Girl with a Monkey (5 page)

There was the school, the oldest in town, festering with bird lice and blistered paint, where the classrooms in the February days simmered like an oven, or filled up with great sound waves from the phrenetic drumming of the monsoon rains; each class antipathetic to learning and each teacher cowed before the rotund tyrant who guarded each sub-clause of each day's work. There lay no room for imagination with this inflexible syllabus and none for affection when the entire process of education became a holocaust to the headmaster, who in turn sacrificed it to the inspectorial system peopled by bizarrely ignorant men who knew half a dozen tricky ways of wording a mental problem and all the hardest spellings for children under fourteen. All
unaware, Mr James Duffecy was a root cause for her leaving. Let Harry cross swords with him to prick him with guilt. “Stick to the time-table, Miss Ford,” he had sibilated audibly before the forty blanknesses that were the cream of our youth, before the forty wisely secret smiles that flickered and went out like tiny lamps. She had run after him. “But you've made no provision for this topic in my time-table. You insist on my teaching it. When do I teach it?” His walk had not faltered a moment, his fat little godhead strode on to further Jenas, and suddenly, without thinking and with incontinent rage, she had shouted, “We don't seem to agree at any point. If you would prefer it, I'll ask for a transfer!” Then she had crashed the door behind her with every atom of power her quivering nerves could apply. That had been three weeks ago.

Mrs Crozier had been speaking for some time, but Elsie, wrapped in self-pity and retrospective spleen, only caught the word “lunch”. She refused mildly.

“Though I would like to telephone before I leave if I may. My bank-book is mislaid somewhere, and I must find out what to do.”

Mrs Crozier put on a flapping-brimmed raffia hat, and wandered down into the garden, snipping haphazardly with her shears. Elsie sat on in the big cool house and confronted the telephone with a wry expression.

Mr Connington's voice gyrated in a carousel of
words through climes of austerity and restraint until it familiarized itself as Jon speaking with gratitude and surprise. Elsie deafened herself to these undertones, watched, during the preliminary platitudes, the large bowl of scarlet hibiscus placed with sensibility beneath a print of “Ta Matete”. The decorations of the room were strangely dissimilar. Opposite, mercifully shadowed by the swinging doors, was a browned “Gleaners” cheek by jowl with a piece of most exquisite Swedish glass; next to the telephone table, a wall map of the Ross River mouth and breakwater with the southernmost tip of the island just shown.

“You'll have to sign a statement to the effect that you lost it.”

“All right. I'll do that.”

“But do have a good look first. We're supposed to be extra careful about these things.”

“Yes. I understand. I must have at least three pounds seven and fourpence in my current account.”

“Now don't get bitter.” Jon's voice became puzzled. “You know how it is and I'm already on the outer with this bunch. I can't afford to make a mistake, even about three pounds seven and four. That's just the way it is at the moment.”

“You mustn't let the job get you down,” said Elsie lightly. What else was there to say? His stolidity always made her want to meet it with banter.

She replaced the receiver with a very great feeling
of relief, both that the conversation had been achieved and concluded and that she could at least ensure the recovery of the pathetic remnants of her finance. How blatantly she was using this young man! But so had she been used for years, and the resolve only hardened to diorite within that never again would she allow emotion to reduce her to a spineless receptivity.

Almost epileptically Mrs Crozier was moving beneath the large pergola on the southern lawn, pruning as she went the ambient roses, so that stems, petals and seed-pods lay in her wake in an untidy trail. The heat had sprung on them at nine, like an angry panther, and was now devouring the midday with unbearable cruelty. Between the shoulder blades of her dress and below the armpits untidy splotches of perspiration had already appeared, and oily rivulets ran down her vague white face with such regularity she had rather the appearance of one weeping.

“Each year I say I cannot bear it, I must go,” she cried pitifully as Elsie approached. “And then a harbour wall breaks or the river has to be dredged so I wait for Bruce's sake, and another summer is upon me. I think perhaps you are lucky to be going.”

Their eyes and their hands met in real tenderness, for they liked each other and they said their good-byes with genuine regret. Elsie made many false promises to get in touch with Lesbia, acting the lie out for the mother's sake, but inwardly really wanting to be
severed from the town and all its associations as soon and as completely as possible. Path, grass, trees, shrubberies, blue skirt glimpsed in strips between the slats of the white picket fence and the inanely good-humoured face unhappy beneath its absurd hat. The moment was gone while she tasted it.

For the second time that morning the nemesis of local transport crashed and rocketed along the stony road. The sun blazed quite wretchedly on Elsie's bare head, and another little friendship was ended.

June

T
HEIR BICYCLES
, if not their hearts, lay linked where they had flung them on the crest of the dune. Festuca and bamboo grass tied the sand-hills into shape, giving promise of a more or less permanent barricade between land and sea. Two miles away, clear in the placid June afternoon, the quarantine station on the cape spilt bungalows, outhouses and offices in profusion down the headland slope, like an untidy vine unpruned by government economies, flourishing recklessly. The island, sky-floating above its shadow, seemed closer than ever. Sea tango'd in lyrical blue, mutations of indigo, ultramarine, cobalt. From this point up the coast it was impossible to see the breakwater that created the artificial harbour or the clumsy hulks of coastal trawlers and freighters that put in twice weekly. But one was aware of their actuality, just as the unseen presence of township, hill, and river made itself felt six miles away. Silence hung in white arcs between island and coast, dune and dune, so that the regular lapping and smacking of water along the beach became an integral part of it.

Winter breathed lightly on the tropics.

For a week now there had been temperatures in the higher seventies, cool enough for this part of the world, but freed of all the viscous humidity that often accompanied the same amount of heat in southern places, and lacking, too, the hot winds from the dry plains below the Gulf. It would be like this for weeks ahead, day after day of boringly good weather, cloudless, mild, predictable.

A foreshortened fishing boat with dirty white sail crossed the circle of their eyes and below it in the reef water sailed its drowned companion. Harry raised one stumpy foot to watch the sand cascade between his toes, but, tiring of this pastime, turned with cavernous yawn to Elsie, who had already commenced sketching, charcoal, art-gum and bottle of fixer higgledy-piggledy on her lap.

“I finished that book you give me last week.”

“What one was that?”

Elsie always felt slightly surprised to hear he could actually read.

“The one about them bums during the depression years. Now that sounded real to me, because I know jus' what it's like trying to get a job when there aren't none. Somethink like a bloke is now, what with trying to better himself so his girl won't look down her nose. Think it's about time I worked me way into the upper crust!”

“It's an idea, anyway. Changing your job, I mean.”

Elsie was far too absorbed in her anaemic artistic efforts either to hear or really to care what he said.

“Well, what about it?” Elsie added two more outhouses to the quarantine station, balancing the heavy land-masses with the hump of the island. Complete isolation of the mind was the trick to which she resorted during the trivia uttered by others, whether it concerned her or not, and she found that she was perfectly capable of maintaining a more or less intelligent front while within its esoteric circle the personality intensified its self-searchings.

“How do you fancy me as a garage man? Bit classier than digging, and I know a thing or two about cars. Two bombs and a semi-ute learnt me.”

Elsie gave him her profile. She had tied her thick brown hair into two little pigtails and looked surprisingly young.

“They cost thousands. You'd never be able to buy one, not unless you had a returned serviceman's loan. And even then you'd be battling.”

“You know I was mining all through the war,” said Harry petulantly. “So that's out. Unless you'd rather be married to a miner?” He smiled reminiscently, remembering the pitch-black walls splashed with light from his forehead lamp, the crib tins, the fooling in the shower-rooms. “I had a favourite lamp called Sal. She saved my life once in a rock-fall down at the
old Limekiln. No. I think it had better be cars. I'd rather wipe the exhaust pipes of the rich than dig their drains.”

“If we're aiming so high,” suggested Elsie, “why not a country pub? Then we can fleece the wealthier tourists, have them pleading for accommodation the way I've pleaded in vain, every time I was on transfer.”

“Maybe some bank might finance it,” Harry said. “Give us a kiss to seal the idea, anyway.”

She rebuffed him gently, preferring fantastic, impossible dreaming to having his shortcomings as spiritual lover or future hotelier brought home to her by being forced to relinquish what she was doing, and give him her whole attention instead of this simulacrum. He was hurt.

“Listen, Else, if you wanter talk we'll talk, and you'll hear somethink all right. Within two months my job winds up, see. We'll have fixed up the lower functions of every householder in Pimlico and Hermit Park. No one else has 'em. Anyway, whether they have or not, I'm getting out. I've had it. It's spoiling me hands.” He grinned, complacent with his humour. “When I first heard I was worried. So I saw Art Mason, who's the union boss for the sugar loaders on the waterfront, and arst him if he had a job coming up for the next season. And he said no. Why? Because there isn't going to be any loading. Not onto boats anyhow.”

Rodomontade, this? Elsie laid aside her sketching block prepared to make a burnt offering, as it were, of her whole attention.

“I feel in my bones this is going to be an unpleasant little tale.”

“It is. And it's strictly on the Q.T. Art's a pal of mine. I did him a good turn once back in Ipswich, and he's for ever grateful like the song. Well, friend Art has quite large interests in a carrying business that runs down to Sydney and back. And what he really wants is to get sole loading rights on sugar for this company of his. I don't know yet how it will go, but at the moment things look so smooth Uncle Harry might come right in on the ground floor. Art offered me a job as his repair man on the whole fleet of trucks. There's fifteen of 'em. If things go the way he wants, I might even get set up in a repair shop, name on the door and all.”

“But how is he going to divert the sugar? How will he ensure it?”

“Use your noddle, Else. There's going to be the dirtiest, biggest strike you've ever seen on the Townsville waterfront, and it's going to take place in exactly nine weeks.”

“But Mason can't use union policy to feather his own nest. He'll be jailed.”

“You don't think he'd be such a bloody fool, do you, as to come forward himself? No. What happens
is another bloke who's the registered company name goes to Northern Sugar, points out that their stuff is rotting away on the wharves—he waits a week or so before he approaches them, see—so that they're desperate—and makes them a fair offer. It's got to be fair”—Harry sounded regretful—“so that they'll come in on it.”

He rolled over on the dune gazing across the road to where the salt-marsh soil, brownish-grey loam with salt crystals, mothered sedges, Noogoora burr, tassel blue grass, and gilgais. On the skyline clumps of Burdekin gidgee lay like green clouds among the she-oaks and paper-barks seeking vanishing point within the sand couch and bunchy spear grass. He picked a blade of couch and chewed it reflectively.

“See this,” he said after a while, pulling a fistful of spiny daggers from the sand, “this stuff's got a funny name. They call it fescue grass.”

“Do they? I always thought it was just called beach grass.”

“No, that's different. More feathery and hanging somehow. This is tough and wiry.”

Elsie turned eyes filled with questioning surprise upon him.

“I didn't know you were interested in things like that.”

“Oh, I've known the name of this grass since I was a kid. Why, I could tell you any type of tree you cared
to point to all round this place. I ran wild along the coast here when I was a nipper.”

“You never mentioned it, you dark horse.”

“No reason. But magging about that strike made me remember. I left here when I was sixteen. The old man took the family down to Brissy for a while, but things was real bad just after that, and he couldn't get work any place. He had a smashed-up leg that kept bothering him and he spent half his time in an' out of quacks' joints trying to get it fixed. Got it up here, too, but there wasn't any compo for the shindy he collected it in. Ever hear about the riots up here?”

“But the Americans weren't here then,” said Elsie mischievously.

Harry tweaked the lobe of her delicately whorled ear and his thick features broke into an incredibly kind smile.

“Course you wouldn't have. I was only seven at the time and you was just somethink your mum and dad dreaded.”

He ruminated awhile, perhaps to expunge this idle persiflage from his mind, for what he remembered was a serious business, chaotic and frightening.