A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  Sylvia Tucker-Brown leant confidentially towards the coffee-pot and kept her eyes lowered. This was her moment to recoup on marital boredoms and the unenthusiastic mate. She filled her cup and sipped.

  “Yes,” she agreed after a while. “Yes. That was exactly it.”

  3 p.m.

  At three o’clock Father Lake caught the Air Torres bus to the air-port. There was a flaccid farewell after the others realized he was determined—Pray for me, father. And for me. Let’s try to forget the whole thing, shall we? Shall we not! No ill-feelings, I hope? You’re the Christian! You will regret this, father. I insist that you report at once to the archbishop when you reach the mainland. I’ll pray towards that end . . .—at the presbytery steps, a jaunty strut with his embarrassed grip (a change of clerical collar and an absence of breviary), and a volume of operatic records on which the male and female voices of the Italianate performers entwined like limbs.

  The heat was intolerable.

  His pulpy fingers clasped and unclasped themselves nervously as he squatted on the bench seat behind Mister Alfred Norman, the ever so slightly familiar hotel porter-boy. When he looked at his palms he observed that the splotches of pink and white unhealthily plumped over the tendons had a permanence like disease. A priest’s hands are holy hands, he remembered from long ago—B.L.I., he used to call it—Before Loss of Innocence. And he said, “Alfred, I’ll send you some stamps.”

  “Thank you, father. No trouble?”

  “No trouble.”

  They were bouncing wildly between the coconut plantations and banana groves of the southern road at such a speed that the trees merged into solid hue while dust spouted up and a fly, trapped in the bus with them, cavorted stickily around Lake’s face until he thought he would lose his reason.

  He was puzzled he could feel no regret. All manner of pictures filled this screen of revision that dazzlingly presented himself in disguises of twenty years of adulthood: singing “Sure a Little Bit of Heaven” at a seminary Christmas party and later getting shickered on an unaccustomed four glasses of beer and gallons of goodwill; watching his father die and helping him urinate as he held the limp sad organ thinking, “I came from there and this is the thing I can do for him at the last”, and trying hard not to cry; driving by himself and alone on how many hundreds of miles of back-country roads in the great straggling state where he had worked for years, and wanting anyone beside him because when he talked to himself the God in his heart did not answer; teaching that young boy to play chess and at the fool’s mate, so doubled up with amusement, grabbing his hand in . . . in . . .; and after that the slow, tedious process of finding other hands that would not pull back or might be touched into warmth as the face smiled some kind of union.

  But it was less than ten minutes before they pulled up outside the Customs building, a stinking timber cube with fly-screen windows and a crowd tailing out through one door. There was no plane on the strip between the plantations and, even before the intercom began to bellow the news, he could tell it wasn’t coming.

  “You wait,” said Mister Alfred Norman, politely anticipating, “and I will ask about.”

  He vanished into the building, snaking by the passengers in his tight blue jeans.

  Lake smiled unhappily at three of his parishioners and wandered away to the Glare Bar, a jazzed-up box fifty yards away that sold liquor and canned fruit juice and deadly cups of tea.

  It wasn’t any cooler there although three fans were beating the air about into a stew of beer smells and stale food and sweat across the glass-topped counter that sheltered the tea-cakes. He slouched with his elbows dug into the stains of someone else’s festivity and listened to the speaker howling out the words of the hit tune that had been bashing the island to death. He even began to hum with it and paused in mid-phrase only to say, “A gin squash, Lily.”

  And Lily turned her chocolate and white eyes up in the despair gesture and said, “No plane, father.”

  All those lonely people,

  Where do they all come from?

  “No,” he said. “No plane.”

  “It’s a shame.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. We all have to wait, you know.”

  All those lonely people,

  Where do they all belong?

  “Me especially,” she said, and giggled as she mopped along the bar. “I get pretty bored stuck here. I’d love very much to catch that plane.”

  “If it comes.”

  “Yes. That of course. But here,” she added, opening her hands in the palms-out gesture of resignation, “in this place we are all waiting for something. Who knows for what?”

  Lake had to laugh at that and he gazed over the rim of his drink, which had already given him a bitter moustache, and saw three stools away Bobby Woodsall, the Government stores pay clerk, bent over a double scotch that he appeared to be plumbing with false interest. Woodsall’s timid eyes met his for a second and slipped away. He knows, Lake decided. He knows the lot. Omnia scit, he said softly in his doggy Latin. He pronounced it shit. God bless him. Edging off his stool, he stepped along the bar and forced his embarrassing presence upon the other, leaning too close and smiling into the other man’s dim eyes. I shall consciously practise humility, he told himself, in the best Jesuit tradition. Just the mildest flagellation of the spirit.

  And before the other could raise the social barriers he always tried to place about himself, said gently, “I’m off, you know. They can’t bear me here any more. I imagine it’s about time.”

  Mr Woodsall regarded him absently through pebble lenses that gave off frightening refractions of light. For a minute shortsightedness prevented him from knowing who it really was.

  “I say, old boy,” he protested when his eyes had focused, “that’s nonsense. We were all awfully fond of you.”

  Lake smiled at his own discomfort.

  “That’s not true, you know. I’ve—I’ve let go everything. Lost would be a better word.”

  “Nonsense, Frank.”

  “Ah! I’m not Frank.”

  “Not?” Woodsall peered between lids that almost closed with the strain and after an abortive second or two removed his glasses and rubbed at them with a handkerchief.

  “Lake,” said the priest.

  “Oh, Gawd! How idiotic of me! Of course! Lake!”

  “You’ve heard, I suppose?”

  “Heard?”

  “Yes. The endless and varied reasons for my departure.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow. What are you drinking?”

  “Gin.”

  “Then allow me.”

  “No. You’re right. We certainly won’t talk about it. Buy me another drink. You’re saddled with me until the plane comes. And then you can forget all about me. I’m a hot, sweating, dog-collared failure and I’m going out of here at four hundred miles an hour.”

  “If you’re lucky,” Woodsall said. He began humming. The canned music headed for a repeat and they both looked away towards the palms that stood like bars all round the tarmac. “I’ve come out to pick up the new surveyor from the mainland. But I don’t mind really if the plane doesn’t come. I can fill in a lot of time like this.”

  “I’ve been filling in time all my life,” Lake said. “Other people’s time.”

  He upturned a can of fruit juice that Lily had brought him, holding it over his gin so that it trickled sadly; remembered his seminary days and the young full-back type clerics larking in the change rooms, up-ending basins and flicking with towels. Good clean fun—propria laetitia sana. Yuck! All the Gregorian chanting, open mouths and minds washed clean, so clean they had almost ceased to think, bent over yards of porridge bowls or wasting salads or beef stews that ran thinly through the mind as well as the stomach. Almost drowning in the chapel after a flogging football game on the mountain slopes, drowning in incensed air and the trapped rising breaths that gasped between aspirations. Pray for us now and at the hour of. . . .

  Oh, look at all those lonely people.

&nbs
p; Mr Woodsall began to cough because he couldn’t bear the intimacy of another person’s pain. Selfishness didn’t come into it; it was the training that aggravated his British phlegm and became, in these lax tropic places, an acute pressure that made him wear ties for dinner, change his underwear twice daily, and talk only in clichés.

  Lake thought, you’d have fitted in exactly into the laetitia, by golly. You’d have been a towel-flicking whodunnit-reading full-back acolyte and you might have picked on me a little because I didn’t conform and because I never enjoyed the footie and the cold showers and the knockabout heartiness of the relaxation periods. I would have disliked you, I suppose, and been troubled and tried to be extra kind or humble and only succeeded in looking like a crawler.

  Mister Alfred Norman put his shiny face around the door of the bar.

  “No plane at all, father.” (Sometimes he would say “boss” in parody of black man talk, and sometimes cynically he let loose a spate of pidgin and pretended insolently he couldn’t do otherwise.) “There’s a cyclone Fiji way, radio says. Moving up here. It’s stopped the planes taking off.”

  “Cyclone?” Woodsall repeated.

  “Yessir, Mr Woodsall. They got all warnings out.”

  Oh my God, thought Lake. What can I do now? I can’t go back to the house where I shall be treated with superhuman attention and a resilient tact that will have us all on edge. Nor can I sit here in the Glare Bar filling my belly with acid. The idea of public scandal ballooned. He could go back into the Port where at a waterfront bar he would be able to disgust himself as well as others in a final frenzy of humiliation that might scarify for ever the pain of his behaviour.

  At the thought of this calvary he wanted to weep, but said instead with all the brash urbanity he could drag up from his inner self, “I’m going back, Alfred. Don’t go without me. They’ll wonder what is happening at the school.”

  Mister Norman winked gaily at Mr Woodsall who frowned almost as if he had observed this commentary through his myopic eyes. He did not approve of familiarity from coloured people and, although he always tried to avoid using that very word and even mentally balked as it crossed his mind at moments such as this, his rigidly preserved use of “islander” melted away.

  “What will you do now?” he asked the priest, who only shrugged.

  Outside the bar the heat seemed to be curling along the grass ruts like a vicious steam. Disconsolate, palms dripped fronds of green sweat. The crowd was moving away from the passenger shed into cars while they died within from the sun, for the heat seemed encased in a thin skin that expanded until it would split with the humidity and the oppressiveness of the weighted air. Feet dragged across the roadway. Skirts were held away from thighs. In the privacy of the convent car a small group of nuns removed their sandals. (Back at the bishop’s residence Deladier was allowing himself a double lemonade with ice.)

  But Lake, seated at the mirrored bar of the Lantana fifteen minutes later, plunged into a bottle of Scotch assisted by Mister Alfred Norman, who found it suddenly to be his lunch hour and felt he was extending charity in need.

  “What story you told one time, father, about a man going out into the streets?” he asked after the third glass had released some clamps upon his tongue. “A man, him go out into the streets, I think this says it, and he ask lotsa fellers he don’t know to sit along with him longtime dinner.” He began to giggle because he could really talk very good mission school English and he was frightened of the fun he was starting to make. He wondered how long the barman was going to let him sit there even blessed by the God-man’s presence.

  “That was how it went,” Lake replied. “Just like that.” He poured into the other’s glass what he privately regarded as a libation to his own lost gods, lost friends, and the places he could not return to without the welcome in the eyes turning quiet.

  “That’s what I’m doing now,” he said, wanting to hurt the brown face he suspected might be laughing at him. Its eye was very brazen. “I have gone into the highways and the byways and the Glare Bar and I have gathered up a stranger.”

  Mr Fricotte, his old and anxious parishioner who had poured into the consecrated ear many sad trifles that had accumulated upon his conscience, concerned that some intangible thing was being violated, watched from the kitchen doorway, his face fragmented by propriety and a respect that had been the habit of years. He wanted to say quietly, “Do not disgrace yourself, please. Or me, though I do not matter. Or the Being I believe in that you conjure up in a wafer day after day, distributed into soft or tired or bitter mouths, some brown, some grey. All anxious.”

  He rattled warning bottles, glancing sideways, but Lake ignored him and used one of his sanctified hands to pull matily at the shoulder of the taxi-man who was soon to be chucked aside. Through the window of the dining-room he observed a wrinkling of the sea face and the first wind tremblings making an invisible warning. After the fifth scotch he was hardly aware that it was going to be a very long day.

  The Reverend Father Lake, late parish of Vaitape, fiddled about with a piece of grilled fish someone had thoughtfully put before him at least half an hour before. It was intended to absorb his self-administered poison. More than that was working through memory and dragging him by the hair backwards into places he would rather never have seen again having left them, worked-over hills or honeycombed mounds. They were tunnelled with his persistent and various failures. Not ever, not even when he was a schoolboy with a gift for mimicry, had he been a success.

  He had been put into boarding-school too soon.

  He was ten and thin and recovering from a respiratory complaint whose recurrence weakened his natural cheerfulness. His aunt, who had brought him up since he was three, made private and busy consultations. “A drier area,” they had all said. He was packed away with all his underwear taped Vincent Joseph Lake, a new bat, a pencil set, and a lot of confused advice about blowing his nose and speaking up if he felt ill and resting as much as possible and playing good healthy sport.

  The bigger boys, the small bullying knot who controlled the play-yard, were waiting for him on the first morning.

  He had stood shivering on the asphalt quad wanting badly to wet himself as they swaggered up and closed in.

  “What’s your name? How old are you? What’s your father do? Can you fight?” The questions blurred and coalesced into one enormous threat as his skinny legs trembled. He began to sneeze in his nervousness, his head bouncing. This pricked them. Jeers and cat-calls and forced loud laughter bombarded him and the less successful smaller boys, anxious to capitalize, moved in as well.

  They gave him hell for a fortnight—dropped ink on his books and clothes; tripped him up in corridors; made farting sounds right behind him and then complained to the master. At night he’d find his bed tumbled or the pillow sodden. They filled his football boots with glue. Then after a while they began to forget about him and one of the senior boys, who had observed with some pain but refrained from interfering, got him to do small jobs and patted him kindly on his skinny shoulders and made him grin. He hero-worshipped this boy until one steaming night on the pretence of helping him with his prep the bigger fellow attempted seduction, and young Lake, ignorant and afraid of hurting the other boy’s feelings and completely unsure of what he should do, complied in his own clumsy way.

  They were united furtively and occasionally for a year until matriculation removed the one and liberated the other.

  Others had suspected, but he had slid into a position of moderate acceptance in the junior school, came in the middle of his class, was mediocre at games, and sang in the choir. He had never experimented again but formed rather weak friendships with other unsuccessful boys and trudged on through senior school and went prizeless out of the closing gates into a clerical job in a law office. He took out two girls but never plucked up the courage to kiss either of them, and one Christmas, after running into one of his old teachers and talking with him seriously over a lunch-time beer, he entered a seminar
y in despair as much as in hope, and for a time his problems were settled for him.

  He never had to think.

  “I think that was what pleased me most,” he admitted drunkenly to himself now, tracing interlocking wet rings on the bar before him. “I never had to think, to worry, to examine. I accepted the lot.”

  “Garbage,” he added out loud. “Utter garbage.”

  His loneliness had only sharpened in his thirties and he had begun clubs for the young men in the parishes in which he worked. It was only a step from there. Only a step.

  Yet fighting it back all the time, all the time, all the bloody time he said now, that he could remember, became such anguish he decided he would have to go away. No island outpost could really need such a failure, he knew, but he concealed his uselessness under the bright boy smile that disarmed authority. Everyone said what an amiable bloke and watched alarmed when he drank too much at the church socials and made remarks that smacked of the unorthodox if not the actually heretical. Otherwise . . . he was certainly fun.

  “I was always fun,” Lake said, looking up and trying to catch Fricotte’s eye. “I was fun fun fun and not one bloody person really liked me.”

  Fricotte was battening down shutters. Some of them sprang loose at once.

  He watched a hideous painted lady some tables away dab more colour on her mouth. It was an unspeakable wound. Her face held under its wrinkled surface the outlines of something he already knew but had forgotten. Gulping the last of his whisky he wondered for a minute or two where or how, and inexplicably he was in an inland town cluttered with pubs and pepper-trees where locusts drilled the summer wide open. The metal of cars grilled. Bare flesh, it was sensed, would spit if placed directly upon roadways. He was cycling out of town along the southern road and his black choking clothes were devouring him from the outside. He was on a sick call and he carried his God in a black valise on the carrier. Not even this protected him, however, and at the swimming hole two miles from town he left his bicycle under the trees and pushed through the tree growth to the sandy beach above the water where truant boys ducked and dived. Their nakedness terrified him but gripped him there in his clerical disguise, a timid satyr beneath the freckled leaves. He was recognized and hailed and invited to join them but could only shake his head and grin and tremble until finally one of the smaller ones waded out and stood beautiful and dripping before him.