by David Malouf
He was still there and had turned a whole quarter-circle. She saw his slight figure with the slumped shoulders in profile. But what was happening? He cast no shadow. His shadow had disappeared. The iron tap cast a shadow and the young man didn't. It took her a good minute, in which she was genuinely alarmed, to see that what she had taken for the shadow of the tap was a dark patch of lawn where the water dripped. So that was all right. It was midday.
She did a strange thing then. Without having made any decision about it, she went into the kitchen, gathered the ingredients, and made up a batch of spiced biscuits with whole peanuts in them; working fast with the flour, the butter, the spice, and forgetting herself in the pleasure of getting the measurements right by the feel of the thing, the habit.
They were biscuits that had no special name. She had learned to make them when she was just a child, from a girl they had had in the country. The routine of mixing and spooning the mixture on to greaseproof paper let her back into a former self whose motions were lighter, springier, more sure of ends and means. She hadn't made these biscuits—hadn't been able to bring herself to make them—since Greg died. They were his favourites. Now, while they were cooking and filling the house with their spicy sweetness, she did another thing she hadn't intended to do. She went to Greg's bedroom at the end of the hall, across from where she and Jack slept, and began to take down from the wall the pennants he had won for swimming, the green one with gold lettering, the purple one, the blue, and his lifesaving certificates, and laid them carefully on the bed. She brought a carton from under the stairs and packed them in the bottom. Then she cleared the bookshelf and took down the model planes, and put them in the carton as well. Then she removed from a drawer of the desk a whole mess of things: propelling pencils and pencil-stubs, rubber-bands, tubes of glue, a pair of manacles, a pack of playing cards that if you were foolish enough to take one gave you an electric shock. She put all these things into the carton, along with a second drawerful of magazines and loose-leaf notebooks, and carried the carton out. Then she took clean sheets and made the bed.
By now the biscuits were ready to be taken from the oven. She counted them, there were twenty-three. Without looking up to where the young man was standing, she opened the kitchen window and set them, sweetly smelling of spice, on the window ledge. Then she went back and sat on Greg's bed while they cooled.
She looked round the blank walls, wondering, now that she had stripped them, what a young man of twenty-eight might have filled them with, and discovered with a pang that she could not guess.
It was then that another figure slipped into her head.
In her middle years at school there had been a boy who sat two desks in front of her called Stevie Caine. She had always felt sorry for him because he lived alone with an aunt and was poor. The father had worked for the railways but lost his job after a crossing accident and killed himself. It was Stevie Caine this young man reminded her of. His shoulders too had been narrow and stooped, his face unnaturally pallid, his wrists bony and raw. Stevie's hair was mouse-coloured and had stuck out in wisps behind the ears; his auntie cut it, they said, with a pudding-basin. He smelled of scrubbing-soap. Too poor to go to the pictures on Saturday afternoons, or to have a radio and hear the serials, he could take no part in the excited chatter and argument through which they were making a world for themselves. When they ate their lunch he sat by himself on the far side of the yard, and she alone had guessed the reason: it was because the metal lunch-tin that his father had carried to the railway had nothing in it, or at best a slice of bread and dripping. But poor as he was, Stevie had not been resentful—that was the thing that had most struck her. She felt he ought to have been. And his face sometimes, when he was excited and his Adam's apple worked up and down, was touched at the cheekbones with such a glow of youthfulness and joy that she had wanted to reach out and lay her fingers very gently to his skin and feel the warmth, but thought he might misread the tenderness that filled her (which certainly included him but was for much more beside) as girlish infatuation or, worse still, pity. So she did nothing.
Stevie Caine had left school when he was just fourteen and went like his father to work at the railway. She had seen him sometimes in a railway worker's uniform, black serge, wearing a black felt hat that made him look bonier than ever about the cheekbones and chin and carrying the same battered lunch-tin. Something in his youthful refusal to be bitter or subdued had continued to move her. Even now, years later, she could see the back of his thin neck, and might have leaned out, no longer caring if she was misunderstood, and laid her hand to the chapped flesh.
When he was eighteen he had immediately joined up and was immediately killed; she had seen it in the papers—just the name.
It was Stevie Caine this young man resembled, as she had last seen him in the soft hat and railway worker's serge waistcoat, with the sleeves rolled on his stringy arms. There had been nothing between them, but she had never forgotten. It had to do, as she saw it, with the two forms of injustice: the one that is cruel but can be changed, and the other kind— the tipping of a thirteen-year-old boy off the saddle of his bike into a bottomless pit—that cannot; with that and an empty lunch-tin that she would like to have filled with biscuits with whole peanuts in them that have no special name.
She went out quickly now (the young man was still there on the lawn beyond the window) and counted the biscuits, which were cool enough to be put into a barrel. There were twenty-three, just as before.
He stayed there all afternoon and was still there among the deepening shadows when Jack came in. She was pretty certain now of what he was but didn't want it confirmed—and how awful if you walked up to someone, put your hand out to see if it would go through him, and it didn't.
They had tea, and Jack, after a shy worried look in her direction, which she affected not to see, took one of the biscuits and slowly ate it. She watched. He was trying not to show how broken up he was. Poor Jack!
Twenty-two.
Later, while he sat over his chess set and the mechanical voice told him what moves he should make on its behalf, she ventured to the window and peered through. It was, very gently, raining, and the streetlights were blurred and softened. Slow cars passed, their tyres swishing in the wet. They pushed soft beams before them.
The young man stood there in the same spot. His shabby clothes were drenched and stuck to him. The felt hat was also drenched, and droplets of water had formed at the brim, on one side filled with light, a half-circle of brilliant dots.
“Mustn't it be awful,” she said, "to be out there on a night like this and have nowhere to go? There must be so many of them. Just standing about in the rain, or sleeping in it.”
Something in her tone, which was also flat, but filled with an emotion that deeply touched and disturbed him, made the man leave his game and come to her side. They stood together a moment facing the dark wall of glass, then she turned, looked him full in the face, and did something odd: she reached out towards him and her hand bumped against his ribs—that is how he thought of it: a bump. It was the oddest thing! Then impulsively, as if with sudden relief, she kissed him.
I have so much is what she thought to herself.
Next morning, alone again, she cleared away the breakfast things, washed and dried up, made a grocery list. Only then did she go to the window.
It was a fine clear day and there were two of them, alike but different; both pale and hopeless looking, thin-shouldered, unshaven, wear- ing shabby garments, but not at all similar in feature. They did not appear to be together. That is, they did not stand close, and there was nothing to suggest that they were in league or that the first had brought the other along or summoned him up. But there were two of them just the same, as if some process were involved. Tomorrow, she guessed, there would be four, and the next day sixteen; and at last—for there must be millions to be drawn on—so many that there would be no place on the lawn for them to stand, not even the smallest blade of grass. They would spill
out into the street, and from there to the next street as well—there would be no room for cars to get through or park—and so it would go on till the suburb, and the city and a large part of the earth was covered. This was just the start.
She didn't feel at all threatened. There was nothing in either of these figures that suggested menace. They simply stood. But she thought she would refrain from telling Jack till he noticed it himself. Then they would do together what was required of them.
Sorrows and Secrets
You've fallen on yer feet, son, you're in luck. This is the university ‘v hard knocks you've dropped into but I've taken a fancy to yer. I'll see to it the knocks aren't too solid.”
It was the foreman speaking, in a break on the boy's first day. The five of them had knocked off just at eleven and were sitting about on logs, or sprawled on the leaves of the clearing, having a smoke and drinking coppery tea.
The foreman himself had made the tea. Gerry had followed him about, watching carefully how he should trawl the billy through the scummy water so that what he drew was good and clear, how to make a fire, how the billy should hang, when to put in the tea and how much. The foreman was particular. From now on Gerry would make the tea. The foreman was confident he would make it well and that he would do all right at the rest of his work as well. The foreman was taking an interest.
He was a sandy, sad-eyed fellow of maybe forty, with a grey flannel vest instead of a shirt. Gerry felt immediately that he was a man to be trusted, though not an easy man to get along with, and guessed that it was his own newness that made him so ready on this occasion to talk. With the others he was reserved, even hostile. When they sat down to their tea he had set himself apart and then indicated, with a gesture of his tin mug, that Gerry should sit close by. Gerry observed, through the thin smoke of the fire, that the other fellows were narrowly watching, but with no more than tolerant amusement, as they licked their cigarette-papers and rolled them between thumb and finger. As if to say: "Ol’ Claude's found an ear to bash.”
They were quiet fellows in their thirties, rough-looking but cleanshaven, and one of them was a quarter-caste called Slinger. The others were Charlie and Kev. Gerry was to share a hut with them. The foreman Claude had his own sleeping quarters on the track to the thunder-box. He was permanent.
They were working for a Mister McPhearson, a shadowy figure known only to Claude; and even Claude had seen him less often than he let on. They were on McPhearson's land, using McPhearson's equipment, and it was his timber they were felling and to him, finally, that Claude was responsible. His name was frequently on the foreman's lips, especially when there was some question of authority beyond which there could be no appeal. “Don’ ast me, ast McPhearson,” he'd say. And then humourously: "If you can find ‘im.” Or: "Well now, there you'd be dealin’ with McPhearson. That'd be his department,” and there was something in Claude's smile as he said it that was sly. Inside, he was laughing outright.
Claude had a preference for mysteries. If McPhearson's name hadn't been stamped so clearly on all their equipment they might have decided he was one of Claude's humourous inventions.
Gerry had been sent here to learn, the hard way, about life. It was his father's intention that he should discover at first hand that his advantages (meaning Vine Brothers, which was one of the biggest machine-tool operations in the state) were accidental, had not been earned by him, and were in no way deserved; they did not constitute a proof of superiority. His mother spoiled him, as she did all of them. She had let him believe he was special. That's what his father said. He was out here to learn that he was not. The job had been arranged through a fellow his father knew at the Golf Club, who happened also to know McPhearson. Claude had started off by asking questions, as if he suspected a connection between Gerry and the Boss that had not yet been revealed, but there was none. Just that friend of his father's at the Club.
They worked hard and Gerry kept up with them. He didn't want it to show that what for them was hard necessity was for him a rich boy's choice. All day their saws buzzed, their sweat flew in the forest, and at night they were tired.
There wasn't much talk. Gerry, who usually fell asleep immediately they'd eaten, and had to be shaken to go to bed, got very little of the wisdom of the wider world out of what was said when they had swallowed their stew, drunk their tea, and were just sitting out in the smell of timber and burnt leaves under the stars.
“You should watch out f’ loose women,” one of the fellows said once. He seemed to be joking.
“I been watchin’ out for ‘em,” Slinger said. “There ain't none around ‘ere that I been able to discover.” He looked off into the shifting, stirring dark.
“No,” the third fellow said bitterly, "it ain't the loose women you need t’ watch out for, it's the moral ones. A moral woman'll kill a man's spirit. The others—” But he bit off the rest of what he might have to tell. It went on silently behind his eyes, and the others, out of respect for something personal, fell into their own less heavy forms of silence.
It was Claude who provided most of the talk.
“One time,” Claude told, "I was stoppin’ at this boarding-house in Brisbane. I was workin’ at the abatoors then, it was just after the war. Well, at the boarding-house there was this refugee-bloke, an’ sometimes after tea, if I din’ feel like playin’ poker or listenin’ t’ Willy Fernell and Mo, this bloke an’ me'd sit out on the front step in the cool. Not talkin’ much—I wasn’ much of a talker in them days. But I s'pose he reckoned I was sort of sympathetic, I din’ rib ‘im like the rest. He was a Dutchman, or a Finn—one of that lot. Maybe a Balt. Anyway a thin feller with very good manners, and exceptionally clean—exceptionally. On'y ‘e was as mad as a meat axe. I mean, one day ‘e'd be that quiet you couldn’ get a word out of ‘im, and the next ‘e'd be on the booze and ravin'. ‘E kept the booze under his bed. Vodka. Talked like a drain when ‘e was pissed, an’ all stuff you couldn’ make sense of. He was hidin’ from someone—some other lot, I never did find out who—you know what these New Australians are like. Look ‘ere mate, I'd tell ‘im, there's no politics here, this is Australia. But ‘e'd just look at me as if I was soft or somethink. And in fact he was loaded—God knows what ‘e didn’ have stacked away, jewellery an’ that—I saw some of it—'e could of lived in any place he liked—at Lennon's even. ‘E'd be in his sixties now, that bloke—I often wonder what happened to ‘im … Anyway, we were sit-tin’ out on the step one night, jus’ cool in our shirtsleeves, havin’ a bit of a smoke, when the cicadas start up. ‘What's that?’ ‘e says, jumpin’ to ‘is feet. ‘Cicadas,’ I tell ‘im. ‘Chicago?’ he says, all wild-eyed, ‘the gangsters?’ I had t’ laugh, but it was pathetic jus’ the same. The poor bugger thought ‘e'd got ‘imself to America, thought it was machine-guns.
Never seemed t’ know where ‘e was half the time. You'd think a boarding-house at Dutton Park ‘d impress itself on anyone, but not him. ‘Chicago,’ ‘e says, ‘the gangsters!’ God knows what sort of things ‘e'd been through— over there—I mean, you can't tell, can you? You look at a bloke jus’ sittin’ there an’ you can't tell. There's a lot of misery about. You've only got t’ go into some o’ them boarding-houses and see what blokes ‘ave got in ports under their beds. Old newspapers, bottles, stones. It'd surprise you. It'd surprise anyone.”
Gerry listened to Claude's tales. They were interesting but he could make nothing of them; they appeared to tell more than they told. There was a quality in Claude's voice that asked for something more than interest, and it was just this that Gerry resisted. He wanted Claude to be the foreman, only that, and preferred the dour but dignified silence of the other men, who if they had stories to tell kept them entirely to themselves.
The hut where Claude lived was divided by a partition into sleeping-quarters and storeroom. On one wall of the storeroom there were tools, very neatly arranged on hooks. They might have borne labels and been mistaken at first sight for a wall display in a folk museum, or for the e
laborate fan shapes and sunbursts that native weapons assume when they have been stripped of their power of violence and become flowerlike— till you examine the points.
“I like t’ see things in their place,” Claude explained. “Order at a glance.” And he glanced up from where he was sitting at a desk doing McPhearson's accounts.
He wore half-glasses and was peering over the straight tops of them. It made his eyes a weaker blue and gave him, for all his toughness, a scholarly look, like a failed monk. To his left were heavy ledgers, and immediately before him a pile of accounts waiting to be pushed down hard on a spike. Beyond, at the far end of the room, which was dark, Gerry could see the shelves of foodstuff—jars, tins, packets—from which Claude provided the ingredients for their meals, including a whole shelf of Claude's own homemade chutney.
Claude had surprised Gerry the first time he went there by what seemed like an act of disloyalty.
“Here,” he had offered impetuously, "have a jar of peanut paste. On the house! McPhearson won't miss it. He's swimmin’ in peanut paste that man. An’ smoked salmon, they tell me.” And when Gerry politely refused: "What about a packet a’ Band-Aids?”
Claude shrugged his shoulders and looked disappointed, and Gerry was left with a puzzle. The foreman was strict but inconsistent.
As for the other side of the partition, where Claude slept, Gerry saw that only once, when Claude cut his leg, bled badly, and sent him off to get a fresh pair of shorts. There were cuttings from newspapers pinned to the bare boards—racehorses—and on the desk a box of old stereopticon plates that Claude had already told him about and promised to show: pictures from round the world. “You can stand right at the edge and see the waters of Niagara come thunderin’ down—I tell yer, it's marvellous. I've stood there f ‘ hours and even heard the noise of it. Imagined that, of course. The pyramids, the Taj Mahal, George the Fifth's Jubilee—you name it! A man can go round the world in ‘is head with one a’ these stereopticons, and it don't cost a brass razoo.”