A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley

say,’young Jenner says. ‘Mr Buckmaster says it was the blacks did it.’
    â€˜Desecrate their own?’
    â€˜He says it was a punishment for killing the old man.’
    â€˜And what does Mr Lunt say?’
    â€˜He won’t say anything.’
    â€˜What a world!’ Dorahy thinks. ‘What a world!’
    He crosses to his window and looks out. Town looms out of rose. He marvels at the static quality of buildings he remembers, still there but nursing different memories for other eyes. He walks out to the veranda in front and looks down the road to see the school, extended and gardened, yet with a remembered window through which he had eased his mind while stumbling translation pocked the unreality of tropical summer. He can see the irony of it better now, the folly of discussing Hannibal’s passage to power in this scraggy landscape that bore the frightful sores of its own history, scenes Suetonius would have regarded with horror—shattered black flesh, all the more horrible because of the country’s negation—none of your soft olive groves and dove-blueness in the hills—heat, dust and the threat of scrub where trees grew like mutations.
    Yet
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus
put up alongside the scrabblings and the gropings, the arrowed hearts and linked initials behind the School of Arts, wasn’t so different at that. Thinking of the slender boys bedewed with odours and remembering young Jenner in love with the slender ghost of the fat woman he had recognised in the lobby. Where, unable to rest, he feels that he must return. He unpacks his bag and hangs his other suit in the wardrobe. Womb-fluid is all nostalgia, he tells himself, walking back down the stairs, his puritan mouth keeled over towards disapproval.
    At the foot of the stairs a man is waiting.
    Dorahy looks uncertainly at a face whose features have beenbashed by two decades of living since he last saw it. A name struggles to the surface and he knows who it is. There is nothing to this man now: a cipher once he had been washed up and let die.
    â€˜It is Tom Dorahy?’ the lips ask.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Remember me?’
    â€˜I’m terribly afraid…’ He is battling to gain time. The lost shiftiness of the face disturbs him. He finds himself shrinking.
    â€˜Barney Sweetman,’ the old man says, confirming what Dorahy knows. ‘There isn’t too much the same, but I’d know you.’
    Grudgingly Dorahy puts out a hand and has it pumped for a few seconds while Sweetman’s down-and-out angel face crawls into his for deliverance.
    â€˜I remember,’ Dorahy says at last. ‘Things were different then. Are they any different now, I wonder?’
    â€˜A lot,’ the other says, and they both recall the high rock and the court and a certain hot noon. ‘Yes, a lot.’ Sweetman pushes his mouth into a smile. ‘I’ve cut right out of municipal politics altogether now. I’m still State member for this area. Gives me a wider interest. And there’s no real retiring age, you know. A man has to do his work. You retire when the electors tell you and not a day before.’
    â€˜And they haven’t told you yet?’
    â€˜Still the same old Tom,’ Sweetman says, grinning. ‘You haven’t changed, mate. No. They haven’t sent me out yet.’
    â€˜And Buckmaster?’ Dorahy asks. ‘Buckmaster and his now middle-aged bull son?’
    â€˜Buckmaster’s still here,’ he says. ‘But his boy pulled out of the police and runs a pub on the Palmer. A fine man he’s turned out, so it happens.’
    â€˜My God,’ Dorahy says. ‘My God!’
    Sweetmanplaces his arm around the thin shoulders for a moment. ‘You’ve come back, Tom,’ he says. ‘What’s your reason then? You shouldn’t have come back in a spirit of criticism. That’s all over now. So long ago no one