by David Malouf
She made for a small flight of stairs at the far end that went down to a door, and when she opened it, and it too clicked shut behind her, found herself outside the building altogether, standing in her stockinged feet on stone flags that were still warm. The warmth came right up through her, and all about were night-flowering shrubs, and bigger trees with boughs that drooped. She took a good breath. The air was heavy with scent—with different scents. Night insects were twittering. All was clear moonlight, as still as still.
She began to walk—how simple things could be!—enjoying her own lightness and wondering if she wasn't still asleep and dreaming. Only in dreams did your body dispose of itself so easily. She walked on springy lawn. But they must have been watering it, because almost immediately her stockings were soaked. She sat down on a low wall and peeled them off, and when she looked back gave a little laugh at the look of them there on the shadowy grass. Like two snakeskins, a couple. That'll make ‘em guess!
Soon she was in a car park, empty but flooded with moonlight, then out again into soft sand. Red sand, still with the warmth of the sun in it, but cooler when you worked your naked toes in. Luxurious. She waded to the top of a dune and let herself go, half sliding, half rolling, till she came to a stop and was on level ground again. She righted herself and, seated in warm sand, checked for broken bones. All around her the bushes, which were spiky and had seemed dull by day, were giving off light like slow-burning fireworks. Big clouds rolled across the moon, thin as smoke, then darker. There was a twittering, though she could see no birds. Everywhere, things were happening—that's what she felt. Small things that for a long time now she had failed to notice. To see them you had to get down to where she was now, close to the ground. At kiddie level. Otherwise there were so many other things to demand your attention that you got distracted, you lost the habit of looking, of listening, unless some kiddie down there dragged at your skirt and demanded, "Look, Mum, look.”
That twittering for instance. She knew what it was now. Not birds but the Station Master's office at Babinda. It was years, donkey's years, since that particular sound had come to her, yet here it was. Must have been going on all around her for ages, and she was too busy listening to other things to notice.
Babinda.
For a whole year after she was married, with Leonard away in New Guinea, she had been with the Railways, an emergency worker while the boys were at the war. Those were the days! She was off the shelf, so that was settled, and she had no domestic responsibilities. She had never in her life felt so free. She loved the noise and bustle of the Station Master's office when things were on the go; the buzzing and tinkling when the First Division was held up by floods below the Burdekin or when, outside the regular timetable, a Special came through, a troop-transport with all the boys hanging out the windows wolf-whistling and calling across the tracks to where she was walking up and down with a lantern, to ask her name. Then the long sleepy periods when nothing was happening at all and you could get your head into Photoplay.
The Station Master, Mr. O'Leary, was a gardener, his platform a tame jungle of staghorns, elkhorns, hoyas, maidenhair ferns in hanging baskets, tree orchids cut straight from the trunk. He was out there in all weathers in his shirtsleeves whispering to his favourites. “Hullo, ducky,” he'd be singing, "here's a nice drop of water for you. That's a girl! You'll enjoy this.”
She'd pause at her knitting to listen to him. He used the same tone when he was talking to her. It made her feel quite tender towards him. But he was always respectful—she was, after all, a married woman.
Sometimes, in the late afternoon, when everything was at a low point and even the bush sounds had dropped to nothing, he would talk of his son Reggie, the footballer, who had been in her class at primary school and was now a POW in Malaya. Reggie had played the mouth organ, that's what she remembered. A chunk of honeycomb at his lips and his breath swarming in the golden cells, that's what she remembered. The Flight of the Bumble Bee.
“It's a blessing his mother's already gone,” Mr. O'Leary would tell her softly while the light slanted and turned pink. “At least she's spared the waiting. Once you've got kiddies, Dulce, you're never free, not ever. I spend half my time asking myself what he's getting to eat, he's such a big feller. If he's got a mate an’ that. I'm only half here sometimes.”
She listened and was sympathetic but did not understand, not really. Douglas and Donald were still way off in the future, waiting there in the shadows beyond the track; they had not yet found her. But she liked listening to Mr. O'Leary. No one had ever thought her worth confiding in, not till this. She felt quite grown up. An independent woman. She was all of twenty-three.
Under the influence of the many unscheduled trains that were running up and down the line, all those lives the war had forced out of their expected course, she was led to wonder what direction she herself might be headed in. Odd, she thought now, that she had never considered her marriage a direction, let alone a terminus. But that was the times, the war. Everything normal was suspended for the duration. Afterwards, anything might be possible.
“You won't find me stickin’ round once the war is over.”
This was Jim Haddy, the Station Master's Assistant. “No fear! I'll be off like a shot. You watch my dust!”
At sixteen, Jim Haddy was the most amazing boy she'd ever come across. He was so full of things, so dedicated. He thought the Queensland Railways were God and got quite upset if you threw off at them or said things like “You know the theme song of the Queensland Railways, don't you? ‘I Walk Beside You.’ ” He thought Mr. O'Leary “slack” because when they went out with their flags and lamps and things to wave a train through, he left the tabs on his waistcoat unfastened. Jim was a stickler. He did not roll his sleeves up on even the muggiest days. Always wore his soft felt railway hat. And his waistcoat, even if it was unbuttoned in front, was always properly buckled at the sides.
He was a soft-faced kid who got overexcited and had, as Mr. O'Leary put it, to be watched. He knew all there was to know about the Royal Houses of Europe, and talked about the Teck Mecklenburgs and the Bourbon Parmas as if they owned cane farms down the road, and Queen Marie of Romania and King Zog as if they were his auntie and uncle. He spent a lot of the Railway's time settling them like starlings in their family trees on sheets of austerity butcher's paper.
“What a funny boy you are,” she would tell him dreamily as she leaned over his shoulder to watch.
The summer rain would be sheeting down, a wall of impenetrable light, and when it stopped, the view would be back, so green it hurt your eyes, and the earth in Mr. O'Leary's flower beds would steam and give off smells. The little room where they sat at the end of the platform would be all misty with heat. She'd be thinking: When I get home I'll have to take Leonard's shoes out of the lowboy and brush the mould off. “Where is Montenegro?” she'd ask, and Jim was only too happy to tell, though she was none the wiser.
That boy needs watching.
But she had lost sight of him. Like so much else from that time. And from other times. She was surprised now that he had come back, and so clearly that as she leaned over his shoulder she caught the vinegary smell of his neck under the raw haircut.
“What happened to you, Jim Haddy?” she found herself asking in her own voice, her feet in the powdery red soil. “Where are you, I wonder? And where are Queen Marie and King Zog?” She hadn't heard much of them lately either.
“I'm here,” she announced, in case Jim was somewhere in the vicinity and listening.
She looked about and saw that she was in the midst of a lot of small grey-green bushes, with daylight coming and no landmarks she could recognise.
“My God,” she said to herself, "where? Where am I? This isn't my life.”
Off in the distance a train was rumbling in over the tracks: a great whooshing sound that grew and grew, and before she knew it passed so close to where she was standing that she was blown clear off her feet in a blaze of dust. It cleared, and
she realised that high up in a window of one of the carriages as it went thundering past she had seen her own face, dreaming behind the glass and smiling. Going south. She picked herself up and got going again.
The Rock was there. Looming. Dark against the skyline. She made for that.
The sun was coming up, hot out of the oven, and almost immediately now the earth grew too hot to walk on. The bushes around her went suddenly dry; her mouth parched, she sat down dump. There was no shade. She must have dozed off.
When she looked up again a small boy was squatting in front of her. Not Donald. And not Douglas either. He was about five years old and black. He squatted on his heels. When her eyes clicked open he stared at her for a moment, then took off shouting.
When she opened her eyes again there were others, six or seven of them. Shy but curious, with big eyes. They squatted and stared. When she raised a hand they drew back. Dared one another to come close. Poked. Then giggled and sprang away.
At last one little girl, older than the rest, trotted off and came back with some scraps of bread and a cup full of water. The others looked on while the little girl pushed dry crusts into the open mouth, as if feeding a sick bird, and tipped the cup. The cup was old and crumpled, the child's fingers rather dirty. Oh well, she thought, it's a bit late to be worrying over my peck of dirt.
She swallowed, and the children watched as her old throat dealt with the warmish water, got it down.
She saw that it was a test. To see what she was. Old woman or spirit.
No need to look so puzzled, she told them, though not in so many words. It's just me, Dulcie MacIntyre. It's no use expecting anything more. This is it.
But they continued to watch as if they were not convinced.
She lay like a package while they sat waiting. As if, when the package finally unwrapped itself, it might contain something interesting. Oh well, she thought, they'll find out. If they're disappointed, that's their lookout.
After a while she must have seemed as permanent and familiar to them as any other lump of earth because they got bored, some of them—the littlies—and went back to whatever game they'd been playing when that first one interrupted them, shouting, "Hey, look what I found! Over here!”
But two or three of them stayed. Watching the old lizard turn its head on the wrinkled, outstretched neck. Slowly lifting its gaze. Shifting it north. Then east. The dry mouth open.
They fed her dribbles of water. Went off in relays and brought back armfuls of dry scrub and built a screen to keep the sun off, which was fierce, and moved it as the sun moved so that she was always in shade. She had never in all her life felt so closely attended to, cared for. They continued to sit close beside her and watch. They were waiting for something else now. But what?
“I told you,” she said weakly, "it's no good expecting anything more.” They had been watching so long, poor things. It was a shame they had to be disappointed.
They must have waited all day, because at last she felt the sun's heat fall from her shoulders, though its light was still full in the face of her watchers. Then a shadow moved over them. The shadow of the Rock. She knew this because they kept lifting their eyes towards it, from her to it then back again. The Rock was changing colour now as the sun sank behind it.
The shadow continued to move, like a giant red scarf that was being drawn over them. The Rock, which had been hoarding the sun's heat all day, was giving it off now in a kindlier form as it turned from orange-red to purple. If she could swing her body around now to face it, to look at it, she might understand something. Might. But then again she might not. Better to take what she could, this gentle heat, and leave the show to these others.
I'm sorry, she chuckled, I can't compete.
She was beginning to rise up now, feeling even what was lightest in her, her thoughts, drop gently away. And the children, poor things, had their eyes fixed in the wrong place. No, she wanted to shout to them. Here I am. Up here.
One of the little ones, sitting there with a look of such intense puzzlement on his face, and baffled expectation, was Donald. I'm sorry, Donald, she said softly. But he too was looking in the wrong place.
The big dolphinfish lay stranded. The smaller waves no longer reached it. There were sandgrits in its eyes, the mouth was open, a pulse throbbed under its gills. It was changing colour like a sunset: electric pink and mauve flashes, blushings of yellow-green.
“What is it?” Betty Olds asked. “What's happening to it?”
“Shush,” Isobel told her.
So they sat, all three, and watched. The waves continued to whisper at the edge of the beach. The colours continued to play over the humped back and belly, flushing, changing, until slowly they became less vivid. The pulsing under the gills fluttered, then ceased, and the flesh, slowly as they watched, grew silvery-grey then leaden.
“What happened?” Betty asked again. “Is it dead now?”
“I think so,” Isobel told her. Then, seeing Betty's lip begin to quiver, put her arm around her sister's shoulder and drew her close. “It's all right, Bets,” she whispered. “It was old.”
Dulcie said nothing. She too was breathless. This was a moment, she knew, that she would never forget. Never. As long as she lived. She also knew, with certainty, that she would live for ever.
The Domestic Cantata
Starting back before he stumbled, the man groaned, then raised his voice in protest.
“Maggie,” he shouted. “Maaggieee!”
The ten-geared blue-and-gold Galaxy had been propped against the panelled wall of the staircase and was sprawled now on its side in the hallway outside his room, like a giant insect that had blundered in and expired there, or a stunned, iridescent angel—one more example of the chaos they lived in, the clutter and carelessness. Nobody in this house, so far as Sam could see, ever rinsed a coffee mug or returned a book to its shelf, or threw out a newspaper, or picked a wet towel up off the sopping bathroom floor. He knew the savagery he was assailed with had nothing to do, specifically with the bike, but he kicked it just the same, and saw even as he did so what a spectacle he was making of himself. A grown man in the hallway of his own home, putting his boot into a defenceless machine!
Maggie had appeared at the kitchen door.
“Maggie,” he moaned, “look at this!” His voice had the arch and droop of classic lament. “That boy wants a good hiding. Look at it!” A good hiding was a phrase that Sam McCall was excessively fond of. It belonged to the world of his boyhood—maybe even of his father's boyhood, though the truth was that neither he nor any one of his children had ever had a hand laid on them.
Maggie looked, but not at the bike. Hot blood suffused his brow. There were veins in his neck.
“I'm sorry, love,” she said mildly, and came out into the hallway drying her hands on her skirt. “I tell them and they don't listen.”
She reached down, hoisted the bike upright, and stood for a moment, bare-armed, poised on her solid legs as if, tempted by its promise of velocity, she might be about to leap into the saddle, sprint down the hallway, over the threshold and away. Instead, she turned the beast into its stall under the stairs.
“There,” she said. All was restored, made good again.
Sam watched. Quiet but unappeased.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, pet?”
He shook his head.
She waited. He might be amenable to some other distraction.
“Well,” he said in a tone of aggrievement, "I'll get back to it. I came out to make a phone call.”
What he meant was that the moment of tender sociability that had drawn him away from his work had been spoiled now and was irretrievable. He turned, went back to his workplace, and a moment later she heard, tentative, in one chord, then another, the notes of the piano.
Redeeming a football boot he'd failed to notice, she set it on the bottom step—she'd carry it up later—and went back to the kitchen, a little song rising in her throat, set off perhaps by a suggestion in one o
f the chords. She sang three or four bars of it, then returned in silence to the sink, where, in a high, soft head voice, she launched into the rest while she topped and tailed celery sticks and scored a dozen radishes that, when they were plunged into cold water, would open and transform themselves into peppery, pink-and-white roses.
Twelve years ago,when they first moved in, this house had seemed perfect.
It was a big Federation house on three levels, with pierced work above the solid doors and in the archway between the ground-floor rooms, leadlight windows that in the early morning threw dancing colours on the walls, and balconies that broke out in unexpected places on a view of palm crowns and glinting water. The children had been more manageable then, and fewer.
These days, everything above the ground floor, which Maggie tried to keep clear, had been abandoned to general mayhem and din. She tolerated this, and only intermittently dealt with it, so long as there was no clattering on the stairs, no shouting in the hallway, and, above all, no argument with the law “down here,” and the garden outside their father's window, was the sacred realm of Silence. Silence, in this house, was a positive not a negative commodity, a breathing space and pause that was essential not only to the production of their father's work but to the work itself, as they knew very well from counting out the fixed measures of it, either in their head or with the muted tapping of a foot, when they played or sang.
But silence, outside music, was hardly absolute.
“What about the birds?” Miranda had demanded once, meaning the bad-tempered Indian mynahs that carried on an incessant warfare around the bottlebrush and pomegranates below their father's window, screaming and driving off the natives.
She kept her voice civil, draining it of any suggestion—she was twelve then—of rebelliousness or irony. Her father already suspected her of the first. He did not consider her old enough, as yet, for the second.
