Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  On Sunday afternoons as the sun tilted behind Mt. Zamia and even the flies were overcome by heat, the two young women had long soft talks on the veranda, plotting behind vermouth and ice. I could never interrupt enough.

  “Not yet. You can see how it is.” Bonnie jabbed her note of complaint along with a sandaled foot in my nagging direction. “She’s still too young. I couldn’t cope. She’s too young.”

  I could not disentangle clues.

  Words like work and money peppered these conversations and because I was aware of the threat of change, I raised my nuisance value to the nth power trying to impede conclusions. How did it happen that I could write down those words Mother was a drummer in her own all-women’s group? How?

  As my comprehension grew, their Greek chorus of complaint sorted itself out into long-remembered footnotes to the snapshots.

  “I can’t face,” Aunt Marie said, “going back to that dreary office job in Brisbane, run by pimply oafs who can barely form a sentence but have all the competence in the world when it comes to pushing you around because you’re the wrong sex. Overworked underpaid by air-brains. That damn pretentious store. Doing me a favor, I ask you!” (I realized later that Aunt Marie had teetered on the brink of unemployment largely because she was married.) “‘Taking jobs from men,’ they said, ‘in these hard economic times,’ she would rant to Bonnie. ‘My body requires food too,’ I told them. ‘You’ve a husband to support you,’ they said. ‘He spends all his money on beer,’ I said. ‘My goodness,’ they said, ‘what a way to talk and the honeymoon barely over!’ ‘What man,’ I asked them, ‘would want to spend his time cooped up all day behind a typewriter?’ They said, ‘We can give your job to some young girl who isn’t lucky enough to have a husband.’ ‘Lucky!’ I said. And I tipped my typewriter off my desk onto the section head’s foot. ‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ Then I cleaned out my desk and caught the first train back.”

  Tell me again, Aunt Marie, I would plead at bedtime. Tell me how you lost your job. And, Here we go, she would say, and I would join in at the climax, Good heavens, I’m so sorry!

  Grandmother who overheard one night commented that it was improper moral training. We were too overcome with giggles to care.

  How did it happen that I could write My mother was a drummer in her own all-women’s band?

  I must have been nearly four when mother and Aunt Marie made definitive moves by inserting advertisements into every bush newspaper for miles, tacked up notices on the doors of parish halls, rang friends on properties as far away as Allbut and Banana. The weekly music sessions had become daily practices. Grandfather threatened to leave. What are you two up to? grandma frequently asked. I was all ears. What! You can’t do this. Really. You’ll give yourselves a reputation. As what? they asked, interested. Curling up trying to be invisible on a lounge chair, I was interested too. I don’t know, grandma replied. As something odd. Screwballs, she ventured. Is that the word? (It became my word. I loved it. I said it over and over. What a talisman!)

  Their musical twosome was a smash hit the first night they played for the Drenchings’ Sheep Breeders’ Convention. They extended their empire and played at the picnic races in Allbut and Banana. They were received with delight in Dingo and Jericho Flats. It must have been at this stage that the two of them decided to advertise in a Brisbane newspaper for a third member to plump out the musical tone of their act. Wilma was a former conservatorium student from Sydney who played clarinet. She also played saxophone and the whole of Drenchings fell about when she joined Bonnie and Marie for a New Year’s shindig at the School of Arts hall. Wilma was too good for them but she added that professionalism they needed. Wilma on sax had the town clerk and councillors reeling. It was unwomanly. Un-womb-man-ly, Wilma explained later, punning in a way I wouldn’t appreciate for years. A lady on sax!

  It was 1964. I am six and a half. I lurk. I listen behind and in front of doors. I loiter near bedrooms. I shall write their dialogue with hindsight.

  I see them now as I saw them one late afternoon when I ran to the empty woolshed where they practiced, to call them to tea. The air was granulated sun and dust.

  “We need a name for the group. A name,” Aunt Marie was insisting. “We can’t,” she said emphatically, “go on calling ourselves The Girls.”

  “Virgin Rock!” Bonnie suggested. She was staring out the woolshed door at the bleak landscape’s one exaggerated feature. “God, doesn’t it suit us!”

  Marie said tartly, “And we don’t play rock.”

  “We could try,” Wilma said.

  “What! Swivel and lurch? We’d be run out of town.”

  Wilma tapped the charts on the piano lid. “Don’t say you weren’t warned. Soon there’ll be nothing else but.” She began badgering the other two about improving attacks and cutoffs, the need for more inspired improvisation. “You’ve got the tempo. You’ve got the key. Play around with it for heaven’s sake! Tease it a little.”

  Marie pulled a face. “I can’t do it. I simply can’t.”

  “Oh God, of course you can.” Wilma snapped the hasps on her clarinet case. “All you do, Marie, is wham de wham de wham de wham. You could try. But you don’t. You won’t. It’s no fun going whumpety whump all night. Who wants that?”

  “They do,” Marie argued. “The dancers want it. All those old boys and their partners togged up in their mothballed best. It’s shiny satin time, sequin time, hair in the ol’ tight perm time. We’re not the star turn. We’re subsidiary, can’t you understand, to all those creaking joints having a great night out. They’re making their own music.”

  Bonnie frowned. She said, “Marie’s got a pretty good voice. We could jazz it up a bit by having her sing a number or two.”

  Wilma gave her a sharp look. “You serious? Okay, so the voice is big and the body too. But she ain’t black. She ain’t got it.”

  Marie went on as if no one had spoken. “They come to dance. Repeat, dance. Not to listen. You could play ‘Three Blind Mice’ and they wouldn’t notice anything but the beat. If we start getting too fancy, they won’t enjoy the dancing part, their bone music, and they won’t damn well come.”

  “Nonsense!” Wilma began shuffling the sheet music, selecting, discarding, and then she slammed the lot down in an untidy skitter. “There’s nothing wrong with making what we play more interesting musically, is there? More intelligent? I’m not asking you to intellectualize it for God’s sake!”

  She stomped out the door into sunset.

  Wilma had been a student at the Sydney Conservatorium, the child of musicians who had banned all forms of profane music from the house. She, too, had been totally absorbed in the classical mysteries, until one weekend spent at a fellow student’s flat, she heard an old Artie Shaw recording of “Frenesi.” “It blew my mind,” she told Marie and Bonnie. “I simply didn’t know that sort of stuff was going on.” Conversion was blinding. Within days she had nosed out Buddy de Franco and Peewee Russell. She missed classes for a week as she sweated it out in her Balmain bed-sit trying to reproduce what she heard. She became obsessed (how well I understand that now). She combed record bars. When at last she returned from her explorations in new territory, her clarinet instructor asked icily what she had been doing. She smiled radiantly, picked up her instrument, blew a few starter notes and arpeggios, began a bird-like rendering of “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen” and then started to swing. Hello Schubert and goodbye! Wild improvisatory phrases ripped away from her breath and fingers and soared wildly and unrestrained through the open second floor windows of the building. The landscape began to liquefy in the summer rain of water and music.

  “Stop!—Will you stop—that—at once!” her teacher shouted, rushing to slam the window shut.

  She was asked to leave. Her scholarship was withdrawn.

  If she were a believer in signs, as I am, in the dissected innards of the chicken of convention, then this was it. She found it almost impossible, she told Bonnie and Marie, and inciden
tally the flapping ears of a small girl, to break into the world of jazz and pop music and knew that if she had stayed in her neat basic black and had been absorbed by an orchestra or chamber-music group, the playing of a wind instrument wouldn’t have been unacceptable at all. There was a musical double standard and while it was preferred that she be playing violin or spreading her legs round a cello, it was possible for the concert-going intelligentsia (Wankers! Wilma cried bitterly) to accept women on brass and woodwind merely as an eccentricity. But out there in the clubs and pubs and bars, it would be a jokey matter, as unacceptable as a woman telling raunchy stories or propositioning a man. Do you sing, love? they asked Wilma. No? Pity. We can handle women singers okay. Fact is, we like ’em. Bit of cling. Bit of tit and you’re a sexy number, no sweat. But Jesus, love, you wanta get up there with the boys and mix it? No way! I don’t think they’d like that. I don’t think anyone would like that. My God, a sheila on clarinet!

  Knockback depleted her. Her response to Aunt Marie’s advertisement was, we all knew, the end of the line.

  At the last audition with a small-time group on the Gold Coast, she lost her temper.

  “Just tell me why, goddamn you,” she had demanded. “A good reason. Go on. Why?”

  The bandleader had shuffled uncomfortably. He couldn’t cope with female rage. Embarrassed, he directed a wink at the others.

  “Look,” Wilma screeched, intercepting the wink, “I’ll tell you boneheads why. It’s not that I’m no good. I’m damn good. I know I am. I don’t even think it’s a question of professional jealousy though there could be a bit of that. It’s more basic than that even.” Her voice had begun to crack with strain. As she relived the moment for Bonnie and Marie on the veranda at Drenchings, her voice cracked again. “It’s a male preserve, isn’t it? It’s like women wanting the vote or drinking in public bars or trying to crash the members’ stand at a poofter cricket match. You don’t want to share the orgasm, do you? You’re not ever going to say was it good for you too? God, you’re pathetic. You bring your crummy little sexual attitudes into your public performance. The club. The fucking club.”

  I tell this as if I were there, fully mature and apprehending, but I can only say what I heard or think I heard. My mother and aunt had a way of rehashing old grievances and old stories until they gilded them as myth (whoever said fucking in those days?) and it was the myth that made my thoughts switchback on the bland grasslands of Perjury Plains.

  I resolved, of course, never to play piano drums clarinet.

  “You didn’t have much talent, dear,” mother would say to me later. “Not much musical ability at all. Strange how it can give one generation a miss.”

  I suppose I must have lisped the cliché “Where’s daddy?”

  Did I?

  Oh you did. You certainly did.

  Sometimes I even asked if we could have another daddy.

  Mother explained inexplicably that she was still married. Only legally of course. Daddy’s over there, she said.

  Where?

  America somewhere.

  Actually she never bothered with divorce, and after the first jubilant bitterness of separation had settled into relief for them both, she and Huck exchanged cards now and then, small how-are-you letters and inexpensive parcels at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Mother sent photos of me. Huck replied with cuddly toys that I trailed round the sheepyards until they were too grubby for hugging. Neither ever mentioned the feasibility of reunion. Each preferred things as they were.

  Bonnie’s dance-group finally exhausted the possibilities of townships within driving range of Drenchings and my seven-year-old spy ears detected them working up to the necessity of a move. Bonnie pined for the coast. I was the difficulty.

  As long as mother remained at Perjury Plains there was no problem with baby-sitters. My exhausted grandmother bore the brunt of me. Wilma, despite the fact that she had become almost a fixture in the household and could handle grandfather’s attempts at bullying with an offhanded charm that stunned all of us, was becoming restless. The first I knew of a group decision to move east was the day they packed me into the van, bedding me down on a mattress among the instruments and suitcases, grandmother protesting through tears. They took two days to reach Townsville but after six months of lugging me along with them to sleep in change rooms at the back of dance halls, clubhouses and hotel bars, I became the youngest boarder at a small school outside Brisbane that seemed to specialize in the distraught progeny of divorce and government overseas postings. By the time I had learnt to make my own bed and stop crying myself to sleep at night, Wilma had left the group for Melbourne to become a variety act in a nightclub.

  Bonnie and Marie were on their own again and who wanted their sort of music?

  Who? Cow hicks? Yearning oldies? Maybe it was the sight of two still handsome but slowly middle-aging thumpers that made the dancers giggle more than was strictly necessary. Or appear to be giggling.

  Grandmother paid my school fees and at term holidays and Christmas the little stranger was sent home to Perjury Plains so she could be measured, exclaimed over, checked for precocity and educational skills. They didn’t know I was starting to regard the school as home.

  I had stopped saying, Mummy, mummy, I’ll die if I have to leave Perjury Plains. Long since.

  One of my last stunning memories of the homestead is a broiler of a Christmas vacation and I, aged nine, playing shop with gibbers for groceries under the steps leading to our gracious veranda. Mother and Aunt Marie were away on the eventide circuit near Gladstone. Somewhere above me I could hear the sounds of teacups being refilled, the occasional comment of grandmother and grandfather’s mumbled grudgers of replies when I suddenly chucked down the handful of gumleaves and pebbles that represented currency and sobbed. I sobbed as if I wanted to dissolve within my own salty tears. “I want love,” I heard myself whispering. I’m not sure what I meant. I can only say what I said, or thought I said. But those few whispered words brought into opposition a maturity and innocence that understood nothing at all except a yawning emptiness and boredom. Not even later, when I heard other students talking about boys or tried not to hear two of the prefects canoodling in the dormitory bed opposite mine, would I be able to interpret the emptiness of that moment.

  I stalked round to the front of the veranda steps and trod up them with a lumpish deliberation to announce challengingly to grandma that I would never play piano. Never.

  Grandma handed me a chocolate biscuit hoping it would soothe.

  She understood, more that I did, the reason behind the words.

  “We’ll see, dear. We’ll see. Eat up your biscuit. There are worse things than having to learn piano.” She gave an odd and tiny smile.

  “What?”

  I looked across at grandfather but he appeared to have gone to sleep except for the glisten of eyeball I detected between his narrowed lids.

  “Lots, darling. Lots. You’ll discover. It’s an escape hatch, believe me.”

  The opening argument for the defense!

  By my twelfth birthday Bonnie and Marie, welded into a partnership stronger than marriage, a kind of twinhood sanctified and integrated by cornball rhythms and sugar-candy tunes, had got their feet in the doors of several downmarket Brisbane clubs and had settled into a dedicated impoverishment at a bayside suburb, living in a set of furnished rooms in a boardinghouse near Shorncliffe, a ramshackle timber scramble called Villa Marina.

  They were to be there for the next seven years.

  “It’s handy, darling.” Mother always believed in exploring expediency. “Your school’s just across the bay. We could almost wave to each other. You can come home each weekend.”

  “Home?”

  “Here.”

  “It’s hideous. How can I tell the other kids I live in this dump? How can I ever ask them here?”

  “It’s not hideous, Belle. It’s homely and friendly and it saves Marie and me from housework. Well, more or less. And it gives us freedom for
daytime jobs.”

  Economics had forced submission. They were now both working as checkout assistants in a local supermarket. Engagements were becoming fewer as the electronic age forced musicians to the wall. And especially their sort of musician. Dance engagements, even in outer suburbs or the less savory parts of South Brisbane and Fortitude Valley, dwindled to a trickle, for who wanted, in this post-Beatle era, the sort of sounds that would engage the attention of graybeards only, pensioner groupies wanting to wallow in nostalgia. Even their sort of dancing was gone. People stood in front of other people and shook like holy rollers. Body contact was being kept for muggers.

  Bonnie and Marie lied bravely to me to explain the checkout jobs. “Icing on the cake,” they said. “Icing.”

  Yet inexorably, steadily, I was becoming interested in the ramifications of nostalgia.

  Mother was thirty-three, -four. She looked more. Her figure had thickened and became magisterial. She wore her beautiful gold hair hacked into a cropped cap that was easy to deal with. She wore sensible shoes. Every afternoon after work mother and Aunt Marie would enter phase one of their health kick, don bathers and swim in the limpid bay waters from beach to pier-end and back half a dozen times. Both of them developed shoulders like policemen’s. Their skin had a pickled look from saltwater. But they gave off the boisterous confidence of men-free women who, having achieved and now eschewed matrimony, managed to support themselves. Mother had long since ceased writing to Huck or accepting checks from grandfather’s sheep.

  I should have been proud of her, of them, of this conquering of the economic slave system so geared against females but on school sports days or prize-givings, at fetes and breakup concerts, I would cringe as mother and aunt appeared like twin constables (The praetors! one of my nastier friends would whisper), ready for a bit of girls-together reminiscence and cheeroh. As they wandered through the school grounds under the camphor laurels and the fig trees, I would try to lose them, pretend they were some anonymous part of the crowd of parents and guardians who were sauntering across the lawns. My classmates, however, always directed my attention to them. Hey hey hey! There’s Bonnie and Clyde! Choruses of sniggers. I wanted to die.