The Great World

by David Malouf

  ‘What’d he die of?’ she would ask, to get it over and done with. It was kinder in the long run. ‘Was Billy diftheria?’

  Kind and quick. She wished she’d done that with Vic, ages ago, but Billy was easy, he was dead.

  The trouble with Digger was, he remembered too much. Give him long enough and he’d remember everything.

  2

  NEWCOMERS TO THE Crossing, calling on Digger to discuss a bit of work they needed doing, a sundeck extended or a new roof, took it for granted that he had got his name from the war. He was lean-jawed and leathery, said little, was never without a fag in the corner of his mouth and a spare one, newly rolled, behind his ear.

  In fact he had been Digger from birth, or very nearly. They had called him that, with no special foresight, before there was any hint of a new war he might be growing up for.

  Albert was the name his mother had picked out for him, meaning to call him Bert. But to the father, from the very first, he was another man about the house, a little offsider and mate.

  ‘Right, dig,’ he would tell the boy when he was barely old enough to understand, ‘we’re gunna take a look at this greasetrap. Are ya with me? Geez! Not so sweet, eh?’ Or: ‘C’mon, digger, we better be makin’ tracks or the ol’ lady’ll rouse on us. We wouldn’ wanna be in ’er bad books.’ The name became Digger and stuck. After a time even the mother used it, since that was what he answered to, but she regretted Albert.

  She had thought of him as Albert, Bert, all the months she was carrying him; had had conversations with him under that name, and believed later, he was such a knowing little thing, that he must remember this and the secrets she had confided to him. But once he was born the father’s needs prevailed. He became Digger and that was that.

  Their first little girl, Jenny, was slow. The second, May, was already gone before Digger was born. So was the third, Pearl, who survived just long enough to become another absence to tug the mother’s heart. She had been banking on Bert.

  Back home in England, in the orphanage where she grew up, she had had a brother called Bert. He was the only thing she had that was in any way her own. A stocky, dark little fellow, two years younger than herself, she had fussed over him and come to believe he couldn’t get on without her.

  Because he had no memory of their real home, or of their mother, she had set out to give him one, to impress upon him by constant telling and retelling all she could remember of their dark little room and the life they had lived there. There wasn’t much, but some detail, she hoped, a yellow dress their mother had worn, a picture she recalled of two long-haired cows in a mist, might take life in him and become memories of his own. She owed it to him. To their Ma as well.

  But when she sat him down on a form opposite, their knees touching, she could recall very little and he was too young to listen. What she found herself doing was searching his face for some resemblance that would link them and make solid a vision of their mother’s pale, pinched features that had already gone ghostly for her. She was assuring herself that she was not alone in the world. Her intensity at these moments scared him. He would hide to avoid her.

  Her last sight of him was in a line of other boys, all big-eyed and bony-kneed, shuffling about in the cold, on the stone steps that led up to the schoolroom. She stood below in a made-over dress and with a little bundle they had given her. She was eleven and was going out to begin her working life. In service.

  His dark face above the curve of the banister rail was the last she would ever see of him. He was on tiptoe, frowning. Then he raised his hand and waved. When she went back three years later he had gone to be apprenticed in Liverpool.

  So when what she knew was proved at last and she had a boy, she had fought for him, from the first day searching his face for some likeness to his namesake, Albert, Bert, and for some hint that her own family, about whom she knew nothing, had come through. But in the end she had given in. Her heart got the better of her. She knew what loneliness was, and how this man she had married, this boy, longed for a form of companionship that she could not give him or which he was not able to accept. Digger, she told herself, wasn’t so much a name as an assurance that he would have it at last. She could not deny him that. But before she knew it Digger was a name. The child answered to no other. Albert, Bert, the gesture she had made to a past that was beyond recall, was just the name in a register that he would never use.

  He wasn’t the last. A year later there was Bill, then James, then Leslie, but by then Albert was used up. And they didn’t survive anyway, these boys, any more than the girls had. In the end there were just the two children. Digger and Jenny.

  *

  Billy Keen had run off to France when he was fifteen. By the time he got home again, a survivor of Pozières and Villers Bretonneux, he had already, at just eighteen, had the one great adventure of his life. Though married and more or less settled as chief ferryman at the Crossing, he continued to live in spirit, since he was barely out of his lively boyhood, at that intensified pitch of daring, terror and pure high-jinks that would forever be his measure of what a man’s life should be when he is at full stretch. Anything else was a tameness he could not endure.

  History had conspired, for a time, to set him in a world where risk, up to the very edge of extinction, was a point of honour, and animal energy had scope. It was his natural element. After that, life at the Crossing seemed to him like daily punishment. He hated the regularity of it, the timetable the ferry ran on, the six-minute crossing, then the same time back, his having to be home, and already washed and brushed up, for dinner at twelve and for tea at six, the fuss about knives and forks and the state of his socks. It meant nothing to him that Keens had been at the Crossing for a hundred years and that the place bore his name. He was too young, he felt, for the responsibilities that were put upon him by a household that had arrived from nowhere, had simply crept up on him (that’s how he saw it) while he was dreaming at the wheel. She was the trouble, the girl he’d got.

  He had met her the first week he was back. She was a barmaid in a city pub. He had taken one look at her and told himself: ‘She’ll do.’

  He said this thoughtlessly, because he was eighteen, wanted a girl of his own and didn’t know any better. He was home now, and the next thing to do was get married. It was what blokes did. What else was there? He knew nothing about her except that she was lively, had newly arrived in the place and had a soft mouth with just a touch of colour to it. He had spent three years dreaming of that colour. She ruled the rough clientele of the pub, which was a waterside pub at The Rocks, in an easy, no-nonsense way that impressed him. You could play up to her but there was a line, and she soon let you know if you tried to cross it. He was amused by that.

  She knew what he was after. He was no different in that from the rest. But there was something in him that appealed to her. He was like a cricket, very chirpy and always on the dare. His military bravado took the civilian form of impudence, especially where girls were concerned. He would look you straight in the eye with so much confidence in his own attractions that she was tempted to laugh outright. ‘Yes, it’s me,’ the look said. ‘I’m a bit of all right, eh?’ He would wink then and you could see the utter satisfaction he felt in himself. ‘Well, that oughta do it.’

  In fact he was wrong. It wasn’t that that did it. She could take with a good deal of salt the sort of swagger, of inexperience too, that made him feel she could be caught (girls are easy) just like that. ‘Not me, m’lad,’ she told him with a look of her own, and set her jaw.

  But she too was eager to get out of her present life and be settled. It was what she had come all these miles for. And something he had said, just in passing, had caught her ear. The place he came from bore his name. Back home in England that meant something, an ancestral house or manor, or a sizeable farm at least. Family names on a map were solid; they rooted you in things that could be measured, so many acres. So what, she wondered, was Keen’s Crossing? It wouldn’t be a manor of course
. She knew what country she was in; she wasn’t quite a fool. But it must be something. She was a practical girl and added it to the immediate and more touching fact of his ears.

  It would have surprised Billy Keen, and might have reduced him a little, if he had realised that what had fetched her was not the line he ran, not at all, but the giveaway reddening of his ears. What he had awakened in her, though she didn’t know it yet, was the mother she would be in less than a year if she took him. His ears made such perfect shells.

  In fact they were deceived, both of them. What she took for boyishness in him was a lightness he would not outgrow. He was strong-willed and stubborn, in fact. He would not be led. As for what amused him so much, her competence – the ease with which she managed men and change and glasses and all sorts of daring backchat – he did not like it much when it was applied daily to him. She was competent all right. Ambitious too. And when she got hold of a thing she hung on to it.

  She would remember the journey to Keen’s Crossing for the rest of her life, perhaps because she was to make it just the once. Every detail of it remained new for her.

  Years later, towards the end, on a windy day in August, she would climb the bluff behind the Crossing and be astonished to see that Sydney, a place she thought of as worlds away, further even in some ways than England, had all the time been visible, just thirty miles from where she was. She could have gone up there and looked at it any day of her life. Its outer suburbs by then were already climbing the far side of the ridge.

  But it wasn’t in fact the same city she had come to and left more than thirty years ago. That had been a big country town with arms of the harbour breaking into it at every turn, open trams bucketing about and sparking on their poles, wagons with heavy carthorses loaded with barrels and barefoot boys shouting headlines at every corner; a shabby place, all steep hills and with ships of one sort or another, or masts at least, at the bottom of every street. What she saw now, from a distance of half a lifetime, was skyscrapers.

  The thirty-mile journey by train, and then sulky, had taken all day. At first through suburbs that were all new brick bungalows and gardens dense with pin oaks and rhododendron; then, with the last of the streetlamps, market gardens tended by Chinese. At last they had come out on to a plateau under a scud of clouds. Stretches of low flowering scrub lay on either side, broken by platforms of rock. When they left the little isolated station and made their way down to the river, the Hawkesbury, the road (a highway they called it) took bend after bend, and the trees, which were both above and below them, were of a kind she had never seen before, giants with feathery tops in bunches, and trunks and limbs of a naked pink or white, incredibly twisted and deeply creased at the joints with folds like fat. Ridged outcropping ledges tilted and thrust out at angles, and there was a smell of animal droppings, dark and heavy, mixed with the crush of ferns. She soon saw how different it was from England, and how wrong, how romantic, her expectations had been.

  They turned off the highway, took a less frequented road which was also a highway, and came down to where the store occupied its elbow of dust in an arc of the river. The ferry was idling at the bank.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is it. Waddaya think?’

  She didn’t. She had given up thinking miles back and had sworn then that she would never come this way again. Whatever it was, she would accept and make the most of. Thirteen thousand miles, plus thirty, was enough.

  The road they were on came to a halt at the ferry, then took up again on the other side, where it went all the way, he told her, to Gosford, Woy Woy, Maitland: he spoke these names as if they offered the possibility of escape. But she had never heard of any of them, and told herself she could do without them. Sydney, too. She would stick to what she had got.

  It wasn’t much. Whatever modest grandeur or continuity she had imagined, and had hoped in her ignorance to find in a settled-looking house and garden, had to be taken up from the landscape. It was wild, but once she stopped thinking in the old terms and opened her eyes and let it work on her, she was struck by the stillness of it, the space it gave you to breathe.

  It wasn’t what she had wanted – how could it be when she hadn’t even known such a place could exist? – and she wasn’t sure, either, that she had the qualities to deal with it, since she had been preparing most of her life for something else. But something in her wanted it, now that it was here. Something new in her, that the place itself would deal with.

  She committed herself immediately, come what might, to that, and made a mission of it.

  Newly come home and not too happy about it, Billy watched her closely, seated on a log and sweating, knocking away flies. ‘You’re not disappointed?’ he asked.

  She was the one who had wanted to come here. If only to take a look. He had banked on her being put off by the dreariness of the place. They would look and go back to town. Sydney was what he wanted.

  Her look of fierce resignation was the first indication he got that she might not be what he had taken her for. She strode about looking, asking questions. He fell deeper into gloom. She liked it. She was making plans.

  The river was wide between granite bluffs that were all yellow-orange in the sunset and forested with the same weird, fleshy trees they had come down through. But there was a pepper tree in front of the store and, behind, Scotch firs. Very gloomy they looked too, compared with the lightness and airiness of the bush trees; familiar, yes, but that was just what she didn’t like about them. Still, it was through them that she saw what the others might be.

  No sign of a garden. Not even a geranium in a tub.

  Not much of a house either. Just the gabled store, all weatherboard, unpainted for ages she thought and a lot of it gone to ruin, with, at the back, three pokey rooms.

  What Billy couldn’t know, following behind her and feeling more and more uneasy, was that it was more than she had ever had in her life before. It was all to be made, and what she made would be hers.

  The store was boarded up. ‘Well,’ she thought, ‘we can reopen it.’ The house was filled with rubbish except for one room. Billy’s brother Pete lived there, or rather, camped in a space he had made by pushing the rubbish it contained into the corners of it. He immediately offered to give the place up to them, and his job at the ferry to Billy if he wanted it. He couldn’t wait to get away.

  She had looked forward to this brother, hoping to learn from him some of the things that Billy didn’t know or couldn’t be bothered to tell. Having got a relation at last she was determined to make the most of him. She had seen herself making meals, looking after his clothes, in exchange for which there would be confidences.

  But one look at Pete was enough. He and Billy might have been strangers for all they had to say to one another; and when she followed him to the woodpile, and tried to draw him out, he was scared out of his wits. He leaned on the axe and muttered, so awkward and shy she thought he might choke. He had none of Billy’s lightness. Billy stood at the door of the shack and laughed.

  Pete had been living in the house as if he had come upon it by chance, and Billy came back to it, she saw, in the same spirit. The house, all this, meant nothing to them. For the remainder of the week, which he endured only to collect his wages, Pete avoided her, then was gone and they heard no more of him.

  This carelessness about things she held sacred astonished her. The place after all bore their name; the house was the one they had grown up in, even if it was given over now to the bush rats whose nests were everywhere, and to big spiders with egg-sacks under their bellies, and woodlice and centipedes. Rolling her sleeves up she got the three rooms cleared and clean again, but Billy scarcely noticed and did nothing to help. He was happiest camping in one room like Pete, wearing the same filthy shirt he had worn all week and splashing his face with two fingers of water from a pail. He was, she saw now, a kind of savage, as resentful as a ten-year-old of any suggestion that he should wash his neck, or his feet at least, before he came to bed.

  T
here were few relics in the place of any former habitation, but rummaging about one day in the bottom of a cupboard she found a stack of photographs, dusted them off, set them on the rickety sideboard and spent the rest of the morning studying them for some clue to this family she had married into – what it was that might go into her children, when she had them – and for some clue to him. When he came in she questioned him.

  ‘Oh, that’s Merle,’ he said lightly of a big girl, lumpish and worn-looking, whom she had taken at first for the mother. He stood easing his braces over his shoulder and peering.

  ‘Yair. That’s Merle. She lives up Lismore way. Or Casino. I dunno.’

  Prompted, he named the others.

  ‘That’s Jess. Geez, what a tartar!’

  ‘Where’s she?’ she demanded.

  ‘I dunno. Married. Out west somewhere, I dunno. She’s no loss.’

  Eric had gone to work on the railways. ‘Funny feller, Eric,’ he laughed. ‘A bit touched.’

  Leslie?

  ‘Went ta Queensland, oh, ages ago. Just ran off. You shoulda heard dad roar! I was on’y a nipper.’

  He told all this with only the most casual interest and with none of the little details that might have made any of it real. They had gone. He didn’t expect to see them again and didn’t care, one way or the other. Should he?

  Her parents-in-law, the mother and father of this scattered brood, appeared on their wedding day; he in a tight-looking suit with a stiff collar, a grim-faced working man who didn’t know where to put his hands; she in a cup-shaped chair in front of him, her skirt spread and at her elbow a pedestal and urn.