David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

Once, in the night, a fierce-eyed little ragman comes, and takes him by the collar, and tries to push him into a sack. He breaks away, climbs a rope, tumbles into a box, and falls dead asleep.

When he wakes cold sunlight is on his cheek. The box has no lid. But he lies very still as he usually does in this particular dream and waits for Willett to find him: ‘Ah, so that’s where you’ve got to.’

But it isn’t Willett. It is a big, tow-headed fellow of eighteen or nineteen, in a blue knitted cap and with dirty stubble on his cheek and no teeth, who hauls him up by the scruff of his neck so that he hangs like a rabbit outside a poulterer’s shop. The youth’s nose is on a level with his own; his legs are dangling. Then the mouth opens: ‘Captain!’ it bellows.

He had not meant to set himself loose in the world. He had not meant to end anything. He felt himself swinging now where the blue-capped youth held him in his fist, first one way, then another, and what he saw over the youth’s shoulder terrified him: no gas-lamps, no houses, but a vastness of an ashen grey colour crawling with smoke as if the whole world was burning behind him.

He would learn to live with this crawling emptiness, but the first glimpse of it made his belly squirm. He had cast himself loose and the world had run away with him; he was lost, he was dangling, and would remain so till Willett, in an odour of char, with his eyebrows ablaze and his scorched boots hanging from their laces at his neck, turned up again to curse and wallop him, then, with a growl, take him back. He never ceased to expect that event and to fear it. He expected it still. A world from which Willett had entirely disappeared was inconceivable to him.

Willett’s boots had reappeared: utterly real to him, every crack in their leather running with flame, the laces trailing, the tongue-flaps loose. It was Willett he could not find, though he heard him often enough, grumbling in the corners of the room, and smelt him there, a mixture of char and sweat, then at last the garden smell. He lay with his eyes closed, hands folded on his chest, his cheeks in the hot dark wet with tears. ‘Ah, boy, so that’s where you’ve got to!’

Where? Where had he got to?

Two years he was at sea. Or three. On one ship, then another: The Gannet, The Star of Newcastle, The Charleston — those were some of the names; last of all The Pamukale . He made himself small, had a full belly, was often bullied and worse by the others. Mosey. The Irish.

Old Crouch, The Pamukale’s carpenter, was a good ’un. He liked to sing hymns while he worked and had two daughters, one a seal — a silkie he called her; she could change herself into a seal. He learned to use a chisel, a plane, a spirit level. Then, one day, too ill to care what happened to him and with no knowledge of what part of the world he was in — how would Willett find him here? — they put him overboard; he moved out of the shadow of the ship that tilted and creaked above him, out of its coolness, away from the faces at the rails. Burning alive down there, he felt the sun leap out, a single flame. All he had known shrank to a black dot jigging in his skull.

These visions that dragged him back and racked his body with the reliving of what he had already endured a first time, left him weak and shaken. Despite the kindness Mrs Hutchence showed him, and Leona’s many attentions, he grew heartsick for his lean-to at the McIvors’, and for the children, especially Lachlan. Meg and Janet he also missed, though he saw them almost daily. At Mrs Hutchence’s they were absorbed now in a new life, the group round the kitchen table, where the presence of Hector and the schoolmaster, and the rapid talk, and so much laughter and play, confused him, kept him off. He began to sicken, and saw at last that what he was suffering here had to do with the sheets of paper where, months ago, Mr Frazer and the schoolmaster had set down his life. It was from there that the events of his former existence came and demanded to be turned back again from magic squiggles into the pain, joy, grief he was torn by, and which his present body was too weak to endure.

More and more now he was haunted by those sheets, seven in all, he had not forgotten the number, that Mr Frazer had folded and put into his pocket, and which he had never seen again; till he was convinced that the only way to save himself from so much racking, and despair and sweat, was to get them back again. They would be in one place or the other, those sheets; either at Mr Frazer’s or at the schoolhouse. All he needed was the strength to get there. But that was just what their magic had drawn from him.

WHEN LACHLAN BEATTIE looked about, it seemed to him that his whole world had come apart. The group of younger boys he moved among was all edge and shove. Their code was the same one their fathers used, but their fathers had seen enough of others’ and their own deficiencies to draw back from unyielding absolutes. They could not. Lachlan, though he was smaller than the rest, had till now held authority over them and commanded fellows like Jeff Murcutt and the younger Corcorans. They saw their chance now and were after him.

He had always been a firebrand. When he first came among them it had amused the older fellows to taunt him. At the least touch he would fly red-faced to the attack. The others would strike back, but in a lazy fashion, condescendingly, since they were so much older. ‘Lay off,’ they would drawl, ‘you mad bugger!’ Very fast on his feet, he would duck in under their fists and leave them winded. They learned then. ‘Honest, Locky,’ Hec Gosper would tell him as they started off home, ‘you’re bloody mad!’

Hector, in those days, had not yet moved up into the group of older fellows, young men almost, who hung about the verandah of the store. Though convention decreed that he should ignore a mere ten-year-old so long as they were in company, Hector had from the beginning taken the younger boy under his wing. Lachlan, who was unhappy in the new place, was grateful for it, but wary too, at first. His accent was the point on which he was tormented, and he was concerned that what Hector might have in mind was a shared impediment.

It was a mean thought, and when he saw, as he did almost immediately, how open Hector was, how little of his own indirectness there was in the other boy, he was ashamed. There was always this seed of self-consciousness in him that made him suspicious and spoiled things. He grew fond of Hector and depended on him, so it was distressing when Gemmy’s coming raised a conflict between them.

For the others, taunting Gemmy had become a new way — the old one had become stale by now — of provoking him, a new form of fun. These were the days when Gemmy was always at his heel, and he, still full of his moment at the fence, tended to swagger and show him off.

Hector did not join in these boyish scrabblings in the dust, he was too old for that; but he too was under the influence of that first day, and so long as others were about, kept up his grudge. It had put Lachlan in a spot. It was a matter of honour with him to stand up for Gemmy whatever the cost. He ignored Hector’s gibes as long as he could, but the time came at last when he had to protest.

It was foolish of him. There were too many interested bystanders. Hector, furious that he had broken what he had thought was an understanding between them, could do nothing but respond. ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What’s that?’, and there was, on the first sound, as it burst from him, a little hissing through the nose that was the last of a defect he had eliminated save when he was out of control.

Lachlan was stricken. He would have given anything not to be the occasion of such a lapse. ‘Com’ awn, Gemmy,’ he said and walked away, but the damage was done. There was, after that, an embarrassment between them that made it necessary, so long as others were about, to keep up a show of hostility that each knew was a pretence. When they were not observed they fell back into their old intimacy, though it was constrained. On these occasions, Gemmy, who did not understand the rules they followed, was puzzled, and hurt too at times, by an inconsistency in Lachlan that he could not account for.