by David Malouf
The father blushed. ‘That’s enough from you, mister,’ he said mildly. Then with an anger that was feigned to hide a more painful emotion: ‘What you’re looking for is a good clip over the ear.’
Jim sniggered. He went on eating. And while the others sat stilled with their knives in the air, the man made an attempt at conciliation. He reached out to set his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
Jim ducked. ‘Keep yer hands offa me, I’m sick of it! Don’t try that stuff with me!’
Out of some newly discovered distaste for the man, and his own sense of being no longer a child, Jim refused now to sleep in the same bed with him. He made a rough sleeping place for himself on a bench near the stove, and Clyde, breaking up at last the threesome of younger brothers, climbed into the space he left between the father and Frank.
‘Jim’s growing up,’ the father crooned. ‘He’s got an eye for the girls. Well, that’s on’y natural. Nothing wrong with that, Jimbo. I’ve got an eye for the girls myself. It’s another influence.’ He glanced about the big untidy room with its heaps of dirty washing, its unmade beds, the sink full of pans and dishes and the litter of the table with his five boys around it, all chins and elbows and scarred and grimy knees. He groaned a little. ‘Look at us! Look at this mess! Snips and snails! We’re too many men in this house, that’s it, eh Jim? Some other influence. It’s missing. That a woman could provide.’
Frank could make nothing of this. He wondered if his father wasn’t preparing to marry again and had been using his quarrel with Jim as a way of breaking it to them.
Meanwhile Jim sulked and stormed in genuine anguish. There was always tension among them now. It came out in every way. Their father found fault with everything Jim did: with how slow he was to get up in the morning, his sleepiness at the bails, the slovenliness with which he hosed out the stalls and did all his duties, the way he sat at the table, the look on his face. Everything about the boy’s change into something other than the child he had been (and Frank too saw this) affronted the man, put him out of sorts or enraged him. The dancing was a compensation.
‘There’s no harm in it, you know,’ he’d tell them as he tied the laces of his glossy shoes, ‘a bit of a waltz with a nice woman on yer arm an’ a bit of talk. It relaxes you, the dancin’, takes you out of yerself. It’s an innocent enough pleasure, God knows, for a widower with a hard life like mine n’ five boys to think of – one of them almost a man. The albertina. That’s a nice dance, now. Needs a good straight back, a firm arm and lightness in the feet. A lovely dance with the right couple.’
So he would go on till he was ready; then, standing up, all dressed and polished, with his hair slick and his cheeks smooth and burning, he would look apologetic for a moment, with all their eyes upon him, and slip away.
*
But the changes that came with Jim’s growing to manhood and the increasing hostility between the boy and his father could not be contained. The house began to have unsettled areas where conflict brewed. One of them was the bench by the stove, where Jim, in a huddle of sheets and blankets, spent his unruly nights. But there were others. Any of those places in the room where the boy sulked apart, or hunched against a wall with his hands in his pockets and what their father called a ‘look’ about his mouth, could become the site of a disturbance that translated itself first to the father, whose voice would lose its easy softness, then to Frank as a kind of sickness at heart for what might be slipping away from them, then to the others, who all took it in different ways. Pearsall sucked his thumb and wanted to snuggle. Tam, now in his first days at school, was alternately beaten up or accused of being a bully. Clyde, who appeared after all to be the least steady of them, began to pinch things: a penknife from a fellow in the Cubs, pencils from the classroom cupboard, and from French’s on the way home lollies to bribe his mates at school. Frank worried and took it all upon his own shoulders. Having lost his place once, he had a horror of anything that might threaten it a second time.
Things could only get worse. From standing hunched in the open door, neither in nor out, Jim took to locking himself in the dunny or bursting away to sit alone by the water-tank chucking stones.
‘Let him,’ the father said, ‘if he’d rather be out there with the toads than in here with his brothers. It’s his nature. He can’t help it.’
Soon he was no longer out there in the yard but on the road to town and was free, more or less, to come and go as he pleased. He had a girl at Tannymorel. He would eat, do his share of cleaning up, then slouch off without explanation.
‘Jim’s after the girls,’ the father sneered. ‘He’s a ladies’ man.’
But the boy let the challenge drop. He despised his father too deeply to argue with him. It was Frank who was left, after the others had fallen asleep over the table, to listen to his father’s complaints and sentimental effusions and apologies for himself; and this was much as it had always been, except that Jim now was away at his girl’s place or at the pictures rather than sleeping like the rest.
They were beginning to fall apart, that is what Frank saw; and it was not in their father’s power – it was not in his nature – to keep them together. He had taken it for granted till now that some special grace hovered over them, which was inherent in his father, even in his father’s voice, and that the qualities it suggested, of love, warmth, a feeling for continuity in the remembrance and recording of things, would hold them against all shocks. But these qualities had no substance. With regret, and without at all qualifying his affection for the man, Frank admitted it: his father was all self-indulgence and wistfulness, there was no strength in him; when the storm came he would run to some woman, hide his head in her lap and demand, like a child, to be smooged and mothered.
Even as he thought this, and recognised the danger, his father would be weaving around them the warm, silk-soft enchantments that Frank loved to hear and still felt the power of but could no longer believe. He listened, half spellbound, half in fear for himself and the others, but with the first stirring in him of a sense of his own power, and a fearful suspicion that it might after all be his fate, or his duty, to shield them all.
He still brooded, as he listened, over the pages of a pad, and his father’s voice might have been an essential condition of the dreamy state in which he worked or played, for his notion of what he was doing swung from one to the other but was in all ways serious. It was a state in which mind was suspended and his hand did the thinking for him.
Each night he drew what was in front of him: a child’s head heavy with sleep, a plate of scraps, a cheese dish and cover, a petrol lamp and the shadows it threw up to bare rafters, the light as it fell on his father’s hair or on the man’s knee where it was drawn up under him, and fell differently on the rucked material of his trousers and on the bare foot – always the same objects, familiar but different.
It wasn’t the objects themselves he was concerned with, though they too had their burden of feeling for him and their own dense reality; or the play of light and shadow; or even the weight and volume of each thing as it exerted a visible pressure on the air about it and could suggest, to the feeling eye, a space shared with the viewer that the viewer also displaced. His mind, in its play-work, had got beyond that.
He smoothed the sheet of paper in his hand (it was clean enough) and considered.
Whiteness.
That alone was enough to take your breath away. It was the source of all possibility, an infinity of objects and occasions.
Unsteadily, but with a steady hand, he intervened, he acted, and with his eye on the real object he was about to capture, made a line – one clear stroke, slightly curved.
The page was transformed. Where the soft lead bit into the paper, the paper resisted at first, then yielded, enough for the pressure-point to make a dent, and for the dent to fill with minute crumblings. It looked like a full stop, but was in fact an opening from which the lovely gr
ey-black graphite flowed out.
He let his mind flow with it, and as his eye perceived two dimensions then three and shifted between them, so he uncovered a further dimension. The page was his mind and contained everything that was in his mind and which waited there to be brought forth. Hidden beneath it was the world. He had only to let things emerge, to let his hand free them: on this occasion a head, a specific one, his brother Tam’s, on the next . . . But the occasions were without end. The page and his mind could become one, and what they contained was the infinite plentitude of things that was Creation, in which all things were equal; their equality, and the possibility of their springing into immediate existence, guaranteed by his recognition of them and by the space he had prepared and would let them fill.
He sat very still and contemplated what was before him. It seemed to him that he had understood something important; that his hand, almost without him, had made a great discovery.
He had a box of watercolours as well, and in moments when he was free from work would try to catch in line, he loved that, and in thin wash, the long undulations of the land under a sky that was filled with happenings. They were so large – such lyrical, slow tumblings and transformings in ice-blue or in opening mushrooms of black all ablaze at the edge – that the earth seemed a sphere where nothing happened at all unless the slope of a hill was made active with running shadows or the stale surface of a lake, broken only by lily pads, was touched at a distance by a storm that might have been blowing up below its hand-span of real depth out of aeons of mud.
Compared with events in the cloud-theatre above – the towers of falling cities, the rising with a dagger in their fist of ragged pedlars, great galleons, camel-trains, shaggy lions – compared with that, the passage of an old Clydesdale across a paddock that was half grey topsoil and half turned loam, or one of his brothers making a bare-arsed dive from a boat-ramp, or a mob of cows, all black and white patches, moving in dust clouds past a slip-rail fence, was as nothing at all – an occasion so deep in the picture as barely to be noticed, until ignoring the real scale of things you framed only that, and made the drama overhead the merest play of light on a mare’s flanks or the crests of furrows, or on a boy’s shoulderblades as he jack-knifed into it.
But beyond this fascination with mere event, and the challenge offered by light and weather, there was another purpose to his recording on sheet after sheet all the details of a particular countryside, and a pattern in his choice of this or that wooded hill or stretch of pasture.
He was setting down all the places, as he knew from his father’s stories, that had once been Jack Harland’s share of the triple empire, before it was lost in a card game by that Gem Harland, his great-grandfather’s eldest, and drunk away by Gem’s brother Sam, and schemed or stolen out of the hands of others by sly cousins, envious brothers-in-law, fly neighbours, or given over to storekeepers who had to foreclose on credit, or to banks run by men who were understanding enough (and shyly sorry) but accountable at last to a head office in London or Sydney; or thrown up in despair by men who were sick, as his father was, of being tied to a shitty herd, and taking the plunge as his father never would, had tied themselves to a conveyor-belt in a canning factory.
The pattern involved a plan. It was, quite simply, to win all this back some day and restore it, acre by acre, to its true possessors. That was the gift he was preparing. It was for them. For his father and brothers.
It was, he knew, a large ambition, which is why he hoarded it up till all was done. He might easily look foolish if it were known. But he was not foolish. The power he had, as he more and more felt it, was a practical thing. His pictures were a reminder and inventory. They were also a first act of repossession, which made them charms of a sort and their creating an act of magic. The idea scared him a little but he was stubborn. He had chosen a course and would stick to it. For life – if that is what it came to.
One afternoon of drizzling rain, when it was hot and stuffy in the closed house with its smell of mattresses and steamy socks on a line by the fire, and the closeness of them all packed into a single room (their father was in bed with ’flu), they had a kind of celebration. It was for its own sake; there was no birthday or particular date.
Half-sprawling or seated cross-legged on their father’s bed, they had been playing grab with an old pack of cards, and it was Frank who thought of it. Together, he and the smaller kids cooked a bread pudding, while their father, sitting up in his shirt out of a heap of bedclothes, gave directions; though in fact they had made it often before, and knew without his telling how to soak the bread, mix in the suet – plenty, so that it would cut in wet slabs – and the cinnamon, raisins, sultanas. When the dish came out of the oven it was perfect. They could hardly wait for it to cool. Tam and Pearsall kept poking it to see how cool it had got and it was Clyde who dealt with them. Frank was busy doling out mugs and warming the pot for tea. At last Clyde declared it ready to be cut, and with the biggest of their carving-knives, which he held upright in his fist, he cut thick slices and passed them around.
Father had his on a plate. The others, leaning over the worn oilcloth that covered the kitchen table, had theirs in their fingers, slurping tea between mouthfuls and noisily sucking their fingers.
‘This is delicious bread pudding,’ the man announced from the bed behind them. ‘It’s a bit on the wet side, but Frank likes it on the wet side, don’t you Frank? So do I.’
‘So do I!’ Pearsall echoed, like Amen.
Jim was there. He ate his slice along with the rest, wearing a cap to show that he was already on the way somewhere and had been caught at the last moment by the familiar smell of the pudding, and by the love they all had of it from the days when their father used to make it with the last of the week’s bread.
They gorged themselves, finishing the whole dish and prolonging the feast by arguing over who could be relied upon to cut fair second helpings. They drank the whole pot of tea. Then Jim, a bit unwilling, but too deeply committed by the cap to pull back, hunched his shoulders at the door, buttoned his jacket and turned his collar up against the rain. His face in profile had a bony, painful look that Frank never forgot.
‘There he goes! He’s got a girl,’ the father taunted, sitting up out of the moil of sheets and blankets to shout it. ‘Jim’s off to his girl!’ Teasing, the way none of the other kids would.
Then the boy was gone, leaving the door open on dribbles of rain.
Frank remembered both these scenes as marking the end of something: their celebration at the kitchen table, the last time they were all together, and Jim’s isolation there in the open door while the rest looked gravely towards him. Jim went off soon afterwards to be an apprentice printer, in Glen Innes over the border, and Frank inherited the bench by the stove, that staging-place – as he knew, even as he crawled for the first time into the envelope of blankets and his shoulders adjusted to hard planks after the big soft bed – to the world outside. Turning on his side, he was right up against the timber wall.
A first step away – the longest that could be taken inside the house itself. One more and he too would be gone.
Clyde, without explanation, went back to his old bed, and it was Pearsall now who crawled in and snuggled up to the father.
These adjustments in their sleeping arrangements, in their lives, occurred naturally, without thought perhaps, certainly without speech – but were statements just the same. Of intention, of alliance, of rupture. Lying awake in the dark, aware of their disposition now in space, Jim at Glen Innes, he on the bench by the stove with the rain drizzling at his ear, Clyde and Tam rolled together in the dip of one bed, Pearsall and his father in the other, Frank thought of their lives as being restated in a new form, like the words in a sentence being shifted about to make a new meaning. He felt dizzy. As if the centre had fallen out of things and he was spinning off now on his own trajectory.
[5]
In the Au
gust of that year (he was turned sixteen), Frank went up to Brisbane for the Exhibition, where the farmer he worked for, one of the Mackays, had a bull to show. He took a batch of drawings with him and most of the watercolours tied up in a clean singlet.
They slept in a stall with the cattle like all the rest and he had only his work clothes, but on the second day he asked for time off to see the town and to buy presents for his brothers, and making himself as presentable as he could, set off for a gallery he had read about in the Courier-Mail.
The woman at the gallery, which was in a basement, looked cool, unapproachable, and the pictures on the wall seemed silly – even to him. They were incompetent, garish. He took one look and decided to go away. But seeing him slinking off, a clumsy kid with a countryman’s hat in his hand, rough boots that were not quite clean and with a bundle under his arm, the woman left her desk and called ‘Hey!’ – suspecting him, he thought, of running off with something. But she was smiling, and seemed, on second glance, rather brassy.
‘What were you after, love? No need to be shy here, you know.’
She had seven or eight inches of coloured bangles up her arm that clattered when she drew on her cigarette, painted nails, a lot of makeup; and though she must have been well over fifty had preserved her shape. She might, in her smart little suit with the lapels, have been an usherette in a theatre.
‘Here, let’s see what you’ve got. Drawings, is it? And what’s this? A singlet?’
Before he knew quite what was happening she had taken the folio of drawings and was removing the singlet – he couldn’t have been more embarrassed if it was his own, the one he was wearing. In fact it was an old singlet of Jim’s.
She was making little clucking sounds. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s nice. It’s an arm, isn’t it.’ She regarded it as if she had never seen one.
‘Listen, I’ll tell you what, love, I’ll give you the name of someone you should show them to – they’re not our sort of thing. You can see that.’ Without apology she indicated the faces round the wall. ‘This friend of mine is an art teacher. At a college. Will you go there if I give ’im a tinkle and say you’re on the way? It’s not far and he’d be intrigued, I know he would.’