The Slow Natives Read online

  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.

  “In Mexico,” Keith overheard him saying to Bernard, “I did a whole series based on the sombrero. Everything was sombrero-shaped. Buildings, pools, cacti, breasts, the lot. Marvellous people—simple, superstitious, fanatical, Catholic or Communist. It didn’t seem to matter about extremes in a climate like that. Even the landscape was extreme.”

  As he munched tea-cake he breathed heavily, not always closin
g his mouth, exposing strong yellow teeth and thick busy tongue that flickered rapidly after lost crumbs. His mind’s like that, Bernard thought, listening to him investigate a memory evoked by a memory, and inside that penultimate box another even smaller—and in that . . . atrocious.

  “More dip?” he asked, watching Keith sideways watching both of them. “How’s my boy getting along with his French?” Keith looked away as he listened for the answer, and Mr Varga paused to wipe his mouth vigorously on a week-old handkerchief that he wore tucked into the cuff-opening of his gleaming sleeve before he gazed across the room at Keith’s too-large head now bent over a sandwich tray that he inspected with flicking finger.

  “Reasonably, reasonably. He responds well to coaching, you know. It’s never for the dull pupil.” He had smiled. That was the face, the attitude he reserved for interested parents, a kind of testudo to shield against questions that might prise him open like an oyster and reveal his pearl-less state. Someone joggled a coffee-cup into his balancing hand and self-defensively Mr Varga caught Harry Geoghegan’s eye and rearranged the group while Dr Geoghegan, who had been shuffling records in a corner, distracted Keith in an appeal for advice.

  The doctor, Keith mused. He almost admired, despite his adolescent arrogance that forbade overt admiration of the adult.

  “Do you stomp?” she was asking his bitter baby face and not waiting for an answer. “Keith, dear, have you ever thought of using vast slabs of iambics when you’ve run out of records? Chanted fast, heroic couplets are devastating for the twist, and stomping needs the same two-stress beat!” She was really way out, that zany, so far it was on the point of embarrassing. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man!” she intoned rapidly, swishing her wide thighs. Keith had wanted to laugh, but was uncertain, for she coddled his genius. Years later, people referring to him and evoking the absurdly babyish face with its thin curly mouth, would dismiss him as one of Julia Geoghegan’s mistakes. But now it was hard to tell who was whose disciple. “My dear,” continued Dr Geoghegan, still gyrating, “I made my two biddies learn the whole of the Essay on Man this way. Ruined the poem of course, but then that’s what it deserved. Here we are—’Pipeline Stomp’!” She slid the record on to the turntable and, guiding Keith to a recess formed by a bamboo wall-screen, locked her hands behind her back and began bumping from one foot to the other. Soon the Seabrooks came over.

  “What I like about it,” Dr Geoghegan panted, “is that only one need play.”

  Gerald Seabrook grinned in the accommodating way that made him popular (“Let’s ask Gerald Seabrook. He’s always so nice!”) and, facing her, made more or less rhythmic duplicating patterns. For that moment, observing their turtle necks, lined cheeks and awkward bodies, Keith could not smile, the inward grimace showing through.

  “Conformist!” heaved out perceptive Julia Geoghegan between polished lips, a stinger that urged him, unbearably tight pants and all, into their group.

  “Darkness after light,” Kathleen Seabrook said apologetically to Mrs Coady, who did not hear as she watched her husband bend over Miss Lumley. Oddly enough, Miss Lumley’s pancake face was disapproving, her displeasure aimed at the stompers, primitively tribalistic, waving sandwiches in a free hand and snapping with the other. But not, not at coarse-pored, heavy-pawed baboon Gus.

  By eleven the bored guests regrouped themselves in the dining-nook and bright Kathleen Seabrook with her wide charming smile and incredulous eyes talked musical shop with Bernard. Professor Geoghegan was listlessly turning the pages of an anthropological work that should never have been allowed through the Customs (“It’s been done before,” he yawned, pursing a critical mouth) while beside him Gerald Seabrook and Berenice Coady and Dr Geoghegan were losing their tempers over State aid for schools. Mr Coady and Miss Lumley were no longer in the room but had unobtrusively moved to a darkened lobby or laundry where he pressed her somewhat harshly against the gleaming corner of the chrome tubs, accepting her agony as ecstasy. Meanwhile Leo Varga, cosily knowledgeable, demonstrated yoga positions to Keith in as nearly an unobtrusive corner by the wall divider, sitting at the moment oddly mute in lotus position, concentrating on an enviable nothing.

  The room dizzied with pattern. The adolescent ear missed nothing.

  “I saw exorcism practised in the country once,” Professor Geoghegan was saying, “strangely reminiscent of this, for instance.” He flourished a not quite indecent picture at Iris Leverson, who was wedged between him and his wife. “Two seasonal pineapple-pickers up in the Wollum. He did it by loud prayers and rolling with his pal in an old tin lean-to on the boss’s property. As they rolled they screamed together.”

  “It sounds disgusting,” Iris said, taking a prophylactic sip of black coffee and leaning across to pat Mrs Coady’s knee with a comforting hand as she fought and fought the impulse to go out through the kitchen.

  “No, no,” Geoghegan assured her. “It was most intriguing. Most intriguing.” He was seized with a terrible coughing fit. “Anyone who cared could join and roll with them. Most cathartic. Afterwards the fellow being exorcized claimed he felt free of his incubus at last. The physical work-out, that’s the thing.”

  “What is it that roareth thus, can it be an incubus?” parodied Bernard softly. “It must have been invented for tired married couples.”

  “What’s that?” Iris asked who had not quite heard. “What’s that about tired married couples?”

  Keith smiled, watching them, observing how they sprouted out of their chairs like a lot of tired old fungi, yellowed, browned, spotted. You were always a tired married couple, he accused, from way back. Way back when we went each year for a beach fortnight and you wrestled with sand and surf and kerosene stoves and trailed round the merry-go-rounds and the beach-garden competitions and the roller-skating rinks and the hamburger stalls—all, all to keep me happy. Your feet ached, Iris, and Bernard’s sensitivities when the speaker-crowned life-savers’ tower at Kirra used to spew pop tunes all over the bathers and both of you used to moan; because I remember and would run off to the rocks and lie with my nose over a pool, not wanting a conducted joy-tour. I didn’t need you and I didn’t know how to tell you then. Hot dogs eaten solo were twice as good as hot dogs paid for by you, consumed with you. Once I put a handful of raw peanuts in the pockets of my shorts. I wore a clean white shirt and my sunburn had settled into tan and I felt brave and strong and free and I sneaked off for an hour across the dunes under the twisted salty scrub and watched the twisty salty breakers eat away at the beach while two lovers coiled in a hollow fifty yards away. You never knew. I never told you. And I was eight that year and Bernard used to sing on the sea-beaten glassed-in veranda in the after-bed dark me father kept a boarding-house hullabaloobelay and only last week I discovered how he’d guarded me even then from a word.

  “Excuse me?” the boy asked Varga. “Excuse me, Leo. I won’t be a minute.”

  As soon as he rose to edge across the living-room he felt his mother’s eyes swivel with inquiry that probed his new adult anger. Even if I told her I only wanted to go to the john, he thought, she’d still be curious. He went out to the kitchen where he found the remainder of the savoury tray resting on top of the refrigerator. Swiftly he scooped up some biscuits and then pushed back the laundry door behind which his host was most terribly engrossed.

  They did not hear him at once and then, after that paralysed moment, wrenched themselves apart under the confrontation of his knowingly innocent face.

  “Sorry,” Keith mumbled through savoury.

  He sidled past them, past the lavatory and round the side of the house into the maze of privet and japonica. All of a sudden his sophistication had gone where? He could not support the flimsy child who began walking groggily to the gate but who still did not look back once at the lighted windows behind which adults talked and corrupted each other, slandered, hated, betrayed, remained pathetically loyal and pretended—above all, that was it—pretended self-contain
ment, assurance, all the adult virtues he had regarded himself as having.

  The slopes down to the river were sticky with moonlight that fawned all over the posh houses and the blocks of flats between which he then strode, not looking really, not seeing the wet moonlight or the tiger gardens crouched across the river. Curled tight as a fist he went smashing, punching darkness that syruped out thinly to the ferry hill, below which the river, seen suddenly, its swoop and the deep grooving of it and the boat hulks, was black as lusting Coady, lusting for the sea. It was so still that behind the chug-chug of the ferry dripping drunk across on its cables, drunk as Coady and as purposefully finding the shortest distance from A to B, he could track the rattle of a Queen Street tram.

  As he waited in the ferry-shed his thumb smoothed over the impersonal face of his watch and in the half-dark he rested on the sweep of the hands that now, greenly luminous, moved up on midnight. Later, he decided, later he would go home. But some time before that his parents would be anxiously pestering Mr Coady’s embarrassed ear, a Martian projection that caught up the delicate sound-waves created by girls’ skirts.

  Rattling his small change, he stepped aboard the rocking ferry. Ten minutes to walk up town. Another thirty to circumnavigate the shoppers’ coasts. Perhaps twenty for a coffee. Ideally absorbed, Keith had watched the minute hand move steadily up the dial. It seemed to become slower, sweeping across the moon’s face, bridging craters of sixty seconds deep down which Keith plunged again, again. Soon, he told himself. Soon. The river quivered. Fish-tail lights flickered. The town’s big gold teeth grinned. Soon they would be home.

  Prowling downtown, all-absorbing, he slipped into an arcade cellar, where he huddled on a late-night-diner stool, prodding the nerve-spots of the last two hours.

  Lay me down baby blues . . ., bawled a crooner, canned, from a corner microphone, moaned loudly and dreadfully above the chairs and tables and the three other patrons. Keith watched the electric wall-clock creep down the next day, sensing his smile brazen as a juke-box, as the machine now whimpering: