by David Malouf
The old woman squatting beside them glanced up under heavy pads of flesh, happy to have attracted his attention. She was preparing to call out to him. But the look he was wearing, or the threatening bulk of him, must have warned her of something. Her hand moved out to cover the single reel at the apex of the pyramid she had made. To save it. She sat staring up at him.
He was in a rage, a kind of madness, and close to tears.
In the left-hand pocket of his new shorts was the length of thread he had kept. His fingers went to it. He hadn’t thrown it away – you never know. Its value to him, anyway, was absolute. And here now, in this dirty bit of a place, this old crone of a Chinese woman had six reels of it on her mean little tray, six whole reels – and beyond that, on shelves somewhere in a storehouse, there would be cartons-full. They were common as dirt. He had a vision suddenly of how small it was, all that had happened to him.
The old woman’s hand, which was yellow and wrinkled like a duck’s foot, kept hold of the reel, expecting this crazy boy to use his boot now and kick the whole tray aside. They were like that, these blond ones. But instead he let out a cry of rage, flung something out of his pocket and ran off.
She watched him go, her hand still protecting her wares. Then she leaned forward over the edge of her tray a little to see what it was. A bit of dirty thread. Nothing.
Minutes later he was back. With his eye crazily upon her, he stooped, snatched up the bit of cotton as if she might be intending to rob him of it, and was gone.
IV
1
ON HOT NIGHTS late in Darlinghurst Road Digger found what he had always been in search of, a crowded place with the atmosphere of a fairground, but one that did not have to be knocked down and set up again night after night. It was simply there, another part of town.
It was a rowdy place, the Cross. It could be violent, sordid too at times, but it had put a spell on Digger just as Mac had told him it would.
Girls, some of them toothless and close to sixty, worked out of mean little rooms up staircases smelling of bacon-fat or sharp with disinfectant. The pubs were blood-buckets.
You would see a couple of fellows come hurtling through the door and in seconds a full-scale brawl would be going on, right there on the pavement, with passers-by ducking aside to get away from it or standing off on the sidelines to watch.
Often it was seamen; but mostly it was young blokes, louts, who had come in on motorbikes to roar about and see what was doing, keen to get a reputation and discover how tough they were.
They wore second-hand air-force jackets, duck-tailed Cornel Wilde haircuts and wanted blood.
They would roam about putting their shoulders into the crowd, waiting to be challenged, with a Friday night ferocity in them that had the pent-up frustration of a week’s work behind it, and would only be content at last when the man they were bludgeoning was in the gutter and they heard his ribs crack – ‘Ah, that’s it, that’s the sound’ – or when they had gone down themselves and were sitting with their head in their hands, hearing a whole lot of new sounds in there that might be permanent and with their palms wet with blood.
Occasionally it was a woman you saw, still clutching her handbag but with her mouth bloody, one arm like a broken wing, and the man who had done it shouting right into her face, spitting out obscenities but weeping too sometimes, justifying himself. This was peacetime again.
And in between these savage episodes the delivery boys would be out and old people, or women dragging a suitcase in one hand and a reluctant child in the other, would be going about their daily affairs. Well-dressed ladies walked pug dogs. Kids sucking sherbet sticks dawdled back and forth to school. Old fellows slept it off on benches or stood with their sleeve up to the elbow in bins.
There were coffee shops, continental, with mock-cream cakes in the window, and other, darker ones downstairs where it was rumoured that satanic cults were being practised. The paintings on the walls, which were pretty bold, gave you a hint of what they might be: a woman with her legs round a shaggy male figure with horns above his ears, another in which a girl was coupling with a gigantic cat.
Then there were the milk-bars, all fan-shaped mirrors and chrome, spaghetti places where men in business suits lined up for lunch, and barber shops, some with a dozen chairs; always with two or three fellows lathered up for shaving while the barber, razor in hand, harangued them while others, further down the room, would be snipping and chatting or showing a customer the back of his head in a glass, and in the doorway one of the idle assistants hung on a broom.
Barber shops, billiard saloons, dark corners in pubs – this was where the SP bookies followed their trade, using runners and a ‘nit’ to watch for the cops. But everyone up here had something to sell: petrol, stuff without coupons that had fallen off the back of a truck, nylons, second-hand cars, pre-war of course, and girls.
Towards five, with paperboys shouting the headlines and running out barefoot to cars, working men, still in their singlets, would be strolling home with the Mirror under their arm, taking it easy and eating a Have-a-Heart or a Grannie Smith apple; going back to a room in a boarding-house, or up three flights to where a girl was cooking sausages in a two-roomed maisonette, the only place they could get in the housing shortage.
This was the rush hour, the hour before closing. Sailors would be up in mobs from the ships you could see moored at Woolloomooloo, and along with them came fellows, newly demobbed, wearing suits you could pick a mile off (Digger had one) that they had been given to start them off in Civvy Street, but still with their old army haircut, and with the half-expectant, half-lost look of men who were waiting for life to declare a direction to them, now that they were free to go wherever they pleased.
Digger kept away from these fellows. They depressed him. He knew their story. It was his own. They were men who for one reason or another had never gone home – or had done so and come straight back again, one or two of them on the first day. They hung about feeling sorry for themselves and keeping close to one another, looking on at a show they were not part of, not yet, and wondering if they ever would be.
Digger felt that too, on occasions. He hadn’t been home either, but not because he was scared of what he might find there. He was putting it off, that’s all; enjoying himself, getting back into the stride of things. There was such a sense abroad of streets being swept for a new day, of ties off, sleeves rolled up, girls walking with a new bounce to their heels and their handbags swinging, full of what the world might offer them now and what they could do with it. ‘Me too,’ Digger thought. ‘The war is over and we won!’ – Except that it wasn’t quite like that.
‘We didn’t win our war because it wasn’t a war we went to. It was something else. It’s victories that are all the go now. This is a victory parade. No one wants to know about us.’
There were men who were bitter about that, and not just on their own behalf. Digger shared the feeling but would not give in to it.
He wrote to his mother nearly every week and she sent back sharp replies. His father was in Japan now, a hero of the army of occupation. Jenny had run away, she didn’t know where. Yes, he assured her, he would come back, she knew that. But from week to week he put it off, still dizzied by all that was going on here, all he saw and was trusted with. Once he went back he would be caught. For a little time longer he wanted to be off the hook.
People trusted him. He didn’t know why.
A man he hardly knew, though they might have spoken a couple of times, would thrust an envelope into his hand. ‘Here, mate, keep this for me, willya? Don’t worry, I’ll find you. Next week or the week after. Somewhere. Just keep it under ya pillow, eh?’
Digger would sock the thing away behind the mirror of the little room he had at the Pomeroy and forget about it. A week later the man would come up to him in a pub, fool about for a bit, then say casually: ‘How’s the bank vault? – That envelope I give you, Is’pose you still got it.’ With the envelope safe in an inside jacket poc
ket he would slip Digger a twenty. ‘Thanks, mate. I’ll do the same f’ you some time.’
What had he been part of? He didn’t ask. That’s why he was trusted.
Someone who had heard that he knew how to look after himself and was handy with his fists put him on to one of the clubs. He got a job as a bouncer at thirty quid a week, working from seven till five in the morning at a place where sly grog was served, and in a room at the back, poker and blackjack were played. He helped clean up afterwards, went out and got himself a cup of tea at an all-nighter, then, in the early-morning coolness, walked home.
He loved the Cross at that hour. Greeks would be setting up fruit stalls, apples and oranges in glossy pyramids. Men in shorts would be unloading fresh flowers, setting them out in buckets on the pavement and sprinkling them from a can against the coming heat. He would buy a paper and scan the morning news.
‘Haven’ you got any better place to go than this, feller? You don’t want to hang around here.’
The man who offered him this advice was a cop, a thick-set fellow with close-cropped straight black hair and freckles. Mid-thirties, a bit flash, with a good overcoat, a soft grey hat, and eyes Digger had taken a liking to. They were very steady and blue. He could offer the advice because he did it lightly. It was a joke between them. His name was Frank McGowan.
Digger had seen him about often enough and they’d got talking. He didn’t mind having a drink with him, though he knew he was breaking a code.
‘I seen you drinkin’ with that dingo McGowan,’ one of his acquaintances observed. ‘Is’pose you know what ’e is.’ There was a little beat of silence. ‘Yair, well, ’e’s a cunt. An’ ’e’s crooked as shit, you ast anyone! SP – they’re all in on it, you ast anyone!’
Digger listened but did not reply. It was all such tales up here. The Cross was a village, full of intricate alliances and drawn lines. A thing had barely happened, they’d hardly picked the body up off the pavement, before it was in the mouth of every barber’s boy and saloon-bar lounger. McGowan was in the Vice Squad. That was enough. It embarrassed Digger sometimes that McGowan should take an interest in him, but he did not believe it was a ploy. He was no use to McGowan.
‘So,’ McGowan would say each time they ran into one another, ‘you’re still here. Go an’ get lost, why don’t you?’
But once, in a darker mood, when they were sitting quietly together, he said: ‘I don’ understand you, Digger, a feller like you. What are you doin’, hangin’ about with this sorta rubbish?’
Digger looked up, a shadow of doubt in his eyes. His experience in the camps had given him an ear for the various forms of self-hatred that men go in for, and he thought now that some of the venom in McGowan’s voice was directed at himself.
McGowan saw the look. ‘Yair, well,’ he said, and made a brusque movement with his thumb across the tip of his nose. There was a grossness in it that was deliberate. He had given himself away and was drawing back again. Digger too withdrew.
It was the word he had used, rubbish, that Digger wanted to go back to. What came back to him at times, and too clearly, was that break in the forest and the fires he had tended there. It had given him such an awareness of just what it is that life throws up, and when it has no more use for it, throws off again. Not just ashes and bones, but the immense pile of debris that any one life might make if you were to gather up and look at the whole of it: all that it had worn out, used up, mislaid, pawned, forgotten, and carried out each morning to be tipped into a bin. Think of it. Then think of it multiplied by millions.
What he would have wanted, given the power, was to take it all back again, down to the last razor blade and button off a baby’s bootee, and see it restored. Impossible, of course.
He wanted nothing to be forgotten and cast into the flames. Not a soul. Not a pin.
He said none of this to McGowan, but wished later he had done and taken the risk.
‘I’m like one of those old blokes you see poking about the bins,’ he would have had to say, making a joke of it. But he was serious.
‘Not a soul,’ he would have said. ‘Not a pin.’
2
ONE SATURDAY AROUND three o’clock he did something he had been meaning to do for weeks. He got himself ready and took a tram out to Bondi Junction to find Mac’s sister-in-law, Iris. He carried with him the letters Mac had given him. It was all he had to pass on to her.
He recognised the house easily enough from the description Mac had given him, but the woman who opened the door was not at all what he expected.
He had seen her often enough. He had stood behind the door in the kitchen and seen her come in, turn on the tap, pour herself a glass of water, and then, with wonderful slowness, drink it, all the time looking out through the window in a dreamy way at the stars.
That woman had worn her hair in a style he remembered from before the war. She was very sober and tall. This one, with the light of the hallway behind her, was shorter, heavier too, and she stepped out of a moment of hilarity that had to do with something that was still going on in the depths of the house. There was a radio playing. He heard thumps from back there and saw the flash of a blue shirt – one of the boys that would be – between the hallway and the back stairs.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said in the midst of her laughter. ‘Come on in.’
He stepped into the narrow hallway. He was cleaned up, his hair combed, his feet washed – that was normal now. But he wore a tie as well, feeling the constriction of it, and had the letters, in a clean envelope, in his right-hand breast pocket.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘let me take your hat.’
‘Oh – good,’ he said. He had been just standing there, staring about.
He had thought he would know the place, and he did in some ways; Mac’s sleep-out would be the bottom of the hall to the right. But the whole house was lighter than he had imagined, more airy. More cheerful, too. Mac had described only the things his own plain taste would have put here; the rest he had left out. A lot of what Digger saw now was fanciful: a tall Chinese vase with umbrellas on it, and a little Alpine house with a man and woman in peasant costume, who came out, the one or the other, according to whether it was fine or would rain.
She settled him in the front room, then went out to turn the wireless down, put a kettle on, and at the same time to shout something through a window into the yard. Digger had a chance to look about.
Above the upright piano, which was covered with a green velvet cloth, was a certificate showing that Elizabeth Iris Ruddick had her letters from the Trinity College of Music in 1921 – the year, as it happened, of his birth. There was a metronome, a bust of Beethoven, a bronze rose bowl with a wirework lid. Another object that took his eye was an ornamental tray in mother-of-pearl. On it was a young fellow in olden-days dress, a satin coat and breeches, who sat with two shepherdesses in a moonlit ruin. In a corner, on a little lacquered stand, was a basket of a kind he had seen before only in the foyers of picture theatres, where it would have been filled with gladiolus spears. This one had half a dozen dolls in it, their spangled skirts fixed to bentwood crooks.
Nothing in her letters suggested any of this. She had subdued her liveliness there, limiting herself maybe to the way Mac saw her. Anyway, it had given him the wrong idea, and when she came back now, bringing in tea and a slice of Napoleon, he observed her with different eyes. She apologised for the Napoleon. It came from a shop.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Sargents.’
She was surprised at that, and at his knowing already that she worked there, and he restrained himself from telling her greedily how much more he knew: the sweet-peas, the tomato jam she made that he and Mac had so often talked about and smacked their lips over, the forty-nine piece dinner set Mac had given her and Don as a wedding present, and how upset she had been when she broke the lid of a soup tureen the first time she washed it up. These facts seemed trivial now. He had made too much of them.
Several times, as they drank their te
a, he caught her eye on him, a frankly puzzled look, and it was a while before he saw the reason for it. She had no idea really who he was. Mac, he saw, had never mentioned him, or if he had she had forgotten it.
She asked questions of him: where he came from – he gave her a quick sketch of Keen’s Crossing – what he was doing in Sydney, where he lived. She came from Queensland herself. Had he been up there? He told her about the boxing. He had never found it so easy to talk about himself.
Once the preliminaries were over they barely mentioned Mac. She simply took it for granted that what he had come for, now that he was here, had to do with her.
The idea alarmed him at first. It took him a little time to get used to it. But once he did he had to admit that it was true, and had been right from the start. How quickly she had seen it! That was a woman for you. She was over forty, he guessed, working backwards from the date on the certificate, but hadn’t lost the assurance of her own attractiveness.
She called the boys up to get a piece of Napoleon. They came in barefoot and in their house clothes, shorts and ragged shirts, and were awkward at first but found their tongues at last under her meaningful looks. He knew them already, of course. Ewen, the eldest was. He would be sixteen. The younger boy, Jack, was the high-jumper. They were making something down in the yard and were keen to get back to it. They shifted from foot to foot, and after a decent interval she relented and let them go.
So they came at last to the letters.
He had expected them to provide the climax of his visit and had prepared a speech. But so much had already happened that they seemed like an afterthought now, and when he said what he had to say it was in such a confused, emotional way that it sounded false.
‘Goodness,’ she said, when he told her what the envelope contained. She looked at it a moment, turned it over in her hands, then lay it, unopened, on the piano stool; and there it sat, very white and clean, for the rest of his visit.