by David Malouf
‘It wasn’t all bad, Digger. There was a good bitta fun to be had if you looked out fer it. Always is. But a lotta the time it was bad, and some of it was hell. The cold fer instance. Wicked it was, you can’t imagine. But you’d be surprised what blokes c’n put up with. When you really get down to it. Well, I was one a’ the lucky ones.’ He said this fiercely and went silent, and his mouth was so grim that Digger, watching him, wondered if he really believed it.
His stories always involved the same characters and Digger got to know the men’s names as if he had known them. They were the men, he guessed, that his father was closest to, even now; closer certainly than to any of his drinking cronies at the pub, or fellows they exchanged a word with here and there at the ferry – regulars – or when they went into town to find some machine part they needed.
Wally Barnes was one. Digger saw him, for maybe the hundredth time, go sideways off the duckboards. Saw his eyes turned up white, filling with mud; his mouth already full as the weight of his boots, his pack – his own weight too, he was a big fellow – took him down. Felt at the end of his arms the tug of the fifteen stone, and would close his eyes and with a jerk, as his father had, for the hundredth time, break his grip.
Billy Keen told these horror stories in a voice that scared even himself, as if no amount of telling would ever get him used to the fact that they had happened, and he had once been part of them. He lifted his head and looked about the still place they were in, which was all sunspikes and glitters, almost soundless except for the flutter of a grasshopper’s wings, as if it was this that he needed to be convinced was present and real.
Digger too felt a chill go over him; and the father, seeing it, would feel sorry for the boy, for having dragged him so deep into things.
‘Well,’ he would say, ‘at least you won’t have to face that, Dig, not that. It won’t happen again. Can’t. We finished it once ’n fer all. It can’t happen twice – not that sort a’ thing.’
‘Can’t it?’ Digger asked himself. ‘Is there a rule?’
He looked at his father’s youthful shoulders, the jaunty way he stepped over the sleepers, and thought: ‘Well anyway, he come through it. I reckon I will.’
He did not think this in a superior way. For all his mother’s criticisms, which she did not hesitate to present the moment she had him alone, he knew his father’s qualities and admired them. He took no part in their war.
‘I’d watch out if I was you,’ she warned him. They would be out under the pepper tree where he was helping her hang out, shifting the props, or it might be Friday nights in the back of the shop where she was making up deliveries, weighing out salt, flour, rice, tea in brown paper packets, while he read to her from the order book and packed each thing as she handed them to him in a butter-box. ‘You’ll catch his disease if you don’t watch out. You’ll be a dreamer like him.’
‘Is Dad a dreamer?’
He wouldn’t have said so. Action was what his father was in love with.
‘What else would you call it?’
She plonked another bag on the scales, settled the half-pound weight, and poured in another dozen grains. She was precise about these things.
He took the bag from her, folded the top down and settled it in the box.
What she was really warning him of was the difference between what she called reality, or duty, or fate – she had different names for it on different occasions – and a hunger he had, and which his father had too, for something that began where her reality, however clear and graspable it was, left off. Something he knew existed because he had already got glimpses of it, from his father; from fellows too who talked to him at the open doors of their cars during the six-minute ferry crossing; from books; from the pictures he had been to; and from some physical stirring as well in his own belly.
What it had to do with was the sheer size of the world, and the infinite number of events and facts and objects it was filled with. Things you could touch and smell, but other things too that were just thoughts; which were real enough, and could even be put into words and turned this way and that, but you couldn’t see them.
There was no set of scales in existence that could measure all that, and no number of little paper bags would be enough to contain it, but your head could. That’s what he had seen. Your head. Which was the same shape as the world, and really was the world, only on an infinitely small scale; an inch to a million as on the globe he loved to look at, where the tip of your finger could cover an area of thousands of square miles, and whole cities with millions of people in them, but only because in your head you could see this. Didn’t she know these things? Didn’t she want to know them or want him to? He saw the scared look on her face.
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ he could have assured her. ‘I’ll be all right.’
But that wasn’t really the point, and he knew it. So what he said, putting his arm round her waist and hugging her, was, ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I won’t leave you.’
‘It’s not me I was thinking of,’ she told him, and pushed him off. ‘You know that.’
‘Who then?’
‘You know.’
He did, too. She meant Jenny. But more than that, the Crossing. But what she really meant you couldn’t put a name to. It was so powerful that when she summoned it up he could accept and bow his whole life before it, yet at the same time he wanted to break and run.
Jenny.
There was no moment he could recall when this sister of his, this big soft girl who was three years older, with her milky breath and bubbly lips, had not been at his side.
When he was very little she liked to look after him.
‘Now you watch Digger,’ the mother would tell her, ‘there’s a good girl,’ and just to be safe, so as not to lose sight of him, she would haul him on to her knee and hold him so tight he would go breathless.
‘No, love, I said watch baby, don’t squeeze him like that. He’s a baby. He won’t go away.’
But she had seen others and they had gone away. She kept hold of him, and if she didn’t, and he began to crawl off, she would go running on her stumpy legs to their mother: ‘Digger! Digger’s under the dunny! Digger’s eating dirt! Digger’s getting away!’
But by the time he could talk Digger knew that he was the younger only in years. Whatever they pretended, he had on all occasions to look after her. To be an interpreter between her and a world that would always go too fast for her or come to her in forms she could not comprehend.
The fact that there had been others, and that in one way or another they had failed to live on, was a warning, and accounted, he saw, for the fear with which their mother guarded them, and for her intense possessiveness.
He resented these others. She would never let him forget them; never a day went by without her evoking one or other of them, May or Pearl or James or Leslie.
Pearl was just a name to him, a small dissatisfied spirit that each time he went to his mother’s breast was already there, fighting him off. May, just weeks before he was born, had pulled a kerosene tin of boiling water off the stove. Her howls, he suspected, were often in their mother’s ears, even when she was trying to keep her temper and talk quietly to him. She was their mother’s favourite, the daughter whose company she had longed for, since Jenny was not able to provide it. She had never trusted herself after what happened to May. She had become over-cautious, terrified of the capacity of even the most ordinary objects to turn murderous on you, and the house was full of them.
Of the others, the three boys, only Billy had been round long enough to be quite real. Digger had nursed and petted the others, but Billy had been old enough to follow him round the yard, and they had played together, all three. Billy had had time to develop features and his own smell in the room where they slept, all in the one bed; a voice, demands, little oddnesses that took your heart or raised in you an antagonism that reinforced your separateness and for that reason stuck.
Billy had wandered off into the river. The river aft
er that had a new meaning to them, the sound of it at night, the cold touch of it when you reached a hand in. It was no longer just a boundary that let you say which side you were on, or the broad stretch of sunlight in motion that their father, and later Digger too at times, sent the ferry out on. Even dropping a line into it became a different act.
‘Watcha doin’?’ Jenny had asked him once when she saw the line trailing. ‘Are you gunna find Billy?’
She often said things you had thought of but never quite come up with, and when you did, bit off.
These deaths made the house more crowded than it might otherwise have been, but also emptier, exerting a pressure all round that forced him and Jenny, who, as his mother told him over and over had only one another, into a space that was too narrow and which he felt at times was another sort of coffin. Their having survived imposed a heavy responsibility on them: of living not just for themselves but for the others as well, and in this way letting them get another go at the world, a second breath. Since Jenny was limited, and always would be, the main weight was on him.
‘It’s not me, Digger,’ his mother would insist when he bucked at the unfairness of it. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Do you think I would want to put a thing like that on you? It’s not me. It’s life!’
‘C’mon, Dig, Digger, tell us somefing.’
In the beginning he told her everything he knew. His voice, velvety in the dark of their little room, was what made the world real to her. A lot of what he told was made up. She could not tell the difference.
‘For God’s sake, Digger!’
Hearing his voice rise as it often did to a point of dangerous excitement, their mother had come from her sewing, stopped a moment in the shade of the door, and heard him. The moment he saw her he knew how angry she would be. But he couldn’t help himself. Coming to the edge of some extraordinary possibility, he would let himself claim it, put it into words; if he didn’t, the force of it, huge and expanding in his head, might make him go flying off from the centre of himself. What he did now, shamefaced at being caught, was explode in giggles.
‘Jenny, love,’ she said, ‘be a good girl and see if the postman’s been.’
‘He hasn’t,’ Jenny said, ‘I been listnin’.’
‘Don’t you answer me, Miss,’ the mother spat, ‘If I say go, you do it. Quick smart!’
‘You little bugger,’ she said when Jenny was out of earshot, but her anger had died before the shamefaced look of him. ‘How can you do that, Digger? Scaring the poor kid. What gets into you? You know what she’s like. I should box your ears.’
Instead she reached out and touched the corner of his mouth with her thumb as if there were a crumb there. Sobered, he looked up at her. He never knew what she was after. She was so unpredictable.
She drew her hand away. She had been reassuring herself yet again that he wasn’t simply a child of her wishing. She could not imagine sometimes where he had sprung from. He wasn’t like her, or like his father either, not really. He was like no one she had ever known. Tell him something once and it was there forever. He remembered things she didn’t even know she knew till he recalled them to her. ‘You remember, Mum. You remember,’ he would insist, and he was right, she did. Talk, facts, happenings from away back, the names of things, whole pages of any book he had read. Where did it all go in the skinny arms and legs (she thought of it as other mothers might think of food), all this knowledge he picked up and swallowed.
One night, hearing him reading aloud to his sister long after they had been told to go to bed, she had burst in in a fury.
‘Digger, I’ve told you a thousand –’
But there was no lamp alight, no book. He was reciting the pages off, sentence by sentence, out of his head. He looked up at her, all innocence. He was nine years old.
She had known then that it was too late, that she could not hold him. It was already in there, the world she wanted to keep away from him, and expanding at a rate she could not control. She did not know enough to keep up with him.
He came at times like a small child, hugging her waist and hanging on. ‘None of that,’ she would tell him. ‘You’re all kidstakes. That’s all that is.’
She believed he would leave her, but she never said it outright. She was protecting herself against loss.
‘No I won’t,’ he would have assured her, ‘how could I leave? Ever?’
He meant it and he did not.
*
‘Tellus somefing, Digger,’ Jenny would whisper in the dark of their little room. ‘They’re asleep, they won’t hear.’
He no longer told her everything, but he did tell her some things.
People he saw on his deliveries, for instance, like the Breens: Mrs Breen in her old felt slippers, who always gave him ginger ale in a peanut-butter glass, sitting him down at the kitchen table, then sitting down herself, right opposite, and watching him drink.
Mrs Breen had Eddie, a big fellow nearly twenty who was a mongol. All the time he was there Eddie would be hanging about in the hallway outside. Sometimes he would poke his head round the corner and grin. ‘Hullo Digger,’ he’d call, too loud. Other times he would be scowling, as if he begrudged Digger his mother’s attention and the mouthful of sweet soft-drink he was getting. Once, when Digger looked up, Eddie had his dick out and was playing with it. He looked quickly at Mrs Breen and she pretended not to notice, or she really didn’t notice, she was too intent on him. As if there was something miraculous in his just being able to drink a glass of ginger ale without spilling it.
Then there were fellers he met at the ferry, commercial travellers some of them, and the stories they had to tell, including jokes; and things he got from older boys down at the river, where there was a deep pool and you could swing out over the swirling blackness on a rope. Later, when he ventured to the pictures at the School of Arts, and to dances where he hung around outside with the older blokes, smoking, swapping yarns, there was news of visits some of these fellows had made to Sydney or to the Riverina to pick fruit.
He would slip away to these dances, or to the picture shows, in secret. Not much more than fourteen, he would wait till he thought the others were asleep, then, getting up softly in the dark, pull his pants on, and with his shirt and boots in his hand creep away to finish dressing in the yard.
‘Where y’ off to, Digger?’ she would whisper, sometimes, in her sleep.
‘Sshh. I’ll tellya t’morrer.’
Beginning softly in the dark, he would tell her things. He would start in a whisper, but quite soon he would get excited, break into giggles, or his voice would crack in squeaky shouts.
‘Shuddup in there, get ta sleep,’ their father would shout through the wall, ‘or I’ll bloody come in an’ make yer.’
Then, after a moment, their mother’s voice:
‘Go t’ sleep now, Digger, you can tell that t’morrow. It’ll keep.’
3
‘SO,’ DIGGER SAID, ‘how’m I doin’? Still on top?’
Vic grinned. ‘You’re doing OK. Want a statement?’
‘Nah! I’ll trust ya.’
Exchanges of this sort between them had become ritual in these last weeks. They were jest. There were subjects still that they steered clear of, where they would have felt shy and constrained with one another, but there was no lack of trust between them.
Vic, elbows on knees, looked past Digger to the river and its dancing swarm, bits of winged life in millions whose bodies at moments caught the light and made a second river up there, as if the first had thrown off a lighter variant of itself, all living particles, with the freedom to hover, prop, dance on the spot, while the other, earthbound, could do nothing but flow on. Occasionally the oily surface broke. A pair of jaws rose up and snapped down a dozen of those lives, or a hundred – whatever it could get. He watched Digger jiggle the handline.
‘Waddabout you?’ Digger asked.
‘I don’t know, I think I’m winning. But they’re crafty buggers. I can’t be sur
e.’
‘They still after you then?’
‘Yes,’ Vic said. He had caught the hint of scepticism in Digger’s tone. ‘They’re still after me.’
Digger pretended to be occupied with the line. After a moment, falling back on an older game between them, he said: ‘I don’t know why you don’t pull out while the going’s good. I would. I don’t know how you put up with it.’
There was at times, Vic thought, something prim and old-womanish about Digger. ‘These are just the sort of things,’ he thought, ‘that mothers must say. Looking just like that, too. Half-horrified, half-impressed.’ This side of Digger was a source of amusement to him.
‘And young Alex?’
Young Alex, as they called him, was Vic’s nephew, though in fact he was no longer young. He was forty-three.
Vic frowned. ‘Oh, he’s against me, I think.’ He made it sound a matter of no concern. ‘Only I can’t be sure of that, either. He doesn’t give much away.’
No, Digger thought, I bet he doesn’t.
‘If they get me this time,’ Vic said, and Digger looked up, caught out by something he hadn’t heard before, ‘I’ll chuck the towel in. Do you believe that?’
Is he serious? Digger thought. But Vic had already covered himself.
‘Maybe I should just do that anyway,’ he said. ‘Chuck it in and come up here.’
He laughed at that, and after a moment Digger did too. It was so improbable.
Their lives were as different as any two lives could be that still touched and crossed and could at moments like this move quietly as one.
‘You’ve left us f’ dead,’ Digger used to tease him in the early days. The mockery was of the gentlest sort, but Vic was sensitive on the point of loyalty and would look hurt.
‘What do you mean? Because I’m makin’ a bit of money? That doesn’t make any difference.’
But as time went on he stopped protesting. It did make a difference; not so much the money as the level he moved at, the moves he made there, and the amount of interest people took in him.
