The Slow Natives

by Thea Astley

  “I think she was rather a pet,” he said, and turned the ignition on fartingly to drown her irritated words. “Poor little thing. You tried to be too grande dame.”

  He skidded off, wanting his son. Parental love, he told himself sourly, the only damn’ love affair that goes on and on. After all, loving only has to be active to exhilarate and you accept that fact and they love you back sparingly because there is a natural wish to escape. I must have a drink with Bernard, he promised himself, to celebrate my freedom.

  Left alone with conscience and visitor, Iris flapped about a little, straightening blinds, cushions, lamps. Thank God for adornment, she might have prayed as she set that part of her house in order, that part which now she knew she must value most or appear to under the lenses of this watcher’s eyes. Uncomfortably, refugee to the kitchen, she made more coffee and listened for the phone, a car, a footstep, while the nun, as if somehow she had reached the limits of a necessary journey, accepted silence in the stuffy living-room, folded her hands within her sleeves, and waited.

  It had been one of those days for Bernard when the natural hues wash back as in some cheap print exposed to rain and only the outlines of events appear the black upon the white, the conversational bones, the remembered actions branch sharp. He had gone past old Bathgate’s studio on the way to the canteen and from outside the door heard a Ravel sonatina played so maturely he thought, Good old Fred, he’s not bad when he bothers. But then the choleric features of Bathgate popped at him round the door Punch-like.

  “Come in,” he hissed, “and listen to this.”

  A blasé nine-year-old was playing, her cranium barely in line with that of the grand. In a corner of the room, matrona bellicosa, crouched Mum.

  “Watch your feet,” she ordered smartly as Leverson tiptoed in. “Not you. Her.” She wasn’t really apologetic, and hunched in the chair, her eyes slitted at daughter, at prodigy, at celebrity. Under storm-cloud, the little girl sped smartly to an end and began a no-nonsense blowing of her unformed nose the moment she had lifted her miraculously swift hands from the keyboard.

  “Not bad, is she?” Bathgate demanded with pride.

  “Excellent,” agreed Bernard. The little girl looked him over coldly. “I wish they were all like that.

  “Play your Mozart for them,” Mum said.

  Bored, she flexed her downy narrow arms.

  “Which is that?” she whined.

  “Oh, you silly!” Mum snapped. “It’s the one with the blue cover.”

  Prodigies, thought Bernard. Prodigies. De prodigiis domine libera nos. And he whispered something of the sort to the teacher, who guffawed and disgraced himself.

  That was one outline.

  And then a public phone, jammed with pennies, stuffed with lovers’ fee, had prevented his reaching Iris. And after that a missed bus stamped its green backside on his memory for ever and ever. Then the ferry stalled mid-river on its cable, wallowing in apologetically ten minutes late; and oh God when he walked in. . . . Iris, who was no dispassionate observer, believed they confronted each other like a guilty pair, recognizing some oblique aspect of her own betrayal with such force that even she, who normally lacked finesse, was forced to leave them alone in his study.

  “I have to speak with you,” Sister Matthew said, making the preposition sound strange. “I’ve come all this way.”

  “I’m so tired,” Leverson said, but without meaning to be rude, “and my son—” He stopped. “Yes, of course.”

  Like a child, she sat opposite and again he was struck by the sad curve of her shoulders and the lamenting arch of veil over head and neck. She was watching the piano with an almost obsessive rapacity, but he closed its lid and leant against it, observing her white face curiously.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I have to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  The confession had to be executioner-swift.

  “I sent it. That letter to Monsignor.”

  “You!” Bernard flushed annoyedly. “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “Certainly not for His,” Sister Matthew said.

  “Oh, don’t be witty, please!” Bernard snapped, not detecting her humility, and then watched, horror-struck, the tears sparkle out.

  “I was not”

  “I’m sorry. I see that I’m upset, you see. You’ll have to excuse me. Why, then?”

  She remained silent.

  “Don’t you realize what a letter like that could have done? God knows I have troubles enough.”

  “Yes, yes. I know.”

  “Do you hate me?”

  This was one of those traps of sixty seconds where every wild beast of time flared its eyes.

  “No. Not at all. No, Mr Leverson. I wish—I wish to please you.”

  “That was hardly the way, do you think, to expose me to scurrilous charges, risk my employment, my reputation?”

  “I’m sorry. I came because of that, because I’m sorry. To say I’m sorry.”

  “Never mind then. So long as that is the last of it.” Collision of ideas in his mind held his speech in confusion for a moment. Then he joked with her, suggesting that perhaps she had come all the way to play the Bach, and opened instantly the old wound and watched it gush in horror. She did not seem able to find her handkerchief or was too embarrassed to search before him.

  At last she spoke. “I’ve finished with all that,” she said.

  “All what?”

  “Music. I intend never to play again. Not ever.”

  Bernard wondered what should be said now, if protest would soothe or false flattery aid. She seemed, so he imagined, beyond the help of mere words and he knew now that unwittingly he had inflicted hurt he could never mend. Absent-mindedly and tactlessly he helped himself to one of the boiled sweets he kept on his desk while Sister Matthew watched through streaming eyes.

  “Here,” he said ineptly, “would you—” He stopped, horrified. “I want you to have one,” he went on, “not for your playing, you know, but for owning up. You were very brave.”

  Blindly she reached into the jar and took one, holding it without recognition; then with extreme care she put it in the depths of her apron pocket, and rummaged uselessly for a handkerchief.

  “Take this,” he said hopelessly. He really did not know what to do with her. “I sympathize, Sister. I’m not quite sure what your troubles are. Perhaps if I tell you that those of my own—only—well, only serve to blind me to yours. I don’t want to seem unkind. But my boy is missing.”

  She was nuzzling the linen square wetly. “He is missing and has been since last night.”

  Selfishly she gave no sign of having heard but continued to dribble sadness into the damp rag she held before her give-away face.

  “You could pray for me,” he suggested. “I don’t seem able to somehow.”

  Soon she would go. Had she come with anyone? he inquired, and she shook her small head. Without telling anyone or without permission? To follow her letter up with this was intolerable.

  “May I ring your mother house?” he asked. “It is—difficult—to be involved this way. I honestly don’t know what to do with you.”

  The rejection of words was unintended, but struck her Stephen-like martyred body with stone upon ringing stone as she accepted his suggestion that he telephone for a cab.

  “You must go back, you know. There is nothing else.”

  “I don’t want to. I don’t know what I want really, except that I am so unhappy.”

  “But isn’t it too late? What is there for you to do if you leave such a sheltered life? Where would you be swept? It’s worse on the outside, believe me. In there, you’re safe. God’s on your side. There are people, meals, and salvation.”

  In that order, they each thought, communing unaware.

  Outside a taxi howled like a tiger. Here was one Christian being flung on to the hungry circus floor.

  “My wife will go with you,” he said, to help. “She will see you safely to the con
vent.” Impulsively he put his arm about the narrow shoulders and held her gently for a minute, then he opened the door.

  Beneath his kindness she shuddered, for the world should only shock, and she turned her strange lonely face up to his and said simply, “Thank you for this.”

  In the hall he found Iris opening the door to the cabby, and then he became the beggar, the one who had to force himself to plead, a thing he hadn’t done for years, to squeeze her arm despite his own discovery of her inward shudder. She nodded. Merely that. Nor did Sister Matthew say another word after he saw them to the front gate where his good-night fluttered like a moth in the car’s headlights and was not answered, though he could see the strangely sculpted profile turned deliberately towards the river and the wet shadows of the city.

  This is death, Sister Matthew thought, to have confessed and been absolved and feel no relief.

  IX

  “YOU’RE THE SAME AS ME,” Chookie said.

  He was looped up in a hollow of the dune. They had walked on down the coast all afternoon and just on six a timber jinker had picked them up and run them on past Fingal towards Cudgen Headlands.

  “Jesus, it’s cold!” Chookie said. “Bloody cold.” Foetus-curled, he hunched his skinny knees up under the duffle-coat and shivered, looking from the crook of his arm to where Keith sat with his arms coiled round his knees. A caesura in the dactyls of the dunes showed the licking, fawning sea, full of fear and fish and tides that dragged the shore endlessly across the world and back again. Carbon-paper sky stuck all over with stars. Mosquitoes droned up in the damp.

  “How do you mean?” Keith asked. “What’ve we got in common?”

  “We’re boys,” Chookie said, and giggled dirtily. “But I don’t mean that, maybe. I mean the inside us like. You know. Not the bits you see, the doovers stuck on, the face-stuff an’ all. I mean inside, see. How we feel.”

  “No,” Keith said sulkily in the gripping cold. “I don’t see.”

  “That’s ‘cause you’re such a puking puss,” Chookie said amiably. “Cause you stink with fancy notions. But don’t make no mistake. We’re just the same. Two of a kind.”

  Keith stared into the lonely starlit sky and out across the luminous sandhills.

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “We’re both thieves.”

  He thought of those other two all that time back hanging beside with all their blood dropping south, dropping towards the antipodes, hour after hour.

  “What church do you go to?” he asked.

  “Don’t go to none. Give that stuff up years ago.”

  “No. But what were you brought up as?”

  “You’re a bit nosey, aren’t y’?”

  “No. Just wondered.”

  “Tyke. Catholic. Altar boy, too, if you know what that is. I could spout the ole Latin then orl right. Couldn’t have put a finger between you and me, hay? Credo in unum deum omnipotentem factorem coeli et terrae,” he began to chant glibly, and crumblingly crushed the words together, back again in his red slippers and cassock, with the white surplice mum starched so carefully especially along the loving lace, a bit common in its enormous edging, sewn by mum and torn by Lil (six, and savage, man!). Back with the missals and holy-water containers, the blessed palms and the polished brass, back horsing in the sacristy and parking gum under choir-seat edges, taping notes to girls under Father Lingard’s car when he went up to the convent to hear the girls’ confessions.

  “Well, what is it, Chookie?”

  “Look over your car, Father?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Chookie. Does it need it?”

  “I’ll give it me papal blessing, Father. Give her a look-see underneath. Dust y’ gaskets!”

  “All right, Chookie.”

  And ungum the replies, Father darling. Oh, the joy of it till they jacked her up at Sid Hancock’s and found the blooming caboodle. Yes. Holier-than-thou Mumberson winking across the red carpet at his mates but pulling the Communion cloth with his mouth sucked in and his eyes cast down. Funny, all that stuff. Looking back he couldn’t see how he’d got into it. “I was a rough dimand,” he said, having grinned through the darkness an explanation that illuminated all the impossibility of his once having held the water and the wine in his hands, having carried the heavily bound gold-hasped missal from epistle to gospel side, having struck the altar bell and lit candles and snuffed them with a taper and having afterwards, to see if he would get struck down by fire, said “bugger” in the sacristy when he had changed back from cassocked sample acolyte to uniformed schoolboy. And, not being scorched on the spot, saying it again to his dazzled mates. “Buggaremus, you mean,” said Jamie Mahon who was a bit of a scholar, and they all chanted, “Buggerabo, buggerabis, buggerabit”, and howled with laughter until they collapsed with the silent pain of it. “You’ll have to confess that one,” Tim Whosit had said. And he remembered now on the cold dune with the wind coming in off the sea smelling of ships and lost sails, of gulls and fish and landfalls found only in the horizon fulfilments of dreams; remembered Miss Trumper’s protesting paws hitting him feebly and him saying I can’t stop I’m sorry but I can’t stop Miss Trumper.

  “O Jesus,” he whispered, and it was a prayer he whined into the stippled dark. “It’s a mortal sin.”

  “What do you mean?” Keith asked curious. “Do you mean deathly?”

  “I dunno. Mortal Not venial. Big, I always thought it meant. Funny, y’ know, the way they’d explain. There was an old Irish geezer came round one year to the Missions. ‘Boys,’ he said, ‘eating meat on Fridays is a terrible thing. A mortal sin, boys. Imagine now, you were out say, and hungry. You hadn’t had a bite all day. And there, boys, right under your nose you might say, was this darling pie. Ah, the smell of it! The gravy! The crust! And yer took one nibble, mark you, just one teeny nibble, y’d be damned for ever.”

  “He was kidding,” Keith said.

  “No, he wasn’t. He meant it. And us kids shivered in the chapel and nudged each other because only the week before we’d seen Jamie Mahon munching a dirty big pie while we ate our tomater sandwiches. All drama, it was. . . .”

  “Uh-huh.” Drama, Keith thought. He didn’t know his luck! Stuck with sterile church service for years till Bernard put his foot down and told Iris let the boy shop around if he wants and if he feels he’ll get something from it. But then it was too late. He’d missed the bus, the poetic bus, the celestial omnibus, and though the incense and the Latin and the plainsong and the candelabra touched his heart, they did not touch his mind. Unexpectedly, desperately, he wanted to say aloud with Eliot, “I should be glad of another death”, but instead stumbled sandily to his feet and pressed, waded, up over the dune to relieve himself in the darkened hollow on the other side.

  There was a great lump of driftwood outlined by sea-glow and he called back over his shoulder, over the hill,

  “Hey, come here, Chook! We’re a couple of galahs. Where’s your matches?”

  Chookie staggered up the loose and crumbling slope, a determined back-slider.

  “What d’y’know!” he said. “How about that! I’ll mosey about and gather some more sticks. There’s sure to be a bit of bracken and stuff along the top.”

  “Thought you were the big bushman, the original first-type sundowner,” Keith said maliciously.

  “Well, I’m okay in me own territory,” Chookie said defensively. “But all that water boxed me. And there weren’t nothing back there but sand.”

  Half a dozen matches got the fire going at last, with a lot of dry leaves Keith fished up from the scrub behind the beach. Squatting before the blaze, they watched the salt bum green and blue, deep aquamarines hidden in the scarlet, while they held out their hands or stood or stomped and saw their shadows, huge as giants, career all over the white moon hillocks.

  “She’s right. She’s a bit of all right.” Chook stuck his ugly paws right over the main log which had caught and was burning steadily. “This’ll keep us warm all night.” He sat on his hunkers and s
queezed the duffle-coat hood round his mulberry-glowing jug ears. “Wish we had a few spuds.”

  Gem or Magnet? Keith couldn’t be sure. The dregs of a paternal vintage passed on in family reference—but some nasty part of him stood off and grinned and some other part was thrilled and responded to the desolation and the ancient fire-rite, so that he moved in closer until he could see the nimbused hair of the bigger boy catch light, trap fire.

  “It should burn for an hour if we keep these smaller bits packed up close. Let’s get some sleep while it’s warm, and if it gets too bad later on we can head back to the highway.”

  Keith curled up with his head on his arm.

  “Good night,” he said, politely and crazily.

  Chookie gurgled something.

  “What’s that? Did you say something?”

  No answer.

  “Hey! What did you say?” Keith persisted, propping his head and looking hard across the firelight into the fluid shadows.

  “Nothin’.” Chookie shut his lips tight. Despite himself, despite tight-panted, slick as hair-oil Mumberson, something still made him gabble a prayer in the dark. He clenched his fingers in traditional appeal and said the first words he could remember of the act of contrition. But he didn’t get very far, not past “who art so deserving of all my love and I” something something. . . . He fought silently to finish it in the inner dark and the outer dark came up across the sea like the spread of an albatross’s wing, like the crow in the Looking Glass, and he snivelled a bit in the privacy of his arm and went to sleep at last.

  If I count this in pence, Keith calculated, as I did ten years ago, the wealth will seem immense, an infinity of winegums or licorice snakes or rainbow monsters or even those jelly babies with the starvation plumped bellies and the rudimentary navels poked in by some wit of a lolly manufacturer. Or the four-a-penny conversation sweets, flat as plates with gimmick phrases flat as fate written in heavy pink cochineal: Dig me Crazy, Surfie Man! Two pounds four and eight made four hundred and eighty plus fifty-six pence, and the sum total stark. Even a pie was a shilling—and they had to eat.

  Chookie looked a bit livelier. They’d wasted fourpence on a morning paper and there was no mention of rape or missing boys or stolen duffle-coats.