by David Malouf
One afternoon he was holed up in a corner, just enjoying the soft light and the scent of coolness, when he glanced up for no particular reason and Vic was there. He was on a stool at the other end of the bar and had been watching him; goodness knows for how long.
Digger felt a jolt of panic. It was uncanny the capacity this cove had for unsettling him. The once or twice they had run into one another there had been a kind of constraint that had grown at moments to open hostility.
Vic eased himself off the seat, and when he came up it was with a look of surprise and feigned indifference that made Digger furious. Why could he never be open with you? This was no accidental meeting. He had been hearing all week about this bloke who was asking around for him.
‘So, what’ve you been up to?’ Digger asked when they were settled over a beer.
Vic looked at him, and there was a little play of light in his eyes. He was preparing some cock-and-bull story, some lie maybe, that he wouldn’t even expect you to believe. He would just throw it out in contempt, and defy you to take offence at the effrontery of it. ‘Blast ’im,’ Digger thought. But when he spoke it sounded like the truth.
‘Been out west,’ he said. ‘Moree.’
‘Oh? You don’t come from out there, do ya?’
Digger was holding himself in, keeping calm and at a distance. It struck him how little he knew of the bread-and-butter things of Vic’s existence. What he did know he wanted to keep away from. It was too intimate for here. He felt a weakness in his gut. He was inwardly trembling. At the mere sight of Vic a shadow of fever had flickered over him and his body was responding to it now with shivers.
‘Nah,’ Vic said. ‘Thought I’d go out an’ take a look at what we were supposed to be fighting for.’
Digger looked up enquiringly.
‘We might as well ’ave let the bastards have it,’ he said, ‘if you want my opinion.’ He laughed, tipped his head back, opened his throat and poured down the rest of his beer.
‘He’s been on the booze,’ Digger thought. ‘Or he’s off-colour somehow. Crook.’ He felt the pull on him to say something now, as if, for all Vic’s offhandedness, what was really being appealed to was an arrangement between them that was still in operation, because there was no way it could not be. Digger was shaken. He had thought, back here, that he might be finished with all that, that this place was to be all beginnings. But once bitten there was no shying away. The medicos had told them that.
‘What about you?’ Vic was asking. ‘How they treatin’ ya?’
‘Oh, good,’ Digger said, and swallowed. ‘Pretty good.’
He could barely speak. Suddenly he had seen what it was in Vic that touched him, and it was something he did not want to touch.
They had been prisoners of the Japs up there; anyway, he had been; so were Ern and Doug and the rest. It was one of those things that just happened to you, if you were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place. But that wasn’t how Vic saw it. The Japs for him were only part of it, so it hadn’t ended for him. It was still going on. ‘What’s more,’ Digger thought, ‘he wants to drag me into it.’ He had even kept the look of a prisoner. And deliberately too, or so Digger thought.
It was a sickness he did not want to get too close to. Maybe you could pick it up just by seeing it in someone, someone you were too close to; or just by realising it could exist.
‘Thought I’d try the big smoke again,’ Vic was telling him. ‘Give it another shot.’
He looked up. There was only one thing Digger could say. ‘Got a place?’ he asked, and looked quickly away.
‘Yair,’ Vic said after a moment, and Digger could feel the tension break between them. ‘Yair, I’m all right that way. Thanks, mate.’
They sat for a time in silence, Digger all emotion, Vic calmer now. They talked. Digger’s mind began to wander. He kept falling through holes in the conversation that were no bigger than single words sometimes, but the distance he fell was hundreds of miles. He began to sweat. All that brutalisation up there had left a weakness in him, a part of his mind that was open on one side to absolute darkness, and the stench that came from that direction was so powerful at times that he gagged on it, not daring to turn his head, even in the clearest sunshine, for fear of having to face again the tattered columns of them, big-boned, filthy, with their muddy eyes and outsized hands and feet.
They went out into the street together, stopped at a pie stall and sat down side by side in the gutter to down a pie.
Digger barely tasted his. Vic offered to finish it. When they parted on the footpath outside the club he was still shaking, and he knew for certain now. It was the malaria. A return bout.
It hit him harder than he expected. He was carried back, not just months, but three or four thousand miles, to a place of jungle heat and wetness that had nothing to do with geography – he knew about geography – but was a condition his body had surrendered to once and could never now be free of. With the physical symptoms came all the troop of events and visions and ghosts he had thought he might be rid of back here. He had thought she might rid him of them, but no power on earth could do that.
He was one again among others and could barely make himself out among them, they were all so tattered and thin. They closed in on him, stifling his breath, and when he tried shifting in the ranks to get a glimpse of her, of her sunlit figure through the press, they were too many; thin as they were, mere bones some of them, as if they had just hauled themselves upright out of the mud, they stood between him and even the smallest chink of sunlight, holding their hands up like begging bowls with nothing in them, and each one in a whisper saying the syllables of their own name over and over, as if only in that way could it be kept in mind, in their own mind or anyone’s. Anyone’s.
Digger tried, against the great hissing sound they made, to speak his own name, but his mouth was dry and he had no breath. He tried to think it, but his head now was filled with their names, and he had given his word, officially, and was afraid in his weakened state that he might forget one of them, let it slip. How could he ever face the man, knowing he had let go of him so that he was no longer present and accounted for?
But his own name was safe enough. It was buried somewhere. He would dig it up again later.
He had to survive. If he didn’t, how could they, since so many of them were now just names anyway, with no existence save as syllables in someone else’s head? In his head.
His mind went back to that swarm of tiddlers in the river. He felt the touch of the stream, then the tiddlers striking and striking in fury as they tore at his flesh; but with a touch, though it was all selfishness and savagery on one side, that on the other was the gentlest healing. It could also be like that.
His eyes clapped open. The voices now were roaring up from the street. There must be a huge mob down there, all shouting their names and holding their faces up like empty bowls.
A face tilted towards him. Hands brought a coolness to his brow. She was here. No, it was a man’s hands. Vic’s. The whispering rose in a great shuddering wave and he was swept under again, and he battled with it, half-drowning in scald.
He blinked, opened his eyes again, this time on silence, then lapsed a moment, rolling back months into wet heat; then blinked himself back again into the room.
‘So. You’ve decided to come back to the living.’
It was Frank McGowan. He was looking up over a newspaper, with glasses halfway down his nose. He lay the paper aside and took them off.
‘How you feeling?’
‘I’m all right,’ Digger said weakly. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Playing nurse. Any complaints?’
‘Was that you?’ Digger asked.
‘Yair. You want to try an’ eat something?’
He got up off the cane-bottomed chair and busied himself for a bit at the gas ring with a little saucepan and a tin of soup. He was in shirt-sleeves and braces.
He brought a bowl and spoon and sat on the edge of the bed, preparing to feed Di
gger with the spoon, but Digger put his hand up. He put the spoon back in the bowl.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Not too long. You’ve been sick for three days.’
He opened his mouth and let McGowan feed him warm pea soup.
‘I suppose I’ve been saying things,’ he said after a moment.
‘Not much. Here, you should try and get a bit more of this down you.’
‘How did you know?’ Digger asked. ‘That I was crook. The room and that.’
‘Oh, I’m a cop, remember?’ He met Digger’s eyes with his own and there was a flash of humour in them.
‘I should be at work – it must be nearly six.’
McGowan took the bowl away. ‘It is,’ he said. ‘Six in the morning. Anyway,’ he added, ‘you’re out of a job.’ He was fussing about at the gas ring. He turned and faced Digger.
‘The club was raided,’ he explained. ‘Wednesday night. Stroke a’ luck, really – f’you. Being crook when it occurred.’ He seemed pleased with himself.
Digger frowned. He didn’t need anyone to take charge of his life.
‘Nah, that was just good luck,’ McGowan said, as if he had seen what Digger was thinking. ‘Or maybe you’d prefer to have been taken in.’
‘I’d be safe enough,’ Digger said sharply. ‘I’ve got friends in the force.’
McGowan looked at him and laughed. But Digger was failing. In just seconds he was delirious again. But he saw what McGowan was now. He was an agent for his mother. How on earth had she recruited him?
4
WHEN DIGGER WAS in the third grade at primary school, and the teacher allowed them for the first time to take home books, he had for several months been obsessed with atlases and maps of every sort. Kneeling up at the kitchen table to get closer to the lamp, he would screw his eyes up so that he could read even the smallest print, and making himself small, since whole towns in this dimension were no larger than fly-spots, would try to get hold of what it was here that he was dealing with, the immensity of the world he had been born into, but also the relation between the names of things, which were magic to him, and what they stood for, towns, countries, islands, lakes, mountains.
Countries, for instance, the shape of them.
Each one was its own shape entirely, cut out of the whole, out of earth and water, and resembling nothing in nature but itself. The shape was random, determined only by the way a bit of coastline ran or the course of a river, or by the language people spoke, or by battles that had been fought whole centuries ago; but once you were familiar with it you couldn’t imagine how it could be otherwise – Spain or Italy or Australia – any more than you could imagine a different shape for the things that nature had evolved or that men had designed to fit a use. A moth, for instance, a sleeve. And the names also fitted. ‘Moth’ was perfect for the furry thickness and powdery wings of the creature, as ‘sleeve’ was for what you slipped your arm through. But ‘Italy’? ‘Australia’? Yet once it was in your head the name perfectly evoked the shape of the country and contained it; the fit was perfect.
Patagonia, the Pamir Plateau, the Great Bear Lake. You let these names fall into your head and, by some process of magic, real places came into existence, small enough to find a place there with other names and places, as they also fitted on to a page of the atlas, but existing as well in a latitude on the globe that you could actually travel to, where they were immensities of water and rock and sky.
The world was so huge you could barely make your mind stretch to conceive of it. It would take days and nights, months even, for your body to cover in real space what you could spread your fingers across on a page; this is what Magellan and Vasco da Gama and Abel Tasman had had to prove. Yet whole stretches of it could be contained as well in just two or three syllables. You spoke them – it did not have to be out loud – and there they were: Lake Balaton, Valparaiso, Zanzibar, the Bay of Whales. And among these magic formulations, and no less real because it was familiar and he knew precisely what it represented, Keen’s Crossing.
It wasn’t in any atlas. You could hardly expect it to be. How could you get yourself small enough even to contemplate it, when a city of millions like Sydney was just a dot? But it was there all right, even if they hadn’t put it in. He was sitting there. At a table, with the atlas open in front of him under a lamp.
He would fall into a dream. Letting his mind expand till it was as diffused and free-floating as a galaxy off at the limits of space, he would rove about, searching till he had located the world, a pin-point of light, far off and spinning. He would home in on it then, till he could see the exact point on its surface, in New South Wales, where he was: Keen’s Crossing. He would find Broken Bay first, the mouth of the river; then, moving high up over it in the dark, follow the twists and turns of it till he saw the wharf, the store, the lighted window, his head like another globe bent low over the atlas, and could slip back into it.
His mind would be dazzled, like a moth that had been drawn in out of the dark and was at the centre now, dazed but excitedly fluttering. Around him, in pitch darkness, the Scotch firs soaring sixty feet towards the stars, the pepper tree, the clothes-lines touched with moonlight, the beginnings of an immensity of scrub.
How much of all this was contained by the name he could not determine. There was no visible border. Not enough, clearly, to make a showing in the atlas, but quite a lot if you thought of all the dust you had to wade through to get from the ferry to where the highway crested the ridge; or considered the millions of ants that were scurrying about over the dried-up leaves and twigs of it.
He did see a map at last on which Keen’s Crossing was marked. A fellow at the ferry showed it to him, a government surveyor, unfolding the big sheet across the bonnet of his car while they rode across. A dotted line showed the river-crossing, and there was a dot, a red one, to mark the store. Beside it, in italics, Keen’s Crossing.
So there it was: his own name, Keen, making an appearance in the great world. On a map, along with all those other magic formulations, Marcaibo, Surabaya, Arkangel.
There was a tie, a deep one, between the name as he bore it and as the place did; they were linked. And not just by his being there. He could leave it – he would too, one day, he was bound to – but the link would remain. The name contained him, from the soles of his feet to his thatch of roughly scissored hair, wherever he might go, whatever might happen to him, as it contained as well this one particular bit of the globe, the Crossing, the store, all the individual grains of dust and twigs and dead leaves that made up the acres of the place, along with the many varieties of ants and insects and spiders, and the birds that flew in and out of it; all covered. There was a mystery in this that he might spend the whole of his life pondering, beginning at the kitchen table here; except that it was just one of the mysteries, and he knew already that there were others, equally important, that he would have to explore. Still, this one was enough to keep him going for the moment, and he saw, regretfully, that he might have to forgo all those other places, Mont St Michel and Trincomalee, however attractive they might be, if he was to get hold of this one, which he was linked to because he was born here, and because his name was on it, or its name on him.
What had Keen’s Crossing been, he wondered, before his grandfather stopped here and claimed the crossing and built the store? Did it have any name at all? And, without one, how had anyone known what it was or that it was here at all?
It had been here, and pretty much as it was now, if you put back the trees that had been cut down to build the store and the ferry-landing and to make way for the road, and if you took away the clothesline, the three Scotch firs and the rosebushes and gerbera his mother had planted: the same high ridge of sandstone with its forest of flesh-coloured angophoras.
Nameless it would have been; untouched in all time by the heel maybe of even a single black. But here all right. And not even in the dark. You couldn’t say that, just because people had no knowledge of it.
The same hard sunshine would have beat down on it, the same storms and slow winter rains. The same currawongs and magpies would have been here, blue finches, earthworms, tree snakes, frogs. But it was not Keen’s Crossing. It wouldn’t have known that there were any Keens, to drive their horses across the river and cut down the first tree and make a camp. It hadn’t been waiting.
But then the two things met: his grandfather’s axe and the hard trunk of one of its trees, and the first letter of a syllable cut into it. Keen meant sharp. The axe’s edge was Keen. So the place got a name and he and it had found a connection that was unique in all the world. The shared name proved it.
Years later, in some of their worst times in Thailand, this connection would sustain Digger and help keep him sane, keep him attached to the earth; to the brief stretch of it that was continuous with his name and, through that, with his image of himself. He could be there at will. He had only to dive into himself and look about.
Time after time, in his own shape, or taking on the secret shape of some four-footed creature that could move freely past the guards, he would start running, and, with the air streaming behind him, leap bushes, rivers, over seas at last, and come down through the moonlit trees to where the store stood back from the edge of the river, with the great sandstone ridge behind it, and on the other bank a forested bluff rising sheer to the stars.
He was there now, sweating a little after his run; having come down again from where his fever had dragged him. He stood in the trees at the edge of the clearing and watched while his mother hung out the wash.
She wasn’t expecting him, except that he was always on her mind; so she was, too. When he stepped out between the trunks he would not alarm her.
In a moment he would do it. But just for a bit he stood panting, letting the big drops of sweat roll off him, and watched her lift up and peg one wing, then another, of a sheet.
V
1
VIC, WITH THE drowse of afternoon sleep still on him, stood in his undershorts, one bare foot on the other, his elbow against the dusty wall. The telephone receiver was loose in his hand. He stood with his head dropped, shaking it hopelessly from side to side. Round the old-fashioned speaking-horn fixed to the wall were scribbles in indelible pencil, numbers, names (some of them horses), an irregular heart doodled in a waiting moment, which was bleeding purple at the tip. Down the hallway a race was being called.