Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  There was nothing. Air flowed thickly from room to room through all the open doorframes. Moonlight made bars on the floor and diagonals on the wall with its rough-wood bookshelves and the shirts, newly ironed, that hung one above the other from hooks.

  What I was most aware of, because Gerald had been, was the great wedge of dark under the floorboards, that air-cushion on which the whole house floated, that layer of dust. It had the force of gravity, hauling every object, and my thoughts, strongly, irresistibly down.

  Gerald had added the weight of his body to that darkness, feet pointing to the earth. I could still feel it, a counterweight to my own that was laid out lengthwise on his bed. I slept and woke, slept and woke unrefreshed, even in the coolness after the storm; and had the greatest difficulty holding my head upright, lifting my feet off the sticky-damp floor.

  On the second night, about two o’clock, Tam whispered to me through the wall.

  ‘You awake, Phil?’

  ‘I am now.’

  ‘Listen, I can’t sleep. Could we have a game of cards?’

  He made tea and we sat at the kitchen table playing euchre till the light came creeping in over the river and up the tangled slope; lighting the scrub that was aswarm with tiny, flickering wrens, climbing the trunks of trees, opening the bright, dewy cups of the morning glory. I was glad, after two nights, there being nothing more that I could do, to eat the bacon and eggs Tam cooked me, and leave.

  The same day, while Tam was out doing the shopping, Frank went as well. He got up off his stretcher, walked out of the house, taking nothing with him, and disappeared.

  And now the time I had felt passing on the night I sat by Frank Harland’s bed really did pass; not so fast as I had imagined, but fast enough.

  My grandmother died after three years of a progressive illness. My father was in charge at last. People had assumed, since my grandmother was always there, that it was her energy that had kept the business alive; there was, about my father, something too fine and vague, not sufficiently aggressive or resilient, to suggest capacity in the affairs of men. His mother’s going would reveal the truth.

  It did. For whatever reason, either because she really had been the force behind the business, or because his own qualities, without the addition of hers, were not strong enough to endure, or because now that she was no longer there to be hurt by it, he could admit at last that the Markets had never suited him, had never been more than a duty undertaken that went clean against his nature – for whatever reason, the Section began to decline and he was advised by friends to sell up while there was still a profit in it. The city markets were about to be demolished anyway to make way for a park; the whole enterprise would move to the suburbs. My father, who loved the noise and bustle of the old buildings, was unwilling to move. His style – the good grey suit and silk shirt – was not for the suburbs, or for anywhere nowadays. It belonged to an older style of imperial allegiance that had died with the war, in which gentlemen of a certain standing had kept up the pretence that Brisbane, Queensland, was on the same commuting terms with London as the Home Counties. He was out of place in the only place he had ever known. Some possibility he had seen in himself, and in the country, had died on him, leaving only a set of aspirations that were out of all proportion now to the realities of the day. He sold the business for a good price and he and my mother sailed for Europe.

  In deciding that he should see England at last, he was grasping for some vision of what it was in that place that had created this one, an actuality that would prove his view of things had been neither an affectation nor an empty dream. He had turned away from my grandmother to his father’s world, and I was startled when I went down to the liner to get their luggage aboard to see how old he had grown. We seemed more than a generation apart.

  When my grandfather was dying I had thought of him as approaching, day by day, a country that was more real to him than the one the rest of us lived in. I had called it England. Now my father was on the way there. I watched the liner pull away from the wharf, saw the gap of brown water widen, heard the band strike up ‘Auld Lang Syne’, felt the taut streamers snap and flutter while we smiled and kept waving.

  He died off Cape Town. My mother saw him buried, spent two lonely weeks in that place, of which she would never speak, and sailed home again. England – whatever it was – had not been her dream. We sold the house and moved together into a unit on Hamilton Heights.

  It was in all ways the end of an era. I noticed, now that he was gone, that my father had been almost the last of his kind. You no longer saw round the city, in bars, or in trams, those formally attired old men who had in their time stood for so much in the way of a firmer world and a sterner set of values; reading in the men’s section of the tram their well-thumbed leather-bound copies of the classics, with the tram ticket folded thin under a ring; raising their hats to ladies; under no circumstances, even on the hottest days in February, appearing in public without a jacket and tie.

  They lived, the men of that generation, in a world of their own strict choice, defying climate and place. Manners and morals were inseparable and both derived from some reality that stood over and above the actual. There was some foolishness in it but a good deal of courage as well. I had enough of my grandfather in me to regret the passing of the old ways. It was, as my Aunt Roo would have said, another aspect of my classicism; by which she meant, as usual, that side of me that was incurably romantic.

  As for Frank Harland, he had simply gone back on the road. It was nearly a year before I had word of him. He was at Cooktown. Then later at Magnetic Island, then at Yeppoon. He had already given instructions that the house should be settled on Tam, who stayed on, took in half a dozen students, for companionship and because he had to have someone to fuss over, and was soon drawn into a new life among the young.

  ‘That house was a mistake,’ Frank wrote. ‘Houses are not for me. They never were. I won’t make that blue again.’

  The notes began at last to come regularly; he was moving in. From Childers, Tin Can Bay, Noosa. Finally, after another long period of silence, I had a letter from Worawun. He was back in the Bay, almost on the doorstep; had been settled there, in his own patch of scrub between the Passage and the surf, for almost a year; in a fettler’s tent, with an open-sided pole-and-bark studio behind it of his own making. He was at work. He named a day when I should come down to the island and find him, and gave me a list of the things he wanted me to bring: tins of Nu-Plastic paint.

  *

  He was in better shape than I expected, stringy but toughened, and chirpy as a cricket. He was living the life that suited him, the life he had always lived, even in the house at West End – he had knocked a few walls out, that’s all; the inner view was always like this. I saw, too, that this wasn’t, as I had thought when I drove down, one of his makeshift camps. It was permanent. He would be here now for the rest of his life. That was, I think, absolutely understood between us from the first day.

  His tent was of a kind I had often seen in my childhood: a tarpaulin drawn tight over an A-frame of raw saplings, the cross-poles and supports still with their covering of tattered bark and the ropes pegged with wooden spikes. You saw such tents from the slow-moving trains of those days, often with railway workers beside them in flannel singlets and braces, who would step away from a cookpot or billy for a moment to call out greetings and ask for papers, which you rolled up and threw onto the frosty grass.

  He had strung up a hammock for sleeping, and at the back, under a canopy of bark slabs upheld by poles, had his workbench, knocked up as usual from whatever was to hand. The scrub, its trunks all spotted and pealed with grey, lime, mushroom, ochre, came right up to where he worked; and Frank, himself all spotted brown and pealing white or pink, in a straw hat and frayed army shirt, was as much part of it as any straight trunk or gnarled and papery limb. He was not so much painting it as painting out of it; out of a mode of be
ing in which one of these misshapen but entirely natural forms might have found a way of restating itself as liquid, or had developed a system for spreading its own light and colour in dense strokes on a surface, of playing in and out of itself in vivid self-mutation.

  He kept his distance at first, and I saw that it would always be like this. We had each time to go back to beginnings.

  Standing defensively at the entrance to the tent, side-on and stoop-shouldered, he would fix me with a look that immediately brought me to a halt. We would stand facing one another thus for long seconds, sometimes minutes. Then he would smile, turn his back, and I was free to move in.

  But the space he had established between us would impose itself for a time, even after I had crossed it. It might be half an hour before we were fully at ease. We stood, slowly circling one another, while he considered what I had to say, what he had summoned me to discuss. He was uneasy; we might have been meeting as conspirators on a bit of wasteland at the edge of a city or in an empty square. But at last, grounding himself in familiar objects, he would take up a brush and begin to clean it or shift a bottle from one side of his table to the other, bringing himself home. Or he would go and stare at the piece of work he was engaged on, standing for a long time silent before it; then examining it closer, reach for a brush, and leaning over his workbench, try something, try something more, till he was immersed.

  I was free to settle then, I could talk. And he would listen, laugh, make his own monosyllabic explosions of disagreement or assent. Or I could sit in silence and watch.

  The silence was deep but never absolute. There was always the slight hushing sound of a breeze high up in the leaves, even when all below was still, the clatter of banksia cones, a low ground-bass of tickings and fumblings and brittle rustling, as straws or small bones were lifted, eggshells cracked, twigs tapped and fretted, tiny wings flapped, and a grasshopper’s saw-foot rasped across bark. Each sound was infinitesimal, but multiplied they made a continuous burring note, so low and unchanging that the ear could ignore it and the mind might take its ceaseless buzz for silence.

  I went when he sent for me and stayed for as long as he was content to have me there: sometimes twice in the same month, more often once in six. He had his own seasons.

  He had grown hard, and was, so far as I could see, quite immune to all changes of weather and to heat or cold. I thought of him often, out there in the dark, as a parent might think of an errant child. We had moved to opposite poles of it, that relationship that had opened up, by the merest accident, all those years ago at Southport; as he had moved in time from one end of the Bay (the southern end, closed in by the low sandpit of South Stradbroke) to the island, his island, that closes the Bay to the north. His island – with the wide, still waters of the Bay on one hand, the Pacific on the other, and the tattered grey gum-forest and banksia scrub between.

  Comfortably installed at my desk above the river, working late on a set of draft documents, or fretting over a few terse phrases of Tacitus that could make alive for a moment, in the unsettled present, a world that was two thousand years gone, all its endings settled and known, I would turn aside to watch the tide of moonlight go sweeping down the last of the city reaches before it broke up in channels at the mouth.

  Out there, the Bay and its wrecks as I knew them from Thomas Welsby: the Sovereign, wrecked on the South Passage Bar on 11 March 1847, the Countess of Derby, 1853, the Phoebe Dunbar, gone ashore at Amity, 5 May 1856, the Young Australia, broken up off Cape Moreton, 1872; the Bay with its shoals of whiting, bream, perch, tailor, the big fish – sailfish and marlin, and the rays like the shadow, thrown small on the sandy bottom, of giant delta-shaped spaceships. I thought of Frank out there; especially on nights of storm or in the cyclone season after the turn of the year when the river would be swollen and the fig trees and palms in suburban gardens clattered and churned. The Bay then was all pitched black tents. Rain-lashed, wind-rocked in his flimsy white one, he was always in my thoughts. Down on his island: on his island, one of the many, each with its history of vanished tribes – the Nooghies and Noonunckle – of convicts, lepers, whalemen, and those old ladies at Dunwich whom my mother would go once a year to see dance for pennies, laughing and tossing up their skirts. And in our time, Frank Harland.

  *

  Slowly, over months then years, he revealed it to me, all the details of his world: the scribbles under bark that might have been the most ancient indecipherable writing; the lemon and lime-green of new flesh where the rust-red roughened skin had shucked from a trunk; a hive where he got honey; cranes on a lagoon that suddenly broke skyward, as if the pale water had taken on flesh from their reflections and was flocking away past the vine-hung and orchid-sprouting treetops; the procession, at dusk, of board-riders and their girls, like the ghosts of the Nooghies and Noonunckle whose middens he had shown me, trooping back on Sunday evening on old, deep-worn tracks past the edge of his camp.

  I came to see his life here as the only one I could imagine for him. He had settled at last among his works, found a way of making them stand up around him as rust-red, powdery blood, as tatters of buff-coloured flesh, as scribbles under the skin that were the record of another existence, as the wandering crimson of ant-lines, companionable trickles. I came to see how time might pass here, and the grainy days and deepening nights become weeks, months, a decade, half a lifetime . . .

  He would live and work for the rest of his life now in a state of almost complete isolation; connected to the city across the Bay only by the glow its lights made over the treetops on starless nights and the passage of suburban board-riders past his patch of scrub, and to the disruptive decade we had broken into by the piles of newspaper he collected each fortnight from the local store, on which he puddled thick house-paint and from which, on occasion, a headline might start up and catch his eye, or a whole paragraph or column emerge for a moment because framed by vivid strokes: some corner of a corrupted dream, a clash in this city or that between demonstrators and police, or a private killing – one single shocking death – out in the suburbs. He laid his paint thickly over these events and made his own news. Forms emerged from the forest about him and the forests from which these sheets of newsprint, by a long process, had themselves emerged. Fresh occasions and immanent, uncarnate creatures swam to the surface of the paper as to the surface of his mind, pushing their way through street happenings and accidents, the rhetoric of public men, the columns of chanting students and of closing prices on the exchange, the horse’s mouths and the mouths of murderers and their victims, in great sweeps and slashes, as his hand obscured the regular smeared newsprint and restored to it the colours of earth.

  Only occasionally now were there human figures in this world. They had to be detached from the other shapes here of trunk and wing, or from the great vertical masses that were blue-green, blue-purple, purple-red water. The spirit that moved back and forth in him was like the breeze that swung between land and sea, or the tides to which his sandfly bites responded with itch and quiet; or as his eye conceived of the world either horizontally in bars of sand-light, sea-light, sky-light, each a kingdom of creatures, or vertically in the up-thrust of rocks, tree-trunks, foam.

  When he admitted the human to this world it was on nature’s terms. Picnickers raising smoke out of flat water, crouched surfboard-riders, lone walkers by the sea with a dog or a solid shadow at their heels, gave up their separateness and the hard lines of a species, and as they moved on into the landscape resumed earlier connections, between bough and bone, and hand or footprint and leaf. Celebratory or destructive forces caught them up, poured on through them.

  Each new work as I saw it in that place, with the man’s clawed and blotched hand steadying it at the edge, was a newly emergent form out of the island itself, roughly torn away like bark from a tree; as if there were continuity in essence, but also in the movement of a real hand across paper, between all the individual parts of this world, and each
made object had to be judged first against the natural objects it rose from and among which he now set it down.

  The newspapers responded by creating their own version of all this. Onto the popular figure of the artist in the garret, the misfit and man apart, they grafted a local image; that of the bush hatter, the old-timer still panning for gold in exhausted creeks or pursuing a vision so unique to the ragged, head-shaking, nickering, half-animal bagman as to put him permanently, but sentimentally, beyond the company of men.

  I used to take him clippings. He would ask me to read them aloud to him, not wanting to show too much interest; but I suspected he had come across some of these pieces already, on pages he had smeared with earth or rust or shit-colours – I could imagine with how much vengeful glee. Since the hermit painter was a public figure intended for general enjoyment, Frank had decided to get his own entertainment from him.

  ‘Well, c’n y’ beat that!’ he’d say, as if he were hearing about someone else. ‘Takes all sorts! Sounds interesting, eh, this Bottlebrush Man? Wouldn’ want t’ meet ’im in the dark but – waddaya reckon? Sounds as mad as a meat-axe. An’ I’m not sure I’d want t’ see anything he akcherly paints. I mean, what would ’e paint, what would ’e see? Down there? Even worse if what ’e painted just come out of ’is head. You wouldn’ want what comes off the edge of a meat-axe, would you? Nobody would.’

  Or, deserting this vein of easy parody, he would stomp about and turn grumpy. ‘Silly ol’ coot! What does he think he’s up to? Who’s he trying t’ fool? I’m sick of hearing about ’im!’

  His growing fame, if that is what it could be called that was so trivial, so much on the level of what was accorded as well to popstars, rippers and prisoners on the run, was a genuine astonishment to him. Whatever vanities he was capable of, I don’t think he had considered it as a real possibility.