David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“Do you want me to try it?” Maggie asked.

“You're not too tired?”

She made the effort, sprang upright. Sam briefly laughed. She took the sheet from the piano, and Sam handed her two more that she ran her eye over in preparation as his fingers found one chord, then, in a way that made her draw herself together and attend, another. And now the focus was in her. In her shoulders, her legs where she settled the column of her body on the worn carpet, and reaching in the spaces of her head for the first note let out her breath.

Ah! Sam turned his head. He felt the whole surface of his skin thrill at the wonder of it, the purity of this voice she harboured so mysteriously in a body he had lived with now for nearly twenty years and which never failed to astonish him. Fleetingly their eyes met and Maggie smiled, as sounds he had with so much difficulty drawn out of himself now poured forth, without effort it seemed, on her breath, and on the same breath climbed and spread. So much part of her, of her actual being, yet entirely independent. As they had been of him too, even before she took them over, took them into herself, gave them life.

With the turn of his head Sam showed a different profile, and Maggie recorded it while all her attention remained fixed on the page and on what, with all her body's susceptibilities and claims in perfect collusion, she was miraculously translating into this other self he had discovered for her, and which her breath, pushed almost to its limit, was once again amply reaching for.

UPSTAIRS,with the blanket drawn up high under his chin, Tom contemplated his sister Miranda, who sat on the edge of the low bed and regarded him with a look he preferred not to meet. She was preparing, he thought, to rebuke him. He felt warm and comfortably indulged. He did not want to be told, yet again, how hopeless he was. There had been a moment down there in the sitting room when he had been the centre of all their attention and concern — not just his mother's, his father's, and Miss Stinson's, but everyone's, and had felt, beyond his usual awkward self-consciousness, a kind of glow, an assurance of how loved he might be. He did not want that spoiled.

But Miranda did not mean to spoil it. She wanted to tell him how fond she was of him, how often she thought of a time, before the twins appeared, when there had been just the two of them and he had been her dumb, soft, wet-mouthed little brother who needed her to watch out for him and trailed after her and did everything she did.

There were moments when she still saw him that way.

Recently, when she began to colour her hair and explore the decorative resources of the safety pin, her mother had told her angrily: "This is very silly, Miranda, your father is disappointed. Is that why you're doing it? To get at him? And it's such a bad example!”

“Who to, for heaven's sake?”

Her mother had had to stop and think.

“To Tom,” she decided. “You know how he copies everything you do.”

Miranda had laughed outright. “Honestly,” she said. “Tom!”

But it was true. He did follow, in his odd, half-hearted way. Careful always not to stray too far from his own stolid centre. He had acquired a pair of black parachute pants, put colour in his hair that would wash out for school, wore a stud in his ear.

“What is that?” their father had taunted. “That thing in your ear. A hearing aid?”

She too wished he would stop trying so hard and just be his own lovable self.

What he really wanted, she thought, was that they should be twins; whereas what she wanted, in her contradictory way, was to be an only child. What she said now was: "I could sleep here, if you like. On the floor.”

Tom was surprised. Wary.

“Julie's in my bed anyway. It'd be better if she just stayed there.”

“Well, if you want to,” he said. “But I don't need it.”

“I know you don't,” she said. “I do.”

He snuggled down into the blankets.

“I'm pretty tired now,” he told her. “I might just go to sleep.”

“That's all right. I'll be tired myself in a bit.”

She took his hand.

His eyes were closed but he was smiling. Already sinking downwards into sleep.

Far off in the depths of the house their mother's voice rose in a long sweet arc of sound, pure and unwavering.

Tom heard it, a shining thread he was following in the dark that step by step was leading him down into his own private underworld.

Julie too heard it. Still stiffly awake in the next room, she was puzzled for a moment. She lay breathless, listening, salt tears in her throat — not for the music, though the throbbing of it seemed one with her own silent weeping. As if it had appeared just at this moment to reassure her that what she felt, her unassuageable misery, was part of something larger that was known, shared, and could take this lighter form, a high pure sound out of elsewhere. Something more than this hot welling in her throat, this salty wetness in her nostrils and on her lips.

Maggie was on the last page now, and aware, as she moved with ease along the line of notes, of the silence she was approaching, which began just a little way up ahead, where he had laid down his pen.

As she came closer to it Sam's head turned further in her direction and his eye caught hers. She was coming to what had stopped him.

He was looking right at her now, as she reached the small difficulty he had set himself there. Had set her. She closed her eyes, to free herself from his look of anxious expectancy, so that without anxiety she could allow what was purely physical in her to take over and get her through. She heard his breath go out. Then silence.

But not quite silence. A slight hissing of night through the parted slats of the louvres. Nature. Then again their breathing.

“That's it for the moment,” he said — unnecessarily, but to return them, she understood, to the ordinariness of speech.

She nodded. Laid the last sheet beside the others on the stand.

Her body was still attuned to what she had just been so caught up in. She felt the vibrations still. No longer emanating from her, they went on where the music continued to flow and spread. Beyond the page. In his head. In the silence which was not quite silence. On the lines of score-paper as yet still empty.

Which would sit where she had just set down the last uncompleted page, in the dark of this room, after he had put the lamp out and closed the door behind them, and they had gone upstairs, undressed, lain down side by side in the dark; for a few moments simply going over the day's events, Diane Novak, whatever it was that had afflicted the child— not one of their own — who now lay sleeping across the hall, Tom's accident, Miss Stinson. Till once again he turned to her and whispered her name.

And this, waiting below.

To be resumed. To be continued.

1

At Schindler's Jack woke early. The sound of the sea would find its way into his sleep. The little waves of the bay, washing in and receding, dragging the shell-grit after them, would hush his body to their rhythm and carry him back to shallows where he was rolled in salt. It was his own sweat springing warm where the sun struck the glass of his sleepout, which was so much hotter than the rest of the house that he might, in sleep, have drifted twenty degrees north into the tropics where the war was: to Borneo, Malaya, Thailand. He would throw off even the top sheet then to bake in it, till it was too hot, too hot altogether, and he would get up, go down barefoot to pee in a damp place under one of the banana trees and take a bit of a walk round the garden. Until Dolfie, the youngest of the Schindlers, came out bad-tempered and sleepy-eyed to chop wood, he had the garden's long half-acre to himself.