by David Malouf
The white gravestones all around pulsed with light and might have been preparing to rise straight up like rockets. Which was just what was required, he thought, to free him from the scrutiny of the strangers over there and the need to hold himself so strictly to attention. Then suddenly the trees on the skyline exploded. Dozens of snow-white, sulphur-crested cockatoos flocked skyward, the noise of their shrieking so fierce, so like the sound of souls in torment, that all the people turned their heads.
That was his father's funeral. His father had always been absent in one way. Now he was absent in another. And beginning then, at the edge of the open grave, so was his mother. She went home to her family in England. From where she rang regularly twice each year, on his birthday and at Christmas, long distance, tearfully. And sent presents in elaborate wrappings that his aunt resented and referred to, though never to him, “extravagant.”
He had heard often enough from his grandfather that every man had his justifications, though one did not have to believe that they were always good; and since every man clearly meant every woman too, he wondered what his mother's might be. For having left him— temporarily at first, then permanently—in the charge of his grandfather and aunt.
Had she already given him over so completely to them and what they had to offer that she felt her own claim was weak, and that by taking him with her she would deprive him of more than she could give— even in the matter of love? Was he unlovable? Did he remind her too much of his father? Was she simply—he felt the implication of this in his aunt's silence on the matter—weak?
The word hung in the air so often, though unspoken like so much else, because his grandfather, and even more his aunt, were so fond of the “strong.”
He felt the house was full of watchers. Not just his grandfather and aunt, but those presences, invisible but by no means to be underestimated, who were watching them—which was as far as his grandfather went in the matter of religion.
But all this meant was that the forces under whose watchful gaze they were living—who missed nothing, he came to feel, and were pitilessly demanding—had no names, no faces, and were difficult therefore to get a hold on, to approach and reason with. No doubt they too had their justifications, impossible to challenge.
He wondered sometimes, since his grandfather did not actually refer to them, how he had got so clearly into his head, and so early, that they were there. As palpably there as the furniture—big old-fashioned dining chairs with high backs, ample seats, solid legs, bedroom suites with mirrored wardrobes and dressing tables—that his grandfather had had made in Brisbane, and which, as newly-weds, his grandparents had brought up here after the First World War.
He reminded himself that his father too had grown up among these heavy presences. Perhaps it was the furniture, and the shadow it cast, that had alarmed his mother and driven her from the house.
These were the perplexities and childish conclusions of a lively seven-year-old. But a dozen years later he had got no further with them.
SOMETIMES,in the early afternoon, he rode out to the edge of town and spent an hour or two with Cliff Hodges, who had sold him the CZ and was prepared to take it back again when he left.
Cliff was twenty-four. An easy-going fellow and a big drinker on Friday and Saturday nights, he was popular with the girls. Married women mostly, if his own stories were to be believed. Charlie was never sure he did believe them, but it didn't matter. Cliff glowed so convincingly in the aura of them.
He was a mechanic. He worked out of a corrugated-iron shed on a lot where two giant pepper trees grew out of broken concrete. A dozen oil drums and some old car parts, now gone to rust, were piled against a fence that seemed to be held up only by the woody rose bush, all out- bursts of yellow buds and creamy, extravagant blooms, that climbed in and out of its grainy slabs.
Charlie looked forward to the afternoons he spent out here; his back to the corrugated-iron wall of the shed, his long legs thrust out before him, while Cliff, sprawled out of sight, flat on his back under the car he was working on, put easy questions to which he gave his own wry answers, or launched into a live-wire account, all crude but colourful riffs and clownish avowals of contrition, of his latest night out with the boys. The desultory nature of these exchanges, the easy pace, which included a good many silences, none of them heavy as elsewhere with the unsaid, was tonic. Charlie laughed. He let go.
Very little that passed between them was personal. What they shared were the formal rituals of taking an engine apart and putting it together again, which Charlie, under Cliff's instruction, had quickly grasped and become expert in. The dexterity it involved, the easiness about getting your hands mucky, the masculine talk punctuated with shit, fuck, come on you bitch, give, which was the almost musical accompaniment to this, led naturally, while the fingers worked delicately with wires and screws, to discussion of that other area of male expertise where the parts were anatomical. Charlie was less expert here but once again looked to Cliff's instruction as a likely way ahead.
Later in the afternoon it was the Beach Boys or Cream or Hendrix that filled the air between them, when Cliff, at a point of exasperation with some bit of machinery that would not yield to him, took time out, and they sat side by side with a mug of hot coffee to warm their hands, and floated—mostly on drags of the good grass Cliff had access to.
What Charlie found so appealing in these afternoon hours was that they led nowhere and could have no consequence. Two years from now, when he got back, Cliff would be just the same, or he would be married with a kid and would be the same anyway. And he would have Vietnam behind him. Because he had chosen that, and all that it involved and would bring. To mark him; mark him off. To set the seal on a certain way of living that a man could choose, and which Cliff had not chosen and might never know. It was a difference between them that was already in operation, because in spirit he was already gone. It gave him, despite his being so much younger, and quite without experience in some matters, an advantage here that Cliff recognised and did not resent.
“Rather you than me, boy,” Cliff had said after a pause when Charlie first made his announcement.
The respect, a matter of taking him seriously, Charlie thought, had come about later. A kind of concern for him too, which in Cliff's case took a particular form.
“We better set you up with a girl, eh? Before you go and get your collateral blown off.” This was a reference, witty to an extent that surprised Charlie, to a Dylan song they were fond of.
So far it had gone no further than that, the offer. In the meantime they sat with their backs to the wall and took in the music along with the grass.
The nice thing, around Cliff, was that there was no need to hurry.
SO HE CAME to the last days. He had a strong sense, as he made his rounds, of other people stopping, in the ordinary flow of their lives, to make room for him. He had made that much at least of an impression. Perhaps it was simply that they knew it would soon end: that he would in a few days now be gone. They could afford to grant him room.
He had no illusions. The moment he was no longer here their lives would flow on again without him; not because they did not care but because that's the way it is, the way we are.
He felt he existed in a space which, the moment he stepped out of it, would close behind him, and he began practising; in mind stepping out, then looking back at the space he had filled for a little with his warmth and watching it cool and give up all sign of his presence.
This sort of thinking was new to him. That there might be in you a ghostly quality of your own absence even when you were most warmly there; when you were most conscious of your long, blunt-ended fingers flattened against a mug of scalding tea, your breath visibly blowing across the earthenware rim, your smile and your last words hanging in the silence. And their eyes on you, also smiling, and telling you how substantially present you were.
He would glance briefly towards the greatcoat tossed over the back of a chair, its thick serge bunched and
shapeless. His father's greatcoat. Which he had commandeered for a bit. And where was his father?
He shrugged, and the cough he gave was half a chuckle.
It was an uncomfortable feeling only for a moment. The mug was warm against the soft flesh of his palm. The coffee or tea, when he lowered his head to hide his confusion, and sipped, was hot in his mouth.
There was a design of painted flowers on the tiles behind the sink in the Whelans’ kitchen: detached yellow petals round a dob of red, with a green stem and two symmetrical green leaves—the kind of flower he remembered painting when he was first at school, the flower a five- or six-year-old paints. Not a real flower, one you've seen—they're too difficult, too complicated and raggedy. The stripped-down idea of a flower. The one from which all other flowers might have evolved.
The rightness of these flowers, each one planted in the centre of its tile and repeated all over the bit of wall, pleased him in a way he could not have explained, and centred him for a moment, but only for a moment, in a space of his own.
One afternoon, when he was leaving the Whelans', Josie followed him out to where his bike was parked under the overhanging canopy of a camphor laurel.
She dawdled, and he wondered, as he sat astride the CZ, at a hesitancy in her that was unusual and which, for all the little crease between her brows, softened her features and brought her close, in a way that created a soft feeling in him as well.
It was a time of day when everything was in suspense. The light high up in the sky just yielding to the first smokiness of dark. A hint of nighttime coldness in the air. Birds restless in the grass and beginning to flock low now over the neighbouring roofs. He waited.
Josie too had an offer to make. What she had access to, if he wanted, was a line of safe houses. In Sydney. He could, even at this point, refuse to go, declare himself an objector—and people down there, good people, would pass him on from one house to another till the war was over.
He listened quietly. To the agitation of birds. To some boys off in the distance, shouting as they kicked a ball about.
“How would I get there?” he asked. Not because he might actually do it but out of curiosity, to catch himself briefly in the light of an unexpected possibility. “To Sydney, I mean.”
“I could arrange it,” Josie told him. He was impressed by her intensity. “There's an organisation.”
He nodded but remained sceptical. She made it sound like the underground during the war. It had the air of a game.
What was no game was where he was going.
“I'll think it over,” he told her, turning his head to where the voices of the footballers were raised in a triumphant shout. She touched the sleeve of the greatcoat. “No, I will,” he assured her, "I'll think about it. I really will.”
But he wondered that she should have seen so little of what was in him. When his last visit came and he gave her his answer, feeling clumsy though he tried not to be—they were once again in the half-dark under the camphor laurel tree—she was silent and did not try to persuade him, though she accepted none of “reasons.” What he could not tell her was that since the ballot was announced his life had had a shape. He could see himself. He had begun to see, in the events he had organised for himself, the outline of what he was to be.
She kissed him lightly to one side of his mouth and turned back into the house.
He sat a moment—he was not reconsidering—he had never in fact considered—before he kicked the bike into sputtering life and went roaring off.
The other proposition that had been put to him, Cliff's offer to set him up with a girl, he did accept. He was shy, he found, about such matters, even with Cliff, and feared afterwards that he had not hit the right note between throwaway ease and the sort of eagerness that might have been expected of red-blooded youth when he told Cliff, "What you said that time—you know, about a girl—I've been thinking, and I'd really appreciate it.” Cliff seemed to have forgotten his offer. They agreed, however, to meet up at the pub on his last night.
He arrived on time but missed Cliff, who had already been there and left. He bought a beer, talked to one or two people, but after half an hour pushed his way out again and took a slow ride around town.
It was Saturday night. Everyone was out. He felt an odd affection for the place now that he was about to leave it, though it had nothing to recommend it really and he was eager to go.
The usual Saturday-night crowd of fellows and their girls was milling round the entrance to the pictures, which was all lit up; the girls with hair buffed and lacquered, a little top-heavy in their miniskirts and skintight sweaters, the boys trying not to look dressed up, but dressed up just the same in camouflage battledress or motorcycle jacket and cord flares. Some with long hair, one or two with the beginnings of a beard. A good many of those who were still at school, or worked in banks or stores, had short hair with just the sideburns left to thicken.
Charlie felt distanced from them. He rode slowly, scanning the crowd, then did a circuit of the local War Memorial.
Groups of lone youths sat on the backs of benches in the low-walled park there, and smoked or skylarked; others stood leaning against the cars parked along the kerb, making remarks to the passers-by that flared up on occasion into shouting matches. But on the whole a fairground atmosphere prevailed.
He stopped and shouted across to a group of fellows he recognised from school.
“I'm looking for Cliff Hodges,” he called. “Anyone seen Cliff Hodges?”
“You seen him?” one of them asked another.
The boy pursed his lips.
“We haven't seen him,” the first boy called. “Try the pub.”
Charlie drove off, did another slow circuit of the park. He felt let down, decided to look in again at the pub, just in case.
An hour later he was still there. He hadn't found Cliff but had got into conversation with a fellow he'd known at primary school when they were eleven.
Still reddish-blond and freckled, Eddie McPhee was not much bigger than he had been then. Charlie towered over him. He was an apprentice jockey at a local stables. For a good two hours before Charlie met up with him he had been drinking vodka and orange and Charlie decided now to join him. He was very noisy and argumentative, but so slight and pallidly childlike that none of the fellows he picked on thought it honourable to hit him. The worst they did was tell him to get lost and walk away, which made him all the madder. After his second vodka Charlie found this extraordinarily amusing.
He remembered Eddie as a kid who couldn't spell and was always getting whacked across the palm with a ruler. He had grown up cocky and sure of himself. This surprised Charlie but impressed him too. He began to feel happily light-headed, then elated, then affectionately grateful to Eddie for having at this point reappeared out of his primary-school years to take him on a long loop backwards that he might otherwise have missed.
“Remember that bastard Hoyland?” Eddie shouted. This was the wielder of the ruler. “Remember Frances Jakes?” She was a girl who, at twelve, had had the most enormous tits. I'm really enjoying myself, Charlie thought. Too bad about Cliff.
When the pub closed, he redeemed his overcoat from a bar stool where he had abandoned it and offered Eddie a lift back to the stables on the other side of town.
It was after midnight, and cold. What he was aware of, as they rode between the houses down deserted street after street, was the closeness of the stars overhead and the distance between his hands on the handlebars of the bike and his head, where it just managed to stay put at the top of his body. This made the business of keeping the bike upright— and steering it through space with the cold night air pouring over them, and the bitumen, with its starry sheen, ribboning out before and behind—a skill that for all its familiarity approached the miraculous. If anyone was looking down from up there, he thought, how amazing all this must look. And us too. How amazing wmust look!
“I'm fucken freezing,” Eddie shouted in his ear, crouched behind the wall
of his back.
“Yahwee!” Charlie shouted in return and, aiming at the stars, he jerked the bike upwards so that for a moment they sailed along on one wheel.
He woke,feeling stiff and sorry for himself, as the first light was coming. His head was heavy, still thick with sleep, his mouth dry. He couldn't think for a moment where he might be, swaddled in the bulki-ness of the greatcoat, its collar round his ears.
There was a sharp ammoniac smell. Ah! Eddie! The stables.
He saw the wooden walls of the stall then. Sat up in straw. Heard the snuffling close by of horses.
Eddie, in thick socks and greyish longjohns that sagged at the knees, was already upright, pulling a sweater over his head. “I gotta go,” he explained.
“I'll go with you,” Charlie told him and got to his feet.
Eddie sat to pull on his boots. Charlie discovered he was still wearing his.
They staggered out into the pearly light, unbuttoned, and standing side by side took a good long piss, watching it stream and puddle between the pebbles in the yard. Eddie hitched up his pants and went back inside. Charlie walked up and down, hands deep in the pockets of his greatcoat, which was still unbuttoned, his head and shoulders drawn inside the collar, hunched in on the warmth of himself. “Jesus,” he hissed.
He couldn't believe how cold it was out here. There was a bluish frost on the paddock; on the fence post, where it had split and hardened, a glint of ice.
“Here,” Eddie said when he reappeared, "give us a hand with these.”
He was weighed down with a load of gear. Charlie allowed him to heft a pouched bag over his shoulder that weighed a ton. He released a hand from his pocket to steady it. They went out of the yard, where the CZ rested against the fence, and down a gravel drive beside a slip-rail fence towards the highway. Other figures loomed up in the misty light.
“Is it always as cold as this?” Charlie asked.
Eddie had almost disappeared under the load he was carrying. “Yair. You never fucken get used to it!”
