The Slow Natives (16 page)

But Miss Trumper had to sob and moan through the guilt of her satisfaction, rushing crazy as goats across the half-clad road across the lawns past the startled saints and finding her wildly flapping arms in some terrible collision with a small mad nun who was running also across the garden after her lost God.

In the hurtling dark, bleeding with remorse and the batterings of escape, Bernard drove east, aware of guilt. I could have been kinder, he acknowledged, could have flirted or pretended or touched just momentarily, laid one Christian healing palm on her dried-up loneliness. It wouldn't have meant anything at all except the sacrifice of seconds. You selfish bastard, he said. No wonder Iris . . . and swerved in the dim light to avoid what might have been the materialization of his sin. the waving, thumbing figure on the edge of the road.

“Givus a lift, mister,” it asked out of the shadow as he drew up, but Bernard waited until the figure moved closer to the light before he spoke. “Give us a lift?” There was the merest trace of whine. And then he saw it wasn't a man, but a boy not much older than . . . and with an absurdly spotted face.

“Where to?” Bernard asked.

“As far as you're goin'.”

“Oh.” He looked down at the empty hands. “No luggage?”

“Nope. On a walkin' trip.” Chookie grinned nervously. “I been comin' in from Dalby and me bundle got pinched when I was in the station washroom back there.”

“Back in Dalby?”

“No. Condamine.”

Liar, said Bernard to himself, and “Hop in,” he said aloud. “I'm going through to Brisbane.”

“Good-oh,” Chookie agreed slamming the door. He leant back in the corner. “That's where I'm goin', too.”

S
HARP AS TACKS
Leo Varga slid his sports car into the city crushed with trams and cars, himself crushed rather delightfully by two students whom he had picked up in glancing as it were on the way out of the last lesson. Mr Varga was wearing a thigh-gripping shortie coat with a real (but real, kids) astrakhan collar, even in July a wee bit hot and unsuitable for Brisbane. His cravat was spotted foulard and somewhere above or below this barrier there was plenty of after-shave lotion that he dabbled also generously between his thonged toes. Wow wowee! Generously and keenly interested in young minds, he had been taking young Tom Seabrook and Keith Leverson on an adult outing, an after-six invitation to a preview of paintings at an
avant garde
gallery in a South Brisbane basement. He had two or three rather limp crayon nudes hung, and it was always good to take disciples who might make suitable and overheard remarks.

Tommy Seabrook was a double of his dad—a town innocent, when it was all boiled down. Yet he and Keith, after the initial horror had worn off, discussed their parents with unpleasant detachment and kept their real feelings, their bruised soft souls for private exposure at those times when each reverted to the little boy who cried for lost fairylands. Avuncular Varga latched on quickly to the fact that the relationship knit the two of them matily. Disgusting little beggars, he mused, when they showed off and were hard-boiled and super blasé before him, stripping their pathetic erring parents naked, coupling them and laughing them into pieces. What he simply did not know was that each witty dissection was agony, though the boys suspected this of each other, and sometimes after a particularly amusing comment
by Keith one would catch the other's eye with an apology lurking there afraid to reveal itself fully.

“What do you think of Leo really?” Tommy Seabrook ventured, unable to imagine the suitable reply he wanted.

“Oh, he's okay.” Keith was cautious. “The only adult I know who's human.”

“Human?”

“Yes. Intelligent. Interesting. Interested in us.”

“I suppose he is. You don't think he's too interested, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh . . . well, just that. I don't know. Skip it!”

But they knew all right.

Leo could be charming when he wanted. And he wanted now. As if they were contemporaries, he gossiped with the lads, introduced them to other adults who were holding opinions and tiny glasses, bought them coffee, listened to what they said—and then drove them home.

“Pretty neat, Leo!” Keith said. That meant “thank you”

“Yes. Keen!” Tommy said. “Me, too.”

“Don't forget, laddies”—that was just his fun!—“we're off to the big surf when the weather lets up.”

They nodded gravely while Leo leant out of his car like a fun-in-the-sun ad to drop them off at their street corner.

“Wonder if father's home?” Tommy said, kicking it along but hoping wildly that he was.

“Wonder if mother is!” Keith said.

They all laughed, extra cynically, and Mr Varga supplied the slow wink.

Later that evening, during an especially interesting television documentary on Poland, Keith began saying, “Duffle-coat, duffle-coat”, over and over. The words were not loud, but distinct.

“Shut up!” Bernard ordered with lukewarm reaction as he missed something he was straining to catch. Sombre as phenyle, Keith smiled and watched the glassy images distort and coalesce, holding fifteen minutes' silence out like a floral tribute to dad, but when the interviewer was questioning a particularly pretty student in a turtle-neck who was eager
to be voluble, Keith began intoning firmly the same pair of words.

“Ah, get to bed!” Bernard ordered, raising the volume and contemptuously not looking. The phone clucked as if it were about to lay an egg.

“Dear God!” Bernard said, reaching across.

“Duffle-coat,” Keith repeated, smiling gently.

Bernard handed the receiver out to knitting Iris, who fulfilled every function of the women's magazines from snappy sweaters even to her adultery.

“It's Kathleen Seabrook,” he said. “Tell her to hurry up and get off.”

Keith went white suddenly. He watched his mother, his eyes glinting like a prophet's about to uncover a truth, and Bernard, noticing this, could only sigh.

“Cut along, son,” he said, remembering the closed tight fists of babyhood and the pinkness, the sweet-smelling firmness, the gentle fuzz of hair. Love fell, just for a few seconds, a wild and unexpected rain, with memories of bath-times, animal-shaped cakes of soap, red-faced tantrums and small fierce fingers curling about his own.

“If you're old enough to listen, Bernard,” the bright lad said, “I'm sure I am.”

Refusing to move, he lounged along the carpet over a copy of
Swot
, the threepenny weekly he and Tommy Seabrook had begun at the high school. He was busy compiling the pre-vacation issue editorial and was sweating over a variety of headings. “Oh the thickening thilence!” he had just written and was moodily chewing a dissatisfied Biro end over it. “Gone, the patter of enormous feet,” he had scribbled underneath, “as our favourite sadists sneak from room to room, diligent in their search for victims. Gone, the happy carefree canings, the detentions, the pieces of flying chalk hurled with expertise by masters of modern languages.”

I like that last bit, he thought, and said, “Hey Bernard, what do you think of this?” He began to read through his mother's endless voice, trying to drown the lies and the insincerity, the fake friendship. “What do you think of this for a profile on old Slugs? ‘It has been rumoured among the
dim brains from Junior School that
liaisons dangereuses'
—how d'you spell
‘dangereuses'
Bernard?—'are imperilling the morals of susceptible teenagers. One of our slower-moving staff-members, Slugs being the frivolous nomenclature given him by discerning students, has become involved'—is ‘involved' the word, dad?—'with a set of vital statistics from the economics faculty. What the school wants to know is—what do all these figures add up to?' How's that, huh?”

There seemed no end to it, Bernard thought, like one of those dream roads, hazardless and empty, that never touch the horizon, or round the hill or even reach the boat-yearning sea. The television flickered; Iris talked inanities and Keith, smiling somewhat madly (wherever have I seen that smile before? Leverson asked himself) visually negotiated the room as if he were setting an enormous trap and were awaiting the exact moment to spring it. Sheltered by telly buzz, what seemed a foreign language and radiant commercials, Iris began confidential side comments into the mouth-piece, looking as if she would never tear herself away from its two-way comfort, so that finally Bernard switched off the set and hid in his small study where the four walls with their brown stains and shabbiness accepted and did not criticize. Piles of undone work rammed their obligations home, forcing him to close the door very gently on his still listening, spying son. Softly, too, he turned the key and, shoving aside the pile of unmarked theory papers, he put on a record and mentally dug in.

Throughout his instant porridge, Keith said “duffle-coat” approximately fifteen times. Bernard had almost ceased to hear it by now, but Iris poured acid into the breakfast compounds, witchily hexed them both, nerves on edge, and watched her own edges curl over and crisp. When I pray, she decided, the saints cease to be flesh and become plaster. They turn bland plaster saintly smiles towards me, calm as the Inquisitors and as unmoved by others' endurance. Let someone, anyone, love me, she prayed, burning the toast. . . . But half a mile away Gerald curled up behind his newspaper and wondered anxiously how he could extricate himself. Keith
watched her with amused hatred and Bernard for once failed to notice anything.

“
Turn te turn, turn tee turn, turn tee ti ti
” he sang absently marmalading his blackened bread. “
Now your days of philandering are over
!”

And Keith left without apology and gathered up his school-bag.

But he did not go there. Normally he picked up with Tommy Seabrook at the Edward Street ferry and together they loafed over to High through the Gardens and down again. But this time he went straight towards the Bridge and came up into the city through the Valley, prowling round Anzac Square and mesmerizing the goldfish in the fonts—“‘the gold fin in the porphyry font,” he quoted dreamily to the rhythm of trams and out loud, startling the old ladies or the early shoppers, not caring either, and wondering if he could have written it better. In the state in which his emotions daily rested he was half drugged—intermediate between nothing and fantasy, with ideal parents who drove long cars and flirted and were gay but intelligent, who kept him in his place and said no often and firmly.

Oh, how they said no and how often and how firmly.

But the big tower rang and, prompt on the final hurly-burly of the bells, he slipped, a knowing minnow, into the open doors of the store. Everywhere the black-clad girls primped goods and clicked cash-registers and patted their hair-dos—but there weren't nearly enough customers, so he went back to the square again and, taking off his school blazer, folded it neatly, tightly, and packed it into his bag. Then he bought himself a slow peppermint-flavoured julep to be sucked through a lingering straw minute after minute. He was boxed a bit by the morning's crossword, but filled in half the blanks untidily though accurately before he went back to the store and up the escalator to men's wear.

There were plenty of shoppers now. Keith slid unnoticed into the mob, sidled along a rack of jackets, and selected the one he fancied long before obsequiousness tottered up, all iron-grey and florid.

“Yes, sir?” it said—because it was certainly desexed and
dehumanized by the sanctions of its employment. “Can I help you?”

Keith put on his open blond urchin smile that worked so well in tight spots.

“Could I try on a couple of these coats?” he asked. He was at his most engaging.

“Any particular colour?”

“Well, I can't quite make up my mind.”

“What size would you be? Youth's?”

“Oh, about thirty-six, I think. My mother told me to get thirty-six,” he added dazzlingly.

“Then this rack over here. Anything along here would do. Just select a couple and I'll be with you in a minute. There. That's a nice bit of camel-hair. Pricey but good. And that worsted is imported.”

“May I use a dressing-room?” Keith asked.

“Through over there.”

“Right.”

Keith did not hurry. Casualness was the thing. He selected four coats from the rack and managed to hold them as if he had three; then, sauntering easy as could be, he went into the dressing-room block, the confessional, and it didn't take him more than half a minute to swap coat for blazer and be found casually and elegantly admiring his back view when the salesman poked his head round the curtain.

“How's that, sir?” he inquired. Pretending he cares, Keith thought savagely. I'll fix him.

“I think it's a little too big across the shoulders.” He pivoted slowly.

It was balletic. As he divested himself of one, the older man stood poised with the next garment outstretched for him to slip into. They proceeded with the farce. Somewhere an orchestra should have been playing
pizzicato
. Excuses came so easily from the boy it might have been assumed the salesman wanted them too for when Keith finally sorted his blazer from under the discards, both were glad.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I've always been hard to fit.”

“That's all right, sir.” The salesman had barely looked at
him or seen the straw bright hair, the blue eye, the rose tan of skin. He hated his job and he hated the customers who were faceless shapes with voices persistent or nagging. Some chaps blew smoke and some shifted false teeth but most never wanted to buy at all, just kid themselves along a little, and he was prepared to oblige so long as not much effort was expected, the minimum that kept the departmental head's eye off him and left him alone to brood among the hand-woven tweeds and the shoddy.