Free A Boat Load of Home Folk by Thea Astley Page B

brute!” He flapped his arms and clapped.
    â€œOf course, I shouldn’t tolerate it. His quiet insolence. There’ll have to be a written report.” As his voice rose, he wondered if it were true or if he were imagining the lot. Everyone was beginning to think him neurotic. He talked too much of his persecutors. People were starting to laugh. A line ran through his mind—
    Every face seems to have lost its features.
    Some inner quake has flattened out the maps.
    He had to pull himself to with a jerk of his sandy skull and found Marie had put her pen down to regard him with some concern. He heard his voice continuing to say, “But I don’t have the time. Simply don’t have the time. The map is flattened—” He paused. He wasthinking out loud the wrong things that should be kept private. He was sure he must be ill in some way.
    Marie’s luminous brown eyes took every bit of his uncertain mouth in.
    â€œI have to go to Dravuni,” he fumbled on. “Young Woodsall has to be taken up. There’s been petty theft at the asbestos plant. They think it’s one of the packers who comes down here. Oh God! It’s all so petty and pointless and I’m so tired I hardly know what I’m doing. I don’t know what the hell we colonize for, do you?”
    The noise of someone knocking around near the inner door distracted Miss Latimer who left abruptly, the fragments of their talk scattered about in air. Stevenson could hear her just beyond the room, but could not see. His irritability threatened him with pain again and when she returned he was bent over in his chair, holding his enduring belly.
    Unmoved, she went straight past him to the corner locker where the fan staggered round above the table and chair. She opened the locker door and watched herself in the mirror, not pleased, not unpleased. Her confidence overtook her in waves as she ran a comb through her short hair. Even the way in which she cold-bloodedly applied paint to her mouth and barely stayed to check the end result was alarming, Stevenson felt suddenly as he watched.
    â€œWhat’s up?” she asked, sensing his misery but not looking at him.
    â€œI’ve told you. I’m sick.”
    â€œVery?”
    â€œJesus!”
    â€œWell, I just asked. How about having a small drink?” She pulled a brandy flask from the top shelf and a couple of glasses. “P.R. they call this. I keep it for the paying customers.”
    He was trying to smile.
    â€œLake’s off,” she said. “I’m keeping you posted.”
    He tapped his fingers in some protective rhythm. “Poor buggar,” he said. “Don’t let’s dissect.”
    â€œHe was weak.”
    â€œSo are we all. Let’s leave him alone now. He’s had enough. I brought back a great fat prelate to roast him.”
    â€œThey’ve been saying he was going for days. It was only that you’ve been away for a fortnight.”
    Stevenson felt too tired at that moment to relate the outside world with this haphazard word-design; too tired even to move out of his puddle of self-pity that he could feel pulsing into a wave crescendo. He began to nibble his thumb, then the wet end of his cigarette, and regard with the anxiety that was natural to him what he imagined to be the vanishing shape of love. A tired vagueness, he supposed, in the most penumbral of lilacs and blues that waited constantly at the end of hot colonnades or tree aisles or beyond blinding dune curves, so that infuriatingly, amid stereotyped landscapeswith predictable figures, it might vanish into some arrangement of shadow or curve.
    â€œYou’re too soft,” she was saying.
    â€œI? I’m hard as nails.” He offered for inspection the bitten down jagged end of one finger. “And d-dangerous.” He stuttered on the word and made her laugh.
    â€œYou sympathize with everyone. Anyone at all. It doesn’t matter who. You