by David Malouf
Bobby, she called. Skip, she called. Mitch. He did not respond. And she wondered if there was another name he might respond to that she had never heard. She tried to guess what it might be, certain now that if she found it, and called, he would wake. She found herself once leaning over him with her hands on his shoulders, prepared—was she mad?—to shake it out of him.
And once, in a moment of full wakefulness, she began to sing, very softly, in a high far voice, the tune he played on the ukulele. She had no words for it. Watching him, she thought he stirred. The slightest movement of his fingers. A creasing of the brow. Had she imagined it?
On another occasion, on the third or fourth day, she woke to find she had finally emerged from herself, and wondered—in the other order of time she now moved in—how many years had passed. She was older, heavier, her hair was grey, and this older, greyer self was seated across from her wearing the same intent, puzzled look that she too must be wearing. Then the figure smiled.
No, she thought, if that is me, I've become another woman altogether. Is that what time does to us?
It was the night they came and turned off the machine. His next of kin, his mother, had given permission.
TWO DAYS LATER,red-eyed from sleeplessness and bouts of uncontrollable weeping, she drove to Castle Hill for the funeral.
His mother had rung. She reminded Jo in a kindly voice that they had spoken before. Yes, Jo thought, like this. On the phone, briefly When she had called once or twice at an odd hour and asked him to come urgently, she needed him, and at holiday times when he went dutifully and visited, and on his birthday. “Yes,” Jo said. “In June.” No, his mother told her, at the hospital. Jo was surprised. She had no memory of this. But when they met she recognised the woman. They had spoken. Across his hospital bed, though she still had no memory of what had passed between them. She felt ashamed. Grief, she felt, had made her wild; she still looked wild. Fearful now of appearing to lay claim to the occasion, she drew back and tried to stay calm.
The woman, Mitch's mother, was very calm, as if she had behind her a lifetime's practise of preserving herself against an excess of grief. But she was not ungiving.
“I know how fond Bobby was of you,” she told Jo softly. “You must come and see me. Not today. Ring me later in the week. I can't have anyone at the house today. You'll understand why.”
Jo thought she understood but must have looked puzzled.
“Josh,” she said. “I've got Josh home.” And Jo realised that the man standing so oddly close, but turned slightly away from them, was actually with the woman.
“I can't have him for more than a day or so at a time,” the woman was saying. “He doesn't mean to be a trouble, and he'd never do me any harm, but he's so strong—I can't handle him. He's like a five-year-old. But a forty-year-old man has a lot of strength in his lungs.” She said this almost with humour. She reached out and squeezed the man's hand. He turned, and then Jo saw.
Large-framed and heavy-looking—hulking was the word that came to her—everything that in Mitch had been well-knit and easy was in him merely loose. His hands hung without occupation at the end of his arms, the features in the long large face seemed unfocused, unintegrated. Only with Mitch in mind could you catch, in the full mouth, the heavy jaw and brow, a possibility that had somehow failed to emerge, or been maimed or blunted. The sense she had of sliding likeness and unlikeness was alarming. She gave a cry.
“Oh,” the woman said. “I thought you knew. I thought he'd told you.”
Jo recovered, shook her head, and just at that moment the clergyman came forward, nodded to Mitch's mother, and they moved away to the open grave.
They were a small crowd. Most of them she knew. They were the members of the clan. The others, she guessed from their more formal clothes, must be relatives or family friends.
The service was grim. She steeled herself to stay calm. She had no wish to attract notice, to be singled out because she and Mitch had been—had been what? What had they been? She wanted to stand and be shrouded in her grief. To remain hidden. To have her grief, and him, all to herself as she had had him all to herself at least sometimes, many times, when he was alive.
But she was haunted now by the large presence of this other, this brother who stood at the edge of the grave beside his mother, quiet enough, she saw, but oddly unaware of what was going on about him.
He had moments of attention, a kind of vacant attention, then fell into longer periods of giant arrest. Then his eye would be engaged.
By the black fringe on the shawl of the small woman to his left, which he reached out for and fingered, frowning, then lifted to his face and sniffed.
By a wattlebird that was animating the branches of a low-growing grevillea so that it seemed suddenly to have developed a life of its own and began twitching and shaking out its blooms. Then by the cuff of his shirt, which he regarded quizzically, his mouth pouting, then drawn to one side, as if by something there that disappointed or displeased him.
All these small diversions that took his attention took hers as well. At such a moment! She was shocked.
Then, quite suddenly, he raised his head. Some new thing had struck him. What? Nothing surely that had been said or was being done here. Some thought of his own. A snatch of music it might be, a tune that opened a view in him that was like sunlight flooding a familiar landscape. His face was irradiated by a foolish but utterly beatific smile, and she saw how easy it might be—she thought of his mother, even more poignantly of Mitch—to love this large unlovely child.
The little ukulele tune came into her head, and with it a vision of Mitch, lost to her in his own world of impenetrable grief. Sitting in his underpants on the floor, one big foot propped on his thigh. Hunched over the strings and plucking from them, over and over, the same spare notes, the same bare little tune. And she understood with a pang how the existence of this spoiled other must have seemed like a living reproach to his own too easy attractiveness. It was that—the injustice of it, so cruel, so close—that all those nicks and scars and broken bones and concussions, and all that reckless exposure to a world of accident, had been meant to annul. She felt the ground shifting under her feet. How little she had grasped or known. What a different story she would have to tease out now and tell herself of their time together.
The service was approaching its end. The coffin, suspended on ropes, tilted over the hole with its raw edges and siftings of loose soil. It began, lopsidedly, to descend. Her eyes flooded. She closed them tight. Felt herself choke.
At that moment there was a cry, an incommensurate roar that made all heads turn and stopped the clergyman in full spate.
Some animal understanding—caught from the general emotion around him and become brute fact—had brought home to Josh what it was they were doing here. He began to howl, and the sound was so terrible, so piteous, that all Jo could think of was an animal at the most uncomprehending extreme of physical agony. People looked naked, stricken. There was a scrambling over broken lumps of earth round the edge of the grave. The big man, even in the arms of his mother, was uncontrollable. He struck out, face congested, the mouth and nose streaming, like an ox, Jo thought, like an ox under the hammer. And this, she thought, is the real face of grief, the one we do not show. Her heart was thick in her breast. This is what sorrow is that knows no explanation or answer. That looks down into the abyss and sees only the unanswering depths.
She recalled nothing of the drive back, through raw unfinished suburbs, past traffic lights where she must dutifully have swung into the proper lane and stopped, her mind in abeyance, the motor idling. When she got home, to the house afloat on its stilts among the sparse leaves of the coral trees, above the cove with its littered beach, she was drained of resistance. She sat in the high open space the house made, feeling it breathe like a living thing, surrendering herself to the regular long expansions of its breath.
Against the grain of her own need for what was enclosed and safe, she had learned to live with it.
What now? Could she bear, alone, now that something final had occurred, to live day after day with what was provisional, which she had put up with till now because, with a little effort of adjustment, she too, she found, could live in the open present—so long as it was open.
Abruptly she rose, stood looking down for a moment at some bits of snipped wire, where he had been tinkering with something electrical, that for a whole week had lain scattered on the coffee-table, then went out to the sink, and as on that first morning washed up what was there to be washed. The solitary cup and saucer from her early-morning tea.
For a moment afterwards she stood contemplating the perfection of clean plates drying in the rack, cups turned downwards to drain, their saucers laid obliquely atop. She was at the beginning again. Or so she felt. Now what?
There was a sock on the floor. Out of habit she retrieved it, then stood, surveying the room, the house, as you could because it was so open and exposed.
Light and air came pouring in from all directions. She felt again, as on that first occasion, the urge to move in and begin setting things to rights, and again for the moment held back, restrained herself.
She looked down, observed the sock in her hand, and had a vision, suddenly, of the place as it might be a month from now when her sense of making things right would already, day after day, imperceptibly, have been at work on getting rid of the magazines and newspapers, shifting this or that piece of furniture into a more desirable arrangement, making the small adjustments that would erase all sign of him, of Mitch, from what had been so much of his making—from her life. Abruptly she threw the sock from her and stood there, shivering, hugging herself, in the middle of the room. Then, abruptly, sat where she had been sitting before. In the midst of it.
So what did she mean to do? Change nothing? Leave everything just as it was? The out-of-date magazines, that dead match beside the leg of the coffee-table, the bits of wire, the sock? To gather fluff over the weeks and months, a dusty tribute that she would sit in the midst of for the next twenty years?
She sat a little longer, the room darkening around her, filling slowly with the darkness out there that lay over the waters of the cove, rose up from the floaty leaves of the coral trees and the shadowy places at their roots, from around the hairy stems of tree ferns and out of the unopened buds of morning glory. Then, with a deliberate effort, she got down on her knees and reached in to pick up the match from beside the leg of the coffee-table. Shocked that it weighed so little. So little that she might not recall, later, the effort it had cost her, this first move towards taking up again, bit by bit, the weight of her life.
Then, with the flat of her hand, she brushed the strands of wire into a heap, gathered them up, and went, forcing herself, to retrieve the sock, then found the other. Rolled them into a ball and raised it to her lips. Squeezing her eyes shut, filling her nostrils with their smell.
Then there were his shirts, his shorts, his jeans—they would go to the Salvos—and the new things she had bought, which lay untouched in the drawers of his lowboy, the shirts in their plastic wrappers, the underpants, the socks still sewn or clipped together. Maybe Josh. She had a vision of herself arriving with these things on his mother's doorstep. An opening. The big man's pleasure as he stroked the front of his new poplin shirt, the sheen of its pure celestial blue.
She sat again, the small horde of the rolled socks in her lap, the spent match and the strands of wire in a tidy heap. A beginning. And let the warm summer dark flow in around her.
War Baby
Charlie Dowd spent the last weeks before he was inducted and went to Vietnam riding round town on a CZ two-stroke, showing himself off to people and saying goodbye.
It was August and cold: high dry skies, the westerlies blowing. He wore a navy blue air force greatcoat of his father's, who had been a Spitfire pilot in the war. It was belted and double-breasted with wide lapels, and when you turned the collar up your ears were covered. The skirts were so long that what Charlie saw in the long wardrobe mirror in his room (he'd been reading War and Peace) was a French cavalry officer in the Napoleonic Wars in flight from Cossacks. Anticipating his first day in camp he had been down to Sam Harker and had his hair cut short on top and shaved at the sides. When he stood and contemplated himself in the mirror, he really looked the part.
He had a routine. He got up late, ate the breakfast his aunt made for him, which doubled as lunch, then sat for a couple of hours in warm winter sunlight in the window of the pub. Always in the same place, looking out across the veranda rails to the median strip of the town's one main street, with a schooner of beer at his elbow on the chocolate-brown sill, and beside it, as a way of making himself at home, his pen, his wallet, the paperback he was reading, and the makings of the roll-your-owns he liked to smoke—papers, Drum tobacco in a plastic wrap, and an oblong tin not much bigger than a matchbox that contained the simple mechanism for turning them out. He took trouble over this, giving the roller a practised spin between forefinger and thumb, and when he ran his tongue along the edge of the paper, putting just enough spit into it for the spill to be dry but perfectly, almost professionally, sealed. He smoked a little, read a little, wrote in his notebook.
He was keeping notes. Not a diary exactly, just random thoughts. As they came to him in the drowsy sunlight in the slow early session after midday, and as they took off, the moment he began to set them down, and led him into all sorts of unpredictable and shadowy places where he was pleased to roam. Bemused speculations.
If he tired of writing, and had no book at hand, he would read the contents of his wallet: his library card and driver's licence, several torn-off corners of a notepad or newspaper with names and phone numbers on them that he could barely decipher, ads from magazines that he must have thought, when he folded them small and tucked them away in one of his wallet's many pockets, might one day come in useful. With a cigarette at his lips, the sun on his hands, a crease between his brows, he would give these exhibits his solemn attention, as if this time he might catch, in the evidence they offered of unfulfilled needs and momentary promises, some reflection of himself that till now had subtly eluded him.
Occasionally when he looked up he would find upon him the pink-rimmed, rheumy eyes of one of the old-timers, pensioners and retired tradesmen or storekeepers, who were the regulars of this hour: thin-faced, silent fellows with elongated ears and noses who had been turned out of the house by their daughters or daughters-in-law, and towards two or two thirty in the afternoon dropped in, very formally attired in coat and hat, for a beer and whatever talk might be going. In the early days one or two of them had enquired from a distance what he was writing. They seemed ready to start a conversation. Charlie put his pen down and let them go on.
It wasn't really a conversation. What they wanted was to tell him their story—well, not him exactly, anyone would have done.
He listened. That they had a story, and took it for granted they did, confirmed him in the assumption that he too had one. But he was glad when they drifted off at last and went back to their beer, and after a time they ceased to be curious about him. He had become one of them.
They were becalmed at the end of their lives, that's what he saw, and he was becalmed in the middle of his, but nearer the beginning. Waiting out these last days as if they were an enforced holiday, which was why his aunt let him sleep till past midday and did not complain, as she would have done earlier, when the breakfast she made him was also his lunch.
Afternoons had always been a trouble to him, going right back to when he was little and had to take a nap each day beside his mother on a high double bed in their cool spare room. He would play afterwards on the lino and watch his mother laugh on the phone or do her nails on the back veranda, or with her skirt hoicked up and her bare feet propped on the rail, sit tanning herself while the radio played, "Music, music, music,” and willy-wagtails switched about on the grass.
Time passed slowly after midday, before tea. That's what he had found. The air
grew thicker. There was a weight that dragged. It had something to do with the clouds, loaded at times with thunder, that at that hour gathered and rolled in over the Range. Summer or winter, it made no difference: trees, houses, grass, sky—the whole world seemed to be waiting only for the coming on of dark.
Lately, that quality he had felt of a whole world hanging on what was to come, nightfall, had become the keynote of his own existence. He had waited. First for his birthday to come around, then for his name to come up. He was waiting now for the last days to pass before his induction. All that time had been a mixture in him of restless impatience for each day to dawn and pass, and a kind of inertia which, if he had not deliberately taken a hand, would have made a sleepwalker of him, just when he needed to be most fully awake.
The truth was that Vietnam, and his going, was the certainty he had needed to give his life direction; to close off an open and indeterminate future where he might have gone on stumbling about in a maze that had no end. He was going. He would see action—the phrase brought a prickle of excitement to his skin that scared and at the same time gravely enlivened him. Meanwhile, though others need not see it in this light, he had organised a small carnival for himself.
Around four in the afternoon, with the sun gone from the sill where his empty beer glass sat—he never had more than two—he set out on his rounds.
HIS ARRIVAL on their doorstep puzzled some people. They had not seen him in a while; in some cases, a long while. They did not immediately recognise the crop-headed boy in uniform greatcoat who loomed in the door frame as if he had come to deliver something official, and stood smiling and stamping on the doormat in the assurance of being invited in. They had difficulty remembering who he was.
