by David Malouf
There could be (this too I saw clearly) no door to such a place – even a door like all the others in the house that was kept permanently open. The whole point was in its being visible at all times, so that we had, in going down the hall, to see its many temptations glowing subtly in the dark.
Beyond the Front Room was the door that led to the passage and the rooms at the back of the house; and at the end of this passage, on the left, was the Side Door through which, in his own good time, Our Burglar would get in.
It was another heavy door, whose glass had been covered with oiled paper in a geometrical pattern: squares superimposed to make eight-sided stars. Outside, a porch, from which stairs led down to the drive. The bottom step was where I was sent to collect the lettuces, tomatoes, egg-plants, radishes and beans that my grandfather left on his way home from his garden patch.
But I was connected to this door by something deeper than my ordinary comings and goings. I was, in those days, a prodigious bleeder. At the least provocation my nose became a bloody fountain, and Cassie’s quick folk cure was to lay me flat on my back and slip the Side Door Key under my sweater, a heavy black key about five inches long that smelled of iron or dried blood.
It was meant, I suppose, to work by physical suggestion, or a kind of sympathetic magic that turned on the word lock. So the Side Door by association became My Door. In the most intimate terms, it ‘spoke to my blood’. That is how I thought of it. When Our Burglar chose just this door to break in by I was deeply disturbed. Might there be something sympathetic in that as well?
The world is full of odd, undisclosed connections. Our house was alive with them. But none seemed odder, or more alarming and secret, than the one I felt between my nose, the key to the Side Door and that faceless intruder, the Young Fellow in sandshoes who had been in our house for no more than a quarter of an hour perhaps but had smelled out, in that time, even in darkness, more of its connecting paths than I had in a lifetime. Do burglars, I wondered, have some sixth sense that allows them to see the threads between things as a luminous net? If so, then what I really wanted to be when I grew up was not a fireman or a famous surgeon but a burglar. That is why I needed to see our burglar’s face, to sit down and have a good chinwag with him. The Side Door was the connection between us. When Cassie slipped its key down my back a cold shiver went through me. My blood stopped.
But all this is body talk, and I see now that I tune my ears and listen to it – or rather, now that I recall in an active manner my nose – that I have omitted something from my description of our Front Room that was the real reason for going back to it. Memory has played a trick on me. One of my senses has declined to work. How else have my nostrils failed to detect, among the mingled odours of dusty velvet, furniture polish, Brasso and the damp of ancient floorboards, a smell that is different in kind from the rest, a familiar, not unpleasant odour that cuts clean through the metal and cloth and wood-smells, and brings to this overfurnished garden the authentic odour of shit. For there, in a hidden corner, on the polished forest-floor, is a pile of turds. It is my habit to bless, in this direct and simple manner, certain places in the house that are my particular concern. (Have I been reminded of this by my evocation of Our Burglar, and the habit of some housebreakers – animal, childish, primitive – of leaving such ‘signatures’ in the houses they have robbed?)
I am punished for the offence but I persist. These are gift-offerings. I leave them in special places. Perhaps they are cold spots in the house that need, I feel, to be heated by this easy expression of my body’s warmth, or dangerous places I want to leave my scent on and appease. I am speaking with what is, for the time being, my body’s only expressive mouth, poems that are hymns or critical protests – who knows which? Whatever I intend, it is in a particular corner of our Front Room, the forbidden garden of delights, that I choose most often to leave this evidence of myself, and what I have done, in the peculiar argot of the household, is a job. (I am amused at the attempt to find a place for this low natural function in the ‘work ethic’, and the suggestion, all confused as it is in my mind with burglary, of a vocation. This body talk, which seems so local, opens into a real social world. So I am invited to speak of my penis, back there – with what appeal to aggression and lawlessness? – as my trigger.)
And so at last we come down to it, the body – that small hot engine at the centre of all these records and recollections; gravely preoccupied, as it hoovers about the house and yard, with its own business of breathing, pumping blood, processing the fruits of the earth, but in every sense meeting reality head on – as dirt that stains, sunshine that warms or burns, berries that delight the eye but when tasted catch fire in the mouth. And is that smell lemon-blossom or some passing woman’s scent?
The world is all edges. They bruise for a time, drawing to the surface of the skin a purple storm-cloud than can be seen but not heard, no matter how hard you strain your ear. There are raw nails, open chocolate-boxes, the glass panes of louvres that in a single, sharp encounter will leave this body marked with a pit in the softness of the calf and a ridge of hard scar-tissue across the kneecap; on the ball of the thumb a puffy mound with stitch marks (a butcher’s job).
It is out of the hot core of this body, its constant heat, that I test the climate of the world, its cool places, its dead cold ones. It is from a changing height as my eyes move about in it, two feet seven one year, three feet two the next, as the door to the Piano Room would show, that I judge dimensions, including my own, and the distance at which I stand from things.
A complex assembly: of organs, nerve-ends, bones, cartilage, muscle. An experience machine, that observes, thinks, smells, attends, touches. It learns to listen in this forest for the creaking of familiar boards that is the approach of this or that sharer of the house, and as the day’s heat ebbs and the old house-frame resettles, marks the distance we have moved into night. It gets cramps and growing-pains; it sweats, stinks, grumbles; but at certain intangible contacts, it soars till it might be angelic, gifted with unique, undeniable powers – of flight, of change, of eternal instant being. It is always in a state becoming. Only in the last and most private room of all do we come upon it – not still, not fully revealed, but alone, unguarded, and in easy nakedness.
7
YOU ENTER THE Bathroom up one step from what we call the Kitchen, a long room divided by an archway like the one in the Hall, only grander; a wooden arc springing from fluted pedestals and with leaded glass in the frames – pink, mauve and crimson flowers of a kind that do not exist in nature but which respond to it just the same. They glow or are muted according to the weather and change every hour of the day.
The larger section is our dining-room. The smaller, beyond the arch, is Cassie’s cooking and washing-up place. Here, on an Early Kooka gas-stove with a laughing jackass on the front, she prepares the enormous meals of those days, meals that defy latitude and the facts of climate and weather by reproducing the baked dinners, stews, hot-pots and boiled puddings of the Mother Country (our mother’s country), which we continue to consume, after more than a century, as if a hundred degrees of humidity constituted a strictly moral challenge, and we had our real existence in a cold place on the other side of the globe. Physical bodies and the actual have nothing to do with it. In a properly British way we ignore them, as we ignore the view from the window on to a backyard that dazzles in sunlight, steams after rain, and is choked with tropical weeds out of which cannas burst in scarlet and golden flames.
What we are feeding when, at fixed hours – breakfast at seven, dinner at noon, tea at six-thirty – we assemble behind serviette-rings initialled with our names, are the spirits of the fathers. We are paying tribute to origins – even those of us whose origins are of another kind.
So we sweat and consume: Steak and Kidney Pudding, Rolled Shoulder of Lamb with Mint Sauce and Potatoes Carrots and Peas, Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding, Corned Beef with Cauliflower and White Sauce, all washed down with tea and followed by one of the
sweet puddings that on hot afternoons blow steam out under the lid of an aluminium saucepan as they boil the hours away in a cloth or in a special pudding-basin with a clip-over top: Sago Plum-Pudding, Ginger Pudding, Golden Syrup Pudding, Spotted Dick.
It is a distinguishably different body, then, that goes up that one step into the old-fashioned bathroom and strips itself to view, a body fed with different notions of itself as well as different food. For our bodies are inventions; we shape them to our views. This contemporary body we move in, which seems to belong so deeply to the world of nature, is a work of art, the product of convention, fashion, diet – of pure idea and the power of advertising. The body of forty years ago, though anatomically the same, will show, when we observe it closely, a subtle difference. It is, as we see from its roughness and scars, less cared for than our modern one, less conscious of itself and of some ideal beauty to which it might be expected to conform; or the ideal is of another kind.
Women’s bodies are chunkier, their legs plumper than might be acceptable now, particularly at the knee. Largely undieted, they are constrained by a girdle and have one shape when they are attired and a quite different one when they are not. In the soft flesh at the top of the thigh there is the impression of suspender-belt buttons.
It is a body that retains its hair and is not deodorised. In repose it sags, and the emphasis is less on good lines, good bones, than on the roundness of the flesh. Even without the clothes that distinguish one decade from the next, it is a body of the past. There is a lingering memory of the classical about it, of the Renaissance, the Nineties. And if men’s bodies seem more familiar, and less easy therefore to date, it is because they, save for an inch or two of average growth, have undergone fewer transformations, or because the ideal in their case is not the product of aesthetic fantasy but of physical hard work, and those forms of play that are hard work disciplined and refined.
The rooms that serve these bodies reflect them. Modern bathrooms are secular shrines. Under lights as brilliant as in any theatre, the body is apotheosised, becomes a stage for all those evolutionary disciplines that create the godlike creature, all its human imperfections smoothed and disguised, that TV advertisements sing extravagant hymns to and heated towel rails, a vanity, a cubicle devoted entirely to the rituals of the shower, ferns, goldfish, a cane chair or two and a battery of sockets for shavers, vibrators, tooth-brushes and hair-driers, are called from all corners of the earth to mollify and make fine. This is a holy of holies. Here household gods are present in the flesh.
Old-style bathrooms (of which ours was entirely typical) were the product of a simpler and poorer economy and served a body with simpler needs.
Stripped to the bare essentials, and with all their functions rudely undisguised, they were not intended or furnished for the pursuit of the ideal, or for uncovering erotic possibilities, or ministering alone or in company to the flesh. What you practised before their brutal plumbing and beaten-tin walls, in a spirit of dour austerity, was the virtue that was next to godliness; and it was most nearly a virtue when you did not linger over it. You did what you had to do briskly, efficiently, and you never locked the door.
The bath is of enamelled iron. It stands high on clawed feet, with a cold tap at one end and a geyser at the other. The geyser roars when lighted. In it, as in the bath, some animal form has been reduced to metal and crudely stylised – reminder of a continuity to which we also belong. After a few unroyal splutters it emits a trickle of steam.
Overhead a galvanised-iron shower, with a rose so large, and with such wide perforations, that it might better, I think, be called a sunflower. A bathmat of wooden slats, water-softened and worn at the centre. The towel-rail also wood. The only other furnishings a linen-press where fresh towels are kept and a little two-shelved medicine-chest, high up out of reach; and on the wall opposite, a full-length mirror with a kitchen chair in front, where we stand to be dried after our bath and to have our hair combed when we are going out.
The mirror seems out of place. It is too grand for here. It has a metal frame that might once have been bronze, its egg-and-dart pattern subdued but not quite extinguished with paint. Too large for mere convenience – shaving for example – it might encourage illusions of a baroque sort if our imaginations could jump to them. Standing in front of it you see: black-and-white-checked lino in big squares like the chessboard in Musgrave Park, a lion’s paw, the geyser, and the passage that leads to our lavatory.
There is no wash-stand or basin. We wash our face and hands over the bath, with cold water and Lifebuoy soap; but the soap-holder, galvanised iron in which my father has punched irregular holes for drainage, contains as well a pumice stone, a scratchy loofah and the bar of abrasive Solvol with which he scrubs up after a day in the toolshed or mowing the lawn. Our hair we wash in rainwater out in the yard, in a basin by the watertank, with a jug for rinsing.
Between the linen-press and the bath is another door. It opens into a passage, a no-man’s-land with no source of light and no electric light of its own between the Bathroom proper and our cubby-hole lavatory. Here, at the bottom of a cupboard whose shelves are crammed with all sorts of broken stuff and rubbish – old Photoplays and pattern books, oil-lamps, meat-dishes and boxes of discoloured snapshots – are our bulk provisions: sugar, salt and rice in hundredweight sacks, string bags bulging with potatoes and onions.
It is a creepy, half-way place, only partly domesticated. There are cockroaches. You can hear them scuttling about when the bathwater shuts off. And rats. Our father has laid pink and white baits he gets from the Council, little squares of poisonous coconut-ice. So the book when I discover it, with its evocation of a dark, half-animal world, does not seem surprising or out of place.
I have been locked in for an hour, because my sister and I have been scrapping, and decide to amuse myself from the cupboard shelves. It is light enough. The mice keep out of sight if you scrape your shoes a little, and I am used to cockroaches.
I find first of all some old snapshots, several of which I already know. One is of my parents on a picnic at Peel Island – ‘where the lepers were’. In another they are standing knee-deep in the surf at Coolangatta, and my father is holding me, aged seven or eight months, in his arms. A big wave is coming and my father is holding me out to it. I have my mouth open, screaming. I am learning not to be afraid of the sea. But today, feeling bolder than usual, I go deeper. Pushed down behind a stack of broken soup tureens I find a book.
I like books. This one is small, about the same size as a prayer book, only thicker, and with a cover the cockroaches have eaten: red but blotched now with white. It has pictures, and they are of a kind I have never encountered before, crudely printed in black ink.
One of them is a sheep-child, a little boy with the face and chest of a human but the woolly body and feet of a lamb. Another is a dog-boy. Fiercer. There is nothing frightening about these creatures. They are odd, that’s all. I think them wonderful. They give me such a marvellous sense of possibilities, of how the world of animals and me might be connected. It is only when I sit down to read the text that I become alarmed. Here are deep warnings to women against having to do with sheep, dogs, asses (or lions and tigers, it might be) and against exposing themselves, while with child, to any deformity. A woman, it seems, might produce one of these children by being frightened by a passing dog.
I close the book and push it back (and used to think of it later with real excitement, hidden away with its ‘secrets’).
So creation contains more than the colouring books let on. Giraffes, hippos, whales, for all their oddness, I accept and believe in, though I have never actually seen one. Now sheep-boys! But where are they? Do their parents hide them away?
I go back into the bathroom, and with no particular sense of anxiety, in a spirit of pure curiosity, take all my clothes off, climb onto the chair and stand staring at my small naked body in the glass. It is the first time I have ever really looked at myself. There is no sign of hair.
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nbsp; But when Cassie comes in and finds me there I am punished a second time and sent to exile in the yard. Where I go and help Grandpa stake some tomato plants, then watch the rooster among our chooks.
The body has two lives as it has two sides, an outward and visible one and a dark, interior life that follows laws and processes we cannot always control. The life of the inner body is obscure, and the rooms that are set aside to serve it share that obscurity, more in some places and at some times than others, and even when they are clearly to be seen.
Brisbane lavatories at the time of which I am writing are still set at a distance, outside at the bottom of the yard. Weatherboard dunnies with a corrugated-iron roof swathed with bougainvillaea or a loaded choko vine, they are serviced by a night-man; when you shut the door you are in the dark. Our lavatory, in fact, has been brought inside but has brought the dark in with it. At the end of the storeroom passageway, behind a three-ply screen with no door, you sit in utter blackness on a split-seated throne that pinches. Berries drop into the guttering overhead. Warm air gusts up through the floorboards from under-the-house.
Our cubbyhole of a lavatory is one exit into the body’s dark. There is another. High up on the Bathroom wall is a door of doll’s house size and the only one here that is securely latched. Beyond it, the smallest room of all. When you open the door and look into its white-painted interior you are looking into the body’s dark places. When you approach it you are stepping through into another age. Lined up on its two narrow shelves are the patent and homemade remedies that in those days, before antibiotics and the arrival of the big drug companies, constitute our entire armoury against the body’s ills, and what their paucity reveals is how little can be done before the body ceases to be close and treatable and moves into that slide area where the powers of medicine shockingly fail. Parents live in a state of permanent anxiety; and children, while suffering easily enough the nicks, jabs and scars of rough play in a world of edges, unconcerned as all children are by the future disadvantages of a gouge under the left eye, or stitches or a dead tooth, are aware just the same, through endless warnings, of lockjaw, blood poisoning, polio, even hydrophobia as we called it then – all runaway illnesses that represent the irruption into the body of a chaos beyond control.
