The Slow Natives

by Thea Astley

  “Well, now,” Bernard said, baffled, “what can I do to help?” And he experienced once more the unorthodox persistence of emotion.

  “May I try again?” she asked. “May I try that Bach again for you?”

  He was staggered by her seriousness.

  “But you passed most creditably,” he argued. “You couldn’t have wanted to do much better, could you?”

  Her fingers seemed stripped to the bone; the flesh, her only protection, was gone. “I have been working on it.” She faltered. “I think—I think the interpretation has improved.”

  Neither looking at him directly nor waiting for his answer, she jerked across to the piano and began to play with terrible emotionalism what she had once performed with such mathematical accuracy. He waited until she had finished, impatiently, but resigned.

  “Would you like me to show you?” he asked gently, attempting to align himself with her, but she did not stir.

  “Here,” he said, “sit in my chair, and I’ll show you my version.”

  Years ago one of his pupils had told him his fingers smelt of tobacco and biscuits and, watching now the reddish hairs on the back of his fingers, he wondered if they still affected pupils that way. Slyly he glanced at the little nun but could see nothing except the curve of black shaping her neat and, he suspected, crazy head. Preposterously, all the same, when he finished and lifted his hands from the keys, swivelling on the stool so that he could look directly at her, she was crying silently with her eyes shut tight, her mouth open as a child’s, rebelliously unsure, and as a child making no effort to hide her face.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. The grating timbre of his voice was grotesque. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  He ground his teeth over this mundanity, its idiocy; but she unexpectedly replied with her eyelids still gripping each other as if she might let the world in should they open, “I’m fit for nothing. Neither in this life nor any other.”

  The room whirled with embarrassment. Should he be involved like this in personal confidences? He thought not. The reversal of what he had assumed secure hit him blow upon blow. Three of a kind, he told himself. And the numerical situation gave him comfort.

  “That’s a drastic statement,” he said weakly. (One could hardly pat the hand of a religious.) “Do you mean life in general? The religious life?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “How long have you been professed?” he asked.

  “Nine years.” She opened her eyes. “Since my eighteenth birthday.”

  “You don’t know much about any other sort of life, then, do you? Do you think it’s so much better?”

  “Are you lonely?” she inquired, changing the subject with an abruptness that was outrageous.

  “I suppose so.” Bernard smiled at her but she stared whitely into his face, cold as wax, and he added to placate her, “Everybody is. All knotted up inside.”

  “But you have a family, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. I have a boy. But we are very much apart these days. He’s growing up. He doesn’t seem to need me any more. I wish he did, you know.”

  Impossibly the memory of the eight-year-old recurred. “Dad, Tommy told Chris he was a dirty rotten bloody bastard.” Eyes radiant. “True. He did. He says dirty rotten bloody bastard. I’d never say dirty rotten bloody bastard.” Coming at sin obliquely for a week after that until the novelty wore off. “Dad, is it really wrong to say ‘dirty rotten bloody bastard’?” And he had ruined it all for Keith by saying, “No, son. Not really.”

  Sister Matthew stood up convulsively as if she had been twitched from an occasion of sin.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Leverson.” She was so formal and dry her tears might have been his own fabrication to ease an intolerable situation. Just as unexpectedly she put one of her small-boned hands on his and with a limpid smile, which cut past that secondary one and curved her face into that of a child, she said, “My playing certainly didn’t deserve a sweet.”

  The bell rang! That was it. Ten years ago he might have laughed at her distress and five years before that again he would not even have noticed; but charity, like cancer, grows slowly until it involves the whole being and he could only regard her through the increased understanding of his own unhappiness.

  “I haven’t got any with me, you know. I’m giving up smoking. It’s bad for my heart and I simply have to have something to distract me. Gum. Lollies.”

  “Perhaps next time,” she insisted. She was pinning him down.

  “Certainly next time. I owe you one, anyway, for your examination work.”

  It all was incredibly silly, though he could not have been more gently amused. Having opened the door for her, he walked across the grounds to the front of the building, the circular grass plot where unacclimatized bauhinias wrestled with the weather. The saints were on guard, calculating with their hollowed eyes, and he was conscious as he walked down the short drive of agitation behind and flapping of veil and habit where Sister Beatrice and Reverend Mother endeavoured to catch him before he left. The lop-sided conversation was never completed.

  As he moved back towards Mother St Jude to deal with polite reassurances, he was surprised and not surprised to notice Sister Matthew’s gliding departure in the direction they had come and to see Reverend Mother’s jutting jaw pursue the last fold of the vanishing habit.

  V

  CHOOKIE MUMBERSON UNDER THE LEAVES, under the probing twigs of Miss Trumper’s garden. Mould heaps, fertility rites with bone-dust from his biblically broadcasting hand in a snail-trail so that we can follow him into the shrubbery near the rubbish dump where he is having a furtive arvo smoke. Behind the polka-dot freckles bumpy mouldings of his short-nosed face with its light-blue eyes can be observed without much pleasure. Only a mother could—and she never did. He is and always has been too much of a skit on the tough little boy. Now at seventeen he is just not tall enough, kid-freckled still and with his largest finger-nails not quite half-an-inch deep, over whose pink segments wet nibbled flesh bulges cushions. He would squat on a laundry bucket by the bottle heap or relieve himself, still the small boy, making a wet pattern on the paling fence. C-H-O-O-K-I-E he would write, awkwardly button up, roll a fag clumsily and puff tiny smoke signals he hoped Miss Trumper might not read in her weekly time.

  But—

  “Tea,” she would trill from the house. “Tea, Chookie!” Standing on the back step, upright as glory, her myopic eyes blinking against daylight. To convince her he would make a few digging sounds with his hoe while she cried, “Chookie,” in a frantic hopeless way into the long lost acre, her voice finding him out down the overgrown paths, across parterres, with its trickle of doubt and anxiety: “Chookie . . . Chookie . . .” Once he had cackled like a hen in reply all the mad freckled way to the back veranda where she had gaped her humility and leant her shock against the fly-screen door.

  “But I never thought you minded,” she protested, her limp mouth kneaded by her own guilt. “I didn’t know. Really I didn’t.”

  “Course I don’t,” said Chookie, glad she was upset. “I was only kiddin’. Everyone calls me Chookie, ever since I can remember like.”

  She mumbled something.

  “Silly ole faggot,” Chookie had thought, following her into the kitchen, all germ-free chrome and laminated plastics reeking of Dettol. “Ain’t got no sensa humour.”

  He ground his cigarette out carefully and scraped a little dirt over it with his boot. Germs. Smoking was dirty. She was always tellin’ him. Silly ole nut. But he didn’t want to lose a sweet cop like this. One day a week, but she paid as much as if it was two. Almost as much as he got at the convent for three. Nope! This was for him. And in a few months maybe he’d push off to Brissy and look the girls over there. That’s what he told himself, anyway. Not that Chookie had ever had a girl, but he’d thought about it sadly and desperately since he had his first set of long strides. All his mates used to rib him and he couldn’t stick that.

  He trailed after her voic
e.

  Where the concrete path began between an apple-tree and a hedge her anxious face could be observed at the back window. Grinning, he dragged a hand across his mouth.

  She had the tea made this time when he got in—“Scrape them please, Chookie,” she had said and he had lumbered back to the steel doormat and ground off a little mound of twigs and clay—but she had two goes at rinsing his cup and it took her quite a while to make up her mind to pour his tea into it.

  “I hope it’s not dirty,” she pleaded, not looking at him. And he played it along with her, poor biddy.

  “That’s okay, Miss Trumper,” he said. “That’s how I like it.”

  “Biscuit?” she inquired. “No. Not the top one. I’ll take that. There you are.” Relieved, she nibbled safely.

  “Good-oh,” Chookie said. He ate two fast, and poured himself a second cup.

  “How’s your mother?” Miss Trumper always inquired. And he always said she was okay.

  “And your father?” Chookie used to marvel at the routine and suspect she never listened to his answers. Or cared.

  “Shot froo,” he said for a change, putting two heaped ones into his cup.

  “But only last week you said he was all right.”

  “Did I?” Chookie grinned, showing a row of teeth that badly needed bracing. “Well, he wasn’t really.” He shoved the last corner of a biscuit into his mouth. “He’s been gone for a month now, only mum didn’t want me to tell no one. But last week she heard he’d been smashed up in his truck near Longreach and she says she don’t care who knows now. Serves him right.”

  “Was he badly hurt?”

  “Only enough for it to be a warnin’, mum says.”

  Miss Trumper’s mind reeled. Backing from the sugar, she pushed her chair out a little. Chookie dropped his eyes and reached for another biscuit.

  “Shot froo,” he repeated, surveying the fabric of this tale with artistic satisfaction. “Yeah. We think there was some dame at the back of it. Mum says he’s a regular rooster an’ he shot froo.”

  Miss Trumper took the envelope (floral motif in corner) containing his thirty shillings from where she always slipped it beneath the clock. Something made her recheck the contents, but then, as she pressed her long grey fingers on its crispness before giving it to him, “If there’s anything I can—” she was saying when the doorbell cut through the ceremony and she had to thrust it at him suddenly and then vanish down the hall while Chookie stuffed the envelope into one pocket and three of the biscuits into another.

  Background noises—female duckings—and he slipped out of the kitchen door, re-coiled the hose, and put the gardening tools in the garage where no car but an old harmonium propped its age against the wall upborne by the harmonics of nonconformist hymns. Chookie dragged up a fruit case, squeezed the bellows with his knees and very softly picked out with one audacious finger a wheezing version of “When the Saints Come Marching In”. It was so vulgar it made him laugh out loud, like the time he had crept into St Scholastica’s and played “Roll Out the Barrel” before Sister Beatrice pulled him by his ear from the stool. Wish the ole girl’d gimme this crate, he thought vamping softly with his left hand. But he closed the lid down before she got mad, and sloped round the front where she and Miss Paradise were practically nibbling the shoots off an umbrella-tree. Miss Paradise inclined the hideous painted flower of her face over the shiny leaves so she would not have to speak, but Miss Trumper, who hated all good-byes, kept waving until he allowed his eyes to see hers.

  “Next Tuesday, Chookie?” she asked unnecessarily.

  And he answered condescendingly, “Dee vee and double yew pee!” She was delighted, the old superstitious dear, the thrower of salt, the avoider of ladders, the reader of astrological forecasts.

  “Good-bye then,” she carolled. But he did not answer, following his shadow absorbedly along Fitzherbert Street. Before the plate glass should begin he paused to run a clogged comb through his carrot-crop and clean his finger-nails on the teeth of it.

  Thoughtful in a shade patch. Side lanes ran north and south through a lantana scrub at the backs of houses. He waited in the sun-pocket and felt a perspiration film like jelly over his freckled mug. Chookie in aspic! He giggled at the thought, fingered his pay, and watched a town lovely swing past. He gave her a wolf-whistle, but she just tipped her profile upward. “Snoot!” he hissed softly. “Snoot.” All the desperation of his adolescence rushed through him so horribly he could have cried. “What’s up with me?” he asked himself then. And as he went down the short-cut he burned with some terrible force that sharpened when he saw the skinny kid he’d seen once or twice before come down the lane after him, bouncing a ball which entirely occupied her as she whacked it along the cow-track. Smackety-smack. Miss, grab, smack, smack; until his fairy-tale giant loomed over her as the ball rolled right to his clumsy feet.

  He kicked it gently backwards.

  They stood very still in the sun.

  The ball rolled red, green, blue, across the rut. There was no one coming or going, only their two-ness and the rubber ball beneath a bramble. Her innocence inflated like a monstrous blister on his eyes.

  “Come here,” Chookie ordered, frantic, and unable to stop himself.

  The child backed away.

  “I want my ball.”

  “Get yer ball.” Chookie grinned, hideously nervous. “Then come here.”

  The child felt her throat grow solid and God move away into the sky like a star going out. Edging past him she bent and picked up her ball while Chookie measured her thin frame, terrified by a guilt that grabbed him in its hand and squeezed and urged him. It made him angry.

  “Come on,” he said very softly and dreadfully. “I’ll show you somethink. I got a pound. Come here an’ I’ll show you.”

  She sprang round and started to run as Chookie pounced across the track. In her constricted throat a soundless scream formed, higher than fear, the high-pitched nothing of hysteria that broke into rain-patter of breathing when he grabbed her fleeing cardigan tail and dragged her round. But she wrestled viciously and silently on the path under the lantana cliffs, and between the bites and kicks and guilt and rage Chookie wanted terribly to let her go but could hear only his blind self saying over and over, “I wanter show you somethink. I wanter. Lemme show you. Lemme show. Lemme.” Her heel caught his anguished shin so that he wanted to hurt her now, she made him so mad, shake her and shake her till she rattled her silly little bloody head off and it banged away down the path like the ball. Then on the thought the rhythm began and he shook, shook, shook, the blackness dazzling him, shaking her stupid light-boned body all over the path, scattered like lantana flowers to break in a gust away from him down the laneway, right down between the cubby-holed scrub, away from him collapsed suddenly to his haunches on the track, watching with his blind eyes and dropping his head between his knees to vomit sparsely the bitter bile of his spasm and catching the last trickle down the side of his mouth on a checked sleeve.

  The second day he’d lost his school money, a whole two shillings, and when he first discovered it had slipped from the knot mum had made in the comer of his hanky, his flat little stomach had contracted and given him belly-ache. “Tell Sister,” the ginger-headed girl in the jazz garters had said. “Tell Sister.” And he told, but no one found it or if they did they weren’t saying, and that night mum had nearly given him a hiding except he was so upset and hadn’t eaten anything. Sister made him share his orange, too, at play-time and one of the other boys had shoved him over on the slope behind the church so that he cut his knee and it bled. “I don’t like school much,” he told them between his grimy sobs. “No one would play with me.” And the next day when he saw the girl in the beautiful jazz garters—all pink and blue stuff like little dobs of flowers round the crinkly tops of her gleaming white socks—she had looked away and pretended that . . . and then he got in the way of the big boys playing footie. Weeks of it, he remembered. Weeks of it. Later on he settled down and
a big slob of a kid who had jug ears and couldn’t multiply a thing used to catch it every lesson while Chook shone with sixty per cent brightness and watched the new victim gratefully. But there were some bad spots. Like the time Sister Gabriel pinned his inky copy page to his back and he had to wear it all arvo, half dead with shame. All the girls laughed at him. “Chookie!” they trilled across the playground. “Inky!” Not that the boys were so bad. And the next day the limelight shifted from him because Gabe announced that there was a lot of cheating going on in the class and even if they thought she didn’t see their guardian angel did and anyway she’d prepared a big pasteboard sign with CHEAT printed large across it and the first one she caught would wear it all day. It was ole Barbie Jazz Garters. She had hysterics later and her parents came up to the convent and Reverend Mother saw them in the parlour and even Father Keefer came over from the presbytery. All the kids had sneaked round by the coleus hedge near the music-room windows that looked across to the front parlour, but they couldn’t see or hear a thing and he had to go and spoil it all by laughing out loud. Later on Gabe gave him the strap—one on each hand—with a leather bound discipline beater from whose impersonal guts he could still see the sawdust oozing. Wish! Don’t cry, Chook! Wish! Geez. Geez. It hurts! And he’d cut out sharp into the grins waiting to rip him, with his blue eyes watering and his mouth twisting a way he didn’t mean it to go. But ole Jazz Garters left the next day and went over to the State School and none of the convent kids ever spoke of her afterwards except in soft secret voices because of the scandal. For a couple of Sundays, too, Father Keefer had been strong on sending the children to government schools. “Godless institutions!” he’d thundered from the pulpit. “Godless. Given to the world and mammon.” “What’s mammon, mum?” he’d whispered urgently in church. “Wait till you’re older,” she’d said, and folded her neatly mended tan gloves over the worn colour-lost edges of her old handbag. He only put two out of the three pennies she’d given him on to the plate, but he never really enjoyed the gob-stopper he bought afterwards.