by David Malouf
In one corner of their room is a heap of keys of every shape and size, some as long as his forearm. Willett adds to them each week by poking about in the boxes outside rag-and-bone shops, or in the market barrows along the canal, weighing this one or that in his palm, turning it in the air and chuckling. He has never been introduced to the rooms, or chests or little boxes the keys unlock. They are part of a life, he believes, that Willett keeps secret from him. He can only think that while he is asleep at night Willett must slip off to one or other of those rooms and sit gloating over the contents of the chests or boxes that lie open before him, but what they might contain he cannot imagine: things that exist in parts of the world he has not seen, that Willett has not revealed to him.
He pinches himself to stay awake. He will follow Willett and see where he goes. But he is too tired. The moment his head touches the sacks he sleeps on he is asleep. He imagines that he has stolen one of the keys, found the room it opens, then a box, and with the lid of the box closed over him, lies with his hands folded in the dark, not daring to breathe, waiting for Willett to appear. He hears the door of the room open. Hears Willett’s boots dragging. Sees a crack of light as the lid is lifted, smells the sweet garden smell, squeezes his eyes shut in the dark, waits for the voice: ‘Ah, boy, so that’s where you’ve got to.’ Waits and waits. In one of the drawers of the chest, in the clean little box of a room at Mrs Hutchence’s with his hands folded on his breast, his cheeks wet with tears, barely breathing.
Six days a week, rain or shine, they go to the park, Regent’s Park. Willett’s job is to clear its ponds of rats. His job is to go in with the ferrets, then, at the end of the day, to see that the animals are caged and watered, to dry Willett’s boots, polish the brass on Ketch’s lead, and, when all is done, to slip out in the early light of the gas-lamps and fetch ale for their supper.
Among so many barefoot urchins slipping in and out of the crowd – up to no good, on the lookout for mischief – he has a place, he is Someone’s Boy. The jug he carries is the guarantee of that; empty on one leg of the journey, so that he can skip along as he pleases, full and in danger of slopping on the way back.
Very happy, since he is of a cheerful disposition, to be free for a little among the noise and many interests of the streets, he ducks and dodges among the crowd, leaping out of the way of carriage wheels on the slushy cobbles and cursing the drivers; when it freezes keeping an eye on the rumps of the standing horses, or the donkeys in costers’ carts, for the wink of an arsehole and the load of steaming shit that comes tumbling; then diving in quick to get the good of it, the lovely quick-fading warmth between his toes. He may stop a moment, not long – Willett can be a devil – to see the blood from an accident, or two punks, urged on by a mob, beating the daylights out of each other, or a tinker at work with a little tink-tink hammer and a bit of fire in a tin, or to trade insults with his friend the hot-muffin man, or catch snatches of music outside a penny-gaff.
As a sideline to the rat-catching trade, Willett supplies rats for weekend matches. As Willett’s Boy he gets pennies for drawing the rats out of their cage, which is a basket with an iron top, and tossing them by handfuls into the ring.
He is used to rats, but it is a mucky business. Willett, very dandified in a red handkerchief and brushed hat, rubs him beforehand with caraway oil, and pets and cajoles, and urges him not to look feared, and if he draws back (out of sight of the gentlemen, of course) whispers hoarse threats, which he knows he can rely on, and pinches him hard under the ribs. But he is afraid.
When he plunges his arm into the musky dark and hauls the sewer- and ditch-rats out of the hot, drain-smelling interior, they squeal and tumble over one another’s backs, and fight, using their teeth something horrible, and he gets many wounds that turn to open sores. He has scars all over his hands – one thumb is bitten through – and on his ears as well, since the rats, if they get the chance, will run up his body like squirrels up a tree trunk and fix their claws in his hair, till Willett untangles and tears them off. They get up the legs of his trousers too if they are not laced at the knees with string.
He is a game little fellow – that is his reputation. He is proud of it, and has learned to swagger and win cheers. Only at night, when he curls up on his pile of sacks, the rats appear in great numbers and huge size in his dreams, and if he yells and wakes Willett he is thrashed. So he sleeps with one of the ferrets under his shirt, in the belief that the smell of it will keep the dream rats off.
That is his life. He can imagine no other. He fusses, in his anxious, old-mannish way, over Willett’s needs, takes pride in their housekeeping and their catch, and pleasure in what bits and pieces of entertainment he comes by in the streets. Willett is an easy fellow when he isn’t drunk or in one of his dumps. They have rare times together. Especially when Mag is with them, who is Willett’s moll, and sometimes, on Willett’s suggestion, when they’ve all been drinking together, takes him on her lap like an overgrown baby, and gives him her breast to suck, and, to Willett’s vast amusement, frigs him under his shirt till he is squealing. But one night, after a beating no worse than others he has received, he waits till Willett is snoring, and, still heavy-headed from the beer they have drunk, gets up, lets the ferrets out of their cages, sweeps a heap of rubbish into the middle of the room, finds tinder, and lights it. There, he thinks as he watches it catch. He could not say what he has in mind. Nothing, perhaps. He is eleven or twelve years old and some darker nature has begun to emerge in him. He has resentments.
He stands watching the smoke make wavery threads. They twine and thicken. When the first little jigging flames appear, a smile comes to his lips. Now a lively redness is playing on the walls, the flames jump in play, so cheerful and full of change that he is held in a state between dreamy contemplation and an excitement that makes the hairs rise all over his body. He breaks off and goes, in an easy unthinking way, to where Willett lies and kicks him. Perhaps he intends to show Willett how changed everything is, to share with him what he has achieved. Willett growls. He does not stir.
The ferrets are running now, tumbling over the backs of chairs, leaping at the walls, the redness bristling on their backs. He too begins to be alarmed. The flames are taller than he is. He runs at them and stamps a little but burns the soles of his feet. Snatching up a rug, he tries to stifle them, but they shoot out from under it, and the rug too catches, showering sparks. He has to throw it in with the rest. The whole room is aglow. It sweats. Grease runs down the walls. The ferrets are mad things under his feet. At last, with smoke thickening all round him and choking in his throat, he can think of nothing else to do but throw the window open, and, as the cold air rushes over his shoulders and the room gives a roar behind him, leap out into the night, and run, and keep running till he passes the last street he recognises and where anyone might recognise him.
It does not occur to him that he has stepped off the world. The streets he is moving through are cobbled, have corners to turn. Walking briskly though aimlessly, since he is in a place he has never been, and avoiding strangers, he comes at last to a deserted part of town, tall buildings with bricked-up windows and what he takes to be the rigging of ships. With his brain roaring, he sits for a time with his hands over his ears and his feet in the gutter, all the inside of his head a blaze of red; then crawls into a doorway to sleep.
Once, in the night, a fierce-eyed little ragman comes, and takes him by the collar, and tries to push him into a sack. He breaks away, climbs a rope, tumbles into a box, and falls dead asleep.
When he wakes cold sunlight is on his cheek. The box has no lid. But he lies very still as he usually does in this particular dream and waits for Willett to find him: ‘Ah, so that’s where you’ve got to.’
But it isn’t Willett. It is a big, tow-headed fellow of eighteen or nineteen, in a blue knitted cap and with dirty stubble on his cheek and no teeth, who hauls him up by the scruff of his neck so that he hangs like a rabbit outside a poulterer’s shop. The youth’s nose
is on a level with his own; his legs are dangling. Then the mouth opens: ‘Captain!’ it bellows.
He had not meant to set himself loose in the world. He had not meant to end anything. He felt himself swinging now where the blue-capped youth held him in his fist, first one way, then another, and what he saw over the youth’s shoulder terrified him: no gas-lamps, no houses, but a vastness of an ashen grey colour crawling with smoke as if the whole world was burning behind him.
He would learn to live with this crawling emptiness, but the first glimpse of it made his belly squirm. He had cast himself loose and the world had run away with him; he was lost, he was dangling, and would remain so till Willett, in an odour of char, with his eyebrows ablaze and his scorched boots hanging from their laces at his neck, turned up again to curse and wallop him, then, with a growl, take him back. He never ceased to expect that event and to fear it. He expected it still. A world from which Willett had entirely disappeared was inconceivable to him.
Willett’s boots had reappeared: utterly real to him, every crack in their leather running with flame, the laces trailing, the tongue-flaps loose. It was Willett he could not find, though he heard him often enough, grumbling in the corners of the room, and smelt him there, a mixture of char and sweat, then at last the garden smell. He lay with his eyes closed, hands folded on his chest, his cheeks in the hot dark wet with tears. ‘Ah, boy, so that’s where you’ve got to!’
Where? Where had he got to?
Two years he was at sea. Or three. On one ship, then another: The Gannet, The Star of Newcastle, The Charleston – those were some of the names; last of all The Pamukale. He made himself small, had a full belly, was often bullied and worse by the others. Mosey. The Irish.
Old Crouch, The Pamukale’s carpenter, was a good ’un. He liked to sing hymns while he worked and had two daughters, one a seal – a silkie he called her; she could change herself into a seal. He learned to use a chisel, a plane, a spirit level. Then, one day, too ill to care what happened to him and with no knowledge of what part of the world he was in – how would Willett find him here? – they put him overboard; he moved out of the shadow of the ship that tilted and creaked above him, out of its coolness, away from the faces at the rails. Burning alive down there, he felt the sun leap out, a single flame. All he had known shrank to a black dot jigging in his skull.
These visions that dragged him back and racked his body with the reliving of what he had already endured a first time, left him weak and shaken. Despite the kindness Mrs Hutchence showed him, and Leona’s many attentions, he grew heartsick for his lean-to at the McIvors’, and for the children, especially Lachlan. Meg and Janet he also missed, though he saw them almost daily. At Mrs Hutchence’s they were absorbed now in a new life, the group round the kitchen table, where the presence of Hector and the schoolmaster, and the rapid talk, and so much laughter and play, confused him, kept him off. He began to sicken, and saw at last that what he was suffering here had to do with the sheets of paper where, months ago, Mr Frazer and the schoolmaster had set down his life. It was from there that the events of his former existence came and demanded to be turned back again from magic squiggles into the pain, joy, grief he was torn by, and which his present body was too weak to endure.
More and more now he was haunted by those sheets, seven in all, he had not forgotten the number, that Mr Frazer had folded and put into his pocket, and which he had never seen again; till he was convinced that the only way to save himself from so much racking, and despair and sweat, was to get them back again. They would be in one place or the other, those sheets; either at Mr Frazer’s or at the schoolhouse. All he needed was the strength to get there. But that was just what their magic had drawn from him.
17
WHEN LACHLAN BEATTIE looked about, it seemed to him that his whole world had come apart. The group of younger boys he moved among was all edge and shove. Their code was the same one their fathers used, but their fathers had seen enough of others’ and their own deficiencies to draw back from unyielding absolutes. They could not. Lachlan, though he was smaller than the rest, had till now held authority over them and commanded fellows like Jeff Murcutt and the younger Corcorans. They saw their chance now and were after him.
He had always been a firebrand. When he first came among them it had amused the older fellows to taunt him. At the least touch he would fly red-faced to the attack. The others would strike back, but in a lazy fashion, condescendingly, since they were so much older. ‘Lay off,’ they would drawl, ‘you mad bugger!’ Very fast on his feet, he would duck in under their fists and leave them winded. They learned then. ‘Honest, Locky,’ Hec Gosper would tell him as they started off home, ‘you’re bloody mad!’
Hector, in those days, had not yet moved up into the group of older fellows, young men almost, who hung about the verandah of the store. Though convention decreed that he should ignore a mere ten-year-old so long as they were in company, Hector had from the beginning taken the younger boy under his wing. Lachlan, who was unhappy in the new place, was grateful for it, but wary too, at first. His accent was the point on which he was tormented, and he was concerned that what Hector might have in mind was a shared impediment.
It was a mean thought, and when he saw, as he did almost immediately, how open Hector was, how little of his own indirectness there was in the other boy, he was ashamed. There was always this seed of self-consciousness in him that made him suspicious and spoiled things. He grew fond of Hector and depended on him, so it was distressing when Gemmy’s coming raised a conflict between them.
For the others, taunting Gemmy had become a new way – the old one had become stale by now – of provoking him, a new form of fun. These were the days when Gemmy was always at his heel, and he, still full of his moment at the fence, tended to swagger and show him off.
Hector did not join in these boyish scrabblings in the dust, he was too old for that; but he too was under the influence of that first day, and so long as others were about, kept up his grudge. It had put Lachlan in a spot. It was a matter of honour with him to stand up for Gemmy whatever the cost. He ignored Hector’s gibes as long as he could, but the time came at last when he had to protest.
It was foolish of him. There were too many interested bystanders. Hector, furious that he had broken what he had thought was an understanding between them, could do nothing but respond. ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What’s that?’, and there was, on the first sound, as it burst from him, a little hissing through the nose that was the last of a defect he had eliminated save when he was out of control.
Lachlan was stricken. He would have given anything not to be the occasion of such a lapse. ‘Com’ awn, Gemmy,’ he said and walked away, but the damage was done. There was, after that, an embarrassment between them that made it necessary, so long as others were about, to keep up a show of hostility that each knew was a pretence. When they were not observed they fell back into their old intimacy, though it was constrained. On these occasions, Gemmy, who did not understand the rules they followed, was puzzled, and hurt too at times, by an inconsistency in Lachlan that he could not account for.
But Hector, at last, dropped out of the group of younger boys, keeping with fellows now who were his own age. Lachlan, not quite thirteen, was in between. He would leave school at Christmas, be free at last of the indignity of ink-stains on his fingers and the company of kids like Jeff Murcutt and the Corcorans, and littlies, and girls. In the meantime he began to test his welcome among the group at the store; he developed a talent for launching gobs of spit further than any of his fellows, laughed louder than the loudest of them at any sort of raw joke, and smoked and swore.
It was one of the conditions of his move into an older group that Gemmy could not appear, and he had, gently at first, then coldly, to discourage him. He was sorry for it. But it was absurd to have Gemmy always tagging at his heels, and he blushed now to recall a time when he had regarded it as a sign of his power. How puffed up he had been with his own importance! What a fool
he must have appeared to the very fellows he had meant to impress!
His enlightenment had begun with the humiliations the schoolmaster had heaped upon him, and though he did not thank the man for it, he saw now that having set his face in the direction of manhood, he could not turn back. What he distrusted in himself was a tendency, a girlish one he thought, to let his affections rule. It was a weakness he was determined to stamp out. Still, there were days when he could not bear the look Gemmy wore, and would have given anything to step back a year and tell him, ‘A’richt, Gemmy, com’ awn then’ – but what good would it do?
It was about the time of Gemmy’s visit from the blacks and the series of accidents that had begun with the broken fence. Christmas was two months off. He was in the playground with companions he had outgrown.
‘So where’s yer mate,’ Jeff Murcutt asked, ‘yer shadow?’ And then, looking about with mock surprise, ‘Oh, I didn’t see ’im!’ Leo Corcoran had begun a little lopsided walk around them, with an expression so like Gemmy’s that three or four younger boys, who were watching, rolled about in the dirt at such a show of brilliance.
‘Shut your jaw,’ Lachlan hissed.
‘An’ if I don’t?’
Lachlan began to walk away.
‘An’ if I don’t? What’ll you do, eh? Get Gemmy t’ set ’is blacks on us?’
He turned at that.
‘You should hear what my Pa says. It’s a wonder someone don’t do the right thing, one a’ these nights, and pot the bastard!’