David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“I'm fucken freezing,” Eddie shouted in his ear, crouched behind the wall of his back.

“Yahwee!” Charlie shouted in return and, aiming at the stars, he jerked the bike upwards so that for a moment they sailed along on one wheel.

He woke,feeling stiff and sorry for himself, as the first light was coming. His head was heavy, still thick with sleep, his mouth dry. He couldn't think for a moment where he might be, swaddled in the bulki-ness of the greatcoat, its collar round his ears.

There was a sharp ammoniac smell. Ah! Eddie! The stables.

He saw the wooden walls of the stall then. Sat up in straw. Heard the snuffling close by of horses.

Eddie, in thick socks and greyish longjohns that sagged at the knees, was already upright, pulling a sweater over his head. “I gotta go,” he explained.

“I'll go with you,” Charlie told him and got to his feet.

Eddie sat to pull on his boots. Charlie discovered he was still wearing his.

They staggered out into the pearly light, unbuttoned, and standing side by side took a good long piss, watching it stream and puddle between the pebbles in the yard. Eddie hitched up his pants and went back inside. Charlie walked up and down, hands deep in the pockets of his greatcoat, which was still unbuttoned, his head and shoulders drawn inside the collar, hunched in on the warmth of himself. “Jesus,” he hissed.

He couldn't believe how cold it was out here. There was a bluish frost on the paddock; on the fence post, where it had split and hardened, a glint of ice.

“Here,” Eddie said when he reappeared, "give us a hand with these.”

He was weighed down with a load of gear. Charlie allowed him to heft a pouched bag over his shoulder that weighed a ton. He released a hand from his pocket to steady it. They went out of the yard, where the CZ rested against the fence, and down a gravel drive beside a slip-rail fence towards the highway. Other figures loomed up in the misty light.

“Is it always as cold as this?” Charlie asked.

Eddie had almost disappeared under the load he was carrying. “Yair. You never fucken get used to it!”

They came to a T-junction. There was no traffic. Horses were being brought up in a long line; silvery shadows in the misty half-light, their hooves making a hollow sound on the bitumen. They might have been packhorses setting out across a continent. Charlie was reminded of a troop of soldiers — or was it Indians? — out of some black-and-white movie. Something unfamiliar anyway, not part of his world. Yet here it was, and routine to Eddie, who was grumping along at his side. Just another Sunday morning.

If I hadn't missed Cliff last night, and the girls, Charlie thought, I wouldn't know all this was here. How much else was there, he wondered, that he wouldn't have time now to discover?

He felt a little cloud of doubt, of depression, puff up in him. But just then the sun broke through, touching the grass on either side of the road, and with its sudden warmth came a strong earth smell, comfortingly dark, along with the rankness of the horses.

He dumped the bag. “I should get going,” he said.

Eddie, standing beside him at the fence, was absorbed now with what was happening out in the paddock.

“Yair, good,” he said in an absent voice. “See you round.”

He continued to stare out into the distance.

Charlie, standing for a moment, felt the pull of Eddie's absorption. In a world. In work. There was so much liveliness in the way the horses pranced about, proud and full of themselves and their power, the air blowing white from their nostrils, light rippling on their coats. When he turned and walked back briskly to where the CZ was parked, he felt in himself some of the energy they moved with, the touch of coming warmth in the air, the beginning excitement of realising that this was it, it had arrived. The day.

At home he showered, got his few things together.

He was very much aware, in a sentimental way, that these would be his last moments, for a while at least, in this room.

It had been his for the whole of his life. Its view, into the branches of an old liquidambar, was one of the first he could recall, the luminous green of star-shaped leaves in the early-morning light that went gold then rusted at the end of May, then crisped and yielded to a faint line of hills; bluish, but sometimes with the red of the sun behind them, and a flash as it was sucked down and disappeared behind their blackness.

He stood now looking out over the sill. There was just an instant when it struck him — repeating an episode from a conventional Boy's Own story — that he could still climb over the sill, grab one of those branches, swing to the ground ten feet below and be away. But where to? To Josie and the limbo, the dangling interim, of a series of safe houses?

He turned back into the room. He had slept here virtually every night of his life for almost twenty years. Seven full years that would make in all, of being laid out here in a state of suspension, colouring its darkness with his dreams. Its walls bore the record, meagre as it might be, of the dedications and brief enthusiasms of his passage — it too seemed brief — from childhood to wherever he had arrived at now of imperfect manhood. When he closed the door on it, it would remain here, complete to a point, while four thousand miles away the same body that had trusted itself each night to unconsciousness, and done its daily push-ups here on the polished floor, and sat at the desk sweating over the binomial theorem and making its way through Sons and Lovers and the Iliad and War and Peace, would be putting itself through a new set of experiences, as yet unimaginable, which it might or might not at last get back from.

He hung the greatcoat in the wardrobe — the period of that particular uniform was over — and closed the door, then stood and examined himself, hair still wet from the shower, in the mirror.

He had expected these last weeks to resolve in some way the puzzle of what he was — they had not. To provide something, caught from others, that he could take away and hang on to, refer back to, measure himself against.

He opened the door of the wardrobe and looked again at the greatcoat on its hanger, bulky and familiar. He buried his nose in it. The odour of mothballs had faded over the weeks. There was another smell now, not quite familiar. Was that him?

Once more he closed the wardrobe door and, avoiding his image, sat for a moment, hands placed lightly on his knees, very quiet and still, on the edge of his bed, the way the characters do in a Russian novel before a journey Then went out to where his aunt, in her dressing gown, was just coming from the bathroom.

She kissed him, laying her hand very gently to his cheek. It was so unusual, the touch of her fingers added to the regular, rather formal kiss, that it came to him with a little start of reality, which those last moments in his room had not quite produced, that he was actually going.

They were quiet at breakfast, though no more than usual. His grandfather complained, which was unusual, of a neighbour's dog, which had kept him awake half the night, he insisted, with its barking — growing, as he went on, more and more aggrieved, then angry.

What Charlie saw, his aunt too, was that he really was angry, though not with the neighbour. And not with me either, Charlie said to himself, but with the fact that I am going. Maybe even with the war. But nothing of this — the war, his going or not going — had ever been discussed between them, and he wondered why. He had simply taken it for granted that if his number came up he would go, and that his grandfather and aunt, however they might fear for his safety and miss him, would expect him to, because it was the strong thing to do. Wasn't that what they had always been looking for in him? A sign that the moral weakness, or whatever it was that had made his father run, and had then brought him back again destroyed by his own hand, had passed him over. Now, when they shook hands on the veranda step and he felt himself briefly hugged and pushed away, his grandfather's anger, or sorrow, suggested something shocking: that in his own unaccustomed weakness, the old man might be willing to accept even a lack of strength in this last of his line if he could be kept home and safe from harm.