by David Malouf
They did remember at last—and would have known the name anyway, because of his grandfather—but could not guess why on earth he had called, and why, when he settled, his long legs extended, the skirts of the greatcoat open like dark wings, he looked from one to another of them with so much wide-eyed alertness—in expectation of what, they wondered.
More than puzzled, some of them were embarrassed. But Charlie wasn't. He knew very well what he was after. He wanted to know, before he went away, what impression his having lived here for a whole twenty years had made on people. Not much, he guessed. But that was just the point. They would remember his going. They would remember that he had come to say goodbye.
One or two of them were old friends of the family who had known him when he was little and whom his aunt had mentioned. They were surprised to see him after so long but soon made him feel at home.
In other cases they were fellows a little older than himself who, two or three years back, had been on the school swimming team with him but could not, when he turned up now, come up with his name.
“Who did you say he was?” he heard a girl whisper out in the kitchen while he sat alone in the front room with a round-eyed baby and the TV. “Have I met him? Was he at the wedding?”
In households where he had, for a time, been the schoolfriend of a son or daughter now lost to the city, it was recalled that he had always been odd—old-fashioned they had called it then; a consequence of his having no one to bring him up but his grandfather and an old-maid aunt.
Well, he was even odder now. The way he had of just sitting and looking. With his ears sticking out above the lapels of his greatcoat. And the greatcoat itself. What was that? What was that about?
For all his affability, some older men looked him over and were put off. They had been to a war themselves. They hadn't gone around making a song and dance of it, parading about in what looked like fancy dress. He was young of course, but no younger than they had been. Young people these days made too much of themselves. That came from the sort of pop music they listened to, and from the TV. Life for them was all play-acting, dressing up. Sideburns, old double-breasted suits and striped collarless shirts they'd raked up from a deceased uncle's lowboy or picked up cheap at the St. Vincent de Paul's. Fleecy-lined bomber jackets, and if the leather was cracked and worn so much the better. Camouflage battledress and other fads. Sergeant Pepper Band uniforms!
In a way that would never have occurred to them at that age, this feller was making a show of himself, and enjoying it too. What gave him the right to prance around drawing attention to himself?
All this would have surprised Charlie.
He was enjoying himself, and it was true, he did want to be noticed. But play-acting? He was on his way to Vietnam. Wasn't that real enough? There had been a ballot, a lottery. The world had cast him one of its backhanded prizes, and since he had no notion himself of what his life was to be, he had accepted it. Not passively, but without complaint. He'd let a roll of the barrel decide things. Given himself over to hazard, to chance. In a spirit, as he thought, of existential stoicism.
The war itself, when he got to it, would present hazards of a different sort. He had seen something of that. Body bags, statistics, fellows who brought back, in one way or another, a good deal less of themselves than they had taken away. He had no illusions. But chance in that case was tempered with something else. Something you yourself brought to the bar.
Guts. A feeling for where to put your foot down and where not. The good-luck charm of life itself—the one you were intended for. He believed, though none of this, of course, had yet been tested, that he was the possessor of all three.
Beyond that you could present yourself as you wanted to be seen and then try to live up to it. With a rough outline in your head of a story, you could do everything in your power to act it out; to incorporate the accidents that hit you into its form, as he had incorporated the lottery and his conscription. Later parts of it, in his case, included Paris, which he definitely saw himself visiting one day a language or two he meant to pick up, a wife of course—he had a whole list of things he'd barely started on. He had already read War and Peace, but he had not, as yet, fired a gun or been up in a plane. He had never tasted Tokay, or champagne or oysters, or slept with a girl or been further from home— this small town tucked into a hollow behind the Range—than Brisbane once on a rugby trip while he was at school: he had been sick, both ways, on the coach. But he was young, and believed, even with Vietnam up ahead, that he had time.
He had discovered in the eyes of others, beginning with his grandfather, an affectionate wish that all things should go well with him. It was partly out of a desire to extend to as many people as possible the privilege of exercising their large goodwill towards him that he appeared on so many doorsteps of what was still, for the time being, his own little world.
One of the places he liked to go was a household where he was known; the family of his best friend Brian Whelan, who at the end of the previous year had decided on university and was away now in Brisbane.
The Whelans had known him since he was ten years old. The difference, when he went there now, was that Brian was gone and his sister Josie, who was three years older and had been away, was back. It was Josie who had opened the door to him when, after a six-month absence, he turned up one weekday around five in the afternoon, a little lightheaded from the two beers he had drunk and with his hair, and the hairlike filaments of the greatcoat, touched with tiny droplets of moisture, silvery and weblike from the drizzling rain he had driven through.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Josie announced to the lighted room behind her as he stood stamping on the threshold.
It was three years or more since he had last seen her. She had changed. She was thinner with longer hair. But her voice had not changed. It still had its edge of dismissive irony.
She had never really liked him, that's what he felt. His closeness to Brian had shut her out. He had never intended that and was sorry for it. He wished now that he had known her better and that she was more pleased to see him.
“Come in, love,” Mrs. Whelan called.
In a little while there were mugs of tea and his favourite Tim Tams. The greatcoat was draped over the back of a chair.
“I'm going to Vietnam,” he announced.
“Oh,” Mrs. Whelan said, and Josie, who was standing with her back against the sink, made a huffing sound.
“Brian's older than you,” Mrs. Whelan said after a bit. “Isn't your birthday in March, love?”
“May,” he told her.
“Yes,” she said, "Brian's is February the ninth.”
What she meant was that Brian's birth date had put him in a previous ballot; he was safe. She held out the plate of Tim Tams, as if offering him a small consolation, and when Charlie saw it he wanted to laugh. He had, he felt, grasped so clearly what was in her mind.
Lately he had found himself looking at the world—at people—as if he had developed another sense, beyond the usual five, for what was happening around him, for what was being said. Listening, really listening, was a kind of looking. For the way a glance passed from one person to another, or a soft mouth was compressed into a hard line, as Josie's was now, or cheeks were momentarily sucked in. As often as not that was where the real conversation was being conducted.
The younger boys of the family, Luke and Jack, came crashing into the room. They were eleven and fifteen. Barefooted, in out-at-elbow woollies, they had been tempted in by his arrival—and the promise of Tim Tams—from practising hoops at the basketball ring where he and Brian had spent long afternoons just a year ago.
“I've seen you riding,” Luke told him. His eyes went to the greatcoat.
Jack, the older boy, laughed, as if this intended more than it said.
“CZ,” Luke said admiringly.
The greatcoat and the bike, that's what they saw.
What Josie saw was a warmonger.
“I suppose you're p
roud of yourself,” she accused, "going off to blow a lot of women and children to pieces who've never done you any harm.”
He was surprised by her vehemence, but when he looked he saw that her eyes were bright with something different.
“Leave Charlie alone now,” her mother told her. “Have another Tim Tam, love.”
“Can I?” Luke asked.
“He's had two already,” the older boy protested.
“Don't be a tittle-tat,” his mother told him.
“Well, he has!”
“She's a real Tartar, eh?”
This, proudly, came from the father, who had just stepped in from work and overheard the scene. “Good to see you, son.”
He shook Charlie's hand, and they stood a moment in what might have been manly solidarity while Josie scowled.
“He's going to Vietnam,” Luke told his father.
“Hmmm,” Mr. Whelan said.
He gave Charlie another look and accepted the mug Josie was passing him.
“Well,” he said gravely, "I suppose someone's got to go. Good on you, son.”
“No they don't,” Josie insisted.
“Josie's been on demos"—this was Luke again—"in Sydney.”
“That's enough, Luke,” his mother told the boy.
But Josie was not so easily silenced. She gave them her opinion of various politicians, local and overseas, and in no uncertain terms stated her convictions about wars in general, men, and this war in particular.
“I told you she was a Tartar,” her father said with a laugh, and Charlie wondered what side he was on. “Hope you've got your crash helmet handy.”
Charlie was amused. He enjoyed being so immediately the centre of attention here, and the little sensual kick he got from her high colour and excitement. He'd never looked at Josie in this light. She had always been “Brian's sister.” But there was something as well that confused him. All this talk of politics, all these fierce convictions.
He had no convictions himself and did not consider what he was about to do as involving him “politics.” There was nothing in the notebook about that. His going or not going concerned only himself. It had to do with where he stood with the world and what it had put in his way, the claims thatmade on him. With how he saw himself and wanted others to see him. With what he could live with. Maybe—though he believed this would not be demanded of him—with what sort of death he might make.
Josie's insistence that what really mattered was some larger question of right or wrong made nothing of all that. And made nothing too—this is what affronted him—of his presence here, a little heated as he was by all the sensations of the moment and the turmoil of these last weeks. As if his life, his life, the one he felt so strongly pulsing through him, was of no account.
“You've got no imagination,” Josie accused.
“And you have, I suppose,” he shot back. Surprising himself.
“That's it, son,” Mr. Whelan laughed. “You speak up for yourself.”
“Enough of a one,” Josie told him mildly.
Charlie tried not to show how angry he felt. The implication was that his rude good health, his youth, his high spirits, put some things that she saw with blinding clarity beyond his comprehension. That something boyish and crudely warlike in him, male bravado, the rush of hormonal mayhem, made him insensitive to the price that others would have to pay—women and the old, and little helpless terrified kids—so that his brand of swagger and mindlessness could have its way. He felt acutely, under her gaze, the bunched muscles of his shoulders in the old school sweater and eased them a little.
But the fact was, he did see these things, and no less clearly perhaps than she did. He knew about blood. His own, just at the moment, was very much present to him, in his forearms and wrists, in the veins of his neck. He meant to keep it there. But also, if he could, to preserve his honour as well. That was his argument.
It involved words it would have embarrassed him to use. Things that could be thought, and warmly felt, but not stated. There was no way he could lay claim—or not openly—to so much for himself. But he was sorry just the same that she had not seen it.
There were ways in which she too was insensitive—and she didn't see that either.
Still, all this intrigued him. He kept coming back.
“A glutton for punishment, eh, son?” was how Mr. Whelan put it.
At home in his grandfather's house they never argued about politics. They never argued about anything. If his grandfather and his aunt had convictions he had never heard them. His aunt's view was that some things, most things as it turned out, were better left unsaid, and Charlie had learned to see the point of this, having learned early that a good deal that went unsaid was too cruel, or too painful, for speech. The unspoken, in his grandfather's house, had mostly to do with his father. Charlie had few memories of his father, and none of them substantial.
The earliest was a character called Charlie that his mother and aunt spoke of in passionate whispers, and ceased to discuss the moment he appeared. He had assumed at first that they were speaking of him (he must have been three years old) and wondered what he had done that they should be so disturbed; his aunt so angry, his mother so weakly tearful. Only over time did it come to him that this Charlie, whose shadow fell so darkly over the house, was his father. Who had, it seemed, once more failed them—but mostly himself—and whom his aunt sometimes defended, and sometimes his mother, but never both at the same time and never in front of his grandfather.
Sometimes, when his grandfather laid a hand on his shoulder and asked sadly: "So how's it going, Charlie? How are they treating you?” he understood that it was not really him that his grandfather was speaking to but that other, who once, before he failed them all, had also been young, and had not yet discovered, or not yet revealed, that failure was what he was inevitably heading for. His father seemed frighteningly present then in his own name and skin.
There was a photograph on the piano in the front room of a young man in RAAF uniform and cap, much the same age as Charlie was now and bearing a resemblance to him that Charlie found unsettling. He looked out of the frame with such a guileless sense of his own presence and future that Charlie, on those occasions when he was led to take a good hard look, felt—along with curiosity and a shy affection for this stranger who was so uniquely close to him—a pang of doubt about his own too easy optimism.
No hint of failure there, or of failings either. What clung to the image was the romance of a period when his father had been a hero fired with a belief in his own physical survival into a time to come. It was in this spirit, it seemed, that he had got hold of Charlie's mother; the suggestion being that she had been deceived.
But perhaps, Charlie thought, she had wanted to be. And wasn't his father also deceived? By a belief that the high spirits that had swept him up, and the high action he had been involved in, were an aspect of his own nature rather than of the times; were in him rather than in the air, and could be confidently extended. And that the old weakness in him had been burned away. By a boyish delight in immediate danger and the nerve with which, in mission after mission, he had met it and come through.
Charlie was inclined to identify with this youthful warrior, and had developed, from what he knew of his own doubts and confusions—his own anxiety about getting what he was, or might be, out into a world that was so undependable and chancy—an understanding, a sympathy even, for what might have gone wrong in the man, though he did not mean to repeat it.
Perhaps the dramatic excitements of that brief year of scrambles and dogfights and ditchings had exhausted what was in him. He had made demands on his spirit that he could meet only once, and could not match under other, more ordinary circumstances.
But then he had never seen, as his mother had—his aunt, too, perhaps—what weakness was like close up; the sly deceits and fierce self-justifications that were the daily accompaniment of it.
The clearest sense he had of his father's actual presence was o
f standing—he must have been six—at his father's grave.
Men in dark suits, their hats clasped to their chest, hair plastered to their skulls and sweating, stood on the far side of the grave and all around it, looking hard at him and frowning. The ladies at their side wore gloves and were also looking, but their eyes were hidden under wide-brimmed hats that they were allowed to keep on.
It was hot. The midsummer sky was a blanched yellow-white, and the gum trees at the edge of the cemetery shimmered as if they were not real trees at all, only their reflection in water.
He stood very still, trying not to shift his feet, but could not tell if he was standing the right way, and thought he must be doing it wrong, which was what made people over there look at him so hard, and frown.
He had frequently been encouraged by his aunt to be a good little soldier in the matter of grazed elbows and bloodied knees, and plasters that had to be ripped off, but no one had told him how it would be at his father's funeral and how he should stand.
His grandfather was close behind him. His hand, blotched, with lumpy veins, rested on his shoulder, and occasionally drew him in to the soft belly and the hot smell of his woollen suit.
His mother and his aunt were on the other side of him, his aunt crying. He had never thought of his aunt as a woman who cried.
His mother cried very often, and noisily. She was what his aunt called theatrical. When his father met her, in London, she had been on the stage. Being theatrical was something, later, when his mother was gone, that he would be severely warned against; as he was against being, like his father, weak—it was the double inheritance he must constantly fight against.
But at his father's funeral his mother did not cry, she simply stood, and he thought of her later as having already left, as he understood by then she must already have decided to do. So that what he recalled of that day was his aunt's tears, the weight of his grandfather's hand on his shoulder, and the dry, peppery smell of the bush, along with a ladies’ smell of talcum powder and sweat.
