The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  Weeks passed.He drifted.

  In the month before he left things had been like this. He had felt the same way. Detached. Floating. But those days had not been entirely aimless. They had a fixed termination; he had known then what he was moving towards. Now he did not.

  And he himself had been different, not simply younger. With a different sense of where he might look for enlightenment. Intrigued still by the spectacle of his own existence, and open to every clue he might pick up—a look here, a passing comment there—of what he might be. Still making himself up out of what others saw in him. Or wanting to. Because it was easier than looking too clearly into himself.

  He had tried that too, but it was confusing. What he had found there was contradictory, or the evidence was in a code he could not crack.

  Was he wiser now?

  Not much, he thought.

  What he had learned in the heat of action was useful only in moments of extremity, of violent confrontation. The pressures now were soft, the dangers more insidious because not deadly. Or not immediately so.

  His aunt went easy on him, was not demanding. She had become sociable and went out a good deal, leaving his meals on a plate in the fridge with a note telling him how they should be heated. The notes were jaunty, an easier and more playful form of communication than talk, and became more so as the weeks rolled on.

  He ate alone in the kitchen with the radio playing, for the comfort of some other voice in his head than his own, which wearied him, or in the new lounge in front of the news.

  He ate slowly, trying not to let the images that flashed from the TV connect with his own low-level anger; which was more like a taste in his mouth that no other could quite displace than an emotion, a subtle disturbance of his vision that bled the world of vividness and gave everything he looked at a yellow tinge.

  He watched a group of young men in battledress run hunched and stumbling towards a medevac chopper that swayed and tilted. Its blades churned the fetid air, whipped up a tornado of smashed grass stalks and twigs. He felt a damp heat on his skin. Found he was sweating.

  He watched a bunch of young men, much the same age as in the previous clip, but in T-shirts and jeans and with young women among them—and some older women too, not unlike his aunt, grey-haired, in glasses—push hard against a line of uniformed police. Banners hung askew above their heads, like thought bubbles in a cartoon. All capitals, all pointing in the same direction. The young men, animal spirits fiercely mobilised in a violent forward movement, were engaged in their own version of war. And the enemy?

  He ate. Chewing slowly. Swallowing it down.

  “You know,” his aunt remarked one morning at breakfast, "there's some money. You haven't asked, but it's yours, you know, whenever you want it.”

  “I don't need it yet,” he told her.

  “Well,” she said, not pressing, "it's there. Just ask when you do.”

  On another occasion: "Have you thought of getting in touch with your mother?”

  This surprised him. He looked up, but could not tell from her eyes— she glanced quickly away—what she was thinking. Did she want him to or not?

  “No,” he said. “I can barely remember what she looks like.”

  This wasn't quite true.

  “She thinks you're angry with her.”

  “I'm not,” he said. “Not anymore. There are too many other things. Anyway, I try not to be angry at all. It does no good.”

  “You're right,” she said, but seemed unconvinced.

  “Do you keep in touch then?”

  “Not regularly. But there is a tie. Your father—”

  She foundered, unwilling to go further, and he was glad—he did not want her to. He wanted, just for a moment, to think of himself as a free agent, no ties—or at least to tell himself he had none. The ties, such as they were, he could pick up later. When he was ready. When.

  “She's moved to Aberdeen,” his aunt told him.

  “Aberdeen!”

  The word fell into the room out of nowhere. He knew where Aberdeen was, he could see it on the map, but had never expected to have any connection to it. Hadn't thought of his connections as being so worldwide. He gave a little laugh, more a snigger perhaps, and his aunt looked alarmed.

  “I can't imagine her,” he said, "in Aberdeen,” and laughed again.

  It denied, of course, what he had already claimed. That he had no clear picture of her at all. And what did he know of Aberdeen?

  He walked.From one end of town to the other. Walking was another form of thinking—or maybe unthinking—in which the body took over, went its own way and the mind went with it; the ground he covered, there and back, measurable only by the level of quietude he had arrived at, and the change, when he came out of himself, in the atmosphere and light.

  One of the places he liked to go when the weather was fine was to a river park at the far end of town. Willow-fringed along the brown, rather sluggish stream, it was featureless save for an elaborate rotunda of timber and decorative wrought iron that was unusual in that it offered more in the way of fantasy than you got in other parts of town, and a children's playground where, in the afternoon, mothers brought their kids to climb, swing, and roll about in a sandpit. He liked to sit high up in the bandstand, where he had a good view over the expanse of park and an oval beyond, and lose himself in a book.

  Towards the end of January it rained for three days. He stopped his walks and stuck to the pub.

  Finally the rain gave up, though the air remained saturated. There were still heavy clouds about and the ground was soggy underfoot. He took his usual walk out towards the river. And the park when he came to it was a place transformed. Great sheets of water broke the green of its surface, and hundreds of seagulls had flocked in, bringing with them the light of ocean beaches and of the ocean itself. They were crowding the shores of the newly formed ponds: huge white creatures that had made their way a hundred miles from the coast to translate what had been one kind of landscape into something entirely other. The children had deserted the swings and ladders of the playground and were chasing about among the big birds, delighted by the novelty they presented, the news they had brought—not just of another world, but of a world inside the one at their feet that they had scarcely dreamed of.

  He too felt the miracle of it. It was as if a breath of fantasy, that had existed as no more than an unlikely possibility in the lightness and whiteness of the bandstand, had re-created itself as fact in these hundreds of actual bodies, independent organisms and lives, that were shifting about over the green or making brief flights across the expanse of silvery, sky-lit water.

  What he felt in himself was an equal lightness, that reflected, he thought, the persistence out there in the world, of the unexpected—an assurance that nothing was final, or beyond surprise or change. The dry little park had transformed itself into a new shore, but the force he felt in touch with was in himself. It was as if he had looked up from a book he was lost in and found that what his eyes had conceived of on the page was shining all round him.

  Half a dozen children were chasing along the banks, delighted that by rushing at them they could drive the big birds skyward, half expecting perhaps to find in themselves the power to join them and go heavily circling and gliding. One small boy, unready to challenge the birds as the others were doing, stood stranded on the sidelines. He was maybe five years old. Skinny with pale reddish hair. Doubtful but tempted.

  Charlie stood looking at him, and the boy, aware of it, turned to meet Charlie's gaze, drawing his underlip in, which only made his moist eyes rounder.

  “Magic,” Charlie told the boy with a laugh, and made a sweep with his arm that sent a dozen birds streaming aloft.

  The boy's mouth fell open, and Charlie saw in the look of sudden enlightenment in his eyes that the child had taken the word literally, as a claim on Charlie's part to be the presiding genius here who had turned a bit of the local and familiar into something extraordinary, and for a moment Charlie actuall
y felt a breath of what the child's belief had accorded him.

  A girl of ten or eleven appeared, also skinny but more vigorously red-headed than the boy. She took him sternly by the hand.

  “Kelvin,” she scolded in a whisper, "you know you're not allowed!” Fiercely protective, she cast a baleful look in the direction of the stranger who had been speaking to him. But the boy, suddenly defiant, broke away, and with arms outspread launched headlong into a flock of gulls, which lifted with excited shrieks and went flapping past his head. Glancing back a moment to make sure that he was the one who had been the actual cause of this commotion, he tilted his arms like outstretched wings and made another rush among the birds.

  Charlie turned away, lightly amused. But he would think of this inconsequential moment afterwards as being for him the end of one thing and the beginning of another, though which element in it, if any, had been decisive he would never know: the translation of the park to another shore; the boy Kelvin's mistaken belief that, like a conjuror at a children's party, he had produced all this shifting light, all these plump white bodies, out of his sleeve; the sister's defiance of him as a dangerous stranger. Perhaps it was all these in odd collusion with one another, or in collusion with something in himself that had been waiting for just this concatenation of small events to touch it awake and open a way to the future. Or something else again that he had no possibility of bringing to consciousness. Some chemical change in him even more miraculous at one level, though ordinary and explicable at another, than the appearance overnight, out of nowhere as it were, of a thousand sea creatures so far from the sea.

  Walking home he had no sense that anything momentous had occurred. He was aware only of his immediate mood; an amusement that continued to work on him, quiet but quickening, and a glimpse— for the moment it was no more than that—of how small the pressures might be that determine the sum of what is and what we feel, the fugitive deflections and instinctive blind gestures that might be the motor of change.

  He did not know as yet that there was a change. Only that it was possible, and that the agents of it could be small. But that, for the moment, was enough.

  Towards Midnight

  What came to her ear was the hovering close by of mechanical wings, that had come, she thought, to carry her off. In her dream-state she felt only the relief it would be to pass the weight of her body, light as it now was, to some other agency.

  The wings beat closer. She started awake, and the familiar objects of her upstairs sitting room, as if a second earlier she might have surprised them in a temporary absence, settled back into place.

  The TV screen was dancing, white with static. It was after midnight. For a good hour and a half, it seemed, she herself had been absent. She reached for the remote. But the sound out of her dream persisted. It was the clatter of the filter boxes in the pool two levels below. A breeze must have sprung up. She stirred herself, gathered up her things.

  But against the blue Tuscan night the cypress tops in the window were as still as if they were painted.

  She stepped out on to her terrace and, half hidden in shadow, peered down through the darkness of pomegranate and bay. Someone was down there, swimming. All she could make out were the streamers of light at his shoulders, and when he came, too quickly, to the end of a length, the heap of silvery bubbles he left as he tucked over into the turn. Up and down he went, in a dozen powerful strokes, and the pool, which for so many weeks had lain heavy and still in the heat, under a mantle of olive florets, drowned midges, beetles paddling in clumsy circles, expanded and contracted like a living thing.

  If Gianfranco was here, or one of her sons, Tommy or Jake, what a ruckus there'd be! They'd feel bound to go down and shout at the fellow. Chuck him out.

  Well, she wasn't going to try that. She was alone in the house, a kilometre from the village. No neighbours in calling distance. But she felt no particular alarm. Only surprise, and a kind of delight at the unexpectedness of it, exhilaration in the presence of so much effort. As if she had got herself hooked up to some new chemical—neat starlight— that glowed in her veins and quickened her awareness of her own body, but as a thing alive and part again of the living scene.

  With her elbows propped on the parapet of her terrace, she watched—hard to say for how long—and was taken out of herself, till at the end of a length like any other he did not tumble into a turn, but with his head streaming moonlight came to his feet, and in the same agile movement sprang on to his splayed hands, heaved himself up, and was out.

  No one she recognised.

  A sturdy peasant type, in a bathing-slip that might have been red.

  She stepped back in case he glanced up and caught her there.

  But he was too absorbed for that. Standing with his arms forced back hard behind him, fingers linked, he did half a dozen stretching exercises, dipping his head swiftly like a bird; then straightened and moved out of sight under the pergola.

  The pool, meanwhile, had settled to clear moonlight again.

  She felt let down, as if he had taken with him part of the night and what was vital to it. Was it over? Was that it?

  She stood peering into the darkness of the pergola. He must have gone already, through one of the gaps in the fence. The fence had gaps, but there were so many brambles along its length, and the bank was so steep, that they hadn't bothered to have it mended. Was he really gone?

  A gust of fragrance came on the air, then thinned and came again. So strong! Her lime tree.

  Out of sight on the other side of the house, and taller now than the house itself, its scent was so overpowering on these warm May nights that in her mind she could actually see the great dark mass of it looming against the stars.

  How good it is to be here, she thought, at just this moment. With the moon resting like that on the tip of a cypress, the air freighted with the scent of tiglio, the clear bright notes of the nightingale dropping so precisely into place, off in the dark. It was a moment, she thought, when all things were just as they should be. Not a degree lighter or heavier or louder or more intense.

  Ah, her swimmer!

  Wearing rough workman's trousers but still bare-chested, he moved to the edge of the pool and stood there towelling his hair with his T-shirt; then, rather dreamily, began to dry his chest.

  He might have looked up then and seen her. She drew back. But something else had caught his attention.

  He was gazing out over the wall of bay to the hills with their swathes of blue-black macchia. Looking, perhaps, for where the nightingale was dinning from its post in the olive grove, establishing, note on note, its claim to territory.

  There, she could have told him. Further to the left. Down there.

  He turned his head as if he had heard, but in the wrong direction. Then kneeling, laced his sneakers and, with the soaked T-shirt across his shoulders, ducked down beside the fence and was gone.

  She continued to stand. Looking at the place where he had vanished, but with no sense of being left. Rather of remaining, of being here and in possession of all this. The place. The hour. Most of all, of herself.

  The moon, which just a moment ago had been straw-coloured, when she looked at it now was paling, as if it had been subjected to immersion in some fast-working chemical. Again the scent of lime came to her, and with it the quickening sense of a whole world astir and on the move. Small nocturnal creatures, destructive in fact—but so what—were nosing in around the fleshy roots of her iris. A cat was on the prowl—or was it a fox? Other lives, intent on their interests. Invisibly close and companionable.

  She felt settled, wonderfully so. And by a situation that on another occasion or in a different mood might have alarmed her. Why hadn't it? She did not know and did not need for the moment to ask. What she needed now was to tumble into her bed and sleep.

  She was alone because she chose to be. Later it might not be possible, she knew that, but for the time being she could manage, and it was what she preferred. She had worked through her perio
d of rage and hard words, but wasn't sure she could trust herself, just yet, with others.

  Each night at seven she boiled herself an egg or heated a pan of soup, and at half past, right on the dot, Gianfranco rang. She was comfortably settled in her routine.

  No, she told him, everything was fine, just fine. Marisa came to clean each morning. Corrado looked after the orto and the pool.

  Gianfranco, she knew, was nodding, but what she could hear in his silence, even at this distance, was the terrible humming of anxiety in him, the fear that there was something—there was always something— that she was holding back. She raged up and down beside her kitchen cupboards, the receiver tight in her fist. But her voice when she spoke was soothing (or so she hoped).

  “No, no,” she cooed. “Gianfranco! Darling! I'm perfectly okay, I promise I am. Stop fussing.”

  She gave a little laugh that was meant to assure him that this, like all the other things he fretted over—the boys, his office, money, the house—was nothing, he was being silly.

  He said goodnight, made her promise to ring if there was the slightest problem, the least change.

  Then waited, as he always did, for her to reconsider and tell him the bad news. She refrained. And in fact there was none.

  At last, on his third goodnight, he rang off.

  She gave a subdued scream of a theatrical kind—seeing herself in a jokey, self-dramatising way helped to keep up her spirits—and sat down hard on a stool.

  But it was over. She was alone again. Free. The whole night before her.