David Malouf - The Complete Stories

They dug in places where the ground was disturbed, they dragged the river. Nothing.

Rumours flew about. She had been seen getting into a car — a Holden, or a Ford ute, or a Customline — poor little thing! It was her innocence now, suddenly restored, that people were drawn to. Then the news came back that she was in Sydney, in a Salvation Army Home, having a baby. One boy got a postcard from her. Several others spent anxious days in the weeks afterwards running out to waylay the postman in the fear that she might drop them a line as well. They are middle-aged now, my generation. One is our local baker, another a real-estate agent, another a circuit judge. Our lives these days barely cross. One of them does odd jobs out at the golf course and we exchange a few words now and then. Not about Valmay Others I see driving their daughters to dances or calling for them afterwards, just as in the old days, or at football matches where their grandsons are playing.

Still, it's an older fellowship we share than the ones we belong to now, Rotary, or the Lions, or the BMA; and in a ghostly, dreamy area of ourselves, some of us are still willing to acknowledge it. The gangs we ran with back there, whose passionate loyalties did not last — the scratch teams for rounders, with captains choosing in turn. You can look about, if you have an eye for these things, at a public meeting where people are vociferously taking sides, or round the spectators at a concert, or in the thin gathering at an Anzac Day service, and re-form, in a ghostly way, those older groups, and see something that is oddly moving: darker loyalties, deeper affinities, submerged now under the more acceptable ones. The last luminous grains of a freer and more democratic spirit, that the husbands and wives of my generation still turn to in dreams. It's like having the power to see into someone's pocket, where among the small change and dustballs he is still turning over a favourite taw.

It is this, all this, that will go under the bars of neon lights and the crowded shelves and trolleys of the supermarket, the wheels of skateboards, the bitumen walks and solid, poured-concrete ramps.

Jacko's, as we knew it, will enter at last into what a century and more has already prepared it for, the dimension of the symbolic. Which is of course what it has always been, though the grit of it between your bare toes and the density of its undergrowth, the untidy mass of it against the evening sky, for a long time obscured the fact. After all, you don't lose something as palpable as a solid silver cigarette lighter, not to speak of your innocence, in a place that is purely symbolic. Or gash your foot there so that you carry for ever after the consequent scar. Or stand, day after day, waiting to be called as the possible ninth, the tenth man of a team, in an agony of humiliation you feel may never end.

So it will be gone and it won't be. Like everything else.

Under.

Where its darkness will never quite be dispelled, however many mushroom-lights they install in the parking lot.

Where it will go on pushing up under the concrete, reaching for the wilderness further out that its four and a half acres have always belonged to and which no documents of survey or deeds of ownership or council ordinances have ever had the power to cancel. The possibility of building over it was forestalled the moment it got inside us. As a code-word for something so intimate it can never be revealed, an area of experience, even if it is deeply forgotten, where we still move in groups together, and touch, and glow, and spring apart laughing at the electric spark. There has to be some place where that is possible.

If there is only one wild acre somewhere we will make that the place. If they take it away we will preserve it in our head. If there is no such place we will invent it. That's the way we are.

Driving at speed along the narrow dirt highway, Harry Picton could have given no good reason for stopping where he did. There was a pine. Perhaps it was that — its deeper green and conical form among the scrub a reminder out here of the shapeliness and order of gardens, though this particular pine was of the native variety.

May was sleeping. For the past hour, held upright by her seatbelt, she had been nodding off and waking, then nodding off again like a comfortable baby. Harry was used to having her doze beside him. He liked to read at night, May did not. It made the car, which was heavy to handle because of the swaying behind of the caravan, as familiar almost as their double bed.

Driving up here was dreamlike. As the miles of empty country fell away with nothing to catch the eye, no other vehicle or sign of habitation, your head lightened and cleared itself of thoughts, of images, of every wish or need. Clouds filled the windscreen. You floated.

The clouds up here were unreal. They swirled up so densely and towered to such an infinite and unmoving height that driving, even at a hundred Ks an hour, was like crawling along at the bottom of a tank.

A flash of grey and pink flared up out of a dip in the road. Harry jerked the wheel. Galahs! They might have escaped from a dozen backyard cages, but were common up here. They were after water. There must have been real water back there that he had taken for the usual mirage. Like reflections of the sky, which was pearly at this hour and flushed with coral, they clattered upwards and went streaming away behind.

“May,” he called. But before she was properly awake they were gone. “Sorry, love,” she muttered. “Was it something good?” Still half-asleep, she reached into the glovebox for a packet of lollies, unwrapped one, passed it to him, then unwrapped another and popped it into her mouth. Almost immediately she was dozing again with the lolly in her jaw, its cherry colour seeping through into her dreams.

They were on a trip, the first real trip they had ever taken, the trip of their lives.

Back in Hawthorn they had a paper run. Seven days a week and twice on weekdays, Harry tossed the news over people's fences on to the clipped front lawns: gun battles in distant suburbs, raids on marijuana plantations, bank holdups, traffic accidents, baby bashings, the love lives of the stars.

He knew the neighbourhood — he had to: how to get around it by the quickest possible route. He had got that down to a fine art. Conquest of Space, it was called, just as covering it all twelve times a week in an hour and a quarter flat was the Fight against Time. He had reckoned it up once. In twenty-seven years bar a few months he had made his round on ten thousand seven hundred occasions in twelve thousand man-hours, and done a distance of a hundred thousand miles. That is, ten times round Australia. Those were the figures.

But doing it that way, piecemeal, twice a day, gave you no idea of what the country really was: the distances, the darkness, the changes as you slipped across unmarked borders.

Birds that were exotic down south, like those galahs, were everywhere up here, starting up out of every tree. The highways were a way of life with their own population: hitch-hikers, truckies, itinerant fruit-pickers and other seasonal workers of no fixed address, bikies loaded up behind and wearing space helmets, families with all their belongings packed into a station wagon and a little girl in the back waving or sticking out her tongue, or a boy putting up two fingers in the shape of a gun and mouthing Bang, Bang, You're Dead, kids in panel-vans with a couple of surfboards on the rack chasing the ultimate wave. Whole tribes that for one reason or another had never settled. Citizens of a city the size of Hobart or Newcastle that was always on the move. For three months (that was the plan), he and May had come out to join them.

Back in Hawthorn a young fellow and his wife were giving the paper run a go. For five weeks now, their home in Ballard Crescent had been locked up, empty, ghosting their presence with a lighting system installed by the best security firm in the state that turned the lights on in the kitchen, just as May did, regular as clockwork, at half past five; then, an hour later, lit the lamp in their living room and flicked on the TV; then turned the downstairs lights off again at nine and a minute later lit the reading lamp (just the one) on Harry's side of the bed in the front bedroom upstairs.