by David Malouf
He held it close and in the early days had had to turn away not to be sick himself. But there was no escaping the smell of it or the sounds she made as the last strength was torn from her. ‘I’m sorry, love, I’m sorry,’ she would murmur over and over.
When he had cleaned up some of the mess he would carry the basin out and empty it in a place in the yard that was all rusty cans, chop-bones and bleached pippies and crab-shells, then kick sand over it, turning his head away in disgust and taking quick gulps of air that had a taste of coal-dust in it.
The yard backed on to barren dunes. The rise behind was always on the move. There was a time, not so long ago, when he had had a rabbit cage out here, but it was gone now, yards back under the dune. There had even, further back, been a couple of trees. He remembered climbing them. He wondered sometimes how long it would be till their whole house was covered. He would lie at night hearing the wind and the individual grains rolling. The great white slope of a wave would rise up and break in his sleep, come trickling first through the cracks in the walls, then press hard against the windows till they fell with a crash and sand came pouring over their table and chairs and the rafters caved in and the whole hill went over them. He would be fighting to get above it.
The shack they lived in was just one room knocked up out of timber, old packing cases mostly, and patched with fibro and corrugated iron – anything his father had been able to scavenge.
There was a dunny behind, and for privacy a curtain his mother had sewn out of bags.
Their neighbours down here were all squatters like them, families that in one way or another had got into trouble and been evicted. It was four years since they had lived in a proper house, in a street with fences between the yards and a number on the gate. Number 6, Marlin Street.
He swilled the basin with water from their tank, once, twice, then went in and sponged her brow with a damp cloth; then poured water so she could clean her mouth.
‘You’re a good kid, Vic,’ she would whisper as he settled her pillow. It was grey and stiff with dirt. ‘You’re all a mother could wish for.’
He did all he could for her. Sitting beside her on a butter-box, he read the books that one of their neighbours, Mrs Webb, got from the library behind Williams’ store. At nine he was an excellent reader. He hardly ever stumbled over the words.
When he slipped away to play cricket with the other kids in the hour before dark, he would pause a moment and bury his nose in the sleeve of his jumper.
That smell – ingrained dirt, coal-dust, salt from the sea, mutton-fat, sour milk – he loathed it! Stripped to the waist in their outhouse, with a cake of Sunlight soap and a scrubbing-brush, he would punish his flesh till it was raw, but the smell persisted. It was a condition, like a disease, and went so deep you couldn’t get at it; or like character, or family features. It was their smell, them. Whatever the ads said, it was beyond the power of Sunlight.
The other kids at school held their noses when he appeared. Pooh! they went, even the ones he was mates with. He flashed out but his spirit squirmed. He loved his mother and hated to feel ashamed of her. His father was another matter. There was nothing anyone could do about him.
All this he bore in silence, he was proud; and they were all outcasts, more or less, the kids like him who lived along the railway and down the dunes.
He wasn’t by nature morose. The brightness of his blue eyes and their steady gaze, his quickness and sturdiness of limb, belonged to a disposition that was meant to be sunny. He should have moved easily in the world. But circumstances had taught him to hold back. Indirectness, an intense secretiveness about all that mattered most, had become second nature to him, the first surviving in an assurance, which belonged to his physical side, that the world must some day lay itself at his feet, though he was pretty certain now he would have to force it to.
As for the ready smile and liveliness of manner that came so easily to him, they could leave you vulnerable, he had discovered, unless used as a mask. They disarmed people. That was their use.
He ought to have been without hope. But his body was hopeful and he trusted it. Everything he did he looked forward to with an eager impatience. As a little lad he would come rushing in from play and suddenly stop dead on the doorstep, wondering, now he had arrived, why he had been in such a hurry to get back; as if he had expected the house to have changed while he was away. His mother saw the look on his face and it went right through her.
When he examined the world he was in he could only assume that an error had been made in the true workings of things. He was harmed by this. It would make life hard for him. But he intended to rectify the situation any way he could and would have no mercy on whatever it was that had sought to rob him of his due.
Standing still out there in the fading light and knowing that the moment he went in his eyes would lose their capacity to follow the flight of a ball or catch a disturbance in the grass, he would try to keep contact with the animal part of him, trusting to that, and would feel his whole body come to the edge of something – something he could have too, if he could only grasp what it was.
Here, at the smoky edge of darkness, even stones lost their sharp edge and their heaviness a moment and seemed ready for flight. He felt his body leave the earth. That was the animal in him, which was sure-footed and had perfect timing. It took off in a long leap and he held his breath.
The land breeze had fallen, just on the turn. Everything was suspended, hanging for one last moment between daytime and night, between its day life and that other darker life of the night hours. His body too was suspended.
But after a moment of almost miraculous lightness in which he felt he had actually done it, and worked the change, he came back to earth. The weight of his body, light as it was, reclaimed him. It was too heavy to shake off.
The sea breeze quickened and in kitchens all down the shore they would be feeling its coolness now. His eyes had adjusted. The lights were hard window-squares.
‘Maybe,’ he thought grimly, ‘there is no other life to be broken through to. It’s all continuous, and you just keep getting thicker and thicker and heavier and heavier as it builds up in you, and that’s it.’
He thought this but could not believe it. That sort of fatality was not in his nature. He would sigh and go home disappointed, but not hopeless, never entirely without hope.
Mornings, out early to fetch the milk, he would see the local men gathering at bus stops on their way to the mine. Other fellows from villages down the coast would be on bikes and would call to them as they passed. Happy enough they seemed, with their little lunch-boxes. They were the lucky ones who still had work. The rest, unshaven, in pyjamas some of them, would be pottering about behind fences, digging a bit, keeping busy. Later, still unshaven but dressed now in collarless shirts and braces, they would be hanging about in groups outside the pub, quiet enough till they got going. Horses were what they were passionate about, or greyhound races or football teams.
At the weekends you could see them, in the same groups, walking to matches with their hands in their pockets. Younger blokes in flash suits, their girls in stockings and high heels, would be stepping along beside them, occasionally calling across to a fellow they knew, or the girl would call to a neighbour she recognised. They would have a fifth share in a lottery in their pocket, these youngsters, maybe a frenchie just on the off-chance.
‘Doin’ all right, are yer?’
That question from an older man, with just a touch of envy in it, would satisfy in most of them the need for recognition.
‘Can’t complain,’ was the conventional, understated response.
A raw, scrubbed look, hair cut short around the ears and palmed down with California Poppy, a suit. Kids like Vic, still barefoot, in an old knitted jumper with a hole at the elbow from leaning on a desk, were supposed to be impressed by that and to catch in it a hint of what they too might step into, if they did what they were told, stayed on the right side of the law, and the Depression e
nded.
Vic considered this and didn’t think much of it. He would make his own life, not just pick up what was passed on to him. He would. He knew it.
His father was a miner, or had been till an old war wound asserted itself – ‘came good’, as the cynics put it. He had a pension and spent his days now, winter and summer, down at the jetty where the coal-loaders put in and there was always a little crowd of men lounging about or casting a line for whiting. There or in one of the town’s three pubs.
He was a well-set-up dark fellow with the same blue eyes Vic had (Vic resented this, whatever value they might have in the way of foxing people), and a natural slovenliness in all he did that affronted the boy. It was to assure himself of the impossibility of there being any link between them that Vic tormented his spirit into hardness and punished his skin with the scrubbing brush.
Easy-going – that was the word for him. They had both been easy-going, Dan and Till Curran, in the days when he was still in work and she was a big woman who liked a beer or two and a hand of poker. They had friends all over. Vic was little then, but he remembered Marlin Street and the rowdy nights.
His father now was a byword in the town. A drunk and a scrounger, he was always dancing about on the edge of whatever crowd there was at the Pacific or the Prince of Wales, and there was a point in his booze-sodden day – Vic had been witness to it more than once, and could not, young as he was, wipe out the horror of it – when he would, with a show of clownish good humour, easy-going as ever, do whatever was demanded of him so long as there was a beer at the end of it: run messages for people, tell tales, swallow insults – always with a silly smile on his face and a fawning eagerness to make himself agreeable.
He had no shame, and it amused some of the smart-alecs of the town, a good many of whom had no shame themselves, to see how far he would go. With a mixture of low pleasure and fascinated disgust, a touch of fear too at what they might have in common with him, they would taunt him with insults, amazed that he should just stand there smiling, blinking, and make no effort to defend himself.
He would do anything, Dan Curran, if he was far gone enough. Lick up your spit and thank you for it, laughing. Then swallow his schooner at a gulp.
There were others, decent men who had worked in the pit with him or been in the same class at school, who felt humiliated themselves to see a man with so little regard for himself.
‘That’s all right, Danno,’ one of them would say stiffly, ‘have this one on me.’ A couple of coins on the linoleum would save him then from his own weakness. But after a minute or two he would have an empty glass in front of him and start making up again to his tormentors, since they were more reliable in the long run than the occasional benefactor.
When he got home he would be in a shouting mood. Then suddenly he would break down and weep.
Every stage of this daily drama disgusted Vic and confirmed him in the view that this vicious crybaby who claimed to be his father had nothing to do with him.
The shame of it was that in the early days, when things had not yet come to their worst, when his father was just newly out of work and had time, since he was home all day, to take Vic fishing and tell him stories of the war, they had been mates, and Vic had been inveigled on more than one occasion into going round to the back door of the pub, just on closing time, to fetch a couple of bottles. Jimmy, the Pacific’s barman, would slip them to him and he would get back fast to hear the end of whatever it was his father had been telling. It was a secret between them – Jimmy, his father and himself. The bottles came in loose straw jackets and they went out and burned them quickly in a corner of the yard so that his mother wouldn’t find them, a real blaze. The empty bottles they sent sailing into the dunes.
But Jim Hardy the publican got to hear of it and told his wife, and when she told Vic’s mother, she cried and was angry with him. Didn’t he know, couldn’t he see what was happening?
He did see then. His mother and father, who had always been so lively together, began to have brawls, and in no time at all, or so it seemed, were forever clawing at one another.
‘You’re a bloody wowser,’ he complained when she refused to drink with him. ‘I din’ expect that. I din’ expect you t’ turn into a bloody wowser. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a bloody whingein’ woman an’ a wowser!’
He would come home belligerent now, ready, on a point of honour, to take offence at everything.
‘You shoudn’ be sewin’ for bloody Sam Goddard’s bloody wife,’ he bellowed. ‘That bitch! Here, gimmee that,’ and he would wrench the bit of work, whatever it was, a skirt to be let down or a new blouse, right out of her hands. If she resisted he would hit her.
Now, when his father tried to get around him, Vic used his elbows to push him off.
‘You git away from me,’ he would hiss, quite prepared to fight if he had to. ‘I won’t do yer scroungin’ for yer.’
He would go out in the dark and sit on the woodpile and look at the axe swung down hard into the block. There would be a breeze from the sea, cooling the sweat on his upper lip, and he would sit there letting it cleanse him.
But when he went back in his mother would say: ‘You oughtn’ta speak to ’im like that, Vic. Don’t think you’re doin’ it for me.’ She would have a cut on her lip or a puffy eye, and still she said it.
He hated that. The way she found excuses and put up with things. He was a fighter. He wanted her to be.
‘Vic, love,’ she told him, ‘you don’t understand these things. Don’t be too hard on me.’
Later, when they thought he was asleep, he would hear them in the double bed. She would be saying his father’s name over and over, gasping it, and with her cut lip kissing and petting him.
He loved her, but her weakness enraged him. When his father flung about with his fists and they were all in a savage moil, shouting and using their shoulders and elbows, he would have given his last breath for her, and was in a frenzy of such rage and blind impotence that he thought he might die of it; of being caught up with them – between them at one moment, at the next outside and beating with his fists to get in, and of shame at being so big for his age and so helpless to do anything.
In the closeness of such moments, when they were all three struggling and shouting, they were like creatures trying to give birth to something, some monster, that’s what he thought, and he saw at last what it was: a murder, that’s what it was. One day soon, as soon as he was strong enough to keep hold of the axe, he would kill this man.
Then his mother took sick. In just weeks she fell away from being a big soft woman to skin and bone. He brought her the basin, and watched her, one hand clutching her side, drag herself from chair to table to doorknob, then across the sandy yard to their dunny. His father was nowhere in sight. Never home now. He had stayed sober for a day or so, right at the start, but now he was drunk from morning to night, though he stayed quiet enough. There was no more shouting. He slunk home after midnight and went to bed in his boots.
Too young to see beyond the immediate horrors, it did not occur to Vic that his father was a man in panic: that what subdued him, drove him deeper into himself, but also kept him away, was an animal terror of what was happening here, the wasting of the big body he had clung to, so that he barely knew it any more, her pain that was like a wild thing in the bed between them, all teeth and claws. He never came near her, that’s all Vic saw. When he did, he couldn’t wait to get away again.
His mother knew what he was thinking. ‘You’re wrong about yer father, Vic,’ she told him, but her voice was no more than a whisper. She was too weak to elaborate.
She died at last. Vic was ten. His father wept and tried to cuddle him. ‘There’s just the two of us now, Vic,’ he said. But Vic was not deceived and offered no sympathy. When his father held on he pulled away.
His own sorrow was overwhelming. He dealt with it. But what feelings he had left over were for himself. He had none for this drunken bully who whined and sn
ivelled and laid claim to him but did nothing but bring them shame.
‘You’re a hard man, Vic,’ the father said bitterly. ‘I wouldn’ wanna be in a world where you was God. God help me if I was. There’s no softness in yer. Not like yer mother.’
He was trying to get around him again. Vic shut his ears.
So long as his mother was there to see it, for her sake, and to set himself at a distance from his father’s slovenliness, since he would do nothing, Vic had tried to keep things in order, wiping the oil-cloth after they ate, rinsing the galvanised iron tub they washed up in, sweeping the floors.
It was hard enough. No matter how often you used the broom there was always a grist of sand under your feet. It settled on the skirting boards and along the windowsills, got between the sheets and scratched when you climbed in. There were always a few grains of it in a teacup when you took it down from its hook.
He had been concerned, in those last weeks, when his mother lay all day in a coma, with her mouth open, that he might come home and find her choked with it, and had nightmares of having to use his fingers to scoop sand out of her throat.
Once she was gone he did nothing. To spite his father he let the dirt accumulate as a witness to all he was responsible for. Food lay about the table, a mess of bread-crusts, open jam tins, knives smeared with fat. Flies gathered and big cockroaches swarmed and scuttled. The beds were unmade, their sheets growing filthier from one week to the next. Milk soured in the jug. Dirty socks and shirts piled up. The whole place stank of fish and sour milk and sweat, and when the windows grew thick with coal dust and salt they stayed that way. He wouldn’t lift a finger. He too stank, he knew that, worse than ever, and was itchy.
He loathed filth of every kind, but he let it accumulate, and lived with it out of spite, to torment himself and as a witness against his father.