by David Malouf
“I had an accident,” he hooted.
He was triumphant, despite the bump on his forehead and his discoloured eye. “I got hit by a board. I had to have stitches!”
Still pumped, still caught up in the world of mishap and risk he had come from, but torn now between the wish to astonish them and at the same time not to alarm, he came forward to show his mother the wound.
“It's not serious,” he told her. “I had to go in an ambulance. Is that okay? Do we belong?”
It was true, it was nothing, nothing much. A gash that would heal, leaving a scar over his left eye that would be interesting. But it must have been close just the same, and because it was so physical, and came so soon after their earlier commotion, Maggie shocked the boy by suddenly clasping him to her and bursting into tears. He faced the others—his father, Miranda—over her shoulder and did not know what he had done.
“Honestly,” he told them, "it's nothing. I hardly felt it.”
Sam, recalling how angry he had been with the boy, was suddenly heartsick. Tom saw it.
“Hey, Dad,” he said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you.”
“That's all right, son,” Sam told him, playing calm. “We've had a bit of an afternoon, that's all. Come and get something to eat.” It surprised him that his tone was so much one that Maggie might have used. She too caught it, gave him a swift look, and laughed.
“Well,” she said, releasing Tom, then drawing him back to give him a light kiss on the corner of his mouth, "welcome back from the wars.”
The guests were gone, the children settled. Upstairs was quiet, all the lights out except in Tom's room; the rooms left and right down the hallway filled with quiet breathing, their windows half open to the summer night of clicking insects and the barely audible slow flapping past of flying foxes, the stirring of possums among leaves. Downstairs the washing-up was stacked in racks above the sink.
Sam and Maggie, having shut the kitchen door behind them, were in Sam's sleepout workroom, Maggie, with closed eyes, in an upright chair by the door, Sam at the piano. Idly his fingers struck a chord, the same one that earlier in the day, out in the kitchen, had led her to an old song that was there somewhere in the four ordinary notes. But what moved out into the silence now was full of other, stranger possibilities that brought the room into a different focus: the air, rather thick and heated; the bright ellipse of the lamp under its hood, where it lit the keys and the reddish wood of the piano; Sam's profile, lips slightly apart in anticipation; the glare of the louvres, parted to let in a scent of leaves and distant water.
“Do you want me to try it?” Maggie asked.
“You're not too tired?”
She made the effort, sprang upright. Sam briefly laughed. She took the sheet from the piano, and Sam handed her two more that she ran her eye over in preparation as his fingers found one chord, then, in a way that made her draw herself together and attend, another. And now the focus was in her. In her shoulders, her legs where she settled the column of her body on the worn carpet, and reaching in the spaces of her head for the first note let out her breath.
Ah! Sam turned his head. He felt the whole surface of his skin thrill at the wonder of it, the purity of this voice she harboured so mysteriously in a body he had lived with now for nearly twenty years and which never failed to astonish him. Fleetingly their eyes met and Maggie smiled, as sounds he had with so much difficulty drawn out of himself now poured forth, without effort it seemed, on her breath, and on the same breath climbed and spread. So much part of her, of her actual being, yet entirely independent. As they had been of him too, even before she took them over, took them into herself, gave them life.
With the turn of his head Sam showed a different profile, and Maggie recorded it while all her attention remained fixed on the page and on what, with all her body's susceptibilities and claims in perfect collusion, she was miraculously translating into this other self he had discovered for her, and which her breath, pushed almost to its limit, was once again amply reaching for.
UPSTAIRS,with the blanket drawn up high under his chin, Tom contemplated his sister Miranda, who sat on the edge of the low bed and regarded him with a look he preferred not to meet. She was preparing, he thought, to rebuke him. He felt warm and comfortably indulged. He did not want to be told, yet again, how hopeless he was. There had been a moment down there in the sitting room when he had been the centre of all their attention and concern—not just his mother's, his father's, and Miss Stinson's, but everyone's, and had felt, beyond his usual awkward self-consciousness, a kind of glow, an assurance of how loved he might be. He did not want that spoiled.
But Miranda did not mean to spoil it. She wanted to tell him how fond she was of him, how often she thought of a time, before the twins appeared, when there had been just the two of them and he had been her dumb, soft, wet-mouthed little brother who needed her to watch out for him and trailed after her and did everything she did.
There were moments when she still saw him that way.
Recently, when she began to colour her hair and explore the decorative resources of the safety pin, her mother had told her angrily: "This is very silly, Miranda, your father is disappointed. Is that why you're doing it? To get at him? And it's such a bad example!”
“Who to, for heaven's sake?”
Her mother had had to stop and think.
“To Tom,” she decided. “You know how he copies everything you do.”
Miranda had laughed outright. “Honestly,” she said. “Tom!”
But it was true. He did follow, in his odd, half-hearted way. Careful always not to stray too far from his own stolid centre. He had acquired a pair of black parachute pants, put colour in his hair that would wash out for school, wore a stud in his ear.
“What is that?” their father had taunted. “That thing in your ear. A hearing aid?”
She too wished he would stop trying so hard and just be his own lovable self.
What he really wanted, she thought, was that they should be twins; whereas what she wanted, in her contradictory way, was to be an only child. What she said now was: "I could sleep here, if you like. On the floor.”
Tom was surprised. Wary.
“Julie's in my bed anyway. It'd be better if she just stayed there.”
“Well, if you want to,” he said. “But I don't need it.”
“I know you don't,” she said. “I do.”
He snuggled down into the blankets.
“I'm pretty tired now,” he told her. “I might just go to sleep.”
“That's all right. I'll be tired myself in a bit.”
She took his hand.
His eyes were closed but he was smiling. Already sinking downwards into sleep.
Far off in the depths of the house their mother's voice rose in a long sweet arc of sound, pure and unwavering.
Tom heard it, a shining thread he was following in the dark that step by step was leading him down into his own private underworld.
Julie too heard it. Still stiffly awake in the next room, she was puzzled for a moment. She lay breathless, listening, salt tears in her throat—not for the music, though the throbbing of it seemed one with her own silent weeping. As if it had appeared just at this moment to reassure her that what she felt, her unassuageable misery, was part of something larger that was known, shared, and could take this lighter form, a high pure sound out of elsewhere. Something more than this hot welling in her throat, this salty wetness in her nostrils and on her lips.
Maggie was on the last page now, and aware, as she moved with ease along the line of notes, of the silence she was approaching, which began just a little way up ahead, where he had laid down his pen.
As she came closer to it Sam's head turned further in her direction and his eye caught hers. She was coming to what had stopped him.
He was looking right at her now, as she reached the small difficulty he had set himself there. Had set her. She closed her eyes, to free herself from his look of anxious expe
ctancy, so that without anxiety she could allow what was purely physical in her to take over and get her through. She heard his breath go out. Then silence.
But not quite silence. A slight hissing of night through the parted slats of the louvres. Nature. Then again their breathing.
“That's it for the moment,” he said—unnecessarily, but to return them, she understood, to the ordinariness of speech.
She nodded. Laid the last sheet beside the others on the stand.
Her body was still attuned to what she had just been so caught up in. She felt the vibrations still. No longer emanating from her, they went on where the music continued to flow and spread. Beyond the page. In his head. In the silence which was not quite silence. On the lines of score-paper as yet still empty.
Which would sit where she had just set down the last uncompleted page, in the dark of this room, after he had put the lamp out and closed the door behind them, and they had gone upstairs, undressed, lain down side by side in the dark; for a few moments simply going over the day's events, Diane Novak, whatever it was that had afflicted the child— not one of their own—who now lay sleeping across the hall, Tom's accident, Miss Stinson. Till once again he turned to her and whispered her name.
And this, waiting below.
To be resumed. To be continued.
DREAM STUFF
At Schindler's
1
At Schindler's Jack woke early. The sound of the sea would find its way into his sleep. The little waves of the bay, washing in and receding, dragging the shell-grit after them, would hush his body to their rhythm and carry him back to shallows where he was rolled in salt. It was his own sweat springing warm where the sun struck the glass of his sleepout, which was so much hotter than the rest of the house that he might, in sleep, have drifted twenty degrees north into the tropics where the war was: to Borneo, Malaya, Thailand. He would throw off even the top sheet then to bake in it, till it was too hot, too hot altogether, and he would get up, go down barefoot to pee in a damp place under one of the banana trees and take a bit of a walk round the garden. Until Dolfie, the youngest of the Schindlers, came out bad-tempered and sleepy-eyed to chop wood, he had the garden's long half-acre to himself.
There was a pool at Schindler's. In the old days Jack and his father had swum there each morning. Jack would cling to the edge and kick, while his father, high up on the matted board, would leap, jackknife in the air, hang a moment as if he had miraculously discovered the gift of flight, then plummet and disappear. Then, just when Jack thought he was gone altogether, there would be a splash and he would reappear, head streaming, a performance that gave Jack, after the long wait in which his own breath too was held, a shock of delighted surprise that never lost its appeal.
Schindler's was a boarding-house down the “Bay” at Scarborough. They went there every holiday.
The pool these days was empty, closed, like so much else, for “duration.” But Jack, who this year would have been old enough to use the board, liked each morning to walk out to the end and test its spring. Toes curled, arms raised, beautifully balanced between the two blues, the cloudless blue of the early-morning sky and the painted one that was its ideal reflection, he would reach for what he remembered of his father's stance up there, grip the edge, strain skyward with his fingertips, push his ribcage out till the skin felt paper-thin, and hang there, poised.
He had got this part of it perfect. For the rest he would have to be patient and wait.
HIS FATHER was missing—that was the official definition. Or, more hopefully, he was a prisoner of war. More hopefully because wars have a foreseeable end, their prisoners come home: to be missing is to have stepped into a cloud. Jack's mother, who was aware of this, never let a mealtime pass without in some way evoking him.
“I suppose,” she would say, "your daddy will be having a bite to eat about now.”
They knew quite well he wouldn't be sitting down, as they were, to chops and boiled pudding, but it kept him, even if all he was doing was pushing a few spoonfuls of sticky rice into his mouth, alive and in the same moment with them.
When St. Patrick's Day came round she would say: "Sweet peas. They're your father's favourites. You should remember that, Jack. Maybe by the time they're ready he will be home.”
One year, struck by one of the models in a Paton and Baldwin pattern book, she knitted a cable-stitch sweater for him. Jack held the wool when it was wound, watching the yards and yards it would take pass over his hands. Twenty skeins! When all the parts were finished and had been assembled into the shape of a sweater, his mother held it up to her shoulders. “Look, Jack.”
He was astonished by the bulkiness of it. He hadn't remembered his father's being so big. In a moment when his mother was out of the room he held its roughness to his cheek, but all he could smell was new wool.
Collapsed now between layers of tissue, it lay in a drawer of his father's lowboy acquiring an odour of naphthalene.
But as the months slipped by and they still had no news of him, no postcard or message on the radio, Jack saw that his mother's assurance had begun to fail. She still spoke as if his father were just out of the room for a bit, at a football match or having a drink down at the boat club, but she was pretending. For his sake—that is what he felt—and it worried him that she might realise that he knew. They would have to admit something then, and it was imperative, he thought, that they should not. If she no longer had faith, then he must. If his father was to survive and get home, if he was to hang on to whatever light thread was keeping him in the world, then he was the one who must keep believing. It was up to him.
“Now, Milly!You can't just sit around mooning. Stan wouldn't want that. You're young, you need a break. You need to get out and have a bit of fun.”
This was his aunt Susan speaking, his father's sister. Jack wondered how she could do it.
“Look,” she said, holding his mother's hair up, "like this. You've got such lovely bones.”
They looked into the mirror, his aunt lifting the thick hair in her hands like a live animal, their two bodies leaning close.
His mother regarded herself. “Do you really think so?” she said dreamily. “That I could get away with it?”
Jack frowned. Don't, Mum, he said silently.
The two figures in the mirror, his mother smiling now, her head turned to one side, disturbed him; there was a kind of complicity between them. When they looked at one another and leaned closer, their eyes full of daring and barely suppressed hilarity, he felt they had moved away into a place where he was not invited to follow. Other rules applied there than the ones he knew and wanted her to keep.
“Well, I don't know,” his mother was saying. But she looked pleased, and his aunt Susan giggled. “Maybe,” she said. “What do you think, Jack?”
He looked away and did not answer. She must know as well as he did that his father hated anything of that sort—rouge, painted toenails, permed hair. What was wrong with her?
For the past few weeks she had been working one night a week at a canteen. Now, under his aunt Susan's influence, she changed her hair- style to a glossy pompadour, put on wedgies, and, drawing Jack into it as well, began to teach herself the newest dances. They tried them out with old gramophone records, on the back verandah; Jack rather awkward in bare feet and very aware that he came only to her shoulder. I'm only doing it to make her happy, he told himself. He felt none of the pride and excitement of the previous year, when he had gone along each Saturday night in a white shirt and bow tie to be her beau at the Scarborough dances.
Americans began to appear at their door. Escorts, they were called. It had a military ring, more formal, less personal than partner. They brought his mother orchids in a square cellophane box and, for him, "candy,” which only Americans could get. He accepted, it was only polite, but made it clear that he had not been bought.
His mother asked him what he thought of these escorts and they laughed together over their various failings. She was more cri
tical than Jack himself might have been and this pleased him. She also consulted him about what she should wear, and would change if he disapproved. He was not deceived by any of this, but did not let her see it.
And in fact no harm was done. New dances replaced the old ones every month or so, and in the same way the Rudis, the Dukes, the Vergils, the Kents, were around for a bit and sat tugging at their collars under the tasselled lamps while his mother, out in the kitchen, fixed her corsage and they made half-hearted attempts to interest or impress him, then one after another they got their marching orders. Within a week or two of making themselves too easily at home, putting their boots up on the coffee-table, swigging beer from the bottle, they were gone. The war took them. They moved on.
MILT,Milton J. Schuster the Third, was an air force navigator from Hartford, Connecticut, a lanky, fair-headed fellow, younger than the others, with an Adam's apple that jumped about when he was excited and glasses of a kind Jack had never seen before, just lenses without frames. Jack took to him immediately.
He wasn't a loud-mouth like so many of the others, he did not skite. And for all that he was so young, he had done a lot, and was full of odd bits of information and facts that were new to Jack and endlessly inter- esting. But most of all, it was Milt who was new. He was put together with so much lazy energy, had so many skills, so much experience that he was ready, in his good-humoured way, to share.
“Jack,” his mother protested, "give us a break, will you? That's the fifty-seventh question you've asked since tea.”
But where Milt was concerned Jack could never get to the end of his whats and whys and how comes and who said sos, or of Milt's teasing and sometimes crazy answers.
Milt was a fixer. Humming to himself a tuneless tune that you could never quite catch, comfortable in a sweat-stained singlet with the dog-tags hanging, he would, without looking up from the screwdriver he was spinning in his long fingers or the fuse-wire he was unravelling, “Hi, kiddo,” the same for Jack and his mother both, and just go on being absorbed. It wasn't an invitation to stay, but it wasn't a hint either (Jack was sensitive to these) that you should push off. He accepted your presence and went on being alone. Yet somehow you were not left out.
