by David Malouf
The one thing he kept clean was the edge of the axe. He would stand stripped before the bit of broken mirror in the outhouse wall and make a muscle with his arm, the right one. A hundred times, in fantasy, he went through with it. Without these acts of assertion he might never have been able to tolerate it, the muck they lived in, and the look on his father’s face when he sat in his singlet on the bed with one dirty foot across his knee, sore-headed and sorry for himself.
‘Givvus a hand, son. Git yer dad ’is boots, eh? There’s a good lad.’
‘Fetchem yerself,’ the boy would tell him, pulling on his shirt for school and jerking in the belt of his hand-me-down trousers.
‘Yer a callous bugger,’ the father whined, while Vic stood at the window chewing a bit of crust and taking a good swig of tea, and the whine was enough to close the boy’s ears if he had been inclined to respond. ‘You don’t give a bloke a chance, do you?’
The roof of the house had no lining. You could look up at night and see, under the corrugated iron peak of it, the bare rafters with mice skipping along them. It was, Vic had thought when he was younger, like living inside a huge tree, all branches. An owl lived in this tree, and sometimes, in his childhood sleep, it flew right into his head, and quietly, very quietly for all its heaviness, flopped about there among the rafters woo-hoo-ing and blinking its yellow eyes. He would feel its warm droppings come down. He would wake sometimes with his arms flailing to keep the big bird off.
He had not had that dream for ages. Now the big bird reappeared. It flew about, its wings beat, warm droppings fell. But when he woke in his dream and looked, the owl had a mouse in its beak. The droppings were blood. He woke with warm blood in his mouth and was too choked to cry out.
*
A night came when his father brought a woman home, a big girl of seventeen called Josie.
Vic had seen her round often enough, with three or four littlies, her brothers and sisters in tow, and had heard stories about her from the older boys. She roots.
At breakfast, which she had ready by the time he got up, she looked at Vic without hostility but without attempting to win him over either, as if she already owned the place and he came with it. She had, it seems, laid her hand on everything she needed, the right teapot, the only one with a decent spout, and had solved their curious way with labels – tea in the cannister marked sago, sugar in the one marked rice. She had chopped her own wood, too, and laid a proper table. She was the sort who got on with things and knew how to make do.
Vic resented the ease with which she had discovered the oddnesses of their male housekeeping. He was embarrassed – as usual he had woken up with a horn – at having to dress in front of her, though she paid no heed. When he came in at lunchtime she was still there and was cleaning the house. He was furious, but realised, when he saw the windowpanes clear again and the floorboards scrubbed, how important it was to him, this orderliness and the smell of suds.
His father did not change and Josie did not demand it. She took things as they came. Vic could hear them at night, and the fury of it tormented him. He was nearly twelve.
She was soft with him, but expected nothing in return. She was a person, it seemed, who had no expectations of any sort, and this touched him but he held back. He was wary of her. He resented the way she took over things his mother had treasured and changed their use.
She kept the house clean, did their washing and sang a bit as she shifted the clothes-props and hung it out. In the afternoons when he came in she would be reading a magazine, Photoplay or Pix, with her bare feet up on a chair, and was glad to have someone to talk to at last. Putting the magazine aside she would ask him about school, and despite himself he was drawn into talking things over with her.
‘No,’ she admitted, ‘I never was much good at parsing. Algebra I am – that was my long suit.’
Occasionally she read things out to him: ‘Myrna Loy and William Powell,’ she read, ‘are close friends, both on and off the set. Since appearing together in The Thin Man . . .’
Sometimes they played Ludo, which was the only game she seemed to know.
When boys at school, or outside the pictures, taunted him, he found himself standing up for her. This was just what they wanted. ‘Gettin’ a root now, are ya Curran?’ the older boys jeered. He reddened and went for them.
He continued to exercise at the woodpile. She thought he was doing it for her, a boyish gallantry, and his fantasies became more complicated: she kept getting in the way of what had been a simple act of violence. What it was now he could not quite determine. The fantasy was its own satisfaction. He did not want to give it up.
In the end it was taken out of his hands. One night his father, who had lately become combative, got into a brawl. A man came to the door to call Josie, and she and Vic went running. For once, it seems, he had stood up for himself, refused some piece of self-abasement no worse than others he had complied with (but who can tell how he saw it?), struck out with an empty glass, and the other fellow, one of his persistent tormentors, infuriated that he should be challenged, and by a fellow for whom everyone had contempt, struck the top off a bottle and took his guard.
No one could say what happened then. The man’s account was that Dan Curran had thrown himself at the jagged edge and cut his throat. When Josie burst in, with Vic behind, though rough hands tried to hold him back, he was dying. There was a six-inch gash in his throat and blood all over.
Vic was astonished. The blood in his own throat thundered. He looked at his hands.
The men were standing back in a ring, their boots making a cordon round the head with the long open wound across its throat, the cheeks and brows grey as mutton-fat, and the sawdust floor like a butcher’s shop all pooled with blood.
People were kind to him. They took him aside and gave him a nip of something that burned and brought tears to his eyes, but it was this unexpected kindness, not grief, that made him weep.
Josie was inconsolable. They sat at the table together under the branching rafters and he looked up for the owl. He had shown no grief.
‘You’re a real shit, Vic – you know that?’ she told him fiercely.
She was white-faced and looked childlike in her big-girl clothes. They had the house to themselves.
‘Don’t you worry, mister high-and-mighty virtuous – you’ll find out, one day.’ She saw the look on his face and laughed. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, though he had not spoken. ‘Well, there’s a lot you don’t know.’ She leaned close and for a moment he thought from the scornful look of her that she might hit him. If she did, he would not defend himself.
He was shaking. Her face was very close now. Two inches closer and he could have kissed her.
They sat like that for a full minute, then she burst into tears and he put his arms round her till she cried herself out.
Later, when she had crawled into bed, he went out to the woodpile and sat. The axe was where he had put it, with a good swing, when he had chopped the wood for her at teatime. In the block.
His father’s blood. It had stunned him, that, the thickness of it, the liveliness. He had had a vision of his own blood rushing with a thump to his heart, swirling through him, pushing out into the roots of his hair, swelling the veins in his wrists.
He felt obscurely, and not for the first time, some limit to his imagination, his grasp on the complexity of things, that sent a wave of depression over him. You could be so wrong! His mother had warned him of that. He felt himself butting against something, some wall that would not yield. He might never discover now what was on the other side of it, though he knew there was a wall and that his failure to penetrate it was important. Without thinking, he smelled his hand.
Sweat. His sweat, with the grime in it of things he had touched. He rubbed hard at his shorts. Guilt moved in him but he did not know what it was for since he had done nothing.
Maybe (and a shadow cast itself across his heart) it was for something that was still to come.
And
the anger he had hoped to relieve himself of? To throw off forever with one swing of the axe? It would have no relief now, ever. He would be left with it.
He rubbed his hands again on the rough of his shorts. So his father had got the better of him after all.
He sat in the dark of the woodpile with the wall of the house behind him and the moonlit slope of the dunes in front and saw the great wall of it shift and begin to move. It rolled towards him. He did not move. It covered the pile of rubbish in the corner where he had so often emptied the basin, covered the smell of it and the old rags and papers there, and the burned ash of the straw jackets off beer-bottles, and the rusty tins and fishbones, then the woodpile till only the axe-handle poked out above it; then it covered that too and rolled on to push against the windows of the shack and break in and cover the chairs and table and the stiff grey sheets on the beds, and climbed into the teacups high on their hooks, till the whole room was filled to the ceiling and the rafters and roof were covered and there was no sign any more of them or of the life they had lived except in his head.
2
HIS LIFE CHANGED abruptly, and in ways so like his own secret wishing that he wondered later if he hadn’t, by some power he only half guessed at, brought it about, and that that was the guilt.
His father, though he had nothing to leave, had made a will. Vic was the sole beneficiary. But more important, he had named an executor, a Captain Warrender of Strathfield, Sydney. For three years during the war Dan Curran had been Captain Warrender’s batman, and the officer had agreed, in the event of Curran’s death, to act as guardian to any children he might leave. He appeared now, nearly twenty years later, to make good his word.
He was a large shy man in a three-piece suit. He patted Vic on the shoulder, then shook his hand, and Vic saw immediately that of the two of them it was Mr Warrender who was the more ill at ease.
He had come up from Sydney by train. The dirty little town, scattered at the edge of the sea, all unpainted timber and rusty iron, the sandy yards full of rubbish, the coal dust which that day was blowing all about in a stiff south-easterly making the sea air sharp with smuts – all this was unfamiliar to him. So was the barefoot boy with his raw haircut. At home he had only girls.
But for all his shyness he had eyes that looked right at you, not unkindly but with perfect frankness about what they were up to that showed you frankly, as well, what they saw.
Vic, who had put on a clean shirt and wet-combed his hair, stared straight back. He knew his best qualities and was confident they would show. He trusted this man to see them.
Mr Warrender looked for a long time, then patted Vic’s shoulder again and nodded.
Vic did not relax, not quite yet, but he saw that Mr Warrender did, and that was a good sign.
What he had grasped by instinct was that Mr Warrender was innocent and had better remain so, whatever glimpses he might have got into the truth of things from the squalor of their shack. He could have no idea how much Vic really knew, and Vic saw that he would need to be careful about this, hide it, bury it deep inside him and be a kid again. He would learn about life (or pretend to) all over again, on Mr Warrender’s terms. He could see, just from looking at him, that this was what he would expect.
When Mr Warrender explained that he was taking him to Sydney, Vic said nothing. He let him go on.
Mrs Warrender and the girls (there were two of them) had been told about him and were looking forward to his arrival, to having another man in the house. Vic still said nothing, but smiled to himself as Mr Warrender, in order to set him at his ease – which wasn’t necessary really, he was at ease, it was Mr Warrender who was nervous – made this acknowledgement of their shared masculinity.
He would have a room of his own of course and would go to high school. Only first, perhaps, they ought to go into town and get him some shoes.
Out of a fear of upsetting him, or out of embarrassment at the whole business of ‘grief’, Mr Warrender said nothing at all about his father, and Vic wondered at this. He wondered, too, what Mr Warrender had been looking for when at first he stood there studying him. Not what he had found – he was confident of that – but what, knowing only his father, he had expected.
Sitting beside him on the train, impressed by the smell of damp wool he gave off, which was oddly comforting, and watching the landscape fly through his own ghostly face in the glass, in a new pair of shorts, a sweater and boots that they had bought a size too large, Vic felt his body draw into itself, compact and sturdy, as solid on the velvet seat as the man’s, and got hold at last of the consequences of the thing. ‘I’ll never see this place again,’ he told himself as stretches of flat beach flew behind. It was a promise. There was only one thing he regretted, his mother’s grave.
He stayed quiet and would continue to be until he knew where he stood. He saw that Mr Warrender, who was observant, was impressed by this, and by the pride he showed in not feeling he had to be saying ‘thank you’ all the time, though he was very polite. He squared his shoulders, and when Mr Warrender spoke to him looked up very frank and steady, so that what Mr Warrender saw was a reflection of his own lack of guile. He was grateful for this chance to show himself in the best possible light, and to be looked at as if frankness and steadiness could be taken for granted in him. He felt a wave of affection for this shy man.
‘You’d better call me Pa, Vic,’ Mr Warrender said, ‘if that’s all right. It’s what the girls call me.’
Vic relaxed and smiled. By now he had done some observing of his own.
When Mr Warrender smoked he held the cigarette between thumb and finger like a pencil, and sucked, like a kid taking his first puff, which was odd in so bulky a figure. But he did it voluptuously. Vic thought that very strange, and after a time he decided that Mr Warrender, for all his air of solid assurance, was strange. That lack of ease he had felt in him hadn’t had to do only with the uncomfortable nature of the occasion. It was part of the man. He wasn’t intimidating at all, Vic decided, not at all. I needn’t have worried.
It occurred to him then that his father must have found Mr Warrender easy to fool, and this brought him up sharp. All the more reason, he decided, why I should be open and honest with him.
They were coming in to Sydney now, and as street after street flashed by, little backyards with chook-houses and rows of vegetables, and off in the distance smoke pouring up out of giant chimney stacks, he felt some wider vision open in him as well, an apprehension of just how large the world was that he was being carried towards, and the opportunity it offered of scope and space.
Strathfield, when they came to it, was an older suburb not too far from the centre, with avenues of big detached houses that had once been fashionable and were now in a state of elegant disrepair. Along the railway line there were some meaner streets, workmen’s houses in terraces that were quite scabbed and shabby, the alleys behind them piled with filth. Still, it was Sydney at last, the big smoke, and Vic had never seen anything like it.
Mrs Warrender, Ma, accepted him with open arms.
The girls, Lucille and Ellie, were sceptical at first, he saw that; but he knew just how to deal with them.
There was also an old lady, an aunt of Mrs Warrender’s, who wasn’t in her right mind and thought he was someone else.
*
Mrs Warrender showed him his room and they stood for a moment, the two of them, not knowing what to say to one another. Mrs Warrender was plainly embarrassed.
‘Well, Vic,’ she said at last, ‘I’ll leave you to get used to things.’ She thought he might want to be alone with his grief. ‘The bathroom, when you want it,’ (maybe it’s only that, she thought, she wasn’t used to boys) ‘is first down the hall.’
She stood at the door, looking at him as he stood with his boots on the carpet in the middle of the room, and his look said, Don’t go, I don’t need to be alone. But she fiddled with her hands a little, then went.
He sat on the edge of the bed, which was rather high, and
looked at his boots. They were heavy. His shoulders slumped and he heard himself sigh. A wave passed over him. Not grief, but desolation, a feeling of utter loneliness that surprised him after the confidence he had felt downstairs. Maybe it was the largeness and whiteness of the room, which he was afraid he would betray himself by dirtying with the grime off his hands; its emptiness, too, since he hardly thought of himself as occupying it – it was so big.
He looked at the case he had brought. It was a little cardboard one with a leather strap. His mother, in the days when she had taken in sewing, had kept buttons and snips of ribbon in it, and off-cuts she could use for patches. What it contained now were the new shirts Mr Warrender had fitted him out with, underpants, even socks. He had brought nothing out of his old life but what was all the heavier for being invisible, and he would have left that too if he could, or shoved it down the windy lav in the train; only there was no way you could get your hands on it. It came along in the roots of his hair, in the mark his fingers left on everything he touched.
Another boy, with his sour miseries and anger deep hidden, had come along with him, and would push his feet each morning into the new shoes, leave dirt marks round the collar of his shirts, soil the bed, these clean sheets, with the sweat of his dreams.
He felt the despair of that boy flow into his heart and sicken him. Getting up quickly, he went to the long mirror of the lowboy, and in an attempt to drive him off stood very straight and square, as he believed Mr Warrender had seen him, in his new clothes.
He turned sideways, and as far as he could, rolling his eyes, looked at himself from that angle too. Then he put his face close to the glass, breathed, and his features vanished in fog.
After a moment, when they came back again, he went to the door along the hall and found the bathroom. It had green tiles. Unbuttoning his shorts, he lifted the seat of the lavatory, pissed, and when he was finished stood for a time and played with his dick till it was stiff. Then he pulled the chain and watched the bowl flush.