David Malouf - The Complete Stories

I remember catching my parents once in a rare but heated quarrel. There was a family wedding or funeral to attend and the question had arisen of who might look after me.

“No,” my mother whispered, "he's irresponsible. I won't have the child traipsing around billiard-saloons or sitting in gutters outside hotels. Or riding in a cab with that Hector Grierley He's an abortionist! Everyone knows it.”

“He could spend the day at Ruby's.”

I heard my mother gasp.

“Have you gone off your head?”

Ruby was one of Uncle Jake's girlfriends, a big china-doll of a woman who lived with her daughters at Stones Corner.

What my mother did not know was that I had been to Ruby's already. Uncle Jake and I had dropped in there for an hour or so after an outing, and I had been impressed by his insistence that I swear, scout's honour, not to let on. The act of swearing and the establishment of complicity between us had made me see the quite ordinary house, which was on high stumps with a single hallway from front to back, in a special light.

Ruby wore pink fur slippers and was sitting when we arrived on the front doorstep, painting soft, mustard-yellow wax on her legs, which she then drew off like sticking plaster, in strips. She had a walnut-veneer cocktail cabinet, and even at three in the afternoon it came brilliantly alight when you opened the doors. I was allowed, along with the two skinny daughters, to sip beer with lemonade in it; and later, while Uncle Jake and Ruby had a little lie down, I went off with the two girls, and a setter with a tail that swept the air like a scarlet feather, to see their under-the-house.

“Watch out for the dead marines, love,” Ruby had called after us in her jolly voice, and one of the daughters, giggling at my puzzlement, indicated the stack of Fourex bottles on the back landing. “She means them, you dill!”

Among the objects that had taken my eye at Ruby's was a bowl of roses, perfect buds and open blooms in red, yellow, and pink, that looked supernaturally real but were not. I had never seen anything so teasingly beautiful, and when I left, one of the scarlet buds went with me. In crossing the hallway on my way to the toilet I had stopped, unhooked the most brilliant of them from its wire basket, and taking advantage of my time behind the bathroom door, had slipped it easily into my pants.

“Ruby's,” my mother said “is out of the question. I'm surprised at you even suggesting it.”

So with Ruby's hotly in mind, and exaggerated in retrospect as a carnival place of forbidden colour, I spent the day with a neighbour, Mrs. Chard, who took me on a tram-ride to the Dutton Park terminus, questioned me closely about Jesus, and informed me that she was descended from Irish kings, "though you mightn’ think it." (I didn't, but at nearly seven was too polite to say so.) She had a place above her lip where she shaved — you could see the shadow picked out in sweat drops — and seemed quite unaware of how the afternoon in her company was transfigured by the pink glow of my imagination, and how her louvred weatherboard became for a moment, as we approached it, the site of lurid possibilities — not perhaps a cocktail cabinet, but some equally exotic object that would be continuous with the world of Ruby's where it had been decided I should not spend the day.

But there was nothing. Only the smell of bacon fat in the kitchen, that clogged the back of my throat the way it clogged the drains, and an upright with candleholders.

Mrs. Chard played something classical in which she crossed her plump, freckled wrists; “Mother McCrea.” After which she showed me photographs, all of children who were dead. Then, acting on some compulsion of her own, or responding perhaps to a mood that I myself had created, she disappeared into a room across the hallway and came back holding her hands behind her back and looking very coy and knowing.

I was fascinated. She hadn't seemed at all like a woman who could tempt.

Suddenly, with a little cry and a not-quite-pleasant giggle, she produced from behind her back a pair of glossy dancing-shoes such as little girls in those days wore to tap-dancing classes, and waggled them seductively before me. They were Kelly green, and were too small for her hands, which she was using to make them dance soundlessly on the air. Uncertain how to react, I smiled, and Mrs. Chard fell to her knees.

She set the Kelly green shoes on the linoleum, where they sat empty and flat; then shuffling forward, she lifted me up, set me on the piano stool, and while I watched in a trancelike state of pure astonishment, she removed my good brown shoes, took up the Kelly greens, and forced my left foot — was she mad? — into the right one and my right into the even tighter left. Then she rose up, breathy with emotion, and set me down. I stood for what seemed ages among the bone china and maidenhair in an agony of humiliation, but unable, despite every encouragement, to make the shoes take flight and release their magic syncopations.

I refused to cry. Boys do not. But Mrs. Chard did. She hugged and kissed me and called me her darling, while I quailed in terror at so much emotion that both did and did not involve me; then quietened at last to heaving sobs, she fell to her knees again, snatched the shoes off, and left me to resume my own.

After our fit of shared passion she seemed unwilling to face me. When she did she was as cool as a schoolmistress. She stood watching me sweat over the laces, fixing me with a look of such plain hostility that I thought she might at any moment reach for a strap. The tap-shoes had disappeared, and it was clear to me that if I were ever to mention them, here or elsewhere, she would call me a liar and deny they had ever been.

Of course all my mother's predictions, in Uncle Jake's case, came true. He did go to gaol, though only for a month, and as he got older his charm wore off and the flash suits lost their style. The days of Cagney and George Raft gave way to years of tight-lipped patriotism — to austerity, khaki. The Americans arrived and stole the more stunning girls. Uncle Jake was out of the race. Something had snapped in him. He had bluffed his way out of too many poker-hands, put his shirt on too many losers. He began to be a loser himself, and from being a bad example in one decade became inevitably a good one in the next — the model, pathetically threadbare and unshaven, in a soiled singlet and pants, of what not to be. I came to dread his attempts to engage my ear and explain himself. His rambling account of past triumphs and recent schemes that for one reason or another had gone bung ended always in the same way, a lapse into uneasy silence, then the lame formula: "If you foller me meanings.” I was growing up. I resented his assumption of an understanding between us and the belief that I was fated somehow to be his interpreter and heir.

“Poor ol’ Jake,” my father would sigh, recalling the boy he had grown up with, who had so far outshone him in every sort of daring. He would every now and then slip him a couple of notes, and with his usual shyness of emotion say, "No mate — it's a loan, I'm keeping tag. You can pay me when your ship comes in.”

My mother had softened by then. She could afford to. So far as she knew I had escaped contagion. “Poor ol’ Jake,” she agreed, and might have felt some regret at her own timidity before the Chances.

So it was Uncle Jake who came to spend his days in the third bedroom of our house, and as he grew more pathetic, as meek as the milk puddings she made because it was the only thing he could keep down, my mother grew fond of him. She nursed him like a baby at the end. It's odd how these things turn out.

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