Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  Betsy is pretty, I concede, in a wretched kind of way as if already she knows the workload of the country wife. Her eyes are enormous and lost. The lower lip, if only the granulations of print might move, would tremble.

  God, I say. And I move my spyglass back over Mr. Lockyer’s abradingly carved features, lingering on somber eyes and curved mouth with a jealous irritation. Why jealous? Do I really feel him to be my discovery? I refuse to believe I am experiencing reactions of this sort. Insanity.

  Years pass with every hour. The piles of newsprint grow. The ransacked boxes of settler memorabilia, with their curling photos and fading ink annotations on the flip side, pile up. There he is again, kindly positioned in time by a reverent hand (could it be Betsy’s?): 15th March, 1894, outside a settler’s hut on his run west of Mackay. That spring bride has worn a little. There’s no sign of orange blossom. She’s pregnant again despite a family roll-call of three, two boys and a girl, the youngest child in Mr. Lockyer’s arms. The family dog is trying to leave the picture and from behind the lean-to cookhouse a pig and three chickens are entering. Wretchedness. Struggle.

  Oh Mr. Lockyer, has it come to this?

  Between delicately turning the ocher pages of one hundred and fifty-three issues of the Drenchings Weekly Dispatch, groping through boxes of family photographs, plumbing copies of the Mackay Mercury and Gazette, the Brisbane Courier and the Queenslander, and making several hundred foolscap pages of notes later to be transferred to entry cards, Seb and I begin a relationship of sorts. He takes me to plays and concerts and gallery openings and lobster dinners at the Gold Coast where my virginity submits at last to his fifteen years’ seniority in these matters. Thinking I might at this point find my missing center we achieve a quiet marriage attended by four other archivists and six cataloguers. Mother attended the wedding but in a plaster cast. She had broken her leg falling from the roof of her bush hut as she cleaned the gutters. Then we go away for a fortnight to the Barrier Reef where sibylline rains for seven days fail to prevent a sunburn so extreme Seb is forced to practice continence during the second week to avoid my cries of pain. But my nose unblocks.

  Years later Seb would accuse me of courting sunburn deliberately but then, in the tropic ritz of the honeymoon suite while he resentfully patted calamine onto my blistered shoulders and thighs, I thought to woo him with innocent confidences. My virginity had startled him enough. I tell him about the man on the track and even as I tell, the terror hits me again and I whimper and pretend it’s my sunburn. Seb is juicing for detail. He has begun licking his lower lip, an unpleasant habit I’ve noticed when he is about to receive the sunburst revelation of prurient gossip.

  “And then?”

  “He told me to pull my pants down. And all the time smiling. A sort of fixed smile.”

  “And?”

  I look at Seb’s face and I decide to varnish the story a little. “I said pull down your own, buster, and give me a look.”

  “Well, that’s a new twist.”

  “It sort of stopped him,” I say. “He wasn’t expecting it. So I kept yelling Show me, show me, and he began to back off. Silly cow, he said. Silly cow. But I was back in the saddle by now—did I mention I was riding?—and I taunted him. Go on, go on, I yelled. Bet you’ve got nothing and then I dug my heels in and my horse sprang forward, practically on top of him and he just managed to jump clear, screeching at me.”

  Have I overplayed my hand? Seb is peculiarly thoughtful. His calamine-slapping hand has a sting to it. I want commendations for bravery but Seb says, “Quite the little ball-breaker, weren’t you?”

  I cannot believe I am hearing this. I had hoped for encircling arms, nuzzling reassurance.

  “I was eleven,” I protest. “Eleven. I thought you’d applaud.”

  Seb doesn’t answer.

  “You mean I should have let him? Protected his ego, his bloody needs?”

  Seb is still silent. I inspect him. Puffy, I can see now, in his godawful crocodile motif pajamas. Puffy, not cuddly. And that smile. Well, I must be honest. It is lovely but it surmounts the beginnings of jowls, and lower down a beer gut from academic drinking sessions in libertarian pubs—the Regatta Hotel gut. His eyes are too large with a tendency to hyperthyroidism, the whites clearly circumscribing each freckled iris. They definitely bulge. I had hoped the excess of thyroid indicated an interesting sexual drive, but I’ve been wrong there too.

  Seb is muttering something and I catch the words,

  “You belittled him.”

  “So?”

  “Well, you said he was only a kid.”

  “I don’t believe this! My God, there has to be an antonym!”

  “An antonym? For what?”

  “Ball-breaker. Careful, you’re hurting. Crusher. Whatever. How about womb waster? Boob buster?”

  “Keep trying,” Seb says indifferently, his smile now at its most outrageous. “You’ll luck up on something. And if you use if often enough, you’ll give it currency. A spurious currency. But currency.”

  “You bore me,” I say unforgivably. We have been married a mere six days.

  “I’m going out,” Seb announces, removing his hand and screwing the cap back on the calamine bottle. He peels off his pajamas, drags on shorts and a sweatshirt and slams out of the honeymoon suite.

  I am left there for three hours until the bar closes to brood on the delicacy of male sensibility, its capacity for easy bruising and the non-existence of its converse in the face of the male put-down. I wish I had thought of slamming out instead but it hurts to walk. Bonnie is right, I tell myself, in her committed obsessions, attached emotionally only to the abstract problems of life-style or drums or even me in a tangential way. As far as I know, my father had been the only man in her life. Her circle has had several centers. I wonder about the emotional refutations of Euclidean assertions and vow to give myself up to archival relics that are beginning to assume for me a reality and an importance my own days lack.

  If going forward is disaster, I have no alternative but to go back. I have to start somewhere, go somewhere. Heading for the womb and beyond.

  Do not put anything down this toilet you have not eaten first.

  Bonnie is the mistress of précis. She has taped this message to the wall of the shack’s dunny. I call it a shack because the abandoned miner’s lease she has purchased sports a three-room hut leaning away from the coastal wind and threatening to rejoin the bracken floor of her scrub-forest acres. The flush john fed by gravity flow from a tank is an unexpected nicety.

  We are visiting, Seb and I, and are locked into the first shocked harmony of our marriage. Bonnie’s leg is out of plaster and she has an interesting limp. I worry about her. True, the view is stunning. The houselet is perched on the edge of an escarpment that watches the country unroll in superb pleats and tucks for miles. True, the nearest township is creeping ever closer to her property because of developers crazy for subdivision, but the overall impression is of isolation.

  Bonnie has the same dog and now two hens as well. The three animals have unlimited access to the house and accompany her when she drives to town for mail or to stock up on groceries she cannot avoid buying. The smaller hen sits on her shoulder as she limps from one store to the next.

  “She’s very fierce, aren’t you darling?” Bonnie asks the hen droolingly. “Thuck thuck thuck.”

  We have been here for two days now and Bonnie has shown us every corner of her land. Exhausted, we are collapsed in homemade deckchairs when Seb says, unexpectedly compassionate, “You don’t have to stay here, Bonnie. You can move down with us, you know.”

  I suspect he wants her as a talking point at parties. He adores the freakish. I am part of his collection. Now that he is upwardly mobile, as they say, and has become deputy librarian, our house vibrates each weekend with the resonance of academic jousters. Everyone is a critic. No one is a performer. I long to hear kindly words spoken. I tell this to Seb petulantly after a trying Sunday afternoon when I spent my social t
ime washing glasses. He wants my mother there to perform.

  But Bonnie grins delightedly. “You’d hate it.”

  “Of course I would,” Seb agrees, taking the wind out of her sails and grinning back, “but it might be fun. How about a cuppa, Bon?”

  Bonnie has been snapping twigs for the old fuel stove she bought from a demolished settler’s hut in the next valley. The pot rings are rusted, the oven door won’t close properly, the damper doesn’t work and the shack fills with smoke.

  “I thought you’d be rubbing two sticks together,” Seb adds, fanning with the Observer.

  “I would,” Bonnie says, “only you’re so impatient. I hate,” she adds, “to hear cracks like that from a barbecue freak.”

  Bull’s-eye!

  Seb, high priest of the weekend barbie, winces in his expensive casuals. His garden rituals of salad tossing and steak turning never extend inside the house to the kitchen where at mealtimes he becomes abominably limp. For a man of the eighties he has a disposition to the cultural domestic arrangements of the last century, and I am becoming increasingly soured of a relationship that sees us both travel to and from work together and sees me go on working solo once the front door has slammed. Ploys like after-work drinks with women friends fail. He can always outstay me. I try heading straight to the garden to pluck listlessly at weeds but darkness and mosquitoes drive me in; or playing sick (I have a bit of a headache, too, old girl. Let’s not eat. It will be good for us. Nothing like judicious starvation). Seb’s cunning is boundless. No wonder he’s the deputy librarian at forty with a five-figure mortgage that is grinding us both to pieces.

  After three days of Bonnie’s raw salads, mountain water (Seb develops gastric problems), leech and tick bites, Seb announces our return to the comforts of town. I am offended for mother. We are on our four weeks’ annual leave and although she is an eccentric of talent, she is still my mum. I jolly that fact along by saying the words aloud to myself for their cozy sound. I am trying to make her my center but nothing seems to work. Despite that, I hate to leave her in her crazy comfortless commitment. The two of us, Bonnie and daughter (you note I refrain from writing “mother and daughter” at this point) go plodding up the mountainside in gumboots seeking privacy from the deputy librarian.

  She looks at me squintily. “You’re not happy, are you?”

  We are cleaning yabbies out of our small holding tank at the spring. Bonnie has forgotten to bring gloves—or decided we don’t need them—and it is unpleasant work.

  I counter with vagueness. “Well, it’s marriage, isn’t it?” adding unkindly, “You should know.” She ignores that.

  “I should have stopped you,” Bonnie complains. “The tiny pedant.”

  “You were never around.”

  “You left me, my dear,” she says.

  “Oh this is pointless, arguing. Pointless.”

  I must admit I do know of some sturdy and pleasant relationships. I meet couples who are still affectionate and considerate even after decades together. It’s these newer couplings that abrade and dissolve within weeks months years. Grandmother blames the new independence—she means women’s—and maybe she’s right. They’re rejecting the chattel status that’s been expected of them for so long. I say this to Bonnie who, despite being a living example of this emancipation, purses her lips as she gazes back down the hill at the just visible askew roof of her shack where it skulks under trees. I gaze with her and at this distance Seb’s garden-prowling figure, spotted in glimpses as he noses critically about the vegetable patch, emits, even up here, a diffusion of impatience and irritation. We watch him go back inside and reappear with overnight bags. Any moment he will begin honking the car horn to summon me with infuriated morse.

  Bonnie starts laughing to herself.

  “What’s up? I don’t feel much like laughing.” I was hoping for a concentration on my own problems for once.

  She giggles a little more before she replies.

  “Gloombug! Don’t let him worry you. Listen, I’ve developed an admirer. Despite all my vows.”

  My raised eyebrows prod her on. I won’t indulge her by asking questions. What about my plight? I scoop a resentful pile of sludge from the tank and heave it into the trees, only half-hearing mother’s account of a neighbor from the next valley.

  “Nothing carnal, dear, in case you’re wondering. Nothing like that. It’s a tea and conversation program.”

  From the babble of description I pluck a name, “Stanley.” Mother is busy explaining that he dislikes diminutives.

  “He’s a widower, Belle, of about sixty. Just a nice age for me. And he’s been farming here for the last thirty years.”

  I fear he might be a redneck oaf but I manage to tell her how pleased I am and ponder what the sociologists describe as the oppositional or complementary aspects of gender. Christians have a terrible duality to deal with when confronted with the body—the spirit and the flesh at tugowar—but even that is not as laughable as the casuistry of Eastern religions—explaining away their dependence on sex as relaxation (“it’s contemplating each other’s navels,” Seb tells me)—or the Muslim tralala I heard some mullah pundit in full explicatory cry give out on a national radio program: “The junction of these two oppositions,” he said gently and persuasive pervasive, “finds its fullest moment in intercourse.” I think he meant in the sight of Allah. I get really irritated when religion tries to give mystique to people wanting to have a fuck! (You notice how marriage has coarsened me.) Then he went on to say that genital differences were given the world purely to achieve this junction. I’d always had the unpopular idea genitals were for breeding and perpetuating the species. But I guess if you’re an Eastern guru you can get away with anything.

  “Well,” I say to mother, “it’s good you’ve got someone close you can call on in an emergency. It’s great. I won’t worry nearly so much.”

  If mother has been lonely, she’s not admitting it and if she has been fearful at times as she must be when the moon opens up the secret places of the scrub and sends shadows scurrying, she has always pretended that the world is sweetly safe. She’s wrong, of course, and I am beginning to feel cross about it all, about the hours I have spent worrying on her behalf, about her oddity stuck here in a clearing ten miles from the nearest township.

  I make a snap decision. I want to inspect this new messmate. “Let’s go back down and tell Seb to drive back without me. I can get myself home by train later in the week. There are things I’ve got to talk through.”

  Bonnie’s eyes light up. Her lashes blink rapidly over that still intense blue. “Now you’ll be able to meet Stanley,” she cries delightedly, my own problematic marriage the last thought in her head. “We’ll drive over there after Seb’s gone.”

  Bonnie was lying.

  Stanley is indeed sixty and a widower but he is no farmer.

  He is an elderly dropout in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse—what the real estate jackals call a “classic Queenslander”—postulating its charms on a small green hill overlooking the river. The return verandas are draped in jasmine and Chinese honeysuckle and though it all looks conventional enough externally, the interior provides shock. Every partition has been partially or totally removed, the remaining structure braced by massive studs and crossbeams so that ultimately the house is one enormous room with arched annexes for sleeping and cooking. The rest of the space is given over to easy chairs—Stanley, I discover, does a lot of sitting—and shelving that contains the largest record collection I have ever seen. Rack upon rack of old standards, LPs, discs and tapes. As well as the latest hi-fi equipment—compact-disc players and banks of speakers—there are several vintage turntable machines, one with an enormous exponential horn. Only the terrier is missing.

  Stanley presides over it all in an unhurried way, even in the initial flurry of meeting, a seemingly absentminded man with a scholarly stoop, lank white hair and exhausted good looks. But the noticeable feature, the stunning feature really, is the baby
bland innocence of his eyes which are of a crystalline blue and have the wondering look of eyes seen peering over the edges of prams and strollers.

  Mother is waiting for my reaction. I muffle it.

  While he makes coffee, I inspect the shelves, my archival glands working at top strength. He has everything, I estimate, on my first and necessarily cursory peerings. And often several versions of everything. The recordings and tapes range from the Victoriana of music halls through jazz, rock, pop to standard classics, collector’s items of baroque, rare masses, Gregorian chant, the most avant garde of serious work. There is a beautifully filed catalogue in one corner of this great barn. I pull drawers and flick through index cards. Is he simply a collector? There are tapes of Eastern music, African drum rhythms, Pacific singsings, Aboriginal corroborees. There’s flute music from the high Andes and guitar music from the Basque region. Is he simply a collector?

  My attempts at reconstructing or revivifying Mr. Gaden Lockyer seem amateurish.

  “There’s one thing you’ve missed,” I can’t resist saying as he puts the coffee tray down on the table. But I say it with a smile. I can hear my own foolishness clang.

  He looks over at me with those absurdly innocent eyes.

  “What’s that?”

  Is he affronted? Anxious? Does he detect my meanness of spirit? “Trucking music.”

  “Trucking—music?” He is frozen into perplexed recall, the sugar bowl tendered at an oblique angle. He stands for so long like this I think he has forgotten me.

  “Let me see,” he says finally at the very moment Bonnie reproves, “Stop your nonsense, Belle.”

  He has forgotten us, forgotten the coffee. You can hear him racking his brains while he remains, defying gravity, leaning gently forward into space, the sugar bowl still extended. I take a mug from the tray and help myself to sugar but he doesn’t notice.