Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  ‘Andy?’

  Barney felt the colour rise to his throat. ‘Look here, Jock,’ he said, ‘don’ play me about, eh? I’m not the only one, you know.’

  Jock turned away. Andy he could ignore, but he resented this appeal on Barney’s part to the mob who stood behind him. A sense of loneliness came over him. He did not want what was happening here.

  But Barney, who felt he had put himself on the wrong foot, was defiant. ‘Jock,’ he said, ‘I won’t be fobbed off. Not this time.’

  The sense of distance between them was new, and it seemed to Jock to hold the possibility of a terrible desolation. None of the old assurances would cross it. To attempt them, he saw, would be to insult Barney by making too little of what it had cost him to risk a break between them. They meant a good deal to one another.

  ‘A’richt then Barney,’ he said, as coolly as he could manage, ‘Ah’ll speak to him. Tell Polly no’ to worry. Trust me.’

  He might have left it there, on that note of appeal to what was intimate between them; but some imp of irritation in him, some wish to register, at least, the hurt he felt, made him speak again. ‘They went off, dinna they?’

  ‘They did, yes. They did. But there’s this – this thing they brought ’im? This stone.’

  ‘Wha’ stone?’

  ‘They brought him a stone. Didn’t you know that? Andy says –’

  Andy again! Jock blazed up. ‘For God’s sake, Barney, dinnae gie me what Andy says. Andy’s a mug, ye know that. Dinnae throw Andy at me!’ He controlled himself. ‘So what’s a’ this aboot a stone? What’s it supposed to be? Magic? Is that what Polly’s a’ workt up aboot? For Guid’s sake, man, ye’ve got a shotgun!’

  They met one another’s rage in a little shocked engagement, then glanced away.

  Jock’s defiant scorn was false and he knew it. The shotgun he had evoked to balance that other threat had no weight. The two forces were not equal; not in his own head nor in Barney’s either, certainly not in Polly’s. He had brought them to the very edge of it; of a world where what was cleared and fenced and in Jock’s own terms reasonable – all their education, their know-how, yes, and the shotguns they carried – might not be enough against – against what? Some vulnerability to the world that could only be measured, was measured still, by the dread it evoked in them?

  ‘Barney,’ Jock said, and he felt a coldness at the bottom of his brain, as at some gathering darkness in himself and all around him, ‘this is madness, ye know that. Andy’s a ratbag. For God’s sake, man, when did ye ever tak heed o’ what Andy says? We’re no’ scared o’ stones. Ah thought that was the difference between us and them. What’s it supposed to do, aeneway, this stone? Soor the coos’ milk? Set haystacks on fire?’

  He was trying to make light of the thing, but the very spit in his mouth went dry, and when the words were out, in a voice he barely recognised, he regretted them, however light they might be, as if, in the urgency of his attempt to beat Barney down, he might have set forces in action, out there, just by breathing into the air the mere possibility, that he could not deal with any more than Barney or any other man.

  ‘Look Barney,’ he said, sickened that they had come so far, ‘Let me talk to him, eh? Gie me that much. And dinnae let me hear denny more’ – he could scarcely bear to make another reference – ‘aboot myalls, and magic and –’

  But he did hear – from Ned Corcoran – and lost his temper, and was sorry for it, since he saw in the other men’s faces a kind of hardness – did his defence of Gemmy go this far? – at what they saw as a disturbing confirmation of change.

  Was he changed? He saw now that he must be, since they were as they had always been and he could not agree with them.

  When had it begun?

  When they agreed to take Gemmy in. That was the simple answer, since it was from that moment that some area of difference, of suspicion, had opened between them. But the more he thought of it, the clearer it seemed that the difference must always have existed, since he too was as he had always been; only he had been blind to it, or had put it out of his mind from an old wish to be accepted – and why not? – or a fear of standing alone.

  He had never been a thinker, and he did not now become one, but he began to have strange thoughts.

  Some of them were bitter. They had to do with what he saw, now that he looked, was in the hearts of men – quite ordinary fellows like himself; he wondered that he had not seen it before. What the other and stranger thoughts had to do with he did not know.

  It was as if he had seen the world till now, not through his own eyes, out of some singular self, but through the eyes of a fellow who was always in company, even when he was alone; a sociable self, wrapped always in a communal warmth that protected it from dark matters and all the blinding light of things, but also from the knowledge that there was a place out there where the self might stand alone.

  Wading through waist-high grass, he was surprised to see all the tips beaded with green, as if some new growth had come into the world that till now he had never seen or heard of.

  When he looked closer it was hundreds of wee bright insects, each the size of his little fingernail, metallic, iridescent, and the discovery of them, the new light they brought to the scene, was a lightness in him – that was what surprised him – like a form of knowledge he had broken through to. It was unnameable, which disturbed him, but was also exhilarating; for a moment he was entirely happy.

  But he wondered at himself. A grown man of forty with work to do, standing dreamily stilled, extending his hand, palm downwards, over the backs of insects, all suspended in their tiny lives in a jewel-like glittering.

  Another time, by the creek, he looked up, casually he thought, and saw a bird. It was balanced on a rounded stone dipping its beak into the lightly running water, its grey squat body as undistinguished and dusty looking as a sparrow’s (but there were no sparrows here), its head grey, with a few untidy feathers.

  He was sitting, himself, on a larger stone, also rounded, eating the last of a sandwich, his boots in mud.

  But what his stilled blood saw was the bird’s beak drawing long silver threads out of the heart of the water, which was all a tangle of threads, bunched or running; and his boots had no weight, neither did his hand with the half-bitten lump of bread in it, nor his heart, and he was filled with the most intense and easy pleasure: in the way the air stirred the leaves overhead and each leaf had attached itself to a twig, and whirled yet kept hold; and in the layered feathers that made up the grey of the bird’s head; and at how long the threads of water must be to run so easily from where they had come from to wherever it was, imaginably out of sight, that they were going – tangling, untangling, running free. And this time too the intense pleasure he felt had a disturbing side.

  The things he had begun to be aware of, however fresh and innocent, lay outside what was common, or so he thought; certainly, since he could have found no form in which to communicate them, outside words.

  His wife missed very little of this. She knew it went against his nature to be at odds with his friends and to be thrown so much on his own thoughts. It worried her to see him brood, and once he had begun, to see how bitter it made him, as if, once opened, that gate led to darker places than he had meant to venture into or had known existed.

  She too was distressed that they had drifted so far apart from their neighbours; neighbours meant a great deal up here. She had recognised before he did the change in people’s attitude. She defied it – that was her nature – and in doing so, perhaps, made it worse. She had even perhaps, in her indignation, encouraged in him a view of his friends that he might not have discovered so easily, or so soon, if he had not seen how hurt she was. She was sorry for it now. She had not meant to make things hard for him.

  But the sense of being wronged drew them together. She could not be sorry for that. They found consolation in one another, and things to say, not always directly, that restored an intimacy between them that she had missed i
n the harshness of their life up here.

  He had turned his full gaze upon her – that is what she felt. He wanted to know now what her life was beyond what he saw and had taken for granted, a shirt washed and shaken to make it soft, food on the table; to enquire into her affections. It was amazing to him – that is what his tentativeness suggested – that he had known so little and had not looked. There were times now when the intensity of his looking made her blush.

  It was as if they were at the beginning of a courtship, very delicate, almost fearful on his part, and it struck her that in the early days of their knowing one another he had not been like this – he had been too sure then of winning her, or she had let him see too quickly that he had done so. It had prevented them from discovering something essential in one another. She was wiser now. She let him go on, and felt like a girl younger than she had been in those early days; more hopeful too.

  ‘D’ye think aften o’ hame?’ he asked one evening.

  They had walked, as they often did these days, to the top of the ridge, where they could stand at the boundaries of their own land, which had grown clearer to them in their recent difficulties. It was just on sunset. All the western sky was drenched in flame, and the daylight moon, the wrong way round, hung colourless, almost transparent, in a blaze of such resplendence that you felt small, almost dwarfed before it. He turned his face to her and was transparent himself.

  She knew what his question intended. In these last weeks he had begun to wonder if their coming here, that great irreversible act that had determined so much in them and in the lives of their children, had been a mistake. Home, suddenly, seemed very close to him.

  He had turned his gaze from her and was looking, very intently, at a little flower he must have plucked as they walked, which grew on a bush that was very common here – they were standing in an unruly tide of it; a kind of pea-flower, very satiny white and small, which it would be easy to miss. It was the way he held it, the grace of the bit of a thing in his rough hand, and the attention he gave it, that touched her and made its whiteness come alive. When she looked round the whole slope was shining with it.

  What could she tell him?

  The conditions of their life up here were harder than any she could have imagined at home because they were so different. Even the openness she had longed for was a frightening thing. There had been a comfort in crowdedness and old age grime and clutter that she only appreciated when it was gone. If it was easy here to lose yourself in the immensities of the land, under a sky that opened too far in the direction of infinity, you could also do it (every woman knew this) in a space no longer than five paces from wall to wall; to find yourself barging about the hut like a trapped bird, clutching at whatever came to hand, a warm teapot, a startled child, a shirt with the smell of sweat on it, to steady yourself against the cyclone that had blown up in the gap between you and the nearest bedpost, and threatened to sweep you right out the door into a world where nothing, not a flat iron, not the names of your children on your lips, could hold you down against the vast upward expanse of your breath.

  She had known such occasions, often, often. The children saw them in her and kept clear. It was the fearful loneliness of the place that most affected her – the absence of ghosts.

  Till they arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that much thinner, harder to breathe. She had not understood, till she came to a place where it was lacking, the extent to which her sense of the world had to do with the presence of those who had been there before, leaving signs of their passing and spaces still warm with breath – a threshold worn with the coming and going of feet, hedges between fields that went back a thousand years, and the names even further; most of all, the names on headstones, which were their names, under which lay the bones that had made their bones and given them breath.

  They would be the first dead here. It made death that much lonelier, and life lonelier too.

  What she was homesick for, not always, but on some days, in some weathers, were the two little graves she had had to leave down there on the Downs, in the newly dug black soil under the big, foreign trees, with no one to visit them. That had been the real break; deeper than leaving Airdrie, or crossing the sea in the knowledge that she could never go back.

  Time and again, in her loneliness, even with her other children about her, she went and stood there among the rusty fallen spikes and monkey-puzzle light, gazing down at the rain-streaked stones with the names and dates, hoping to look up and find that he too had come. But it had never happened. If he came there on occasions, and she thought he did, their times had never coincided. All this was something they did not speak about, because there was too much space, up here, between words, even the simplest, as there was between objects.

  But that was another of the changes. She felt sometimes, as now, that they stood together there beside the two little humped places in the ground.

  ‘Ah miss Kate,’ she said very quietly. ‘And Alex.’

  He nodded. He was turning the little white pea-flower in his hand. Then he bent down and placed it, very tenderly, on one of the mounds.

  ‘Oh, and a thing Ah saw once, a tightrope walker –’ she felt no oddness in the transition. ‘He had a rope fae wan side o’ the street t’ the ither, and he walked on it, in baggy troosers, wi’ a bar in his han –’ She held her hand out, balancing, and took a step or two above the earth. ‘It wid be grand to see something,’ she said.

  What she meant was to have something so rare, so miraculous even, to show the girls, as her father had shown her. (It was her father’s hand she had held when she looked up breathless to see the tightrope walker, with his slippered feet, walk.)

  ‘Where was it?’ he asked.

  ‘Airdrie.’

  ‘How auld were ye?’

  ‘Seven. Eight maybe. Aulder than Meg.’

  ‘How did he do’t? Show me again.’

  She showed him. Held her arms out and took three steps, very slowly, raising one foot then the other, over the rough earth with its sticks and dried leaves, as if she were walking thirty feet up in the air.

  He followed her with his eyes. Then reached his hand out and caught hers, as if he was afraid she might fall.

  ‘Ah’d gie aenethin’ t’ hae seen it,’ he said. ‘You, Ah mean. T’ hae seen you.’

  11

  GEMMY’S VISITORS HAD appeared on a Thursday. In the days that followed one or two little things began to go wrong around the place. None of them was unusual, but that they should happen just now, and that there should be a string of them, was unsettling. Accidents, Jock told himself. Coincidence. He was trying hard to hold on to the normality of things, to resist in himself the wave of panic and suspicion that was running uncontrolled through the settlement. He did not believe the bit of trouble he was having was the work of blacks, and it had not yet occurred to him that it might be a neighbour. He and Lachlan fixed the break in the fence – he did not involve Gemmy – and he kept to himself one or two later breaches in the daily run of things. But when three of Ellen’s geese were found with their throats cut, and the stones of their little yard all alive with greenflies and sticky with blood, the enormity of the thing could not be concealed.

  The geese had names. One was Hereward the Wake, another Jemima, the third Lucie. The children were brokenhearted, but frightened too. Who could have done such a thing? Little Meg, through her tears, gave him a look that went right through him. He had been powerless to protect Jemima, so why not her, or any one of them?

  He was shaken. Who was it? Who could have done the thing? He looked in one man’s face, then another’s, and could not tell, or what was worse, save himself from the poison now of suspecting each one of them. He was a stunned animal, all his strength, now that he was staggering, the weight that might bring him down. Ashamed to admit to his friends, even to Barney and Jim Sweetman, what was happening, he chose not to go out.

  Lachlan was full of outraged defiance. ‘We dinnae have t’ tak this
,’ he insisted.

  He wanted Jock to demand of him some proof of absolute affection. He would defend them, the household, his uncle’s honour, their blood, no matter what. ‘Just tell me what,’ he told Jock, who was touched by the boy’s fierce loyalty, ‘and Ah’ll do it. Ah’ll kill them.’

  But when he looked a little and saw what it might mean, he too fell quiet. The idea that they should draw in close behind an invisible stockade and pretend that nothing had been done to them was shameful to him; but even more shameful was the business of admitting before Jeff Murcutt and the Corcoran boys that they had been set apart, and could be so openly terrorised.

  Once again the responsibility, Jock felt, was his. It’s a’right for me, he thought, but he’s too young for this.

  His aunt too saw it. ‘Lachlan,’ she told him gently, though she too was bitter, ‘we’ve done naethin’ wrang, you know that. We’ve done naethin’ to be ashamed o’.’

  ‘Ah’ll kill them,’ he repeated, ‘gin Ah find who ’tis.’

  As for Gemmy, he simply vanished; not into the bush, as one or two fellows predicted, but into his own skin, behind his own dim but startled eyes. He knew what was happening and that he was the cause of it.

  One morning early, three days after the slaughter of the geese, Jock was making his way down the slope towards the gully when he came upon Gemmy half-running up the track towards him, wild-eyed and stumbling as if someone, or something, was after him. Jock put an arm out to stop him, but Gemmy shot him a look, of desperation Jock thought, and ran on. He called after him but he did not turn. Jock went on, and the feeling of dread that came over him was like the faint, far-off smell of some new violation that was on its way towards them. He came to the foot of the track, and there it was.

  Just where he should turn off and enter the gully was the shed Gemmy had been mending when his visitors arrived, the new planks in its wall, the new nail heads showing plainly in the weathered grey of the rest. And there, smeared across them, was a stain, a gathering of greenflies that heaped and bubbled, and the air that came to his nostrils rich with its stink. Someone had plastered the place with shit. Someone else – Gemmy he guessed – had tried to clean it off with a handful of grass but had only succeeded in spreading the filth.