The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  The telephone rings in the hallway. You answer. There are pips, then.

  Uncle Charles says in a jokey kind of voice: "This is GAY 437 calling. I am approaching Bulahdelah.” The air roaring through the car makes his voice sound weird, like a spaceman's. Far off. It is like a spaceship homing in.

  Later he calls again. “This is GAY 437,” the voice announces. “I am approaching Wauchope.”

  “Don't any one of you pick up that phone,” my grandfather orders.

  “But, Grandpa,” my brother Ben says, "it might be Mrs. McTaggart.” Mrs. McTaggart is a widow and our neighbour.

  “It won't be,” Grandpa says. “It will be him.”

  He is a stranger to us, as if he had never been born. This is what Grandpa says. My grandmother says nothing. She was in labour for thirty-two hours with Uncle Charles, he was her first. For her, it can never be as if he had never been born, even if she too has cast him out. I heard my mother say this. My father told her to shush.

  You can see his car coming from far off. You can see it approaching. It is very like a spaceship, silver and fast; it flashes. You can see its windscreen catching the sun as it rounds the curves between the big Norfolk Island pines of the golf course and the hospital, then its flash flash between the trees along the river. When it pulls up on the road outside our gate there is a humming like something from another world, then all four windows go up of their own accord, all together, with no one winding, and Uncle Charles swings the driver's door open and steps out.

  He is taller than Uncle James or Uncle Matt, taller even than Grandpa, and has what the Book calls beautiful locks. They are blond. “Bleached,” my grandfather tells us. “Peroxide!” He is tanned and has the whitest teeth I have ever seen.

  The corruption is invisible. The fire is under his clothes and inside him, hidden beneath the tan.

  The dogs arrive, yelping. All bunched together, they go bounding over the grass to the fence, leaping up on one another's backs with their tails wagging to lick his hands as he reaches in to fondle them.

  “Don't come any closer,” my grandfather shouts. “We can see you from there.”

  His voice is gruff, as if he had suddenly caught cold, which in fact he never does, or as if a stranger was speaking for him. Uncle Charles has broken his heart. Grandpa has cast him out, as you cut off a limb so that the body can go on living. But he likes to see that he is still okay. That it has not yet begun.

  And in fact he looks wonderful—as far as you can see. No marks.

  Once when he got out of the car he had his shirt off. His chest had scoops of shadow and his shoulders were golden and so smooth they gave off a glow. His whole body had a sheen to it.

  Uncle James and Uncle Matt are hairy men like Esau, they are shaggy. But his chest and throat and arms were like an angel's, smooth and polished as wood.

  You see the whiteness of his teeth, and when he takes off his sunglasses the sparkle of his eyes, and his smoothness and the blondness of his hair, but you do not see the marks. This is because he does not come close.

  My grandmother stands with her hands clasped, and breathes but does not speak. Neither does my mother, though I have heard her say to my father, in an argument: "Charlie's just a big kid. He never grew up. He was always such fun to be with.”

  “Helen!" my father said.

  I know my grandmother would like Uncle Charles to come closer so that she could really see how he looks. She would like him to come in and eat. There is always enough, we are blessd. There is an ivory ring with his initial on it, C, in the dresser drawer with the napkins, and when we count the places at table she pretends to make a mistake, out of habit, and sets one extra. But not the ring. The place stays empty all through our meal. No one mentions it.

  I know it is Grandpa Morpeth's heart that is broken, because he has said so, but it is Grandma Morpeth who feels it most. She likes to touch. She is always lifting you up and hugging. She does not talk much.

  When we go in to eat and take up our napkins and say grace and begin passing things, he does not leave; he stays there beside his car in the burning sunlight. Sometimes he walks up and down outside the fence and shouts. It is hot. You can feel the burning sweat on him. Then, after a time, he stops shouting and there is silence. Then the door of his car slams and he roars off.

  I would get up if I was allowed and watch the flash flash of metal as he takes the curves round the river, past the hospital, then the golf course. But by the time everyone is finished and we are allowed to get down, he is gone. There is just the wide green pasture, open and empty, with clouds making giant shadows and the trees by the river in a silvery shimmer, all their leaves humming a little and twinkling as they turn over in a breeze that otherwise you might not have felt.

  Evil is in the world because of men and their tendency to sin. Men fell into error so there is sin, and because of sin there is death. Once the error has got in, there is no fixing it. Not in this world. But it is sad, that, it is hard. Grandpa says it has to be; that we must do what is hard to show that we love what is good and hate what is sinful, and the harder the thing, the more love we show Him.

  But I don't understand about love any more than I do about death. It seems harder than anyone can bear to stand on one side of the fence and have Uncle Charles stand there on the other. As if he was already dead, and death was stronger than love, which surely cannot be.

  When we sit down to our meal, with his chair an empty space, the food we eat has no savour. I watch Grandpa Morpeth cut pieces of meat with his big hands and push them between his teeth, and chew and swallow, and what he is eating, I know, is ashes. His heart is closed on its grief. And that is what love is. That is what death is. Us inside at the table, passing things and eating, and him outside, as if he had never been born; dead to us, but shouting. The silver car with its dusky windows that roll up of their own accord and the phone in there in its cradle is the chariot of death, and the voice announcing, "I am on the way, I am approaching Gloucester, I am approaching Taree"—what can that be but the angel of death?

  The phone rings in the house. It rings and rings. We pause at the sink, in the middle of washing up, my grandmother and my mother and me, but do not look at one another. My grandfather says: "Don't touch it. Let it ring.” So it keeps ringing for a while, then stops. Like the shouting.

  This Easter for the first time he did not come. We waited for the telephone to ring and I went out, just before we sat down to our meal, to look for the flash of his car along the river. Nothing. Just the wide green landscape lying still under the heat, with not a sign of movement in it.

  That night I had a dream, and in the dream he did come. We stood below the verandah and watched his car pull up outside the fence. The smoky windows went up, as usual. But when the door swung open and he got out, it was not just his shirt he had taken off, but all his clothes, even his shoes and socks. Everything except his sunglasses. You could see his bare feet in the grass, large and bony, and he glowed, he was smooth all over, like an angel.

  He began to walk up to the fence. When he came to it he stood still a moment, frowning. Then he put his hand out and walked on, walked right through it to our side, where we were waiting. What I thought, in the dream, was that the lumpy coarse-stemmed grass was the same on both sides, so why not? If one thick blade didn't know any more than another that the fence was there, why should his feet?

  When he saw what he had done he stopped, looked back at the fence, and laughed. All around his feet, little daisies and gaudy, bright pink clover flowers began to appear, and the petals glowed like metal, molten in the sun but cool, and spread uphill to where we were standing, and were soon all around us and under our shoes. Insects, tiny grasshoppers, sprang up and went leaping, and glassy snails no bigger than your little fingernail hung on the grass stems, quietly feeding. He took off his sunglasses, looked down at them, and laughed. Then looked across to where we were, waiting. I had such a feeling of lightness and happiness it was as if my bones had b
een changed into clouds, just as the tough grass had been changed into flowers.

  I knew it was a dream. But dreams can be messages. The feeling that comes with them is real, and if you hold on to it you can make the rest real. So I thought: if he can't come to us, I must go to him.

  So this is what I do. I picture him. There on the other side of the fence, naked, his feet pressing the springy grass. Stretch out your hand, I tell him. Like this. I stretch my hand out. If you have faith, the fence will open for you, as the sea did before Moses when he reached out his hand. He looks puzzled. No, I tell him, don't think about it. Just let it happen.

  It has not happened yet. But it will. Then, when he is close at last, when he has passed through the fence and is on our side, I will stretch out my hand and touch him, just under the left breast, and he will be whole. He will feel it happening to him and laugh. His laughter will be the proof. I want this more than anything. It is my heart's desire.

  Each night now I lie quiet in the dark and go over it. The winding up of the smoky windows of the chariot of death. The swinging open of the door. Him stepping out and looking towards me behind his sunglasses. Me telling him what I tell myself:

  Open your heart now. Let it happen. Come closer, closer. See? Now reach out your hand.

  Dream Stuff

  1

  C

  olin's earliest memory was of the day his mother's Dober-man Maxie died, of heartworm, they said; he had dragged himself up under the house near the front steps and would not come out.

  Late in the morning Colin slipped away and, crawling on his hands and knees in the dirt, though the place had always scared him—it was all dustballs and spiders, some of them just shells but others alive and skittering—he had gone up after Maxie and crouched there holding the big floppy creature in his arms.

  The slats that closed in their under-the-house made the place dim, even in daylight. But up where Maxie lay, still drawing breath, there was the fleshy green light of the gladioli stems that rose stiffly on either side of their front steps.

  Colin stayed up there the whole day, hugging Maxie and listening to footsteps in the rooms overhead: Mrs. Hull going from room to room as she swept and made beds, then coming heavy-footed down the hallway to the postman, then going out the back again for the ice.

  About lunchtime they began calling to him. Casually at first, then with increasing anxiety. Mrs. Hull, then his mother, then, joining them, the first of the ladies who had arrived for Bridge. Finally—it was afternoon by now—his father, who had been called home from work.

  “Colin,” his father said severely from far off where their wash-tubs stood, "come on out of there.”

  But he turned his face away and would not be persuaded.

  His father, handing his jacket to Mr. Hull, started up through the forest of stumps, crouched at first, then crawling, then wriggling on his belly. His tie was loose, his cufflinks jingled. Colin could hear them and the heavy breathing as his father emerged from the middle darkness and came up to where there was light.

  “Colin,” he said, "what are you doing? Come on out, son. It's time to come out.”

  “No,” he said. “Not unless Maxie does.”

  “Colin, Maxie is very sick, we can't help him. Now, be a good fellow and come out.” The voice was exasperated but calm, holding on hard against shortness of breath rather than shortness of temper.

  Colin had no memory of what happened next. The story as they told it simply trailed off, or led, in that anthology of anecdote and legend that is family history, to another story altogether. The occasion remained suspended at a point where he was still crammed into the close space under the floorboards, with the big dog warm in his arms and the whole weight of the house on his shoulders, while his father, dark-faced and wheezy with hay-fever, stretched a hand towards him, all the fingers tense to grasp or be grasped, and his brow greasy with sweat; as if he were the one who was trapped up there dying—the worm at his heart taking all his breath.

  This image was overlaid with another from perhaps a year later.

  They were staying at his grandfather's house at Woody Point. His father was teaching him to swim. One afternoon, after several attempts to make him let go and strike out for himself, his father carried him out of his depth in the still, salty water and, breaking contact, stepped away. “Now, Colin,” he commanded, "swim.”

  His father's face, just feet away, was grim and unyielding. He floundered, flinging his arms about wildly, gasping, his throat tight with the saltiness that was both the ocean and his own tears. He dared not open his mouth to cry out. He choked, while his father, his features those of a stony god, continued to urge him and back away.

  As Colin saw himself, he wore, as he gasped and thrashed at the surface, the same look of desperation that he had seen in his father when, with his chin thrust up and the muscles of his neck horribly distended as his whole body fought for breath, he lay stretched on his belly in the dust.

  So it was from somewhere far up under their house at Red Hill, or choking in the waters off Woody Point, that he woke now to his hotel bedroom and a climate established somewhere in an unearthly season between autumn and early spring, in a place that might have been anywhere but was in fact, for the first time in nearly thirty years, home—that is, the city he had grown up in, though when he went to the window there was little that recalled that exotic and far-off place save a lingering warmth out of his dream and a tightening of anxiety in his throat.

  All that belonged to the interior view. Down below, in the real one, the big country town of his childhood, with its wharves and bond-stores and two-storeyed verandahed pubs, had been levelled to make way for flyovers, multi-level car parks, tower blocks that flashed like tinfoil and warped what they reflected—which was steel girders, other towers like themselves and cranes that swung like giant insects from cloud to cloud. Brisbane, as his cousin Coralie put it, “gone ahead.” It was a phrase people used here with a mixture of uneasy pride and barbed, protective humour, expecting him, out of affection for the slatternly, poor-white city of his youth, to deplore this new addiction to metal and glass.

  Well, he did and he did not. It wasn't nostalgia for a world that had long since disappeared under fathoms of poured concrete that had led him, in half a dozen fictions, to raise it again in the density of tropical vegetation, timber soft to the thumb, the drumming of rain on corrugated-iron roofs. What drew him back was something altogether more personal, which belonged to the body and its hot affinities, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing at the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone he knew now would never appear.

  He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and that his original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather. In a fig tree taller than a building and alive with voices not its own, or a line of palings with a gap you could crawl through into a wilderness of nut-grass and cosmos and saw-legged grasshoppers as big as wrens.

  It was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed. It fell on the new city with the same promise of an ordinary grace as on the old. He greeted it with the delight of recovery, not only of the vision but of himself.

  He had left the place when he was not yet twenty. That was the year his mother went back to Sydney.

  Twenty-three years earlier, his father, on a weekend rowing trip, had discovered her there and brought her north. She had never really settled. When she put the old house up for auction and went home, Colin had seized the chance to make his own escape. He went to London. Till now he had not come back.

  In the twenty years that they lived together he had found his mother a puzzle, and where his need for affection was concerned, a frustration.

  A lean ghost of a woman, intense, but not in his way, she had prowled the house with an ashtray in her hand, d
istractedly chain-smoking, argued with friends on the phone, mostly men-friends, gone to committee meetings and charity drives, and was always interested, out of a sense of duty, in his doings but reticent about her own. Dissatisfied, he thought, maybe desperate—he could not tell, and he knew she would not have wanted him to ask. She made no enquiry about his feelings. They got through his childhood and adolescence without ever being close.

  Then something unexpected occurred. Freed by distance, they found a way of being intimate at last. Perhaps it was the writing itself that did it. Anyway, the letters she sent him, warm, inventive, humourously critical of everything she came across (he recognised, he thought, and with curiosity now, the tone of her telephone conversations), were those of a woman he more and more wanted to know. So much of what he was haunted by, all that underworld of his early memories and their crooked history, was in her keeping. If he was ever to get to the heart of it he would need her as his guide.

  He no longer tormented himself with the wish that things had been different. They had made him what he was. But he did want to know why the world he had grown up in had been so harsh and uncompromising, and had made so little room for love.

  Then there was the question of his father. His father had disappeared in the waters off Crete in May 1942. Swimming out on a night of no moon to be rescued along with other remnants of a defeated army by the British submarine Torbay, he had tired and gone under.

  Colin, who was just six, had believed for a time that he was actually there and had seen it happen, but understood at last that he had been imposing on that moonless night on the far side of the world the only clear memories he had of his father and their time together; though even then there was part of him in which his presence out there, in those dark unknown waters, remained more vivid than either.

  Each year as Christmas drew near he would suggest to his mother that he should come and visit. They would see one another at last and talk.