David Malouf - The Complete Stories

It wasn't a question of innocence, or the loss of innocence — he found these days he could no longer talk in such terms, and people who did made him angry.

There were fellows he had come across “up there” who were, in a childlike way, unknowing; others who, again like children, seemed unmarked by the evil they had come up against. The first was just that — childishness. The second, maybe, a form of grace. We lose whatever innocence we might have laid claim to the moment we are drawn into that tangle of action and interaction, of gesture and consequence, where the least motion on our part, even the drawing of a breath, may so change things that another, close by or far off, will be nudged just far enough out of the clear line of his life as to be permanently impaired.

That, so Charlie would have written now, if he still had his notebook and thought it worth the effort of setting down, was the price of living.

To that extent, no man is innocent. As for the loss of innocence, how could you lose what you'd never had? He had never claimed to be innocent. Only alive.

Ah, thoughts. Thoughts.

He saw himself as a man who, whole as he might look, in that he had no wound to show, had come back just the same with a limb missing, a phantom limb that continued to putrify

Or with fragments of shrapnel in his flesh that sent metal detectors into electronic fits, whether others had ears for it or not.

Or bearing on his breath spores from the soil of a disorderly and darkly divided country where for two whole years he had taken the infected air into his lungs, so that that too — along with the dulled habit of boredom, the unnatural excitements and dreams he had been dragged through, the brutal descents into degradation and a blundering despair without hope of renovation — had come home with him, in selves who had their own other and haunting lives to live.

It scared him at times that one of these ghostly selves who now sheltered in him might speak up and send a conversation skidding in some new and terrible direction. He would have to deal then with a look on the face of whatever companion he had found of startled incomprehension, as if with no warning a mask had slipped.

So he watched himself. Watched them. These others who had set up in him, who insisted at times on drawing attention to themselves and had motives that were not his own.

The need to be heard was theirs, not his. He had no wish to discuss what he had been witness to, and there was no way of doing it anyway. So he did not mention that he had been to the war.

Some people knew it already. They did not mention it either. Embarrassed for him, and for themselves, in case it led to argument. There was a lot of argument on the subject, but only, up here, on the TV, which had smuggled itself now into every household all up and down the country, where it dominated the front room like a child overexcited by the power to say at last the once unsayable.

Up here an older decorum prevailed. People had as little appetite as ever for open dispute.

He thought of Josie and wondered how deep she was now in her hostility to the war, and her disappointment with fellows, like him, who had been duped into going. But he wasn't sure of that — of having been duped. He had had no illusions. The experience had offered itself, that's all, and he had accepted. He did not disagree with the arguments he heard against the war, and his aunt, he suspected, was fiercely opposed to it, though she did not say so. He picked this up from the line of her profile as they sat watching the news together. Her sharp little glances to see how he was taking it. She was afraid of offering some insult to what he “been through.”

He recognised this and was touched. Her fierceness, he knew, was on his behalf. She meant to protect him. But it was too late for that.

What affronted him was not the opinions he heard but the gap between their glib abstractions and what he himself had come across in the way of fact: the heaviness of a soaked pack and mud-caked army boots; grime, dank sweat, the death smell of bloated corpses; the incessant tense preoccupation with keeping all the parts of a body that was suddenly too large, and could not effectively be hidden, clear of the random brute agents of destruction that kept hurtling in from every direction; death-dealing but indifferent. For whom you, warm and intelligently alive as you might be, were no more than another object in their path, though the roar with which they came at you was specific and the collision, when it came, so wet and personal.

On the few occasions when people did argue he turned his back. He had only his experience — combustive actualities — to offer, and they weren't an argument. He screwed his mouth shut and sat sullen over his beer.

The wall of silence he felt between himself and others, which he refused to breach, was noise of a kind they could not even begin to conceive: so dense with the scream of metal and the lower but distinguishable screams of men, with the splash of heavy objects through oil-slicked swamp, and night calls out there in the stilled other world of nature that might be birds but might also be the location signals of a waiting enemy, and with heartbeats and the thump-thump of rotor blades, that not even the music he liked to listen to, and which his aunt thought unnecessarily loud, could block it out.

Weeks passed.He drifted.

In the month before he left things had been like this. He had felt the same way. Detached. Floating. But those days had not been entirely aimless. They had a fixed termination; he had known then what he was moving towards. Now he did not.

And he himself had been different, not simply younger. With a different sense of where he might look for enlightenment. Intrigued still by the spectacle of his own existence, and open to every clue he might pick up — a look here, a passing comment there — of what he might be. Still making himself up out of what others saw in him. Or wanting to. Because it was easier than looking too clearly into himself.

He had tried that too, but it was confusing. What he had found there was contradictory, or the evidence was in a code he could not crack.

Was he wiser now?

Not much, he thought.

What he had learned in the heat of action was useful only in moments of extremity, of violent confrontation. The pressures now were soft, the dangers more insidious because not deadly. Or not immediately so.

His aunt went easy on him, was not demanding. She had become sociable and went out a good deal, leaving his meals on a plate in the fridge with a note telling him how they should be heated. The notes were jaunty, an easier and more playful form of communication than talk, and became more so as the weeks rolled on.

He ate alone in the kitchen with the radio playing, for the comfort of some other voice in his head than his own, which wearied him, or in the new lounge in front of the news.

He ate slowly, trying not to let the images that flashed from the TV connect with his own low-level anger; which was more like a taste in his mouth that no other could quite displace than an emotion, a subtle disturbance of his vision that bled the world of vividness and gave everything he looked at a yellow tinge.

He watched a group of young men in battledress run hunched and stumbling towards a medevac chopper that swayed and tilted. Its blades churned the fetid air, whipped up a tornado of smashed grass stalks and twigs. He felt a damp heat on his skin. Found he was sweating.

He watched a bunch of young men, much the same age as in the previous clip, but in T-shirts and jeans and with young women among them — and some older women too, not unlike his aunt, grey-haired, in glasses — push hard against a line of uniformed police. Banners hung askew above their heads, like thought bubbles in a cartoon. All capitals, all pointing in the same direction. The young men, animal spirits fiercely mobilised in a violent forward movement, were engaged in their own version of war. And the enemy?