by David Malouf
Occasionally, driving out to collect the keys, she had had a cup of tea in Ellie's kitchen, had sat at the rickety table telling herself, in a self-conscious way: I'm having a cup of tea in the house of a black person.
What she felt now, with a kind of queasiness, was how slight and self-dramatising her own turmoils were, how she exaggerated all her feelings, took offence, got angry, wept too easily, and all about what?
“See you, El,” she said, very lightly touching the woman's hand. She pushed through to where Angie stood.
“Listen,” she said, "can we get out of here? I'm being pursued.”
Angie looked interested. “Who by?”
“You know who,” she said. “He's got that look. He keeps—hovering.” She frowned. This was only half the truth.
Angie laughed. “Come on,” she said. “Let's go down to the beach.”
When Audley returned to the deck, a moment later, Fran was nowhere to be found. He was disappointed. There were things he wanted to ask—things he wanted to say to her.
He set the glass of wine on the rails, an offering, and sat on a chair beside it.
He would have liked to consult her about one or two things. About Clem. About his own life. About Death: would she know anything about that? About love as well, carnal love. Which he thought sometimes he had failed to experience or understand.
Absent-mindedly, he took the glass he had brought for her— forbidden, of course—and sipped, then sipped again. Just as well, he thought, that Madge wasn't around!
6
From the headland above, the sea was flat moonlight all the way to the horizon, but down in the cove among the rocks, almost below sea-level, it rose up white out of the close dark, heaped itself in the narrow opening, then came at them with a rush. Fran leapt back at first, up the shelving sand. “I don't want to get wet!” She had to yell against the sea as well as get out of the way of it. But when she saw how Angie just let the light wash in around her ankles, then higher, darkening all the lower part of her skirt, she laughed and gave in, but did tuck her dress up. It was grey silk and came to her calves. She did not want it spoiled.
They walked together, Angie half a head taller, along the wet beach, their heels leaving phosphorescent prints, and laughed, talked, regaled one another with stories.
It was a secret place down here. With the sea on one side and the cliffs on the other, you were walled in, but the clouds were so high tonight and the air so good in your lungs that you didn't feel its narrowness, only a deep privacy.
“Do you know this Cedric What's-his-name?” Fran asked after a time. “Pohl—Cedric Pohl. Isn't that a hoot?”
She disguised the spurt of excitement, of danger she felt at saying the name twice over. “He's a good-looking boy, isn't he?”
“He isn't a boy,” Angie said. “He's thirty-three.”
“He asked if he could drive back with me.”
“I thought you were staying.”
“No. That was a mistake. I can't stay.”
They walked on in silence.
“Actually,” Angie said at last, "he's a bit of a shit.”
“Who is?”
“Your Cedric Pohl.”
“He isn't mine,” Fran said, but it exhilarated her to be speaking of him in these terms.
“So,” she said when a decent interval had elapsed, "what do you know about him? He's married, I suppose.”
“Was.”
“Well, that's nothing against him.”
“She left him and took the kids. He was two-timing her.”
Fran gave a little laugh, then thought better of it. “Well,” she said, "I haven't committed myself. He can go back with the Bergs.”
They came round the edge of the knoll and once again the sea was before them.
A slope, low dunes held together by pigface and spiky grass, led down to the beach. On any other occasion they would have hauled up their skirts at this point and sprinted, but the beach was already occupied. There was a party down there round a leaping fire. They made a face at one another, lifted their skirts like little girls preparing to pee in the open (was that what gave the moment an air of the deliciously forbidden and set them giggling?) and sat plump down in the cool sand to spy.
The fire had been built in the most prodigal way, a great unsteady pyramid of flames. A man with a sleeping bag round his shoulders was tending it, occasionally tossing on a branch but otherwise simply contemplating it, watching the sparks fly up and the nest of heat at its centre breathe and glow. Something in his actions suggested a trancelike meditation, as if the pyre had drawn his mind out of him and he were living now as the fire did, subdued to its being but also feeding his and the fire's needs. Watching him you too felt subdued yet invigorated, taken out of yourself into its overwhelming presence.
They sat with their arms round their knees, unspeaking, and the silence between them deepened. Drawn in by the slow gestures of the man as he tossed branch after branch on to the pyre—and, like him, by the pulse of the fire itself, which was responding in waves to the breeze that came in from the sea, and which they felt on the hairs of their arms—they might have stepped out of time entirely.
The others—there were three little groups of them—lay away from the fire but still in the light of its glow.
One couple was curled spoon-fashion on the sand. In the curve of the woman's body, a child, its plump limbs rosy with firelight.
A little distance away another woman sat on a pile of blankets with a baby at her breast and a boy of six or seven beside her. He had his thumb in his mouth.
Further off, where the darkness began, two men sat cross-legged and facing one another so that their brows almost touched.
One, his long hair over his eyes, his head bent, was playing a mouth- organ, some Country and Western tune, very sad and whining, to which the second man beat a rhythm on his thigh.
All around them, scattered without thought in the sand, were bottles, paper plates, cartons, the remains of their meal.
The group of the man, woman, and baby shifted a little. The man's arm had gone numb. He eased it, and the woman's body moved with his into a new position. She drew the baby in.
The man with the sleeping bag threw another branch on to the fire.
I could sit here for ever, Fran thought. If the fire went on burning and the man fed it and the others slept like that, and those two men kept on playing that same bit of a tune, I could sit here till I understood at last what it all means: why the sea, why the stars, why this lump in my throat.
Still seated in the sand with her skirt tucked between her knees and her spine straight, she saw herself get up and walk slowly to where the man with the sleeping bag stood. He turned, and without surprise, watched her come in out of the dark. She stood before him for a moment, then, as if granted permission, went and lay down on the sand among the others, between the group of the man, woman, and baby and the woman with the small boy, feeling the fire's warmth on one side and the breath of the sea on the other. The tune went on. She slept. And in her dream saw a thin, tight-lipped woman with big eyes like a bush-baby's, sitting far off in the dark of the dunes. Gently she beckoned to her, and the woman got up and came into the circle of light.
Long minutes had passed. They had grown cold. Angie wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. She got to her feet and began to walk on. Fran took up her shoes and followed.
The track led to the crest of the hill. From there a second track would take them down to the horse-paddocks, then the long way round to the house. But as they climbed there was a brighter glow in the sky.
“What is it?” Fran asked. “More bonfires?”
Then they came to the top and saw it. Great shoots of flame over the town.
7
From the house a fleet of cars had already set off, their progress slowed by the many gates that had to be opened. They were barely out of sight when the telephone rang.
“Poor Audley,” Madge said when Milly Gates from the
Post Office gave her the news. She sat down in her black frock, closed her eyes and, worn out with all the preparations and the talk and because it was the only way she had of dealing with things, immediately fell asleep, her head back, snoring.
The half-dozen guests who had stayed behind with her were embarrassed, but felt free now to step out on to the deck and watch from a distance the play of flames across the inlet and the reflected glow in the sky.
In the cars they were still in doubt, as they came along the edge of the Lake, what it was that was making such a show.
“Looks like the police station,” Rupe ventured.
“No,” Ralph told him gloomily, having a good idea what it must be, "it's not the cop shop.”
Tommy Molloy, sitting in the back seat between them, said nothing. He knew what it was. So did Audley. A vision of it had appeared spontaneously in Audley's head, the four rooms and all their objects in glowing outline, in a red essence of themselves, a final intensity of their being in the world before they collapsed into ash.
He sat very still in the front seat beside Jonathon, wearing a look, behind the startled eyes, of practised stoicism.
The first one away had been Barney Shannon in his ute, with Lily in the cabin beside him. When they came to the gates it was Barney who leapt out and ran forward in the headlamps’ beam to open them.
In procession they crossed the causeway into town.
The street was jammed with cars. On the roofs of some of them young fellows in boardshorts were standing as if at a football match, with beer cans in their fists. Girls were being hauled up beside them, slipping and shrieking. Further on was the inner circle of those who had pushed in as close as the heat would allow.
Abandoning the cars, they began to ease their way through the crowd, Ralph staying as close as he could to his father's side. People turned to protest, but, when they saw who it was, made way, and Audley finding himself the object of so much attention, felt his heart flutter.
A young fireman came hurrying up. He was in uniform but without his helmet.
“Sorry about this, Mr. Tyler,” he shouted, "she's pretty far gone. Old stuff. That's what done it. Went up like a haystack.”
He was a fresh-faced fellow of twenty-two or -three, recently married. The firebell must have got him out of bed. His hair was wild, his face aglow. There was something hectic and unreliable in his looks. He shouted as if afraid his rather high voice might not carry across the distance he felt between himself and a world that was entirely occupied now by the blaze; all the time casting quick little glances over his shoulder, anxious that if he took his eyes off it for even a second, this conflagration, this star-blaze whose heat he felt between his shoulder blades, and which sent runnels of sweat down his sides under the heavy uniform, might die on him before he had time to savour the excitement it had set off in him. Suddenly, unable to resist any longer the attraction of the thing, he swung round and took the full blast of it on his cheeks. He had, Audley saw, a proprietorial look.
Beautiful! His look said. She's a real beauty! It was his first big do.
If I were a policeman, thought Audley, I'd arrest that boy on the spot.
Surprised by his own excitement, which he had caught from the young fireman and which he felt too in the silent concentration and glow of the crowd, he approached the flames.
Don Wheelwright, the local policeman, materialized. “Don't worry, Mr. Tyler,” he shouted, "we'll get ‘em soon enough, the bastards that done it.”
Audley did not respond. He knew who the fellow was referring to. And Don Wheelwright, feeling snubbed, put another mark in his book of grievances. He had had go-ins with Audley before. His promise of action was a challenge. Well, what about it, Mr. Tyler? Now it's something of yours the bastards have touched. As if, Audley thought, in Clem, he had not been touched already.
All these unofficial reports were an embarrassment to him, he did not want them. He had no doubt Don Wheelwright and his people would come up with a culprit—several, perhaps. There might even be among them the one who had struck the match. But standing here in the crowd was like being in the fire itself, there was such an affinity between the two, such a surge of intensity. It stilled the mind, sucked up attention and subdued the individual spirit in such a general heightening of crowd-spirit, of primitive joy in the play of wind and flame, that he found himself saying, with grim humour, out of the centre of it: "So we got our bonfire after all—want it or not.”
He felt, against all sense or reason, exhilarated, released. He could have shaken his palms in the air and danced.
Looking about quickly to see if anyone, Lily for instance, had noticed, he was struck again by the intensity of the faces. They were like sleepwalkers who had come out, some of them still in their night-wear, to gaze on something deeply dreamed.
What we dare not do ourselves, he found himself thinking, they do for us, the housebreakers, the muggers, the smashers, the grab merchants. When we punish them it is to hide our secret guilt. There is ancient and irreconcilable argument in us between settlement and the spirit of the nomad, between the makers of order and our need to give ourselves over at moments to the imps and demons, to the dervish dance of what is in the last resort dust. We are in love with what we most fear and hide from, death. And there came into his head some lines of a poem he had read, composed of course by one of the unsettled:
And yet, there is only
one great thing,
the only thing:
to live to see, in huts and on journeys,
the great day that dawns,
the light that fills the world.
As for the objects in there, brilliantly alive for a moment in the last of what had been their structure and about to fall into themselves as ash— the dining table with its set and empty places, each occupied now by an eddy of flame, the writhings on the double bed, the glass cases exploding and tossing their rocks back into the furnace of time—what was that but a final sacrifice, like his bones, to the future and its angels, whose vivid faces are turned towards us but with sealed lips?
He glanced sideways, feeling an eye upon him.
It was Lily. Tilted at a precarious angle on her stick, her silks all flame, her twist of a smile saying: Don't think I can't see right through you, Audley Tyler, you sorrowful old hypocrite.
He too must have been smiling. She pitched a little and, using her stick to right herself, dipped her shoulder in acknowledgement and turned away.
There is no hope, he told himself, that's what the old know, that's our secret. It is also our hope, our salvation.
It was then that he remembered Tommy. Searching among the nearby crowd, he found him standing a little way off to the left, his face gleaming with sweat. He was watching along with the rest, and as always seeing the thing, the fire in this case, out of another history.
Audley, touched, went across and laid a hand on his old friend's shoulder. They had been through so much together, he and this old man, over the years. Battles won and lost; the night, which might so easily have divided them, of Clem's accident. They looked at one another, but only briefly, then stood side by side without speaking and went on gazing into the fire.
8
“LISTEN,“ Clem said, "listen, everybody. I want to say something.”
They were a small group now, seated on the coarse-bladed lawn with just the lights from the house falling on them through the open windows, only one or two among them, Audley, Lily, in deck chairs; Barney Shannon lay full-length with his hands folded on his chest, but not sleeping. Subdued, each one, by the recent event, which no one referred to, but also by the overwhelming presence, at this hour, now that the music had packed up and they had run out of talk, of the moon, running full-tilt against a bank of fast-moving clouds, and by the bush, so dense and alive with sound, and down in the cove, the sea breaking. Clem could not have said which of these things moved him most. They were all connected.
The day was over, past, if what you meant by that was t
ime strictly measured—it was past midnight. But what he meant by it was the occasion, though that too might end if one of them now made the move, got up and said: "Well, I'm off,” “Let's call it a day,” “Me for the blanket show.” The group would break up then, and these last ones, the survivors, would go to join those who were already curled up in bunks and sleeping bags on their way to the next thing. Tomorrow. He wanted to forestall that. Something more was needed. Something had to be said. And if no one else was ready to say it, then it was up to him. He felt their eyes upon him, and saw Audley's look of disquiet and shook his head, meaning to reassure him: Don't worry, Dad, I know what I'm doing. It's all right.
He felt confident. The words were there, he still had hold of them. And these were friends, people he loved, who would understand if what he said went astray and did not come out the way he meant. Their faces, which just a moment ago had seemed weary and at an end, were expectant. A light of alertness and curiosity was in them, a rekindling.
“Listen,” he said, "this is what I want to say.
“Out there—out there in space, I mean—there's a kind of receiver. Very precise it is, very subtle—refined. What it picks up, it's made that way, is heartbeats, just that. Every heartbeat on the planet, it doesn't miss a single one, not one is missed. Even the faintest, it picks it up. Even some old person left behind on the track, too weak to go on, just at their last breath. Even a baby in its humidicrib.” He took a breath, growing excited now. He had to control the spit in his mouth as well as the sentences. But he had their attention, it did not matter that one or two of them were frowning and might wonder if he was all there.
“Once upon a time, all this bit of the planet, all this—land mass, this continent—was silent, there was no sound at all, you wouldn't have known it was here. Silence. Then suddenly a blip, a few little signs of life. Not many. Insects, maybe, then frogs, but it was registering their presence. The receiver was turned towards it and tuned in and picked them up. Just those few heartbeats. What a weak little sound it must have been, compared with India for instance or China, or Belgium even—that's the most crowded spot. How could anyone know how big it was with so few heartbeats scattered across it? But slowly others started to arrive, just a few at first, rough ones, rough—hearts—then a rush, till now there are millions. Us, I mean, the ones who are here tonight. Now. There's a great wave of sound moving out towards it, a single hum, and the receiver can pick up each one, each individual beat in it, this one, that one—that's how it's been constructed, that's what it's fixed to do. Only it takes such a long time for the sound to travel across all that space that the receiver doesn't even know as yet that we've arrived—us whites, I mean. Our heartbeats haven't even got there yet.
