David Malouf - The Complete Stories

The woman ignored her. Rocking the baby a little, she turned away and told the youth fiercely: "Get it over with, will ya? Get ‘em outa here.”

May, who had spoken as woman to woman, was deeply offended. But the woman's speaking up at last gave life to the boy.

“I'm hungry,” he whined into her skirt. “Mummy? I'm hungreee!” His eye had caught the bowl of fruit on their fold-up table. “I wanna banana!”

“Shuddup, Dale,” the woman told him, and put her elbow into his head.

“You can have a banana, dear,” May told him.

She turned to the one with the gun.

“Can he have a banana?”

The child looked up quickly, then grabbed.

“Say ta to the nice lady, Dale,” said the youth, in a voice rich with mockery.

But the boy, who really was simple-minded, lowered the banana, gaped a moment, and said sweetly: "Thank you very much.”

The youth laughed outright.

“Now,” he said, and there was no more humour, "get over here.”

He made way for them and they passed him while the woman and the boy, who was occupied with the peeling of his banana, passed behind. So now it was May and Harry who were squeezed in at the entrance end.

“Right,” the youth said. “Now—” He was working up the energy in himself. He seemed afraid it might lapse. “The car keys. Where are they?”

Harry felt a rush of hot anger.

Look, feller, he wanted to protest, I paid thirty-three thousand bucks for that car. You just fuck off. But May's hand touched his elbow, and instead he made a gesture towards the fruit bowl where the keys sat — now, why do we keep them there? — among the apples and oranges.

“Get ‘em, Lou.”

The woman hitched the baby over her shoulder so that it stirred and burbled, and was just about to reach for the keys when she saw what the boy was up to and let out a cry. “Hey you, Dale, leave that, you little bugger. I said leave it!”

She made a swipe at him, but the boy, who was more agile than he looked, ducked away under the youth's arm, crowing and waving a magazine.

“Fuck you, Dale,” the woman shouted after him.

In her plunge to cut him off she had woken the baby, which now began to squall, filling the constricted space of the caravan with screams.

“Shut it up, willya?” the youth told her. “And you, Dale, belt up, or I'll clip y’ one. Gimme that.” He made a grab for the magazine, but the boy held on. “I said, give it to me!”

“No, Kenny, no, it's mine. I found it.”

They struggled, the man cursing, and at last he wrenched it away. The boy yowled, saying over and over with a deep sense of grievance: "It's not fair, it's not fair, Kenny. I'm the one that found it. It's mine.”

Harry was flooded with shame. The youth, using the gun, was turning the pages of the thing.

“Someone left it in a caf,” Harry explained weakly. “Under a seat.”

The youth was incensed. He blazed with indignation. “See this, Lou? See what the kid found?”

But the woman gave him only the briefest glance. She was preoccupied with the baby. Moving back and forth in the space between the bunks, she was rocking the child and sweet-talking it in the wordless, universal dialect, somewhere between syllabic spell-weaving and an archaic drone, that women fall into on such occasions and which sets them impressively apart. The others were hushed. May, lowering her voice to a whisper, said: "Look here, if you're in some sort of trouble— I mean—” She indicated the gun. “There's no need of that.”

But the youth had a second weapon now. “You shut up,” he told her fiercely. “Just you shut up. You're the ones who've got trouble. What about this, then?” and he shook the magazine at her.

She looked briefly, then away. She understood the youth's outrage because she shared it. When he held the thing out to her she shook her head, but he was implacable.

“I said, look!" he hissed.

Because of the woman's trouble with the baby he had lowered his voice again, but the savagery of it was terrible. He brandished the thing in her face and Harry groaned.

“Is this the sort of thing you people are into?”

But the ten-year-old, excited now beyond all fear of chastisement, could no longer contain himself.

“I seen it,” he crowed.

“Shuddup, Dale.”

“I seen it …”

“I'll knock the bloody daylights out of you if you don't belt up!”

“A cunt, it's a cunt. Cunt, cunt, cunt!”

When the youth hit him he fell sideways, howling, and clutched his ear.

“There,” the youth said in a fury, swinging back to them, "you see what you made me do? Come here, Dale, and stop whinging Come on. Come on here.” But the boy had fled to his mother's skirts and was racked with sobs. The baby shrieked worse than ever. “Jesus,” the youth shouted, "you make me sick! Dale,” he said, "come here, mate, I didn't mean it, eh? Come here.”

The boy met his eye and after a moment moved towards him, still sniffling. The youth put his hand on the back of the child's neck and drew him in. “There,” he said. “Now, you're not hurt, are you?” The boy, his thumb back in his mouth, leaned into him. The youth sighed.

“Look here,” May began. But before she could form another word the youth's arm shot out, an edge of metal struck her, “Oh God,” she said as she went down.

“That's enough out of you,” the youth was yelling. “That's the last you get to say.”

She thought Harry was about to move, and she put out her hand to stop him. “No, no,” she shouted, "don't. It's all right — I'm all right.” The youth, in a kind of panic now, was pushing the gun into the soft of Harry's belly. May, on her knees, tasted salt, put her fingers to her mouth and felt blood.

“All right, now,” the youth was saying. He was calming himself, he calmed. But she could smell his sweat. “You can get up now. We're going outside.”

She looked up then and saw that it made no difference that he was calm. That there was a baby here and that the mother was concerned to get it to sleep. Or that he was so clean-looking, and strict.

She got to her feet without help and went past him on her own legs, though wobbling a little, down the one step into the dark.

The tropical night they had stepped into had a softness that struck Harry like a moment out of his boyhood.

There were stars. They were huge, and so close and heavy-looking that you wondered how they could hold themselves up.

It seemed so personal, this sky. He thought of stepping out as a kid to take a piss from the back verandah and as he sent his jet this way and that looking idly for Venus, or Aldebaran, or the Cross. I could do with a piss right now, he thought, I really need it. It's what I got up for.

They were like little mirrors up there. That's what he had sometimes thought as he came out in the winter dark to load up for his round. If you looked hard enough, every event that was being enacted over all this side of the earth, even the smallest, would be reflected there. Even this one, he thought.

He took May's hand and she clutched it hard. He felt her weight go soft against him.

The youth was urging them on over rough terrain towards a patch of darker scrub further in from the road. Sometimes behind them, but most often half-turned and waiting ahead, he could barely contain his impatience at their clumsiness as, heavy and tender-footed, they moved at a jolting pace over the stony ground. When May caught her nightie on a thorn and Harry tried to detach it, the youth made a hissing sound and came back and ripped it clear.

No words passed between them. Harry felt a terrible longing to have the youth speak again, say something. Words you could measure. You knew where they were tending. With silence you were in the open with no limits. But when the fellow stopped at last and turned and stood waiting for them to catch up, it wasn't a particular point in the silence that they had come to. A place thirty yards back might have done equally well, or thirty or a hundred yards further on. Harry saw with clarity that the distance the youth had been measuring had to do with his reluctance to get to the point, and was in himself.