Q2

Text 2 — Prose fiction extract
Dorahy submits to this pull of fate. He packs a small bag, noting how one’s needs in age lie in inverse ratio to the expansion of the soul. He hopes. He boards a lumbering coastal vessel that rocks him out of his capital and, after a sea-shaken slumber, wakes after the third night to a sugarville morning of hard blue and yellow north of the tropic. From the salty deck he observes the wide reaches of blue bay water as the boat enters his destiny. Coastal scrub has thinned out its scraggy imprecision and has become the scraggier, scrubbier buildings of a town he has not entered for twenty years, which yet, as he watches the houses grow larger with approach, fills him with a nauseating nostalgia. He has kept apart as far as possible from the other passengers all the week, but now, as they join him along the railing, he feels obliged to share the excitement and the chatter. Hands point. Voices cry out. The boat noses its rusty way from harbour to river and river docks. There are only two others disembarking and he hopes to avoid them, knowing the town is full of pubs. Their reason for return is the same as his and already, conscious of his ambitions for solitariness, he wonders why he has come. His elderly legs wobble on this Friday morning gangplank but they are the same legs that strolled through this town twenty years before, and he marvels that he is experiencing grief when, he supposes, rage would be the better thing. Turning his back firmly on the river and the docks, he walks steadily up the slope past the warehouses and enters the town. The streets are busy with horses and big drays*. There are people on bicycles bumping along the rough roads. Groggy from all this, he stands uncertain in sunlight, his bag at his feet. One should never go back. He decides this with vehemence and wonders then is he thinking of the psychic mistake of it or his own lack of charity. One does go back, he knows, again and again. One should forgive places as much as people. This place has much to be forgiven it. Terrible to sense the valetudinarian** legs tentative along the footpath. But up here everyone saunters. He is relieved he does not look remarkable. It is a refusal to fight the heat which already is dealing him blow upon blow; rather a yielding to it. Already steam is rising from the baking township and its slow river. Already there is sweat along his hairline, the saddened back of his neck, trickling between his breasts. Text 2 continues on page 4 He feels reluctant to face his hotel yet, knowing its drabness already, the tired pots of fern, the bar-stink, the narrow bedroom with its spotted mirror. He walks on one hundred, two hundred yards and finds a tea-shop sluicing out the evening before. Rinsing the last strains of it, a thin girl has been doing penance with mop and bucket. She couldn’t care less about this elderly man with his thin face and thinner voice demanding tea. She isn’t forgiving anybody, refuses the credit of his smile, while slinging her bile across one table surface after the other with a rancid grey rag. But he tries. ‘It’s twenty years,’ he volunteers, ‘since I’ve been here.’ (Where are the banners, the bunting . . .) She deals savagely with the counter and crashes the glass jars of sweets to one side. ‘Lucky you,’ she says.

THEA ASTLEY Extract from A Kindness Cup * drays horse-drawn carts ** valetudinarian weak, feeble © Thea Astley, A Kindness Cup reproduced with permission from The Text Publishing Company Pty Ltd