by David Malouf
In fact the jobs Milt did were things Jack's mother could do quite well herself, but she was happy now to have Milt do them. When he made a lamp come on that had, for goodness knows how long, failed to work, he wore such a look of beaming satisfaction that he might have supplied the power for it out of his own abundant nature, out of the same energy that fired his long stride and lit his smile.
So what was his secret? That's what Jack wanted to know. That was where all his questions tended. And what was the tune he hummed? It seemed to Jack that if he could only get close enough to hear it, he would understand at last Milt's peculiar magic. Because it was magic of a sort. It put a spell on you. Only Milt didn't seem to know that he possessed it, and it was this not-knowing, Jack thought, that made it so mysterious, but also made it work.
Milt was twenty-two. In the strict code of those times it was inconceivable that a woman should be interested in a man who was younger. Jack could imagine his mother breaking some of the rules, smoking in the street for instance, or whistling, but not this one. So he had come to think of Milt as his friend.
When Christmas came they took him to Schindler's.
2
They had been going to Schindler's for as long as Jack could remember. His mother and father had spent their honeymoon there. Unlike the other guests, who ate in the little sunlit dining room at midday and half past six, they took their meals at the big table in Mrs. Schindler's kitchen, and Jack had permission to go in at any hour and ask for milk from the fridge, or an ice-block, or one of Mrs. Schindler's homemade biscuits. On days when they went fishing at Deception, Mary, the Schindlers’ girl, packed them a lunch-tin with things only the family ate: salami, sweet-and-sour gherkins, strudel.
The soil at Scarborough was red. So were the eroded cliffs, which you could slide down and whose granular, packed earth could be trickled through a fist to colour sand-gardens. So were the rocks that formed a Point at each end of the beach, and the escarpments of the reef that at low tide emerged from the dazzle about sixty yards out, where fishermen, standing on the streaming shelf, cast lines for rock-cod or bream.
When the tide was in, the Points were covered, the beach was isolated. But at low tide, walking on what had just an hour before been the bottom of the sea, you could go round by the beach way to Redcliffe in one direction or Deception in the other.
No need to consult the Courier Mail for high- and low-water times at the Pile Light. When the tide was coming in your sandfly bites grew swollen and itched. When it went out, they stopped.
The beach at Scarborough was a family camping-ground. Bounded on one side by a grassy cliff-top—where at Christmas there was a fairground with hoopla stalls and an Octopus and a woozy merry-go-round—and on the other by a storm-water drain, it was a city of tents; or if not a city, at least a good-sized township, where the same groups, established in the same pozzies each year, made up a community as fixed in its way as any on the map.
It was a lively and relaxed world. When the tent flaps were up people's whole lives were visible, the folding table where they ate, the galvanized or enamel tub where they washed their clothes and did the dishes, the primus stove, camp-stretchers and carbide or petrol lamps. Jack spent his whole day moving from tent to tent asking if his friends could come out, or being gathered into the loose arrangements that were other people's lives. There were a dozen families where he could simply step in under the flap, which would be golden where the sun beat through, and be offered a slice of bread with condensed milk or, in the afternoon, a chunk of cold watermelon.
At home in Brisbane, people's lives were out of sight behind lattice and venetians. Here, it was as if, in some holiday version of themselves, they had nothing to hide. All you had to do to be one of them was to make yourself visible; and if, in tribute to settled convention, you did “knock, knock,” it was a kind of joke, the merest shadowy acknowledgement of the existence elsewhere of doors and of a privacy that had already been surrendered or was dissolved here like the walls.
“Come on in, pet.” That is what Mrs. Chester or Mrs. Williams would call, the comfortable mothers of his holiday friends. And if strangers were there, other women like themselves, barefoot, in beltless frocks, they might add: "This is Jack. He's one of the family, aren't you, love?”
It was a manner of speaking, a temporary truth like all their arrangements down here. Rivalries, gangs, friendships existed with a passionate intensity for the six weeks of Christmas and two more at Easter, and for the rest of the year, like some of the rivers they drew in Geography, went underground, became dotted lines.
Jack loved these broken continuities. They were reassuring. You let things drop out of sight, then you picked them up again further on. Nothing was lost. Even a single day could have that pattern. For a whole morning, while you played Fish or Ludo, you were one of the Ches-ters. Then in the afternoon you became a loose adjunct of the Ludlow family or returned to your own.
It was his own family that was the puzzle.
The way Jack saw it was this. He and his mother were two points of a triangle, of which the third point was over the horizon somewhere in a place he could conceive of but never reach, though there were times when his whole body ached towards it, and so intensely that he would wake at night with the torment of it. Growing pains, his mother called it. And it was true, he was growing; he had shot up suddenly into a beanpole. But that wasn't the whole of it.
Down here at Scarborough, where he was most keenly aware of his body as the immediate image of himself, the sun's heat, day after day, and especially in the early morning when it struck the glass of his hothouse sleepout, would draw him in a half-waking dream to some tropic place where everything grew faster. His limbs would be stretched then across three thousand miles of real space till every joint was racked, and he would experience at last the thing he most hungered for: a smell of roll-your-owns as sharp as if his father were actually there in the room with him, or a light-headed feeling of being hefted all along the verandah-boards on his father's boot, the two of them laughing, Jack a little out of fear, and his father shouting: "Hang on, Jack, that's the boy. Hang on!”
It was the voice he found hardest to keep hold of. He strained to hear it, vigorously lifted, under the beating of the shower, "All together for the Floral Dance,” but got nowhere. When he did sometimes discern the peculiar line of it on a stranger's lips it was in one of the phrases his father liked to use: "fair crack o’ the whip" “you wouldn’ credit it.” He would try for the tune of it then under his breath.
SO HERE they were at Schindler's; Jack, his mother, and Milt. Jack was in his element.
Even Mrs. Schindler, who had treated Milt at first with a kind of coldness, was won over by the drawling stories he told, a way he had of kidding people that was rough but inviting. By the end of their first meal together she adored him and from then on insisted on making all his favourite dishes, waiting breathlessly, like a girl, for him to taste and approve. Once it had been Jack who was consulted on whether the precious dessert-spoons should be used for ice-cream or for pudding. Now it was Milt. And Jack didn't mind at all. How could he be resentful of someone he himself was so eager to see pleased?
Milt kidded Mrs. Schindler the way he kidded Jack's mother, with a mixture of courtliness and plain tomfoolery. He hung around the kitchen benches, beating eggs and dipping his finger into bowls. He set up a little speaker so that Mrs. Schindler could listen in to the news from the lounge-room wireless while she helped Mary wash up. He danced her all round the kitchen, on the black-and-white tiles, “Wiener Blut.”
Jack still spent the day with his friends down at the beach, but in the evenings he and Milt played Chinese Checkers or Fiddlesticks, or the three of them played Euchre, or Milt worked with him on the crystal set he was making while his mother read. They went fishing at Deception, roller-skating at Redcliffe, and some afternoons he and Milt went off alone to the Redcliffe Pictures. Milt was crazy about cartoons. He sat with his long legs drawn up, cracking pe
anuts, and afterwards acted it all out again for Jack's mother—Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Goofy, Pluto—running about all over the room being a rabbit, a tom-cat, a mouse, and reducing her to helpless laughter as she never would have been by the real thing. Once, walking home the beach way, he told Jack about the fossils he wanted to study: palaeontology—bones. He got excited, threw his own bones about, arms and legs, and Jack had to run backwards on his heels over the wet sand not to miss any of it, since so much of what Milt was telling was in the dance of his Adam's apple, the electric spikes of his crew-cut hair.
“How do you do it?” Jack shouted, excited himself now and breathless with trying to run backwards fast enough to stay in front. “How do you work it out? What they were like? If they've been extinct for millions of years? If all you've got is a few bones?”
“Logic,” Milt told him, looking wild. “There are laws. We don't get this way by accident, you know. We aren't just thrown together.” Though the way his limbs were flying about, as if they were about to dislocate and break loose of his frame, might have denied it. “The body's got laws, and the bones follow ‘em, just like everything else. It's a kind of—grammar—syntax. You know, everything fits and agrees. So if you've got one bit you can work out the rest, you can—resurrect it. By logic. But also by guessing right. There's a lot of guesswork involved, hunches. You've got to think yourself inside the thing, into the bones.”
It had all gone too fast for Jack. Running backwards wasn't the ideal way to hear something so important and take it in. But he felt, just the same, that in this shouted exchange he had got hold at last of an important clue, one that convinced him because, in some obscure part of himself, he already knew it. When they fell into step again, saying nothing now, just letting the fall of the waves fill the silence between them, they were together, and in a way that utterly settled him in his own skin.
It was a happy time for Jack's mother too.
A lively girl with ideas of her own, she had been brought up to despise a view of women in which dependency and a sweet incapacity for everything practical were the chief attributes of the eternally feminine.
“For heaven's sake,” she was fond of saying, "what's the advantage, I'd like to know, of sitting around in the dark until some man comes along who can fix a fuse.”
She knew how to fix a fuse, and use a soldering iron, and how to bowl overarm and putt a ball. She had done these things when Jack's father was there, and when he was gone had taught Jack to do them, but with some concern that in having only her to learn from he might be missing something, some male thing, beyond the mere acquiring of a competence, that would ground him in the world of men. So she was glad to have Milt around. Glad too that Jack had taken to him. He had a new sense of himself that she found attractive—she had found it attractive in his father, whom he more and more resembled—and she was grateful that Milt, out of a natural generosity, should have reserved for Jack something that was special. It was part of Milt's instinct for things that he knew how to draw back and leave room for something special between Jack and herself as well.
“No good asking you to play,” she would tease when they set up for cricket. And her mocking tone, which Milt only pretended not to recognise, kept him lightly in view, even as it lightly excluded him.
It was a tone Jack had never heard her use till now. And once he was alerted to it, he noticed something else as well. A little shift in her way of speaking—it was only on certain words—that was an imitation, a mockery perhaps, of Milt's. It occurred to him, but so fleetingly that he was barely conscious of it, that if he could determine which words, he would have a clue to what they talked about, Milt and his mother, when he was not there.
Meanwhile Milt's replies, all Yankee ceremony, had an edge of their own.
“No use at all, ma'am. None at all.” And as he said it he would lie back, extend his long legs and, with his arms folded under his head, prepare to take a nap.
He was grinning, so was Jack's mother, and Jack had the feeling that their game of two-man cricket was not the only game in play When his mother got hold of the bat she hit out with a flair, a keenness and accuracy, that had him running all over the yard.
In time he came to feel uncomfortable with all this. There was something in his mother's heightened glow on these occasions, when Milt lay sprawling in the grass, a loose spectator, not playing but none the less exerting a quiet attraction, that was more disturbing to Jack's fixed idea of her than other and more obvious changes—the ribbon she wore in her hair when they went skating, her acceptance now and then of a stick of gum.
He had a good think about it.
Milt, he decided, lying off to the side there, broke the clear line of force between batsman and bowler. His mother was too aware of him. Even more, he unsettled the map Jack carried in his head, in which the third point of their triangle, however far out of sight it might be, was already occupied.
They would be out on the pier at Deception, all three, their hand-lines trailing, stunned to a heap by the sun and with the glare off the water so strong that when you looked out across it everything dazzled and disappeared. Above the lapping, against the piles, of waves set off by a distant rowboat, Jack would catch a voice he could no longer characterize naming the peaks of the Glasshouse Mountains on the opposite shore: Coochin, Beerwah, Beerburrum, Ngungun, Coonowrin, Tibrogargan, Tiberoowuccum. Smokily invisible today in their dance over the plain, but nameable, even in a tongue in which they were no more than evocative syllables.
“Hey, kid! Jack! Don't jerk the line like that. Take it easy, eh?”
That was Milt. And his voice, with its unmistakable cadence, was sufficiently unlike the one Jack had been listening for that it was a comfort. It so plainly did not fit.
3
AMONG JACK‘Sspecial friends this year were two brothers, Gerald and Jamie Garrett, who were new down here. Tough State School kids, they swore, told dirty jokes, and could produce prodigious gobs of spit that they shot like bullets from between their teeth. But what gave them a special glamour in Jack's eyes was their father's occupation. Back home in Brisbane, Mr. Garrett was the projectionist at the Lyric Pictures where Jack went on Saturday afternoons, and was responsible as well for putting up the posters that appeared in three places on Jack's way to school and which on Monday mornings he read, right down to the smallest print, with an excitement that cast a glow over the whole week ahead.
What they proclaimed, these posters, was the existence of another world, of such modernity, such intensified energy and speed, of danger too, that their local one of weatherboard houses and bakers’ carts, unweeded pavements, and trams that filled the night sky with electric sparks, seemed by comparison flimsy and becalmed. America, that world was called. It moved on numbered highways at a hundred miles an hour. It was twenty storeys high, all steel and glass. It belonged to a century that for them was still to come. Jack hungered for it, and for the dramas that it would unfold, as for his own manhood.
He had looked for some reflection of all this in his mother's escorts. But once you had got to the end of whatever magic could be extracted from “Santa Fe" “Wisconsin” “Arkansas,” they had turned out to be ordinary fellows off farms, or small-town car salesmen or pharmacists’ assistants. As for Milt, he was just Milt. But in Mr. Garrett the power of that projected world was primary, and he found it undimin-ished in Gerald and Jamie as well, who would have been astonished to know that in Jack's eyes they were touched with all the menacing distinction of the gun-slinger or baby-faced killer.
There was a third brother. Arnold he was called. A year older than Jack, he was spending the first three weeks of the holidays at their grandfather's, out west. Gerald and Jamie, as if they needed his being there to know quite how they stood with one another and the world, were for ever evoking his opinion or using his approval or disapproval to justify their own. Before long the tantalising absence of this middle brother had become a vital aspect of the Garretts as Jack saw them, and he too found
himself looking forward to Arnold's arrival. “Arnold'll be here next week, eh?” Then it “Saturday.” “this arvo.”
But Arnold, when he got off the green bus and was there at last, was not at all what Jack had expected. The quality he found in the others, of menace and tough allure, far from being intensified in this third member of the family, appeared to have missed him altogether. Blond where the others were dark, and tanned and freckled, he seemed dreamy, distant. When they told him stories of what had been, for them, the high points of these last weeks, he listened, but in the way, Jack thought, that adults listen to kids. Not disdainfully, he was too easy-going to be disdainful, but as if he could no longer quite recall what it was like to be involved in adventures or crazes. When he left school next year he would be out west permanently. On the land.
His most prized possessions were a pair of scuffed riding boots that sat side by side under his camp-bed and a belt of plaited kangaroo hide that cinched in the waist of his shorts with a good seven or eight inches to spare. He had ridden buckjumpers. He could skin a rabbit.
He did not boast of these things. He was not the sort to draw attention to himself or be loud. But the assurance they gave him, the adult skills they represented, set in a different light the excitements that had marked their weeks down here; even the abandoned fuel tank that had drifted in one afternoon and which they had believed, for a long, breathtaking moment while it bobbed about just out of reach, might be a midget sub.