David Malouf - The Complete Stories

He was sweating. Silvery flashes lashed the louvres of the sleepout. They rattled in their frames. The tin roof drummed. They got these storms along the coast down here, in January when the king tides were running.

He rolled out of bed.

Barefoot, in just his pyjama bottoms and still shaken by his dream, he stepped outside and, like a child younger than his present self, a six-year-old still scared of the dark, started off down the verandah to where his parents slept.

Rain was beating in under the rails, forming pools of lightning round every post. Rivulets followed the cracks in the floorboards. Careful not to get his feet wet, he stepped over them — he was awake enough for that — and turned the corner towards his mother's room, which was halfway down the long side of the house, facing the front.

When he came to the french doors, they were open. The rain on the roof was deafening.

His first thought was that he had found his way back to a time, three years ago, when his father was still here. There were two figures on the bed.

Or — his mind worked slowly — or his mother had hit upon a way of summoning his father to her in the night. Some spell. His heart leapt. Daddy! Dad! The words were already on his lips.

The two figures were fiercely engaged. He knew what it was, what they were doing. He had heard the facts of it. But nothing he had been told or imagined was a preparation for the extent to which, in their utter absorption in one another, they had freed themselves of all restraint. They were at a point of concentrated savagery that for all its intensity of thrusting and clutching was not violent, not at all, and not scary either, though it did set his heart beating.

His mother's head was thrown back and flinging from side to side. Her mouth was open, moaning. And Milt's breadth of shoulders and long back — for it was Milt, he could see that now — was rising and falling to the tune she sang, or it was Milt's tune they moved to, and she had discovered it, the one he hummed under his breath. What Jack was reminded of was moments when, in a kind of freedom that only his body had access to, he ceased for a time to be a boy and became a porpoise, rolling over and under the skin of sunlight all down the length of the Bay. Under the waves, then over. Entering, emerging. From air to water, then back again.

There was a lightning flash. The whole room for a moment was blindingly illuminated, the high ceiling, the walls, the rippled sheet and the figures beneath it. And there, on the other side of the bed, glimpsed only for the merest second before it fell back into the half-dark, was another figure, also watching.

It was his father. Bare-ribbed, long-necked, in a pair of old pyjama bottoms that hung below the hollow of his belly, he stood watching, in an exclusion that made him ghostlike, as if the world he belonged to was the otherworld of the dead. Jack strained to make him out there, to hold on to the sight of him. And realised, with a little shock, what the apparition really was. Not a ghost, but himself, fantastically elongated in the glass of the old-fashioned wardrobe.

Something snapped then. He heard it. A sound louder than the crack of thunder or the rising climax of their cries, or his own smaller one, which they were too far off now in the far place to which their bodies had carried them to hear.

He stood,barefoot and still in pyjamas, at the very edge of the diving-board above the empty pool, using his weight to test the springs. He did not raise his arms or practise his pose.

The garden had been badly hit. There were smashed branches all over, and the pool had leaves in it and puddles where tiny frogs squatted and leapt. There was a strangeness. Some of it was in the light. But some of it, he knew, was in him. Keeping as close as possible to his normal routine, he went in, changed into a pair of shorts, and went out through the gate, across the road and down the red-soil track to the beach.

It was early, just before six, but men were already out tightening guy-ropes, digging new trenches round their camps. There was a high tide running. It was grey, its dull waves crested with weed as if a gigantic shark out there were showing first its back, then its belly, leaden, dangerous. Little kids, standing on isolated hillocks in the dunes, were gesturing towards it, marvelling at the absence of beach, dancing about on a ledge of soft sand that fell abruptly to foam.

He went on to the north end where the storm-water channel ran all the way to the water's edge, in a tangle of yellow-flowering native hibiscus so dense and anciently intertwined that without once setting your foot to the ground you could move on through it all the way to the beach. He swung up on to a low branch and made his way along it, gripping with his toes and using his arms for balance, then hauled himself on to a new branch higher up.

It was another world up here, a place so hidden and old, so deeply mythologized by the games they played in the twists and turns of its branches, their invented world of tribes and wars and castles, that the moment you hauled yourself up into its big-leafed light and shade you shook loose of the actual, were freed of ground rules and the habits of a life lived on floorboards and in rooms.

Hauling himself up from branch to branch, higher than he had ever been before, he found a place where he was invisible from below but had the whole bay before him.

It was an established custom that they came to the Trees only in the afternoon. He had the place to himself. Feeling the damp air begin to heat, he settled and let himself sink into an easy state where it was his blood that did the thinking for him, or his thumbs, or the small of his back where it was set hard against rough bark. From high up among leaves he watched the tide turn and begin, imperceptibly at first, then with swiftness, to go out.

His father would not be coming back. That was the first fact he had to face. And the second was that his mother already knew and had accepted it. Somewhere too deep for thought, he too had known it. The pain and bafflement of his first reaction had been at some failure of his own: he had let his father go; his will had not been strong enough to prevent him from slipping away. But he saw now that that was foolish. There were things that were out of your control. And if this was scary, it was also a relief. There were happenings out there in the world that you were not responsible for.

He must have slept then, because when he looked out again the morning had moved on. The sun was out. Mothers were pegging clothes to improvised lines, along with towels and old rags that had been used to sop up the rain. Others were dragging out furniture as well, stretcher-beds and mattresses, suitcases, the wooden, gauze-sided cupboards where groceries were kept. Fathers were going from tent to tent inspecting damage, tendering advice. He could see it all from up here. Weak rays were lighting the tent flaps and the tarpaulins laid out on the grass, but would soon be stronger.

Inside, card games would be starting up, Fish or Grab for the littlies, Euchre for the older kids, or Pontoon or Poker. He did not have to look in to see any of this.

Fran Williams would be laid across a stretcher with The Count of Monte Cristo open on the grass below. The Ludlow girls would have set up their grocery shop, its cardboard shelves stacked with tiny packets of tea, rice, sugar, sago, and little stamped coins in piles to shop with. Along the shoreline, processions of treasure hunters were poking about among the rubble of seaweed and cuttlefish shells and Have-a-Heart sticks.

Eventually, not long from now, he would go down and join them, and later again, not too late, not too early either, but at his usual hour, he would make his way back to Schindler's.