David Malouf - The Complete Stories

They were writing now with their heads bent to the task, filling the first page with the fruits of their imagination. Later she would read what they had written and give it a mark. She comforted herself with the thought that if their imagination stopped at a certain point it was just as well. It would save them, as she could no longer save herself, from the enormity of the thing.

She glanced quickly at her watch. “Time, children,” she said briskly. “You have two more minutes. Make sure you have a concluding paragraph, label it, and see that your name is printed clearly at the top of the page.”

She stood at the window, with her arms clasped to her breast as if she were cold, though it was in fact too warm today. The garden below was approaching the full thickness of summer, every leaf separate and astir in the afternoon breeze, discovering darkness as an edge of shadow, the hungry little birds dipping and feeding on berries and squabbling disgracefully over the remains.

And in one way or another they had accepted it, the others. They allowed Jane, who had never been popular among them, and whose face soon grew dim in their minds, to walk out of their lives as she had walked out of the dormitory, and made as little as possible of her failure to come back.

The event itself remained for them a series of glowing but unreal moments when they had sat on a bed in the unlighted dormitory and watched Jane and the boy, two figures already touched by the strangeness of distance and the night; high dreamlike occasions between stretches of sleep, when they had, briefly, touched on something outside the rules of their daily existence, the rules that would govern their lives afterwards, and which they knew now was there, had always been there, and would never, even in their own case, and despite the rules, be entirely exorcised; though it did not have to be confronted — or not yet. They would recognise it again later, at a point further on, past the husbands and the children still to come. It was ten years off for one, at the bottom of twelve feet of water; twenty years for another, for others fifty sixty even. It would reappear in a different and quite unpredictable form to each one of them: as a tree trunk suddenly illuminated on a country road, every scribble in its bark clearly readable; or a lump secretly nourished in one of the soft parts of the body; or a welling up, beyond the faces of children and grandchildren, of a sea of blood. At that moment they might understand her at last, their lost schoolfellow, and in whatever part of themselves they harboured a memory of all this, without precisely recalling it, see themselves getting up out of their solid childlike bodies to follow.

Meanwhile there was Miss Wilson's essay to finish — the marvellous cavern to be got out of.

They wrote on.

1

There is more goes on in this suburb than meets the eye. But naturally.

Waiting at McAllister's newsagency yesterday for a magazine order I overheard a conversation between our popular newsagent and Doctor Cooper of Lancaster Road. “You know, McAllister,” the doctor remarked, "you must be about the most regular man, time-wise, in this whole city. I hear your wagon turn into Arran Avenue in the morning and I say to myself, ‘That's McAllister. It must be five thirty. Time to get back into my clothes and go home.’ ” McAllister was delighted. Three minutes later he was repeating the story to a new customer as an example of the complete reliability of his service.

There's no better place than a newsagent's for finding out what goes on in the world. And I don't mean by reading the papers.

2

Ours is one of the older suburbs, no longer fashionable as it was forty or fifty years ago but still retaining a certain desirable elegance, and still, with its expansive gardens and tree-lined avenues, a place where a mode of life can be observed that has not yet surrendered to the patios, clothes-hoists, and drive-in supermarkets of the Estates. Houses here are of painted weatherboard in the colonial style: with gables, turrets, pepperpot domes, bull's-eye windows of emblazoned glass, verandahs, wrought-iron railings, and venetians that hum in a storm. Bougainvillea and Cardinal Creeper grow thick over outhouse roofs and the lattice- work that keeps out the westering sun. Lawns planted with old-fashioned natives like hoop-pine and bunya, along with the deodars and Douglas firs of empire, make secluded spaces, some of them close to parklike, where willy-wagtails feed and fat grasshoppers wobble in flight above the cannas. It's a quiet area. Lawn sprinklers weave elaborate loops and figures-of-eight; kids on bicycles hiss over the gravel; a station wagon driven by a young housewife rolls along under the bouhineas, delivering a kindergarten group or a riot of small footballers. Deep in a garden somewhere, a splash, then laughter as children lark about in a backyard pool. That's the nearest you might come to a disturbance of the heavy stillness. At night a tennis court, one wire wall thick with cestrum, suddenly lights up in the sub-tropical dusk and there will be, for an hour or two, the leisurely thwack thwack of a ball. So that the assaults, when they broke out, seemed especially shocking.

3

The earliest victims were disbelieved. They were written off as hysterical. Two of them were unmarried, one was a young mother of three with a history of mental illness, another a schoolgirl of sixteen. It was only after the sixth or seventh attack that one of the newspapers got on to the story, and almost overnight, it seemed, we had a prowler. From that point on, the assaults ceased to be imaginary.

Scarcely a day has passed since then without a new report. Once the prowler entered our lives, via the columns of the paper, he was everywhere. He dominated the headlines and became the obsessive subject of even the most casual conversations. He began, little by little, to change the fabric of our lives. So local schoolgirls no longer walk up from the bus-stop alone. They ring from town and are met by anxious fathers in the Holden Kingswood. Wives, returning home from a meeting, have learned to drive with the doors locked and the windows up, waiting in the garage till someone appears on a lighted verandah to see them safely inside. What did we do with ourselves before there was the prowler? What did we talk about? He is as much part of our lives now as the milkman or the newsagent. Every suburb has its prowler and we have ours. It is, the newspapers tell us, the price we pay for modern living. Prowlers come to us as part of that “way of life” that elsewhere in the papers we are urged at all times to defend.

4

Not all of the attacks follow the same pattern.

Sometimes the prowler does no more than watch a sleeping woman from the windowsill or from the foot of the bed. When she starts awake at last, suddenly aware of a real presence in her dreams, he signals with his forefinger to his lips that she should not cry out, shows the edge of a knife, and then just sits, holding her thus — captive, mesmerized — till the light begins to grow in the room and his face, a darkened blank against the sky, is in danger of becoming clear. Then, without a word, he rolls over the sill and is gone.

Often, while the woman is washing up at the sink, he slips in behind out of the darkening house; an arm goes round her waist, a hand covers her mouth, she feels his breath, his fingers, but sees nothing. On some of these occasions, startled by the sound of a step on the verandah, or a train whistle, the attacker will break and run, and the last she will hear of him is the banging of a wirescreen door — which from that moment onwards will always “assault.” Sometimes the man is naked. More often he is not. There are times when he has been sighted by a curious neighbour, but only rarely are these sightings reported till after the event. One wonders why. What, standing there at the bathroom window or behind the slats of the venetians, did the observer make of a naked figure stalking across the lawn? What area of a neighbour's secret life did he think he had stumbled on, that might be observed but not violated? There are lines, it seems, that we are conditioned not to cross. Does the prowler know this, and feel certain that in nine cases out of ten, even if sighted, he will not be betrayed? His assurance comes perhaps from the very fact that he is a prowler: that is, one for whom the lines exist to be crossed.