The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  Her younger brother, Brian, who was fourteen, spent all his time in the camouflage battledress of his school cadet corps, including a khaki net that he wore round his shoulders like a shawl.

  Sometimes he wrapped his head in it and stalked the corridors of the house in his big boots, moving warily through an atmosphere of damp heat and dripping bamboo while the boards under the linoleum creaked. He even wore the uniform when he was practising shots out in the yard at their basketball ring, and once, looking into his room, she saw him, his face swathed in the net, sitting crouched under the desk-lamp, doing his maths homework. Did he sleep in it?

  Only once did she see him when he wasn't in full rig. He had taken the jacket off to chop wood in the yard. She was shocked by his thinness and by the whiteness of his hairless arms and chest.

  At breakfast she asked, "Don't you ever take it off?”

  He grunted, his face in a bowl of cornflakes.

  “Does he ever wash?” she asked her mother.

  Her mother looked at him and frowned, as if she were seeing this warrior who had seated himself at her kitchen table for the first time.

  “Brian,” she said wearily, "a shower! Tomorrow, eh? Did you hear what I said?”

  “Huh,” he grunted.

  Her sister, Jess, who was two years younger but the same height, worshipped him. She longed for a uniform and was sometimes allowed to wrap her head in the camouflage net while they practised shots at the ring. They never stopped sniping at one another and appealing to her mother to adjudicate.

  On the Saturday she went off with her mother to a wedding. In the yard of the reception hall at the School of Arts they ran into Mrs. Preston, who was a guest at the wedding and the mother of her oldest friend, Jodie. She and Jodie had been at school together.

  “Oh, didn't you hear?” Mrs. Preston told her. “Jodie's married. They're living out at Parkes. Clive—her husband—is in the railways.”

  “And Jodie?” Sally asked. She had been the wildest of their group. She was surprised to hear that Jodie was married.

  Mrs. Preston looked beatific. “Jodie,” she told them, "is getting on with her cake decoration.”

  Today's wedding, as usual up here, was a very grand affair: three bridesmaids attended by groomsmen in suits of the same pastel blue. All shoulders, and uncomfortable with their button-holes and formal bow ties, they had played rugby with the groom. One of them, Sally noticed, fooled about a lot. He was a broad-faced, well-set-up fellow with a full mouth, but otherwise very square and manly. He had a thatch of blond hair that would not stay down, and kept beating at it with the flat of his hand. He got drunk on the cheap champagne and made bawdy remarks that people laughed at, and chatted up all the girls, and was at every moment in a state of high excitement, but in the photographs when they were developed looked dark, almost surly. This was surprising.

  “Who's this?” she asked her mother.

  “Oh, that's Brad Jenkins; don't you remember him?”

  “No,” she said. “I don't think so. Should I?”

  “Works down at McKinnon's Hardware. Used to work for Jack Blade at the service station. Don't you remember him?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Poor boy, his wife left him. Lives out Dugan way with two little kiddies. It can't be much fun.”

  “Why?” she asked, examining the photo. “Why did she leave?”

  “Who knows? Just packed up one day and when he got home she was gone. People say she ran off with a fellow she was engaged to before Brad. You know, she got pregnant to Brad, and—” Her mother consulted the photograph. “Maybe he isn't as nice as he looks,” she said. “Sometime these happy-go-lucky fellers—”

  She didn't finish. She was thinking, Sally knew, of their father, who had been nice-looking and charming enough but grew sullen when there were no more hearts to win, and more and more disappointed with himself, and angry with them, and beat their mother, and at last, when they were still quite small, took off.

  Sally, with her new understanding of these things, threw her arms around her mother, who was too surprised by this burst of affection to resist.

  “Lordy, Lordy,” Sally said to herself in the old black mammy's voice she used for one set of exchanges with herself, "life is saaad.”

  In the afternoons she had taken to going for long walks over the low, rather treeless hills. It pleased her, after so many months in the city, to be in the open again, alone and with no one to consider but herself.

  The air in these late-spring days had a particular softness. There were birds about, there was the scent of blossom. She felt a lightening of her spirits that was more, she thought, than just a response to the soft weather. She was beginning to recover some of her old good humour in the face of what life presented, its sly indignities. The errors she had made need not, after all, be fatal. “Things will turn out all right, I'll survive. I'm young, I'm tougher than I look.”

  This was the way she argued with herself as she strode out under the high clouds, with the rolling landscape before her of low hills and willow-fringed creeks and their many bridges.

  One day, when she was out later than usual and had turned back because the sky far to the west had darkened and was growling, she was overtaken on the white-dust road by a Ford Falcon that tooted its horn, went past, then came to a halt and stood waiting for her to catch up. A dirty-blond head appeared at the window. “Want a lift?”

  “No thanks,” she called, still twenty yards off. “I'm walking.”

  “You'll get drenched,” the voice told her. “Gunna be a storm.”

  When she came level she saw who it was. She might not have recognised him without the blue suit and groomsman's bow tie, but it was him all right. Same unruly head of hair, same look of broad-faced amusement.

  “That's all right,” she told him. “I'll risk it.”

  He looked at her, his eyes laughing. “Okay,” he said, "suit yourself. We don't mind, do we, Lou?”

  She saw then that there was a child in the back, a boy about four years old, and a baby strapped in beside him and slumped sideways, sleeping.

  “No,” the boy shouted, "we don't mind. We got ourselves, eh?” He laughed and repeated it. It was a formula.

  “That's right,” the man said.

  “Hi,” said Sally, ducking her head to be on a level with the boy.

  “Hi,” the boy said, suddenly shy.

  They looked at one another for a moment, then he said, shouting: "Hey, why don't you ride with us? We're not goin’ far.”

  “Where?” she asked, "where are you going?”

  “Anywhere! We're ridin’ the baby. She likes it, it stops ‘er screamin'. We just ride ‘er and she stops. Anywhere we like. All over. We like havin’ people ride with us, don't we, Brad?”

  “Sometimes,” the man said. “It depends.”

  “We like girls,” the boy shouted.

  The first drops of rain began to fall. They bounced in big splashes off the roof of the car.

  “All right,” Sally said, "I'll ride with you for a bit,” and she ran round the back of the car and got in.

  “Well,” he said to the boy, "we got lucky, eh?”

  “We did,” the boy crowed, "this time we got lucky.”

  “Brad Jenkins,” the man told her, starting the car up. “And that's Lou and Mandy”

  “I'm four,” the boy announced, "an’ Mandy's one. Nearly. Our mum ran off an’ left us. He's our dad.”

  She looked at the man. Oh Delilah, that mouth! she thought. He lifted an eyebrow and gave a slow grin. “Reuters,” he said, "all the news as soon as it happens. That's enough, eh, Lou? We don't want to give away all our secrets.”

  “What secrets?” the boy shouted. “What secrets, Daddy? Have we got secrets?”

  “It's true,” he told her, still grinning. “No secrets.”

  The boy looked puzzled. Something was going on here that he didn't get. “Hey,” he said, "you didn't tell us your name.”

  “Sally,�
� she told him. And added for the man's benefit, "Prentiss.”

  “I know,” he said. “Jumbo's wedding.”

  Almost immediately the heavens opened up and water began pouring into her lap. Not just a few drops, but a torrent.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She shook her head. There was not much use complaining. The car swooped up and down the low hills.

  “Hey, Brad,” the boy shouted over the sound of the storm, "are we gunna take Sally to our house? Like the last one?”

  “Steady on,” the man told him. “She'll think we're kidnappers.”

  “We are. We're kidnappers.”

  “Don't worry,” he told her seriously. But she wasn't worried. It amused her to think of him riding round the countryside letting Lou do the talking for him, using the kids as bait. She didn't expect to find herself tied up at the back of a barn.

  “He goes on like that all the time. Non-stop.”

  “What?” The boy shouted. “Was that about me?”

  “Yes it was,” the man told him. “I said you talk too much.”

  “I do, don't I?” the boy said. He was very pleased with himself. “I'm a chatterbox.”

  “Okay, now, a bit of silence, eh? While we work out what we're doin'. You're soaked,” he told Sally. “We could get you some dry clothes if you like. I could take you back after we've eaten. We'd be goin’ out anyway t’ get the baby to sleep—No, Lou,” he told the boy, who was trying to interrupt, "I'll handle it. It's true, we would like it. I'm a pretty good cook.”

  She wasn't taken in by any of this and he didn't expect her to be. Part of his charm, she saw, was that he expected you to see through him and become complicit in what all this playfulness, with its hidden urgencies, might lead to. But nothing else had happened to her in the last week.

  “Okay,” she said. “But you're looking after me, eh, Lou?”

  “Am I? Am I, Brad? What for?”

  “It's all right, mate,” he told him, "she's jokin',” and he gave her a bold, shy look that was meant to disguise with boyish diffidence his easy assurance that she was not.

  When they got there it proved to be a house on wheels, a portable barrack-block for workers on the line. Long and narrow, like a stranded railway carriage, it consisted of a dozen rooms all of the same size along a single corridor, with a kitchen unit at one end and a shower and a couple of toilets at the other. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the land, all washed and dripping, glowed under a golden sky.

  “Well,” he said, "this is it—nice, eh? We aren't cramped. Lots of room for expansion, if you'd like to move in. We can put up any number. We could open a hotel.”

  Only four of the rooms were in use. The others, when she looked in, were thick with dust, the little square windows grimed with months, maybe years, of muck. One or two of them had old pin-ups on the walls. Another was piled with dusty cartons and magazines, and there were tools, several shovels, and a pick or two in a pile in one corner.

  “That's it,” he told her; "have a poke around. I'll find something for you to put on in a minute while we dry your clothes.”

  It was true. She was soaked. Her hair was dripping.

  He was kneeling while he got Lou's wet shoes off. The baby was gurgling in an armchair.

  “Sorry,” he said; "take a towel. In that basket there—it's clean—and dry your hair. Children can't wait.”

  After a minute, with the children settled: "You watch baby for a bit,” he told Lou and, soft-footed in his socks, led Sally two doors down the corridor to a bedroom.

  As soon as she stepped in, though he was careful to leave the door open, she felt the change in him; a heightening of his physical presence, a heat that glowed under his clothes, out of the open-necked shirt, and a wet-grass smell that was his excited sweat. She recalled what her mother had said: "Two kids—that can't be much fun,” and was impressed by how easily her mother had found, in that word fun, just the light in which he should be looked at. What was essential in him, what you might need to take most seriously in him, was a capa- city he had for being light-spirited, for making himself easy with the world.

  “Well,” he said, breaking the tension between them, "let's see what we've got.”

  He found a pair of jeans in one drawer—his, she guessed, but they were clean enough—and among a jumble of T-shirts and jumpers in another, a woollen shirt, also his. He put his face into it and smelled to see if it was clean.

  “Okay? Will they do?” he asked. “I've got t’ look after the baby now.” He hovered a moment, hesitant, apologetic, appealing to her to understand that he was not entirely free.

  She closed the door behind him, but it was unnecessary really, and as soon as she did so she knew it was not to preserve her own privacy but so that she could peek a little into his. She changed quickly, then opened the door of the wardrobe.

  Dresses, all neatly on hangers, and at the bottom a pile of shoes. In a drawer, jeans, shirts, all ironed and folded. His wife's clothes. Why hadn't he offered her something from here?

  But she could see why. All this was untouched.

  And what had she expected? To find them torn from their hangers and ripped? She felt a sadness in these things. In their emptiness. In their remaining just as the woman had left them, untouched. No, not untouched—she could imagine him opening the wardrobe and letting his hand move among them. Undisturbed. His own things, as she had seen when he found the shirt for her, were a mess.

  She opened the drawer again, took up one of his T-shirts, and held it to her face; saw the girlie magazine underneath, and the stiff, crumpled handkerchief.

  “How's it going?” he called.

  “Fine,” she said, closing the drawer.

  “We'll toss these in the drier,” he said, when she emerged with her pile of wet clothes.

  “I will! I will!” Lou shouted, and rushed to take them from her.

  “It's okay,” he said, "he knows how t’ work it. I've got to bathe the baby. Do you mind? Then I'll get us some tea.”

  She watched while he sat the baby in a tub of warm water and washed her, supporting her very gently with one hand while he soaped and splashed with the other. He spoke to the baby, who crowed and gurgled, soft-talking her, and was absorbed. The habitual nature of what he was doing absorbed him and for moments at a time he seemed unaware of her presence. But at others he grew self-conscious, and the soft-talk, the way he handled the baby, she felt, was for her. Or perhaps it was simply that she was aware of him.

  The jeans she wore, which were too big for her, were his. So was the shirt. Her own clothes were tumbling away in the drier.

  Lou had come back. With the baby's fresh clothes in his lap, he was sitting very quietly watching them both. He too was subdued.

  “Is she gunna stay?” he asked at last.

  The man cast her one of his shy looks. “I don't know,” he said. “Why don't you ask her.”

  “Are you?” the boy asked.

  “We'll see,” she said.

  The man turned away, but was smiling, she knew, and, holding the baby high, smacked a kiss on its wet belly. The baby laughed.

  “Okay, Lou,” he said when the child was dried and set down, "you can take over.”

  “We're a team,” he told her.

  “Oh, I can see that,” she said.

  She did stay,and did not hold it against him that he was so obviously pleased with himself, and so eager to show how good he was—he was—and that it wasn't because of thatthat his wife had left.

  What was it then? she wondered. Why did she? Would she too find out?

  Lying awake beside him, this almost stranger with his warmth against her, listening to the depth of his breathing, she was aware of the watchers she would have to deal with: the ghostly versions of Hedda and Rosalind and Blanche Du Bois waiting silently in the dark for her breath to release them. Behind the flimsy pine door of the wardrobe, just feet away, the rows of empty frocks.

  Then there was the hurt she ha
d felt in him. She could heal that. It seemed to her, at this moment, that she wanted nothing more in the world than to be his healing. She did not see, or not immediately, that his presenting himself to her in this light, with so much tremulous need, and when he felt her response to it, so much commanding passion, might be her healing as well.

  Sometime in the night she woke to find him gone, and when he came back again he had the baby.

  “Sorry,” he whispered, as he set it down in the bed between them. “Do you mind?” He lay down again holding the child close to his chest, cradling its head.

  So there was that, too.

  She began to laugh.

  “What is it?” he asked; "what's so funny? She won't be in the way. You go on back t’ sleep. I'm used to it.” And reaching across the baby, he had another hand for her, his fingers gently stroking her cheek.

  Lordy, Lordy, she said to herself, looking at the two of them, the rough thatch of his blond head, the baby nestling into the warmth of him, snuffing his scent, burrowing deep into the familiar bulk of him.

  Life is so—

  But she was not sure that she believed, quite yet, in such happy turnabouts, and feared it might be tempting fate if she were to find a word, a new one, to finish the phrase. Instead she too snuggled down and let herself float free on the unloaded breath.

  Jacko's Reach

  So it is settled.Jacko's Reach, our last pocket of scrub, has been won for progress. It is to be cleared and built on. Eighteen months from now, after the usual period of mud pies and mechanical shovels and cranes, we will have a new shopping mall, with a skateboard ramp for young daredevils, two floodlit courts for night tennis and, on the river side, a Heritage Walk laid out with native hybrids. Our sterner citizens and their wives will sleep safe at last in a world that no longer offers encouragement to the derelicts who gather there with a carton of cheap wine or a bottle of metho, the dumpers of illegal garbage, feral cats, and the few local Aborigines who claim an affinity with the place that may or may not be mystical.