David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

But Hector, at last, dropped out of the group of younger boys, keeping with fellows now who were his own age. Lachlan, not quite thirteen, was in between. He would leave school at Christmas, be free at last of the indignity of ink-stains on his fingers and the company of kids like Jeff Murcutt and the Corcorans, and littlies, and girls. In the meantime he began to test his welcome among the group at the store; he developed a talent for launching gobs of spit further than any of his fellows, laughed louder than the loudest of them at any sort of raw joke, and smoked and swore.

It was one of the conditions of his move into an older group that Gemmy could not appear, and he had, gently at first, then coldly, to discourage him. He was sorry for it. But it was absurd to have Gemmy always tagging at his heels, and he blushed now to recall a time when he had regarded it as a sign of his power. How puffed up he had been with his own importance! What a fool he must have appeared to the very fellows he had meant to impress!

His enlightenment had begun with the humiliations the schoolmaster had heaped upon him, and though he did not thank the man for it, he saw now that having set his face in the direction of manhood, he could not turn back. What he distrusted in himself was a tendency, a girlish one he thought, to let his affections rule. It was a weakness he was determined to stamp out. Still, there were days when he could not bear the look Gemmy wore, and would have given anything to step back a year and tell him, ‘A’richt, Gemmy, com’ awn then’ — but what good would it do?

It was about the time of Gemmy’s visit from the blacks and the series of accidents that had begun with the broken fence. Christmas was two months off. He was in the playground with companions he had outgrown.

‘So where’s yer mate,’ Jeff Murcutt asked, ‘yer shadow?’ And then, looking about with mock surprise, ‘Oh, I didn’t see ’im!’ Leo Corcoran had begun a little lopsided walk around them, with an expression so like Gemmy’s that three or four younger boys, who were watching, rolled about in the dirt at such a show of brilliance.

‘Shut your jaw,’ Lachlan hissed.

‘An’ if I don’t?’

Lachlan began to walk away.

‘An’ if I don’t? What’ll you do, eh? Get Gemmy t’ set ’is blacks on us?’

He turned at that.

‘You should hear what my Pa says. It’s a wonder someone don’t do the right thing, one a’ these nights, and pot the bastard!’

Leo at that began his lopsided walk again, and Jeff Murcutt, with a grin, brought his arm up like a shotgun and followed Leo round the circle. There was a breathless moment in. which boys of ten, eleven, some of them almost thirteen as Lachlan was, were soul-struck as he himself had been, that first day at the fence, by the evocation of arms. Jeff Murcutt stood empowered in the midst of them, actually changed, himself impressed almost to awe by what he was reaching for, and Leo hovered. Then Jeff’s lips moved. ‘Bang!’ he said, not loud.

The puff of air out of his mouth struck Leo in the chest. He hung in the air, mouth open, head thrown back, one hand at his breast, and they watched him, slowly, buckle at the knees and fall.

It was in the same playground circle, two days later, that he heard of the night attack.

He had known at breakfast that something was amiss but nothing was said, and it was a sign of how things had changed among them that he dared not ask. His aunt fussed and looked strained, his uncle was soft with him. He kept looking from one to the other waiting for enlightenment.

‘I hear you had a bit of strife last night,’ Jeff Murcutt announced. The others looked interested; they knew no more, Lachlan saw, than he did. He narrowed his eyes and did not respond, but felt his heart knock against his ribcage and knew, from the sudden dizziness he felt, that he had gone pale. Let Jeff Murcutt tell, if he knew something. But all he did was stand smirking, with his head down and his toes scuffing the dust.

It was Jed Corcoran, poor dumb Jed, who did the asking. He thought he was the only one who did not know.

‘What strife? What happened?’ he said in his babyish, snot-thickened voice.

‘ He knows,’ Jeff Murcutt told him.

Jed Corcoran turned his soft eyes on him. ‘What Locky? What happened?’

Lachlan turned and strode away. ‘What?’ he heard Jed ask again. ‘I din’ hear nothing.’

He felt betrayed on all sides. That Janet had been there, and he had not. That he had slept through it like a mere kid. That they had let him sleep, as if he could be no help, and had afterwards kept it from him!

It was his aunt who told him the details at last, white-faced, taut as a wire, speaking through clenched lips. He understood how his uncle felt because he too felt the power drain from him and the stab of fear; not at what he might have to face — he would face anything, he was brave enough — but at what he might have to admit of the way the world was, and how his failure to see it was a weakness in him.

He did not go to school. He took his gun and went off into the bush, but all he did was sit, hunched up with the gun in his lap, trying to see how they could go on now, how their life, his life, could ever be settled and ordinary again.

It was out here that Hector found him.

‘Wha’ do you want?’ he called.

Hector, a little way off, squatted on his heels. He plucked a grass-stalk and put it between his crooked teeth.

‘Well?’ Lachlan demanded. He had to fight to keep back tears.

Hector continued to sit, his hat down over his eyes, the lip showing clear under his pale moustache.

He knew what Hector was doing. He had decided to sit, saying nothing, since there was nothing words could say, and wear him down. And it happened. The hostility he felt melted in him, and after a little, still without speaking, Hector got to his feet and walked away.

With Gemmy’s removal to a distance a kind of normality did come back to them in a pretence on all sides that what had occurred was a misunderstanding and no harm done.

His aunt, always a realist, went along with it. When her neighbours turned up, full of high spirits, to gossip or bring recipes or ask for help with a bit of sewing, she welcomed them, frostily at first, and never quite in the old way; she had a kind of reserve now that would never leave her. They knew it and took her as she was.

Things were not so easy for his uncle. Lachlan saw this because he too felt it. Something had been destroyed in him that could not be put right. He watched his uncle drift back after a time to his friends, to Barney Mason, Jim Sweetman, but the days of unselfconscious trust in his standing among them, and the belief that to be thought well of by such fellows was the first thing in the world, were gone. He was watchful now. There was always a little niggling worm of denial in him, a need to seek out, even in the straightest of men, some hint of crookedness that might be the truth even they did not know. He was quieter these days. He had moved away into a distance in himself that even Lachlan felt he could not presume on, and what he experienced there began to engrave itself in lines upon him, though he too kept up the pretence that life, in something like the old form, had resumed and would go on.

Lachlan did not believe it. He was still at the stage where everything presented itself in the absolute, as a possibility to be carried blithely into the future or done with, once and for all. When he was forced to qualify, as with Hector, he felt uneasy. He was so changeable himself he wanted the world, even in the bitter form in which he now saw it, to be fixed. So when he went to visit Gemmy at Mrs Hutchence’s, a little shamefaced at having left it so long, he was surprised to walk in on a noisy company whose existence he had had no conception of, though Janet, and Meg too, had tried to tell him of it. And here they were, all, seated at a table among teacups and crumbs — Janet, Meg, Gemmy, Hector, even the schoolmaster — with Leona pouring tea out of a blue pot. They turned to face him, looking up out of the same mid-sentence, whose unfinished hilarity hung in the air, and he saw with a pang that in all these last weeks, which had been such misery to him, they had been happily settled, even Hector, in this lighted corner of the world.