David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

Gemmy was squatting, a nail between his teeth. He looked up.

Yair, Andy thought, eyes, observing the yellow whites. Like one a’ them. Muddy. Mistrustful.

Gemmy lowered his gaze, and in a leisurely fashion, as if he was here with only the crickets for company, drew a nail and slapped it in. The blows flew straight at Andy’s skull. The nail head glinted in the wall.

‘Ol’ friends eh?’

Gemmy sighted along the plank, which Andy could have told him was not straight, and took another nail from his box.

His way with people he did not want to deal with was to pretend they were not there. He looked right through this fellow now, this Andy, and he was gone. He disappeared into the glare off the wall.

Andy huffed. He knew that trick. He had felt the effect of it before. With his eyes narrowed against the sun and the shotgun across his arm, he stood his ground, all stringy indignation. Gemmy squinted at the plank, slapped the nail in.

That’s all right, feller, you take your time. I ain’t in a rush.

But personal affront was added now to his anger on behalf of the others, and with it came a burst of illumination. He saw what the feller was up to. He was letting on that those blacks had never existed. That he had never seen them. That they had never even been here, any more than he himself was. That they were hot wavering apparitions, produced by the heat or — at the sickening possibility of his old weakness coming up again to dog and defeat him, he lost the assurance he’d had of being a representative here of those who might see him at last as one of them. The sun blazed on his neck. His head throbbed. If I don’t get out of the way of this bloke, he thought, he’ll bloody nail me to the wall. I’ve got to find Barney. I’ve got to get in before he does — bloody coon!

With a hiss he turned and strode off, afire now with a need to justify himself that was at furnace heat by the time he found Barney. He could barely get the words out.

‘Andy,’ Barney told him, ‘take it easy, eh? Just slow down. What visitors?’

‘Blacks. What’d you think it’d be? Fucken blacks!’ The words bubbled in his mouth and he swung his head towards the gully, eyes blazing. He punched a fist into his palm. It was such a relief to get them out of his head at last. ‘Fucken myalls!’

Barney’s lips parted. The dent appeared in his brow.

Good, Andy thought, good. They’re in his head now.

‘They brung ’im something,’ he shouted. ‘On’y when I went an’ faced ’im with it, the crafty bugger’d hidden it, got it outa the way.’

He blinked. This detail had come of its own accord. He hadn’t realised till now that he had seen such a thing. His mind must have seen it though, when it took its own walk across there and hovered round them while they sat, because he saw it as clear as day. The whole occasion presented itself to him as the clearest picture, and as it did he felt a widening calm.

‘You know, Barney,’ he said softly, ‘I never did trust that feller. I know you never did.’

The word trust was important to him. When it came to his lips he felt the welling of tears. Things would be on a new footing from now on. Trust me Barney. You can. You know you can. That was what his fierce silence expressed.

But if Barney heard the appeal he did not respond to it.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I dunno. Gemmy’s harmless enough.’ The same old song. That was Jock McIvor talk. Andy was incensed.

‘Jesus, Barney,’ he said, ‘didn’ you hear what I said? They come to him. Bold as brass. Why? Why did they come? What did they bring him? He may be harmless, but they aren’t, they aren’t fucken harmless .’

The news alarmed Barney, but he was even more alarmed by Andy, whose sense of outrage, it seemed to him, grew fiercer each time he went over it.

The fact was, things had settled in these last weeks. He did not know what Jock had said to Gemmy, he would not ask, and Jock had spared him the embarrassment of informing him, but he had said something . Gemmy no longer strayed where he was not wanted — not by daylight, anyway, though once or twice when he was out last thing at night –

It did not mean the problem had gone away, of course. Gemmy, just by being there, opened a gate on to things, things Barney couldn’t specify, even to himself, and did not want to ask about, that worried the soulcase out of him. But for Jock’s sake he kept mum. The very last man in the world he would open himself to was Andy. He turned away now, meaning to put an end to the occasion, but as luck would have it Jim Sweetman hove into sight, climbing the long slope towards them. Andy lurched to meet him.

‘That feller’s been receivin’ visitors,’ he shouted, all breathless again. ‘I was there, I seen it! Hell, they come right up to ’im, bold as brass. Myalls! Fucken myalls!’ — the same words, almost, as before, but to Barney they had a different colour now that they were being addressed to Jim Sweetman.

‘Some people don’t think nothin’ of it,’ he shouted, ‘but what’d they come for, eh? What are they after? If it’s two of ’em this time, next week it’ll be twenty —’

Jim Sweetman frowned, his mouth tight with distaste at the crudeness of the fellow’s speech. He was always half off his head, this Andy. He ignored him and turned to Barney: ‘What’s he talking about?’

‘Blacks,’ Andy yelled with genuine outrage. ‘Blacks. Fucken myalls, that’s what.’

He was determined not to be ignored. He had a savage need to convince people of things; but had first, he knew, and he withered at the old injustice of it, to convince them about himself. He knew that look on Jim Sweetman’s face. He had been living with it, in one form or another, all his life. But this time things were different, he had the goods. He got control of the spit in his mouth and started in on his story, and this time, when he evoked the two blacks, he could describe them in every detail; he was astonished himself by what came to him. As if each time he approached the incident it got clearer. When they sat down with Gemmy now, he felt a burning in his right shoulder as if, all invisible, he was leaning right there against the wall of the shed, just feet away, and could see every move they made, hear every word, even if it was some blackfeller lingo they were conversing in. He was inspired.

Barney was astonished. ‘You didn’t tell me that,’ he protested. ‘You didn’t say that the first time.’ It embarrassed him that Jim Sweetman now was taking in every word.

‘You never give me the chance,’ Andy hooted. ‘I tried to, an’ you never bloody give me the chance!’ His voice was thick with emotion. He was on the edge of tears.

Jim Sweetman looked across at the line of greyish scrub, the last strip of country that was in any way comfortable to him, out of which, if this unreliable fellow was to be believed, with his wild eye and unsteady jaw and the spittle shooting out of his mouth, two blacks had walked in, just like that, as if they owned the place, then walked out again.

His own property was one of the most isolated in the settlement. The edges of it were part of the blacks’ traditional hunting ground, and at odd seasons, in the shadowy way of those whose minds you cannot touch, they still passed through it, quietly for the most part. He had no quarrel with them — so far as he knew and so far as any black, once your back was turned, could be trusted; there were a good many white fellers round here, this Andy for instance, that he trusted less. Even now he preferred not to look at the man. He got too much heady satisfaction from being the bearer of ill news. Still …

‘What do you make of it?’ he asked Barney in a level voice. He was thinking of his little granddaughter, around whom his whole world revolved. He saw her wandering off from the safe ground where her mother was hanging out the wash, after a butterfly maybe that kept moving ahead into longer and longer grass. But before Barney could reply, Andy broke in again. ‘I saw them give him something,’ he said.