David Malouf - The Complete Stories

She began to walk — how simple things could be! — enjoying her own lightness and wondering if she wasn't still asleep and dreaming. Only in dreams did your body dispose of itself so easily. She walked on springy lawn. But they must have been watering it, because almost immediately her stockings were soaked. She sat down on a low wall and peeled them off, and when she looked back gave a little laugh at the look of them there on the shadowy grass. Like two snakeskins, a couple. That'll make ‘em guess!

Soon she was in a car park, empty but flooded with moonlight, then out again into soft sand. Red sand, still with the warmth of the sun in it, but cooler when you worked your naked toes in. Luxurious. She waded to the top of a dune and let herself go, half sliding, half rolling, till she came to a stop and was on level ground again. She righted herself and, seated in warm sand, checked for broken bones. All around her the bushes, which were spiky and had seemed dull by day, were giving off light like slow-burning fireworks. Big clouds rolled across the moon, thin as smoke, then darker. There was a twittering, though she could see no birds. Everywhere, things were happening — that's what she felt. Small things that for a long time now she had failed to notice. To see them you had to get down to where she was now, close to the ground. At kiddie level. Otherwise there were so many other things to demand your attention that you got distracted, you lost the habit of looking, of listening, unless some kiddie down there dragged at your skirt and demanded, "Look, Mum, look.”

That twittering for instance. She knew what it was now. Not birds but the Station Master's office at Babinda. It was years, donkey's years, since that particular sound had come to her, yet here it was. Must have been going on all around her for ages, and she was too busy listening to other things to notice.

Babinda.

For a whole year after she was married, with Leonard away in New Guinea, she had been with the Railways, an emergency worker while the boys were at the war. Those were the days! She was off the shelf, so that was settled, and she had no domestic responsibilities. She had never in her life felt so free. She loved the noise and bustle of the Station Master's office when things were on the go; the buzzing and tinkling when the First Division was held up by floods below the Burdekin or when, outside the regular timetable, a Special came through, a troop-transport with all the boys hanging out the windows wolf-whistling and calling across the tracks to where she was walking up and down with a lantern, to ask her name. Then the long sleepy periods when nothing was happening at all and you could get your head into Photoplay.

The Station Master, Mr. O'Leary, was a gardener, his platform a tame jungle of staghorns, elkhorns, hoyas, maidenhair ferns in hanging baskets, tree orchids cut straight from the trunk. He was out there in all weathers in his shirtsleeves whispering to his favourites. “Hullo, ducky,” he'd be singing, "here's a nice drop of water for you. That's a girl! You'll enjoy this.”

She'd pause at her knitting to listen to him. He used the same tone when he was talking to her. It made her feel quite tender towards him. But he was always respectful — she was, after all, a married woman.

Sometimes, in the late afternoon, when everything was at a low point and even the bush sounds had dropped to nothing, he would talk of his son Reggie, the footballer, who had been in her class at primary school and was now a POW in Malaya. Reggie had played the mouth organ, that's what she remembered. A chunk of honeycomb at his lips and his breath swarming in the golden cells, that's what she remembered. The Flight of the Bumble Bee.

“It's a blessing his mother's already gone,” Mr. O'Leary would tell her softly while the light slanted and turned pink. “At least she's spared the waiting. Once you've got kiddies, Dulce, you're never free, not ever. I spend half my time asking myself what he's getting to eat, he's such a big feller. If he's got a mate an’ that. I'm only half here sometimes.”

She listened and was sympathetic but did not understand, not really. Douglas and Donald were still way off in the future, waiting there in the shadows beyond the track; they had not yet found her. But she liked listening to Mr. O'Leary. No one had ever thought her worth confiding in, not till this. She felt quite grown up. An independent woman. She was all of twenty-three.

Under the influence of the many unscheduled trains that were running up and down the line, all those lives the war had forced out of their expected course, she was led to wonder what direction she herself might be headed in. Odd, she thought now, that she had never considered her marriage a direction, let alone a terminus. But that was the times, the war. Everything normal was suspended for the duration. Afterwards, anything might be possible.

“You won't find me stickin’ round once the war is over.”

This was Jim Haddy, the Station Master's Assistant. “No fear! I'll be off like a shot. You watch my dust!”

At sixteen, Jim Haddy was the most amazing boy she'd ever come across. He was so full of things, so dedicated. He thought the Queensland Railways were God and got quite upset if you threw off at them or said things like “You know the theme song of the Queensland Railways, don't you? ‘I Walk Beside You.’ ” He thought Mr. O'Leary “slack” because when they went out with their flags and lamps and things to wave a train through, he left the tabs on his waistcoat unfastened. Jim was a stickler. He did not roll his sleeves up on even the muggiest days. Always wore his soft felt railway hat. And his waistcoat, even if it was unbuttoned in front, was always properly buckled at the sides.

He was a soft-faced kid who got overexcited and had, as Mr. O'Leary put it, to be watched. He knew all there was to know about the Royal Houses of Europe, and talked about the Teck Mecklenburgs and the Bourbon Parmas as if they owned cane farms down the road, and Queen Marie of Romania and King Zog as if they were his auntie and uncle. He spent a lot of the Railway's time settling them like starlings in their family trees on sheets of austerity butcher's paper.

“What a funny boy you are,” she would tell him dreamily as she leaned over his shoulder to watch.

The summer rain would be sheeting down, a wall of impenetrable light, and when it stopped, the view would be back, so green it hurt your eyes, and the earth in Mr. O'Leary's flower beds would steam and give off smells. The little room where they sat at the end of the platform would be all misty with heat. She'd be thinking: When I get home I'll have to take Leonard's shoes out of the lowboy and brush the mould off. “Where is Montenegro?” she'd ask, and Jim was only too happy to tell, though she was none the wiser.

That boy needs watching.

But she had lost sight of him. Like so much else from that time. And from other times. She was surprised now that he had come back, and so clearly that as she leaned over his shoulder she caught the vinegary smell of his neck under the raw haircut.

“What happened to you, Jim Haddy?” she found herself asking in her own voice, her feet in the powdery red soil. “Where are you, I wonder? And where are Queen Marie and King Zog?” She hadn't heard much of them lately either.

“I'm here,” she announced, in case Jim was somewhere in the vicinity and listening.

She looked about and saw that she was in the midst of a lot of small grey-green bushes, with daylight coming and no landmarks she could recognise.

“My God,” she said to herself, "where? Where am I? This isn't my life.”

Off in the distance a train was rumbling in over the tracks: a great whooshing sound that grew and grew, and before she knew it passed so close to where she was standing that she was blown clear off her feet in a blaze of dust. It cleared, and she realised that high up in a window of one of the carriages as it went thundering past she had seen her own face, dreaming behind the glass and smiling. Going south. She picked herself up and got going again.