Thomas Keneally - A River Town

But one of the Singles, a wholesome teetotal boy perhaps, who had not been vitiated by the beer, was running for the ball like a terrier. He had an appointment with that ball and Wooderson kept running, and Tim had his back to the boy when he heard the scream of triumph, and over his shoulder saw that the boy was flat on his back holding up in one hand the safely taken catch. Tim was exceptionally out . Patting his left hand with the blade of his bat, Wooderson applauded him as he left the paddock. Johnny came running towards him. “Dada, you scored thirty-seven runs.” The boy stood on his hands and remained like that for a time. A sign that he had all his unruliness back and would need to be watched.

Approaching Kitty, Tim could hear the patter of applause from wives and spectators. He yielded up his sweaty bat to the next batsman in, who said, “Can’t match you, Tim.”

“Here he is,” called Kitty to him. He noticed she had a glass of stout sitting thickly by her chair. Ideal for expectant and nursing mothers … Deep in the shade he saw pale Mrs. Malcolm clapping, though in a distracted way. As he knelt to unclasp the pad on his right leg, he saw his large white feet stained with grass and dirt. He wished he’d been wearing shoes for his cricketing performance. The river, by taking one of his new canvas shoes, had rendered him into a yokel.

“Sturdy chap, Tim!” called Ernie Malcolm. As if a score of 37 runs confirmed everything he’d ever known.

Someone put some warm ale into his hand, and as he drank it down he felt its amber pressure in his bladder. He waved to Kitty, and then off to the bushes for one of the great male delights. The open air piddle. A lion of cricket marking the open ground. Knees bent. Looking up at the rugged filigree tops of eucalypts. And 37 runs. Bugger me! Wondrous number.

In returning to Kitty he passed the keg. Two young men were standing there. One of them held his ale glass in his left hand, and in his right had raised up for viewing by himself and his friend a photograph of a young woman. One of those photographs taken by what they flashly called a studio. The photo was stiffly backed in cardboard. Passing behind them, Tim had no reason not to glance at it. The endless fascination of the twinning of souls. This kind of photograph commonly celebrated in photographic studies with the photographer’s name and address embossed on the edge of the object of desire and tenderness.

So he glanced. And oh Jesus it was Missy. Quite clearly so. Missy with her throat and shoulders shown off by a summer blouse. She stared indirectly at the viewer. Her head was turned down towards the bottom corner of the photograph, but her eyes held the centre of his gaze.

“What is this?” he asked the young man urgently. They turned to him, but the one with the photograph did not lower it.

“A dear friend of mine,” said the young man holding the photograph.

“Dear God,” said Tim. “Do you not bloody know…?”

“Know what?” asked the young man.

Tim’s face felt insanely hot. The sun had burned him by its massive stealth, and he was aware of the fact now.

“What is her name?” he asked the young man. “What is her name?”

The young man winked at his mate.

“Afraid she’s spoken for, Tim,” said the mate.

“For God’s sake, don’t play around. Give her name!”

“Go to hell, Tim,” said the boy with the photograph, lowering it now.

“Don’t you know?” asked Tim. “Don’t you even know that Constable Hanney is riding around with her head in a bottle?”

The first young man, the owner of the photograph, stepped forward.

“What’re you saying? What sort of bloody insult is that?”

“The sun’s got to him,” said the second young man, holding back his friend.

“Bloody hope so!” said the first one. He had however decided now not to attack Tim. He was looking around for his blazer to put the photograph away in it. Tim stepped out though and grabbed him by the arm. “For dear Christ’s sake, son, give me her name.”

“Miss Millie Holmes,” the young man yelled at him. “Miss Millie Holmes of Summer Island. Not in any bloody bottle, I can tell you, and I resent the idea like blazes.”

To prove the point, the young man ran at Tim and pushed him away. Trying to keep balance, Tim found he had no legs. He fell hard on his back under a bare, blue, circling sky. He saw the young man’s face swing like an errant star across his vision, and felt in his skull the urgent tread of many people on the earth close by. Wooderson’s voice crying, “Hold hard there!”

“Bloody disgrace, bloody disgrace,” he heard the friend of Millie Holmes say. A man’s voice asked, “Has he been drinking?” Kitty’s face and Wooderson’s swung into his vision, both massive. Welcome stars descended.

“It’s shock,” said Wooderson.

“And the heat,” said Kitty. “Poor Tim. Get him up, will you?” Of course Kitty could not bend forward. Wooderson could, and helped sit him up.

“He was ranting on about Millie Holmes,” Millie’s admirer’s well-liquored, easily-angered mate said. But he sounded uncertain.

“Don’t be a bloody fool,” Wooderson told the tipsy boy, and Kitty from her lesser height made soothing noises with her lips. Mrs. Malcolm had appeared with a glass of lemonade, and she was able to bend also. Tim was very careful to make all these observations, comparisons and calculations about people’s movements. He wasn’t sure which pieces of knowledge would be of help to him later. “Mr. Shea,” Mrs. Malcolm said in her lovely, serious, fey manner. “I knew this morning would prove altogether too much for you.”

Tennyson’s Maude . “On either side the river lie,” Tim told her, “long fields of barley and of rye.”

“Well, that is correct,” said Mrs. Malcolm, but Tim could tell she didn’t get the message.

Wooderson on his haunches now right beside him.

“Ask them please to show me the girl’s photograph,” Tim pleaded with Wooderson.

“Why, dear, do you want to see it?” murmured Kitty over Wooderson’s shoulder. She was frowning, and fearful too. She spoke softly. “Who do you think it is?”

“It’s Hanney’s Missy,” he told her. He had begun to shudder. He was fevered.

“That’s sunstroke talking,” said Wooderson to Kitty.

Kitty walked straight to the young man who owned the photograph.

“Let my husband see the picture,” she said commandingly. “Come on, give the thing up! He’s not going to eat it.”

And the boy did, defeated by little Kitty, who brought it over and lowered it towards Tim and said, “There!”

But when Tim inspected it the photograph had changed to something normal. All the lightning had gone from it. He saw there an altered, ordinary young woman who would see old age. A woman with an ordered life ahead. It could be told just by looking at her that she would not be hauled around the country by a bewildered constable. Hard for Tim to know now how the mistake had been made.

“I’m sorry,” he told Kitty, shivering. “I made an awful mistake. I’m sorry.”

Wooderson said. “No, don’t give it a thought. It’s heat prostration and the shock.”

“He’s sensitive to these things,” Kitty explained to Wooderson and Mrs. Malcolm. “To a fault, you know. Too much of a poet.”

Tim saw Winnie Malcolm’s rose-pink lips purse, going along with Kitty’s judgment.

The young admirer received his photograph back from Kitty, and went and put it away in his jacket with scarcely any show of grievance.

Someone—not Kitty—brought a cushion for Tim’s head. Perhaps it was Mrs. Malcolm again, but he could not be sure.

“No need for you to field, Tim,” said Wooderson. “You’ve done the brave task with your batting.”