Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  But the heaviness on his heart will not shift. His one consolation is that he knows at last what he must do, and who his report is for.

  15

  WHEN THEY WERE working with the bees they worked in silence. That was how Janet thought of it, though in fact Mrs Hutchence kept up a continuous slow talk – it was the only time she did – which was not meant to tell you things – that was all by-the-way – or to do anything at all in fact but be a soothing noise in which the bees, Mrs Hutchence herself, and she as Mrs Hutchence’s helper, were gathered in a single breath into an activity that required this overriding soft babble to contain and settle them.

  Mrs Hutchence would have been surprised if you had told her: ‘That was a funny story – the one about the Chinese pirate.’ She would have denied she had ever told it, and wonder, perhaps, how it had got across from her head, since the event or the memory of it might indeed have been hanging about there, into yours. When she was silent she often thought she had said something – it could cause difficulties that, Leona certainly thought so – but when she had said something she was, as often as not, unaware of it.

  This business with the bees was like no other. Something in you slept while you were at it and you woke refreshed, which was just why Janet loved it and why the bees, now, were a necessity to her, as if without them she could never enter into her own thoughts. She felt too that Mrs Hutchence was her first and would always be her greatest friend.

  The old woman had a strange effect on her. Under her influence the world slowed to a pace she could manage at last: by which she meant that she had time to see things, to let them enter her and reveal what they were. It was a beautiful effect, this. Without it she did not know how she would ever have discovered certain things or believed they existed.

  They had come to Mrs Hutchence through Gemmy, who had been called to make hives for her, and since he knew about these things, had once or twice gone into the bush and found swarms of the little stingless native bees she kept along with her imported ones.

  The first time they went to visit her Janet had been carrying a present her mother had sent: a bowl of mutton jelly with a sealing of solid fat, and to keep the flies off, a crochet cover weighted with beads. With Meg trailing behind and the bowl held in both hands before her, she had walked slowly down the long road out of town, found the house, which they both marvelled at, mounted the stairs to the verandah, called into the still, dark interior, and when they got no reply, set off downhill towards the gully and its hives.

  They saw Mrs Hutchence from far off, looking unfamiliar in a bonnet and veil, with her skirts hiked up and her big boots flopping. Billowy clouds of smoke issued from her sleeves so that she herself was shadowy, and the bees, where they passed through the slanty sun-shafts, were dazzling sparks.

  Janet knew what she was doing, there was no mystery in it. But the scene, just the same, touched on something, just at the edge of thought, that she could not catch hold of. She would have liked to set the bowl down, relieve the ache in her arms, and concentrate on the spectacle and the slight disturbance it had set up in her, which was not at all unpleasant; but she could not risk it. Ants were already scurrying around her feet, engaged for the moment in hauling off dead bees, but alert already, the explorers among them, to what she carried. She had to use first one foot, then the other, to brush them off.

  So she stood holding the bowl just yards from where Mrs Hutchence was working, with Meg, who was not sure about the bees, sheltering behind her; and in fact one or two of the most adventurous of them did come and settle on the crochet cover, and roll about there, and light at last on her hands. Mrs Hutchence, she thought, was singing; though it might have been the bees, which were exploding in separate points of light, then rushing together in clumps. The smoke reached their nostrils. Meg sneezed.

  ‘Goodness,’ Mrs Hutchence exclaimed, ‘who are you, child?’ seeing only one of them. She came forward. Bees were tumbling in the folds of her sleeves and dotted all the front of her veil. ‘Don’t be frightened.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Janet said. Her stiffness had to do with the way her arms ached from holding the bowl.

  ‘An’t you now.’

  Mrs Hutchence gave her a hard look.

  ‘Well you needn’t be, either. The smoke makes ’em sleepy, you know,’ and she sent a little puff towards them.

  ‘Dear me, there are two of you.’

  They came often after that, and were introduced to the house and its treasures, but for Janet the real attraction was Mrs Hutchence and the hives, which looked so closed and quiet under the trees but were filled with such fierce activity – another life, quite independent of their human one, but organised, purposeful, and involving so many complex rituals. She loved the way, while you were dealing with them, you had to submit yourself to their side of things.

  Meg, on the other hand, was attracted to Leona. Janet too enjoyed the company of the kitchen table, with its games and teases, but it was the hives that drew her more. If she could escape, she thought, just for a moment, out of her personal mind into their communally single one, she would know at last what it was like to be an angel.

  This thought belonged, yet did not, to what she thought of as her ‘visions’ but was more reliable than those, more down to earth. They had a worked-up quality to them; she worked them up out of herself. This came from outside and had begun when she saw Mrs Hutchence at work for the first time.

  She associated her feelings at that moment with the ache in her arms, and with the bowl and its two covers, the one of fat, the other of crochet weighted with beads, which had kept her earthbound if she had been inclined to float; but mostly with the sound the bees made, the single vibrant word resounding in their furry heads, the way it gathered and magnified, so that she understood immediately not just what they were, in their individual bee bodies, but why they were; the flow of the honey and its making out of pollens gathered from all the surrounding country – the stringybark blossoms, the banksias, the eggs-and-bacon bushes they grazed on, the swamp-water they drank – to become the heavy scoop of gold in the bowl of a spoon, and the transparent thread from which, in its slow falling, it hung and did not fall.

  She became Mrs Hutchence’s helper, with a sunbonnet and veil of her own, and soon was as expert, almost, as the older woman. But by then, the event had occurred that was to settle her in this business; and for life.

  It was on a day not long after Gemmy had moved into the little room there, so she was no longer a beginner. They had finished their work with the bees. She had put off her bonnet and veil.

  The day had been unusually oppressive, steamy, and for the last hour a dull sky had been glowering, bronze with a greenish edge to it, that bruised the sight. Suddenly there was the sound of a wind getting up in the grove, though she did not feel the touch of it, and before she could complete the breath she had taken, or expel it in a cry, the swarm was on her, thickening so fast about her that it was as if night had fallen, just like that, in a single cloud. She just had time to see her hands covered with plushy, alive fur gloves before her whole body crusted over and she was blazingly gathered into the single sound they made, the single mind.

  Her own mind closed in her. She lost all sense of where her feet might be, or her dreamy wrists, or whether she was still standing, as she had been a moment before, in the shadowy grove, or had been lifted from the face of the earth.

  The bees have their stomachs full, her mind told her, they will not sting. Stand still, stand still. It was her old mind that told her this.

  She stood still as still and did not breathe. She surrendered herself.

  You are our bride, her new and separate mind told her as it drummed and swayed above the earth. Ah, so that is it! They have smelled the sticky blood-flow. They think it is honey. It is.

  Mrs Hutchence was only feet away. So was Gemmy. She could hear their voices calling to her through the din her body was making. But it made no difference, now, the distance, three feet or a thousan
d years, no difference at all; or whether she was a girl (a woman), or a tree. She stood sleeping. Upright. A bride. Then the bitterness of smoke came to her throat, and the cloud began to lift; and there, through the gaps in herself, was Mrs Hutchence with coils of smoke pouring out of her sleeves, and Gemmy, open-mouthed with a frame in his arms, and the bees, one by one, then in fistfulls, rolling off her, peeling away like a crust, till she stood in her own skin again, which was fresh where the air touched it, and only a few dozen foolish creatures were left that had got themselves caught and were butting with their furry heads and kicking, in a panic at being alone.

  She felt Mrs Hutchence’s hands on her skin now, which was quite clear and unharmed but seemed new to her, and all through Mrs Hutchence’s fearful ministrations and Gemmy’s whimpering cries, she remained a little out of herself – half-sleeping, regretful, her two feet planted square on the earth.

  Years later she would become expert beyond anything Mrs Hutchence might have dreamed of at the bee business. She would know all the breeds and crossbreeds, and create one or two new ones – actually bring them into being, whole swarms that the earth had never known till she called them. She would devote her life to these creatures, bringing to the daily practical study of their habits and all the facts and lore that is the long history of their interaction with men, a bodily excitement that went back to this moment, under the trees, when her mind had for a moment been their unbodied one and she had been drawn into the process and mystery of things.

  For it was not the bees themselves that had claimed her; they had been only the little winged agents of it, the little furry-headed, armed angels that might, if she had panicked, have stung her to death, martyred her on the spot, a solid, silly giant that had stumbled in among them.

  All that was still to come. For the moment, still numbed by the shock of what had struck her, she moved to comfort Mrs Hutchence, who had sunk to the ground, and sat like a rock gone suddenly soft, and sobbed and took a good while to get her breath.

  ‘Don’t be upset Mrs Hutchence,’ she said, feeling the older by years, though her voice was unchanged. ‘The bees didn’t hurt me, I knew they wouldn’t. I remembered what you told me and it was true. They didn’t sting.’

  She saw then, from the look on Mrs Hutchence’s face, that though her own faith had been absolute, Mrs Hutchence’s had not.

  So it had been that that had saved her, the power of her own belief, which could change mere circumstance and make miracles.

  She went, half-dreaming, and looked at the hive, all sealed now, a squared-off cloud, still drumming, that had once been clamped to her skin, a living darkness, so that the only light came from inside her, from the open space she had become inside the skin they made of living particles, little flames.

  She had remained cool inside, and when the flames drew off what was restored to her had a new shape, was simpler; she had emerged with a new body, which the world – and this was the point – had dealt with to its limit and let go, and which, from now on, however things might appear, it could not destroy.

  She was rather surprised really that she did not appear changed to Mrs Hutchence, since the body she was now standing in, as her mind saw it, was not at all the old one.

  She looked past Mrs Hutchence to where she had stood just a moment back, and what she saw was not herself, not a gawky child in pigtails and a faded frock, but a charred stump, all crusted black and bubbling; and she saw it – this, when she met his astonished look, was what convinced her – through Gemmy’s eyes.

  16

  GEMMY, SUFFERING FROM bruised ribs and a broken mouth, but even more from a bruising of the spirit that threw him into moments of frantic terror, was given a room at Mrs Hutchence’s, a little back room so small you might have stood in it and touched your fingertips to either wall, but clean, freshly painted and cheerful, the women thought. It did not occur to them that its very spareness, its being so light and open, yet enclosed, might prove frightful to him. Once the door was shut he did not know where to set himself between its close walls.

  There was a cot where in his first days in the house Leona sat beside him and fed him soup and tried to make sense of the stumbling stories he had to tell; also a chair with an embroidered cushion, and a low little chest of drawers. From the beginning the chest was a worry to him.

  He believed at first that the discomfort it caused him, the sense that assailed him of his spirit being touched and interfered with, must come from something Mrs Hutchence kept there. Leona was astonished one day to find him sitting in the midst of a snowstorm. He had taken the sheets and pillowcases they kept in the drawers, hauled them out, dragged them round the room, and then tried, very ineffectually, to stuff them back again. What could have possessed him? Was it a tantrum? Something they had done? Mrs Hutchence reproved him, but lightly – she did not want the poor fellow upset – and they spent a whole morning with their sleeves rolled up and the copper boiling. To make sure there was no repetition of the trouble, Mrs Hutchence found a place for the things in her own room. The little two-drawered chest stayed empty. But Gemmy by then had discovered what it was that had touched him.

  It was the smell of the wood, which was quite unlike that of any of the local timbers he had to do with, and the moment he understood it, he stepped out of the room, out of his present self, into a clearing that had always been there, he thought, just waiting for him to stumble to the centre of it. And there he stood again with fine wood-dust raining down on his head, mixing with snot to clog nostrils and throat.

  Back, far back, before Willett, when he was still at the maggot stage, he had been one of an army of little shitty creatures, mere bundles of rag and breath but with hands that could clasp a broom and strength enough to push it, whose job it was, for all the hours of daylight, to crawl about in the low place under the machines in a timber mill, sweeping sawdust into wooden pans. Fine wood-dust poured incessantly from the teeth of the saws – that was the smell – and there was another, heavier smell, which was that of the oily grime round the base of the machines and the bolt-heads that fixed them to the floor, which they picked out with their nails, mixed with sawdust, and ate. He had never since tasted anything so good. Overwhelmed, he stared at the object, the little pinewood chest that came no higher than his thigh, the same height he had been then, which had brought all this back to him.

  When darkness fell in the close little room, it stirred; the smell moved towards him and the screaming of the machines returned that all day had deafened them so that even when they were stilled the screaming in their heads went on. He would feel about in the darkness then for the others. What part of the world had they got themselves to? Their sharp little elbows and knees had poked through his flesh. When they curled up in close heaps together between the legs of the machines, among snufflings and breathings and bubbly murmurings, their communal heat and breath was a thing his body had never forgotten or known again. Where were they, his fellow maggots? What had they turned into when, at five or six, he had discovered the shape of an ancient, undernourished child and become Willett’s Boy? All night his body sought them in his sleep.

  So the room began to work its magic on him. Sweating between walls he entered a different sleep from the one he had known in the lean-to at the McIvors’ and in his years with the blacks, a sleep that belonged to a different life and produced different demons; the kind that live in rooms.

  It is a fearful thing to be faced in the dark by a pair of cracked leather boots, all their eyeholes torn, their laces trailing, the loose tongues charred and smelling of flame.

  The boots are Willett’s. They are empty. Touched with flame, they sit propped up in front of a grate. Willett has just stepped out of them, and in his stockinged feet, one big toe showing, is padding round the room, filling it with his richness and the rumblings of his voice. Willett. Source of unquestionable commands; of curses, blows, growls, slobbery kisses. The first being he has memory of. Before Willett there is only darkness, his life as a
maggot, the giant legs of machines. In a moment he will turn his attention from Willett’s boots, which it is his job to place in such a way that they dry but do not scorch, and there, in the reflected light of the fire, Willett himself will stand, red-haired, gigantic, with his shaggy brows and a voice that can creep about in every corner of a room, the fiery god-demon and ruler of his world, whose touch and smell and breath is on every object he puts his hand to.

  The boots? Willett’s. The long clay pipe that he is allowed, when Willett is in the mood, to take a slow drag on? Willett’s.

  The blackened pan is for cooking Willett’s supper, a nice fat sausage, and provides his own supper too, in the grease he scrapes from it with his finger or with a crust of bread.

  Willett’s razor strop. Which he has experience of on Saturday nights, when he uses it to whet Willett’s razor – more intimately, if he has been playing up, when Willett gives him a lick of it across his back. Then there is the cake of soap that gives Willett’s hands their smell, a choking sweetness.

  He is Willett’s Boy, as the boots are Willett’s boots. He has nothing of his own. Everything that comes to him comes through Willett, including his name, Gemmy, which is what Willett calls him when he is not just ‘Boy’.

  Willett is a rat-catcher, and they have a bulldog, Ketch, and two ferrets. If the ferrets have names he has forgotten them.

  Having known no better life than this, he cannot imagine one. Willett provides the only bit of closeness he has ever been offered, and since he has nothing else to love, he loves him with a fierce intensity, a fear too, which is the greatest he knows, that he may get lost, or that Willett one day may abandon him, taking with him the whole world as he conceives it: Ketch, the ferrets, the streets Willett is king of, the razor, the sweet garden smell of his hands, his curses, his kisses, the warm grease of the skillet, the boots with their trailing laces and tongues lit with flame, his name, Gemmy, his claim to existence as a boy, as Willett’s Boy.