David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

She slipped away and stared into a glass but could find no such beauty — no promise of it either — in herself. She was gangly and freckled. She had warts on her hands. And there was such a hunger for beauty in her. The appearance of it in Lachlan did not make her envious. It struck her with awe, as of something impersonal, that commanded her absolutely beyond her will.

But he saw after a time, for all his stubbornness and pride, that if he was to get on here he would have to know the place. He set out, in a dogged way, to learn all the little skills and tricks of bushcraft, and because he was quick and had to be first in everything was soon as much a bushman as the best of them, with a grit, and a fierce little-mannish tenacity that even Jim Sweetman grew to respect. Jock McIvor was proud of him. They tracked and hunted together, shot scrub turkey, and bronze-wings and topknots and fruit pigeon, and in the ti-tree forest on the margin of the lagoons a dozen varieties of duck.

It was a flame in the boy, this power he had acquired over the world they moved in. He gave up being contemptuous, since he was the one now who ‘knew things’, assumed an easy, masculine air that he had picked up by imitation from his elders, and was so good at it that it looked like nature. And what of me? she thought. I am as brave as he is. I could do all that. Being in possession now of so many skills, and the code that went with them and belonged to men, he had put himself beyond reach. And she was still, if only by an inch now, the taller!

She resented bitterly the provision his being a boy had made for him to exert himself and act. He had no need to fret or bother himself; only to be patient and let himself grow and fill out the lines of what had been laid up for him. The assurance of that, and of his own will, gave him a glow you might never have guessed at from the thin-faced, thin-shouldered town lad he had been when he first came to them. He would grow quickly now. The vision of what lay before him would square his shoulders, deepen his voice, give him room.

She had no such vision of her own future. All she saw laid up for herself was what her mother presented, a tough pride in competence, in being unflagging and making no fuss. She admired her mother but the narrowness of it was terrible to her.

All silent mutiny, she would stand punching at a lump of dough at her mother’s table, and might have gone on doing it for ever — stood there with one bare foot on the other on the dirt floor, punching away at her own dull lump of a soul. Her mother watched and was concerned. She looked up and smiled, a wan attempt. Her mother was not fooled.

She pored over books, anything she could lay her hands on that offered some promise that the world was larger, more passionate, crueller — even that would be a comfort — than the one she was bound to.

She sat over a piece of simple needlework, and worked as if her life was in every stitch; as if one day the angel of the Last Judgment would hold up the pot-holder with its design of forget-me-nots, point to a stitch that was too small, or not straight, and say for the whole world, all the gathered souls of all the ages to hear: ‘Janet McIvor, did you do this?’

One day, hunched in the shade of a scrubby lemon tree, picking idly at a scab on her knee, she was amazed, when the hard crust lifted, to discover a colour she had never seen before, and another skin, lustrous as pearl. A delicate pink, it might have belonged to some other creature altogether, and the thought came to her that if all the rough skin of her present self crusted and came off, what would be revealed, shining in sunlight, was this finer being that had somehow been covered up in her.

When she got up and walked out into the paddock, and all the velvety grass heads blazed up, haloed with gold, she felt, under the influence of her secret skin, suddenly floaty, as if she had been relieved of the weight of her own life, and the brighter being in her was very gently stirring and shifting its wings.

In a particular vibrancy of light that on another occasion might have given her a headache, all the world shimmered and was changed.

The paddock of standing wheat when she wandered out into it boomed with a flaminess that bounced and struck out flares, then was quenched by a passing cloud.

Grasshoppers, pinches of dust but with spring-like muscles in their thighs that allowed them to leap distances that in human terms would have been hundreds of yards, seemed made of the finest glass, and she too felt fine-spun, toughly transparent.

Trees shook out ribbons of tattered bark, and the smooth skin under it was palest green, streaked orange like a sunset, or it had the powdery redness of blood. Glory was the word she thought of. A part of her rose into vague, bright zones where her name, she thought, ought to have been Flora; she hated plain Janet. In giving it to her they had set her too low and thus too early settled her fate. (It was Flora Macdonald she had in mind, but some other dream-figure with flowers round her hem and bright petals opening miraculously out of the clods at her feet might also have been there in the regions she moved in an inch or two above the earth.)

But she was a practical child and sceptical of mere feelings. They blazed up a moment, then died and left you stranded, barefoot, in the grass. She did not put too much store by them, but they were important enough, these moments, for her to keep them to herself.

Unlike Lachlan. When he was fired up with something he had to let it out. That was what made things difficult for him. Full of bright schemes for the future, heroic visions in which the limitations of mere boyhood would at last be transcended, he felt that if he could only see them clearly enough they would be there, up ahead, waiting for him to catch up bearing the details at last of place and time.

As soon as he was old enough, with Gemmy as his guide, he would get up an expedition to search for Dr Leichhardt. Somewhere along the way he might be wounded by blacks. Gemmy would nurse him back to health with herbs only the natives knew of. He would discover two or three rivers, which he would name after some of his acquaintances, and a mountain to which he might give his aunt’s name, Mount Ellen, or the name of some place in Scotland, and they would find Leichhardt, or his bones at least, and when they got back and people wanted to put up a monument, he would insist, nobly, that Gemmy’s name should be inscribed there along with his own. Then, when all that was done …

There was no end, no limit either, to his plans.

Janet could not take it seriously, not because she did not believe in his capacity, one day, to do such things, but because the things themselves were so ordinary. Her view was that when real life caught up with you, it would not be in a form you had already imagined and got the better of. But she had no wish any longer to bring him down, so in this too he had his triumph over her.

The chief sharer of his visions was Gemmy, who listened, grasped only half of what he heard, and made his own assessments.

What moved him most was to see that he too was there in the boy’s dreams. He felt a rush of affection at being trusted and given a place in what Lachlan Beattie had laid up to himself, but also a fearful protectiveness that Lachlan, if he had perceived it, would have resented.

He was just a child! The realisation shocked Gemmy but settled him too. It was not often here that he could reclaim a sense of himself as a grown man.

FROM THE BEGINNING there were those among them, Ned Corcoran was the most vehement, for whom the only way of dealing with blacks was the one that had been given scope elsewhere. ‘We ought to go out,’ he insisted, controlling the spit that flooded his mouth, ‘and get rid of ’em, once and for all. If I catch one of the buggers round my place, I’ll fuckin’ pot ’im.’ He jerked out the last couple of syllables, and the explosion they made, and the silence afterwards, made some men uncomfortably hot. The rest shifted their boots but did not speak. They were not so candid as Ned Corcoran, but did not essentially disagree with him. It was the quickest way; the kindest too maybe, in the long run. They had seen what happened to blacks in places where the locals were kind. It wasn’t a pleasant sight.