The Slow Natives (29 page)

“Mister?” someone said behind. “Mister?” And there was an Ajax boy, blond as a starlet, bunched over a chair at the next table, and making gimme gestures with his fag-lusting fingers. Leo looked this bird over—who winked and smiled very cutely and said thanks and turned away so that all Varga could see was a tight little bottom, and a spread of muscular back and a bigger man, a real muscle-man with a low forehead and behind that . . . behind that, two straining kids in grubby clothes. One of them moved off up near the stage where the guitarists had reappeared, together with a youth in a sprayed-on glitter suit of sinuous silver that rippled with every thrust of his pelvis. Girls went mad. “Twist and shout,” hummed the kid at the next table, pounding with his foot. Twist and shout. And above the riot and the racket the high operating thrust of a mouth-organ swung away with the tune and the rhythm and there was chaos as the player got shoved up, dirty jeans and all, with the jerking quintet on stage. Woweeeeeee! screamed the girls. Woweeeeeee!
Now you got me going like I knew you would. . .
. Take it away, kid! Take it away, pianner. And they took it away in a series of vibrating chords while the singer and the organist reeled off into space above the rhythm line, pursuing each other with wild improvisation that touched the essence of jazz. The squealers moved forward and among them, Keith, distant, sound-borne, waved at by Ajax and athlete, but unhearing, was tensed forward, forward, to the stage where Chookie curved and grinned above his instrument.

Leo let excitement take over and the impulsiveness that all his life created intolerable situations jogged him by the shoulder to make him lean forward to the next couple, smiling like a crocodile above his beard.

“Coffee with me?” he shaped.

But this was not his lucky night. During a measuring pause of insolent length, the sandpiper inspected as much of Mr Varga as was visible, noting with an expert tiny eye the texture of fabric, the heavy case of a watch, and, inhaling with the merest twitch of his nose an expensive aromatic
after-shave lotion, consented. “We're all together.” He turned to the athlete, who was beating the table with a closed fist, and said something softly. There was a nod. Mr Varga accepted, set out to be charming while the orgy out by the piano filled in the gaps. Leo beat time, too, with his plump, black-haired hand, and was alert for the slightest sign. He never missed a nuance. But he talked too much. He messed things up for himself by rattling on, not in a good-natured or simple way, but with the angry compulsiveness of one who has something to hide and sets up a smoke-screen of wit and false wisdom that is all give-away. The surfie boy watched him carefully. He didn't go much on middle-aged types with their jowl folds and their receding hair. Leo's went out like the tide and broke in a smother of black curls on the crisp edge of his collar.

“Ride?” Leo asked, longing to inquire about Keith, but withholding the impulse for a judicious moment.

“What?” asked the boy coolly.

“Boards.”

The kid grinned. “I'm fussy,” he said.

“You're good at double-talk, too,” Leo said. “I mean surf.”

Surfie boy couldn't be bothered answering. He turned away rudely and said something to the big man at his side. Leo created a hiatus by calling the waitress and ordering more coffee. “Sweets, perhaps?” he insisted, forcing them to acknowledge. And when the breaking-down process was under way, he leant over to the older man and said as casually as he could, “That blond lad you waved to—happen to know him?”

“Only casually.”

“Oh?”

“I gave them a lift. They're coming up to town with us.”

“Them?”

“Him and that other kid. The one playing the mouth-organ up there.”

Leo was silent, inspecting the stage.

“Do you know him?” asked the athlete.

‘I'd hardly be inquiring, would I?”

“Wouldn't you?”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“What you mean, probably.”

Surfie boy was grinning wildly, sucking his coffee up through a lump that filtered from his spoon. He giggled.

“You sound like an under-water gun,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Leo asked. Something dangerous swelled inside him.

“Oh, come off it! Gun. Everyone knows what that is.”

“I think you've got me wrong,” Leo said, knowing he hadn't. He was afraid to say more.

“Have I?” The kid exchanged a glance with his companion. “I don't think we have, though. This place is packed with ‘em.”

“Packed with what?”

“Oh, for God's sake! Stop kidding. You're wasting your time with us, I tell you.” He scraped the last of the cream noisily from his dish.

“Tell me,” Leo said softly and with menace, leaning dangerously across the table so that their faces could almost have touched, “if I've got you all wrong as you say, why do you accept my coffee? Are you a couple of gold-diggers? Stinking little gold-diggers?”

“Manners,” the boy said. “Watch it, mister. I could make it nasty for you. It's an offence to solicit.”

Leo stood up sharply, so abruptly the table rocked and some of the coffee slopped hotly on the boy's thigh.

“Jesus!” he said. “Watch it, will you, you great ape?”

Just as Leo tried to apologize the words banked up inside and unexpectedly the big man swung at him and gave him a shove. Behind him the music had stopped. Keith was winding back through voices.

“Keith!” cried Leo uselessly. “Keith!”

Athlete pushed his fist into Leo's calling mouth and instinctively the two of them grappled and rocked between the tables, belting each other about the chest and face while furniture quaked and toppled. Keith began to run forward. He had seen the great black flag of Leo's beard and behind him Chookie had leapt from the stage, flailing the mob so that in a minute it seemed everyone was running and hitting
without reason, slashing between the screams and squeals of the girls and the shoving onlookers. Two waiters had come forward and had each grabbed one of the fighters round the waist, tugging and dragging them apart. Crazily Keith began to laugh and laugh. Leo's nose was bleeding and blood was trickling down messily in to the dark hair of his beard, while from the dizzy corner of his eye he saw Keith laughing and the snarl in him built up like an enormous growth, so that he shouted, “Get outside, you little bitch. Get out into the car and wait for me.” Then he was punched again and subsided under a pile of rolling men who had him down and pinioned.

“Quick!” Chookie hissed, coming up behind Keith in the crowd. “If y' don't hurry the cops'll be here.”

They pushed through the glass doors just as the manager began to shout that no one was to leave.

In the cool eclipse of the car-park they ran between the vehicles, bending low and looking back along the glossy hoods to see if they were being followed. But between the impassive cars nothing else moved, though in a minute they heard the scream of a siren coming along the main road.

“This way,” Chookie whispered. “This way. The mug left the key in it. He was so pissed he didn't notice what he was doin'.”

The athlete's lone chrome job smiled through the blackness at them. Come in, stranger, it too was saying, and before they knew it they were inside and Chookie was fiddling with the dashboard knobs.

“Can you drive?” Keith found himself obliged to know.

“Yup!” Chookie grinned confidently. “I am the original twelve-year-old milk-boy champ!”

Their frightened eyes inspected each other and each was unwilling to give that final order.

“Should we wait?” Keith asked, only an amateur at that. “The police . . .” His voice wobbled away. “Go on,” he said urgently. “Turn her over.”

It started as sweetly as forgotten childhood, and in half a minute Arch Mumberson had her backed out of the park, swung about, and was rocketing north.

Shrimps in a can, Iris and Bernard lay implacable in bed. Bernard's parrot profile projected an enormous dadda parrot on to the wall, a shadow Iris tried to avoid seeing. But she was turned that way with her back to him. After this, she was thinking, I shall be able to cartoon him at parties, tear him out of newspaper, make masks, do anything at all that will involve me with him, and still we shall be as separate as paper dolls. There's nothing now—husband, lover, son. A few tears of self-pity rolled down.

Ringing violently, the telephone throbbed like an important cardiac muscle in the heart of the house and made these two at last confront each other.

“I'll take it this time,” Bernard said, and he struggled out with his ageing white legs and went, closing the bedroom door behind him so that she might not hear.

“Yes?” he asked the black cavern.

“Mr Leverson?”

“Yes.” Hearing the stranger voice identify itself with city police headquarters he felt his heart stop as if it too had been picked up by a listener. Had he a son? the voice demanded. Have I a son? Bernard pondered. He had indeed only just discovered his son, discovered with complete warmth and love the troubled eye, the sulking lip, the helplessness, emptiness and need that was his son.

“Yes,” he said heavily. “I have.”

Could he tell them where the lad was now? the voice went on. Bernard paused. No, he said at last, he couldn't do that. The lad had been gone from home for some days. Had he sought police aid? the voice, censuring, inquired. No, Bernard was guiltily forced to admit, he hadn't. He had his reasons. Need he explain now? No, the voice said then, more kindly. No. That could be gone into later. The voice went on for some time, making statements that spelled doom and from which he extracted only one thing.

“Where?” he asked heavily after a while. “Where did you say?”

“Just outside Brisbane on the main highway.”

“Anyone hurt?” Bernard asked, not wanting to know.

The barbaric simplicity of this question struck him as he
said the words that had to be asked. Across the living-room there was one of Iris's flower arrangements in a bowl of translucent green; three—three!—everlastings limped upwards against an ivy-entwined rib of polished driftwood. There was a great deal more leaf than flower, but the discs of copper glowed tawnily through a complication of tendril. He saw this. He saw his left hand tremble as it played with the tassel of his dressing-gown. He did not even hear the answer the first time and had to ask the voice to repeat it.

“I'm afraid so,” said the small far voice. “A youth was killed. The other lad is in hospital. I think he'll be all right.”

“I see.” Bernard could not force himself to the next step of the game at once, but in a minute his voice came out high and dry. “Which lad was killed, can you tell me?” Keith, he thought, Keith. Pink, warm, wet, scabby, peeing, jumping, giggling, pop-eyed, grinning, yowling, whining, arrogating. The voice was like a far star of which some rays might reach him millions of years from now.

“That's the trouble,” the slow voice was explaining. “We're not sure. There were only a couple of things to go by. One of the boys must have been carrying a book. There was a name in it. Only a paperback, you know. But that's how we got on to you. We've been a while tracking you down. You see, the lad's still unconscious.”

“I see.” Bernard saw. He saw. Beneath his dressing-gown his body felt as if it were weightless, yet the curve of thigh and arm were part of the nervous entity that was he. It might not be his boy, the voice was saying stupidly, might not. But if he could help, identify. . . . Bernard thought he was going to vomit there and then with apprehension, but he leant against the wall and, holding to the acknowledged support of a room-divider he had always hated, agreed that whatever he could do he would.

Iris was paler than loss when he opened the bedroom door again and he told her what must be done. She did not answer but commenced dressing in silent frenzy, pulling on a skirt, dragging a jumper carelessly over her limp hair.

“Don't come, he said. “Please don't come. We are both guilty.”

Without a word she pulled on stockings and shoes and walked out of the house to wait in the driveway for him to back the car. She waited there in the dark of the hedge as he finished dressing and thought how like tears the city lights looked, wetly splashed upon the air in the fine tropical weather. Dusk powdered with neon and the long spatterings of yellow across the outgoing tide where boats waited patiently for men to pasture them at sea. She wished she were going out with them to an unknown landfall.

“Please pray,” she asked her husband when she slid in beside him, shivering on the cold leather. “Please pray.” Her trembling filled him with pity and a trace of the old love which made him pat her knee and take her hand. Moved by the same need, she gripped his fingers so harshly he exclaimed. Where will we be, Bernard found himself wondering, if it is Keith? Or if it is not? Are we reuniting? Is some catalytic process at work? When we stand before whomever we stand before, must we become a couple or will we proceed as separately as we have been? Appalled, he was aware that at this moment that should not be the core problem, yet it was the original ache, the one from which all others had stemmed. His guilt ate away at him and was still probing and piercing when a starched woman said, “This way”, and took them into an office that seemed crowded with men in blue or white uniforms.

The sense of unreality persisted. Once before, at an artists' ball, surrounded by fleshy pierrettes, Cavalier bucks with the eyes of wine-merchants, he had this same sensation, as Iris and he had lived it up all night in borrowed costumes and personalities. Nothing of it was true. Yet now the voices addressed him, as then; eyes investigated, as then; but he could not focus and questions and eyes slid over and away into a mist through which Iris was saying yes and no and attempting to discipline her crumpling face.