David Malouf: The Complete Stories

12

The CIB has just announced that according to their experts the Nun-dah prowler and our prowler, who were thought to be one and the same, are indisputably different.

How, one wonders, do they know?

Nundah is the next suburb from here, the boundaries being the suburban railway line, a park, and the winding course of a creek that is quite visible in old photographs of the area but has long since been filled in to make an equally winding street; both sides of the street are planted with bouhinia, which all flower in the same exuberant pink and at the same season, but one side is Nundah and the other is not.

Does the Nundah prowler never cross the street? And if not why not?

I can understand that he might hesitate at the railway line, which does after all represent a real obstacle and where the character of the two suburbs is distinct, our side being older and better established, with big parklike gardens and, as the real-estate agents put it, a better class of resident. One can imagine that the Nundah prowler, used to small houses on sixteen-perch allotments, mostly treeless and unsewered, might feel intimidated before the big verandahed mansions on our side, might find the gardens, with their clumps of dark shrubbery and shade-trees, off-putting in some way, being unused to their odd pattern of moonlight and shadow or the sound of creatures rustling and breathing in the boughs. Insufficiently urbanized is what he might find them, and threatening to his sense of space. And the same would be true of the old-fashioned interiors. Too many rooms, too many corridors and stairways. Or it might be the unfamiliarity of the life that is lived here that makes him insecure. Or the kind of woman. One understands well enough that there may be social frontiers, and with them a whole set of sexual associations, that a prowler is unwilling to cross. At the railway line anyway.

But what about further down, where the boundary between the two suburbs is little more than a bureaucratic convenience? Does the Nun-dah prowler really stick to one side of the street, leaving the other to our prowler? Is some sort of territorial instinct in operation? Do prowlers lay down a scent that keeps off rivals, creating a magic fence around the borders of their fantasy world that a stranger recognises and is repelled by or finds himself unable to penetrate? And if this is so, how extraordinary that these private boundaries should follow exactly the line laid down on a map in the Surveyor's Office and recognised by most citizens only when their water rates arrive in a different post from their neighbour's opposite — should follow, that is, all the twists and turns of an underground creek filled in nearly sixty years ago and chosen then, quite arbitrarily (we can imagine the debate that was to determine so much in the lives of future prowlers and their victims) as a surburban dividing-line by a committee of respectable aldermen.

No doubt these considerations have occurred to the Incident Squad and been properly dealt with. But they have not published their reasons. When they do so, a great deal may be revealed that at the moment remains inexplicable, and valuable light shed on the secret life of suburbs — not to mention the anthropology of prowlers.

13

DESPITEthe warnings that are published almost daily in our papers, and the growing number of assaults, women continue to make themselves vulnerable.

Driving slowly round the suburb in the gathering dusk I see window after window in the dark gardens ablaze with light, open to the cool summer breeze and all the scents, sub-tropical, overpowering, of the night: jasmine, honeysuckle, cestrum — that heavy night-walker.

The scenes that appear in these brightly lit squares constitute a series of frames between spaces of dark, a living peepshow. Here a girl in a half-slip is ironing, her thin shoulders moving to the music behind her, which as I drive on, bounces a moment and is gone. Another woman at a kitchen bench is decorating a birthday cake in the shape of an open book; my kids will be at the party where it is to be eaten, among party-hats, whistles, bowls of jelly and ice-cream (two dozen moulds of raspberry jelly are cooling on the laminex bench), and off-key renderings “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.” Yet another woman stands in half-thought at a washing machine, holding an armful of overalls and waiting for the cycle to begin.

They are all unaware, these women, in their ease of movement or in their dreamy repose, that they are not only clearly visible as they hang aloft there in the dark, but have been endowed, in their detachment within the single frame, with a special quality of significance, so that the smallest of their gestures strikes the senses, is incised on the memory, is given, in all its ordinariness, an aura of the exotic that suggests a pose, as if what we were really watching were a set of professionals acting out a series of domestic scenes in such a way as to emphasize what is specifically erotic in them.

Even later, towards midnight, when the bluish-silver of the television screens has drained away down a pinhole and the suburb sleeps — all its citizens still present but communally engaged now in reassembling the facts of their daily life into the other language of dreams — even then, I notice, there are casements ajar, obliquely taking the moonlight, a curtain's drift and fall shows where a sash window has been raised a little to let in the breeze.

Not me is what is being proclaimed. Others may fall victim, but not me.

Some of these windows are open invitations. But which? That is the point. Obviously the prowler cannot judge or his attacks would not be reported. Do the reported attacks, then, represent only the tip of an iceberg, the prowler's errors, his misreading of what a window left unlatched or a woman moving half-clad across a stage-lit space might innocently suggest? Are there rooms where women wait night after night for the sound of a footfall, the creak of a board on the verandah, or a doorhandle being tried, only to suffer, night after night, the entry of nothing more than moonlight, thin, disembodied, that in the morning leaves no mark on the flesh?

The signs are not clear enough. What we need is a more specific means of communication. If only so that some women may discover the signals they should avoid.

14

I WONDER,since so much of the objective evidence has led nowhere, if the Incident Squad shouldn't try something quite different; as a way, I mean, of releasing the crimes for a moment from the world of fact into the world of fantasy where they properly belong. Since fantasy and its irrational associations are the language the prowler speaks, mightn't we try thinking in that language as a way of anticipating his moves? At the very least the sort of games I am proposing would loosen things up, get rid of preconceptions that may be standing in the investigators’ way, would send them back to the evidence with a more open and intuitive understanding of that pattern of analogies that lies often enough under the confusions of mere event. Several “Letters to the Editor” have suggested the employment of a clairvoyant. But this is so much simpler. And there is something liberating in the very idea of a group of policemen and women, under the direction of Senior Detective Pierce, abandoning their files for a morning to play party-games.

So then, a questionnaire:

What colour does the prowler bring to your mind?

Apple green.

What fish?

A squid.

What great novel?

Elective Affinities.

What pop record?

Dark Side of the Moon.

What flower?

Datura.

What cloud formation?

Cumulus.

What animal?