David Malouf - The Complete Stories

The Rock was there. Looming. Dark against the skyline. She made for that.

The sun was coming up, hot out of the oven, and almost immediately now the earth grew too hot to walk on. The bushes around her went suddenly dry; her mouth parched, she sat down dump. There was no shade. She must have dozed off.

When she looked up again a small boy was squatting in front of her. Not Donald. And not Douglas either. He was about five years old and black. He squatted on his heels. When her eyes clicked open he stared at her for a moment, then took off shouting.

When she opened her eyes again there were others, six or seven of them. Shy but curious, with big eyes. They squatted and stared. When she raised a hand they drew back. Dared one another to come close. Poked. Then giggled and sprang away.

At last one little girl, older than the rest, trotted off and came back with some scraps of bread and a cup full of water. The others looked on while the little girl pushed dry crusts into the open mouth, as if feeding a sick bird, and tipped the cup. The cup was old and crumpled, the child's fingers rather dirty. Oh well, she thought, it's a bit late to be worrying over my peck of dirt.

She swallowed, and the children watched as her old throat dealt with the warmish water, got it down.

She saw that it was a test. To see what she was. Old woman or spirit.

No need to look so puzzled, she told them, though not in so many words. It's just me, Dulcie MacIntyre. It's no use expecting anything more. This is it.

But they continued to watch as if they were not convinced.

She lay like a package while they sat waiting. As if, when the package finally unwrapped itself, it might contain something interesting. Oh well, she thought, they'll find out. If they're disappointed, that's their lookout.

After a while she must have seemed as permanent and familiar to them as any other lump of earth because they got bored, some of them — the littlies — and went back to whatever game they'd been playing when that first one interrupted them, shouting, "Hey, look what I found! Over here!”

But two or three of them stayed. Watching the old lizard turn its head on the wrinkled, outstretched neck. Slowly lifting its gaze. Shifting it north. Then east. The dry mouth open.

They fed her dribbles of water. Went off in relays and brought back armfuls of dry scrub and built a screen to keep the sun off, which was fierce, and moved it as the sun moved so that she was always in shade. She had never in all her life felt so closely attended to, cared for. They continued to sit close beside her and watch. They were waiting for something else now. But what?

“I told you,” she said weakly, "it's no good expecting anything more.” They had been watching so long, poor things. It was a shame they had to be disappointed.

They must have waited all day, because at last she felt the sun's heat fall from her shoulders, though its light was still full in the face of her watchers. Then a shadow moved over them. The shadow of the Rock. She knew this because they kept lifting their eyes towards it, from her to it then back again. The Rock was changing colour now as the sun sank behind it.

The shadow continued to move, like a giant red scarf that was being drawn over them. The Rock, which had been hoarding the sun's heat all day, was giving it off now in a kindlier form as it turned from orange-red to purple. If she could swing her body around now to face it, to look at it, she might understand something. Might. But then again she might not. Better to take what she could, this gentle heat, and leave the show to these others.

I'm sorry, she chuckled, I can't compete.

She was beginning to rise up now, feeling even what was lightest in her, her thoughts, drop gently away. And the children, poor things, had their eyes fixed in the wrong place. No, she wanted to shout to them. Here I am. Up here.

One of the little ones, sitting there with a look of such intense puzzlement on his face, and baffled expectation, was Donald. I'm sorry, Donald, she said softly. But he too was looking in the wrong place.

The big dolphinfish lay stranded. The smaller waves no longer reached it. There were sandgrits in its eyes, the mouth was open, a pulse throbbed under its gills. It was changing colour like a sunset: electric pink and mauve flashes, blushings of yellow-green.

“What is it?” Betty Olds asked. “What's happening to it?”

“Shush,” Isobel told her.

So they sat, all three, and watched. The waves continued to whisper at the edge of the beach. The colours continued to play over the humped back and belly, flushing, changing, until slowly they became less vivid. The pulsing under the gills fluttered, then ceased, and the flesh, slowly as they watched, grew silvery-grey then leaden.

“What happened?” Betty asked again. “Is it dead now?”

“I think so,” Isobel told her. Then, seeing Betty's lip begin to quiver, put her arm around her sister's shoulder and drew her close. “It's all right, Bets,” she whispered. “It was old.”

Dulcie said nothing. She too was breathless. This was a moment, she knew, that she would never forget. Never. As long as she lived. She also knew, with certainty, that she would live for ever.

Starting back before he stumbled, the man groaned, then raised his voice in protest.

“Maggie,” he shouted. “Maaggieee!”

The ten-geared blue-and-gold Galaxy had been propped against the panelled wall of the staircase and was sprawled now on its side in the hallway outside his room, like a giant insect that had blundered in and expired there, or a stunned, iridescent angel — one more example of the chaos they lived in, the clutter and carelessness. Nobody in this house, so far as Sam could see, ever rinsed a coffee mug or returned a book to its shelf, or threw out a newspaper, or picked a wet towel up off the sopping bathroom floor. He knew the savagery he was assailed with had nothing to do, specifically with the bike, but he kicked it just the same, and saw even as he did so what a spectacle he was making of himself. A grown man in the hallway of his own home, putting his boot into a defenceless machine!

Maggie had appeared at the kitchen door.

“Maggie,” he moaned, “look at this!” His voice had the arch and droop of classic lament. “That boy wants a good hiding. Look at it!” A good hiding was a phrase that Sam McCall was excessively fond of. It belonged to the world of his boyhood — maybe even of his father's boyhood, though the truth was that neither he nor any one of his children had ever had a hand laid on them.

Maggie looked, but not at the bike. Hot blood suffused his brow. There were veins in his neck.

“I'm sorry, love,” she said mildly, and came out into the hallway drying her hands on her skirt. “I tell them and they don't listen.”

She reached down, hoisted the bike upright, and stood for a moment, bare-armed, poised on her solid legs as if, tempted by its promise of velocity, she might be about to leap into the saddle, sprint down the hallway, over the threshold and away. Instead, she turned the beast into its stall under the stairs.

“There,” she said. All was restored, made good again.

Sam watched. Quiet but unappeased.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, pet?”

He shook his head.

She waited. He might be amenable to some other distraction.

“Well,” he said in a tone of aggrievement, "I'll get back to it. I came out to make a phone call.”

What he meant was that the moment of tender sociability that had drawn him away from his work had been spoiled now and was irretrievable. He turned, went back to his workplace, and a moment later she heard, tentative, in one chord, then another, the notes of the piano.