Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  It was in this light that he considered the yammering, yowling fellow whose story he had taken down that day in his own schoolroom.

  He had thought himself very clever then in making his own additions to what he had been set to write down. His fear now was that in following that frivolous urge he had allowed himself to become contaminated, and in the same idle, half-sleepy way in which he did everything here, as if nothing had meaning or consequence.

  He forbad the McIvor children to let the fellow accompany them to school, and when his orders were defied – ‘We can’t help it Sir,’ they sang, ‘if he just tags along’ – took the matter up with the girls’ father. The boy, Lachlan, set out deliberately to provoke him. Instead of keeping Gemmy off, he encouraged him and a struggle ensued, of just the little niggling kind that reduced him, in his saner moments, to despair.

  He was the brightest of his pupils, this Lachlan Beattie, and might easily have become a favourite; took it for granted, in fact, that he must be. Quick-witted and free in his nature, full of a pert assurance that George recognised only too well, and hungry for praise, he had done everything he could at first to draw attention to himself and win approval; and for this very reason George was determined from the start to deny it. Very deliberately, in a way that the boy was certain to recognise, he ignored him, and Lachlan, perceiving that however quick he was with an answer, however vigorously he waved his hand in the air, he would not be chosen, grew disdainful, then disruptive, then dull. Now, to his usual pointed indifference, George added sarcasm, using the presence of his ‘shadow’ to mock the boy to his companions. It was Lachlan now who kept Gemmy away.

  5

  WHEN THEIR MOTHER announced that a cousin was to come out and join them, the two girls were delighted. Kin at last, and a boy! From Scotland, from home. They were to be especially soft with him. His father had been killed in a pit accident, leaving five weans to feed; Lachlan was the eldest.

  His father, Rob, had been their mother’s favourite among her brothers. When she saw him last he had been a lad of nineteen just newly married. She had made the shirt he was married in out of pure sea-island cotton that cost her two shillings a yard; she had saved a whole six months for it.

  They knew all the details of their mother’s life at home, she had told it to them a hundred times, but now she told it all again: how her own mother, their grandmother, as a child not much older than they were, had worked down the mine – imagine that now! The house with a little backyard not big enough for a cat to jump in – and here they were with twenty acres. The father and four brothers, all miners. Janet saw them, in her mother’s telling, sat down at tea together, still in their pit dirt, black-fisted, noisy, only their eyelids, when they fell to eating, and their teeth when they grinned, showing white in the sooty masks, till one after the other, in the dark little scullery off the yard, they ducked their heads in a tub, soaped their backs and shoulders, and too big now in their whiteness for the low-ceilinged parlour, came towelling their heads and larking about and laughing, and were restored at last – she saw that too – to their separate, recognisable selves: Willie, Ewan, Jamie, Rob.

  Her mother as a girl had kept house for them all, washed their shirts, darned their socks, listened to their growls and grumbles, but she hated the pit life and was determined that when she found a man of her own he would never be a miner. She had watched them grow up, each one, from eager, affectionate little lads into coarse fellows who pushed down and extinguished everything that was fine in them. On Saturday nights they were no better than any other of the Airdrie men. They got into fights, came home bruised but elated, then lay stupefied.

  When their daddie turned up – Janet, glancing up, saw him grin, very pleased with himself and looking twenty years younger – it was just in time, she told them. She was already twenty-four and on the way to being an old maid. One of her brothers brought him in after a football game, but she had seen him already in a tug of war team the summer before. A big, raw-boned, fair-skinned, sandy fellow. Silly drunk and a bit ashamed of himself, he was still as a stockfish on that first occasion, though he was bold enough later. He worked as a gardener, like his father, on a big estate. Her brothers warned her, teasingly, that he wasn’t as tame as he looked, that he liked a dram, had an eye for the girls; but she had seen that for herself. She wasn’t put off.

  Janet listened to all this in a kind of dream, as she always did when her mother spoke of things that brought the world back there alive in her; she clung to every detail, she couldn’t get enough of it. She was in love with this other life her parents had lived; with Scotland and a time before they came to Australia, before she was born, that was her time too, extending her life back beyond the few years she could actually recall, and giving reality to a world she had need of; more alive and interesting, more crowded with things, with people too, than the one she was in. This cousin who was coming would bring some of that with him. He would still have its light upon him, alive and actual. He would have its speech in his mouth.

  But when he arrived he showed no gratitude for the chance they were offering him, and wasn’t at all pleased to see them. He was a stocky, tough lad of nine, a town boy. Airdrie, he told them loftily, was a toon. The bush – it wasn’t even country – was of no interest to him, and Janet saw, because he set out in his superior know-all way to make her see it, that the things they had been saving to show him, all their little treasures and secrets, were in his eyes poor – she had not seen till now just how poor. She felt humiliated, as if the poverty was in them. It did not occur to her that he might be protecting himself; that his refusal to enter into their world might be a fear of losing, more than he had done already, the one he had left and was heartsick for. He scoffed and swaggered. Nothing here was good enough for him.

  He began every sentence with ‘At hame in Scotland’ – yet at home, as she knew from her mother, they had been starving. She would harden her heart and mock him. ‘Oh, at hame in Scotland,’ she would sing, imitating his accent, which she also loved. He went red in the face and could barely hide his tears.

  She had her triumph. But seeing it she felt ashamed, it was so easy. And Scotland, home, was sacred to her. She was going against herself when she mocked it.

  There were times when she felt helpless against a place which, as her parents evoked it in every word they uttered, belonged so much more strongly to all the highest emotions in her than the place she was in. And he had seen it, and she had not. He would have that over her for ever.

  After a time he discovered what he was endowed with that gave him an advantage over her and used it mercilessly; except that the thing was so native, so accidental in him, that though he could name it, even he did not know what it really was. He was full of scorn when she failed to understand some word he used, and took delight, with their mother, in slipping into the old tongue. He would look towards her with his eyes wide and innocent but a little smile of satisfaction on his mouth that for the moment he had shut her out. Her fist ached to wipe the smug look from his face, and he knew it, and was more cocky than ever. ‘I don’t understand,’ little Meg would whine. ‘What’s splairgin’? What’s a moothfu’ o’ mools?’ But she would not ask.

  The struggle between them was fierce. Till Lachlan came she had been used to going her own way, unconditioned and free. She had no limit to herself. Now she resented his easy assumption that he was superior, should take the lead in all their doings, and that she must naturally yield to him.

  She was half a head taller, for the moment she had that over him; but it would not last, she had no illusions about that. (She had long ago discovered the satisfaction of tormenting herself with hard truths.) She sought out ways to hurt him. He was very proud and liked to believe he was tough, but he cried easily, she could make him cry. Then, when she did, she was shocked, felt miserable, and longed, against her own interest, to comfort him, though she saw that if she did he would hate her for it.

  Sometimes for a day or two they would be
close. Full of liveliness and schemes for fresh adventure, he was easy so long as you gave in to him. He had always to assert himself and be first. He was in love with his own nobility but at the same time needed to boast, and of things, Janet saw, that were not always true. It offended her own sense of inviolable honesty. She was hard on herself; why should she be less hard with him? She was consumed after a time with the need to expose him, to make him confess that so much of what he claimed was just another attempt to intimidate and assert himself and the superiority of ‘hame’; which might be true – the latter in fact was true – but she could not let him be the judge of it.

  She would have forgiven him all if he had shown any sign of humbling himself. She was full of affection, she wanted to love him, and longed for some softening in him that would allow it without loss of pride. But first he had to admit need, and he would not. Everything she and Meg knew, and he did not, was not worth the knowing.

  They showed him the reddish-gold resin that ironbarks wept, which when you chewed it had a bitter flavour. He spat it out and thought they were making a fool of him.

  They showed him bacon-and-eggs bushes. He told them scornfully, ‘That’s no’ them. That’s no’ the real wans.’ He had seen bluebells. When he stood up and sang of them in his high clear voice, Janet was overwhelmed and their mother wept. He glowed. He was radiant. The light of some far-off place she had only imagined shone through his skin.

  She slipped away and stared into a glass but could find no such beauty – no promise of it either – in herself. She was gangly and freckled. She had warts on her hands. And there was such a hunger for beauty in her. The appearance of it in Lachlan did not make her envious. It struck her with awe, as of something impersonal, that commanded her absolutely beyond her will.

  But he saw after a time, for all his stubbornness and pride, that if he was to get on here he would have to know the place. He set out, in a dogged way, to learn all the little skills and tricks of bushcraft, and because he was quick and had to be first in everything was soon as much a bushman as the best of them, with a grit, and a fierce little-mannish tenacity that even Jim Sweetman grew to respect. Jock McIvor was proud of him. They tracked and hunted together, shot scrub turkey, and bronze-wings and topknots and fruit pigeon, and in the ti-tree forest on the margin of the lagoons a dozen varieties of duck.

  It was a flame in the boy, this power he had acquired over the world they moved in. He gave up being contemptuous, since he was the one now who ‘knew things’, assumed an easy, masculine air that he had picked up by imitation from his elders, and was so good at it that it looked like nature. And what of me? she thought. I am as brave as he is. I could do all that. Being in possession now of so many skills, and the code that went with them and belonged to men, he had put himself beyond reach. And she was still, if only by an inch now, the taller!

  She resented bitterly the provision his being a boy had made for him to exert himself and act. He had no need to fret or bother himself; only to be patient and let himself grow and fill out the lines of what had been laid up for him. The assurance of that, and of his own will, gave him a glow you might never have guessed at from the thin-faced, thin-shouldered town lad he had been when he first came to them. He would grow quickly now. The vision of what lay before him would square his shoulders, deepen his voice, give him room.

  She had no such vision of her own future. All she saw laid up for herself was what her mother presented, a tough pride in competence, in being unflagging and making no fuss. She admired her mother but the narrowness of it was terrible to her.

  All silent mutiny, she would stand punching at a lump of dough at her mother’s table, and might have gone on doing it for ever – stood there with one bare foot on the other on the dirt floor, punching away at her own dull lump of a soul. Her mother watched and was concerned. She looked up and smiled, a wan attempt. Her mother was not fooled.

  She pored over books, anything she could lay her hands on that offered some promise that the world was larger, more passionate, crueller – even that would be a comfort – than the one she was bound to.

  She sat over a piece of simple needlework, and worked as if her life was in every stitch; as if one day the angel of the Last Judgment would hold up the pot-holder with its design of forget-me-nots, point to a stitch that was too small, or not straight, and say for the whole world, all the gathered souls of all the ages to hear: ‘Janet McIvor, did you do this?’

  One day, hunched in the shade of a scrubby lemon tree, picking idly at a scab on her knee, she was amazed, when the hard crust lifted, to discover a colour she had never seen before, and another skin, lustrous as pearl. A delicate pink, it might have belonged to some other creature altogether, and the thought came to her that if all the rough skin of her present self crusted and came off, what would be revealed, shining in sunlight, was this finer being that had somehow been covered up in her.

  When she got up and walked out into the paddock, and all the velvety grass heads blazed up, haloed with gold, she felt, under the influence of her secret skin, suddenly floaty, as if she had been relieved of the weight of her own life, and the brighter being in her was very gently stirring and shifting its wings.

  In a particular vibrancy of light that on another occasion might have given her a headache, all the world shimmered and was changed.

  The paddock of standing wheat when she wandered out into it boomed with a flaminess that bounced and struck out flares, then was quenched by a passing cloud.

  Grasshoppers, pinches of dust but with spring-like muscles in their thighs that allowed them to leap distances that in human terms would have been hundreds of yards, seemed made of the finest glass, and she too felt fine-spun, toughly transparent.

  Trees shook out ribbons of tattered bark, and the smooth skin under it was palest green, streaked orange like a sunset, or it had the powdery redness of blood. Glory was the word she thought of. A part of her rose into vague, bright zones where her name, she thought, ought to have been Flora; she hated plain Janet. In giving it to her they had set her too low and thus too early settled her fate. (It was Flora Macdonald she had in mind, but some other dream-figure with flowers round her hem and bright petals opening miraculously out of the clods at her feet might also have been there in the regions she moved in an inch or two above the earth.)

  But she was a practical child and sceptical of mere feelings. They blazed up a moment, then died and left you stranded, barefoot, in the grass. She did not put too much store by them, but they were important enough, these moments, for her to keep them to herself.

  Unlike Lachlan. When he was fired up with something he had to let it out. That was what made things difficult for him. Full of bright schemes for the future, heroic visions in which the limitations of mere boyhood would at last be transcended, he felt that if he could only see them clearly enough they would be there, up ahead, waiting for him to catch up bearing the details at last of place and time.

  As soon as he was old enough, with Gemmy as his guide, he would get up an expedition to search for Dr Leichhardt. Somewhere along the way he might be wounded by blacks. Gemmy would nurse him back to health with herbs only the natives knew of. He would discover two or three rivers, which he would name after some of his acquaintances, and a mountain to which he might give his aunt’s name, Mount Ellen, or the name of some place in Scotland, and they would find Leichhardt, or his bones at least, and when they got back and people wanted to put up a monument, he would insist, nobly, that Gemmy’s name should be inscribed there along with his own. Then, when all that was done …

  There was no end, no limit either, to his plans.

  Janet could not take it seriously, not because she did not believe in his capacity, one day, to do such things, but because the things themselves were so ordinary. Her view was that when real life caught up with you, it would not be in a form you had already imagined and got the better of. But she had no wish any longer to bring him down, so in this too he had his triumph over her.


  The chief sharer of his visions was Gemmy, who listened, grasped only half of what he heard, and made his own assessments.

  What moved him most was to see that he too was there in the boy’s dreams. He felt a rush of affection at being trusted and given a place in what Lachlan Beattie had laid up to himself, but also a fearful protectiveness that Lachlan, if he had perceived it, would have resented.

  He was just a child! The realisation shocked Gemmy but settled him too. It was not often here that he could reclaim a sense of himself as a grown man.

  6

  FROM THE BEGINNING there were those among them, Ned Corcoran was the most vehement, for whom the only way of dealing with blacks was the one that had been given scope elsewhere. ‘We ought to go out,’ he insisted, controlling the spit that flooded his mouth, ‘and get rid of ’em, once and for all. If I catch one of the buggers round my place, I’ll fuckin’ pot ’im.’ He jerked out the last couple of syllables, and the explosion they made, and the silence afterwards, made some men uncomfortably hot. The rest shifted their boots but did not speak. They were not so candid as Ned Corcoran, but did not essentially disagree with him. It was the quickest way; the kindest too maybe, in the long run. They had seen what happened to blacks in places where the locals were kind. It wasn’t a pleasant sight.

  But there were others, the milder members of the settlement, who argued that it was surely worth trying a softer policy. What they looked forward to was a settled space in which they could get on with the hard task of founding a home, and maybe, if they were lucky, a town where in time all the civilities would prevail. If they got the preliminaries right, the natives too might be drawn in, as labourers, or house-servants. They had secretly, some of them, a vision of plantations with black figures moving in rows down a field, a compound with neat whitewashed huts, a hallway, all polished wood, with an old grey-haired black saying ‘Yessir’, and preparing to pull off their boots (all this off in the future of course, maybe far off; for the moment they would not mention the boots since most of them did not have any). They ought at least, so they thought, to use this Gemmy fellow to get some reliable information that would temper with fact the fantastic rumours that flew about the place and kept them in a state of permanent anxiety. What haunted them was the endless round of reprisals they would be involved in if one of their number got jumped and speared (as God knows could happen easily enough) and some hothead like Ned Corcoran took it into his head to get up an extermination party.