David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Milt kidded Mrs. Schindler the way he kidded Jack's mother, with a mixture of courtliness and plain tomfoolery. He hung around the kitchen benches, beating eggs and dipping his finger into bowls. He set up a little speaker so that Mrs. Schindler could listen in to the news from the lounge-room wireless while she helped Mary wash up. He danced her all round the kitchen, on the black-and-white tiles, “Wiener Blut.”

Jack still spent the day with his friends down at the beach, but in the evenings he and Milt played Chinese Checkers or Fiddlesticks, or the three of them played Euchre, or Milt worked with him on the crystal set he was making while his mother read. They went fishing at Deception, roller-skating at Redcliffe, and some afternoons he and Milt went off alone to the Redcliffe Pictures. Milt was crazy about cartoons. He sat with his long legs drawn up, cracking peanuts, and afterwards acted it all out again for Jack's mother — Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Goofy, Pluto — running about all over the room being a rabbit, a tom-cat, a mouse, and reducing her to helpless laughter as she never would have been by the real thing. Once, walking home the beach way, he told Jack about the fossils he wanted to study: palaeontology — bones. He got excited, threw his own bones about, arms and legs, and Jack had to run backwards on his heels over the wet sand not to miss any of it, since so much of what Milt was telling was in the dance of his Adam's apple, the electric spikes of his crew-cut hair.

“How do you do it?” Jack shouted, excited himself now and breathless with trying to run backwards fast enough to stay in front. “How do you work it out? What they were like? If they've been extinct for millions of years? If all you've got is a few bones?”

“Logic,” Milt told him, looking wild. “There are laws. We don't get this way by accident, you know. We aren't just thrown together.” Though the way his limbs were flying about, as if they were about to dislocate and break loose of his frame, might have denied it. “The body's got laws, and the bones follow ‘em, just like everything else. It's a kind of — grammar — syntax. You know, everything fits and agrees. So if you've got one bit you can work out the rest, you can — resurrect it. By logic. But also by guessing right. There's a lot of guesswork involved, hunches. You've got to think yourself inside the thing, into the bones.”

It had all gone too fast for Jack. Running backwards wasn't the ideal way to hear something so important and take it in. But he felt, just the same, that in this shouted exchange he had got hold at last of an important clue, one that convinced him because, in some obscure part of himself, he already knew it. When they fell into step again, saying nothing now, just letting the fall of the waves fill the silence between them, they were together, and in a way that utterly settled him in his own skin.

It was a happy time for Jack's mother too.

A lively girl with ideas of her own, she had been brought up to despise a view of women in which dependency and a sweet incapacity for everything practical were the chief attributes of the eternally feminine.

“For heaven's sake,” she was fond of saying, "what's the advantage, I'd like to know, of sitting around in the dark until some man comes along who can fix a fuse.”

She knew how to fix a fuse, and use a soldering iron, and how to bowl overarm and putt a ball. She had done these things when Jack's father was there, and when he was gone had taught Jack to do them, but with some concern that in having only her to learn from he might be missing something, some male thing, beyond the mere acquiring of a competence, that would ground him in the world of men. So she was glad to have Milt around. Glad too that Jack had taken to him. He had a new sense of himself that she found attractive — she had found it attractive in his father, whom he more and more resembled — and she was grateful that Milt, out of a natural generosity, should have reserved for Jack something that was special. It was part of Milt's instinct for things that he knew how to draw back and leave room for something special between Jack and herself as well.

“No good asking you to play,” she would tease when they set up for cricket. And her mocking tone, which Milt only pretended not to recognise, kept him lightly in view, even as it lightly excluded him.

It was a tone Jack had never heard her use till now. And once he was alerted to it, he noticed something else as well. A little shift in her way of speaking — it was only on certain words — that was an imitation, a mockery perhaps, of Milt's. It occurred to him, but so fleetingly that he was barely conscious of it, that if he could determine which words, he would have a clue to what they talked about, Milt and his mother, when he was not there.

Meanwhile Milt's replies, all Yankee ceremony, had an edge of their own.

“No use at all, ma'am. None at all.” And as he said it he would lie back, extend his long legs and, with his arms folded under his head, prepare to take a nap.

He was grinning, so was Jack's mother, and Jack had the feeling that their game of two-man cricket was not the only game in play When his mother got hold of the bat she hit out with a flair, a keenness and accuracy, that had him running all over the yard.

In time he came to feel uncomfortable with all this. There was something in his mother's heightened glow on these occasions, when Milt lay sprawling in the grass, a loose spectator, not playing but none the less exerting a quiet attraction, that was more disturbing to Jack's fixed idea of her than other and more obvious changes — the ribbon she wore in her hair when they went skating, her acceptance now and then of a stick of gum.

He had a good think about it.

Milt, he decided, lying off to the side there, broke the clear line of force between batsman and bowler. His mother was too aware of him. Even more, he unsettled the map Jack carried in his head, in which the third point of their triangle, however far out of sight it might be, was already occupied.

They would be out on the pier at Deception, all three, their hand-lines trailing, stunned to a heap by the sun and with the glare off the water so strong that when you looked out across it everything dazzled and disappeared. Above the lapping, against the piles, of waves set off by a distant rowboat, Jack would catch a voice he could no longer characterize naming the peaks of the Glasshouse Mountains on the opposite shore: Coochin, Beerwah, Beerburrum, Ngungun, Coonowrin, Tibrogargan, Tiberoowuccum. Smokily invisible today in their dance over the plain, but nameable, even in a tongue in which they were no more than evocative syllables.

“Hey, kid! Jack! Don't jerk the line like that. Take it easy, eh?”

That was Milt. And his voice, with its unmistakable cadence, was sufficiently unlike the one Jack had been listening for that it was a comfort. It so plainly did not fit.

3

AMONG JACK‘Sspecial friends this year were two brothers, Gerald and Jamie Garrett, who were new down here. Tough State School kids, they swore, told dirty jokes, and could produce prodigious gobs of spit that they shot like bullets from between their teeth. But what gave them a special glamour in Jack's eyes was their father's occupation. Back home in Brisbane, Mr. Garrett was the projectionist at the Lyric Pictures where Jack went on Saturday afternoons, and was responsible as well for putting up the posters that appeared in three places on Jack's way to school and which on Monday mornings he read, right down to the smallest print, with an excitement that cast a glow over the whole week ahead.

What they proclaimed, these posters, was the existence of another world, of such modernity, such intensified energy and speed, of danger too, that their local one of weatherboard houses and bakers’ carts, unweeded pavements, and trams that filled the night sky with electric sparks, seemed by comparison flimsy and becalmed. America, that world was called. It moved on numbered highways at a hundred miles an hour. It was twenty storeys high, all steel and glass. It belonged to a century that for them was still to come. Jack hungered for it, and for the dramas that it would unfold, as for his own manhood.