David Malouf - The Complete Stories

What we dare not do ourselves, he found himself thinking, they do for us, the housebreakers, the muggers, the smashers, the grab merchants. When we punish them it is to hide our secret guilt. There is ancient and irreconcilable argument in us between settlement and the spirit of the nomad, between the makers of order and our need to give ourselves over at moments to the imps and demons, to the dervish dance of what is in the last resort dust. We are in love with what we most fear and hide from, death. And there came into his head some lines of a poem he had read, composed of course by one of the unsettled:

And yet, there is only

one great thing,

the only thing:

to live to see, in huts and on journeys,

the great day that dawns,

the light that fills the world.

As for the objects in there, brilliantly alive for a moment in the last of what had been their structure and about to fall into themselves as ash— the dining table with its set and empty places, each occupied now by an eddy of flame, the writhings on the double bed, the glass cases exploding and tossing their rocks back into the furnace of time — what was that but a final sacrifice, like his bones, to the future and its angels, whose vivid faces are turned towards us but with sealed lips?

He glanced sideways, feeling an eye upon him.

It was Lily. Tilted at a precarious angle on her stick, her silks all flame, her twist of a smile saying: Don't think I can't see right through you, Audley Tyler, you sorrowful old hypocrite.

He too must have been smiling. She pitched a little and, using her stick to right herself, dipped her shoulder in acknowledgement and turned away.

There is no hope, he told himself, that's what the old know, that's our secret. It is also our hope, our salvation.

It was then that he remembered Tommy. Searching among the nearby crowd, he found him standing a little way off to the left, his face gleaming with sweat. He was watching along with the rest, and as always seeing the thing, the fire in this case, out of another history.

Audley, touched, went across and laid a hand on his old friend's shoulder. They had been through so much together, he and this old man, over the years. Battles won and lost; the night, which might so easily have divided them, of Clem's accident. They looked at one another, but only briefly, then stood side by side without speaking and went on gazing into the fire.

8

“LISTEN,“ Clem said, "listen, everybody. I want to say something.”

They were a small group now, seated on the coarse-bladed lawn with just the lights from the house falling on them through the open windows, only one or two among them, Audley, Lily, in deck chairs; Barney Shannon lay full-length with his hands folded on his chest, but not sleeping. Subdued, each one, by the recent event, which no one referred to, but also by the overwhelming presence, at this hour, now that the music had packed up and they had run out of talk, of the moon, running full-tilt against a bank of fast-moving clouds, and by the bush, so dense and alive with sound, and down in the cove, the sea breaking. Clem could not have said which of these things moved him most. They were all connected.

The day was over, past, if what you meant by that was time strictly measured — it was past midnight. But what he meant by it was the occasion, though that too might end if one of them now made the move, got up and said: "Well, I'm off,” “Let's call it a day,” “Me for the blanket show.” The group would break up then, and these last ones, the survivors, would go to join those who were already curled up in bunks and sleeping bags on their way to the next thing. Tomorrow. He wanted to forestall that. Something more was needed. Something had to be said. And if no one else was ready to say it, then it was up to him. He felt their eyes upon him, and saw Audley's look of disquiet and shook his head, meaning to reassure him: Don't worry, Dad, I know what I'm doing. It's all right.

He felt confident. The words were there, he still had hold of them. And these were friends, people he loved, who would understand if what he said went astray and did not come out the way he meant. Their faces, which just a moment ago had seemed weary and at an end, were expectant. A light of alertness and curiosity was in them, a rekindling.

“Listen,” he said, "this is what I want to say.

“Out there — out there in space, I mean — there's a kind of receiver. Very precise it is, very subtle — refined. What it picks up, it's made that way, is heartbeats, just that. Every heartbeat on the planet, it doesn't miss a single one, not one is missed. Even the faintest, it picks it up. Even some old person left behind on the track, too weak to go on, just at their last breath. Even a baby in its humidicrib.” He took a breath, growing excited now. He had to control the spit in his mouth as well as the sentences. But he had their attention, it did not matter that one or two of them were frowning and might wonder if he was all there.

“Once upon a time, all this bit of the planet, all this — land mass, this continent — was silent, there was no sound at all, you wouldn't have known it was here. Silence. Then suddenly a blip, a few little signs of life. Not many. Insects, maybe, then frogs, but it was registering their presence. The receiver was turned towards it and tuned in and picked them up. Just those few heartbeats. What a weak little sound it must have been, compared with India for instance or China, or Belgium even — that's the most crowded spot. How could anyone know how big it was with so few heartbeats scattered across it? But slowly others started to arrive, just a few at first, rough ones, rough — hearts — then a rush, till now there are millions. Us, I mean, the ones who are here tonight. Now. There's a great wave of sound moving out towards it, a single hum, and the receiver can pick up each one, each individual beat in it, this one, that one — that's how it's been constructed, that's what it's fixed to do. Only it takes such a long time for the sound to travel across all that space that the receiver doesn't even know as yet that we've arrived — us whites, I mean. Our heartbeats haven't even got there yet.

But that doesn't matter—" he laughed, it was going “—because we are here, aren't we? Others were here, now they're gone. But their heartbeats are still travelling out. Even though they stopped ages ago, they're still travelling. It doesn't matter one way or the other, which people, the living or the dead, it's all the same. Or whether they're gone now or still here like us. The birds too. You can feel the way their hearts beat when you pick one up, even when it's still in the shell. And rabbits. What I think is—" he prepared now for his “—is this. If we imagined ourselves out there and concentrated hard enough, really concentrated, we could hear it too, all of it, the whole sound coming towards us, all of it. It's possible. Anything is possible. Nothing is lost. Nothing ever gets lost”

He looked about, their attention was on him. And suddenly there was nothing more to say.

“That's all,” he said abruptly, "that's all I wanted to say. Because of what day it is. You know, because of that. Because no one had said anything. So I did.”

He smiled nervously but felt pleased with himself. He felt good about things. He grinned, gave a little laugh, then sat on the grass and saw that they were all smiling, except for Audley, who always had a few tears on these occasions. But that was all right. It was good. Only he wished that Fran had still been here. She had left half an hour ago and that put a damper on his heart, but not so much of a one. That was all right too. They could go to bed now. He could. They all could. The day was over.