The Thorn Birds Page 32

  And he seemed to assume she was quite as happy and comfortable as he was, that the coastal plain flying by was fascinating her. While she sat staring at it and not seeing it, hating it before she had so much as set foot on it.

  At Cardwell the two men got off, and Luke went to the fish-and-chip shop across the road from the station to bring back a newspaper-wrapped bundle.

  “They say Cardwell fish has to be tasted to be believed, Meghann love. The best fish in the world. Here, try some. It’s your first bit of genuine Bananaland food. I tell you, there’s no place like Queensland.”

  Meggie glanced at the greasy pieces of batter-dipped fish, put her handkerchief to her mouth and bolted for the toilet. He was waiting in the corridor when she came out some time later, white and shaking.

  “What’s the matter? Aren’t you feeling well?”

  “I haven’t felt well since we left Goondiwindi.”

  “Good Lord! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t you notice?”

  “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 timetable up here too much. There’s plenty of room now those blokes are gone; lie down and put your tootsies in my lap.”

  “Oh, don’t baby-talk me!” she snapped tartly. “It would have been a lot better if they’d got off two days ago in Bundaberg!”

  “Come on now, Meghann, be a good sport! Nearly there. Only Tully and Innisfail, then Dungloe.”

  It was late afternoon when they stepped off the train, Meggie clinging desperately to Luke’s arm, too proud to admit she wasn’t able to walk properly. He asked the stationmaster for the name of a workingmen’s hotel, picked up their cases and walked out onto the street, Meggie behind him weaving drunkenly.

  “Only to the end of the block on the other side of the street,” he comforted. “The white two-storied joint.”

  Though their room was small and filled to overflowing with great pieces of Victorian furniture, it looked like heaven to Meggie, collapsing on the edge of the double bed.

  “Lie down for a while before dinner, love. I’m going out to find my landmarks,” he said, sauntering from the room looking as fresh and rested as he had on their wedding morning. That had been Saturday, and this was late Thursday afternoon; five days sitting up in crowded trains, choked by cigarette smoke and soot.

  The bed was rocking monotonously in time to the clickety-click of steel wheels passing over rail joins, but Meggie turned her head into the pillow gratefully, and slept, and slept.

  Someone had taken off her shoes and stockings, and covered her with a sheet; Meggie stirred, opened her eyes and looked around. Luke was sitting on the window ledge with one knee drawn up, smoking. Her movement made him turn to look at her, and he smiled.

  “A nice bride you are! Here I am looking forward to my honeymoon and my wife conks out for nearly two days! I was a bit worried when I couldn’t wake you up, but the publican says it hits women like that, the trip up in the train and the humidity. He said just let you sleep it off. How do you feel now?”

  She sat up stiffly, stretched her arms and yawned, “I feel much better, thank you. Oh, Luke! I know I’m young and strong, but I’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 contrition. “I’m sorry, Meghann, I really am. I didn’t think of your being a woman. Not used to having 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 come outside to look at Dungloe?”

  There was a Chinese café next door to the hotel, where Luke led Meggie for her first-ever taste of Oriental food. She was so hungry anything would have tasted good, but this was superb. Nor did she care if it was made of rats’ tails and sharks’ fins and fowls’ bowels, as rumor had it in Gillanbone, which only possessed a café run by Greeks who served steak and chips. Luke had brown-bagged two quart bottles of beer from the hotel and insisted she drink a glass in spite of her dislike for beer.

  “Go easy on the water at first,” he advised. “Beer won’t give you the trots.”

  Then he took her arm and walked her around Dungloe proudly, as if he owned it. But then, Luke was born a Queenslander. What a place Dungloe was! It had a look and a character far removed from western towns. In size it was probably the same as Gilly, but instead of rambling forever down one main street. Dungloe was built in ordered square blocks, and all its shops and houses were painted white, not brown. Windows were vertical wooden transoms, presumably to catch the breeze, and wherever possible roofs had been dispensed with, like the movie theater, which had a 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 sprawled everywhere—up posts, across roofs, along walls. Trees sprouted casually in the middle of the road, or had houses built around them, or perhaps had grown up through the houses. It was impossible to tell which had come first, trees or human habitations, for the overwhelming impression was one of uncontrolled, hectic growth of vegetation. Coconut palms taller and straighter than the Drogheda ghost gums waved fronds against a deep, swimming blue sky; everywhere Meggie looked was a blaze of color. No brown-and-grey land, this. Every kind of tree seemed to be in flower—purple, orange, scarlet, pink, blue, white.

  There were many Chinese in black silk trousers, tiny black-and-white shoes with white socks, white Mandarin-collared shirts, pigtails down their backs. Males and females looked so alike Meggie found it difficult to tell which were which. Almost the entire commerce of the town seemed to be in the hands of Chinese; a large department 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 old head stockman’s residence on Drogheda. This was to achieve maximum air circulation, Luke explained, and keep the termites from causing them to fall down a year after they were built. At the top of each pile was a tin plate with turned-down edges; termites couldn’t bend their bodies in the middle and thus couldn’t crawl over the tin parapet into the wood of the house itself. Of course they feasted on the piles, but when a pile rotted it was removed and replaced by a new one. Much easier and less expensive than putting up a new house. Most of the gardens seemed to be jungle, bamboo and palms, as if the inhabitants had given up trying to keep floral order.

  The men and women shocked her. To go for dinner and a walk with Luke she had dressed as custom demanded in heeled shoes, silk stockings, satin slip, floating silk frock with belt and elbow sleeves. 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 improperly dressed!

  The men were bare-footed, bare-legged and mostly bare-chested, wearing nothing but drab khaki shorts; the few who covered their chests did so with athletic singlets, not shirts. The women were worse. A few wore skimpy cotton dresses clearly minus anything in the way of underwear, no stockings, sloppy sandals. But the majority wore short shorts, went bare-footed and shielded their breasts with indecent little sleeveless vests. Dungloe was a civilized town, not a beach. But here were its native white inhabitants strolling around in brazen 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 mere ninety degrees; in Gilly at 115 degrees it seemed cooler than this. Meggie felt as if she moved through solid air which her body had to cut like wet, steamy butter, as if when she breathed her lungs filled with water.

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

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

  “Summer rain, not winter?”

  “All year round. The monsoons always come, and when they’re not blowing, the southeast trades are. They carry a lot of rain, too. Dungloe has an annual rainfall of between one and three hundred inches.”

  Three hundred inches of rain a year! Poor Gilly ecstatic if it got a princely fifteen, while here as much as three hundred fell, two thousand miles from Gilly.

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

  “Not very much. You’ll get used to it.” He opened the door to their room and stood back for her to enter. “I’m going down to the bar for a beer, but I’ll be back in half an hour. That ought to give you enough time.”

  Her eyes flew to his face, startled. “Yes, Luke.”

  Dungloe was seventeen degrees south of the equator, so night fell like a thunderclap; one minute it seemed the sun was scarcely setting, and the next minute pitch-black darkness spread itself thick and warm like treacle. When Luke came back Meggie had switched off the light and was lying in the bed with the sheet pulled up to her chin. Laughing, he reached out and tugged it off her, threw it on the floor.

  “It’s hot enough, love! We won’t need a sheet.”

  She could hear him walking about, see his faint shadow shedding its clothes. “I put your pajamas on the dressing table,” she whispered.

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

  “Yes.”

  “Then take it off. The bloody thing will only be a nuisance anyway.”

  Fumbling, Meggie managed to wriggle out of the lawn nightgown Mrs. Smith had embroidered so lovingly for her wedding night, thankful that it was too dark for him to see her. He was right; it was much cooler lying bare and letting the breeze from the wideopen transoms play over her thinly. But the thought of another hot body in the bed with her was depressing.

  The springs creaked; Meggie felt damp skin touch her arm and jumped. He turned on his side, pulled her into his arms and kissed her. At first she lay passively, trying not to think of that wide-open mouth and its probing, indecent tongue, but then she began to struggle to be free, not wanting to be close in the heat, not wanting to be kissed, not wanting Luke. It wasn’t a bit like that night in the Rolls coming back from Rudna Hunish. She couldn’t seem to feel anything in him which thought of her, and some part of him was pushing insistently at her thighs while one hand, its nails squarely sharp, dug into her buttocks. Her fear blossomed into terror, she was overwhelmed in more than a physical way by his strength and determination, his lack of awareness of her. Suddenly he let her go, sat up and seemed to fumble with himself, snapping and pulling at something.

  “Better be safe,” he gasped. “Lie on your back, it’s time. No, not like that! Open your legs, for God’s sake! Don’t you know anything?”

  No, no, Luke, I don’t! she wanted to cry. This is horrible, obscene; whatever it is you’re doing to me can’t possibly be permitted by the laws of Church or men! He actually lay down on top of her, lifted his hips and poked at her with one hand, the other so firmly in her hair she didn’t dare move. Twitching and jumping at the alien thing between her legs, she tried to do as he wanted, spread her legs wider, but he was much broader than she was, and her groin muscles went into crampy spasm from the weight of him and the unaccustomed posture. Even through the darkening mists of fright and exhaustion she could sense the gathering of some mighty power; as he entered her a long high scream left her lips.

  “Shut up!” he groaned, took his hand out of her hair and clamped it defensively over her mouth. “What do you want to do, make everyone in this bloody pub think I’m murdering you? Lie still and it won’t hurt any more than it has to! Lie still, lie still!”

  She fought like one possessed to be rid of that ghastly, painful thing, but his weight pinned her down and his hand deadened her cries, the agony went on and on. Utterly dry because he hadn’t roused her, the even drier condom scraped and rasped her tissues as he worked himself in and out, faster and faster, the breath beginning to hiss between his teeth; then some change stilled him, made him shudder, swallow hard. The pain dulled to raw soreness and he mercifully rolled off her to lie on his back, gasping.

  “It’ll be better for you the next time,” he managed to say. “The first time always hurts the woman.”

  Then why didn’t you have the decency to tell me that beforehand? she wanted to snarl, but she hadn’t the energy to utter the words, she was too busy wanting to die. Not only because of the pain, but also from the discovery that she had possessed no identity for him, only been an instrument.

  The second time hurt just as much, and the third; exasperated, expecting her discomfort (for so he deemed it) to disappear magically after the first time and thus not understanding why she continued to fight and cry out, Luke grew angry, turned his back on her and went to sleep. The tears slipped sideways from Meggie’s eyes into her hair; she lay on her back wishing for death, or else for her old life on Drogheda.

  Was that what Father Ralph had meant years ago, when he had told her of the hidden passageway to do with having children? A nice way to find out what he meant. No wonder he had preferred not to explain it more clearly himself. Yet Luke had liked the activity well enough to do it three times in quick succession. Obviously it didn’t hurt him. And for that she found herself hating him, hating it.

  Exhausted, so sore moving was agony, Meggie inched herself over onto her side with her back to Luke, and wept into the pillow. Sleep eluded her, though Luke slept so soundly her small timid movements never caused so much as a change in the pattern of his breathing. He was an economical sleeper and a quiet one, he neither snored nor flopped about, and she thought while waiting for the late dawn that if it had just been a matter of lying down together, she might have found him nice to be with. And the dawn came as quickly and joylessly as darkness had; it seemed strange not to hear roosters crowing, the other sounds of a rousing Drogheda with its sheep and horses and pigs and dogs.

  Luke woke, and rolled over, she felt him kiss her on the shoulder and was so tired, so homesick that she forgot modesty, didn’t care about covering herself.

  “Come on, Meghann, let’s have a look at you,” he commanded, his hand on her hip. “Turn over, like a good little girl.”

  Nothing mattered this morning; Meggie turned over, wincing, and lay looking up at him dully. “I don’t like Meghann,” she said, the only form of protest she could manage. “I do wish you’d call me Meggie.”

  “I don’t like Meggie. But if you really dislike Meghann so much, I’ll call you Meg.” His gaze roved her body dreamily. “What a nice shape you’ve got.” He touched one breast, pink nipple flat and unaroused. “Especially these.” Bunching the pillows into a heap, he lay back on them and smiled “Come on, Meg, kiss me. It’s your turn to make love to me, and maybe you’ll like that better, eh?”

  I never want to kiss you again as long as I live, she thought, looking at the long, heavily muscled body, the mat of dark hair on the chest diving down the belly in a thin line and then flaring into a bush, out of which grew the deceptively small and innocent shoot which could cause so much pain. How hairy his legs were! Meggie had grown up with men who never removed a layer of their clothes in the presence of women, but open-necked shirts showed hairy chests in hot weather. They were all fair men, and not offensive to her; this dark man was alien, repulsive. Ralph had a head of hair just as dark, but well she remembered that smooth, hairless brown chest.

  “Do as you’r
e told, Meg! Kiss me.”

  Leaning over, she kissed him; he cupped her breasts in his palms and made her go on kissing him, took one of her hands and pushed it down to his groin. Startled, she took her unwilling mouth away from his to look at what lay under her hand, changing and growing.

  “Oh, please, Luke, not again!” she cried. “Please, not again! Please, please!”

  The blue eyes scanned her speculatively. “Hurts that much? All right, we’ll do something different, but for God’s sake try to be enthusiastic!”

  Pulling her on top of him, he pushed her legs, apart, lifted her shoulders and attached himself to her breast, as he had done in the car the night she committed herself to marrying him. There only in body, Meggie endured it; at least he didn’t put himself inside her, so it didn’t hurt any more than simply moving did. What strange creatures men were, to go at this as if it was the most pleasurable thing in the world. It was disgusting, a mockery of love. Had it not been for her hope that it would culminate in a baby, Meggie would have refused flatly to have anything more to do with it.

  “I’ve got you a job,” Luke said over breakfast in the hotel dining room.

  “What? Before I’ve had a chance to make our home nice, Luke? Before we’ve even got a home?”

  “There’s no point in our renting a house, Meg. I’m going to cut cane; it’s all arranged. The best gang of cutters in Queensland is a gang of Swedes, Poles and Irish led by a bloke called Arne Swenson, and while you were sleeping off the journey I went to see him. He’s a man short and he’s willing to give me a trial. That means I’ll be living in barracks with them. We cut six days a week, sunrise to sunset. Not only that, but we move around up and down the coast, wherever the next job takes us. How much I earn depends on how much sugar I cut, and if I’m good enough to cut with Arne’s gang I’ll be pulling in more than twenty quid a week. Twenty quid a week! Can you imagine that?”

  “Are you trying to tell me we won’t be living togther, Luke?”