The Slow Natives (24 page)

“O Jesus,” he whispered, and it was a prayer he whined into the stippled dark. “It's a mortal sin.”

“What do you mean?” Keith asked curious. “Do you mean deathly?”

“I dunno. Mortal Not venial. Big, I always thought it meant. Funny, y' know, the way they'd explain. There was an old Irish geezer came round one year to the Missions. ‘Boys,' he said, ‘eating meat on Fridays is a terrible thing. A mortal sin, boys. Imagine now, you were out say, and hungry. You hadn't had a bite all day. And there, boys, right under your nose you might say, was this darling pie. Ah, the smell of it! The gravy! The crust! And yer took one nibble, mark you, just one teeny nibble, y'd be damned for ever.”

“He was kidding,” Keith said.

“No, he wasn't. He meant it. And us kids shivered in the chapel and nudged each other because only the week before we'd seen Jamie Mahon munching a dirty big pie while we ate our tomater sandwiches. All drama, it was. . . .”

“Uh-huh.” Drama, Keith thought. He didn't know his luck! Stuck with sterile church service for years till Bernard put his foot down and told Iris let the boy shop around if he wants and if he feels he'll get something from it. But then it was too late. He'd missed the bus, the poetic bus, the celestial omnibus, and though the incense and the Latin and the plainsong and the candelabra touched his heart, they did not touch his mind. Unexpectedly, desperately, he wanted to say aloud with Eliot, “I should be glad of another death”,
but instead stumbled sandily to his feet and pressed, waded, up over the dune to relieve himself in the darkened hollow on the other side.

There was a great lump of driftwood outlined by sea-glow and he called back over his shoulder, over the hill,

“Hey, come here, Chook! We're a couple of galahs. Where's your matches?”

Chookie staggered up the loose and crumbling slope, a determined back-slider.

“What d'y'know!” he said. “How about that! I'll mosey about and gather some more sticks. There's sure to be a bit of bracken and stuff along the top.”

“Thought you were the big bushman, the original first-type sundowner,” Keith said maliciously.

“Well, I'm okay in me own territory,” Chookie said defensively. “But all that water boxed me. And there weren't nothing back there but sand.”

Half a dozen matches got the fire going at last, with a lot of dry leaves Keith fished up from the scrub behind the beach. Squatting before the blaze, they watched the salt bum green and blue, deep aquamarines hidden in the scarlet, while they held out their hands or stood or stomped and saw their shadows, huge as giants, career all over the white moon hillocks.

“She's right. She's a bit of all right.” Chook stuck his ugly paws right over the main log which had caught and was burning steadily. “This'll keep us warm all night.” He sat on his hunkers and squeezed the duffle-coat hood round his mulberry-glowing jug ears. “Wish we had a few spuds.”

Gem
or
Magnet?
Keith couldn't be sure. The dregs of a paternal vintage passed on in family reference—but some nasty part of him stood off and grinned and some other part was thrilled and responded to the desolation and the ancient fire-rite, so that he moved in closer until he could see the nimbused hair of the bigger boy catch light, trap fire.

“It should burn for an hour if we keep these smaller bits packed up close. Let's get some sleep while it's warm, and if it gets too bad later on we can head back to the highway.”

Keith curled up with his head on his arm.

“Good night,” he said, politely and crazily.

Chookie gurgled something.

“What's that? Did you say something?”

No answer.

“Hey! What did you say?” Keith persisted, propping his head and looking hard across the firelight into the fluid shadows.

“Nothin'.” Chookie shut his lips tight. Despite himself, despite tight-panted, slick as hair-oil Mumberson, something still made him gabble a prayer in the dark. He clenched his fingers in traditional appeal and said the first words he could remember of the act of contrition. But he didn't get very far, not past “who art so deserving of all my love and I” something something. . . . He fought silently to finish it in the inner dark and the outer dark came up across the sea like the spread of an albatross's wing, like the crow in the
Looking Glass
, and he snivelled a bit in the privacy of his arm and went to sleep at last.

If I count this in pence, Keith calculated, as I did ten years ago, the wealth will seem immense, an infinity of winegums or licorice snakes or rainbow monsters or even those jelly babies with the starvation plumped bellies and the rudimentary navels poked in by some wit of a lolly manufacturer. Or the four-a-penny conversation sweets, flat as plates with gimmick phrases flat as fate written in heavy pink cochineal:
Dig me Crazy, Surfie Man
! Two pounds four and eight made four hundred and eighty plus fifty-six pence, and the sum total stark. Even a pie was a shilling—and they had to eat.

Chookie looked a bit livelier. They'd wasted fourpence on a morning paper and there was no mention of rape or missing boys or stolen duffle-coats.

“Consider,” Keith said as they warmed up their dew-shrunk legs along Highway One, “where and what exactly is it we intend?”

“Ever smoked grass?” Chookie asked. “Dried out buff's beaut if you shred her up a bit.”

“Oh, skip the folklore!” Keith said impatiently. “This morning, this bleary-eyed morning, I simply cannot see why we're doing this.”

“You talk funny,” Chook said.

“How do you mean funny?”

“Y' words. What y' say. Well, I dunno. I got my reasons.”

“Maybe you have. But I haven't.”

“Maybe.”

“I feel like tossing it in and going back. I'm aching, cold, hungry, bored, and Bernard always said I knew which side my bread was buttered.”

Chookie scowled at the rising sun across the water.

“Y' said y' wanted to get away. What was all that stuff you give me about wanting to get away? Said y' people gave y' a touch of them.”

“Well, this seems pretty wet, stringing along the road with no money and no plans. Where do
you
want to go?”

“Sydney.”

“Sydney? But that's precisely where they'll expect us to go.”

“So what!” Chookie snarled.

“Well, we're certainly pointing the right way. There must be only five hundred miles to go by now. If you get there.” Keith experienced a gush of despair. “And then you'll get hauled back, anyway. We both will, and you know it.”

“There's no need,” said the other defensively.

“Your family'll be on your tail. Mine must be half nuts by now.” Keith smiled with pleasure at the thought. I shall see if Bernard cares. I shall see.

But Chookie was saying, “Listen, clunk, they'll be so glad I've gone they'll cover up for me, see? At least, the ole man will. I've never been his pride and joy. Never looked pretty like the girls. Never come top like Ken and Bert who's studyin' for an artiteck. No. No-good Mumbo he called me, an' shot me out on the paper-run when I was nine jus' after we came to live in Condamine, and the milk-run three years after that while in between times I come bottom. And then I struck out on me own doin' a spot of gardenin'. Never went much on the hard yakker, but I seemed to have a bit of a
way with plants an' things. Liked them, anyway, though I had trouble with the proper names.”

“What's that plant outside the Town Hall?” Keith asked promptly and bitchily.

“Which Town Hall?”

“Brisbane, of course.”

“I don't think I ever noticed. You mean them big green-leaved things creepin' up the front?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Them? Them's monsterio delicioso.”

“That's it,” Keith said, triumphant. “Everyone says that wrong.”

“Ah, yer silly poof!” Chookie said. “Whassit matter? I worked in a nursery for near three months getting the hang of it like, but like you they thought I was too dumb mixin' up the leptospermum with the pittostrum.”

Again, Keith felt the incomprehensible surge of shame. The other boy's face was lumpy in the morning heat and scowled a little in protest against what he was.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“That's okay,” said Chookie briefly. “Skip it.”

A semi-trailer was rocking down the gradient behind them, happy as a roller-coaster, so they gave it a burl with their thumbs hitching thattaway, but the driver snorted and grinned and shoved his up at them as he screamed past.

“Swine!” Keith said.

They tried for half the morning. Round eleven a semi-ute with an empty carrier and two men in front pulled out of a side road and turned south, hesitated for a doomed second, and was trapped by young Leverson's ready eye.

“Going to Sydney?” he asked.

The driver nodded, inspecting them for loutishness. “Not quite. Coff's,” one of them said. “Okay. Hop up back. How far?”

Keith was opening his mouth to explode this kindness when Chookie hacked him sharply on the ankle bone.

“We're on a walking marathon. Student thing, you know.” Yielding, Keith explained in his best polite student voice. “We don't mind how far.”

“All right,” the driver said. “Pull a coupla sacks over yerselves and
get
a snooze. We're not stopping this side of the Harbour if we can help it. We're running behind time.”

The dust jived in the corners of the platform; their bums crashed up and down as they jerked off, and then the truck got going smooth as custard, taking film snaps of moving tree turbulence that closed over, became cocoon womb and then sleep in the rhythm, the swing-sway rhythm.

Mum, Chookie begged in his sleep. Mum, where's me pitcher money? And she said you're not going again. Your dad said you wasn't to and I say you're not sitting down in the bleachers with girls and carrying on then reading your missal on Sunday. You should be ashamed. I don't do nothin' he whined in his sleep, true. Nothin'! And she slapped his face hard and said she didn't mind the lie, but hadn't he no respect for God's holy house and he'd better get Father Lingard to hear his confession in the Sacristy before Mass started. Do you really know what a state of grace is, Chookie? Father Lingard had asked, grave as God, standing under the stained glass and the Crucifix behind him on the lockers. It's not—? No, Chookie, you don't really understand, do you? Well, you told us—Chook, a state of grace is being free from Miss Trumper paddling her hands at you on the living-room sofa. It was striped—blue with brownish thread and there was a stain near the arm that his unseeing eyes had fastened on unconsciously so that his soul now bore a duplicate Rorschach blot like a couple hard at it. Or—no, Father, he whined. Mum! And he whimpered and pleaded in his sleep for the mum of farther back who made cookies with currant eyes or dabbed stingy stuff on his toes or wiped his behind and praised him and hugged him hard and touched his bony knees with plaster.

He half woke, half slept, and lay there with his head cuddled into the crook of his arm, hearing the kids giggle behind him when he got the add-ups wrong and Sister Bernadette (“Bumface”, he used to call her in the playground) red as hell-fire, shrieking at him to come out and towering over him with the blackboard pointer. Hold out your hand, she ordered, bigger than Mother Church. And he'd spat on
his corny little palm first and rubbed it hard on the seat of his pants and grinned at Tony Mason in the back row. Don't you dare smile, she cried, and down came the strap. There was a split in one corner and he could spot the sawdust through it as she raised it again and he was so frightened he giggled aloud and couldn't stop and the pain made him wet his pants. Under the ashamed lids of his eyes he saw a few spots dabble the floor and she saw them, too, and her virtue seemed assaulted, for she turned away and began working furiously at a long tot that stretched like Jacob's ladder from Condamine to Heaven.

But he was bully-cock of the yard later.

I peed meself laughing, he lied. And the others took it up and passed it on. Did you hear? they asked. Good ole Chookie peed hisself laughing. Good ole Chook! And he grew away from mum in that moment so that there was no one to turn to for hot cake in the arvo or for the pressed football jacket. He pressed it himself and stitched his own number on with his big rawboned twenty thumbs tangling the thread and making strides of tacks while with a terrible desolation inside he heard his mother say that Arch seemed to be getting a bit of sense at last, growing up a bit and doing things for himself. Grew away and rubbed his own muddy rings round his eyes and grew beyond that and didn't even cry at all much, hard and bold in class and dumb as they come—but brazen. Chewed gum through Confirmation classes and during the Sacrament itself, not game enough to pop a piece in his gob, kept a plug at the ready in his pressed-down best.

“You have no sense of or, Mumberson,” Father Lingard said, passing him out and handing him his altar boy's dismissal. “No sense of or. Of what is fitting.” Or what? Chookie wanted frantically to ask and excused himself later to the gang. Ole L's been at the altar wine. Kept on saying no sense of or like a nut or something.

So that was that. And after he told mum and all the thunder and lightning cleared a bit and she'd put on her wounded look for a change, he got into tighter pants and left school with some queer sort of storm in his stomach as he took a last look round the familiar yard, the pepper-trees and
the slab seats like those where little Sister Teresa had coached them in Catechism for their First Communion. He remembered her sweet, delicate face, melting with trust and belief. “It is the most important moment of your lives, children,” she said. And Chookie had believed her with all his ginger seven-year-old heart. “At that moment your whole lives will change. God will be within you.”