The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  Newly arrived in the country, a gangly ten-year-old, and hating everything about this place she had never wanted to come to—the parched backyards, the gravel playground under the pepper trees at her bare public school, the sing-song voices that mocked her accent and deliberately, comically got her name wrong—she had gone one Saturday afternoon to the local pictures and found herself tearfully defeated. In love. Not just with the hard-heeled freckle-faced boy up on the screen, with his round-headed, blond, pudding-bowl haircut and cheeky smile, his fierce sense of honour, the odd mixture in him of roughness and shy, broad-vowelled charm, but with the whole barefoot world he moved in, his dog Blue, his hardbitten parents who were in danger of losing their land, the one-storeyed sun-struck weatherboard they lived in, which was, in fact, just like her own.

  More than a place, it was a world of feeling she had broken through to, and it could be hers now because he lived in it. She had given up her resistance.

  On that hot Saturday afternoon, in that darkened picture theatre in Albury, her heart had melted. Australia had claimed and conquered her. She was shocked and the shock was physical. She had had no idea till then what beauty could do to you, the deep tears it could draw up; how it could take hold of you in the middle of the path and turn you round, fatefully, and set you in a new direction. That was what he could know nothing of.

  All that time ago, he had changed her life. And here he was more than twenty years later, in the flesh, looking sideways at her in this unmade lump of a bed.

  “Hey,” he was saying, and he put his hand out to lift aside a strand of her hair.

  “I just can't get over it,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said again. “Don't be silly! It was nothing. Something my mother got me into. It was all made up. That stupid kid wasn't me. I was a randy little bugger if you want to know. All I could think about was my dick—" and he laughed. “They didn't show any of that. Truth is, I didn't like myself much in those days. I was too unhappy.”

  But he was only getting himself in deeper. Unhappy? He caught the look in her eyes, and to save the situation leaned forward and covered her mouth with his own.

  From the start he famished her. It was not in her nature to pause at thresholds but there were bounds she could not cross and he was gently, firmly insistent. He did give himself, but when she too aggressively took the initiative, or crossed the line of what he thought of as a proper modesty, he would quietly turn away. What he was abashed by, she saw, was just what most consumed her, his beauty. He had done everything he could to abolish it. All those nicks and scars. The broken tooth he took no trouble to have fixed. The exposure to whatever would burn or coarsen.

  A series of “spills” had left him, at one time or another, with a fractured collarbone, three bouts of concussion, a broken leg. These punishing assaults on himself were attempts to wipe out an affliction. But all they had done was refine it: bring out the metallic blue of his eyes, show up under the skin, with its network of cracks, the poignancy— that is how she saw it—of his bones.

  Leaving him sprawled, that first morning, she had stepped out into the open living room.

  Very aware that she was as yet only a casual visitor to his world, and careful of intruding, she picked her way between plates piled with old food and set on tabletops or pushed halfway under chairs, coffee mugs, beer cans, gym socks, ashtrays piled with butts, magazines, newspapers, unopened letters, shirts dropped just anywhere or tossed carelessly over the backs of chairs. A dead light bulb on a glass coffee-table rolled in the breeze.

  She sat a moment on the edge of a lounge and thought she could hear the tinkling that came from the closed globe, a distant sound, magical and small, but magnified, like everything this morning. The room was itself all glass and light. It hung in mid-air. Neither inside nor out, it opened straight into the branches of a coral tree, all scarlet claws.

  She went to the kitchen bench at the window. The sink was piled with coffee mugs and more dishes. She felt free to deal with those, and was still at the sink, watching a pair of rainbow lorikeets on the deck beyond, all his dinner plates gleaming in the rack, when he stepped up behind her in a pair of sagging jockey-shorts, still half asleep, rubbing his skull. He kissed her in a light, familiar way. Barely noticing the cleared sink—that was a good sign—he ran a glass of water and drank it off, his Adam's apple bobbing. Then kissed her again, grinned, and went out on to the deck.

  The lorikeets flew off, but belonged here, and soon ventured back.

  Over the weeks,as she came to spend more time there, she began to impose her own sort of order on the place. He did not object. He sat about reading the papers while she worked around him.

  The drawers of the desk where he sometimes sat in the evening, wearing reading glasses while he did the accounts, were stuffed with papers—letters, cuttings, prospectuses. There were more papers pushed into cardboard boxes, in cupboards, stacked in corners, piled under beds.

  “Do you want to keep any of this?” she would enquire from time to time, holding up a fistful of mail.

  He barely looked. “No. Whatever it is. Just chuck it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “Letters.”

  “Sure. Chuck ‘em out.”

  “What about these?”

  “What are they?”

  “Invoices. 1984.”

  “No. Just pile ‘em up, I'll make a bonfire. Tomorrow maybe.”

  She had a strong need for fantasy, she liked to make things interesting. In their early days together, she took to leaving little love notes for him. Once under the tea caddy, where he would come across it when he went out in the morning, just after six, to make their tea. On other occasions, beside his shaving gear in the bathroom, in one of the pockets of his windcheater, in his work shorts. If he read them he did not mention the fact. It was ages before he told her, in a quarrel, how much these love notes embarrassed him. She flushed scarlet, did not make that mistake again.

  He had no sense of fantasy himself. He wasn't insensitive—she was often touched by his thoughtfulness and by the small things he noticed—but he was very straight-up-and-down, no frills. Once, when his film was showing, she asked if they could go and see it. “What for?” he asked, genuinely surprised. “It's crap. Anyway, I'd rather forget all that. It wasn't a good time, that. Not for me it wasn't.”

  “Because you were unhappy?” she said. “You told me that, remember?”

  But he shut off then, and the matter dropped.

  He told her nothing about his past. Nothing significant. And if she asked, he shied away.

  “I don't want to talk about it,” was all he'd say. “I try to forget about what's gone and done with. That's where we're different. You go on and on about it.”

  No I don't, she wanted to argue. You're the one who's hung up on the past. That's why you won't talk about it. What I'm interested in is the present. But all of it. All the little incidental happenings that got you here, that got us here, made us the way we are. Seeing that she was still not satisfied, he drew her to him, almost violently—offering her that, his hard presence—and sighed, she did not know for what.

  He had no decent clothes that she could discover. Shirts, shorts, jeans—workclothes, not much else. A single tie that he struggled into when he had an engagement that “official.” She tried to rectify this. But when he saw the pile of new things on the bed he looked uncomfortable. He took up a blue poplin shirt, fingered it, frowned, put it down.

  “I wish you wouldn't,” he said. “Buy me things. Shirts and that.” He was trying not to seem ungracious, she saw, but was not happy. “I don't need shirts.”

  “But you do,” she protested. “Look at the one you've got on.”

  He glanced down. “What's wrong with it?”

  “It's in rags.”

  “Does me,” he said, looking put out.

  “So. Will you wear these things or what?”

  “I'll wear them,” he said. “They're b
ought now. But I don't want you to do it, that's all. I don't needthings.”

  He refused to meet her eye. Something more was being said, she thought. I don't deserve them—was that what he meant? In a sudden rush of feeling for something in him that touched her but which she could not quite catch, she clasped him to her. He relaxed, responded.

  “No more shirts, then,” she promised.

  “I just don't want you to waste your money,” he said childishly. “I've got loads of stuff already.”

  “I know,” she said. “You should send the lot of it to the Salvos. Then you'd have nothing at all. You'd be naked, and wouldn't be able to go out, and I'd have you all to myself.” She had, by now, moved in.

  “Is that what you want?” he asked, picking up on her lightness, allowing her, without resistance for once, to undo the buttons on the offending shirt.

  “You know I do,” she told him.

  “Well then,” he said.

  “Well then what?”

  “Well, you've got me,” he said, "haven't you?”

  He had a ukulele. Occasionally he took it down from the top shelf of the wardrobe and, sitting with a bare foot laid over his thigh, played— not happily she thought—the same plain little tune.

  She got to recognise the mood in which he would need to seek out this instrument that seemed so absurdly small in his hands and for which he had no talent, and kept her distance. The darkness in him frightened her. It seemed so far from anything she knew of his other nature.

  Some things she discovered only by accident.

  “Who's Bobby Kohler?” she asked once, having several times now come across the name on letters.

  “Oh, that's me,” he said. “ Was me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It's my name. My real name. Mitchell Maze is just the name I work under.”

  “You mean you changed it?”

  “Not really. Some people still call me Bobby.”

  “Who does?”

  “My mother. A few others.”

  “Is it German?”

  “Was once, I suppose. Away back. Grandparents.”

  She was astonished, wanted to ask more, but could see that the subject was now done with. She might ask but he would not answer.

  There were times when he did tell her things. Casually, almost dismissively, off the top of his head. He told her how badly, at sixteen, he had wanted to be a long-distance runner, and shine. How for a whole year he had got up in the dark, before his paper run, and gone out in the growing light to train on the oval at their local showground at Castle Hill. He laughed, inviting her to smile at some picture he could see of his younger self, lean, intense, driven, straining painfully day after day towards a goal he would never reach. She was touched by this. But he was not looking for pity. It was the folly of the thing he was intent on. It appealed to a spirit of savage irony in him that she could not share.

  There were no evocative details. Just the bare, bitter facts. He could see the rest too clearly in his mind's eye to reproduce it for hers. She had to do that out of her own experience: Albury The early-morning frost on the grass. Magpies carolling around a couple of milk cans in the long grass by the road. But she needed more, to fix in a clarifying image the tenderness she felt for him, the sixteen-year-old Bobby Kohler, barefooted, in sweater and shorts, already five inches taller than the Skip Daley she had known, driving himself hard through those solitary circuits of the oval as the sunlight came and the world turned golden around him.

  One day she drove out in her lunch hour to see the place. Sat in her car in the heat and dazzle. Walked to the oval fence and took in the smell of dryness. There was less, in fact, than she imagined.

  But a week later she went back. His mother lived there. She found the address, and after driving round the suburb for a bit, sat in her car under a paperbark on the other side of the street. Seeing no one in the little front yard, she got out, crossed, climbed the two front steps to the veranda, and knocked.

  There was no reply.

  She walked to the end of the veranda, which was unpainted, its timber rotting, and peered round the side. No sign of anyone.

  Round the back, there was a water tank, painted the usual red, and some cages that might once have held rabbits. She peeped in through the window on a clean little kitchen with a religious calendar—was he a Catholic? he'd never told her that—and into two bedrooms on either side of a hall, one of which, at one time, must have been his.

  He lived here, she told herself. For nearly twenty years. Something must be left of him.

  She went down into the yard and turned the bronze key of the tap, lifting to her mouth a cupped handful of the cooling water. She felt like a ghost returning to a world that was not her own, nostalgic for what she had never known; for what might strike her senses strongly enough— the taste of tank water, the peppery smell of geraniums—to bring back some immediate physical memory of the flesh. But that was crazy. What was she doing? She had him, didn't she?

  That night, touching the slight furriness, in the dark, of his earlobe, smelling the raw presence of him, she gave a sob and he paused in his slow lovemaking.

  “What is it?” he said. “What's the matter?”

  She shook her head, felt a kind of shame—what could she tell him? That she'd been nosing round a backyard in Castle Hill looking for some ghost of him? He'd think she was mad.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  His face was in her hair. There was a kind of desperation in him.

  But this time she was the one who would not tell.

  He was easy to get on with and he was not. They did most things together; people thought of them as a couple, they were happy. He came and went without explanation, and she learned quickly enough that she either accepted him on these terms or she could not have him at all. Without quite trying to, he attracted people, and when “situations” developed was too lazy, or too easy-going, to extract himself. She learned not to ask where he had been or what he was up to. That wasn't what made things difficult between them.

  She liked to have things out. He wouldn't allow it. When she raged he looked embarrassed. He told her she was overdramatic, though the truth was that he liked her best when she was in a passion; it was the very quality in her that had first attracted him. What he didn't like was scenes. If she tried to make a scene, as he called it, he walked out.

  “It's no use us shouting at one another,” he'd tell her, though in fact he never shouted. “We'll talk about it later.” Which meant they wouldn't talk at all.

  “But I need to shout,” she shouted after him.

  Later, coming back, he would give a quick sideways glance to see if she “calmed down.”

  She hadn't usually. She'd have made up her mind, after a bout of tears, to end things.

  “What about a cuppa?” he'd suggest.

  “What you won't accept—" she'd begin.

  “Don't,” he'd tell her. “I've forgotten all about it.” As if the hurt had been his. Then, "I'm sorry. I don't want you to be unhappy.”

  “I'm not,” she'd say. “Just—exasperated.”

  “Oh, well,” he'd say. “That's all right then.”

  What tormented her was the certainty she felt of his nursing some secret—a lost love perhaps, an old grief—that he could not share. Which was there in the distance he moved into; there in the room, in the bed beside her; and might, she thought, have the shape on occasion of that ukulele tune, and which she came to feel as a second presence between them.

  It was this distance in him that others were drawn to. She saw that clearly now. A horizon in him that you believed you alone could reach. You couldn't. Maybe no one could. After a time it put most people off; they cut their losses and let him go. But that was not her way. If she let him go, it would destroy her. She knew that because she knew herself.

  There was a gleam in him that on occasion shone right through his skin, the white skin of his breast below the burn-line his singlet left. She could not
bear it. She battered at him.

  “Hey, hey,” he'd say, holding her off.

  He had no idea what people were after. What she was after. What she saw in him.

  For all the dire predictions among the clan, the doubts and amused speculations, they lasted; two people who, to the puzzlement of others, remained passionately absorbed in one another. Then one day she got a call at work. He had had a fall and was concussed again. Then in a coma, on a life-support system, and for four days and nights she was constantly at his side.

  For part of that time she sat in a low chair and tuned her ear to a distant tinkling, as a breeze reached her, from far off over the edge of the world, and rolled a spent light bulb this way and that on a glass tabletop. She watched, fascinated. Hour after hour, in shaded sunlight and then in the blue of a hospital night lamp, the fragile sphere rolled, and she heard, in the depths of his skull, a clink of icebergs, and found herself sitting, half frozen, in a numbed landscape with not even a memory now of smell or taste or of any sense at all; only what she caught of that small sound, of something broken in a hermetic globe. To reach it, she told herself, I will have to smash the glass. And what then? Will the sound swell and fill me or will it stop altogether?

  Meanwhile she listened. It demanded all her attention. It was a matter of life and death. When she could no longer hear it—

  At other times she walked. Taking deep breaths of the hot air that swirled around her, she walked, howling, through the streets. Barefoot. And the breaths she took were to feed her howling. Each outpouring of sound emptied her lungs so completely that she feared she might simply rise up and float. But the weight of her bones, of the flesh that covered them, of the waste in her bowels, and her tears, kept her anchored—as did the invisible threads that tied her body to his, immobile under the crisp white sheet, its head swathed in bandages, and the wires connecting him to his other watcher, the dial-faced machine. It was his name she was howling. Mitch, she called. Sometimes Skip. At other times, since he did not respond to either of these, that other, earlier name he had gone by. Bobby, Bobby Kohler. She saw him, from where she was standing under the drooping leaves of a eucalypt at the edge of a track, running round the far side of an oval, but he was too deeply intent on his body, on his breathing, on the swing of his arms, the pumping of his thighs, to hear her.