The Slow Natives

by Thea Astley

  “Consider,” Keith said as they warmed up their dew-shrunk legs along Highway One, “where and what exactly is it we intend?”

  “Ever smoked grass?” Chookie asked. “Dried out buff’s beaut if you shred her up a bit.”

  “Oh, skip the folklore!” Keith said impatiently. “This morning, this bleary-eyed morning, I simply cannot see why we’re doing this.”

  “You talk funny,” Chook said.

  “How do you mean funny?”

  “Y’ words. What y’ say. Well, I dunno. I got my reasons.”

  “Maybe you have. But I haven’t.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I feel like tossing it in and going back. I’m aching, cold, hungry, bored, and Bernard always said I knew which side my bread was buttered.”

  Chookie scowled at the rising sun across the water.

  “Y’ said y’ wanted to get away. What was all that stuff you give me about wanting to get away? Said y’ people gave y’ a touch of them.”

  “Well, this seems pretty wet, stringing along the road with no money and no plans. Where do you want to go?”

  “Sydney.”

  “Sydney? But that’s precisely where they’ll expect us to go.”

  “So what!” Chookie snarled.

  “Well, we’re certainly pointing the right way. There must be only five hundred miles to go by now. If you get there.” Keith experienced a gush of despair. “And then you’ll get hauled back, anyway. We both will, and you know it.”

  “There’s no need,” said the other defensively.

  “Your family’ll be on your tail. Mine must be half nuts by now.” Keith smiled with pleasure at the thought. I shall see if Bernard cares. I shall see.

  But Chookie was saying, “Listen, clunk, they’ll be so glad I’ve gone they’ll cover up for me, see? At least, the ole man will. I’ve never been his pride and joy. Never looked pretty like the girls. Never come top like Ken and Bert who’s studyin’ for an artiteck. No. No-good Mumbo he called me, an’ shot me out on the paper-run when I was nine jus’ after we came to live in Condamine, and the milk-run three years after that while in between times I come bottom. And then I struck out on me own doin’ a spot of gardenin’. Never went much on the hard yakker, but I seemed to have a bit of a way with plants an’ things. Liked them, anyway, though I had trouble with the proper names.”

  “What’s that plant outside the Town Hall?” Keith asked promptly and bitchily.

  “Which Town Hall?”

  “Brisbane, of course.”

  “I don’t think I ever noticed. You mean them big green-leaved things creepin’ up the front?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Them? Them’s monsterio delicioso.”

  “That’s it,” Keith said, triumphant. “Everyone says that wrong.”

  “Ah, yer silly poof!” Chookie said. “Whassit matter? I worked in a nursery for near three months getting the hang of it like, but like you they thought I was too dumb mixin’ up the leptospermum with the pittostrum.”

  Again, Keith felt the incomprehensible surge of shame. The other boy’s face was lumpy in the morning heat and scowled a little in protest against what he was.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” said Chookie briefly. “Skip it.”

  A semi-trailer was rocking down the gradient behind them, happy as a roller-coaster, so they gave it a burl with their thumbs hitching thattaway, but the driver snorted and grinned and shoved his up at them as he screamed past.

  “Swine!” Keith said.

  They tried for half the morning. Round eleven a semi-ute with an empty carrier and two men in front pulled out of a side road and turned south, hesitated for a doomed second, and was trapped by young Leverson’s ready eye.

  “Going to Sydney?” he asked.

  The driver nodded, inspecting them for loutishness. “Not quite. Coff’s,” one of them said. “Okay. Hop up back. How far?”

  Keith was opening his mouth to explode this kindness when Chookie hacked him sharply on the ankle bone.

  “We’re on a walking marathon. Student thing, you know.” Yielding, Keith explained in his best polite student voice. “We don’t mind how far.”

  “All right,” the driver said. “Pull a coupla sacks over yerselves and get a snooze. We’re not stopping this side of the Harbour if we can help it. We’re running behind time.”

  The dust jived in the corners of the platform; their bums crashed up and down as they jerked off, and then the truck got going smooth as custard, taking film snaps of moving tree turbulence that closed over, became cocoon womb and then sleep in the rhythm, the swing-sway rhythm.

  Mum, Chookie begged in his sleep. Mum, where’s me pitcher money? And she said you’re not going again. Your dad said you wasn’t to and I say you’re not sitting down in the bleachers with girls and carrying on then reading your missal on Sunday. You should be ashamed. I don’t do nothin’ he whined in his sleep, true. Nothin’! And she slapped his face hard and said she didn’t mind the lie, but hadn’t he no respect for God’s holy house and he’d better get Father Lingard to hear his confession in the Sacristy before Mass started. Do you really know what a state of grace is, Chookie? Father Lingard had asked, grave as God, standing under the stained glass and the Crucifix behind him on the lockers. It’s not—? No, Chookie, you don’t really understand, do you? Well, you told us—Chook, a state of grace is being free from Miss Trumper paddling her hands at you on the living-room sofa. It was striped—blue with brownish thread and there was a stain near the arm that his unseeing eyes had fastened on unconsciously so that his soul now bore a duplicate Rorschach blot like a couple hard at it. Or—no, Father, he whined. Mum! And he whimpered and pleaded in his sleep for the mum of farther back who made cookies with currant eyes or dabbed stingy stuff on his toes or wiped his behind and praised him and hugged him hard and touched his bony knees with plaster.

  He half woke, half slept, and lay there with his head cuddled into the crook of his arm, hearing the kids giggle behind him when he got the add-ups wrong and Sister Bernadette (“Bumface”, he used to call her in the playground) red as hell-fire, shrieking at him to come out and towering over him with the blackboard pointer. Hold out your hand, she ordered, bigger than Mother Church. And he’d spat on his corny little palm first and rubbed it hard on the seat of his pants and grinned at Tony Mason in the back row. Don’t you dare smile, she cried, and down came the strap. There was a split in one corner and he could spot the sawdust through it as she raised it again and he was so frightened he giggled aloud and couldn’t stop and the pain made him wet his pants. Under the ashamed lids of his eyes he saw a few spots dabble the floor and she saw them, too, and her virtue seemed assaulted, for she turned away and began working furiously at a long tot that stretched like Jacob’s ladder from Condamine to Heaven.

  But he was bully-cock of the yard later.

  I peed meself laughing, he lied. And the others took it up and passed it on. Did you hear? they asked. Good ole Chookie peed hisself laughing. Good ole Chook! And he grew away from mum in that moment so that there was no one to turn to for hot cake in the arvo or for the pressed football jacket. He pressed it himself and stitched his own number on with his big rawboned twenty thumbs tangling the thread and making strides of tacks while with a terrible desolation inside he heard his mother say that Arch seemed to be getting a bit of sense at last, growing up a bit and doing things for himself. Grew away and rubbed his own muddy rings round his eyes and grew beyond that and didn’t even cry at all much, hard and bold in class and dumb as they come—but brazen. Chewed gum through Confirmation classes and during the Sacrament itself, not game enough to pop a piece in his gob, kept a plug at the ready in his pressed-down best.

  “You have no sense of or, Mumberson,” Father Lingard said, passing him out and handing him his altar boy’s dismissal. “No sense of or. Of what is fitting.” Or what? Chookie wanted frantically to ask and excused himself later to the gang. O
le L’s been at the altar wine. Kept on saying no sense of or like a nut or something.

  So that was that. And after he told mum and all the thunder and lightning cleared a bit and she’d put on her wounded look for a change, he got into tighter pants and left school with some queer sort of storm in his stomach as he took a last look round the familiar yard, the pepper-trees and the slab seats like those where little Sister Teresa had coached them in Catechism for their First Communion. He remembered her sweet, delicate face, melting with trust and belief. “It is the most important moment of your lives, children,” she said. And Chookie had believed her with all his ginger seven-year-old heart. “At that moment your whole lives will change. God will be within you.”

  But it hadn’t been a bit like that, not for him. He’d prayed like mad all through the Offertory, keeping his eyes closed tight like fists and his fists closed tight like eyes and he’d gone up to the altar rails behind the other blue-serge boys and white flouncy little girls. He’d opened his mouth and put out his tongue ever so gently for God and then it was all over and he was walking back to his seat, shuffling and edging past the other kids. And nothing happened. The sky didn’t burst like a cracker or flare like a Roman candle—although next day Barbie Jazz Garters told everyone she had seen a vision. He had trouble swallowing and after, at the breakfast, he got bellyache looking at the cold ham sandwiches. Breakfast was bacon and eggs and that was what he’d expected and what he wanted. You’ll love the Communion breakfast afterwards, they’d all said. They’d all been saying it all his life. There’s no bloody glory, Chookie mumbled into the hessian, and turned over and saw mum walking him home in disgrace from the school hall where he’d howled because there wasn’t bacon and eggs and taking him the angry way home shortcutting through the Methodist churchyard with her fingers like pincers on his muscleless arm. But Sister Teresa had meant it nice and he liked her and so he’d got this funny feeling now when he looked around and saw the corner of the building where he split his eyebrow open and the old bougainvillea where they’d had their first fags.

  He could still remember the day that mad Joey Finn had climbed up fifteen feet into the branch tangle and sat there like a monkey peering down through the leaves at the class underneath. Sister Bernadette nearly burst trying to get him down to the rest of them who were having a tables lesson out in the open. But he stayed squatting on a branch, chanting after them mockingly, one table behind, and after a while ole Bumface said in her oiliest tones, “We will ignore him, children, and pray for him.” And they did. And then the mad blighter prayed back just one word behind like a litany and it was gorgeous and he wanted to laugh so much he nearly died hiding his face and pretending with the others it was terrible.

  Good-bye. So long. Bung-ho. The lump in the throat, in the stomach. And vaulting the fence from primary into the playing yard of the Brothers next door, down to the handball courts where some wit had managed to scrawl up BROTHER SYLVESTER at the top of the concrete wall.

  “How could the boy have got there?” grave saintly Brother Leopold had asked the assembled school when the outrage was discovered.

  “Levitation, sir,” a suave anonymous senior had suggested.

  “Who said that? Come out the boy who said that!” But there was nothing except the discreet movement of laughter waving across the other three hundred faces.

  So long, chapel. So long, brimstone missions and unspeaking unspeakable mystic retreats filled to the brim with spiritual reading and reluctant examination of conscience. So long. Hooroo. Hooroo to that sub-junior window through which he shot pellets at the infants, the littlies in their hot blue serge. So long.

  “You do well to leave, Mumberson,” Brother Leopold had said. “You do the best thing. I feel an academic career is not for you.” He placed an indicting forefinger on the non-committal reference he had just completed. “But there are many openings for your special abilities.”

  “What are they, sir?”

  “What, my boy? Your special abilities?”

  Chookie had smiled warily. “Well . . .” he said.

  “Indeed there are many openings,” Brother Leopold went on, avoiding mutual embarrassment. “Trust in God, lad. Ask and ye shall receive, remember. We have only to ask. God bless you now.”

  They were anxious to leave each other. Neither was quite sure what to say and although each knew that platitudes were in order, these did not soothe.

  You ask, all right, Chookie thought, you ask and you end up on the back of a ute heading nowhere, with a mortal sin heavy as lead weighing you down on the tray. Groaning, he pushed the sin back but it rolled and crushed him and at last, like Keith, he and his sin fell asleep.

  “Feeling better?” Miss Paradise asked, not nastily, but not sweetly either, as though she were jealous or had an unpleasant steel weapon to grind. Under the dry violet light of the trees in Kitty Trumper’s garden, she sat beside the swing-hammock and knitted something shapeless and terrible in expensive wool.

  “What’s that called?” inquired Miss Trumper with the languor of the invalid.

  “Mohair. Kitty, there’s so much you’ve never been able to answer or seemed to be sure of, perhaps because you never really hear. Remember the time that colonel proposed?”

  Kitty Trumper’s sad orbs began to water. “Don’t.”

  Her protest did not even ruffle the poise of the monster who clicked needles and occasionally teeth (in a moment I shall run you through, Kitty dear!). But—“I’m sorry, darling,” she said leaving a snail-trail of reference. “What I can’t understand, though, is why you didn’t report this to the right authorities.”

  Rock, rock. The hammock wobbled uncertainly its striped but split chrysalis, on the brink of discarding the dried-out pupa.

  “Has there been any word?” nagged Miss Paradise. “About him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He seems to have vanished. I’ve made a few discreet, very discreet inquiries, you know. Father Lingard. I saw him at the library. In the Westerns. Isn’t that funny, dear? He said, by the way, ‘I’m doing a thesis on the Western for a higher degree.’ Do you think he meant it?”

  Miss Trumper closed her eyes gently so that even that might not disturb her companion.

  “It seems strange his family does nothing.”

  “They don’t care,” said Kitty Trumper, still with her eyes closed.

  The burning centre of the sun fired a black pit through her lids. She preferred dull rainy days when blotting-paper skies soaked up the guilts of weather and soul, not letting the sun expose. The stained sky was washed with self but concealed by the bruises of thunder.

  “Poor old Chookie.” She expelled her sadness. “Poor old Chookie.”

  Miss Paradise was exasperated. “Oh Kitty, really!” she said. “You baffle me. Truly you do. Two days ago you were hysterical with what we all presumed to be shock.” She let that one sink in. “And hate. Now it’s ‘poor old Chookie’!”

  “Poor old Chookie and poor old Kitty. Verna, what has happened to that strange little nun I met in the convent garden?”

  “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see in the twilight. She ran from me after a moment. Someone pulled her away. She was trembling and so thin, even with all that heavy habit, those mounds and mounds of clothes. I was conscious of the bone.”

  Miss Paradise finished another row, stabbed her needles viciously into the ball of wool, and creaked upward.

  “I’ll make cocoa,” she announced. It was like the pronouncement of one about to sacrifice all and enter the tropical jungles of the Congo.

  “Do me a favour, Verna?” pleaded Kitty Trumper’s voice. Her eyes were still closed—perhaps against negation. “Only a teeny favour.”

  Angrily Miss Paradise swung about.

  “You always did seem to think, Kitty, that teensy-weensy adjectives removed half the difficulty from the request. Modified it. Made it the teensy-weensiest of demands. Ach! You saints!”

&n
bsp; “No, but—”

  “No but about it! Lie there while I get the cocoa.”

  When she returns I shall broach the matter, Miss Trumper told herself, but when her friend returned with two angry cups clashing on their saucers and sat aloof and righteous in the winter garden where the concrete steps led up between succulents to a terrace of Rousseau green, she could not speak. One of the yuccas was in flower, with its proboscis a mass of bees and bloom, curving dangerously and sexually over the fish-pond’s gold-finned water. All the trains, Miss Trumper thought, have gone out. I have missed the last train, and now, unlike Anna Karenina, I cannot even heave my grief to oblivion on the rails. The disappearing vans, but the guard leaning out waving a last-halt flag had the familiar face of a dream or an acquaintance one cannot place—the ubiquitous traveller in half a dozen European towns or chartered buses; on paddle-wheels or Rhine steamers, or in cafés on terrasses; passed along escalators (you riding up, he down—but always away). You saw him on the liner coming back six tables away at second sitting and once in Colombo rickshaw whirled; and after in a smoky goods grinding up the Gap; but never never. . . .

  She cried openly into the cocoa and the white drops widened and thinned a mixture of grief and chocolate.

  “Verna, I shall ring Father Lingard.”

  Miss Paradise expressed her doubt with the faintest grimace, the shadow of a shadow.

  “Do you think he can help you now? Really? I mean—you’ve been over and over it with me and where did it ever get you? Sometimes I think you’d do better never to discuss it at all. Every time you do you only remind yourself. Haven’t you thought of that?”

  I’m very humble, Miss Trumper hoped, and knew she would say yes . . . but, “No,” she said. “I want to. I have to. Please, could you do it for me?”

  “My dear,” Miss Paradise, said, superiorly Christian, “he likes Protestants a great deal. More than they ever care for him, I’m positive.”

  “Don’t shame me,” begged the other. “I’m not very well at all.”