by David Malouf
I sat down in the big gloomy sitting room. By daylight, and without its usual crowd, it seemed desolate, for all its objects interestingly placed. Aunt Roo strode about wearing a cashmere shawl. She was too distraught to sit.
‘I didn’t expect it,’ I said. ‘How could I have?’
I didn’t mean simply that I had misunderstood Gerald or failed to take him seriously, but that self-destruction was so far from my own sense of things that it had never entered my head. Lack of imagination perhaps. But my grip on life was very strong at that time. I was shaken, and the shock had thrown me back on my youth.
‘I expected it,’ my aunt was saying, half to herself. ‘Well, not that exactly – but I told you, Phil, I told you over and over that the boy was desperate. You wouldn’t see it, you thought I was dramatising. Well what do you think drama is all about? It’s about the agonies people suffer, about what they do. Don’t you believe that?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Well now you do – not that there’s any satisfaction in it. Poor Gerald, I can’t –’ She stood wringing her hands a moment then came rapidly across the room. ‘Listen,’ she said, settling on a footstool so that our knees touched, ‘I wouldn’t try to see Jacky if I were you. Oh I know you’ll want to, but it’s the wrong time, pet. She was so terribly fond of the boy.’
‘Does she think I wasn’t?’
Aunt Roo put her head on one side and regarded me. That she did not reply immediately made me see how doubtful I should be of myself.
‘Well I know you were, Phil, because I know you. But you put yourself on the other side, didn’t you? That’s how Jacky sees it. You were his man – the uncle’s.’
‘I thought,’ I said bitterly, ‘that I was my own man. I’ve told you that before.’ I felt the injustice of being caught so many ways. There was too much to explain: my loyalty to Frank, the respect I had for his work but also for the man – he too had suffered; my affection for Gerald, which had been the wary affection of young men who must test themselves one against the other – an uneasy thing, but passionate in its way and painfully real; and more than all of that, my devotion to Jacky. ‘Will she refuse to see me?’
My aunt shook her head. ‘She says she will, but who knows? You’ll have to settle that yourselves.’
I went to find Jacky one afternoon at the end of the week. I had never been to her house before. It was a windy day, not yet winter but with a westerly blowing that set all the palm fronds streaming in one direction, like sea creatures swimming in from the Pacific. There was an odd electricity in the air that made things rasp, grow fretful and give off sparks.
Jacky’s mother seemed suspicious of me. She showed me to a closed room off the verandah where Jacky was working at an old school-desk, deeply absorbed, like a child, with her paints. Outside, green things thrashed and tore themselves to pieces, snapping off twigs to litter a path; but the room was secure from all that. When I entered it even my excitement dropped and was stilled.
Jacky looked up briefly and then away. ‘I knew you’d come.’
I sat with my back to the weather and she went on with her work.
She was colouring a set of costume designs for a play, her red hair falling in straight bands on either side of her face as she leaned close to the desk. Was she short-sighted? I’d never thought of that. I knew so little of her. I sat for a long time watching her dip the fine brush in water, which clouded blue; the clouds thinned out and dispersed through what might have been whole afternoons and great bright spaces of luminous sky. Once or twice she put the brush in her mouth and drew it slowly between her lips.
It was the first still time I had ever known with her. Until now I had been shy of our being alone together because there would have been nothing to say but what I felt for her, and she had not wanted to hear it. So there was always Gerald between us. He was still between us, but his death was so much larger for the moment than anything we might have to say to one another that I felt freed; we could be together without fear. The minutes opened out into what might have been hours or years. I laid my head back. I could have slept.
Suddenly she looked up and regarded me sideways past the fall of her hair.
‘Why?’ she demanded.
I must have looked particularly blank.
‘Why did you let it happen? I thought you knew him!’
More minutes passed. She drew her cardigan round her shoulders and went back to her work.
‘I wish you’d go,’ she said after a bit.
But I continued to sit. I was in a dream, lightheaded but leaden. Even with so much that was unresolved between us, and in the shadow of her questions, I felt easy, I was spellbound by her presence and by my own; by our being at last so still and quiet together amid so much turmoil.
She made a gesture of impatience. ‘I want you to go! Don’t you understand anything?’
She pushed her work away and stared fiercely ahead.
‘I don’t want to see you again. Ever! Why are you so stupid always? You never say anything, you just sit in a dream as if it’d all been said already. Well it hasn’t, it’s time you woke up. You never see what’s really happening because you’re so full of yourself. I didn’t love Gerald – not in that way. You knew the sort of trouble he was in, he trusted you, and you knew as well what that old horror was like – that Frank Harland – and you did nothing!’
She had got to her feet and stood turning her face from me, clenched and white. I went to her, though I did not wake up out of my dream. Not yet. I was too deeply lost in it. I touched her arm and she pushed me off.
‘Leave me alone, don’t touch me! You’re such a fool. Don’t you see I don’t want you here?’
She went on for several minutes, berating me, blaming me, heaping accusations on my head while I continued to stand; then she broke down.
I took her in my arms then and she allowed it. I kissed her brow, her ears, her hair. I was utterly, foolishly happy. But it made no difference in the end. She pushed me off after a moment, refused to see me again, and rigorously kept her word. So there was no beginning after all.
Harland’s Half Acre
In a series of discontinuous dreams that were all voices, out of a delirium broken by days and sometimes weeks of mere existence, or spells in which he was engaged body and soul with a mess of paint and paper, he heard things.
The voices were of men spinning yarns beside an oildrum filled with coals, or at a siding waiting for the rattler. Or they came from the generations of men and women who were stacked up in him when he lay down to sleep and whose sleep he entered: Harlands and McQueens and before that Currys, and on the other side, Walkers and Ranleighs. They spoke of days of quiet reflection, a view across stones into the heart of midday or of the light off winter paddocks on empty afternoons, or of the lifetime it had taken one fellow to clear a hill; of ill-luck, loss, exultation, anger, endurance; and of small sights caught at sunset from the seat of a tractor – two spur-winged plovers, that was – or the glint of starlight out of pebbles under a stream.
Most of these voices he had not known. Others he could identify by what they told. It was what his father had told.
That Gem Harland, for instance, who in a card game lasting three nights had lost the last patch of cedar in the valley, along with a hundred and sixty acres of prime pasture, to a gimlet-eyed fellow from Warrnambool in Victoria, who had been an unsuccessful traveller till then, in kitchen goods, saucepans and that, but as Gem Harland laid down hand after hand saw his unconsidered offspring – the Mackays, they would be, and the Cramms and Salters – move in out of the dark.
You’ve wiped me out, young fella. (He heard that clearly.) You’ve wiped me clean off the map.
The nervous giggle that followed must have been the youth’s, astonished at what he had done. All that land! The weight of it fell heavily upon him and snuffed out laughter. He grew silent wit
h the need to formulate out of his dull head some plan to meet his own life. His loins stirred; he would found a dynasty. The silence that claimed him was a grave one, it too was filled with voices. Some other cove, Frank told himself, will be listening to those. They’re another story.
He set down what he heard the only way he knew. Not as a story.
I put my shirt on that mongrel, ’e was nipped at the post. Wattl I tell Milly? A man’s a mug – Harland’s luck! Look love, listen, it’s like this . . . No, love, listen!
Beautiful she was, I used only the best. Silky oak, six-be-threes. Just the sandpaperin’ took me three nights. Then I give ’er a satin finish, three coats with sandpaperin’ between. Finally I oiled ’er. She was beautiful, I could of sat and looked at ’er for a whole week. You can be in love with a thing, you know, as well as a person . . .
Jack? Is that you, Jack? Are you awake? Still listening?
Yairs . . . There was this light. I just caught it at the edge of the furrow as I brought the team round, outa the corner of me eye, an’ when I looked up it was gone. Might’ve been the whole earth uncoverin’ itself to me, I’m a beauty, I am, in a flash . . .
Do you mean that, Tom? Do you really and truly? . . .
Now let me, oh, what’s the odds? I said it, didn’ I? It’s not the sayin’ . . .
Oh but it is, to me it is! . . .
That is the only possession, in the muddle and midst of things. Or of being possessed. And we do have ways of saying it. You don’t need words. A tune for instance, knocked up on the fiddle and spoons, or from a squeezebox or comb; and in the moment when you stop to draw breath you hear it: a voice, I’m a beauty, I am. Or bees in a kerro tin, that sort of music, not yet honey. Or doves going hammer and tongs under the shingles of a weatherboard steeple. Or steps on gravel, then a rough fling of it against a moonlit pane – no, love, not rain not moonlight – that sort of music. We touch something then could be ours for ever. That’s possession for you, the only sort there is. Only none of it can be passed on. Though it is of course, just the same. You’re listening, aren’t you?
There were silences he was drawn to from which no words emerged. They belonged to little girls in shabby frocks who sat on a stump in sunlight and regarded their feet. Scraggy kids of twelve or so who if they looked up saw no path, only familiar roofs being doused and a line of scurfy hills, while their bodies told them the world was enormous and time infinite just waiting to be filled. They couldn’t get the two views together. The difficulty appeared as two sharp lines between their eyebrows that would not meet.
From the same source later – it seemed to him to be the same, but might not be – a little humming arose that was a tuneless lullaby. One of those girls, a woman now, rather slummocky in a nine-ply cardigan, was singing a two-year-old to sleep. She looked up frowning out of her freckles and the hills were still there, hadn’t budged an inch, not in seven years. They hadn’t stepped closer or moved off to give her room.
He felt sometimes that he came between such a woman and what she saw; and when she stopped looking through him and allowed him to become flesh and bone he felt the line of hills harden in her eyes, all burning at the edge, and saw things himself then all the clearer, because it was her view that came to him. If he met that woman later, at the counter of a store, among pails and brooms and harness straps, or at the door of a shed, she might look up and words would pass between them. Not spoken of course.
Well, so you seen it too. Doesn’ help me but, does it?
Doesn’t it?
At times it was axefalls. He felt the hard blows knocking him off balance as some kid threw himself into it. There! An’ anotheree! Fuckit! Fuckit! Fuck you! The sweat trickled down his brow, down from his armpits under the flannel vest, down the inside of his thighs, the only tears he would allow himself.
It doesn’ help me neither!
Doesn’t it?
He slapped the paint on just the same.
Once or twice, after so long, it was his aunt’s voice. Hearing it he was a child again, pale, thin, sandy, sitting puzzled and goosepimply with cold on the edge of his cousin’s bed while she knelt to tie his boots.
She was unwilling to look up. She wanted it to be her own boy’s boots she was lacing and him little and alive again, sixteen or seventeen – no, fifty years ago. But her voice was not resentful and she no longer accused him of tracing.
So you saw that, Frank love, did you? Or did I tell it to you? Would I of?
And his uncle: Yes boy, that’s it, that’s the style. Match-talk, finger-talk. You got the hang of it now, I always knew you would. Bettern’ maggin’.
And better than a galleon, Uncle Fred?
Well son, diff’rent is what I’ud say. Not inferior though.
Forgive me, Father, I have not explained things well, not the way I would’ve wanted. The words in my head won’t do it, only the paintings could tell the whole of it and they are in a language you don’t read. What I leave you, my dear brothers – and you too, Father, if you survive me – is only the smallest part of what I wanted to give you out of the great love I had for you, out of the –
That was his own voice. No less ghostly than the rest, he heard it out of the future, and covered it for the moment with the slap of paint and the scraping of a knifeblade through it, not daring to pause.
The breath of cattle came to him, the sound of a windmill creaking, a magpie’s wing black-on-white, and its cry the colour of morning, smoke after flame. And there was a quilt, mostly green, that when darkness covered it like a second quilt showed its true colours. Hands had chosen them from a drawer full of remnants. The pads of his fingers felt for ridges. They were stitches where a needle had gone through with the force of a hand behind it, and behind that a body. He mimicked, as he brought his own colours into being, the movement of that hand.
The quilt was green beyond green, an island continent in the dark of his sleep. He had news of it and the news now must be spread. In colour, in colours. When all was done and the fragments gathered and laid side by side, he would have laid bare say half an acre. It wasn’t much, no more than a glimpse. But as much as one man might catch sight of.
The Island
[1]
In the first hours after Gerald’s death Frank Harland lay night and day on the camp bed in his verandah studio and would speak to no one. He neither ate nor drank. He simply lay there on the grey blanket, unwashed, unshaven, in his clothes, and stared through the rafters.
During the first night a storm blew up: the mulberry tree knocked and thrashed at the sill, rain beat in, there were bangings, a sudden crash. I went in to latch the studio window, and hoping he might stir or speak, I sat for a time on an upturned case beside the bed.
It was like watching over a cadaver. The flesh had fallen away, leaving the sharply exposed cheekbones and jaw of a man of eighty. Veins were visible under the mottled skin, the eyes were icy. Smashed jars, sodden newspapers and sheets of cardboard were on the floor among runnels of red and blue watercolour, brushes, rags, warped books. Disorder was natural to any place where Frank was working but this was wreckage. I sat for half an hour, and felt when I got up that years had passed. It was only partly the man’s skull-like mask and the immediate ruins made by the storm. It was something in myself as well, the beginnings of a process in which, my youth already gone, I put on the heaviness of decades. I had sat down in my twenties, and when I crossed the threshold of the spare room and looked out down the hallway towards the kitchen, it was as a man of forty that I saw Tam Harland standing, grey and flabby, at the head of the stairs. He raised his face towards me like a very old and helpless animal.
Poor Tam. It was painful to see the man wandering from room to room and finding nothing to do. He washed all the cups and saucers on the draining board, and the pots, pans and cullenders out of the cupboards, and when they were dry he took them off the draining board
and washed them again. He gathered up armfuls of the yellowing, dusty, cobweb-trailed newspapers that for so long had stood in piles in the spare room and on the front verandah, and staggering through the hallway with them, and down the back steps to the incinerator, sat with one bare foot tucked up under him and watched them burn; leaning forward occasionally to poke the ashes with a boiler-stick that was itself of an unnatural colour, bleached and softened with soapsuds and long years in the copper, till it too began to char. After that he scrubbed the floors, the bare boards of the front verandah, the front and back steps and the linoleum in the hall, sloshing about on his knees with a zinc pail and a wooden scrubbing brush and using an old-fashioned soap that left the whole house sharp with carbolic.
It might have been easier for him, I think, if there had been bloodstains. He could have scrubbed them away once and for all, and something would have been achieved. As it was, he dealt in every room of the house, on all its bare boards, and in cups, pans, cullenders, with invisible stains that could neither be located nor washed out. He did not go back into the darkness, which he had once found such a comfort, under the house.
*
I had agreed to stay for a day or two in the hope that Frank might stir, and to deal with the funeral arrangements and the police.
Putting aside old superstitions that I did not want to face, and trying not to think of my own part in what had been done, I slept in Gerald’s room, listening as he had, and as he had evoked them for me, to the night sounds of that house: the knuckle-like cracking and creaking of the ceiling joists, as after a day of tropical sunlight they gave up their heat, the plop of berries from the Moreton Bay fig whose fruit blocked all the southside guttering. Overhead small feet clawed at iron, and slithered and skid, ghostly steps in the hallway went on downstairs; on the other side of the wall, Tam’s snufflings, and the groaning of bedsprings as he shifted his weight. Once – but I might have imagined this – I thought someone came to the open door and stood there, watching as I slept. A figure approached. It squatted, stared into my face, and I felt the eyes as palpable fingertips, feeling for the bones. I started awake.
