David Malouf - The Complete Stories

He ate. Chewing slowly. Swallowing it down.

“You know,” his aunt remarked one morning at breakfast, "there's some money. You haven't asked, but it's yours, you know, whenever you want it.”

“I don't need it yet,” he told her.

“Well,” she said, not pressing, "it's there. Just ask when you do.”

On another occasion: "Have you thought of getting in touch with your mother?”

This surprised him. He looked up, but could not tell from her eyes— she glanced quickly away — what she was thinking. Did she want him to or not?

“No,” he said. “I can barely remember what she looks like.”

This wasn't quite true.

“She thinks you're angry with her.”

“I'm not,” he said. “Not anymore. There are too many other things. Anyway, I try not to be angry at all. It does no good.”

“You're right,” she said, but seemed unconvinced.

“Do you keep in touch then?”

“Not regularly. But there is a tie. Your father—”

She foundered, unwilling to go further, and he was glad — he did not want her to. He wanted, just for a moment, to think of himself as a free agent, no ties — or at least to tell himself he had none. The ties, such as they were, he could pick up later. When he was ready. When.

“She's moved to Aberdeen,” his aunt told him.

“Aberdeen!”

The word fell into the room out of nowhere. He knew where Aberdeen was, he could see it on the map, but had never expected to have any connection to it. Hadn't thought of his connections as being so worldwide. He gave a little laugh, more a snigger perhaps, and his aunt looked alarmed.

“I can't imagine her,” he said, "in Aberdeen,” and laughed again.

It denied, of course, what he had already claimed. That he had no clear picture of her at all. And what did he know of Aberdeen?

He walked.From one end of town to the other. Walking was another form of thinking — or maybe un thinking — in which the body took over, went its own way and the mind went with it; the ground he covered, there and back, measurable only by the level of quietude he had arrived at, and the change, when he came out of himself, in the atmosphere and light.

One of the places he liked to go when the weather was fine was to a river park at the far end of town. Willow-fringed along the brown, rather sluggish stream, it was featureless save for an elaborate rotunda of timber and decorative wrought iron that was unusual in that it offered more in the way of fantasy than you got in other parts of town, and a children's playground where, in the afternoon, mothers brought their kids to climb, swing, and roll about in a sandpit. He liked to sit high up in the bandstand, where he had a good view over the expanse of park and an oval beyond, and lose himself in a book.

Towards the end of January it rained for three days. He stopped his walks and stuck to the pub.

Finally the rain gave up, though the air remained saturated. There were still heavy clouds about and the ground was soggy underfoot. He took his usual walk out towards the river. And the park when he came to it was a place transformed. Great sheets of water broke the green of its surface, and hundreds of seagulls had flocked in, bringing with them the light of ocean beaches and of the ocean itself. They were crowding the shores of the newly formed ponds: huge white creatures that had made their way a hundred miles from the coast to translate what had been one kind of landscape into something entirely other. The children had deserted the swings and ladders of the playground and were chasing about among the big birds, delighted by the novelty they presented, the news they had brought — not just of another world, but of a world inside the one at their feet that they had scarcely dreamed of.

He too felt the miracle of it. It was as if a breath of fantasy, that had existed as no more than an unlikely possibility in the lightness and whiteness of the bandstand, had re-created itself as fact in these hundreds of actual bodies, independent organisms and lives, that were shifting about over the green or making brief flights across the expanse of silvery, sky-lit water.

What he felt in himself was an equal lightness, that reflected, he thought, the persistence out there in the world, of the unexpected — an assurance that nothing was final, or beyond surprise or change. The dry little park had transformed itself into a new shore, but the force he felt in touch with was in himself. It was as if he had looked up from a book he was lost in and found that what his eyes had conceived of on the page was shining all round him.

Half a dozen children were chasing along the banks, delighted that by rushing at them they could drive the big birds skyward, half expecting perhaps to find in themselves the power to join them and go heavily circling and gliding. One small boy, unready to challenge the birds as the others were doing, stood stranded on the sidelines. He was maybe five years old. Skinny with pale reddish hair. Doubtful but tempted.

Charlie stood looking at him, and the boy, aware of it, turned to meet Charlie's gaze, drawing his underlip in, which only made his moist eyes rounder.

“Magic,” Charlie told the boy with a laugh, and made a sweep with his arm that sent a dozen birds streaming aloft.

The boy's mouth fell open, and Charlie saw in the look of sudden enlightenment in his eyes that the child had taken the word literally, as a claim on Charlie's part to be the presiding genius here who had turned a bit of the local and familiar into something extraordinary, and for a moment Charlie actually felt a breath of what the child's belief had accorded him.

A girl of ten or eleven appeared, also skinny but more vigorously red-headed than the boy. She took him sternly by the hand.

“Kelvin,” she scolded in a whisper, "you know you're not allowed!” Fiercely protective, she cast a baleful look in the direction of the stranger who had been speaking to him. But the boy, suddenly defiant, broke away, and with arms outspread launched headlong into a flock of gulls, which lifted with excited shrieks and went flapping past his head. Glancing back a moment to make sure that he was the one who had been the actual cause of this commotion, he tilted his arms like outstretched wings and made another rush among the birds.

Charlie turned away, lightly amused. But he would think of this inconsequential moment afterwards as being for him the end of one thing and the beginning of another, though which element in it, if any, had been decisive he would never know: the translation of the park to another shore; the boy Kelvin's mistaken belief that, like a conjuror at a children's party, he had produced all this shifting light, all these plump white bodies, out of his sleeve; the sister's defiance of him as a dangerous stranger. Perhaps it was all these in odd collusion with one another, or in collusion with something in himself that had been waiting for just this concatenation of small events to touch it awake and open a way to the future. Or something else again that he had no possibility of bringing to consciousness. Some chemical change in him even more miraculous at one level, though ordinary and explicable at another, than the appearance overnight, out of nowhere as it were, of a thousand sea creatures so far from the sea.

Walking home he had no sense that anything momentous had occurred. He was aware only of his immediate mood; an amusement that continued to work on him, quiet but quickening, and a glimpse— for the moment it was no more than that — of how small the pressures might be that determine the sum of what is and what we feel, the fugitive deflections and instinctive blind gestures that might be the motor of change.

He did not know as yet that there was a change. Only that it was possible, and that the agents of it could be small. But that, for the moment, was enough.