by David Malouf
Slipping from tree to tree like a native, Ned began to stalk them. There were six adults and some children.
The men, who were young, wore jeans and T-shirts, except for one with hair longer than the others and tied with a sweatband, who wore a singlet and had tattoos. They carried sleeping bags, an esky, and the man with the tattoos had a ghetto-blaster. Two of the women carried babies.
Ned manoeuvred himself into a better position to see what it was that had stopped them.
An echidna, startled by their footfalls on the track, had turned in towards the foot of the stump and, with its spines raised, was burrowing into the ashes and soft earth, showing a challenge, but pretending, since it could not see them, that it was invisible.
“What is it?” one of the women was asking.
“Porcupine,” one of the men told her, and the man with the tattoos corrected him: "Echidna.”
“Gary, come away,” the other woman said, and she hauled out a boy of five or six who was dressed as a space invader and carried a plastic ray-gun.
Ned, very quietly, squatted, took a handful of ashes, and smeared them over his cheeks, forehead, and neck, then took another and smeared his chest.
If I was really a native, he thought, and had a spear, I could drive them off. They don't even know I'm here.
It pleased him that while they had their eyes on the echidna, which was only pretending to be invisible, he had his eye on them and really was invisible, camouflaged with earth and ashes and moving from one to another of the grey and grey-black trunks like a spirit of the place. He was filled with the superior sense of belonging here, of knowing every rock and stump on this hillside as if they were parts of his own body. These others were tourists.
They were on their way to the beach. You could not legally stop them—the land along the shore was public, it belonged to everyone— but this headland and the next as well belonged to Audley and would one day be Ralph's, then his. He felt proprietorial, but responsible too. As soon as the party had moved on, he went and checked on the echidna, which was still burrowing. When he stepped out on to the track again he was surprised to find the space invader there, a sturdy, dark-headed kid with freckles.
“Hi,” the boy said cheerfully. “We're gunna have a bonfire, you can come if you like. My name's Gary, I'm six.”
Ned was furious. It hurt his pride that he had been crept up on and surprised. He was disarmed for a moment by the boy's friendliness and lack of guile, but affronted by his presumption. It wasn't his place to offer invitations here.
The boy meanwhile was regarding him with a frown. “You know what?” he said at last, "you've got stuff all over your face.”
“I know,” Ned told him sharply, "I don't need you to tell me,” and he began to walk away. The space invader followed.
“Don't go,” he shouted, as Ned, arms stiffly at his side, his body pitched forward at an odd, old-mannish angle, began to stride away downhill. “We got sausages. D'you like sausages? We got plenty.”
Ned walked faster.
“We got watermelon, we got cherry cheesecake. Hey, boy,” he shouted, "don't go away. My name's Gary, I already told you. What's yours?”
He was trotting after Ned on his plump little legs. “Hey,” he panted, when he finally caught up, "why are we walking so fast?”
Ned swivelled. “You piss off,” he said from a height.
The boy looked at him as if he might be about to burst into tears, and when Ned turned and started off again, did not follow.
“Ralph!” Ned shouted as soon as he was in sight of the house, "there's a whole heap of people up there going to make a bonfire. Can they?”
Ralph, hearing the note of hysteria in his voice, was tempted to laugh, but Ned was quick to take offence and Ralph was touched, as he often was, by the boy's intense concern about things. He was always in a blaze about something—the Americans in Nicaragua, what the Libs were up to in the Senate. Keeping his own voice even, he said: "Well, it's a free country, Ned. They can have a bonfire if they want. So long as they're careful.”
Ned huffed. He had hoped his father might be more passionate. “Well, I'm going to tell Audley,” he announced. He stalked off.
Audley was on the phone in the sitting room. All morning he had been receiving congratulatory messages, most of them from people who would later be at the party. He stood hunched and with his head bowed, murmuring politenesses into the mouthpiece while, with his eyes screwed up in acute distress, he did a little stamping dance on the carpet and tugged with his free hand at a button on his vest.
Ned waited impatiently; then, when the call went on longer than he had expected, sprawled in an armchair and took up a magazine. At last Audley replaced the receiver. He stood a moment, looking gravely down. Ned, who was still all eagerness and anger, held back.
He was impressed by this grandfather of his, and not only by his reputation; also by the sense he gave, with his deep reserve, of being worthy of it.
Audley was on all occasions formal. Ned liked that. He had a hunger for order that the circumstances of his life frustrated. He wished that Angie and Ralph, whom he otherwise approved of in every way, would insist a little more on the rules. He would have liked to call “sir,” as kids did on TV. But everything around them was very free and easy—maybe because Ralph, when he was younger, had been a hippie.
“How are you, Ned?” Audley said at last, but went on standing, deep in thought. He might have been out in a paddock somewhere, having got there, Ned thought, without even noticing, on one of his walks.
“Audley,” he began, very quietly, but Audley was startled just the same.
“Ah,” he said, "Ned!”
Ned went on bravely: "Do you know there are people on the headland? They want to make a bonfire.”
He watched for Audley's reaction, which did not come, and was surprised how the urgency had gone out of the question, not just out of his voice, which he lowered out of consideration for Audley, but out of what he felt. He had taken on, without being aware of it, some of Audley's subdued gravity.
Audley seemed not to have heard the question. Putting his hand on Ned's head in a gentle, affectionate way, he stood looking down at the boy. “So what do you think of today, eh, Ned?”
Ned was confused. He knew what Audley thought because it was what Ralph thought as well. They were to be non-participants in the national celebrations. “Not wet-blankets,” Ralph had insisted. “If these fellers want an excuse for a good do, I'm not the one to deny them, but it's just another day like any other really, when we've got to get along with one another and keep an eye on the shop.”
It was a view that did not appeal to Ned. It was unheroic. He would, if it could be done with honour, have gone out and waved a flag. He wanted time to have precise turning-points that could be marked and remembered.
“Well,” Audley said now, and turned aside. Ned slumped in his chair. Dissatisfied on that question as on the one he himself had put.
This is how it always is, he raged to himself. They like things left up in the air. They never want anything settled.
Later that morning,and again in the afternoon, he went back to the headland to see what those people were up to.
The first time, the four men, stripped to their bathers, were playing football on the wet beach, making long rugby passes and shouting, tackling, scuffing up sand.
Three of them were hefty fellows with thickened shoulders and thighs. The fourth, the long-haired one who had previously worn a singlet, was slimmer and fast. They were all very white as if they never saw the sun, except that the slim one with the tattoos had a work-tan on his neck and arms that made him look as if he was still wearing the singlet, only now it was cleaner.
The boy was down at the shoreline dragging a wet stick. The two women, lying head to toe opposite one another in the shade, were waving off flies from the babies, who were asleep. They were talking, and every now and then one of them gave a throaty laugh. Ned sat for a long time watching.
When he went back the second time the men were dressed and their hair was wet. They had been surfing and were busy now constructing a bonfire, shouting to one another across great stretches of air and energetically competing to see who could drag out the longest branch and heave it crosswise on to the pile. They laughed a lot and every second word “fuck.”
The two women, each with a child on her hip, were walking along the edge of the tide, almost in silhouette at this hour against the wet sand, which was lit with rays of sunlight that shot out from under the clouds. Oyster-catchers were running away fast from their feet.
Once again he sat for a long time and watched. He wondered how high the bonfire would go before the men tired of hauling dead trees and brush out of the sandhills, and how far, once it was alight, it would be visible out at sea. He admitted now that what he really regretted was that the bonfire was not theirs. It ought to be theirs. The idea of a bonfire on every beach and the whole map of Australia outlined with fire was powerfully exciting to him. The image of it blazed in his head.
He got up and began to walk away, and almost immediately stumbled on the boy, who had been squatting on the slope behind him.
“Hi,” Ned said briskly, and walked on—a kind of reconcilement. It was too late for anything more.
4
UNDERthe influence of his birthday mood, which was sober but good-humoured, and in honour as well of the larger occasion, Audley decided on a walk to town.
He often took such a walk in the afternoon. It helped him think. He could, while strolling along, turn over in his mind the headings of a report he had to write, or prepare one of the speeches that since his retirement were his chief contribution to public life, polishing and repolishing as he walked phrases that would appear on the late-night news bulletins, to be mulled over the morning after by politicians, economists, friends, rivals, and his successors in the various public-service departments he had once had at his command. It was an old trick, this recovery of the harmony between walking pace, our natural andante as he liked to call it, and the rhythms of the mind. “I think best with my kneecaps,” he would tell young reporters, who looked puzzled but scribbled it down just the same. “I recommend it.”
If he didn't feel like walking back he could get a boy from the garage to drive him, or there was always some local, a farmer with his wife and kids or a tradesman with a ute full of barbed wire or paint tins, who would offer him a lift. He was a familiar figure in these parts, traipsing along with his head down, his boots scuffing the dust.
His object was not, as gossip sometimes suggested, the Waruna pub, though he did sometimes drop in there for an hour or so to hear what the locals had to say, but the museum just beyond, the Waruna Folk and History Museum as it was rather grandly called, which was housed in a four-roomed workman's cottage next to the defunct bank.
It had been founded by his grandfather in the early Thirties, with furniture and other knick-knacks from the house and a rare collection of moths and beetles.
Other families over the years had added their own cast-offs and unfashionable bric-a-brac: superannuated washboards and mangles, butter-churns, a hip-bath, tools, toys, photographs. Holiday-makers on their way to the beach resorts further south would stop off to stretch their legs among its familiar but surprising exhibits. It was educational. They would point to a pair of curling-tongs or a shaving-dish that looked as if someone had taken a good-sized bite out of it, a ginger-beer bottle with a glass stopper, a furball as big as a fist that had been found in the stomach of a cat.
But the main body of the collection had come from the Tylers, so that stepping into the dark little rooms where everything was so cramped and crowded was for Audley like re-entering one of the abandoned spaces of his childhood, which had miraculously survived or been resurrected, but with different dimensions now and with all its furnishings rearranged.
The cedar table and twelve dining chairs, for example, that filled the front room, had once stood in the larger dining room at the house, whose windows looked down to the sea, and when Audley seated himself—as he liked to do, though a notice expressly forbade it—in one of the stiff-backed carvers by the wall, and gazed out across the glazed table top, he was disconcerted, startled even, when that view failed to materialize. He could not imagine mealtimes at this table in any other light.
He recalled such occasions vividly. The big people seated round the extended cedar table, he and the other children—his brother, various cousins—at side-tables by the wall.
The table, minus its extensions, was set now with dinner plates from some other household and just the sort of engraved glasses that his grandmother, who was a snob, would have relegated to the back of a cupboard. He could imagine the well-dressed ghosts coming in through the door (and one or two of them, uncles, through the windows) and seating themselves in their accustomed places, a bit surprised by some of the details, as if one of the long string of maids his grandmother found and then let go had made an error, but happy just the same to find themselves back, and taking up immediately the never-ending arguments his grandmother wished they would refrain from—"Not at the table, Gerry, please!"—and which as a boy he had longed to join.
Above the table hung a lamp. It was of an old-fashioned kind that was all the rage again, in coloured glass. He remembered climbing on to his father's shoulders to light it, and from that height seeing the room, as the flame took, spring into a new shape. It had looked foreshortened from up there, as if he had been seeing it as it was now, nearly seventy years later.
What he had failed to notice, on that occasion, was the old fellow in the suit seated on a chair against the wall.
His father's contribution to the museum was a collection of rock specimens and rare fossils, set out now in display-cases in the hallway, each piece labelled in neat copperplate, his father's hand, and the ink so faded it could barely be read. The shell fossils were of exquisite engineering, little spiral staircases in perfect section, the ferns indelible prints.
He had loved these objects as a child. As a young fellow of sixteen or seventeen he had often come here with his father to examine them and been led so deep by his awed contemplation of their age, and all his father had to tell, that he had thought that his fate, his duty, was to become a geologist and solve the mysteries of their land.
They still moved him, these dusty objects, but that particular fate had never been taken up, though it still hovered in his excited imagination, as if the dedication of his life to stones and minerals were still an option of his secretly enduring youth. Would the distinguished geologist he might have become—he had no doubt of the distinction—have been all that different? He doubted it.
Other people saw him, he knew, as if what he was now had been fixed and inevitable, a matter of character. He wished sometimes that he could introduce them to some of his favourites among those other lives he had been drawn to and had abandoned or let go. Like the jazz pianist who, for two or three summers, along with a saxophonist and drummer, had rattled round the countryside in an old Ford, using his left hand to vamp while he reached with the other for a glass—already on the way to an established drunkenness and sore-headed despair that he actually felt on occasion. As if that other self had never quite been dismissed. The museum was full of such loose threads that if he touched them would jerk and lead him back.
On a wall of the little ex-bedroom out the back were three photographs. One of them was of a class from the one-teacher school where he and old Tommy Molloy the head-man out at the Camp, had started school together more than sixty years ago, singing the alphabet and their times-tables together at the same desk. If he poked his head out the window he could see the little verandahed schoolhouse under a pepper tree, in the grounds now of Waruna High.
The photograph had been taken two years before he and Tommy arrived there, in his brother Ralph's year.
He studied the faces. Sitting cross-legged in the front row, holding a slate on which Miss Curry, whose first name
was Esme, had chalked Waruna One Teacher School, 1922, was Tommy's sister Lorraine.
She had been the best fisherman among them: that is what Audley recalled. Once, when the trevally were running, she had caught forty-three at a single go. The sea had been so thick with them that you could have walked on their backs from one side of the cove to the other, and he believed sometimes that they had done just that. It was one of the great occasions of his life.
Lorraine had gone off a year later to be a domestic somewhere. Her eyes in the photograph looked right through you. So alive and black you might think they were beyond defeat. Well, time had known better.
He set his fingertip to the glass—also forbidden, of course. The print it left was a mist of infinitesimal ghostly drops that in a moment faded without trace.
But it was something other than this old photograph, however moving he found it, that drew him to this room. In a display of children's toys—a jigsaw puzzle that some local handyman had cut with a fine jigsaw, a pipe for blowing bubbles, some articulated animals from a Noah's Ark—was a set of knucklebones. He had won them more than sixty years ago from a boy called Arden Robinson who, the year he was nine, had come to stay with neighbours for the Christmas holidays and for whom he had formed an affection that for five whole weeks had kept him in eager and painful expectation.
He had not meant to win. He had meant to give the knucklebones up as a token of the softness he felt, the lapse in him of the belief that he was the only one in the world who mattered. As a hostage to what he had already begun to think of as The Future. A sacrifice flung down to nameless but powerful gods.
But he had won after all. The holidays came to an end, he had never seen Arden Robinson again. He had kept the knucklebones by him as a reminder, then five years ago had given them over, his bones as he called them, into public custody, which was in some ways the most hidden, the most private place of all. It would be nice, he sometimes thought, if he could give himself as well.
