David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“It's all right, mate,” he told him, "she's jokin',” and he gave her a bold, shy look that was meant to disguise with boyish diffidence his easy assurance that she was not.

When they got there it proved to be a house on wheels, a portable barrack-block for workers on the line. Long and narrow, like a stranded railway carriage, it consisted of a dozen rooms all of the same size along a single corridor, with a kitchen unit at one end and a shower and a couple of toilets at the other. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the land, all washed and dripping, glowed under a golden sky.

“Well,” he said, "this is it — nice, eh? We aren't cramped. Lots of room for expansion, if you'd like to move in. We can put up any number. We could open a hotel.”

Only four of the rooms were in use. The others, when she looked in, were thick with dust, the little square windows grimed with months, maybe years, of muck. One or two of them had old pin-ups on the walls. Another was piled with dusty cartons and magazines, and there were tools, several shovels, and a pick or two in a pile in one corner.

“That's it,” he told her; "have a poke around. I'll find something for you to put on in a minute while we dry your clothes.”

It was true. She was soaked. Her hair was dripping.

He was kneeling while he got Lou's wet shoes off. The baby was gurgling in an armchair.

“Sorry,” he said; "take a towel. In that basket there — it's clean — and dry your hair. Children can't wait.”

After a minute, with the children settled: "You watch baby for a bit,” he told Lou and, soft-footed in his socks, led Sally two doors down the corridor to a bedroom.

As soon as she stepped in, though he was careful to leave the door open, she felt the change in him; a heightening of his physical presence, a heat that glowed under his clothes, out of the open-necked shirt, and a wet-grass smell that was his excited sweat. She recalled what her mother had said: "Two kids — that can't be much fun,” and was impressed by how easily her mother had found, in that word fun, just the light in which he should be looked at. What was essential in him, what you might need to take most seriously in him, was a capa- city he had for being light-spirited, for making himself easy with the world.

“Well,” he said, breaking the tension between them, "let's see what we've got.”

He found a pair of jeans in one drawer — his, she guessed, but they were clean enough — and among a jumble of T-shirts and jumpers in another, a woollen shirt, also his. He put his face into it and smelled to see if it was clean.

“Okay? Will they do?” he asked. “I've got t’ look after the baby now.” He hovered a moment, hesitant, apologetic, appealing to her to understand that he was not entirely free.

She closed the door behind him, but it was unnecessary really, and as soon as she did so she knew it was not to preserve her own privacy but so that she could peek a little into his. She changed quickly, then opened the door of the wardrobe.

Dresses, all neatly on hangers, and at the bottom a pile of shoes. In a drawer, jeans, shirts, all ironed and folded. His wife's clothes. Why hadn't he offered her something from here?

But she could see why. All this was untouched.

And what had she expected? To find them torn from their hangers and ripped? She felt a sadness in these things. In their emptiness. In their remaining just as the woman had left them, untouched. No, not untouched — she could imagine him opening the wardrobe and letting his hand move among them. Undisturbed. His own things, as she had seen when he found the shirt for her, were a mess.

She opened the drawer again, took up one of his T-shirts, and held it to her face; saw the girlie magazine underneath, and the stiff, crumpled handkerchief.

“How's it going?” he called.

“Fine,” she said, closing the drawer.

“We'll toss these in the drier,” he said, when she emerged with her pile of wet clothes.

“I will! I will!” Lou shouted, and rushed to take them from her.

“It's okay,” he said, "he knows how t’ work it. I've got to bathe the baby. Do you mind? Then I'll get us some tea.”

She watched while he sat the baby in a tub of warm water and washed her, supporting her very gently with one hand while he soaped and splashed with the other. He spoke to the baby, who crowed and gurgled, soft-talking her, and was absorbed. The habitual nature of what he was doing absorbed him and for moments at a time he seemed unaware of her presence. But at others he grew self-conscious, and the soft-talk, the way he handled the baby, she felt, was for her. Or perhaps it was simply that she was aware of him.

The jeans she wore, which were too big for her, were his. So was the shirt. Her own clothes were tumbling away in the drier.

Lou had come back. With the baby's fresh clothes in his lap, he was sitting very quietly watching them both. He too was subdued.

“Is she gunna stay?” he asked at last.

The man cast her one of his shy looks. “I don't know,” he said. “Why don't you ask her.”

“Are you?” the boy asked.

“We'll see,” she said.

The man turned away, but was smiling, she knew, and, holding the baby high, smacked a kiss on its wet belly. The baby laughed.

“Okay, Lou,” he said when the child was dried and set down, "you can take over.”

“We're a team,” he told her.

“Oh, I can see that,” she said.

She did stay,and did not hold it against him that he was so obviously pleased with himself, and so eager to show how good he was — he was — and that it wasn't because of thatthat his wife had left.

What was it then? she wondered. Why did she? Would she too find out?

Lying awake beside him, this almost stranger with his warmth against her, listening to the depth of his breathing, she was aware of the watchers she would have to deal with: the ghostly versions of Hedda and Rosalind and Blanche Du Bois waiting silently in the dark for her breath to release them. Behind the flimsy pine door of the wardrobe, just feet away, the rows of empty frocks.

Then there was the hurt she had felt in him. She could heal that. It seemed to her, at this moment, that she wanted nothing more in the world than to be his healing. She did not see, or not immediately, that his presenting himself to her in this light, with so much tremulous need, and when he felt her response to it, so much commanding passion, might be her healing as well.

Sometime in the night she woke to find him gone, and when he came back again he had the baby.

“Sorry,” he whispered, as he set it down in the bed between them. “Do you mind?” He lay down again holding the child close to his chest, cradling its head.

So there was that, too.

She began to laugh.

“What is it?” he asked; "what's so funny? She won't be in the way. You go on back t’ sleep. I'm used to it.” And reaching across the baby, he had another hand for her, his fingers gently stroking her cheek.

Lordy, Lordy, she said to herself, looking at the two of them, the rough thatch of his blond head, the baby nestling into the warmth of him, snuffing his scent, burrowing deep into the familiar bulk of him.

Life is so—

But she was not sure that she believed, quite yet, in such happy turnabouts, and feared it might be tempting fate if she were to find a word, a new one, to finish the phrase. Instead she too snuggled down and let herself float free on the unloaded breath.

So it is settled.Jacko's Reach, our last pocket of scrub, has been won for progress. It is to be cleared and built on. Eighteen months from now, after the usual period of mud pies and mechanical shovels and cranes, we will have a new shopping mall, with a skateboard ramp for young daredevils, two floodlit courts for night tennis and, on the river side, a Heritage Walk laid out with native hybrids. Our sterner citizens and their wives will sleep safe at last in a world that no longer offers encouragement to the derelicts who gather there with a carton of cheap wine or a bottle of metho, the dumpers of illegal garbage, feral cats, and the few local Aborigines who claim an affinity with the place that may or may not be mystical.