The Slow Natives by Thea Astley Read Free Book Online

quietly and steadily.
    â€œGod in Heaven,” thought Bernard watching those regular and deliberate pulsings.
    â€œNo,” he said. “No. I’ll get it for you. It was autographed if I remember rightly . . . what? Don’t get excited, Harry. I can’t hear you. There probably won’t be anything on the lyrics at all. Come over, if you want, or go and have your siesta, do. Or detick the Labrador.”
    He hung up. “There’s cultural zest for you,” he said smilingwith an effort at his wife. “Geoghegan on some imaginary trail of a medieval lyrist. He’s like a cultural Mountie. Or do I mean mountebank? Tavern songs and some rather delicious little—”
    â€œShut up!” Iris said unexpectedly. “Shut up shut up shut up.”
    Because for years she had been afraid to explode the legend of for ever and ever, the durability of love within marriage, and had kept this lie alive along with a dozen other women with whom she took coffee breaks and who complained boastfully of their husband’s incessant attentions, she was staggered now by her lapse into truth. For half a minute, perhaps, their denuded dislike glared across the hire-purchase jungle that bound them in a cocoon of habit and monthly payments—“Till final instalment do us part,” witty Bernard had murmured provokingly—and then she took her frenzy with her into the back garden and started the car.
    Since there is a divination that apprehends the hawk about to fall or the branch, or the shadow within shadow, the held breath behind the darkened door, Bernard was able now to recognize that, Gerald or no Gerald, they had separated across rivers and the bridges were crumbled years ago. At this point the leaves are almost counted by the stripped brain; an exaggerated interest notes droplets swell on faucet ends and tumble into sinks, gutter, swell, tumble; nostalgia melts at last and the soul hops about like a ticket-of-leave man. Observe this frond, the spores of velvet, or this, this anguished new green bursting its sheath, or that jean-clad bottom-bouncing cookie or this fragile amber of pre-storm luminescence that might crack and reveal some horrible normalcy of the sky. Bernard could scarcely bear to look into the garden where thousands of shapes revealed piquancies he had not observed for fifteen years, could hardly withstand the blast of light let in by her repeated phrase. Groggily he raised the fly-screen and pushed the window out. Two incredibly beautiful, feather-soft, beak-sharp birds jazzed over the grass. The grass stabbed with millions of individual blades. Fence palings became identifiable with knots that rang chords, serrations that bit blue. His nothingness brimmed over and,still trapped by minutiae, he went out again to the canvas chair under the mango-trees and sat down to wait for his son.
    Yet neither flustered nor ashamed, Keith split eight-fifteen apart softly with his suede feet. He did not like the look of the anxious illumination of the porch, the clearance-waiting garbage bin too early by half, the show-boat brightness of number twenty-three that blazed its dangerous festivity on to the side lawns of twenty-one and twenty-five. Keith trod rubber silences by the side bougainvillea and came up the one, two, three, four, five back steps into the accusations of refrigerator and gas hot water switching noisily on.
    Through the open kitchen door he could see in the dinette his parents not speaking over coffee.
    â€œHullo, Bernard. Iris.” He was the jaunty attempter but his father told him to sit down in a tone he did not recall ever having heard before. Iris could not speak for relief. He counted the plastic canisters on top of the dresser and suddenly, idiotically became aware of Professor Geoghegan’s pedagogic tones talking with persistent mania into the living-room telephone.
    â€œWhere have you been?” Bernard asked.
    The terror-pleasure aspect