He sat down and then got up again. “And you, Dr Broughton, should not need to be told that,” and sat down again.
Hearing her addressed as “Doctor” threw me back to the night when I’d read, for the first time, the title attached to her name on the door of her college room. “Dr Broughton” seemed so less vulnerable than “Cindy”.
“I’m utterly sick of people,” she said, angrily lighting a cigarette, “who say while-I-have-every-sympathy and then refuse to come good with any concrete assistance, who do nothing to heal the injury done. Shit, we sit here day after day talking, talking—all on fat salaries.”
“We’re employed to talk, Dr Broughton, we’re not paid as social workers,” shouted Charles. “And anyhow, you know as well as I do that oppressed groups have to be the instruments—the authors—of their own advancement. That’s not our job.”
I wanted to go to her and say, “Come on now, Cindy, leave it for now.”
Professor Curtiss, an old man, nominally chairman of the whole conference, rose and talked about the “careful consideration and considerable planning by an able committee . . . no one more mindful of our obligations to the former colonial peoples . . .”
He was listened to, but I did not think he would change the direction of the argument.
“You’re just middle-class do-gooding,” Charles called out at Cindy, not bothering to stand, “taking your basket of revolutionary groceries to the poor . . . trying to irradiate your bland existence by associating with . . . outgroups.” He floundered, again waving a hand vaguely behind him as an unfinished statement, or apology.
I touched his arm as he finished, restrainingly. “Take it easy—she’s close to the edge.”
As I did this I thought, Cindy will see us talking and think I’m in on the attack.
“What do you mean?” he asked in a loud, bad-tempered whisper.
“I can’t explain, just go easy.”
“She’s big enough to look after herself,” he said.
Bisi, an African, stood up, he waited until quiet surrounded him and then he spoke. “The question to which the white Australians, including Dr Broughton, might address themselves is this. Do they know, do they have comprehension, of just how much they themselves are injured? How much they are the real victims to colonialism? That they, as the abandoned children of the colonisers, have wounds that they cannot see, that they, having not yet gained a true independence not having, so to speak, been through fire and anger and violence against the metropolitan country, have not yet experienced the anguish of true independence. Have not, as we in Africa, and the United States, historically, and India has, have not yet found an identity through independent behaviour in world politics . . .”
There were murmurings of assent from around the room.
Cindy said anxiously, “No, look, don’t misunderstand me . . . all I wanted . . .
Bisi put up a hand to silence her and went on. “Assuredly, I do not misunderstand, Dr Broughton. Before you white Australians start offering to heal us, or the black people of this country, I might suggest that you are more in need of political healing, of liberation, of growth, that in many ways you remain political children »»
More assent from those who liked a bit of moral flagellation. Markham, for instance, in a solemn voice said, “Too true.”
Cindy began, “I really think we are basically in agreement—I’ll amend that to whatever you think . . .” Bisi continued, “I am far from certain that we are in basic agreement, Dr Broughton, but, be that as it may, I want to point out that your Prime Minister—called by you,
I believe, “The Prefect”—embodies all the values of your colonial masters. He is a type well known to us from the Third World—we know him in the person of the plantation manager, we know him as the comprador. May I suggest that time be set aside for the white Australians to consider their confusion, their wounds.”
He took his seat, one hand carefully smoothing his kaftan under him.
Cindy, her voice even closer to breaking point, said, “I didn’t mean to be patronising, quite rightly, I should have included ourselves, I mean . . .”
Charles rose up again. “It seems we are getting even further from the purpose of this conference.”
He sat down and, turning to me, said, “What did you mean earlier about her?”
“I can’t tell you, just let it go.”
He was quite bad tempered because it was obvious that the vote would go with Cindy, and he fumed when it was taken and the session agreed to give the last hour of the remaining two days to “post colonialism”. There was an amendment about “whites being permitted to read poems or make statements on the subject of post colonialism”.
“As long as they are self-abasing,” added Charles. And turning again to me he said, “So much for intellectual rigour—the African takes the mickey out of them but they go on with political games. Well, now tell me about Dr Broughton.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
He said that he planned to have the decision overturned somehow.
“Please don’t, Charles, don’t hector her.”
“You’re playing some mysterious game,” he said, quite rightly irritated.
“Come outside.”
I felt that further opposition to Cindy from Charles on top of the criticism from Bisi might be enough to push her over the edge. I noticed that I still had an impulse to throw her to the dogs, to let her be punished for having allowed this to happen, but there was my protectiveness—still limply there after the passing of years. Left over from that early love.
It seemed unimportant now for Charles to try to defeat her. The conference had only two days to run, by late afternoon numbers had always shrunk. Who cared?
I put this to Charles in the corridor.
“If you keep giving away corners you lose the middle,” he said.
I again suggested that it was bad for Cindy.
“But give me one damn reason for not opposing her—she’s supposed to be tough.”
I decided to tell him.
“Look, this is confidential and when I tell you, you’ll see why.” I told him of the rape.
“Who?!”
“The two she came in with, the two aboriginals.” “Bullshit!”
His face filled with disbelief. “I don’t believe it.” “Actually three of them.”
“Come on,” he said, “make it four.”
“Why should I make it up?”
He shrugged. “To shield her. You’re old lovers. Aren’t you supposed to be legendary lovers?”
“I just ask you to believe it, leave things be.”
“How do you know about the alleged rape?”
“I walked in on it.”
He looked at my face. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I just don’t find it very real. Why is she in there now?” He pointed into the lecture room.
I rubbed my face wearily, I knew that it was going to be difficult to convince him of the Stockholm Syndrome idea. Before I could start he broke in again, “And why isn’t she in hospital?”
“Charles—males are all a bit hazy about these things. Listen . . .” I told him about the Stockholm Syndrome and what seemed to be her way of therapeutically working through the trauma.
“Now that is craziness,” he said with emphasis. “You are off the air,” he cried. “This conference and you—infectious irrationality.”
He looked at me again, as if looking for other explanations—as if what I’d told him was some bizarre attempt to divert him, or was an attempt at deadpan humour. He shook his head and turned away from me, going back into the room. I stood at the door, not going back in.
At the door I listened while Charles announced that he wouldn’t be attending any “compulsory political reeducation” and would arrange another meeting room for those who wanted to go on with the “conference proper”.
“Screw you!” Cindy shouted, breaking into tears. She looked around frantically, picked up a wooden-backed duster fro
m the table and hurled it at Charles, hitting him on the forehead.
In doing so she knocked over a glass of water on the table and it dripped, loudly it seemed, on to the floor, taking everyone’s attention.
“You racist,” she cried, “you conservative deadshit.”
Charles almost lost his glasses from the blow. He took them off, looked at them trembling, saying, “Charming, charming”, touching his head gingerly with his hand.
He bent down, looking for his conference satchel, found it, stood up, said something about “the standard of discussion” and left the room, passing me at the door without a word.
Someone shouted after him, “Don’t get in a lift with us—if you have any sense.”
Others began to leave, perhaps voting with their feet, but a small group gathered around Cindy supportively and I heard her talking in a high, loud, hostile voice, still upset.
I caught up with Charles on the stairs, he was still making exploratory touchings of his forehead.
“You okay?” I asked.
“She could have knocked out an eye,” he said. “It’s fortunate she didn’t have a machine gun.”
I decided that he was still closed to any explanations or defence of Cindy.
I walked alongside him, down the stairs.
“They say the biggest crop raised in Dixie is guilt,” I said.
“Sometimes,” he said, slightly amazed, “you come up with the most oddly inappropriate things to say.”
I shrugged.
He said that he’d had enough of conferences and would probably try to get an evening flight home.
WRITING YOURSELF
A PROPER NARRATIVE
“Do you remember me?”
Aes? Bees? Cees? Dees? Aitches—Kays. Kay Harris? No, not Harris.
“Kay,” I said, “Kay Norris. Of course I remember you.”
A seminar.
An adult education seminar in North Queensland.
“This is a long way from North Queensland,” I ventured.
“Not so far across country. And I saw your name on the list of speakers.”
“That’s flattering.”
A drunken night.
“I flew myself down,” she said.
“I’m impressed.”
And the letter, hell yes.
“You didn’t answer that letter, but I understand why. I mean, a silly thirty-eight year old woman from a property in North Queensland with a lot of silly ideas. But you don’t know what that weekend meant to me.”
A drunken night. John. Confessional drinking.
“Could I speak with you alone?” she asked.
I was sitting in the outdoor student cafeteria with some other people from the conference. She crouched the way a girl would.
“Of course.”
We moved away from the table and found a place on the grass.
“I actually want to use you,” she said.
“Go ahead, use me.”
The letter, yes.
“In my letter I hinted at things but you didn’t answer. I want to leave my husband and to get off that blasted property and down south to the city.”
She was the only person in North Queensland, I recalled her telling me, who took Forum magazine. She had to subscribe because the village newsagent wouldn’t handle it and even the postmistress had commented about it.
“I want to get to hell out of it and come down to the city.”
I said that didn’t seem to be a difficult exercise, giving it no thought. “Place an advertisement—‘attractive thirty-eight year old, well read, desires . . . but I realised then that I was being too flippant. “I’m sorry,” I said, “that life hasn’t worked out for you down on the farm.”
I couldn’t stop myself.
“I didn’t go there,” she said, stubbornly serious, “I was born there! I grew up five miles from where I live now.” “Yes, I’m sorry, I remember now.”
“External Studies saved me. I was born again—I .kid you not.”
Four children.
“But as I said,” she went on, “I want to use you.” “Yes, sure.”
“Could you help me rehabilitate myself—in the city?” “How could I do that . . .?”
“Could you introduce me around, help me meet people—find a place to live—which suburb should I live in? Where are all you trendies living now? You see, I don’t even know that. And about schools—for the youngest kids.”
My mind spread like the two pointed legs of a caliper, stretching between the North Queensland cattle station and the cafes and bars of the city. And not quite making the distance.
“I want to meet people who talk.”
I pulled a face.
“But I do! Before I go MAD!” “Oh come off it, Kay.” I tried to make her come back to cynicism. “You’re the one who’s got it made. Flying to conferences in your own aircraft.”
“What would you know!”
I took her point.
“But we don’t,” I said. “Well, it’s not like that.”
I sometimes think we should sit up all night discussing Marquez or arguing about Althusserian marxism, but we never seem to. Did we once?
But, yes, I suppose in a ragged way, in an indirect way, we discussed Big Ideas. If that was what Kay was on about.
“I’m a member of anything that looks intellectual—you name it—” she said. “Whales—the Institute of Political Science—you should see the magazines I get. The Humanists. But I’m just a postal member of it all.”
“My friends are . . .” I stalled, Don says we’re worried hedonists. “Well, we’re not really heavies like that.”
“Oh come on . . .” she said disbelieving. “I sometimes have day-dreams about being in the city with you people.” She paused. “With people like you and John. Is he still with the Department?”
“Yes.”
“But he’s not here? At the conference?”
“No, not that I know of.”
“The magazines drove my husband to a rage—I would read the ‘New Statesperson’ while he read the Maronoa Grazier.”
I wouldn’t mind that. I saw myself on a wide, cool verandah after a hard day’s mustering, a cold Heineken beer, a well-read wife, sun setting on the acres.
Hectares.
“I flaunt them,” she said. “I go to a couple of residential schools a year and sometimes a WEL conference, or something like that, and I think he prefers that to me having an affair in the district.” She laughed. “With an aboriginal stockman.”
She looked consciously outgoing in her jeans, crafted jewellery, her hair in bunches. Boots. Frye boots.
“Poor man,” she said, shifting on the grass, “I parade my intellectual superiority.”
She told me how some days she would make herself a French-style lunch, set the table in the dim dining room away from the Queensland sun, serve herself champagne and read a magazine, “something a thousand miles from Queensland—New York magazine or something like that”, and would pretend she was in an intellectual cafe in Soho or Greenwich Village or somewhere. “Isn’t that crazy?”
It sounded all right to me.
“The help around the place think I’m crazy.”
She asked me if we had regular clubs. “Or is it just an informal thing?”
How is it?
“Long lunches. It’s all rather haphazard.”
And we didn’t have as many lunches now as we did once.
“You must, well, have cafes where you all go.” “Where who go?”
“The intelligentsia.”
“Intelligentsia—we don’t hear that word much. Oh yes, there are restaurants where you would be likely to see people you know.”
She was quiet and then said with an exaggerated firmness, “I don’t intend to have anything to do with drugs.”
“Drugs?”
“I suppose it’s sort of obligatory to have something to do with drugs.”
I laughed. “My friends are drunks.”
�
��I think it’s rather serious, don’t you?”
“These things are around.”
I was trying to look back on my life in the city, to see what shape it was. Loose groupings. I think we still had envious suspicions that there were other “preferable” groups, superior to “our group”, vaguely existing somewhere. “Group” was even too strong a word to describe us now.
“Originally most of us came to work in the city or to university,” I said, “and we found ourselves—it came about imperceptibly, one didn’t join, it was all imperceptible, accidents of time, age, and occupation.”
I wasn’t putting this very well.
“I’d be happy,” I said, “to be just going to conferences, schools and such, and then running back to a property in North Queensland and the serenity of rural life.” Trying to joke.
“I worry about the kids and drugs,” she went on, pulling at the grass. “The other two are away at school but the two youngest would have to come with me to the city.” “Yes,” I said, “I suppose drugs offer status and pleasure to kids. Instantly. The escapade.”
“I don’t think there is any status in drugs,” she said defiantly.
. “We mightn’t,” I said, “but I’m saying that kids do.” “I just don’t see that.”
We lapsed into silence. I felt that might be the end of it. But she went on. “Am I doing the right thing?”
“How would I be able to know that?”
And what we don’t know is how many kids are al?le to try drugs and give them away.
“Is John still separated from Marjorie?” she asked. She played with the grass, running her palm over it. That was it. She’d had a night with John. It came back to me now. That night we went back to the motel, all of us, after the panel discussion in the Town Hall. I saw her now in recollection, leaning into John there on the floor of the motel room.
“Yes, as far as I know.”
“Does he take anyone out?”
“Well, I don’t see much of John. And we don’t say ‘taking someone out’ any more—in the city.”
She blushed.
I touched her. “I’m only teasing you.”
“Is he still fond of me, do you think? . . . I wrote to him too . . . I know that isn’t cool, but I wrote and told him I was leaving Harry.”
The Everlasting Secret Family Page 11
