David Malouf: The Complete Stories

What unnerves him is not the patch of wetness itself, but what it forces upon him — the fact of the burglar's ordinariness and at the same time his utter strangeness. He has before him the man's bodily juices, but no face, no name, and it comes home to him that he lives among strangers, more than half a million of them, who might at any moment break the unwritten contract and force their way into his bedroom, open his tallboy, put to use one of his initialled handkerchiefs.

Later he comes to think of his reaction as excessive and finds it difficult to isolate the precise cause of his panic. It seems irrational. But it is precisely this irrationality that continues to exert an influence on him. When he thinks of the incident he burns with shame.

So it is that many of the attacks — perhaps even the majority — go unreported.

9

Each morning nearly a dozen women appear at the office of the Incidents Squad with information they will impart only to Senior Detective Pierce in person.

Senior Detective Pierce has become a popular figure in our little world. Smilingly reassuring when he appears on television, grim and determined when he is snapped at press conferences, he is a sort of prowler in reverse who has caught the imagination of the public in much the same way as the prowler himself. What did we do, we ask ourselves, before we had Senior Detective Pierce?

Even the genial detective's two small boys have entered the pantheon. They are called Sam and Harry, aged ten and seven.

They bear no clear resemblance to Senior Detective Pierce but are said to be the living picture of his dead wife, whose absence lends a touch of pathos to the policeman's rugged assurance and brings to an image that is otherwise all assertiveness and power an engaging ambiguity. It allows him to be a family man, very solid and reliable, but also turns him loose.

The two boys, tough-looking blonds, keep the mother's figure clearly in view (did she really look like that?) but in their cocky imitation maleness it is disturbingly redefined. When Senior Detective Pierce and his boys are photographed together at a swimming carnival or at one of our local rugby matches, this simultaneous absence and presence of the wife and mother constitutes a mystery that women respond to (and some men as well) without at all knowing what is in play. Around the rough edges of the two boys, all grazed elbows and knees, glows the aura of the missing wife, and the hard outline of Senior Detective Pierce, ex-lifesaver and League forward, is softened as he stoops to see that Sam's windcheater is buttoned, or with the corner of a handkerchief wet with spit, cleans ice-cream from Harry's shirt-front, by the lineaments of the tender, all solicitous mother.

“How are Samnharry?” women tend to enquire as a way of easing themselves into their story, slipping thus, as they might see it, into the role of family friend or next-door neighbour.

Then immediately, breathlessly, before the proud father can answer: "I have seen the prowler!”

10

The information provided by many of the victims has no basis in fact. That is quite clear. But it is not therefore false. They have seen the prowler, but in one of those dreams that nightly crowd the streets of our suburb with a life as intense, as busy, as any it knows by day. Here is just one of them.

The dreamer is a woman of forty, a pharmacist. She is walking at dusk along the grassy footpath of a street planted with poincianas, so thick (it is early summer) that they meet above the roadway, making a tunnel that the light of the street lamps barely penetrates. In the woman's dream the darkness in which she is walking is thickened by an unseasonable fog. It swirls so densely about her that she cannot see her feet. She wades in it. (This is dream weather. No such conditions occur in our damp sub-tropical city at the hour at which the woman is walking, though they are not infrequent, in another part of the year, in the hour before dawn — that is, at the time of her dream.) It is in a state of great weariness, as she drags her body through the warm fog, that she hears behind her, or in front, for she cannot tell which, a soft thudding, the footsteps as she quickly perceives of an approaching jogger.

She stops, flattens herself against the trunk of a tree; hoping that the runner, whoever he may be, will not see her.

The footsteps get closer.

She presses her body closer to the tree trunk, trying to pass through the rough bark into it, to become part of its life, and seems for a moment to have succeeded. She is not there. Only the roughness of the bark, its pressure round her thighs, gives her some sense of her own separate being as the runner (it is the blond boy in the tracksuit we have previously imagined) materializes out of the fog.

And at that moment a woman she recognises, with horror, as her perfect double steps right into his path. The runner has to pull up with a jerk to avoid colliding with her. They stand face to face. The youth steps to the left in order to pass her, and her reflection steps to the right. Again they are face to face. She tries to scream but cannot, her voice belongs to the double. She wakes with her face contorted in a silent shriek, and the boy's features are so clearly before her that she can describe them in detail: colour of eyes blue; a scar under the right eye high up on the cheekbone, which gives him a slight squint; hair heavy with sweat, hanging in bangs over his brow; a day's growth of stubble; a film of spittle that makes his teeth gleam, when recovering his breath at last, he opens his mouth to defend himself. She shakes her head. No! No! No defence! No defence possible!

It is the boy in the tracksuit, no doubt of it. She gives his picture to the life. For a whole week, each night of fog, he pads softly through her sleep and confronts her, always at the same point; comes so close she can smell his sweat, feel his breath on her face. He is too breathless to speak and she too terrified to cry out. They do their strange dance on the grass in utter silence.

After the seventh night of this silent intimidation she goes to the police. The boy enters their files. He contributes his features to one of the three identikit pictures, but is never sighted.

11

It is easy of course to get things out of proportion, to forget that on a night when one, maybe two attacks take place, hundreds of innocent girls sit at their dressing table mirrors with the window open, rubbing coldcream into their face and neck, smoothing it gently upwards, then lower themselves into untroubled sleep; that schoolboys, tired after late football practise and an hour of television, roll gently over the touchline into absolute oblivion before they have even resolved the question, with fingers round their cock: "Will I tonight or won't I? Did I do it last night?;" that young lovers in cars angle-parked towards the drop on Bartley's Hill are softly rediscovering one another, moving into a lifetime together as they uncover the familiar unfamiliarity of one another's bodies in the hot darkness; as their parents, in a space of dark between the streetlights below, are also moving through one another (having graduated from here more than twenty years ago) like palpable ghosts, towards the mystery of sleep and the odd messages, important, uncatchable, that come to them in flashes before dawn.

The suburb sleeps. Most of its dreams are dull, bursting like bubbles in the light, and as clear as bubbles. Entirely guiltless. The sleepers drift, go under, climbing back into the shallows every hour in phase after phase, feeding on stillness; pulse slow, breath regular, renewing themselves with huge draughts of space in which there are no objects to catch the eye or engage the body's idling senses; free for a time of the body's demands as it goes its own way through the dark. Cats are abroad. Their eyes redden under a culvert. Flying-foxes row in to raid a patch of Moreton Bay figs at the edge of a golf course or a backyard mango tree; they hang there, upside down under the boughs, like the souls of a suburb of sleepers, ranked in the dark. Just before first light the newsagent, McAllister, from a car with one whole side cut away, tosses the morning papers rolled into a cylinder on to dew-damp lawns, and Dr. Cooper, hearing him turn into Arran Avenue, will know that it is time to get back into his clothes and go home. The papers lie there in the growing light. They carry the news. But the night's real occurrences will not be in them. One or two extraordinary moments, yes: a car-smash on Ipswich Road, a fight in a roadside caf on Petrie Terrace, another assault. But not the familiar couplings, the exchanges, the busy life the suburb pursues in its sleep. This is anti-news, and from this point of view the papers are unreliable. Too much that happens here is of no interest to them. A hundred and fifty thousand potential victims un-attacked in a single night. What sort of news is that?