by David Malouf
Three years ago she had discovered, or rediscovered, the church— not her old one, but a church of a newer and more personal sort—and had been trying ever since to bring Harry in.
She gave him her own version of confessions she had heard people make of the most amazing sins and of miraculous conversions and cures. She grieved over the prospect of their having, on the last day, to go different ways, the sheep's path or the goat's. She evoked in terms that distressed him a Lord Jesus who seemed to stand on pretty much the same terms in her life as their cats, Peach and Snowy, or her friends from the Temple, Eadie and Mrs. McVie, except that she saw Him, Harry felt, as a secret child now grown to difficult manhood that she had never told him about and who sat between them, invisible but demanding, at every meal.
Harry, who would have defended her garrulous piety against all corners, regarded it himself as a blessd shame. She was a good woman spoiled.
Now, when she started up again, he vanished into himself, and while she chattered on in the background, slipped quietly away. Down the back steps to his veggies, to be on his own for a bit. To feel in his hands the special crumbliness and moisture of the soil down there and watch, as at a show, the antics of the lighting system in their empty house, ghosting their lives to fool burglars who might not be fooled.
Harry woke.His years on the paper run had made him a light sleeper. But with no traffic sounds to give the clue, no night-trains passing, you lost track. When he looked at his watch it was just eleven.
He got up, meaning to slip outside and take a leak. But when he set his hand to the doorknob, with the uncanniness of a dream-happening, it turned of its own accord.
The young fellow who stood on the step was as startled as Harry was.
In all that emptiness, with not a house for a hundred miles in any direction and in the dead of night, they had come at the same moment to opposite sides of the caravan door: Harry from sleep, this youth in the open shirt from—but Harry couldn't imagine where he had sprung from. They faced one another like sleepers whose dreams had crossed, and the youth, to cover his amazement, said “Hi” and gave a nervous giggle.
He was blond, with the beginnings of a beard. Below him in the dark was a woman with a baby. She was rocking it in a way that struck Harry as odd. She looked impatient. At her side was a boy of ten or so, sucking his thumb.
“What is it?” Harry asked, keeping his voice low so as not to wake May. “Are you lost?”
He had barely formulated the question, which was meant to fit this midnight occasion to a world that was normal, a late call by neighbours who were in trouble, when the young man showed his hand. It held a gun.
Still not convinced of the absolute reality of what was happening, Harry stepped back into the narrow space between their stove and the dwarf refrigerator, and in a moment they were all in there with him— the youth, the woman with the baby, the boy, whose loud-mouthed breathing was the only sound among them. Harry's chief concern still was that they should not wake May.
The gunman was a good-looking young fellow of maybe twenty. He wore boardshorts and a shirt with pineapples on a background that had once been red but showed threads now of a paler colour from too much washing. He was barefoot, but so scrubbed and clean that you could smell the soap on him under the fresh sweat. He was sweating.
The woman was older. She too was barefoot, but what you thought in her case was that she lacked shoes.
As for the ten-year-old, with his heavy lids and open-mouthed, asthmatic breathing, they must simply have found him somewhere along the way. He resembled neither one of them and looked as if he had fallen straight off the moon. He clung to the woman's skirt, and was, Harry decided, either dog-tired or some sort of dill. He had his thumb in his mouth and his eyelids fluttered as if he was about to fall asleep on his feet.
“Hey,” the youth said, suddenly alert.
Down at the sleeping end, all pink and nylon-soft in her ruffles, May had sat bolt upright.
“Harry,” she said accusingly, "what are you doing? Who are those people?”
“It's all right, love,” he told her.
“Harry,” she said again, only louder.
The youth gave his nervous giggle. “All right,” he said, "you can get outa there.”
Not yet clear about the situation, May looked at Harry.
“Do as he says,” Harry told her mildly.
Still tender from sleep, she began to grope for her glasses, and he felt a wave of odd affection for her. She had been preparing to give this young fellow a serve.
“You can leave those,” the youth told her. “I said leave ‘em! Are you deaf or what?”
She saw the gun then, and foggily, behind this brutal boy in the red shirt, the others, the woman with the baby.
“Harry,” she said breathlessly, "who are these people?”
He took a step towards her. It was, he knew, her inability to see properly that most unnerved her. Looking past the man, which was a way also of denying the presence of the gun, she addressed the shadowy woman, but her voice had an edge to it. “What is it?” she asked. “Is your baby sick?”
The woman ignored her. Rocking the baby a little, she turned away and told the youth fiercely: "Get it over with, will ya? Get ‘em outa here.”
May, who had spoken as woman to woman, was deeply offended. But the woman's speaking up at last gave life to the boy.
“I'm hungry,” he whined into her skirt. “Mummy? I'm hungreee!” His eye had caught the bowl of fruit on their fold-up table. “I wanna banana!”
“Shuddup, Dale,” the woman told him, and put her elbow into his head.
“You can have a banana, dear,” May told him.
She turned to the one with the gun.
“Can he have a banana?”
The child looked up quickly, then grabbed.
“Say ta to the nice lady, Dale,” said the youth, in a voice rich with mockery.
But the boy, who really was simple-minded, lowered the banana, gaped a moment, and said sweetly: "Thank you very much.”
The youth laughed outright.
“Now,” he said, and there was no more humour, "get over here.”
He made way for them and they passed him while the woman and the boy, who was occupied with the peeling of his banana, passed behind. So now it was May and Harry who were squeezed in at the entrance end.
“Right,” the youth said. “Now—” He was working up the energy in himself. He seemed afraid it might lapse. “The car keys. Where are they?”
Harry felt a rush of hot anger.
Look, feller, he wanted to protest, I paid thirty-three thousand bucks for that car. You just fuck off. But May's hand touched his elbow, and instead he made a gesture towards the fruit bowl where the keys sat—now, why do we keep them there?—among the apples and oranges.
“Get ‘em, Lou.”
The woman hitched the baby over her shoulder so that it stirred and burbled, and was just about to reach for the keys when she saw what the boy was up to and let out a cry. “Hey you, Dale, leave that, you little bugger. I said leave it!”
She made a swipe at him, but the boy, who was more agile than he looked, ducked away under the youth's arm, crowing and waving a magazine.
“Fuck you, Dale,” the woman shouted after him.
In her plunge to cut him off she had woken the baby, which now began to squall, filling the constricted space of the caravan with screams.
“Shut it up, willya?” the youth told her. “And you, Dale, belt up, or I'll clip y’ one. Gimme that.” He made a grab for the magazine, but the boy held on. “I said, give it to me!”
“No, Kenny, no, it's mine. I found it.”
They struggled, the man cursing, and at last he wrenched it away. The boy yowled, saying over and over with a deep sense of grievance: "It's not fair, it's not fair, Kenny. I'm the one that found it. It's mine.”
Harry was flooded with shame. The youth, using the gun, was turning the pages of the thing.
&n
bsp; “Someone left it in a caf,” Harry explained weakly. “Under a seat.”
The youth was incensed. He blazed with indignation. “See this, Lou? See what the kid found?”
But the woman gave him only the briefest glance. She was preoccupied with the baby. Moving back and forth in the space between the bunks, she was rocking the child and sweet-talking it in the wordless, universal dialect, somewhere between syllabic spell-weaving and an archaic drone, that women fall into on such occasions and which sets them impressively apart. The others were hushed. May, lowering her voice to a whisper, said: "Look here, if you're in some sort of trouble— I mean—” She indicated the gun. “There's no need of that.”
But the youth had a second weapon now. “You shut up,” he told her fiercely. “Just you shut up. You're the ones who've got trouble. What about this, then?” and he shook the magazine at her.
She looked briefly, then away. She understood the youth's outrage because she shared it. When he held the thing out to her she shook her head, but he was implacable.
“I said, look!" he hissed.
Because of the woman's trouble with the baby he had lowered his voice again, but the savagery of it was terrible. He brandished the thing in her face and Harry groaned.
“Is this the sort of thing you people are into?”
But the ten-year-old, excited now beyond all fear of chastisement, could no longer contain himself.
“I seen it,” he crowed.
“Shuddup, Dale.”
“I seen it …”
“I'll knock the bloody daylights out of you if you don't belt up!”
“A cunt, it's a cunt. Cunt, cunt, cunt!”
When the youth hit him he fell sideways, howling, and clutched his ear.
“There,” the youth said in a fury, swinging back to them, "you see what you made me do? Come here, Dale, and stop whinging Come on. Come on here.” But the boy had fled to his mother's skirts and was racked with sobs. The baby shrieked worse than ever. “Jesus,” the youth shouted, "you make me sick! Dale,” he said, "come here, mate, I didn't mean it, eh? Come here.”
The boy met his eye and after a moment moved towards him, still sniffling. The youth put his hand on the back of the child's neck and drew him in. “There,” he said. “Now, you're not hurt, are you?” The boy, his thumb back in his mouth, leaned into him. The youth sighed.
“Look here,” May began. But before she could form another word the youth's arm shot out, an edge of metal struck her, “Oh God,” she said as she went down.
“That's enough out of you,” the youth was yelling. “That's the last you get to say.”
She thought Harry was about to move, and she put out her hand to stop him. “No, no,” she shouted, "don't. It's all right—I'm all right.” The youth, in a kind of panic now, was pushing the gun into the soft of Harry's belly. May, on her knees, tasted salt, put her fingers to her mouth and felt blood.
“All right, now,” the youth was saying. He was calming himself, he calmed. But she could smell his sweat. “You can get up now. We're going outside.”
She looked up then and saw that it made no difference that he was calm. That there was a baby here and that the mother was concerned to get it to sleep. Or that he was so clean-looking, and strict.
She got to her feet without help and went past him on her own legs, though wobbling a little, down the one step into the dark.
The tropical night they had stepped into had a softness that struck Harry like a moment out of his boyhood.
There were stars. They were huge, and so close and heavy-looking that you wondered how they could hold themselves up.
It seemed so personal, this sky. He thought of stepping out as a kid to take a piss from the back verandah and as he sent his jet this way and that looking idly for Venus, or Aldebaran, or the Cross. I could do with a piss right now, he thought, I really need it. It's what I got up for.
They were like little mirrors up there. That's what he had sometimes thought as he came out in the winter dark to load up for his round. If you looked hard enough, every event that was being enacted over all this side of the earth, even the smallest, would be reflected there. Even this one, he thought.
He took May's hand and she clutched it hard. He felt her weight go soft against him.
The youth was urging them on over rough terrain towards a patch of darker scrub further in from the road. Sometimes behind them, but most often half-turned and waiting ahead, he could barely contain his impatience at their clumsiness as, heavy and tender-footed, they moved at a jolting pace over the stony ground. When May caught her nightie on a thorn and Harry tried to detach it, the youth made a hissing sound and came back and ripped it clear.
No words passed between them. Harry felt a terrible longing to have the youth speak again, say something. Words you could measure. You knew where they were tending. With silence you were in the open with no limits. But when the fellow stopped at last and turned and stood waiting for them to catch up, it wasn't a particular point in the silence that they had come to. A place thirty yards back might have done equally well, or thirty or a hundred yards further on. Harry saw with clarity that the distance the youth had been measuring had to do with his reluctance to get to the point, and was in himself.
The gun hung at the end of his arm. He seemed drained now of all energy.
“All right,” he said hoarsely, "this'll do. Over here.”
It was May he was looking at.
“Yes,” he told her. “You.”
Harry felt her let go of his hand then, as the youth had directed, but knew she had already parted from him minutes back, when she had begun, with her lips moving in silence, to pray. She took three steps to where the youth was standing, his face turned away now, and Harry stretched his hand out towards her.
“May,” he said, but only in his head.
It was the beginning of a sentence that if he embarked on it, and were to say all he wanted her to know and understand in justification of himself and of what he felt, would have no end. The long tale of his inadequacies. Of resolutions unkept, words unspoken, demands whose crudeness, he knew, had never been acceptable to her but which for him were one form of his love—the most urgent, the most difficult. Little phrases and formulae that were not entirely without meaning just because they were common and had been so often repeated.
She was kneeling now, her nightie rucked round her thighs. The youth leaned towards her. Very attentive, utterly concentrated. Her fingers touched the edge of his pineapple shirt.
Harry watched immobilised, and the wide-eyed, faraway look she cast back at him recalled something he had seen on television, a baby seal about to be clubbed. An agonized cry broke from his throat.
But she was already too far off. She shook her head, as if this were the separation she had all this time been warning him of. Then went back to him.
He leaned closer and for a moment they made a single figure. He whispered something to her that Harry, whose whole being strained towards it, could not catch.
The report was sharp, close, not loud.
“Mayyeee,” Harry cried again, out of a dumb, inconsolable grief that would last now for the rest of his life, and an infinite regret, not only for her but for all those women feeling for the lump in their breast, and the ones who had lost kiddies, and those who had never had them and for that boy sending his piss out in an exuberant stream into the dark, his eyes on Aldebaran, and for the last scene at Todgers, that unruly Eden, which he would never get back to now, and for his garden choked with weeds. He meant to hurl himself at the youth. But before he could do so was lifted clean off his feet by a force greater than anything he could ever have imagined, and rolled sideways among stones that after a moment cut hard into his cheek. They were a surprise, those stones. Usually he was careful about them. Bad for the mower.
He would have flung his arms out then to feel for her comfortable softness in the bed, but the distances were enormous and no fence in any direction.
&n
bsp; Her name was still in his mouth. Warm, dark, filling it, flowing out.
The youth stood.He was a swarming column. His feet had taken root in the earth.
Darkness was trembling away from the metal, which was hot and hung down from the end of his arm. The force it contained had flung these two bodies down at angles before him and was pulsing away in circles to the edges of the earth.
He tilted his head up. There were stars. Their living but dead light beat down and fell weakly upon him.
He looked towards the highway. The car. Behind it the caravan. Lou and the kids in a close group, waiting.
He felt too heavy to move. There was such a swarming in him. Every drop of blood in him was pressing against the surface of his skin—in his hands, his forearms with their gorged veins, his belly, the calves of his legs, his feet on the stony ground. Every drop of it holding him by force of gravity to where he stood, and might go on standing till dawn if he couldn't pull himself away. Yet he had no wish to step on past this moment, to move away from it into whatever was to come.
But the moment too was intolerable. If he allowed it to go on any longer he would be crushed.
He launched himself at the air and broke through into the next minute that was waiting to carry him on. Then turned to make sure that he wasn't still standing there on the spot.
He made quickly now for the car and the group his family made, dark and close, beside the taller darkness of the pine.
Blacksoil Country
This is blacksoil country. Open, empty, crowded with ghosts, figures hidden away in the folds of it who are there, who are here, even if they are not visible and no one knows it but a few who look up suddenly into a blaze of sunlight and feel the hair crawl on their neck and know they are not the only ones. That they are being watched or tracked. They'll go on then with a sense for a moment that their body, as it goes, leaves no dent in the air.
