. It was love.
This was better than sex, I decided then, which had, in the reality, little of affection, little of tenderness. It was an emptying. This was the filler.
This was the edge of something.
A beginning. A middle. An end.
MEANWHILE…
The world, she decided, is divided into travellers and stayers. She might have said readers and non-readers, and wondered if there were some congruence between the classifications. She was bluffed by repetitiveness, by the day to day to day.
Janet leant her doldrums over the rail of her upstairs balcony and watched the empty early morning street. The town was vanishing before her eyes. Across the road, just up from the charred remains of the primary school, the Legless Lizard still dangled a FOR SALE sign like a dead flag. The doors were closed, the rooms hollow reminders of casual overnight stays. A soiled mattress, dumped on the verandah, still huddled against the railing. Some weeks back a team of workmen had appeared and clumped through the empty rooms making an assessment of the building’s suitability for some kind of heritage museum. She could see the building crumbling to dust under the pressure of council waffle and postponed decisions. Bureaucracy couldn’t make up its mind whether to bulldoze the school building or not. Why save the Lizard?
Did it matter?
There was a certain (she did not know how to pin down the word for it – disaffection? mistrust?) in the fewer and fewer customers who came in for their morning paper, their lottery tickets. ‘Morning, Janet.’ Minus smiles. Or the skeletal ‘Morning!’ No name. Nothing.
Three of the properties west of the town had been reclaimed by the banks. More humiliated dispossessed, their sad belongings crammed into old pickups along with baffled, yowling kids, hadn’t bothered to say goodbye or settle bills. She didn’t mind the latter. It was the goodbye she missed. The café down the road had closed for lack of custom.
What was wrong? What was happening?
There had been muggings in Red Plains. Two men were arrested for peddling cocaine and the head boy of the high school was discovered selling pot to junior pupils in the lavatory block. Put this down, she instructed herself. Put this all down. But her hands mind heart had lost the impulse.
Strangely she missed the racket from the bar. Had to admit that. Hated to. Evenings now had a lack of emphasis, a nothing to resent, except when the skateboard riders screeched up and down the bitumen. Earlier that week some kid had nailed a basketball hoop to the front door of the pub and the thud-thud of a ball whacking meaninglessly against the wall had driven her crazy. Two nights ago she had dragg
ed on her dressing-gown and gone down to confront the noise-makers, careless of her appearance, sustained by rage. She stood chilled and trembling in the midnight street.
The kids had laughed in her face then danced about her chucking the ball from one to the other, making lightning passes that giddied and befuddled, and had driven her back across the road to the safety of her shop. Not one of them spoke, answered her protests; just silently, viciously played arrow-fast around her, herding her away like dogs a sheep.
She locked herself in from what she knew to be an approaching terror.
The town, as a town, was being out-manoeuvred by weather. As simple as that. Drought. Dying stock. A hard sky across which clouds massed, hovered, then rolled away to the coast. The small spatterings of rain that dropped were as offensive as spit.
She made breakfast then went downstairs to put a notice on the front door: Closed until eleven. She locked up and looked grimly at the racks that had once held books and were now given over to videos. She had to live somehow! Their covers, their titles, all assaulted. ‘You might as well, Janet,’ Howie Briceland had advised unctuously. ‘It’s the way to go. You won’t get the kids ploughing through books when they can get a quick buzz by flicking a switch.’
That decided her. That and the increasingly leached quality of living.
At nine she had an appointment with a lawyer in Red Plains to see about transferring the newsagency franchise to Howie Briceland’s wife who had expressed interest, as they say. ‘As they say!’ she said aloud with a downturn of the mouth. ‘As they say!’ – confirmed by a phone call the previous evening. The words that had festered for two long months determined this inevitable end.
Where had all the goodwill gone?
We’re leaving, Ted, she said to her long-gone husband as she bucketed along the gravel to Red Plains. We’re getting out.
This sudden abandonment of sentimental loyalties to the place made her weepy.
Perhaps I should remember this moment, this landscape, should try to hold this endless line of red dirt and grey scrub as something to recall, to return to after I’ve left it. Once, when she was ten, twelve, she had been driving with her mother through a green valley in northern New South Wales, a valley so beautiful with its sunny iris caught between the azure lids of hills that she had consciously, oh so consciously, stared hard and deeply at it, telling herself she would stamp it in her mind for later recollection. She summoned that moment now while the strengthening sun struck the Rock full on its weathered face and momentarily revealed a figure, a something, watching the morning world. A phantom of light and shadow that was gone in moments. She pulled over by the fence-line and watched the vision fade under a blast of shifting luminosity and the ripping cries of crows.
Her business didn’t take long. After she had signed papers of transfer and banked Howie Briceland’s minuscule cheque she walked down the main street of Red Plains and went into the Western Rose for a coffee. Briceland had given her a week’s grace for removal but while she sipped and looked unseeingly through the smeared glass of the café she knew the time would be less than that. It wasn’t dust she wanted to shake off her feet but memories.
She had no idea where she might go. Only that she must.
There were a few friends in the town but she now felt so alienated from the life-pulse, if it were that, of the last decade that she intended to leave (Hey! Cut the fanfare! The bunting! The balloons! The round of farewell drinks and insincere – well, maybe not all – goodbye speeches from unsure hosts!) quietly, not like those shamed bank-busted settlers with their tatty bedding, worn mats and drunken fridges exposed for all to see on the trays of their trucks. Two days ago Paddy Locke had thrown a farewell lunch. Only three turned up: Lily Barnes, Win Briceland and herself. ‘Not like old times,’ Win had complained. ‘Not a scrap. When we all came with a plate, a gift. Dozens of us. Remember?’ The world, Janet remembered, had appeared to be a glut of chicken mornay and cream-filled sponge. Everyone united by robust goodwill. At the end – her sort of end – there was so little that could be taken. All she would be ferrying across the frail borders of time would be boxes of books, records and pages of typing worked over as anodyne, the residue of lonely evenings.
‘Morning, lady!’ a loud voice hooted with jocular irony. And she looked up into the face of Win Briceland who planted her assured behind in the seat opposite, lively with new enterprise.
‘Well, this is a day!’ Win kept dabbing at ladylike perspiration. ‘Something for me to get my teeth into. I must say I’m a bit tired of hardware and veg. Howie says he’ll put Toff in to handle the store – it’s his last year and the stupid kid doesn’t want to go on to uni – so that’ll free me for handling the agency. I’m really looking forward.’
She smiled complacently. ‘And what about you, Janet?’
‘Time. Just time. I haven’t any ideas really.’
‘Something will turn up.’ Win could think of nothing but her own prospects. She gave Janet a sly look. ‘Weren’t you writing away? Putting it all down? You’ll have lots of time for that now. New places. New ideas.’
Janet bent her head over her cup.
‘You know,’ Win said, ‘I went to a couple of those writing classes. Some young woman came through. Remember? But I thought it was a waste of… well… life, I suppose. I mean, people these days don’t want to sweat over something for days, do they? Like reading and such. What they want is something quick. You know. Turn it on and watch and get the story straight away.’
Janet looked up at the open simple face opposite.
‘You’ve got a point,’ she conceded. It had taken her more than fifty years to get any ragged sort of a story at all.
‘Yes,’ Win went on, ‘this young woman, she talked about the death of the novel. Maybe she had something. Afraid I’ll just be going for the newspapers and videos. Can’t lose that way, eh?’ She couldn’t stand the silence of the woman facing her. ‘You know, there’s a lot of hypocrisy about. All those greenies blaming us for land clearing, felling the trees and so on for grazing. What about paper? What about that? A lot of trees for paper.’ She smiled and reached across and patted Janet’s hand. ‘We’ll miss you, love. Part of the place now.’
No, Janet thought. Not. I’m still the outsider.
‘I have to be getting back,’ she said. She rose and went over to the cash register and paid her bill, gave a small handwave to Win Briceland and went out into the shadowless street.
She drove quickly along the goodbye road.
Mulga. Bloodwood. Gidgee. The stayers. The ones that kept cropping up after fire, after felling. Would she, would all the others who had been drifting out and on, crop up so well? When she came into Drylands’ main street the empty pub seemed to have stopped breathing. Its FOR SALE sign dangled lower and flapped uneasily in air-shift as the day’s temperature rose.
She drove round to the rear of the newsagency, parking in her usual place in the back lane. The yard door shifted slightly as if to greet her and a small quiver of unease crept round her stomach. The back door swung ajar and she could see the screwdriver marks in the wood of the jamb, the splintering around the lock. She pushed the door wide. ‘Hello!’ she cried. ‘Hello!’
Nothing.
She forced herself to go in, slowly now, cautiously along the little passageway to the shop. She could feel the emptiness. The nothing space. Every shelf of videos had been emptied, the racks of magazines gutted, the small supplies of writing materials and greeting cards removed. She had cleared the cash register before she left but the few dollars in loose change that had been in a drawer beneath were gone.
She was delighted to find she didn’t care, not about any of it, and sat down on the stool she kept behind the counter for the quiet times – and there had been little but quiet times – to survey a kind of victory, a kind of defeat.
Shabbiness defeated her. The shop. The town. The empty street outside in the brightening late morning. And in addition the meaningless qualit
y of her years. The victory would be in leaving.
After a while she rose and went upstairs, listening for movement, hardly caring if there were. The whole place had been trashed: drawers turned out, kitchen cupboards, bookshelves. She stepped across mounds of down-flung paperbacks over which had been emptied the contents of tea and flour canisters. Her typewriter sat grimly on her work table, and beside it a loose smothering of pages of writing she had been working on during the last six months. Everything was shuffled out of sequence, and she grinned sourly as the term ‘deconstruction’ blazed instantly and briefly. The ultimate roman trouvé! A killer deal for the academic.
On the top page of this pile, a final evaluation, someone had scrawled in texta ‘GET A LIFE!’
She picked up the discarded pen and sat, legs wobbly, hands jittering, hoping for the ultimate reply.
She would never find it.
There was a house she had seen once in a tiny forgotten settlement on the edge of a coastal lagoon somewhere north of Brisbane. Its two storeys listed towards the sea. Its cock-eyed roof was as insolent as a navvy’s cap. There was a name on a board beside the front door – Bateau Ivre – and the house, the name, the memory of the lonely sand-shore with its dripping she-oaks had stayed with her over the years. Rimbaud! Miles from anywhere! Refinding would be like the search for the ultimate Eden. For Elysium, Asgard, Heaven. Quests, crusades, illusory ideologies crumbled and ran away like sand.
She looked around her own drunken room and her hand, drunk on the pen, hesitated to write beneath the scribbled admonition the words ‘TOO LATE’.
Suddenly she began laughing. She couldn’t stop. It was the pointlessness of it all. And more savagely, the point made by the unknown adviser. There was something out there, but she doubted she would ever discover. The idiocy of her wasted years made her laugh even more.
There were no endings no endings no
