by David Malouf
“The thing is,” he said, sitting on the low branch, his face squared up now, the cheeks under the narrowed eyes wooden, the eyes gazing away into himself, "if this goes wrong it'll be the finish of me. For me it's all or nothing. If she would just have me—let me have her—it'd be all right— my life, I mean—hers too. If she won't I'm finished. She knows that, she must. I told her often enough. So why's she doing it?”
I found I couldn't look at him. We remained poised like that, the question hanging, the open expanse of water like glass in the early light. He got up, took one of the billies, then the other, and set off back to camp.
I sat on at the bank for a moment. Then I crouched down and splashed cold lagoon water over my face, then again, and again.
Stuart's misery scared me. My own adolescent glooms I had learned to enjoy. I liked the sense they gave me of being fully present. Even more the bracing quality I felt in possession of when I told myself sharply to stop play-acting, and strongly, stoically dealt with them. Did I despise Stuart because he was so self-indulgent? Was he too playacting, but not alert enough to his own nature to know it? I preferred that view of him than the scarier one in which his desperation was real. I didn't want to be responsible for his feelings, and it worried me that out here there was no escape from him.
He tackled me again later in the day.
“You know, Angus,” he said mildly as if he had given the matter some thought and got the better of it, "you could put in a good word for me. If there was the opportunity.”
We were standing together on a shoot, just far enough from the others not to be heard, even in the late-afternoon stillness.
Braden was with his father and Henry Denkler, a little away to the left. The air was still, the ground, with its coarse short grass, moist underfoot. Steely light glared off the nearby lagoon. The dogs, in their element now, had discovered in themselves, in a way that impressed me, their true nature as bird-dogs, a fine tense quality that made them almost physically different from the rather slow creatures they were at home. They were leaner, more sinewy.
“You could do that much,” he persisted, "for a mate. We are mates, aren't we?”
I turned, almost angry, and found myself disarmed by the flinching look he gave me, the tightness of the flesh around his eyes, the line of his mouth.
I was saved from replying by a clatter of wings, as a flock of ducks rose out of the glare that lay over the surface of the big lagoon and stood out clear against the cloudless blue. But it was too late. I had missed my chance at a shot and so had Stuart. The others let off a volley of gunfire and the dogs went crashing through the broken water to where the big birds were tumbling over in the air and splashing into the shattered stillness of the lake, or dropping noiselessly into the reeds on the other bank.
“Damn,” I shouted. “Damn. Damn!”
“What happened?” Braden asked, when we stood waiting in a group for the dogs to bring in the last of the birds. “Why didn't you fire?”
I shook my head, and Braden, taking in Stuart's look, must have seen enough, in his quick way, not to insist. The dogs were still coming in with big plump birds. There were many more of them than would go into the pot.
“Good girl, Tilly,” he called, and the dog, diverted for a moment, gave herself a good shake and ran to his knee. He leaned down, roughly pulled her head to his thigh and ruffled her ears. The strong smell of her wet fur came to me.
I spent the rest of the day stewing over my lost chance, exaggerating my angry disappointment and the number of birds I might have bagged, as a way of being so mad with Stuart that I did not have to ask myself what else I should feel. Braden and I spent the whole of the next morning with Matt Riley and Jem, but in the afternoon I came upon Stuart sitting on a big log a little way off from the camp, with a scrub-turkey at his feet. I stopped at a distance and spent a moment watching him. I thought he had not seen me.
“Hi,” he said. I stepped out into the clearing. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing much,” I told him.
I settled on the log a little way away from him.
“Listen, Stuart,” I began, after a bit.
“Yair, I know,” he told me. “I'm sorry.”
“No,” I said, "it's not about yesterday. You've got to stop all this, that's all. She won't change her mind. I know she won't. Not this time.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“No. Not in so many words. But she won't, I know she won't. Look, Stuart, you should leave me out of it, that's what I wanted to say. I don't know anything so I can't help you. You've got to stop.”
“I see,” he said. “That's pretty plain. Thanks, Angus. No, I mean it,” he said, "you're right, I've been foolin’ myself. I can see that now.”
“Look, Stuart—”
“No, you're right, it was hopeless from the start. That's what you're telling me, isn't it? That I might as well just bloody cut my throat!”
I leapt to my feet. “Shut up,” I told him “Just stop all this. Bloody shut up!”
He was so shocked that he laughed outright.
“Well,” he said after a moment, with bitter satisfaction. “Finally.”
What did that mean? He gave me a look that made me see, briefly, something of the means he might have brought to bear on her. But she was harder than I was. I knew the contempt she would have for a kind of appeal that she herself would never stoop to.
I stood looking at him for a moment. I did not know what more I could say. I turned and walked away.
“I thought you were on my side,” he called after me.
I had heard this before, or an echo of it. I looked back briefly but did not stop.
“I thought we were mates,” he called again. “Angus?”
I kept walking.
I did know what he was feeling, but he confused me. I wanted to be free of him, of his turmoil. The nakedness with which he paraded his feelings dismayed me. It removed all the grounds, I thought, on which I could react and offer him real sympathy. It violated the only code, as I saw it then, that offered us protection: tight-lipped understatement, endurance. What else could we rely on? What else could Irely on?
I walked.
The ground with its rough tussocks was swampy, unsteady underfoot, the foliage on the stunted trees sparse and darkly colourless, their trunks blotched with lichen. I had no idea where I was headed or how far I needed to go to escape my own unsettlement. Little lizards tumbled away from my boots or dropped from branches, dragonflies hung stopped on the air, then switched and darted, blazing out like struck matches where the sun caught their glassy wings.
I walked. And as I moved deeper into the solitude of the land, its expansive stillness—which was not stillness in fact but an interweaving of close but distant voices so dense that they became one, and then mere background, then scarcely there at all—I began to forget my own disruptive presence, receding as naturally into what hummed and shimmered all round me as into a dimension of my own being that it had taken my coming out here, alone, in the slumbrous hour after midday, to uncover. I felt drawn, drawn on.
I had enough bush sense, a good enough eye for recording, unconsciously as I passed, the little oddnesses in the terrain—the elbow of a fallen bough, a particular assembly of glossy-leaved bushes that would serve as signposts on my way back—to feel confident I wouldn't get lost. I let Stuart, seated gloomily back there on his log, hugging his rifle, hugging even closer his dumb grief, fade from my thoughts, and moved deeper into the becalmed early-afternoon light, over spatterings of ancient debris, crumblings of dried-out timber. Slowly, all round and under me, an untidy grey-green world was continuously, visibly in motion. Ti-tree trunks unfurled tattered streamers; around their roots a seepage like long-brewed tea.
I walked, and the great continent of sound I was moving into recorded my presence, the arrival, in its close-woven fabric of light, sound, stilled or moving shadow, of a medium-sized foreign body, displacing the air a moment as it advanced, an
d confusing, with the smell of its sweat and the shifting of its breath, the tiny signals that were being picked up and translated out there by a myriad of forms of alien intelligence. I was central to it but I was also nothing, or close to nothing.
In the compacted heat and drowsy afternoon sunlight, I could have kept walking for ever, all the way to the Gulf. It was time, not space, I was moving into. Years it might be. And there was more of it—not just ahead but on all sides—than I could conceive of or measure.
There was no specific point I was heading for. I could stop now, turn back, and it would all still be here. It was myself I was moving into.
One day, far off down the years, I would come stumbling back in my body's last moments of consciousness and here it would be: crumbling into itself and dispersing its particles and voices, reassembling itself cell by cell in a new form that was also the old one remade. I had no need to go on and actually see it, the place where I would lie down in the springy marsh-grass, among the litter and mould, letting the grass take the impression of my weight, the shape of my body's presence, and keep it long after I was gone.
Away back, when I first heard about the Valley and let it form itself in my mind, I had thought that everything I found unsatisfactory in myself, in my life but also in my nature, would come right out here, because that is what I had seen, or thought I had, in others. Kids who had been out here, and whom I had thought of till then as wild and scattered, had come back settled in their own aggregation of muscle, bone, and flesh, and in some new accommodation with the world.
Nothing like that had come to me. I was no more settled, no less confused. I would bring nothing back that would be visible to others— to my father, for instance. I had lost something; that was more like it. But happily. As I walked on into this bit of grey-green nondescript wilderness I was happily at home in myself. But in my old self, not a new one.
I don't know how far I had gone before I paused, looked around, and realised I was lost. For the last ten minutes I had been walking in my sleep. The landscape of small shrubs and ti-trees I had been moving through was now scrub.
I consulted the sun and turned back the way I had come. Minutes later I looked again and changed tack. It was hot. I had begun to sweat. I took my shirt off, draped it round my neck, and set off again.
Five minutes more and I stopped, told myself sternly not to panic and, standing with my eyes closed and the whole landscape shrilling in my head, took half a dozen slow breaths.
The shot came from closer than I would have expected, and from a direction—to my left—that surprised me. How had I gone so wrong? It was only when I had got over a small rush of relief that it struck me that after the first shot there had been no other. I quickened my pace, then began to run, my boots sinking and at times slipping on the swampy ground. When I arrived back at the clearing Stuart lay awkwardly sprawled, white-lipped and holding his shirt, which was already soaked, to his bloodied thigh.
“Hi, Angus,” he said, his tone somewhere between his old, false jauntiness and a dreamy bemusement at what had occurred and at my being the one who had arrived to find him.
“Better get someone. Quick, eh?”
He glanced down to where blood, a lot of it, I thought, was flooding through the flimsy shirt.
I fell to my knees, gaping.
“No,” he said calmly. “Just run off as quick as you can, mate, and fetch someone. But be quick, eh? I'll be right for a bit.”
I wasn't sure of that. I felt there was something I should be doing immediately, something I should be saying that would make him feel better and restore things, maybe even cancel them out, and I was still nursing this childish thought as I sprinted towards the camp. Something I would regret for ever if he bled to death before I got back. Was he bleeding to death? Could a thing like that just happen, without warning, out of the blue?
In just minutes I had shouted my breathless announcement and we were back.
He was still sitting, awkwardly upright, his back against the log. I took in the rifle this time. It lay on the ground to his right. There was also the heap of dull black feathers that was a scrub-turkey He was no longer holding the soaked rag to his outflung leg. A pool was spreading under him. He was streaming with sweat. Great drops of it stood on his brow and were making runnels down his chest.
“It's all right, Dad,” he said weakly when the old man and Matt and the others reached him. “Bugger missed.”
It took me a moment to grasp that it was the bullet he was referring to.
They got his boot off and Matt slashed the leg of the scorched and bloodied jeans all the way to the crotch and worked quickly to apply a tourniquet. “You'll be right,” he told Stuart. “Bugger missed the main artery, you're a lucky feller. Bone too.” Blood was seeping out between his hands. There was a smell that made me squeamish. Seared meat. Stuart, bluish-white around the mouth, was raised up on his elbows and staring, fascinated by the throbbing out of the warm life in him. Like a child who has borne a bad fall manfully, but bursts into tears at the first expression of sympathy, he seemed close to breaking.
I was dealing with my own emotions.
I had seen Stuart stripped any number of times, in the changing room at the pool, in the noise and general roughhouse of the showers afterwards. A naked body among other naked bodies, with clear water streaming over it and a smell of clean soap in the air, is bracing, functional, presents an image too common to be remarkable or to draw attention to itself. But a single ravaged limb thrust out in the dirt, the soaked denim of the jeans that covered it violently ripped and peeled away, black hairs curling on the hollow of the thigh and growing furlike close to the groin, has a brute particularity that brought me closer to something exposed and shockingly intimate in him, to the bare forked animal, than anything I had seen when he stood fully naked under the shower. I was shaken. His jockeys, where they showed, sagged, and were worn thin and greyish. A trail of blood, still glistening wet, made its way down the long ridge of the shank bone.
Not much more than half an hour ago I had walked out on him. Exasperated. Worn down by the demands he put on me. At the end of my patience with his turmoil, the poses he struck, his callow pretensions to martyrdom. Now I was faced with a shocking reality. It was.
Stuart McGowan's blood I was staring at. What impressed me, in the brute light of day, was its wetness, how much there was of it, the alarming blatancy of its red.
He caught the look on my face, and something in what he saw there encouraged him back into a bravado he had very nearly lost the trick of.
“Angus,” he said. He might just have noticed me there in the tense crowd around him and recalled that I was the one who had found him. “Waddya think then?” He managed a crooked smile, and his voice, though strained, had the same half-jokey, half-defensive tone as when on those early visits to my sleepout he had picked up one of my books and asked, "So what's this one about?”
As if on this occasion too he were faced with a puzzle on which I might somehow enlighten him, and in the same expectation, I thought, of being given credit for the seriousness of his interest.
A smile touched the corner of his lips.
He was pleased with himself!
At being the undoubted centre of so much drama and concern. At having done something at last that shocked me into really looking at him, into taking him seriously. The wound was worth it, that's what he thought. All it demanded of him was that he should grit his teeth and bear a little pain, physical pain, be a man; he had all the resources in the world for that. And what he gained was what he saw in me. Which, when I got back, I would pass on to her, to Katie. When she was presented with the facts—that hole in his naked thigh with its raw and blackened lips, the near miss that had come close to draining him of the eight pints of rude animal life that was in him—she would have to think again and accept what she had denied: the tribute of his extravagant suffering, the real and visible workings of his pure, bull-like heart. He had done this for her !
“Okay,” Matt Riley was saying. “That's the best we can do for now.”
He got to his feet, rubbed his hands on the cloth of his thighs, and told Jem: "You—-Jem—we'll need some sort of stretcher to get ‘im to the truck. See what you can knock up.” Then, quietly, to Wes McGowan: "The quicker we get ‘im back to town now the better. It's not as bad as it looks. Bullet went clean through. Bugger'll need watchin', but.”
It took me a moment to grasp that what was being referred to this time was the wound.
In all the panic and excitement around Stuart, I had lost sight of Braden. He was hunched on the ground a little way off, his back to Stuart and the rest, his head bowed. I thought he was crying. He wasn't, but he was shaking. I squatted beside him.
“You okay?” I asked. I thought he hadn't heard me. “It's just a flesh wound,” I told him. “Nothing serious. He's lost a bit of blood, but.”
He gave a snort. Then a brief contemptuous laugh.
Was that what it was? Contempt?
He thought Stuart had done it deliberately! I was astonished. But wasn't that just what I had assumed a moment back, when I told “He's done this for her"?
I touched Braden lightly on the shoulder, then got up and turned again to where Stuart, wrapped in a blanket now and with his eyes closed, but still white-lipped and sweating, lay waiting for the pallet to be brought.
I told myself that it had never occurred to me that he would go so far. It was too excessive, too wide of what was acceptable to the code we lived by. A hysterical girl might do such a thing but not a man, not Stuart McGowan's sort of man. But at the edge of that I was shaken. Maybe what I thought I knew about people—about Stuart, about myself—was unreliable. I looked at Stuart and saw, up ahead, something that had not come to me yet but must come some day. Not a physical shattering but what belongs to the heart and its confusions, the mess of need, desire, hurt pride, and all the sliding versions of himself as lover triumphant, then as lover rejected and achingly bereft, that had led him to force things—had he?—to such lurid and desperate conclusions.