Coda

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Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925 and studied at the University of Queensland. She taught in schools in Queensland and New South Wales, then at Macquarie University in Sydney between 1968 and 1980. The author of fourteen novels, two novellas and two short-story collections, she won the Miles Franklin Award four times, for
The Well Dressed Explorer
(1962),
The Slow Natives
(1965),
The Acolyte
(1972) and
Drylands
(2000), which was also nominated for the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
was nominated for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award, and in 1989 she was awarded the Patrick White Award for services to Australian literature. In 1992 she became an Officer in the Order of Australia, and received a special award at the 2002 NSW Premier's Literary Awards for lifetime achievement. She died in 2004.

This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by William Heinemann, Melbourne, in 1993

Copyright © Thea Astley 1993

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Part One

Part Two

Part Three

 

 

 

 

A representative for an electronics firm travelling between Condamine and Cunnamulla last Monday noticed an elderly couple sitting beside the highway midway between Moonie and St George, apparently having a picnic lunch. On his return two days later, he observed the same couple still seated beside their spread rug. He stopped his car to ask if he could be of assistance as they appeared to have no means of transport
.

Our good Samaritan, Mr Bob Trugrove of Condamine Electronics, managed to get both of them into his car, whereupon he drove them immediately to hospital
.

The couple, he reported later to police in Condamine, were extremely old and did not seem to understand what he said to them. They were obviously distressed. Their water flask was empty and the only food remaining was a small packet of crackers
.

There was evidence, too, of distress of a personal nature and their clothes were soiled and in need of changing. The woman insisted they were waiting for the return of their son-in-law. Inquiries are under way
.

Police state that there has been an alarming increase in so-called ‘granny dumping' throughout the country
.

Condamine Examiner,
16 January 1992

I'
M LOSING MY NOUNS
, she admitted.

God knows she was losing other things as well. Hearing. Sight. Tenses. Moods. A grammarian's funeral! But the nouns worried her most, proper nouns especially—names of people and places. Proper and common. Oh yes, it was not all there. And it was those nouns from the present tense or the past perfect—yes, that!—she'd lost grips with. Try her out on a preterite or a pluperfect of forty, fifty years ago
and everything flowed like syrup, filling each crevice of memory.

A funny thing about all this: she was starting to think of herself in the third person when she went back to where the nouns and the verbs all stayed in place in the sweetest logical sequence, as if she were some other. Which she was, the body replenishing its cell structure every seven years.

Was that me?

The wrapping's changed!

The me of me rattles on, nounless
.

It had been a bad few months.

You know, Tolstoy was wrong with that little aphorism he tossed off in the Austen manner about families: All unhappy families
are
the same in their wretchedness. There are no grading lines in
un
-happiness. Most, as far as she could see or remember, simply blundered about in a kind of economic fog, groping the walls of their caves with daylight-seeking palms. Lucky if they landed on a bit of bat dung.

‘When you want to stop moving,' Daisy had said, ‘you're dead.'

Those were prognostic words.

Daisy was her friend. She was all wrinkles with brooches everywhere. For four—was it five?—years, they used to meet at a bus stop near the town hall to do the caffs in the big
stores and have a nose around. What a survivor!
Hot diggety, Daisy!
‘I've got me shack,' she used to say, ‘and me radio and me telly.' (Ruining her possessive adjectives!) ‘I've got everything I need. Can't need much more at seventy-eight, can I?'

She had her nouns, too, those days, proper and common. Could run through a list of recalled people, places and objects, no sweat, never missing a beat.
Daisy, I miss you
.

She was the link, the tie, the anchorage of flat-voiced comfort over endless cups of tea.

There's more to this story
, she said to her.
It will be pointillist. A spot here. A dab there. As it comes. Hang in there!

But she wanted to stop moving. She'd had the moving. She longed for the slack of the wind.

That's Shamrock and Brain, Kathleen remembered, pausing in the town mall, humping her bag between the schoolkids taking the morning off and bargain hunters at the summer sales. Her thoughts were angular, sharpened to that horrible moment of wounded antagonism where
she could wipe her hands free of both. Unwanted and unwanting. No, that wasn't strictly true. She found herself shaking her head, unsure of anything except that she was there and on her own. ‘Face it, lady,' she said aloud. ‘This is it.'

She could afford a cuppa as the morning heat swelled, needed a cuppa, needed time to think of Shamrock obliterated in her own fizzle of spit and howl, of recriminations puling across the grievances of decades.

‘It's impossible, Mum,' her daughter had told her. ‘Can't you see that? You can't go on living there, not the way you are now, forgetting every damn thing. And there's no way you can possibly fit in at our place. Apart from the smallness.'

Is it small?
Kathleen had asked, looking at what seemed acres of tile and wall-to-wall.
Is it?

Shamrock had crimped her mouth into refusals and after a long pause had said, ‘Well, it's too late now. It's all arranged. There's this retirement place. Come and see it. Just see, for God's sake. You know it's better. You can't always depend on neighbours. If you'd only try to remember and not wander off the way you've been doing lately. I can't cope with that. None of us can. You have to try to remember.'

Up north in this steaming no-count town
where she had been born, grown up and lived so long ago now, there had been too much to remember, drunk with youth, especially in those years of early marriage, seeking the idyll yet somehow missing it. Solitariness, despite people, shops, work-mates, friends. Inexplicable. Solitariness nibbling away even in the middle of parties, dances, pillow-talk. Her parents had moved south when the war ended but were killed within the year by a vigorous semitrailer insisting on its right of way, and Daisy had become a scrawled signature on infrequent letters from Melbourne.

Although she had Ronald and later the children, she was involved in clutter at the store through red-rimmed evenings wrestling the accounts into shape, chasing overdue and often never-paid bills. At night, lying sleepless in the scratch of weather, she wondered about the meridian of marriage, the peak point from where everything began its descent into the chafe of ordinariness.

She might have asked the frizzy waitress this, did ask,
When is the meridian of marriage?
to a sideways look that dragged her into now.

How long had she been squatting at this plastic table under the fig tree in the mall? Her elbow had stopped bleeding but there were rusty stains on the front of her skirt. She licked a
finger and rubbed at them absent-mindedly. Mugged in Brisbane, she decided. Patched and peeled in Townsville.

Coffee, she recalled suddenly. And milk. A twitch of skirt vanished with her demand for what had become a communion ichor.

The pecking order. Life was dominated by a pecking order in town, suburb, home, an order against which everyone fought: she and the waitress, she and Ronald, she and the kids.

Remembering.

Then.

There had been all the stage props of a low-rent production of
South Pacific
: rattling palms, sagging shacks eaten out by woodworm and salt, a sharp wind combing the water onto the cooling sand as the sky darkened, and the endless biting of midges where they huddled by a fire under the rocks of the headland. The last ferry was lurching across Cleveland Bay to the island.