Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  I met them, all three, when they appeared one Saturday afternoon on their way to the surf. They had left their boards and a bag full of provisions at the entrance to the clearing, and came, light-footed, half-clothed, along the narrow path between the banksias, and were disconcerted at first to find he was not alone. They held back, like shy natives, and it was only Frank’s obvious disappointment, I think, that made them agree at last to come on to the camp.

  The two boys shook hands, rough but formal, then fell back. They were used to having him to themselves.

  Very contained and serious, they were not much more than schoolboys, sixteen at the most. They wore boardshorts, nothing else, but their nakedness was a uniform that covered them like armour, they were unconscious of it; physical perfection was accidental like any other attribute. It was this, I guessed, that had made Frank qualify his declaration of beauty. You had to look close to see, behind identical muscles and leathery tan, blond sunbleached hair and faces patched raw pink, how different they were.

  The bolder of the two stood warily alert. Not hostile exactly but on the lookout. This was Jeff, the one who did the talking, though he said nothing at all now; he narrowed his green eyes, watching me. The effort of standing tall gave him an air of childish concentration, as if he were focusing on a difficult mental problem.

  The other was all looseness. He kept his eye on the first, ready to support or follow, and affected the same half-tough stance, but could not manage it.

  It was Katie who was really at ease. In no way challenged, and not in the least intimidated by my clothes or the way I talked, or by any suggestion I might have given of a previous claim, she weighed me up. She had reserves of irony, I guessed, that her companions knew nothing of.

  Frank meanwhile was dancing about preparing tea, delighted both by the arrival of his young friends and by the slight embarrassment we caused one another.

  Katie came and stood beside me at the table. With a half-hearted flick of her hand she shooed off half a dozen wasps. They had found the remains of some cold chops and were tearing, with persistence, at gobbets of fat.

  ‘Pop,’ she said, giving me one of her sharp looks. ‘Is he somebody, then? Like a millionaire or something? You know – in hiding?’

  I laughed. ‘Whatever made you think that? He’s a painter.’

  ‘Oh, I know that. I saw a programme on TV, that’s all. This old bloke was a millionaire.’

  ‘That’s different,’ I said, ‘that’s America. Frank is just – Frank.’

  She grinned and seemed pleased. ‘That’s what Jeff says!’

  Frank by now had drawn the two boys out. They were engaged in conversation, exchanging words that were mostly ritual. The boys sat on upturned fruit cases, Frank on the edge of his workbench, hugging his knees.

  ‘You been all right then, have you?’ Jeff asked. ‘That spotta rain Wednesday. Djuget any a’ that?’

  ‘A few drops. Nothing to write home about.’

  ‘Rained like buggery out Jindalee, eh Darren?’

  ‘Unreal! It was unreal.’

  Jeff lifted his chin and jerked it westward. ‘Waddabout that rope on the hammock? Needs changin’.’

  ‘Yairs. I already thought.’

  ‘We’ll bring some Saturday, eh Darren? You remind me.’

  ‘He’s terrific, isn’t he?’ Katie was saying. Her eye was on Frank. He was, I saw, their very own discovery, a kind of wonder the island had thrown up. She didn’t resent me as Jeff did, but she could not see how I might be fitted to an idea of Frank that was already complete, entirely of this place and no other.

  ‘He’s very fond of you all,’ I told her. ‘You mean a lot to him.’

  ‘Do we?’ She grinned. Then, accepting a responsibility, she creased her brow and regarded the pile of dirty plates with their scraps of charred fat, and the clutter in which they had been set down, as if forever.

  ‘I keep telling myself I’ll get down and clean this place up,’ she said, ‘but look at it! You wouldn’ know where to start.’

  She began gingerly to shift a plate from one part of the table to another. But this too was ritual. When Jeff called, ‘Hey Katie, we’re off,’ she gave the plate another shove, made a face at me, and let it go till next time.

  ‘Right then, we’ll be off,’ Jeff announced, getting up and standing squarely at the entrance to the tent. ‘Seeyah Saturday, Pop, we’ll bring that rope. Anythink else you can think of?’

  Darren too had risen. They bulked in the doorway, and Jeff, still wary but more confident now, stepped forward and put out his hand. Very formally, we shook.

  ‘Right then, seeyah Pop. Take care a’ yerself.’

  Frank stood at the tentpole and watched them move off lightly over the leaves. He raised his hand. They had stopped at the edge of the clearing to resume their things, and all three looked back now and were waving. Then the boys took up their surfboards, Katie her armful of packages, and they moved on.

  So it happened that, two or three times each year, when something unusual came up, I would hear from Jeff, either at home or at the office. He was always very formal and constrained, aware of a difference between us, but over the years we came to admit to ourselves, and tacitly to one another, that Frank was a shared responsibility. We might have been brothers, with nothing in common but a loved and difficult parent.

  ‘I been tryin’ t’ get ’im to close in the hut,’ Jeff would tell me, ‘but you know what ’e’s like. S’ like talkin’ to a brick wall. Offered t’ come down with Darren an’ do it for ’im, but ’e’s that stubborn, Frank, I got nowhere. D’ y’ reckon you could talk ’im into it? Katie’s worried ’e’ll get pneumonia. Gets bloody cold these nights. We worry, both of us.’

  On one occasion he was wiped out by a fire. A great wall of flame came sweeping through his camp. He lay in a hollow in the ground and let it roar over him. His hut and tent were burned and the forest all round was blackened and strewn with small furred animals turned to balls of char, but Frank got up without even a scorchmark, tore the last black tatters off his tent-frame, salvaged what he could of his saucepans, mugs, bottles, and began all over again.

  ‘It was the smell I didn’ care for,’ he told us. ‘The heat was nothing much, it was too quick. Good practice, I reckon, for you-know-where. But the smell was horrible. And it’d break your heart to see those echidnas curled up on themselves and turned to ash. And the paddymelons. An’ birds even! They must of fallen straight out of the sky. All the heat goes up, y’ see, so I went down.’

  On yet another occasion when a cyclone blew up lashing the whole coast, carrying away beaches in great king tides, shredding forests, flattening the flimsy wooden settlements along the shore, leaving a trail of smashed timber and sheet iron and soaked bags in its wake and flooding all the low-lying suburbs of the city, I had a quick call from Jeff at six o’clock on the Saturday night. He was ringing from the public phone box at the parking place.

  ‘He’s okay,’ Jeff told me. ‘Got a walloping but! Lost the roof off the hut and half ’is stuff is down the beach. It’s not too bad, considering. Darren’s with us. We’ll help ’im get a roof on and ’e’ll do the rest ’imself. Oh yes, he’s in good shape, never better. Cyclone was a bit of entertainment. You should see ’im! Jumpin’ round like a two-year-old.’

  I went down myself next morning. In the damp wreckage of his camp, amid torn leaves and twigs and whole branches that had been scattered about the clearing, he was working away stripped to the waist, still humming with the energy and excitement of it all.

  ‘You should of been here, Phil. It was . . . You could hear the sea buzzing like a great swarm, that was the first thing. Then it roared like it was going to break right over the island. Just the wind at first. All the trees they rose up, you’d of thought they were going to lift themselves right out of the earth. They rose up –’ he himself rose on tiptoe and st
retched his arms skyward – ‘the whole forest! It was extraordinary. An’ I reckon they’d of done it too if the rain hadn’t come on. It was the rain that held it all down, bashed it back into the ground again, it was that heavy. You couldn’t stand up in it. I tried to and it kept beatin’ me back into the mud. I thought I’d drown. I reckon that’s why the trees didn’t make it, not this time. My hut did but. It shook and shook, then it lifted itself right up, turned a coupla somersaults as it went, and sailed right away over the tops of the trees like a kiddy’s kite. I’d of been scared of following it if the rain hadn’t come. I just slithered about then, holding on to the tentpole, and the rain was like bloody fists, beating me into the ground, and my nose and mouth were so full of it I thought this is it Frank, you’re goin’ t’ be buried standing up, or drowned an’ buried both at the same time. What an experience! But look, no damage at all. Or hardly.’

  He indicated the tentpole, the clearing, which was smashed and faintly steaming in the sunlight, and himself with only minor scratches.

  ‘Of course I lost a few things. They just went sailing off after the roof. I was holding on to the tentpole with one hand and trying t’ grab ’em out of the air with the other as they went whipping past. They were bein’ sort of sucked down a plughole – only up if you know what I mean. That old army blanket a’ mine – you know the one. Had it since the army. Well, that went. An’ me army sweater! Oh, and heaps a’ things! Still, it could of been worse. The boys ’ve been and we’re building a new studio. A proper one. It’ll last this time. It’ll last me out, any rate.’

  He was happier, I think, than I had ever seen him. Some of the storm’s electric violence had got into him as he lay huddled under his tent, holding fast to a raw pole of it and feeling the vibrations go down through him, the strokes of power. Out of a black sky a palpable force had hauled and tugged at the pole, trying to wrench it from his grip and out of the earth; and only the earth had held steady in the black din that was the sea and in the twisting and turning of the sky, as the forest drove its roots down but gave up leaves and limbs. He had held on to the pole for seven hours. First in the sick light, then in darkness. Till just before dawn the wind simply dropped into the middle of the island like a stone, and when he struggled to his feet and went out it was morning, the first light of creation; astonishingly pale and clear with the slick of new birth on everything, on mud, leaves, branches, and all things wet with colour.

  ‘It was what Hopkins was tryin’ t’ show me,’ he said dreamily. ‘I see that now. I thought I’d seen it already but I hadn’t. You need blackness, a card covered with black, and then all the colours leap out for the first time. I was staggering about drunk with it. Shouting. It wasn’t just that I was knocked silly by the storm. And that’s when the boys come, Jeff and Darren.’ He looked anew at some further vision: two half-naked figures coming in under a wash of rainbow-coloured air. ‘They must of – well, it was good of them really. They must of left before it was even over.’

  The boys’ coming, and their part in the rebuilding of the hut, confirmed a relationship that was already one of the supports of his life. It was for him the vivid physical quality of what he had experienced, the long ordeal of holding for so long to that shuddering pole, of feeling through his wrists and chest and thorax the rhythms of the island itself as it hung on against sea and sky, that had endowed with such force the image of the two boys, who were now in fact young men, stepping up without fuss and calling to him from the path: ‘You there, Pop? You oright?’ – the extraordinary at that point brought down to earth and losing none of its beauty or power.

  Recalling the moment, Frank drew his chin down. His expression was childlike and vulnerable. ‘I been very fortunate, Phil. At this stage of my life. You don’t expect it. It’s –’

  He made a gesture that took in the hut, the tent, what remained of his possessions, all laid out to dry and faintly steaming in the sun.

  ‘I can’t wait to get going again! Maybe it’s what I needed, a good shaking up, a good ducking.’ He laughed. ‘Well – it was a bit more than I needed, in fact, but you can’t bargain, can yer? Here, help me with this. I want to get a roof back on. You never know when the buggers’ll start beatin’ you flat again.’

  It was about this time that I was woken late one night by a telephone call. It was not all that rare an occurrence but rare enough to bring my mother to the door. I made a little sign that was part of the language we had developed, indicating that it was not a family matter but that I would have to go out. I heard her pass through to the kitchen and begin making tea. A few minutes later I was sitting at the bench with her.

  It was an odd hour, two-thirty, and I would remember it afterwards by the way the kitchen looked at that time of night.

  It was a kitchen of the new kind where everything is out of sight, pots, pans, dishes; no hooks for cups, no spoons or ladles or canisters; a machine for eating up garbage locked away under the sink. It was all clean white plastic and natural wood, polished and glazed to show the grain. Even the handles by which you opened drawers or cupboards were integrated into the beading, with just a smooth finger-grip underneath. Every surface was unbroken and might have been impenetrable.

  It was still hot. Close against the windowpane were the upper branches of a Moreton Bay fig, an old giant going back decades, whose roots were in the cliff. It went down three storeys, like the unit block itself, and had been saved and included in the plan. Its leaves too looked plastic, glossy-green and tough; but the flying foxes that had been congregating in its darkness for as long as it had stood there, going back longer perhaps than any of us, still flocked in at dusk to gorge on its seed-packed berries and kept up a continuous disturbance of small furry lives in the cave of its boughs.

  Silent by day, when the unit block was at its most lively, the tree came alive at nightfall as the building was darkened and slept. It was as if life flowed back and forth between the two with the regularity of light and dark. I could hear it rustling now in the strange night-silence, and could hear as well, from downriver, the regular thug, thug, like a heartbeat, of a dredger, keeping the river-mouth clear of mud.

  ‘Tam thinks he’s found Pearsall,’ I told my mother at last. ‘He wants me to go and try to bring him in.’ I looked quickly away.

  She saw immediately what it was.

  ‘That timber yard?’

  I nodded. She too looked away.

  It was a story that had been all over the evening papers. Early that day, two seven-year-olds wagging school had climbed through a fence into a suburban gully and found a slave camp – that is what the newspapers called it. It was a four-acre timber yard, six miles from the GPO, as all distances are measured in this city, on one of the old tramlines.

  Nearly a hundred men had been found in chains there, derelicts, drunks, vagrants, men without home or family. They had been forced to work by day and had slept at night, many of them roped to their cots, in a rat-infested bunkhouse. Some had had their bail paid by benefactors at the city watch house, only to find themselves in a new sort of captivity. Others had been picked up in parks or off the streets. Many were pensioners; their captors had collected their pension money and used it for their keep. But most, having no means of support, were kept by their own labour. They were all men whose passage from a backlane shed or building site, from wagons on the shunting lines at South Brisbane or from under the fig trees in Musgrave Park, into the slave camp or timber yard had gone quite unnoticed. They had never been missed.

  Those who had been there long enough were kept unfettered because they had no will to leave; not even through an open gate. Whatever the horrors (reporters spoke of beatings with lengths of hosepipe, of cots with maggoty sacks for mattress and blanket), the city of regular bus services and clean citizens and police cars had no temptation for them. No one had ever broken out.

  All night the police, with dogs and searchlights set up on wagons, had been
hunting down absconders; in the timber yard itself with its great thirty-foot towers of planks and in the dense scrub of the neighbouring gully. Large crowds had gathered from surrounding streets to watch the men, bearded, barefoot, many of them wild-eyed with terror, being herded into police vans or ambulances and carried off.

  I had seen only a few moments of it, on the news. It had sickened me. The cowed and desperate men, young or old it made no difference, had been driven to resist at last. They punched out wildly at their deliverers, swearing, shouting, struggling in the arms of the law. One of them, with his head turned away from the cameras for shame, had been forced to show, as a policeman gripped and held up his wrist, the raw mark of chains. And on the other side of a barrier, the spectators: housewives with small round-eyed children in their arms, men in shorts and singlets, boys on bicycles, all staring at what had for so long been going on in their midst. With compassion, some of them, others with distaste or with frank hostility, but all with puzzlement at the appearance in this flat, quiet suburb where everyone minded his business, of a monstrosity, and most of all with wonder at the way these men fought to stay, their unwillingness to come out and join their shocked, uncomprehending neighbours. Backyards ran down into the gully where these men had been chained and beaten. No one had heard or seen anything. Nothing had been reported.

  It was a hot night, and people’s faces under the lamps were greasy with passion or sweat. Episodes of swift, indiscriminate violence kept breaking across the crowd – between police and spectators, police and reporters, or among the spectators themselves. Some spirit of disruption that we had failed to take account of was in the open at last and running loose among us. As the cameras caught them, the crowds of spectators, derelicts in their rags, officers of the law who with buttons torn from their shirts lashed out with boots, belts, already-bloodied fists, were thrown savagely together in frame after frame. We were all involved, there was no escape from it.