by Tim Winton
‘He does it every night,’ says his mother with some pride.
‘Okay.’
For the first block, he manages to keep pace with his father, but gradually begins to drop back. His father’s footsteps smack on the bitumen. He sees his father’s bare back, glinting with light sweat, pull away from him, until his father slows down for him.
‘You’re too good for me.’
‘You’re damned unfit for your age. You’ll be dead by the time you’re forty.’
‘It’s not a bad age to go.’
‘What would you know,’ his father says.
They flash past parked cars, long, dry tresses of wild oats.
‘Do you think she’ll come back?’ his father asks, easing.
‘Yeah. Yes. I suppose.’ His legs ache; his breath burns. His father grunts and speeds up. He follows, smelling the salt of sweat and sea.
TUESDAY There is no fish. In the afternoon he goes to the markets and loses himself in the fragrances of food and wood and incense and the crowd. As he leaves the markets, the sun is setting and the sky is purplish-pink, about to collapse into a tumult of thunder and warm rain. The colour suggests pain; he sprints home with a bag full of vegetables. He leaves his house and runs down to the fishermen’s harbour to see the sunset. He watches the sun melt into the livid ocean and walks back in the warm rain, conscious that he has not come here just for the sunset. He disallows himself the memories.
He lags behind his father in the dark. He is tired of eating snapper. His father does not speak.
WEDNESDAY This morning there is a big, mottled squid on the verandah. He is cheered for a moment, but when he is cleaning it in the sink he realizes that there is something wrong. He turns the squid over several times in his hands; there are three eyes. It angers him. He throws it in the garbage and goes to his books and works fitfully.
Running with his father, managing to keep pace with him most of the way, he mentions the squid.
‘Seen it before,’ says his father. ‘Once. Cuvier, I think. Funny, eh? A mutation, I s’pose.’
He keeps abreast of his father’s pumping arms.
‘What did you do with it?’ his father asks as they turn for home.
‘Threw it out.’
‘You’re a wasteful bastard,’ his father says sharply, pulling away until he is twenty or thirty yards ahead. They remain so spaced all the way back.
THURSDAY Before dawn he waits for Tuglio and the others. He intends to speak to them about the squid. He has no idea what he will say, but he is still angry. When the fishermen do not arrive, he goes inside. He eats breakfast, throws the snapper fillets out to make room for the extra milk, and begins work.
After lunch, he gets up to find a pullover; it has turned cold and it is raining. Looking in his cupboards, he realizes that her clothes are gone. She has been back while he was gone. He goes, surreptitiously, to look for her. He walks downtown, the newsagent’s, the bookshop, Papa Luigi’s cafe; nothing. Then he goes to the fishermen’s harbour, between the stained vessels flexing at their moorings. He sits on the end of the jetty in the rain for a few minutes, then leaves for home, chilled.
His father is quiet in the darkness. Neither lets the other ahead. The sky thunders. They run in the gentle rain. As they turn for the return lap, his father asks him suddenly: ‘Have you ever wept? Cried, I mean.’
He does not reply. Nothing more is said. Rain hisses about their feet.
FRIDAY No fish. The neighbours are asking him about her. Is she sick? He says she is not, certain that they know and have seen her, and only ask to see his response. He rings her work extension. Another woman answers. No, she is not available at the moment; she is busy. He does not leave a message; he does not identify himself. I won’t give her the pleasure, he thinks.
In the evening, he rings his parents. His mother’s voice is somehow hostile.
‘Your father isn’t up to a run tonight. You needn’t come.’
‘Is he sick?’
‘No.’
There are long pauses in the conversation. His mother seems uncomfortable.
‘How is your work?’ she asks.
‘Oh, alright.’
‘Yes.’
‘Mum.’
‘Yes?’
‘She’s staying there, isn’t she?’
‘Your father’s waiting for his tea.’
He hangs up.
It rains all night. The bed, suddenly vast, does not warm.
SATURDAY Before dawn he hears the fishermen’s truck pass, grinding up the street. He has slept poorly, on one side of the big bed. He lies awake late into the morning, sensing the unusual heat of the day. At 10.30 he goes outside onto the verandah. It is hot in the sun; it startles him. There is a big pink snapper on the step. It is stiff and dry from the long exposure. He takes it by the unbending tail, scales rasping his palms. He leaves the milk; it has curdled in the sun.
He goes into the empty house.
Lantern Stalk
IT WAS like playing soldiers. Egg began to see it was a game they could play without shame, out here in the bush. The sergeant major called ‘Parade!’ from back in the clearing, and the shadows of other school cadets crumped past as he tried to secure his ground-sheet tent in the twilight. His mother had insisted he come. He was bewildered. So many pieces of equipment. Everything proceeded too fast. The sergeant major’s call became a scream. Egg lifted his block-of-wood boots and fell in with the others.
Officers appeared with searing torchbeams. They were teachers in fancy dress. The sergeant major brayed: ‘Atten-haargh!’ Forty boys came raggedly to attention. It was the sound of a stampede. The sergeant major berated them. He was a school prefect and he played full back in the school team. Egg could smell dyed cotton and nugget and webbing and trees and earth. Stars were beginning to prick open the sky.
Captain Temby spoke. Even in the twilight Egg could see his beergut. He had felt Temby’s sawn-off hockey stick on the back of his legs at P.E. more than once.
‘Tonight, men, we’re sending you on a lantern stalk.’ A cheer; they liked to be called men. The sergeant major growled, ‘For those of you too stupid to know what a lantern stalk is, I’ll explain the aims and objectives of the exercise. You will be trucked out into the hills by the sea, and on the highest hill will be a lantern. Your task is to make it to the lantern, or inside the white circle of tape around the light, without being detected and tagged. Two men will be guarding the light. They have a fifteen yard circle to cover. Ten officers and N.C.O.’s will be patrolling the area between you and the light. The aim is not to get seen, heard, smelt, felt or tasted. In short: not to get caught. At nine we will sound the trucks’ horns to signal the end of the exercise. Be careful, for Chrissake.’
The darkness in the back of the truck was full of elbows and knees and the vegetable smell of sweat. Someone smoked. Next to Egg, Mukas and Roper told jokes.
Egg had found make-believe soldiering fun at first. Earlier in the year when he’d signed up there was the brand-new bag of kit: boots, uniforms, webbing, beret, and the trips to the rifle range at the edge of town where he tried to shoot cardboard men off the face of the embankment. He learned to pull apart an S.L.R. rifle and an old Bren gun, to read maps and to use compasses. His mother said it would make a man of him, but his father looked at him sadly when he came home from parade, and didn’t say a word. From his room at night he heard his parents arguing. His mother’s voice was strong and rich. She spoke well. Egg’s parents never got along. These days he saw little of his father who worked so hard in his office, seeing other husbands and wives. Each Saturday evening, Egg heard the chatter of his father’s typewriter. The phone rang night and day. Egg’s mother and her friends drank sherry and spoke well in the livingroom. When she was angry, his mother called his father ‘Reverend Eggleston’ and he left the room looking whipped and pale. She kept Egg away from ‘that church’. She broiled Egg with tears. ‘I should have married a man,’ she said. He hardly ever
saw his mother and father together.
Egg was conscientious about homework. He stayed in his room a lot where it was peaceful. In the early evenings he jogged and bits of songs came to him in the rhythm of his breath. He wasn’t exactly unhappy. He often thought about Stephanie Dew whom he’d caught looking at him twice in Maths. He smelt apricots in her hair when she passed him in the corridors. The proximity of her made him sad.
Some nights Egg had a dream. It was always the same: he was running up a staircase. Something terrible chased him. He could not see it or hear it but his bursting heart told him it was terrible. All along the staircase were doors padlocked against him. He hit them and sheered off them and staggered on, too scared to scream, upwards, up, twisting into the sky. Upon reaching the last step he woke. There was nothing beyond that last step, he was certain of it. Only cold space, some void to fall through forever.
‘Hey, Egg, what’s your plan?’ Mukas asked. ‘Hey, hey, Eggface!’ Mukas pulled Egg’s beret down over his eyes.
‘Get out of it, slag-bag,’ Egg said, shrugging away.
‘What’s your strategy? How you gonna get up to that lantern?’
‘I dunno. Crawl like they said.’
‘I reckon walk. Just get up and walk like you couldn’t give a stiff. Reckon that’s the trick.’
‘Crawl, I reckon.’
‘You’ll never make it by nine o’clock.’
Egg shrugged in the dark. He didn’t care; he was thinking about his parents. Probably, they would get divorced. He wished they could be normal. His mother was stronger than everyone else’s mother. People said she wore the pants. And no one else’s father was a minister.
With a whang, the tailgate of the truck swung down and someone bawled at them to get out. In the still darkness Egg heard other trucks in the distance. He got down and waited with the others by a wire fence. He smelt cow dung and wet oats. The ground oozed up wet chill. A long way off, the sea.
A light appeared small and fierce in the distance. ‘Alright, spread out,’ the sergeant major said. ‘It’s a lot further than it looks. Don’t let it out of your sight.’
A horn sounded, as though miles away.
‘Go on, get going!’
Egg set out with Mukas and Roper, slouching along, boot-heavy. For a while there was nothing else in the night but the suggestion of crickets and the shuffle of bodies. No one spoke. They walked, hands in pockets, until a bark stopped them dead and a torch beam lanced across from the right.
‘Middleton and Smythe – you’re dead! Back to the truck.’
Egg fell to the ground. All around him, others did the same. He pressed into the sweet, wet earth, and he lay there listening to the others moving on. A stalk of grass poked his lip and he drew it into his mouth. For a while, he had the inclination to just go to sleep there and then, give the whole thing a miss. The whole exercise was stupid. Why the hell did his mother want him squirming up and down hills? He could be alone in his room now, or out in the streets jogging by uncurtained windows with the whole world baring itself to him.
He didn’t know how long he lay there, but it was long after he stopped hearing others move past, long after he heard any movement at all. He would stick to crawling. With infinite care he began to belly-crawl to the left, clearing the way ahead before edging forward. Flank ’em, he thought vaguely. He crawled for a long time. The ground changed. In time he heard trees and began to make out their shapes against the sky. He picked his way through twigs and leaves until he rested behind a log with its smell of charcoal and ants. He was sore.
A cow bassooned softly. Egg lay on his back. The sky pressed down and it made him think that if someone knocked the chocks from the right corners, the whole lot would crash down and the world would be as it must once have been, with no margin between earth and space, no room for light or dark, plant or animal, no people. He had tried to write a class paper on the subject, but the teacher returned his opening paragraph with a suspicious glance.
Dew and cold reminded him that he had a lantern to stalk. He struck out again with a strange restlessness, sliding quickly over the even ground so that when he keeled out into nothing he wondered insanely whether he hadn’t crawled off the edge of the world. He fell, filled himself with air, and had it driven from him a moment later when he hit the bottom of the washout hard enough to make white light behind his eyes.
He got up quickly and fell down again. With his head on cold sand, he lay still and waited for the sky to settle. He was calm: it wasn’t the first time he’d been badly winded. As before, he told himself he would not die, that breath would return. His heart felt engorged as it did when he dreamt his dream of the spiral staircase. He was afraid.
When he had his wind back, he rose and slewed about in the washout for a moment before aiming himself at the silhouette of the bank and scrabbling up. He came upon a fence which sang as he climbed through. He was tired of playing soldiers, so he walked brazenly through the shadows of a paddock, looking for the light on the hill and someone to blunder into for the sake of getting it over with. Only, he could not find the light. Crawling, as he had been, with his head to the ground, he hadn’t seen the light for some time. He couldn’t even remember when or where.
Egg marched on. He whistled. Quite suddenly, a light appeared. Below him, to the left. He galloped. Where had he been? He was above the lantern. Had he gone round behind? His boots thocked through wet, dung-thick, downsloping pasture. A dog barked. He stopped. It was a farmhouse. He was stalking the wrong light. Feeling reckless, he pressed ahead anyway. A dog spattered out of the dark to greet him, to blunt itself on his shins and whimper. Egg scuffed its cold slick coat and walked with it towards the light of the house. Lamplight streamed from a paned window, illuminating the shapes of parked vehicles. Egg moved carefully between flat-tops and utilities. In the house, people were singing, and to him it sounded like an old movie. He felt his heart fill again. He crept to the window and saw faces in the burnished light of a Tilley lamp.
Big rough-faced men and women with blunt chins and black eyes stood in a semi-circle by the fireplace. A bearded man in a bib and brace held a white parcel in his arms. Egg saw the chequered smiles of the people. He saw their hands. A man near the end of the semi-circle warmed the back of his legs by the fire. Tears glistened on his face. Egg was dumbfounded.
The big man with the white parcel looked around at those present and then to the window. Egg ducked. The dog pasted his face with its tongue. A door opened. Egg flattened himself on the ground.
‘It’s cold out.’ The voice of a man. ‘Come in by the fire.’
Egg rolled over and looked up at the shadow.
‘Come on, soldier.’
Inside there was quiet. Roots sputtered in the fireplace. Egg felt the faces coming to bear upon him. The man with the white bundle ushered him to a spot by the fire. Egg’s uniform steamed. The bundle in the man’s arms gave a tiny cough. A baby!
‘Now,’ said the man with the baby, ‘we’ll get on.’
Egg stole a look at the people in the room. They looked like farmers, people who knew what they thought. An old woman in a pink dressing-gown had two fluffy balls peeping from between buttons. They were ducklings, he saw, and she was keeping them warm.
‘What I was gunna say is that this kid is a bloody miracle. That little heart just suddenly starting to beat – that’s a miracle. Tonight we claim God’s promises for this baby . . . er . . . Bill, what’s the name again?’
‘It’s,’ the man with the tears cleared his throat, ‘it’s Sidney Robert James Maitland.’
‘Like Bill said. And tonight we swear ourselves to the sacred duty of raising this kid up to hear God. That’s what this is about. We love each other, we try. We look after each other in our way, and that’s miracle enough in this world. And now there’s one more of us. Let’s just hope the poor little bleeder can remember all his names.’
Everyone laughed and the man started to pray with the baby in his arms. Egg studied the
still faces in the room, wondering who they all were. It was like a secret society, a Resistance meeting. The furniture in the room was pushed back against the walls: an old sofa, a card table, treadle sewing machine. The floorboards were polished. Egg felt warm and comfortable, but his heart remained engorged.
A loaf of bread came around the semi-circle, and Egg, following the others’ lead, broke a piece from it and ate it. The man holding the baby took the loaf from him and put it on the mantelpiece above the fire. A ceramic mug came around in the same manner and Egg drank from it. The liquid was warm as blood and it made his mouth shrivel, his belly glow. When Egg had drunk like the others, the mug went on the mantelpiece beside the loaf.
Then Egg saw that white bundle coming around, hand to hand, and his heart thickened and he felt it rising in his chest. Each person receiving the baby touched his face, looked into his eyes, and kissed him on the forehead. As it came to him, Egg felt panic. He was certain his arms would never bear the weight. The vanilla-smelling pupa slid into his arms, heavier even than he had expected. His knees creaked. He wanted to run away. How could such a thing be borne? It was insupportable. Someone coughed good-humouredly and Egg looked up.
‘Serious business, soldier,’ said the man in the bib and brace.
Egg glanced around at all the expectant faces. Some of them were rutted with tears. He freed one arm, reckless, and touched the infant’s cheek, noticing his own blackened hands and clogged fingernails. He looked into the child’s eyes. They were the colour of the night sky. Egg kissed the cool, sweet brow, then passed the baby to the man with a weak, faint sensation fluttering in him as though it had been an ammunition box he’d been holding and not a newborn.
‘Amen,’ said the man.
‘Amen,’ said the others.
‘Beer and cake, then?’ asked the man, holding the child for them all to see.
‘Beer and cake!’ they replied with a cheer and the room was suddenly full of movement. Egg stayed by the fire, almost dry. A thin woman in a mohair jumper put a glass of beer in his hand and a wedge of rainbow cake in the other, saying: ‘You’re a godfather, soldier.’ Her smile surprised him. He was drinking beer. No one asked him questions. A small man with no hair on the back of his head showed him how to play the spoons. The dog whined outside. Someone fiddled with an accordion. The night seemed so real. He could do nothing but stand and watch and listen and feel the panic of wonder. The beer was sour and cold as brass. His mouth rioted when he filled it with cake. He was dizzy; it was the light-headedness of the jogger. He was more than himself. He felt deeper and wider. He felt as though he was more.
