Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  He stared and his gorge rose. Snatching up a handful of dry grass, he smashed at the loathsomeness of the flies that were feeding on it, as if the abomination was in them. They leapt away, but some of them, drunk on foulness, were caught and smashed. He threw the soiled grass from him and sank to the ground. Drugged himself, he began to roar through his clenched teeth and his body swayed.

  The flies returned. They climbed over one another’s backs in their eagerness to feed and wallow. He felt maddened that such creatures should exist in the world, and would have rushed once again to smash them. But what had they to do with it? Some man had done this. That was the real abomination. Someone he knew. Someone whose eyes he had looked into, and recently; maybe at the very moment when he was planning the thing. That fellow had squatted here, somewhere here – he swung about again as if he might catch the glimpse of a retreating shirt-tail – and with a grunt of satisfaction squeezed this filth out of himself, fouled his own hand with it, and spread it as an insult between them, made public and stinking in the sun. He saw the hand with its load of filth moving across the wall and understood now that what it was setting there was a word. What word? He shook his head wildly to prevent it forming, to prevent the possibility of it getting in there, of himself giving it form, and was glad that the only other man who had seen it was Gemmy, who could not read. To have that word in his head, where it could never be scrubbed out, would be madness to him. Even now –

  He got to his feet and went swiftly to the creek, his breath racking him like a wounded animal’s, and stumbled into the smooth and liquid light (it was the same spot where he had seen his bird), and scrubbed his hands, and would have stripped and scrubbed his whole body, but discovered that he had no belief any longer in the water’s power to cleanse.

  What horrified him was that he might find himself face to face with the man whose smell he had on his hands, in his head too, a thing so intimate, so personal, that surely he would recognise it on the man himself, and the word would leap up in the air between them, taking form from the stench. He swung about again. And it seemed to him now that it was the sky that had been smeared, the earth, the water. The word was on them; some old darkness out of the depth of things was scribbled there for ever, and could never now be eradicated.

  12

  ANDY MCKILLOP’S visionary powers were greater than he knew. The blacks had brought Gemmy something, though it wasn’t a stone.

  When all the proper formalities had been exchanged, and the necessary questions asked and answered, the silence between them as they sat, all three, and faced one another, became a conversation of another kind; and the space between them, three feet of baked earth where ants in their other life scurried about carrying bits of bark and other broken stuff in the excited scent of a new and foreign presence, expanded and became the tract of land up there under the flight of air and the stars of the night sky, that was the tribe’s home territory, with its pools and creeks and underground sources of water, its rock ridges and scrub, its edible fruits and berries and flocks of birds and other creatures, all alive in their names and the stories that contained their spirit, for a man to walk into and print with the spirit of his feet and the invisible impact of his breath.

  For longer, much longer, than the ten minutes Andy McKillop counted from his side of the hill, they moved together through its known places. And Gemmy – as he recognised one and then another feature of it, the site of old happenings, strange encounters, or stories, or lean feasts – felt the energy flow back into him, and saw, in the sudden access of it, how weak he had grown in these last months, with the dry little cough that plagued him, and his stomach troubles.

  The air he breathed here did him no good, the food too. The ground he walked on jarred at every step. The land up there was his mother, the only one he had ever known. It belonged to him as he did to it; not by birth but by second birth, by gift, and not just for his lifetime either but for the whole of time, since it was for the whole of time that it existed, as he did too so long as he was one with it. This was what the blacks had brought him, in case he needed it. They were concerned that in coming here, among these ghostly white creatures, he might have slipped back into the thinner world of wraiths and demons that he had escaped, though never completely, in his days with them. They had come to reclaim him; but lightly, bringing what would feed his spirit.

  They spread the land out for him, gave him its waters to drink. As he took huge draughts of it, saw it light his flesh. Watched him, laughing, bathe in it, scooping great handfuls over his breast. In the little space of dust between them as they sat, they danced, beat up clouds, threw rainbows over their heads. Then they rose, exchanged the formalities of parting, and went. A day and a night it would take them to reach a place that was already humming all round him as he took up his hammer and sent the blows of it leaping with such clarity in the release of his spirit that they might be flying, he thought, thirty miles off, like stars his arms could fling over the furthest ridge to light their path.

  Then that bloke Andy appeared; came stumbling out of the scrub with his crooked jaw and restless, runaway eyes, and stood leaning on air, with the odd, empty look that anything, any madness might fill; hinting, demanding. The air around him was immediately infected, sucked into the emptiness he made just by stepping into it. Gemmy felt the good health that had been given him weaken. As if he had looked into a pool – that was how this Andy affected him – and seen an image of himself that was all unfocused pieces that would not fit.

  With an effort he pulled his eyes away, and the man, or the furious emptiness rather that wore a look and held a shotgun and was trying to find the shape of a man, went still and vanished.

  It was the kind he was, this Andy. If you refused him your attention he mumbled, dithered, boiled with his own hopeless impotence, and disappeared.

  But when, with a hiss, he did turn on his heel at last and stalk away, Gemmy felt his heart fall. He was real enough; the emptiness was real. And they stood too close to one another on the lowest rung of things in the settlement for his ferocity to accept defeat.

  Slowly, over the months, he had learned how to handle such fellows. He stepped into their skin, looked about quickly, stepped out again, then dealt with them as they dealt with themselves.

  One or two of them knew this and kept clear. They did not care to be exposed, even to themselves. Others felt it but did not know, and the less they knew the more openly hostile they grew; these were the ones you had to watch out for. He watched, allowing himself no illusions, and since there was a kind of agreement among them, or so it seemed, that open savagery was not permitted, he survived.

  He had no real tormentors here. Even the crudest among them affected a bantering tone – though he soon saw through it – as if any mischief they might get up to was an expression of an irresistible jollity, and when it went too far, and he was roughly used, the fault, if anyone’s, was his. They got him to his feet, brushed him down, told him he wasn’t hurt, that he was a good fellow and that they had meant no harm. (It was true. They thought they didn’t.)

  His real tormentors were in his head, and they came after him more and more often now as their shapes rose clearer in his memory and grew faces and fists in the dark hours of his sleep. And as always, it was Mosey and The Irish who were the worst of them: Mosey with his high thin voice and fair wisp of a beard, soft as a girl, and The Irish with gunpowder pits in his cheeks and two fingers gone from his right hand.

  ‘What have we got here, now? A boy, is it? By Jimminy yes, I reckon it’s a boy, a boyo. But what a scrawny, thin-necked, weasel of a boy,’ and with each new taunt they would begin to push him back and forth between them, ‘what a snub-nosed –’

  ‘Red-eared –’

  ‘Big-mouthed –’

  ‘Low-arsed –’

  ‘Knock-kneed –’

  ‘Imitation of a boy it is! More like a scrap of old cheese –’

  ‘Or the sole off me boot –’

  ‘O
r a bit of stale pie crust you can’t hardly get your teeth into –’

  ‘Than a boy, a boy, a boyo!’

  All the while leering and lunging as they sang the words back and forth and bowled him back and forth between them, till they began to thrust about under his clothes, and the cries that broke from him as their fingers pinched and poked and teased and twisted were the cries of a child, but the pain now was that of a grown man, outraged and powerless, who had to stand by and see it done, and for all the fierce howls that came out of him could neither drive the devils off nor prevent what, in a moment now, unless he wakes, will be past all remedy …

  He wakes from such a dream. A clammy hand is over his mouth, a mouth, close in the dark but not his own, is roughly panting. He struggles; half waking, jerks his body to get free, but as so often, the dream hangs on, tough arms hurdle his ribs. It hangs on just that breath longer than sleep, but the breath, indrawn, is very deep and the fear comes to him that this time he may not be able to shake it off, that the tormentors he carries within him, who have been so long hidden and have begun, more and more often now, to come to the surface in him, will this time break clear, get out into the real world, where he will have no more control of them than he had in the days when they were real and he was one of them.

  And it is true. This time it is true. He is awake, and these others, all knuckled hands and shoulders and rough heads and breath, are cramped close under the lean-to with him, shoving, whispering instructions, at one point giggling.

  They have got him hooped about with their arms, they are pulling a bag over his head, and with the choking chaffy roughness of it against his mouth, and in the dry breathlessness of nightmare, he is being hopped and dragged over stones, and when he stumbles, jerked upright by a crowd of bodiless whisperers who are trotting along on all sides of him, as if all his tormentors had found one another at last in the dream-space of his head, and discovering now what they have in common, have joined forces to gallop him to some corner of the dark where he is flat-handed this way and that, and when he throws up his hands to protect himself, falls, but at other times merely hovers on the brink, and is baited and played with; not brutally but with hands, neither fisted nor frenzied, coming at him from every direction, and without sound save for the grunted effort it takes to haul a man to his feet so that he can be knocked down again, and the breathing in the darkness, which is huge even inside the sack, of many mouths.

  Suddenly there is water round his ankles, and when he stumbles this time there is a splash that scatters moonlight through his skull.

  His arms are jerked back, his head pushed down. His head, roaring into the sack, is thrust under water and the darkness in the sack turns to mud. He gasps mud. Then goes under again, and yet again, till a voice rises in protest. The others say hush, but it changes things. The grip on his arms weakens.

  He is released and on his knees in the creek when he hears a voice he does recognise: Jock’s. It is shouting.

  A scuffle, the barging all round him of bodies in the dark, and the next moment he is upright, gasping, breathless inside the sack, and the sack, muddy and streaming, is torn from his head.

  13

  ELLEN MCIVOR STIRRED. From the other side of the wall had come one of those nightmare cries that were so much part of their nights up here that she did no more at first than pause in her half-sleep and listen for the disturbance it might make among her children. But on this occasion there was more. A series of bumps against the wall itself jerked her into full wakefulness. She put her hand out, touched her husband’s arm in the dark, and he started up, his hand on his shotgun. Rolling out of bed he went to one window, then quickly to the other, as she, her heart swinging wildly, put her foot to the ground. One of the children woke. It was Janet. ‘Shh,’ she said, rising quickly now.

  The child sat up with her eyes wide in the darkness and looked to where her father crouched at the window, his face tense in the faint light from out there, the barrel of the shotgun softly aglow. ‘What is it?’ she breathed.

  ‘Shh,’ the voice came again.

  Jock was puzzled. He saw a muffled group, but it was making away from the hut, not towards it, in an awkward, shuffling way that he could not understand; a huddle of four, maybe five figures.

  He handed Ellen the shotgun and began to pull on his moleskins and boots while she, with the shotgun ready, took his place at the window. She could see nothing out there. The group was swallowed up now in the darkness further down the slope and she wondered what he had seen that disturbed him.

  He took the gun, touched her hand lightly in the half-dark, gave her a warning look to be quiet, and slipped the latch of the door.

  ‘What is it?’ Janet asked again.

  ‘Shh, ye’ll wake the ithers.’

  Going to the door, she opened it a crack, letting a flood of moonlight in, and a medley of night sounds, but nothing more.

  ‘It’s naethin’,’ she said. ‘Gae back to sleep.’

  She had opened the door just wide enough to slip through, and barefoot now, just as she was in her nightgown, she stepped out, dropping the latch behind her.

  Careful not to wake Meg, who slept beside her, or Lachlan, who was already mumbling, Janet set her foot to the ground and crossed quickly to the door. Very carefully she raised the latch and, barefoot like her mother, ventured out into the strangeness of the yard.

  It was transformed, made unfamiliar by moonlight and the tinking of night-creatures. Big clouds overhead seemed closer than any she had seen by day, and the ground, which her bare feet knew well enough in sunlight, felt odd, not quite safe. She was aware of every pebble in the unevenness of it.

  Her mother was standing very still about halfway down the slope, her nightgown shifting a little and the dark of her body outlined within it. She was struck by the heaviness, the solidity it suggested, and a sudden affection for her mother, which she did not always feel and seldom expressed, came moistly into her throat so that she was tempted to call her. The material of her mother’s nightgown was all agitated moonlight, but the body inside it was dark, bulky, deeply rooted out there. Though exposed, it did not seem vulnerable. She had a flash of her own body, dark and thin inside her nightgown, but was exhilarated rather than afraid.

  There was no sign of her father, or of whatever it was that had drawn him out, then her mother, then her.

  She stood without breathing, or so it seemed, and the calm she felt, which was all suspense of ordinary, daytime feeling, had to do with the tense and brittle strangeness with which the world was touched, which might have more to do, she thought, with some quality she had brought to it out of her sleep than with the play of clouds across moonlight.

  I am the one who is seeing all this, she thought.

  That, as much as anything, accounted for the nature of what she saw. And with it came another thought: Me, not Lachlan.

  She was aware suddenly of being outside in the dark, while the other children slept on in the house.

  Not for a moment in all this did she think of danger.

  Her mother turned and started up the slope, then stopped a moment, looked back, then came on again; and when she saw her standing in the dark there, outside the door, did not chide her.

  They stood side by side and watched her father and Gemmy come up the hill, Gemmy stumbling, her father with one arm round the man, supporting him. Her father raised his head and the look he gave them she would never forget.

  He led Gemmy by them and to his sleeping place against the side of the house.

  ‘Janet come awa’ noo,’ her mother coaxed, touching her lightly, not perhaps for the first time, ‘come ben, come to yur bed.’

  When Jock McIvor reached the bottom of the slope, it had been to see no more than the last shadowy retreat of whoever it was. They were gone across the creek. He could hear them crashing through the scrub on the other side. There was no point in following. He had Gemmy to deal with, who was drenched and quaking, and had to be half-carried up the slop
e.

  What he had dreaded most when he had come rushing downhill was that he would have now to come face to face with them; they would stand in the open at last. They had saved themselves, and him too, by making off. Cowards, he thought bitterly. But wasn’t he one too in the relief he felt? He was shaking, but comforted Gemmy as well as he could and for the first time did not draw away when the man clutched and held on.

  Looking up about halfway up the slope, he saw his wife. He did not want to face her. She saw it and turned away, and went to where Janet was standing, barefooted at the door.

  That was when the real fear, the real anger took him. That in the middle of the night his wife and daughter should be standing out under big clouds at the edge of the dark, hanging together and watching him drag a helpless creature, half out of his wits, back from a moment of senseless bullying, while the men who had done it – neighbours! – were creeping home to crawl in beside their own wives, safe in bed.

  He went on past them and dragged Gemmy into the shelter of the lean-to. Laying aside his rifle, he crawled with him into that musty, dark-smelling place, and did a thing he could not for his life have done a week, perhaps even an hour ago: he sat huddled close to him in the dark, and when he shivered, drew him closer, pulled the old moth-eaten blanket round the two of them, and with the man against him, heard his juddering breath, and smelt it, while outside moonlight fell on the cleared space round the hut where his wife and children waited.