Coda (2 page)

‘Miss it,' he had pleaded, his face young and unsure in the dark-light dark-light of the jumping flames. His ill-fitting khakis hung like
sacking. She was aware how thin his wrists were as he reached over to stoke the fire with pieces of driftwood that sputtered blue.

‘No,' she had said and saw the word bite into his mouth. ‘No. I've got to get to work in the morning.' The bones of his working hands stuck innocently out, sharpened by firelight.

‘Please.' He looked across at her and then at the riding light of the drunken boat as it rocked across water. ‘Don't make me plead. Please.'

She didn't intend to be brutal but she found herself saying, ‘It's time we doused this,' and began throwing handfuls of sand onto the fire. ‘I can't. I simply can't.'

They had met a fortnight before on the island five miles across the water. She and Daisy had gone across for the weekend and after dinner had wandered into the cavernous lounge room of the pub where a small group of soldiers, time-filling before they were demobbed, were taking their leave in this down-home version of island hells they had left to the north. Daisy urged her and within minutes she was sitting at the out-of-tune upright angled across one corner of the room, while the soldiers clustered around as she banged out sentimental wartime ballads. Wind and palm-rattle came in vertical slices through the wooden louvres that
acted as walls, and the young men's voices strained seawards while outside the sea gabbled answers as it nuzzled the beach, its watery descant dragged by an egg-frail moon. Fireflies sparked messages.

Did
she
? Had
she
?

Even later that evening she found herself strolling with this young man along a windy beach, moving away from the pub and stumbling up the rocky knoblands of the front until they were turned back by a coast-watcher.

‘The war's over, anyway,' the young man had argued with the over-zealous fellow.

‘Orders,' the coastguard said, straining to catch their features in his torch, ‘until the treaty's finally signed. You're lucky, mate. You've missed out on Wewak.'

‘I'm coming back, not going.'

His thin face was earnest under its ochre patina from Atebrin, and he gripped Kathleen's arm so fiercely she felt his fingers digging at bone.

‘Well, you'll be demobbed soon, mate.'

‘And I can't wait,' he said bitterly. ‘King and country! Shit!'

‘Now, now,' the coastguard said. ‘That's not nice.'

Kathleen saw the tense profile beside her sketched briefly in torchlight, the eye a straining blue.

‘Oh shut up!' she had said suddenly. ‘Just shut up!' The fingers on her arm squeezed their thanks.

They didn't miss the ferry that weekend. When she returned a week later, hoping that he too might have managed leave from the army barracks outside the town, the reunion, the recognition of something shared, established a harmony deeper than either believed in, if either had thought about it. They hiked through the scrub away from the old hotel and the jetty, climbing down the granite boulders of Rocky Bay. Isolation was complete. Gulls screamed across the dipping waves that were so clean in their shocking blue, there might be no memory of flesh mangle and stink of the dying and already dead on those other lyric islands. They swam in the rubbery tide of the inlet, splashing like kids, to stagger back to the beach-line gasping and spluttering with draughts of sea.

‘I could stay here for ever,' he had said, lying back on the whitest and most burning of sand, remembering the Solomons and Tulagi and his father's store. Nothing left now, he had told her, after the civilians had been evacuated before the raids that had destroyed everything his father had built up.‘For ever.' He lingered over the repeated words that were part of another dream.

She was more of a realist.

‘You couldn't. Only for a little while. You'd get bored.'

He jerked up, swinging round to face her, jamming his fingers deeply into the shell grit so that they vanished to the knuckles. ‘You don't know about islands, do you? You don't understand. How could you?'

She repeated stubbornly, ‘Everyone gets fed up, needs change. You'd get bored, I tell you.'

He was silent so long she began to suspect sulks, but he was looking at her so intently she found herself turning away, watching her toes as she dug them in and out, in and out of the shingle.

At last he asked, ‘Is that a prompt? Should I say not with you? Never bored with you?'

‘Oh no!' she had cried. ‘Oh no! It wasn't intended.'

Embarrassed, she began tracing doubtful lines in the sand, erasing then tracing again. She scribbled arabesques of nothing and the sea scrawled its own messages of shell and kelp on the tide edge.

He had been idiotically rash, she realised now, fifty years on.

‘Let's give it a try,' he said, only half joking. ‘How about it?'

Everyone was doing foolish things those years, racing impulsively to ruin.

‘How about what?' As if she hadn't known! As if!

‘Us. My heart aches,' he said and touched his groin with simple candour.

Us. We. Us. We. Us. We.

Uswe.

It was as simple as that.

Although there were patterns in the past, she conceded, relationships had blurred and now there were only these brilliant sharp-edged pictures smashing against memory, bringing surf-whack aches.

Before Ronald? Had there been a before?

There had been encounters, some momentary, some promising definition and a hope of endurance. They belonged to some other life, not hers. Sweltering in the mall, her third coffee steaming at her elbow, there sprang onto the mind-screen, uncalled, a curly office relief clerk who played drums, a sombre traveller in electrical goods, a too good-looking airforce officer who flew out before she could fly in, and the almost forgotten face of a merchant skipper on a British cargo ship that had resumed trading
in the last month of the Pacific war. (Down by the breakwater on the turgid river came the long-drawn wail of a boat.)

‘Background music,' she said aloud.

How had they met? she asked herself, wrestling with memory.

She had stepped accidentally into his hotel room and briefly into his mind, in Sydney where she had gone for a holiday with an
older girl from the typing pool. ‘Daisy?' she had asked the thickening air.

The door, which was opened fully onto the darkness beyond, offered no sense of welcome but suggested all the hollowness of an empty theatre (the cast late, the technicians on strike, the audience turned away). Behind, the corridor stretched, an empty laneway of hard yellow.

Outlined by reflected glow from buildings across George Street, a bulkiness by the window stirred and loomed. A lamp was switched on. Involuntarily she stepped back a pace from this huge fellow, a bland round-faced towerer with a built-in curve to the mouth, almost but not quite clown-like, giving the impression of continuing mirth.

‘As you can see,' he said, ‘no.'

Despite his amusement she had continued standing puzzled in the doorway, embarrassed by her night attire, fingers pleating her dressing-gown tie.

But this was her room, she explained. They had arranged to meet.

He dropped his past tense like a stone, Kathleen remembered. ‘Was.' The flat thud of the syllable hit her arrested feet. ‘I believe she has been elevated, moved up a floor. Promoted to the bridge.'

He was a man who dealt in final decisions, she could tell.

The shot-blue silk of his smoking jacket, its almost ecclesiastical bravura, overwhelmed her. He was brimming with liquor and loneliness. From the next room came the sound of a radio, Satchelmouth drooling through ‘A Kiss to Build a Dream on', a chocolate flow that permeated the air of this drab upstairs stage.

‘I'm terribly sorry,' she remembered saying, foxed by the inanity of words.

‘Not at all.' Infinitesimally the bulk of him appeared to move closer. ‘Not—at—all.' He laughed, an abrupt bark of a laugh, and said, ‘Do stay. All very proper. Do have a small drink with me in this God-forsaken town. I can offer Scotch …' he began an untidy rummaging in a drawer ‘… or Scotch. Not terribly exciting, I'm afraid.'

What had possessed her then? What? She knew no one in Sydney but Daisy, who had vanished that morning in a flurry of jumpers and scarves to visit old friends in the Blue
Mountains, and her own loneliness was underscored inexplicably by the man and the room and the music so that she said, encouraged by the light of the place and the door open behind her, ‘Why not?' Sophisticated, she thought. Poised, she thought.

Moving lightly, he pulled out the other chair for her with a desperate florid courtesy, uttering his name. She could not remember it now, sitting in the mall. Benedict? she wondered. Bernard? Yet she told him hers and he repeated the ‘Kathleen' and asked ‘Irish?', without waiting for an answer.

She held the drink he had poured into a tooth mug and they sat looking at each other in the abominable awkwardness of a failed party.

‘Well,' he said, regarding her curiously over the rim of his own glass. ‘Well.'

Unexpectedly her own laughter was caught in cough and wheeze with the first sip. God, she could still remember the coughing, the fear she would choke in this stranger's room. But he had helped her recovery with the most tentative of back slaps and somehow, some gauche how, she found herself rattling on as if he had freed words as well, talking of herself, the north. She could barely recall his replies now but she knew he had admitted to being master of a cargo vessel plying between London, the far East and
Australia. He came from Suffolk, he told her, and round about his third drink (taken with a desperate compulsion) confessed, an ironic twist to the mouth, to being a bachelor.

Common ground, something to marvel at, the world's smallness, came when she dredged up the name of his ship from a recently typed invoice and lading consignment. Daisy, her friend Daisy, she had been anxious to explain, and she both worked for the same shipping company, nothing exciting, simply clerical work, beating typewriters to death.

This small and innocuous moment of union was suddenly ripped apart by her returned buddy, stuffed with drama and accompanied by the hotel manager fearful of scandal. There had been voluble explanations, cries of protest, everything a shamefaced blur.

Yet the next evening she allowed him to take her to a show at the old Tivoli. She had never seen vaudeville before and found the crudity of the acts appalling from the moment the curtain rose. It was during a scene where some check-pantsed ocker kept groping suggestively in a bubble bath filled with a naked blonde and an evasive soap cube that she found laughter stopped dead in her throat like a plug. She turned to her companion and saw that he was hugely amused. ‘Not funny,' she couldn't
refrain from whispering. ‘Not funny at all.' She winced with her discomfort and he allowed her to suffer only a few more minutes.

‘I think we've had enough of this,' he suggested kindly. In the neon glare of George Street he seemed filled with contrition. ‘Sailors are crude animals.'

After she returned north, beautifully typed and mis-spelled letters arrived at her workplace from ports along the eastern seaboard. ‘Hello,' he wrote. ‘I keep saying hello to my chief officer. I think I caught it from you. When may I say hello in person? I have discussed this with him and his advice is to proceed.'

Should I?
she had asked Daisy, who had only giggled and said
well, any storm in a port!

They met at Queens Hotel on the waterfront. She remembered his letters better than his face.

He was drunk, lordly and staggering. Other diners were stunned by his ducal assumptions as he ushered her to a table.

‘I have thought of you for three weeks,' he confessed. ‘I have thought all that time between saying hello and getting drunk.'

She hardly knew what to say to that. His voice seemed over-loud and diners were regarding them with interest.

‘I know I'm far too old for this sort of hi-jinks.' He belched and apologised with inebriated
formality. ‘I know I'm a thousand years older than you. But would you consider marrying me?'

The food had not even arrived. She was mesmerised by the craziness of his proposition, idiotically tempted by thoughts of escape from the job, the heat, the town.

‘But I don't even know you.'

His voice rose as he brushed objections away with drunken hands. ‘No one knows anybody. Absolutely no one. In fact the only one I really know,
really
know …' He stopped as if he had forgotten already ‘… is the old girl. My ship. She's the only one I know. After this meal, if it ever comes, I'll take you to say hello to her. You'll love her.'

After that they ate almost in silence. The other diners stopped watching and occasionally, but only occasionally, she found his fogged eyes regarding her.

Perhaps he was invigorated by the tropic air, for his step became lighter as they walked to the docks afterwards and he moved with the eagerness, she recognised now, of lover towards lover. There were lascars on night watch. There were short exchanges, friendly, she observed, and his tipsiness evaporated in direct ratio to the shortening of distance between him and the love object.

On the bridge he opened a door with
panache. The cabin was large, functional and gleaming with highly polished wood. There were leather chairs and a giant slab of a desk whose solidity her fingers involuntarily stroked while her lips, unwilled, shaped O's of approval which he observed, drunk or not. Outside and below, the docks squatted under sky-dark, listening to tides round their massive piles, yarning about the sea.

‘You like it, don't you?' he said. ‘I can see you like it.' The absurdity of his eagerness! ‘You can travel back with me.'

She asked how. Already he was foraging for a drink.