Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Flora Manhood did stoop, to pick up, not a stone, but an empty bottle which had begun swirling round her ankles. She half-aimed it at a window, and it fell short; it plopped amongst the oleanders. She walked on muttering, smarting for a feebleness which overcame her at decisive moments. There were moments when she wondered what actual control she had over her own will, in spite of her latchkey, her training as a nurse, and her contempt for those who thought they would take advantage of her.

Probably she felt contempt for everyone she knew, except perhaps Mrs Hunter: why not Mrs Hunter, when half the time she hated the old thing, she had not yet been able to decide. She admired, possibly, heights to which she herself could not aspire. Flora Manhood remembered how she and Col had once watched a rather boring documentary of some mountaineering expedition on which the climbers never quite made the highest peak; the last shots in the film, with a commentary you had stopped listening to long before, were of this half-veiled peak, sombre at first in the distance, then for a moment, as the sun struck, breaking through to blind.

Of course it was silly really to connect this half-dead bed-wetting still spiteful old woman with a mountain, even though Mrs Hunter did at times break through the mists of senility and give you a glimpse of something else. You only hoped that one day she wouldn’t frighten you with such a glimpse as you feared she might.

Down at the intersection the night closed in more grimly in spite of the noise, the traffic, the lights. At least from that level the refineries could no longer be seen, but the exhaust fumes thickened. It was frightening, all this lung cancer. She began breathing very lightly, tried in fact not to breathe at all, so as not to inhale the fumes. Along the pavement, in the shadow between lamps, a man was trying to pick her up, of what description she couldn’t, didn’t want to know. As she hurried along, the man followed on her darker side, mumbling half-intelligible words. A foreigner of some kind, which made it worse: foreigners were darker, and usually sober. To sleep with some hairy foreigner ( Yes I did it Col with my eyes open I am my own mistress aren’t I knowing all the dangers — the risk of venereal disease which is actually what I have caught — syphilis has been diagnosed).

By the next crossing at least she had shaken off the man. She was in the hell of a lather, though. Keep on along the same old everlasting stretch. Turn left, second right, and she would be ‘home’: Vidlers’ back room with use of kitchen and cons. Fry herself a couple of eggs. Women are lucky: they can live on eggs if need be. And cheese. And chocolate. Then a long hot bath if the system wasn’t playing up. She enjoyed her sleep: couldn’t get enough of it; and dreams. Sometimes she tried to choose her dreams. She would try to dream about Sir Basil Hunter.

At 26 Gladys Street decency prevailed: the dwarf shrubs pruned to shapes in their green concrete surrounds; the composition path, which Mrs Vidler scrubbed and mopped all the way from gate to doorstep; the letter-box poised at the top of a stiffened chain (Mr Vidler, a handyman at all times, had his artistic side). Sister Manhood rooted around in her bag for the key. What if she had lost it? It wouldn’t matter all that much: Mr Vidler would let her in, into her own room, with its airless cleanliness, and lounge you converted into a bed. Mr Vidler would say, no trouble at all, Flo — just as if you was our own daughter. Mr Vidler was ‘Vid’, Mrs Vidler ‘Viddie’: they were such mates.

Because kindliness can suffocate, Sister Manhood went away, back along the composition path, past the letter-box standing on its stiffened chain. She wasn’t going to Col’s, though. She would muck around for a bit. None of Col’s old chops and grease under your fingernails. If you wash the grill Flo soon as it cools off you won’t notice you’re doing it — not like if the fat sets. Oh, yeah? This was the kind of decisive moment which always slipped away from her: it left her elbow-deep in grey water washing up Col’s greasy old grill, while Col played Mahler at her, or read out from some intellectual magazine opinions which confirmed his own. Then when you had hung out the damp, stinking towels, and you were what Col liked to call ‘mooded’ by the music, he would make ‘love’, he referred to it; and though you too, recognized it as such, you couldn’t very well have admitted. Love as she tried, but failed to imagine, couldn’t be so easy and cheap, or smelling of mutton fat and sweat.

Col once read her thoughts and said, what if I’ve planted a baby in you Flo that’ll give us something for real. She downright panicked; she tried to remember how regular she had been with the pill; she couldn’t.

Tonight she panicked, not for that reason, but for trying to come to the end of this street of deadly dolls’-houses, all painted up in emulation of one another, and behind their faces, either suffocating kindliness, or variations on her own theme of chaos. So her feet slapped the pavement. She almost broke her neck to reach the Parade: where a couple of blocks down she could read PHARMACY in crimson. She half expected to smell the chops he must have charred by now, for reading What’s-his-name — Oonermooner, or some equally unreadable nut.

Flora Manhood crossed the Parade. She would go to Snow’s; it was surprising she hadn’t thought of it before. There was every reason why she should come to this decision: my cousin Mrs Hunter my only relative left has asked me to share her flat I only have to make up my mind Snow Tunks a bus conductress. Snow could be the answer: as good as a man without the disadvantages.

Flora Manhood went spanking through the night towards ‘Miami Flats’ where her cousin Snow hung out. There was nothing to recommend the street, except its convenience: close to the bus, the delicatessen — and the chemist. ‘Miami’s’ barley-sugar columns were peeling; one of them had cracked; something, probably a runaway truck, had cannoned off a corner of the building and played hell with the roughcast. Just at the entrance a fluorescent light sat spitting at the top of its pole, so that all the potplants in the hanging gardens of ‘Miami’ were nickering sickeningly.

But Flora Manhood was almost puking with relief: she might have been walking through the steady white glare, like in the old days, along the road which ran between the banana farms. Snow, an older girl, told how Ken Mathews asked me to go steady but you’re the one Florrie I’ll always love. It tickled Flora. Not that she hadn’t been, and still was in a way, fond. It was sort of comforting, close and easy, being cousins. But funny. Ken Mathews must have been simple or something to want Snow as a steady date. Even went into Coff’s Harbour and bought her a diamond baguette ring. While other boys were laughing: she was growing muscles instead of tits. Had white hair as far back as you were able to remember. Certainly Snow was strong: Uncle’s best hand about the place; no man, Uncle said, would ever regret his investment. Helped Auntie Ol too, with the goats; the boys at the Saturday dance said you could smell the buck on Snow. (What would Mrs Hunter make of that?) Then Snowy decided to leave. In spite of the baguette ring she said Ken Mathews was unnatural. She was going to the city to find a job. She did. She became a bus conductress.

Though it was planned you should do nursing, so as to better yourself in life and perhaps get a doctor or other professional man for a husband, it couldn’t be for some years yet. Snow went first seeing she was that much older. The night before she left you clung together and snivelled a bit; you had never been closer. Because she was tense, Snow pressed her hard body in between your thighs, her flat tits against the beginnings of your cushiony ones, while the moonlight was rustling between the rows of bananas, and the bandicoots went frrt-frrt. You had a cry, because the future was too enormous to grasp, and the bandicoots would still be making their farting noise in the country around Coff’s Harbour long after Snow, or yourself even, had left.