David Malouf - The Great World

Another time it was a different terminus: New Farm Park. She sat on a bench this time among the rosebushes and a feller come up and started talking to her very fast and with a lot of spit, but kind really. He put his arm round her. He was a bit smelly. Grog. Then he put his wet mouth to her ear, which wasn’t as bad as Sister Francis’s fist, and whispered something dirty; then shoved his hand up her skirt. It was no good her saying anything. But when some people come past she got up quickly and followed them, but turned after a minute to look back.

He was still sitting on the bench. He looked at her like he was ready to cry — he was that disappointed — and she thought, ‘Well, I might as well let him have what he wants, poor bugger, why not?’ He looked that hopeless. Wanting something and seeing you take it away.

She walked back, sat beside him, and they spent a while sleeping in tram-sheds and that. It wasn’t too bad. But when he got on the grog he bashed her about, just like Sister Francis, and called her a dummy, so she went back.

It wasn’t the fear of being alone out there that took her back each time. It was all the hands, even in a crowd of strangers, that kept reaching out to grab or squeeze or pinch or turn themselves into fists and go smash at you. Some of those hands, she knew, might be gentle, but you couldn’t take the risk. Even if they started off gentle, you never knew when they were going to switch. So she went back.

She could have tried a different tram (there were lots), to some other terminus. But she’d already seen two and two was sufficient. She didn’t reckon Ashgrove or Enoggera would have been any better. Or Kalinga or The Grange. So she stuck, and then one day Digger appeared and said, ‘I’ve talked to the boss here, the Mother, and you c’n come back home,’ and that was it. Digger too had been shut up somewhere and had got out — she didn’t know where.

So that was all she had actually seen .

But it was so astounding that it stopped her breath even now just to think of it. The terror of what was possible out there, the cruelty of some people, and how helpless you were once they got stuck into you. You don’t need all that much experience . Two seconds flat and she’d got to the end of her own power to bear it, that was the point. There’s nothing more.

The difference between her and Digger was that Digger had not . He’d never come up against whatever it was, out there, that could utterly flatten him.

‘That sister of yours is a hard nut to crack,’ Vic had said once in the early days, when he still had some hope of winning her over.

‘Yairs, well — she’s got a mind of her own,’ Digger told him. ‘I wouldn’ worry about Jenny.’

But he did.

Today, as she bashed the crockery about — ‘There, that’s yours, mister!’ — she kept fixing her eye on him. She had something on her mind.

They sipped their tea and she was still looking. At last, in her abrupt way, she came out with it.

‘Hey,’ she said, cutting right across something Digger was saying, ‘what’ve you done with that little kiddie?’

When they failed to catch on she got furious and shouted.

‘The one you come with!’

It was Digger who saw what she meant.

‘Jenny love,’ he told her, trying to pass it off, ‘that was ages ago, you know that. That was Greg.’ He shot a glance at Vic. ‘He’s grown up. Ages ago.’

That little feller with the sticky fingers that she’d given a lolly to? She couldn’t believe it. How could he? She felt a real dill. Ages, Digger said.

It was true she hadn’t seen him, or even thought of him, for a bit. But ages! And in just that little while he’d grown up into someone. ‘Who?’ she wondered, and was about to ask but thought better of it.

But she felt sad. Something in the news put a real damper on her. Something she had been looking forward to she knew now she would never have.

She glanced up. And that Vic had the oddest look on his face, like there was suddenly nothing to him. Like something, some one , some Sister Francis, had loomed up out of nowhere and king-hit him. She saw right through him to that feller in the long overcoat who had come looking for Digger the first time, nothing to him, thin, pale as potatoes, and she found herself thinking, in spite of herself, ‘You poor bugger! Now what’s gone wrong with you ?’

THE BASIN WAS enamel, white, chipped black at the rim. In the year his mother died Vic brought it to her three and sometimes four times a day. When he was at school or out playing one of their neighbours did it.

He held it close and in the early days had had to turn away not to be sick himself. But there was no escaping the smell of it or the sounds she made as the last strength was torn from her. ‘I’m sorry, love, I’m sorry,’ she would murmur over and over.

When he had cleaned up some of the mess he would carry the basin out and empty it in a place in the yard that was all rusty cans, chop-bones and bleached pippies and crab-shells, then kick sand over it, turning his head away in disgust and taking quick gulps of air that had a taste of coal-dust in it.

The yard backed on to barren dunes. The rise behind was always on the move. There was a time, not so long ago, when he had had a rabbit cage out here, but it was gone now, yards back under the dune. There had even, further back, been a couple of trees. He remembered climbing them. He wondered sometimes how long it would be till their whole house was covered. He would lie at night hearing the wind and the individual grains rolling. The great white slope of a wave would rise up and break in his sleep, come trickling first through the cracks in the walls, then press hard against the windows till they fell with a crash and sand came pouring over their table and chairs and the rafters caved in and the whole hill went over them. He would be fighting to get above it.

The shack they lived in was just one room knocked up out of timber, old packing cases mostly, and patched with fibro and corrugated iron — anything his father had been able to scavenge.

There was a dunny behind, and for privacy a curtain his mother had sewn out of bags.

Their neighbours down here were all squatters like them, families that in one way or another had got into trouble and been evicted. It was four years since they had lived in a proper house, in a street with fences between the yards and a number on the gate. Number 6 , Marlin Street.

He swilled the basin with water from their tank, once, twice, then went in and sponged her brow with a damp cloth; then poured water so she could clean her mouth.

‘You’re a good kid, Vic,’ she would whisper as he settled her pillow. It was grey and stiff with dirt. ‘You’re all a mother could wish for.’

He did all he could for her. Sitting beside her on a butter-box, he read the books that one of their neighbours, Mrs Webb, got from the library behind Williams’ store. At nine he was an excellent reader. He hardly ever stumbled over the words.

When he slipped away to play cricket with the other kids in the hour before dark, he would pause a moment and bury his nose in the sleeve of his jumper.

That smell — ingrained dirt, coal-dust, salt from the sea, mutton-fat, sour milk — he loathed it! Stripped to the waist in their outhouse, with a cake of Sunlight soap and a scrubbing-brush, he would punish his flesh till it was raw, but the smell persisted. It was a condition, like a disease, and went so deep you couldn’t get at it; or like character, or family features. It was their smell, them . Whatever the ads said, it was beyond the power of Sunlight.