David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Things were going fast down in his pants, the woman luxuriously leading. He liked it that for once someone else was making the moves. A small noise struggled in his throat. No one around seemed to care, or even to have noticed. He wondered how far all this was to go, and saw that he could simply go with it. He was pleased, in a quiet, self-congratulatory way, that this was how he was taking it.

The woman drew her head back, looked at him quizzically, and smiled. “Umm,” she said, "nice. I'll be back.” Then, fixing her hair with a deft hand, she disengaged; gently, as he thought of it, set him down. He was left red-faced and bothered, fiercely sweating.

He dealt with his own hair, a few flat-handed slaps, discreetly adjusted things below. He felt like a kid. What was he supposed to do now? Wait for her to come back? Follow? He leaned against the wall and stared at the plaster ceiling. His head was reeling. He decided to stumble after her, but she was gone in the crowd and instead he found Harry, squatting on a low three-legged stool that was too small for him, his thumb in a book.

“Harry?”

Harry glanced up over the big horn-rimmed glasses he used for reading. He looked like a professor, Andy thought with amusement, but could not fathom his expression. Harry handed him the book.

It was a poetry book. There were more, exactly like the one he was holding, on the shelf at Harry's elbow, with the gap between them where he had pulled this one out. Andy shifted his shoulders, rubbed the end of his nose, consulted Harry. Who nodded.

Andy rubbed his nose again and opened the book, turning one page, then the next. To Debbie, he read on a page all to itself. All through, he could see, her name was scattered. Debbie. Sometimes Deb.

He was puzzled. Impressed. The book looked substantial but he had no way of judging how important or serious such a thing might be, or whether Harry, in showing it to him, had meant him to see in it a justification or an affront. It was about things that were private, that's what he saw. But here they were in a book that just anyone could pick up.

He turned more pages, mostly so as not to face Harry. Odd words jumped out at him. “Witchery" was one — he hoped Harry hadn't seen that one. In another place, "cunt.” Right there on the page. So unexpected it made his stomach jump. In a book of poetry! He didn't understand that. Or any of this. He snapped the book shut, and moved to restore it to the shelf, but Harry reached out and took it from him.

Andy frowned, uncertain where Harry's mind was moving.

Using both hands, Harry eased himself upright, slipped his glasses into one pocket of his jacket, forced the book into another, and turned down the hallway towards the front door.

Andy followed.

So it was over, they were leaving. It struck Andy that he had never discovered whose house this was.

“You need to say goodbye to anyone?” he asked Harry.

“Never bloody met anyone,” Harry told him.

Outside it was night-time, blue and cool. Some people on the steps got up to let them through. One of them said, "Oh, you're leaving,” and another, "Goodbye" — strangers, incurious about who they might be but with that much in them of politeness or affability.

They found the car, and Andy took his jacket off and tossed it into the back seat. Harry retained his.

They drove across bridges, through night traffic now. Past water riddled with red and green neon, and high tower blocks where all the fluorescent panels in the ceilings of empty offices were brightly pulsing.

After a bit, Harry asked out of nowhere, "What's a muse? Do you know what it means? A muse?”

“Amuse?” Andy asked in turn. “Like when you're amused?” He didn't get it.

“No. A — muse. M-U-S-E.”

Andy shook his head.

“Don't worry,” Harry told him. “I'll ask Macca. He'll know.”

Andy felt slighted, but Harry was right, Macca would know. Macca was a workmate of theirs, a reader. If anyone knew, Macca would. But the book in Harry's pocket was a worry to Andy. He hoped Macca wouldn't uncover too much of what was in it. He'd seen enough, himself, to be disturbed by how much that was personal, and which you might want to keep that way, was set down bold as brass for any Tom, Dick, or Harry — ah, Harry — to butt in on. He didn't understand that, and doubted Harry would either.

Suddenly Harry spoke again.

“She was such a bright little thing,” he said. “You wouldn't credit.”

Andy swallowed. This was it. A single bald statement breaking surface out of the stream of thought Harry was adrift in — which was all, Andy thought, he might ever hear. He kept his eyes dead ahead.

What Harry was thinking of, he knew, was how far that bright little thing he had been so fond of, all that time ago, had moved away from him, how far he had lost track of her.

He had his own bright little girl, Janine. She was ten. He felt sweetly bound to her — painfully bound, he felt now, in the prospect of inevitable loss. She too would go off, go elsewhere.

At the time Harry was recalling, Andy thought, he would have been a young man, the same age I am now. He had never thought of Harry as young. There was a lot he had not thought of.

He glanced at Harry. Nothing more would be said. Those last few words had risen up out of a swell of feeling, unbearable perhaps, that Harry was still caught up in, but when Andy looked again — the look could only be brief — he got no clue.

A wave of sadness struck him. Not only for Harry's isolation but for his own. He was fond of Harry, but they might as well have been on different planets.

“Have a bit of a nap if you like,” he told Harry gently. “You must be buggered. I'll be right.” What he meant, though Harry would not take it that way, was that he wanted to be alone.

In just minutes Harry had sunk down in the seat, letting the seat belt take his weight, and had followed his thoughts deeper, then deeper again, into sleep. Andy focused on the road ahead, his hands resting lightly on the wheel. Free now to follow his own thoughts. Not thinking exactly. Letting the thoughts rise up and flow into him. Flow through him.

Something had come to him back there and changed things. When? he wondered. In the noisy hallway? Where in a world that was so far outside his experience, and among people whose lives were so different from his own, he'd given himself over to what might come? No, he'd been fooling himself, and he blushed now, though no one but himself would ever know about it. Earlier than that.

His body, which knew better than his slow mind, set him back in the bluish dusk of that back porch.

For a moment there he had been out of things, looking down from high up into a quiet backyard. A camphor laurel tree, its swarming leaves lifted by a quickening of the air. The same breeze touching shirts pegged awkwardly on a line, filling them with breath. Then like fingers in his hair. It was something in those particular objects that had struck him. Something he felt, almost grasped, that was near and familiar.

Or it was a way of looking at things that was in himself. That was himself. A lonely thought, this — the beginning, perhaps, of another kind of loss, though his own healthy resilience told him it need not be.

He drove. The road was straight now, a double highway running fast through blue night scrub. Under banks of smoky cloud a rounded moon bounced along treetops. He put on speed and felt released. Not from his body — he was more aware than ever of that, of its blockiness and persistence — but from the earth's pull upon it. As if, seated here in this metal capsule, knees flexed, spine propped against tilted leather, it was the far high universe they were sailing through, and those lights off to the side of the ribboning highway — small townships settled down to the night's TV, roadside service stations all lit up in the dark, with their aisles of chocolate biscuits and potato crisps — were far-flung constellations, and Harry, afloat now in the vast realm of sleep, and he, in a lapse of consciousness of a different kind, had taken off, and weightless as in space or in flying dreams, were flying.