A First Place

by David Malouf

  There was also my grandfather. He came each day to garden at the bottom of our yard, and though he never ventured into the house, liked to stop and chat with my mother at the bottom of the back steps. He was, in his shy way, fond of her, but afraid of showing it in front of my grandmother, who was powerfully jealous. For some reason, among the bits and pieces of darning my mother and Cassie got through on Wednesday afternoons there was often an old shirt of Grandpa’s or a pair of his trousers that needed a new fly button (I don’t know why it was my mother rather than one of the aunts who did this), and later, when he was dying in the front bedroom upstairs at the shop, on a high brass bed beside a dressing table decked out like an altar with statues, holy pictures, wax flowers, she often went to sit with him for an hour or two, and when she couldn’t, sent me to climb up on to the end of his bed and read while he dozed and mumbled, and to call someone quick if he needed the bedpan or began to choke.

  We liked going down to Grandma’s, a small but obvious betrayal.

  There was the shop itself, with its busy traffic, and the big old-fashioned kitchen behind with a real wood stove in an alcove and a smell quite different from our kitchen at home, a little sour from the cheese bag dripping its whey into the sink and the sharpness of chopped mint. I liked looking into their downstairs lavatory, which was outside, and had walls of whitewashed stone, though I preferred not to use it. I liked looking into the bedrooms upstairs, whose tongue-and-groove walls were painted sky blue, lime green, rose, and in one of which our father had once slept. I liked stepping out past the blown muslin curtains of Grandpa’s room to the cast-iron balcony that hung over the street. Leaning far out over the rails you could see all the way down the tramlines, past Kyogle Station and the Trocadero, to the Blue Moon Skating Rink and the Bridge.

  What made my mother uneasy about these visits was, I think, precisely what attracted me – the company that gathered at my grandmother’s courtyard table. Housewives in worn-down slippers who smoked, and ought, at four in the afternoon, to have been at home getting their husband’s tea but would not leave for fear of ‘missing something’. Nuns from St Mary’s, who quizzed me on the Catechism and asked what prayers we said – and no doubt reported our answers to the Dean. After the Japanese war began, Yanks, including a loud-mouthed top-sergeant called Duke, who was a fixture there at one stage and was supposed to be sweet on their girl Della, though I think this was a teasing invention of my aunts. And sometimes a lady friend of Uncle Johnny’s called Addie, who would wait, attended on by one or other of the aunts, in the half-dark of the kitchen while he was out walking his greyhounds round Musgrave Park. A dumpy person with jet-black ringlets and too much rouge on her cheeks, she worked in a ‘house’ in Margaret Street – did my aunts know this? They treated her, according to my mother, like the Queen of Sheba, whom she resembled I thought in the beaded finery of her get-up, which might have been just what was expected in Margaret Street, at half-past midnight, but was extraordinary in the heat of my grandmother’s kitchen at four in the afternoon.

  ‘Was that Addie there?’ my mother would enquire when we got back from a message.

  What got her goat was that ‘a woman of that sort’ should be made so much of, whereas all she got out of them was a strained politeness.

  Under Cassie’s Spartan regime we were forbidden to accept anything on these visits, on the grounds that children ought not to be encouraged to wheedle for sweets and that Have-a-Hearts and sherbets would ruin our teeth. But my grandmother was eager to spoil us, and since I was especially attracted to Conversations – little pastel-coloured hearts and lozenge-shapes with the corners nipped off that had words, love-messages, on them that could be read then licked off (the combination of words, the scent of patchouli, and their apricot, mauve and yellow colours, was irresistible to me), I frequently fell and was given away, when I got home, by the musk on my breath.

  Exacerbated by sensitivities of a kind neither thought possible in the other, jealousies, misunderstandings, and the hundred little niggling resentments with which my mother especially, who was all nerve, fed her lively indignation, the two households were often at crisis point, but the crisis never came.

  My grandmother’s complaint against my mother – the one, anyway, that she made public – was that she had compromised our father, who had always been so scrupulous in his faith, and us children too, by a marriage which, no matter what sort of strings Dean Cashman had pulled, was no more than a got-up legal affair.

  What my mother on the other hand could not forgive was that my grandmother, for purely selfish purposes, had deprived our father of an education, made him a slave to her needs and kept him, until she came along to open his mind and free him, as tied to narrow old-country superstitions as the most ignorant of his sisters.

  Some of my grandmother’s ways she found merely ludicrous, others barbaric. In the first category was her custom of going to bed when she had a fever with a hot brick wrapped round with hessian – and this in the days of cheap hot-water bottles! In the second (a sight that made my sister and me squirm with delighted horror) was her trick of forcing open the beak of a fowl she had just throttled to pour a cup of vinegar down its gullet, which made the dead bird twitch and flap its wings in demonic resurrection.

  Which of our mother’s ways our grandmother found similarly objectionable we never knew. No doubt they formed one of the subjects of those secret communings between mother and son that my mother resented and stewed over and of which my father reported, I’m sure, not a single word.

  Then quite suddenly, almost overnight it seemed, everything changed. Two of my aunts got married, one at forty, the other at thirty-seven, just when they appeared, as my mother put it, to have missed the bus. (But by then we were in the middle of the war. Anything was possible.) One day in 1944, while he was supervising the unloading of a truck down at the docks, my father missed his footing on an upturned fruitcase and fell, bruising his back. It was a minor occurrence and did not, among the huge events that in those days shook our world, seem likely to change our lives. But the pain persisted, and after several months of seeing one specialist, then another, he had to admit that the injury was permanent and the sort of work he was used to, and had done all his life, was beyond him. He sold his trucks and for some time, I think, he and my mother must have wondered how they would survive. They were saved by a second accident.

  At an auction she was attending my mother made a bid on a lot of cheesecloth curtaining – fifty yards, she thought, at so much a yard: it turned out to be fifty bolts. She panicked at first, then considered a little and put an ad in the Courier-Mail. All day long women hungry for uncouponed material kept ringing at our door. She thought that she might dispose in the same way of one or two other things she had no use for – an Aynsley tea set, a red fox fur – and when the same thing happened it struck her that there was a trade to be done in commodities that because of the war could no longer be imported and were in short supply. She advertised again, this time to buy: dinner sets, tea sets, crystal, canteens of cutlery. Quite soon our front room, and the trestle tables she had set up on the side verandah, could no longer accommodate the stock she had acquired. She took a shop.

  No more shopping expeditions to the Valley with tea at McWhirters. No more long afternoon rests when we joined her on a bed on the cool side of the house. All the weights and balances of her life had shifted. Of her personality too. Though humorous and down-to-earth, she had also in the past been high-strung, wilful, inclined to sulk. We had learned as children to deal with her moods, which for whole days sometimes would hang like a cloud over every room in the house, though it had taken me a long time to realise that not all her ‘states’ had to do with me. This was because the real offender, my father, simply ignored these displays of atmospherics (the unbroken storms that occasionally rolled about them were a darker aspect, though I saw this only later, of the high charge between them that for the most part gave our household its luminous calm) till, by some act of wiz
ardry that was invisible to us children, and therefore miraculous, his spirit triumphed and the house was itself again.

  I had thought of her in those days as a more conventional character than some of her friends; her favourite bridge partner for example, Maisie Panos, who had been a dancer in vaudeville, and wore neat little suits with white piping on the lapels, and was hard-boiled, risqué, and smoked. Now, with all her energies taken up, she was so clearly superior to the women she had moved among, and whose easy attractions she had allowed to shine out and dazzle us, that I was amazed at my own blindness. I could only assume that for most of the time I had known her she had been in disguise, playing a role as suburban wife, contented mother, that had nothing to do with what she was.

  One of her first decisions, now that the war was ending, was that we should move: away from South Brisbane, out of the shadow of my father’s family. My father, poring over sheets of draughtsman’s paper, began to design us a new house. Of brick, not timber and two storeyed, with a tiled bathroom and all-electric kitchen. Up to date, almost American, it would establish us in a new era, After-the-War, but was also, for him, the entry into a sphere of interest in which, to my mother’s delight, all his talents would at last be at full play.

  Caught up in the excitement of a time when Australia, or our part of it anyway, was about to wake up, catch its second breath, we assumed that all these changes in our lives were a product of the times. I see now that their only originator was my mother.

  I don’t know how she managed it, but objects that had been central to the world of Edmondstone Street, and from which powerful emanations had moved out through every room to hold and define us, the painting of the Sacred Heart for example that had been my grandmother’s wedding present, and through all the nights of their marriage had looked down on their bed, did not make the transition to Hamilton. Neither did its counterpart, the little lamp. Perhaps in her new and more assured self my mother had no need of ghosts.

  I found some of these changes in her disturbing because unexpected. I see now that I would have been better prepared if I had paid closer attention to the books she read me, old romances full of unlikely transformations. If I had looked there, I mean, for what she might have seen in them rather than what appealed to me.

  She had launched herself on one of those late changes of character, those apprehensions of the openness and infinite possibility of things, by which characters in fiction break free of the mechanics of mere plot to find happy endings.

  What surprises me now is not that she did it, or how, but that I should have been surprised when my father clearly was not. He had never read a book in his life, knew nothing of what fiction tells us of how characters develop and stories unfold. What he knew was her.

  Looking back now at his letters, I see, beyond the set phrases, that what holds him, awed and a little fearful, is all he has seen that is still to come – but only if he can convince her that what he has perceived in her is what she must become, and that it can happen only through him. More than his own life is dependent on this.

  Pen in hand, only the most ordinary words in his head, these sheets still empty before him, he feels weak before all he must get down. But he has one great advantage: patience. He knows that what he has seen will take time – and it does, long years of waiting on the moment, and all of it in the midst of events, larger, more violent, that take other lives and blow them about like bits of rubbish, mere chaff, ash, beyond the reach of happy endings. But patience is in his nature, an aspect, entirely active and physical as he is, of his strong passivity, his willingness to subject their lives to time itself, as if all the time in the world has been granted them, or at least all the time they will need: the forty-four years that, as he begins to write, are already there to be entered and filled, and have been from the first moment he laid eyes on her.

  My grandmother died in 1951, my father in 1964. My mother, who had learned by the end a little of his patience, waited another eight years.

  Beth Yahp (ed.), Family Pictures, 1994

  THE NORTH: THE EXOTIC AT HOME

  EARLY IN 1982 WHEN I had just finished Fly Away Peter and was writing back and forth to my publisher at Chatto about how it was to be published, I wrote an afterword to the book. It was an account of my experience with the world of birds and of my early discovery of flying.

  At twenty-one, I had spent five days on a hunting trip to the Valley of Lagoons in Far North Queensland, a vast waterland swarming with game birds of every description. Earlier I had discovered something of the wonder of flight. On my seventeenth birthday, in 1951, I had joined the University Air Squadron, was taken up in a Tiger Moth and, on our first camp at Amberley Air Base, outside Ipswich, had spent a good deal of my free time, when I could inveigle one of the officers in the mess into taking me, on one of the flights that in those early days after the war were still being made in the station’s surviving fleet of Liberators. These flights covered most of southern and Central Queensland and I got used to seeing, laid out in a map below me, a world I already knew at ground level. I took it in turns with the other ‘baby’ of the squadron, GS, to hunch in solitude in the rear gun turret under the tail, where there was nothing between me and the landscape below but a thin wall of Perspex and empty air.

  In the event, the afterword never made it into print. Here, twenty-five years later, are its opening pages, which themselves refer to a period twenty-five years before that when I first went north; a vision of the Far North as I first imagined then saw it, in August 1955.

  In the far-off 1950s, when I was just out of university and knew nothing of the world beyond books, I set off alone and for the first time to the Far North. I took the train from Brisbane to Cairns. Not the new, air-conditioned Sunlander, but the second division Pullman that left Brisbane at nine o’clock on Thursday night, made its first stop for late supper at Landsborough under the Glass House Mountains, and all being well, and the Burdekin and other streams permitting, would arrive at Cairns about two o’clock on Saturday afternoon.

  I had chosen the Pullman because it appealed to the romantic side of me. It looked like the old trains in Western movies. With its brocaded curtains and upholstery thick with decades of dust, ironwork, luggage racks, and all its loops and scrolls and filigree, pressed-metal ceilings and cedar panelling, it belonged to a century when the railways were still new. Equally reminiscent of those days was the speed at which it travelled. The Queensland Railways, with its narrow gauge lines, had a theme song: I walk beside you.

  One of the advantages of travelling on the old Pullman was that you had time to get used to travelling. You could watch the country change, feel the temperature rise, the air dampen, and tell yourself as you counted off the hours that the journey you were making was the equivalent of Paris to Moscow. That, somehow, in those days, made the distance real. Brisbane to Cairns had no such currency, and might, if you were to justify the time spent and the conditions endured, have put more pressure on the landscape, and on your fellow travellers, than either would bear in the way of variety or interest. There were no borders to cross, no bearded and uniformed officials, no changes of coinage or tongue, no colourful peasants to clamber aboard at windswept junctions, no little mujiks to tap away under the wheels.

  That was a long time ago – I would feel differently now – but the things glimpsed from the Pullman window, and even some of my fellow passengers, have stuck in my head longer than I could have believed. The journey north was every bit as crowded and colourful as anything Europe was to provide five or six years later, but of another kind, and it took another eye – which was also mine, but whose visions had not yet surfaced in my mind – to see it.

  It was a world of its own, the North Queensland Mail.

  People started out formally dressed as on other journeys, insulated, as is proper, behind magazines or the sleeves of sweaters they were knitting. But two and a half days is a long time, especially when you are moving deeper and deeper into tropical heat. More than the su
perficial upper layers of our clothing were discarded as the journey progressed. By the time we had crossed the Tropic, the carriage, and beyond that, the train, had become a society with its own loose rules and its own subtle adjustments of the private to the communal, the life outside to the life within.

  You learned a good deal about people on the North Queenslander, and living in close proximity over so long, and in poor conditions, led to revelations that might not otherwise have been made. For clever young people like myself, who had education but no experience, it was a travelling university offering postgraduate degrees in the stuff of life. I learned to deal with card-sharps, drunks, prostitutes who used the train as a beat, seasonal canecutters, immigrant farmers, bands of rowdy schoolboys going home for the holidays, National Servicemen, young mothers travelling with children who, when the corridor was crowded, had to be held out of the window to pee.

  The openness of Queensland houses, in which by convention no door is ever closed let alone locked, has created notions of privacy that are more common, perhaps, in India than in other parts of the Commonwealth. You do not hear what is not meant to be heard in such houses, or see more than you are meant to see. The train extended these conventions.

  Couples could make love in the corridor, provided they covered themselves with a blanket; or even, if they were reasonably quiet about it, in the compartment. After all, life had to go on. I saw that often enough. And once, near Ayr, while the train waited at a crossing, I saw a man who had had a heart attack handed down into a yellow ambulance with a red light on top that had been racing us for the last eight kilometres through the thickening dark.