Inland

by Gerald Murnane

  The grass around the base of the pond would be long and unkempt, I hoped, when my girlfriend first called. While we talked she would glance at the pond and at the lawn around it; she would be enjoying the illusion that the pond did not rest on the ground: that the rows of bricks reached far below the level of our feet and therefore that the clouded green water was far deeper than she had first supposed – perhaps too deep for her to touch the bottom, even if she leaned far over the wall.

  But she would never reach her hand so far into the water. She would be like myself in preferring many possible things to any one visible thing. Besides, she would be wearing her new school uniform, and even in the hot days of February a jacket with a long-sleeved shirt or blouse underneath. She would not reach her hand into the water, but she would sit in a ladylike way on the wall of bricks. She would sit there in her pale brown or sky-blue and I would stand beside her – in long trousers at last: long, dark-grey trousers. She would sit and I would stand. We would be quite still. We would be waiting for the fish to drift into view.

  I would have told her well beforehand how timid the fish were. If she moved abruptly or even if she spoke too loudly the fish would go back into the depths again. But if she was quiet and patient a fish would appear; she would see the blunt red body and the long fluent tail.

  In time she would grow used to the fish pond; she would notice it less. She and I would still sit beside the pond but we would talk like a brother and a sister who had been together for as long as they could remember. One afternoon she would notice a streak of red at the side of the shed. The leaves of the grapevine would be turning red. Then the afternoons would turn cool and misty, but by that time we would be so easy together that she could sit with me in the front room that was kept tidy for my parents’ few visitors.

  In time we might hardly look at the fish pond, but I could always think of the column of green going down into the ground. I could always think of the shaft of green water. Nor would the girl forget the pond. On many a day while she travelled between Bendigo Street and her school in the far corner of our district, some young man much older than myself would begin to talk to her. My girlfriend would answer politely but coldly. She would be thinking of the pond.

  Our pond would not be the only secret sign between the girl from Bendigo Street and myself. In the years between our leaving school and our marrying, I would turn my father’s fowl sheds into an aviary. I would begin to collect the birds that would live and breed in aviaries around our house in all the years when the girl from Bendigo Street and I lived on the other side of Mount Macedon. Even before I bought my first birds I would have planted shrubs and long-stemmed grasses inside the wire-mesh walls. The aviary would become a much bolder sign than the pond: a column of rich green rising out of the bare soil of the fowl yard. Inside the green the parrots and finches and ground-dwelling birds would thrive out of sight.

  The wide district between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek is on the opposite side of Melbourne County from the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. The soil of that wide district is mostly sandy, with swamps and heaths and tea-tree scrub instead of grasslands.

  I lived between Scotchman’s Creek and the Elster, in my parents’ house, from the year when I was thirteen until the year when I was twenty. Those were the years when I learned to keep to my room, as I keep to this room today, and when I began to write on pages like these pages in front of me today. In those years also I forgot what little I had already learned of the language of girl-women, and I did not learn anything of the language of young women.

  Each day in those years I rested for an hour or two from my writing on pages, and I left my room and walked among the streets of the district. While I walked I watched girl-women and young women, but without approaching them or speaking to them. After I had lived for a few years in the district I knew perhaps a hundred girl-women and young women by their faces and by the houses where they lived and sometimes by the shops or the factories where they worked or the schools they attended, but I knew none of their names and I had not spoken to any of them.

  When I was twenty years old I prepared to leave the district between Scotchman’s Creek and the Elster. I still wrote often on pages like this page but I was not so contented with keeping to my room. And I was not so contented with watching girl-women and young women but not being able to speak their language. I had decided to live in another district of Melbourne County where the language of females might be easier to learn.

  Even though I was by then much more a young man than a boy-man, I watched many more girl-women than young women. By then the language of females had come to seem so strange to me that I thought I could only begin to learn that language if I heard it spoken simply at first by a girl-woman.

  One morning I saw in a newspaper a photograph of one of the girl-women I had sometimes watched. I had watched her in the low hills south of the valley of Scotchman’s Creek, and I knew the street she lived in, which was on the side of one of those hills. One day the girl-woman had looked almost into my face when I passed her in the street, and I had thought I understood her look, although I seldom understood the looks of females.

  Underneath the photograph was the girl-woman’s name, which I had not known before. I have already written that name on a few of these pages.

  From the text around the photograph I learned that the age of the girl-woman was fourteen and that she was in the second form at her secondary school and that her teachers thought well of her. I learned that her family consisted of her mother and herself and that the mother and the daughter were what had been called in earlier years newcomers from Europe. I learned that the girl-woman, like myself, kept often to her room. And I also learned that she liked to sleep with her window open.

  What I had learned from the newspaper might have been almost enough to prompt me to speak to the girl-woman if we had happened to meet in the street near her house when I was walking past in the days after I had read about her.

  But what I had mainly learned was that the girl-woman and I would never happen to meet in the street again. On the night before I had seen her photograph and learned her name, the girl-woman had been in her bed in her room with the window open. Someone had climbed in through the open window and had used a hammer or a small axe to break the girl’s skull and to kill her. I learned last of all from the newspaper that the police had not learned who might have climbed in through the window of the room.

  I decided never to walk again in the streets between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek, even though I had never walked by night and I had never once spoken to any of the girl-women or the young women I had seen on my walks.

  During the following days I thought often about the dead girl-woman. I hoped she had been asleep when the hammer or the small axe had first hit her, and that she had died at once. But then I read in a weekly newspaper that she had been hit many times and that she had struggled while she was being hit.

  I next learned that the police had charged a man with having murdered the girl-woman. The man was as old then, when I was twenty, as I was ten years ago. His address was the same as the address of the dead girl-woman and her mother. His surname was different from theirs, but it was a name from the same part of the world as theirs.

  Even after the man had been charged with the murder, I took no more walks in the district between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek, and I looked at no more girl-women or young women between those streams. I had already left that district and left my parents’ house, and I was living in a rented room nearer to my native district when I read the newspaper reports of the trial of the man who was said to have killed the girl-woman.

  The man was what was called in those days the de facto husband of the mother of the girl-woman. Some months before the killing of the girl-woman, so it was said, the man had begun the practice of leaving the house by the front door nearly every night at about nine o’clock. He would tell the mother of the girl-woman that he was going to visit
a man for an hour. He had not visited any man, so it was said, but had gone to the side of the house and had climbed through the open window of the girl’s room and had spent the hour with her.

  In time, so it was said, the girl-woman had learned that she was carrying a child and she had told this to the man. A few nights afterwards, so it was said, the man had climbed in through the window with a hammer. The man had brought the hammer down on the girl-woman’s head while she lay awake in bed but he had not killed her at first. The girl had struggled but the man had gone on hitting her until she was dead. She had not cried out while she struggled.

  The members of the jury believed all that was said against the man. But several times during the trial of the man the mother of the dead girl-woman had cried out that the things being said had not in fact happened. Sometimes the mother of the dead girl-woman had cried out in the language most commonly spoken in Melbourne County, but sometimes she had cried out in the heavy-hearted language of her own part of the world.

  Each night when I get up from this table, I leave my pages lying wherever they happen to lie. I walk away from this table and I do not look at my pages again until the following afternoon.

  I do not look at my pages until afternoon, but I arrive in this room long before midday and I stand for a long time in front of the windows or in front of the spines of books before I look at the pages on the table. And long before I look at the pages on the table, I watch the pages from the sides of my eyes.

  I have found a way of watching a thing that shows me what I never see when I look at the thing. If I watch a thing from the sides of my eyes, I see in the thing the shape of another thing.

  What I see when I watch from the sides of my eyes is the thing I would see if I stood a little way off, in a place where I can never stand for as long as I stand where I am standing. Or what I see when I watch from the sides of my eyes is what another man would see if he looked from a place a little to one side of me.

  Watching from the sides of my eyes I see a shaft of greenish water rising out of the grass of fields. When I turn and look through my windows I see a row of poplar trees. A man standing a little to the side of me looks through the window in the usual way and sees a column of greenish water.

  On some afternoons I look through the windows in the usual way and I see a long pole pointing at the sky. But a man standing a little to the side of me sees the shape of another thing reaching out from the land.

  On some mornings when I stand for a long time in this room but without looking at all the pages strewn on the table, I watch the pages from the sides of my eyes. I see among the scattered pages the shapes of white or grey clouds. Afterwards, when I walk to my table and stand in front of my pages, I see only my scattered pages; but another man standing a little to one side of me might see clouds white or grey whenever he looks at my table.

  The man a little to one side of me might suppose I am writing on clouds. He might even suppose that the clouds that he sees on my table are drifting away towards the clouds in the sky on the other side of my windows, or towards the clouds in the panes of glass in front of my books, or even towards the clouds on the other side of the spines and the covers of my books and other books.

  Yet I have not forgotten that I once wrote on one of these pages that I was going to send the pages to a young woman who was dreaming of herself at a desk with printed pages around her and on top of each page the word Hinterland and somewhere among the first of the printed pages a sentence declaring her to be the editor of all those pages.

  I have written already, on a page among these heaps of pages, that the men and women whose names are on the pages of books, or even on the spines and covers of books, are all dead. And I have written already, on a page among these heaps of pages, that the pages I am writing on are not the pages of books. But if these pages of mine drift away from this table, and if the pages drift in among the pages that drift like clouds in the space like sky behind all the rooms like these with books around the walls, then someone in future may find one of these pages drifting and may take it for a page of a book.

  Anyone finding one of these pages and taking it for a page of a book might suppose that the people named on the page are dead. I have kept my own name well away from these pages, but anyone finding a page in future may suppose that Gunnarsen or his wife or anyone else named in these pages as a living person – that any such person died at some time while I was here at my table writing about such persons. Anyone finding even this page in future may suppose that the people I once dreamed of myself seeing in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute of Prairie Studies – that those people are dead who sometimes thought of me as dead, while I am still alive.

  Today I thought of people who are already dead or who will soon die.

  I do not say today that I have never looked behind the covers or the spine of any book, but I would have said this morning that I could not remember when I last turned the key in any of the glass doors in front of my shelves. This morning I turned a key and swung a pair of glass doors apart and then back against the shelves. I looked up and saw the spines of books with no images of sky or clouds among them.

  I had decided to glance into the space behind the covers of books. I had decided to look at the sorts of words that are written about people who have died or who are supposed to have died. I was looking for words such as the man would see who stands a little to one side of me – the man who sees these pages as drifting and who supposes I have died.

  Many years ago I saw in a book a few words in praise of Thomas Hardy as having been the first writer of books to write about the sound of the wind in tiny, bell-shaped heath flowers. But I neglected at the time to look for the book with the words describing the sound of the wind, and I neglected even to write the name of the book. Later, I forgot the name of the book in which I had first seen the words about the sound of the wind in the heath-flowers in the pages of a certain book by Thomas Hardy.

  Today I remembered a mention of wind among grass and flowers in the last paragraph of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. I have read that book three times: first in 1956, then in 1967, and then again in 1977. I have read the book only three times in the past thirty years, but I am reading it more frequently – as the dates above show. The dates above remind me also that I have to read Wuthering Heights again before 1986 has ended. And I should write here also that on most of the days in the past thirty years when I have not been reading Wuthering Heights I have stared at the spine of it or at a corner of the cover of it. I have stared, and I have dreamed of myself seeing a boy-man and a girl-woman and grasslands.

  I got up from my table today and took down the book from its shelf and turned to the last paragraph and read it aloud. The paragraph is all one sentence, and a memorable sentence, and while I read it aloud I dreamed of myself seeing headstones of graves with grass-stems swaying near by and clusters of tiny flower-heads among the grass and in the background a view of indistinct moorland. I saw as well that the grass and the graves and the moorland were the same that I had dreamed of myself seeing when I last read that page nine years ago, and when I read the page nineteen years ago.

  Like most people, I dream of myself seeing places while I look at pages in books. The places are always grassy places; I do not go on looking at the pages of a book if the first pages have not made me dream of myself seeing grassy places.

  I used to see the grassy places as lying somewhere on the other side of the pages I was looking at. I used to dream as though the pages I looked at were windows. I dreamed of myself seeing grassy places on the other side of every page I had looked at and of every page I would ever look at; and I dreamed of all those grassy places as being parts of one huge landscape. I was looking at pages of books only so that I could dream of myself seeing all the valleys and streams and folds of hills and heath-lands and plains in one huge grassland. A day would come, I used to suppose, when I would have looked at enough pages of books. A day would come when I could sit at this table with
no pages of books in front of me and yet dream of myself surrounded by the one huge window of all the pages of books I had read, with the one huge grassland on the other side of that window.

  That was what I used to suppose. But one day I was looking at a page of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy. I was looking at the page and dreaming of myself seeing a young woman in a grassy place that was called the Vale of the Great Dairies but was only a small hollow in the broad grassland that I hoped to see in time from the one huge window of all the pages of books that I had read. I was dreaming of myself seeing a young woman in a grassy place, and then I saw that she was the same young woman I had dreamed of seeing when I last looked at the pages of Wuthering Heights, and that the grassy place was the same place I had dreamed of seeing while I read about the moorland where Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff had been children together.

  I put Tess of the D’Urbervilles back in its place on my shelves, and I took down Wuthering Heights and looked at certain pages. At first I looked as though I was looking through window-pages, but then I saw that the young woman I saw was not even a young woman but a girl-woman and that the grassy place I saw was not a moorland but part of a paddock of grass in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. When I had seen this I was ready to acknowledge that a page of a book is not a window but a mirror. But in order to prove this finally to myself I looked for a certain page that I remembered in Wuthering Heights. The words on that page describe a man sleeping in a room and dreaming of the ghost of a female child who is trying to get into the room from outside by way of the window.