by David Malouf
‘Birds,’ Jim specified.
‘Not always. But yes, often enough. That sandpiper took my fancy because it was one of my favourites at home – they come down from the north, you know, and winter among us. In Norfolk, I mean.’
‘And here.’
‘Yes, here too. It’s odd, isn’t it? To come halfway across the world and find –. It made me feel homesick. So I set up quickly, got a good shot, and there it is. Homesickness dealt with. Stuffed into the box.’
He found he understood almost everything she said straight off, and this was unusual.
‘Could I see it? The photo?’
‘Why not?’
She led him into the hallway, past what must have been a bedroom, and into the darkness at the end of the hall.
It was the best room in the house; orderly, well set-up, with two sinks, a lamp, black cloth to cover the windows. He understood that too. When he stepped into the place it wasn’t just the narrowness of the space they stood in, among all the apparatus of a hobby, or trade, that made him feel they had moved closer. He saw, because she allowed him to see, a whole stretch of her life, wider, even here in a darkroom, than anything he could have guessed from what she had already told – Norfolk, her brother, the tent city at Mount Morgan. He liked the order, the professionalism, the grasp all this special equipment suggested of a competence. There were racks for her plates, bottles of chemicals all neatly labelled, rubber gloves, a smell of something more than lavender.
‘So this is it,’ he said admiringly as he might have spoken to any man. ‘Where you work.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘here and out there.’
As he was to discover, she often made these distinctions, putting things clearer, moving them into a sharper focus.
‘The light, and then the dark.’
She took a sheet of paper and offered it to him, and looked anxious as he subjected it to scrutiny.
It was the sandpiper. Perfect. Every speckle, every stripe on the side where it faded off into the white of the underbelly, the keen eye in the lifted head – he felt oddly moved to see the same bird in this other dimension. Moved too at the trouble it must have taken, and the quick choices, to get just that stance, which was so perfectly characteristic; her own keen eye measuring the bird’s and discovering the creature’s taut, springlike alertness. Did she know so much about birds? Or did some intuition guide her? This is it; this is the moment when we see into the creature’s unique life. That too might be a gift.
The sandpiper was in sharp focus against a blur of earth and grass-stems, as if two sets of binoculars had been brought to bear on the same spot, and he knew that if the second pair could now be shifted so that the landscape came up as clear as the bird, he too might be visible, lying there with a pair of glasses screwed into his head. He was there but invisible; only he and Miss Harcourt might ever know that he too had been in the frame, hidden among those soft rods of light that were grass-stems and the softer sunbursts that were grass-heads or tiny flowers. To the unenlightened eye there was just the central image of the sandpiper with its head attentively cocked. And that was as it should be. It was the sandpiper’s picture.
‘Perfect,’ he breathed.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I was pleased too.’
They looked at the bird between them, having moved quickly, since yesterday, to where they now stood with just this sheet of paper between them on which the bird’s passage through its own brief huddle of heat and energy had been caught for a moment and fixed, maybe for ever.
‘I must show this,’ Jim said, ‘to Ashley Crowther.’
So they became partners, all three, and a week later Jim told her of the sanctuary, actually using the word out loud for the first time, since he was certain now that there was nothing in her that would scoff at the grandness of it, but blushing just the same; the blood rose right up into the lobes of his ears.
He never uttered the word again. He didn’t have to. When he talked to Miss Harcourt, as when he talked to Ashley Crowther, they spoke only of ‘the birds’.
4
SOMETIMES, WHEN ASHLEY Crowther had a party of friends down for the weekend, or for the Beaudesert races, Jim would take them out in a flat-bottomed boat, and for an hour or two they would drift between dead white trees over brackish water, its depths the colour of brewed tea, its surface a layer of drowned pollen inches thick in places, a burnished gold. Parting the scum, they would break in among clouds.
Ashley would be in the bow, his knees drawn up hard under his chin, his arms, in shirt-sleeves, propped upon them, like some sort of effigy, Jim thought – an image of whatever god it was that had charge of this place, a waterbird transmuted. The women, and the young men in blazers who shared the centre of the boat with their provisions, a wicker basket, its silver hasp engraved with the name of the house, would be subdued, tense, held on a breath; held on Jim’s breath.
‘That,’ he would whisper, lifting the pole and letting them slide forward in the stillness, ‘is the Sacred Kingfisher. From Borneo.’
The name, in Jim’s hushed annunciation of it, immediately wrapped the bird in mystery, beyond even the brilliance of its colouring and the strange light the place touched it with.
‘And over there – see? – those are lotus birds. See? Far over. Aw, now they’ve seen us, they’re off. They’ve got a nest at the edge there, right down at water level. See their feet? Long they are. That’s for walking on the lotus leaves, or on waterlily pads, so they don’t sink.’
He would push his pole into mud again, putting his shoulder into it and watching the birds flock away, and they would ride smoothly in under the boughs. Nobody spoke. It was odd the way the place imposed itself and held them. Even Ashley Crowther, who preferred music, was silent here and didn’t fidget. He sat spell-bound. And maybe, Jim thought, this is music too, this sort of silence.
What he could not know was to how great a degree these trips into the swamp, in something very like a punt, were for Ashley recreations of long, still afternoons on the Cam, but translated here not only to another hemisphere, but back, far back, into some pre-classical, pre-historic, primaeval and haunted world (it was this that accounted for his mood of suspended wonder) in which the birds Jim pointed out, and might almost have been calling up as he named them in a whisper out of the mists before creation, were extravagantly disguised spirits of another order of existence, and the trip itself – despite the picnic hamper and the champagne bottles laid in ice, and the girls, one of whom was the girl he was about to marry – a water journey in another, deeper sense; which is why he occasionally shivered, and might, looking back, have seen Jim, where he leaned on the pole, straining, a slight crease in his brow and his teeth biting into his lower lip, as the ordinary embodiment of a figure already glimpsed in childhood and given a name in mythology, and only now made real.
‘There,’ Jim breathed, ‘white ibis. They’re common enough really. Beautiful, but.’ He lifted his eyes in admiration, and at the end of the sentence, his voice as well, to follow their slow flight as they beat away. They might have been swimming, stroke on stroke, through the heavy air. ‘And that’s a stilt, see? See its blue back? It’s a real beauty!’
They would be stilled in the boat, all wonder, who at other times were inclined to giggle, the girls, and worry about their hair or the sit of their clothes, and the young men to stretch their legs and yawn. They were so graceful, these creatures, turning their slow heads as the boat glided past and doubled where the water was clear: marsh terns, spotted crake, spur-winged plover, Lewin water rails. And Jim’s voice also held them with its low excitement. He was awkward and rough-looking till they got into the boat. Then he too was light, delicately balanced, and when it was a question of the birds, he could be poetic. They looked at him in a new light and with a respect he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to command.
As for Ashley, he liked to show them off: his birds. Or rather, he liked to have Jim show them off, and was pleased at dinner afterward
s when his guests praised the ibis, the Sacred Kingfisher, the water rail, as if he had been very clever indeed in deciding that this is what he should collect rather than Meissen figures or Oriental mats.
But in the boat, in the place where the creatures were at home, they passed out of his possession as strangely as they had passed into it, and he might have been afraid then of his temerity in making a claim; they moved with their little lives, if they moved at all, so transiently across his lands – even when they were natives and spent their whole lives there – and knew nothing of Ashley Crowther. They shocked him each time he came here with the otherness of their being. He could never quite accept that they were, he and these creatures, of the same world. It was as if he had inherited a piece of the next world, or some previous one. That was why he felt such awe when Jim so confidently offered himself as an intermediary and named them: ‘Look, the Sacred Kingfisher. From Borneo.’
When they stopped to picnic there was talk at last. They came back to reality.
‘The nightingale,’ a Mrs McNamara informed them, ‘that’s the most beautiful of all songbirds now.’
‘I’ve never heard it,’ a younger woman regretted.
‘Oh it’s beautiful,’ Mrs McNamara assured her. ‘But you have to go to Europe. Alas, my love, it was the nightingale.’
‘When I was in London,’ one of the gentleman told, ‘I went to a party in a big house at Twickenham. It was the dead of winter and all night there was a nightingale twittering away in one of the trees in the garden. I’d never heard anything like it. It was amazing. All the guests went out in troops to listen, it was such a wonder. Only later I found out it was a lark – I mean, some bird-imitator from the music-halls had been hired to sit up there and do it, all rugged up against the cold, poor chap, and blowing on his fingers when he wasn’t being a nightingale. It’s a wonder he didn’t freeze.’
Europe, Jim decided, must be a mad place. And now they said there was to be a war.
He sat apart with his back to a tree and ate the sandwiches he had brought while the others had their spread. Ashley carried a glass of champagne across to him and sat for a bit, with his own glass, but they didn’t speak.
Later, when he handed the ladies down on to the wooden landing stage he had constructed, at the end of a twenty-foot cat-walk, each of them said ‘Thank you Jim,’ and the gentlemen tipped him. Ashley never said thank you, and he pretended not to see the coins that passed, though he wouldn’t have deprived Jim of the extra shillings by forbidding it.
Ashley didn’t have to thank him. And not at all because Jim was only doing what he was employed to do.
At either end of the boat they held a balance. That was so clear there was no need to state it. There was no need in fact to make any statement at all. But when Ashley wanted someone to talk to, he would come down to where Jim was making a raft of reeds to attract whistlers, or laying out seed, and talk six to the dozen, and in such an incomprehensible rush of syllables that Jim, often, could make neither head nor tail of it, though he didn’t mind. Ashley too was an enthusiast, but not a quiet one. Jim understood that, even if he never did grasp what Wagner was – something musical, though not of his sort; and when Ashley gave up words altogether and came to whistling, he was glad to be relieved at last of even pretending to follow. Ashley’s talk was one kind of music and the tuneless whistling another. What Ashley was doing, Jim saw, was expressing something essential to himself, like the ‘sweet pretty creature’ of the willy wagtails (which didn’t mean that either). Having accepted the one he could easily accept the other.
Ashley did not present a mystery to Jim, though he did not comprehend him. They were alike and different, that’s all, and never so close as when Ashley, watching, chattered away, whistled, chattered again, and then just sat, easily contained in their double silence.
5
THE WAR DID come, in mid-August, but quietly, the echo of a shot that had been fired months back and had taken all this time to come round the world and reach them.
Jim happened to be in Brisbane to buy developing paper and dry plates for Miss Harcourt and new boots for himself. By mid-afternoon the news had passed from mouth to mouth all over the city and newsboys were soon crying it at street corners. War! War! It was already several days old, over there, in countries to which they were not linked, and now it had come here.
Some people seemed elated, others stunned. The man at the photography shop, who was some sort of foreigner with a drooping moustache and a bald skull and side-tufts, shook his head as he prepared Jim’s parcel. ‘A bad business,’ he said, ‘a catastrophe. Madness!’
Maybe, Jim thought, he had relatives there who would be involved.
‘I’m a Swede,’ the man told him, Jim didn’t know why. He had never said anything like that before.
But others were filled with excitement.
‘Imagine,’ a girl with very bright eyes said to him at the saddlers where he got his boots. ‘I reckon you’ll be joining up.’
‘Why?’ he asked in a last moment of innocence. It hadn’t even occurred to him.
The girl’s eyes hardened. ‘Well I would,’ she said fiercely, ‘if I was a man. I’d want to be in it. It’s an opportunity.’ She spoke passionately, bitterly even, but whether at his inadequacy or her own he couldn’t tell.
When he stepped out of the shop with his new boots creaking and the old ones in a box under his arm he saw that the streets were, in fact, filled with an odd electricity, as if, while he was inside, a quick storm had come up and equally swiftly passed, changing the sky and setting the pavements, the window-panes, the flanks of passing vehicles in a new and more vivid light. They might have entered a different day, and he wondered if there really had been a change of weather or he only saw the change now because that girl had planted some seed of excitement in him whose sudden blooming here in the open air cast its own reflection on things. He felt panicky. It was as if the ground before him, that had only minutes ago stretched away to a clear future, had suddenly tilted in the direction of Europe, in the direction of events, and they were all now on a dangerous slope. That was the impression people gave him. That they were sliding. There was, in all this excitement, an alarming sense that they might be at the beginning of a stampede.
He went into the Lands Office Hotel for a quiet beer; it was where he usually went; it was the least rowdy of the Brisbane pubs.
He found it full of youths who would normally have been at work at this hour in government offices or insurance buildings or shops. They were shouting one another rounds, swaggering a little, swapping boasts, already a solid company or platoon, with a boldness that came from their suddenly being many; and all with their arms around one another’s shoulders, hanging on against the slope.
When he went into the back for a piss, one of them, one of the loudest, was leaning with his head on his arm above the tiled wall of the urinal, his body at a forward angle. He seemed to have been like that for a long time.
‘Are you alright?’ Jim enquired.
‘Yes, mate, I’m alright,’ the youth said mildly. He tilted himself upright, buttoned up and staggered away. Outside Jim saw him arguing with another fellow, his face very fierce, his fist hammering the other fellow in the upper arm with short hard jabs, the other laughing and pushing him off.
Later, round at the Criterion, it was the same. These were fellows from the law-courts, clerks mostly, wearing three-piece suits, but also noisy. Jim took one look and slipped into the ladies’ lounge with its velvet drapes and mirrors, its big glossy-leafed plants in jardinières. He had never dared before. All this excitement had made him bold, but given him at the same time a wish for something softer than the assertions and oaths of the public bar. He met a girl – a woman really – with buttoned boots and a red blouse.
‘Are you joining up too?’ she asked.
‘I dunno.’ he lied.
She summed him up quickly. ‘From the country?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘the coast.�
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‘Oh,’ she said, but didn’t see the difference.
They got talking, and on the assumption that he too was off to the other side of the world and would need something to remember before he went, she invited him to go home with her. He wasn’t surprised, he had known all along that this was where their conversation would lead. She was a warm, sandy-headed girl with a sense of humour, inclined to jolly her young men along. She looked at him quizzically and didn’t quite understand, but was used to that; young fellows were so different, and so much the same. She touched his hand.
‘It’s alright. I won’t bite, you know.’
He finished his drink slowly, he wasn’t in a hurry; feeling quite steady and sure of himself, even on this new ground. Perhaps it was an alternative.
‘Right then,’ he said, and she gave a wide smile.
Outside the lights were on and there were crowds. Walking up Queen Street they found that in the windows of some of the bigger shops, the department stores where your cash flew about overhead in metal capsules, there were pictures of the King and Queen with crossed flags on either side, one Australian, the other the Union Jack. And the streets did feel different. As if they had finally come into the real world at last, or caught up, after so long, with their own century.
Taking a short tram-ride over the bridge, they walked past palm-trees and Moreton Bay figs till they came to a park, and then, among a row of weatherboard houses, to a big rooming-house with a latticework verandah. He waited on the step while the girl plunged into her leather handbag after the key, and his eye was led, among the huge trunks of the Moreton Bay figs down in the park, to a scatter of glowing points that could have been fireflies, but were, of course, cigarettes. There was some sort of gathering. Suddenly, before the girl could turn her key in the lock, the stillness was broken by a vicious burst of sound, a woman shrieking, then the curses of more than one man.
