A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  He rolled away from the institutional blanket that had made them one and crawled mentally and physically into wakefulness.

  They were handing round makeshift breakfast, a lot of thin white sugared and milked slops and coffee. The mouths beaked like birds, Lake observed, huddled against a wall. He felt he should move out of obscurity to aid, but his unworthiness held him on threads until he saw across the long room from him a very old man calling soundlessly for help. Stepping between the palliasses Lake steered his charity to some purpose, for the old fellow, he saw as he bent over, was only the frame of a man across which the black skin acted merely to protect the sensitivity of the bone. His grey hair tufted like wild grass. Across his dry lips lay the scum of approaching death.

  Lake raised the water glass to his mouth and moistened it. To do this he had to take the old man’s head like a delicate shell under one cupped hand that was surprised by the heat of the lost body. The head nodded a thanks and kept nodding for a few minutes as if impaled and tried to make known another want. A skinny hand was pointing towards the urinal bottle against the wall. Lake banged back his nausea that was like an ill-behaved child and fetched the greasy looking plastic vessel. Now the old man was struggling to lift the blanket back from his belly and Lake peeled this back, too, back from the bones seen as X-ray under the withered skin. The old man was quite helpless and could only gargle and point. Lake lifted the limp genital very gently and held it over the bottle. He could sense the man’s struggle to relieve himself and heard him hiss with pain as the trickle began and hesitated and stopped altogether. In this emaciated body there was no waste at all now, the total being ready for resumption. Divine resumption, Lake thought bitterly, and as he pulled the blanket back over the dying man he was struck forcibly by the antithesis between the violence of sexual communication and this other intimacy required by love. Blank-minded at this, he gave the man another sip of water and was surprised by voices from the door.

  Mrs Seabrook was offering herself up.

  Her immolation took place in a high-walled room where windows perforated only in a rudimentary way at least four feet above the eyes that might have lusted after sky. She felt too enclosed, and spiritually as well, but struggled to explain, offer, and finally to aid. She was to change water-jugs and remove breakfast bowls. She could, if she wished superlative sacrifice, have emptied pans, but they thought it would be better if she went to the kitchen along the corridor and helped wash up.

  Lake printed a tiny cross with his thumb on the dark dying man. It did not burn white. Then he followed Mrs Seabrook to the kitchen and watched her for a moment as she was absorbed by two others. These left and Lake said, “I saw you last night, I think.”

  She did not know whether priests cared for reminders of their dissipation and, hesitating for mollifying words, paused too long.

  “Although I was blind myself. Blind drunk.”

  “Were you?”

  “Yes. Quite. But not so drunk I couldn’t see you were in trouble. Is that impertinent?”

  She felt a spasm of annoyance. “That’s your job.”

  “Yes. Under the guise of Christian charity we are really maliciously inquisitive. I have never been the sort of religious sticky-beak I should have, you know. Like last night. I was not sufficiently interested in that old woman Mr Stevenson brought in. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  Yes. Yes. He picked up a towel and began to help her. Sisters rattled in, unheaped another load of plates and went away.

  “She died. Early this morning. About three, I think. I wouldn’t help her when she came.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s too long to explain. I just wouldn’t. I wasn’t fit by my own standards and now she’s gone.”

  “She really has gone,” Mrs Seabrook said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The whole hotel has gone. I walked by there this morning and there’s only the bar-rail left.”

  “What about Fricotte?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The manager, barman. He owned it.”

  “I don’t know. I’m only telling you what I saw. Or didn’t see.”

  “There’s nothing we can do, is there?” Lake asked.

  “No. Were there any others at the hotel?”

  “No guests. A couple of staff. But they lived in the town and went home each night. We’re not very touristy, you know. The Lantana was only here for the convenience of the port. You’re the first visitors, in the tourist sense I mean, we’ve had for months.”

  Probably the last, too, as everything else seems to be collapsing or to have collapsed. I should have been gone by now, Lake protested in his heart, and this last ritual of tending others would have been unnecessary. He began to cough as if he might vomit, bending well over the table and making violent hawking sounds that forced the woman away from him. The old lady had been washed away to sea and the last tangibility of guilt was taken by tide. Yet this did make him sick, did make him wish to throw up his soul. After some moments he got his control and breath.

  “What is your trouble?” he asked.

  At this point she could not have refused a man so overcome, with his eyes watering and his lungs refilling and emptying in gasps.

  “My husband, of course. But nothing, I imagine, that isn’t wrong with most marriages.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “I did.”

  “But now?”

  “Oh, I don’t really know. There’s all the force of years together and habit and debts we’ve collected as a pair. You know how it is.”

  “No,” Lake replied gravely. “I have never had that privilege. Non solus cum sola.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, the celibacy jazz. I wouldn’t really know the simplest thing about the human relationships on which I have to be so doctrinaire.”

  “That’s funny really,” Mrs Seabrook said. “It almost seems crazy.”

  “It is. Between you and me,” Lake said, “I’m getting out. Back and out. Last night was a farewell.”

  “What will you do? Then, I mean.”

  “Any old thing. To stop me thinking or regretting or having a conscience. We have the most professional consciences in this business. They never let you go.”

  “I don’t suppose I’ll leave my husband,” Mrs Seabrook said wistfully, “even though I must. It’s very hard.”

  She finished the last pile of dishes and stirred waves into the sink with a small dish-mop. Two nuns brought more soiled crockery and then more. Let us know, they said, when you want a rest. But she was aware they were tireless and she must be too.

  They worked like this through the morning, Lake sometimes taking his turn with dishes or cloth, and at eleven the thought of her husband jabbed. She could watch the check border of the rag in her hand and the dampness spread all through, see cups in piles, and plates, and hear the voices in the corridor or the makeshift ward, and groans from some; and yesterday’s fun-trip had assumed the meaning she had come all this way to prove. All this way and all those years from the first confetti through the confetti (more scattered) of bills and cheque butts and purchase instalments on cars and washing machines, television, garbage disposal, to come to the parting that had begun all those years away with their linked signatures in a school chapel. Gerald’s old school tie had begun to strangle both of them with his bogus and bourgeois subscriptions and demands.

  “Where will you look for him?” Lake asked. He was not curious, only polite.

  Mrs Seabrook explained.

  “There will be makeshift accommodation for everyone who needs it, I suppose,” Lake said. “If there’s any hall large enough standing. You’ll find they’ll all rally! My, they love drama. I imagine even Tucker-Brown will succour half the town!” He smiled awkwardly.

  “Who is Tucker-Brown?”

  “Him big feller white boss. Him resident.” Lake threw down his own dish-rag suddenly and burst into tears, his face splitting into qu
ite frightful patches of pain.

  “Please go,” he said.

  XIV

  9 a.m., 12th December

  BISHOP Deladier was determined there should be some sort of thanksgiving Mass the second morning and this was easy enough to organize, for half the refugees from the island villages and many of the townsfolk had been bedded down in the mission chapel. He was sleeping himself in the sacristy with Mulgrave, who had returned the day before from the hill mission, snoring liturgically beside. The bishop had tried to drag a font between but its callous concrete resisted. Now he stared out of grit-eyes, heavy-lidded because sleep had not touched them, and heaved his thin shanks out of the blanket in which he had rolled. The episcopal legs were definitely fallible this morning yet took him nevertheless through vesting and meanwhile prayer, his eyes heaven-absorbed, though they still found time to observe Mulgrave moaning up from sloth.

  Deladier peered into the church.

  Parishioners, mostly black, were sprawled beneath the stations of the cross and he could even see a pair of white legs sticking out from the confessional. Some prostrate penitent, he imagined with unexpected quirk of conventional sacerdotalism, ravished by divine forgiveness. Mulgrave would never have tolerated such a thought and came after him at that moment rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  “Shall I ring the bell?”

  “If you would, father.”

  Mulgrave went out to the warning bell in the yard and looked down the hill towards the port as he swung the rope. They will have to change the postcards now, he thought. The whole front had been bitten neatly along the sea-wall by the mouths of water and wind, and the harbour road swam with rubbish. The hotel had gone completely, half the bake-house, too, and three Chinese stores that sold kitchenware and seed necklaces and cheap fabric.

  The cultural centre had lost its roof.

  Bong, went the bell. Bong. Bong. Bong.

  In shock he observed Father Lake striding across the grass from Prison Hell steering a woman between the slain trees. Some vestige of turbulence in the air still fought the flapping legs of his old-fashioned greys into which he had changed since the trouble. Father Greely, black and ominous, moved sombrely behind and two other people who looked like tourists. He wasn’t sure until they reached the fence-line that it was Miss Latimer from the trading company with a balding gentleman of great gallantry. He seemed to help over obstacles that were not there.

  Bong, went Mulgrave savagely. Bong.

  In the church, people stirred and sat up and small children ran outside to pee quickly behind bushes while the warning tolled.

  Deladier, black-chasubled, came onto the steps before the altar and raised his spiritual hand for attention.

  “Dearly beloved in Christ,” he began, “we have come through a terrible crisis. A dreadful warning has overtaken our little town but by the grace of God nearly all have been spared. We mourn today, the souls of Katherine Eva Trumper, Dominique Fricotte, Paul Leonard Brinkman and Francis Nguna, all of whom perished in this dreadful hurricane. May the Lord have mercy on their souls and the souls of the faithful departed.” He paused for the congregation’s amen and looked across the church at Lake who was curved against the font. He went on thinly, “We have all lost something, I venture to say, homes, furniture. A great deal of damage has been done. But could we not regard this sparing and rasing as a warning of God’s goodness and power, of his authority to deal out punishment and to withhold it? Let us offer thanks that we have been spared so much.”

  At the back of the church there was a fearsome clatter as the Tucker-Browns entered and banged into each other from their unsureness of ritual. Miss Latimer took charge for a moment and steered them into seats, but Lake stood aside by the confessional and propped his forty-odd years against the wall and yawned.

  “. . . this prison and church have been the only places spared apart from some of the houses along the lee of the hill. So, for a while at least, we must offer it, being God’s house, for the use of everyone. I know you will treat it and everything in it with respect.” Deladier laced his fingers together over something he did not understand for a minute but felt to yield to a political gesture he should make. “As this is the only building large enough to be used as a meeting hall it will so serve for the next few days until things are organized and the repair gangs can start work on the hundreds of things that must be done. In the meanwhile, my dear people,” he paused to draw a spiritual breath, “in the meanwhile I wish to offer a Mass in thanksgiving for what might have been the narrowest escape any of us has ever had. After that, I ask you to remain seated while Mr Woodsall reads out a list of emergency duties which we all must share.”

  Deladier wiped his fingers across his forehead which already perspired freely. For some unknown reason he was feeling faint and beckoned Mulgrave, who was serving, to open one of the end windows. The row of nuns down the front moved and swayed. They sensed something in their spiritual father. One went for a glass of water and then . . . intoibo ad altare dei, I will go unto the altar of God, intoned the Bishop; and the rhythm of the Mass began.

  “Best theatre in the world,” Lake whispered irreverently to Mrs Tucker-Brown who was listening puzzled to the antiphon and response of the congregation. “But the programme never changes.”

  He got up and went outside. It hurt him to be there. Something bit away at him like a piece of wire and he could not translate the pain into tangible terms. The church had come aloud and alive like a hive and with its throbbing he went down hill towards the harbour-front, kicking at the rubbish and the remnants of homes amongst which some of the natives were searching. “’Morning,” they all said. “’Morning.” The old ginger Yank stuff seemed to have been emptied out of him by the wind-purge of the night before. His sins had even faded like a negative exposed to sun, and he remembered the prison room and the ulcerated patient with the too warm and searching hands who had joined his guilt to his and he felt nothing at all, no responsibility of any kind, no moral urgency. That was it, the end, the finish.

  Down along the front as he paddled with his shoes dangling from his hand he came across a funny redheaded man with strange eyes who was turning over some deposit for riches of an undisclosed nature.

  He talked softly and quickly to Lake with his face turned sideways from his smile, yet when he met his glance full on and the eyes blazed back, he saw that the irises were surrounded by a strange white ring that held the lechery in check.

  “What a night!” said ginger pop. “What a blinking night, eh?”

  “Two nights,” Lake corrected. “We are two nights ahead now.”

  “The Malekula’s gone. I had a look yesterday. There doesn’t seem to be a stick of it left.”

  “We’re stuck with him,” murmured Lake. He meant Greely.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. I said it looks as if we’re all stuck in this spot for a while.”

  They were conscious of the stench rising from the stale water pools along the road whose gleaming skin had receded a little. Native children kicked the mud up and threw handfuls at each other.

  “I’ve been sleeping on the beach since the storm,” said the other man. “It’s not too bad except for the sandflies.”

  Lake tried to be interested and patient, licking his lower lip and biting it gently, clutching and clenching his fingers in his pockets and staring past the old bright small-boy rapist face to the scimitar of green that marked the curve of port. From the battered garage near where they stood came the static of radio and an obscene blast of music.

  “Excuse me,” Lake said. He poked his head in a gap that had held a door and asked what had been on the news.

  The man inside did not trouble his shoulders to turn but snuffled back word of the first plane in.

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  The long oh of decision, the long long tear-stained, in this case, way out. He could see abstracts of plane, wing-segments blue, white, partitioned, abstracted acr
oss sky in a blaze of speed and escape slashing cloud with silver that meant thrust through guilt.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He turned away and saw the from-nowhere beach bum scuffling his way northwards along the eroded line of sea-wall. The wind made small biting movements and clouds lumbered over throwing great blue shadows across the land and sea. Lake turned and took his last look at the port and the rubbish that had climaxed his years there.

  Johnny Terope had skipped Mass and, blissfully in state of mortal sin, was coming down the road with a basket balanced superbly on one lean shoulder. The sun cut sharp pictures into his face. He had not thought of the old lady for a whole day. Had not thought of her blue-goosey shanks or her dry grey hair and the ugly scarf or the wrinkled body or the gasping open mouth. He swung her wrist watch reflectively on a free finger and dismissed her ugly and meaningless body from his mind. There she receded into his shadowy distances as she had tottered frightened from his robber hands two nights before. He would not know that his answer to her pleas—which had first baffled and then gained meaning for him, so that when he realized what it was she was really frightened of he had shaken his curly and explanatory noddle with the words “Oh, no! You very ugly laydee”—he did not know these words had been the final killer.

  The watch threw little sun-spears back. He saw Father Lake and waved. The watch flashed.

  “I see you, Johnny,” Lake said mournfully. They were meeting for the first time since.

  “Him one-feller big storm!” Johnny said.

  “Is your family safe?” Lake asked.

  “Good-oh. Out fishing. At the lagoon.”

  “I’m going,” Lake said. “There’s a plane in today.”

  “Today?”

  The boy’s eyes grew clouded and vague.

  “Long time?” he asked.

  “I’m not coming back,” Lake said.

  “Not ever?”

  “No.”

  The boy slipped the watch into the pocket of his shorts. His basket was packed with jack-daw pickings from all along the front. This he slid to the ground to rest his arm and Lake saw on top of the jumble of things that had been taken by wind and flung up by sea his own blue note-book with the memorable jottings of a failure. Leaning down he flicked it open and found the words “This is the middle of the world, the ripe seedy pulpy middle. . . .”