Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  Your affect. brother

  Frank

  He liked to walk to Knack’s through the noisy, wartime city. Down Edward Street, past the steep little triangular park where drunks lay about under the fig trees and the steps beside the Trades Hall, then down by the Town Hall and along the Quay to the Bridge.

  The river was wide, a breathing space in the hot city nights, with its gleam of tropical moonlight and the play on its surface of what lights were allowed under the restrictions. There were concrete pillboxes along the Quay with sandbags round the entrance. Inside, more drunks, and on the slatted seats the occasional couple who had nowhere else to go. The stench of such places was terrible. Piss, mostly, the smell of wet sacking, and the mustiness where summer rains had soaked through the concrete and made a film of slime.

  He liked to stand on the bridge, on the footway beside the iron spans, with the trams rattling and sparking behind, and have the city on either hand. In a wide band below, the mysterious water, darkness transparent making a sweep between mangroves and the roofs of factories to the arch of the next bridge further on. The river came down from farmlands off in the hills and went on widening in slow, snake-like curves to the mouth of the Bay.

  The river wound back and forth through the city, and was, in his mind, its real lifeline: animal, blue, a thinking and feeling presence with its skin of moonlit or sunlit scales, and its depths. If you saw it from high up – higher than where he was standing – it was a kind of serpent with the sun or the moon on its back, on a shield of earth; throwing off houses and squat public buildings, and warehouses, woolsheds, factories, as it moved in its ancient coils. His mind touched a power under the moonlit skin. Some of it entered him.

  Across the bridge, Melbourne Street was a garish thoroughfare with tramlines down the middle and busy traffic on the pavements, especially after dark. Light spilled from doorsteps where crowds gathered: the Blue Moon Skating Rink, with its hurdy-gurdy music and the dull thunder of rollerskates over boards, and round the corner an old-style vaudeville theatre, the Cremorne; on the corner opposite, a two-storeyed pub with verandahs.

  Once, walking home late, he had slipped into a laneway here to take a leak and had come upon two figures fucking in the rain. A soldier in a long army greatcoat had a woman against the wall, with her feet in the greatcoat pockets and her bare thighs damp with moonlight. They moved slowly like figures in a dream, making a single creature with two locked and moaning heads, a mythological beast to which he couldn’t have given a name, born out of the times, the war, as evidenced by the rough woollen material of the greatcoat with raindrops on its hairs.

  It was a street of intense casual encounters and farewells. The high wall down one side, with its giant billboards, was the Interstate station – you could hear the crashing and clashing of carriages, and later, in the city stillness, the shunting of engines. The other side of the street, after the Trocadero dance hall, was terraced houses approached by steep stone steps with railings: all brothels. Beyond, in a newer building on a corner, the junkshop.

  He followed the same route each time, delayed only on occasion by a convoy of shrouded trucks. He might have to stand several minutes then before he could scuttle across: a lean figure who only a few months before had been in uniform like the rest, but had fallen back, as solitude remade him or rediscovered old lines that the rough army material had disguised, into his scraggier self. Sometimes a figure would call out of one of the wagons, ‘Look, a swaggie! Hey! Swaggie!’ and others would take up the cry till there was a regular hullabaloo of whistling and shouting and chucking off.

  He was a leftover from another decade – or maybe he was a few months before his time in the one that was still to come, when all these soldiers, freshly demobbed, with their deferred pay gone and their new suits torn and soiled, after a season of paid boredom, would be scrabbling for a foothold again in a sliding world. Poor buggers, they didn’t know it yet, but when they leaned out of the wagons and catcalled or chiacked, it was themselves they were jeering at.

  He made his way through the greasy streets after a lick of a storm. It had been hot earlier. Now it was cool. The crowds in Melbourne Street were massed round the entrance to the Troc. Taxis were pulled up at the kerb. Red-mouthed girls, chewing gum, were stepping out of them in gaudy sandals. They clung to the arms of officers in pink drab, their caps immaculately straight on their cropped heads or tilted back over a youthful grin. As they passed, enlisted men leaning in groups against the wall sprang smartly to attention, then went back to lounging with their caps off and their hands in their pockets, chewing stale obscenities. Younger girls with skirts too short to hide their pudgy knees giggled and yoked arms, their hair piled so high in an unsteady pompadour they should have staggered. The lounging men offered up a medley of high and low wolf-whistles. From the mouth of the hall came the sounds of a band.

  He went on, tripping lightly on his feet, made happy by the music, which he continued to hum, and by the comfort of having behind him a whole day’s work in the hot attic under the roof, where he had sweated and produced – well, something, something – who knows what? The thought of it spread out there on the low table he had knocked together from fruit cases made him childishly happy. He thought of the colours up there in the dark. He chuckled. It was like milk in cans. He had briefly in mind three dented milkcans on a slatted bench above sand, set down in the cool of a bunyah pine, the lovely necks of them – blueish metal and the flat, clip-over lids. Heavy. The milk sloshing from side to side as you walked, and the steel handle cutting, not unpleasantly, into the soft of your hand.

  He was astonished to see, at Knack’s corner, a crowd bigger even than the one round the entrance to the dance hall – a few curious GIs, some of them black, but mostly barefoot men in singlets and shorts and women in housecoats or dirndls and felt slippers.

  The shop was lit up. All the sideboards and wardrobes and three-mirrored dressing tables with their load of china and cut glass, and the dining chairs hanging lopsided from the ceiling among unlighted lamps, made a clear night-picture.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked someone.

  ‘A murder,’ the woman told him. ‘That German bloke killed his misses or whatever she was – then shot ’imself.’

  He threw himself into the crowd round the door and came up hard against the arm of a policeman.

  ‘Oright, fella, what’s the rush? Where you think you’re goin’?’

  He babbled, he made no sense. The policeman, who was young, looked alarmed. It was a woman in the crowd who identified him. ‘He’s sort of an artist. I seen him in the shop – oh, lots of times. With her.’

  The policeman called a superior. He was let through to where the detective in charge was sitting in one half of the lovers’ seat under the shadowy dining chairs. Beyond, the door to the flat was ajar. He saw the shoulder of a fellow in a felt hat who was half-squatting and moving his arms about in a very regular manner from side to side.

  The man in the lovers’ seat was suspicious. He fired off a whole series of questions that Frank could not answer – his lips were too wooden. But what he did get out at last must have been convincing. With a policeman at his back he was allowed through into the flat.

  Edna Byrne, her dress rucked up a little over her thighs, was sitting in the lounge with her head on one side and a strand of blonde hair hanging. He had seen her sit this way often in their evenings together. She might have been listening, a little puzzled, but quite calm, to Knack’s thunderous left hand. He looked, and expected her at any moment to raise her arm and absent-mindedly restore the strand of hair or give him one of her shy, collusive looks.

  She had been shot twice in the breast. Her skirt, so oddly rumpled, was filled with blood.

  Knack, who must have been kneeling at her feet, had slumped forward with the gun between his teeth. He had shot the back of his head off. The bald dome was gone – it was all jagged bone. Frank star
ed. On the lilac and green wallpaper an area about the same size as his own painting was covered now with a mess of grey and red that was still sliding in wet trails to the floor. There were splashes of red on the walls and in the white space over the picture rail, and feathery red all over the windowpane and in smears and dabs and swashes across his landscape, changing forever its tranquil blue and grey.

  Frank looked and was stunned. He sank down and covered his eyes. The room was still rocking with wave after wave that beat out from the shock centre, the three shots, and was still breaking in red against the walls. He tried not to see, not to think of the forms of Edna and Knack and what that volley of darkness had done to them, as if by excluding them from what he saw he could save them and take all the shock into himself.

  He looked on with incomprehension as one of the men in felt hats picked up the body of the little bird and held it to his ear to see if it was still ticking, and another, with a sudden pinging sound, sent a tape measure flying back into its shell.

  The whole room shook with changes. His picture, for instance – the one thing that was near enough to his own experience to offer him access. Changed! Extraordinary. Such reds! What painter would have dared? He was frighteningly dazzled by the possibilities, as if, without his knowing it, his own hand had broken through to something that was searingly alive, savage, triumphant, and stood witness at last to all terror and beauty.

  That was what shook him: the sense of triumph, over and above what he would let himself feel, in a moment, as sickening loss. He might be blinded for the rest of his life by the boldness of it.

  I could sit here, he thought, for the rest of my life and I still wouldn’t come to the end of it.

  The police questioned him but it was clear that the odd artist bloke had nothing to tell. An ambulance man, not unkindly, treated him for shock and he was allowed to go home.

  The shock, in the non-medical sense, lasted for many days, in which he lay flat on his back on a camp-bed under the hot tin roof and grieved.

  The paintings, even those that were turned to the wall, were an affront to him, being inadequate now to what he had perceived. He slashed at them, tore them in strips. They lay in heaps on the floor.

  Where, he asked himself, had he been all this time, while the horrors were preparing? How had he failed to see the rising of such a tide of red? Most of all, he brooded on the mystery of Edna Byrne, who might have been his sister; they came from such similar worlds and had grown so close. Hand in hand, like children, they had followed a lean back into deep woods, licking from their fingers, and smiling, the remains of purple-grey bread pudding, the sweet fat. And all the time her face had been turned in a quite different direction, attending to music that left him now in a thunderous silence across which no words of comfort could be shouted and no message would pass.

  He drew his knees up on the narrow stretcher and writhed in an agony of cramped guts.

  His lost sister. He wept for her, but no tears came. He wept for both of them and for Knack as well. He hugged a deeper loneliness in himself than he had ever known, some final lack that nothing could fill.

  A death pact, that is what the newspapers called it: a lurid catchphrase to cover love, pity, fury, terror – the unsolvable mysteries.

  He thought of that couple in the lane, so lyrically, intensely involved in themselves and one another under the mizzling rain. Outside all weather and the chain of public events that had brought them together, and which their bodies, in passionate throes like the great coils and curves of the serpent, entirely threw off, they stood beyond words in their own occasion.

  The image haunted him; and he was haunted too by the music, which she it seems had understood in one sense and he, if he understood at all, in another. As something equally compelling but which led to strength and sunlight – that is what his picture had proposed.

  What music was it? Knack had never said. He had wrapped it up and taken it with him, and the police had shut and locked the piano, reducing it immediately, with all the rest of their furniture, to the same status as those sideboards, washstands and dressing tables in the shop outside, the debris of foundered, anonymous lives.

  As for his own fate, that too was a mystery. He caught only the briefest glimpse of it in a half-heard shower of notes, or a feathered scrawl that would have dried now to the colour of old roofs or the side of that barn against which Milly Shoals, their neighbour at Glen Alpin, had chased white chickens inside under a coming storm; or of the earth at Childers. And in another form, as in a bestiary, of that creature, nameless but neither terrible nor obscene, into which the couple in the lane had allowed themselves to be transformed, fine drops of moisture making brilliant all the hairs of its coat.

  He did get up again. He took his things, walked out of the house without even locking the door and went back to the roads. When he was ready to face canvas again he found a place he could work in, the old Pier Pictures at Southport. It helped a little to hear warm tides washing round half-eaten piles and to smell clean, original salt.

  He wrote to his sister-in-law:

  Dear Hilda (if I may call you that),

  I have read your letter many times. I agree we must accept, after being so long without word, that Jim, poor fellow, is among the missing who will not come back. You are very brave to have faced up to this at last after so many months of hoping against hope. I feel for your grief. After all this time, and other losses which I will not go into, I feel it too. Jim and I were very close as boys and I often thought of him in the years after. He and I, as you know, had the same mother – I never knew her – though it never made any difference that the others were only half.

  I have spent many years working and worrying for this family. We seem dogged with bad luck, or worse, I don’t know what. My brother Pearsall is out of the army but has not found work and seems unable to settle. He was the youngest of us and I had great hopes for him, but he is already thirty – half his life gone and nothing started.

  I am sorry to worry you with these thoughts. The fact is, I would like to do what I can for the boy, my nephew Gerald, and from what you say of him have good hopes he will turn out well. Above all, he must be given the best possible education. I get a little money from selling my work in the south – nothing much, but enough to help – and would be happy for his father’s sake to pay for the boy’s schooling. We could begin with that. I would suggest Toowoomba Grammar when the time comes. It is where his grandfather went.

  None of the rest of us, except Pearsall, had any education to speak of and it is a great lack, though I know Jim educated himself and did well – and when Pearsall’s time came we could only afford the State. Gerald must have more.

  I realise it is a little time yet, but I want to reassure you so that we can make plans. My friends in the south, who handle all money affairs, will keep in touch with you. Meanwhile, my best wishes to you in your sorrow – and to the boy.

  Your affect. brother-in-law

  Frank Harland

  Nephews

  [1]

  Frank Harland’s landscape, which my father had acquired for two pounds on the day of our first meeting, hung all the last year of my grandfather’s life on the wall of my parents’ bedroom. Its blues and greens dominated the room, and I thought of it as casting its own light when at five-thirty each afternoon I went in, quietly called my mother, and was allowed to lie with her for a minute or two on the high bed, before she told me regretfully but with firmness: ‘Enough now Phil, I must go to your grandfather, poor love. He’ll wonder what’s happened to us.’

  Later, in the storm that blew up round my grandfather’s death, the picture got left behind.

  ‘What about Frank Harland’s picture?’ I asked when Harland’s name began to be known. ‘Why don’t we ask if we can have it back?’

  My father looked doubtful. ‘I think, son, that your Aunt Ollie’s rather fond of that pi
cture. She was fond of Frank, you know. I don’t think we could ask for it now.’

  So each year when I went to visit my grandmother on her birthday, travelling down on the motor-rail from South Brisbane and returning the following night, I would go at least once and stand before it, and though it bore no resemblance to the landscape of Southport itself, which was all flat water and liquid sky, would find there the exact emotional equivalent of the place as I had known it in the days of my grandfather’s illness. The atmosphere of that time, which I felt for and regretted, was so strongly present that I might have gone out to the front bedroom expecting to find him restored and upright among his pillows, with his mouth open and his eyes shut, snoring, or passed my younger self on the back stairs, slipping out to relieve myself while I gazed through loquat leaves at the moon.

  It was my grandmother who occupied the front bedroom now. Soon after Grandpa’s death she had moved back – it was after all the main bedroom of the house, in which her various children had been conceived – and eventually she too came to spend most of her days there, no longer able to go downstairs but still dealing by telephone with even the most minor details of the business, on which she had never relinquished her hold. Once a week, on Fridays, my father drove down to consult with her over a working breakfast.

  The room had been done up. The big altar-like dressing table with its silver-framed photographs of the family, the washstand and bedside cabinet, the wardrobe with its bevelled mirrors and scrolls and finials, had been cleared out and replaced with blondwood built-ins in the modern style. As if to dispel all shadows, and any secrets that might once have lurked in corners or at the back of shelves, the light was glaringly fluorescent. It made the room look as if it were lit to be photographed. The yellow tube-light cut its natural blue (which was the light off the sea as it passed the coarse, sharp whips of the bunyahs), draining the room so effectively of its heavy warmth that we might have been in another house altogether, with another aspect and view. Only the brass bed was the same. She had kept that. It was inconveniently high, it did not fit, but she lay in it.