Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  The lie of it!

  Grandma looks up from the tomato plants and her quizzical glance is wiped out as I throw myself on her, shuddering.

  “A man,” I tell. “In the trees.”

  It’s wormed out of me and grandpa sends one of the fencers down and my friend’s father rides down and later they discover it is a casual come in for the shearing season and my friend’s father is too late to send him packing. By the time they reach the men’s sheds he is already gone and after a time I forget. Or I think I forget.

  And now I am fourteen and Bonnie and Marie, for a treat, have taken me on tour. They have engagements at country dance-halls in the Mary Valley. Our base is the Miners’ Arms Hotel in main street, Gympie, a large barn of a place with His and Hers bathrooms at opposite ends of the upstairs corridor. Here I am at eight p.m., having resisted the offer to accompany my relatives while they beat out “Gipsy Taps” and “Prides of Erin,” carrying my bath towel along the hallway for pre-bed ablutions. Except for the distant sea-roar of beer-saturated men in the downstairs street bar, the hotel looks and feels deserted. No sound comes from behind any of the closed doors as I walk along this glowing corridor. It is so still, despite the surf crash of yeast, I imagine that if I listen hard enough I might hear aunt and mother whacking their way through “Chattanooga Choo Choo” out in the Kin Kin scrub. Their repertoire never updates. Perhaps that is why, in certain pockets of cutoff country, they are so frequently re-engaged.

  Utter stillness terrifies.

  Outside the twin doors of the ladies’ lavatory and bathroom I pause.

  The bathroom door is half open and there is no light. Perhaps it would be better to describe it as half-closed. Something makes me stop. I stand, towel carefully folded across my arm like a waiter but in boarding school manner, and wait.

  For what? A force field is keeping me from that foot-ajar door.

  I wait.

  The corridor and the moment inflate with my tension. I could wait, withheld from that bathroom forever.

  There is someone behind that door.

  Why don’t I turn and race back to my own room? I am frozen, not with curiosity but paralysis of will as if the chemistry of whoever it is draws like a magnet and my flesh apprehends this as clearly as my eyes are learning the bilious autumn leaf pattern of carpet.

  The moment becomes huge.

  I press back against the wall. There is curiosity, I admit, and anger, and I stay and the racket from the distant bar underscores the silence of this corridor with its coughless laughless rustleless rooms. I wait and into my waiting a man steps from behind the bathroom door.

  The corridor becomes the bush track but this time it is different. The passageway is a desert of light, I am older, larger and the man is a gabble of excuses. I don’t hear them. He is gone into the corridor blaze before I have even seen his face and in seconds I have slammed into the bathroom with the door bolted before reaction sets in.

  “A man,” I tell Bonnie at breakfast next morning, “in the bathroom.”

  “Lucky you,” Bonnie says, busy with marmalade.

  I am too young for her cynicism and her amusement dies in the face of my appalled tears. For the first time in years that night I sleep in mother’s bed, snuggled up to her late-home side, her arms cuddling me in a too-late circle of warm flesh and safety, her breath and mine mingling right through the night.

  Hi, Bonnie, a different drummer, we never did mingle much, did we?

  Time moves. I stay still. A lot of people believe this. I stay still in the teaching—is the word “profession”?—though the hierarchy moves me on.

  Goodbye Villa Marina. Goodbye May and busdriver husband, Reg. Goodbye Mr. Bonsey for whom my time was never quite ripe. Goodbye, for the moment, Bonnie and Marie, vale praetores! And hello Deep Creek, hello Mrs. Moody, pub manageress of the Deep Creek Billabong, hello fellow boarders and school. Hello hello hello.

  The town has one main street crossed by the railway line. There are three shops and the hotel whose proprietor is concentration-camp blonde, stunningly groomed for a one-cow hamlet in the mulga. After dinner at night she serves in the bar, flaunting her bust in a paralyzing electric blue silk. Her accent is fully and plummily English, southern counties. You know she will never say “bum” even though she understands every function of the posterior like an expert. There are four other permanents besides me and perhaps because of my sex I am seated at a separate table where I am crushed by my isolation and the deep browns of the room. Photographs of horses and dairy cattle dominate.

  At the other table sit the forestry officer, a sly young man with a foxy face who works in the bank, the local butcher and a logger. Within a week I will be granted the company of a visiting forestry inspector. Each morning we exchange nods and I listen to their unvarying breakfast orders as I munch my bacon and eggs. After a week or so they add words to nods: have a good day? Bit hot, eh? Bearing up? Kids behaving? This is a very small town. I don’t mind. I prefer it. I enjoy the high-gloss safety of my room with its jam jar of banksia, the votive offering of one of my pupils, wilting in the summer night. I am turning into my own center.

  As I sit upstairs after dinner marking homework books, I hear from the barroom below through the drinking frenzy of loggers in town, the itinerant piano-tuner playing “Sentimental Journey,” the notes limpid as toffee drops. There’s nowhere to go from this place except one stop west into the heart of the pines or six stops east to a slag-heap mining town. The toffee’d nostalgia from the bar melds nicely with my mood in this milky-green room from whose open doors I can see the brief strip of blacktop angling past two of the three shops, the post office cum bank and the rundown picture house where kikuyu grows between the galvanized walls and timber floor that don’t quite meet, sending out runners towards the canvas bleachers.

  Sentimental Journey. For—sooth! Nevertheless I tap an ironic foot and hum along and squeeze out a tear as the sprays of bottlebrush droop on the dressing table and powder its surface with fine red hairs.

  The piano tuner discovered at breakfast is tubby and jolly and can hardly wait to get back to the city. He has, he tells me, four more pianos on outlying farms to attend to. The newly arrived forestry inspector listens to our conversation with lines of disapproval about his mouth. I am an object of speculation. I am the only female guest. The butcher who sleeps three rooms away and faces me each day at every meal from the safety of another table will soon ask me out walking. Walking, for Chrissake!

  Or press his thin dry mouth onto mine fifty yards east of the pub where he has followed me when I step out for air. “You’re a sweet kid, Belle.” “Am I?” “Yes. A really sweet kid. Come on, more like this.” “No thank you. I have to get back and study.” “Study! Give us another!”

  A month passes. At Slagheap railway station, one weekend, I find myself locked in the lavatory with three minutes before the rail-motor leaves for Deep Creek. By climbing to the top of the door and launching myself over, I collapse into the startled gaze of a handsome young woman fixing her butterscotch coil of plaits before the washroom mirror.

  “That’s one way to leave,” says my old schoolmate Sheridan McAvoy.

  We sit facing each other in the rail-motor as it jiggles out of town past the grass-covered cinder piles and I discover that she is teaching at another godforsaken spot down the line. Sheridan played “The Rustle of Spring.” She is an accomplished recitateuse, with a voice as full and assured as her playing. What was she doing now, apart from teaching?

  “Getting married,” she says flatly, “to an itinerant pineapple picker.”

  She waits politely for me to resume polite expressionlessness.

  “Itinerant? Sorry, Boobs, but what do you have in common?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Don’t be dreary. The lot.”

  “Will you go on teaching?”

  “God no. Are you mad
! I’ll be picking pineapples as well. It’s easier.”

  She laughs richly.

  Is she still laughing, that Junoesque fruit sorter with the flash accent, the decorative clothes? Still roaring with laughter as she grubs along the pine rows? I spend the next week pondering the validity of marriage, its necessity, thrown askew by the flip attitudes of my mother and aunt. Surely, I tell myself, one must investigate a relationship with the other sex. Surely. There is nothing to investigate in Deep Creek, though I release a small sigh for the bachelor doctor twenty miles away who hasn’t even noticed me. He has noticed only my infected toe, so swollen it has its own magic.

  “Mmmmm,” he had said, salivating as if handed a rare gem. “Let’s—um—see. Sorry. Mmmm. Well, that’s a toe and a half, isn’t it? Now let me see what we can do about that. It really is quite magnificent.”

  The fool lances it, forgets to give me antibiotics and I end up in Slagheap hospital for a week. Returned to Deep Creek, an enfeebled hobbler, I discover that the shared bath has distributed my bacteria with horrible results. The butcher has a boil on his nose. The forestry officer has one on his right buttock. I sense general resentment. This takes an odd form.

  Another week passes. It is Saturday morning and I lie upstairs, my body twisted with period cramps that make me want to vomit. Overhead, November heat is whacking the pub roof and I’m gunna make … the drinkers bellow below me as Mrs. Moody hits the barroom piano, a sent-a-ment-al journey. Downstairs Ellie bangs the luncheon gong and my stomach contracts at the thought of the horsey dining room, the slabs of beef, the troweling eating technique of the bank clerk.

  Pain bends me double. I crawl beneath the eiderdown and wait for the spasm to pass.

  A sent-a-ment-al jour-ur-nee home, they are all singing.

  Two rooms away Mr. Forestry Inspector’s door opens and closes in response to the gong and as his food-bound footsteps near my room, I call out. From where I am lying I see his polished dome of a head poke round the door, on his face a curious patina of phlegm rather than sympathy as he stares at me curled up with my face projecting wanly above the covers. Perhaps I don’t look wan. I feel wan.

  Mr. Forestry Inspector is on loan from central office in Brisbane to reorganize management and is quietly important, filled with years and gravity. He has been placed at my table, perhaps out of pity for my solitary state, where we have spoken in a desultory way about the weather for a month. But I am about to be betrayed by my innocence, my lack of something, while cramps eat at my gut.

  “Please,” I say, attempting dignity from a supine position, “would you please tell Ellie I’m sorry but I won’t be down for lunch. I’m not well.”

  His face enlarges. He comes round the door and closes it gently behind him, his smile unbelieving. I say, “Please. Please tell Ellie.”

  He doesn’t appear to have heard me. His face is impassive. Why doesn’t he leave? Why does he stand there, now serenely smiling, as if in disbelief? He has the message. It is the wrong one, I realize suddenly, adding supineness to bed and aggregating too much altogether, for his face, seraphic with unexploded opportunity, gazes unblinkingly. Then he pads across to the bed using his smile like a walking-frame and leans over me, propping himself with a hand each side, looming, so that I am trapped between fleshy clamps. His voice deepens remarkably when he speaks.

  “Now, what’s the problem?” he demands gently, still smiling.

  I repeat my message. I am beginning to feel foolish. Any moment now I will begin to shout.

  Look, I want to reveal, beneath these covers, this dressing gown, I am fully clad, do you see? Do you see? I did not …

  “All you need,” the thickened voice decides gently while one paw removes itself from the eiderdown and comes to rest on my flinching skull, “is a bit of loving.”

  Is this really the kindly and rather aloof fifty-year-old with whom I have compared cloud cover and humidity at breakfast and dinner?

  I thrust my body more deeply below the coverlet, dragging it up until my shamed face is covered and cry in a muffled fashion, “Don’t! Don’t! Go away!”

  I cannot believe this is happening.

  He tries pulling at the eiderdown. By now he is seated on the bony edge of my bed and the two of us engage in a silent tugowar as I drag against him like a child. The piano and the belting choruses have long since stopped. There’s a smell of roast meat seeping through the fanlight. Wordless we struggle for another minute with a kind of idiotic quiet violence when suddenly he desists and straightens up as if good sense has intervened. Or the smell of roast meat. Formally he asks, “May I send you up a cup of tea then?”

  My humiliation is so profound I am incapable of answering. I shake my head and keep my face muffled until the door opens and closes, yet a week later he is to pin me for a kiss with a tongue like felt against the corridor wall, taking me by surprise between dinnertime and bed; and a week after that Mrs. Forestry Inspector joins her husband for a brief and beady-eyed holiday visit and breakfast weather forecasts cease as we sit silent and aloof as if never, never. He is invited to dinner at the headmaster’s house when his wife vanishes and he chats on the porch as if kisses wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

  His summation of my needs could be correct. I am lonely and bored in this town which ticks beside a creek of treacherous water-holes, imitation rapids and pine forests that involve it in a spurious resinous comfort. Boredom. Boredom. Into which mother steps to spend midweek with me on her way back from a weekend dance-fest near Slagheap. The pub’s primitive conditions amuse her. Mrs. Moody in a moment of pique has locked the one upstairs water closet, preserving the key to its comforts for casuals. Mother, as relative-guest, fails to come within this category and at night we stumble about the dark pub yard, tripping over drunks and coiled lovers.

  She sits opposite me now giggling in an irresponsible fashion on the extra stretcher they have rammed into my narrow room for these few nights. It is almost impossible to move. We have just returned from the local picture show where, lounging in the bleachers, we listened to Hurd Hatfield play Chopin menacingly and say to Angela Lansbury, “It’s called ‘Prelude’!” threatening her virtue with innuendo. Our veins also thrilled.

  “The twenty-fourth,” Bonnie says as we stare at each other in the confined space of my room. “I can still play it. Shall I go down to the barroom piano?”

  “Oh God!” I say. “No.”

  “But darling, don’t you ever play it? What do you do all the time?”

  “Be,” I suggest. “Simply be.”

  We watch each other carefully.

  Where is Marie?

  “Melbourne,” Bonnie tells me with an attempt at carelessness. “She’s thinking of moving there.”

  South? South is inconceivable. No one moves south.

  “It’s awful,” Bonnie gulps suddenly, and bursts into tears.

  I sit beside her, reversing our roles, give her a hug and rub my face against her wet one. This is only the second time we have been forced for comfort into each other’s arms. The irony is not lost on me.

  “It had to happen, I guess. The day had to come.” I find I am patting my mother’s shaking shoulders as if she were the kid. “She was a lousy pianist anyway.”

  “Don’t talk about your aunt like that,” Bonnie says between snuffles. “She gave pleasure to hundreds.”

  “Hundreds of what?”

  Bonnie giggles through her soggy makeup. Outside doors open and close. There is a listening quality about this upper storey. Someone bangs into the bathroom off the back landing and there is the sound of a tap running.

  “Listen,” Bonnie says suddenly, her eyes glistening through tears like a naughty child’s on the verge of recovery, “cheer me up. Let’s do our party trick.”

  I should explain that this is a musical nonsense we devised one airless summer at Villa Marina. It involves a duet, a voice-blend one semitone apart, calculated to clear a room in minutes.

  “Not here, mother. Please. N
ot here. It’s after eleven and the whole pub will hear us.”

  “Great!” she says. “Great! Go on. Take a note. What will we do?”

  “You’re crazy. Truly. Did I ever tell you what the kids at school used to call you and Marie?”

  “I don’t want to hear. Come on,” she begs. “Please. It’ll cheer me up. God, I need cheering up. Let’s do the Brahms lullaby. Please, Belle.”

  She looks at me all wet-eyed. The hell with it, I think, and grudgingly sing “ah.”

  “Lower,” Bonnie orders.

  I drop my “ah” a third.

  Her face shines with pleasure.

  She sings “ah” a semitone above me. Then, “Keep singing,” she says, and joins in.

  “It’s terrible.”

  “Lovely,” Bonnie says. “Let’s get our disharmony perfect. It says something about what I’m feeling. Aaaaaaaah.”

  The nighttime stillness of the rooms along the corridor is palpable. Everyone is tucked up for the night: Mr. Forestry Inspector, Mr. Bank Clerk, Mr. Butcher, Mr. Logger. The local policeman who is always locked into the bar after official closing time has by now fallen asleep in Ellie’s bed.

  “Right,” Bonnie says. “That sounds the perfect choice. Come on now, I’ll count us in.” (There are praetorian overtones here.) “Are you ready? Uh one uh two uh …”