by David Malouf
Gerry had looked round the narrow room, tried to make something of it—tried to make Claude of it—but saw nothing more than he already knew. He thought of his own room at home. He was untidy and his mother complained, but did his disorder reveal any more of what was going on in his head than Claude's fastidious habit of setting everything in its place? He had been able to tell Gerry, even through the pain of his wound, just where those clean shorts would be: in the second drawer to the left. Gerry had gone straight to them.
One day Claude came down to where he was working and asked him to go to town on a message. The town was twelve miles away. He was to go on Claude's two-stroke and deliver a letter. Claude drew a rough map of the town, showed him where the house was, and gave him very precise instructions about how he should open the gate, go up the four steps, and ring the doorbell—three long rings and then, after a pause, two short ones. “Like this,” Claude explained, tapping it out on a metal cup. He was to leave the motorbike in the main street and go the rest of the way—it wasn't more than a hundred yards—on foot. Claude emphasized that he was putting great trust in the boy, and embarrassed perhaps by the air of mystery he had created, suggested that Gerry needn't hurry back; he could take time off if he wanted to have a milkshake at the Greek's. The message was in a plain white envelope with neither name nor address.
The ride into town was a pleasant one. After three weeks of work Gerry was happy to have this time away, to feel released into his own body again and to be made free of the landscape and of the hot summer day.
The early part of the trip was rough. A narrow trail led upwards between thick-set pines. But he emerged at last on to a high rolling plateau where the clouds rode close overhead, struck a gravel road, then two miles before the town a stretch of bitumen. He opened his shirt and took the full thrust of the air. Crossing bridges over dry streams he heard the sound they made as he rattled across them, the slog slog slog of concrete balusters, a regular beating in his ear, and remembered the different rhythm—three longs, a pause and two shorts—that Claude had tapped out on the cup. Its meaning didn't concern him. It was Claude's business, or maybe it was McPhearson's. He was a messenger. He felt extraordinarily light-hearted. Perhaps because this was the first occasion in so long that he had been on his own, but also because, small as it might be, he was being entrusted with something. He had recently discovered, in the furthest reaches of himself, a capacity for what he thought of as noble action and was concerned now that it should find its proper form in the world; that when the occasion arose (as it surely must) that would demand the full stretch of his powers, he would recognise and meet it.
The problem of course was in the recognition. He was inexperienced but not romantic, and had perceived clearly enough that heroic occasions do not come ready-made, that they spring into existence only when they are grasped. You would need imagination as well as pluck. Two years ago he might have seen himself through drifts of gun-smoke bearing the colours, or as a dispatch-rider in one of the wars, vaulting shell holes on a BSA. But the next occasion wouldn't be like it, and any moment, even the most commonplace, might be either the call or the first step towards it. You had to be on the alert, and believe that when the opportunity came you would be ready for it.
All this was part of his most secret life. He let it out now that he was alone and flaring along a bitumen road—in the open air, under leaves, in sunlight; and all the more because for the last weeks he had held back, and tried among the others to seem acceptable, ordinary.
He came into the town over a bridge. Kids were swimming in the last of the season's water, among thick willows. He stopped the bike halfway across, and still easily astride it, leaned over the railings to watch. Slim bodies swung out on a knotted rope and went flying head-over-heels, their cries cut off in a splash. The sight pleased him. He was just out of that stage himself and might have allowed himself to regret it, but had set himself in the direction of manhood. He rode on into town, parked the bike, and was thirsty enough after his ride to consider going straight to the Greek's. But no, he told himself, Duty first. I'll deliver the message and have the milkshake afterwards.
The town was small and sleepy, but after his weeks up at the camp seemed to him to be bustling with life. Women clicked along the pavement in their high heels. A girl riding by on a bike with her skirt up looked back over her shoulder, and he was taken again by the various-ness of the world and the number of paths that were open in each moment of it. Later, that was for later. With the envelope safe in his shirt pocket he turned out of the main street with its row of two-storeyed buildings that went on for another quarter of a mile, all pubs, banks, general stores, bakeries, into the dusty streets behind. Crossed one, then another, till he found the name he wanted, and was about to consult numbers when he was hailed from a low verandah.
“Hey! Givvus a lift, wilya sonny?”
The man was holding one end of a genoa-velvet lounge as if he had been standing there maybe all morning, waiting for someone to come along, as Gerry had, and take the other.
Gerry hesitated—this was an interruption—but didn't see how he could refuse. The man looked expectant. The lounge, with one end on the ground and the other in the air, was ridiculous. After a moment's hesitation he took it up as directed, walked backwards a few paces, and helped the man push it on to the back of a lorry.
“The rest is a walkover,” the man told him. He was a tall fellow with teeth missing, wearing nothing but football shorts. “I'll bring the armchair, you get the smokers’ stands an’ the side table.”
He followed the man into the house and they cleared the front room and loaded it, then carried out of a second room a dining table, a sideboard, six chairs, and a framed oil painting of the Alps. The lorry by now had about as much as it would carry. Gerry held the other end of several ropes while the man strained, cursed, knotted. Then, with a casual, "Thanks, son, I'll do the same f ‘ you some time,” he climbed into the cabin and drove slowly away. He had left the door of the house standing wide open.
Gerry wondered as he walked away if he mightn't have been assisting at a burglary. But what else could he have done? He noted the number of the house he had helped strip, in case there were questions later, and saw now that the one he wanted was just three doors off on the other side. He crossed, opened the gate with as little sound as possible, went on up the steps, pushed the bell three times as Claude had directed, waited, then rang twice more. Almost immediately a curtain twitched aside in one of the front windows and a girl's face appeared. Then she was at the open door.
“For Christ sake!" she spat out. “What are you playin’ at?” She gave an alarmed glance behind him and to both sides. “Who th’ fuck are you?”
Barefoot, hastily wrapped in a gown with explosive red-and-gold flowers all over it, she smelled of soap and had the misty look of a woman who had come fresh from the bath.
The messenger for a moment failed to find his tongue, and she softened a little at his youth, at the way he flushed, and the movement of his eyes towards the mysterious darkness behind her.
She turned her head as if following his gaze, and said over her shoulder: "It's nothing. Just some kid.” She gave him a look, half-knowing, half-ironical, but no longer alarmed. “Watcha want, son?”
“I've brought this,” Gerry told her coldly, showing the envelope. “It's from Claude.”
She took the envelope, tore it open, glanced quickly at both sides of the single sheet, and then burst out laughing. She began to close the door.
“Isn't there an answer?” Gerry asked foolishly.
“Are you kidding? How would you answer that?”
She showed him both sides of the page, and they stood at the half-open door with the blank sheet between them.
“Piss off,” she said, not urgently: and the door was closed in his face.
He rode back fast, his face still burning. He hadn't after all stopped at the Greek's, and when he came bumping into the camp and parked the bike, and saw
Claude coming down to meet him, would have turned away if he could and found work to do.
Claude came at him sideways. He screwed one eye up as if squinting at sunlight.
“Well,” he said shyly, "how was the trip? Bike behave? Dja find the house alright?”
He answered Claude's questions, he rendered account; but would not, for all Claude's soft-talk, be sweetened.
Yes, he had rung the bell. Yes, it was a woman who had answered. She had been wearing a kimono. No, he hadn't seen into the house. Yes, he had delivered the envelope. What had she done? She'd laughed, that's what, and there was no answer.
Claude patted him on the shoulder, but when their eyes met he looked away, and Gerry, who had been glaring till that moment, was glad of it. There was something between them suddenly of which they were both, but for different reasons, ashamed.
“Thanks, Gerry,” Claude said wearily. “Thanks, mate. You done well. If I ever had another message I'd—”
He broke off, as if he had heard Gerry's fierce, unspoken Not me, you wouldn't! Not again!
“Come ‘n have tea,” Claude was saying in his smallest voice, "I made puftaloons. They're yer favourite.” He looked uncomfortably large in his grey flannel vest, but also beaten, and his tone was so wheedling and auntlike, so keen to make amends, that Gerry was torn between contempt and a kind of shameful pity. Without ceasing to be aggrieved he relented, and allowed himself to be drawn away.
“That's the style,” the man said, as if it were Gerry who had to be got over a rough patch. “I make good puftaloons, even if I say so meself Learned from a Chinese. Little feller with only one arm. It was out Charleville way …” And he was off on another of his tales.
That night they got drunk. Claude sat out in the moonlight on a stump, sucking a bottle of whisky, and the others, out of delicacy, kept away. Slinger the quarter-caste played his mouth organ.
“Wife-trouble,” Kev whispered, and nodded his head seriously.
Gerry didn't admit that he knew something of that already; had been out earlier in the day, subjecting the woman to some mild terrorism.
Kev, staring off into the darkness, was lost in his own story.
Is life so sad then? Gerry asked himself. And was aware, with a sharpness he had not felt before, of the immensity of the darkness that surrounded them: all those leaves holding up individual fragments of it shaped exactly like themselves, the grassblades taking it down into their roots, the birds folding it away under their wings. Sorrows and secrets. All these men had stories, were dense with the details of their lives, but kept them in the dark. Only odd words broke surface and spoke for more than could be said.
“That's a nice tune, Slinger. I remember that one from the navy,” Kev said. “Wartime.”
“Wrong colour f’ the navy,” Slinger let out between chords, barely breaking the line of what he was playing.
Claude meanwhile had gone off, and when he appeared again it was from the door of his storeroom. He was carrying jars of the homemade chutney they had eaten at every meal Gerry had had here. “Mango chutney,” Claude had explained, "off me own trees. I got two big ‘uns in the backyard, with more mangoes than you could eat in a month a’ Sundays. I make a big batch every year.”
Now, armful after armful, he was carrying the labelled jars out of the storeroom and setting them down on the moonlit earth. The others fell silent and watched. He stacked them solemnly, neatly, so that they made a high but solid pyramid, and when the last one was out he closed and locked the storeroom door.
“Now we'll have some fun,” he told them.
Standing bent-kneed and with his feet firmly apart, he balanced a jar on the palm of his hand, took it back over his shoulder, and hurled it against the storehouse wall. Moonlight splintered, and the dark golden stuff with its chunks of stringy fruit rolled slowly down.
“Here Slinger, Kev, Gerry—have a go!” He stooped and hurled another. “It's all right boys, this is on me, it's my bloody chutney. Nothin’ t’ do with McPhearson. I don't account t’ him f ‘ chutney.”
But the others, suddenly sober, did not join in. At last one of them went up to him.
“Come on, mate, time t’ turn in,” he said. “We've got a heavy day.”
It ended then. They went to bed. But were woken some time later by what sounded like another jar of chutney being smashed against the storeroom wall. They all started up at once and trooped out in their underpants to see what it was. The clearing was empty, still. It was Kev who knocked, with embarrassed politeness, at the door to Claude's hut and pushed it open. They heard him gasp.
“Aw, the poor bugger!”
It hadn't sounded like a shot.
There was a note, and beside it an envelope, exactly like the one Gerry had carried earlier in the day. It was addressed to the woman and the house in town. The note asked Gerry to deliver it, and on this occasion to drive right up to the house on the bike. But when the police came they took charge of the envelope along with the body.
The remaining jars of chutney, all shot through with gold as the sun struck them, were still stacked in a ruined pyramid in the grass. The police found them difficult to fit into the picture, and the others, faced with them and with the dried stains on the storehouse wall, which looked almost natural, as if the wood had experienced a new flow of thick golden sap, turned away in common embarrassment. At last one of the policemen unlocked the storehouse door with Claude's keys, and Gerry and Charlie took the jars back and set them neatly, darkly, on the shelf.
The sight of the storeroom, with everything fastidiously in place and even the chutney now restored, unnerved Gerry. If he were to go now into that space behind the partition, and note every detail, and add to it the final disordering of all its objects by the shot, nothing would be revealed, he thought, or added to what he knew.
He watched the younger of the two policemen slip Claude's letter into his breast pocket. The policeman wore a uniform: boots, cap, shirt with epaulettes and a flash—he was official. He would ring the bell just once. And if the door wasn't answered immediately he would ring a second time, and again and again until it was.
That Antic Jezebel
Climbing to her seat in the organ gallery, up three flights of stairs, was such an arduous business, and she was so slow nowadays, that Clay had to begin early, even before the warning bells were sounded. She hated the thought of arriving breathless, of being locked out, or of looking, on the way up, like an old girl in need of aid. “He's cooked his goose—let him lie in it;" that was one of her sayings. Messy of course, but life is, you got used to it.
Clay McHugh had learned her survival tactics in Europe between the wars. She had studied there how to present an appearance that was never less than elegant and might be mistaken by snobs, and by the undiscerning and unworldly, for affluence. You lived in the best part of town, had one outfit of perfect cut that went to the cleaners each week, one piece of jewellery, and you never let anyone past the door.
Her present apartment was at Elizabeth Bay and she had spent all she had on it. Within its walls, among the last of her loot, she practised a frugality that would have surprised her neighbours and made social workers, and other Nosey Parkers, cry famine. Clay despised such terms. She ate a great deal of boiled rice, was careful with the lights, and on the pretext of keeping trim, she walked rather than took the bus. Her one outfit was black; her one piece of jewellery a chain of intimidating weight that chimed rather than tinkled but was too plain to suggest ostentation. Hung with mint-gold coins, seals, and medallions, it provoked questions and the answers told a story—in fact several stories, but never all. There was, each time, a little something-left-over.
This chain was her curriculum vitae. She shook it when she needed to remind herself that whatever hole she was now in, she had once been in a different one and this was her choice. The chain spoke of attachments: of men young and old, back there in Europe, who had wanted at one time or another to present her with their blue eyes, their lives, th
eir titles, or with little flats in Paris or London or country houses near Antwerp or Rome—all of which, for good reason, she had declined. The men had slipped away, leaving only a family seal or rare coin or medal. The weight on her wrist was bearable and she thought of it as a tribute to her intention to keep free.
That was one way of putting it. Put another way, you might say that the men had escaped and that these coins were the price they'd been willing to pay. Clay looked at it different ways on different occasions, but mostly she thought of herself as having come out of all this—of life—as well as could be expected: that is, badly. But her freedom was important to her. All those dull dogs and bushy-tailed buffers, if they were still kicking, would be as old now as herself. She would, if she had accepted their offers, be no more than an expensive nursemaid to an old man's incontinence—though she was not without affection and she wouldn't have complained, even of that, after a lifetime of some other devotion, if it had been her fate; or if the right man—Karel for instance—had asked it of her. Things had turned out otherwise, that's all. She was lying with the goose.
Besides, she told herself in her scarier moments, I'll soon be in that state myself, except that I won't be. I won't hang around to get up at three in the morning like poor Grandma and make scones for people who've been dead for thirty years. I'll finish it first. I'll take the bun and the pills …
(This grandmother had lived with them. As a grown girl of fifteen she had been sent out, burning with shame before the neighbours, but also before the old woman herself, to bring her in when she went aimlessly wandering. On several occasions that now seemed like one, they had stood shouting beside a fence in the overpowering smell of honeysuckle. The old woman whined, screeched, wheedled, tried to shake off the grip on her wrist; dogs barked, children stared, other old women shook their heads behind blinds—she could still feel the pain, the humiliation of it. But the centre of the occasion had shifted now from the unwilling and angry girl to the wilful old woman, who with her hair awry and her gown open stood barefoot under the streetlamp saying over and over, "Why are you doing this to me?” The old woman was herself.)