The Slow Natives (2 page)

And then the ashamed agony of his relief.

From below in the darkness an empty can drummed back tinny reduplication of the act. Frozen, he could do nothing in this deafening silence where his private desperation tattooed the landscape with tin notes.

He knew she had heard because he was aware of her moving faster, and although he was not sufficiently brave to call out, when he did attempt to follow she was far ahead and running up the hill towards the road.

Sulking furiously, he dawdled along behind hoping she would be forced to find her own way home, but near the bus-stop where the park met its match with blocks of flats he came straight on her, and all they could do was exchange stiffly clad politenesses to cover his shame until they reached her gate when she knew and he knew it was finished and they could never again giggle freely together without being conscious of that moment by the bridge. Romantic love did not suffer the body.

So afterwards whenever he saw Brenda they would nod almost like strangers, only strangers with an intimacy that prevented their ever corresponding in a normal way, so terrible is the strangeness between two who have touched souls, but not hands.

For kicks, he would say to himself, when he wilfully moved out on an unexplained evening. For kicks. He developed a habit of loitering about the coaching college he attended, hanging round Valley Junction with blank eyes that took in every detail of the summer night crowds packing the joy-racks of trams as they crashed in towards Queen Street, dawdling just the shade too long so that traffic cops moved across not quite kindly and asked him this or that while his sulky baby face tightened over a knot of lies. By and by he became more cunning, could dandle a coffee-cup refill for sixty minutes that dandled frantic parents phoning up neighbours or peering down the bland flat-lined terrace above the river, longing for the sight of him returning.

So he sat now, cool as ice-cubes, measuring up this evening spent with the folks. Moron bores, he decided bitterly. Morons. He stroked one tightly-panted leg. A series of sensuous impressions seemed to have created him spontaneously at fourteen. Before that—
rien
—as he used to say in a mocking pansy parody of Louis Seize's post-nuptial diary entry. There was the cluttered living-room, and by peering between the red-hot pokers and agapanthus whose colour-lost shapes made phrenetic splotches in one velvet corner he could see Leo Varga's amused coarse face quiver behind the palpitating fan. Or vibrate to it.

That voice above the slides! That voice! As each rectangular reminiscence joggled into position, Mrs Coady, who was tortured also by tight shoes and falsifying undergarments, worried her memory. “Here's a street in Dublin. No, not Dublin. Belfast. Was that Belfast, Poppie?” The eaves had pointed straight
to
the antipodes. “Sorry, everyone!” she had cried gaily. “Upside down. Just a minute. There. There we are. Now you can see—ooh, that man! He was drunk. Poppie would never have taken the snap if he'd known he was drunk. Now here . . .” Her bust throbbed and Keith began to laugh quietly into his handkerchief. “Here's a little Australian tea-room we came across in Cairo. Isn't that fun? Such nice people. From Coogee, I think.”

Mr Varga turned and gave Keith an enormous unsmiling wink that bounced back like a beam. If there be, thought
Keith, a beam in thine eye, cast it out so others may get lit. He fanned his fingers on his plump knees in the dim drawing-room and sensed himself warm, be-jeaned, inhaling tea-cake and someone's after-shave lotion and a faintly disgusting smell when Mrs Coady moved and worshipfully fed another culture biscuit into the god. My face, my rudimentary blond moustache, Keith pondered. Everything beginning. And he ran exploratory fingers across his chin and eased one pointed side-laced suede against the other.

Everyone stared obediently at the hideous little shop.

Mrs Coady laughed tentatively and eased her corset furtively in the darkness. “Poppie nearly got gypped here. Some dreadful camel-drivers. They had him right on a cliff-edge and refused to go on unless he paid more, but dad stood firm, didn't you, dear?” She had glanced hopelessly through the twilight of these gods at her absorbed husband stroking the thigh of a younger guest.

Released, Keith unstoppered a cackle and latched on to Leo's ready eye, which continually investigated an artist's perspective that he used as a please-excuse-me-but for what others might consider an impertinence.

“And there. That was a funny little laneway in Port Said. Dad simply loved it. He went back and took a couple of night shots. They seem a bit blurred though.” She had fumbled them into the machine. The filthy brothels hung suspended on the spotless living-room wall. “Aren't those little windows quaint?” she had cried. And they all goggled, hearing the supper-time rattle, longingly, lustingly, enduring until they could talk about job and each other and those not present and certain furtive arrangements that required skill and strategic communications. Like Leo. Or like Keith. Or Mr Coady greasing a trail of some significance towards an autumnal debutante who worked havoc in the summer months, aided by Bermudas and brown limbs and witty beach shirts that invited, “Ring me. I'm waiting!”

From across the room Mr Leverson watched the back of his son's head, Mr Leverson who did not like parties, who was thickset and bored by the nongs and who suffered Coady's desperate off-colour jokes only because he did not
listen. “I can always flush out a room in four minutes flat with a little chamber-music,” he used to say. And longed to be able to pull the cultural chain at that very moment. A grog, a grog, he prayed. Let there be grog. Yet there was the prospect of coffee only and incidental cocktail music from a scaled-down laminated stereo set while he scratched his thin brown hair and prayed social litanies of despair and supplication that he had not now for years imagined could be answered. His despair, Bernard knew, was scrawled all over his face. It must be the biggest vine in the business. The genuine home-product of leaf gone wild, small bitter fruit fecund as all-get-out, and tendrils gone mad.

A snapping passing summer rain bounced on the roof, nailing them inside, into a stuffy over-House-and-Gardened room junked-up with cultural symbols—a small and well-toned grand (“I haven't practised for years!”)—a guitar (“One of the strings has gone, hasn't it, Poppie?”), a clarinet in pieces—and half a dozen people who would loathe being wrecked together. “Think of an island,” Iris had said sentimentally one evening over a pre-Yuletide brandy. “Think of the most gem-like exotically gleaming island you can, Bernard. All pandanus and banana palms. Who would you most hate to be wrecked with?”

“Well,” he had replied consideringly, “I can think of six Viennese instantly.”

Yet there he was with not one lurking in the yellowing beam of his fifty-year-old eye which found, nevertheless, enemy islanders snoozing behind rubber plants and wall-dividers, the marooned of a suburban evening. Bernard stirred his coffee lingeringly and measured them up. Mrs Coady, widow to what? . . . Mr Seabrook, aerodynamics . . . Iris Leverson, wife? mother? . . . Mr Varga, private coaching . . . Miss Lumley, secretary, sex . . . gallant Mrs Sea-brook . . . Keith . . . Dr Geoghegan, late menopause . . . Professor Geoghegan, medieval Latin poets and other people's gossip . . . Killer Coady, girls . . . If forced, Bernard mused, staring absently across the coffee bar, to emerge from this banana-thatch fortification, then towards whom, all things being equal, risk of tropical infection at a minimum and so
on, would this old boy move? Miss Lumley was so much the obvious choice he recoiled, for he took much pleasure in being an original; and despite crudely pneumatic attractions that would wear thin with time, she was pea-brained, tone-deaf (said Bernard) and afflicted with a long and determined jaw. He hid behind a palmetto and spied on Dr Geoghegan. A teeny bit old for wrecks at fifty? fifty-two?—three? Although, Bernard decided, her handsome Semitic head would remain so graven despite the mutilations to flesh through the next ten years. In two copper bracelets, half a dozen rings and nothing else beyond the comb that slicked back her oily charcoal hair, he could envision her controlling with governing poise a mothers' school auxiliary or a horde of cannibals. On no account, he imagined her saying—and he began to laugh—must you boil the bracelets! They're a rather dangerous tin and copper alloy. Now quickly, where is the cauldron?

Or maybe Iris? Would he move automatically to his wife? Bernard drank quickly to hide something he wanted to shout. Or Keith? he hoped. Would it be Keith? His wife's neat housing-estate face and Vogue-couturier-clad figure obtruded themselves like conscience and Bernard fled into the coast jungle and out on to the lighted uplands where he found Mr Coady bumbling for the swanlike curves of Miss Lumley's shoulders beneath the veil of hair. This she would move in forward-flung concealing motions, fluidly hiding her eyes or her intentions that Mr Coady believed riveted on him but which had a general hunger. Bernard raised his eyes and found his son watching, too. A Father and Son night, he conceded. Embarrassingly progressive.

During supper Keith had observed his father and Mr Varga come together above the dip, contiguous only physically, although Leverson, had the boy known, was wishing that somewhere he might touch openly the source of his son's restlessness that for half a year had disrupted living, had bleached his hair, had squeezed him into the forcing-tubes of epidermis jeans, had brought him too early to smoking, superciliousness, sick jokes (Bernard,
I
am the slow natives!) and a tendency to take a nip for spite on the side. Remember,
remember . . . that time he had vanished immediately before dinner for nearly an hour and they had found him exhausted and frantic on his bed after a fantastic struggle to climb out of the tapered pants he had bought against their wishes. He had lain with his silly white behind sticking up while Bernard tried bracing himself against the wall and tugging the garment by the ankles. Finally Iris angrily slit the pants up each leg with scissors. This is father-dumb, Leverson thought mournfully, the back answers, the resentments, the secret comings and goings to which I make no protest. (Make them! Make them! his son was crying silently.) It's not my idea of it, Iris had objected, missing the point and ironing all the same her son's fourth clean shirt for the week-end. What he needs is a father who will take him fishing or camping or rock-climbing or out to the tests. What, me! exclaimed hilarious Bernard, flexing his long double-jointed fingers and playing a chromatic protest that made his listening son smile. A no-hoper arty like me! Oh come, Iris! The neighbours are starting to affect you, if they haven't done so already.

And what I need, pondered Keith, resenting him from across the room, is a strong hand. I could respect that. I'm tired tired tired of all this pals-with-the-parents crap. I would like—and he grinned—a good strong hand across the seat of my pants.

Mr Leverson had so wanted to be friends with his son and had been investigating the wisdom of saying to him, “Call me Bernard”, when the boy, on the thought, so it seemed now, had said not more than a week later, “Bernard, I badly need five pounds.”

“Girls?” his father had asked. But the wary fish of his son's apprehending eyes glided away past him.

“Not exactly.”

“Well, you can't expect me to lend you a sum like that without knowing why, can you?”

Keith had shoved his hands into his denim pants, pulling them like paper over his plump bottom. He shrugged.

“Well, can you?” silly Bernard persisted, his curiosity alone giving the boy the victory.

“Forget it,” Keith had said indifferently, staring out at the
back garden—hibiscus, crotons, umbrella-trees—and beginning to hum irritatingly.

His father fidgeted with a pile of sheet music, shifting it from a record sleeve that he held up as an introduction to revelation.

“I wish to God you had tidy habits, boy. What's this? ‘Surfer Stomp'? Is it more of this stuff you're after?”

“No.”

But he went on as if he hadn't really heard. “I wouldn't care, you know, if just occasionally, mind you, only once in a while, Keith, you left this muck alone and bought something decent. Anything but this bawling from the guts. Those clotted howls you kids go for. You don't owe anyone anything, do you?”

Keith said, “Hey bop a re bop. Forget it, Bernard!” And waggled his shoulders and snapped his fingers, his eyes distant and away.

Being disloyal to Bernard by liking Mr Varga gave him a semi-adult adulterous thrill.

Leo Varga was an artist of sorts. He fashioned Japanese gardens with intricate terraces of falling water and chapters of pebbles. He water-skied. He had built himself a shack at Surfers. He slept, if all his bragging were true, with a variety of not beautiful but fascinating mistresses who allowed him to cook for them. He was an inspired cook! Them with their
blas bleus
and him with his
cordon bleu
, witty Bernard would groan.
Kyrie eleison
! He painted carelessly and facilely in oils, tempera, water-colour, house-paint, screen dyes and pigments he ground himself with a great deal of carry-on, applying his colours with quills, brushes made from his latest sweetie's hair (Of course not, Bernard! It's far too curly!), leather strips, toothbrushes (marvellous whipped smartly against a wire!) and bits of cardboard that he tore inspiredly from old boot-boxes. In whimsical moods he wore national costumes that he had collected in half a dozen aimless wanderings around central Europe and Mexico. Tonight he had come to the party in nattily side-laced
leder-hosen
which ended at his knotted knees and were supported by a bib and braces. “God!” Iris had whispered to Bernard. “They look
like gigantic Yakkas!” His long socks had a fancy design in primary colours round the band and his white silk shirt was just that merest bit soiled at the collar. He was very sad.