The Slow Natives

by Thea Astley

  They were everywhere, at every age and with every face—full, profile, three-quarter—starry-eyed glancing up, gazing into misty distances; looking down shyly, peeping coyly, and one (a mistake obviously) almost leering out of a leprechaun’s costume. They were framed and hanging. Mounted on stands. Turned into glossy plaques. They were in high gloss, sepia and tinted.

  Bernard blinked, re-focused, blinked again. It was as if he had raped a diary. Later on the padded blue furniture came into being and at an occasional table, set also with twin plaques of Miss Trumper as a shepherd and shepherdess, the ultimate insanity of the ego.

  “What do you think of it?” she asked proudly.

  He coughed desperately until he remembered she meant the piano. But where? he asked himself. Where? And there it was, a gay walnut upright, a little beauty, bearing the weight of a massive plaster stag that reclined casually along its lid and looked down at the performer.

  “Amazing!” Bernard said. “Truly amazing!”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.” Dear Miss Trumper was pink with pride. “There were candlesticks, but I had them taken off and polished.” She jerked away and set a framed photo rocking metronomically on the veneer.

  “Do try it,” she urged. “I have it tuned every six months. Tell me if you think it’s worth the trouble.”

  “Ooooh,” Bernard said. Like most music teachers he hated performing and at this stage in his life remembered fragments from scores of things but hardly anything in its entirety. “You’ll mark me out of ten and not give me a pass.”

  “No, no! No, no.” Masses of exclamations and protestations, and Bernard, pelted by these gasped rebuttals, seated himself heavily at the brow-beaten piano and rushed through one of the earlier Bach preludes. Oppressively close, Miss Trumper lowered her face to watch him and all the other Misses Trumper pranced or peered and the stag impassively observed him make a couple of sloppy mistakes.

  Now, decided some insane gambler in Miss Trumper. Oh now. And she laid one gabbling hand on his sleeve as he played the last chord and shook her head from side to side as if words had collapsed or abandoned her.

  Some mumbled thanks were managed, some garbled inquiry achieved.

  “A lovely instrument,” Bernard soothed, rather astonished at the piano’s full tone.

  But it was like being buried in pot-pourri, and burrowing through rose-leaves he attempted to rise, flapped tweed wings, not a ministering but an escaping angel.

  Miss Trumper burst into tears.

  Before he could slide from the polished seat, she had dropped to her knees beside him and his horrified eyes riveted on her head which she had rested on his lap.

  “Please? Oh please please please?” she asked, several times.

  Instantly he understood what she wanted, but he could do nothing except put her back gently and not ask what was the matter.

  I shall die, Kitty Trumper told herself deliberately. I must. I shall take pills or drop from moving cars or walk into space. I shall court locomotives and precipices and open windows. I shall cut off this knot that pretends to be me.

  “Once,” she dribbled into the tweed thigh that sought to escape. “Once. . . .”

  But Bernard merely said “Now” awkwardly or “Don’t” or “There. You’re over-tired.”

  Her humiliation could not prolong itself like some litany of self-abnegation, yet she did not know how to end the situation that struggled weakly in the wild flare of the lighted moment. Bernard managed to get to his feet and he bent down to help her also, unwilling to have her suffer by seeing him out. Putting one hand under the desperately fragile arm protected only by silk, he helped her into a chair. Her mouth kept breaking words to pieces as if she were feeding them to the youngest and tenderest of animals and he felt very near to weeping himself as he saw her, an old velvet-framed ballet dancer, collapsed on cushions.

  Somehow he conveyed his own grief through the touch he gave her shoulder before he escaped into the garden.

  Chookie was still trembling with his rage when he returned through the side gate and went round to the back of the garage where the rakes and hoes were stacked. He didn’t quite know why he had come back. Maybe it was to look at the harmonium again or maybe it was to conceal himself from home and repercussions. Inside there was some fierce acid burning steadily that seemed to be in control of his veins through which no blood could flow, only the heavy pulsatings of anger and frustrated needs.

  He sat steadily on an upturned box and had a quiet fag to steady himself, but nothing was any good any more and he found the cigarette drooping from his hand, spilling ash tell-tale on the concrete floor while he watched the sleepy afternoon house through the door. There wasn’t any sign of the old girl any place, not even a sound from the house. He hoped she’d gone out. He hoped this and he hoped this and he pulled a bit of paspalum up near the door and chewed it for a bit and watched the wet end dribbled across his knee and said crikey, O Gawd, and threw both grass and cigarette away and lit another fag. I never meant to touch her, he said, he told himself. I never hurt her none. Just give her a bit of a shaking. Strewth. What the hell will I do? I only shook her up a bit and off she went. Am I glad she went or aren’t I? Glad, I suppose. O Gawd. He sat on the box and leant his head against the door, and the trembling, for another reason, took him and he bent over his stomach and moaned and spat tobacco shreds and coughed a bit too loudly, for somewhere back in the house he heard a movement and then the old girl calling out something.

  He stared steadily at a clump of bright leaves and waited for her to call again. I’ll just get what she owes me for that extra day I did last month, he thought, and push off. Now he shivered under his jumper.

  Someone was fumbling at the side window, making ineffectual pushes at the stuck casement. Watching, he almost grinned. She looked so funny struggling with the catch and peering blindly through to see who it was in the garden. He slouched over to the doorway and stood against it until she focused into recognition and he could tell by the shape of her mouth that she was calling him, for her hand appeared to be beckoning, too, in a spidery fashion behind the lace; so he ambled across the lawn and path and went round to the back.

  “Coming,” he called, but not really loud enough for her to hear, and he leapt spindle-leg over a hydrangea clump and put on his sandy grin to the bland back door.

  “Come through, Chookie,” he could hear her cry, faint as cobwebs, as distant as death, from somewhere away in, and it made him hestitate, the house was so dim. No light anywhere. The afternoon of watered silk cut off as he pushed the door to behind him and stepped down the too-glossy linoleum. Even the kitchen clock had stopped. He was aware of his own heart. Or hers, pounding in another room. Bumping against the dining-room table, he narrowed his eyes into cat vision, and heard her movement in the music-room beyond.

  “Yeah?” he asked, pushing past bead curtains into the haunted arcades of Trumperie.

  There she was, curled up funny on the settee. Something was wrong. He took another look. Her face was mucked up as if she’d been crying and the funny thing was she turned away when he came in and he could see she had bare feet and was sitting there in nothing but an old sateen slip. White and sad, her shoulders looked as if they’d been crying, too, and the small shiny mounds of her breasts, tokens, preserved a lonely little sorrow. Sadly her thin knees pressed against each other for comfort.

  Some awful curiosity and excitement lunged back through Chookie as he looked at her coiled up on her pathetic sacrificial table and he swallowed a couple of times and kept very still by the end of the sofa, waiting for her to say something.

  But Kitty Trumper said everything in her tearless silence, in her pleading dress, in the dejected rejection of her slopped-down figure. She wept inwardly and the tears ran inwardly and threatened to drown. She wanted and was not really sure what she wanted.

  Me? wondered Chookie. Kind. Frightened. Lustful. Appalled. Me? Me?

  He prickled all over and was so silent she, who did not
raise her eyes lest he observe too closely, imagined for a moment that he had slipped backwards through irresolution and escaped. Hoped so.

  But he had not and remained, gauche, unable to murmur the most clumsily hewn of consolatory words, too young to do anything except the one terrible final thing which she both wanted and rejected. Slowly he advanced his feet over the deserts of carpet, draggingly, touching before resting weight as if he were on some crumbling margin—as indeed he was—and came at last to pause before her lowered eyes and soul. He heard her breath gasp like an old tyre. One hand jerked convulsively on her black sateen lap and one raised itself to him to be hauled up this mountain.

  Chookie put an opened awkward palm, patting, comforting upon the thin hair and he marvelled, as touch nearly brought him to his senses, at the fragility of the skull under his fingers. His tongue was looping itself about words that refused to untie themselves into proper sounds. Gawd, he prayed. Gawd. And then they were both blinded.

  And afterwards, when they had fled to opposite poles like mad creatures, he ducking out in the early darkness stamped all over with watching photographs and she rushing from pretended rapine towards the angelus gates of the convent, that patting horny hand remained raised like an eternal blessing, recalling, at least to her, endless pictures of tear-stained benedictions.

  But Miss Trumper had to sob and moan through the guilt of her satisfaction, rushing crazy as goats across the half-clad road across the lawns past the startled saints and finding her wildly flapping arms in some terrible collision with a small mad nun who was running also across the garden after her lost God.

  In the hurtling dark, bleeding with remorse and the batterings of escape, Bernard drove east, aware of guilt. I could have been kinder, he acknowledged, could have flirted or pretended or touched just momentarily, laid one Christian healing palm on her dried-up loneliness. It wouldn’t have meant anything at all except the sacrifice of seconds. You selfish bastard, he said. No wonder Iris . . . and swerved in the dim light to avoid what might have been the materialization of his sin. the waving, thumbing figure on the edge of the road.

  “Givus a lift, mister,” it asked out of the shadow as he drew up, but Bernard waited until the figure moved closer to the light before he spoke. “Give us a lift?” There was the merest trace of whine. And then he saw it wasn’t a man, but a boy not much older than . . . and with an absurdly spotted face.

  “Where to?” Bernard asked.

  “As far as you’re goin’.”

  “Oh.” He looked down at the empty hands. “No luggage?”

  “Nope. On a walkin’ trip.” Chookie grinned nervously. “I been comin’ in from Dalby and me bundle got pinched when I was in the station washroom back there.”

  “Back in Dalby?”

  “No. Condamine.”

  Liar, said Bernard to himself, and “Hop in,” he said aloud. “I’m going through to Brisbane.”

  “Good-oh,” Chookie agreed slamming the door. He leant back in the corner. “That’s where I’m goin’, too.”

  VI

  SHARP AS TACKS Leo Varga slid his sports car into the city crushed with trams and cars, himself crushed rather delightfully by two students whom he had picked up in glancing as it were on the way out of the last lesson. Mr Varga was wearing a thigh-gripping shortie coat with a real (but real, kids) astrakhan collar, even in July a wee bit hot and unsuitable for Brisbane. His cravat was spotted foulard and somewhere above or below this barrier there was plenty of after-shave lotion that he dabbled also generously between his thonged toes. Wow wowee! Generously and keenly interested in young minds, he had been taking young Tom Seabrook and Keith Leverson on an adult outing, an after-six invitation to a preview of paintings at an avant garde gallery in a South Brisbane basement. He had two or three rather limp crayon nudes hung, and it was always good to take disciples who might make suitable and overheard remarks.

  Tommy Seabrook was a double of his dad—a town innocent, when it was all boiled down. Yet he and Keith, after the initial horror had worn off, discussed their parents with unpleasant detachment and kept their real feelings, their bruised soft souls for private exposure at those times when each reverted to the little boy who cried for lost fairylands. Avuncular Varga latched on quickly to the fact that the relationship knit the two of them matily. Disgusting little beggars, he mused, when they showed off and were hard-boiled and super blasé before him, stripping their pathetic erring parents naked, coupling them and laughing them into pieces. What he simply did not know was that each witty dissection was agony, though the boys suspected this of each other, and sometimes after a particularly amusing comment by Keith one would catch the other’s eye with an apology lurking there afraid to reveal itself fully.

  “What do you think of Leo really?” Tommy Seabrook ventured, unable to imagine the suitable reply he wanted.

  “Oh, he’s okay.” Keith was cautious. “The only adult I know who’s human.”

  “Human?”

  “Yes. Intelligent. Interesting. Interested in us.”

  “I suppose he is. You don’t think he’s too interested, do you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh . . . well, just that. I don’t know. Skip it!”

  But they knew all right.

  Leo could be charming when he wanted. And he wanted now. As if they were contemporaries, he gossiped with the lads, introduced them to other adults who were holding opinions and tiny glasses, bought them coffee, listened to what they said—and then drove them home.

  “Pretty neat, Leo!” Keith said. That meant “thank you”

  “Yes. Keen!” Tommy said. “Me, too.”

  “Don’t forget, laddies”—that was just his fun!—“we’re off to the big surf when the weather lets up.”

  They nodded gravely while Leo leant out of his car like a fun-in-the-sun ad to drop them off at their street corner.

  “Wonder if father’s home?” Tommy said, kicking it along but hoping wildly that he was.

  “Wonder if mother is!” Keith said.

  They all laughed, extra cynically, and Mr Varga supplied the slow wink.

  Later that evening, during an especially interesting television documentary on Poland, Keith began saying, “Duffle-coat, duffle-coat”, over and over. The words were not loud, but distinct.

  “Shut up!” Bernard ordered with lukewarm reaction as he missed something he was straining to catch. Sombre as phenyle, Keith smiled and watched the glassy images distort and coalesce, holding fifteen minutes’ silence out like a floral tribute to dad, but when the interviewer was questioning a particularly pretty student in a turtle-neck who was eager to be voluble, Keith began intoning firmly the same pair of words.

  “Ah, get to bed!” Bernard ordered, raising the volume and contemptuously not looking. The phone clucked as if it were about to lay an egg.

  “Dear God!” Bernard said, reaching across.

  “Duffle-coat,” Keith repeated, smiling gently.

  Bernard handed the receiver out to knitting Iris, who fulfilled every function of the women’s magazines from snappy sweaters even to her adultery.

  “It’s Kathleen Seabrook,” he said. “Tell her to hurry up and get off.”

  Keith went white suddenly. He watched his mother, his eyes glinting like a prophet’s about to uncover a truth, and Bernard, noticing this, could only sigh.

  “Cut along, son,” he said, remembering the closed tight fists of babyhood and the pinkness, the sweet-smelling firmness, the gentle fuzz of hair. Love fell, just for a few seconds, a wild and unexpected rain, with memories of bath-times, animal-shaped cakes of soap, red-faced tantrums and small fierce fingers curling about his own.

  “If you’re old enough to listen, Bernard,” the bright lad said, “I’m sure I am.”

  Refusing to move, he lounged along the carpet over a copy of Swot, the threepenny weekly he and Tommy Seabrook had begun at the high school. He was busy compiling the pre-vacation issue editorial and was sweating over a variet
y of headings. “Oh the thickening thilence!” he had just written and was moodily chewing a dissatisfied Biro end over it. “Gone, the patter of enormous feet,” he had scribbled underneath, “as our favourite sadists sneak from room to room, diligent in their search for victims. Gone, the happy carefree canings, the detentions, the pieces of flying chalk hurled with expertise by masters of modern languages.”

  I like that last bit, he thought, and said, “Hey Bernard, what do you think of this?” He began to read through his mother’s endless voice, trying to drown the lies and the insincerity, the fake friendship. “What do you think of this for a profile on old Slugs? ‘It has been rumoured among the dim brains from Junior School that liaisons dangereuses’—how d’you spell ‘dangereuses’ Bernard?—’are imperilling the morals of susceptible teenagers. One of our slower-moving staff-members, Slugs being the frivolous nomenclature given him by discerning students, has become involved’—is ‘involved’ the word, dad?—’with a set of vital statistics from the economics faculty. What the school wants to know is—what do all these figures add up to?’ How’s that, huh?”

  There seemed no end to it, Bernard thought, like one of those dream roads, hazardless and empty, that never touch the horizon, or round the hill or even reach the boat-yearning sea. The television flickered; Iris talked inanities and Keith, smiling somewhat madly (wherever have I seen that smile before? Leverson asked himself) visually negotiated the room as if he were setting an enormous trap and were awaiting the exact moment to spring it. Sheltered by telly buzz, what seemed a foreign language and radiant commercials, Iris began confidential side comments into the mouth-piece, looking as if she would never tear herself away from its two-way comfort, so that finally Bernard switched off the set and hid in his small study where the four walls with their brown stains and shabbiness accepted and did not criticize. Piles of undone work rammed their obligations home, forcing him to close the door very gently on his still listening, spying son. Softly, too, he turned the key and, shoving aside the pile of unmarked theory papers, he put on a record and mentally dug in.