Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  There, Hec thought, Jock McIvor. What now, eh?

  He had no malice towards Jock. Malice was not in his nature. It was the spectacle itself that drew him, the discovery, which was new, that there might be more in the world to dwell on than just himself.

  Jock swallowed hard. He restrained himself from replying that Gracie Corcoran, unlike his own wife, was a mouse, if not a bandicoot. But it saddened him, all this. He felt the knot in his throat as a hard little nut of injustice. That the others did not come to his aid – Jim Sweetman for instance, who merely looked embarrassed and turned away. That Ned Corcoran, a man for whom they had no respect, should be glancing about now with such cocky assurance that he had hit the mark and was being listened to.

  None of what followed was new, though it wounded him just the same; they were not original, these fellows. What surprised Jock was that not so long ago he would not have seen it, and if he had would have found reassurance in their being so easily predictable. He had begun lately to be critical, even of Jim Sweetman, and he did not want to be. He did not like the experience, which was new, of seeing his friends from a distance, of finding them on one side and himself on the other, and the knowledge that if he was seeing them with new eyes, he too, since the distance must work both ways, had become an object of scrutiny. He was disturbed, most of all, by the view this gave him of himself. As if there was something in him that justified scrutiny. That he might be less open than he appeared.

  Watching Jock’s difficulty with Gemmy, the terror, which was almost comic, into which he was thrown by the poor fellow’s extravagant bursts of feeling, Ellen McIvor found herself taken back to a vision of Jock that had been obscured in these last years by the hardships they had been through. She had been attracted then by a quality in him that went oddly with his big frame, and must, she thought, be what other women too were drawn to, a mixture of forcefulness and almost girlish modesty.

  Work in the outdoors had burnished him; he was ruddy. His flesh, when his sleeves were rolled, had none of the dead marble whiteness she knew from her brothers and associated with the sunless world underground. It glowed. You felt the heat of it right through his shirt. It carried a scent of grass and clean sunlight she had longed for all her life, or so she believed, in the dismal world she had grown up in, where everything was smudged and smirched with coal dust and even the air you breathed was gritty, and the taste in your throat always of tar.

  He had wanted them to go to Canada. That was what he offered, along with himself. But when they got down to it, Australia seemed the larger choice. There was land there and sunlight (she could not wait) and spaces, he told her, they could barely conceive of here. But she could. Sunlight and space were the first things she had glimpsed in him.

  They arrived in Brisbane in a January swelter. The town, its muddy streets made passable by duckboards, its houses, huts rather, mere makeshift affairs of bark and iron among dark, glossy-leaved figs, was a low place, sunk in a steamy torpor where everything the flesh touched was damp and the flesh itself damper, and the air had a sweetish smell just this side of putrescence. The drunkenness they met in the streets had a desperation to it that made her wonder what there might be in the place, given so much space, that could madden the men and made the women so pinched and colourless. It was not what they had expected. Jock turned gloomy, and she saw for the first time then that the sunniness she had seen in him was not his real nature. She was the one who had to insist that the heat was not too bad, or the steamy rain when it gushed down, or the clouds of mosquitos that blew in from the mangrove-choked islands in the river’s mouth, and whose bites made his eyelids swell; or the cockroaches, big as wrens, that came flying in at every open window and ran over their faces in the dark; or the delays. A different kind of balance was established between them in these first days in the colony, as if, in coming halfway round the world, they had arrived not so much at a new place as a new accommodation with their own natures.

  The delays went on, their money dwindled; they had to take cheaper lodgings where they were separated into dormitories, male and female, and still there was no sign of the land they had been promised. At last, when it was clear that they could expect nothing of others and must act for themselves, they left Brisbane for the Darling Downs, he to work as a general hand on a big holding, she as a housemaid. And Jock, in his disappointment, his shame too, perhaps, at having promised her so much and provided so little, began to refine in himself the stringy, hard-bitten qualities of dourness and harsh self-discipline that the land itself appeared to demand, and which, for all the fierceness of its own sunlight, dashed out the last of sunniness in him. She had Janet, then lost a little boy, then a girl. They stuck it out, saved what they could, and when land was opened in the unsettled districts beyond the Burdekin, came north. She had left more of herself than she dared consider in the rooms of the homestead whose wide verandahs she had scrubbed and in the copper where week after week, on Mondays, she had boiled the household wash; most of all in the two small graves she knew she would not see again, under the black soil in the grove of bunyas.

  Jock, harder than ever now, since more was at stake, dealt sternly with himself and with the children too, Meg when she came, then Lachlan. She saw the last of his youth burned out of him in the hot, bushfire summers up here, when the whole sky, for days on end, was a glowing furnace. And it was to recall a little of his old light-hearted gallantry then – for her own sake, as well as his – that she would tease him about the girls she had won him away from; she knew their names from her brothers – Annie McDowell, Lettie Davidson, Minnie Kyle – happy to see, for all his protests, that it pleased him, woke some spark of his old shy devilry in him, to be taken back to his youthful conquests and the fair lad who had had to dip his head, that first time, silly-drunk as he was, at the door of their parlour. In time this teasing became a show to amuse the two little girls, but also to give them a glimpse of some other side of their stern father. They loved to hear the names – there were so few names in their lives.

  ‘What was she like,’ they would insist, ‘Lettie Davidson? Tell about Lettie.’

  ‘Oh, ye’ll hae t’ask yer faither aboot that,’ she would tell them. ‘Ah never clapt eyes on the huzzie. Tell them, Jock.’

  He looked foolish. ‘Get awa’ wi’ ye, thir wasnae ithers,’ he told her.

  ‘Keep me!’ she’d laugh, ‘sic lees the man tells. Look at the colour of him. Look at yer faither and see what lees a man can tell.’ It relieved him.

  He was often homesick though he did not say so. The land here never slept. If only he could wake one day and find it, just for a day, under a blanket of snow! What he missed were the marks of change. The crying, high up, of curlews flocking to a new season, to some place thousands of miles to the north where it had been winter and was now breathing the freshness of spring, brought an ache to his heart for the sight of rowans just bursting into sticky leaf, and for days afterwards he would be rough-tempered, as if the need of bark for the shiver of radiance was in himself.

  She could not afford such surrenders. Her nature was less volatile than his, less prone to extremes. Occasionally, washing an old frock with a pattern of larkspurs, all their lively colour gone to grey, she would experience a little pang at the thought that she might never again see one. She had chosen the print, years ago, because she had loved so much their vivid blue. But she had few regrets for the world she had left – perhaps because she had none at all for her youth. She lived in the demands of the moment, in the girls, in Lachlan, and was too high-spirited, too independent, to care whether other women approved of her.

  They came in the afternoon with their bits of darning. As the needles went in, they lowered their eyes and put their questions, all barbed concern.

  Gemmy, it was always Gemmy. What had they talked of, she wondered, before Gemmy arrived to give that breathless urgency to their talk and to darken the air in the close little hut to a point where she wondered, sometimes, how even by screwing their e
yes up they could find the hole to thread a needle, the room was so dense with the shadows they called up to terrify themselves and one another.

  Didn’t she find it hard sometimes to sit at the same table with him? Considering that he might be happier running about naked – goodness, remember that first day! – than in the shirts she washed for him. Oh and the trousers, of course! And eating grubs – imagine! – than potatoes and cold mutton. That is, if it wasn’t something worse. Their own grandfathers, so they say. And wasn’t she scared, just a little – well they knew she wasn’t but they would be, it was a wonder really how calm she was – of the time he spent with the children. The little girls, for instance. And Lachlan, who was so lively and impressionable? Wasn’t she worried sometimes about the influence the fellow might be having? And did she really let him chop wood for her? Actually let him loose with an axe?

  The word assumed substance, took shape, and you heard the swish of its blade through the stilled air in the suspension of their breath. Gracie Corcoran, who was a Roman, crossed herself.

  They were forgetting, she told them frostily. Gemmy was white.

  She despised these attempts to undermine her. What especially enraged her was the suggestion that she might not have her children’s safety at heart. She would not let them see how they had unsettled her. Calm. Is that what they thought?

  They were in a place where there were no sureties of any kind. Of course she wasn’t calm! And of course there were times when she was not just scared but petrified, though for the most part she was not, and these weaker moments she kept to herself.

  You took slow, shallow mouthfuls of air till the fear drew off.

  You took it for granted that life would stay normal, and if you believed that hard enough, it did. Three meals on the table, plates drying on the rack, a wash on the line, shirts, children’s things, empty for now but ready to be drawn over your head and stepped into, and hooked and buttoned and soiled and sweat-stained in the time to come.

  But there were nights, lying stiffly in the dark, hands clenched at her side, heart thumping, when she did not feel sure.

  She was aware of the three children breathing in the dark, two of them her own, the third a sacred trust; the notes of their breathing as different, as distinct one from the other, as their voices, or their bright, quick bodies. What would become of them? What sort of life could they have up here?

  She had wanted to give Lachlan a better chance than he might have got at home, but he was wayward, he could go any way at all in this country that was all fits and changes, one thing one minute, another the next. There was no way of telling. Was Gemmy really an influence on him?

  It was now, in this loose state at the edge of sleep, or, worse still, of despairing sleeplessness, that her neighbours’ doubts took possession of her.

  Her mind strayed to where he was sleeping, curled up under a red blanket in his lean-to against the side of the hut; just inches away, the other side of the wall.

  Occasionally, in the deep hours, a cry would come from him. Jock would start awake, his hand already feeling for the shotgun; one of the children, stirring, might speak as if in answer, then a second.

  She would lay her hand to her husband’s arm. He would settle, the child would settle. She would lie there, reaching for breath; wondering what dream out of the dark world he had lived in had come back to claim him or he had gone to meet; which in the open, unguarded state you fell into when consciousness lapsed might have the power to cross from one head to another, to her husband’s familiar one on the pillow beside her, where he slept on his back with his mouth open and his fists lightly clenched above his collarbone, or into the fair head of one or other of the children where a pallet shifted with a rustling of shucks.

  The stretch of smothering darkness that followed was longer than any stretch of daylight, and space too lost all dimensions. Getting up in the pitch blackness, she would set her foot to the ground, and, with one hand held in front, set off unsteadily for where the water butt stood, ten paces off beside the door. It was like crossing a continent, step by step, with the darkness infinitely expanding ahead and no visible marker on either side. At last her knuckles knocked against wood, she found the dipper, her lips touched a familiar coolness that was like light in her skull.

  After such nights, the way back to normality was through habit: matchflare, the worrying of flame out of chips, six mugs unhooked and set down on the table, children, with the puffiness of sleep still on them, not yet come in from the dreams they had been off in, coaxed back to their daylight selves. Little Meg smelling of milk and eager still to cling on, Janet chewing the end of her plait, Lachlan with something distant, almost combative in his look, as if the smoky hut with its familiar objects and smells was not what he had been expecting or was willing for the moment to accept; Jock, as always, finding it hard to get started, elbows on the table, head, all blond tufts, in his swollen hands, the bared neck showing its wrinkles, coarse and pitiable. He would have to shuffle along the form to make room for the girls. He did it without speaking. The girls accepted it. They were used to his glooms. ‘Lachlan,’ she would say for the second time, but low, not to draw her husband’s attention.

  The boy, slowly pulling on his pants, would make a face and pretend not to hear. If he held back long enough, he thought, Gemmy would offer to go and split the wood she needed. He would get off.

  ‘Naw Gemmy,’ she insisted. Gemmy with his doited look would be stumbling about in a light-headed way, eager at an instant for any task she might have for him, all headlong incompetence, and with no hint of the dark places to which the night might have taken him. ‘That’s Lachlan’s job. Lachlan! If I hae to speak to ye again –’

  Jock would raise his head, and Gemmy, hearing the iron in her voice, and fearing the blows that might come – not to him – would hop about in an agony of distress. ‘For the Lord’s sake, Gemmy,’ she would tell him, ‘be still noo and drink yer tea.’

  She was establishing the precarious order that in just a moment now would make the day lurch and move forward on its ordinary course. ‘Come on, lad,’ she urged, her tone a little easier, ‘stir yersel’ and fetch ma wuid.’

  8

  IT WAS George Abbot’s custom in the late afternoon to go out with a book, usually a French one, since he was keen, even here where he had no opportunity of practising it, to keep up his proficiency in the tongue. The slim volume in his pocket, its scrolled lettering upheld by putti, represented escape from his own nature and the humiliations and mean insufficiencies of his schoolmaster’s existence, but even more importantly, kept open in him, by employing the talents that would be adequate to it, the hope of a kinder future.

  He had several favourite retreats. There, the book on his knee and his boots in the dust, he would sit – always alert for ants – in the peppery scent and dull blaze of a tropic afternoon; but his head would be in another place altogether (call it Paris) where the words his soul danced to, sensibilityé, coeur, paradis, relieved him of his bear-like heaviness and rough colonial boots, and all around, the scrub, as the word paysage lit it, assumed new but familiar colours, then opened in avenues, at the end of which, among drooping foliage, a columned temple glowed, where the crude needs he was assailed by fell away as he stepped into the company of a heroine, demanding but also subtly compliant, with the most delicate wrists, and a delectable, angelic little knowing upper lip, whose name was Ursule, or Victorine.

  One day he was tramping along to a place where the entry into this world was easy, when he was hailed by a voice on the track behind him, and when he turned a woman was there, an old woman in brown, rather squat, bareheaded, and wearing boots that were a size too big for her. He recognised her immediately though they had never been introduced.

  ‘That’s lucky,’ she called. She carried a sack over her shoulder and was dragging behind her a good twelve feet of fallen branch. He stood with his book in his hand and waited for her to catch up.

  ‘Here,’ she said, as
she came up beside him, ‘take this,’ and passed the end of the branch to him. ‘I can manage the rest.’

  He had heard of this. Her name was Hutchence. She lived three miles out on the Bowen road, not in a hut but in a real house, and regularly had a load she wanted carrying or a job out there she wanted doing. The boys and young men of the settlement, Hec Gosper, Jake Murcutt, the older Corcorans, went in dread of being collared and dragged off to dig a ditch or lift a piece of unwieldy furniture. George had believed he would be exempt; that she would see at once, even if she did not recognise him, that he was not a farm boy like the Corcorans or Hec Gosper, to be hailed and commanded. But when it happened he couldn’t see how he could protest without appearing foolish; he found himself, as mildly as any other youth of the place, pocketing his book, swallowing whatever mild affront he felt to his dignity, and dragging along beside her.

  The branch was heavy, he wondered how she had come so far with it, but he was strong, it gave him no trouble. Only he sweated in his heavy jacket and had, more than once, to stop and mop his brow.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she told him. ‘You take your time. George – is that what they call you?’

  She was a tough old body, not quite what she appeared. Though she had too much of the domestic about her to be a source of mystery, he could see quite well that she might present a puzzle. No one knew where she came from – that is, she had vouchsafed no information – or how she could afford to build a real house, or why of all places she had chosen to do it here, or what relation she bore, if any, to the young woman who lived with her, whose name, he knew, was Leona. They had come down, it was said, from the Islands, from Macao, or maybe it was Malacca, and while their house was building had roomed with a widow in Bowen – though no one knew anything of them in Bowen either, save that they had come on the steamer with a whole household of furniture, real furniture of a kind people had never seen, carved chests, wickerwork lounges, three or four elaborate birdcages, and seemed quiet and respectable enough, except for the accent, which the older lady had and the younger did not.