by David Malouf
At the same time, in the six months before he turned fifteen, he put on height, six inches, and bulked up to twelve and a half stone. He was suddenly a big fellow. Bigger than either of his brothers. Not heavy, but big.
Then one day he showed me, in a copy of Scientific American, what it was that he was into. Cybernetics. I had never heard the word, and when he tried to explain it to me in his usual style, all jumps and sideways leaps into a silence I had believed I could interpret, I was lost.
I understood the science well enough. Even the figures. What I could not grasp was the excited vision of what he saw in it: a realm of action he saw himself moving through as if it had come into existence precisely for him. And this was the opening of a gap between us. Not of affection—no question of that—but of where our lives might take us. Braden, who had always been so vague and out of it, was suddenly the most focused person I knew. Utterly single-minded and sure of what he wanted and what he was for.
For the first time in my life I felt lonely. But not so lonely, I think, so finally set apart as he felt. From his family. His brothers. Who were still puzzled by him but in a new way.
Here he was, a big boy who had outgrown them and his own strength, and ought, in springing up and filling out, to have become a fellow they could deal with at last on equal terms. Instead he seemed odder than ever. More difficult to get through to. Content to be away there in his own incommunicable universe.
Glen, who had always had a soft spot for the boy was confused, but also I think impressed. He still teased him, but in a soft-handed affectionate way. As if Braden's difference, which had always intrigued him, had turned out to be something he might respect.
Glen, because he was so much older, had for the most part left us alone. We had always been a source of mild amusement to him, but except for the odd burst of impatience he had, in a condescending, big-brotherly way, ignored us. Stuart could not.
In the early days the mere sight of us drove him to fury. All jeers and knuckles, he was always twisting our arms and jerking them up under our shoulder blades to see how much we could take before we turned into crybabies and sissies.
He felt easier with me, I think, because I fought back. Braden disarmed him by taking whatever he could dish out with scornful defiance, never once, after our baby years, yielding to tears.
All this, I knew, belonged to a side of their life together that I had no part in, to hostilities and accommodations, spaces shared or passionately disputed, in rooms, at the table, in their mother's affection or their father's regard or interest.
But the fullness of the change in Braden, when it finally revealed itself, dismayed Stuart. He simply did not know what to do with it.
I think it scared him to have someone who was close, and who ought therefore to have been knowable, turn out to be so far from anything he could get a hold on. It suggested that the world itself might be beyond his comprehension, but also beyond his control. The only way he could deal with Braden was by avoiding him. Which made it all the more odd, I thought, that he began at the same time to latch on to me.
He had left school by now, was working in a garage and ran with a set of older fellows, all of whom were wild, as he was, and “reputations.” But suddenly we were always in one another's path.
He would appear out of nowhere, it seemed, on my way back from the pool, and offer me dinks on his bike. And when he exchanged his Malvern Star for a Tiger Cub he would stop, talk a bit, and offer to take me pillion.
I was wary. I had too often been on the wrong side of Stuart's roughness to be easy with him. It was flattering to be treated, in my own right, as a grown-up, but I did not trust him. He was trying to win me over. Why? Because he had seen the little gap that had opened up between Braden and me and wanted to widen it? To bring home to me that if Braden was odder than any of us had thought, then I had proved to be, like Stuart himself, more ordinary?
I resented his attention on both counts, and suspected that his unlikely interest in me was a form of mockery. It took me a while to see that mockery was not Stuart's style, and that by seeking me out, a younger boy and the brother of a girl he was sweet on (I learned this amazing fact from a bit of conversation overheard while I was sunbaking on the bleachers at the pool), he was putting himself helplessly in my power; making himself vulnerable to the worst mockery of all. That he trusted me not to take advantage of it meant that I never would of course, but I hated the familiarity with which he now greeted me “Angus, old son,” “Angus, old horse,” as if there was already some special relationship between us, or as if getting close to me brought him closer somehow to her. My own belief was that Stuart McGowan was just the sort of rough, loud fellow she wouldn't even look at. Then suddenly he and Katie were going out together, and he was at our house every night of the week.
Taking a break from my homework or the book I was absorbed in, and going through to the kitchen to get a glass of water or cold milk from the fridge, I would hear them whispering together on the couch in our darkened front room, and would turn the tap on hard to warn them I was about.
Or if it was late enough, and Stuart was leaving, I would run into them in the hall: Stuart looking smug but also, somehow, crestfallen, Katie hot and angry, ready I thought to snap my head off if I said more in reply to his “ ‘lo, Angus, how's it going?” than “Hi, Stuart,” and ducked back into my room.
The truth was, I had no wish to know what was going on between them. I did not like the look of shy complicity that Stuart cast me, as if I had caught him out in something, but in something that as another male I must naturally approve.
Two or three nights each week he ate with us. I have no idea what he thought of the noisy arguments that marked our mealtimes. Perhaps it attracted him, as I was attracted by the old-fashioned formality I found at the McGowans'.
Occasionally, to kill time while Katie was helping in the kitchen, he would drift to the sleepout on the side veranda where I would be sprawled on my bed deep in a book. I would look up, thinking, God, not again, and there he would be, hanging awkwardly in the open doorway, waiting for me to acknowledge him and taking my grunt of recognition as an invitation to come in.
Oddly restrained and self-conscious, he would settle at the foot of the bed, take a book from the pile on the floor, and say, with what I thought of as a leer, "So what's this one about?” The way he handled the book, his half-embarrassed, half-suggestive tone, the painful attempt to meet me, as I saw it, on unfamiliar ground, made me uncomfortable. “You don't have to pretend you're interested,” I wanted to tell him, "just because you're going out with my sister.” On the whole, I preferred the old Stuart. I thought I knew better what he was about. It did not occur to me that what I was reading, and what I found there, might be a genuine mystery to him; which disturbed his sense of himself, and had to do with how, in this strange new household he had blundered into, with its unfamiliar views and distinctions, he might learn to fit in.
He would run his eyes over a few pages of the book he had in hand and shake his head. Thinking, I see now, of her, of Katie, and waiting for me to provide some clue—to me, I mean, to us—that would help him find common ground with her.
I would make a rambling attempt to explain who Raskolnikov was, and Sonia, and about the horse that had fallen down in the street. He would look puzzled, then stricken, then, trying to make the best of it, say, "Interesting, eh?” Waiting for some sign perhaps that I recognised the effort he was making to enter my world, and what this might reveal about him: about some other Stuart than the one I thought I knew, and knew only as “bad influence.” After about ten minutes of this, I would swing my legs off the bed and say, "Tea must be about ready, we'd better go out,” and to the relief of both of us, or so I thought, it would be over.
I had begun to dread these occasions of false intimacy between us that were intended, I thought, to be rehearsals for a time when we would be youthful brothers-in-law, close, bluff, easily affectionate. If he could get me to accept him in this
role, then maybe she would.
Once, as he moved towards the door, I caught him, out of the corner of my eye, making a quick appraisal of himself in the wardrobe mirror.
Starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled high to show off his biceps. Hair slicked down with Potter and Moore jelly. In the hollow of his underlip the squared-off, dandified growth of hair he had begun to affect in recent weeks, a tuft, two or three degrees darker than his hair colour but with flecks of gingery gold, that I had overlooked at first—I thought he had simply neglected to shave there. When I realised it was deliberate I was confused. It seemed so out of character.
Now, watching him take in at a casual glance the effect he made in my wardrobe mirror, I thought again. What a bundle of contradictions he is, I told myself.
He gave me a sheepish grin, and stopped, pretending to examine his chin for a shaving nick. But what his look said was, Well, that's how it is, you can see that, eh, old son? That's what they do to us.
When Katie first began to go out with him I'd felt I should warn her. That he was wild. That he had “reputation.” Only I did not know how to begin. We had always been close, and had grown more so since my older sister Meg got married, but for all that, and the boldness in our household with which we were willing to air issues and deliver an opinion, there were subjects, back then, that we kept clear of, areas of experience we could not admit knowledge of.
And it seemed to me that Katie must know as well as I did, or better, what Stuart was like. She was the one who spent all those hours of fierce whispering with him in the dark of our front room.
For weeks at a time they would move together in what seemed like a single glow. Then I would feel an anger in her that needed only a word on my part, or a look, to make her blaze out, though the real object of her fury, I thought, was herself. Stuart, for a time, would no longer be there, on the back veranda or in the lounge after tea. Things were off between them. When I ran into him at the baths, or when he stopped and offered me a lift on the Triumph, he would look hangdog and miserable. “How are you, Angus, old son?” he'd ask, hoping I would return the question.
I didn't. The last thing I wanted was to be his confidant; to listen to his complaints about Katie or have him ask what she was saying about him, what I thought she wanted. These periods would last for days, for a whole week sometimes. Then he would be back, all scrubbed and spruced up and smelling like a sweet shop. Narrow-eyed and watchful. Like a cat, I thought. But also, in a way he could not help and could not help showing, happily full of himself and of his power over her. Couldn't he see, I thought, how mad it made her, and that it was this in the long run that would bring him down?
The crisis came a year or so after they first began.
Nothing was said—my parents were the very spirit of tact in such matters—but I guessed Katie had given him his marching orders. Again. Again. Because for two nights running he did not appear. Then, late on the second night, I looked out and the little Anglia he sometimes ran around in was parked under the street light opposite.
It was there at nine and was still there at half past ten. What was he doing? Just sitting there, I guessed, hunched and unhappy, chewing on his bitten-down nails.
To see if she had some other fellow calling?
More likely, I thought, just to be close to her. Or if not her, the house itself. To reassure himself that since we were all in and going about our customary routine, no serious breach had occurred. Then, remembering the old Stuart, I thought, No, it's his way of intimidating her. It's a kind of bullying. Didn't he know the first thing about her? Had he learned nothing in all those hours in the dark of the lounge room or the back veranda? Did he think that because she had sent him packing on previous occasions, all he had to do now was apply pressure and wait?
I could have told him something about those other occasions. That she was the sort of girl who did not forgive such demonstrations of her own weakness or those who caused them. There was only a limited number of times she would allow herself to be so shamefully humiliated. I stood hidden behind the slats of my sleepout and watched him there. Was she watching too?
I was surprised. That he should just drive up like that and park under the street light where everyone could see him. Was he more inventive than I'd guessed?
It seemed out of character too. Melodramatic. The sort of thing people did in the movies. Was that where he had got it?
Next morning at breakfast I glanced across at Katie to see if she too had seen him, and got a defiant glare. Then that night, late, when I went out to the kitchen to get a drink, she confronted me.
“So what do you think?” she demanded.
It was a clammy night. Airless. Without a breath. She was barefoot, her hair stuck to her brow with sweat. We stood side by side for a moment at the kitchen window.
“He's been there now for three nights running,” she said. “It's ridiculous!”
I passed behind her and opened the fridge.
“Maybe you should go down,” she said, "and sit with him.”
“What? What would I want to do that for?”
“Well, you're mates, aren't you?”
I had turned with the cold-water bottle. She took it from me and rolled it, with its fog of moisture, across her damp forehead, then her throat and chest.
“Is that what Stuart says?”
“Not what he says. Stuart never says anything, you know that.”
“What then? What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said wearily. She handed the bottle back. “Let's drop it.”
“Braden's my friend,” I told her. “If Stuart wasn't here every night I wouldn't even see him from one week's end to the next.”
“Okay,” she said, "let's drop it. Maybe I don't understand these things.”
“What things?”
“Oh, boys. Men. You're all so—tight with one another.”
“No we're not. Stuart and I aren't—tight.”
“I thought you were.”
“Well, we're not.” I finished my glass of water, rinsed it at the sink, and went to pass her.
Suddenly, from behind, her arms came round me. I felt the damp of her forearms on my chest, her face nuzzling the back of my neck.
“Your hair smells nice,” she said. “Like when you were little.”
I squirmed and pretended to wriggle free, but only pretended. “Stop,” I said, "you're tickling,” as she held me tighter and laughed.
“There,” she said, glancing away to the window, "he's gone.”
Neither of us had heard the car move off. She continued to hold me. “Stay a minute, Angus,” she said. “Stay and talk.”
“What about?”
“Oh, not him.” She let go of me. “That wouldn't get us far.”
I sat at the kitchen table, awkward but expectant, and she sat opposite.
In the old days we had been close. When I came out of my room at night to get a glass of water or milk from the fridge, she would join me and we would sit for a bit, joking, exchanging stories, larking about. Stuart's arrival had ended that. He was always there, and when he wasn't she avoided me. Either way, I missed her and blamed Stuart for coming between us. We liked each other. She made me happy, and I made her happy too.
“I know you're on his side,” she said now. “But there are things you don't know about.”
“I'm not on his side,” I told her. “Are there sides?”
She laughed. “No, Angus, there are no sides. There never will be for you. That's what I love about you.”
I was defensive. “What's that supposed to mean?”
“It means you're nicer than I am. Maybe than any of us. And I love you. Listen,” she said, leaning closer, "I'm going away.”
“Where to?”
“I don't know yet. Maybe I'll go and stay with Meg and Jack for a bit. Or I'll take the plunge and just go to Brisbane.”
“What would you do down there?”
“Get an office job, work in a shop—wha
t do other girls do? I'm doing nothing here. Reading a lot of silly novels—what's the use of that? You know what this place is like. You won't stay here either.”
“Won't I?”
It pleased me at that time when people told me things about myself. Sometimes they surprised me, sometimes they didn't. Even when they confirmed what I already knew I was filled with interest.
“I've got to get out,” she told me passionately, "I've got to. Nothing will ever happen if I stay here. I'd end up marrying Stuart, or someone just like him, and it'd kill me. It doesn't matter that he wants me, or thinks he does, or what I think of him. Even if he was kind—which he wouldn't be in fact. He'd be a rotten husband. What he really loves is himself. Maybe I won't get married at all. I don't know why everyone goes on all the time about marriage, as if it was the only thing there is.”
I was bewildered. She was telling me more than I could take in.
“So when?” I asked. “When will you go?”
“I don't know,” she said miserably. “I've got no money.”
“I have. I've got forty pounds.”
She leaned across the table and took my hand. “I love you, Angus. More than anyone. Did you know that?” Then, after a pause, "But you should hang on to your money, you'll need it yourself if you're ever going to get out of this dump. I'll get it some other way. Now go to bed or you won't be able to get up in the morning. It's after eleven.”
I got up obediently, and was at the door when she said, "I suppose you'll be inseparable now.”
“Why?” I asked her. “Why should we be?”
“Because that's the way he is. Once he realises this is the end, really this time, he'll want you to see what a bitch I am and how miserable he is.”