【荆棘鸟】第十一章 02

 “You looked all right to me.” 

   “How far is it now?” she asked, giving up. 

   “Three to six hours, give or take a bit. They don’t run to timetableup here too much. There’s plenty of room now those blokes aregone; lie down and put your tootsies in my lap.” 

   “Oh, don’t baby-talk me!” she snapped tartly¹. 

   “It would havebeen a lot better if they’d got off two days ago in Bundaberg!” 

   “Come on now, Meghann, be a good sport! Nearly there. OnlyTully and Innisfail, then Dungloe.”It was late afternoon when they stepped off the train, Meggie clinging desperately² to Luke’s arm, too proud to admit shewasn’t able to walk properly. He asked the stationmaster for thename of a workingmen’s hotel, picked up their cases and walkedout onto the street, Meggie behind him weaving drunkenly. 

   “Only to the end of the block on the other side of the street,” hecomforted. 

   “The white two-storied joint³.”Though their room was small and filled to overflowing⁴ with greatpieces of Victorian furniture, it looked like heaven to Meggie, collapsingon the edge of the double bed. 

   “Lie down for a while before dinner, love. I’m going out to findmy landmarks,” he said, sauntering from the room looking as freshand rested as he had on their wedding morning. That had beenSaturday, and this was late Thursday afternoon; five days sittingup in crowded trains, choked by cigarette smoke and soot⁵.The bed was rocking monotonously⁶ in time to the clickety-clickof steel wheels passing over rail joins, but Meggie turned her headinto the pillow gratefully, and slept, and slept.Someone had taken off her shoes and stockings, and covered herwith a sheet; Meggie stirred, opened her eyes and looked around.Luke was sitting on the window ledge⁷ with one knee drawn⁸ up,smoking. Her movement made him turn to look at her, and hesmiled. 

   “A nice bride you are! Here I am looking forward to my honeymoonand my wife conks out for nearly two days! I was a bitworried when I couldn’t wake you up, but the publican says it hitswomen like that, the trip up in the train and the humidity. He saidjust let you sleep it off. How do you feel now?”She sat up stiffly, stretched her arms and yawned, 

   “I feel muchbetter, thank you. Oh, Luke! I know I’m young and strong, butI’m a woman! I can’t take the sort of physical punishment you can.”He came to sit on the edge of the bed, rubbing her arm in a rather charming gesture of contrition⁹. 

   “I’m sorry, Meghann,I really am. I didn’t think of your being a woman. Not used tohaving a wife with me, that’s all. Are you hungry, darling?” 

   “Starved. Do you realize it’s almost a week since I’ve eaten?” 

   “Then why don’t you have a bath, put on a clean dress and comeoutside to look at Dungloe?”There was a Chinese café next door to the hotel, where Luke ledMeggie for her first-ever taste of Oriental food. She was so hungryanything would have tasted good, but this was superb. Nor didshe care if it was made of rats’ tails and sharks’ fins¹⁰ and fowls’bowels, as rumor¹¹ had it in Gillanbone, which only possessed¹² a caférun by Greeks who served steak and chips. Luke had brown-baggedtwo quart bottles of beer from the hotel and insisted she drink aglass in spite of her dislike for beer. 

   “Go easy on the water at first,” he advised. 

   “Beer won’t give youthe trots¹³.”Then he took her arm and walked her around Dungloe proudly,as if he owned it. But then, Luke was born a Queenslander. Whata place Dungloe was! It had a look and a character far removedfrom western towns. In size it was probably the same as Gilly, butinstead of rambling¹⁴ forever down one main street. Dungloe wasbuilt in ordered square blocks, and all its shops and houses werepainted white, not brown. Windows were vertical¹⁵ woodentransoms, presumably to catch the breeze, and wherever possibleroofs had been dispensed¹⁶ with, like the movie theater, which hada screen, transomed walls and rows of ship’s canvas desk chairs,but no roof at all.All around the edge of the town encroached a genuine jungle.Vines and creepers sprawled¹⁷ everywhere—up posts, across roofs,along walls. Trees sprouted¹⁸ casually¹⁹ in the middle of the road, orhad houses built around them, or perhaps had grown up throughthe houses. It was impossible to tell which had come first, trees or humanhabitations, for the overwhelming impression was one of uncontrolled,hectic growth of vegetation. Coconut²⁰ palms taller andstraighter than the Drogheda ghost gums waved fronds²¹ against adeep, swimming blue sky; everywhere Meggie looked was a blazeof color. No brown-and-grey land, this. Every kind of tree seemedto be in flower—purple, orange, scarlet²², pink, blue, white.There were many Chinese in black silk trousers, tiny black-andwhiteshoes with white socks, white Mandarin-collared shirts, pigtailsdown their backs. Males and females looked so alike Meggiefound it difficult to tell which were which. Almost the entire commerceof the town seemed to be in the hands of Chinese; a largedepartment store, far more opulent than anything Gilly possessed,bore a Chinese name: AH WONG’S, said the sign.All the houses were built on top of very high piles, like the oldhead stockman’s residence on Drogheda. This was to achievemaximum air circulation, Luke explained, and keep the termitesfrom causing them to fall down a year after they were built. At thetop of each pile was a tin plate with turned-down edges; termitescouldn’t bend their bodies in the middle and thus couldn’t crawlover the tin parapet into the wood of the house itself. Of coursethey feasted on the piles, but when a pile rotted it was removedand replaced by a new one. Much easier and less expensive thanputting up a new house. Most of the gardens seemed to be jungle,bamboo and palms, as if the inhabitants had given up trying tokeep floral order. 

   The men and women shocked her. To go for dinner and a walkwith Luke she had dressed as custom demanded in heeled shoes,silk stockings, satin slip, floating silk frock with belt and elbowsleeves. On her head was a big straw hat, on her hands were gloves.And what irritated her the most was an uncomfortable feeling from the way people stared that she was the one improperly²³ dressed!The men were bare-footed, bare-legged and mostly bare-chested,wearing nothing but drab khaki shorts; the few who covered theirchests did so with athletic²⁴ singlets, not shirts. The women wereworse. A few wore skimpy cotton dresses clearly minus anythingin the way of underwear, no stockings, sloppy²⁵ sandals. But themajority wore short shorts, went bare-footed and shielded theirbreasts with indecent little sleeveless vests. Dungloe was a civilizedtown, not a beach. But here were its native white inhabitantsstrolling around in brazen²⁶ undress; the Chinese were better clad.There were bicycles everywhere, hundreds of them; a few cars,no horses at all. Yes, very different from Gilly. And it was hot, hot,hot. They passed a thermometer which incredibly said a mere²⁷ ninetydegrees; in Gilly at 115 degrees it seemed cooler than this. Meggiefelt as if she moved through solid air which her body had to cutlike wet, steamy butter, as if when she breathed her lungs filledwith water. 

   “Luke, I can’t bear it! Please, can we go back?” she gasped²⁸ afterless than a mile. 

   “If you want. You’re feeling the humidity. It rarely gets belowninety percent, winter or summer, and the temperature rarely getsbelow eighty-five or above ninety-five. There’s not much of a seasonalvariation, but in summer the monsoons²⁹ send the humidityup to a hundred percent all the flaming time.” 

   “Summer rain, not winter?” 

   “All year round. The monsoons always come, and when they’renot blowing, the southeast trades are. They carry a lot of rain, too.Dungloe has an annual rainfall of between one and three hundredinches.”Three hundred inches of rain a year! Poor Gilly ecstatic if it gota princely fifteen, while here as much as three hundred fell, twothousand miles from Gilly. 

   “Doesn’t it cool off at night?” Meggie asked as they reached the hotel; hot nights in Gilly were bearable compared tothis steam bath. 

   “Not very much. You’ll get used to it.” He opened the door totheir room and stood back for her to enter. 

   “I’m going down to thebar for a beer, but I’ll be back in half an hour. That ought to giveyou enough time.”Her eyes flew to his face, startled. 

   “Yes, Luke.”Dungloe was seventeen degrees south of the equator, so nightfell like a thunderclap; one minute it seemed the sun was scarcelysetting, and the next minute pitch-black darkness spread itself thickand warm like treacle³⁰. When Luke came back Meggie had switchedoff the light and was lying in the bed with the sheet pulled up toher chin. Laughing, he reached out and tugged³¹ it off her, threw iton the floor. 

   “It’s hot enough, love! We won’t need a sheet.”She could hear him walking about, see his faint shadow sheddingits clothes. 

   “I put your pajamas³² on the dressing³³ table,” shewhispered. 

   “Pajamas? In weather like this? I know in Gilly they’d have astroke at the thought of a man not wearing pajamas, but this isDungloe! Are you really wearing a nightie?”