The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  So she kept his secret because it was her own, and knew he would come again. She did not even bother to wait for him, since she knew she had only to fall asleep and he would be there; and when he was there she would immediately be awake.

  3

  Standing again,boots in hand, at the washroom door, he recognised in the scene some benevolence of nature that was reserved only for him. He had not expected it, but there it was. The world often surprised him like this. Behind him the raised window was a funnel for moonlight and the gathered noises of the garden, which he found comforting: soft wing-beats that might be an owl or a flying fox, the shifting of leaves, a stirring of furred creatures hunting. Beyond that, the wall he had come over; which formed in his mind a barrier he had passed between the world outside, that still made itself heard in the distant sound of a car (a Falcon, he guessed, changing gears as it turned uphill), the self they knew from the overalls his mother washed and the under-things she laid out for him, and this other self standing in socks and shorts at the threshold of a different world entirely, a strange still world of children sleeping in rows under bluish sheets, which belonged to the night, to this place only, and was female.

  It was to him as if these children slept here always; as if this room were always closed and moonlit, even when it was light elsewhere, because this was the only way he had seen or could imagine it, or cared to. The room hovered above the nightsounds of the garden like a spaceship in a wood, with rows of encapsulated virgins. They slept. They awaited his arrival. The door at the end of the room led nowhere, and the light out there came not from a corridor but from space; nothing familiar lay beyond: no stairways to other parts of the building. This room was its own place, afloat on the children's breathing and on his own will. When he blinked it was not there. It had been waiting—for how long?—till he should at last appear. It was always half-dark and could never be otherwise. Never. Because if he let the light in he would have to let in along with it all those ordinary, exterior events and conditions that belonged to daylight and the sequence of days, which would put it for ever beyond him, whereas this way it was entirely his. No past led up to the room and no future away from it. It simply was. And it was here because he had found it here.

  He listened to the children's breathing. That too, strange as it might be to him, was a comfort. Its regularity calmed him. Could he find her out, he wondered, by the note of her breath?

  He had not seen, on that last occasion, which bed she had come from, but had decided—he had decided—that it was from the second bed on the right, in which last time, as he stood here, a body had spoken and stirred. All his re-enactments of that last time, achieved under the pressure of his need to come back here, if only in imagination, had begun with the turning of that body under the sheet, the first mysterious disturbance and coming alive of the still room as he had originally seen it. In his re-living of that moment he had made certain changes; he had allowed himself to see what he had, in fact, only heard. A child rose up out of the second-last bed on the right, met his gaze, swung her legs slowly over into the dark between the beds—he loved this moment, the contact of her bare foot with the cold pavement—and came down between the rows of sleeping forms, her nightdress transparent in the bluish light, holding out her hand to him.

  He had been over it so often that he had quite erased that other ver- sion in which she surprised him from behind, caught him sitting clod-dishly on the floor, struggling with the laces of his boots. In his new version of their meeting he woke her by the force of his own gaze upon her and she came quickly and willingly.

  Now he fixed his gaze once more on the second-last bed on the right and waited for her to stir. And was again surprised.

  From the first bed on his left came a small gasp; a child pushed herself into a sitting position and their eyes made contact in the dark. She drew down the sheet, swung her legs over. And he thought with a moment's passionate fury that he had been foiled, that the initiative had been stolen from him, and from his child, by an impostor. But she did hold out her hand to him, and when she came and stood before him he saw that it was the same child after all.

  4

  MARYLYN SHOREhad come back to school in the new term with a hamster.

  Pets were not allowed, but the hamster had lived for nearly two weeks in a wardrobe in the dormitory. It was Marylyn's, but in sharing the secret of its presence the others had come to think of it as theirs as well. They had fed it biscuits smuggled in from tea, and bits of lettuce and carrot, and were allowed briefly to stroke its fur. It became part of their dormitory life. Their sleep perhaps had a new quality because of their knowledge that it was there at the bottom of the wardrobe, and because, being nocturnal, they knew it was abroad, a tiny heartbeat in the darkness, while they slept. It moved in their sleep. It gave the night a different texture.

  But the animal was discovered at last and transferred to the science lab, where Marylyn and the others were still able to feed it but where it passed out of their private world, and the glamourous light of a shared secret, and became just one more of the school's public properties.

  Since Marylyn and the rest refused to tell the hamster's name (they had in fact called it Eustace), Miss Wilson, the headmistress, decided on Ruggles.

  Because she was so pleased with herself for having found a neat and happy solution to the problem, Miss Wilson made rather a cult of Ruggles; she frequently referred to him in her pep-talks, and pretended, in a way the girls thought childish and affected, that he was a real personage and a full member of what she “our raft,” so that Ruggles became, in the end, as much one of Miss Wilson's attributes as the moth-eaten gown she wore, her Eiffel Tower brooch, her green-ink corrections, and the tiny bobble of flesh on her left eyelid.

  Meanwhile, the creature's shadow, in his incarnation as Eustace, continued to occupy a place in the life of the dormitory, which had substance in a smell they might pick up from the bottom of the wardrobe, or a memory of how his small heart had beaten when they held him, very carefully, between the palms of their hands. Eustace became a code-word. Having left behind his essence, his secret name, the forbidden animal could be evoked out of the darkness of almost any occasion and went on dwelling among them in a form that was invisible to the eyes of authority and no longer needed feeding with anything but their childish complicity.

  It was with the thought of Eustace clearly in mind that Jane decided to keep her visitor entirely to herself. She thought of him now under a code-name, like Eustace, and when he was about to tell his real name once she warned him quickly, "No, no, you'll spoil it. You mustn't tell your real name. Not to anyone, not even to me.” She knew he would not remain undiscovered for ever, that sooner or later the others would certainly find out; but it seemed to her that if she kept her secret name for him, and if, for the others, he remained nameless, she would have something at least that was her own and that the boy would be safe.

  The others did find out of course, it was inevitable. First Sheryl Payne, then Jill McArthur, then everybody. They sat up in their beds now, except for the sleepiest of them, whenever he came, and watched, and questioned, and tried to steal him away with all sorts of tricks—a different trick in each case, but she always recognised it, she knew them all so well—and with foolish, little-girl stories (how could he be interested in such things?) about their horses, their houses, the places they had been. She had never tried anything like that. It wasn't necessary. It was her bed he sat on; and the others, when gradually over the nights they got used to his presence and had gathered into the familiar atmosphere of the room his odd smell of car-grease—the others, when he had been made safe at last (she at least knew that he was not safe) came on tip-toe over the cool floor and sat cross-legged on the beds opposite.

  From there, gravely, in a little hum of female excitement, they watched. But did not enter the charmed circle. They came only to the edge of it, their faces lit by what they did not understand but felt the glow of just the same, while she and the
boy, just the two of them, burned at the centre. There was nothing now, she felt, as she looked out at their scrubbed faces, still a little fuzzy with sleep, that would ever take her back and make her one of them. She had crossed some border in herself that was still, for them, far in the future. There was no way back.

  5

  The others,watching, saw them as through glass, in a luminous bubble, they were so utterly absorbed in one another, had been drawn into such a distant dimension; and this both fascinated the children and freed them. Accepting the strangeness of the thing, and its attendant glamour, made them spectators and left them untouched.

  What they might have been thinking, with a worldliness that was already an aspect of the women they would become, was “What does she see in him?” It was a mystery, but the question made it ordinary. What-does-she-see-in-him referred to the boy's patent unattractive-ness, to his being too tall, too red-haired, too freckled, to his having bony knees and bitten-down fingernails that were lined with car-grease. These facts set him in a light so common (as the question itself set the whole situation in the light “boyfriends” “romance") that they quite forgot the unusualness of his being there at all in the more interesting mystery of his having chosen Jane and of Jane's having chosen him. His ugliness, since it wasn't their affair, seemed endearing. It was only later that they would see these characteristics that had made him safe as part of what also made him monstrous—his grease-stained hands, his being all arms and legs. But by then he would have passed out of the dormitory world, where everything was softened by the hour, the lingering glow of sleep out of which he had woken them, and their own hunger for fairy-tale, into the panicky blaring of police sirens and arc-lamps that made the school park with its millions of leaves into a dangerous jungle. Then some of these children, who had sat entranced by the spectacle of Jane and her visitor, and had even flirted a little with the unusualness of him, would fly into hysterics; he would rise up out of their sleep, with red hair on the back of his wrists, as a terror they could get around only by crying out aloud, till they found themselves safely awake again in their father's arms.

  “This is Eustace,” she had told them on that first occasion. And they stared. Was it a joke? Who would have suspected Jane, dumpy Jane, of having a sense of humour? Or did she mean some sort of transformation? They stared.

  Jane concealed a smile at her own cunning. The secret significance of the word, which was already informed with both these possibilities (and was not her name for him) immediately cast its spell, not upon the boy, who remained unchangeable, but on her foolish schoolfellows, for whom he was immediately softened and silvered over and made familiar and small. He slipped into the circle of maidens like a changeling prince; puckering his brow a little, poor boy, and wondering where all this might lead.

  She took his hand then, and he relaxed and felt safe. But he thought of the moment later as the point where he first lost control of things, where he was taken over and made an instrument of her more powerful will. What did it mean: Eustace?

  But he was delighted at first by these others; by the glow they made in the room, by the increase ten times over of the specifically female atmosphere they created. They were a magnetic field of which he was the centre. Only gradually did it dawn upon him that this wasn't really so. Their attention wasn't a single force, but a set of forces that pulled him many ways. He couldn't keep track of himself. He felt torn apart, felt odd bits of him being passed around from one to the other of these children like sections of an enormous doll, an arm off here, there a leg. They didn't actually touch him, it was something stronger than touching. He felt parcelled out into so many places he no longer knew where his real centre was, if not in the one part of him they seemed unaware of, though he made no attempt to hide it. Their innocence, which had its own wilder aspects, its knot of chaos, had stolen the initiative from him. He became first resentful then cunningly resourceful. These others were a mistake. They wanted to make a pet of him, whereas what he wanted to make of himself was something quite different.

  That was his real need here: that the situation should make of him something that he painfully longed for and had come here, all unwit- ting, to have revealed. He had no idea what it might be. He had simply followed some clue in himself and arrived. He hadn't even suspected, before now, that such a situation might exist, that high up here among the trees there was this room, magically sealed off from the rest of the world, where children slept and awaited his coming. He made no connection between these misty creatures in their nylon gowns and the crocodile of noisy schoolgirls in bottle-green tunics and straw hats that he sometimes passed down at the shops. Wandering about in the dark, blindly, hardly knowing what he was after, driven by his own restlessness, his dissatisfaction with himself and everything about him, simply lunging out into the air, down unfamiliar avenues and side streets, he had come to a wall that suggested climbing, since there must be something on the other side of it, then a garden, then an open window that could be entered, and there it was. It was as if he had climbed into a high place of his own head where he could breathe at last, and confronted it: a situation that had always been there and from which he was to force now the long withheld revelation.

  But it had begun to go wrong. He had lost his grip of it.

  He wondered sometimes how different things might have been if he had chosen another of the children: the child in the second bed on the right for example. They represented, these nine others, a set of possibilities he had not wakened, dreams or stories he had failed to enter, full vessels stored here unused because he had already chosen, or been chosen by—

  So many possibilities confused him. They would have to be removed. He must go back to the beginning and take her with him. To a place where they could make things simple again, just the two of them. To their own place. To the tiled bathroom with its rows of mirrors above handbasins and that slow dripping from one of the cubicles.

  6

  That was the first step and she made no protest. She too seemed glad to get away. He half-closed the door behind them. It wasn't necessary to close it altogether, that might have alarmed her; and he wouldn't then be able to hear any disturbance from the dormitory. The half-closed door was enough. Here they could be alone, and here he felt the initiative was in his own hands again. He had separated her from whatever there was that she shared with the other children, and which their presence, however supernumerary, might represent. Here in the washroom, with its naked tiles and its own rituals, as of the ordinary public life set aside and the body laid bare, they could rediscover some of the magic that was theirs alone. He could bring his own body into focus here and rediscover what part it was to play in all this. He could see her not as one of a group of maidens, all washed and white in the alien power of their united but generalized sexuality, which if anything set her at a distance from him and disarmed him of his own power, but as herself— soft, real, touchable, as she had been previously only when he summoned up her image during the day, leading her off in his imagination, and being surprised in that dimension how far she was willing to go into his world, how deeply she herself led him on.

  So the washroom was the first step.

  They took it.

  Returning later to the silence of the dormitory, to the hush in which the others almost breathlessly waited, he felt extraordinarily liberated and sure of himself. He would have liked to laugh right out, to throw the door open and shout into whatever lay beyond, or start a pillowfight and see the feathers fly, to do something loud and exuberant and alive with energy; he felt so filled with the joy of things and the power of his own voice and limbs. He would think of this later as perhaps the happiest he had ever been, when between him and the world there had been perfect concord.

  If he had given way then to his boyish desire to whoop and break out everything might have been different. But he was thwarted; and not only by his fear of discovery, which in the recklessness of the moment he might have forgotten. The attention of the others,
which was fo-cussed entirely on her, had pushed him away to the edge of the scene.

  “O Jane, Jane,” their eyes were saying, "what have you been doing?”

  She too saw it, and her hand touched his in an attempt to reassure him, but it was too late. He felt a surge of anger, and saw, in the blind fury of it, that he must take her further than the room next door. He must eliminate these others altogether.

  So it was that he began to talk of a time when they would run away together. He sulked, he cajoled, he was insistent.

  “Will you?” the others asked. Their eyes were hungry for it.

  “Yes,” she said firmly It was as simple as that.

  He dared not ask when. All he could do, as the nights mounted up and the pressure grew in him, was to force her closer, till the link between them was stronger than anything that might tie her to the others and their shared existence, till she stood so far beyond their understanding that she no longer had anything to say to them, and the circle in which they glowed when they sat together on her bed in the dormitory dazzled and even burned the gaze; till together they were so far beyond these others that their going would barely be noticed. He thought of their simply rising where they sat, in a kind of air-bubble, and climbing straight up out of sight.