by Thea Astley
Our eyes lock in challenge. I see his waver.
“Suit yourself,” he says. “You’ve got a long wait.”
He shambles off. Exit, retainer, right. Correction, husband.
The wall to the right of me suddenly gasps with sunlight as he opens the door to the back garden. Somewhere a radio crackles with static and the nine o’clock news. He’ll be back to check, I know, worried about all those cheap bedroom radios, the black-and-white telly portables, worn purses with their five-dollar bills and the savings books hidden beneath old underwear, the loose change, the small plastic boxes of junk beads and rings, the private tins of tea and cocoa and the little hot water jugs (no eating allowed in the rooms), the packets of cheating biscuits, the rare over-read letters and Christmas cards dated three years back now and the only real link with the outside world.
I have broken and entered.
I am an intruder. I have always been an intruder: on mother and aunt and father and husband.
I close my eyes against the implications of this and sit on assimilating those vibrations Mr. Lockyer might have felt. Once he also sat here, his chalky bones aching, catching glimpses of the too blue sea through the front door under the great washings of light, the garden greenery behind the stairwell window. My feet move gently back and forth, back and forth, in the foot pattern he made.
Time passes. I think I might have dozed. The thumping of the radio judders me awake from a distorted dream of Seb and I remember that three months before I left (how everything I encounter holds the spurious sheen of the present rather than the past!) he had taken to the radio with a hatchet. It was the national radio and the house had been shuddering for half an hour with whining pop music. “It sounds,” screamed Seb, his nerves tattered (he had been trying to mend an electric kettle) and timing each word to a murderous thwack, “as if they’re singing through their dicks. A horrible yellow stinking trickle!
“Trickle trickle trickle!” he roared, whacking.
I had waited until he flung radio remnants and hatchet out over the veranda railing.
“Well, that’s positive,” I said. “That’s the most positive thing you’ve done in years. I approve. I wish I’d had the pleasure.”
“I’ve chipped the table,” Seb said apologetically. “Well, actually, I’ve smashed it.”
“But only on one side. And it was only a small table.”
Like
that
table
at
Villa Marina, 1973
or this table
beside my vinyl chair
in a strange boardinghouse at Tin River.
The parallels meeting, however far they are produced.
I look at my watch. It is past lunchtime. There is a small cough above me, a jerker meant to intrude and I see the old man standing righteously on the bottom step.
“Still here, eh,” he comments. “What name did you say?”
I inspect his tired face which is deeply lined and leeched of color like a dried-out fruit. The mouth, however, quivers with an amusement that his eyes reflect.
“My name?”
“Any name. Yours will do.” He grins for me and I like that.
“Of course. I’m sorry.” I struggle to remember my married name and find it escapes me. My maiden name is gone. “Hunter?” I suggest.
“Hunter,” he repeats after me. He utters the syllables again as if he is biting a coin to test it. I’m sprung! By now he would have been downtown and uncovered my car and motel identity. We stare at each other like failed guests at a party and in concurrence with my breakdown—I am sure it is a breakdown—I faintly hear Bonnie drumming away somewhere in the core of the building, tapping along to Aunt Marie’s jazzed-up version of “The Rustle of Spring,” played with swung quavers. And there’s a trumpet as well.
“Listen!” I say to him. “Listen! Can you hear that?”
He lifts his head, cocks it sideways.
“What?”
“That music. Someone’s playing somewhere.”
“Can’t hear a thing,” he says, “except that damn radio. Mind, the hearing isn’t what it used to be. You could be imagining things.”
He is sure I am imagining things. He’s dealing with an idiot, harmless, but someone to watch.
“No. It’s not the radio. Listen.”
Should I tell him I have a torn and life-sized depiction of a former resident of this place folded in my car trunk, crushed by the weight of that same resident’s ancient chip heater? (Mr. Lockyer regrets he’s unable to lunch today.)
My demeanor shuts the poor old devil up for by now I am throbbing with sound that doesn’t reach him.
“I will be booking in here,” I tell him. “Almost indefinitely. I have decided.”
“You’ll have to wait till the wife gets back,” he says. “Be a while yet.”
“Fine,” I say. “That’s just fine.”
“Well, if that’s all right then,” he says suspiciously. “You want a cuppa or something?” I shake my head resolutely and I watch him lumber arthritically up the stairs, taking them ever so slowly, pausing on the landing to inspect me once more before trudging upwards.
I want to follow him.
I want to snoop in and out of every room on that upper floor. No. Not every room. Gaden’s room. The last room along the front that opens onto the upstairs balcony.
I am holding his last journal.
Christmas, 1922, I read again. And again. He is using a fountain pen, clumsy ink droplets fading into a moving spatter. Lost in my own port. (I like that. Gaden, you were a poet as well as an embezzler. Embezzlement requires a flair for imagery, I excuse him.) Everything about this place—the other inmates, prisoners, really, the food, the care or lack of it, seem sufficient punishment for any public error I might have made. My room is the most southern upstairs and I can walk from my bed each morning to the veranda and spend the day watching an indifferent sea. (Indifferent? Ah, if only we had met earlier, later, whatever it required in the same time plane.) I must forget the public nightmare and remember the good things. There’s little time to remember, anyway. And who in the public sphere remembers me? It’s all so brief. So brief. Here on this salty veranda watching the sea which has watched this shoreline, unchanging in its spitting comments for millennia.
I’m blessed to discover my smallness.
I continue to sit, half dozing, half waking, as the day crawls slowly through midafternoon, presenting a negative of total innocence to any doubting passer-by. I have missed the sounds of lunch. My eyes are opened again to the yardman/husband scrubbed up for his late-afternoon stroll along Tin River’s main street. He is wearing an open-necked shirt, too young for him, the sporty white trousers of a lawn bowler and sandals through which his broken toenails jut out.
“I’ll be blowed!” he says, staring. “Still waiting! You must be stiff as a board.”
I believe the state is known as catatonic. Am I? My caution is numb as well.
“I told you,” I state emphatically, “I’m waiting for Mr. Lockyer.” Madness becomes stubborn.
“I told you, lady, there’s no one of that name here.”
“There was. There certainly was. He has been booked in for many years. And in any case I wish for a room myself.”
“No one called that in my time,” he says, “and I’ve been here fifteen years. Think you must have got it wrong, somewhere. Wrong name or wrong address. And I can’t give you any help about a room. The wife handles all of that. We’re just about booked out,” he lies.
Cobalt shadows reach in from the sea and lick along the skirting boards, creeping to the stair risers where the window blazes with western sun. My depletion is now so total I have barely the strength to marvel at my own persistence that keeps suggesting futilely that if I stay, if I can only endure, it might happen. I might break through. The rational side of me views the whole world now as one rocking ocean on which millions of lifebelts flaunt their white circles of security while I flo
under among them unable to touch even the circumference of one of those rings, let alone insert myself into its saving center.
When I dozed through the long afternoon, the ancient dwellers of this house must have revived and strengthened, moving shadowily through upstairs rooms. I hear Gaden Lockyer’s slippered feet shuffle along the corridor immediately above where I sit. I hear drawers pulled out, a cupboard slammed, the sound of taps being turned on and off.
Any moment, I tell myself. Any moment.
I ignore the old man in front of me. I deafen myself to whatever he is saying. I stare into and beyond him for by now he must be thinking of the police and the motel must already be making inquiries about my gate-crashing car.
He retreats a pace from my gummy fixed eye, scratches his head and says, “She’ll be back soon, the missus. Any old tick of the clock.” He’s grunting and mumbling to himself, longing to turf me out but frightened of the dragon wife if he evicts a potential client. There can’t be too many people busting to stay in Tin River.
I don’t see you, old gardener. I don’t see. I refuse to see. The corridor is changing before my eyes, walls moving back, melting, until the former dining and sitting rooms of the once retirement Tin River nursing home appear as they were, a piano angled across one corner of the parlor with a bowl of plastic daisies on top, recovering from its latest struggle with the rustling of spring. Somewhere a supper gong is clanging. How do all these old folk cope with the stairs? The yardman recedes through mists. I dress him in bowyangs and a sundowner hat and he vanishes as the beaten dinner gong explodes in brassy bursts like a stale sunflower through the hot oil fish stink of dinner.
Here they come—I can write about only what I see or think I see—stumblers limpers fragile old women delicate as pressed flowers men hobbling in crumpled trousers with their shirts open on wattle necks, skins blotched with years and sun cancer—all drawn to the sunflower, weary of time and not totting the paces of the sun, counting their own, painfully counting. How does the Blake go? How? Seeking after that sweet golden clime … it is the next line that is all-important … where the traveller’s journey is done. Done. Finished. I recite the stanza aloud for the yardman, passing imperceptibly into a misquotation of Thomas More. Bollocks! I think. These trudgers are beyond worship or turning the adoring eye. They’re counting the calvary of footsteps as their own sunflower drags itself towards Helios.
Ten of them I count, passing me without speaking, reflexed out of their lonely narrow cells all along the upper corridor and down the stairs, trailing after a blue-clad nurse who is jollying them along, while a matron masquerader together with the kitchen maid (May, Allie, whoever, timeless faces shifting from present to past to present, whichever it is as time refuses to move) wait at the ready beside the opened dining room door for us (I include me) to file past.
My head is an attic, a lumber room: packing cases, chipped furniture, the screwed-up tinsel and wrappings from lost feast days, musty letters, books, magazines and journals and everywhere cobwebs. I want to have this attic, this lumber room, whistled through, scoured by a sharp wind off any sea at all from the harbors in the islands, rid of the huggermugger fantasy of poetry or obsession or even that longing for the center, until there is nothing whiter than the gleaming inner walls of my skull.
My mouth keeps shaping excuse-mes to these passing ghosts.
Excuse me excuse me I am shouting in what does not even emerge as a whisper above the mad music-making of mother and aunt, my effort exhausting me so that I seem, but only seem, to sleep again as the last figure limps down the stairway, arrogantly late as befits a man who was once a public figure, and I am congealed in a cold and stiffening numbness and only wake—when is it?—hours weeks years earlier or later to a concerned hand light on my shoulder and a voice close by my ear.
I look up into a baffled smile that expands from world rim to world rim, the ultimate diameter, and find, above mine, eyes that are bewildered and ageless. The face is as familiar as my own but then my own is no longer familiar at all.
I have broken through, beyond the photographic ghost.
I have come to the other side of the picture and the lights in the early dusk outside are not those of a car but buggy lamps and the noises of the outer world are not the slamming of car doors but a snuffle of horses and the scraping measures of their hooves and the sea sound is drowning the notes beaten out by long lost mother father aunt and there is a fussing of hands that seem to be raising and supporting as I explore this puzzled smile.
The smile shapes itself into words and I gather each one like a shell.
“Are you waiting for me?” the lips ask.
July 20th. I have begun my own journal, paralleling, I suppose, the one that brought me to this place.
I have now been staying here in the boardinghouse at Tin River for over three weeks. Very soon my money will run out. I am becoming quite attached to the manager. She decided at once, that early evening three weeks ago, that I was harmless and needed looking after. Perhaps she could become my center. Even her husband/yardman is kind and brings me small posies from the garden. Perhaps they both could become my center. There is no other center here.
I am sitting in the most southern room on the upstairs veranda and it is empty of everything but me. Below in the roadway, my car is parked reflecting the sun. The trunk has been emptied of the chip heater which the old man freighted to mother a fortnight ago. That means it will reach her soon.
I am beginning to find my absorption outside me rather than within. Peripheral. This is hard to explain. Gaden Lockyer is returning to print rather than inhabiting my mind. I do feel I have been ill. I have sent off half a dozen postcards during the last week. On each of them I drew a perfect circle by inverting my breakfast teacup and tracing around the rim. At some distance outside the circle I put the smallest of points. The center lost outside its own perimeter. That is me. I wonder if the card recipients will notice.
I sent one to mother explaining where I was and within days I received a card back saying, “What a good idea, darling. Have a lovely holiday.”
She couldn’t have seen that lonely point, or if she did, failed to interpret.
As well as to mother, I have posted cards to my workplace, my father, Boobs McAvoy, Seb and old Mr. Lockyer at Jericho Flats to whom I also returned all diaries and photographs. Emptied out.
There were explanatory and apologetic notes for grandson Lockyer and Boobs. I don’t think they will understand the symbolism of the circle for they are better equipped to appreciate the significance of the infinite line. But on the cards I sent to my father and Seb, beyond the circle and the lost point, I wrote nothing except my name.
I don’t really expect replies from either of them; but I know they will understand the symbol. Or I think they will.
Text Classics
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The Commandant
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A Kindness Cup
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Reaching Tin River
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The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
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Drylands
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Homesickness
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Sydney Bridge Upside Down
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Bush Studies
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Between Sky & Sea
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&
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A Difficult Young Man
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Introduced by Sonya Hartnett
Outbreak of Love
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When Blackbirds Sing
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Introduced by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
The Australian Ugliness
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The Life and Adventures of
William Buckley
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The Dyehouse
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Introduced by Fiona McFarlane
All the Green Year
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Introduced by Michael McGirr
They Found a Cave
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The Even More Complete
Book of Australian Verse
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The Tournament
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Introduced by Michael Heyward
For the Term of His Natural Life
Marcus Clarke
Introduced by Rohan Wilson
Dancing with Strangers
Inga Clendinnen
Introduced by James Boyce
Diary of a Bad Year
J. M. Coetzee
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Wake in Fright
Kenneth Cook
Introduced by Peter Temple
The Dying Trade
Peter Corris
Introduced by Charles Waterstreet
They’re a Weird Mob
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Introduced by Jacinta Tynan
Aunts Up the Cross
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Introduced by Clive James
The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke
C. J. Dennis
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Careful, He Might Hear You
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Fairyland
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The Explorers
Edited and introduced by
Tim Flannery
