The Conversations At Curlew Creek

by David Malouf

  He was not ready for this sort of banter. Some part of him was still delayed in the hut. And his arrival, he saw, put a kind of restraint upon them, for all their attempt at lightness. It wasn’t simply the difference in rank, or the fact that he was new and made them self-conscious of habits that had grown up between them that a stranger might find dubious. Kersey, he guessed, had already brought them news that he was ill-humoured and hard to please.

  The pannikins of sweet tea helped. Langhurst poured and handed them round, after he had risen up and swung the billy three times overarm to settle the leaves. They sat quietly sipping. After a little, in quite a different mood, as if, after the explosive activity around his arrival, they had moved back to some previous moment, Langhurst, with a half-apologetic glance in his direction, enquired of the other, ‘So go on, Garrety, what happened then? What’d you do?’

  There was in his voice none of its earlier harshness, which even then Adair had thought forced. Its quality now was of an almost childlike openness, which was all it needed to change the mood of the group, to make it seem, as the night closed round them, close-bound in stillness and expectancy. They had, after their interval of rough play and manly belligerence, reverted to story-telling, these youths, and with that to some more contemplative version of themselves that depended, Adair thought, on these ancient conditions of deep night and a fire kept burning to lead a man’s suspended self into the breathing heart of things.

  ‘Go on, Garrety,’ Langhurst insisted, ‘finish it.’

  Garrety suppressed a smile. All cheekbones and narrow jaw, he had a face that might have been vicious. The sockets of his eyes were dark, with a fiery point in each, reflections of the fire or some other flame. He moved away into himself before he answered, in a way that seemed unlikely in the truculent fellow of just moments ago. It’s an act, Adair thought. This fellow’s a satirist.

  ‘So I said to ’im, what d’you want, Jacko, why me?’

  He might have been speaking from a stage. His voice had a dramatic ring to it, leapt past them and seemed projected towards a figure who had stepped out of the night to join them. Langhurst cast a glance over his shoulder, then, with a child’s delighted readiness to be harrowed, turned back, grinning.

  ‘He laughed then, that was the odd thing. After all that, he laughed. You’d of expected a ghost to be, you know, solemn – mournful. But he laughed in an easy way, as if ’e knew something I didn’t.’ He frowned. ‘I wanted to turn me back then and just walk away, on’y I couldn’t. I felt like he was holding me there. I mean, like he was the one seeing me, rather than the other way round, an’ I couldn’t go till he decided to stop and let me, I was too – light, that’s what I felt. And the fact is, I wasn’t the one he was after, it wasn’t me, I never done it. I told ’im that. I told him: it wasn’t me, mate, I never done it, you’ve got this all arse up. He put a smirk on ’is face at that and just looked at me as if he knew better. I was surprised. I always thought – you know, that once you were passed over you’d know everything at last, all the answers, that’s what I would of expected.’

  ‘Yes,’ Langhurst said dreamily, ‘me too. That’s what I would of thought too.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t. That must’ve been why he was hangin’ about. To find out. Anyway, after a bit the weight sort of come back to me, I could move. Then ’e was gone.’

  Langhurst waited. The story-teller had gone sombre. Maybe he isn’t a satirist after all, Adair thought. The skin was tight over his cheekbones, the eyes narrowed.

  ‘And was that the end of it?’

  ‘Yair, well, I never saw no more of ’im, if that’s what you mean. On’y I couldn’t fathom why he thought it was me that done it. I didn’t, I never would have. But he thought I would and that worried me. I felt – you know, that he knew something I didn’t. About me, I mean. Anyway, after a bit, when he didn’ come back, I reckoned, he’s found out who it really was. You see, he’d been after all of us, one by one, till he found out.’

  ‘And who was it?’ Langhurst asked, as if this story like all others must have a satisfactory end.

  ‘Hell, I don’t know. It wasn’t me, that’s all I know.’

  ‘Did the others tell you anything?’

  ‘No, an’ I didn’ ask ’em neither, I didn’ want to know. It wasn’t my life. On’y, about a year later, another one of ’em. Brat Crawley, got drowned in a flash flood up Richmond way, that just sort of rose up out of nowhere. One minute he was there, the next he wasn’t. Gone. Swept right off ’is feet.’

  ‘Were you there? Did you see it?’

  ‘Nah. Heard about it. Another feller, Lucky, he saw it. He was right behind ’im, ready t’ lead his horse down the bank. Bam!’

  Langhurst waited. ‘An’ you reckon it might have been him?’ he said at last. ‘This Brat – what’s-’is-name?’

  ‘Crawley. Brat Crawley.’ Another ghost, in fierce affront at this suggestion, might have risen up and been standing where Garrety stared away past the fire.

  ‘I didn’t say that. No, I wouldn’t reckon so. It was just a coincidence. It didn’t necessarily mean nothin’. Just a lot of weird circumstances, one after the other.’

  Langhurst seemed impressed. In the quietness that fell the two youths, who all this time had been speaking as if they were alone here, so rapt were they by some concern of their own, sat stilled, each with his own preoccupations. Kersey too was stilled. The black, Jonas, who throughout had sat deeply enthralled, hanging with drawn breath on the line of Garrety’s voice but attending to the hushed mood of the telling, Adair thought, rather than to its words or events, had gone most still of all. It was the intensity he established there, as of a darkness more dense, more tautly gathered, that drew Adair’s gaze.

  He was a scrawny fellow who might have been sixteen but could also have been forty. The wear and tear his body had taken was not measurable in white man’s years.

  He wore the jacket and trousers of a trooper, but the trousers were too short above his lean shanks and the jacket so frayed at the elbows and cuffs that the thin threads had lost all colour. He had not solved as yet, either at chest or flies, the relationship of buttonholes to buttons.

  The uniform was an irrelevance – that’s what you felt. Like another form of body decoration, it was no more than the sign, loosely assumed, that he had been brought over from savagery into the service of a remote and ineffectual authority. His nakedness was still intact.

  He was, Adair thought, even under his name of Jonas, an opening there into a deeper darkness, into a mystery – of the place, of something else too that was not-place, which might also be worth exploring – but all traffic through it, in either direction, was blocked.

  Suddenly there was a sound off in the night. It had the clarity and sharpness of a shot and seemed unnervingly close.

  ‘What was that?’ Langhurst whispered.

  Kersey laughed.

  ‘A fish,’ he said, ‘a fish jumpin’.’

  ‘Didn’t sound like a fish.’

  ‘Did to me. Creek’s full of ’em. I’ll be after one or two of them in the mornin’ for our breakfast. Perch. What’d you think it was, I wonder?’ He chuckled and turned to Adair. ‘Fish,’ he said again, inclined to pursue this small advantage at the younger trooper’s expense. Langhurst ignored him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, harking back to what Garrety had been telling, ‘I never experienced nothing like that.’

  He said this ruefully, out of a sense, Adair felt, of inveterate youthfulness, as if he had missed out on something, but there was as well a note of apprehension in his voice, as if it might be an experience, one of many, that was still to come and he was uncertain till it did how he would meet it.

  Garrety broke out of his stillness. With his heel he kicked reflectively at the sandy earth.

  ‘You seem to know an awful lot a fellers,’ Kersey put in, ‘that come to a bad end. Better watch out, Ben. One day yer mate here’ll be tellin’ the same sort o’ story about you.’
<
br />   ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  It was Langhurst again, his tone one of aggrieved offence on the part of his friend.

  ‘Oh, nothin’,’ Kersey told him wearily. ‘Don’t bother about me.’

  ‘We don’t,’ Langhurst shot back. ‘On’y don’t bother to put your oar in if you got nothing to say.’ He turned again to Garrety, afraid these interruptions might have broken the other’s mood.

  ‘So then – you said twice. What was the other one?’

  ‘It wasn’t a person,’ Garrety said.

  Langhurst leaned forward, waited.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘A kind of – event.’

  ‘Go on.’

  But Garrety now seemed unwilling to be drawn, to evoke, even for himself, whatever it was that haunted him. He looked haunted.

  ‘I don’t know what it was really,’ he said. ‘I was crossin’ this big paddock out Camden way. It was a place I knew well enough, I’d been there often enough. I was just walkin’ across it. ‘Bout four in the afternoon. I wasn’t in a hurry. But somethin’ – I don’t know what – must of stopped me. I just stood there, I don’t know how long, but it seemed long. I felt something strange was happening. Not to me but all round me. Like a wind had come up. Only it wasn’t that. The air was still, stiller than it had been, in fact – no birds, no crickets. That’s odd, I thought. I could hear the grass-blades rubbing one against the other, a weird sound, that once you noticed it got louder and louder, like someone was going at a knife-blade with a stone – you know what that sounds like. Only loud. As if it was hundreds of ’em. Something made me look down then. I was standin’ in blood. It was all around me, filling the whole paddock like a lake, I was up to me ankles in it! I smelt it then, and felt its wetness, the air was so thick I could hardly breathe. An’ all of a sudden there were these voices, cryin’ out something terrible, I never heard nothin’ to touch it, all that cryin’ and wailing.

  ‘I knew what it was then. I’d stepped into a place where something terrible had happened, or was goin’ t’ happen, either one, I don’t know which, I couldn’ tell which. An’ it didn’t matter. I was there, that’s all.’

  The silence that had fallen was intense. Langhurst, after a moment, looked away from Garrety, and Adair felt the youth’s troubled gaze upon him, as if, with the advantage of age and authority, or some experience of a wider world, he might have something to say about this; then he turned back to Garrety, who, drawn and pale-looking, with the sweat standing out on his brow and his gaze turned inward, was still isolated in the midst of his vision, a horrified and unwilling witness.

  ‘Well,’ Langhurst said at last. ‘That beats anything I ever heard. What did it mean?’

  Garrety, stirring, shook his head, and swirling the last leaves in his pannikin, tossed them to the dark. It was a gesture that was meant to finish things. He had no more to tell.

  Langhurst sat a little longer, fidgety, unsatisfied, reluctant to let Garrety slip back into his more familiar, uncommunicative self. He opened his mouth and seemed about to speak when another sound intervened.

  Away to their left, outside their circle, a high-pitched wailing began, a weird sound, scarcely human.

  Clearly it was the black, Jonas, who was making it; the top part of his body, where he sat cross-legged in the dust, was swaying. But the sound itself was coming from a point several feet beyond him, out of the earth, and as his voice shifted pitch, the sound too shifted, came from another place altogether. Adair felt the hair rise at the back of his neck.

  ‘Now look what you done,’ Kersey whispered.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Langhurst said, ‘he’s all right. I’ll tend to him.’

  Rising quickly, he went to where Jonas sat just beyond the light of the fire, and with a cracking of his knee-joints that was like gunshot in the hush that had fallen, or perhaps it was simply the intensity with which their ears were attuned, lowered himself and sat face to face opposite. There was just inches between them.

  The wailing had increased and was leaping about from place to place, behind and in front of them, all at different pitches, peopling the night. In the midst of it the two figures, black and white, made a kind of balance.

  It was Adair who thought this. What he could see from where he sat was the blond back of Langhurst’s head, the thick hair rough-cut and greasy, and beyond, the wide-eyed, open-mouthed face of the black.

  As if, he thought, the white youth were staring into a glass, and what looked back at him, though he appeared too calm to be surprised at it, was this black one distorted by horror or irreparable grief.

  Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the wailing ceased, and for a time the two simply sat.

  At last, a little awkwardly, Langhurst twisted his body, unflexed his knees, and got up.

  Jonas continued to sit, staring trancelike ahead.

  What a place this is, Adair thought, his eye on Jonas. God knows what things have happened here and gone unrecorded by men, or are on the way towards us. Will we ever know the true history of it? The secret history, stored away in the dark folds of the landscape, in its scattered bones, of a paradise found or lost. It struck him now that the real difference between himself and these others was that he could leave the place, and would leave it, but that they belonged and would stick. What he could afford to raise as an interesting question was the ground of their lives.

  ‘He’s all right,’ Langhurst was saying, his body suspended from a subdued, almost apologetic grin. ‘He’ll be quiet now.’ He lowered himself and sat.

  ‘That was a good trick,’ Kersey said after a time. It was an unnecessary remark, and the moment it was out he knew it and looked embarrassed, but had needed, Adair saw, the reassurance of speech.

  Langhurst did not respond. He looked very pale and unprotected. Very pure – that was the word that came to Adair’s mind. Perhaps he had not known what he was going to do till he did it, but the impulse he had acted on was perfect, and the rightness of it assured him of something. He shone. So pleased with himself that he could not hide it. In a shy, surprised way, he grinned, then dropped his eyes and rubbed with the heel of his hand at a soft place on his thigh.

  ‘Well,’ Adair said, hauling himself upright. ‘I’ll be getting back.’ Very briskly he began to issue instructions for the morning. A good length of rope, the digging of the grave. ‘Be ready at half-past six,’ he told them. ‘I’ll leave it to you, Kersey, to see that everything is prepared.’

  ‘Right you are, sir, yessir, I’ll see to it. You can depend on me.’

  ‘Right then.’

  He was about to turn away when Langhurst spoke.

  ‘How is he then?’ he asked.

  His tone was neutral enough, but the boy, still in a heightened state after his performance was so open, so undefended, that you could see right into him, his broad face flattened, washed with light. There was the tightness of real pain around his eyes.

  He understood then that it was this one, not the other as he had thought, who was responsible for the beating Carney had taken. He felt sorry for the boy but what was there to say?

  ‘He’s been singing,’ he told them.

  Langhurst glanced at the others.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we heard.’

  With the open, hurt look still blunting his features he stood waiting, as if some explanation might be about to come forth, and Adair saw how strange it must have appeared, that sweet, unexpected singing.

  ‘We thought,’ the boy said, ‘he might have been – you know, getting drunk.’

  ‘No,’ Adair said, ‘but you remind me of something. Kersey, there’s a bottle of rum in my knapsack. You’d better come and collect it. There’ll be a good measure of it for you fellows in the morning’ – he saw the quick looks that passed between them; so they were to be considered – ‘a double shot for the prisoner.’

  With this he felt free to move away.

  ‘At half-past six, then,’ Kersey was singing, delighted
to have been singled out. ‘On the dot! Don’t you worry about a thing, sir. And I’ll come for the other right away.’

  7

  * * *

  * * *

  HE MUST HAVE slept. His neck, when he shifted, was stiff where his head had rolled against the wall, one leg was cramped. He had no recollection of his dream. It was gone. Only the receding shadow of it still hung on and troubled him with the sense of something unfinished or not begun. He eased his leg, began to rub at the tight muscle. The light had burned out, but his eyes had now grown used to the dark. Carney too stirred. He began to mutter, then shouted a garbled phrase or two, and his eyes snapped open. He looked about wildly. They stared at one another.

  The man did not know where he was. With the touch of fear still upon him, he was lost and sweating in whatever dark predicament he had been in just seconds ago and five feet from where Adair lay slumped in his own fitful sleep.

  Adair’s pulse began to race. Amazing that by some process of sympathetic understanding he could feel on the creeping surface of his skin the effect of the man’s dream while having no conscious knowledge of it. And by what means could he have? How could he know what shadows, what old furies or figures of dread, as mysterious and personal as his own, haunted the man, and had followed him here? Yet here he was sweating in some new opening of understanding between them.

  They continued to stare at one another, Carney’s eyes troubled, directed inward. Whatever it was that lay upon him he had difficulty shaking it off. Could it be, Adair thought, the physical certainty at last of what was to occur? Which had come to him out of that deep body-knowledge that in sleep we have no guard against?

  He shivered, and wondered if that, in one of its many hidden forms, had not been the substance of his own dream, which he recognized only now in the chill he felt, the goose-pimpling of his flesh.