The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  A few months back there was never anything to eat in this house except ice-cubes. They used to suck them in the heat while they watched the cricket. “There's a choice,” Hughie would tell him, "icecubes boiled or fried or grilled. Take your pick.” That was while Mrs. Hutchins was still dying in the next room. “I figure,” Hughie told him now, "that if I eat all that stuff they eat on television—you know, potato crisps, Cherry Ripe, Coke, all that junk, I'll turn into a real Australian kid and have a top physique. Isn't that what's supposed to happen?”

  “Maybe you'll turn into a real American kid and stay skinny.”

  “Y’ reckon?” Hughie's hand was arrested in mid-lift.

  “Maybe you'll just get spots.”

  “Nah! Nunna the kids on TV get spots. Look at ‘em. They're all blond ‘n have top physiques, and the girls are unreal.”

  “They've got spots. That's why they use Clearasil.”

  “I use Clearasil.”

  “Does it do any good?”

  “No, but that's because I pull off so much.”

  “So do the kids on TV.”

  “Y’ reckon?”

  He leaned out, flicked to another channel, then another, then pushed the off-switch with his big toe.

  “Maybe you'll just turn into yourself,” Luke said, "only you'll be too full of junk to see what it is.”

  “But that's just what I don't want. You ever see anyone on TV looked like me? I wanna be a real Australian kid. You know—happy. Sliding down a water-chute with lots of other happy kids, including girls. Climbing all over a big ball and making things go better with Coke. That's why I'm into junk food. Junk food makes you tanned and gives you a terrific physique. It's pulling off gives you spots.”

  “No. It doesn't do anything.”

  “Yes it does. It turns you into a monster.”

  Hughie jumped up, made jerking movements with his fist, and turned into a pale skinny version of King Kong. He hopped about on flat feet with his knees bent, his arms loose, and his tongue pushed into his upper lip, grunting. Luke jumped up, made the same motions, and was Frankenstein. Laughing, they fell in a heap.

  “No,” Luke said, sitting upright, "it doesn't do any of that. They just tell you that because they can't sell it on TV.”

  Hughie went back to munching crisps.

  “So what'll you do?” he said, returning to a conversation of several days back.

  “I don't know. What about you?”

  “My dad says I can leave school if I want to and go in with him. There's a lot of money in sailmaking. You know?” He said it without enthusiasm. “Everyone wants sails.”

  “I want to do Japanese,” Luke said, moving to the window and looking across to the marina, where half a mile off, among a crowd of Sunday craft, he could see Starlight just beginning to make way. He was thinking of a time, a year back, when with his grandfather as guide he would go crawling about in the strange light of the sea off Midway, among the wrecks of the Japanese carriers Soryu, Kaga, Hiru, Admiral Nagumo's flagship the Akagi, the heavy cruiser Mikuma, and the York-town. "My grandad says we might have been better off,” he said reflectively, "if we hadn't won the Battle of Midway after all and the Japs had come instead of the Americans. I don't know, maybe he's right. He says winning all those wars was the worst thing ever happened to us.”

  “Is this your grandfather who was in the Wehrmacht?” Hughie enquired.

  Luke giggled. “No, you nut! They lost all their wars. My dad's father. The one who was in the AIF.”

  Hughie, still hugging the carton of crisps, got up and went to the other side of the room.

  “Listen Luke,” he said seriously, "I've been meaning to tell you. If you need any money I've got stacks of it.”

  “What?”

  “Money. Com'n look.”

  He was standing over an open drawer.

  “My dad's got this woman he goes to, and every time he goes off and leaves me alone I get ten dollars. I mean, he gives it to me. I'm making a fortune!” The two boys stood looking at the drawer full of bills. “He feels guilty, see? I ran into them once, up at the Junction, and they were both so embarrassed. She's a sort of barmaid. I had to stop myself from laughing. I feel like I'm living off her immoral earnings, ten dollars a time. If you want any of it, it's yours.”

  Luke looked at the drawer and shook his head. “No,” he said, "I get pocket money, they give me pocket money. Anyway, all I need now is ninety-five cents for the train fare.”

  “I dunno,” Hughie said before the open drawer. “Why does ‘e do it? What's ‘e scared of?” He looked sad standing there in the boardshorts, so buck-toothed and skinny, peering into the drawer full of bills. They had called him Casper at school. Casper the ghost.

  “My parents,” Luke said, "are scared of all sorts of things.” And at first to take Hughie's mind off his problem, but soon out of a growing contempt and bitterness of his own, he began to list them. “They're scared one of us will go on drugs or join the Jesus freaks or the Hari Krishnas. Or grow up and marry a Catholic. My mother's scared of being poor, the way they were in Europe after the war. She's scared my father's dad'll get sick and have to come and live with us. She's scared of cancer. My dad's scared the tax people will catch up with him.” He turned away to the window, and Starlight was just moving down towards the point opposite. He could see his father amidships, in his captain's cap, directing: "There's only one captain on this boat,” he would be saying. “Most of all,” Luke said, "he's scared of my mother. He thinks he's not good enough for her.” At the prow was Michael, a lonely child, dangling his legs on either side of the bowsprit. Luke could see one dazzling white sneaker.

  “Listen, I'll tell you what,” he said, "why don't we go out and fly the kites? We haven't done that for ages.”

  “You really want to?”

  “Yes, it's just what I want.” He hadn't thought of it till this moment but it was true. “It's what I came for.”

  Last year when they had both seemed so much younger they had spent hours flying the kites, two big box-kites that Hughie's father had made with the same craftsman's skill he brought to his sailmaking. They were beautiful machines, and for a while Luke had liked nothing better than to be at the end of a string and to feel the gentle tugging of the birdlike creation that was three hundred feet up under the ceiling of cloud and gently afloat, or plunging in the breeze—feeling it as another freer self, almost angelic, and with a will of its own. No other activity he knew gave him such a clear sense of being both inside his own compact body and far outside it. You strained, you held on, the plunging was elsewhere.

  Hughie was delighted to drag the kites out of the back room where they had been gathering dust for the past months and to check and re-wind the strings. He did it quickly but with great concentration.

  He tied the sleeves of a light sweater round his waist and they were off.

  Twenty minutes later the kites with their gaudy tails were sailing high over the rocky little park on the Point and far out over the water. Luke too had removed his shirt and was running over the grass, feeling the kite tug him skyward: tug, tug. He could feel the sky currents up there, the pure air in motion, feel its energy run all the way back along the string into his gorged hands. It took him to the limits of his young strength.

  “This is great,” Hughie was shouting as if they had suddenly stepped back a year. “Feel that? Isn't it unreal?”

  They let their animal selves loose and the great kites held and sustained them.

  “What really shits me,” Luke said later when they had drawn the machines in, wound the strings, and were lying stretched in the shade, "is that no one has the guts to be what they pretend to be. You know what I mean? My father pretends to be a big businessman. He makes deals and talks big but it scares the hell out of him, and at the weekend he pretends to be the skipper of a boat. He gets all dressed up in his whites and does a lot of shouting but all the time he's terrified a storm'll blow up or he'll ram someone or that Michael wi
ll fall in and get drowned. People are all the same. You can see it. Scared you'll call their bluff. It makes me puke.”

  Hughie looked puzzled. Luke worried him. Most of the time he was just like anyone, the way he was when they were flying the kites: then suddenly he'd speak out, and there was more anger in what he said than the words themselves could contain.

  “So?” he said.

  “So someone, sometime, has to go through with it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Luke set his mouth and did not elaborate, and Hughie, out of loyalty to an old understanding between them, did not push for an answer.

  They had known one another since they were five or six years old. It was, in terms of their short lives, a long friendship, but Hughie had begun to perceive lately, and it hurt him, that they might already have grown apart. There was in Luke something dark, uncompromising, fanatical, that scared him because it was so alien to his own nature. He was incapable of such savagery himself, and might be the shallower for it. His mind struggled to grasp the thing and it hurt.

  “Listen Luke,” he began, then stopped and was defeated. There was no way of putting what he had seen into words. He swallowed, picked at his toe. Luke, hard-mouthed and with brows fiercely lowered, was staring dead ahead. “Hey, Luke,” he called across the narrow space between them, and knocked the other boy's shoulder, very lightly, with the heel of his hand.

  “What?”

  “I don't know, you seemed—far away.” He screwed his eyes up and looked out across the burnished water. The idea of distance saddened him.

  “Thanks,” Luke said softly after a moment, and Hughie was relieved.

  “For what?” he answered, but it wasn't a question.

  They grinned, and it was as if things between them were clear again. Luke got up. “I'd better get going,” he said. “I'll give you a hand with the kites.”

  Two hours later he was getting down at the empty northern station with its cyclone-wire fence strung on weathered uprights. The view beyond was of the sea.

  He made his way along a tussocky path that led away from the main settlement, and along the edge of the dunes to where his grandfather's shack, grey fibro, stood in a fenceless allotment above rocks. There were banksias all leaning one way, shaped by the wind and rattling their dry, grey-black cones. It was a desolate place, not yet tamed or suburban: the dunes held together by long silvery grass, changing their contours almost daily under the wind; the sea-light harsh, almost brutal, stinging your eyes, blasting the whole world white with salt. Inland, to the west, great platforms of sandstone held rainwater in rusty pools and the wild bush-plants, spiky green now but when they were in flower a brilliant white, thrust clean through rock.

  His grandfather was a fisherman. It was his grandfather who had led Luke to the sea, and his grandfather's war (or rather the Occupation Forces of the years afterwards) that had led him, through yarns quietly told and a collection of objects too deeply revered to be souvenirs— touchstones rather—to his consuming interest of this last couple of years. He had touched every one of those objects, and they had yielded their mystery. He had listened to his grandfather, read everything he could lay his hands on, and had, he thought, understood. He felt now for the key, on a hook by the water tank, and let himself in.

  A shack, not a house, but orderly and to Luke's eyes, beautiful. Washing-up was stacked on the primitive sink. There was a note on the kitchen table: "Luke—be back around five. Love, Pa.” Luke studied it. He took a glass of water, but only wet his lips, and went through to the one large room that made up the rest of the place. It was very bare. Poor-looking, some would have thought. Everything was out and visible: straw mats of a pale corn colour, still with a smell; his grandfather's stretcher; the hammock where Luke himself slept when he stayed overnight. On the walls, the tabletop, and on the floor round the walls, were the objects that made this for Luke a kind of shrine: masks, pots, the two samurai swords, and daggers.

  He went straight to the wall and took one of the daggers from its hook—it was his, and walking through to the open verandah, he stood holding it a moment, then drew the sharp blade from its sheath.

  He ran his finger along the edge, not drawing blood, then, barely thinking, turned the point towards him and made a hard jab with his fist. It was arrested just at the white of his T-shirt.

  He gave a kind of laugh. It would be so easy. You would let each thing happen, one thing after the next, in an order that once established would carry you right through and over into—

  He stood very still, letting it begin.

  At the moment of his first stepping in across the threshold out of the acute sunlight, he had entered a state—he couldn't have said what it was, but had felt the strangeness of it like a trance upon his blood, in which everything moved slowly, slowly. He was not dulled—not at all—but he felt out of himself, free of his own being, or aware of it in a different way. It came to him, this new being of his, as a clear fact like the dagger; like the light off the walls, which was reflected sea-light blasting the fibro with a million tumbling particles; like the individual dry strands of the matting.

  You fell into such states, anyway he did, but not always so deeply. They began in strangeness and melancholy—you very nearly vanished— then when you came back, it was to a sense of the oneness of things. There was a kind of order in the world and it was in you as well. You attended. You caught a rhythm to which each gesture could be fitted. You let it lead you out of your body into—

  It had begun. Slowly he removed his watch—it was twelve past four—and laid it on a ledge. Then he took off his gym-shoes, pushed his socks into them, and set them side by side on the floor. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and, folding his jeans, made a pile of them, jeans, T-shirt, shoes. They looked like the clothes, neatly arranged, of one who had gone into the sea or into the air—how could you be certain which?—or into the earth. The sea was glittering on his left and was immense. He did not look at it. Earth and air you took for granted. Wearing only the clean jockey-shorts now, he knelt on the verandah boards, carefully arranging his limbs: bringing his body into a perpendicular line with his foot soles, and thighs and trunk into alignment with the dagger, which lay immediately before him. He sat very straight, his body all verticals, horizontals, strictly composed; in a straight line with sea and earth, or at right angles to them. He began to breathe in and out, deeply, slowly, feeling the oxygen force its way into his cells so that they exerted a pressure all over the surface of him where his body met the air, in the beginning muscles of his forearms and biceps, in his throat, his lips, against the thinness of his closed lids. He clenched his teeth, the breath in his nostrils now a steady hiss, and took up the dagger. All there was now was the business of getting the body through and over into—

  He paused. He set the point of the dagger to the skin of his belly above the white jockey-shorts (death was so close—as close as that) and all the muscles of his abdomen fluttered at the contact. He felt his sex begin to stiffen, all of itself.

  A wave, not very big, had begun making for the shore and would reach it soon with a scuffling of pebbles, one of which, the one in his mouth, had a taste of salt. He sucked on it, and over a long period, after centuries, it began to be worn away, it melted, and his mouth, locked on the coming cry, was filled with the words of a new language, on his tongue, his tooth ridge, as a gurgling in his throat: the names of ordinary objects—tools, cookpots, baskets—odd phrases or conversations on which a life might depend, jokes (even crude ones), lyrics praising the moon or lilies or the rising of a woman's breast, savage epics—

  “That you, Luke?”

  The boy came back into himself, the wave passed on. He opened his eyes, picked up the sheath, pushed himself to his feet, and with dagger and sheath still in hand, walked barefoot, and naked save for his jockeys, to the door.

  His grandfather was there. He had a heavy sack over his shoulder and a rod and reel.

  “Hullo, Luke,” he called. H
e swung the sack down hard on the concrete path. “I had a good day,” he said. He gave a crack-lipped grin. “Take a look at this.” He lifted the end of the sack, tumbling its contents in a cascade of shining bodies. Luke was dazzled. Some of them were still alive and flipping their tails on the rough concrete, throwing light.

  The boy restored the dagger to its sheath, rested it on the edge of the sink, and stepped down among them. “Terrific,” he said.

  “Yairs,” the man breathed, "pretty good, eh? You stoppin’ the night?”

  Luke nodded, moving quickly away to catch a fish that was flapping off into the coarse grass. It continued to flutter in his hands.

  “Good,” said the man. He went off to fetch buckets and knives. “We'll get started, eh?”

  While his grandfather went through into the kitchen to get clean basins, Luke took one of the buckets round to the side of the house and filled it from the tank. He came back staggering.

  “Good,” his grandfather said. “Let's get into it.”

  They seated themselves side by side on the step and worked swiftly.

  It was a job Luke was used to, had been skilled at since he was nine years old. The blade went in along the belly; the guts spilled, a lustrous silver-blue, and were tossed into the one bucket; in the other you plunged to the forearm and rinsed.

  The work went on quickly, silently; they seldom talked much till after tea. Luke lost himself in the rhythm of it, a different rhythm from the one he had given himself to earlier. A kind of drowsiness came over him that had to do with the falling darkness, with the repeated flashing of the knife and his swinging to left and right between buckets, and with the closeness of so much raw flesh and blood. His arms and bare legs were covered with fish-scales. His face, neck, chest were flecked with gobbets of the thin fish blood.

  At last they were done. The fish, all scaled and gutted, were in the basins. One bucket was full of guts, the other with water that was mostly blood. The doorstep too was all shiny with scales (Luke would come out later and flush it clean).