David Malouf - The Complete Stories

She grew thoughtful but said nothing, and he began to move towards the window.

“It's a secret,” he said.

She continued to watch. She seemed puzzled rather than afraid.

Fearful that if he took his eyes off her for even a second she might break or cry out, he felt his way to the sill, swung a leg over, eased himself down till only his fingertips clutched the cracked paintwork, and dropped. Once safely on the ground he moved swiftly into the shadow of a tree, but did not move away. Something made him stand there, still in the half-darkness, and look up. The garden trembled all about him on tiny waves of sound that might have been wings.

The child had come to the sill, her nightdress billowing a little in the breeze. She stood there, quite calmly, looking down at him. Then she did a strange thing. She raised her right hand briefly and waved.

2

She told no one.

Waking as usual in the narrow bed, with Miss Ivers in the doorway briskly clapping her hands and calling, "Now children, now girls!" and the room already filled with groans, giggles, little shrieks, as the nine others in their different ways took on the new day, sat dangling their feet over the edge of the bed a moment, unwilling to kick off, or wandered about half asleep till the first water struck them, exuberantly teased, slapped at sheets and punished pillows, or brushed their hair with long strokes, counting, or practised whatever rituals they had need of to make the crossing from the deep privacies of sleep to this lighter, brighter world that was embodied in Miss Ivers standing straight and slim in the doorway, the exclamation mark of her body making its own clear point: "This, girls, is how we should bear ourselves in the face of Monday morning,” the clapping of her hands, and “Now girls,” providing the first little hook on which they would hang the many wandering minutes of their day — waking as usual into this utterly orderly disorderly world, she thought she must have dreamed him, the boy in the washroom, he seemed so alien to it all; she put him away with her other dreams as she swung out of bed and drew on her slippers.

But no. In the act of reaching down to ease her finger under the right heel, she saw again the laces drawn tight over his index finger, the freckles on the back of his hand, and knew he was real. Though surrounded still by the soft unreality of her sleep, so that he existed in the continuation of whatever she had been dreaming just before, he had been, none the less, utterly bulky and solid — bare-legged, gangling, freckled, with a smell, a mixture of sweat and car-grease, that did not belong to dreams. Dreams were odourless, she knew that at least. Moving with the others into the washroom she couldn't believe that they too would not catch some trace of his presence, feel some displacement he had made in the ordinariness of the room, with its mirrors above white basins, its shower and toilet cubicles. But the others were washing noisily. They caught no scent of him in their boisterous, not-quite-female world.

He had left no sign.

She told no one, and the day went on as if nothing had occurred. It was organised so tightly, and they moved through it at such a keen pace, that it was difficult to let any new thing in to find a place there: doing mental sums as fast as you could and then sitting up very straight when you had the answer, with your hands on your head and your elbows pushed back — straining, but not too obviously, to be called; vaulting the horse with your chin up and your eyes straight ahead as each of the others, one, two, three, four, went off before you, blonde, black or brown ponytails swishing; copying, but fast, before the blackboard was turned over, the chief products of Western Australia; all this kept your head filled with so many immediacies that there was no time for daydreaming, and no corner, with so much that was public and organised, in which anything unusual could lurk. Even when they wrote a composition and had to use their imagination the lines were strictly drawn. Miss Wilson wrote the opening paragraph on the blackboard. It was an old house on Dartmoor, in England, deep in fog, and they went on from there, filling the house with darkness and the sound of creaking doors, that might be ghosts but would more likely turn out to be tramps or stray dogs that left all mysteries explained in a last paragraph, which they were required to label conclusion.

Faced with the open invitation to confess a mystery, she might have let the boy in. But he didn't seem to fit. He was too tall, too ungainly, too much part, in his desert boots and T-shirt, of the sprawling sub-tropical town that began at the walls of their park, to enter the realms of the imagination as Miss Wilson defined it or to find himself on Dartmoor, in England. But she did think of him briefly. She allowed him to approach out of the fog and come up, in his floppy desert boots, to the door of that deserted cottage. Looking vaguely scared, he stood at the threshold, his whole body tense with what might now be required of him. Then she relented and let him off. She let him move away from his meeting with the perfectly conventional spirit she now introduced, who had once, in the olden days, been a witch whom the village people had drowned (though she wasn't really a witch at all, just a crazy old woman) in a greasy millpond, along with her cat called Lock.

There was an occasion during prep when she considered telling her best friend of the moment, Adele Morgan, who slept in another dormitory; was on the very point of it; but didn't. She had the odd sense that she would not be believed. There was no detail she could produce that would be at all convincing, and she was too matter of fact, had too clear a sense of the real and too high a regard for the truth, to invent one. She would wait till such a detail presented itself.

Besides, she had already anticipated the questions Adele would ask and they were not interesting. “Did he do anything? Weren't you scared?”

No, he did nothing at all. He was just there. And she hadn't been scared because there was nothing to be scared of. He was just an ordinary boy with red hair. Very tall when he stood up, and very shy. When she first saw him he had been sitting on the floor with one bare knee drawn up so that he could tie his shoelace (one was tied already, the other, drawn taut, was still, after the first simple knot, looped over his forefinger) and she had been reminded of how her younger brother, Jack, had learned to tie laces by practising it over and over, all one morning, on the verandah steps. The boy had had that same look of anxious concentration. It was perhaps his coming to her thus out of her own past that made her believe at first that she was still asleep in her bed and dreaming. That is why she had turned away a moment to look at her cool face in the mirror, to see that her eyes were open, and to drink. When she turned back he had got to his feet and was staring.

A tall boy, carrot-haired and unexplained; but he didn't scare her any more than if she had dreamed him. At that odd hour, and in the lingering heaviness of sleep, he seemed like a continuation rather than an interruption of her dreams; as if she had first dreamed him and then found him there. What was there to explain?

Of course his presence wasn't related to her daytime life, to the world of corridors and stairs and stairwells and rooms where the blackboards were filled, even in darkness, with chalked up facts. But then neither were her dreams. These hours that were for sleep belonged to nowhere. They were outside the rules. No bells governed them, they were free. She had dreamed the strangest things, and had sometimes been very frightened indeed. Once she had dreamed of being on a picnic with her family when a ship rode up the beach that had no sail. The sailors, who were very ragged and foreign-looking, begged for some garment they could rig up to sail home and she had offered her dress, a bright yellow one. They had fixed it to the mast and sailed right out of view on the still moonlight, out of sight of her parents and her two brothers, while she, in one of those strange dreamworld experiences of being quite palpably in two places at once, stood both at the water's edge watching and at the rails of the ship, while the yellow dress (which had not been hers in fact but her cousin Millie's) stood out stiffly in the breeze.