David Malouf - The Complete Stories

The town was small and sleepy, but after his weeks up at the camp seemed to him to be bustling with life. Women clicked along the pavement in their high heels. A girl riding by on a bike with her skirt up looked back over her shoulder, and he was taken again by the various-ness of the world and the number of paths that were open in each moment of it. Later, that was for later. With the envelope safe in his shirt pocket he turned out of the main street with its row of two-storeyed buildings that went on for another quarter of a mile, all pubs, banks, general stores, bakeries, into the dusty streets behind. Crossed one, then another, till he found the name he wanted, and was about to consult numbers when he was hailed from a low verandah.

“Hey! Givvus a lift, wilya sonny?”

The man was holding one end of a genoa-velvet lounge as if he had been standing there maybe all morning, waiting for someone to come along, as Gerry had, and take the other.

Gerry hesitated — this was an interruption — but didn't see how he could refuse. The man looked expectant. The lounge, with one end on the ground and the other in the air, was ridiculous. After a moment's hesitation he took it up as directed, walked backwards a few paces, and helped the man push it on to the back of a lorry.

“The rest is a walkover,” the man told him. He was a tall fellow with teeth missing, wearing nothing but football shorts. “I'll bring the armchair, you get the smokers’ stands an’ the side table.”

He followed the man into the house and they cleared the front room and loaded it, then carried out of a second room a dining table, a sideboard, six chairs, and a framed oil painting of the Alps. The lorry by now had about as much as it would carry. Gerry held the other end of several ropes while the man strained, cursed, knotted. Then, with a casual, "Thanks, son, I'll do the same f ‘ you some time,” he climbed into the cabin and drove slowly away. He had left the door of the house standing wide open.

Gerry wondered as he walked away if he mightn't have been assisting at a burglary. But what else could he have done? He noted the number of the house he had helped strip, in case there were questions later, and saw now that the one he wanted was just three doors off on the other side. He crossed, opened the gate with as little sound as possible, went on up the steps, pushed the bell three times as Claude had directed, waited, then rang twice more. Almost immediately a curtain twitched aside in one of the front windows and a girl's face appeared. Then she was at the open door.

“For Christ sake!" she spat out. “What are you playin’ at?” She gave an alarmed glance behind him and to both sides. “Who th’ fuck are you?”

Barefoot, hastily wrapped in a gown with explosive red-and-gold flowers all over it, she smelled of soap and had the misty look of a woman who had come fresh from the bath.

The messenger for a moment failed to find his tongue, and she softened a little at his youth, at the way he flushed, and the movement of his eyes towards the mysterious darkness behind her.

She turned her head as if following his gaze, and said over her shoulder: "It's nothing. Just some kid.” She gave him a look, half-knowing, half-ironical, but no longer alarmed. “Watcha want, son?”

“I've brought this,” Gerry told her coldly, showing the envelope. “It's from Claude.”

She took the envelope, tore it open, glanced quickly at both sides of the single sheet, and then burst out laughing. She began to close the door.

“Isn't there an answer?” Gerry asked foolishly.

“Are you kidding? How would you answer that?”

She showed him both sides of the page, and they stood at the half-open door with the blank sheet between them.

“Piss off,” she said, not urgently: and the door was closed in his face.

He rode back fast, his face still burning. He hadn't after all stopped at the Greek's, and when he came bumping into the camp and parked the bike, and saw Claude coming down to meet him, would have turned away if he could and found work to do.

Claude came at him sideways. He screwed one eye up as if squinting at sunlight.

“Well,” he said shyly, "how was the trip? Bike behave? Dja find the house alright?”

He answered Claude's questions, he rendered account; but would not, for all Claude's soft-talk, be sweetened.

Yes, he had rung the bell. Yes, it was a woman who had answered. She had been wearing a kimono. No, he hadn't seen into the house. Yes, he had delivered the envelope. What had she done? She'd laughed, that's what, and there was no answer.

Claude patted him on the shoulder, but when their eyes met he looked away, and Gerry, who had been glaring till that moment, was glad of it. There was something between them suddenly of which they were both, but for different reasons, ashamed.

“Thanks, Gerry,” Claude said wearily. “Thanks, mate. You done well. If I ever had another message I'd—”

He broke off, as if he had heard Gerry's fierce, unspoken Not me, you wouldn't! Not again!

“Come ‘n have tea,” Claude was saying in his smallest voice, "I made puftaloons. They're yer favourite.” He looked uncomfortably large in his grey flannel vest, but also beaten, and his tone was so wheedling and auntlike, so keen to make amends, that Gerry was torn between contempt and a kind of shameful pity. Without ceasing to be aggrieved he relented, and allowed himself to be drawn away.

“That's the style,” the man said, as if it were Gerry who had to be got over a rough patch. “I make good puftaloons, even if I say so meself Learned from a Chinese. Little feller with only one arm. It was out Charleville way …” And he was off on another of his tales.

That night they got drunk. Claude sat out in the moonlight on a stump, sucking a bottle of whisky, and the others, out of delicacy, kept away. Slinger the quarter-caste played his mouth organ.

“Wife-trouble,” Kev whispered, and nodded his head seriously.

Gerry didn't admit that he knew something of that already; had been out earlier in the day, subjecting the woman to some mild terrorism.

Kev, staring off into the darkness, was lost in his own story.

Is life so sad then? Gerry asked himself. And was aware, with a sharpness he had not felt before, of the immensity of the darkness that surrounded them: all those leaves holding up individual fragments of it shaped exactly like themselves, the grassblades taking it down into their roots, the birds folding it away under their wings. Sorrows and secrets. All these men had stories, were dense with the details of their lives, but kept them in the dark. Only odd words broke surface and spoke for more than could be said.

“That's a nice tune, Slinger. I remember that one from the navy,” Kev said. “Wartime.”

“Wrong colour f’ the navy,” Slinger let out between chords, barely breaking the line of what he was playing.

Claude meanwhile had gone off, and when he appeared again it was from the door of his storeroom. He was carrying jars of the homemade chutney they had eaten at every meal Gerry had had here. “Mango chutney,” Claude had explained, "off me own trees. I got two big ‘uns in the backyard, with more mangoes than you could eat in a month a’ Sundays. I make a big batch every year.”

Now, armful after armful, he was carrying the labelled jars out of the storeroom and setting them down on the moonlit earth. The others fell silent and watched. He stacked them solemnly, neatly, so that they made a high but solid pyramid, and when the last one was out he closed and locked the storeroom door.

“Now we'll have some fun,” he told them.

Standing bent-kneed and with his feet firmly apart, he balanced a jar on the palm of his hand, took it back over his shoulder, and hurled it against the storehouse wall. Moonlight splintered, and the dark golden stuff with its chunks of stringy fruit rolled slowly down.