David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Those four and a half acres were an eyesore — that's the council's line: openly in communication, through the coming and going of native animals and birds, or through seeds that can travel miles on a current of air, with the wilderness that by fits and starts, in patches here and great swathes of darkness there, still lies like a shadow over even the most settled land, a pocket of the dark unmanageable, that troubles the sleep of citizens by offering a point of re-entry to memories they have no more use for — unruly and unsettling dreams. Four and a half acres.

Boys riding past it on their way to school are caught by a sudden impulse, and with a quick look over their shoulder, turn in there and are gone for the day on who knows what adventures and escapades.

Driving slowly past it, you see a pair of boots sticking out from under a bush. At eight thirty in the morning! A drunk, or some late-night rover who has been knocked on the head and robbed. A flash of scarlet proclaims the presence of firetails lighting the grass.

Jacko's Reach: once known, and so marked on older maps, as Jago's. How, and at what point, by what slip of the tongue or consonantal drift, did the name lurch backwards into an earlier, not-quite-forgotten history, so that the white man's name became a black one and the place reverted, if only in speech, to its original owner's? Jacko's.

For as long as anyone can remember the people who had a legal right to the Reach, and are responsible for its lying unkept and unimproved, are Sydneysiders, but there are no Jacks or Jagos among them. They themselves have fallen back to a single remnant, a Miss Hardie of Pymble, who claims to have been a pupil of Patti, speaks with a German accent, and sold Jacko's over the telephone, they say, for a song.

It is a place you have to have seen and been into if you are to have any grasp of it. Most of all, you have to have lived with it as the one area of disorder and difference in a town that prides itself on being typical: that is, just like everywhere else. Or you have to have been hearing, for as long as you can recall, the local stories about the place, not all of them fit to be told — which does not mean that they are not endlessly repeated. Or you have to have lost something there — oh, years back. A little Eiffel Tower off a charm bracelet, or your first cigarette lighter, which you have never given up hope of kicking up again, and go searching for in sleep. Or you have to have stumbled there on something no one had warned you of.

Back before the First World War, two bullockies (they must have been among the last of their kind) settled a quarrel there. No one knows what it was about, but one party was found, the next day, with his skull smashed. The other had disappeared. The bullocks, no longer yoked to the wagon, had been left to wander.

Then, two days later, the second bullocky turned up again, hanging by his belt from a bloodwood. An eight-year-old, Jimmy Dickens, out looking for a stray cow and with the salt taste of porridge in his mouth and that day's list of spellings in his head, looked up and saw, just at eye-level, a pair of stockinged feet, and there he was, all six feet of him, pointing downwards in the early light. Old Jimmy was still telling the story, in a way that could make the back of your neck creep, fifty years later, in my youth.

The facts of the case had got scrambled by every sort of romantic speculation, but it was the awe of that dumbstruck eight-year-old as he continued to look out, in a ghostly way, through the eyes of the gaunt old-timer, that was the real story. That, and the fact that it was still there, the place, and had a name. You could go out yourself and take a look at it. That particular patch of Jacko's, that tree, had been changed for ever, and become, for all of us who knew the story, the site of something you could touch. A mystery as real as the rough bark of the tree itself, it could change the mood you were in, and whatever it was you had slipped in there to get away from or do.

Well, that's Jacko's for you.

When I was seven or eight years old we used to play Cops and Robbers there. It seemed enormous. Just crossing it from the main road to the river gave you some idea, at the back of your knees, of the three hundred million square miles and of Burke and Wills.

Later it became the place for less innocent games, then later again of games that were once again innocent, though some people did not think so. Jacko's became a code-word for something as secret as what you had in your pants: which was familiar and close, yet forbidden, and put you in touch with all the other mysteries.

The largest of those you would come to only later; in the meantime, Jacko's, just the word alone, fed your body's heated fantasies, and it made no odds somehow that the scene of those fantasies was a place you had known for so long that it was as ordinary as your own backyard. It was changed, it was charged. And why shouldn't it be? Hadn't your body worked the same trick on you? And what could be more familiar than that?

What Jacko's evoked now was not just the dusty tracks with their dried leaves and prickles that your bare feet had travelled a thousand times and whose every turning led to a destination you knew and had a name for, but a place, enticing, unentered, for which the old name, to remain appropriate, had to be interpreted in a new way, as if it had belonged all the time to another and secret language. Girls especially could be made to blush just at the mention of it, if your voice took on a particular note. For them too it had a new interest, however much they pretended.

Those four and a half acres, dark under the moon on even the starriest nights, could expand in the heat of Christmas and the months towards Easter till they filled a disproportionate area of your head.

On sultry nights when you had all the sheets off, they suggested a wash of air that could only be fresher and cooler on the skin, a space you could move in with the sort of freedom you had known away back when you were a kid. You walked out there in your sleep and found it crowded. There were others. You met and touched. And those who were bold enough, or sufficiently careless of their reputation, or merely curious about the boundary of something too vague for the moment to be named, actually went there, in couples or foursomes. They weren't disappointed exactly, but they came out feeling that their mothers had exaggerated. There was no danger, except in what people might make of it through talk, and about that their mothers had not exaggerated, not at all.

Valmay Mitchell was thirteen. She got no warning from her mother because she did not have one. She lived with her father in an old railway hut out on the line.

Every fellow of my generation knows Valmay's name. If she were to come back here, to take a last look at Jacko's for instance before it goes under for ever, she would be astonished at her fame.

She was a plain, blonde little thing who left school in the sixth grade. She wore dresses that were too big for her, went barefoot, and her one quality that anyone recalls was her eagerness to please. She would do anything — that was the news. Then one day, when we were all in the seventh grade, she disappeared. She was nowhere to be found.

People immediately thought the worst. Valmay Mitchell was the sort of girl that acts of violence, which haunt the streets like ghosts on the lookout for a body they can fill, are deeply drawn to. She had last been seen going into Jacko's with a boy on a bike. Which boy? He was found — it was the bike that gave him away — but never publicly identified, though we all knew his name. He admitted he and Valmay had been in there. They had both come out. But Valmay stayed missing. They combed Jacko's inch by inch and found no trace of her, though some of the searchers found things they, or others, had lost there and had spent years looking for. It was a real treasure-trove that came out of the hunt for Valmay. You could have weighed her against the heap of it and the heap would have weighed more.