David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

She had known such occasions, often, often. The children saw them in her and kept clear. It was the fearful loneliness of the place that most affected her — the absence of ghosts.

Till they arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that much thinner, harder to breathe. She had not understood, till she came to a place where it was lacking, the extent to which her sense of the world had to do with the presence of those who had been there before, leaving signs of their passing and spaces still warm with breath — a threshold worn with the coming and going of feet, hedges between fields that went back a thousand years, and the names even further; most of all, the names on headstones, which were their names, under which lay the bones that had made their bones and given them breath.

They would be the first dead here. It made death that much lonelier, and life lonelier too.

What she was homesick for, not always, but on some days, in some weathers, were the two little graves she had had to leave down there on the Downs, in the newly dug black soil under the big, foreign trees, with no one to visit them. That had been the real break; deeper than leaving Airdrie, or crossing the sea in the knowledge that she could never go back.

Time and again, in her loneliness, even with her other children about her, she went and stood there among the rusty fallen spikes and monkey-puzzle light, gazing down at the rain-streaked stones with the names and dates, hoping to look up and find that he too had come. But it had never happened. If he came there on occasions, and she thought he did, their times had never coincided. All this was something they did not speak about, because there was too much space, up here, between words, even the simplest, as there was between objects.

But that was another of the changes. She felt sometimes, as now, that they stood together there beside the two little humped places in the ground.

‘Ah miss Kate,’ she said very quietly. ‘And Alex.’

He nodded. He was turning the little white pea-flower in his hand. Then he bent down and placed it, very tenderly, on one of the mounds.

‘Oh, and a thing Ah saw once, a tightrope walker —’ she felt no oddness in the transition. ‘He had a rope fae wan side o’ the street t’ the ither, and he walked on it, in baggy troosers, wi’ a bar in his han —’ She held her hand out, balancing, and took a step or two above the earth. ‘It wid be grand to see something,’ she said.

What she meant was to have something so rare, so miraculous even, to show the girls, as her father had shown her. (It was her father’s hand she had held when she looked up breathless to see the tightrope walker, with his slippered feet, walk.)

‘Where was it?’ he asked.

‘Airdrie.’

‘How auld were ye?’

‘Seven. Eight maybe. Aulder than Meg.’

‘How did he do’t? Show me again.’

She showed him. Held her arms out and took three steps, very slowly, raising one foot then the other, over the rough earth with its sticks and dried leaves, as if she were walking thirty feet up in the air.

He followed her with his eyes. Then reached his hand out and caught hers, as if he was afraid she might fall.

‘Ah’d gie aenethin’ t’ hae seen it,’ he said. ‘You, Ah mean. T’ hae seen you.’

GEMMY’S VISITORS HAD appeared on a Thursday. In the days that followed one or two little things began to go wrong around the place. None of them was unusual, but that they should happen just now, and that there should be a string of them, was unsettling. Accidents, Jock told himself. Coincidence. He was trying hard to hold on to the normality of things, to resist in himself the wave of panic and suspicion that was running uncontrolled through the settlement. He did not believe the bit of trouble he was having was the work of blacks, and it had not yet occurred to him that it might be a neighbour. He and Lachlan fixed the break in the fence — he did not involve Gemmy — and he kept to himself one or two later breaches in the daily run of things. But when three of Ellen’s geese were found with their throats cut, and the stones of their little yard all alive with greenflies and sticky with blood, the enormity of the thing could not be concealed.

The geese had names. One was Hereward the Wake, another Jemima, the third Lucie. The children were brokenhearted, but frightened too. Who could have done such a thing? Little Meg, through her tears, gave him a look that went right through him. He had been powerless to protect Jemima, so why not her, or any one of them?

He was shaken. Who was it? Who could have done the thing? He looked in one man’s face, then another’s, and could not tell, or what was worse, save himself from the poison now of suspecting each one of them. He was a stunned animal, all his strength, now that he was staggering, the weight that might bring him down. Ashamed to admit to his friends, even to Barney and Jim Sweetman, what was happening, he chose not to go out.

Lachlan was full of outraged defiance. ‘We dinnae have t’ tak this,’ he insisted.

He wanted Jock to demand of him some proof of absolute affection. He would defend them, the household, his uncle’s honour, their blood, no matter what. ‘Just tell me what,’ he told Jock, who was touched by the boy’s fierce loyalty, ‘and Ah’ll do it. Ah’ll kill them.’

But when he looked a little and saw what it might mean, he too fell quiet. The idea that they should draw in close behind an invisible stockade and pretend that nothing had been done to them was shameful to him; but even more shameful was the business of admitting before Jeff Murcutt and the Corcoran boys that they had been set apart, and could be so openly terrorised.

Once again the responsibility, Jock felt, was his. It’s a’right for me, he thought, but he’s too young for this.

His aunt too saw it. ‘Lachlan,’ she told him gently, though she too was bitter, ‘we’ve done naethin’ wrang, you know that. We’ve done naethin’ to be ashamed o’.’

‘Ah’ll kill them,’ he repeated, ‘gin Ah find who ’tis.’

As for Gemmy, he simply vanished; not into the bush, as one or two fellows predicted, but into his own skin, behind his own dim but startled eyes. He knew what was happening and that he was the cause of it.

One morning early, three days after the slaughter of the geese, Jock was making his way down the slope towards the gully when he came upon Gemmy half-running up the track towards him, wild-eyed and stumbling as if someone, or something, was after him. Jock put an arm out to stop him, but Gemmy shot him a look, of desperation Jock thought, and ran on. He called after him but he did not turn. Jock went on, and the feeling of dread that came over him was like the faint, far-off smell of some new violation that was on its way towards them. He came to the foot of the track, and there it was.

Just where he should turn off and enter the gully was the shed Gemmy had been mending when his visitors arrived, the new planks in its wall, the new nail heads showing plainly in the weathered grey of the rest. And there, smeared across them, was a stain, a gathering of greenflies that heaped and bubbled, and the air that came to his nostrils rich with its stink. Someone had plastered the place with shit. Someone else — Gemmy he guessed — had tried to clean it off with a handful of grass but had only succeeded in spreading the filth.

He stared and his gorge rose. Snatching up a handful of dry grass, he smashed at the loathsomeness of the flies that were feeding on it, as if the abomination was in them. They leapt away, but some of them, drunk on foulness, were caught and smashed. He threw the soiled grass from him and sank to the ground. Drugged himself, he began to roar through his clenched teeth and his body swayed.