by David Malouf
One of them got it and she watched it gobble the thing down and the others go in under its wings for the crumbs.
‘So,’ she said, feeling a kind of satisfaction now at playing with such powers, bad luck and the possibility of a choking or worse, and of setting things right as well, getting them back into order again, since that extra scone had definitely been a mistake.
It wasn’t her fault which one got it. Somebody else would be deciding that. All she’d done was throw the bad luck to them, she didn’t choose. Greed had chosen. The greediest and strongest of them had got it.
She looked at the big bird, which was preening itself, and chuckled. She knew something the bird did not, ‘A cat’ll get you now,’ she thought, watching it strut. ‘A feral. Or some kid with a shanghai. Well, good riddance!’ She didn’t care. The main thing was, she’d got the bad luck off Digger and herself.
She would have liked to keep a watch on that bird and make sure, only she didn’t have the time. She slumped back to the kitchen, and when she saw the tray sitting there, on the edge of the sink, had a sick feeling. Maybe she ought to have tossed the lot out anyway. But if you started that sort of caper, tossing good stuff out just because you were scared and couldn’t tell good from bad, you’d be lost. You’d end up tossing everything out.
She’d made a choice. That’s what you were supposed to do, make a choice and choose right, by instinct. If you started worrying about mistakes, you’d make one, and if you made a little mistake, well eventually you’d make a big one.
That’s what had alarmed her so much when she saw that one extra. That it might be the beginning of something.
She was pegging out clothes an hour or so later when she saw the birds making a commotion in the scrub. ‘Aha!’ she thought. She pinned up the other end of the sheet she was hanging, which billowed and filled with light, and, leaving the remainder in the basket, went off through the grass a little to see what was doing. This would be proof now. The big birds were excited.
But what presented itself when she parted the grass on the overgrown track was not a bird at all but a cat, a big feral, black with reddish lights in its fur, and when it turned on her, snarling, she gave a gasp. Half its face was gone. Someone had sliced it away with the edge of a shovel. Some feller who was sick of having his chooks taken, no doubt. It looked up at her with such a dumb, suffering look, in spite of the snarl, that she was stricken. It was in agony, poor creature.
She turned away to find a rock or something to finish it off, and saw something else. A hand coming out of the grass.
‘Jesus,’ she thought, ‘what a day!’
With her heart beating she pushed the grass aside and a man rolled over and looked right up at her.
It was Vic.
She was in real panic now. Was he poisoned? Had she done it? But she’d given that scone to the magpies. She’d seen one of them eat it.
She hung over him, very scared and moaning a little, and his eyes rolled, following her movements, his mouth wet and the tongue moving, but no sound coming from him.
She knelt to loosen his collar, which seemed to be choking him, and the hand grabbed hers and tightened on it. She wrenched her hand loose, jabbering, and when she got it free she had hold of a smooth little stone about the size of a kidney, same colour too, which she thought for a moment he might have sicked up. She stared at it.
About the size, too, of a scone. It was warm.
He rolled over now on his side, drew his legs up like a baby, and lay curled up in the grassy nest he had made by rolling about there.
‘What is it?’ she said.
The thought of a child, a baby, had softened her.
She took his hand. With her other hand she stroked his face. After a moment she squatted, lifted him a little, and took his head in her arms. She began to rock him, and the cat, opposite, watched with its one eye. He yielded in her arms and she forgot now all that she had against him. She forgave him for it, whatever it was, and she did not even know what it was. It didn’t matter.
He had his face down between her breasts. She could feel a wetness. She began to weep. She could feel his mouth down there and wished, if that’s what he wanted, that she could feed him, but she had no milk. She had had no milk now for more than forty years. They had pumped it out of her with a machine. She had begged and begged them, those nuns, not to take it, and all that night had dreamt of mouths pulling at her, and she didn’t care in the end what they were, babies or poddy calves or little lambs or what, that were feeding off the rich stuff her body had stored up, which had been meant to feed a creature, not to be squeezed out with a machine. And all the time, out there somewhere, her own little baby was going hungry; or if it wasn’t, it was being fed some other milk, not the one that had been made for it special in all the world; and for the whole of its life, poor thing, it would know that and feel the loss – that the world had stolen something from it that it would never have. She had looked around wherever she went after that, believing she would recognise the face of that little kid she had had the milk for, and who might be looking for it still.
Forty-three years old he would be now, wherever he was. And now, forty-three years late, this.
She hugged his head to her breast, but after a little, when her tears stopped, she eased him off and said gently: ‘Listen, listen, Mister. I’m not leaving you. On’y I gotta get Digger, right? Right? Two minutes. Right?’
She got up, and there was still the cat, still with its head rolled towards her. She had to step around it. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told it, ‘I haven’t forgot. I’ll get to you later.’
She began calling Digger under her breath all the way to the yard, and when she was in hearing distance she started shouting for him, and right away he appeared round the corner of the store.
19
DIGGER WAS WALKING with Ellie on a terrace of springy turf, the edge of which fell away into a wild little gully, all reddish boulders and giant ironbarks and angophoras growing straight out of the rock. Behind them was the low, ranch-style house that Vic had built. They had come out with tea mugs in their hands to see the birds that filled the garden as they did the gully below, not observing, since it was barely visible, the point where wild nature became nature tended and organised, except that the garden offered the greater variety of green things spiked or spurred or exploding in dark or dazzling showers and was the more crowded. In the space of just seconds Digger identified blue wrens, noisy mynahs, three Eastern Rosellas, two kinds of honey-eater, all as Ellie in her many descriptions of the place had promised. He had never seen it before but knew every corner of this garden as if it was his own.
Ellie walked with a limp. She had never told him of any illness or injury; he was surprised. This little change in her, and it wasn’t, as he saw after a time, the only one, alerted him to how many things in her life their correspondence might not have covered. But all that meant was how much more there was to come.
Her smile was the same, and so, almost at once, was the easiness between them.
She was very calm. Her mother was so distressed, she told him, and there had been so much noise and confusion, that she had to be.
In the evening they had been besieged by reporters. They had clambered all over the drive, banging on the doors, front and back, looming up at windows, making camp with their cameras on the lawn. None of them had shown any sort of consideration, or had the least respect for their privacy or grief, or had thought of the event, so far as she could see, as anything more than News. Ellie, who had always hated this public aspect of their lives, and feared it too, was disgusted. They had had to draw the curtains and sit like prisoners in their own house, and still the banging had gone on, the tapping at windows, the shouted appeals. Then suddenly they had all rushed off again, just packed up in great excitement and were gone. An event of world proportions had intervened, and Vic Curran’s death, which on any other day would have been headlines, was reduced to a ten-centimetre column on the front page, with a
direction to page three.
As for Albert Keen, phantom dealer in millions, whose rise and fall from nothing to nothing had covered just thirty-one days, you had to go to the financial pages and read between the lines to get a hint of that. It was a story that was lost as yet in the clouds of dust in which a whole ghostly edifice had tottered and come crashing down.
The Needham’s Group had been hit, and hit badly. That at least was clear, and there were statements, cautious ones, from Alex and from the managers of two major banks.
‘Did you see what the papers are saying?’ Ellie asked him.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘But you know the papers.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s true.’ Digger looked to see how much she knew. Was she testing him? ‘He was doing something, I don’t know what. Alex knows. Something crazy. It wasn’t illegal – or not quite, he wouldn’t have done anything like that. You know what he was like. But it seems –’ Her eye moved out over the layered leaves of the garden, all the different kinds of fronds, and heart-shaped and elongated leaves, and sword-shapes and falls of colour and fiery wheels. ‘Alex says we’re in trouble. He’s out of his mind, poor Alex.’
‘It was me,’ Digger said abruptly. ‘I was in on it. Haven’t you heard?’ It was a confession. He had no reason to boast of it.
‘Yes. Alex told me. But Digger – you don’t know anything about these things.’
‘It was just the name he was using,’ he explained, but it sounded unlikely without Vic to expound the thing and make it real. ‘It seems,’ he said, ‘I’m a ruined man.’
She looked at him then. They both saw the humour of it, and he thought he heard Vic laugh. It was the sort of thing that might have appealed to him.
They walked on for a minute or two.
‘Can I come and see you?’ Digger asked. ‘Or do you want to go on with the letters?’
She thought a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly. ‘Why don’t you write and ask me?’
It was too early to say any of the things they would have at last to get round to. Maybe it would be easier in writing.
They sat holding hands for a time, on a bench under the trees, then she said at last: ‘Digger, I must go, I’ve got to see my mother. Do you want me to get you a car for the station?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Now that I’m a pauper again I’d better get used to walking, don’t you reckon?’
The walk to the station was a warm one. It was hot for October. He had to stop and take his hat off for a bit to let his head breathe. From narrow patches of weeds on either side of the asphalt came the smell of dust and grass-seed, mixed in with an acrid but not at all unpleasant odour that showed there were dogs about. One or two of them came trotting past; out on their own affairs, and leaving at points along their route these sharp-smelling traces of their presence, just a few drops each time, as if it was incumbent upon them to mark their passage in this elemental and entirely personal fashion.
Digger liked the way they trotted about so lightly on their claws, with their ears flopping and their noses to the ground. They knew what they were doing, dogs. You could learn something from them. He walked on.
A list had started up in his head. He let it go on. Burton, Cable, Carwardine, Cooley, Cooper, Crane . . . The next one was him.
He let the two syllables out and found himself choked a moment. He could hardly go on: Curran.
Curran, Victor Charles, one of a list. But they had, after all and despite all, been as close as any two men could be. How had that happened?
He got a flash of him as he had appeared, hovering about behind Doug, in those last days before the surrender, and experienced again, and with a force he wouldn’t have thought possible, as if time had no meaning at all, the immediate aversion he had felt. No, it was something more hidden than that. A sense of their being, in their deepest natures, inimical to one another; in some part of themselves that was not accessible to view, or to reasoning either, though they were both aware of it, and would trust it too. Except that they had not, not in the long run. What they had done instead, since they could hardly do otherwise, was let the spirit of accident lead them. First the monstrous accident of Mac’s killing, then the stranger one of their physical dependence on one another in the coming and going of their fevers, till what was revealed was something stronger even than their first instinctive hostility; unless that had been, from the start, only the negative sign of a deeper affinity. Which they might have missed, and by a long shot too, forty years, if accident had not imposed itself as the true shaper of their lives.
Accident? But what more mysterious force was that the name for in their inadequate language? . . . Daley, Dannagher, Deeks, Dewhurst, Dixon.
He walked on. There were shops now, supermarkets with windows covered with cut-price offers for washing powders or mixed fruit, a café with video games where kids were hunched, utterly absorbed, jerking their shoulders from left to right as they swerved past the asteroids, a newsagent’s with the headlines outside on wired boards: the collapse on Wall Street, but also Vic’s name, just the last one, Curran, in giant letters. In his case that was enough.
Digger stood and looked at it spelled out there, the six letters. It meant one thing on the newsboard and another thing altogether where its two syllables were tucked away, among so many, in his head. Another thing again as he had actually known the man.
He took up the list again where he had left off. Doig, Dooley, Doone, Durani, Dwyer . . . It was a long way yet to the end.
20
THE CHILD, HIS broad feet set firmly in the dust, sits on the bottom one of three steps that lead down from the verandah to their front yard.
It is afternoon, and hot. Across the street are other houses just like theirs, weatherboard with red corrugated-iron roofs and picket fences with numbers on the gate. Their number is six, and he is four. Six Marlin Street, and he is Victor Charles Curran, Vic.
They have lived at number six for as long as he can remember. At night people come to play poker. There is noise, smoke, laughter, and he is allowed to bring in the beer bottles in their straw jackets, and when they are empty he carts them out again and puts them with the others on the back porch. Dead marines, they are called.
His mother gets work to do for ladies. She is sitting now just to his left, on a cane chair she has brought from the kitchen. Her work is in her lap and she is very intent upon it, wearing her glasses. Open at her feet is a little cardboard suitcase where she keeps snips of all different shapes and colours.
Sometimes, to keep him quiet when he has no one to play with, she lets him take the pieces out and sort them into their different colours; but today she has given him something more difficult to do. She has given him a needle, wet the end of a piece of thread, and for the last hour, over and over, he has been trying to do this thing he knows is simple yet finds so difficult.
Now and again, just to reassure himself it can be done, he holds the needle up to see the hole more clearly.
If you bring it up close to your eye you can see the sky through it. It is a big hole and holds a lot of blue. Then if you lower it a little you see a whole house there. Jensens’, opposite, where Trudy and Jack live.
It’s odd, this. You can see a whole house in it, roof and all, but to get just a bit of cotton through is so difficult. He has been trying for a long time, screwing his eye up and setting his jaw, very determined, and the bit of thread which was white when he started is grubby now and getting grubbier. That’s because of his hands. He lays the needle down very carefully, then the thread, and rubs his hands against his shorts. Then he tries again. Then he looks through the eye of the needle again.
He sees a truck parking outside Jock Hale’s place. He sees two girls, Milly and Jane Benson, swinging on their gate. They are singing something he can’t quite hear, and swinging. He sees a boy in grey shorts learning to ride a bike. The bike keeps wobbling and he puts his bare foot down on the bitumen to steady it, then tries again. The boy is abou
t a year older than he is, maybe six, even. It is himself!
He is puzzled by this and looks across at his mother, but she smiles and does not see anything odd in it.
Men begin coming in from the mine. Soon now it will be dark. When he holds the needle up now the eye of it is smoky. It is close to dark in there.
The boy who was learning to ride the bike is riding easily now, he has got the hang of it. He is hardly wobbling at all. He begins to show off, making figures-of-eight in the road, very pleased with himself and laughing. The light will be gone soon and still the thread has not gone through.
He concentrates and holds his hands just so and draws his whole body together.
Soon it will.
Several accounts of the experience of Australian P.O.W.s in Malaya and Thailand provided general information, hints and details for events and moral inspiration for this piece of fiction, chief among them Stan Arneil’s One Man’s War, Sun Books, 1982, Hank Nelson’s P.O.W. Prisoner of War, ABC Enterprises, 1985 (from Tim Bowden’s radio series ‘Australians Under Nippon’) and The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop, E. E. Dunlop, Nelson, 1986. I should also thank the Yaddo Foundation, Saratoga Springs, NY, and the Literature Board of the Australia Council for generous support, and Susan Chace, Joy Lewis and Brett Johnson for their advice and help.
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