David Malouf - The Complete Stories

The war itself, when he got to it, would present hazards of a different sort. He had seen something of that. Body bags, statistics, fellows who brought back, in one way or another, a good deal less of themselves than they had taken away. He had no illusions. But chance in that case was tempered with something else. Something you yourself brought to the bar.

Guts. A feeling for where to put your foot down and where not. The good-luck charm of life itself — the one you were intended for. He believed, though none of this, of course, had yet been tested, that he was the possessor of all three.

Beyond that you could present yourself as you wanted to be seen and then try to live up to it. With a rough outline in your head of a story, you could do everything in your power to act it out; to incorporate the accidents that hit you into its form, as he had incorporated the lottery and his conscription. Later parts of it, in his case, included Paris, which he definitely saw himself visiting one day a language or two he meant to pick up, a wife of course — he had a whole list of things he'd barely started on. He had already read War and Peace, but he had not, as yet, fired a gun or been up in a plane. He had never tasted Tokay, or champagne or oysters, or slept with a girl or been further from home— this small town tucked into a hollow behind the Range — than Brisbane once on a rugby trip while he was at school: he had been sick, both ways, on the coach. But he was young, and believed, even with Vietnam up ahead, that he had time.

He had discovered in the eyes of others, beginning with his grandfather, an affectionate wish that all things should go well with him. It was partly out of a desire to extend to as many people as possible the privilege of exercising their large goodwill towards him that he appeared on so many doorsteps of what was still, for the time being, his own little world.

One of the places he liked to go was a household where he was known; the family of his best friend Brian Whelan, who at the end of the previous year had decided on university and was away now in Brisbane.

The Whelans had known him since he was ten years old. The difference, when he went there now, was that Brian was gone and his sister Josie, who was three years older and had been away, was back. It was Josie who had opened the door to him when, after a six-month absence, he turned up one weekday around five in the afternoon, a little lightheaded from the two beers he had drunk and with his hair, and the hairlike filaments of the greatcoat, touched with tiny droplets of moisture, silvery and weblike from the drizzling rain he had driven through.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Josie announced to the lighted room behind her as he stood stamping on the threshold.

It was three years or more since he had last seen her. She had changed. She was thinner with longer hair. But her voice had not changed. It still had its edge of dismissive irony.

She had never really liked him, that's what he felt. His closeness to Brian had shut her out. He had never intended that and was sorry for it. He wished now that he had known her better and that she was more pleased to see him.

“Come in, love,” Mrs. Whelan called.

In a little while there were mugs of tea and his favourite Tim Tams. The greatcoat was draped over the back of a chair.

“I'm going to Vietnam,” he announced.

“Oh,” Mrs. Whelan said, and Josie, who was standing with her back against the sink, made a huffing sound.

“Brian's older than you,” Mrs. Whelan said after a bit. “Isn't your birthday in March, love?”

“May,” he told her.

“Yes,” she said, "Brian's is February the ninth.”

What she meant was that Brian's birth date had put him in a previous ballot; he was safe. She held out the plate of Tim Tams, as if offering him a small consolation, and when Charlie saw it he wanted to laugh. He had, he felt, grasped so clearly what was in her mind.

Lately he had found himself looking at the world — at people — as if he had developed another sense, beyond the usual five, for what was happening around him, for what was being said. Listening, really listening, was a kind of looking. For the way a glance passed from one person to another, or a soft mouth was compressed into a hard line, as Josie's was now, or cheeks were momentarily sucked in. As often as not that was where the real conversation was being conducted.

The younger boys of the family, Luke and Jack, came crashing into the room. They were eleven and fifteen. Barefooted, in out-at-elbow woollies, they had been tempted in by his arrival — and the promise of Tim Tams — from practising hoops at the basketball ring where he and Brian had spent long afternoons just a year ago.

“I've seen you riding,” Luke told him. His eyes went to the greatcoat.

Jack, the older boy, laughed, as if this intended more than it said.

“CZ,” Luke said admiringly.

The greatcoat and the bike, that's what they saw.

What Josie saw was a warmonger.

“I suppose you're proud of yourself,” she accused, "going off to blow a lot of women and children to pieces who've never done you any harm.”

He was surprised by her vehemence, but when he looked he saw that her eyes were bright with something different.

“Leave Charlie alone now,” her mother told her. “Have another Tim Tam, love.”

“Can I?” Luke asked.

“He's had two already,” the older boy protested.

“Don't be a tittle-tat,” his mother told him.

“Well, he has!”

“She's a real Tartar, eh?”

This, proudly, came from the father, who had just stepped in from work and overheard the scene. “Good to see you, son.”

He shook Charlie's hand, and they stood a moment in what might have been manly solidarity while Josie scowled.

“He's going to Vietnam,” Luke told his father.

“Hmmm,” Mr. Whelan said.

He gave Charlie another look and accepted the mug Josie was passing him.

“Well,” he said gravely, "I suppose someone's got to go. Good on you, son.”

“No they don't,” Josie insisted.

“Josie's been on demos" — this was Luke again—"in Sydney.”

“That's enough, Luke,” his mother told the boy.

But Josie was not so easily silenced. She gave them her opinion of various politicians, local and overseas, and in no uncertain terms stated her convictions about wars in general, men, and this war in particular.

“I told you she was a Tartar,” her father said with a laugh, and Charlie wondered what side he was on. “Hope you've got your crash helmet handy.”

Charlie was amused. He enjoyed being so immediately the centre of attention here, and the little sensual kick he got from her high colour and excitement. He'd never looked at Josie in this light. She had always been “Brian's sister.” But there was something as well that confused him. All this talk of politics, all these fierce convictions.

He had no convictions himself and did not consider what he was about to do as involving him “politics.” There was nothing in the notebook about that. His going or not going concerned only himself. It had to do with where he stood with the world and what it had put in his way, the claims that made on him. With how he saw himself and wanted others to see him. With what he could live with. Maybe — though he believed this would not be demanded of him — with what sort of death he might make.

Josie's insistence that what really mattered was some larger question of right or wrong made nothing of all that. And made nothing too — this is what affronted him — of his presence here, a little heated as he was by all the sensations of the moment and the turmoil of these last weeks. As if his life, his life, the one he felt so strongly pulsing through him, was of no account.