David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“You should ask Audley,” Madge told him now, turning her eyes from his glowing face. “He's the archive.”

“But I want you to tell me.”

She paused, looked at the worn handle of her knife. “You were a strange little lad,” she began after a moment.

He laughed. “How was I strange?”

“You had this knitted beanie you liked to wear.”

“What colour?”

“Red. It was a snow cap, in fact, though we never went near the snow. It looked like a tea-cosy. It was too big for you, but you wouldn't go anywhere without it. It made you look like a sort of mad elf. If I said no, you'd rage at me.”

“What would I say?”

“I can't remember what you'd say. Just the look of you.”

“Was this when I was six?”

“Five, six, something like that.”

“Go on.”

“Ralph used to refuse to go out with you. My God, what a pair you were! People will look, he'd tell me, they'll think he's a dill.”

“Was I?”

“No, of course you weren't. You were just a funny little boy.” She paused and looked at him. “Don't you remember any of this, Clem?”

“No,” he said happily. “It's all news to me.”

He wasn't a dill. He had, in fact, been an intense, old-fashioned little fellow, but with a form of intelligence that wasn't quick like the others— a sign, perhaps, an early one, of a relationship to the world that was to be obscure and difficult and a life that was not to shoot forward in a straight line but would move by missteps and indirections through all those crazes taken up and dropped again that had filled a cupboard with abandoned roller-skates, a saxophone, a microscope and slides, all the gear for scuba diving. He looked down now, embarrassed by what he had to ask, but hitched his shoulders and plunged in.

“Did you and Dad love me?”

His voice was painfully urgent, but what struck her, as she clutched the knife to her breast, was his odd, dislocated cheerfulness. She closed her eyes.

There were times, years back, when they were all shouting and clutching at her skirt, when she would, for just a second, close her eyes like this and pretend they were not there, that they had succumbed to lockjaw or whooping-cough, or had never found the way through her to their voices and demanding little fists. It was restful. She could rest in the emptiness of herself, but only for a second. Immediately struck with guilt, she would catch up the littlest of them and smother him with kisses, till he felt the excessiveness of it and fought her off.

“What's it like,” some silly young woman had once asked her, one of the hangers-on, "to live in a house full of boys?”

She had given one of her straight answers: "The lavatory seat is always up.”

Now, opening her eyes again, she looked at Clem, at the darkness of his brow, and said, "Of course we did. Do. How could we help it?” He stared at her with his blue eyes, so clear that they could see right through you. “You were Audley's favourite — always. You know that. If he was hard on you sometimes it was because he was afraid of his own feelings, you know how he is. Of being swept away.”

“I thought I was a disappointment to him.”

“Maybe. Maybe that too. Things get mixed up. Nothing's just one thing. You know that.”

He nodded, fixing his eyes on her, very intent, an alert seven-year-old, as if there was something more to what she was saying than the words themselves expressed, some secret about Life, the way the world is, that he would some day catch and make use of.

“Ah, here's your father,” she said, relieved at the promise of rescue. Audley was coming up the track between the banksias.

Clem immediately leapt to his feet. Hurling himself through the wire-screen door and down the steps, he flung his arms around his father, clasping him so tight that Audley, with his head thrown back and his arms immobilised, had the look of a black-suited peg-doll. “Clem,” he said, clutching at his glasses, but allowing himself to be danced about as Clem hung on and shouted: "It's me, Dad, I'm so glad to see you!”

3

MOSEYINGabout on the slope beyond the house in swimming trunks, sneakers, and a green tennis-shade, Ned glimpsed through the trees a party of interlopers. Stopped on the stony track, among blackboys and leopard gums that had been blackened the summer before by a bushfire, they were gathered in a half-circle round a charred stump.

Slipping from tree to tree like a native, Ned began to stalk them. There were six adults and some children.

The men, who were young, wore jeans and T-shirts, except for one with hair longer than the others and tied with a sweatband, who wore a singlet and had tattoos. They carried sleeping bags, an esky, and the man with the tattoos had a ghetto-blaster. Two of the women carried babies.

Ned manoeuvred himself into a better position to see what it was that had stopped them.

An echidna, startled by their footfalls on the track, had turned in towards the foot of the stump and, with its spines raised, was burrowing into the ashes and soft earth, showing a challenge, but pretending, since it could not see them, that it was invisible.

“What is it?” one of the women was asking.

“Porcupine,” one of the men told her, and the man with the tattoos corrected him: "Echidna.”

“Gary, come away,” the other woman said, and she hauled out a boy of five or six who was dressed as a space invader and carried a plastic ray-gun.

Ned, very quietly, squatted, took a handful of ashes, and smeared them over his cheeks, forehead, and neck, then took another and smeared his chest.

If I was really a native, he thought, and had a spear, I could drive them off. They don't even know I'm here.

It pleased him that while they had their eyes on the echidna, which was only pretending to be invisible, he had his eye on them and really was invisible, camouflaged with earth and ashes and moving from one to another of the grey and grey-black trunks like a spirit of the place. He was filled with the superior sense of belonging here, of knowing every rock and stump on this hillside as if they were parts of his own body. These others were tourists.

They were on their way to the beach. You could not legally stop them — the land along the shore was public, it belonged to everyone— but this headland and the next as well belonged to Audley and would one day be Ralph's, then his. He felt proprietorial, but responsible too. As soon as the party had moved on, he went and checked on the echidna, which was still burrowing. When he stepped out on to the track again he was surprised to find the space invader there, a sturdy, dark-headed kid with freckles.

“Hi,” the boy said cheerfully. “We're gunna have a bonfire, you can come if you like. My name's Gary, I'm six.”

Ned was furious. It hurt his pride that he had been crept up on and surprised. He was disarmed for a moment by the boy's friendliness and lack of guile, but affronted by his presumption. It wasn't his place to offer invitations here.

The boy meanwhile was regarding him with a frown. “You know what?” he said at last, "you've got stuff all over your face.”

“I know,” Ned told him sharply, "I don't need you to tell me,” and he began to walk away. The space invader followed.

“Don't go,” he shouted, as Ned, arms stiffly at his side, his body pitched forward at an odd, old-mannish angle, began to stride away downhill. “We got sausages. D'you like sausages? We got plenty.”

Ned walked faster.

“We got watermelon, we got cherry cheesecake. Hey, boy,” he shouted, "don't go away. My name's Gary, I already told you. What's yours?”

He was trotting after Ned on his plump little legs. “Hey,” he panted, when he finally caught up, "why are we walking so fast?”