David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Late in the morning Colin slipped away and, crawling on his hands and knees in the dirt, though the place had always scared him — it was all dustballs and spiders, some of them just shells but others alive and skittering — he had gone up after Maxie and crouched there holding the big floppy creature in his arms.

The slats that closed in their under-the-house made the place dim, even in daylight. But up where Maxie lay, still drawing breath, there was the fleshy green light of the gladioli stems that rose stiffly on either side of their front steps.

Colin stayed up there the whole day, hugging Maxie and listening to footsteps in the rooms overhead: Mrs. Hull going from room to room as she swept and made beds, then coming heavy-footed down the hallway to the postman, then going out the back again for the ice.

About lunchtime they began calling to him. Casually at first, then with increasing anxiety. Mrs. Hull, then his mother, then, joining them, the first of the ladies who had arrived for Bridge. Finally — it was afternoon by now — his father, who had been called home from work.

“Colin,” his father said severely from far off where their wash-tubs stood, "come on out of there.”

But he turned his face away and would not be persuaded.

His father, handing his jacket to Mr. Hull, started up through the forest of stumps, crouched at first, then crawling, then wriggling on his belly. His tie was loose, his cufflinks jingled. Colin could hear them and the heavy breathing as his father emerged from the middle darkness and came up to where there was light.

“Colin,” he said, "what are you doing? Come on out, son. It's time to come out.”

“No,” he said. “Not unless Maxie does.”

“Colin, Maxie is very sick, we can't help him. Now, be a good fellow and come out.” The voice was exasperated but calm, holding on hard against shortness of breath rather than shortness of temper.

Colin had no memory of what happened next. The story as they told it simply trailed off, or led, in that anthology of anecdote and legend that is family history, to another story altogether. The occasion remained suspended at a point where he was still crammed into the close space under the floorboards, with the big dog warm in his arms and the whole weight of the house on his shoulders, while his father, dark-faced and wheezy with hay-fever, stretched a hand towards him, all the fingers tense to grasp or be grasped, and his brow greasy with sweat; as if he were the one who was trapped up there dying — the worm at his heart taking all his breath.

This image was overlaid with another from perhaps a year later.

They were staying at his grandfather's house at Woody Point. His father was teaching him to swim. One afternoon, after several attempts to make him let go and strike out for himself, his father carried him out of his depth in the still, salty water and, breaking contact, stepped away. “Now, Colin,” he commanded, "swim.”

His father's face, just feet away, was grim and unyielding. He floundered, flinging his arms about wildly, gasping, his throat tight with the saltiness that was both the ocean and his own tears. He dared not open his mouth to cry out. He choked, while his father, his features those of a stony god, continued to urge him and back away.

As Colin saw himself, he wore, as he gasped and thrashed at the surface, the same look of desperation that he had seen in his father when, with his chin thrust up and the muscles of his neck horribly distended as his whole body fought for breath, he lay stretched on his belly in the dust.

So it was from somewhere far up under their house at Red Hill, or choking in the waters off Woody Point, that he woke now to his hotel bedroom and a climate established somewhere in an unearthly season between autumn and early spring, in a place that might have been anywhere but was in fact, for the first time in nearly thirty years, home — that is, the city he had grown up in, though when he went to the window there was little that recalled that exotic and far-off place save a lingering warmth out of his dream and a tightening of anxiety in his throat.

All that belonged to the interior view. Down below, in the real one, the big country town of his childhood, with its wharves and bond-stores and two-storeyed verandahed pubs, had been levelled to make way for flyovers, multi-level car parks, tower blocks that flashed like tinfoil and warped what they reflected — which was steel girders, other towers like themselves and cranes that swung like giant insects from cloud to cloud. Brisbane, as his cousin Coralie put it, “gone ahead.” It was a phrase people used here with a mixture of uneasy pride and barbed, protective humour, expecting him, out of affection for the slatternly, poor-white city of his youth, to deplore this new addiction to metal and glass.

Well, he did and he did not. It wasn't nostalgia for a world that had long since disappeared under fathoms of poured concrete that had led him, in half a dozen fictions, to raise it again in the density of tropical vegetation, timber soft to the thumb, the drumming of rain on corrugated-iron roofs. What drew him back was something altogether more personal, which belonged to the body and its hot affinities, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing at the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone he knew now would never appear.

He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and that his original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather. In a fig tree taller than a building and alive with voices not its own, or a line of palings with a gap you could crawl through into a wilderness of nut-grass and cosmos and saw-legged grasshoppers as big as wrens.

It was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed. It fell on the new city with the same promise of an ordinary grace as on the old. He greeted it with the delight of recovery, not only of the vision but of himself.

He had left the place when he was not yet twenty. That was the year his mother went back to Sydney.

Twenty-three years earlier, his father, on a weekend rowing trip, had discovered her there and brought her north. She had never really settled. When she put the old house up for auction and went home, Colin had seized the chance to make his own escape. He went to London. Till now he had not come back.

In the twenty years that they lived together he had found his mother a puzzle, and where his need for affection was concerned, a frustration.

A lean ghost of a woman, intense, but not in his way, she had prowled the house with an ashtray in her hand, distractedly chain-smoking, argued with friends on the phone, mostly men-friends, gone to committee meetings and charity drives, and was always interested, out of a sense of duty, in his doings but reticent about her own. Dissatisfied, he thought, maybe desperate — he could not tell, and he knew she would not have wanted him to ask. She made no enquiry about his feelings. They got through his childhood and adolescence without ever being close.

Then something unexpected occurred. Freed by distance, they found a way of being intimate at last. Perhaps it was the writing itself that did it. Anyway, the letters she sent him, warm, inventive, humourously critical of everything she came across (he recognised, he thought, and with curiosity now, the tone of her telephone conversations), were those of a woman he more and more wanted to know. So much of what he was haunted by, all that underworld of his early memories and their crooked history, was in her keeping. If he was ever to get to the heart of it he would need her as his guide.