by David Malouf
He was surprised, ashamed even. What would Harry think? But not enough, it seemed, to subdue the flutter he had felt in his belly the moment the idea of the trip came up, or the heat his body was giving off inside the suit.
They arrived early. To kill the time they drove out to Bondi and sat in the car eating egg hamburgers in greasy paper and watching the surf.
Boardriders miraculously rose up and for long moments kept their balance on running sunlight, then went down in a flurry of foam.
Mothers, their skirts round their thighs, tempted little kiddies too far past the waterline for them to run back when the sea, in a rush, came sparkling round their feet. Surprised beyond tears, they considered a moment, then squealed with delight.
Andy thought of his girls. He should bring them down here, show them the ocean. They hadn't seen it yet. He had only seen it one other time himself.
On their rugby trip they had come down here in the dark, half a dozen of them, seriously pissed, and had chased about naked on the soft sand after midnight, skylarking, taking flying tackles at each other, wrestling, kicking up light in gritty showers, then stood awestruck down at the edge, watching a huge surf rise up like a wall, and roar and crash against the stars.
He glanced sideways now to see what Harry was making of it, this immense wonder that at every moment surrounded them.
“That's South America out there,” Harry informed him. “Peru.”
As if, by narrowing your eyes and getting the focus right, you might actually see it.
Andy narrowed his eyes. What his quickened senses caught out there was the outstretched figure of a long-bodied woman under a sheet, thin as a veil, slowly turning in her sleep.
The funeral was a quiet affair, with everyone more respectable-looking than Andy had expected, though the fellow who gave the service, which wasn't really a service—no prayers or hymns—was jollier than is normal on such occasions. He talked of Debbie's life and how full it had been. How full of life shehad been, and how they all liked her and what a good time they'd had together.
He did not refer to the fact that she was actually here, screwed down now inside the coffin they'd carried in.
Andy himself was acutely aware of that. It made him uncomfortably hot. He pushed a finger into his collar and eased it a bit, but felt the blood swelling in the veins of his neck.
It was the bulk of his own body he felt crammed into a coffin. How close the lid would be over his head. And how dark it must be in there when the chapel all around was so full of sunlight and the pleasantness of women in short-sleeved frocks, and a humming from the garden walks outside, of bees. The big-boned woman he'd spent a night drinking vodka with seemed very close: the heaviness of her crossed legs in the expensive-looking shoes, and her determination, which he had missed at the time but saw clearly now, to outdrink him. He wondered what shoes she was wearing in there. Then wondered, again, what Harry was thinking.
Harry looked very dignified in his suit and tie. Andy had last seen him in it at Dorothy's funeral, a very different affair from this. It was hard to tell from the straightness of him, and the line of his jaw, what he might be feeling. Andy looked more than once and could not tell.
It's his daughter, he thought. He's the father. Someone ought to have mentioned that.
But there was no talk of Debbie's family at all. Didn't they have families, these people? Or was it that they thought of themselves as a family? He couldn't work it out, their ties to one another—wives and husbands, mothers and fathers.
Still, it went well. People listened quietly. One or two of the women cried. People laughed, a bit too heartily he thought, at the speaker's jokes. They were private jokes that Andy did not catch, and he wondered what Harry thought of that. A couple of poems were read, by an older fellow with a ponytail who seemed to be drunk and swallowed all his words. When the curtains parted and the coffin tilted and began to slide away, there was music.
At least that part was like a funeral. Except that the music was another fellow singing to a guitar: Dylan' “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Andy cast a glance at Harry and laid his hand for a moment on the soft pad of his father-in-law's shoulder, but Harry gave no sign.
They drove for nearly half an hour to the wake, through heavy traffic, the city dim with smoke but the various bits of water they crossed or saw in the distance—the Harbour—brightly glinting. They stopped at a phone box and he called Helen, who was full of questions he found it hard to answer. He had really called—the idea occurred to him towards the end of the service—so that Harry could speak to her.
When Harry took the phone he walked away from the box and stood on the pavement in the sun, and only once looked back to see how things were going.
It was hot in the sun. Too hot for a suit. He was sweating under the arms and in the small of his back. Most of the passers-by wore jeans and T-shirts. It was a run-down neighbourhood of old factory buildings, with a view of wharves stacked with containers, and on the dirty waters of the bay a busy movement of ships.
He took his jacket off, hooking his finger into the collar and letting it trail over his shoulder.
He felt easier back in his own loose body, though he continued to sweat. He rolled his shirtsleeves, but only halfway.
At last Harry appeared. He pursed his lips and nodded, which Andy took as an indication that the talk with Helen had gone well. Well, that was something. When they got back into the car he remained silent, but his silence, Andy thought, was of a different kind. More relaxed. Something had broken.
When they got to the house and found a parking place, Harry, who had not removed his jacket, stood waiting for Andy to resume his. Which he did, out of respect. For Harry. For the fact that Harry thought it was the right thing to do.
The front door of the house was open and a crush of people, all with drinks in hand, spilled out on to the narrow veranda of the one-storeyed house and down on to the footpath. They pushed through, conspicuous, Andy thought, in their suits. People looked and raised an eyebrow. Maybe they think we're cops, Andy thought. It made him smile.
The hallway, which ran right through to the back door, was crowded. It was noisy in the small rooms with their tongue-and-groove walls, so noisy you could barely hear yourself speak. Music. Voices.
“Debbie's brother-in-law,” he shouted to a fellow who gave him a beer, and offered the man his hand. The man took it but looked surprised.
“Debbie's father,” he explained when, with just a glance, the fellow looked to where Harry was standing, towering in fact, in his pinstriped double-breasted suit, against the wall.
The fellow was fifty or so, in a black skivvy, and bearded, with a chain and a big clanking medal round his neck.
“Well, cheers,” he said, looking uncertain.
“Cheers,” Andy replied, raising the can.
He took a good long swig of the beer, which was very cold and immediately did something to restore him—his confidence, his interest. He looked around, still feeling that he stuck out here like a sore thumb; so did Harry. But that was to be expected.
This was it. Elsewhere. He was in the middle of it.
But he wished Harry would relax a bit. Trouble was, he didn't know what to do or say that would help. He had to tell himself again that Harry was a man standing in the hallway of a house full of people shouting at one another over a continuous din of party music, at his daughter's wake. He felt protective of Harry, most of all of Harry's feelings, but he also wanted to range out. All this represented a set of possibilities that might not come his way again. His own impatience, the itch he felt to move away, be on his own, see for himself what was going on here, seemed like a betrayal.
“Listen,” he said to a woman who was pushing past with two cans of beer in her hand and a fag hanging from the corner of her mouth. “Where can I get a drink for my mate?” He jerked his head in Harry's direction. “He's Debbie's father,” he told her, lowering his voice.
The woman looked. “Agh!" she said. �
�Here, take one a’ these.” Then, with lowered voice and a stricken glance in Harry's direction, "I didn't know that was Debbie's father.”
“It is,” he told her. “I'm her brother-in-law.”
He took the beer, thanked her, then carried it over to Harry. They stood together, side by side in the hallway, and drank.
“Thanks, mate,” Harry told him.
Andy stood,taking in the changing scene. People pushing past to the front door and the veranda. Pausing to greet others. Joking, laughing. More guests kept arriving, some with crates of beer. He still hadn't said more than a word or two to anyone else, but felt a rising excitement. He would move out and get into it in a minute. He was very will-ing to be sociable. It was just a matter, among these people, of how to make a start.
He was curious, considering the mixture, about who they were, how they were related to Debbie and came to be here, and increasingly confident, looking around, of what he himself might have to offer. He caught that from the eye of some of the girls—the women—who went by. Things were developing.
He had another beer, then another, lost track of Harry, got involved with one group, then a second—but only at the edge. Just listening.
He drifted out to the kitchen, where people were seated around a scrubbed-pine table stacked with empties and strewn with scraps. Others leaned against the fridge and the old-fashioned porcelain sink. He leaned too.
No one paid any attention to him, though they weren't hostile. They just went on arguing.
Politics. Though it wasn't really an argument either, since they all agreed.
He stepped past them to a little back porch with three steps down to a sloping yard, grassy, the edges of it, near the fence, thick with sword fern in healthy clumps. It was getting dark.
There was a big camphor laurel tree, huge really, and a Hill's Hoist turning slowly in the breeze that he felt, just faintly, on his brow, and clothes pegged out to dry that no one had bothered to bring in. They were hung out just anyhow. Not the way a woman would do it.
He watched them for a while: the shirts white in the growing darkness, filling with air a moment, then collapsing; the tree, also stirring, filling with air and all its crowded gathering of leaves responding, shivering. He too felt something. Something familiar and near.
He thought of Helen. Of the girls. He did not want the feeling of sadness that came to him, which had been there all day, he felt, under the throb of expectation, and which declared itself now in the way these clothes had been hung out, the tea towels all crooked, the shirts pegged awkwardly at the shoulder so that the sleeves hung empty and slack.
Back in the hallway he got talking to a very young woman in a miniskirt, hot pink, with a tight-fitting hot-pink top and a glossy bag over her shoulder, and glossy cork-heeled sandals, her toenails painted the same hot pink as her lips and clothes. He hadn't seen her at the funeral. She had just arrived. He introduced himself. “I'm Debbie's brother-in-law,” he told her, but without making it sound, he hoped, like a claim.
The girl took a sip from her glass and looked up at him, all eyelashes. “Who's Debbie?” she asked, genuinely stumped.
He opened his mouth but felt it would be foolish to explain. Still, he was shocked.
A little later he found himself engaged with another woman, older and very drunk, who in just minutes began pushing herself against him. He was a bit drunk himself at this stage. Not very drunk, but enough to go where his senses took him. He stood with his back against a wall of the crowded hallway and the woman pushed her knee between his thighs in the thick woollen suit and her tongue into his mouth. Her fingers were in his hair. He was sweating.
She undid a button on his shirt, put her nose in. “Ummm,” she murmured, ”au naturel, I like it. Where have they been keeping you?” When they broke briefly to catch their breath he glanced around in case Harry was close by.
All this now was what he had expected or hoped for, but he was surprised how little of the initiative was his. Somewhere in the back of his head, as the woman urged her tongue into it and her hand went exploring below, he was repeating to “I'm Debbie's brother-in-law. She's dead, this is her wake.” Since he had arrived in this house he was the only one, so far as he knew, who'd volunteered her name.
Things were going fast down in his pants, the woman luxuriously leading. He liked it that for once someone else was making the moves. A small noise struggled in his throat. No one around seemed to care, or even to have noticed. He wondered how far all this was to go, and saw that he could simply go with it. He was pleased, in a quiet, self-congratulatory way, that this was how he was taking it.
The woman drew her head back, looked at him quizzically, and smiled. “Umm,” she said, "nice. I'll be back.” Then, fixing her hair with a deft hand, she disengaged; gently, as he thought of it, set him down. He was left red-faced and bothered, fiercely sweating.
He dealt with his own hair, a few flat-handed slaps, discreetly adjusted things below. He felt like a kid. What was he supposed to do now? Wait for her to come back? Follow? He leaned against the wall and stared at the plaster ceiling. His head was reeling. He decided to stumble after her, but she was gone in the crowd and instead he found Harry, squatting on a low three-legged stool that was too small for him, his thumb in a book.
“Harry?”
Harry glanced up over the big horn-rimmed glasses he used for reading. He looked like a professor, Andy thought with amusement, but could not fathom his expression. Harry handed him the book.
It was a poetry book. There were more, exactly like the one he was holding, on the shelf at Harry's elbow, with the gap between them where he had pulled this one out. Andy shifted his shoulders, rubbed the end of his nose, consulted Harry. Who nodded.
Andy rubbed his nose again and opened the book, turning one page, then the next. To Debbie, he read on a page all to itself. All through, he could see, her name was scattered. Debbie. Sometimes Deb.
He was puzzled. Impressed. The book looked substantial but he had no way of judging how important or serious such a thing might be, or whether Harry, in showing it to him, had meant him to see in it a justification or an affront. It was about things that were private, that's what he saw. But here they were in a book that just anyone could pick up.
He turned more pages, mostly so as not to face Harry. Odd words jumped out at him. “Witchery" was one—he hoped Harry hadn't seen that one. In another place, "cunt.” Right there on the page. So unexpected it made his stomach jump. In a book of poetry! He didn't understand that. Or any of this. He snapped the book shut, and moved to restore it to the shelf, but Harry reached out and took it from him.
Andy frowned, uncertain where Harry's mind was moving.
Using both hands, Harry eased himself upright, slipped his glasses into one pocket of his jacket, forced the book into another, and turned down the hallway towards the front door.
Andy followed.
So it was over, they were leaving. It struck Andy that he had never discovered whose house this was.
“You need to say goodbye to anyone?” he asked Harry.
“Never bloody met anyone,” Harry told him.
Outside it was night-time, blue and cool. Some people on the steps got up to let them through. One of them said, "Oh, you're leaving,” and another, "Goodbye"—strangers, incurious about who they might be but with that much in them of politeness or affability.
They found the car, and Andy took his jacket off and tossed it into the back seat. Harry retained his.
They drove across bridges, through night traffic now. Past water riddled with red and green neon, and high tower blocks where all the fluorescent panels in the ceilings of empty offices were brightly pulsing.
After a bit, Harry asked out of nowhere, "What's a muse? Do you know what it means? A muse?”
“Amuse?” Andy asked in turn. “Like when you're amused?” He didn't get it.
“No. A — muse. M-U-S-E.”
Andy shook his head.
“D
on't worry,” Harry told him. “I'll ask Macca. He'll know.”
Andy felt slighted, but Harry was right, Macca would know. Macca was a workmate of theirs, a reader. If anyone knew, Macca would. But the book in Harry's pocket was a worry to Andy. He hoped Macca wouldn't uncover too much of what was in it. He'd seen enough, himself, to be disturbed by how much that was personal, and which you might want to keep that way, was set down bold as brass for any Tom, Dick, or Harry—ah, Harry—to butt in on. He didn't understand that, and doubted Harry would either.
Suddenly Harry spoke again.
“She was such a bright little thing,” he said. “You wouldn't credit.”
Andy swallowed. This was it. A single bald statement breaking surface out of the stream of thought Harry was adrift in—which was all, Andy thought, he might ever hear. He kept his eyes dead ahead.
What Harry was thinking of, he knew, was how far that bright little thing he had been so fond of, all that time ago, had moved away from him, how far he had lost track of her.
He had his own bright little girl, Janine. She was ten. He felt sweetly bound to her—painfully bound, he felt now, in the prospect of inevitable loss. She too would go off, go elsewhere.
At the time Harry was recalling, Andy thought, he would have been a young man, the same age I am now. He had never thought of Harry as young. There was a lot he had not thought of.
He glanced at Harry. Nothing more would be said. Those last few words had risen up out of a swell of feeling, unbearable perhaps, that Harry was still caught up in, but when Andy looked again—the look could only be brief—he got no clue.
A wave of sadness struck him. Not only for Harry's isolation but for his own. He was fond of Harry, but they might as well have been on different planets.
