A Cry from the Dark (12 page)

Till then no harm could come to them, surely.

The Corunna Trio finished their tuning and started the evening off with the “Merry Widow Waltz.” The Corunna Trio knew what they were doing. A traditional waltz was the first thing learned at Mrs. MacKenzie's dancing classes in Corunna. These classes were eagerly attended by the girls of the area, less so by the boys—those who went only did so under the impression that dancing was the way to get girls. Many of the boys who did not attend (and family finances rarely stretched beyond the girls anyway, and dancing was really a girls' thing, wasn't it?) were taught by their classmates, and for many of the lads of Bundaroo their first real feel of a girl happened to the strains of the “Merry Widow Waltz” or the “Blue Danube.”

Betty took to the floor with Hughie. Both of them knew the steps, and after a single circuit of the little hall they were doing them with confidence and brio. Their showmanship, their consciousness that they made a good-looking couple, brought its inevitable reward: “Just look at those two—don't they just think they're the cat's whiskers!”; “Thinks her poopie doesn't smell, that Betty Whitelaw—always has.” Betty and Hughie danced on, smiling at each other if at no one else. I don't care, said Betty to herself. I'm enjoying it, I'm doing it well, I could be a wonderful dancer someday and so could Hughie, and why should we
hide
it just because some of the cow cockies are
jealous
?

When the “Merry Widow” had had a good outing, the trio changed tempo to a veleta, and Hughie and Betty made for the food table, chattering and laughing. Some of the others did the same.

“Are we allowed to eat with the star performers?” asked Steve Drayton, addressing no one in particular, as if posing an abstract philosophical question.

“Suit yourself,” said Betty. The moment she'd said it she wished she'd said, “Oh, don't be silly, Steve,” or something personal.

“They think they're Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers,” said Alice Carey.

“Got to do something like dancing if you're one of the queer brigade like him,” said Steve.

They did not dance for the next half hour, but stood around eating sandwiches and cake and drinking lemonade, behaving as if the world would end if they stopped talking. When their talk got down to the personal level Hughie said that Steve Drayton was uncertain about his own sexual tastes, which Betty thought unlikely, and that Alice had probably nourished gnawing feelings of jealousy for years as the less interesting partner in her friendship with Betty, who thought that made sense.

Needless to say, no one asked Betty to dance, and Hughie knew that anyone he asked would refuse, or just turn away. You could tell that by the expressions on their faces. Even many of the faces on the dance floor turned in their direction in the middle of gracious, Mrs. MacKenzie–tutored motions with looks approaching hatred, or with theatrical grimaces of contempt. Betty felt her blood stirring. It was clearly time for them to take to the floor again—this they both realized without saying so: standing talking for too long only underlined their status as pariahs.

Suddenly the trio seemed to respond to their instinct. With a scrape and a twiddle they ended their current fox-trot, and the leader announced in a stentorian voice: “And now for our medley of songs from the shows!” The medleys were popular—the parents and other assorted adults who came and went at these evenings, forming a little knot at the door, loved them and hummed along with old favorites; the less enthusiastic dancers left the floor gratefully and pounced on the refreshments, and only the adept who could keep up with the ever-changing tunes were left in the center of the hall floor. The tunes could range from old music-hall favorites to the “Barcarole” from the
Tales of Hoffmann,
and the trio prided themselves on keeping up with the latest hits on Broadway and Shaftes-bury Avenue.

They began with “Bill,” and they emphasized the yearning, painful qualities of the tune, and that clutching at the heartstrings got to Betty, made her feel she had to play it out somehow, give it some physical embodiment. She went toward the floor, where only two or three couples were left, and her hands went above her head and her body began to gyrate in a routine that was expressive of longing, that was partly sexual, partly a lust for anything new, surprising, unknown—anything that was not Bundaroo. She had hardly begun when Hughie left his station by the wall and began his own dance—slow, unshowy, introspective, as before out at Wilgandra, near to Betty but not with her, exploring the unknowable, or maybe the inexplicable strangeness of love. Perhaps on a signal from their leader (Betty was conscious only of her own body) the trio kept with the yearning, frustration, unhappiness; they slipped into “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and Betty's own eyes glinted with recognition and Hughie gave her a brief grin of mutual understanding, and their bodies speeded up as they tried to give expression to a cynical resignation that they knew about, could identify with, but had never really felt themselves—and even as they danced they felt a performer's sort of elation.

Two of the couples on the floor walked off, and as they went by they said “Show-offs” and “What do they think they look like?” Now there was only one other couple, Ed Malone and Kitty Horne, unwilling to give up any opportunity of licensed bodily contact (in the succeeding twenty years they were to increase significantly Bundaroo's population, and Kitty continued the good work even when Ed was with the Australian army in New Guinea), but they preferred the darkness and anonymity of the edges of the dance floor, and left the center to Betty and Hughie. As the trio edged their way into “Summertime,” the languorous heat of the day entered Betty's limbs and the enervating nothingness of a place where the sun sucked out all desire for activity except the purely sensual, and Hughie made gestures toward his classmates that were slow and minimal (and kept from the eyes of the parents clustered around the door), but verged on the obscene.

Then the trio launched into “Anything Goes” and Betty and Hughie, as with the Beethoven Seventh but in reverse, could not cope with the effervescent after the steamy and languid, and, talking and laughing, they left the floor.

From the doorway there came a smattering of applause.

“
Didn't
they make an exhibition of themselves?” said Alice to Steve Drayton.

“If only they could see themselves,” said Steve. “Flaming galahs!”

But Miss Dampier, sensing trouble like an educational weather vane, came over from the door where she was swapping words with some of the parents and said, “That was really wonderful, both of you. So unusual!”

“Out of this bloody world!” came a mock-upper-class accent from somewhere around the food table. Miss Dampier seemed to feel she ought to say something, respond in some way to the obvious hostility from the rest of the Leavers, but, unable for once to think of anything to say, she wandered off, looking back nervously.

“There's your parents just come in,” said Betty to Hughie.

“Thank God they weren't here ten minutes ago. These hicks have nothing on them when it comes to ignorance and nastiness if their beloved only son steps out of line.”

“They'll probably hear about it from the other parents.”

“Not them! We don't talk much with the natives…” The thought seemed to make him nervous, though. “Still, maybe I'll preempt it.”

They were now at the doorway, where the little knot of parents and others were talking freely among themselves. Hughie went over with a self-induced air of confidence.

“Hi, Mum. Hi, Dad. You should have been here ten minutes ago. Betty and I did a solo spot. It was a real laugh.”

“Oh, it wasn't—it was lovely,” said one of the mothers. “It was so artistic, and very tasteful.”

“Excuse me,” said Betty, smiling but determined, pushing her way through the little throng and out into the fresh air. Sometimes the attitudes of Bundaroo made her feel as if she were suffocating.

Outside was better. Outside had a tiny touch of cool in the air. Betty looked around her. She gazed over toward the lights of Bob's Café, where some parents were standing in the entrance, under the veranda, chatting and laughing. Probably coming over to take a look at the performing seals, she thought. She wanted to be on her own—not watched, not questioned, not jeered at by her onetime friends. If she was different from them—which was the substance of their jeers, at Hughie as well as herself—then she didn't want to be like them. She walked away from the school gate and the little main street beyond, round the back of the high school building with the assembly hall built on to it, then toward the primary section, which was a small wooden building little better than a shack.

One thing about inland Australia: land was cheap. The Bundaroo School did not have lavish facilities, but it had plenty of playground space. She stood between the school she was now leaving and the school she had started at when she was five. Back in the hall the music had started up again, and she could hear the thump of heavy shoes on wood. She felt, suddenly, very tired. Her solo dances with Hughie had not been physically exhausting, but they had been a gesture, a defiant slap in the face at attitudes and prejudices that she loathed, but which seemed endemic in her friends. The gesture had left her feeling alone and drained. She wondered if she had been right in thinking she would come back often to Bundaroo. It could only be to see her parents, whom she loved. If they moved, she now felt, she would never set foot in the little town again.

There was hardly a sound to be heard, beyond the beautiful ripple of water and the distant rhythm of dance music. There was a rustle in the long grass, as one of the creatures of the bush reacted to her presence. She began to feel cleansed of the spite and jealousy in the school hall. She turned toward the slow dribble of water that they called “the river,” which had only once in her lifetime swelled to the raging torrent that everyone said it was capable of. A little wattle fence separated the littlies' playing area from the rough-grassed bank leading down to the river. Here it was very dark, and well away from all the futile bustle of a tiny town on one of its gala nights. She ought to have felt frightened here, but she did not—only a sense that the best thing that Bundaroo offered was the space to be alone.

The attack came from behind—an arm around her neck, then tightened so savagely that she choked. For the rest of her life even a tap on the shoulder from behind would terrify her. She tried to scream, but the arm was still against her windpipe, holding her, rendering her helpless, but saying nothing.

“Stop it!” she whispered hoarsely. “It's not funny! Who is it? Steve?”

But now she was being turned around, and now the darkness was no longer a friend. Her dress was being torn, brutal fingers searching underneath it, ripping away her pants. She heard gulped breathing, smelt a smell she recognized, smelt it with nausea and fear, then felt her legs being forced apart. She tried kicking, but her feet went wide of the mark and she felt something hard and terrifying entering her, and a hand across her mouth preventing her screaming. Some long ago advice in a woman's magazine her mother read regularly told her she should fight no more, should relax and hope to take the edge off “the vile beast's ferocity.”

Minutes later she lay in the undergrowth at the foot of the fence, bleeding and sobbing, conscious of footsteps running away. Part of her wanted to lie there, hide, put a temporary stop to her life. But something else told her to get away. Who knew who else might be there in the darkness around the primary school? Who knew whether some of the male members of her class might not be lurking in the darkness, just to watch, or to take their turn? She must run or it could happen again.

She dragged herself to a sitting position. It felt as though her legs would refuse to support her, but she managed to kneel, then to push herself upright, then to take a step. Then she began to run, clutching her torn and bloody dress around her—first toward the high school, still alive with music and lights, then suddenly swerving away from it, nauseated by the thought of appearing before her fellow pupils as she now was, beaten, degraded, humiliated. She ran around the school, around the hall, then toward the school gates and out into the street. Down the far end of the main street she saw the lights of Grafton's and shuddered. Nearer, marginally more of a refuge, was Bob's Café. Maybe her parents were still there. She ran, still sobbing with rage and shame, till she made the veranda and could throw open the door. She had no sooner entered than she heard a woman scream, heard footsteps coming toward her, felt protective hands even as she felt herself floating out of consciousness.

When, reluctance gripping her like a vise, she drifted back into awareness of what was going on around her, she heard her father's voice, but with a blazing fury she had never heard before, say, “I'm taking her home. Where's that Naismyth? We can use Bill's car.”

“What about PS Malley?” came Bob's voice.

“Sergeant Malley can come out to our place. Where was he when he was needed? Grafton's, I bet. And tell him to get hold of Dr. Merton. Come on, Dot. We're taking her home and putting her in her own bed.”

Someone at the door said, “That's the Naismyths coming back now.”

A way was made for her father, and she heard him from farther off saying, “Paul. I need the car. We've got to take Betty home.”