Tim Read online

  She was conscious of a terrible, crushing disappointment, a desire to weep: Mrs. Parker's presence had faded to the back of her thoughts. It was a kind of ironic anti-climax to discover now that Tim's tragic mouth and wistful, wondering eyes led inward to a nothing, that his spark had been snuffed out of existence long before there could possibly have been tragedy or loss. He was no better than a dog or a cat, which one kept because it was good to look upon and blindly, lovingly faithful. But it could not think, it could never answer intelligently and draw out a shivering response in another questing mind. All the beast did was sit there, smiling and loving. As did Tim, Tim the simpleton. Tricked into eating excrement, he had not vomited it as any thinking being must; he had cried instead, as a dog would have howled, and been cajoled back into smiling again by the prospect of something good to eat.

  Childless, loveless, destitute of any humanizing influence, Mary Horton had no emotional yardstick whereby to measure this new, frightening concept of a mindless Tim. As retarded emotionally as he was intellectually, she did not know that Tim could be loved because of his stunted mental growth, let alone in spite of it. She had thought of him the way Socrates must have thought of Alci-biades, the aging, unlovely philosopher confronted with a youth of surpassing physical and intellectual beauty. She had imagined herself introducing him to Beethoven and Proust, expanding his careless young mind until it encompassed music and literature and art, until he was as beautiful within as he was without. But he was a simpleton, a poor, silly half-wit.

  They had a pungently evocative way of expressing it, smacking of the earthy callousness so typical of the Australian; they translated intelligence into money, and expressed the one in terms of the other. He who was poorly equipped mentally was "not the full quid"; a value was set upon his intellectual powers, expressed in parts of the dollar or in the vernacular, quid. He might be worth as much as ninety cents or as little as nine cents, and still be not the full quid.

  Mrs. Parker was not aware that she held only a small part of Mary's attention, and chattered on happily about the insensitivity of the average male, drank several cups of tea, and answered her own queries when Mary did not. At length she heaved herself to her feet and took her leave.

  "Cheery-bye, pet, and thanks for the cuppa tea. If you don't have anything he'd fancy in yer fridge, send him across to me and I'll feed him."

  Mary nodded absently. Her visitor disappeared down the steps, while she returned to her contemplation of Tim. Glancing at her watch she saw the time was creeping on toward nine, and remembered that these outdoor workmen liked their morning tea around nine. She went inside and made a fresh pot, thawed a frozen chocolate cake and covered it with freshly whipped cream.

  "Tim!" she called, putting down her tray on the table under the vines; the sun was stealing across the ridge of the roof, and the table by the steps was getting too hot for comfort.

  He looked up, waved to her and stopped the tractor immediately to hear what she was saying.

  "Tim, come and have a cup of tea!"

  His face lit up with puppyish eagerness; he bounded off the tractor and up the yard, dived into the little fern-house, reappeared with a brown paper bag, and took the back steps two at a time.

  "Gee, thanks for calling me, Miss Horton, I wasn't caught up with the time," he said happily, sitting down in the chair she indicated and waiting docilely until she told him he might begin.

  "Can you tell the time, Tim?" she asked gently, amazed that she could ask gently.

  "Oh, no, not really. I sort of know when it's time to go home, that's when the big hand's at the top and the little hand is three thingies behind it. Three o'clock. But I don't have a watch of my own, because Pop says I'd lose it. I don't worry. Someone always tells me the time, like when it's time to make the tea for smoke-oh or break for lunch or go home. I'm not the full quid, but everyone knows I'm not, so it doesn't matter."

  "No, I suppose it doesn't," she answered sadly "Eat up, Tim, the cake's all for you."

  "Oh, goody! I love choccy cake, especially witr lots of cream on it like this one! Thanks, Miss Horton! "

  "How do you like your tea, Tim?"

  "No milk and lots of sugar."

  "Lots of sugar? How much is that?"

  He looked up at her, frowning, cream ail over his face. "Gosh, I can't remember. I just sort of fill it up until it spills into the saucer, then I know it's all right."

  "Did you ever go to school, Tim?" she probed, beginning to be interested in him again.

  "For a little while. But I couldn't learn, so they didn't make me keep on going. I stayed home and looked after Mum."

  "But you do grasp what's said to you, and you did cope with the tractor all by yourself."

  "Some things are real easy, but reading and writing's awful hard, Miss Horton."

  Much surprised at herself, she patted his head as she stood stirring his tea. "Well, Tim, it doesn't matter."

  "That's what Mum says."

  He finished all the cake, then remembered he had a sandwich from home and ate that as well, washing the repast down with three big cups of tea.

  "Struth, Miss Horton, that was super!" he sighed, smiling at her blissfully.

  "My name is Mary, and it's much easier to say Mary than Miss Horton, don't you think? Why don't you call me Mary?"

  He looked at her doubtfully. "Are you sure it's all right? Pop says I mustn't call old people anything but Mister or Missus or Miss."

  "Sometimes it's permissible, as between friends."

  "Eh?"

  She tried again, mentally expunging all polysyllables from her vocabulary. "I'm not really all that old, Tim, it's just this white hair of mine that makes me seem so old. I don't think your Pop would mind if you called me Mary."

  "Doesn't your hair mean you're old, Mary? I always thought it did! Pop's hair is white and so is Mum's, and I know they're old."

  "He's twenty-five," she thought, "so his Pop and Mum are probably only slightly older than I am," but she said, "Well, I'm younger than they are, so I'm not quite old yet."

  He got to his feet. "It's time for me to go back to work. You've got an awful lot of lawn, Mary. I hope I finish it in time."

  "Well, if you don't there are plenty of other days. You can come some other time and finish it, if you'd like to."

  He considered the problem gravely. "I think I'd like to come back, as long as Pop says I can." He smiled at her. "I like you, Mary, I like you better than Mick and Harry and Jim and Bill and Curly and Dave. I like you better than anyone except Pop and Mum and my Dawnie. You're pretty, you've got such lovely white hair."

  Mary struggled with a hundred indefinable emotions rushing in on her from all sides, and managed to smile. "Why, thank you, Tim, that's very nice of you."

  "Oh, think nothing of it," he said nonchalantly, and hopped down the stairs with his hands flapping at each side of his head and his behind poking out. "That was my special imitation of a rabbit!" he called from the lawn.

  "It was very good, Tim, I knew you were a rabbit the minute you started hopping," she replied.

  She gathered up the tea things and carried them inside.

  She found it terribly hard to alter her conversation to a toddler level, for Mary Horton had never had anything to do with children since she ceased being a child herself, and she had never really been young anyway. But she was perceptive enough to sense that Tim could be easily hurt, that she had to mind what she said to him, control her temper and her exasperation, that if she let him feel the sting of her tongue he would divine the tenor of the statement if not the actual words. Remembering how she had snapped at him the previous day when he had been, as she thought at the time, deliberately obtuse, she was mortified. Poor Tim, so utterly unaware of the nuances and undercurrents of adult conversation, and so completely vulnerable. He liked her; he thought she was pretty because she had white hair, as did his mother and father.

  How could his mouth be so sad, when he knew so little and functioned on such a limi
ted scale?

  She got her car out and went down to the supermarket to shop before lunch, since she had nothing in the house that would appeal to him. The chocolate cake was her emergency entertaining fund, the cream a fortuitous mistake on her milkman's part. Tim had brought his lunch with him, she knew, but perhaps he hadn't enough, or could be charmed by the production of something like hamburgers or hot dogs, children's party fare.

  "Have you ever been fishing, Tim?"- she asked him over lunch.

  "Oh, yes, I love fishing," he replied, beginning on his third hot dog. "Pop takes me fishing sometimes, when he isn't too busy."

  "How often is he busy?"

  "Well, he goes to the races and the cricket and the football and things like that. I don't go with him because I get sick in crowds, the noise and all the people make my head ache and my tummy go all queer."

  "I must take you fishing, then," she said, and left it at that.

  By the middle of the afternoon he had finished the backyard and came to ask about the front. She looked at her watch.

  "I don't think we'll bother about the front today, Tim, it's nearly time for you to go home. Why don't you come back next Saturday and do the front for me then, if your Pop will let you?"

  He nodded happily. "All right, Mary."

  "Go and fetch your bag from the fern-house, Tim. You can change in my bathroom, then you'll be able to see if you have everything on properly."

  The interior of her house, so chaste and austere, fascinated him. He roamed about the gray-toned living room in his bare feet, digging his toes into the deep wool carpet with an expression of near-ecstasy on his face, and stroking the pearl-gray crushed velvet upholstery.

  "Gosh, Mary, I love your house!" he enthused. "It all feels so soft and sort of cool!"

  "Come and see my library," she said, wanting to show him her pride and joy so badly that she took him by the hand.

  But the library did not impress him in the least; it made him frightened and inclined to be tearful. "All those books!" he shuddered, and would not stay even when he saw that his reaction had disappointed her.

  It took her several minutes to coax him out of his odd dread of the library, and she took care not to repeat the mistake by showing him anything else intellectual.

  Once recovered from his initial delight and confusion, he evinced a critical faculty, and took her to task for not having any color in the house.

  "It feels so lovely, Mary, but it's all the same color!" he protested. "Why isn't there any red? I love red!"

  "Can you tell me which color this is?" she asked, holding up a red silk bookmark.

  "It's red, of course," he answered scornfully.

  "Then I'll see what I can do," she promised.

  She gave him an envelope with thirty dollars in it, a much higher wage than any laborer could command in Sydney. "My address and telephone number are written on a piece of paper inside," she instructed him, "and I want you to give it to your father when you get home, so that he'll know where I am and how to get in touch with me. Now don't forget to give it to him, will you?"

  He gazed at her, hurt. "I never forget anything when I'm told properly," he said.

  "I'm sorry, Tim, I didn't mean to hurt you," said Mary Horton, who had never cared whether what she said hurt anyone. Not that she habitually said hurtful things; but Mary Horton avoided saying hurtful things from motives of tact, diplomacy, and good manners, not because she wanted to avoid giving another being pain.

  She waved him goodbye from her front stoop, after he had refused to let her drive him to the railway station. Once he had gone a few yards down the street she walked to the* front gate and leaned over it to watch him until he disappeared around the corner.

  To anyone else in the street watching, he would have seemed an amazingly handsome young man striding along the road at the height of his health and looks, the world his to command. It was like some divine jest, she thought, the kind of joke the Greek immortals had loved to play on their creation, man, when he got conceited or forgot what was owed to them. The gargantuan laughter Tim Melville must provoke!

  Seven

  Ron was at the Seaside as usual, but early for a Saturday. He had loaded up his portable ice chest with beer and gone off to the cricket match clad in shorts, thong sandals, and a shirt left open all the way down to let in the breeze. But Curly and Dave had not shown up, and somehow the pleasure of lying on the grassy hill in the Sydney cricket ground sleeping in the sun was not the same alone. He stuck it for a couple of hours, but the cricket proceeded at its normal snaily pace and the horses he had backed at "Warwick Farm had both came in last, so at about three he had packed up his beer chest and radio, and headed for the Seaside with the unerring instinct of a bloodhound. It would never have occurred to him to go home; Es played tennis with the girls on Saturday afternoons, their local Hit and Giggle Club as he called it, and the house would be deserted with Tim working; Dawnie was off somewhere with one of her Quiz Kid boyfriends. When Tim turned up a little after four Ron was very pleased to see him, and bought him a schooner of Old.

  "How'd it go, mate?" he asked his son as they leaned their backs up against a pillar and stared across the sea.

  "The grouse, Pop! Mary's a real nice lady."

  "Mary?" Ron peered into Tim's face, startled and concerned.

  "Miss Horton. She told me to call her Mary. I was a bit worried, but she said it was all right. It's all right, isn't it, Pop?" he queried anxiously, sensing something unusual in his father's reaction.

  "I dunno, mate. What's this Miss Mary Horton like?"

  "She's lovely, Pop. She gave me a whole heap of beaut things to eat and showed me all over her house. It's air conditioned, Pop! Her furniture's real nice, so's her carpet, but everything's gray, so I asked her why she didn't have anything red around, and she said she'd see what she could do about it."

  "Did she touch you, mate?"

  Tim stared at Ron blankly. "Touch me? Gee, I dunno! I suppose she did. She took me by the hand when she was showing me her books." He pulled a face. "I didn't like her books, there were too many of them."

  "Is she pretty, mate?"

  "Oh, gee, yes! She's got the most lovely white hair, Pop, just like yours and Mum's, only whiter. That's why I didn't know whether it was all right for me to call her Mary, because you and Mum always tell me it isn't polite to call old people by their first name."

  Ron relaxed. "Oh!" He slapped his son playfully on the arm. "Struth, you had me worried for a minute there, I tell you. She's an old girl, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Did she pay you like she promised?"

  "Yes, it's here in an envelope. Her name and address is inside. She said I was to give it to you in case you wanted to talk to her. Why would you want to talk to her, Pop? I don't see why you'd want to talk to her."

  Ron took the proffered envelope. "I don't want to talk to her, mate. Did youse finish the job?"

  "No, she had too much lawn. If it's all right with you, she wants me to do the front garden next Saturday."

  There were three crisp, new ten-dollar bills in the envelope; Ron stared at them and at the clear, heavy overtones of authority and education in Mary Horton's handwriting. Silly young girls or lonely housewives didn't have handwriting like that, he decided. Thirty quid for a day's gardening! He put the notes in his own wallet and patted Tim on the back.

  "You done good, mate, and you can go back next Saturday and finish her lawn if you want to. In fact, for what she pays you can work for her any time she wants."

  "Gee, Pop, thanks!" He wiggled his empty glass from side to side suggestively. "Can I have another beer?"

  "Why can't you ever learn to drink it slowly, Tim?"

  Tim's face fell into misery. "Oh, gee, I forgot again! I really did mean to drink it slowly, Pop, but it tasted so good I went and forgot."

  Ron regretted his momentary exasperation immediately. "No matter, mate, don't let it worry you. Go and ask Florrie for a schooner of Old."


  The beer, extremely potent as Australian beer was, seemed to have no effect on Tim. Some dimwits went crazy if they even smelled grog, Ron puzzled, but Tim could drink his old man under the table and then carry him all the way home, he felt it so little.

  "Who is this Mary Horton?" Es asked that night, after Tim had been packed off to bed.

  "Some old geezer out at Artarmon."

  "Tim's very taken with her, isn't he?"

  Ron thought of the thirty quid in his wallet and stared at his wife blandly. "I suppose so. She's nice to him, and doing her garden on a Saturday will keep him out of mischief."

  "Free you to skip around the pubs and racetracks with the blokes, you mean," Es interpreted with the skill of many years.

  "Jesus bloody Christ, Es, what a rotten thing to say to a man!"

  "Hah!" she snorted, putting down her knitting. "The truth hurts, don't it? Did she pay him, eh?"

  "A few quid."

  "Which you pocketed, of course."

  "Well, it wasn't that much. What do you expect for mowing a bloody lawn by machine, you suspicious old twit? No fortune, and that's for bloody sure!"

  "As long as I get me housekeeping, I don't give a sweet bugger how much she paid him, mate!" She got up, stretching. "Want a cuppa tea, love?"

  "Oh, ta, that'd be real nice. Where's Dawnie?"

  "How the hell should I know? She's twenty-four and her own flaming mistress."

  "As long as she's not someone else's flaming mistress!"

  Es shrugged. "Kids don't think the way we did, love, and there's no getting around it. Besides, are you game to ask Dawnie where she's been and if she's shagging with some bloke?"