David Malouf - The Complete Stories

He sat a little longer, enjoying the sense that there was no rush. In a state of easy well-being. Refreshed, restored. Then, as slowly as he had come, he began to make his way back down through the open tangle; at one moment poised upright, at another crouched and reaching out till he could find a further branch to swing on, then hanging, then swinging out again in the slowest sort of flying twenty feet above the ground.

If he had bothered to think about it he would have said that he was happy. But as he came to the last of the trees and dropped lightly to the sand, he was thinking only that he was hungry and could do with a bit of breakfast and how hot the sun felt on his shoulders and how good it would be to put his hand out, have Arnold Garrett take it, and know that all was well again.

Not entirely well. There was a shadow on his heart that would be there for many years to come, a feeling of loss from which he would only slowly be released. But he was too young to conceive of more years than he had known, and the sun was getting hotter by the minute, and a little kid he had seen often enough but had never spoken to was hailing him from the top of a dune. “Hey,” he called, "is your name Jack? There's some boys been lookin’ for you, all over. I know where they are if you like. Hey,” he said, "what about that? They been lookin’ all over and I'm the one that found you.”

No you didn't, he might have told him, I wasn't lost. But the boy was so pleased with himself that Jack did not want to disappoint him. “Come on,” he said, and they set off together down the ravaged beach.

There was a time, not so long ago, when we saw my uncle Charles twice each year, at Easter and Christmas. He lives in Sydney but would come like the rest of us to eat at the big table at my grandmother's, after church. We're Pentecostals. We believe that all that is written in the Book is clear truth without error. Just as it is written, so it is. Some of us speak in tongues and others have the gift of laying on hands. This is a grace we are granted because we live as the Lord wishes, in truth and charity.

My name is Amy, but in the family I am called Ay, and my brothers, Mark and Ben, call me Rabbit. Next year, when I am ten, and can think for myself and resist the influences, I will go to school like the boys. In the meantime my grandmother teaches me. I am past long division.

Uncle Charles is the eldest son, the firstborn. When you see him in family photographs with my mother and Uncle James and Uncle Matt, he is the blondest; his eyes have the most sparkle to them. My mother says he was always the rebel. She says his trouble is he never grew up. He lives in Sydney, which Grandpa Morpeth says is Sodom. This is the literal truth, as Aaron's rod, which he threw at Pharaoh's feet, did literally become a serpent and Jesus turned water into wine. The Lord destroyed Sodom and he is destroying Sydney, but with fire this time that is slow and invisible. It is burning people up but you don't see it because they burn from within. That's at the beginning. Later, they burn visibly, and the sight of the flames blistering and scorching and blackening and wasting to the bone is horrible.

Because Uncle Charles lives in Sodom we do not let him visit. If we did, we might be touched. He is one of the fools in Israel — that is what.

Grandpa Morpeth calls him. He has practised abominations. Three years ago he confessed this to my Grandpa and Grandma and my uncles James and Matt, expecting them to welcome his frankness. Since then he is banished, he is as water spilled on the ground that cannot be gathered up again. So that we will not be infected by the plague he carries, Grandpa has forbidden him to come on to the land. In fact, he is forbidden to come at all, though he does come, at Easter and Christmas, when we see him across the home-paddock fence. He stands far back on the other side and my grandfather and grandmother and the rest of us stand on ours, on the grass slope below the house.

We live in separate houses but on the same farm, which is where my mother and Uncle James and Uncle Matt, and Uncle Charles when he was young, grew up, and where my uncles James and Matt still work.

They are big men with hands swollen and scabbed from the farm work they do, and burnt necks and faces, and feet with toenails grey from sloshing about in rubber boots in the bails. They barge about the kitchen at five o'clock in their undershorts, still half asleep, then sit waiting for Grandma to butter their toast and pour their tea. Then they go out and milk the herd, hose out the bails, drive the cows to pasture and cut and stack lucerne for winter feed — sometimes my brothers and I go with them. They are blond like Uncle Charles, but not so blond, and the hair that climbs out above their singlets, under the Adam's apple, is dark. They are jokers, they like to fool about. They are always teasing. They have a wild streak but have learned to keep it in. My mother says they should marry and have wives.

Working a dairy farm is a healthy life. The work is hard but good. But when I grow up I mean to be an astronaut.

Ours is a very pleasant part of the country. We are blessd. The cattle are fat, the pasture's good. The older farmhouses, like my grandfather's, are large, with many rooms and wide verandahs, surrounded by camphor laurels, and bunyas and hoop-pines and Scotch firs. Sodom is far off, but one of the stations on the line is at the bottom of our hill and many trains go back and forth. My uncle Charles, however, comes by car.

His car is silver. It is a BMW and cost an arm and a leg. It has sheepskin seat covers and a hands-free phone. When Uncle Charles is on the way he likes to call and announce his progress.

The telephone rings in the hallway. You answer. There are pips, then.

Uncle Charles says in a jokey kind of voice: "This is GAY 437 calling. I am approaching Bulahdelah.” The air roaring through the car makes his voice sound weird, like a spaceman's. Far off. It is like a spaceship homing in.

Later he calls again. “This is GAY 437,” the voice announces. “I am approaching Wauchope.”

“Don't any one of you pick up that phone,” my grandfather orders.

“But, Grandpa,” my brother Ben says, "it might be Mrs. McTaggart.” Mrs. McTaggart is a widow and our neighbour.

“It won't be,” Grandpa says. “It will be him.”

He is a stranger to us, as if he had never been born. This is what Grandpa says. My grandmother says nothing. She was in labour for thirty-two hours with Uncle Charles, he was her first. For her, it can never be as if he had never been born, even if she too has cast him out. I heard my mother say this. My father told her to shush.

You can see his car coming from far off. You can see it approaching. It is very like a spaceship, silver and fast; it flashes. You can see its windscreen catching the sun as it rounds the curves between the big Norfolk Island pines of the golf course and the hospital, then its flash flash between the trees along the river. When it pulls up on the road outside our gate there is a humming like something from another world, then all four windows go up of their own accord, all together, with no one winding, and Uncle Charles swings the driver's door open and steps out.

He is taller than Uncle James or Uncle Matt, taller even than Grandpa, and has what the Book calls beautiful locks. They are blond. “Bleached,” my grandfather tells us. “Peroxide!” He is tanned and has the whitest teeth I have ever seen.

The corruption is invisible. The fire is under his clothes and inside him, hidden beneath the tan.

The dogs arrive, yelping. All bunched together, they go bounding over the grass to the fence, leaping up on one another's backs with their tails wagging to lick his hands as he reaches in to fondle them.