by David Malouf
When it was time for Horlicks, the drink that kept off night starvation, Edna was in charge again and the mists dispersed.
‘What about a bit of bread pudding,’ she suggested once. ‘If you don’t mind it wet.’ She showed a half baking dish of the grey glutinous stuff, solid with lard and bruised purple where sultanas, of which there were many, had bled in cooling into the surrounding grey. ‘Walt won’t eat it, so I make it the way I like it myself. Real wet. Me mum used to make it of a Sunday mornin’, with the leftovers.’
‘This,’ Knack was muttering as over a philosophical problem, ‘I have never understood. Bread pudding!’
‘Well we do, don’t we Frank?’
‘Sometimes,’ Knack said, looking at the slices of sweet grey pudding they were stuffing into their mouths, ‘this place disgusts me. Worse even than the other. Blood isn’t the worst of it.’
‘Oh come on, Walt,’ she jollied, ‘it’s not that bad.’
‘How would you know?’
‘Well I wouldn’t!’ she said, immediately on her dignity. ‘Too ignorant. Too – Australian!’
He narrowed his eyes and said wearily, ‘Yes. That too.’
‘Well, Frank and I are enjoying our bread pudding, aren’t we, Frank? Ummmm!’ She sucked her fingers like a child, and like a child went on teasing just a moment too long. ‘I reckon I’ll have another piece.’
Knack got up abruptly and she stopped sucking her fingers. Large-eyed and pale, she followed his movements across the room. He stooped to the leadlight doors of the sideboard, found the bottle of brandy, and when he turned, holding it up like a counterweight to the slice of pudding she had not yet bitten into, his mood had changed; whatever there was of savagery in him had abated.
‘Well, enough!’ she said, putting her slice of pudding down and pushing the dish aside. She waited for Knack to say something that would restore relations between them, all three.
‘I find, Frank,’ Knack said, ‘that a drop of cognac – even after the Horlicks, is a great –’
He did not finish the sentence, being engaged in filling, with intense concentration, the three little glasses he had placed in a row on the velvet cloth.
They watched him in silence, and when he had passed the glasses to them with his long chalky fingers, they drank, very solemnly, as at a feast.
Frank was grateful for their affection, and having nothing to give the household that could compete with the vast jumble of stuff that was stacked outside as in an anteroom, waiting to be moved in, he brought one of his paintings.
He had framed it himself. It was hung above the Genoa-velvet lounge, on the wall opposite the window, its pine frame making a clean break between lilac-and-green and the predominate grey-blue of the landscape he had opened up in the wall: as an alternative, he liked to believe, to the concrete yard and to Knack’s own gloomy views. It pleased him to have his painting in that particular spot, and to think that he had, for his friends’ sake, changed the room and its perspective in the same way that Knack’s music could change it, opening the walls, even at night, on to a new sort of weather.
Knack approved. He would stand before the picture with his hands clasped behind as before a window, his long, cloth-covered back making an impressively solid downstroke, black, against the pale rectangle of the frame and the flickering light within. He took a deep breath.
‘I like this country you have painted, Frank. This bit of it. It is splendid. A place, I think, for whole men and women, or so I see it – for the full man, even if there are no inhabitants as yet. Perhaps it is there I should have migrated.’
He gave a dark chuckle. It was one of his jests.
‘But it is this country,’ Frank said.
‘You think so?’ Knack looked. ‘No, Frank, I don’t think it is. Not yet, anyway. It has not been discovered, this place. The people for it have not yet come into existence, I think, or seen they could go there – that there is space and light enough – in themselves. And darkness. Only you have been there. You are the first.’
Edna was less enthusiastic. Unlike Knack, who hated the countryside itself – too glarey, too many flies! – she would have preferred the real thing, if only on an outing to Dayboro, but was touched by the gift and proud as a sister might have been of the achievement.
‘Well, you could of bowled me over,’ she said. ‘I knew you painted, love, but I didn’t know you were an artist. Knack says you’re an artist. I feel quite out of it.’
The public had a great hunger at this time for actualities. Each day after ten-thirty there were long queues outside the Carlton Newsreel Theatrette, which showed an hour – interspersed with cartoons in which Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry cavorted in vivid colour through a world of aggressive vegetables and vengeful tables and doors – of stark, black-and-white horrors, the happenings of three days or a week ago on the other side of the earth.
As the weeks passed and the horrors mounted, the queues grew longer. Waves of grey figures moving forward under a shaken sky; tall buildings collapsing amid thunder to show all the rooms in section like a grey doll’s house; then quieter, remoter events for which there was no sound at all.
Frank Harland went along with the rest to see what sort of world he was living in and what had been going on in it while he was at work in his attic or listening to the music at Knack’s. What he saw did not immediately explain itself.
Skeletal figures with all the ribs showing, huge genitals the only sign of flesh about them, were ranged along a cyclone-wire fence. Their eyes were a cavernous black in the smudged, poor-quality film, their bodies a cheesey white. It was difficult to understand what they could be doing. Normal life gave no clue. But others, wearing striped pyjamas, stood in groups in the grey churned-up mud behind, and had strayed, it appeared, out of their safe beds into an area of general nightmare where they had been caught by the arrival of daylight, and had woken and could not get back. A bulldozer, itself a new sort of machine, was turning over a pile of soft rubbish in a yard, out of which arms and legs were flung or whole figures rose up and slowly turned over, showing a withered rump and fishlike backbone, dangling a bony foot. All this had, in the stilled theatre, which smelled of cigarette smoke and disinfectant, a peculiar unreality – this event out of your own time, of ten days or a month ago, which you sat watching from an armchair, in a set row, while others lounged against the walls. It was so sharply discontinuous with the three o’clock tropical simmer of the streets outside. A grainy, grey-and-white, black-and-white world in which the areas of light were too luminous and the blacks too dull, it was already ghostly. Flesh was not solid enough in this dimension to dissolve or be violated. Impossible to believe that food might go into the open mouths, or that breath or vomit or cries could come out of them. Film took the shadows and made them more shadowy still. It set them, for the viewer, at the same distance of believing unbelief as fade-out kisses, or the picking off in flickering thousands of redskins on far plains.
An alsatian leapt up. A boy in uniform turned to the camera, gave a wide grin, and set his gloved hand on a holster. The bleached-out film ran smoothly through the projector. Every object within the frame – the boy’s teeth, the fur on the alsatian’s neck, the leather of the holster and of the suitcase carried by an old man who was being hauled with difficulty into an open truck – had the same quality here, and seemed inevitably linked as the unreal light fell upon them.
These events were actual but unreal. They belonged to the history of another planet that had its own weather and its own range of colours, grey-black-white. It was recognisable but remote, or seemed so. Till in one of the images a figure in the same grey-striped pyjamas as the rest, shaven-skulled and with a shovel in his hand, appeared beside a sunflower. It was taller than himself and in full bloom. The great round head of the sunflower, with its circlet of grey flames, dropped, and was turned towards what must, you saw with a little shock, be a blazi
ng sun. So it could be hot there! Vivid yellow flowed out of the sun into the flamey petals, and as it did so the grey flesh too was touched with light and smeared with earth, blood, shit colours, and along with the colour, sound, smells – it was intolerable!
Frank began to sweat. At last, when he could take no more of it, he got up and began to push out past the real knees, and back, almost choking, into Brisbane, into the airlessness and banked heat of Queen Street.
He was shamefaced now before Walter Knack. What he had glimpsed in those images of a place that was contemporary with last week’s muggy weather – with kids, cats, clotheslines, taxis full of American sailors, and the smashing of bottles on back fences in what passed here for violence – was the gap that existed between Knack’s world and anything he himself had known. It invested the man with a quality – history it might be – that he and the rest here, including Edna, had escaped. He couldn’t imagine how, in her dealings with Knack, she got over that. It accounted, in Frank’s eyes, not only for Knack’s views but for his long back as well, and the way the cloth rucked across it when he knelt to the diamond-paned doors of the sideboard or leaned to the upright with its empty sconces. It set the man apart, physically as well as in experience, but as one of millions. It was as if he bore on his shoulder an invisible weight that was the shovel to dig his own grave, for which the budgerigar Allegra, wearing the blue-green of the native bush, was no more than a bit of local mockery, or on Knack’s part the spirit of wishful thinking, a trick to mislead the gods.
The man had a visible fate. He had sucked it up with the fog that drifted in off his native lakes, or from exhalations out of flooded chalkpits where the dead would not lie still but breathed and gave off gases. It was in the dirt, of whatever colour, that had got in under his nails, and that no scrubbing could flush out; into the pores of his skin, into his footsoles, and was the thickness on his tongue, which would only imperfectly accommodate itself to local vowels.
In other places, Frank saw, men’s lives might take other forms and be subject to forces that were inconceivable here. Did that make their suffering different? It must. Did it make it more real? And what of strength and happiness?
These questions were a torment to Frank Harland. What he had suffered himself, and the suffering he had seen and heard of from others, out there on the road but also here in the city, behind crooked grey fences and in bursts of quarrelling and screams of rage or terror out of neighbours’ windows – did it lose some quality of the human before those stripped and skeletal figures, to whom Knack, even in a black suit rather than pyjamas, was related by fifty years of breathing the same air, of putting his foot down on the same infected soil? Whereas he and Edna and all the rest here, in their real innocence, were related only by the accident of existing in the same time – which was not at all the same thing – and had been let off. Lightly, was it? Is anyone let off lightly? Is anyone let off?
It was Knack’s smooth bald skull, that impenetrable hemisphere with the thin membrane that shone, sweated, occasionally drew back in painful corrugations, that fascinated and appalled him.
A monstrous egg. He would have liked to clasp it in his hands and feel what was hatching there, the warmth and the beat of the blood, since there was no way of getting to what it knew, or had seen and walked away from. He wondered – and shocked himself – if Edna, in their intimate moments, sometimes cradled the big stone egg between her breasts. How much did she know from Knack that she could never have grasped in any other way? How much had entered her – and entered her understanding – of what Knack knew?
He understood that this was the real question between them when on long hot mornings, with Knack off at an auction, they sat in a corner of the junkshop while trams rattled past and the women in hats and with shopping baskets pressed their noses against the plateglass windows.
‘I’ve had a letter from me sister,’ she told him, ‘she’s in the WRAACS. Wants t’ come ’n stay.’ She turned her hand and examined the lacquered nails. ‘I’m gunna put ’er off. I don’t think she and Knack ’d get on.’ She gave a rough laugh. ‘That’s putting it mildly!’
Their eyes met. She was, he saw, in glimpsing Knack through her sister’s eyes, expressing astonishment at herself and how far she had wandered into some more complex world than her beginnings at Childers.
‘I c’n pretend,’ she said slowly, ‘that the letter never got here. Wartime ’n that. What d’y’ reckon? Does it seem awful?’
He swallowed, non-committal. They came from people for whom family loyalties mattered, but Knack’s call upon her was greater, and different.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it don’t seem right. I’m fond of me sister, she’s a good sort, and sometimes you know it’d be nice to have a good chinwag with someone who knows all about you. That’s the thing about families, they know all there is to know, even the worst, no surprises! We used t’ be so alike, me and Bet, peas in a pod. We’ve gone different ways. But I’ve got t’ think of Walt. I wouldn’ want ’im hurt. They just wouldn’t get on, that’s all. Better not risk it.’
She glanced up again, shy of what he might think of her; then sighed, having made her decision, and he was drawn, as often before, to something in her through which he glimpsed, as through a half-open door into an unfamiliar room, that corner of her being in which Knack stood tall, dark, dressed in a power that arose for both of them out of stories they had scared themselves with as children and whose fascination they had never thrown off – a gentle, mocking, ugly, clever, tormented stranger, who spoke their own language with pedantic correctness but belonged to another world.
He recognised this romantic and rather touching view of Knack because he shared it. But one day, in the course of their easy dealings with one another, she gave him another view of things.
‘I can’t explain it,’ she was saying, ‘it’s beyond anything I could of expected. Just think! He’s come from so far away, from such a foreign place, those forests ’n all. An’ you know he was a kind of aristocrat there, he’s told you the sort of life they lived, his people. Not like us, Frank, not in the least. Fur coats in winter, servants – even a special maid to dress him and put on his little hand-sewn shirts. An’ it took all those circumstances – you know what I mean – civil wars, revolutions and then this war and all he’s suffered, poor dear, to bring him to a place where we could just meet. I mean, all the chances were against it, but the wars and that happened as if they were just for that. I’ll tell you this, Frank, without Walt I’d never – I’d never of known even the half of what I am, I’d have missed myself – walked right past myself in the dark. It was like being turned round and seeing yourself for the first time, what he could show me. Like there were things in me – not all good things even – I mean not nice – but me; and the same things in him as well, and when we came together they could flow out of me and I could stop being – I don’t know – all loaded down with what I was scared of and ashamed of. People think I’m sunny. I’m not. Not always. Not deep down. There’s a lot of darkness in us.’
Frank looked at her and wondered. She was no longer talking only of herself and Knack.
She lay her fingertips very gently on his arm. He raised his eyes, having lowered them; questioningly, as to an oracle. The light of the shop, with its free-floating chairs and other debris of ruined households, was strange at this hour just before sunset, with the traffic streaming home.
‘You’re not to be scared, Frank,’ she said softly. ‘I’ve seen that you’re scared sometimes. Of what’s in you, I mean. You’re not to be.’
She might have been very old, for all the softness of her fingerpads in the palm of his hand. He felt strongly the beating of his own blood, very dark and loud, and really was scared for a moment, then not. He felt lightheaded, free, happy, and younger perhaps than he had ever been.
He was concerned once again at this time with his difficult family.
He w
rote:
My dear brother Tam,
I am sorry you have had such troubles. You say you have no luck – well, good luck seems hard to come by these days. I know you are a worker and have been a good son to our father – none better, sticking to him all these years and with so much to put up with. I will do what I can but could never raise nearly that much cash. The war makes things hard, even if it is nearly over. I will ask the people in Sydney who have my paintings to advance me a little bit and send it direct. If the worst comes to the worst the five acres must be sold, but it will break my heart just the same that we have not been able to keep it. The best of what we have!
You are a good fellow, Tam, and a kind and affectionate son and brother. I have, by the way, heard from our sister-in-law, Jim’s wife. She doesn’t say so direct, but seems to have reconciled herself to the fact that poor Jim has perished – no news for sure, but it is more than a year since she had word of him and all those in the hands of the Japanese have had terrible things to bear. We were very close once, Jim and me – as we all were. He has a son, aged nine or ten, I will do what I can for him. Our sister-in-law asks for help and has no one else to turn to, no family of her own.
What news of Pearsall? Since I was let out of the army myself I have been a bit crook – chest. Worked for a while in an aeroplane factory, but it was too much for me at that stage. I’m better now and have a bit of a house in Brisbane. Am painting again. Let me know when you get the money, and about the five acres. Do what you can. My love to our father and to Pearsall when you hear from him.
