The Great World

by David Malouf

  It was a men’s boarding house in Surry Hills. He had been summoned to the phone just before tea.

  Sprawled on his back in the airless heat, legs spread, mind empty, his body as flat as paper – one of a string of such fellows cut out of a single folded sheet – he had been tempted to call out ‘Not in,’ but had staggered up, still half in a dream, scratched his head and applied the receiver to his ear. It was Ma. Every Friday night she rang and they had the same three-minute exchange.

  She wanted him to come home, of course; but after the first time she had never again tried to persuade or bully him. But she rang each Friday at the same hour, and though he was often tempted not to, he took the call. She was clever, Ma, and had infinite patience. Eventually he would give all this up and come back. She knew that and so did he. In the meantime, as lightly as possible, she hung on.

  Sunday dinner – that was the open invitation, a surprise for Pa; no pressure, but the invitation was always there. One Sunday, yes, he promised, but he continued to put her off.

  Back in the room he lay on the bed, not thinking, and stared up at the stamped-tin ceiling with its design of circles within squares, and inside the circles, fleurs-de-lis.

  In these last years, when the population of the city had very nearly doubled, the big front room of the place, with its long sash-windows and fifteen-foot ceilings, had been partitioned with three-ply to make smaller rooms, he had no idea how many, each with its bare bulb hanging, its wardrobe, washbasin and cot. The long gap between the top of the partition and the ceiling meant there was no privacy here. All night you heard other men coughing, hawking, turning the pages of the Zane Greys they were reading, shifting on the rusty wires and groaning in their sleep. You participated, whether you cared to or not, in their dreams.

  He was earning good money now and could easily have had a room of his own. But he couldn’t sleep in a room of his own. He wouldn’t have admitted it, even to Digger, but he couldn’t get through the night. The one time he had taken a room in a hotel and tried it, he had woken in a cold sweat, filled with a panic he could not contain. He had had to go out and sit with the tramps at an all-night pie stall.

  The proximities of this place, the indifference, the low-keyed despair of the other men, who were mostly older, were what he wanted; they suited him. So did his job.

  For six months he had been out west, moving on from one township to the next and picking up any work he could get; as a greenkeeper in one place, a fencer in another. Out past Bathurst to Orange, then to Moree, Walgett and across the Queensland border. He had done that to lose himself for a while, but in the end had worked his way back. He was employed by the council now as a ganger on the roads, spreading gravel in front of a steamroller, all day in the heat and reek of tar. It was fierce work in the December sun. His hands were calloused and black. There were burn-spots where the hot tar spat. Some nights his arms felt as if they had been torn out of their sockets. But it was what he wanted.

  He was home, he accepted that. It was a fact. But some stubbornness in him, a sense of outrage that he would not relinquish, still kept him captive, not to a place but to a condition. He did not want to be free of it. To be so would be to accept at last that what had been done to him could be ended and put behind him, and he could never accept that.

  He was back, and could have whatever he wanted now, a room of his own, a girl, what Ma called a normal life. But he chose not to. The right to choose, even if the choice was against his own interest, was important to him. By living as he did now he made what had happened to him ‘up there’ – the deprivations and shame he had suffered, the misuse he had been subject to – that much less of a violation. ‘You see, I might have chosen it anyway. Like I’m doing now.’

  But he also chose, out of pride, not to let the Warrenders see him like this; however fond they were of him and whatever allowances they might be willing to make. He did not want allowances made. When he saw them again it had to be in his old self as he was before he went away. Those were the conditions he set.

  In his last days in the camp, among other letters from Pa and Ma and Ellie, had been one from Lucille. It was written in a style that had immediately enraged him, which pretended to make light of the facts it had to tell and was entirely false. She was married, that’s what she had to tell. To a Yank. And had a child.

  He accepted these facts. He had a high regard for facts. What he did not accept was their finality. Like the things that had happened to him, they were a result of the extraordinary conditions of war, and were to that extent accidental. He chose himself not to be a victim of accident, in this case or any other. He would in time reverse these facts, but only when he was strong enough to take hold of things with something like his old power. Till then, he would have to wait.

  The other men in the house were mostly winos. He met them in the dark hallway or on the steps outside, tottering home with a bottle of port in a brown-paper bag, or stopped halfway up the stairs and lolling. ‘G’day, son,’ was all they ever said. But one or two of them were old fellows, respectable enough, who had nowhere else to go. No woman any longer, maybe a son or daughter somewhere who had no room for them; or they had never had a family at all. They read the papers, took an interest in the races, exchanged cheap mystery books. To these men all this was normal. They did not look at him and wonder what he was doing here. They assumed he was as they were – only a few years earlier on the road.

  He kept away from people he knew, or tried to; but occasionally, in a panic, would need the comfort of a familiar voice. He would go out shakily and ring someone. Douggy mostly, since Douggy was settled; more rarely, but he had done it once or twice, the Warrenders, hoping that he might catch Lucille. It was enough on most occasions just to dial the numbers and hear the phone ring. He could go back to sleep then. Or he would wait for the answering voice and stand listening a moment, too ashamed to speak.

  But there were times as well when only one person would do, and that was Digger.

  He hung off as long as he could. He hated this dependence and didn’t understand it. But sooner or later he would give up fighting and seek Digger out. Once it was up the Cross. The next time he had to hitch-hike all the way up to the Hawkesbury, to Keen’s Crossing.

  Facing Digger took him right back. He would be shaking so badly at times he thought it must be the malaria coming back; it was physical. But it wasn’t malaria, and after a little he would be calmer, then a great calmness would settle and spread in him; his spirit would go sleepy with it and it would last for days sometimes, like a laying on of hands.

  He did not know why this was. He was moved, and grateful, and wished he had some way of showing it, but Digger needed nothing from him, barely knew, he thought, what had taken place. Digger was patient with him but also held him off. He felt hurt. He was touched at times by a spirit of generosity and affection for the world that broke something in him which needed, he knew, to be broken. He would blunder about empty-handed then, looking to some as if he were drunk, to others crazy, with the light-headed, swollen-hearted sense of being a bearer of gifts that would appear and declare themselves, must do, as soon as he found someone who would accept them from him.

  2

  ‘WELL, HE’S COMING,’ Ma said, turning aside from her accounts. ‘He’s promised this time. But I’m not telling Pa till he’s actually here. He’d be too disappointed. Oh,’ she added, ‘and I think it would be better if we didn’t say anything, any of us – you know, about where he’s been.’

  Ellie did no more than glance up briefly from her book. It was Lucille who said sharply: ‘For heaven’s sake, why not?’

  She was feeding creamed pears to little Alexander. The child, peeved at the interruption, at anything that came between him and the big warmth that shone so continuously upon him, shifted his gaze to his grandmother and his lip dropped. His mother was turned away from him. The spoon was in mid-air, inches from his mouth.

  Mrs Warrender did not immediately reply. She understoo
d Lucille’s position. It was difficult to be a married woman and a mother, and to have a husband who was thousands of miles off and no household or home of your own. She knew too that where Vic was concerned Lucille was proprietorial. She had no right to be, but all that did was make her touchier.

  ‘Well,’ Ma said at last, ‘I know Vic and he won’t want to talk about it. If he brings it up himself it’s a different matter. But he won’t, I know he won’t.’

  Lucille glowered. In these last months she had grown increasingly impatient with Ma, and now that she was about to break free, increasingly critical, scornful even, of the way they lived, the evasions and half-truths they were driven to in being so sensitive always of one another’s hurts. She wanted a life now that was robust, and open and honest, even if it hurt, and such a thing was impossible here. She was tired of being a married woman and still a child in her parents’ house.

  All the months she was pregnant she had felt wonderfully separate and self-contained. She had eaten what she liked, slept till midday, spent her afternoons stretched out in the sun; with none of her usual restlessness, and none of the vexations either that went with her ‘difficult’ nature. And there was no selfishness in it, because she was no longer thinking only of herself.

  Separate, but at the same time connected and in the line of something: real forces, by which she meant forces that were outside her will.

  Time, for instance.

  The clock that had begun ticking in her, which was perfectly synchronised to the sun, was real time, not just clock time, and it synchronised her as well. It could not be stopped or slowed or quickened. She submitted herself to it and felt no violation; in fact the opposite, a kind of release.

  Gravity, too.

  One afternoon, in the dreamy state she fell into under the blazing sun, she had had a vision of herself as a cloud, so light and transparent that she might have dissolved or risen up and floated. But inside the cloud, far off in a spotlight at the very centre of it, a little figure was performing, not for an audience, not at all, but for himself. In a state of perfect self-absorption he was turning somersaults, and she could see him quite clearly, though in fact he was such a long way off. He wasn’t weightless, but he appeared to know enough of the secrets of gravity to play the most astonishing tricks with it. She kept her eye on him; she wanted to learn the secrets of all this – of lightness, but also her own true weight in the world.

  For months, with her eyes screwed up against the sun, her feet propped on the arms of a squatter’s chair and a jug of Meggsie’s lemon drink at her elbow, she had watched him perform. He was very small and far off at first, but the far-offness had to do with time, not space. He grew as he got closer; till he was so close she no longer had to squint to make him out.

  Never for a moment in all this did she feel anxious for him, or for herself either. She would not float away and he would not fall. They were held, both of them.

  And she did not have to feel impatient either. He was moving in his own time and would not be hurried. He was the clock. Somewhere up ahead, at a point they had not yet arrived at, he was already sitting up in his high-chair and banging with a spoon. All she had to do was wait the days out till they were there.

  ‘Well,’ she said now, ‘I know Vic, too.’ She urged the child to open up for a last mouthful. ‘You’re doing just what he wants. All this carrying on! It’s to make us see what a sensitive soul he is and how careful we ought to be with him, that’s all. And to make himself the centre of things.’

  Ellie looked up again. It was the note of vehemence in Lucille’s voice, not the words themselves, that shocked her.

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ Ma said, and she too was angry now. ‘Honestly, Lucille, there are times when I don’t think I know you at all.’

  Lucille flushed. It was humiliating to her to come under her mother’s criticism and be rebuked. She took up her things, set Alexander on her hip, and stalked from the room.

  ‘Why are you so down on Vic?’ Ellie asked later, when they were alone together in Lucille’s room, the child on the bed between them. Lucille was sitting up cross-legged threading a needle.

  ‘Am I?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you are. And you haven’t even seen him. You upset Ma, too. You know how fond she is of him. What’s the matter with you?’

  Lucille went on with her needle. After a moment she lowered her work and said fiercely: ‘He thinks he’s the only one in the world that anything’s happened to. I know Vic. I don’t have to see him.’

  Ellie drew back. She knew these stormy, half-tearful, half-defiant moods in her sister. They were close, and had been even closer in these last months since Lucille was alone.

  The three years between them made a difference.

  Ellie had been too young to go out with Americans – Pa wouldn’t allow it; but she had hung about when they appeared (just as in the movies) with an orchid in a square cellophane box, or chocolates, or nylons, had sized them up in her quick down-to-earth way, and afterwards, when she and Lucille, still in her dancing dress, were rolling about on one of their beds, whispering, laughing, comparing, criticising, could catch just the drawl with which this one said, ‘We sure do, ma’am,’ or the self-satisfied sprawl or little military stamp and snap of others, or the boiled look of this one, or the muscle-bound, collar-jerking shyness of another, a certain Virgil Farson Jr of Greenwood, Mississippi, who had not been Lucille’s favourite at the start, not by any means, then was. In the Virge business she had known at every point what Lucille was up to. To the extent that Ma actually blamed her for not telling and had not spoken to her for a week.

  When Vic went away Ellie was fifteen. They were friends and she was fiercely loyal to him. She had taken it for granted that in the end Lucille would choose him – there was such a tie between them – and that their other little affairs and flirtations were no more than a kind of teasing play to conceal the inevitability of it.

  ‘No,’ Lucille told her gravely, ‘that was just kid’s stuff. Don’t you know the difference?’ She was so sure of herself that Ellie wondered what she had missed.

  Still, when she got pregnant there was the sense all round, but especially on Ma’s part, that a mistake had been made.

  Lucille did not think so. She broke the news to Ellie as a sworn secret, and with so much awed excitement and triumph (Ellie had never seen her at once so elated and sober and overwrought) that Ellie had felt a little thump in her own belly at the immensity, the serious adultness of it.

  Lucille, she told herself, was right. She was still a schoolgirl and had no grasp of things. Even in the midst of the war, when so much that was terrible had occurred, she had simply gone on in the old way, believing that life, their life, was a story that could end only one way, according to the rules of the films she went to and the romances she read. Lucille had broken through all that, and for all their closeness she had not seen it.

  For the two weeks that she had Lucille’s secret to keep she had looked on her sister as a being transformed, suddenly endowed with urgency and purpose.

  The germ of light that with each passing second was swelling and rounding in her had drawn Lucille into the line of life; and it had been put there, amazingly, in such a precise and effective way, though also no doubt in his usual barging manner and with no clear intent, by Virgil Farson, a big slow boy of less than twenty. At that moment three thousand miles away in the Islands he was lounging about an Air Force base reading his Felix the Cat comics, quite ignorant yet of what he had done.

  These facts astonished Ellie. She had gone about the house in a dazed state, aware suddenly of how fragile and important things could be and feeling her bond with Lucille immeasurably deepened. Lucille had crossed a border. Ellie felt that she too had come to the edge of it and was shining now and swelling in sympathy.

  It was an exaggeration, of course. She had been stirred by her own possibilities, that’s all, had felt the pull in her own nature of the change in Lucille’s. She
soon came back to earth.

  But the little life she had been so aware of then as a mere floating presence, a new, nameless one that had turned towards them and was starting for a point maybe sixty or seventy years away was no longer nameless. It was this odd little Alexander; who filled the house with his squalls and hungers, his smells too, and was at this moment lying on the bed between them, singing to himself, kicking up his heels, and when she put her face down into his naked belly, uttering squeals of ecstasy.

  ‘Do you think he’ll be so different, then?’ she asked, lifting her head. She was asking on her own account, rather wary now of what it might be that she had not understood.

  Lucille was more upset than she would admit. She made a mouth and turned away. It was too difficult. She couldn’t put it into words.

  He would be, of course he would. He must be. Weren’t they all? So much had happened in these last years. But Vic, she knew, had a way of closing himself off from mere happenings. It was a strength; it was also, from another point of view, a weakness. The more he was touched by a thing the more he did it.

  He would be changed, sure enough, perhaps horribly, and the possibility of that, however small her own part in it, was painful to her. But he would pretend not to be, and at the same time would want you to see through it and pity him.

  So when Sunday came round and he did appear as promised – she heard the bell, then the clamour they were making in the hall, even Meggsie and Aunt James – she did not go down immediately. She took a little extra time, not on herself, she spent no time at all on herself, but on the child. When she came to the door of the front room they were all gathered around him, Ma, Pa, Meggsie, Aunt James (Ellie was still out at her tennis match), in a close family group. He was the lost son come home; they were making a royal fuss of him. She felt shut out. Had she always, secretly, been resentful of his place among them? Was Ellie? But when he turned, and she saw the quick, clenched look of him, she felt ashamed. She went up quickly, holding the child and relying on his warmth and weight to steady her, and kissed him on the cheek. She was shocked. He was no thinner than in the old days but he had a flayed look that went straight to her heart.