Homesickness

by Murray Bail

  A man wearing a vivid blue suit and holding a silver microphone had come through giving loud instructions over his shoulder in a language only Phillip North understood. He was stopped short. ‘Merde! Allons!’ Small as it was the microphone wire had caught under the door. One of the waiters—they were all crowding the door now—silently sprang forward and freed it. Then came four young men each with a neat black moustache and carrying various bits of equipment, some of it heavy. One had the TV camera on his shoulder and trailed cables. A red-haired girl wearing a silk shirt and no brassière held a clipboard. Garry Atlas had been about to do another jack-knife but changed his mind.

  For the first time Hofmann murmured something to his wife. Both sat up looking at the door.

  The redhead acted all stuck-up. She had her back to them while the man in blue strode over to the edge of the pool. They noticed then he had a pink unnaturally perfect complexion, and beautifully combed hair. His crew stumbled after him. At the chrome steps he stopped with his back to the camera, ran his tongue over his teeth several times, and slipped on a pair of rose-tinted spectacles. Oh là là! As he turned, a red light on the camera lit up. ‘Raymond Canterel, Antenne Deux, en extérieur,’ he said earnestly, almost worried. The rest of his spiel rose and fell among the chairs and tables: a never-ending sentence to them. Punctuation consisted chiefly of visual effects: a rhythmic shrugging of shoulders interspersed with a kind of hunching-up, look-up of surprise, and like a busker who simultaneously plays the drums, cymbals, bells and a mouth organ, threw in a wide range of calculated eyebrow movements and frowns, his hands describing sweeping arabesques and numerical symbols. ‘Economie…Briteesh Empire…capitalisme…cuisine…Mélancolie…éléphants…le noble sauvage…were some of the recognisable words.

  In an adroit movement he turned unexpectedly to the nearest nest of chairs.

  ‘Par-don,’ he smiled. ‘What are your impressions d’Afrique?’

  Poor Sheila. She froze. Her grey eyes which were normally magnified grew even larger staring at the microphone.

  ‘Beg yours?’ said Doug Cathcart, stepping in. A shade too loud.

  His wife though understood perfectly.

  ‘We’ve only just arrived,’ she told them firmly, or rather the camera to the man’s right. She gave the skirt of her bathing costume a few tugs.

  But this didn’t satisfy the Frenchman.

  ‘First impressions, don’t you find them interesting? Interesting, if perhaps dangerous?’ Turning to the camera he rolled his eyes, ‘Ah, ces Anglo-Saxons!’

  ‘Interesting! Oh, yes,’ said Sheila, nodding.

  ‘We’ve been told,’ said Cathcart in his nasal voice, ‘not to drink the ice here.’

  ‘It’s not exactly tidy,’ agreed his wife. ‘But we’ve only just arrived.’

  The people…smell, she felt like saying. Or they smell different. And they don’t talk. They stare or glance at us. Still, it’s a holiday and interesting. We’re on a holiday.

  The TV crew had moved on.

  No, not Kaddok! They all squinted as the crew surrounded him on the other side of the pool.

  ‘My husband is blind,’ explained his wife.

  Profuse apologies! But Kaddok interrupted.

  ‘Interesting country. Thorn trees, spoor and so on. The tall animals such as the giraffe. A colourful dark people. The women in their brightly coloured costumes—dyed from berries, I believe. Naked kiddies, Africa. I’ve always wanted to visit Africa. Livingstone’s trek, remember? The Masai—very proud people. Burton and Speke. I’ve taken already, let me see, a number of subjects. Ektachrome X, I use,’ tapping his camera. ‘ASA Speed 64. I wouldn’t use anything else.’

  Looking straight ahead as he spoke Kaddok sweated. The camera’s little light was off, saving valuable film, although the man in blue remained in front still holding out the microphone, un diplomatiste.

  Garry Atlas who had trailed the crew stood beside the redhead, and dripping water, spoke to her. It was his method usually to crack a small joke. But she turned her head away: hominivorous bitch, look and lighting up yet another Gauloise.

  They moved on to Sasha and her friend, the actress; Garry began whistling.

  Violet Hopper, recently Mrs: chiefly a taker of bit-parts in film, the distant ageing sister in a period dress. Ibsen? Trollope? Her apparent trouble was: only occasionally could she go outside her own smooth surface, even there being interviewed. She lifted her chin, tilted her head and spoke. As for Sasha she could only hitch up her top and laugh across as her friend offered the answers. Sasha was no help, none. She was on the verge of collapse. North found himself smiling. Not even the Rive Gauche redhead could object. And matters were made even worse by Garry Atlas in the background there standing on his head, supporting the earth, waving his legs whenever Sasha looked up. Everyone had their mouths open, and some began laughing.

  ‘Africa?’ someone else answered. A tall wide-shouldered man in a wash-n-wear suit. ‘Africa’s got the ball at her feet. Good healthy climate. Not a bad diet when you look closely at it. Labour and natural resources: I think it’s got a bloody good future.’

  ‘Is he with us?’ Louisa whispered. Her husband, Ken, was supposed to never forget a face.

  ‘Was he on our plane?’ asked another.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen that one,’ said Ken Hofmann. He smiled. ‘But he should be with us.’

  ‘Nothing like the Aussie accent,’ said Doug, pretty loud, nodding at the bloke. The stranger gave him the thumbs up.

  Fancy being on television! Sheila, for one, had found it fascinating. That was always the thing about travel: the unexpected. The proof lay clearly on her lap. In all honesty she could say she hadn’t had time ‘till now’ to write ‘even a postcard’.

  ‘I am with an interesting and rather nice group of people,’ she quickly began. But by then she saw most were getting up and going inside; and when the Cathcarts followed suit, with Doug yawning, she decided to gather up the postcards and finish them in her room.

  Three tables had been pushed together, camouflaged by a loose-fitting cloth, more an iridescent blanket than ‘tablecloth’; but away from their own country, in an unfamiliar dining room, even eating off an unstable surface seemed to be an adventure. They had dressed for dinner. The men appeared in patterned jackets and cotton trousers, their hair combed, and Cathcart and Ken Hofmann both came down in the same click-clicking white shoes. The women had put on special blouses, and skirts, some in long skirts or long dresses, and silk ribbons—Gwen Kaddok wore a shawl—and for some reason the wives entered with folded arms and solemn expressions. Skirts and dresses. Interesting… One is supported by the hips. The skirt is. Its weight must tug and remind that part of the body all day. In Africa: the grass skirt. Resting on the hips it creates a constant swish. Its removal eventually is in parts, two time-delaying motions: woman ‘steps out of skirt’. The sensible floral dress was Mrs Cathcart’s. Supported by the shoulders the dress is (eventually) lifted up over the hair, mechanical, elbow-jerking motion: those few seconds of blindness. Violet Hopper’s dress had all lines, angles and energy aimed at the waistline: so narrow and brittle. As for the jeans worn by Sasha they traced the soft hourglass shape and other differences: how a woman’s knees touch, as underlined in Life Classes. With Violet Hopper this could take place only beneath her dress. And Sasha had barged in ahead of her friend, swinging her leather bag.

  At this stage the party kept to its original groups. Sitting with the Cathcarts suited Sheila. She could watch the others and appear to join in. Garry Atlas stuck with the girls. At the other end, Phillip North took his place with the Kaddoks without thinking; Gwen nodded acknowledging the habit. The Hofmanns sat together: he already gazed at a spot on the bare wall, drumming his fingers on his teeth. Behind him was a mural showing (‘depicting’) a tribe of wrestlers rolling entwined in the sky above a tiny but widespread European-styled city. They were thick thighed, these coffee-coloured wrestlers—of course—and wore fur coats. Evide
ntly it was the work of a well-known local surrealist. It was reproduced across the menu cover in full colour but unfortunately out of register, so that the menu or the dining room itself seemed to vibrate from the falls of the heavy men.

  Two empty chairs: gradually they had an irritating effect. Just about everybody glanced at them and became distracted, some frowning and glancing at them again, as they tried to recall the missing pair, wondering where they were. There was fidgeting of forks. It had grown dark outside. Some who twisted in their seats seemed to think the waiters would arrive only when the group was complete—the anticipatory hunger of travellers.

  Gerald Whitehead hurried in, and with him a younger man wearing an old US air-force jacket, tropical style.

  They quickly sat down. Gerald nodded at his neighbours, apologetic, and seeing the rest of the table looking at him with interest, put his head down. People naturally thought the two had been together but the younger one put out his hand and introduced himself. James Borelli. Borelli. Italian? He waved the fork like one. At the same time Gerald began spearing the bridge of his nose with his forefinger, to poke his glasses back. The odd thing about that hand, as Sheila and Mrs Cathcart observed, was that it had an additional small finger, a burden to that side which is connected to the brain’s reasoning, non-creative sector.

  But they quickly became accustomed to that and Gerald’s nose-spearing (seven, eight times a minute), and turned to Borelli. He was a little over thirty but carried a walking stick. He hooked it over the neck of his chair. He had pleasant keen eyes. As he discussed with Gerald what they had seen outside he saw Louisa Hofmann watching, and gave an open slow smile.

  Evidently Gerald Whitehead must have felt it. For then he looked up too.

  Garry Atlas here took the opportunity.

  ‘Say, you missed out being on television. We were all stars’—looking around—‘weren’t we?’

  ‘There was a film here,’ nodded Mrs Cathcart down the end.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Sixteen-mill,’ Kaddok told them.

  ‘French television,’ others explained, several talking at once, and all looking at Borelli for his reaction.

  ‘And I don’t suppose we’ll ever get to see it ourselves.’

  Although he kept listening Gerald Whitehead remained staring at his hands.

  ‘I went dry inside,’ Sheila whispered to Mrs G. ‘You were good. You told them exactly enough.’

  ‘I wouldn’t drink that if I were you,’ Doug advised.

  ‘Doug’s right,’ Mrs Cathcart turned to Borelli. ‘You’ll get the trots.’

  ‘Never mind. We’re not living long.’

  ‘Don’t you get constipated travelling?’ Sheila asked, leaning forward. ‘I find I do.’

  ‘Thanks, chief,’ said Doug to the waiter. Plates were now being served.

  ‘I simply love the French language,’ Louisa Hofmann was saying. ‘I could just sit and listen to it all day.’

  Her husband turned to her. ‘You don’t know a word of French.’

  She was about to protest when the film crew trooped in and sat at the other long table, talking loudly.

  For Borelli’s benefit Garry Atlas pointed with his forehead, ‘That’s the crew there.’

  It was the last mention of the film.

  ‘I can’t eat this,’ Cathcart pushed his plate away. It’s yams or something. How are you people finding it?’ he called down the table.

  ‘Right!’ Atlas nodded with his mouth full. ‘A T-bone anyday. But I’m wading through. When in Rome, you know…’

  ‘I’ll eat anything,’ Sasha murmured to Violet. ‘A horse or anything. Gosh, I’m hungry.’

  ‘But you always are,’ said her friend looking away.

  Garry was going on, ‘The beer’s pissy too. It’s not within a bull’s roar of ours. Have you had any yet?’

  ‘You’re a vegetarian?’ Mrs Kaddok asked.

  North nodded.

  ‘We too,’ she smiled.

  North cleared his throat. ‘Yes, the diet of harmless beasts with slow reactions.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’ And again Gwen showed her teeth. She turned, ‘Did you hear that, Leon?’

  North frowned. He hadn’t exactly meant it like that.

  ‘Elephants,’ Kaddok confirmed, ‘eat eight hundred to a thousand pounds of grass a day. They weigh up to seven and a half tons. Both sexes of the African elephant have tusks.’

  ‘Eight and a half tons,’ Dr North corrected gently.

  ‘Our waiters,’ Mrs Cathcart announced to the rest, ‘if you look, have got bare feet.’ And she made a clicking noise with her tongue.

  The waiters too could understand English.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Sheila, perplexed.

  She’d asked for tea, they’d given her coffee. Sheila looked around and decided to drink it.

  ‘Say, guess what?’

  This was Garry Atlas again leaning forward with a quiz question; veins on his neck bulging. ‘Guess what I saw on the end of the diving board?’ He turned to everybody at the table. ‘Someone had scratched on it with a knife, or something. “REMEMBER-DAWN-FRASER”. It’s there. And in brackets they’ve put A-U-S-T.’

  ‘Austria?’ Borelli suggested.

  ‘She’s our swimmer!‘ Cathcart cried out down the end.

  ‘Right!’ Garry nodded.

  ‘Someone’s been here before us,’ giggled Sasha to Violet.

  Sshhh.

  ‘One of the best,’ said Doug. ‘The 1960 Rome Olympics, remember?’

  ‘The first woman to break sixty secs for the one hundred metres,’ Kaddok said. ‘Freestyle.’

  The stranger they’d seen at the pool passed but didn’t stop at the table. He gave them the thumbs up.

  North lit a small cigar and glanced at his watch.

  There was a lull as they realised where they were; or how far they had gone away.

  ‘Have you been overseas before?’

  Sasha shook her head. ‘This is the first time.’

  Directly below lay the pool illuminated by Dutch underwater lamps, ultramarine slab sloping to dark cold at the deep end. The surface tilted with the shifting dining room fixtures and candles, fluid lights, and the board floated, an interesting twisted rectangle. The board and the surrounding tiles were still riddled with pools. Further out, the bordering lawn was soaked in shadow and suggestion, black but not completely, Reinhardt’s black. And from the dining room they could see over the wall large silhouettes, evidence of new constructions, capital, and a hidden flashing light. There was no muffled racket from there now; no distant sibilance of wheels, not even the last truck or a bicycle bell. It was late but the window-wall also possessed pleasant editing properties. The entire continent felt empty.

  ‘There aren’t many lights,’ Hofmann reflected as he folded his serviette, breaker of silences.

  Does he mean neon?

  ‘This is Africa,’ Whitehead reminded him, almost rudely, looking down at his cup.

  The Museum of Handicrafts: MUSEUM spelt MUSEU. Of handicrafts, arts’n local artifacts perhaps. These people were known for their woven baskets and the painted gourd; grass bags; jewellery as strapped to the forehead: and so on. Fabrics, but to a lesser extent.

  Many other groups after sitting down to the English breakfast must have strolled the same three or four blocks to the Museum, for although they took up the full width of the footpath, talking and pointing things out to each other, often pausing for photographs, little notice was taken of them by the locals, the natives preferring the road. Doug Cathcart had a pair of powerful binoculars and now and then stopped, his bow-legged wife alongside, as he focused on a distant cyclist or a woman breastfeeding. The morning was clear and pleasant. Except for his shuffle and the way he leaned to hear his wife, Kaddok looked no different from anyone else. Most of the others wore special sunglasses too. As they turned into the square and saw the building, someone—it was Gerald Whitehead—let out a low whistle of disapproval.r />
  Facing them the Museum dominated, overwhelmed the square. It was para-Palladian, ambitious in scope, hoping to gain kudos from one of the previous high points in Western civilisation. It had the grey steps, the portentous columns, porticos and mock balconies; while the square in the foreground had been set aside as a piazza, concave à la Siena. Such was the Museum’s presence (pressure) the roofs of the ramshackle shops lining the square had splintered upwards. On the short left side a collapsing lazaretto and a basket factory had trees and shafts of grass growing out of the cracks.

  There were other things wrong. Gerald stood making sounds of unbelievability with his tongue.

  1) Look, that proposed ‘piazza’ in the foreground was a dustbowl. It was paved with mud bricks but crowded with squatting apothecaries and vegetable dealers; skinny men flogged aphrodisiacs (displayed on folded blankets); outdoor butchers there to one side, a Club; rhythmic Malevich knife-grinder next cranking a large stone with one foot; what looked like rows of Medicine Men (their arcane jars, powders, animal skins); an elderly ocularist; Sirdarjis and drifting Somalis; the inevitable tellers of fortunes—at least two dozen of them under torn umbrellas; and there were canvas awnings, an acrobat suspended between nasal monotonous hawking. The function of the ‘piazza’ was neatly eclipsed.

  2) The museum itself. Somehow its ratios were out. It was ungainly, oppressively so. Through an oversight or to fit into the square it had been made squat. A good case of the Golden Rectangle ignored or misunderstood. Architects should sign their names on buildings, as they do in Argentina.

  Gerald kept shaking his head, muttering. Was anyone else so aghast?

  3) On the roof to one side had been grafted a cupola. Quite incongruous. It was pink, a huge Moscow breast, pierced by a tilting television aerial.

  4) And flanking the entrance, two rusting pedestals held a half-ton pair of vulgar terrestrial condors—or were they crows?—cast in concrete. These were visible from a great distance. Dr North told Sheila they were African vultures.