David Malouf: The Complete Stories

“Okay,” she said, "let's drop it. Maybe I don't understand these things.”

“What things?”

“Oh, boys. Men. You're all so— tight with one another.”

“No we're not. Stuart and I aren't — tight.”

“I thought you were.”

“Well, we're not.” I finished my glass of water, rinsed it at the sink, and went to pass her.

Suddenly, from behind, her arms came round me. I felt the damp of her forearms on my chest, her face nuzzling the back of my neck.

“Your hair smells nice,” she said. “Like when you were little.”

I squirmed and pretended to wriggle free, but only pretended. “Stop,” I said, "you're tickling,” as she held me tighter and laughed.

“There,” she said, glancing away to the window, "he's gone.”

Neither of us had heard the car move off. She continued to hold me. “Stay a minute, Angus,” she said. “Stay and talk.”

“What about?”

“Oh, not him.” She let go of me. “That wouldn't get us far.”

I sat at the kitchen table, awkward but expectant, and she sat opposite.

In the old days we had been close. When I came out of my room at night to get a glass of water or milk from the fridge, she would join me and we would sit for a bit, joking, exchanging stories, larking about. Stuart's arrival had ended that. He was always there, and when he wasn't she avoided me. Either way, I missed her and blamed Stuart for coming between us. We liked each other. She made me happy, and I made her happy too.

“I know you're on his side,” she said now. “But there are things you don't know about.”

“I'm not on his side,” I told her. “Are there sides?”

She laughed. “No, Angus, there are no sides. There never will be for you. That's what I love about you.”

I was defensive. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means you're nicer than I am. Maybe than any of us. And I love you. Listen,” she said, leaning closer, "I'm going away.”

“Where to?”

“I don't know yet. Maybe I'll go and stay with Meg and Jack for a bit. Or I'll take the plunge and just go to Brisbane.”

“What would you do down there?”

“Get an office job, work in a shop — what do other girls do? I'm doing nothing here. Reading a lot of silly novels — what's the use of that? You know what this place is like. You won't stay here either.”

“Won't I?”

It pleased me at that time when people told me things about myself. Sometimes they surprised me, sometimes they didn't. Even when they confirmed what I already knew I was filled with interest.

“I've got to get out,” she told me passionately, "I've got to. Nothing will ever happen if I stay here. I'd end up marrying Stuart, or someone just like him, and it'd kill me. It doesn't matter that he wants me, or thinks he does, or what I think of him. Even if he was kind — which he wouldn't be in fact. He'd be a rotten husband. What he really loves is himself. Maybe I won't get married at all. I don't know why everyone goes on all the time about marriage, as if it was the only thing there is.”

I was bewildered. She was telling me more than I could take in.

“So when?” I asked. “When will you go?”

“I don't know,” she said miserably. “I've got no money.”

“I have. I've got forty pounds.”

She leaned across the table and took my hand. “I love you, Angus. More than anyone. Did you know that?” Then, after a pause, "But you should hang on to your money, you'll need it yourself if you're ever going to get out of this dump. I'll get it some other way. Now go to bed or you won't be able to get up in the morning. It's after eleven.”

I got up obediently, and was at the door when she said, "I suppose you'll be inseparable now.”

“Why?” I asked her. “Why should we be?”

“Because that's the way he is. Once he realises this is the end, really this time, he'll want you to see what a bitch I am and how miserable he is.”

“That's all right,” I said. “I won't listen.”

“Yes you will. But don't worry—”

“Katie—”

“No, no,” she said. “Go to bed now.”

She came and kissed me very lightly on the cheek.

“We'll talk about it some other time. I told you, I love you. And thanks, eh? For the offer of the money. You sleep well now.”

That was in mid-April. The weeks passed. There was no reconciliation. Stuart stopped driving up to keep a watch on the house. Katie did not go away.

But she was right about one thing. Despite my reluctance, Stuart and I did become mates of a sort. Hangdog and subdued, he was in no mood to go out on the town with his mates, the daredevil rowdies he normally ran with, who did shift work at the cane mill, or were plumber's mates, apprentice builders, counter-jumpers in drapery shops or hardware stores, or helped out in their father's accounting business. Fellows whose wildness, which involved a lot of haring around late at night, scaring old ladies and Chinamen or the occasional black, was winked at as a relatively harmless way of letting off steam; the sort of larrikin high jinks that on another occasion might take the form of dashing into a burning house to rescue a kiddie from the flames or dragging a cat from a flooded creek or, if there was another war, performing feats of quicksilver courage that would get their names on the town memorial.

What Stuart needed me for, I decided, was to be a witness to his sorrows. Which he thought I might best be able to confirm because so much of what he gave himself up to came out of books. He was literary in the odd way of a fellow who did not read and who trusted my capacity to appreciate what he was feeling because I did. Perhaps he believed that if I took him seriously, then she would; though with a fineness of feeling I had not expected, he never once, in all our times together, mentioned her. Which made me more uneasy than if he had, since at every moment she was there as an unasked question between us, and as the only reason, really, why I was there at all.

He would pick me up in the Anglia at the bottom of our street, usually around nine when I had finished my homework, and we would drive out to some hilltop and just sit there in the cool night air, with the windows down, the sweet smell of cane flowers coming in heady wafts and the night crickets shrilling.

Stuart's self-pitying tone, and his self-conscious half-jokey way of addressing me “Angus, old boot,” “Angus, old son,” suggested more than ever, I thought, a character out of some movie, or a book he had been impressed by, and had more to do with the way he wanted me to see him, or the way he wanted to see himself, than with anything he really was.

Then it was July at last. The McGowans asked me to go out to the Lagoons. And I was going.

Just before sun-up the McGowans’ heavy-duty Bedford ute swung uphill to where I was waiting with my duffel bag and bedroll on our front veranda. Behind me, the lights were on in our front room and my mother was there in her dressing gown, with a mug of tea to warm her hands, just inside the screen door. I was glad the others could not see her, and hoped she would not come out at the last moment to kiss me or to tuck my scarf into my windcheater. But in fact, "Look after Braden" was all she said as I waved to the ute, shouted “See you” over my shoulder, and took three leaps down to the front gate.

Glen was driving, with his father and Henry Denkler in the cabin beside him. Braden, Stuart, and the dogs were in the back. Stuart leapt down, took my bedroll, and swung it up into the tray where Braden, on his feet now, was barely managing the dogs. “Hi, Angus,” Stuart said, “all set for the boat race?” He laid his hand on my shoulder, but his glance, I saw, went to the house, in case she was there.