The Slow Natives (19 page)

He didn't bother to wave back, but paddled slowly along the shark-line south towards the umbrellas. Funny, this. He thought of something funny and laughed out loud, but it sounded queer over the hum of the moving sea. Those big sea-riders down at Kirra used to go out so far on their boards they could yell out to each other, “Well, which beach will it be, Turk? Greenmount or Kirra?” Funny, that. Funny if they'd said Tugun. “Get lost, Leo!” he said loudly, and then shouted it. “Get lost, bum!” And paddled his board suddenly a little closer to the rising waves and crouched, waiting for a boomer. When he caught the third he came in, his feet pressing forward, back, with tiny dancing steps, changing the pressure and the pull to keep ahead on this big feller that was trying to get away from under his feet. His arms swung
out and he felt pudgy and awkward like a drunk gull, but managed to keep upright until the top broke and he was flung forward into the sandy watery turmoil of the sucking fringe.

Tommy began running along the beach towards him, but slicker than seaweed Keith was out again, paddling furiously across the current and moving farther down the beach.

“Let him go,” he imagined Leo saying. “Let the little fool go. He's having a tiz about something. He'll calm down by tea-time. That's certain.”

But Leo was wrong.

The boy crossed the dunes an hour later, a mile away from their bathing spot, and walked back along the road with his board balanced on his head.

The shack was empty. There was shock in this, but he grabbed his shirt from the lanai rail, took the key out of the meter box, and went into the bathroom where his trousers were hanging on a peg. A clock gobbled seconds while he dressed, while he stuffed his few clothes into his overnight bag.

Poets, spies, criminals, saints, have just this ecstasy. Cramming the clothes down, zipping his furtiveness and not troubling to leave a note, he swung the door to with a crash, smiling as he remembered he had left the key on the table inside.

Or like stout Cortez, he told himself. Stout—bloody stout-Cortez.

The township was a-glitter with clip joints and espresso bars and fake continental dining spots where for twice the price of the local brand you could have the same frozen dinners accompanied by the dreadful whining waltzes that were known as French. Or, for even a little less, Spanish American hot chilli foods would be de-thawed and served to the hot plunking of electric guitars they called Spanish. It was all a matter of taste. Sharp like razor edges, bright, falsely clean, falsely smart in front of their tiny sordid kitchens, ten minutes ahead of now, all down the main highway. Boutiques. Girls in boutique wear. Old girls in better boutique wear. Boys with boards, hamburgers, chips, wide straw sombreros,
Okinui shorts and girls. Their souls like spit spazzled and dried on the hot bitumen and what was left promenaded and searched and never found.

Keith had a coffee and sandwich, and sat to watch the week-end millionaires puddle by towards the ritzy bars and the beach, hardly coping with the heat. He decided—and it was the whip-flash in the blackness—that he would not go home that night. No one would care. Those scenes, those catechisric agonies with Iris and Bernard meant the snap of two fingers to both, he was sure. No one cared. He'd fought them out of love, not hatred, and they were too thick-skulled to see. Not even Keith saw.

Munching the in-price biscuit, he dangled the tiny paper bag of sugar over his cup and emptied it slowly in, pondering over Leo's invitation for the Saturday and Sunday. This gave him all Sunday to flick Mister Varga with. Just for kicks, Leo could stew, simmer as delicately with worry as one of those delicious ragouts he was so fond of carrying on about. He wouldn't go back and they could frighten themselves sick along the beach-fronts looking for him under the weed-heaps, or behind dunes or lost lingering walls of blue water.

Jeans went by. Skirts. More skirts. Palm Beach shirts exposing great bellies. A duffle-coat. More jeans. Duffle-coat? Bright blue? Keith did a re-check—duffle-coat, duffle-coat. And the hair. Something about the hair. Grabbing his bag and thrusting his chair back, he flung out past the till with his four shillings at the ready. It was like baton passing, and then he yelled down the window-fronts at the vanishing coat, “Hey, you! Come back! Hey! Hey, you!”

Growing longer, his sprinting legs stretched like rubber between the receding shops. “Hey!”

Chookie dodged into an arcade and behind an eruption of plastic banana palms and rubber plants slipped into a telephone booth and began flipping the directory over. He thought himself smaller, crouched down stupidly under the shelf with the ear-piece stretched agonizedly out on its cord. Gawd, he breathed. Gawd! And heard the door pant open behind him.

“Okay,” said Keith, “I thought I knew your face. Give me that coat.”

It was the longest shot on the world that they should meet like this in sea-dazzle forty miles from town, so witty, so ghastly, Chookie grinned oafishly, then began to laugh. He had, after all, other problems—“Always in trouble, Chookie,” Sister Philomene had said before she whacked him. “Can't you ever learn?”—and apparently he could not. “Bless me, Father,” he confessed unsorrowfully in the cubicle, “it was me filled Monsignor's biretta with ink.”

“Do you know what profanity is, my child?” came the voice from the other side.

“No, Father.”

“It's treating in a light or joking way anything relating to God.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Now Monsignor is God's representative on earth and what you did was poke fun at him. There you did wrong.”

“Yes, Father.”

“And I think, if you have real contrition, you will go and tell him you're sorry—as well as telling God.”

“I can't, Father.”

“Why can't you?”

“Well, I'm not really sorry. I mean I thought it was funny.”

There was a sound he could not interpret from the other side of the grille.

“Then why are you confessing?”

“I dunno. I jus' thought I better.”

“Do you wish you were sorry?”

“Yes. I guess I do, Father.”

And that was how he always felt—wishing he were sorry.

Chookie stepped out of the booth and against the lush plastic background began to peel the coat off, stroking its bright blue lovingly for a minute before he handed it across.

“Thanks,” Keith said, looking hard at freckle-face. All he had on underneath was a dirty check sports shirt and a pair of soiled jeans.

They inspected each other carefully, Keith touching
penumbra of some tragedy somewhere some lost time on the other boy's shadowed cheek.

“Why did you take it?” he asked. “What gives?”

“Dunno,” said Chookie.

“Haven't you got a coat?”

Chookie began to move away.

“Well, haven't you?”

“Not here.”

He's too dumb to get one my way, Keith thought. Dimdumb. I could lift me another while he's thinking about it. A foreign emotion took Keith by surprise: looking at that dirty shirt and those grubby jeans he was sorry, sorry because he, too . . .

“Here,” he said ungraciously, “I'm lumbered up enough.” He joggled his bag. “You might as well keep it now.”

Ginger paws dangled the coat stupidly, wanting to say no and shove the thing back but not knowing how, so that all he could do was turn away down the arcade, still trailing it, and dreading what it held—the power to shove him quaking and curdling before a broad oak desk and a mean face over a blue uniform. Theft? Rape? He shuddered away from the word. Five years. For youth. He wasn't
that
lovable. Ten if he got a day looking as he did, back from the glass fronts like a cheap bum in his ground-down jobless heels with half a note in his pocket. Yeronner, I thought she wanted it I thought I thought I thought she was fed up and miserable and then Yeronner I dunno I thought she seemed sittin there in her under-stuff. . . .

O Gawd, prayed Chookie, sloping out at the far end of the arcade by the garage and trailing snail-wise across the oil streaks and the gravel.

He'd mooched around a bit for a job, but no luck except a three-day break as grease boy at a car-park that set him up for a little cash but still had him sleeping in the dry leaves of the park or along the dunes, huddled under the duffle-coat. He ate Chinese because you seemed to get more; but afterwards, with the gas in his belly and the empty watery feeling of the shredded half-cooked vegetables and the sauce, he ached for a great plate of solid steak. His plan was to hitch
a ride, farther down the coast into New South for preference, but he wasn't fussy. The north was pretty big and the old hunger for the hot dry parts gripped him now and again like the incense of prayer. Odd-job Mumberson, he thought. That's me. That's the ole Arch.

“Hey!” Keith called, coming up through unexplainable shame and wishes to atone. “Just a minute.”

Chookie shoved truculent hands into his pockets. In one, his fingers took hold for comfort of his harmonica and the tips of his fingers slid along the reed lips, touching the tenderness of this pal.

“What now?” He was holding the coat out. He never had known anyone who hadn't changed his mind after a gift. “Here y'are!” Pop had said to his mum. “Got yer somepin'.” He'd tossed the packet on the table and mum had looked up from the ironing, incredulous because fairy-tales had finished twenty years before and pulled the string off without saying a word. It was a new hand-bag, all shiny black with a gold button for a clip and it looked as if it cost the world. “Like it?” sober-for-once pop had asked. And mum had started to cry a bit, not much, but Chook had seen her mouth go funny like she was trying to hold it still. Holding the bag and stroking it. But something seemed to have stopped her talking. “Thought you would,” the old man said. He seemed pretty pleased with himself that day and mum took it to Church on Sunday instead of the beat-up brown thing she'd been carrying for years and hauling hankies out of for their noses and pennies for the collection plate. “
Domine non sum dignus,
” intoned the priest, and he had seen mum rub at a dull spot on the glossy black skin. She loved that bag, but during the next drunk his old man had hit around on it and just to watch her squirm had shot it out through the window clean into the water trap. Mum had cried half a day and then shut up with her mouth tight and never said a thing for days and the old man was sorry and tried to clean it up. But it was never the same.

“Here,” he said to the other boy. “I don't want it”

“No, it's not that,” Keith said uncomfortably. “I thought you might want a coffee or something.”

“I don't want nothin', thanks.”

“Don't be mad. You look as if you could do with one.”

“What's the gag?”

“No gag. Just that. Would you like a coffee? Would you?”

“Not gunner dub me in, are y'?”

“What for?”

“The coat?”

“Oh, that.” Keith went red. “Forget it. I'll tell you about that some time. It wasn't really mine.”

Chookie looked suspicious, but the hot white sun wiped faces clean of secondary intent and the dazzled eyes that blinked regularly against glare could cope with nothing more than light. Any sin might be concealed. They fell into step.

“Don't like this place much. Nothin' doin'. And too much, if you know what I mean. Too much to take notice of a nobody and not enough to give us a chance.”

“Been here long?”

“About a week. Just lookin' around like. Think I'll push on.

“Don't you have a home?” Keith demanded enviously.

“Not now. I've give that away.”

A possibility here for himself, the pussy-footed possibility that had sneaked in and out of the mind-maze for weeks, the sly shadow under the shrubbery, the quick form caught between moonlit trees.

“Don't they care?” he asked curiously, imagining Iris's tentacles stretching all over the State until they burned themselves on the flaming tropical tip of the Cape.

“Maybe.” Digging his reluctance into the ground, Chookie hoisted a flag that said no questions yet.

They walked out across the bridge towards the surfing beach where Keith bought two parcels of hot chips topped with glistening salt crystals, and, holding the greasy paper in cat-on-hot-brick hands, they mumbled the potato in, their faces trapped in the heat of the chips and the blustering sea-winds across the water.

“I've never been to the beach before,” Chookie confided.

“You mean you've never seen the sea?”

“Not till this week.”

Keith was silenced, then he began to laugh.

“Sorry,” he said, after a bit. “Sorry. It just seems strange, that's all. I've never met anyone before who . . . I mean . . . I can't imagine. How did it strike you?”

“You ever bin inland?” Chookie demanded angrily. “Right in, I mean.”

“Well, no.”

“Same thing,” Chookie said. “Guess it is funny never havin' seen the sea. But I dunno why everybody thinks you gotter see it. You haven't never seen inside and I don't think that's funny. I have. Same thing, really. Just the same thing—only dry. Rollin' oceans of earth, see? Waves-a hills and no end to it. Just like this. Only brown instead of blue. And still. Terrible still except for the heat shimmer. And just as dangerous.”

Shut up, Leverson! the boy told himself. Shut up before this freckle mug that knows all the answers.

“Chip?” he asked, thrusting over his yellow paper.

“Still got some. Could do with a drink, but.

They looked round by the dressing sheds for a bubbler and found one whose chrome spout dribbled endlessly into the porcelain basin jammed with leaves and sand. While Chookie sucked away busily, he was aware, as one is aware of shadow or light across closed eyes, that the younger boy had moved behind him in some supplicating fashion.