The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  “Goodnight, Colin,” she said softly when the taxi arrived and they went out into the gathered nightsounds of the verandah. The touch of her hand very softly on his cheek was an assurance.

  “Goodnight, mate—keep in touch,” Eric told him, leaning into the window of the taxi. And he called again from the foot of the steps where Coralie fitted into the hollow of his arm: "And remember, we need you. Come back soon.”

  3

  The events of the following hours he would have rejected outright if they had presented themselves to him as the components of a plot. They were too extravagant for the web of quiet incident and subtle shifts of power that were the usual stuff of his fiction. But they occurred and he was not granted the right of refusal. From the moment the Ped-ersens saw him into the cab (the front seat beside the driver) he was aware that some agency had taken over whose imagination was wilder than his own and which he could neither anticipate nor control.

  The driver himself was part of it. Young, bearded, in boxer shorts and sneakers, he was one of the sociable ones, an Armenian or Yugoslav with the broad vowels of the local accent drawlingly prolonged and the consonants of another tongue altogether.

  When a few direct questions established that Colin was a visitor, he began evoking possibilities for the remainder of the night: a gambling club, a massage parlour, other darker, more dangerous amenities that were not to be named. When Colin, with a wave of his hand, rejected them, he shrugged and removed himself to a sulky distance, one hairy arm on the steering wheel, the other angled out of the window and drumming lightly on the roof. After five minutes or so of this Colin said abruptly: "Look, just let me out at the next corner, will you? I need a breath of air. I'll walk.”

  The driver pulled in. “Please yerself,” he said. “You're the driver.” He sniggered at his own joke, consulted a card, made calculations, very slowly as if the figures wouldn't add up, and named a price. Safely outside, Colin passed him a note and relinquished the change.

  The driver grinned. It wasn't a pleasant grin, and Colin wondered, as he set off beside a row of dingy shops that appeared sinister but were merely unlit, if the fellow hadn't after all delivered him over to one of those obscure and perhaps hazardous occasions that had not been named.

  The city at this hour was deserted. The street (and he could see down a dip a good half-mile of it) was clear. He thought of flagging down another cab. But that was silly. He knew this place, he had grown up in it, his hotel was five minutes away, and he had the odd conviction that if he did hail a cab it would turn out to be the one he had just got out of making a circle around the block.

  He had gone no more than forty yards—past a gunsmith's, its barred windows stacked with rifles and binoculars, a jeweller's, the frosted windows of a bank—when he was aware of a car, a battered Kingswood, that had slowed to walking pace and was travelling close to the pavement beside him. The driver's head was thrust out, in an effort, he realised, to see him more clearly in the diminished light.

  He tried to conceal his anxiety, but began to walk faster. When the Kingswood put on speed at last and swung round the next corner, he crossed briskly against the lights, and was just beginning to regain his composure and admonish himself for being a fool when he heard behind him the footfalls of someone running, and a moment later was being pushed back hard against a wall.

  It was a matter of seconds. His attacker, too close for him to get any impression except of damp flesh, had him pinioned and was breathing heat into his neck.

  “You din’ expect that, didja,” the man hissed. “Didja? Didja?” With each question he pushed his face closer and jerked Colin's arm. “You cunt!”

  He whispered this almost lovingly into Colin's ear.

  “I seen you get outa that cab. I knew I'd catch up with you sooner or later. Cunt!”

  Colin's panic, now that the situation had declared itself, had given way to raging anger. He was surprised at the intensity of it and at how clear-headed he felt.

  “Get off,” he shouted, and raised his elbow and pushed.

  “Oh no you don't,” the fellow warned, and he held him even closer, half smiling, very pleased with himself. A lean-faced fellow of maybe thirty, red-headed, unshaven, wearing a singlet. Colin could smell the excitement that came off him, a yeasty sourness. When he was satisfied his grip was firm, he leaned back a little and said easily: "So here we are, eh? Just the two ‘v us.” He gave a short laugh, but seemed now to lose concentration, as if he did not know what should come next. Perhaps his arm was tiring and it had occurred to him that he could not go on holding Colin for ever. “I seen you get outa that cab,” he said again. Then he found what it was he really wanted to say. “You din’ think I'd face up to yer, didja? Well, you made a bad mistake, feller. I'm fed up t’ th’ gizzard. I'd rather fucken finish off the both of us.” He said this with passion, his voice rising to a sobbing note, but did not move.

  “Look,” Colin said, "this is crazy. I don't even know who you are.”

  “Don't you? Don't you? Well, that's what you would say.”

  Once again the energy had gone out of him. He swung his head from side to side as if looking out for something. “Only I'm not that much of a mug. I know you've been with ‘er. I wanta hear you say it. Say it, cunt! Bloody say it!”

  These were not so much orders as desperate appeals. When Colin did not respond, the fellow looked about again, and with a forceful motion broke his grip, then stood slumped, his arms hanging. His face was distorted with a pain so naked and hopeless that Colin, who was free now and might have run, was mesmerized. The man raised his voice in a dismal howl. “Say it,” he sobbed. But hopelessly now, as if the words were a spell that had failed to work, or whose purpose he could no longer recall.

  I should get away now, Colin told himself. This is the dangerous bit.

  That other stuff was nothing. Just bluster. This is it. And almost on the thought a knife appeared in the man's hand. He stepped back, the knife flashed, and with a series of anguished cries he began slashing at the freckled, dead-white flesh of his own neck and shoulder and at the dirty singlet, which was immediately drenched with blood.

  “For God's sake!” Colin shouted.

  But the man was now triumphant. He stood at the edge of the pavement with his head thrown back in the light of a streetlamp and wielded the knife in slow motion while Colin, helplessly, watched. “There!" he sobbed, "There! There!"—as if what he had wanted all along was not Colin's life but his attention, and the sobs came as regular as the gushes of his blood.

  Colin, without thinking, made a grab for the knife and felt himself cut.

  There was blood everywhere now, some of it on the man's body, some of it on him. The knife slid away into the gutter and they were locked fiercely together on the pavement, grunting and shouting wordlessly between breaths until, with a mechanical whooping and a pulsing of blue light, a car came screaming to a halt beside them and Colin felt himself hauled skyward by a hefty cop. “Okay, feller,” he was being advised, "you just calm down, eh?” The incident was at an end.

  He was covered with blood. The other man, savagely wounded, was weeping and on his knees.

  It wasn't till he was in the squad car, and his heart had slackened a little, that he caught up with the enormity of the thing. The blood that covered his shirt and jacket in a sticky mess was the stranger's. He was barely scratched.

  “But it doesn’ t make sense, now does it, Colin?” the larger of the two detectives told him. He was speaking gently, with tolerance for a navety that might, after all, be genuine; as one talks to a bemused and stubborn child.

  The room seemed too small for the three of them. There was too much light.

  “Now, tell us again, Colin. You get out of the cab. Why? What was it that upset you? In what way did this Armenian, or Yugoslav, seem threatening?”

  The more often he told it the less probable it became. He saw that. A taxi-driver he had been eager to get away from, at midnight, half a mile from his ho
tel. A perfect stranger who first attacked and abused him and then turned the knife on himself. The only fact he could produce was his identity.

  These sceptical fellows, who had never heard of him of course, were not impressed. “What sort of books, Colin?” the blond one, who was larger, enquired with a sneer. He was called Lindenmeyer, the other Creager.

  After a time they allowed him to ring the Pedersens, and Coralie verified that, yes, he had been with them. They had seen him off in the taxi. The driver was dark. Greek maybe, Lebanese. “Listen, Colin,” she whispered, when they passed the phone to him, "don't tell them anything till we get hold of a lawyer. Eric will be there to bail you out. Don't say a word. And most of all, don't provoke them. You don't know what they're like.”

  Looking sheepishly at the two detectives, he thanked her. They were grinning. Perfectly aware of what Coralie was telling him, they seemed amused by their own reputation—which did not mean that it was undeserved.

  But Coralie was wrong, he did know these men. They were boys he had grown up with, and Lindenmeyer might even have been familiar. It was a name he knew from school.

  He was very blond and bony, and must, in early adolescence, have been girlishly pretty. There was, behind his rather high voice and beefy grin, a hint of fineness savagely repressed. Only with women, Colin thought, might he feel free to reveal it. But of the two, it was Linden-meyer he was wary of. His brutality, like his coarseness, was assumed. Having no necessary cause, it would also have no limit. Creager, more obviously the bully, had no need to make a show. Red Irish and with freckles that in places had turned to open sores, he was all bluster, but too lazy to do more than put a blow in now and then to keep up his name for toughness. It was Lindenmeyer who asked the questions.

  So he claimed to be local. Didn't sound it.

  And had stepped out of nowhere into a situation with which he had absolutely no connection. Well, he was in the clear then.

  Given the state of his clothes and the amount of blood he was covered with, very little of which was his own, and the crusting of it in the cracks of his knuckles and under his nails, there was some justification, he saw, for Lindenmeyer's irony. Blood needs explaining. He recalled, with astonishment now, the sense of elation in which, just before he was hauled off the man, he had been aiming blow after blow at his face.

  “Will he be all right?” he found himself asking, and was uncertain whether the question put him in a better light or a worse.

  It was recorded, but neither Lindenmeyer nor Creager gave him an answer. The role of questioner, here, was theirs.

  “All right, Colin,” Lindenmeyer said for the third or fourth time, "let's go over it again. This taxi-driver, this Armenian or Lebanese—”

  LATER,lying stripped on the cot of a clean cell, he considered his position.

  When he was brought down here he had not been thrown into the communal cell at the end of the corridor, which was crowded and stank and from which, as they passed, came catcalls and curses against the constable who was accompanying him, followed by gobs of spit, but he was alarmed just the same. It was a low throb in him, sign of some larger unrest that he had become part of.

  He wished desperately that they had allowed him to wash. More than his assailant's blood, it was the man's smell, which once it got into his head might be ineradicable, that he felt all over him; the rancidness and close animal stink of self-loathing. He began to tremble with delayed shock. Not for the danger he had been in but for how close he had stood to an anguish so intense that the only escape from it was into self-extinction. When he did fall at last into a fevered sleep he was in a place where there were no walls; his sleep was open to the communal cell opposite, he was surrounded by broken mutterings and cries whose foul breath he took into his lungs and breathed out as protests that found no sound except as echoes in his skull.

  At some point he woke, or half-woke. Three or four black youths were being dragged to the door of his cell, shouting obscenities; but the constable must have thought better of it and pushed them on. There was a scuffle. Hard blows against something soft or hollow. Then a violent eruption as the cell opposite burst into a howling, and again he had in his nostrils the odour of his assailant's sweat. It was overpowering. He started up, shouting, and his cry was immediately taken up in a renewed frenzy of catcalls and yells.

  He did not sleep again. He lay stiff and still, aware of the exchange of heavy night-heat for the clearer heat of day. Light came, and with it the shrill clattering among palm fronds and fig trees of thousands of starlings.

  “Right, mate,” the new duty-officer told him, "you c'n have a bit ‘v a wash. Inspector'll see yer.”

  He stood in the open doorway, severely official, and let Colin pass.

  The working day had begun. The cells were being unlocked. Bleary-eyed but subdued, the night's pick-ups had begun shuffling out: drunks, derelicts, young toughs, barefoot and with tattoos on their calves, who had been hauled out of fist fights just on closing time or from round the doors of discos, thin young Aborigines, one or two with dreadlocks— the agents, or victims or both, of a violence that was random but everywhere on the loose. You had only to step into the path of it to be picked up and whirled about and shattered. It was something he had always known about the place but had allowed himself to take for metaphor. He was being reminded again that it was fact.

  He washed, when his turn came, at the dirty basin, and drew wet fingers through his hair.

  In the metal mirror above the tap he barely recognised himself. The metal distorted, but there was also the puffed eye and thickened lip. He looked, he thought, like a dead ringer of himself who for thirty years had lived a different and coarser life—maybe even that of the man he had been mistaken for.

  The interrogation room appeared different in daylight. Larger. But the real difference was that Lindenmeyer and Creager had been pushed to the edges of it, one lounging in a chair by the typewriter, the other hunched into the window frame. The younger man who occupied the centre immediately offered Colin his hand. His name was McKinley.

  “I'm sorry, Mr. Lattimer,” he said, all affability, "we've finally got things sorted out. You'll be free in just a minute.”

  Without being obvious he made it clear that he knew quite well who he was dealing with, and might even, if pressed, have been able to produce a title.

  Lindenmeyer and Creager watched closely, wearing faces that expressed different styles of contempt—whether for him or for their superior he could not guess.

  Creager might have spent the remainder of the night in the derros’ cell. His tiny blue eyes had disappeared into the beef of his cheeks. He kept hitching his belt over the roll of his belly. Lindenmeyer, too intelligent not to feel that this writer bloke and the inspector made an oaf of him, boiled with resentment. Whatever residue of violence the room contained came from him.

  “The man's out of danger,” McKinley was telling Colin. “Superficial wounds is what the report says. It wasn't a serious attempt.” He cleared his throat. “Mind you, he's still pretty convinced that he's got some grudge against you.”

  The hint of a question in his voice made Colin say very firmly, for perhaps the twentieth time in the last eight hours, "I never saw the man in my life before.”

  McKinley nodded.

  “Well, don't concern yourself. On the evidence,” he said, as if evidence might not be the only thing to go by, "we accept that. The man doesn't, that's all. We're waiting for the psychiatrist's report.”

  Lindenmeyer and Creager were grinning. McKinley paused, regarding him, Colin thought, with anticipation, as if, now that he was officially cleared, he might offer some private explanation of an affair that was still worryingly obscure. McKinley's interest at this point could be thought of as personal, literary—that was the suggestion— and Colin's obligation to explain, that of an author to a loyal but puzzled reader.

  But Colin himself was in the dark. It might have helped, he thought, if he had had a name for the man he ha
d struggled with, held close, beaten, and whose blood and sweat, mingled with his own, had discoloured the water in the dirty handbasin and gone swirling to join the rest of the city's scourings, the accumulated debris and filth of nearly a million souls.

  What he had not been able to wash off was the claim that had been laid upon him. In some ward, in a hospital somewhere in the city, a man lay sedated, physically restrained perhaps, who still inwardly pursued him, consumed with resentment for the harm done to him by a shadowy third party to whom, Colin thought, he too was connected, but in ways so dark and undeclared that they might never be known.

  But if McKinley did have a name, he did not offer it, and Colin knew that he could not ask.

  “I'll just call your friend in,” he said, closing what had been for a moment an open silence.

  Eric was outside and immediately turned to face them, substantial looking in a suit and tie, and already preparing, Colin saw, to take charge. His face was a mixture of concern for an old friend—"Are you okay, Colin?"—and prickly disdain for the ways of local officialdom.

  McKinley too saw it, but stood back, too polite to let his irritation show. His attention was not on Eric but on a woman on the bench opposite, who looked up, and as she did so, met Colin's eye.

  He knew immediately who she must be, and was aware too of the inspector's awakened interest. He was on the watch. Not out of professional interest now, but with that curiosity about human behaviour and its shifts and by-ways that made him both a policeman and a reader.

  She was blonde, and coarse but sexy. He took in the soiled tank-top, the feet, which were dirty, in their high-heeled, patent-leather sandals, and felt a little shameful kick of desire.

  A smile, half-scornful, drew down the corner of her mouth. She had caught the spark of attraction in him that might have confirmed, to a practised onlooker like the inspector, that his assailant's suspicions had to this extent at least been entirely plausible. For a moment they made a triangle, a second one, this woman, the inspector and himself. The tension of the moment was felt by all three.