Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  When the call came to board, the young woman walked ahead of me and took a seat in front of mine in a silence more lavender than her cable-stitch. She was to be spared nothing for immediately an overfleshed poncho wearer, breathy and wheezing, slid into the seat beside her, snuffled wetly and belched. “Oh pardon me,” he begged the air. He sang quietly, as if in cynical self-parody, “Oh pardon me, pardon me.” I could see by the utter stillness of the young woman’s head that, while I cringed from the antisocial noises, she had not even glanced in his direction, so impaled was she on her central point of love and departure. Poncho reached up and pressed the call button. “May I have some Kleenex?” he asked the hostess softly and winningly. “I have this very heavy cold.” He proved he had this heavy cold and the hostess drew herself fastidiously backwards and went off to the galley. When she returned she handed him the tissues with a fully extended arm making its criticism plain and I could have laughed at that and even at the revolting sound of nasal clearing that followed were it not for the unmoving wounded posture of the woman at his side. He acted as if the seat next to him were vacant. I guess it was if we accept that physical presence means nothing in the absence of the spirit. Poncho spoke to himself, soothingly. She did not stir. He began humming, humming and talking alternately, ignoring the meals placed before him, the withdrawn body at his side.

  After we touched down at Los Angeles he swung away into space at the terminal with the frightening lightness, the weightlessness, of fat men that has its own menace while Blue Skirt, cumbered by her very lack of weight, lugged her bag with an effort over to the schedule screen and began peering astigmatically. I longed to speak, to comfort, to say anything at all.

  What could I say?

  Relationships! Yeah!

  Here’s another on my way to the center.

  Ten years have passed since I last saw Mr. Bonsey, schoolyard spunk who propositioned me between play lunch at eleven and the midday recess. Even before I had moved on he had applied for an up-country teaching post, to be dutifully but unwillingly close to aged parents. As far as I know he is still there. I will smoke him out without warning in his small school near Hornet Bank, my visit a kind of social appetizer before the main course of my travel takes over. After all, this is my area, the outer periphery of Drenchings and Jericho Flats.

  I time my arrival to coincide with the last bell of the afternoon, dawdling along unsurfaced back roads until I arrive at the township of Taroom where I drink a fly-spotted cup of tea in an ancient milkbar and munch time. I have checked into the town’s better hotel and feel a certain confidence mingle with my curiosity as I drive, bristling with directions, out beyond the school to inspect what time has done to Mr. Bonsey.

  Never go back, people say. Never.

  Where is the handsome roué who glided around the schoolyard above Moreton Bay confident of conquest? Poor Mr. Bonsey has suffered a stroke of some magnitude and one eye, the glad eye, is half closed. This makes him look sinister, untrustworthy—unfairly, I suppose, for one always knew exactly where one stood with Mr. Bonsey. His left hand is hooked into a useless arc from temporary paralysis though he assures me physiotherapy has made it functional once more.

  He is almost unrecognizable.

  In the family home, a puzzle box of overfurnished rooms, he sags on a divan clutching a scotch. I clutch another. Where are the aged parents, I wonder. Bitterly he tells me they have gone to retirement homes.

  “Separate retirement homes,” he explains sourly. “After fifty years of marriage they split up in the end, can you believe it? Can’t bear the sight or sound of each other.”

  I want to laugh and stifle it. “Fifty years,” Mr. Bonsey says angrily. “She must have laundered eight thousand shirts in that time and that’s just for starters and then the old bastard sneaks off to a friendly doctor who hides him away fast in a nursing home where she can’t get at him. His words. So what can the old girl do except find another? I couldn’t cope, what with this stroke and all. God!” he says savagely. “What a life! That’s marriage for you.”

  He limps over to the fridge to get more ice. The house is untidy, dark, comfortless. It’s nightmare country. Through an open side door I can see his dying garden, shrubs keeling over from lack of water. A truck hurtles past on the main road and the dust seeps over the plants and into the sitting room.

  “I was married,” I confess. “I understand how they must have felt.”

  He’s not interested in me. He doesn’t seem to have heard.

  “I finally gave in,” he said. “Married, I mean. Pretty girl. Pretty as paint. I thought when I saw her I’ve got to get into bed with that but she went for the formal bit. That should have warned me. So there I was tied up, ready to give her everything and two years after I brought her home here I had this damn stroke and when I got out of hospital she’d gone. Deserting me in my hour of need, the bitch. What do you think of that, eh?”

  I don’t think anything much. I’m beginning to understand expediency. Somehow, looking around the house, looking at Mr. Bonsey, a vanished charmer, and thinking of his aged gum-munching parents, I sympathize with her. I doubt if I would have lasted a week. But he is working away at his wound, determined to inflame it. “Would you desert someone when they needed you?” he persisted. His one good eye gives a hopeful flash of the old boulevardier.

  “Needed me for what?” I temporize.

  “Of course you wouldn’t. My God, am I going to shaft that bitch! She’s after half of everything. More than half. House, car, the lot. I’ll give her half! God, she wouldn’t even sleep with me for the last year, I ask you.”

  Don’t ask me, I think. There is a new coarseness about Mr. Bonsey that I could not recall his displaying in the old days. He tells an off-color joke. He fails to register my po-faced reaction.

  “Couldn’t sit out the stroke. Too much to ask. I’ve had to do everything for myself. Every goddamn thing.” Gloomily he tops up his drink and forgets about mine. “Anyway, she was being laid by the town clerk, for God’s sake. The bitch. Just because I had a temporary setback. God, I had an erection this morning.” He mentions it wistfully as if it’s an old friend he hasn’t seen for a very long time. “Don’t know why. Must have known you were coming.”

  This is terrible.

  “It just means you’re getting better,” I say.

  He staggers back to his couch and collapses against a stack of cushions. “Forgive me,” he says, “for lying down like this. A day in class and I’ve had it.”

  The truck returns and more dust drifts onto the floor, the furniture, his words. One could be buried alive. I want to leave. I can’t bear him or the room.

  “Don’t you think,” I suggest, groping for openings, “it would be better if you moved, applied for a transfer, something. This house is too big for you. You must get worried about intruders.”

  I bend down to retrieve my glass from the floor where I have placed it and on looking up find I am gazing straight into the barrel of a shotgun he has whipped out from under the divan covers. It is pointed directly at my face from six feet and, behind his trigger finger, there’s a wild smile.

  “I’m safe enough,” he says. “There are guns all over.”

  He’s mad, I decide. Crazy.

  There’s been no laughing discussion of the old days at the bay. No interest in me. Not one question about my lifestyle or work. No guffaws over Mrs. Burgoyne. He is so absorbed in self, he is his own center, the ultimate Euclidean point nurturing nothing but his own lopped pride.

  Although he had laid down the gun my bladder distresses me.

  I ask for the bathroom and there find a rifle leaning matily beside the toilet bowl. I wet myself. I glance into a bedroom as I pass and there’s another gun lying on the bed.

  “I have to go now,” I tell Mr. Bonsey when I return to the living room. “Have to hit the road.”

  “The bitch,” he says. “See that greenhouse out the back? See that? Prize orchids. Can’t be bothered now.” He
points to a couple of tacky felt ribbons dangling above the mantelpiece. “Won prizes for them. Look, I had everything going for me. God, I’ll shaft her.”

  Enough.

  I pick up my tote bag. I walk firmly to the door.

  “It’s getting late,” I lie. “I have to be in Drenchings tonight.”

  He doesn’t hear.

  “We’re the ones. We should have got together,” he suggests hopefully as I reach the top of the steps. He hasn’t used my name once, I notice. Maybe he has forgotten it. He is limping after me, still holding his scotch.

  “Goodbye,” I say, offering my hand, programmed for politeness.

  He ignores it.

  Irrelevantly he begins another blue story as if we are guests at a party.

  “Take care,” I suggest, halfway down the steps, and I hear him say, “Write to me, will you?”

  Before I have even engaged the motor he has gone inside again to the dying furniture, the unswept floor, the pileup of food dishes and the guns.

  I drive beyond the fences of his tomb, go back to the hotel, cancel my room and drive into my own obsession.

  Already.

  I am driving into cardboard.

  Let me tell you how.

  I can hardly believe I have achieved this.

  It’s a blow-up of Gaden Lockyer complete with wife and children outside his slab farmhouse in the Upper Burdekin. The blow-up is twelve feet by eight and everyone is life-size. It’s hard to reconcile this with its archival print original six inches by four.

  “I want to fit that woman,” I had explained badly to the man in the camera shop. Maybe I am no better than Mr. Bonsey.

  “You what?”

  I don’t blame him. Lately I have become awkward with words as explanatory devices. I could hardly summarize my intentions publicly. But the shop, he assured me, would make posters any size: Red Square size, friends of the people size, any size within reason. The cost would be even bigger.

  “It’s for a feature wall,” I lied. No. That wasn’t a lie. There was nowhere else to put it. It took up, smothered, the entire end wall of my bed-sitter. My obsession was assuming a new slant. I ordered two of them and the man in the shop had looked slantwise into my calm demented eyes, pursed his lips and looked down.

  The posters are ready two or three months before I begin my journey backwards. Let me go back at least those few months.

  I lie there on my sleepless bed and watch Mr. Lockyer grimly holding his peeing child and half-smiling half-grimacing across its bawling head at Mrs. Lockyer who stands in a flurry of wood shavings no one has bothered to sweep up yet. Her dark hair is pulled back rather prettily into a loose bun and imaginative wisps drop across her forehead. She’s too tired to smile back and her eyes are weepy (I wish I knew their color) and she wears what seems to be a patterned blouse tucked into the full and tight-waisted skirts of those times. There are three children older than the baby and the house isn’t even finished. I can see sky through a bush-pole annexe erected to one side of the main shack. You poor bitch, I think. Poor poor bitch.

  I get up from the bed and stand in front of her. Allowing for the difference between my floor level and hers, she is exactly my height. The enlarger has seen to that. My hair is pulled back like hers and I think, looking into the mirror I have placed strategically on the opposite wall, that we really are rather alike. Especially with the hat. I forgot to mention the hat, a floppy straw arrangement with two ribbons dangling at her nape. It took me weeks to find that hat and I finally had to steal it from the props department of a theater company which was doing a period piece last summer. I wish I knew if the color was right. I settled for that battered straw yellow.

  I turn, revolving demurely, watching myself from my sideways eyes and smile back at Gaden. (I have begun to use his first name.) His wife is obliterated.

  So while I smile, I remove my housecoat which I too have worn tightly belted, and stand naked for him, naked bar my shoes whose heel height brings me level with Betsy. Does his smile shift slightly?

  Here I am peering intently at our reflected images and the baby’s howling is driving me mad and young Aubrey (I know the name’s right—it took me a week of checking at the central registrar of births) has just kicked dust and woodchips at Liz’s clean white pinafore I starched specially for this photograph. Her young sister is starting to cry. But I smile and keep smiling and reach across and try to take Gaden’s paper hand.

  I have to watch this. I must be careful.

  Only last week I very nearly made holes in the poster’s backing trying to dig my fingers into his arm.

  I am looking for the right clothing, I tell him. Forgive my nakedness (hoping he’ll whisper, It’s my pleasure), standing here in my dewy skin. There’s a dressmaker in Valley Junction who is working on a skirt and blouse for me. She thinks it’s the coming length or that I’m needing fancy dress for the theater company I stole from. I tell her conflicting lies. But when I try on the skirt with a pair of button-up boots I’ve also filched from a heritage museum in South Brisbane, she begins to wonder.

  I am assembling myself.

  I am getting into the right frame.

  Of mind.

  I don’t think the project is affecting my work, though my colleagues, when they bother to speak to me these days, tell me outright that I am becoming distracted, unmindful, and had better sharpen up. Once last month the chief sub bawled me out when I forgot to send up the material he asked for. Actually he more than bawled. He threatened with “One more balls-up like this, miss, and you’re out.” I rather liked him. He’s a small intense man with violet eyes and he wears an eyeshade. They say it’s no affectation but a visual weakness that makes him peculiarly allergic to fluorescent lighting. I believe this. Sometimes when I have allowed Mr. Lockyer to slip from my awareness for an hour or so (yes, it is as intense as this), I could almost wish the chief sub would take my hand. It might help but it’s unlikely that we could ever play sweaty palms. He’s a crusty thirty- and-more years ahead of me and is still happily married to the cadet reporter he met in Sydney four decades ago. They are welded by grandchildren and even if he did take my hand, lingering over a proffered sheaf of clippings, it would be merely to pat it aside. Fatherly.

  So I live with a paper lover. There was a corny song during the second world war the words of which went something like I’m gunna buy a paper doll that I can call my own, a doll that other fellas cannot steal. Bonnie and Marie used to beat it out for dances. I think of this. My emotional itch is absurd. Crass. Some might even say perverted, obscene. But how pleasant to wake in subtropic summer and find his gaze two degrees to my right, a gaze that will settle on me when I press myself into that lost moment of his life northwest of Hornet Bank.

  Despite making no direct inquiries about Seb, acquaintances I run into on the Queen Street Mall tell me he has taken Patch over from Frank Hassler. I could have foreseen this. What I could not have foreseen is that Patch would leave him within months for a handsome lady real estate agent with prospects who was cutting a swathe through the Gold Coast with Japanese clients. An enraged Seb was talking high-pitchedly of dykes, lumping me in with them to the morbid delight of these sexual scroungers who would watch as they told for the giveaway flicker.

  How titillated they would be to know my neurosis is less satisfyingly fleshly and a world more crazed.

  *

  Maybe I have been wrong all along and am a center looking for a circumference. A Pirandellian problem.

  As if the car objects to the vibrations of landscape as I drive closer to Hornet Bank, it judders and runs itself to a halt miles from anywhere. Is it a technical or a psychic pause? I check petrol, water, oil. All correct. Battery? Spark plugs? Fan belt? Transmission? Fuel line? God love me, I don’t know. How do I gauge dust and grit in the arteries of my car? The gravel road on which I am marooned winds off to the west between strangely empty paddocks whose tree borders crowd in on me unmoving. Something insists that I should, at this poi
nt, whether I like it or not, be traveling by horse and sulky. It is as if the countryside rejects the alien character of my mode of transport and, more that that, as if it rejects my color, my language, my personal search. It threatens. The stillness of the scrub, the lack of insect hum, are menacing.

  I will give myself, I say, fifteen minutes and not a second more for a car to pass and if nothing turns up start walking for the nearest farm.

  It does not resemble farming country. Miles of tea-tree scrub and gidgee stretch away to north and south and though the road is used, its surface has a pondering air of infrequency. I wait and wait. I hum right through a Bach prelude. I wait. Grass at the road edge hangs rangily limp through the broken fenceline. The trees could be painted drop-scenes.

  No one comes.

  But I sense the landscape moving in as I sit in the driver’s seat, the prelude finished and smoking what I intend as a nonchalant cigarette, tapping one foot, occasionally trying to start the engine which barks and dies. The landscape shambles in as the afternoon closes downward, pincering me too close to that massacre thirteen decades away. Where were you, Gaden, that jittering morning? Were you slopping oatmeal on your bib thirty miles off?

  Panicked, I am out of the car in a door-banging rush and striding west into paper shadows, mile after mile. This is a pocket where no birds sing. Our country is full of them, spirit circles that reject intruders. Yet after an hour a thinning in the trees near a road-fork that will take me out in the general direction of Drenchings reveals pasture and sorghum sweeps and slow home-wending cows on hillslopes. My spirits rise to meet the ridgecap of a distant galvanized roof.