David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“You're late,” his mother complained, without even looking to see who it was.

“It's all right,” he said. “I don't want anything. Just tea.”

His mother poured it with her back to him, where she was preparing salads for their picnic, and he came and took it from the bench.

His father was eating toast, snapping clean rounds out of it with his teeth and devouring the Sun. Michael was on the floor with the comics. Only Julie, all in white for tennis, her shoulders brown and bare, was sitting up straight and eating the way people were supposed to eat; and doing it beautifully as she did everything.

She was sixteen, two years older than Luke, and did not know how extraordinary she was. Her presence among them was a mystery. It had always amazed him that they were of the same family, especially in the days before Michael when there had been just the two of them. People were always proclaiming in that silly way, "What beautiful children!” But they had meant Julie. Any likeness between them was illusory, and when Michael appeared and was such an ugly duckling, Luke had felt easier, as if a balance was restored. He had a special fondness for Michael's batlike ears.

“Well, are you coming out or aren't you?” his father demanded.

“No. I promised to see Hughie.”

His mother made a straight line with her mouth. Hughie was the son of the man who had made the sails for their boat. She didn't approve of that. It was all right when they were just kids at primary school, but now he was supposed to have other friends. He did not.

“But you said you would,” Michael wailed. “You promised! I don't want to go either.”

Michael was eight and still said exactly what he felt. It embarrassed Luke that Michael was so fond of him and did not dissemble or hide it. He felt Michael's affection as a weight that he might never throw off. He hated to hurt people, and was always doing it, whichever way he turned — Michael, Julie, his mother.

“I can't,” he said again. “I promised Hughie.”

Michael turned away and his mother gave him one of her looks of silent reproval: he was so selfish.

He had in fact made no promise to Hughie, but ten minutes later he came round the harbour path with its morning glory vines and its wall of moss-covered, dripping rocks to where the Hutchins's house was built above the water, with a slatted ramp beside it. The walls of the house were of stained shingles, and at night you could hear water lapping below and the masts of pleasure-boats tapping and clicking.

Luke had known it always. It was a big open house full of light and air, but since Hughie's mother died, six months ago, had been let go. There were cartons in the hallway crammed with old newspapers and boating magazines that no one had bothered to move, already cob-webbed and thick with dust. In the kitchen, away to the right, flies buzzed among open jam-jars and unscraped plates where T-bones lay congealed in fat and streaks of hardened tomato sauce, a bottle of which, all black at the rim, stood open on the oilskin cloth. It was all mess — Luke didn't mind that; but beyond the mess of the two or three rooms where Hughie and his father camped, you were aware of rooms that were empty, where nobody ever went. They gave your voice in this house a kind of echo — that is what Luke thought — and made Hughie, these days, a bit weird. As if all those empty rooms were a part of him he could no longer control. “Is that you, Luke?” he called now, and his voice had the echo. “C'mon through.”

He was the youngest of three brothers. The eldest, Ric, was a panel-beater. He lived in the Western suburbs with a girl who was just out of school. The other had got in with a drug crowd, and after a period of hanging round the city in a headband and waistcoat, had gone to Nim-bin and was raising corn. Hughie was the baby. Spoiled and petted by his mother when she was alive, he had been drifting since. He spent his days in front of the TV or up at the Junction, barefooted in boardshorts, with the Space Invaders.

An excessively skinny kid, always tanned but still unhealthy-looking, he was sprawled now on the vinyl lounge in front of the TV, wearing the stained blue boardshorts that he never changed and with his fist in a packet of crisps. He took his hand from the packet and crammed a fistful into his mouth, then licked the salt from his fingers before it dropped. “Want some?” he asked through the crunching.

Luke shook his head. “Why do you eat that stuff?”

“Because I saw it on TV,” Hughie answered straight off. “And because I'm dumb and don't know any better. Besides, it beats ice-cubes.”

A few months back there was never anything to eat in this house except ice-cubes. They used to suck them in the heat while they watched the cricket. “There's a choice,” Hughie would tell him, "icecubes boiled or fried or grilled. Take your pick.” That was while Mrs. Hutchins was still dying in the next room. “I figure,” Hughie told him now, "that if I eat all that stuff they eat on television — you know, potato crisps, Cherry Ripe, Coke, all that junk, I'll turn into a real Australian kid and have a top physique. Isn't that what's supposed to happen?”

“Maybe you'll turn into a real American kid and stay skinny.”

“Y’ reckon?” Hughie's hand was arrested in mid-lift.

“Maybe you'll just get spots.”

“Nah! Nunna the kids on TV get spots. Look at ‘em. They're all blond ‘n have top physiques, and the girls are unreal.”

“They've got spots. That's why they use Clearasil.”

“I use Clearasil.”

“Does it do any good?”

“No, but that's because I pull off so much.”

“So do the kids on TV.”

“Y’ reckon?”

He leaned out, flicked to another channel, then another, then pushed the off-switch with his big toe.

“Maybe you'll just turn into yourself,” Luke said, "only you'll be too full of junk to see what it is.”

“But that's just what I don't want. You ever see anyone on TV looked like me? I wanna be a real Australian kid. You know — happy. Sliding down a water-chute with lots of other happy kids, including girls. Climbing all over a big ball and making things go better with Coke. That's why I'm into junk food. Junk food makes you tanned and gives you a terrific physique. It's pulling off gives you spots.”

“No. It doesn't do anything.”

“Yes it does. It turns you into a monster.”

Hughie jumped up, made jerking movements with his fist, and turned into a pale skinny version of King Kong. He hopped about on flat feet with his knees bent, his arms loose, and his tongue pushed into his upper lip, grunting. Luke jumped up, made the same motions, and was Frankenstein. Laughing, they fell in a heap.

“No,” Luke said, sitting upright, "it doesn't do any of that. They just tell you that because they can't sell it on TV.”

Hughie went back to munching crisps.

“So what'll you do?” he said, returning to a conversation of several days back.

“I don't know. What about you?”

“My dad says I can leave school if I want to and go in with him. There's a lot of money in sailmaking. You know?” He said it without enthusiasm. “Everyone wants sails.”

“I want to do Japanese,” Luke said, moving to the window and looking across to the marina, where half a mile off, among a crowd of Sunday craft, he could see Starlight just beginning to make way. He was thinking of a time, a year back, when with his grandfather as guide he would go crawling about in the strange light of the sea off Midway, among the wrecks of the Japanese carriers Soryu, Kaga, Hiru, Admiral Nagumo's flagship the Akagi, the heavy cruiser Mikuma, and the York-town. "My grandad says we might have been better off,” he said reflectively, "if we hadn't won the Battle of Midway after all and the Japs had come instead of the Americans. I don't know, maybe he's right. He says winning all those wars was the worst thing ever happened to us.”