Coda by Thea Astley Read Free Book Online Page A

desperate elocution. Within three years they had two pouting, aggressive, indulged boys who were later rendered semiliterate under the new tolerance curricula promoted by academic refugees from the classroom.
    That was all it took. (Was that all it took?)
    Marriage was the dangled worm that hooked women. Women were the dangled worms that hooked men. Both ways it was a bad deal, a lousy deal. Who was trapped the most? He found awe-inspiring those decades ofsmall miscalculations, the trifles on which monstrous disasters depended: the struggle for home ownership—but the right sort of home!—the home that would bring Bosie’s ultimately suburban approval; the children—those beaking birds querulous with demand; the school fees; the debts; the overdraft. That never-ending overdraft. The pretence, at gatherings of friends who were also engaged in pretending, that everything was jake, hunky-dory, keen, cool, a total gas. Cheap laughter around the unpaid-for pools with the cheap wine flowing and in the back of every mind, thrust back but there, the tick of the plastic card meter, tocking over.
    Hey, what a party!
    Great bash, man!
    Jesus, Brain, do I have a hangover!
    Smashing, Bosie darling. Absolutely smashing. We had a ball! Just loved those thingummies en croûte. You must tell me how you did them
.
    Make it our place next time
.
    And ours
.
    And ours
.
    And ours and ours and ours and …
    In the red. In the mood and in the red. A frieze of unpally bank managers. In the red but still in the mood. Failed projects one after another. Even failed despair. In the syncopated pauses Brain pondered suicide, thoughts flippantenough of cutting out without a trace; of leaps from buildings, train hurlings, boat plungings. He couldn’t crack even those and Bosie’s
Oh Brain, must you! Bims and Chaps are at boarding school. Think of them
. changed to
Thank God Bims and Chaps are at boarding school. Thank God they’re spared seeing their father
… (But seeing his father, that grotesque scene in the specialist’s rooms on the Terrace as a horrible entr’acte before he too moved on to the next scheme, to collapse in a torpor of weather when the induced lassitude of Brisbane’s streets threatened to choke.)
    He was not really serious
, Bosie assured telephoning friends who had heard of his latest financial misadventure, a disco called Heart of Darkness with shares largely owned by the minister for transports and closed down after three months by the police, who wanted more protection money.
If he were truly serious
, she babbled,
then he would achieve oblivion. Listen, why don’t we meet for coffee?
    Huh?
    Bosie punished him.
    â€˜I’ve booked it up,’ she would say challengingly to his outraged face (there were no cheapskate kisses these days!) as he glared at a new dishwasher, freezer, airconditioner, inflatable swimming-pool table, entire new summer wardrobe.
    â€˜You’ve bloody what?’
    Shit! Head between hands. Oh shit!
    It felt, Brain decided in his saner moments, like the Hundred Years War. And the protagonists never changed.
The woods decay
, he quoted softly and sullenly to himself, pouring fibre bran into his breakfast bowl,
the woods decay and fall, the vapours weep
(pouring the milk)
their burthen to the ground … Me only cruel immortality consumes
. ‘ “I wither,” ’ he suddenly shouted at the heavenly morning glittering on the impeccable surface of the pool, ‘ “slowly in thine arms, here at the quiet limit of the
worlds
!” ’
    â€˜Brain, the neighbours!’ Bosie cried, coming out to the kitchen.
    Yet, ‘“And thee returning on thy silver heels,” ’ he mischanted impertinently to her after one particularly trying evening with a failed avocado grower from the Tablelands.
    â€˜What?’ Bosie snapped. ‘What? I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
    â€˜No