David Malouf: The Great World

Her fourth war, which she also had to wage in silence, was with this feller Vic. It went back years.

‘So waddazee want?’ she had demanded when he first turned up. ‘Who is ’e?’

Dumb, that was. She knew no better in those days. That wasn’t the way to find out.

‘A bit of a chat.’ That’s all Digger would tell her. ‘’E’s a mate.’

A mate! Men had mates. She had never even had a friend. All she had ever had was Digger, and that’s just what she had against him , this Vic. He butted in. He got between them. He took Digger off.

The first time he turned up she thought he was a ghost, he was that washed-out looking. As pale as potatoes.

‘Who are you?’ she challenged.

He was standing there in an old army coat that fell to his ankles, all chapped and unshaven, with a short back and sides and his blondy hair sticking up in peaks. You could have blown him over with just a puff. She was younger then. Pity she hadn’t done it and got him out of the way once and for all, and saved herself the next forty years. He would have gone over like ninepins.

‘I’m Vic,’ he said, as if he expected her to know.

If he wasn’t a ghost she didn’t know him from Adam.

She looked at him hard and saw that for all his being such a tuppence worth of God-help-us he was pretty keen on himself. ‘Digger about?’ he asked, casting little looks around and ignoring her.

‘Of course ’e’s about,’ she snapped. ‘’E’s off somewhere.’ She jerked her head towards the river, not to be too specific (let him do his own finding), and stood with her hands shoved down into the pockets of her cardigan and watched him trudge off with his ears sticking out and the coat hanging from his thin shoulders. She knew where Digger was, all right. He was out the back.

‘So waddazee want?’ she demanded when Digger appeared at last and saw him mooching about there under the she-oaks. She wasn’t going to be fobbed off with this business about mates. ‘What’s ’e after?’

Digger’s face clouded and he was a long time replying. ‘Nothing much,’ he said, his eyes away there. He didn’t seem all that anxious to go down and meet him.

‘Listen, Dig,’ she had said, lowering her voice, ‘I could get ridduv ’im.’

‘No,’ Digger said after a minute. ‘He’s all right. He’s a mate.’

He went down across the yard, ducking under the line, that was low on its props, to where the fellow in the coat had turned and could see him. He looked so forlorn there, for all his tallness, that she might have felt sorry for him; but she had sensed something in him, first thing at the door, that made her wary. He was stronger than he let on.

She watched them face one another.

They stood a long way apart. Digger was nodding his head and she could tell from the pitch of his shoulders what his eyes would be like; he was an open book, Digger. Then he moved, touched this Vic very lightly on the shoulder and they turned away together under the she-oaks.

She couldn’t tell at that distance whether they were talking or just sitting in silence.

If it was talk it had the tense, quivering quality of long silence.

She was a pretty good judge of silence. If you lived with Digger you had to be.

Since then he had been turning up on a regular basis every three or four months — till these last weeks.

It was always the same. Digger afterwards would be as silent as the grave; he couldn’t be reached, you couldn’t get through to him. She’d flop about like a wounded bird, not knowing what to say or do that would bring him back to the table or into the house even, he’d got so far off. She would try to be quiet with the dishes, but each time her hands let her down and they would clash and bang. When he laid his knife and fork down and went out, she would watch him wandering about there in the moonlight, walking up and down under the clothesline, lost in himself.

Digger had other visitors, also mates, but they didn’t affect him the way Vic did, and they didn’t come so often. That’s what she had against him.

Ern, one was called. Another was a jolly, one-armed fellow called Douggy Bramson. He was the one she felt easiest with. For one thing, he had a bit of conversation and wasn’t afraid to share it with you, he enjoyed a joke. Then there was the sleeve tucked up neatly with a pin; it aroused a soft feeling in her. Something missing. She tried not to look at it but couldn’t help herself. Douggy understood that and didn’t mind. Once, when he caught her at it, he winked.

Douggy kept poultry out at Regent’s Park, near Parramatta. He always turned up with a dressed chook.

They were Digger’s mates from away back. She knew that much because old times was what they talked about while they downed a pot of tea and a couple of pikelets. Hovering about behind them, fetching butter or strawberry jam, she would pick up snatches of what they had to say: names, odd bits of stories. She tried to keep the names in her head in case one day the men who owned them turned up, but they never did.

Mac was one name. Jack Gard was another. Jack Gard had eaten forty-two boiled eggs once at a show up near Tenterfield, and Ern told this story pretty well every time he came. He laughed each time as if the story was new and the others hadn’t heard it, and said, ‘Can you credit that? Forty-two bloody hard-boiled eggs at a single go. Waddaya think a’ that, eh Missus?’

He was noisy, Ern, but Douggy was the one who asked for more pikelets and told her how good they were.

Once or twice what they talked of was the great world.

Occasionally, too, the name that came up was Vic’s. She pricked her ears up then, eager to hear some bit of information about him that Digger hadn’t told; but they had none, or only what she knew already: that he was a big noise out there.

‘Seen Vic lately?’ they’d say, ‘Vic Curran? — Oh, ’e’s been down again, has ’e, t’ see ya? Good.’

They knew nothing more than she did. They were fishing for information. They waited, so did she, for Digger to come across with something, but he never did.

He could drive you wild, Digger, with his secrets and his silences. She had learned to live with it. Sitting quietly together over a cup of tea, around nine say with the table cleared and Digger working on some bit of a thing he was fixing, leaning close up to it with his glasses on the end of his nose while she got on with her knitting, she would find his voice in her head, and so clear that she automatically answered it. But when she looked up he was lost in his work. He hadn’t spoken. Or if he had it was without thinking.

Still, there were times when he did speak up, and abruptly enough to startle her. ‘You and me and Billy —’ he would say with the hint of a laugh in his voice, and she would jump right out of her skin.

‘What?’ she’d say. ‘What Billy?’

There was a Billy, only she didn’t think Digger knew about him. Billy the Rigger. Once, years back, she had gone off to Brisbane with him.

‘ You know.’

‘Do I?’

‘I told you. Our brother Billy.’

‘Oh. Him .’

He would have a story then, one of the little incidents of their childhood that he recalled and she did not, though she was three years older. Involving a tyre their father had rigged up under the pepper tree as a swing — he would have been two years old then, could he really remember these things? — or a shoebox full of silkworms, and as he described it she would begin to hear again the rustling of them and see the fat little creatures, all silvery but with darker feet, lifting their heads as they munched and moved about among the leaves; feel the breath too of a smaller kid on the back of her neck. Was that Billy?