by David Malouf
It was Eric who broke it. “Come on, Colin,” he said. “Let's get you out of here.”
So it was over—or almost. In moving too quickly away under the double gaze of the inspector and the woman, Colin stumbled, very nearly fell, and found himself caught and supported by an arm that shot out from nowhere and belonged, when he looked up, to a young man in a crash-helmet who had been waiting at the counter to report a theft.
“Hey, steady on.”
“Sorry,” Colin said as he righted himself. Then, "Thanks.”
“She's right, mate.” The young man produced a grin that was all friendliness and good humour and a frankness that knew no guile.
“Come on,” Eric said, in a tone that suggested a growing apprehension at how accident-prone his new friend might be. “I'll get you back to the hotel, we can ring Coralie from there.”
Safely back in his room at the hotel, he splashed cold water over his face, and as soon as he had recovered a little, rang London. Emma's voice was thick with sleep.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”
He closed his eyes, and her breathing in his ear was so close that she might have been lying half-curled against his body in the dark.
“What is it?” she asked. “What time is it?”
“Nothing. It's nothing to worry about. Go on back to sleep.”
The closeness, the familiarity of her, collapsed the hemispheres, the vast spaces across which her voice was being projected towards him. With his eyes close-shut he could believe that the slight hissing he could hear in the gaps of her breathing came from the high-ceilinged room where she lay, their flat high up above Redcliffe Square, and felt himself settle in the stillness and order, even in its customary disorder, of their shared life: dishes left overnight in the sink, books on shelves, LPs, newspapers.
“Go back to sleep,” he said again. “I'm fine. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“No, it's nothing,” she was calling now, her head turned away from the mouthpiece. “It's Colin. From Australia.”
That would be Marcus. He saw the boy standing in striped flannel pyjamas and his Manchester United jersey at the door to their room.
He was sixteen and diabetic, so used to his disease and its regimen that you were barely aware of it except for the chocolate biscuits he carried in the pockets of his coat. He liked to go to discos. He was so easy and serious and assured that Colin, who, in the three years that he and Emma had been together, had grown fond of the boy, was sometimes intimidated. He expected the young to be confused, as he had been.
“That was Marcus,” Emma told him unnecessarily. “Are you sure you're all right?”
“Yes, I'm fine, I'll be there on Friday. Go on back to sleep. I'll ring in the morning.”
He listened for a moment after she hung up to the different quality of silence—which was no longer that of their bedroom and the warmer, reassuring spaces of the flat, but the white noise, the rubbing together in a soft, functional hissing, of a myriad random particles colliding and parting in the high wastes of air.
At seven that evening, uneasily assured and with a puffiness about the lip that gave him a disreputable look, which must have been a puzzle to those readers of newspaper and magazine articles for whom he was “distinguished,” he read to a modest gathering at a popular bookshop, then fielded the usual questions, some effusively respectful but others aggrieved. What did he think of the place? Why had it taken him so long to come back? How had his work suffered by his having abandoned, as they said, his roots? Still feeling battered, he moved to one of the vast plate-glass windows and looked out.
The city he knew, and in one part of himself still moved in, was out there somewhere, but out of sight, underground. Unkillably uncontrollably green. Swarming with insects and rotting with a death that would soon once again be life, its salt light, by day, blinding to the eye and deadening of all thought, its river now, under fathoms of moonlight, bursting with bubbles, festering, fermenting.
Inescapable. Far from having put it too far behind him, he felt entangled, caught.
He thought of the flying foxes hanging in furry rows under the boughs of the Moreton Bay figs, the metho-drinkers on the Victoria golf-links, the teenage blacks and dropouts on their cots at the watch-house or in gutters in the lanes off Mary and Margaret Streets. The frowsy blonde in the back room of a massage parlour, the taxi-driver with one hairy arm out the window, drumming impatiently on the roof. And in a darkened room somewhere, a man, restrained or sedated, who long after the scars had healed on his neck and chest would go on stalking down midnight pavements the one who had wronged him.
Later, in the cool of a room nine storeys above the street, he fell into a reviving sleep and was for a time nowhere—or nowhere that can be found on any map.
He was standing at a street corner, lounging against a wall in the neon dark and watching the headlamps of a truck rise slowly between lightpoles over the crown of a hill. He did not move. Even when the truck drew level, stopped, and he was called to. Till, being called a second time, he pushed away from the wall, ambled to the kerb, and setting his hand on the high cabin window, listened, shrugged his shoulders, looked to where others, already blindfolded, were packed together in the open truck, and shrugged again. Then, blindfolded himself, he was hauled up to join them, and they began a long ride out through the sleeping suburbs towards wherever it was out there in the foothills that the green stuff, the dream stuff, was.
The truck came to a halt, high among insect voices. He shuffled to the edge of the tray, a little breathless. How long a drop was it? He put his hand out, feeling air. Then there was a hand. He had only to take it and launch off.
And now, in a stretch of time where before and after had no meaning, in which none of the things had yet occurred that had so shaken his world and none of the people who most mattered to him had yet left his life or come into it, or they had and he was not yet aware of it—in that neither before nor after, he was high up under the floorboards of the house, and though the light was almost gone, he knew that the pale stems in which he could see the endless pushing upwards of a liquid green were the stems of gladioli, and that the great weight of darkness in his arms, which was still warm, was Maxie. The heart he could feel beating had a worm in it but had not yet stopped. It still made a regular, reassuring thump against his ribs.
He heard them call. They were calling to him.
“Come on out now. Come out,” and a hand was stretched towards him.
But he would not for a while yet, for a good while yet, respond to the voices, or reach out and put his own into the outstretched hand.
Night Training
The day Greg Newsome turned seventeen he joined the University Air Squadron. It was 1951. The memory of one war, which had been in progress all through his childhood, was still strong in him, gathering to it all the appealing mementoes and moods of those years, and the Cold War had recently thrown up another conflict, a smaller one, in Korea. War seemed to him, and to others like him, a natural thing. It galvanized people's energies and drew them to a pitch. It clarified meanings. It held you in the line of history. It also cleansed the spirit by offering occasions where mere animal energy and the noblest aspirations could meet at a point of vivid exultation, and mind and body, which at a certain age seem like divergent states of being, were instantly reconciled.
When Greg went to be medically examined he had to wait for more than an hour in a poky enclosure with walls of three-ply. There were a dozen other fellows there, on benches; he didn't know a single one of them. He plunged into his book, a Loeb Classic. When he was called at last he had to strip and sit on a chair to one side of the examiner's desk.
The man was a civilian but with one of those handlebar moustaches that in those days still evoked the image of a fighter pilot in the war. He looked at Greg's birth date, then at Greg, and was silent. Greg blushed. It was odd to be sitting stark naked on a chair beside a desk with his flesh sticking to
varnish. He hung on mentally to his Plato.
“So,” the doctor said, "we've got around to you lot.” His face expressed a profound weariness.
On their first camp three months later he was assigned to the Intelligence Unit and shared a hut with the other baby of the squadron, a country boy from Harrisville, Cam Brierly They were so much the youngest that they took it in turns on official mess nights, when all the officers of the station were assembled, to be Mister Vice: that is, to reply to toasts and initiate the passing of the port. It was a role in which you appeared to be the centre of the occasion, but only in the clownish sense of being a king of fools.
They stuck together, he and Cam. Not because they had anything in common but to conceal from others their appalling innocence.
Their task by day was to catalogue and reshelve the station library, under the eye of the Chief Education Officer, Dave Kitchener, a cynical fellow who did nothing himself but lounge behind his desk and was by turns a bully and a tease. He resented having them fobbed off on him.
At night, after dinner, while other fellows got drunk, played darts or snooker, or sang round the piano in true wartime style, they tried, one after another, a series of exotic liqueurs of lurid colour and with enticing names: Curaao, Crme de Menthe, Parfait d'Amour. They were sickly, every one.
The mess late at night got rowdy, then out of hand. Understanding, though they never admitted it, that if they hung around too long they would very likely become butts, for their youth was in itself ridiculous, they slipped away before eleven and were soon asleep.
One of the wildest figures at these nightly gatherings was Dave Kitchener, the officer who gave them such a hard time by day. A bit of an outsider with his fellow officers, he was always looking for trouble. When he got a few drinks under his belt he turned sarcastic, then aggressive, and went on the prowl; they had, more than once, caught him glaring in their direction. If he once got up, they thought, and came across, it would be to lash them with his tongue. They knew him by now. He couldn't be trusted to keep to the rules. He might pass muster in the office, and on official parade, but in the mess at night his uniform was loosened at the neck, and his hair, which was longer than permitted, fell uncombed over his brow. He had a sodden look.
Six or seven years back—Greg had the story from a fellow who had known him at Charters Towers when he was a geography master at All Souls—he had been caught climbing into the room of a woman from the sister school, Blackheath, and after a scandal that was quickly hushed up, they were both dismissed. One night when there were women in the mess, air force nurses, Dave Kitchener went up to one of them and threw a glass of beer in her face.
They had been in camp for two weeks when he appeared for the first time in their hut.
It must have been between one and two in the morning. Greg stirred, aware of a presence in the room that registered itself first as a slight pressure on his consciousness, then on the mattress beside him. He woke and there he was, sitting on the edge of the bed. Just sitting. Quietly absorbed, as if he had come in, tired, to his own room and was too sleepy to undress.
He's made a mistake, Greg thought.
His cap was off, his tie loose, and there was a bottle in his hand.
Greg lay quiet. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He didn't know what to do. When the man realised at last that he was being watched, he turned, fixed his eyes on Greg, made a contemptuous sound deep in his throat, and laughed. He lifted the bottle in ironic salute. Then, reaching for his cap, which he had tossed carelessly on to the bed, he set it on his head, got to his feet, and took a stance.
“All right, cadet,” he said. “Get out of there.”
Greg was astonished.
“Didn't you hear? That was an order.” His nails flicked the stripes on his sleeve. “Get your mate up. I said, get up!”
Greg rolled out of bed. He was out before he properly realised it. This must be a dream, he thought, till the cold air struck him. Skirting the officer, who stood in a patch of moonlight in the centre of the room, he crossed to Cam's bed and hung there in a kind of limbo, looking down at his friend. He still couldn't believe this was happening.
“Go on,” the man told him.
Cam was sound asleep, and Greg, still touched by a state that seems commonplace till you are unnaturally hauled out of it, was struck by something he had never felt till now: the mystery, a light but awesome barrier, that surrounds a sleeping man. Which is meant to be his protection, and which another, for reasons too deep to be experienced as more than a slight tingling at the hair roots, is unwilling to violate.
Cam's head rested on the upper part of his arm, which was thrust out over the edge of the mattress. Under the covers his legs were moving, as if he were slowly running from something, or burrowing deeper into the dark.
Greg glanced across his shoulder at the officer, hoping, before this new breach was made, that he would reconsider and go away. But the man only nodded and made an impatient sound. Greg put his hand out. Gingerly, with just the tips of his fingers, he touched Cam's shoulder, then clasped it and shook.
But Cam was difficult. He put up a floppy arm and pushed Greg off. Even when Greg had got him at last into a sitting position he wasn't fully awake. Sleep was like a membrane he was wrapped in that would not break. It made everything about him hazy yet bright: his cheeks, his eyes when they jerked open. Greg began to be impatient. “Come on, Cam, get up,” he whispered. “Stop mucking about.”
The man, standing with the cap at a rakish angle, laughed and took a swig from his bottle.
“Wasser matter?” Cam muttered. The words were bubbly. “ ‘S middle o’ the night.”
Greg hauled him up, cursing, and propped him there: he kept giggling like a child and going loose. “Cut it out,” Greg hissed, staggering a little in the attempt to hold him. He hadn't realised before what a spindly, overgrown fellow he was. But at least he was on his feet, if not yet fully present. Greg turned to the officer.
Dave Kitchener had been watching his struggles with a mixture of amusement and contempt. He seated himself, as before, on the edge of Greg's bunk, his legs apart, the cap pushed now to the back of his head, his feet firmly planted. He was enjoying himself.
“Right,” he said. “Now. Get stripped.”
Greg was outraged. After all his exertions with Cam, it still wasn't finished. This is wrong, he told himself as he started on the buttons of his pyjama jacket. He shouldn't be wearing his cap that way. He shouldn't be sitting on my bed. He wrenched at the buttons in a hopeless rage, the rage a child feels at being unjustly punished, feeling it prickle in his throat. Tears, that meant. If he wasn't careful he would burst into tears. His concern now was to save himself from that last indignity. He lifted his singlet over his head, undid the cord of his pants. They were in winter flannels. In the mornings here, when you skipped out barefoot to take a piss, the ground was crunchy with frost.
Cam was still dazed. He stood but was reeling. Greg looked towards the officer; then, with deliberate roughness, began to undo the buttons on Cam's jacket.
“We've got to take them off,” he explained as to a three-year-old. When they were naked Dave Kitchener had them drill, using a couple of ink-stained rulers. He kept them at it for nearly an hour.
He did not come every night. Three or four might pass and they would be left undisturbed, then Greg would be aware again of that change of pressure in the room.
After the first occasion there was no need for commands. As soon as Greg was awake, Dave Kitchener would rise, stand aside for him to pass, and Greg would go obediently to Cam's bed and begin the difficult exercise of getting him to his feet. It was always the same. Cam had to be dragged to the occasion. He resisted, he pushed Greg off. Laughing in his sleep in a silly manner and muttering sentences or syllables from a dialogue of which only the one side could be heard, he reeled and clung on.
Dave Kitchener showed no interest in these proceedings. They were Greg's affair. He left him to it.
And because the officer no longer made himself responsible, Greg found all this intimate business of getting Cam out of bed and awake and stripped more repugnant than ever. Damn him! he thought—meaning Cam. He had come to see this peculiarity in the other boy, his reluctance to come awake, as a form of stubborn innocence. It set his own easy wakefulness in a shameful light. He resented it, and his resentment carried over into their dealings in the library as well. They began to avoid one another.
Meanwhile the waking and drilling went on. And afterwards, while they stood naked and shivering but at ease, the lectures.
Each morning the squadron was broken up into specialist units, but in the afternoons after mess, they came together for a series of pep talks that were intended to develop a spirit of solidarity in them as well as providing an introduction to the realities of war. Some of these talks were given by men, bluff self-conscious fellows not much older than themselves, who were just back from the fighting in Korea. They made everything, even the rough stuff, sound like Red Rover or some other game, where getting a bloody knee, or your shirt torn, was the risk you took for being in it. One fellow told them that his liaison officers up there had been called Cum Suk and Bum Suk, then went on to describe the effects of something called napalm.
In the break between lectures they stood about smoking, or formed circles and tossed a medicine-ball.
Dave Kitchener's lectures were of a different sort, and they came, after a time, to signify for Greg the real point of these midnight sessions, for which the rest, the dreamlike ritual of ordering and presenting arms, of turning left, right, about face, coming to attention, standing at ease and easy, was a mere preliminary, a means of breaking them down so that they would not resist. They drilled. Then they stood at ease, they stood easy, and Dave Kitchener, walking in slow circles around them, began.