David Malouf - The Complete Stories

He grinned and hunched into himself but did not pull away.

“Our football team won the premiership,” Jenny announced. “I got best and fairest.”

“Gee,” said Fran, "did you?”

Clem slammed the door of his car and came up beside her. Smiling, he took her hand. “Do we look like newly-weds?” he asked.

Jenny was suddenly suspicious. “Why?” she asked. “Why should you?”

“I don't know. Do we?”

The two children glanced away.

Since his accident Clem said things, just whatever came into his head. They felt some impropriety now and cast quick glances at Fran to see what she thought of it, but she didn't appear to have heard. “I'm going to look for Angie,” she said “I could do with a cuppa.” She started off towards the house with her bouncy, flat-heeled stride. With the long scar across his brow, Clem was smiling.

At the step to the verandah Fran had turned and was waiting for him.

One night three years back, on a straight stretch between a patch of forest and the Waruna causeway, a child had leapt out suddenly on to the moonlit gravel. It was late, after ten. Clem was tired after a long drive. The boy, who was nine or ten years old, was playing chicken. He stood in the glare of the headlights, poised, ready to run, while his companions — who were all from the Camp, half a dozen skinny seven-or eight-year-olds — danced about on the sidelines yelling encouragement, and the little girls among them shrieked and covered their eyes.

Clem swung the wheel, narrowly avoiding the boy, and the whole continent — the whole three million square miles of rock, tree trunks, sand, fences, cities — came bursting through the windscreen into his skull. The remaining hours of the night had lasted for fourteen months. It had taken another year to locate the bit of him that retained the habit of speech.

Always the odd man out among them, the stocky dark one, he was a good-natured fellow, cheerful unless taunted, but slow, tongue-tied, aimless. Even at thirty he had been unable to see what sort of life he was to lead. It was as if something in him had understood that no decision was really required of him. The accident up ahead would settle that side of things.

When Fran first came to the house it was with one of the others. She had been Jonathon's girl. But in time the very qualities that had impressed her in Jonathon, the assurance he had of being so much cleverer than others, his sense of his own power and charm, appeared gross. They got on her nerves in a house where everyone was clever, and shouted and pushed for room.

An outsider herself, never quite sure that Madge approved of her and whether to Audley she was anything more than an angry mouse, she had seen Clem as a fellow sufferer among them and decided it was her role to save him. From Them. She would take him away, where he could shine with his own light. “There, you see,” she wanted to tell them, "you have been harbouring a prince among you.”

“You're making a grave mistake,” Madge warned her once while they were in the kitchen washing up.

“Oh?” she had replied, furiously drying. “Am I?”

The marriage lasted two years.

After being at passionate cross-purposes for a year, they lived a cat and dog life for another, each struggling for supremacy, then separated. But when Fran got back from her year in Greece they had begun to see one another again, locked in an odd dependency. She was adventurous, what she wanted was experience, "affairs.” Clem was the element in her life that was stable. And after his accident, she became the one person with whom he felt entirely whole.

“So,” she demanded now, "what do they say about me turning up like this?” "They" meant Madge and Audley.

She had her bare feet up on a chair, a straw hat over her eyes. She looked, Angie thought, wonderfully stylish and free.

“Nothing. They wouldn't say anything to me.”

“Huh!”

Fran pushed the hat back, screwed her nose up, and squinted against the glare off the sea.

They were friends. When Fran first appeared all those years ago — Angie was already a young wife, Fran then just another of the hangers-on — they had been wary of one another; they were so unalike.

She thinks I'm bossy, like them, Fran had told herself. A know-all. A skite.

She thinks, Angie had thought, that I'm a dope.

But then they became sisters-in-law and found common cause. Angie, with Fran to lead her, discovered how much stronger her resentments were now that she had someone to share them. She admired Fran's fierce sense of humour, was bemused by her assumption that being honest gave her the right to be cruel. Fran, when she wearied, as she often did, of her own intensity, was drawn to Angie's stillness, her capacity to just sit among all that Tyler ebullience and remain self-contained.

When they were alone together Fran made a game of her rage, doing imitations of Audley's voice and manner and little turns of phrase that kept them in a state of exhausted hilarity. But Angie could never quite free herself of a feeling of discomfort, of something like impiety, when Fran took her flair for mockery too far.

The fact was that for all his peculiarities, Audley was without doubt the most remarkable person she had ever known. On this point she agreed with Ralph. Then, too, there was something in him, a side of his odd, contradictory nature, that Fran had no feeling for and for which she had coined the “Doctor Creeps.” But it was just this quality in him that Angie felt most connected to, since she recognised in it something of herself. When Fran mocked it she felt the opening between them of a dispiriting gap, a failure of sympathy on Fran's part that must include herself as well.

Angie's darkness was inherited. The Depression was already a decade past when she was born, but she had grown up with it just the same. In her parents’ house it had never ended; they were still waiting for the axe to fall. She had married to break free of that cramped and fearful world and had been surprised, when her father-in-law engaged her with a sorrowful look that said, Ah, we know, don't we, that even among the Tylers there was this pocket of the darkly familiar.

Audley had ways of disguising his moodiness with bitter jokes and a form of politeness that at times had an edge of the murderous. “Your glass is empty,” he would say to some unsuspecting guest, leaning close and whispering, full of hospitable concern, and Angie would shudder and turn away.

“So,” Fran said, "what's the cast list at this wake? As if I didn't know! Jonathon, Rupe and Di, the Rainbow Serpent—”

Angie laughed.

“God, why did I come? Am I really such a masochist? Well, you'd better not answer that.”

Clem, meanwhile, was with his mother at the pinewood bench in the house, sipping tea from a chipped mug while she chopped and prepared spinach. Madge looked up briefly, then away. The scar across his brow was so marked that all other signs of age seemed smoothed away in him.

“Tell me when I was six, Mum,” he was saying, and he gave a cheery laugh as at an old joke between them. Madge paused, then chopped.

It was a thing he used to say when he was a little lad of nine or so: "Tell me when I was six,” he would say, "when I was four, when I was just born.” It was an obsession with him. But no detail you gave was ever enough to convince him that he really belonged among them.

Madge had had no time for the game then. Too many other questions to answer. And the house, and their homework, and Audley's many visitors. Now she made time. Clem's questions were the same ones he had been asking for nearly thirty years, but these days they had a different edge. Ashamed to reveal how much of his life was a blank, he had become skilful at trapping others into providing the facts he was after. Starting up a conversation or argument with Audley and his brothers, he would turn his head eagerly from one to another of them like a child catching at clues that the grown-ups would give away only by default; or he would begin stories that the others, with their passion for exactitude, would immediately leap to correct.