David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

‘Red-eared —’

‘Big-mouthed —’

‘Low-arsed —’

‘Knock-kneed —’

‘Imitation of a boy it is! More like a scrap of old cheese —’

‘Or the sole off me boot —’

‘Or a bit of stale pie crust you can’t hardly get your teeth into —’

‘Than a boy, a boy, a boyo!’

All the while leering and lunging as they sang the words back and forth and bowled him back and forth between them, till they began to thrust about under his clothes, and the cries that broke from him as their fingers pinched and poked and teased and twisted were the cries of a child, but the pain now was that of a grown man, outraged and powerless, who had to stand by and see it done, and for all the fierce howls that came out of him could neither drive the devils off nor prevent what, in a moment now, unless he wakes, will be past all remedy …

He wakes from such a dream. A clammy hand is over his mouth, a mouth, close in the dark but not his own, is roughly panting. He struggles; half waking, jerks his body to get free, but as so often, the dream hangs on, tough arms hurdle his ribs. It hangs on just that breath longer than sleep, but the breath, indrawn, is very deep and the fear comes to him that this time he may not be able to shake it off, that the tormentors he carries within him, who have been so long hidden and have begun, more and more often now, to come to the surface in him, will this time break clear, get out into the real world, where he will have no more control of them than he had in the days when they were real and he was one of them.

And it is true. This time it is true. He is awake, and these others, all knuckled hands and shoulders and rough heads and breath, are cramped close under the lean-to with him, shoving, whispering instructions, at one point giggling.

They have got him hooped about with their arms, they are pulling a bag over his head, and with the choking chaffy roughness of it against his mouth, and in the dry breathlessness of nightmare, he is being hopped and dragged over stones, and when he stumbles, jerked upright by a crowd of bodiless whisperers who are trotting along on all sides of him, as if all his tormentors had found one another at last in the dream-space of his head, and discovering now what they have in common, have joined forces to gallop him to some corner of the dark where he is flat-handed this way and that, and when he throws up his hands to protect himself, falls, but at other times merely hovers on the brink, and is baited and played with; not brutally but with hands, neither fisted nor frenzied, coming at him from every direction, and without sound save for the grunted effort it takes to haul a man to his feet so that he can be knocked down again, and the breathing in the darkness, which is huge even inside the sack, of many mouths.

Suddenly there is water round his ankles, and when he stumbles this time there is a splash that scatters moonlight through his skull.

His arms are jerked back, his head pushed down. His head, roaring into the sack, is thrust under water and the darkness in the sack turns to mud. He gasps mud. Then goes under again, and yet again, till a voice rises in protest. The others say hush, but it changes things. The grip on his arms weakens.

He is released and on his knees in the creek when he hears a voice he does recognise: Jock’s. It is shouting.

A scuffle, the barging all round him of bodies in the dark, and the next moment he is upright, gasping, breathless inside the sack, and the sack, muddy and streaming, is torn from his head.

ELLEN MCIVOR STIRRED. From the other side of the wall had come one of those nightmare cries that were so much part of their nights up here that she did no more at first than pause in her half-sleep and listen for the disturbance it might make among her children. But on this occasion there was more. A series of bumps against the wall itself jerked her into full wakefulness. She put her hand out, touched her husband’s arm in the dark, and he started up, his hand on his shotgun. Rolling out of bed he went to one window, then quickly to the other, as she, her heart swinging wildly, put her foot to the ground. One of the children woke. It was Janet. ‘Shh,’ she said, rising quickly now.

The child sat up with her eyes wide in the darkness and looked to where her father crouched at the window, his face tense in the faint light from out there, the barrel of the shotgun softly aglow. ‘What is it?’ she breathed.

‘Shh,’ the voice came again.

Jock was puzzled. He saw a muffled group, but it was making away from the hut, not towards it, in an awkward, shuffling way that he could not understand; a huddle of four, maybe five figures.

He handed Ellen the shotgun and began to pull on his moleskins and boots while she, with the shotgun ready, took his place at the window. She could see nothing out there. The group was swallowed up now in the darkness further down the slope and she wondered what he had seen that disturbed him.

He took the gun, touched her hand lightly in the half-dark, gave her a warning look to be quiet, and slipped the latch of the door.

‘What is it?’ Janet asked again.

‘Shh, ye’ll wake the ithers.’

Going to the door, she opened it a crack, letting a flood of moonlight in, and a medley of night sounds, but nothing more.

‘It’s naethin’,’ she said. ‘Gae back to sleep.’

She had opened the door just wide enough to slip through, and barefoot now, just as she was in her nightgown, she stepped out, dropping the latch behind her.

Careful not to wake Meg, who slept beside her, or Lachlan, who was already mumbling, Janet set her foot to the ground and crossed quickly to the door. Very carefully she raised the latch and, barefoot like her mother, ventured out into the strangeness of the yard.

It was transformed, made unfamiliar by moonlight and the tinking of night-creatures. Big clouds overhead seemed closer than any she had seen by day, and the ground, which her bare feet knew well enough in sunlight, felt odd, not quite safe. She was aware of every pebble in the unevenness of it.

Her mother was standing very still about halfway down the slope, her nightgown shifting a little and the dark of her body outlined within it. She was struck by the heaviness, the solidity it suggested, and a sudden affection for her mother, which she did not always feel and seldom expressed, came moistly into her throat so that she was tempted to call her. The material of her mother’s nightgown was all agitated moonlight, but the body inside it was dark, bulky, deeply rooted out there. Though exposed, it did not seem vulnerable. She had a flash of her own body, dark and thin inside her nightgown, but was exhilarated rather than afraid.

There was no sign of her father, or of whatever it was that had drawn him out, then her mother, then her.

She stood without breathing, or so it seemed, and the calm she felt, which was all suspense of ordinary, daytime feeling, had to do with the tense and brittle strangeness with which the world was touched, which might have more to do, she thought, with some quality she had brought to it out of her sleep than with the play of clouds across moonlight.

I am the one who is seeing all this, she thought.

That, as much as anything, accounted for the nature of what she saw. And with it came another thought: Me, not Lachlan.

She was aware suddenly of being outside in the dark, while the other children slept on in the house.

Not for a moment in all this did she think of danger.

Her mother turned and started up the slope, then stopped a moment, looked back, then came on again; and when she saw her standing in the dark there, outside the door, did not chide her.