The Slow Natives Page 22

  Iris went into the bathroom and began to vomit while Bernard, in between heartbeats and sips of tea, went out to the front porch and watched the long road to the bridge down which his son must come. Early afternoon traffic. The gardens beyond the river. Everything was in its set place, with accustomed attitudes to reassure him. Asphalt walks and cut lawns, the roly-poly slope that somersaulted straight over the retaining wall to the river flats. Fifteen years up here, Bernard moaned within, is too long. And yet when he first moved into his domestic nook, nothing was capable of being long enough, and he had been, he recalled, afraid to examine the gyrating circumference of mortality that spun, flashing ominous light-shafts. Turning aside, he had imagined some infinity of material bliss, but found he had peered into the shifting nebulae that clouded a desperate unknown, that his tolerance of for ever and ever was sickeningly limited to the duration, say, of a hire-purchase span or Iris’s plans for the Christmas holidays or the quartet he was always half-way through writing: the end was never really in sight, yet one had an idea of the whole that had all the muted prismatic colours melting into one shimmering, elusive, incomplete thing. I do not hate you, Iris, he discovered in that moment. Not at all now. Whatever it was that scorched or burned I have expelled in my last fire-breathings upon you. All I want, all I will ever want, is the warmth of my son, our mutual toleration, for his running away has at last convinced me of his love.

  When he inspected the sky-shadow above him, the sombre quality of trees along River Terrace, when he calculated that although there might be no general rain ever again, he was yet aware that in this particularly secret and tantalizing acre the drought had broken and he could see Keith clearly through the glass that had divided them from each other, clearly as if he had only to reach out to touch with father fingers the firm arm, the still straight shoulder. They faced each other through the transparent barrier and each was mouthing something at the other, was crying, “Come in”, was answering, “I want to, I want to.” Boy, he shouted silently, rubbing his soft musician hands through his straggling hair, boy. You were right all those years ago when you lusted after denial. He began to smile, a smile that overpowered him, brought him back from the lost country to definite decisions in his own well-charted landscape.

  He walked slowly back to the house.

  “I’m sorry,” he was just starting to say to Iris, when the telephone began to ring.

  At four Mr Varga left his Wednesday rooms stone cold sober and drove out towards the coast road, nagged by conscience, the silence of the Leverson family, and a sense of doom. Searching seemed pointless, but a night at the shack might drag off the fog that settled, sticky, oppressive, each time he attempted to think. His own peculiar neurosis, he had discovered, was an inability to sort out problems even after hours of extensive analysis. In fact, the lengthier the probing, the hazier, the more autumn-toned the solution. I will not think of this at all as I drive, he rationalized, and in this way I shall eventually bring a sharper mind to the whole matter. He was glad Leverson had avoided police action. And he especially refused to analyse this gladness. Taste the moment, Leo would advise gaily. It may be your last.

  He drove with brio, with the elegance of a man confident of his dress and the condition of his bank account and bowels. There were times when he barely remembered being a child, and that was the impression he created wherever he went—a circumfusion of permanent gecko-faced adulthood, the eyes blinking against the secret sins; the thick hide of the rationalizer horny and coated with the self-induced imperviousness he must maintain to preserve his balance.

  He coffeed and sandwiched along the highway. He wiped a fastidious mouth. He selected his favourite menthol-flavoured cigarette and he drove doomwards through early summer languors, the somnolence of rising sap and heat coming and the eye-burning blueness of the coastal road.

  Eheu, sighed his classical fly-screen door as he pulled it back. Eheu. The room hooded its eyes, and yawned in his face while he pottered, plugged in an electric jug to hear the purring and final bubbling with the gratitude of one who has clung to a raft in a never-ending desert of water. Keith would have gone south, he supposed. Anything else was ridiculous. He could visualize young Leverson charming the hauliers all the way to Sydney until the city’s skin drum was before him ready to be tapped by the most sensitive of fibrillating fingers.

  His big male muscular pin-ups flexed continually from the walls, giving an illusion of crowdedness with all those impassive, unaccusing but commemoratory figures. What was it Julia Geoghegan had said?—“Beef patties, darling?” Of course she was an amusing bitch, he knew; but there was probably something awry with her own sexual drive. They had all been squatting about the fire last winter at the Sea-brooks. Julia was dazzling despite her age, with heavy green-blue lids and a lot of fake rings that she wore with her own special flair together with shockingly expensive clothes that never quite fitted. The skirt had ridden up above her bony knees so that he caught a glimpse of nylons held up by old chewed garters and then a mass of white thigh blotched with networks of varicose veins. Every gesture was dramatized and underlined by her ring-cluttered hands as she talked swiftly, intelligently, and breathlessly, holding them all on lines which she twitched.

  “We were never teen-agers,” she was saying. “Never-nevernever, Tobralco prints of animals and flowers or the gathered crepe suitable for forty-year-olds. There was never this cult. Fashion designers left us alone because we were at the awkward age. Now the only awkward age is ours.”

  “The menopause,” suggested snaky Leo.

  “My dear, you flatter me. I’m way past. But no. That’s really what I meant, you know. The forty-five plus group nobody wants.” Her husband laughed into his Scotch like something demented.

  “There’s an enormous wasted labour force there,” Julia said, “rotting away at bowls or in front of the telly or going on to quiz shows to be insulted by pup announcers and nearly win things they don’t really want.

  “But they think that’s their reward,” Kathleen Seabrook said, “after years of baby-minding and getting up at night. It’s a well-earned rest.”

  “It might be,” agreed Dr Geoghegan, “for those who have had four or five children, but hardly for those with one or none.” She could not be bothered being kind to Kathleen, whom she thought a fool. “That’s what puzzles me. How on earth do you fill in your time?”

  And then, of course, Leo had made the one remark that no one could ever forget—now that the facts were established: “Oh, there’s reading and shows and a little adultery on the side.”

  “The back, surely,” Dr Geoghegan had suggested quick as birth-pangs. But they had all looked at each other, not diverted, and they knew.

  Varga locked the house up on the savoury traces of his meal. The shack was like a false heart which he entered and set vibrating. Tick. Tick. He regarded its plumb square glassy walls with the despair of one who has tried for years to achieve an intimacy with another and failed. “I’ll sell you, you Judas,” he snarled at it in the darkness. “But for three times what you cost me.” The restlessness that poisoned him drove him out again in dissatisfaction. He was for ever driving to and then away, the attained proving empty and desolate. Perhaps he had half expected the boy would have been there making use of the place. But there was no sign at all that anyone had trodden for one moment on his sea-grass matting. Even the cushions were still lying where Tommy Seabrook had pitched them. The car sounded angry as he, snarling on the U-Turn, while his radio throbbed savagely and he sang with it in a kind of tuneless rage that augmented his arrogance, his defeat, his emptiness. He was tired of these purposeless high-speed excursions that like drugs became so necessary he was constantly haring down highways at dangerous speeds while the inner distortion took over and the outside world streamed by in a joyless scuttling of pedestrian or lurching of oncoming car. His technique was startling, but the eyes did not see. Instinct guided the twisting wheels and so, raging, singing, he was three-quarters of the way b
ack to the city when a new night-club beckoned with glittering eye from a side-road.

  It was the biggest, glassiest purveyor of no-joy he had seen for weeks. “Sea Urchins”, said a sign, flashing on and off provocatively. The shrimps were drawn up in shoals and had been sucked in by a blare of youth and jazz. Speakers screeched across the car-park and falsely green lawns, across the fountain that fell like flowers, across the no man’s land of footpath. Leo drove into a narrow space near a side wall and swam up the stream of light and noise.

  Couples, untouching, gyrated to the pulsations that came from a small platform where five young men, wielding guitars like sub-machine guns, thrust phrases over and over at the tumescent mob. Polo necks and beards became confused. Girls in cotton sweat shirts and tight jeans waggled their behinds and flung their manes of hair forward with screams. The foyer cage of glass looked in on this tank of trapped fish, and shark Leo prowled up and down the black and white tiles until a pink-sequinned girl sidled out of a pouffe booth and attended to him. There were mobiles of harmless artiness, unframed nudes, lots of potted cotton palms and rubber plants, and a whole wall of hand-printed anemone, mollusc, stone-fish (hoped Varga), trochus, nautilus and conch.

  Moodily he sat at a side table and forked up oysters, stirred up an entrée of mussels in a thin wine sauce. No one looked at him. He was too old. There raged about him adolescence with its hair bleached, straightened, thudding and thumping to the music. The guitarists vanished. A spaghetti-tube pianist hit the stage while the girls went mad, screaming before and after he began to play, stroking imperfect minor chords in beguine time. Cameo faces swayed behind curtains of hair. Surfie boys moved with the undulating ease of those who have been on top of the world. Leo attempted to hook on to one submissive eye, but they glazed, swept past, and under his fishy breath Leo cursed.

  I’ve got you tender my skin, the pianist crooned in a rich fruitcake voice. I got you deep in the heart of me . . . somewhere close by in the pearl-grey smoke fuzz a girl-kid squealed. Lordy, thought Varga half-turning and seeing the face, the jeans. Not here. Not again. . . . simply a part of me. . . . Drool, drool, and another squeal from the rear and half a dozen swaying youngsters let loose, pushing through the late fad bead-craze curtains.

  “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 r
un 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.