David Malouf - The Complete Stories

It had cleared his own head as well, giving things, when he went to the window, an intense glow as if lit from within. The big trees in the Gardens opposite, that in their darkness of packed leaves might have been sinister, seemed filled with a powerful energy: gigantic angels momentarily stilled.

Greenness, that was the thing. Irresistible growth. Though it wasn't always an image of health or of fullness.

He thought of the mangroves with their roots in mud, and under their misshapen arches the stick-eyes of crabs and their ponderous claws. They had been banished for a time under concrete freeways, but would soon be pushing up fleshy roots, their leathery leaves, black rather than green, agleam with salt.

Vegetation spread quickly here. Everything spread quickly — germs, butter, rumours. There was talk of plantations outside the city, in pockets deep in the foothills of the Range, where cannabis was being grown in dense plantations. Each night late, trucks would move into the city, on the lookout for teenagers who had nowhere to sleep or were simply loose in the streets, available for whatever might bring a little action into their lives. They would be approached, hired, loaded on to trucks, and driven blindfolded to the marijuana fields, where in long rows, until first light, they would go about the business of harvesting the green stuff, the dream stuff. Then, towards four thirty, when the sun began to show, after being paid and blindfolded again, they would be driven back and dropped off in the Valley or at Stones Corner, or along the various bus routes into the city.

True? It did not have to be. It was convincing at some deeper level than fact. It expressed something that was continuous with the underground history of the place, with triangles and flayed ribs, the leper colony on its island in the Bay, the men with scabbed and bloody hands sleeping on sacks behind the Markets, an emanation in heavy light and in green, subaqueous air, of an aboriginal misery that no tower block or flyover could entirely obliterate.

He moved one of his characters into place somewhere along Petrie Terrace where he could be approached. Loose, open, waiting for the truck that had just set out from a covered shed and was wobbling, low down on a rutted track, under moonlit leaves.

It was ten. Precisely. Any moment now his cousin Corrie would ring.

2

He and Coralie had grown up together. In the war years, with his father gone and his mother taken up with a social round that had a new definition as war work, he had spent the long weeks of the Christmas holidays at his Grandfather Lattimer's house at Woody Point, in a muddle of uncles and aunts and their children of whom Coralie James, who was just his age, had always been closest to him. In the obsessive way of only children they had done everything in tandem, having discovered in one another feelings they had thought too private, too much their own and only theirs, to be shared. They exchanged whispered secrets, scared one another with ghost stories, had their own coded language full of private jokes and references, which they would recognise only later as another version of the Lattimer exclusivity, and had, at eight or nine years old, to the amusement of the grown-ups, committed themselves to marriage. They had even picked out the house they meant to live in. A two-storeyed cottage with dormer windows, it was sufficiently unlike the houses they and their friends lived in to suggest possibilities of behaviour, of feeling too, quite different from the ones they found unsatisfactory at home.

Well, it had come to nothing, of course. A childish dream. Only once after those early years had he and Coralie spent any time together.

At twenty-five she had turned up in Swinging London, at a time, just after the birth of their second daughter, when he and Jane were still dealing happily with broken nights, babies’ bottles, and wet nappies drying on a ceiling rack in the damp little kitchen. Coralie, while she made up her mind between a teaching job in Portugal and a return to the arms of a boy in Brisbane who was prepared to wait, though not perhaps for ever, had spent six weeks on the floor of their basement living room.

It was the time, as well, of his first novel, which he wrote each night at the kitchen table, in the early hours while his family slept in the room next door; getting up every half-hour or so and stepping away from the warm sunlight of his Brisbane childhood to feed the coke-fire or make himself a mug of tea, and when the baby woke to walk her up and down a little while a bottle heated. His head would be so brimming with sunlight, and images and whole sentences that he needed to set down before they were gone, that he would write on sometimes with the baby over his shoulder, feeding off her warmth, in a state of wholeness and ease with his life and work that he was never to know so completely again.

In the conspiratorial way of lovers, he and Jane had made alliance against their wanted, unwanted guest. When he crept to bed at last, Jane would tease him about his other woman out there — and he could never be sure how serious she was and whether it was Coralie she meant or his book.

And in fact there was a sense in which they could scarcely be separated, that's what he saw after a time, since it was Coralie's presence he was drawing on when so many vivid pictures came back to him. Of blue sand-crabs spilled from a gunnysack and setting out over the red-earth floor of a hut, till they could be grabbed by the back legs and dropped squealing into the pot. Of tiger-moths at a wire-screen door and the peculiar light of a ribbed sandbank when the tide rippled out and a whole battalion of soldier crabs wheeled and flashed, then darkened.

“She's still in love with you,” Jane whispered. “She thinks I'm a mistake. She thinks I'm the interloper.”

“Don't be silly,” he protested.

“She thinks you two were made for each other. And you love it — you really love it. Being the rooster with two hens.”

“Do I?” he asked, genuinely surprised but not entirely displeased with this new and more dashing version of himself.

“Yes, you do — bastard!” Her voice, in playful accusation, had a throatiness, a sensuality that stirred him. “At heart you're a philanderer.”

“No I'm not,” he told her. “What do you mean? I'm not,” and he clasped her more warmly in the rumpled bed.

It became a joke between them, one of her ways of playing up to his ego and exciting him. It had taken him another seven years to see that it was also true.

But she had been wrong about Coralie. Their moment was past. He found her presence at the edge of his enclosed and sufficient family an irritation. Too keen-eyed, too deeply imbued with their Lattimer scepticism, she was an infidel. He resented her humourous disbelief in his being so easily settled. Being settled was important to him — too important, perhaps, that is what she had seen, and if he had been less concerned to defend his own small victory over aimlessness and the fear that without the constraints of a conventional family life he would sink back into the perplexities and self-destructiveness of adolescence, he too might have seen it.

How little he had known himself! What a mess he had made of things. And now, after half a lifetime, this late reunion.

It did not help that Coralie and Jane had remained friends, and that she knew, from Jane's side, all the sorry details, the whole sad story. And would have heard as well that of his two daughters, Eleanor would see him only to make their meetings, each time, the occasion of bitter recriminations and punishment, and Annabel, who had been his favourite, would not see him at all.

They had been to the North Coast — a patchy occasion, despite the perfect weather. Now, sun-dazed, they were having drinks on the Ped-ersens’ verandah above the river. Coralie, shoes discarded, her bare legs tucked away under her, had retreated into silence. It was Eric who did the talking.