The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  But that doesn't matter—" he laughed, it was going “—because we are here, aren't we? Others were here, now they're gone. But their heartbeats are still travelling out. Even though they stopped ages ago, they're still travelling. It doesn't matter one way or the other, which people, the living or the dead, it's all the same. Or whether they're gone now or still here like us. The birds too. You can feel the way their hearts beat when you pick one up, even when it's still in the shell. And rabbits. What I think is—" he prepared now for his “—is this. If we imagined ourselves out there and concentrated hard enough, really concentrated, we could hear it too, all of it, the whole sound coming towards us, all of it. It's possible. Anything is possible. Nothing is lost. Nothing ever gets lost”

  He looked about, their attention was on him. And suddenly there was nothing more to say.

  “That's all,” he said abruptly, "that's all I wanted to say. Because of what day it is. You know, because of that. Because no one had said anything. So I did.”

  He smiled nervously but felt pleased with himself. He felt good about things. He grinned, gave a little laugh, then sat on the grass and saw that they were all smiling, except for Audley, who always had a few tears on these occasions. But that was all right. It was good. Only he wished that Fran had still been here. She had left half an hour ago and that put a damper on his heart, but not so much of a one. That was all right too. They could go to bed now. He could. They all could. The day was over.

  But not yet, not quite yet. They would sit for a bit, letting the moon, the dark surrounding bush with its medley of nightsounds, hold them in its single mood, which his speech had not broken.

  Fran had left in a group of a dozen or so, including Cedric Pohl, who did go with the Bergs. The cars made a procession down the rutted slope and through the three gates to the main road.

  In the flurry of farewells, in the leaping torchlight as people stumbled over clods and picked their way among bushes to find their cars, she had had no chance to explain to Clem, simply to say what he already understood, that she felt out of things and would rather drive back tonight than in the heat of the day. He nodded, smiling. She kissed him quickly and climbed into her car.

  The procession got under way and she closed her mind to every- thing but the drive ahead: her mind, not her body. The excitement she felt at the prospect of something new, a romance even, had settled now to a slow but regular ticking in her. Like a bomb, she thought, that was timed to explode somewhere up ahead. Well, she'd deal with that when she came to it.

  As they swung down past the horse-paddocks and began to climb the moonslope, two figures appeared in the light of the headlamps and had to move away to the side of the road.

  It was Ralph and Angie out walking—bailed up now by the line of cars. She would have stopped and spoken, but there were two more cars behind her and before she could wave even, they had been left standing, looking blanched and ghostlike, stunned by the blaze of lights. Still, the image of them together, isolated in the dark, Ralph in his white shirt, Angie in black, pleased her.

  Ralph and Angie walked, as they often did at the end of the day, even at home in the city. Sharing a half-hour together after so many in which they had gone their separate ways.

  Down here in the open they walked in whatever light there was from the moon, since they knew this place like the back of their hands. At home it was under humming streetlights, past fences behind which dogs leapt or growled and walls scribbled with graffiti—Yuppies Fuck Off or Eve Was Framed—stepping over rubbish spilled out of doorways, old-fashioned hearts drawn in chalk on the pavement and roughly initialled, through streets where the inhabitants were already sleeping; pausing sometimes before a lighted window to catch a couple of moments from a late-night movie. Ralph, who knew every movie ever made, would identify it for her. “That's Jack Palance, the rat! In Panic in the Streets” Or, "That's Marilyn in Bus Stop.”

  They seldom talked, or if they did it was to pass on bits and pieces of the day's news, none of it important. It was the walking together that held them close. Now, as they came up the hill in the dark, they could hear Audley at the piano. He liked to play quietly to himself when the rest of the household had gone to bed: simple things that he had learned when he was a boy. Tonight it “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.” The flowing accompaniment brought them right up to the kitchen steps and they stood a moment in the dark to let him finish.

  The piano was an old Bechstein upright, its black enamel finish chipped in places, worn in others. He played without music but with his eyes fixed ahead, as if the pages stood open on their rest; very straight on the stool, still hearing in his head that first voice telling him: Keep your shoulders back, Aud, sit up straight, and don't drop your wrists. Being stern with himself, as he was in everything.

  When he came to a conclusion he sat with his hands on his knees, till Ralph called: "That was great, Dad. We just dropped in to say goodnight.”

  Angie had gone to the tap over the sink to get a glass of water. Nothing had been cleared. In the sink, still in its wrapping, was a big bunch of flowers—tuberoses, the air was drenched with their scent—and under them, Audley's blackfish.

  “You go on,” she told Ralph quietly. “I'll just clear up a bit.”

  Ralph kissed her on the back of the neck while she stood and sipped her glass of water, then went to say goodnight to his father. She unwrapped the flowers, found a pail to put them in, and ran cold water over the fish to freshen them up, then made room for them in the bottom of the fridge. When she looked up Ralph was gone and Audley was standing in the doorway behind her.

  She turned and ran the tap to rinse her hands.

  “Would you like me to make some tea?” she asked.

  They were the night owls of the household. They often found themselves alone like this, last thing.

  He did not like to go to bed, she knew that. He was scared, she suspected, that if he took his clothes off and lay down to sleep he would slip so far into the dark, into the night that becomes greater night, that he might never get back. He had never said any of this, he was too proud, but she had seen the same thing, the year before he died, in her father. Without waiting for an answer now she filled the electric jug and he sat down like a patient child on one of the forms.

  The throbbing of the jug filled the silence. When it stopped she was aware, as she had not been before, of the odd little sounds that came from the house itself, its joists and uprights creaking as they shifted and settled like sleepers—or it was the sleepers themselves in their several rooms and out on the deck where the young were sleeping. She thought she could hear Ned, who was inclined to mutter in his sleep.

  Taking her cup, she stepped to the window and looked down on half a dozen forms all huddled in their sleeping bags, and made out Ned's fair head, then Jenny's darker one. All safe as houses.

  She came back and sat by Audley at the bench.

  “What I've always admired about you, Angie,” he said after a moment, "is the gift you have for attending—for attention. People never mention it among the virtues, but it might be the greatest of them all. It's the beginning of everything. Malebranche, you know, called it the natural prayer of the soul. I think it's what Clem's speech meant to say. You didn't hear it, did you?”

  She shook her head, took a sip from her cup.

  “I wish you had. It would have meant something to you. I was deeply moved. By the boy's intense—happiness. He spoke from a full heart—I think he was trying to say something to me. You know, about the fire— as well as all the rest. What a day we've had!” He sipped his tea. “Thank you,” he said in his formal way.

  They sat a little longer, saying nothing now.

  Outside, a breeze had sprung up; it stirred the faded chintz at the windows, touched with freshness the stale air of the room. On the edge of town, the charred ashes of the museum glowed a moment so that here and there a flame appeared and wetly hissed.

  Down in the cove, the bonfire, which had collaps
ed on itself, a shimmering mass, revived, threw up flames that cast a flickering redness over the sand, and one of the men, conscious perhaps of the renewed heat, sat up for a moment out of sleep and regarded it, then burrowed back into the dark. Till here, as on other beaches, in coves all round the continent, round the vast outline of it, the heat struck of a new day coming, the light that fills the world.

  ANTIPODES

  Southern Skies

  From the beginning he was a stumbling-block, the Professor. I had always thought of him as an old man, as one thinks of one's parents as old, but he can't in those days have been more than fifty Squat, powerful, with a good deal of black hair on his wrists, he was what was called “ladies’ man"—though that must have been far in the past and in another country. What he practised now was a formal courtliness, a clicking of heels and kissing of plump fingers that was the extreme form of a set of manners that our parents clung to because it belonged, along with much else, to the Old Country, and which we young people, for the same reason, found it imperative to reject. The Professor had “position"—he taught mathematics to apprentices on day-release. He was proof that a breakthrough into the New World was not only possible, it was a fact. Our parents, having come to a place where their qualifications in medicine or law were unacceptable, had been forced to take work as labourers or factory-hands or to keep dingy shops; but we, their clever sons and daughters, would find our way back to the safe professional classes. For our parents there was deep sorrow in all this, and the Professor offered hope. We were invited to see in him both the embodiment of a noble past and a glimpse of what, with hard work and a little luck or grace, we might claim from the future.

  He was always the special guest.

  “Here, pass the Professor this slice of torte,” my mother would say, choosing the largest piece and piling it with cream, “Here, take the Professor a nice cold Pils, and see you hand it to him proper now and don't spill none on the way": this on one of those community outings we used to go to in the early years, when half a dozen families would gather at Suttons Beach with a crate of beer bottles in straw jackets and a spread of homemade sausage and cabbage rolls. Aged six or seven, in my knitted bathing-briefs, and watching out in my bare feet for bindy-eye, I would set out over the grass to where the great man and my father, easy now in shirtsleeves and braces, would be pursuing one of their interminable arguments. My father had been a lawyer in the Old Country but worked now at the Vulcan Can Factory. He was passionately interested in philosophy, and the Professor was his only companion on those breathless flights that were, along with the music of Beethoven and Mahler, his sole consolation on the raw and desolate shore where he was marooned. Seeing me come wobbling towards them with the Pils—which I had slopped a little—held breast-high before me, all golden in the sun, he would look startled, as if I were a spirit of the place he had failed to allow for. It was the Professor who recognised the nature of my errand. “Ah, how kind,” he would say. “Thank you, my dear. And thank the good mama too. Anton, you are a lucky man.” And my father, reconciled to the earth again, would smile and lay his hand very gently on the nape of my neck while I blushed and squirmed.

  The Professor had no family—or not in Australia. He lived alone in a house he had built to his own design. It was of pinewood, as in the Old Country, and in defiance of local custom was surrounded by trees— natives. There was also a swimming pool where he exercised twice a day. I went there occasionally with my father, to collect him for an outing, and had sometimes peered at it through a glass door; but we were never formally invited. The bachelor did not entertain. He was always the guest, and what his visits meant to me, as to the children of a dozen other families, was that I must be especially careful of my manners, see that my shoes were properly polished, my nails clean, my hair combed, my tie straight, my socks pulled up, and that when questioned about school or about the games I played I should give my answers clearly, precisely, and without making faces.

  So there he was all through my childhood, an intimidating presence, and a heavy reminder of that previous world; where his family owned a castle, and where he had been, my mother insisted, a real scholar.

  Time passed and as the few close-knit families of our community moved to distant suburbs and lost contact with one another, we children were released from restriction. It was easy for our parents to give in to new ways now that others were not watching. Younger brothers failed to inherit our confirmation suits with their stiff white collars and cuffs. We no longer went to examinations weighed down with holy medals, or silently invoked, before putting pen to paper, the good offices of the Infant of Prague—whose influence, I decided, did not extend to Brisbane, Queensland. Only the Professor remained as a last link.

  “I wish, when the Professor comes,” my mother would complain, "that you try to speak better. The vowels! For my sake, darling, but also for your father, because we want to be proud of you,” and she would try to detain me as, barefoot, in khaki shorts and an old T-shirt, already thirteen, I wriggled from her embrace. “And put shoes on, or sandals at least, and a nice clean shirt. I don't want that the Professor think we got an Arab for a son. And your Scout belt! And comb your hair a little, my darling—please!”

  She kissed me before I could pull away. She was shocked, now that she saw me through the Professor's eyes, at how far I had grown from the little gentleman I might have been, all neatly suited and shod and brushed and polished, if they had never left the Old Country, or if she and my father had been stricter with me in this new one.

  The fact is, I had succeeded, almost beyond my own expectations, in making myself indistinguishable from the roughest of my mates at school. My mother must have wondered at times if I could ever be smoothed out and civilized again, with my broad accent, my slang, my feet toughened and splayed from going barefoot. I was spoiled and wilful and ashamed of my parents. My mother knew it, and now, in front of the Professor, it was her turn to be ashamed. To assert my independence, or to show them that I did not care, I was never so loutish, I never slouched or mumbled or scowled so darkly as when the Professor appeared. Even my father, who was too dreamily involved with his own thoughts to notice me on most occasions, was aware of it and shocked. He complained to my mother, who shook her head and cried. I felt magnificently justified, and the next time the Professor made his appearance I swaggered even more outrageously and gave every indication of being an incorrigible tough.

  The result was not at all what I had had in mind. Far from being repelled by my roughness the Professor seemed charmed. The more I showed off and embarrassed my parents, the more he encouraged me. My excesses delighted him. He was entranced.

  He really was, as we younger people had always thought, a carica- ture of a man. You could barely look at him without laughing, and we had all become expert, even the girls, at imitating his hunched stance, his accent (which was at once terribly foreign and terribly English) and the way he held his stubby fingers when, at the end of a meal, he dipped sweet biscuits into wine and popped them whole into his mouth. My own imitations were designed to torment my mother.

  “Oh you shouldn't!" she would whine, suppressing another explosion of giggles. “You mustn't! Oh stop it now, your father will see—he would be offended. The Professor is a fine man. May you have such a head on your shoulders one day, and such a position.”

  “Such a head on my shoulders,” I mimicked, hunching my back like a stork so that I had no neck, and she would try to cuff me, and miss as I ducked away.

  I was fifteen and beginning to spring up out of pudgy childhood into clean-limbed, tumultuous adolescence. By staring for long hours into mirrors behind locked doors, by taking stock of myself in shop windows, and from the looks of some of the girls at school, I had discovered that I wasn't at all bad-looking, might even be good-looking, and was already tall and well-made. I had chestnut hair like my mother and my skin didn't freckle in the sun but turned heavy gold. There was a whole year between fifteen and sixteen when I was fascinat
ed by the image of myself I could get back from people simply by playing up to them—it scarcely mattered whom: teachers, girls, visitors to the house like the Professor, passers-by in the street. I was obsessed with myself, and lost no opportunity of putting my powers to the test.

  Once or twice in earlier days, when I was playing football on Saturday afternoons, my father and the Professor had appeared on the sidelines, looking in after a walk. Now, as if by accident, the Professor came alone. When I came trotting in to collect my bike, dishevelled, still spattered and streaked from the game, he would be waiting. He just happened, yet again, to be passing, and had a book for me to take home, or a message: he would be calling for my father at eight and could I please remind him, or yes, he would be coming next night to play Solo. He was very formal on these occasions, but I felt his interest; and sometimes, without thinking of anything more than the warm sense of myself it gave me to command his attention, I would walk part of the way home with him, wheeling my bike and chatting about nothing very important: the game, or what I had done with my holiday, or since he was a dedicated star-gazer, the new comet that had appeared. As these meetings increased I got to be more familiar with him. Sometimes, when two or three of the others were there (they had come to recognise him and teased me a little, making faces and jerking their heads as he made his way, hunched and short-sighted, to where we were towelling ourselves at the tap) I would for their benefit show off a little, without at first realising, in my reckless passion to be admired, that I was exceeding all bounds and that they now included me as well as the Professor in their humourous contempt. I was mortified. To ease myself back into their good opinion I passed him off as a family nuisance, whose attentions I knew were comic but whom I was leading on for my own amusement. This was acceptable enough and I was soon restored to popularity, but felt doubly treacherous. He was, after all, my father's closest friend, and there was as well that larger question of the Old Country. I burned with shame, but was too cowardly to do more than brazen things out.