Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  Whose mother is she, for Chrissake?

  That’s the moment, the back-turning moment, when I begin to hate him, my loathing confirmed as he clicks the receiver into its cradle and walks out into the garden without a word.

  I pursue, battering with questions until he yields.

  Marie, he tells me, is returning to join Bonnie, her dredge master having collapsed on the sixteenth hole of St. Kilda golf course. The ambulance taking him to the nearest hospital was redirected by casualty to another, one hour away, and he was dead by the time they wheeled him from the ambulance.

  Seb pulls the mower’s starter cord as if he has just read me a grocery list. I chase him across the spinning lawn and pound at his beautiful back, sobbing with rage. He knows I can’t ring back. Bonnie would have had to drive ten miles into town to make that call. I sense my face screwed into new configurations.

  “You look awful when you do that,” Seb says coldly, heaving again at the starter cord because my attack has caused him to stall the motor.

  I trail back inside and for the first time in our life together I pack the smallest, the most deliberate of go-away bags.

  I’m on a spy high. Looking for the center. Another try.

  It is possible for me to reach the States and be back, butter unmelting in my mouth, in one weekend.

  One long weekend.

  It is possible for me to nose out my conception spot in San Diego on the way back or through to the east coast. I really have been investigating the permutations and combinations of airways schedules.

  The sound of my departing car is drowned by the snarl of the motor mower now munching its way around the barbecue pit. I am fled airportwards before Seb can pull the starter ratchet to Stop, bristling with passport and a visa with three years to run, credit cards and one change of clothes.

  “You’re sacked,” Seb will, and does, pronounce when I return to work, twenty-four hours late, my eyes popping with jet lag. “Where have you been?”

  I had arrived straight from the airport, my brain fogged from in-flight movies, my body clogged with airline meals.

  “America,” I said, walking past him and going straight to my desk.

  Seb ignored what appeared an obvious lie and stalked upstairs.

  “Where were you?” he asked again as we passed later in the day outside the staff common-room door.

  “I told you,” I said.

  His jaw tendons displayed themselves through tightened skin.

  At home that evening Seb, early for once, asked again but I was too far under with sleeping pills to mumble the truth for the third or even a fourth and a fifth time.

  It is interesting—and I discovered this fact very early—that when you tell the truth, particularly if it’s outrageous, no one ever believes you.

  There has to be some sort of rapprochement for we are a social pair, according to Seb who thinks it fitting. His job demands it.

  A week later here are six of us clutching after-dinner drinks or coffees on the back stoop looking across suburbia to glimpses of the Brisbane River trapping twilight’s gleam on its muddy surface. There’s Frank Hassler from Cataloguing accompanied by a small wide-eyed junior from a branch library. I suspect Seb of interest as well. Patch (the affectionate agnomen has been bestowed by Hassler) is given to plunging cleavage and wrinkled lisle stockings. The antithesis is stunning. And as well there are the Flutes, both academics with tenure. They often mention this. They don’t often mention that they work at a technical institute and not a university. Garry Flute has been everywhere. Erica Flute has been almost everywhere.

  Worn out from ministering I am sagging behind the strategic camouflage of a philodendron, limply holding a Campari and listening to the others discuss possible holiday destinations.

  “Tahiti’s fucked,” says Frank Hassler who has also been everywhere. “And Spain. Spain’s really fucked. Greece, Italy, Peru, the Bahamas, Britain. God, Britain! Fucked. They’re all fucked.”

  “But I want to go somewhere, Frank.”

  Is there the tiniest suggestion of whine in Patch’s musical complaint which she has transposed a girlish and plaintive semitone? “Come on, you others, where? Help.”

  “There’s nowhere to go,” Frank says. “The planet has become a nightmare of tourists crossing and recrossing on package tours. The whole globe is geared to the seven-, nine-, fifteen-day joy binge. Everything’s fucked. Stay here. Enjoy here.”

  “But I’ve been here.”

  “Delicious!” Garry Flute cries. “Delicious! Been here, done this!”

  “But I’ve never seen Tahiti or Tonga or Samoa. I don’t know the Pacific.”

  “Those emphases make it sound so carnal,” Garry Flute says.

  Seb watches the four of them, his smile at its most beautiful. I find myself wishing his teeth would go black.

  Frank Hassler is becoming annoyed. He reaches rudely for the decanter and pours himself another port the size of a Coke.

  “If you want to be ripped off by natives just finding their tourist muscle, my dear, and dine regularly on radiated lobster, then you’re mad. You’ll have to do it alone.”

  “Anyway,” Erica Flute says, “it’s wrong to give even a cent to the French. And think of siguatera poisoning.”

  “I try never to think of it,” Garry Flute says amid appreciative laughter.

  Frank Hassler frowns. His first marriage has been ruptured for only two years. He is a librarian, faute de mieux, having tried and failed at a political career. I wonder if he would be interested in Gaden Lockyer, who knew the horror of political disgrace right at the end. Flattery in Frank Hassler’s early years had got him everywhere. Preselected by a conservative party he went on the hustings dragging his wife behind him. He took her hand affectionately on public walkabouts, helped her in and out of cars when newsmen were around, smiled fondly into her eyes while cameras clicked. She couldn’t believe this attention. “And, I might add,” he would announce on one public occasion after another, “my wife is my greatest supporter.” Smile smile. Her own turned into a frozen grimace. Almost on the eve of election he ushered her onstage, one arm about her shoulders, to the cheers and yoicks of a wining-dining mob of supporters to whom, after the chairman had made his introductory speech, Frank waved his gratitude before turning and kissing his wife soundly to applause and catcalls.

  She had waited until the whistles and cheering died away.

  “Thank you,” she said. She had a clear carrying voice. “He hasn’t done that for years. Seven and a half to be exact.”

  “For God’s sake!” he hissed.

  “You don’t mean it, you insincere bastard,” she hissed back. “He doesn’t mean it,” she cried, turning to the crowd. They were fascinated. “You never do it when we’re alone,” she said.

  “Jesus!” It was turning into a public domestic.

  He kept trying to catch the eyes of his minders to have her thrown offstage but she had the audience enraptured as she took a step towards them, smiled wistfully and waved in a tiny submissive gesture that embarrassed him even more.

  He was completely stumped for chin-up words as she walked away. “What a kidder!” he laughed nervously. “What a kidder, eh?”

  The newspapers published every detail, with photos. He polled disastrously. His wife lived on alone with unamused memories and worked at her golf handicap.

  I watch Frank frowning. I watch Seb watching Frank frown. I lean forward under my green umbrella of leaves. I lean, lean, as if I am some threatening rock or tower that will collapse on the party. The eyes around the barbecue pit under the mango tree are glittering above the ruined table with the alerted interest of observers hoping for a lovers’ jangle. I look from one to the other, from the Flutes to Frank Hassler to Patch but always, as if he were my center, my eyes return to Seb who is standing near the fire having trouble with a reluctant wine cork and the first of the mosquitoes. As if there had never been five years of marriage I find myself inspecting him impersonally. He has
the claret bottle between his legs and is wrenching at the cork with furious twists. Bits of it fly about.

  “New York’s not fucked,” I suggest, availing myself of their own trendy participle. “I was there last weekend.”

  “Were you, dear?” Seb says smiling sourly. “Oh my God, this bloody cork.” He never listens. Not to me. He hasn’t been listening for five years.

  “I said New York.”

  “We heard you, dear. Frank, pass me that other corkscrew will you, or a putty gouger or some goddamn thing.”

  “Eating a BLT at the Rockefeller Plaza down by the rink.”

  “Oh yes,” Seb says, humoring the idiot wife. He has the last of the cork out by now and is pouring more wine into Patch’s glass and his own. I put my hand over my Campari to protect it.

  I find I am shouting—well, not shouting—but increasing my volume for our absorbed guests. “And I had lunch in San Diego.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Seb says. “Erica?”

  She is too delighted to look anywhere but at me. Frank and Garry Flute lean back as if the outdoor table is suddenly too small. They are captivated by the evening’s progress and even more so when I leap up, rocking a reef of crockery, and demand to know if Seb wants proof.

  “Proof! Proof!”

  Ignoring his sumptuous italics I walk inside, coolly, and extract evidence from the back of my spare-room wardrobe: hotel receipts, diner’s checks, my stamped visa and a leather cylinder like an extra-large old-fashioned folio holder and go back to the titillated guests.

  “There,” I say truculently, thrusting an opened passport under Seb’s unwilling nose and waving the leather cylinder about.

  Seb glances briefly at the appropriate page.

  “Salami anyone?” he asks. “Bratwurst?”

  I hit his hostly arm with the cylinder. Frank Hassler’s face is angelic with pleasure.

  Seb puts down his glass carefully and grabs the leather case from me.

  “And what have we here?” he demands of the world. “Souvenirs? Tourist trash? Not a wifely present?”

  He opens the case and pulls out the drumsticks.

  “Heavens!” he says. “A gift for mother.”

  “They’re my father’s,” I say. “My father’s. He gave them to me.”

  Even Seb composes his face into more seemly lines. A few remnants of my history have stuck after all.

  “Your father’s what, dear?” Frank Hassler asks, feigning ignorance.

  I ignore him. I drop my eyes and refuse to look at any of them but I look at the long brown leather case in Seb’s hands and feel tears prick as I reach out and grab in return and snatch it to me. Seb is holding the sticks out into the candlelight.

  No one knows how to respond. I hand the case to Patch who shows some vestige of warmth as she inspects my father’s inked-in name inside the top flap.

  “Ooh look!” she cries, her fingers spelling out the words as if she’s just mastered reading skills. “Ooh look, Frank!” She turns to me. “Is he your father?”

  I’m nodding. I don’t want to tell them he was a trumpet player by profession (I have never spoken of him in any detail), that these sticks were something he had bought once for my mother and she had left angrily behind. I don’t want to say anything. But Seb does.

  “The marvels of modern travel,” he comments with his delicious smile. “I never cease to be amazed.”

  *

  There’d been a series of pressures.

  I mean girls. Women.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Seb would confess, telling me. He always told. He believed in the healing value of confession and catharsis. Catharsis for me, that is. The first time there had been tears.

  “She’s nothing, really. It’s nothing. Just a student. I can barely remember her name. It’s nothing.”

  “Then why tell me? Can you remember mine?”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He would sob for a bit and cling. This wasn’t what my reading had trained me to expect. Men were devious and arrogant and when discovered in infidelity became angry and lied. In Seb’s case it was as if admission were stimulus to orgasm, for afterwards, in the sticky connubial reconciliation, he would take my head in his hands as he thrust away and I would feel—no, I would know—he was trying to fuck my head. He was bent on turning my skull into a second orifice, establishing a thing-ness. All of me. My God, he was going to take all of me and he refused to let the brain be separate from his mindless banging. He wanted to incorporate it into the act as if the vagina led straight to the cranium.

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” I accused him once. “Get your hands away from my head. You’re trying to fuck my skull, aren’t you?”

  He smiled in a satisfied way, delighted I’d got the message.

  “Goose,” he chided sweetly. “Silly goose. You’re too bright for that.”

  I agreed with him and his face changed from sweet to sour, light to dark.

  So after girl number seven, nine, whatever, and the telephone call from mother, it was easy enough to allow him to assume I had fled up-country in a filially dazed resentment.

  I reached Los Angeles only a little later than the time I left Brisbane. It was still Saturday and I was elated the entire trip that no one knew where I was, could not hazard a guess, not in Seb’s or Bonnie’s most fantastic conceptions, or imagine this unknown unimportant archivist cog flung into space at over eight hundred kilometers an hour towards a continent she would glimpse for a mere two days before being flung back.

  The center hunter.

  That was nonsense of course. Merely finding the trailer park where I was conceived would prove nothing, establish no building blocks of emotional security, but might serve to satisfy a sentimental wish to examine the connotations of my origin. The furniture, as it were. I had an address that was part of my childhood grudgingly revealed by mother, the rare cards and gifts from unknown territory, and though I knew father was long gone from there, there would be satisfaction in looking. I kept asking myself why, on a previous New World visit with Seb when I suffered for five days in Washington at an international library conference, I had made no effort then to discover father. Perhaps I had believed Seb might still provide a point of secure reference.

  The cabbie dropped me at the gates of a rundown trailer park simmering in Californian sun. The woman behind the office glass was one of those obese women who can be found all over the States, huge and light-moving. Above her pebble lenses was a lot of shiny white forehead which wrinkled as she listened to my stumbled inquiry with suspicion. When I finished she told me she couldn’t understand me. Fazed by my accent. I tried again and when dawn ultimately over Lethe broke, her smile was wide and sorrowing.

  “Honey,” she said, “that musta been alla thirty years back. No way that van is gunna be there now. No way. Why, I wouldn’t even know where to look. Whole park’s been changed about before we come.”

  I ask, a foreign suppliant, if I can wander round. I have to absorb some moment from this place after all that distance, the infinite tangent drawn to the circumference.

  Her lenses flash. I don’t look dangerous. I have been diminished by travel. Clothes and skin are crumpled. My hair is sticky. I’m afraid I smell, not simply of weariness but the angry despair that has traveled with me. She’s dubious.

  “From Australia,” I retell her. “I’ve come all that way.”

  “Jus’ to look at this ol’ trailer park?” she says.

  Who could believe this, I agree. The fruits of impulse or obsession look toxic to the outsider. I offer my passport as guarantee and she thumbs through it slowly and carefully.

  “Well,” she says at last, “it’s so goddamn crazy I jus’ might. I jus’ might at that. Look,” she offers, “I’ll get my ol’ man to show you around. Why don’t you set yourself down.”

  She waddles into a back room where television has been making muffled cries. I am so exhausted I could drop down o
n the floor of this hot cube but she is back before collapse with a beanpole husband who resents being dragged from his Saturday program.

  I go through it all again. It is starting to sound lunatic, even to me, and I can see by the way he looks quizzically at me, his head a judgmental fraction to one side, he thinks it’s crazy, too. Loony country. He shakes his head. “What you say the name was again.”

  I tell him.

  “Well,” he says, “there’s but only one ol’ reglar who’s been at this park the last twenty years. Maybe he knows sumpn. What you say the name of the group was?”

  “Rockwarblers.” I drag up a smile. It is hauled from farther down than my boots. It is hauled from a slow hot summer night on the veranda at Drenchings with Bonnie and Marie, brain-addled by reminiscence.

  We trudge through the park. I know he is resenting missing his ball game. He tells me all the vans are new by now, old ones replaced over the years. “But this ol’ chap,” he says, “this one we’ll go see, was here when I came and he was here way back before then.”

  We are moving between rows of fifty-foot boxes, all with their TV antennae, their patches of garden. A few kids are playing up and down the trailer lane ways, biffing a softball. Everywhere there’s the blare of canned music. By now we are headed towards the boundary where there are half a dozen trailers parked under a line of trees.

  “That end one,” he says, pointing. “I’ll jus’ give him a knock.”

  The van door opens up on a seventy-year-old with a crutch under one arm, and behind him a television set is flashing with the ball game the park manager is missing. I go through the calvary of explanation once more and the park manager nods my words along as if this gives credence to what I’m saying. I don’t care by now. I’m too tired but I hear the park manager say “Then I’ll leave you to it” and he’s gone fast and the old man in the doorway of the trailer and I stare at each other.

  “My father,” I say. “Look, I know it sounds crazy, I know he’s not here anymore. I just wanted to see where he lived. Where I came from. Where I came into it.”