David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Milt was a fixer. Humming to himself a tuneless tune that you could never quite catch, comfortable in a sweat-stained singlet with the dog-tags hanging, he would, without looking up from the screwdriver he was spinning in his long fingers or the fuse-wire he was unravelling, “Hi, kiddo,” the same for Jack and his mother both, and just go on being absorbed. It wasn't an invitation to stay, but it wasn't a hint either (Jack was sensitive to these) that you should push off. He accepted your presence and went on being alone. Yet somehow you were not left out.

In fact the jobs Milt did were things Jack's mother could do quite well herself, but she was happy now to have Milt do them. When he made a lamp come on that had, for goodness knows how long, failed to work, he wore such a look of beaming satisfaction that he might have supplied the power for it out of his own abundant nature, out of the same energy that fired his long stride and lit his smile.

So what was his secret? That's what Jack wanted to know. That was where all his questions tended. And what was the tune he hummed? It seemed to Jack that if he could only get close enough to hear it, he would understand at last Milt's peculiar magic. Because it was magic of a sort. It put a spell on you. Only Milt didn't seem to know that he possessed it, and it was this not-knowing, Jack thought, that made it so mysterious, but also made it work.

Milt was twenty-two. In the strict code of those times it was inconceivable that a woman should be interested in a man who was younger. Jack could imagine his mother breaking some of the rules, smoking in the street for instance, or whistling, but not this one. So he had come to think of Milt as his friend.

When Christmas came they took him to Schindler's.

2

They had been going to Schindler's for as long as Jack could remember. His mother and father had spent their honeymoon there. Unlike the other guests, who ate in the little sunlit dining room at midday and half past six, they took their meals at the big table in Mrs. Schindler's kitchen, and Jack had permission to go in at any hour and ask for milk from the fridge, or an ice-block, or one of Mrs. Schindler's homemade biscuits. On days when they went fishing at Deception, Mary, the Schindlers’ girl, packed them a lunch-tin with things only the family ate: salami, sweet-and-sour gherkins, strudel.

The soil at Scarborough was red. So were the eroded cliffs, which you could slide down and whose granular, packed earth could be trickled through a fist to colour sand-gardens. So were the rocks that formed a Point at each end of the beach, and the escarpments of the reef that at low tide emerged from the dazzle about sixty yards out, where fishermen, standing on the streaming shelf, cast lines for rock-cod or bream.

When the tide was in, the Points were covered, the beach was isolated. But at low tide, walking on what had just an hour before been the bottom of the sea, you could go round by the beach way to Redcliffe in one direction or Deception in the other.

No need to consult the Courier Mail for high- and low-water times at the Pile Light. When the tide was coming in your sandfly bites grew swollen and itched. When it went out, they stopped.

The beach at Scarborough was a family camping-ground. Bounded on one side by a grassy cliff-top — where at Christmas there was a fairground with hoopla stalls and an Octopus and a woozy merry-go-round — and on the other by a storm-water drain, it was a city of tents; or if not a city, at least a good-sized township, where the same groups, established in the same pozzies each year, made up a community as fixed in its way as any on the map.

It was a lively and relaxed world. When the tent flaps were up people's whole lives were visible, the folding table where they ate, the galvanized or enamel tub where they washed their clothes and did the dishes, the primus stove, camp-stretchers and carbide or petrol lamps. Jack spent his whole day moving from tent to tent asking if his friends could come out, or being gathered into the loose arrangements that were other people's lives. There were a dozen families where he could simply step in under the flap, which would be golden where the sun beat through, and be offered a slice of bread with condensed milk or, in the afternoon, a chunk of cold watermelon.

At home in Brisbane, people's lives were out of sight behind lattice and venetians. Here, it was as if, in some holiday version of themselves, they had nothing to hide. All you had to do to be one of them was to make yourself visible; and if, in tribute to settled convention, you did “knock, knock,” it was a kind of joke, the merest shadowy acknowledgement of the existence elsewhere of doors and of a privacy that had already been surrendered or was dissolved here like the walls.

“Come on in, pet.” That is what Mrs. Chester or Mrs. Williams would call, the comfortable mothers of his holiday friends. And if strangers were there, other women like themselves, barefoot, in beltless frocks, they might add: "This is Jack. He's one of the family, aren't you, love?”

It was a manner of speaking, a temporary truth like all their arrangements down here. Rivalries, gangs, friendships existed with a passionate intensity for the six weeks of Christmas and two more at Easter, and for the rest of the year, like some of the rivers they drew in Geography, went underground, became dotted lines.

Jack loved these broken continuities. They were reassuring. You let things drop out of sight, then you picked them up again further on. Nothing was lost. Even a single day could have that pattern. For a whole morning, while you played Fish or Ludo, you were one of the Ches-ters. Then in the afternoon you became a loose adjunct of the Ludlow family or returned to your own.

It was his own family that was the puzzle.

The way Jack saw it was this. He and his mother were two points of a triangle, of which the third point was over the horizon somewhere in a place he could conceive of but never reach, though there were times when his whole body ached towards it, and so intensely that he would wake at night with the torment of it. Growing pains, his mother called it. And it was true, he was growing; he had shot up suddenly into a beanpole. But that wasn't the whole of it.

Down here at Scarborough, where he was most keenly aware of his body as the immediate image of himself, the sun's heat, day after day, and especially in the early morning when it struck the glass of his hothouse sleepout, would draw him in a half-waking dream to some tropic place where everything grew faster. His limbs would be stretched then across three thousand miles of real space till every joint was racked, and he would experience at last the thing he most hungered for: a smell of roll-your-owns as sharp as if his father were actually there in the room with him, or a light-headed feeling of being hefted all along the verandah-boards on his father's boot, the two of them laughing, Jack a little out of fear, and his father shouting: "Hang on, Jack, that's the boy. Hang on!”

It was the voice he found hardest to keep hold of. He strained to hear it, vigorously lifted, under the beating of the shower, "All together for the Floral Dance,” but got nowhere. When he did sometimes discern the peculiar line of it on a stranger's lips it was in one of the phrases his father liked to use: "fair crack o’ the whip" “you wouldn’ credit it.” He would try for the tune of it then under his breath.

SO HERE they were at Schindler's; Jack, his mother, and Milt. Jack was in his element.

Even Mrs. Schindler, who had treated Milt at first with a kind of coldness, was won over by the drawling stories he told, a way he had of kidding people that was rough but inviting. By the end of their first meal together she adored him and from then on insisted on making all his favourite dishes, waiting breathlessly, like a girl, for him to taste and approve. Once it had been Jack who was consulted on whether the precious dessert-spoons should be used for ice-cream or for pudding. Now it was Milt. And Jack didn't mind at all. How could he be resentful of someone he himself was so eager to see pleased?