David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

That did it. ‘Give ’im what?’ Jim Sweetman demanded.

‘A stone,’ Andy said softly, and was amazed himself at the size and smoothness of the thing as it landed slap in Gemmy’s hand. ‘It was wrapped up like. In bark and that — you know. But I seen it alright. Big as me fist.’ And he thrust his closed fist towards them.

A stone. Now how had that come to him? Why had he said that? He sweated. He inwardly beat his open hand against his thigh and cursed. That stone, when they went to look for it, would prove difficult to locate; and Jim Sweetman, for one, would want to see it.

He had been afraid that Gemmy would accuse him of seeing things, and what had he done? He’d given him the chance to prove it. It was always the same. He always went that bit too far. When the stone was looked for and failed to appear they would start to wonder, their voices take on a sceptical tone and the sort of sly derision that leaves a man no way out but to insist, and dig deeper into his own grave. ‘Been seein’ things again have you, old son? Sufferin’ from a touch of imaginitis, are we?’ There was no pity in people.

Well, if it came to the test he would stick to his story and let them choose. Between him and this blackfeller. When push came to shove, they’d choose him , they’d have to. Only he wasn’t sure of it. His bowels went soft in him.

And the stone, once launched, had a life of its own. It flew in all directions, developed a capacity to multiply, accelerate, leave wounds; and the wounds were real even if the stone was not, and would not heal. Andy McKillop felt miserably that he was the first victim of it.

He mooched round the settlement with his head down, scared silly by what he had achieved, and sat at times looking at his closed fist and telling himself that when he opened it, by some magic he did not believe in, it would be there, solid, graspable. See? See? You’ll believe me now, I reckon. He would make them recognise it at last, as proof of the non-existence of that other, heavier and more fatal thing, an imagination.

But best of all, he thought, might be to tip his head back and swallow the bastard as if he had never coughed it up in the first place.

WITHIN AN HOUR of the blacks’ visit Jock had news of it. First from Ellen, who looked serious — she had heard it, in a panic, from Polly Mason — then, as he expected, from Barney, who could barely hold in the exasperation he felt.

Jock felt sorry for him. He was being pressed from all sides: by Polly, by Jim Sweetman, and as always by his own unhappy sense that the world was preparing at any moment to tear away from him the last vestige of security. Jock, however, was determined to insist for as long as he could that there was a reasonable centre to things, though he too had been shaken in these last months; not by what Gemmy threatened but by what he had begun to see in others.

Barney looked miserable. Usually when he came to Jock it was for consolation, and he was looking for it even now. He was alarmed by what he had heard, since Polly was; but what mostly upset him was that he had been shown up in front of Jim Sweetman. He came striding. But there was something in Jock’s steady calm that made the words he had been preparing all the way uphill go dry in his throat. When he spoke it was mildly.

‘Yes,’ Jock admitted, ‘so Ah’ve heard.’

‘Well?’ Barney said. There was a whine in his voice that was very nearly childish. He wanted to be let off the hook. ‘It’s what we been worried about all along. You know that. No use pretending you don’t.’

‘Ah’m nae pretending,’ Jock said.

‘I mean — they just walked right in, in full daylight. Bold as brass —’ Jock gave him a hard look, as if he knew that the words were the same ones Andy had used, and Barney was embarrassed to hear in his voice something as well of Andy’s thin, self-justifying tone. ‘I mean,’ he said, in a voice closer to his own, ‘they didn’t seem to mind who saw ’em. Neither did Gemmy. Andy says —’

‘Andy?’

Barney felt the colour rise to his throat. ‘Look here, Jock,’ he said, ‘don’ play me about, eh? I’m not the only one, you know.’

Jock turned away. Andy he could ignore, but he resented this appeal on Barney’s part to the mob who stood behind him. A sense of loneliness came over him. He did not want what was happening here.

But Barney, who felt he had put himself on the wrong foot, was defiant. ‘Jock,’ he said, ‘I won’t be fobbed off. Not this time.’

The sense of distance between them was new, and it seemed to Jock to hold the possibility of a terrible desolation. None of the old assurances would cross it. To attempt them, he saw, would be to insult Barney by making too little of what it had cost him to risk a break between them. They meant a good deal to one another.

‘A’richt then Barney,’ he said, as coolly as he could manage, ‘Ah’ll speak to him. Tell Polly no’ to worry. Trust me.’

He might have left it there, on that note of appeal to what was intimate between them; but some imp of irritation in him, some wish to register, at least, the hurt he felt, made him speak again. ‘They went off, dinna they?’

‘They did, yes. They did. But there’s this — this thing they brought ’im? This stone .’

‘Wha’ stone?’

‘They brought him a stone. Didn’t you know that? Andy says —’

Andy again! Jock blazed up. ‘For God’s sake, Barney, dinnae gie me what Andy says. Andy’s a mug, ye know that. Dinnae throw Andy at me!’ He controlled himself. ‘So what’s a’ this aboot a stone? What’s it supposed to be? Magic? Is that what Polly’s a’ workt up aboot? For Guid’s sake, man, ye’ve got a shotgun!’

They met one another’s rage in a little shocked engagement, then glanced away.

Jock’s defiant scorn was false and he knew it. The shotgun he had evoked to balance that other threat had no weight. The two forces were not equal; not in his own head nor in Barney’s either, certainly not in Polly’s. He had brought them to the very edge of it; of a world where what was cleared and fenced and in Jock’s own terms reasonable — all their education, their know-how, yes, and the shotguns they carried — might not be enough against — against what? Some vulnerability to the world that could only be measured, was measured still, by the dread it evoked in them?

‘Barney,’ Jock said, and he felt a coldness at the bottom of his brain, as at some gathering darkness in himself and all around him, ‘this is madness, ye know that. Andy’s a ratbag. For God’s sake, man, when did ye ever tak heed o’ what Andy says? We’re no’ scared o’ stones. Ah thought that was the difference between us and them. What’s it supposed to do, aeneway, this stone ? Soor the coos’ milk? Set haystacks on fire?’

He was trying to make light of the thing, but the very spit in his mouth went dry, and when the words were out, in a voice he barely recognised, he regretted them, however light they might be, as if, in the urgency of his attempt to beat Barney down, he might have set forces in action, out there, just by breathing into the air the mere possibility, that he could not deal with any more than Barney or any other man.

‘Look Barney,’ he said, sickened that they had come so far, ‘Let me talk to him, eh? Gie me that much. And dinnae let me hear denny more’ — he could scarcely bear to make another reference — ‘aboot myalls, and magic and —’

But he did hear — from Ned Corcoran — and lost his temper, and was sorry for it, since he saw in the other men’s faces a kind of hardness — did his defence of Gemmy go this far? — at what they saw as a disturbing confirmation of change.