David Malouf - The Complete Stories

He would glance briefly towards the greatcoat tossed over the back of a chair, its thick serge bunched and shapeless. His father's greatcoat. Which he had commandeered for a bit. And where was his father?

He shrugged, and the cough he gave was half a chuckle.

It was an uncomfortable feeling only for a moment. The mug was warm against the soft flesh of his palm. The coffee or tea, when he lowered his head to hide his confusion, and sipped, was hot in his mouth.

There was a design of painted flowers on the tiles behind the sink in the Whelans’ kitchen: detached yellow petals round a dob of red, with a green stem and two symmetrical green leaves — the kind of flower he remembered painting when he was first at school, the flower a five- or six-year-old paints. Not a real flower, one you've seen — they're too difficult, too complicated and raggedy. The stripped-down idea of a flower. The one from which all other flowers might have evolved.

The rightness of these flowers, each one planted in the centre of its tile and repeated all over the bit of wall, pleased him in a way he could not have explained, and centred him for a moment, but only for a moment, in a space of his own.

One afternoon, when he was leaving the Whelans', Josie followed him out to where his bike was parked under the overhanging canopy of a camphor laurel.

She dawdled, and he wondered, as he sat astride the CZ, at a hesitancy in her that was unusual and which, for all the little crease between her brows, softened her features and brought her close, in a way that created a soft feeling in him as well.

It was a time of day when everything was in suspense. The light high up in the sky just yielding to the first smokiness of dark. A hint of nighttime coldness in the air. Birds restless in the grass and beginning to flock low now over the neighbouring roofs. He waited.

Josie too had an offer to make. What she had access to, if he wanted, was a line of safe houses. In Sydney. He could, even at this point, refuse to go, declare himself an objector — and people down there, good people, would pass him on from one house to another till the war was over.

He listened quietly. To the agitation of birds. To some boys off in the distance, shouting as they kicked a ball about.

“How would I get there?” he asked. Not because he might actually do it but out of curiosity, to catch himself briefly in the light of an unexpected possibility. “To Sydney, I mean.”

“I could arrange it,” Josie told him. He was impressed by her intensity. “There's an organisation.”

He nodded but remained sceptical. She made it sound like the underground during the war. It had the air of a game.

What was no game was where he was going.

“I'll think it over,” he told her, turning his head to where the voices of the footballers were raised in a triumphant shout. She touched the sleeve of the greatcoat. “No, I will,” he assured her, "I'll think about it. I really will.”

But he wondered that she should have seen so little of what was in him. When his last visit came and he gave her his answer, feeling clumsy though he tried not to be — they were once again in the half-dark under the camphor laurel tree — she was silent and did not try to persuade him, though she accepted none of “reasons.” What he could not tell her was that since the ballot was announced his life had had a shape. He could see himself. He had begun to see, in the events he had organised for himself, the outline of what he was to be.

She kissed him lightly to one side of his mouth and turned back into the house.

He sat a moment — he was not reconsidering — he had never in fact considered — before he kicked the bike into sputtering life and went roaring off.

The other proposition that had been put to him, Cliff's offer to set him up with a girl, he did accept. He was shy, he found, about such matters, even with Cliff, and feared afterwards that he had not hit the right note between throwaway ease and the sort of eagerness that might have been expected of red-blooded youth when he told Cliff, "What you said that time — you know, about a girl — I've been thinking, and I'd really appreciate it.” Cliff seemed to have forgotten his offer. They agreed, however, to meet up at the pub on his last night.

He arrived on time but missed Cliff, who had already been there and left. He bought a beer, talked to one or two people, but after half an hour pushed his way out again and took a slow ride around town.

It was Saturday night. Everyone was out. He felt an odd affection for the place now that he was about to leave it, though it had nothing to recommend it really and he was eager to go.

The usual Saturday-night crowd of fellows and their girls was milling round the entrance to the pictures, which was all lit up; the girls with hair buffed and lacquered, a little top-heavy in their miniskirts and skintight sweaters, the boys trying not to look dressed up, but dressed up just the same in camouflage battledress or motorcycle jacket and cord flares. Some with long hair, one or two with the beginnings of a beard. A good many of those who were still at school, or worked in banks or stores, had short hair with just the sideburns left to thicken.

Charlie felt distanced from them. He rode slowly, scanning the crowd, then did a circuit of the local War Memorial.

Groups of lone youths sat on the backs of benches in the low-walled park there, and smoked or skylarked; others stood leaning against the cars parked along the kerb, making remarks to the passers-by that flared up on occasion into shouting matches. But on the whole a fairground atmosphere prevailed.

He stopped and shouted across to a group of fellows he recognised from school.

“I'm looking for Cliff Hodges,” he called. “Anyone seen Cliff Hodges?”

“You seen him?” one of them asked another.

The boy pursed his lips.

“We haven't seen him,” the first boy called. “Try the pub.”

Charlie drove off, did another slow circuit of the park. He felt let down, decided to look in again at the pub, just in case.

An hour later he was still there. He hadn't found Cliff but had got into conversation with a fellow he'd known at primary school when they were eleven.

Still reddish-blond and freckled, Eddie McPhee was not much bigger than he had been then. Charlie towered over him. He was an apprentice jockey at a local stables. For a good two hours before Charlie met up with him he had been drinking vodka and orange and Charlie decided now to join him. He was very noisy and argumentative, but so slight and pallidly childlike that none of the fellows he picked on thought it honourable to hit him. The worst they did was tell him to get lost and walk away, which made him all the madder. After his second vodka Charlie found this extraordinarily amusing.

He remembered Eddie as a kid who couldn't spell and was always getting whacked across the palm with a ruler. He had grown up cocky and sure of himself. This surprised Charlie but impressed him too. He began to feel happily light-headed, then elated, then affectionately grateful to Eddie for having at this point reappeared out of his primary-school years to take him on a long loop backwards that he might otherwise have missed.

“Remember that bastard Hoyland?” Eddie shouted. This was the wielder of the ruler. “Remember Frances Jakes?” She was a girl who, at twelve, had had the most enormous tits. I'm really enjoying myself, Charlie thought. Too bad about Cliff.

When the pub closed, he redeemed his overcoat from a bar stool where he had abandoned it and offered Eddie a lift back to the stables on the other side of town.

It was after midnight, and cold. What he was aware of, as they rode between the houses down deserted street after street, was the closeness of the stars overhead and the distance between his hands on the handlebars of the bike and his head, where it just managed to stay put at the top of his body. This made the business of keeping the bike upright— and steering it through space with the cold night air pouring over them, and the bitumen, with its starry sheen, ribboning out before and behind — a skill that for all its familiarity approached the miraculous. If anyone was looking down from up there, he thought, how amazing all this must look. And us too. How amazing w must look!