by David Malouf
‘Mumma,’ I whispered; and though she was often difficult to wake from these late-afternoon naps, she immediately sat up and swung her stockinged feet over the edge of the bed.
Downstairs, in the big closed sitting room, a hall clock with gilded lead weights the size of sledgehammers, that my grandmother wound up every Sunday before lunch, began to chime the hour. It had never, to my ears, sounded so round and solemn. Though I had often lain awake and heard it dividing off the quarters, the halves, the full hours in its companionable way, dealing with the spaces of dark, I had not thought of it till now, as I followed my mother down the hallway, as dealing also in finalities, as mechanically, irrevocably, pushing us out of one moment into the next and closing off forever what lay behind.
The room was even quieter than when I had left it. My mother sat on the edge of the cane-bottomed chair, very grave and pale, with her hands on her knees.
‘When did it happen?’ she asked. And suddenly the tears leapt out of my eyes in the most alarming way. They didn’t well and trickle, they leapt right out as if on springs.
‘I don’t know!’ I gasped between sobs, and she pressed me to her, shushing and patting the back of my head. ‘I don’t know!’
‘Be quiet now,’ she whispered, ‘it isn’t your fault, you couldn’t have done anything.’ I had climbed onto her knee and was sobbing into her neck. ‘Just be quiet, darling, while I think. We mustn’t say anything’ – her voice was barely audible – ‘till your father comes. He should be the one to break the news to your grandmother. I can’t do it.’
I had fallen still at last and she eased me off her knee.
‘I’ll just settle him a little, poor sweet, and we’ll wait for your father to come.’
So I sat on the cane-bottomed chair while she took the pillows from under Grandpa’s head, straightening him, laying his hands crosswise on his chest, and drew the sheet up to his chin – all the time weeping. Then, not speaking, we both sat.
The light began to deepen. There was the sound from below of Della and Aunt Ollie preparing tea, and my Aunt Roo called once from the top of the stairs and we heard her going down. The sea breeze sprang up, bringing its smell of salt, quickening all the leaves below and lifting the curtains in drifts. I had had time by now to take the whole thing in. Not just the fact that my grandfather was dead at last, had crossed some physical barrier that was real and ultimate – though sitting in the same room with him I had not perceived it – but that the activities I associated with this room, and which made it, and my grandfather, most real to me, were done with now, and all its objects – bedpan, bottles, sponges – had become in a single moment as remote and useless as if a decade’s dust had settled on them.
My mother must have felt it even more. She had, now that Grandpa was gone, no purpose in this room. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after we could pack up and go back to Brisbane. I felt a pang of anxiety. I hadn’t realised till now how completely, over these months, I had come to think of my life here as the only one possible, and could not guess how much of it might be translatable; how much was my own and how much might belong to the household and to Southport itself. I did not want, for the moment, to change, when the inevitability and power of change was just what I had discovered here.
My mother stirred and shooed a fly from the counterpane. She drew the sheet up over Grandpa’s face, then sat again. It was almost dark. It was the hour when she would normally have lighted the little night-lamp. I had been sent down earlier for metholated spirits and it was full. It would not be needed.
It was that more than anything else, I think, that brought home to me the reality of the thing. Grandpa had been afraid of the dark. Suddenly, startling my mother in the silence, I broke down again and began to weep.
But it was nearly six. Time for me to go down and look for my father on his way up from the station. I blew my nose on a clean handkerchief, assured my mother I was all right, and went out; for the last time leaving her alone with him.
She was not a trained nurse but a schoolteacher, who in the early days of the war, when the threat of air raids was pressing, had joined the VADs and been given the usual lessons in first aid and general care of the wounded. My grandfather, it seems, had always been fond of her, but she was too timid in the days when he walked around with a stick and swaggered in public to believe it. Over the long months of his illness they had grown close, bound together in an intimacy that was founded on the regular physical duties she had to perform for him and which he had come at last, through touch, and murmured soothings and easings, to accept at her hands. She alone was witness to the worst indignities imposed upon him by his incontinence, and the agonies in which, for long moments, he became the merest racked meat and bone; and to the fierce, wordless hissing that gave way at times to obscenities he would have been mortified to have her think him capable of on saner occasions, and which she would have been ashamed to hear.
Their life together in that sickroom had been a life apart. I came only to the edge of it, pushed out of sight and earshot of what she felt I should not bear. In their quiet times together all they had endured, in extreme and barely tolerable passages of mere nerve, made an electricity between them that was like the flow of energy between lovers. I might have been jealous if Grandpa and I had not had our own relationship, and if my mother had not made me her only assistant. Grandpa’s body, now that it was laid out under the sheet, seemed barely substantial enough to have been the centre of so much drama and concern. It scarcely broke the line of the bed.
Such stillness could not last. Downstairs the news was broken to my grandmother; my father took her into the darkened sitting room. My aunts were told. The house was filled with their weeping. Then my grandmother, stony-faced and showing her years, appeared with my father beside her at the bedroom door.
My mother still sat by the high white bed. I stood between the curtains at my mother’s shoulder, with the gauzy white blowing over me in the late breeze; beyond the verandah rails, between spiky branches, the flat dark waters of the bay.
I see us all in our positions, utterly still, as my grandmother, rather small and stooped in the doorway, speaks the words that will close this period more completely even than my grandfather’s death.
‘I won’t go in till that woman is out of the room. I don’t want her to lay a hand on my poor Jeffers, ever again!’ She reverted to a pet name no one had heard her use in more than twenty years, and I wondered for a moment who it was that she meant. ‘My husband. Mine! Get that woman out of here!’
My mother’s face had swung into ashen profile as if she’d been struck.
‘Mamma!’ my father said agonisingly, seeing the whole of the next ten years open before him, with their divided loyalties and recriminations and the repetition of this moment over and over in the retelling on both sides, with the same words savagely spat out.
‘He’s suffered enough from her shamelessness, poor darling. He was too sick to complain. And too modest to tell me how she touched and tormented him. But I knew. I’m not blind. It was shameful! That woman has no shame!’
‘Mamma, for God’s sake!’ my father moaned. But he must have known, as my mother did, who had risen and was standing dead-white with her hand on the back of the chair, that he was the real source of contention between them, that it was him my grandmother had in mind.
‘I won’t go into the room till she’s left it. I want her out of my house!’
My mother had already rushed past me, with the white gauze sweeping over her shoulder, and I heard her wrestle with the verandah door, then give an enraged howl from the hallway. My father turned and went after her. My grandmother, her face set, stepped into the room at last. She stood for a moment in the stillness, and then, with her fists clenched, began to beat on the brass rail of the bed so that the whole structure bounced and the body under the sheet began to fly about in terrible convulsions under the hammering
of her ringed fists. No sound came out of her mouth. It was my mother’s voice I could hear from the other end of the hallway. Then it too was drowned by the combined voices of the aunts.
*
So the whole thing ended disgracefully, in ugly brawling and insults. Within an hour my mother had packed our things and would listen to no kind of reason: if my father wouldn’t take her home immediately she would spend the night in a hotel.
Aunt Ollie tried to pacify her mother, but she too was unyielding. Downstairs, in the kitchen, Della sat in the corner by the range and moaned; partly for my grandfather but also for the meal that would never be eaten, which sat in pots on the stove, getting cold, and would have to be scraped out and fed to the chooks.
Uncle Gil, deeply shaken by a kind of violence for which he had no terms, had fled to the bottom of the yard, but came back later, shamefaced and pale, along with Aunt Ollie, to kiss us goodbye. The others did not dare take sides against their mother; and my father, having settled us in the cab, left Aunt Ollie to weep over me and whisper consolations to my mother while he went back upstairs to try for the last time to make his mother retract a little of what, in the shock of grief, and only for that reason, she had said. She refused to take back a word. Not a syllable! Not a breath! My father was a broken man.
‘In a few days –’ he began, but didn’t have the heart to go on. It would be years, and he knew it.
‘Do what you can, Ollie,’ he said miserably. ‘I can’t believe it can be ending like this.’
‘Look after Jess and the boy,’ Aunt Ollie advised him. ‘There’s nothing you can do here. God bless you, dear,’ she said into the dark of the cab, and stood large and solid on the pavement with Uncle Gil at the gate behind her. My father gave a nod to the driver and we pulled away.
Knack
[1]
Moonlit dew on the peaked roofs of Spring Hill gave the sprawling suburb, where it ran up and downhill so steeply, the look of turned ground in a bit of cobwebbed garden rather than the rackety, run-down shambles it was, all gapped verandahs and lopsided paling fences; an eyesore, right there where the toast-rack trams rattled up from Edward Street in the heart of the city.
It was at once a crossroads and cul-de-sac, a packed settlement of working-class families, older people of good standing who had got stranded when the place declined from its better days at the start of the century, and loose establishments of girls too smart to work eight hours a day in a munitions factory, who were serving the war effort in an alternative position. They sat about in the morning in gaudy kimonos – Japanese, but allowing nothing to the enemy – painting their toenails, spreading their hair to dry, and pampering thighs and shoulders with cold cream in the early heat.
Cats melted over fences, or sidled through a gap between palings and were stroked or cuddled or driven off with kicks. Small children in grubby singlets and nothing else waddled about in weed-grown yards, while their mothers, hanging out overalls or bluish-white shirts, wrestled with ten-foot clothes props. In the afternoons after school barefoot boys spat, swore, knuckled and Chinese-burned one another, or, choosing sides, played cricket on the least steep of the up-and-down sidestreets with a couple of fruit cases for wickets and a bald tennis ball. At night there were shouting matches, drunken brawls, the soft crash of bottles on warm bitumen, and sometimes piano music – one of the hit songs, ‘Paper Doll’. American sailors arrived in taxis, five at a time, ordinary youths released into a new life on an unknown continent, their uniforms and little round caps a startling white. Some of them were black – though the blacks, by army regulation and civic compliance, were restricted to the south side of the river. Occasionally there were irruptions of military police to break up, on the limits of the real war, a skirmish between Southern Comfort allies and locals who were resentful of being kept behind the lines to load ships and service vehicles for their heroic defenders, and took it upon themselves to show that it was cowardly government policy and arse-licking that kept them out of the fray, not their own unwillingness to have a go, or any lack of talent in the delivery of lead visiting cards or the aiming of boots.
There was a busy traffic here in sly grog, especially port, and a black market in nylon stockings, tinned asparagus, tinned salmon and off-coupon sugar, butter and meat. It had an economy of its own, Spring Hill, that recreated in little the larger one of which it was a distorted reflection. Frank Harland had, for ten shillings a week, a workman’s cottage with a double-gabled roof. It had been partly burnt out and was condemned. From the two attic rooms, which were the only part of the house he could live in, he had a view of dewlit corrugated iron, electric wires with clusters of cupped white insulators, a maze of rickety fences and narrow back lanes between cross-streets, then, almost without a break, the five- or six-storeyed office blocks and department stores of the city.
He painted while there was light, and when the light was gone went to bed, or if he could get in, to a pub or wineshop, for a single glass of something and an hour or two of feeling at one with the crowd.
It was a time of crowds, and more than ever now he knew what it was to be alone. Everyone else had been recruited into a company of one sort or another; they were living in events he was barely touched by. To settle among them for a while, to smell the powder, scent, lipstick excitement of it all, to be at the edge of brawls or tremendous bouts of drunkenness, made him feel cut off and out of his own times but gave him at least a glimpse of things. The headlong rush into nothingness caught him up and quickened his blood. It was general enough, all that, to ask for no more than your presence as a dispensable unit in an ever-changing and anonymous herd that was plunging on into the dark.
He first saw the antique-dealer Knack, and his friend Edna, in a wineshop in Wharf Street. They too, at their corner table, seemed not quite part of the rout; he in his black suit and soft wide-brimmed hat, she with her straw and feathers; which is why, the second or third time they found themselves at neighbouring tables, squashed in among the half-caste women and thin, long-faced drunks, they had exchanged looks, then nods, and had struck up at last a kind of acquaintance that led to his being invited to the rooms behind the shop in Melbourne Street, South Brisbane, where Knack and Edna had their flat.
This Knack as he called himself, or Walter as the woman called him, was a bald fellow of nearly sixty, a giant of a man with a shiny skull and big knuckles to his hands, who wore a sober, three-piece suit in a cloth from the days before coupons, and boots that he mended himself on a last he had in the backyard.
Unlocking the door of the shop with a thin key, he would lead them through a kind of maze – between stacks of old books, past the solid but shadowy presence of dining tables, sofas, sideboards crowded with little cut-glass or china objects that glittered in the dark, smokers’ stands in chrome and polished wood, the silhouette of a harp or piano-frame whose strings turned red and green with the traffic lights, under rows of hanging lamps of an old-fashioned moulded variety on dusty chains.
These fragments of broken households were the stuff of Knack’s business. All the elements of several rooms, from different periods and levels of society, had been thrown together, so that a Jacobean table with barley-sugar legs, that had seen half a century of regular mealtimes and still spoke up for solid middle-class respectability, might be no more now than the pedestal for a chipped enamel bath of the poorest quality and doubtful provenance, while its chairs, including two heavy carvers, swung ten foot overhead; a whole dinner party at one of those mealtimes might have abruptly levitated. There was a buttoned-leather lovers’ seat that recalled a century of whispers and tentative, exploratory hands. Open upon it now was a surgeon’s case with its nest of blades. A grandfather clock stood among meat safes; a grand piano with no strings supported a chest of drawers, and the chest of drawers an old-fashioned sewing machine. Everything was higgledy-piggledy, a parody of settled existence that suggested some final break in the logic of things
or a general disruption in which every stick had worked loose or floated free of its old use and meaning and would acquire a new one only when it was resurrected into a second (or was it a third?) life. Frank found the place disturbing, especially in the half-dark under the intermittent red, yellow and green of the lights.
But you passed through it, and the room beyond, Knack’s flat, was neat and comfortable.
The moment they entered and put on the light, a bundle of feathers, a little zebra-striped lovebird flew out. It came to rest on Knack’s shoulder. The addition of the bird to his presence, or the flash of colour, or the demonstration of immediate natural affection, lit the man up from within. He cracked his knuckles and showed his teeth in a brilliant grin.
‘Allegra,’ the woman explained as the bird worked up and down at Knack’s ear.
She removed the pink straw, which swept down to cover one side of her face, and held out her hand to it but the bird did not come.
‘Make yerself at home,’ she invited, indicating the chairs. ‘I’ll make a cuppa Horlicks. Horlicks oright?’
‘Splendid,’ Knack said in his precise but thickened accent. ‘Only first, I think, a drop of something – stronger.’ He snapped his knuckles again, and stooped – lean-shanked, dark-suited, with the bird on his shoulder and the hat with its turned-up brim still settled on his skull – to the diamond-paned leadlight door of the sideboard. ‘Hennessy,’ he pronounced, ‘Four Star.’
Before long he had established the habit of going two or three nights each week to sit in the room behind the junkshop, sipping illicit brandy, listening to Knack talk or play the piano, and drinking Horlicks made by the blonded Edna. They had come to be the nearest thing he had, in this sprawling transit camp, to a family, and the room with its lilac and green wallpaper was closer than his own two rooms in the boarded-up and partly burnt-out cottage to being home. He reckoned, on the basis that two-thirds of the place was given over to darkness, that about seven-and-six of his weekly ten shillings was paid for the accommodation of spiders, rats and the occasional cat that crawled in through the floorboards to have a litter of kittens, whose mewling he heard but which were too quick to take refuge in old cartons, or under piles of newspaper, to be caught.
