David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Never seemed t’ know where ‘e was half the time. You'd think a boarding-house at Dutton Park ‘d impress itself on anyone, but not him. ‘Chicago,’ ‘e says, ‘the gangsters!’ God knows what sort of things ‘e'd been through— over there —I mean, you can't tell, can you? You look at a bloke jus’ sittin’ there an’ you can't tell. There's a lot of misery about. You've only got t’ go into some o’ them boarding-houses and see what blokes ‘ave got in ports under their beds. Old newspapers, bottles, stones. It'd surprise you. It'd surprise anyone.”

Gerry listened to Claude's tales. They were interesting but he could make nothing of them; they appeared to tell more than they told. There was a quality in Claude's voice that asked for something more than interest, and it was just this that Gerry resisted. He wanted Claude to be the foreman, only that, and preferred the dour but dignified silence of the other men, who if they had stories to tell kept them entirely to themselves.

The hut where Claude lived was divided by a partition into sleeping-quarters and storeroom. On one wall of the storeroom there were tools, very neatly arranged on hooks. They might have borne labels and been mistaken at first sight for a wall display in a folk museum, or for the elaborate fan shapes and sunbursts that native weapons assume when they have been stripped of their power of violence and become flowerlike— till you examine the points.

“I like t’ see things in their place,” Claude explained. “Order at a glance.” And he glanced up from where he was sitting at a desk doing McPhearson's accounts.

He wore half-glasses and was peering over the straight tops of them. It made his eyes a weaker blue and gave him, for all his toughness, a scholarly look, like a failed monk. To his left were heavy ledgers, and immediately before him a pile of accounts waiting to be pushed down hard on a spike. Beyond, at the far end of the room, which was dark, Gerry could see the shelves of foodstuff — jars, tins, packets — from which Claude provided the ingredients for their meals, including a whole shelf of Claude's own homemade chutney.

Claude had surprised Gerry the first time he went there by what seemed like an act of disloyalty.

“Here,” he had offered impetuously, "have a jar of peanut paste. On the house! McPhearson won't miss it. He's swimmin’ in peanut paste that man. An’ smoked salmon, they tell me.” And when Gerry politely refused: "What about a packet a’ Band-Aids?”

Claude shrugged his shoulders and looked disappointed, and Gerry was left with a puzzle. The foreman was strict but inconsistent.

As for the other side of the partition, where Claude slept, Gerry saw that only once, when Claude cut his leg, bled badly, and sent him off to get a fresh pair of shorts. There were cuttings from newspapers pinned to the bare boards — racehorses — and on the desk a box of old stereopticon plates that Claude had already told him about and promised to show: pictures from round the world. “You can stand right at the edge and see the waters of Niagara come thunderin’ down — I tell yer, it's marvellous. I've stood there f ‘ hours and even heard the noise of it. Imagined that, of course. The pyramids, the Taj Mahal, George the Fifth's Jubilee — you name it! A man can go round the world in ‘is head with one a’ these stereopticons, and it don't cost a brass razoo.”

Gerry had looked round the narrow room, tried to make something of it — tried to make Claude of it — but saw nothing more than he already knew. He thought of his own room at home. He was untidy and his mother complained, but did his disorder reveal any more of what was going on in his head than Claude's fastidious habit of setting everything in its place? He had been able to tell Gerry, even through the pain of his wound, just where those clean shorts would be: in the second drawer to the left. Gerry had gone straight to them.

One day Claude came down to where he was working and asked him to go to town on a message. The town was twelve miles away. He was to go on Claude's two-stroke and deliver a letter. Claude drew a rough map of the town, showed him where the house was, and gave him very precise instructions about how he should open the gate, go up the four steps, and ring the doorbell — three long rings and then, after a pause, two short ones. “Like this,” Claude explained, tapping it out on a metal cup. He was to leave the motorbike in the main street and go the rest of the way — it wasn't more than a hundred yards — on foot. Claude emphasized that he was putting great trust in the boy, and embarrassed perhaps by the air of mystery he had created, suggested that Gerry needn't hurry back; he could take time off if he wanted to have a milkshake at the Greek's. The message was in a plain white envelope with neither name nor address.

The ride into town was a pleasant one. After three weeks of work Gerry was happy to have this time away, to feel released into his own body again and to be made free of the landscape and of the hot summer day.

The early part of the trip was rough. A narrow trail led upwards between thick-set pines. But he emerged at last on to a high rolling plateau where the clouds rode close overhead, struck a gravel road, then two miles before the town a stretch of bitumen. He opened his shirt and took the full thrust of the air. Crossing bridges over dry streams he heard the sound they made as he rattled across them, the slog slog slog of concrete balusters, a regular beating in his ear, and remembered the different rhythm — three longs, a pause and two shorts — that Claude had tapped out on the cup. Its meaning didn't concern him. It was Claude's business, or maybe it was McPhearson's. He was a messenger. He felt extraordinarily light-hearted. Perhaps because this was the first occasion in so long that he had been on his own, but also because, small as it might be, he was being entrusted with something. He had recently discovered, in the furthest reaches of himself, a capacity for what he thought of as noble action and was concerned now that it should find its proper form in the world; that when the occasion arose (as it surely must) that would demand the full stretch of his powers, he would recognise and meet it.

The problem of course was in the recognition. He was inexperienced but not romantic, and had perceived clearly enough that heroic occasions do not come ready-made, that they spring into existence only when they are grasped. You would need imagination as well as pluck. Two years ago he might have seen himself through drifts of gun-smoke bearing the colours, or as a dispatch-rider in one of the wars, vaulting shell holes on a BSA. But the next occasion wouldn't be like it, and any moment, even the most commonplace, might be either the call or the first step towards it. You had to be on the alert, and believe that when the opportunity came you would be ready for it.

All this was part of his most secret life. He let it out now that he was alone and flaring along a bitumen road — in the open air, under leaves, in sunlight; and all the more because for the last weeks he had held back, and tried among the others to seem acceptable, ordinary.

He came into the town over a bridge. Kids were swimming in the last of the season's water, among thick willows. He stopped the bike halfway across, and still easily astride it, leaned over the railings to watch. Slim bodies swung out on a knotted rope and went flying head-over-heels, their cries cut off in a splash. The sight pleased him. He was just out of that stage himself and might have allowed himself to regret it, but had set himself in the direction of manhood. He rode on into town, parked the bike, and was thirsty enough after his ride to consider going straight to the Greek's. But no, he told himself, Duty first. I'll deliver the message and have the milkshake afterwards.