Girl with a Monkey (9 page)

“I keep forgetting you haven't been in the village as long as I have.” She always referred to the third largest town in the State this way. “It means quite a lot actually, for there you see, salaried and superannuated by the Government, one of our leading educational sadists. He takes wild delight in flogging pupils, especially round the head.”

“But aren't there complaints?”

“Don't be naive, darling,” said Laura. “Of course there are. Numerous complaints, and there have already been two official inquiries, one when I was on the staff. I was on the staff, you know, last year for six months. But his job's a sideline to his real, moneyed activities. Why, he's one of the biggest property owners around the village itself, has interests in two big firms that I shan't name, and a sizeable cattle run near the Towers which keeps Ross River busy. In addition, he swings a mighty left with the municipal council. I should have said right there. He's a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. How couldn't he with all that dough?”

“What does the staff think of him? Surely he can't bully adults with the same ease?”

“Just think of Duffecy and us and then answer that
one yourself. Why, Roughley once locked me in the staff-room. It was because of that I managed a transfer.”

“No? Honestly?”

“Yes indeed. It all happened in July last year, when the inspection was due. The fool had some bug that all monthly work-books should be written up with subdivisions for weeks and days. My God, can you imagine it? I hadn't done mine for the last month and he wanted it done in advance up till September. In every subject, too. Well you should have heard the uproar. Most of the men protested, but it was no good; they were nearly all married and couldn't afford to jeopardize their jobs, so in the end they capitulated and got it done. But I couldn't get through the stuff. Obviously I had to complete the month that wasn't entered, but as for doing two more in advance I drew the line. We had all sorts of arguments and I had the private backing of everyone else on the staff. Then one afternoon, when I was the last to leave because I was having a quick cuppa, this great animal came up to the door.”

Laura threw a look darkly venomous in the direction of the man who was by now nearly upon them.

“He said he would have to insist on the registers being finished that afternoon, and since he had already asked me politely on many occasions during the three previous weeks he would now have to force me to stay
at school until it was done. Whereupon he withdrew and locked the door.”

“But it sounds fantastic,” breathed Elsie who felt her own grievances vanishing in the comparison. “Absolutely fantastic.”

“My dear!” Laura laid a blood-tipped slender hand on Elsie's knee for a minute and patted it. “You can't imagine! Of course I wasn't going to do the bloody register. I made myself another cup of tea, had a cigarette and then tried to pick the lock. Naturally it was hopeless. There were only a couple of steel-nib pens round the place and they broke almost as soon as I used force. They were typical school stock, of course. He'd taken the key, too, otherwise I could have knocked it out and drawn it back under the door. Well, by this time it was five and I was quite determined not to scream or plead. So I looked round at the windows.”

Laura paused here, for the men were now passing their bench and the tall one, whose face seen at close quarters proved to be coarse-featured, and sensual raised his hat with a cold good-afternoon. They moved on out of sight to the privies along the fence. Elsie had stared at Mr Roughley with interest and had to admit she found him attractive, coarse but definitely attractive. The essential harlot rose within and she hated herself. Laura did not even glance his way when he spoke but stared stonily into the heat-shimmer.

“This side of the school where the staff-room was,”
she resumed, “was about fifteen feet above the ground. But I had no option. I climbed onto the sill, lowered myself carefully, and dropped. I had three weeks off with my ankle, anyway, and after the August holidays I had a move.”

“Ve-ry pretty,” said Elsie. “Was there any action taken this time?”

“None. Not a speck. The attitude of the Department seems to be to move the dead as quickly as possible.”

“I take it from the way you looked just now when the gentleman passed by you've never kissed and made up. You don't like him?”

“
Dimidium animae meae!
” replied Laura with heavy irony. She had had some small classical education.

The festivities moved on through finals and ball-game adjudicating by keen horse-faced women still the girl-guide, forming lifelong hatreds over an opposing team's neglect of rules, blowing their whistles with over-zealous unpleasantness, and talking in bitter pairs after each event. Time tottered to a humid three thirty which found the grounds carious with soft-drink bottles and fruit-skins. The perspiration was now running without a break from beneath the frame of Elsie's sunglasses, and feeling for a handkerchief to wipe it away she found only the infected rag she had been using that morning. With a small exclamation of
disgust she was about to toss it away when she realized such an action would scarcely be fair to any child who picked it up, whereupon she placed it back in her pocket, intending to burn it when she reached home. But by this time the damage was done, and at the end of the week the first soreness and the first small, peasized swelling had made their appearance on the right leg just near the shin.

August

“
B
UT OF
course you must come for dinner. There'll only be ourselves and the two others who share the flat with me. Then when Joe Seaniger calls at seven thirty he'll drive us both down to the train.”

Laura swung her lean hips with athletic purpose below the tight linen skirt as they passed Buchanan's Hotel, enjoying the sensation of fabric straining against thighs. Her rather ordinary features were placed on a head so beautifully poised, and that in turn upon a body so magnificently carried, that their suburban contours achieved a kind of graceful fragility. Elsie had met her quite accidentally as she left the school by the side gate and had wanted to say good-bye then, but Laura was curious and insistent.

“You've nowhere to go,” she pointed out with accuracy, for Elsie had checked out of the hotel before coming to the school, “except some cafe or a matinee. And what if you run into Harry? He might beat you up!”

She laughed with great geniality, revealing the small white teeth that flashed provocatively in the sepia
rendering of her person. After some half-hearted debate Elsie gave in, and side by side they rounded the corner of Flinders Street now busy with late-afternoon shoppers, women stockingless, pushing parcel-strollers or carrying paper shopping-bags. The crowds were unhurried, casual, and for the most part carelessly dressed, tending to stop and yarn beneath the wide shop awnings. Straight before them the river washed its narrow little passage round the last bend before the outer harbour breakwater came into view. The buildings and houses on the southern bank were drab and crowded and during the war years had been the stage for a great many brawls and stabbings.

Elsie glanced at her wristlet watch and frowned as she saw it was nearly four, the hour when shift workers reached town for a leisurely beer before tea. Her eyes devoured the crowds, but she could catch no sight of the familiar stocky figure she dreaded most to see. Inwardly she puzzled as to whether she really did want to avoid this meeting, for her very nature craved the dramatic and she was honest enough with herself to admit she would extract some perverted pleasure from his anger and disappointment. On the other hand, there was the fear that he might do her violence, and though she was not a physical coward it was the fear of spiritual attack she most dreaded. Should he hit her or strangle, the fear would not be of the consequences of the act to
the flesh, but of the expectation of anger uncontrolled and temporarily, at any rate, non-human.

The frock-shop fronts seduced and bewildered in cheap fabrics rewording the same motif, spelling out the salaries of typists and salesgirls in red and black prices, promising you
him
for seven pounds nineteen and eleven. The milk-bars and ice-cream counters filled up with hot, harassed mums and plaintive brats wiping their sticky fingers on the trouser legs of strangers. The radios bawled their sickly message from the open doorway of the music store. Couples dawdled at bus stops.

While she helped Laura buy fruit and vegetables for the evening meal Elsie almost forgot her fear in this first homely action for weeks. The shade of the palm-trees grew longer, a steamer in the outer harbour blooted into the pale clouds and suddenly, as they walked by the hotel where she had spent the previous night, her heart seemed to stand quite still. Familiarly the dreadful pounding of the artery in her neck began to drum out its panic, and her stomach contracted with such pain she bent forward slightly to counteract it.

Fifty yards away, blindly it seemed and blindly she hoped, Harry lurched in knight's gambit among the afternoon crowds.

The whole street, swayed into a multicoloured pastiche of shirts, dresses, trees and motors, and figures coalesced into one huge, threatening shape that bore
down upon her, now numb with fright and shock. She stood paralysed, stripped of all defence, the people silent mouthing shapes moving by, the island gardens hundreds of miles away. Pinnacle poised with pinnacle. With great effort her dazzled eyes sought those of her friend.

“Dear God,” she whispered, “it's Harry.”

“Where?”

“Straight ahead in that green shirt, coming towards us.”

Laura glanced swiftly up the street and took Elsie's thin arm into her own.

“Just keep going,” she said. “Walk straight ahead. He hasn't seen you yet and with any luck at all you'll get by.”

Even as she spoke it was too late. The man's eyes, dimly perceiving through a day's steady drinking, then comprehending with awakening anger, saw them both and recognized one of them. Laura tightened her grip on the other's arm, knowing the delicacy of the bone beneath the flesh, and literally pushed her along. When they passed him and he realized they had no intention of stopping, he swung back after them with a great, angry bellow.

“Elsie!”

The ballet of heads swung in their direction and a few laughed as they stared, but Laura whispered to the downcast face beside her.

“Don't stop and don't turn round. Whatever you do don't turn round! We'll go up the next turning into South's. There's a women's lounge there, and he won't dare come in.”

They dodged on among the packed shoppers, grateful for the pressure of people along the kerb, and Elsie half ran, half dragged at her companion; but when they reached the corner and glanced back he was still in sight, reeling drunkenly and instinctively towards the core of his rage. Every now and again he shouted, uncaring that his personal sorrow played itself out to the indifferent street.

“Elsie! Come here! I gotta see you. Elsie!”

Thankfully they plunged into the wood-panelled gloom of the drink-parlour which, though very small, was still escape. So they sat at the table that was farthest from the door, and the glass surface with its dried rings gave back from baize depths the frightened features of one and the angry embarrassment of the other. Phantom doubles. We're safe, Elsie thought. He could not have seen us come in here, and he is so drunk he couldn't deduce it. I'm guarded by the chromium, the dingy leather shaped by countless behinds, the wall-veneer and the drink-waitress who presently will come bearing my salvation in a regulationsized glass. My heart must slow down soon. He would never dare touch me; not here with a whole barful of men three yards away. In a few moments the pride,
the blood, and the hands will cease their trembling in order that I may once more speak and act through my diurnal mask.

Sensing rather than seeing movement within the doorway, she glanced up to where, leaning heavily against the jamb, Harry, his face reddened and murderous, glared in at her. The sun struck the left profile, glistening on the oily skin. His shadow blotted out the one shaft of sunlight in the room.

“Come outa there!” he ordered, the words thickly blurred. “Come on out. I gotta talk to you.”

Elsie felt a paralysis seize her whole body, so that, even if she had wished, words shaping themselves in her brain found no means of escape. She shook her head in dazed fashion.

“Come on when I tell you!” shouted the man maddened by this unresponsiveness. “Sitting there like a bloody tart drinking. You won't talk! You won't explain! Come on out of that damned bar! I'll give you no talk! You're as cheap as the rest of 'em.”

Laura's voice was cold and precise.

“Get out, you great boor, or I'll have you put out.”

Years of classroom discipline had whetted her words to an unmistakable edge of authority that cut the drunken brain floundering within its sorrows. Harry's pale-grey eyes swung round towards her, ready to meet this challenge, but wavered before the poise and the apparent detachment. Laura raised her cigarette to her
carefully painted mouth and blew a cautious ring. Harry withdrew a step in face of this perfection, but his anger and truculence were not completely vanquished.

“I'm waiting outside, see. I don't care how bloody long you are. I'll be waiting.”

His shadow raced back across the sunlight.

Laura and Elsie found in each other's eyes a quiet horror. The waitress came and took their orders, returned, served, was tipped and departed. The froth rose above the rims and trickled down the side of the glass adding two more rings to the company on the tables. Act normally, her inner voice told her. Adopt a little of your friend's poise.
Nunc est bibendum, nunc 
. . .

“What incredible friends you make, Elsie. Surely you never entertained the least serious notion about that? You must have been out of your mind!”