Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  In the end my mother had got up, turned the set off and walked out of the room, and it was in the light of the last image as it faded from the screen and the shouting died into silence that we felt it difficult now to meet one another’s gaze. The kitchen was too still, its surfaces too bare and clean.

  My mother leaned across the bench and placed one hand firmly on mine. ‘Ring me as soon as you can,’ she said. ‘Tell Tam I’ll come over if – if it’s what he thinks. But I hope it isn’t.’

  Tam was waiting in the dark of the verandah. He was just sitting there on a cane-bottomed chair, his mouth grim and his hair, now that he had let it grow, a tangled mane. The moment he saw me he was on his feet, his mouth working and the spit flying round a jabber of words I could barely comprehend. He took a deep breath, and it so filled him that tears ran down the floury cheeks. I had to hold him and let him gasp himself still.

  ‘I’m all right now,’ he assured me, snuffling into a dirty handkerchief. ‘Let’s get going.’

  He marched off on his small feet, determined, unsteady, over the loose planks of the footbridge.

  ‘One of my Maoists wanted to come,’ he told me. ‘It was good of him but no, I told him, it’s not the time.’

  We were on our way to the watch house, where the more violent of the prisoners were being held. If Pearsall was not there, we would go on to the hospital where they had taken those who were ill. The rest, the most vulnerable or disturbed, were in mental wards.

  Tam sat hunched in upon himself as we drove and said nothing. Perhaps he too was remembering, at this chill hour of morning, when the streets were blue and only an odd sheet of newspaper lifted and turned under the lamps, those nights, two years ago, when we had gone out like this to examine bundles on the seats of bus shelters and under a litter of cardboard cartons in empty doorways, and been driven off – on one occasion by a figure, all teeth and hair, that had started up shrieking out of a mound of rags like some kind of crazed animal, while a whole row of men, and a few women, laughed, catcalled, taunted us out of a blurred radiance of metho or cheap port.

  The watch house, when we arrived, was worse than any of that. Dozens of shocked, subdued women, who might have been wives, mothers, sisters, and their sons or sons-in-law, had ignored the police calls that asked them to wait till an indentification had been made and were packed into the foyer.

  Those who had arrived first had fallen back against the walls and were quiet. The recent arrivals were all shouting. The young policeman at the desk had lost control. He too was shouting. He seemed about to burst into tears. Behind him, others were taking down names and letting people through, two at a time, to where the men were held.

  Tonight, out in the parks, under bridges, in the bus shelters and round building sites, the derelicts would sleep unmolested. There was no more room in here and no forces to go out and bring them in.

  A woman was led through the crowd, hysterically weeping. It parted before her.

  Difficult to say what she had found in there. It was this consideration – which of the two might be worse, disappointment or discovery – that made the crowd pause and grow still. But almost immediately the shouting resumed, and the shoving to get to the door.

  And now, from inside, an eerie howling made itself heard, was added to, and rose in the new silence to a din. It was as if a whole kennel of dogs had been let loose. There was nothing human in it.

  The doors were blown open as by an explosion or a sudden gust of wind and a young policeman fell into the crowd. He was holding his hands over his face; they were covered with blood. He was followed immediately by two pale-faced visitors who were hurled out bodily. From inside, amid the howling, shrieks were heard, low grunts and thuds; then the doors again slammed shut. The howling rose to a frenzy, and in a moment the crowd in the waiting room too had begun. The effect was contagious and terrible.

  ‘Tam, this is impossible,’ I shouted. ‘Come away.’

  Tam’s face was set. ‘No. You needn’t stay if you don’t want to, but I will. I want to see – the whole of it.’

  At last quiet was restored and three or four policemen, very red-faced and dishevelled, one with his shirt ripped all down his back, shouldered their way through a hostile crowd. They were tense, resentful, and one of them still burned with a visible anger; the others were trying to calm him. The air that flowed out with them was like the breath from a sty. Suddenly the angry policeman broke and turned back; the others struggled with him. He struck out wildly and two of his fellow officers, after a brief scuffle, pinioned his arms and led him off. The crowd fell still.

  At last, after what seemed an age, there was a place on one of the benches along the wall and Tam slid into it. Later I too found a place, lay my head back on the cool wall and must have slept.

  ‘Phil?’

  Tam was standing before me. The room was almost deserted.

  ‘We can go in now.’

  I knew the place well, and Tam knew it too – it was where he had found Pearsall that first time, two years ago; but I had never seen it like this.

  Forty or fifty men, long-haired and bearded so that it was difficult to tell the old from the merely worn and ill-used, their faces streaked with grime and sweat or caked with blood, barefoot some, others in broken shoes without socks or boots with the soles flapping, lay sprawled on the floor of the cell or stood trance-like at the bars. They seemed utterly cowed now, but the violence was not gone; it was in abeyance. One felt it in the tense voices of the policemen, who were very tired, and in their bodies a barely suppressed rage – not, strangely enough, at the condition of these men and those who were responsible for it, but at the men themselves, who continued to give trouble and whose very abjectness, when they did not, aroused disgust. Whatever it was that had allowed them to be chained and beaten provoked others now to beat them again.

  My own reaction, in the foul, stinking, breathing presence of them, was not compassion, as I expected, but shame, panic, a sense of deep uncleanness that made me want to rush out and plunge into saltwater – only the clean salt of the ocean would do. What I wanted to re-establish was my own cleanliness, and I felt ashamed of that too.

  Tam was made of sterner stuff. He was approaching the men and asking, quietly, if they knew Pearsall or had lately or at any time heard of him. He moved from man to man and was insistent, having understood that it would be impossible to recognise his brother in this crowd – all the men were alike in their filth – and that if he called Pearsall’s name he would deny himself, he would crawl for cover among the ragged, indistinguishable bodies and make himself safe.

  When he was satisfied at last that the men knew nothing, or if they did, were determined not to tell, he was for going on to the hospital, and from there, if we found no sign of him, to the mental wards. But a policeman told him firmly, though not ungently, that it would not be allowed. The men there would be treated first and nursed back to some sort of normality. All this – he indicated the cells and the waiting room – had been a kind of midnight madness. There would be no more of it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tam told me as we walked away, ‘whether I’m glad or sorry. I had a dread of it – of finding him, I mean. That he should have let them do that to him. But if he isn’t one of these men, Phil, where is he?’

  We had come out into a busy street. Early traffic was on the move. The first buses, the six-five, the six-eleven, were bringing workers into the city, men in overalls with leather kitbags, boys with dufflebags, girls in little groups who laughed over their shoulders, their blonde hair freshly rinsed. The morning papers were stacked up on the pavement, being loaded into vans. A thin, grey-headed woman in a smock was setting out cut flowers in pails, tight-packed bunches of stocks, paper cornets of yellow, pink and red rosebuds. The early pubs were open, with all the sash-windows up and the first drinkers setting their glasses along the sill.

  But Pearsall was not amo
ng the sick or even the mad. He had simply gone lost. He was moving about somewhere by night or day in this city and was invisible.

  ‘I can’t believe it, it’s all happened so fast,’ Tam whispered. ‘It seems no time ago that there were five of us. Now there’s just me and Frank.’

  ‘And your father,’ I reminded.

  He looked alarmed for an instant, then recovered some of his wry humour.

  ‘I’ll tell you something, Phil. I reckon he’ll outlast the lot of us. An’ you know what? He knows it, he’s always known it, the old bugger! He’s up there at Killarney counting us off!’

  [4]

  There was to be a Harland retrospective, and slowly, over the months, it began to be put together. I went back and forth between Brisbane and Sydney to consult with trustees, negotiate with owners and carry messages and apologies from the painter himself. He had decided to stick, as he put it, to the sandflies.

  ‘Too busy,’ he snapped, when invited to look over a batch of drawings. ‘I don’t want t’ be lumbered with all that, I’d be put off! Too much back there I don’t want t’ know about. All those things. They’ll have t’ look after themselves, I got something else t’ do. I’m short of time. I’m starting to fall t’ bits.’ He grinned, showing the gaps in his teeth. ‘It’s not such a bad way t’ go, actually, once you get used to it. They give you time for that. You’d think but,’ he added, ‘after you’d shucked off so much, that you’d feel – I dunno, freer or lighter or something, or you’d see clearer what it was all about. Well I don’t. It’s just more and more of a mess!’

  So as the artist himself fell to bits, a catalogue raisonné of his works was being assembled by experts; led by that art critic who had sweated uphill with me one day at the island and got nothing for it but a placard and the message DIG. He had finally got down to it, he was on his knees; digging up facts, theories, interpretations, influences; reassembling groups of drawings that had been scattered, deciding on dates and titles. Everyone now wanted to know all there was to know. Real facts, apocryphal stories, letters, they were all relevant; including a scratchy tape from the National Library in Canberra on which a pair of anonymous honeyeaters could be heard filling the silence between Frank’s crabbed refusals of speech.

  ‘Yairs,’ he told me when I played it to him to see if there was something he wanted to add, ‘I remember that lady. Hazel someone. Hazel. She was nice. A bit dizzy but. I had nothing to say, I’d already said it all, but the birds had a good time. Just listen to ’em! They were after some cake she brought. They really appreciated it. You can hear.’

  The paintings began to surface now in great numbers. Some of them hadn’t been seen or even heard of for nearly forty years.

  ‘My God,’ Frank said, looking at the slides. His glasses sat on the end of his nose, his mouth was drawn almost to his chin. ‘Did I do that? I ought to’ve been shot! Some of this stuff I don’t even recognise. Y’ reckon there could be a Harland forger?’ He gave a humorous snort. ‘I suppose not, I’m not famous enough.’

  But the sight of so many lost products of his hand produced a profound gloom in him. It was, I suppose, for all the variety and colour, a proof of limits. He was driven back to his work. ‘Nah!’ he said, refusing to look at any more. ‘I’ll leave that to the professors, let them decide, I’m too pushed. I’m falling to bits fast now. A good sou’easter and there’d be nothing left of me but the pong!’

  It was true. He was suddenly a lot less steady on his feet; he had head-pains, dizzy spells, his sight was failing. It had taken several months before he would see the eye specialist in Brisbane who got him to throw away at last the glasses he had been using, picked up years ago in a junkshop in Cairns. Twice in the last year he had fallen and been a whole day unable to move.

  ‘I did call out a fair bit,’ he admitted. ‘I reckon the ants heard. They turned up from everywhere, little buggers! I must be sweeter than I think.’

  But when we tried to get him to move to the city, where one or other of us could see he was properly looked after, he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘What for?’ he snapped. ‘Why should I move? If they want me the buggers can find me here.’

  There were days, I suspected, when he forgot to eat. Milk sat about in cartons and went sour or was set in saucers for the cats, half-wild blacks and tabbies that had gone feral and haunted the banksia scrub in packs. Food rotted and the rats moved in, till the cats drove them off again. There was a winter when I expected at any moment to hear the phone ring and have to go down and bring him back.

  Some of the locals kept an eye on him, and Jeff’s surfing friends from the beach. The CIA he called them. ‘I can’t hardly budge these days,’ he complained, ‘before the CIA is out. Snooping! They’re behind every bloody tree. Some a’ the buggers get themselves up as animals I reckon – birds! As if I wouldn’t recognise a six-foot budgie when I see one, I’m not that far gone. Wearing thongs! Jeff’s mates they are – or maybe they’re yours. That Mrs Footsy or whatever she’s called, down at the shop. She’s one. I’m not senile you know, I still got some of me faculties.’

  At weekends Jeff and Katie watched him. The call when it came was from Jeff.

  You wait for these things; you know they are on the way but when they come they are always a shock. One of the surfies had found Frank on the path to the beach. He had been there a long time, impossible to say how long, but he was sunburned right through the shirt. He was all scratches and heavily bruised, as if he had been in a fight or had been mauled and clawed at by beasts. His hip was broken. I called the medical helicopter and set off through the early-morning traffic.

  Jeff was with him when I arrived, squatting on one heel beside the makeshift stretcher they had used to bring him up from the beach. A steady, serious young man of twenty-three or four, he knew me well enough by now to have no defences. He glanced up and his eyes were hopeless.

  ‘Frank?’ I whispered.

  He lay very still under a blanket, his eyes open but glassy, and stared at the sky. He was so frail I was startled. They had set the stretcher down in a shady place outside the tent and his body scarcely broke the ground.

  ‘Frank?’

  He did not move, but the ball of his eye rolled and acknowledged me: there was a slight compression of the lips, not quite a smile. Jeff, who had been calm till now, suddenly broke away, and Frank’s gaze followed him. A crease appeared on the brow, the lips moved. Sorry he was saying, or trying to say. Sorry to be such a trouble. To be causing pain. I shook my head and brushed an ant from his cheek. Once again his eye went to where Jeff stood supporting himself with one arm against the trunk of a bloodwood, the other across his face.

  Minutes passed. None of us moved. Frank met my gaze, held it a moment, and I nodded. Silence had never been a burden between us. We had sat for hours sometimes in just such an easy absence of speech while the island spoke for us with its medley of sound, layer on layer of small lives fretting or ticking or whirring above or below us; letting our minds free on the long waves of it. So it was a little time before I identified now, in the familiar hum and click of the place, a new note that was regular, insistent. Rotor blades. Jeff too had heard it.

  It was far off over the low shoreline, slipping in sideways out of the blue. It turned, hovered, the big blades swung; the pilot was trying to judge how much room he had. Now it was right above us. Solid sound was clamped over our ears.

  Frank too had heard the low buzzing grow out of the sea.

  ‘It’s all right Frank,’ I told him. ‘It’s the helicopter.’

  He frowned. In the roar of the engines, perhaps, he had failed to hear me. All round us the trees were stirring. They rose up. They swayed and rustled, they lifted their boughs. Strips flared off tree-trunks, the side of the tent bellied. The ground sprang up and was alive as ants were flicked out of their path, dead leaves flipped over, then bits of solid bark went tumbling and scattering, then stone
s. In the tent a dozen jamjars clashed and fell, but soundlessly, with a thud that was lost in the great roaring and whooshing, as a hundred feet above us a hole in the sky was opened and everything, turning on its own centre, slowly at first, then with speed, rose up.

  ‘Aaargh.’

  Frank gave a long sigh, a sound with no voice behind it, only breath and bones. And now stillness dropped on the clearing, things fell back into their real weight and silence.

  ‘Listen,’ Jeff whispered, drawing me back a moment. Frank had already been got ready and the two stretcher-men were carrying him across to the helicopter. ‘I’ve never been up.’ He was tense and sweating. It took me a moment to understand.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I told him. ‘Ten minutes.’

  He nodded but was not convinced.

  Minutes later we were being lifted over the treetops. Jeff, crouching opposite, watched us fall away sideways from the land, and when he caught my eye gave a sheepish grin, but was still clenching and unclenching his jaw. We were drifting out over the limpid, green-blue waters of the Passage, with its channels of a deeper colour, cobalt, and forests of seaweed lifting and swaying under the surface.

  Now the surf-side swings into view: the long beach on the tilt, then whitecaps, then endless blue. Southward the Bay and its islands, stretching sixty miles to where the long sandy arm of South Stradbroke touches – or almost touches – the northward-pointing spit of the Broadwater, the air so clear I can see all the way to Southport, twenty-five years back – no, more.

  This high free feeling is what it is like to float in time, I tell myself; beyond the limits, beyond flesh. I reach out and my fingers find a papery dryness. It has the texture of bark and my fingertips see through it into the earth; so that when, quite casually, my grandfather lays his hand on my arm and says, ‘Thank you boy,’ I feel the occasion open to include vast stretches of time, the future as well as the past, in which we in our generations are very small, though not unimportant, and a deep contentment comes over me, as of being and belonging just where I am. It is final. It is also a beginning. I am seated once again at the end of Grandpa’s bed, curled up hard against the rails. I do not look up from my book, but his breath fills the spaces of it, and I hear him, very softly, call my name; hear it quite distinctly in his still-familiar voice – the moment is open again. It is as if it has taken all this time – thirty years – for the sound to travel the length of the bed and reach me; as you hear a word spoken sometimes and fail to catch its sense, and then later, thirty years later, you hear it clearer and do. I looked up. There were tears on my cheeks.