David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Ned swivelled. “You piss off,” he said from a height.

The boy looked at him as if he might be about to burst into tears, and when Ned turned and started off again, did not follow.

“Ralph!” Ned shouted as soon as he was in sight of the house, "there's a whole heap of people up there going to make a bonfire. Can they?”

Ralph, hearing the note of hysteria in his voice, was tempted to laugh, but Ned was quick to take offence and Ralph was touched, as he often was, by the boy's intense concern about things. He was always in a blaze about something — the Americans in Nicaragua, what the Libs were up to in the Senate. Keeping his own voice even, he said: "Well, it's a free country, Ned. They can have a bonfire if they want. So long as they're careful.”

Ned huffed. He had hoped his father might be more passionate. “Well, I'm going to tell Audley,” he announced. He stalked off.

Audley was on the phone in the sitting room. All morning he had been receiving congratulatory messages, most of them from people who would later be at the party. He stood hunched and with his head bowed, murmuring politenesses into the mouthpiece while, with his eyes screwed up in acute distress, he did a little stamping dance on the carpet and tugged with his free hand at a button on his vest.

Ned waited impatiently; then, when the call went on longer than he had expected, sprawled in an armchair and took up a magazine. At last Audley replaced the receiver. He stood a moment, looking gravely down. Ned, who was still all eagerness and anger, held back.

He was impressed by this grandfather of his, and not only by his reputation; also by the sense he gave, with his deep reserve, of being worthy of it.

Audley was on all occasions formal. Ned liked that. He had a hunger for order that the circumstances of his life frustrated. He wished that Angie and Ralph, whom he otherwise approved of in every way, would insist a little more on the rules. He would have liked to call “sir,” as kids did on TV. But everything around them was very free and easy — maybe because Ralph, when he was younger, had been a hippie.

“How are you, Ned?” Audley said at last, but went on standing, deep in thought. He might have been out in a paddock somewhere, having got there, Ned thought, without even noticing, on one of his walks.

“Audley,” he began, very quietly, but Audley was startled just the same.

“Ah,” he said, "Ned!”

Ned went on bravely: "Do you know there are people on the headland? They want to make a bonfire.”

He watched for Audley's reaction, which did not come, and was surprised how the urgency had gone out of the question, not just out of his voice, which he lowered out of consideration for Audley, but out of what he felt. He had taken on, without being aware of it, some of Audley's subdued gravity.

Audley seemed not to have heard the question. Putting his hand on Ned's head in a gentle, affectionate way, he stood looking down at the boy. “So what do you think of today, eh, Ned?”

Ned was confused. He knew what Audley thought because it was what Ralph thought as well. They were to be non-participants in the national celebrations. “Not wet-blankets,” Ralph had insisted. “If these fellers want an excuse for a good do, I'm not the one to deny them, but it's just another day like any other really, when we've got to get along with one another and keep an eye on the shop.”

It was a view that did not appeal to Ned. It was unheroic. He would, if it could be done with honour, have gone out and waved a flag. He wanted time to have precise turning-points that could be marked and remembered.

“Well,” Audley said now, and turned aside. Ned slumped in his chair. Dissatisfied on that question as on the one he himself had put.

This is how it always is, he raged to himself. They like things left up in the air. They never want anything settled.

Later that morning,and again in the afternoon, he went back to the headland to see what those people were up to.

The first time, the four men, stripped to their bathers, were playing football on the wet beach, making long rugby passes and shouting, tackling, scuffing up sand.

Three of them were hefty fellows with thickened shoulders and thighs. The fourth, the long-haired one who had previously worn a singlet, was slimmer and fast. They were all very white as if they never saw the sun, except that the slim one with the tattoos had a work-tan on his neck and arms that made him look as if he was still wearing the singlet, only now it was cleaner.

The boy was down at the shoreline dragging a wet stick. The two women, lying head to toe opposite one another in the shade, were waving off flies from the babies, who were asleep. They were talking, and every now and then one of them gave a throaty laugh. Ned sat for a long time watching.

When he went back the second time the men were dressed and their hair was wet. They had been surfing and were busy now constructing a bonfire, shouting to one another across great stretches of air and energetically competing to see who could drag out the longest branch and heave it crosswise on to the pile. They laughed a lot and every second word “fuck.”

The two women, each with a child on her hip, were walking along the edge of the tide, almost in silhouette at this hour against the wet sand, which was lit with rays of sunlight that shot out from under the clouds. Oyster-catchers were running away fast from their feet.

Once again he sat for a long time and watched. He wondered how high the bonfire would go before the men tired of hauling dead trees and brush out of the sandhills, and how far, once it was alight, it would be visible out at sea. He admitted now that what he really regretted was that the bonfire was not theirs. It ought to be theirs. The idea of a bonfire on every beach and the whole map of Australia outlined with fire was powerfully exciting to him. The image of it blazed in his head.

He got up and began to walk away, and almost immediately stumbled on the boy, who had been squatting on the slope behind him.

“Hi,” Ned said briskly, and walked on — a kind of reconcilement. It was too late for anything more.

4

UNDERthe influence of his birthday mood, which was sober but good-humoured, and in honour as well of the larger occasion, Audley decided on a walk to town.

He often took such a walk in the afternoon. It helped him think. He could, while strolling along, turn over in his mind the headings of a report he had to write, or prepare one of the speeches that since his retirement were his chief contribution to public life, polishing and repolishing as he walked phrases that would appear on the late-night news bulletins, to be mulled over the morning after by politicians, economists, friends, rivals, and his successors in the various public-service departments he had once had at his command. It was an old trick, this recovery of the harmony between walking pace, our natural andante as he liked to call it, and the rhythms of the mind. “I think best with my kneecaps,” he would tell young reporters, who looked puzzled but scribbled it down just the same. “I recommend it.”

If he didn't feel like walking back he could get a boy from the garage to drive him, or there was always some local, a farmer with his wife and kids or a tradesman with a ute full of barbed wire or paint tins, who would offer him a lift. He was a familiar figure in these parts, traipsing along with his head down, his boots scuffing the dust.

His object was not, as gossip sometimes suggested, the Waruna pub, though he did sometimes drop in there for an hour or so to hear what the locals had to say, but the museum just beyond, the Waruna Folk and History Museum as it was rather grandly called, which was housed in a four-roomed workman's cottage next to the defunct bank.