A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  He went outside, puzzled when he found a thin, red-headed girl waiting timidly on the footpath. For a moment he couldn’t place her, and then he remembered she was one of old George Lalor’s brood. Youngest, she must be, he reflected. It’s years since George left town. There went a special part of the Railway Hotel income. Ah, well.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked, trying to smile kindly, and not succeeding. He had been a publican too long. ‘What’s the trouble?’

  ‘Please,’ Vinny said. ‘Please, I want to see Mrs. Striebel. She asked me to come and see her.’

  ‘Mrs. Striebel,’ Farrelly said. He looked hard at her. ‘Didn’t you know? She’s gone.’

  ‘She’s gone?’ Vinny said, automatically repeating his words.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Gone. Went first thing this morning on the rail-motor. Thought you’d know. You’re up at the school, aren’t you?’

  Vinny didn’t answer. The whole morning, the bright, the golden, had turned black as pain, was the straw floating away, the lottery drawn and lost, the hoops flung uselessly with the prizes tantalisingly close and unattainable. She felt nothing but a numbness as the shock of the words spread an aching cold over her body. She became nothing, whirling and spinning round foolishly as a dandelion ball in the wind. She opened her mouth to ask a question and the words squeezed out thin as a dream-cry.

  ‘Where to?’

  Farrelly was startled by the sudden whiteness of her face. She looked as if she might fall over.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, hating her for delaying him, wanting to get back to the bar.

  ‘Where to?’ Vinny repeated.

  ‘Camooweal. She’s been transferred. Didn’t you kids know?’

  Vinny could not answer him. It would be public admission of Mrs. Striebel’s treachery in not telling them. She couldn’t understand why they hadn’t been told. Everyone liked her. She shook her head silently. Funnily, it wouldn’t stop shaking for nearly a minute. She had to make a very strong effort to control its spastic jerks. Farrelly watched her, wondering what was the matter and feeling unexpectedly sorry for her in spite of his impatience.

  Vinny raised her pale eyes and looked at his, at the face fatigued with its own striving after money, after the swift deal, the cut here and the gain there.

  ‘She had a book for me,’ she said. ‘I came to get the book. Did she give it to you to give me?’

  ‘No,’ Farrelly said, shifting his feet impatiently. ‘What sort of book was it?’

  ‘Just a book’ – becoming once more as cautious as a cat.

  A flush of irritability prickled right through Farrelly’s being. He really couldn’t stay here chattering with kids. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I haven’t been up to her room. She only went a couple of hours ago. Would you like to go up and see if she’s left it for you?’

  Hope flared. Another ticket was pressed miraculously into the hand, the hoops were handed round again.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  Farrelly turned away, relieved at getting the business out of his hands and into someone else’s. That was the way he had run his whole life when things were proceeding unprofitably for him. Going inside to the foot of the stairs, he called Allie.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to Vinny. ‘Come on in. I’ll get Allie to take you up. You can have a look round Mrs. Striebel’s room and see if she’s left it for you.’

  Allie clumped towards them from the upper storey and stood resentfully on the landing.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘I was jus’ goin’ to start the polisher, Mr. Farrelly.’

  ‘It won’t take more than a minute,’ Farrelly said apologetically. It wasn’t easy to get maids these days. Girls were getting above themselves. ‘I want you to take young – what’s your name, girl?’

  ‘Vinny Lalor.’

  ‘Here’s young Vinny Lalor wants to go up and see if Mrs. Striebelleft a book for her in her room. You haven’t found anything, have you?’

  ‘Me?’ Allie said. Her fat, normally good-natured face was oily with sweat, and annoyance pouted her mouth. ‘I haven’t been in yet. Too busy.’

  ‘Well, take her up and have a look,’ Farrelly said. ‘I’ve got to get back to the bar.’

  He rushed off thankfully. Saturday serving was a divine office.

  Vinny and Allie stared at each other. This was the one, Vinny recalled, who had got into trouble last year. She knew because she had overheard her mother and Mrs. Gilham talking about her going to Brisbane. Superstitiously Vinny decided that some external force had brought them suitably together for this last humiliation.

  ‘C’mon,’ Allie said abruptly. ‘I got too much to do here as it is.’

  Wearily Vinny followed her up the stairs, hopelessly hoping. Here was the corridor along which Mrs. Striebel had moved. It meant nothing. It was merely a dim passage running away from her to left and right with lots of little brown rectangles for doors stamped on it. Allie opened one of them – it did not matter which, and inside in the shadow they both gazed at the bare furniture, the bed with its mattress rolled back, and on it a pile of used bed linen all neatly folded. The wardrobe door swung open on three dangling coat-hangers that underlined the emptiness of the room. Everything spelt departure.

  ‘Have a look inside,’ Allie said. ‘It might be inside.’

  Vinny moved hopelessly across the room, opened the wardrobe door fully and peered in. Nothing. Nothing but a sheet of newspaper on the floor and some mothballs rolled into the corners.

  ‘Nothing,’ Vinny said. ‘There’s nothing there.’

  She looked across at the wash-stand, but there was only a soiled runner on it, and on the shelf below a waterjug with a broken handle. She stood dazedly in the centre of the room, tasting a despair so dreadful she did not care how foolish she might appear.

  Allie looked at her oddly.

  ‘What sorta book, love?’

  ‘Just a book.’

  ‘Maybe she forgot an’ took it with her.’

  ‘No,’ Vinny said. And it was worse remembering this, because it was so true. ‘No, she never forgot anything. She always used to do what she said.’

  ‘You haven’ tried the dressing-table,’ Allie said. ‘Try the dressing-table, love. You never know. She might have jus’ popped it in one of them drawers.’

  Hope flickered like a match and lit Vinny’s search in the top drawer. It was empty. So was the middle one, and Vinny had difficulty putting it back in position because the wood was warped. She pulled the bottom drawer out and her heart leapt convulsively, for at one end there was a heap of things shoved to one side. She squatted on the floor and pulled the drawer right out to see better. There was a pile of unmarked geometry papers, a belt, an odd glove, and the china basket of flowers she had given Mrs. Striebel.

  Vinny’s thoughts were tumbled every way in a sickening incoherence as she looked at it, as she swung in a mental fun-fair razzle-dazzle: Something in her throat seemed to be hitting her violently, bringing her to the point of choking. Her lovely gift – it was more than that – it was herself – had been left behind as a thing of no value, equal with test papers and bits of unwanted clothing. The basket shimmered in the light from the hotel veranda as she and Allie looked into the drawer, and Allie ravished by the gilt cried out with pleasure.

  ‘Ooh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Mrs. S. musta lef’ that behind. Fancy leaving a pretty thing like that! Lemme see.’

  She edged Vinny aside and bent down to pick up the basket and set it on the dressing-table where it wobbled and fell over.

  ‘Gee, it’s brummy,’ she said, but she picked it up again and examined with her head on one side and her eyes taking in every detail like a bird. ‘It’s pretty, though. Gee, it’s pretty!’

  This was the final agony of a week that had been unbearable. Nothing more, she thought, could hurt her like this – that her gift, chose
n with such love and gratitude, could be now as forgotten and unwanted as old examination papers. The day had been reduced to its lowest common multiple. She wished she could cry but there was such a dreadful, hard, tight feeling in her chest, as if all the tears of the last four days had finally dried up, leaving nothing but this pain, solid as rock in her heart, in her mind.

  The heat in the room closed about her, its warm unfriendly arms squeezing tightly so that they would hurt. Fearing she might faint, she sat on the edge of the bed, dizzy in the clutch of the hot air. Allie did not look round. She was still admiring the basket, running a loving finger over the involved flower clusters.

  ‘S’pose we’ll have to send it on to her. I coulda fixed it with a bit of gum.’ She patted her stomach, now curving ever so slightly over the new life it was bearing tenderly within. She glanced over at the girl sitting miserably on the bed and staring unseeingly ahead. Allie thought she looked funny, kinda dazed as if she’d had a shock or something.

  ‘Well,’ she said hesitantly, ‘your book don’t seem to be here.’

  Vinny, blanketed by thicknesses of air, heard nothing, said nothing, had lost touch with meanings and places and people.

  Allie repeated her statement with a doubtful expression on her plump face. ‘I said your book doesn’t seem to be here.’

  ‘No,’ Vinny said. ‘No.’

  She stood up with an effort and walked to the open door, past the large girl whose generosity with lovers was the talk of the town. Here we are, a small voice said far away in Vinny’s mind, both of us here in the same room at last. There is a meaning in that. A proof.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said without irony. ‘Thanks for showing me.’

  She went out into the corridor and she did not look back. The dimness of the building was inseparable from her feelings, as empty. Down the stairs, through the dinning, sweating hall-way beside the bar into sunlight that hit her like a blow.

  Her fear was definite now, resolved at last into its final terrifying shape, pointing nine months ahead to the worst shame she could imagine. She wished desperately that she were dead, and when the word in the thought slipped across her mind, at first without meaning, as often happens in impulsive desires, she chased after it and caught it and held on to the wish with a cornered fierceness. She wanted to melt into no time and no trouble as rain-water vanishes in a pool.

  She turned towards home automatically. Where else was there to go? Along the roads the women were coming from the shops, loaded with vegetables and groceries and meat to pile into the backs of old sedans and trucks. Vinny pushed past them, her eyes staring blindly at the curve of road by the bridge and the long hill that took her home. There was nothing at all left for her now. Her worship was unwanted, her affection, her gift.

  A figure swung on to the bridge from the side road. Betty Klee, swollen and red in the sun, moved past her without a glance and then, struck by an idea, stopped at the far end of the bridge and called back, ‘When are you going to start knitting?’

  Vinny lowered her head against the words. Words were weapons. Her feet raced the laughter that chased the words and then Betty Klee’s voice, smooth as oil, said, ‘Let me knit you something.’

  Let me die, Vinny prayed, her feet stumbling in the dust-filled car ruts. Let me die quickly. I only had one thing and now it’s gone. I never really had it. Maybe she never even liked me. She guessed what I wanted to ask her and she was too ashamed to help, too frightened to give me the truth I didn’t want.

  She felt desolate as a beach at dusk pounded only by the monotonous theme of the sea. Here finally was the point of isolation, so perfect, so complete, there could be neither a going forward nor backward. Here was the occasion when it is better to remain still and allow the forces outside the central situation – but compelling it nevertheless – to take charge.

  The hill home, down which she had walked that morning, less than an hour ago, in the tolerance of hope, was more huge and terrible than she could believe. Her legs dragged in leaden fashion and her whole body felt as if she were pushing enormous weights up the powdery stretch of road. Sky was still blue. Sunlight was still yellow. Trees were still green. She saw none of it. The primary colours escaped a mind absorbed like Sisyphus with its primary task of attaining the top of this impossible hill. Her pain was the boulder she rolled before her. Sweat damped her hair, but her eyes were dry as sand, and her mind, her heart were dry, too, and bent on securing for her the road-crest that seemed to shimmer now in waves of unendurable heat. I hope I die, she said aloud.

  There was the casuarina wilting in the midday sun, sad across the picket fence with its unpainted wooden slats, the lantana hedge dotted with hundreds-and-thousands of colour, thorny and overgrown. She looked back down the hill and saw the township’s hundred houses, the red roads, the railway-line with its shunting goods train. On the far side of the tracks Betty Klee’s dumpy figure was still visible trudging up the slope towards the school.

  Vinny pushed open the front gate and went cat-soft along the side of the house on the uncut grass. She could hear the thudding of the iron in the laundry and then the tiny splashing noise of the water in the jam jar as her mother damped down the clothes. Ducking her head instinctively as she passed the window, she ran on round the corner of the house to the toolshed where it leant drunken against the bright green cassias, its roof spattered with brilliant yellow buds and flowers. Vinny stood inside the door, staring outside at the blue and gold air, and was a column of anger and pride and hurt and fear all at once, but mainly anger; and for the first time in her life, she felt a rebellion of egotism that made her want to be noticed. She wanted to punish someone, cause another person pain and thereby transform her own, be a tragic heroine, a centre of a huge pity, a public martyr.

  She looked all round the walls, at the junk, the bottles matted with dust and cobwebs along the bench, at the heaps of dried cassia leaves and seed-pods blown in by the wind. There were rake and mattock handles jumbled in corners and across and against the packing cases and the tea chests that they once used for storing old clothes, and there were a dozen chipped flower-pots that her mother had used before she lost her husband and her enthusiasm. Along the shelf behind the door were the tins of fertiliser and the packets of lime and bottles of lye and weed-killer that they used from time to time.

  When Vinny saw these her whole body stopped moving for a second, became as still as death which she suddenly knew as her purpose, was the intention of anger that had carried her cat-footed past the house to the toolshed. It was an impulse of resentment that first kept her eyes fixed steadily on the bottles of poison, innocent as the grail, in shadow and under dust. Her intention was shaping itself less with despair than with a fury of desire for attention, for notice, prominence ultimately in school and out of school; even among the adults she would be talked about with awe and pity and perhaps sorrow. She would punish them all. Later Mrs. Striebel would hear and would be sorry too late.

  She felt a spasm of heroic elation, and her freckled hands, no longer those of a child, reached untremblingly for a bottle on which, years before, her mother had printed the warning word. The ink had run, was faded. She took the cork off and looked down into her fame that lay still and dangerous and for her, devoid of any fear.

  It became so desirable she smiled, a quiet thin little smile, while the cassias trembled and shook their flowers against the rotting timber of the shed. No more fear, her mind rejoiced, no baby, no shame, no voices nagging and pestering and tormenting, no empty lunch-hours, no longer the nothingness of everything, the gift unwanted, the person. She wondered if it would hurt, but she didn’t really care. Fame was worth any pain, fame and revenge; and this was her ultimate and most special way of getting even. It wouldn’t be hard to do at all. When she was small she had made herself do things like jumping from the steps or the veranda or swinging off trees by counting to three and accusing herself of cowardice if she didn’t a
ct on the last number.

  She lifted up the bottle and rubbed the dust from its wide rim with the palm of her hand.

  In this moment before glory, everything had an amazing clarity. Outside, the grass stood in millions of separate blades, green and sharp, so plainly she could see the shadow of one blade on another, and by the door the image of leaf stamped on leaf. The house sat in shade purple as a grape. Vinny heard the radio bellow suddenly and then the click of the switch snapped down and Royce’s feet thudding like hooves across the uncarpeted floor of the back sitting-room.

  They would come looking for her soon for lunch. That would be her moment. Hatred, not love, was the last emotion of her heart, and despair was somewhere at the back of this, was everywhere like air, like sounds too high to be heard.

  In the gentlest of breezes blowing across the doorway she looked down the lawn at the bloody flags of the acalyphas, and raising the bottle, counted to three. It might hurt a bit, her mind said, but she would never have to be hurt again. That was the main thing.

  First published by Angus and Robertson

  Published 1983 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  Reprinted 1984, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1996, 1998, 2012

  This edition 2015

  www.uqp.com.au

  uqp@uqp.uq.edu.au

  © Thea Astley 1960

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes

  of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the

  Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without

  written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group