David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“Come on,” Eric said, in a tone that suggested a growing apprehension at how accident-prone his new friend might be. “I'll get you back to the hotel, we can ring Coralie from there.”

Safely back in his room at the hotel, he splashed cold water over his face, and as soon as he had recovered a little, rang London. Emma's voice was thick with sleep.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

He closed his eyes, and her breathing in his ear was so close that she might have been lying half-curled against his body in the dark.

“What is it?” she asked. “What time is it?”

“Nothing. It's nothing to worry about. Go on back to sleep.”

The closeness, the familiarity of her, collapsed the hemispheres, the vast spaces across which her voice was being projected towards him. With his eyes close-shut he could believe that the slight hissing he could hear in the gaps of her breathing came from the high-ceilinged room where she lay, their flat high up above Redcliffe Square, and felt himself settle in the stillness and order, even in its customary disorder, of their shared life: dishes left overnight in the sink, books on shelves, LPs, newspapers.

“Go back to sleep,” he said again. “I'm fine. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“No, it's nothing,” she was calling now, her head turned away from the mouthpiece. “It's Colin. From Australia.”

That would be Marcus. He saw the boy standing in striped flannel pyjamas and his Manchester United jersey at the door to their room.

He was sixteen and diabetic, so used to his disease and its regimen that you were barely aware of it except for the chocolate biscuits he carried in the pockets of his coat. He liked to go to discos. He was so easy and serious and assured that Colin, who, in the three years that he and Emma had been together, had grown fond of the boy, was sometimes intimidated. He expected the young to be confused, as he had been.

“That was Marcus,” Emma told him unnecessarily. “Are you sure you're all right?”

“Yes, I'm fine, I'll be there on Friday. Go on back to sleep. I'll ring in the morning.”

He listened for a moment after she hung up to the different quality of silence — which was no longer that of their bedroom and the warmer, reassuring spaces of the flat, but the white noise, the rubbing together in a soft, functional hissing, of a myriad random particles colliding and parting in the high wastes of air.

At seven that evening, uneasily assured and with a puffiness about the lip that gave him a disreputable look, which must have been a puzzle to those readers of newspaper and magazine articles for whom he was “distinguished,” he read to a modest gathering at a popular bookshop, then fielded the usual questions, some effusively respectful but others aggrieved. What did he think of the place? Why had it taken him so long to come back? How had his work suffered by his having abandoned, as they said, his roots? Still feeling battered, he moved to one of the vast plate-glass windows and looked out.

The city he knew, and in one part of himself still moved in, was out there somewhere, but out of sight, underground. Unkillably uncontrollably green. Swarming with insects and rotting with a death that would soon once again be life, its salt light, by day, blinding to the eye and deadening of all thought, its river now, under fathoms of moonlight, bursting with bubbles, festering, fermenting.

Inescapable. Far from having put it too far behind him, he felt entangled, caught.

He thought of the flying foxes hanging in furry rows under the boughs of the Moreton Bay figs, the metho-drinkers on the Victoria golf-links, the teenage blacks and dropouts on their cots at the watch-house or in gutters in the lanes off Mary and Margaret Streets. The frowsy blonde in the back room of a massage parlour, the taxi-driver with one hairy arm out the window, drumming impatiently on the roof. And in a darkened room somewhere, a man, restrained or sedated, who long after the scars had healed on his neck and chest would go on stalking down midnight pavements the one who had wronged him.

Later, in the cool of a room nine storeys above the street, he fell into a reviving sleep and was for a time nowhere — or nowhere that can be found on any map.

He was standing at a street corner, lounging against a wall in the neon dark and watching the headlamps of a truck rise slowly between lightpoles over the crown of a hill. He did not move. Even when the truck drew level, stopped, and he was called to. Till, being called a second time, he pushed away from the wall, ambled to the kerb, and setting his hand on the high cabin window, listened, shrugged his shoulders, looked to where others, already blindfolded, were packed together in the open truck, and shrugged again. Then, blindfolded himself, he was hauled up to join them, and they began a long ride out through the sleeping suburbs towards wherever it was out there in the foothills that the green stuff, the dream stuff, was.

The truck came to a halt, high among insect voices. He shuffled to the edge of the tray, a little breathless. How long a drop was it? He put his hand out, feeling air. Then there was a hand. He had only to take it and launch off.

And now, in a stretch of time where before and after had no meaning, in which none of the things had yet occurred that had so shaken his world and none of the people who most mattered to him had yet left his life or come into it, or they had and he was not yet aware of it — in that neither before nor after, he was high up under the floorboards of the house, and though the light was almost gone, he knew that the pale stems in which he could see the endless pushing upwards of a liquid green were the stems of gladioli, and that the great weight of darkness in his arms, which was still warm, was Maxie. The heart he could feel beating had a worm in it but had not yet stopped. It still made a regular, reassuring thump against his ribs.

He heard them call. They were calling to him.

“Come on out now. Come out,” and a hand was stretched towards him.

But he would not for a while yet, for a good while yet, respond to the voices, or reach out and put his own into the outstretched hand.

The day Greg Newsome turned seventeen he joined the University Air Squadron. It was 1951. The memory of one war, which had been in progress all through his childhood, was still strong in him, gathering to it all the appealing mementoes and moods of those years, and the Cold War had recently thrown up another conflict, a smaller one, in Korea. War seemed to him, and to others like him, a natural thing. It galvanized people's energies and drew them to a pitch. It clarified meanings. It held you in the line of history. It also cleansed the spirit by offering occasions where mere animal energy and the noblest aspirations could meet at a point of vivid exultation, and mind and body, which at a certain age seem like divergent states of being, were instantly reconciled.

When Greg went to be medically examined he had to wait for more than an hour in a poky enclosure with walls of three-ply. There were a dozen other fellows there, on benches; he didn't know a single one of them. He plunged into his book, a Loeb Classic. When he was called at last he had to strip and sit on a chair to one side of the examiner's desk.

The man was a civilian but with one of those handlebar moustaches that in those days still evoked the image of a fighter pilot in the war. He looked at Greg's birth date, then at Greg, and was silent. Greg blushed. It was odd to be sitting stark naked on a chair beside a desk with his flesh sticking to varnish. He hung on mentally to his Plato.

“So,” the doctor said, "we've got around to you lot.” His face expressed a profound weariness.