Girl with a Monkey by Thea Astley Page B

shorts. He seemed, too, quite unselfconscious, for although his technique was not good he picked out strangely pleasing harmonies with his big blunt fingers, and as he played he sang occasionally a phrase in a nasal baritone.
    With legs outspread and cigarettes glowing, the others passed a bottle between their glasses and drummed out the rhythm on the leather arms of the chairs or tapped it heel-toe on the floor. The pianist who was half turned to them grinned as he sang, “On the golf course I’m under par”, and then executed a slow “blues” break with one hand. One of the soldiers caught sight of the girls and waved.
    â€œJoin us,” he suggested with expansive hospitality. “Bring a little life into our decorum. You’re out-numbered. Everything’s in your favour.”
    But Laura merely laughed, waved, and hurried Elsie, who would have longed to go in, away to the kitchen premises.
    â€œNot tonight,” she whispered to Elsie. “We’re goingto kill a bottle of sherry before bedtime. You said you wanted to experience inebriation, so now you’re going to have it. Tommy put a sweet by in the kitchen for us. He loves me like a daughter.”
    Their room opened on the wide veranda that ran along the entire front of the hotel’s first floor and gave an unsurpassed view of the bay frond-framed by palm-trees. Laura opened the double doors and walked out flexing her arms. The tropic night was so brilliant with stars it seemed alive and very close. On the roadway the lounge light shifted as a figure in the room moved round and flung a shadow across the street. The piano came to her muted pleasantly. She went back inside, rinsed two tooth glasses into the enamel basin, and, having removed the cork from the bottle of wine with a practised dexterity, poured half-tumblers.
    â€œWell, honey, this is it!”
    Their glasses clinked and, seated each on one of the narrow stretchers against the wall, they drank to the month of June. After the first glassful things seemed much more pleasant and relaxed, conversation flowed in pauseless amiability round a score of topics; they touched briefly on trade unionism, birth control, and the royal family, and then Laura refilled the glasses. Outside their island of content the wind creaked among the palm-trees and rattled the bamboo groves beside the water tanks, ramparting their warmth, their very sociability with a fortress of sound that in itself speltoutsideness and shutoutness and made by contrast their own security seem the stronger. The light burned weakly in its bare bulb, and, as the wind blew in, sent waves of shadow rioting round the walls. Shivering suddenly, Laura got up and shut the double glass doors.
    â€œAnother?” she asked, indicating the half-emptied bottle. Elsie, to whom this unaccustomed quantity of liquor was remarkably potent, just laughed and nodded and lay back on the bed. Her thoughts had a spastic quality. They shot unguardedly in any direction.
    â€œI am too full of the milk of human kindness. Should I? Should I really take another? Gentle Falernian or Hippocrene, Laura.
Nunc est bibendum
. Fill ’er up.”
    She took her thrice-replenished glass, sipped and let out a huge sigh.
    â€œI feel sweetly sad tonight and filled with poetic urgency. A sort of ‘what was left of soul I wonder when the kissing had to stop’ feeling. Only this time it’s drinking. Browning.” She belched slightly. “Sorry, darling. Do you like Browning? So passionate, without a word of sex, too, just like the Bronte sisters. I bet they would have made a hot old singing combination had they been alive today. Just imagine them doing ‘Hold tight’.”
    She hummed a little, waving her glass in time, then broke into, “Hold tight, hold tight! Ickyacky acky! Sea food momma!”
    Laura, who had been learning the labels of bottles practically since she could first spell, rolled back on the bed