Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  But this linking of names was only one of the conditions that made them one. They had a game they played, and not just for taxi drivers, which involved the invention of a whole shared childhood of imaginary aunts, uncles, family anecdotes, long periods when they were locked up together with chickenpox or the mumps. They vied boldly with one another in coming up with more and more outrageous memories, which they recounted with such mock-innocence and effrontery that even those who knew they were an invention were shocked; not by the stories themselves, which after all were of things that had never really occurred, but by what might be going on in their imagination. I found it increasingly difficult to disguise what I felt.

  ‘Phil’s unhappy,’ Jacky would tease. ‘He’s feeling left out. Honestly, Phil, what a face!’

  ‘Is he? Are you, Phil?’ Gerald, his eyes set wide like a cat’s, would assume an expression of utter innocence. ‘But why? You don’t need to be,’ he would tell me, ‘honest you don’t.’ But then he would put his red head beside hers again so that they really did look like creatures of a magical oneness.

  Before such demonstrations of a relationship that was arcane, transgressive, and for that very reason perhaps, enticing, I would be torn once more between assurance and the sort of gloomy despair that could only justify Jacky’s original complaint. What I feared was that in creating these fantasies of a secret life together they would hit on the reality. How could they fail to? I watched them move closer each day in a past that had never existed, except as excited make-believe, and wondered when it would spring into existence at last as a future. How could they stay cool about such things? Was it pretence? Was it perversity? Were they subtler and more deceitful than I had dreamed?

  ‘Listen,’ Gerald said, ‘I know what.’ We were about to hail a taxi. They would pile into the back as usual. I would be left with the driver. ‘No, listen. This is a great idea! Why don’t you pretend to be Jacky’s jealous boyfriend? You suspect, see, that she and I – ’

  ‘Leave it Gerald, let’s just not play at all,’ Jacky advised.

  ‘No, this is a really good idea! We’re brother and sister, see, like as usual, and Phil can be –’

  ‘Why not you?’ I asked.

  ‘Why not me what?’

  ‘Why can’t you be the jealous fiancé?’

  ‘And you and Jacky the brother and sister?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘No, but why not? Why do I have to be the dill?’

  ‘You don’t have to be a dill.’

  ‘But I would be, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ Jacky exploded, ‘let’s just not play at all.’

  ‘You don’t have to be a dill. It’s just that you’re jealous.’

  ‘Gerald, will you stop? You’re such kids, both of you.’

  ‘All right, then, we won’t play. I just thought it’d be sort of a new twist.’

  He sat and sulked. He was hurt, though it seemed to me that I, who was to have been cast in the role of deceived lover, had the greater cause to feel aggrieved.

  ‘Oh come on, Gerald, stop sulking, anyone’d think you were a five-year-old.’

  Jacky tugged at his arm. ‘Come on now.’ I didn’t see why she was in such a hurry always to humour him. ‘Let’s get a milkshake up at Con’s. I’ll shout if you can’t afford it.’

  ‘I can afford it.’

  ‘Well for heaven’s sake, let’s go and get it then. Come on Phil. At least you don’t sulk. Honestly, Gerald, you’re impossible sometimes. I don’t know why we put up with you.’

  We, she had said we. The whole sky expanded and shone – it was better than any game. But it was Gerald’s arm she took. They struck out together and I lagged behind, waiting for them to notice; for all the world like the jealous fiancé I had refused to be.

  I was always falling into such traps, many of which I myself had set. In restaurants and at the pictures I made sure I was seated first and would be driven to distraction if Jacky did not settle beside me. I did everything I could, when we were all three together, to make Gerald reveal his worst side, his tendency to whine or brag or get the sulks. I started arguments on subjects he knew nothing about, and when he took the bait and showed off, then got stuck and blustered, would sit back looking wonderfully cool. As my aunt had suggested, I cultivated him in the hours after work, in the hope that he might, while we were alone, and under the influence of liquor, give something away – something that would incriminate him and justify my jealous suspicions or make Jacky entirely mine. What I failed to observe as the months passed was how close we had grown, Gerald and I; how much he had come to confide in me.

  ‘Listen,’ he said late one afternoon when we were alone together at the Criterion, ‘my uncle keeps on at me to bring you back. He remembers you from Southport.’

  We were on our third or fourth beer and had been engaged till this moment in one of those wary discussions, all playful sparring, in which young men test one another, pushing a little, pushing further, retreating, pushing again, but making certain always to preserve the distance between them that the rituals of such places are designed to preserve. Gerald, with his half-shy insistence, was breaking the rules.

  ‘Would you?’ he urged. ‘He keeps on and on at me. I wish you would.’

  He met my eye, smiled weakly, then looked away. For some reason it was important to him.

  ‘You’d be doing me a big favour,’ he said. Then darkly: ‘It’s something I don’t want to talk about.’ He frowned, took a gulp of his beer. ‘Anyway, you’ll see for yourself,’ he said, ‘if you’ll come. Will you?’

  ‘All right, yes,’ I said. ‘One of these nights. If you really want me to.’ I was curious about Frank Harland and flattered that he remembered me. But something in Gerald’s manner put me off, made me wary of being drawn in.

  ‘No,’ he persisted, ‘I mean now. I know it sounds silly but I don’t want to go home without you. Please say you’ll come. It’s true he asks about you. He never forgets anyone – anything – it’s scary the way everything just sticks in his head. You think he’s forgotten or hasn’t seen or heard, and a week later it all comes out again, he’s been stewing over it. I don’t mean he talks all that much. He just broods and glares – it’s worse than talk – and whatever you do you’re never in the right. He torments people. That’s what he likes. It makes me laugh reading that bullshit they write about him.’ He gave a nervous laugh and stopped himself but couldn’t stop talking. ‘You know the sort of stuff the newspapers write. Down south, I mean, they never notice him here. It’s all bullshit. He’s ignorant as dirt. His head’s full of maggots. He doesn’t care about anyone really. All he knows is how to dole out some of his cash and then complain afterwards that people are bleeding him dry, and how he’s sacrificed himself and had no thanks for it. Then he smothers you with –’ He shook his head and took another quick gulp of beer. ‘He disgusts me, I mean it! I’m not just trying to make myself interesting. I know that’s what you think but it isn’t true. You’ll see for yourself.’

  I knew by this time a good deal about Gerald’s past, and might have seen earlier that his plunges from overconfidence into despondency and hopelessness were no new thing, and that his fears, irrational and childish as they sometimes appeared and as he dramatised and exploited them, went back to his childhood – to the years when he was being led up the steps of one boarding house after another in Randwick or Petersham and had known a good many pretending uncles before any real one came on the scene. Not all of them can have been monsters, but they became so in the telling.

  There was a Welsh carpenter with three fingers missing from his left hand who had a workshop at the back of a timber yard. He had taught Gerald at six to use a little plane.

  The boy had never till then seen anything so beautiful as the almost transparent shavings he could coax from a
plank; they made such a lovely sighing sound and such a heap of angelic curls on the floor, each with the grain in it that was really, the man explained, the years of the pine tree’s life, whole winters and summers, many more than his own. He accepted that, but thought of them as falling just the same from the head of a secret child, his playmate, invisible to others but always there. Falling golden-blond, as his own fell red round the high chair at the barber’s.

  The Welshman was sentimental. He smelled of wood glue, had thick hair on his shoulders, sang loud hymns when he got drunk on Friday nights and had beaten Gerald once with a razor-strap for ‘touching’ himself. One of his successors, a young railway-worker of strict habits, a good-looking, fresh-faced youth who wore a serge waistcoat and hat and waved a stick with a flag on it to start the trains, had spared Gerald but beaten the woman; savagely, with his closed fists, for no other reason than that she was willing to go with him.

  ‘Oh, uncles, they’re a race apart,’ Gerald told me. ‘I know all about uncles.’

  He did, he might do. I was prepared to believe in his desperation and to believe as well that there was some essential instability in things that he knew of and which I, till now, had failed to perceive. But I had my own view of Frank Harland.

  ‘All right,’ I said in a low voice, ‘I’ll come. But won’t we be disturbing him?’

  He laughed. ‘Oh don’t you worry, he’ll let us know if we are. He’s not slow at telling you off if you get in the way of his precious work. But you mustn’t take too much notice of the house, you know, it’s a pigsty, we live like pigs. There’s only Uncle Tam to do anything – no woman – so nothing gets done properly. And he won’t let anyone into the room he uses so nothing gets done there at all. But you’ll see! I just don’t want you to be put off, that’s all.’

  He set his glass down, half-finished. ‘I’ll take you pillion on the CZ.’ He was already standing.

  [2]

  The house was in a street beyond the Dutton Park terminus at West End, on a high ridge above the river, a single-storeyed weatherboard with a hallway straight through from the latticed verandah to a set of stairs with a railed back porch.

  The land sloped, so that the house, which you approached over a wooden footbridge, sat on stumps that were three feet high at the front and eighteen at the back, with a view to a low arc of mangroves on the bank opposite and a sweep of muddy, grey-brown river. Two planks of the footbridge were loose. They jumped under our boots. Paint had flaked from the verandah lattice, showing the heads of rusty nails. The timber of the verandah rails was split and weathered, the guttering sagged. Under the footbridge the ground fell away in a wilderness of morning-glory vines that in the late afternoon sunlight gave off a breath of steam, and faintly, drowsily hissed.

  Gerald had paused before the open front door. ‘Look at this,’ he said.

  There was a gaping hole in the verandah boards. Someone, long ago, had nailed raw battens over it in an irregular cross. I knelt as he did and peered through.

  The open space of their under-the-house was cavernous. The slope fell away through the forest of blackened stumps from near darkness immediately below to the high-set lighted end, where there was a set of washing tubs and beside them a chopping block.

  Gerald was absorbed by something I couldn’t see there. ‘Isn’t it scary,’ he said. He meant it. When I clambered upright he continued to kneel with his eye to the gap.

  I was beginning to be impatient with him, he took everything too far. But when he stepped into the hallway I felt its shakiness, a slight vibration of the whole structure on its supports, as uncanny, having still in my head that vision of the slope. Was that what Gerald had meant? You were aware up here, as light struck through the floorboards, of the uncertain anchorage those stumps might have in the crumbling earth, but also of the furriness and palpable density of that wedge of dark on which the world up here was afloat. I had spent my whole life in houses like this, where under-the-house was another and always present dimension, a layer of air between lighted rooms and the damp earth: a repository of early fears, secrets, childhood experiments, whispers, and where the thin covering over clay or sandy loam was of dustballs, rusty pins that had slipped through floorboards, peach stones, dog’s fur, old nails and hinges and the handles of cups. I took it for granted. It was darkness domesticated, a part of local reality, the underside of things. But down in New England where Gerald came from, and in Sydney and Albury where his mother had taken him as a child, houses sat close to the ground and were of stone. For him that underworld was foreign and full of threat. Was that it?

  The shaky hallway and its creaking had drawn from the kitchen at the back a pale, soft, barefooted figure with a frying pan in his hand and a great deal of blond or greyish-blond hair. He might have been called up, armed with the blackened pan, out of a bed of straw. He blinked into the hallway, where the setting sun made us two dense, indistinguishable silhouettes.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, love,’ he sang in his tenor voice. I was reminded immediately, and disturbingly, of Della.

  He was bulky, and might under other conditions have been tough, but there was something so comfortably domestic about him, he had such bleached wrists and forearms, and such an air about him of soapsuds and boiled milk with a skin on it and sour water in zinc pails, that I saw him as womanish when there was no physical reason for it. He had been scrubbing the pan with a ball of steel wool that gave off a strong odour of rust. When Gerald introduced me, he made a gesture – a helpless lifting of the elbows – that suggested he was too soapy-greasy to shake hands, and immediately afterwards a tilt of the head towards the other side of the hallway, which indicated, not altogether respectfully, that the man of the house was at work there and should not be disturbed.

  ‘Stormy weather out there.’ He made a face and giggled. ‘Ol’ Thunder’s in one of ’is moods.’

  He sounded like Della reporting on the weather in my grandmother’s vicinity after taking a tray out to her office. There was the same air of solidarity, as between children against a tyrannous adult.

  Across the hallway an open door led through a room piled with newspapers to what I had observed from the street was a long, closed-in verandah. There were odd bumps and crashes from out there of tins being battered or furniture shifted. ‘That means a blow-up,’ the man giggled. ‘We know, don’t we Jed? – I hope you brought yer brolly!’ he told me in a theatrical whisper.

  But when Frank Harland came out at last, in a short-sleeved shirt and dungarees, he was not at all the angry demiurge his brother had evoked. Abstracted at first and barely noticing any one of us, he stood with his back to the sink, where a line of ants was pouring out of a corner-hole, and stroked his moustache. Tam winked and lifted his chin. You’ll see.

  But I didn’t. Frank Harland suddenly lighted up, producing the shy, rather boyish grin I remembered from Aunt Ollie’s kitchen.

  ‘By golly,’ he said, ‘I can hardly believe it. Those were the days, eh? That old picture show? And your aunts. And Della and the iceman. And there was a terrible man with eyebrows, a friend. What was he called?’

  ‘Uncle Haro.’

  ‘Ah yes, Uncle Haro.’ He repeated the sounds as if they were the formula for a bad smell. ‘Oh, I remember it all, I’ve never forgotten any of it. You’ll see! I’ll show you!’ He was shifting about on the worn linoleum, gaunt and awkward with his horny feet, in what Tam must have seen, with his mouth in a line of wary scepticism, as a new mood altogether, a transformation. What’s this, then, Tam’s look implied, what’s he up to now? ‘We must,’ he was telling Tam, ‘have a celebration.’

  So while the brother Tam went out to buy sausages and beer, and Gerald, easier now, lounged on a windowsill where gold-and-white casements opened on to the green of mulberry leaves, Frank Harland, awkwardly amiable and eager to please, showed me where he worked and some of the pictures he had kept (out of affection, or because he had
never got round to packing and sending them off) from the time ten years back when he was at Southport.

  His work habits had not changed. There was the same low rough-wood table – the same, or another of similar design, its wooden slats all rainbow-puddled; the same crowd of peanut-paste jars with a fan of brushes; the chipped enamel mug, the rags stained and stiff with paint; and on the floor a plate with dinner-scraps. Paper and cardboard sketches were fixed to a wall with drawing pins or lay in heaps on the floor. Other larger works, on board or in frames, rested in stacks against the door of a half-open cupboard, its shelves already crammed. On the door of the cupboard, and at head height all round the tongue-and-groove walls, were yellowed newspaper cuttings and pages from magazines, and on the floor along the skirting board rows of books, of the kind that can be picked up from junkshops and auctions, their cloth fretted at the edges and blotched white where the cockroaches had been at them. In a corner, his stretcher bed. The lower crossbar had snapped out of its socket and was hanging loose. The pillow had no case. The blankets might have been the same greasy-grey army blankets of ten years ago.

  I had the odd sensation, after so long, of being back on the stage of the Pier Pictures, with the great cavern of the empty theatre out front and the sea rising and falling around the piers below. The sunlit verandah, with its fleshy mulberry leaves and the gold-and-white reflection of its casements, might have been the magic box of my childhood. It too was all up-in-the-air and shakily adrift, and the painter himself as custodian of it seemed entirely unchanged – hardly older at all; he had always looked old. Extraordinarily light on his feet and loose-limbed with excitement, he had pulled out a pile of paintings, and with muttered comments and chuckles and clicks of disgust was choosing some and rejecting others. He gave every indication of being unaware of us.