David Malouf - The Complete Stories

A shack, not a house, but orderly and to Luke's eyes, beautiful. Washing-up was stacked on the primitive sink. There was a note on the kitchen table: "Luke — be back around five. Love, Pa.” Luke studied it. He took a glass of water, but only wet his lips, and went through to the one large room that made up the rest of the place. It was very bare. Poor-looking, some would have thought. Everything was out and visible: straw mats of a pale corn colour, still with a smell; his grandfather's stretcher; the hammock where Luke himself slept when he stayed overnight. On the walls, the tabletop, and on the floor round the walls, were the objects that made this for Luke a kind of shrine: masks, pots, the two samurai swords, and daggers.

He went straight to the wall and took one of the daggers from its hook — it was his, and walking through to the open verandah, he stood holding it a moment, then drew the sharp blade from its sheath.

He ran his finger along the edge, not drawing blood, then, barely thinking, turned the point towards him and made a hard jab with his fist. It was arrested just at the white of his T-shirt.

He gave a kind of laugh. It would be so easy. You would let each thing happen, one thing after the next, in an order that once established would carry you right through and over into—

He stood very still, letting it begin.

At the moment of his first stepping in across the threshold out of the acute sunlight, he had entered a state — he couldn't have said what it was, but had felt the strangeness of it like a trance upon his blood, in which everything moved slowly, slowly. He was not dulled — not at all — but he felt out of himself, free of his own being, or aware of it in a different way. It came to him, this new being of his, as a clear fact like the dagger; like the light off the walls, which was reflected sea-light blasting the fibro with a million tumbling particles; like the individual dry strands of the matting.

You fell into such states, anyway he did, but not always so deeply. They began in strangeness and melancholy — you very nearly vanished— then when you came back, it was to a sense of the oneness of things. There was a kind of order in the world and it was in you as well. You attended. You caught a rhythm to which each gesture could be fitted. You let it lead you out of your body into—

It had begun. Slowly he removed his watch — it was twelve past four — and laid it on a ledge. Then he took off his gym-shoes, pushed his socks into them, and set them side by side on the floor. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and, folding his jeans, made a pile of them, jeans, T-shirt, shoes. They looked like the clothes, neatly arranged, of one who had gone into the sea or into the air — how could you be certain which? — or into the earth. The sea was glittering on his left and was immense. He did not look at it. Earth and air you took for granted. Wearing only the clean jockey-shorts now, he knelt on the verandah boards, carefully arranging his limbs: bringing his body into a perpendicular line with his foot soles, and thighs and trunk into alignment with the dagger, which lay immediately before him. He sat very straight, his body all verticals, horizontals, strictly composed; in a straight line with sea and earth, or at right angles to them. He began to breathe in and out, deeply, slowly, feeling the oxygen force its way into his cells so that they exerted a pressure all over the surface of him where his body met the air, in the beginning muscles of his forearms and biceps, in his throat, his lips, against the thinness of his closed lids. He clenched his teeth, the breath in his nostrils now a steady hiss, and took up the dagger. All there was now was the business of getting the body through and over into—

He paused. He set the point of the dagger to the skin of his belly above the white jockey-shorts (death was so close — as close as that) and all the muscles of his abdomen fluttered at the contact. He felt his sex begin to stiffen, all of itself.

A wave, not very big, had begun making for the shore and would reach it soon with a scuffling of pebbles, one of which, the one in his mouth, had a taste of salt. He sucked on it, and over a long period, after centuries, it began to be worn away, it melted, and his mouth, locked on the coming cry, was filled with the words of a new language, on his tongue, his tooth ridge, as a gurgling in his throat: the names of ordinary objects — tools, cookpots, baskets — odd phrases or conversations on which a life might depend, jokes (even crude ones), lyrics praising the moon or lilies or the rising of a woman's breast, savage epics—

“That you, Luke?”

The boy came back into himself, the wave passed on. He opened his eyes, picked up the sheath, pushed himself to his feet, and with dagger and sheath still in hand, walked barefoot, and naked save for his jockeys, to the door.

His grandfather was there. He had a heavy sack over his shoulder and a rod and reel.

“Hullo, Luke,” he called. He swung the sack down hard on the concrete path. “I had a good day,” he said. He gave a crack-lipped grin. “Take a look at this.” He lifted the end of the sack, tumbling its contents in a cascade of shining bodies. Luke was dazzled. Some of them were still alive and flipping their tails on the rough concrete, throwing light.

The boy restored the dagger to its sheath, rested it on the edge of the sink, and stepped down among them. “Terrific,” he said.

“Yairs,” the man breathed, "pretty good, eh? You stoppin’ the night?”

Luke nodded, moving quickly away to catch a fish that was flapping off into the coarse grass. It continued to flutter in his hands.

“Good,” said the man. He went off to fetch buckets and knives. “We'll get started, eh?”

While his grandfather went through into the kitchen to get clean basins, Luke took one of the buckets round to the side of the house and filled it from the tank. He came back staggering.

“Good,” his grandfather said. “Let's get into it.”

They seated themselves side by side on the step and worked swiftly.

It was a job Luke was used to, had been skilled at since he was nine years old. The blade went in along the belly; the guts spilled, a lustrous silver-blue, and were tossed into the one bucket; in the other you plunged to the forearm and rinsed.

The work went on quickly, silently; they seldom talked much till after tea. Luke lost himself in the rhythm of it, a different rhythm from the one he had given himself to earlier. A kind of drowsiness came over him that had to do with the falling darkness, with the repeated flashing of the knife and his swinging to left and right between buckets, and with the closeness of so much raw flesh and blood. His arms and bare legs were covered with fish-scales. His face, neck, chest were flecked with gobbets of the thin fish blood.

At last they were done. The fish, all scaled and gutted, were in the basins. One bucket was full of guts, the other with water that was mostly blood. The doorstep too was all shiny with scales (Luke would come out later and flush it clean).

“Good,” his grandfather said. “We've done well.” He carried in the basins of fish, then took the two heavy buckets and poured them into a dip in the sand where they could be covered. Luke sat, too drowsy to move; but stirred himself at last. He went round to the side of the house and let water run over his legs, and washed the scales from his neck and arms.

It was almost dark. You could hear the sea washing against the rocks below, a regular crashing; but further out it was still, and he stood a moment, clean again, drying off in the breeze, and watched it. He felt oddly happy — for no reason, there was no reason. Just happy, as earlier with the kites. It was like a change of weather, a sudden transformation, that might not last but for as long as it did would fill the whole sky and touch everything around with its steady light. He was back in the stream again — one of the streams.