As for Matty, he drove off with what he felt was really sinful pleasure. The road led away over the known routes by which he had sometimes taken Mr and Mrs Sweet for Sunday drives but he knew there would come a moment when his wheels would take him away from the prints the Daimler might have left, into a new world. When it came, it was a moment, not so much of pleasure as of sheer delight—all the more sinful of course, since that was his nature.
Matty worked for more than a year after that for a fencing company near Sydney. It got him some more money and kept him away from people for most of the time. He would have left the company earlier only his small car broke down so badly it took him six months’ extra work to pay for repairs and get on the road again. The question continued to burn and so did the weather as he moved on towards Queensland. Near Brisbane he needed another job and got it. But he kept it a shorter time than any other he had ever had, including the ironmonger’s in Melbourne.
He started as a porter in a sweet factory which was small enough not to be mechanized; and what with the heat, for it was summer, and his appearance, the women swarmed all over the manager demanding his dismissal on the ground that he kept looking at them. In fact they kept looking at him and whispering “No wonder that lot of cream went sour,” and so on. Matty, who must have thought himself invisible like an ostrich if he did not look at anybody, was called before the manager and in the process of being given his cards when the door opened and the owner of the factory rolled in. Mr Hanrahan was about half Matty’s height and four times his width. His face was fat, with little, darting black eyes always on the watch for something in the corner or behind the door and when he heard why Matty was being dismissed, he looked sideways up into Matty’s face, then round at his ear and after that all the way down to his feet and up again.
“And isn’t he just the man we’ve been looking for?”
Matty felt his questions were about to be answered. But as it was, Mr Hanrahan led the way outside and told Matty to follow him up the hill. Matty got into his ancient car, Mr Hanrahan got into his new one and started it, then leapt out again, dashed back to the door, flung it open and stared into the office. He backed away slowly, closing it carefully but watching always, even through the last crack.
The road wound away from the factory through woods and fields and up, a zig-zag up the side of the hill. Mr Hanrahan’s house hung on the hillside among strange trees that dripped with orchids and moss. Matty parked behind the new car and followed his new employer up an outside staircase to an enormous living-room that seemed to be walled completely with glass. On one side you could look right down the hill—and there was the factory, looking like an architect’s model of itself. Directly he entered, Mr Hanrahan seized a pair of binoculars from the big table and levelled them at the model. He blew out his breath fiercely. He grabbed a phone and shouted into it.
“Molloy! Molloy! There’s two girls skulking out at the back!”
But by the time he had said that, Matty was rapt, gazing at the glass on the three other walls. It was all mirror, even the backs of the doors, and it was not just plain mirrors, it distorted so that Matty saw himself half a dozen times, pulled out sideways and squashed down from above; and Mr Hanrahan was the shape of a sofa.
“Ha,” said Mr Hanrahan. “You’re admiring my bits of glass I see. Isn’t that a good idea for a daily mortification of sinful pride? Mrs Hanrahan! Where are you?”
Mrs Hanrahan appeared as if materialized, for what with the window and the mirrors a door opening here or there was little more than a watery conflux of light. She was thinner than Matty, shorter than Mr Hanrahan and had an air of having been used up.
“What is it, Mr Hanrahan?”
“Here he is, I’ve found him!”
“Oh the poor man with his mended face!”
“I’ll teach them, the awesome frivolity of it, wanting a man about the place! Girls! Come here, the lot of you!”
Then there was a watery conflux in various parts of the wall, some darkness and here and there a dazzle of light.
“My seven girls,” cried Mr Hanrahan, counting them busily. “You wanted a man about the place did you? Too many females were there? Not a young man for a mile! I’ll teach you! Here’s the new man about the place! Take a good look at him!”
The girls had formed into a semicircle. There were the twins Francesca and Teresa, hardly out of the cradle, but pretty. Matty instinctively held his hand so that they should not be frightened by his left side which they could see. There was Bridget, rather taller and pretty and peering short-sightedly, and there was Bernadette who was taller and prettier and wholly nubile, and there was Cecilia who was shorter and just as pretty and nubiler if anything, and there was Gabriel Jane, turner-of-heads-in-the-street, and there was the firstborn, dressed for a barbecue, Mary Michael: and whoever looked on Mary Michael was lost.
Cecilia clasped her cheeks with her hands and uttered a faint shriek as her eyes adjusted to the light. Mary Michael turned her swan’s neck to Mr Hanrahan and spoke enchanting words.
“Oh Dad!”
Then Matty gave a wild cry. He got the door open and he tumbled down the outside stairs. He leapt into his car and wrenched it round the curves down the hill. He began to recite in a high voice.
“The Revelation of St John the Divine. Chapter One. I. John writeth his revelation to the seven churches of Asia, signified by the seven golden candlesticks. 7 The coming of Christ. 14 His glorious power and majesty. The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to show unto his servants—”
So Matty went on, his voice high; and it lowered bit by bit and it was normal as ever it was by the time he had got to—“19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.”
With the “Amen” at the end he found he needed petrol which he got; and while waiting, a kind of after-image of Mary Michael came floating through his mind so he started off again at random, both on the road and in the book—
“22 And Kinah, and Dimonah, and Adadah.
23 And Kedesh and Hazor and Ithnan,
24 Ziph, and Telem, and Bealoth.
25 And Hazor, Hadattah, and Kerioth, and Hezron, which is Hazor.
26 Amam and Shema—”
And Matty came in the evening unto the city of Gladstone which is a great city. And he sojourned there for many months at peace, finding work as a grave-digger.
But the pattern repeated itself, the question returning and the restlessness and the need to move on to some place where all things would be made plain. So Matty began to think; or perhaps it would be better to say that something began to think itself in Matty and presented the result to him. Thus without his conscious volition he came across the thought; Are all men like this? Then there was added to that thought; No. For the two sides of their face are equal.
Then; Am I only different from them in face?
No.
“What am I?”
After that he prayed mechanically. It was strange about Matty. He could no more pray than he could fly. But now he added a bit in after the petitions for all the people he knew, to the effect that if it was permissible he would be glad if his own particular difficulty could be made easier for him and directly following on that another thought performed itself in his mind, a quotation and a horrible one—Some have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of God. He had that thought in a grave, which was the best place for it. It got him out of the grave in a kind of instant resurrection and he was miles up the coast in a land of violent and wicked men before he could put the quotation out of his mind. The wicked men did it for him. He was stopped by police who searched him, and the car, and warned him that murder had been done on the road and would be done again, but he went on because he did not dare go back and there was nowhere else to go. He had looked at a map in a petrol station but his years in the land had not
taught him the difference between a country and a continent. He went ignorantly expecting the journey to Darwin to be a few miles and with convenient petrol stations and stores for food and wells for water. He had no interest in acquiring knowledge and the Bible, though it was full of wildernesses and deserts, did not mention the incidence of wells and petrol stations in the outback. So he turned off what was already no major highway and he got thoroughly lost.
Matty was not frightened. It was not that he was brave. It was that he could not realize danger. He was not able to be frightened. So he lurched and bumped on, juddered and slid and thought he would like a drink but knew he had none, watched the needle of the fuel indicator drop lower and lower until at last it bounced on the pin, and still there was nothing but the merest track and then the car stopped. It did not do so dramatically or in a position of apparent drama. It stopped where scrubby thorns fledged a soil that looked rather like sand and where the only break in the prickly horizon was the low hump of three trees, not all together, but spaced all along on the north hand and seeming distant. Matty sat in the car for a long time. He saw the sun go down ahead of him and the sky was so cloudless that even down at the edge of it the sun mixed and clotted for a while among the thorns before it managed to lug itself down out of sight. He sat and listened to the noises of the night but by now they were familiar enough and even the thumping passage of a large animal among the thorns was not at all frightening. Matty composed himself in the driver’s seat as if it were the proper place and went to sleep. He did not wake up until the dawn; and what woke him was not light, but thirst.
He could not be frightened; but he could be thirsty. He got out of the car into the chilly dawn and walked round as if he might come across a pool or a snack bar or a village store; and then, without any preparation or much thought he began to walk forward along the track. He did not look round until a strange warmness on his back made him turn and stare at the rising sun. There was no car under it, only scrub. He started to walk again. As the sun rose, so did his thirst.
The literature of survival had passed Matty by. He did not know about the plants that hold water in their tissues, nor about digging holes in the sand or watching the behaviour of birds; nor did he feel the excitement of adventure. He just felt thirsty with a burning back and the wooden covers of the Bible bouncing against his right hip-bone. It may not even have occurred to him that a man could walk and walk until he dropped and still not find water. So he went on in the same stubborn way that he had done everything all his life, even back at the beginning of it.
By midday strange things were happening to the bushes. They were floating about sometimes as if Mr Hanrahan had got them into his strange living-room. This interfered with Matty’s view of the track or what he thought was the track and he stopped for a bit, looking down and blinking. There were large, black ants running round at his feet, ants that apparently found the heat encouraging and an incentive to work for they were carrying huge burdens as if about to achieve something. Matty considered them for a while but they had nothing to say to his condition. When he looked up again he could not see which way the track went. His own footprints were no help for they curved out of sight and the scrub lay all around. He examined the close horizon as carefully as he could and decided that in one direction there was a thickening of its texture or additional denseness and additional height. It might be trees, he thought; and with trees there would be shade so he decided to go in that direction if it lay anywhere in the sector to the west. But at midday, that near the equator, even with a sextant it is very difficult to take your bearing from the sun and all that happened was that Matty, looking up, took a step to the rear and fell flat on his back. The fall made him breathless and for a moment among the wheeling rays and flashes from the meridian there seemed to be a darkness, man-shaped and huge. He got to his feet and of course there was nothing, just the sun falling vertically so that when he got his hat on again the shadow of the brim lay on his feet. He found the direction of the thickening and tried to think whether it was the sensible direction or not but all that came into his mind was a stream of Biblical injunctions about the size of seas of brass. They set him seeing water in flashes and this got mixed into the mirrors in Mr Hanrahan’s room and his own lips out there felt like two ridges of rock in a waste land. So then he was pushing through scrub that came up to his shoulders and beyond it was a tall tree full of angels. When they saw him they jeered and flew and circled and then streamed away through heaven so that he saw clearly that they meant him to follow and jeered because he could not fly. But he could still move his feet and he pushed on until he stood under the tree that held its leaves sideways to the sun and gave no shade and all there was round the tree was a little space of bare and sandy soil. He got his back against the trunk and winced at the pain for he was burnt through his jacket. Then there was a man standing at the edge of the bare sand and he was an Abo. He was the man, Matty saw, who had been there, up in the air and between him and the sun when he fell. Matty now had the chance to examine him all over and carefully. The man was not so tall, after all, really rather short. But he was thin and this seemed to make him taller. The long, wooden stick with the burnt black point which the Abo held upright in one hand was taller than either of them. The Abo, Matty saw, had a cloud in his face, which was reasonable enough, seeing how he had materialized in the air under the sun. He was bollock naked too.
Matty took a step away from the tree and spoke.
“Water.”
The Abo came forward and peered into his face. He jerked his chin up and spoke in his language. He gestured hugely with the spear, tracing out a great arc in the sky, which included the sun.
“Water!”
Now Matty pointed into the cloud that hid the Abo’s mouth, then into his own mouth. The Abo gestured with his spear towards the densest of the scrub. Then he took out of the air a small, polished stone. He squatted, put it down on the sandy soil and muttered to it.
Matty was appalled. He scrabbled his Bible out of his pocket and held it over the stone but the Abo went on muttering. Matty cried out again.
“No, no!”
The Abo looked impenetrably at the book. Matty thrust it back into his pocket.
“Look!”
He scuffed a line in the sand and then another that crossed the first. The Abo stared at it but said nothing.
“Look!”
Matty flung himself down. He lay, his legs stretched down the first line, his arms held wide on either side along the second. The Abo at once leapt to his feet. The cloud in his face was split by a wide flash of white.
“Fucking big sky-fella him b’long Jesus Christ!”
He leapt into the air and landed with a foot on either outstretched arm, a foot in the crook of either elbow. He stabbed down on this side and that with his fire-hardened spear into the open palm. He jumped back high, and he landed with both feet in Matty’s groin and the sky went black and the Abo disappeared into it. Matty rolled up like a leaf, like a cut worm, screwed his body up and the waves of sickness increased like the pain until they carried his consciousness away.
When he came to he knew he was badly swelled up so he tried to move on hands and knees but the sickness swamped him again. So it being his nature, he got upright with the world reeling and he kept his legs apart and his belly dragged so that he held himself in with both hands so as not to lose anything down there. He went towards the place where he seemed to remember there had been some thickness beyond the scrub. But when he was through the thickness he came into an open space with trees a little further off. In the open space and stretching all along from as far that way to out of sight on this was an electrified fence. He turned, mechanically, to go along it but a car hooted behind him. He stood still, humbly and dumbly and the car was a Land Rover that came by his left shoulder slowly then stopped. A man got out and came across. He wore an open-necked shirt and jeans and a digger’s hat turned up at the side. He peered into Matty’s face and Matty waited lik
e an animal not being able now, to do anything else.
“My oath. Been done have you? Where’s your cobber? Mate? Matey?”
“Water.”
The man manoeuvred him gently towards the Land Rover, hissing between his teeth now and then as if Matty were a horse.
“You have been done my old son oh dear oh dear. What has been at you? Gone ten rounds with a roo? Drink this. Easy!”
“Crucified—”
“Where’s your oppo?”
“Abo.”
“You seen an Abo? Crucified? Here. Show us your hands. That’s no more than scratches.”
“A spear.”
“Little thin man? With a little fat woman expecting and two nippers? That’ll be Harry Bummer. The bleeding sod. I expect he let on he didn’t know English didn’t he? Moved his head like this, didn’t he?”
Darkness Visible: With an Introduction by Philip Hensher Page 7