by David Malouf
“Anyway,” Arnold assured them, "them Japs wouldn’ get far, even if they did land. Not out there.” And he evoked such horizons when he lifted his eyes in the following silence that the walk to Redcliffe or Deception, even the bush way, seemed like nothing.
Arnold Garrett had the slowest, drawliest voice Jack had ever heard. Secretly, high up on the diving-board or in the privacy of his room, he would reach for the growling flatness of it, "Aout theere,” in the belief that if he could get the tone right he might catch a glimpse, through the other boy's eyes, of what it was.
There were times, listening to Arnold and narrowing his eyes in the same heat-struck gaze, when Jack felt turned about. Away from the Bay and its red rocks, away from their gangs, their games, this particular school holidays and everything to do with being eleven, or twelve even, towards—
But there he came to a barrier that Arnold Garrett, he felt, had already crossed.
They were sitting around after a late-afternoon swim. Jack was in the middle of a story, one of those flights of fancy with which he could sometimes hold them, all attention, in a tight group, when Arnold said lightly: "Hey, are you a Yank or something? You talk like a Yank,” and he repeated a phrase Jack had used, with such dead accuracy, such perfect mimicry of Jack's pitch and tone and the decidedly un-local accent he had given to the otherwise innocent “water,” that the whole group, Gerald, Jamie, the Williams boys, laughed outright. Jack was dumbstruck. It wasn't simply that it was, of all people, Arnold who had caught him out in this small defection from the local, but the thing itself. He flushed with shame.
“It's his mum,” Jamie explained. “She goes out with one.” He said this in a matter-of-fact way. There was a touch of scorn but no malice in it.
“She does not,” Jack shouted, and even as he flung the insinuation back at them he saw that it was true.
“Doesn't she?” Jamie said. “It's what Dolfie Schindler said. What about—”
But Jack, his face burning, had already leapt to his feet. Filled with the crazy conviction that if he denied it with his whole body it would cease to be true, he struck out, though not at Jamie. Honour would not allow him to strike a younger boy.
“Hey,” Arnold yelled, throwing him off. “Hey! Are you crazy or something? Lay off!” Then, seeing that Jack could not be stopped, he weighed in with his fists and they fought, all knuckles, elbows, and knees, tumbling over one another on the coarse seagrass and pigface in a flurry of sand. When it was over they were both bloodied, but neither had won. “You're crazy,” Jamie shouted after him as he strode away.
He was still shaking. Not only with the passion of the fight and the hard blows he had taken, but with the shock of what he had discovered, which the furious involvement of blood and limbs and sweat and breath had failed to mitigate or change. He went and sat under the pump where the campers came to fetch water, tugging on the bit of looped wire that worked the handle and letting gush after gush of chill water pummel his skull. He sat with his arms around his drawn-up knees, uncontrollably shaking, and the tears he shed were hidden by the rush of water, and the din it made replaced for a moment the turbulence of his thoughts.
“Looks like you picked the wrong guy,” Milt remarked when he came in. One cheek was raw and he had the beginnings of a black eye.
“Jack!" his mother exclaimed. “This isn't like you.”
He couldn't look at either of them and shrugged his shoulders when they asked if he was all right.
They treated him gently after that. Warily. Trying not to make too much of it. As if, he thought, they preferred not to know why he had been fighting, or not to have it said. It was Mrs. Schindler who tended his cheek. But when she tried to cuddle him, he slipped out of her grip, and when Dolfie, at the end of their meal, waited as usual for him to help carry scraps out to the chooks, he turned his back on him. “You can drop dead,” he hissed. His only comfort was his wounds.
At either end of the beach at Scarborough was a twelve-foot-high slippery-slide, a tower of raw saplings with a ladder on one side, its rungs so widely spaced that you had to be nine or ten years old to climb them, and on the other a polished chute. On the platform between, four or five kids could huddle, waiting their turn and threatening to shove one another off, or sit with their legs dangling while sunlight crusted the salt on their backs.
For a long time Jack had been too young for the slippery-slide. Then, last Christmas, when he was ready, he had been shocked to discover that he had no head for heights. The climb was all right; so was the slide. The bad bit was having to wait on the platform. In his dream he found himself alone up there with a king tide running.
He was in deep trouble. Dark water rushed and foamed out of sight below, the flimsy structure shuddered and creaked. Worse still, the saplings that supported the platform had done their own growing in his sleep, so that when he shuffled forward on his knees to look over the edge, his head reeled. How had he found the courage to climb so high, to make his arms reach across the space between the rungs? No wonder his whole body ached. In the end there was nothing for it but to jump himself awake. It was the only way down.
He was sweating. Silvery flashes lashed the louvres of the sleepout. They rattled in their frames. The tin roof drummed. They got these storms along the coast down here, in January when the king tides were running.
He rolled out of bed.
Barefoot, in just his pyjama bottoms and still shaken by his dream, he stepped outside and, like a child younger than his present self, a six-year-old still scared of the dark, started off down the verandah to where his parents slept.
Rain was beating in under the rails, forming pools of lightning round every post. Rivulets followed the cracks in the floorboards. Careful not to get his feet wet, he stepped over them—he was awake enough for that—and turned the corner towards his mother's room, which was halfway down the long side of the house, facing the front.
When he came to the french doors, they were open. The rain on the roof was deafening.
His first thought was that he had found his way back to a time, three years ago, when his father was still here. There were two figures on the bed.
Or—his mind worked slowly—or his mother had hit upon a way of summoning his father to her in the night. Some spell. His heart leapt. Daddy! Dad! The words were already on his lips.
The two figures were fiercely engaged. He knew what it was, what they were doing. He had heard the facts of it. But nothing he had been told or imagined was a preparation for the extent to which, in their utter absorption in one another, they had freed themselves of all restraint. They were at a point of concentrated savagery that for all its intensity of thrusting and clutching was not violent, not at all, and not scary either, though it did set his heart beating.
His mother's head was thrown back and flinging from side to side. Her mouth was open, moaning. And Milt's breadth of shoulders and long back—for it was Milt, he could see that now—was rising and falling to the tune she sang, or it was Milt's tune they moved to, and she had discovered it, the one he hummed under his breath. What Jack was reminded of was moments when, in a kind of freedom that only his body had access to, he ceased for a time to be a boy and became a porpoise, rolling over and under the skin of sunlight all down the length of the Bay. Under the waves, then over. Entering, emerging. From air to water, then back again.
There was a lightning flash. The whole room for a moment was blindingly illuminated, the high ceiling, the walls, the rippled sheet and the figures beneath it. And there, on the other side of the bed, glimpsed only for the merest second before it fell back into the half-dark, was another figure, also watching.
It was his father. Bare-ribbed, long-necked, in a pair of old pyjama bottoms that hung below the hollow of his belly, he stood watching, in an exclusion that made him ghostlike, as if the world he belonged to was the otherworld of the dead. Jack strained to make him out there, to hold on to the sight of him. And realised, with a little shock, what the apparition real
ly was. Not a ghost, but himself, fantastically elongated in the glass of the old-fashioned wardrobe.
Something snapped then. He heard it. A sound louder than the crack of thunder or the rising climax of their cries, or his own smaller one, which they were too far off now in the far place to which their bodies had carried them to hear.
He stood,barefoot and still in pyjamas, at the very edge of the diving-board above the empty pool, using his weight to test the springs. He did not raise his arms or practise his pose.
The garden had been badly hit. There were smashed branches all over, and the pool had leaves in it and puddles where tiny frogs squatted and leapt. There was a strangeness. Some of it was in the light. But some of it, he knew, was in him. Keeping as close as possible to his normal routine, he went in, changed into a pair of shorts, and went out through the gate, across the road and down the red-soil track to the beach.
It was early, just before six, but men were already out tightening guy-ropes, digging new trenches round their camps. There was a high tide running. It was grey, its dull waves crested with weed as if a gigantic shark out there were showing first its back, then its belly, leaden, dangerous. Little kids, standing on isolated hillocks in the dunes, were gesturing towards it, marvelling at the absence of beach, dancing about on a ledge of soft sand that fell abruptly to foam.
He went on to the north end where the storm-water channel ran all the way to the water's edge, in a tangle of yellow-flowering native hibiscus so dense and anciently intertwined that without once setting your foot to the ground you could move on through it all the way to the beach. He swung up on to a low branch and made his way along it, gripping with his toes and using his arms for balance, then hauled himself on to a new branch higher up.
It was another world up here, a place so hidden and old, so deeply mythologized by the games they played in the twists and turns of its branches, their invented world of tribes and wars and castles, that the moment you hauled yourself up into its big-leafed light and shade you shook loose of the actual, were freed of ground rules and the habits of a life lived on floorboards and in rooms.
Hauling himself up from branch to branch, higher than he had ever been before, he found a place where he was invisible from below but had the whole bay before him.
It was an established custom that they came to the Trees only in the afternoon. He had the place to himself. Feeling the damp air begin to heat, he settled and let himself sink into an easy state where it was his blood that did the thinking for him, or his thumbs, or the small of his back where it was set hard against rough bark. From high up among leaves he watched the tide turn and begin, imperceptibly at first, then with swiftness, to go out.
His father would not be coming back. That was the first fact he had to face. And the second was that his mother already knew and had accepted it. Somewhere too deep for thought, he too had known it. The pain and bafflement of his first reaction had been at some failure of his own: he had let his father go; his will had not been strong enough to prevent him from slipping away. But he saw now that that was foolish. There were things that were out of your control. And if this was scary, it was also a relief. There were happenings out there in the world that you were not responsible for.
He must have slept then, because when he looked out again the morning had moved on. The sun was out. Mothers were pegging clothes to improvised lines, along with towels and old rags that had been used to sop up the rain. Others were dragging out furniture as well, stretcher-beds and mattresses, suitcases, the wooden, gauze-sided cupboards where groceries were kept. Fathers were going from tent to tent inspecting damage, tendering advice. He could see it all from up here. Weak rays were lighting the tent flaps and the tarpaulins laid out on the grass, but would soon be stronger.
Inside, card games would be starting up, Fish or Grab for the littlies, Euchre for the older kids, or Pontoon or Poker. He did not have to look in to see any of this.
Fran Williams would be laid across a stretcher with The Count of Monte Cristo open on the grass below. The Ludlow girls would have set up their grocery shop, its cardboard shelves stacked with tiny packets of tea, rice, sugar, sago, and little stamped coins in piles to shop with. Along the shoreline, processions of treasure hunters were poking about among the rubble of seaweed and cuttlefish shells and Have-a-Heart sticks.
Eventually, not long from now, he would go down and join them, and later again, not too late, not too early either, but at his usual hour, he would make his way back to Schindler's.
He sat a little longer, enjoying the sense that there was no rush. In a state of easy well-being. Refreshed, restored. Then, as slowly as he had come, he began to make his way back down through the open tangle; at one moment poised upright, at another crouched and reaching out till he could find a further branch to swing on, then hanging, then swinging out again in the slowest sort of flying twenty feet above the ground.
If he had bothered to think about it he would have said that he was happy. But as he came to the last of the trees and dropped lightly to the sand, he was thinking only that he was hungry and could do with a bit of breakfast and how hot the sun felt on his shoulders and how good it would be to put his hand out, have Arnold Garrett take it, and know that all was well again.
Not entirely well. There was a shadow on his heart that would be there for many years to come, a feeling of loss from which he would only slowly be released. But he was too young to conceive of more years than he had known, and the sun was getting hotter by the minute, and a little kid he had seen often enough but had never spoken to was hailing him from the top of a dune. “Hey,” he called, "is your name Jack? There's some boys been lookin’ for you, all over. I know where they are if you like. Hey,” he said, "what about that? They been lookin’ all over and I'm the one that found you.”
No you didn't, he might have told him, I wasn't lost. But the boy was so pleased with himself that Jack did not want to disappoint him. “Come on,” he said, and they set off together down the ravaged beach.
Closer
There was a time, not so long ago, when we saw my uncle Charles twice each year, at Easter and Christmas. He lives in Sydney but would come like the rest of us to eat at the big table at my grandmother's, after church. We're Pentecostals. We believe that all that is written in the Book is clear truth without error. Just as it is written, so it is. Some of us speak in tongues and others have the gift of laying on hands. This is a grace we are granted because we live as the Lord wishes, in truth and charity.
My name is Amy, but in the family I am called Ay, and my brothers, Mark and Ben, call me Rabbit. Next year, when I am ten, and can think for myself and resist the influences, I will go to school like the boys. In the meantime my grandmother teaches me. I am past long division.
Uncle Charles is the eldest son, the firstborn. When you see him in family photographs with my mother and Uncle James and Uncle Matt, he is the blondest; his eyes have the most sparkle to them. My mother says he was always the rebel. She says his trouble is he never grew up. He lives in Sydney, which Grandpa Morpeth says is Sodom. This is the literal truth, as Aaron's rod, which he threw at Pharaoh's feet, did literally become a serpent and Jesus turned water into wine. The Lord destroyed Sodom and he is destroying Sydney, but with fire this time that is slow and invisible. It is burning people up but you don't see it because they burn from within. That's at the beginning. Later, they burn visibly, and the sight of the flames blistering and scorching and blackening and wasting to the bone is horrible.
Because Uncle Charles lives in Sodom we do not let him visit. If we did, we might be touched. He is one of the fools in Israel—that is what.
Grandpa Morpeth calls him. He has practised abominations. Three years ago he confessed this to my Grandpa and Grandma and my uncles James and Matt, expecting them to welcome his frankness. Since then he is banished, he is as water spilled on the ground that cannot be gathered up again. So that we will not be infected by the plague he carries, Grandpa has forbidden
him to come on to the land. In fact, he is forbidden to come at all, though he does come, at Easter and Christmas, when we see him across the home-paddock fence. He stands far back on the other side and my grandfather and grandmother and the rest of us stand on ours, on the grass slope below the house.
We live in separate houses but on the same farm, which is where my mother and Uncle James and Uncle Matt, and Uncle Charles when he was young, grew up, and where my uncles James and Matt still work.
They are big men with hands swollen and scabbed from the farm work they do, and burnt necks and faces, and feet with toenails grey from sloshing about in rubber boots in the bails. They barge about the kitchen at five o'clock in their undershorts, still half asleep, then sit waiting for Grandma to butter their toast and pour their tea. Then they go out and milk the herd, hose out the bails, drive the cows to pasture and cut and stack lucerne for winter feed—sometimes my brothers and I go with them. They are blond like Uncle Charles, but not so blond, and the hair that climbs out above their singlets, under the Adam's apple, is dark. They are jokers, they like to fool about. They are always teasing. They have a wild streak but have learned to keep it in. My mother says they should marry and have wives.
Working a dairy farm is a healthy life. The work is hard but good. But when I grow up I mean to be an astronaut.
Ours is a very pleasant part of the country. We are blessd. The cattle are fat, the pasture's good. The older farmhouses, like my grandfather's, are large, with many rooms and wide verandahs, surrounded by camphor laurels, and bunyas and hoop-pines and Scotch firs. Sodom is far off, but one of the stations on the line is at the bottom of our hill and many trains go back and forth. My uncle Charles, however, comes by car.
His car is silver. It is a BMW and cost an arm and a leg. It has sheepskin seat covers and a hands-free phone. When Uncle Charles is on the way he likes to call and announce his progress.
