The Great World

by David Malouf

  17

  VIC STIRRED AND woke. The jolt he felt had taken place in his sleep. For just the space of a breath back there he must have been free of gravity. He came to earth now but the sense of strangeness he felt, of estrangement even, was of being in a body that was not his own. His hand when he lifted it seemed further off and had a new weight at the end of his arm. Or maybe it was still, as they say, asleep. He worked it a little to take off the numbness.

  He knew clearly enough where he was. It was the bedroom at Turramurra. But what he was chiefly aware of was not the space he was in but the space that was inside him. Echoes were coming up from it, and it was these that gave him a sense of how vast it might be. Something like a stone had fallen a huge distance in there. From where it touched bottom the sound was still travelling upward, having the power, the unusual one, of belonging to a dream but going on past whatever barrier exists between sleep and wakefulness so that he could still hear it.

  What was all this? On the one hand the feeling of being lifted free of gravity like a bird, and on the other of an even swifter descent in the opposite direction, a long plummeting and the rush of air around a stone.

  And if it wasn’t a dream but some purely physical occurrence, why all this business of gravity and stones?

  He shifted his body on the bed and lay a while with his eyes open and very still in his head, fixed on the ceiling. A moment later he was asleep.

  But at moments during the day, which was otherwise normal, his dream, or the sensations surrounding whatever had happened in there, kept coming back to him. He could not shake them off. For whole minutes at a time there was a luminosity round the edge of everything he looked at or touched, even the most ordinary objects, a coffee-machine, a polystyrene cup.

  It was the light out of his dream, in which everything, including his body, had been soaked, he saw now, in a phosphorescence whose stickiness accounted for the heaviness he had felt, and still felt, in his limbs, and accounted too for all this shining. It wasn’t at all unpleasant, but it was strange and he was changed by it. He felt a tenderness in himself that was childish since it attached itself to things it was foolish for a grown man to feel so much for. The propelling pencil he took up, for example, and the way it fitted his hand, the sun rings thrown on his desk by a water-glass. ‘What is happening?’ he wondered.

  These moments, which came in waves, were states of acute happiness, but of a kind he had scarcely known before, and there was, so far as he could see, no reason for them. They brought with them a lightness of heart that he associated with youthfulness, with some image he had had once of what it was to be young and in love.

  Where did that come from? It did not seem like a memory of his own. It was new to him. Yet there was a quality of nostalgia in it too, as if he had broken in on the recollections of another man’s life and was as moved by them as by his own. The bursts of happiness came and came, and were so unconnected with any cause he knew of that they might have been the after-effects of a drug.

  All this surprised him, but he liked the mood and surrendered to it.

  He did all the things he usually did: checked the market reports that had come in overnight from New York, then the Hong Kong and Tokyo prices, then the local ones. Everything was fine, couldn’t be better: Cavendish was up two cents, Cathedral steady, Randall’s up three. It was going fine, better even than predicted.

  For a time he had been anxious that the market might be playing them up. But his advisers, who were all very clear-headed, sceptical fellows, statistics freaks, not at all star-gazers or voodoo merchants, had assured him that the upward trend was steady and would continue. They were experts. He was paying them in hundreds of thousands for their opinions. It was crazy to do that and not listen to them.

  There was a time, a while back, when he would have followed his own hunches, tuning in to the small hairs at the back of his neck. But the market forces these days were too complex for one man to grasp. Even he had to admit that. What happened here was dependent on what they did in Tokyo and New York. You needed advice at every point. Still, it went against the grain with him.

  The good thing was, in three or four days now it would be over. They would be out.

  Just on eleven, as always, he called Alex. These consultations were ritual. They made them by telephone since they could gauge better that way the little evasions they practised.

  Vic joked today, he was in a buoyant mood, and this put Alex on his guard. He was difficult to talk to, Alex, unless you stuck to figures, but he had no suspicion of what was going on, he was certain of that. ‘Watch it, Alex,’ he said. It was his routine farewell.

  He left the office at two to get a breath of air and was surprised to find, when he stepped into the street, that his mood had translated itself to the whole city, and he wondered if it wasn’t this that his body had caught wind of, some meteorological occurrence high up in the atmosphere, the first stirring of an air current that had been gathering there and had only now begun to move in over the edge of the continent.

  It was mid-October, and balmy. Girls were out in short-sleeved dresses, young fellows carried their jackets over their shoulders, joggers were about. Lemony sunlight made the edges of buildings and low walls luminous. He had a sense of being not only in deep harmony with all this, but maybe even responsible for it. How good he felt.

  He dropped in on Felix. He hadn’t done that for quite a while now. They had a coffee and talked. Brad was out on his own these days so it was easy for the old man to brag about him. He did it shyly. Brad was in the car-hire business, and was married and doing well.

  When he got back to the office he decided, for no reason, to ring Ellie.

  ‘No, nothing’s the matter,’ he said when she came to the phone at last from somewhere far off in the garden. He felt foolish. He wanted to tell her simply how happy he was, but she would hear that in his voice. It seemed foolish to make so much of it. ‘I was just ringing,’ he told her, ‘that’s all.’

  At three he called down and had them bring his car up from the parking lot. He would drive up and spend an hour or two (he was still, he felt, on the track his dream had set him on) with Digger, at Keen’s Crossing.

  Impossible to say when, but at some point in the fifty-kilometre drive the light changed, his mind darkened, and as on other occasions the high state of elation he was in revealed itself as no more than a mood, some condition of mind or body that passed now as quickly as it had appeared, as inexplicably too. His heart tightened, till the cramp in his chest was so painful and his arm so numbed that he could no longer trust himself to keep hold of the wheel. He pulled over on to the rough verge, rested a moment, then turned into a break in the scrub. He sat hunched over the wheel in almost total darkness. ‘I should go back,’ he thought, and opened the door of the car and got out.

  He must have slept or passed out for a moment. In the lapse of consciousness he found himself back in his dream; except that he saw now that it wasn’t a dream at all but an actual moment of his boyhood he had come back to. He was in his own nine-year-old body again, standing barefooted in old serge pants and braces, his whole being drawn taut as a bow, at the edge of the dunes, with the day just on the turn and lights coming on all down the shore. One of those occasions when, in the assurance that he had the power to leap out of himself into an imaginable future, he had stood still, and feeling the animal in him crouched, ready to leap, had let himself go with it.

  It took off in a long arc. He went with it, and found himself suspended, outside gravity, at the high point, and with the new moment yet to declare itself. But he must have come down that time, one of those times, in the wrong life. That was the only way he could explain now the otherness he felt in himself. The wrong life. So that everything that had happened to him, from that moment on, all of it, had occurred in another existence from the one he had till then been moving in and was intended for.

  Was that possible? Everything?

  It was all real, it had happened a
ll right. It had happened to him. It was fact. Part of the real happenings of a world that takes note of such things; that records events and enterprises and makes a life of them, and if they are big enough makes history of them. Only none of it had been intended for him, that’s what he saw. What had been intended was something quite different, and he had wrenched himself, by sheer willpower, out of the way of it.

  In the deepest part of himself he had always known this. He had felt it in the presence of that boy who had appeared each morning to push his big feet into his shoes, and left dirt marks on the collars of his shirts. Later, hanging about the streets and watching with a bad conscience the lines of men waiting for handouts, he had seen quite clearly the gap in the line where he ought to have been, and had wondered when he would have to pay the price for getting away.

  Thailand was different. That was intended. At that point the two lives somehow crossed. He had seen so clearly, up ahead, that old, white-headed fellow (‘The one I am now,’ he thought) who had passed clean through him. He had been in the right line that time.

  He thought of all those mornings when, still heavy with sleep, he had sat in Meggsie’s kitchen feeling for the contours of an existence, some other one, that his body might fit more neatly (more clumsily that is) than the one he was in. Not an easier life. It wouldn’t be easier, he was certain of that. But one that was continuous with something in himself that he was afraid of losing contact with yet could not grasp.

  Now, once again, he felt that nine-year-old body prepare to leap in him. He took off. He hung a moment free of gravity, and in the long breath in which he was suspended got a glimpse of what it was he was about to fall back into; which was his own life waiting to reclaim him – that other, harsher life that went back to its beginning in his father’s life, in his mother’s. But gravity was too strong. He could not stay up there long enough to make out the details of it. Once again he felt the force of things take hold and tug him down. And the life he came back into was the one he was in. He took the weight of it again, against his chest, in his belly and groin, and fell with the full force of his body on stones, little sharp-edged ones, and it stayed with him.

  Later, when he came back to consciousness, he was surprised to find himself in deep night, with no light anywhere but where the first stars were showing themselves. ‘Where is this?’ he thought. He was unsure as yet whether it was a place or another condition.

  But when he gathered his senses together he was aware of sharp-edged little stones under him, and there was a great climbing edifice of sound as well, though what the creatures were who were making it he could not guess. Frogs? Night crickets?

  He sat up a little and looked about, but there was nothing to be seen.

  It occurred to him then that he must have got out here by car, but there was no car in sight, and the light was not strong enough to judge directions.

  He recalled, because his body did, a period of sharp pain. He still felt the aura of it, not at this point as a physical thing but as a sense of his limbs being not quite returned to him, or not in their solid form. He had difficulty making judgements about things that ought to have been simple. Like where exactly his fingers were. And along with all this were sensations that were unrelated, so far as he could see, to any fact. A softness of spring weather, delicate breezes blowing about on the bare arms of girls, all of which seemed to have nothing at all to do with the weather but to be a movement of his spirit. He was sitting in the middle of nowhere and had no idea which way to move.

  The decision was taken out of his hands. Suddenly a new and terrible anguish gripped his heart, or it was a physical agony, he could not tell which, and he was crushed, his cheek to the hard edge of stones that cut his flesh. He was on his side and writhing, pushing himself into the smothering blackness of the night or some other, deeper darkness, which was all he desired now, a sack that he could crawl into and pull over his head, and where he could kick out to the end of his breath.

  He must have been crawling. He had come a long distance, pushing himself deeper and deeper into the grass. He lay now in a nest of it that he had made with the working of his limbs, in an agony of spirit that left him breathless.

  The sun was up. Big birds were flopping overhead. He rolled his head a little and saw that he was not awake after all. In the dream he was in, his agony, which was something quite separate from him, had taken the shape of a cat with matted fur that was lying just inches from where his outstretched hand was curled. It had the brutal head and overgrown coarse fur of a feral, gone back, after a generation or more, to wildness, and was lying just beyond arm’s length and watching him.

  But when he blinked and looked closer, it wasn’t a phantom, it was real. Its head had been split by the blade of a shovel, maybe an axe, and half its face was sliced away. It had crawled in here to die. It snarled now, its one fierce eye glaring at him; though the sound it made might not have been hostile after all but a plea for aid. Flies were swarming in the rawness of the open wound and the creature used its paw with the savage claws to keep them off.

  Vic lay with his head on his extended arm, watching the cat, and the cat lay two yards away in extreme agony.

  ‘I have seen all this before,’ he thought, ‘many times. I got out of it then. I survived. I always survived. I know about survival.’

  But the cat, he saw, was dying. He looked at it. ‘Poor bugger,’ he thought, ‘I’d help you, if I could. I’d put you out of your misery.’

  He and the cat looked at one another, quite close like that, for a long time, and the cat went through agonies but did not die. It was suffering, but in what way, he wondered. What sort of consciousness does a cat have? Does a cat have consciousness?

  ‘I’m sorry for you, mate,’ he said out loud, and was surprised to hear his own voice.

  The cat did not hear, or did not understand. It made no difference to it, one way or the other. It just watched him with its one eye, and he had no idea what it thought.

  18

  IT WAS TEN in the morning. The range was drawing just right, making a good heat, and Jenny was feeling unusually pleased with herself, which in her case meant pleased with the world, the way it settled around her this morning as if she was, for once, just right for it. She was waiting for a batch of scones to come out of the oven.

  It was hot but not too hot. October. The yard was dancing a bit where heat came up in waves off a sheet of corrugated iron that Digger had left out there. The leaves of the pepper tree were also dancing. Half a dozen magpies were under the lines. They were excited. Something, some worm or that, or a smaller bird, was getting it. Magpies, Magpies! Watch yer eyes! They would come diving at your head if you passed too close under their nests. Watch yer eyes!

  She dreamed at the windowsill, her mind on the yard but also on the oven: the big birds at their business, getting it over with, quick, quick now, Geez, heat dancing up off the iron sheet, and further back in her head, but not too far back, the scones on their tray which were for Digger’s morning tea, rising nicely now and going crisp on top then browning. They would be ready in about five minutes. She shifted her heavy bulk on the chair.

  When she took them out of the oven she couldn’t believe it. And just a minute ago she had been feeling so good! She held the hot tray and stared at what she had done. At what someone had done. It’s what happens, what always happens, when you start getting too sure of yourself. She couldn’t believe it. She stared so long that the tray began to burn her fingers through the worn linen of the teacloth. She cursed and dumped the thing down on the sink, then screwed her mouth up, hugged herself a little and counted, using her finger this time. It was still thirteen. How? How had it happened? She was always that careful. Someone – but who? – must have slipped the extra one in while her back was turned.

  So who was it for? That was the question. Whose bad luck was it? And which one of them was it? They were all so alike, all nicely raised and browned. She was good at scones. It was her long suit. There was n
o way of picking it.

  But she had to. It was either that or chuck the whole lot to the bloody magpies, and all the philosophy and practice of sixty-nine years went against it. Waste not, want not, that was the rule. If you did waste, then one day you would remember these scones and starve for ’em, and serve you right!

  Quite fearful now of making a second error (if it was really her that had made the first one), but trusting too in some agency in herself that would work when she needed it, she squeezed her eyes shut, stretched out her blunt fingers, which were freckled and thickly padded round the nails, and let her palm hover over the scones. Then, when her mind was emptied of all thought, she took one.

  Well, it had better be it! She had good reason to believe it was. She could work these tricks when she had to. Only where the hell, she wondered, had her mind been – what had her good sense been doing, sleeping? – when she made up that lot of dough in the first place and let the one extra in? If she had.

  So what now? What should she do with it? Throw it back on the coals?

  She looked at the scone sitting there on the sink. Innocent, it looked.

  With a little sideways slew of her mouth she took it up rather gingerly, put her shoulder to the screen door and stepped out. The magpies were there, big black-and-white buggers the size of cats. They had already caught sight of her looming at the back door, but didn’t let on that they were watching. ‘Well,’ she thought, this’ll fix ya!’

  ‘Here I come,’ she sang to herself as she crossed the yard, ‘here’s yer ol’ mate Jenny. You don’t know what I’ve got in me hand, do yer, eh? Look at this. Which one of yez is it for? Which one of you greedy buggers is gunna swaller bad luck?’ She tossed the nicely browned, crisp little scone like a soft stone into the midst of them, and the great black-and-white creatures rolled towards it and flapped and scrabbled, beaks going everywhere, wings too, tearing at one another and squawking.