David Malouf - The Complete Stories

He'd been a football player, good but not good enough. At sixteen he'd gone down the mine. Married at twenty. That there was another life somewhere he had picked up from the magazines he saw and the talk, some of it rough, of fellows who got down to the city pretty regularly and had much to tell. In Debbie, he had, for an hour or so, felt the breath of something he had missed out on. Something extra, something more. Now she was dead.

At thirty-six, some woman's problem. An abortion he guessed, though Helen had done no more than raise a suspicion and the old man of course knew nothing at all. So far as Harry knew, all Debbie had been was a high-school science teacher.

It hadn't struck Andy till now, but everything he'd heard of Debbie's doings had come from Helen and he wondered how much more she knew than she let on. Out of loyalty to Debbie no doubt — but also, he thought, to protect him from a side of herself that might be less surprised by Debbie's way of life, and less disapproving of it, than she pretended.

He felt, vaguely, that here too he had missed out. There was something more he hungered for, and occasionally pushed towards, that Helen would not admit. Because for all the twelve years they had passed in the closest intimacy, she did not want him to see in her the sort of woman who might recognise or allow it.

The drive down was uneventful. Harry was silent, but that wasn't unusual. They were often silent together.

All this, Andy thought, must be hard on him. He'd never asked himself how Harry felt about Debbie's being away. Proud of her, certainly, as the only one of them who had got enough of an education to make a new life for herself. Sad to see so little of her. Worried on occasion. Now this.

Andy followed these thoughts on Harry's behalf — he was fond of Harry — then followed his own.

Which sprang from the lightness he felt at having a day off like this in the middle of the week. The sunlight. The high white clouds set above open country. The freedom of being behind the wheel. The freedom too — he felt guilty to be thinking this way — of being off the hook, away from home and its constrictions. And along with all that, the exhilaration, the allure, of a faster and more crowded world “down there” that he would finally get to see and feel the proximity of.

He was surprised at himself. Here he was, a grown man, twelve years married, two kids, seated side by side with his father-in-law, both of them in suits on the way to a funeral, and he might have been seventeen, a kid again, he was so full of expectation at what the day might offer. In some secret place where the life in him was most immediately physical, he still clung to a vision of himself that for a time back there had seemed golden and inextinguishable. He thought he had dealt with it, outgrown it, let it go, and without too much disappointment replaced its bouts of extravagant yearning with the reality of small prospects, work, the life he and Helen had made together. And now this.

He was surprised, ashamed even. What would Harry think? But not enough, it seemed, to subdue the flutter he had felt in his belly the moment the idea of the trip came up, or the heat his body was giving off inside the suit.

They arrived early. To kill the time they drove out to Bondi and sat in the car eating egg hamburgers in greasy paper and watching the surf.

Boardriders miraculously rose up and for long moments kept their balance on running sunlight, then went down in a flurry of foam.

Mothers, their skirts round their thighs, tempted little kiddies too far past the waterline for them to run back when the sea, in a rush, came sparkling round their feet. Surprised beyond tears, they considered a moment, then squealed with delight.

Andy thought of his girls. He should bring them down here, show them the ocean. They hadn't seen it yet. He had only seen it one other time himself.

On their rugby trip they had come down here in the dark, half a dozen of them, seriously pissed, and had chased about naked on the soft sand after midnight, skylarking, taking flying tackles at each other, wrestling, kicking up light in gritty showers, then stood awestruck down at the edge, watching a huge surf rise up like a wall, and roar and crash against the stars.

He glanced sideways now to see what Harry was making of it, this immense wonder that at every moment surrounded them.

“That's South America out there,” Harry informed him. “Peru.”

As if, by narrowing your eyes and getting the focus right, you might actually see it.

Andy narrowed his eyes. What his quickened senses caught out there was the outstretched figure of a long-bodied woman under a sheet, thin as a veil, slowly turning in her sleep.

The funeral was a quiet affair, with everyone more respectable-looking than Andy had expected, though the fellow who gave the service, which wasn't really a service — no prayers or hymns — was jollier than is normal on such occasions. He talked of Debbie's life and how full it had been. How full of life shehad been, and how they all liked her and what a good time they'd had together.

He did not refer to the fact that she was actually here, screwed down now inside the coffin they'd carried in.

Andy himself was acutely aware of that. It made him uncomfortably hot. He pushed a finger into his collar and eased it a bit, but felt the blood swelling in the veins of his neck.

It was the bulk of his own body he felt crammed into a coffin. How close the lid would be over his head. And how dark it must be in there when the chapel all around was so full of sunlight and the pleasantness of women in short-sleeved frocks, and a humming from the garden walks outside, of bees. The big-boned woman he'd spent a night drinking vodka with seemed very close: the heaviness of her crossed legs in the expensive-looking shoes, and her determination, which he had missed at the time but saw clearly now, to outdrink him. He wondered what shoes she was wearing in there. Then wondered, again, what Harry was thinking.

Harry looked very dignified in his suit and tie. Andy had last seen him in it at Dorothy's funeral, a very different affair from this. It was hard to tell from the straightness of him, and the line of his jaw, what he might be feeling. Andy looked more than once and could not tell.

It's his daughter, he thought. He's the father. Someone ought to have mentioned that.

But there was no talk of Debbie's family at all. Didn't they have families, these people? Or was it that they thought of themselves as a family? He couldn't work it out, their ties to one another — wives and husbands, mothers and fathers.

Still, it went well. People listened quietly. One or two of the women cried. People laughed, a bit too heartily he thought, at the speaker's jokes. They were private jokes that Andy did not catch, and he wondered what Harry thought of that. A couple of poems were read, by an older fellow with a ponytail who seemed to be drunk and swallowed all his words. When the curtains parted and the coffin tilted and began to slide away, there was music.

At least that part was like a funeral. Except that the music was another fellow singing to a guitar: Dylan' “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Andy cast a glance at Harry and laid his hand for a moment on the soft pad of his father-in-law's shoulder, but Harry gave no sign.

They drove for nearly half an hour to the wake, through heavy traffic, the city dim with smoke but the various bits of water they crossed or saw in the distance — the Harbour — brightly glinting. They stopped at a phone box and he called Helen, who was full of questions he found it hard to answer. He had really called — the idea occurred to him towards the end of the service — so that Harry could speak to her.