David Malouf - The Great World

‘That’s all right, Danno,’ one of them would say stiffly, ‘have this one on me.’ A couple of coins on the linoleum would save him then from his own weakness. But after a minute or two he would have an empty glass in front of him and start making up again to his tormentors, since they were more reliable in the long run than the occasional benefactor.

When he got home he would be in a shouting mood. Then suddenly he would break down and weep.

Every stage of this daily drama disgusted Vic and confirmed him in the view that this vicious crybaby who claimed to be his father had nothing to do with him.

The shame of it was that in the early days, when things had not yet come to their worst, when his father was just newly out of work and had time, since he was home all day, to take Vic fishing and tell him stories of the war, they had been mates, and Vic had been inveigled on more than one occasion into going round to the back door of the pub, just on closing time, to fetch a couple of bottles. Jimmy, the Pacific’s barman, would slip them to him and he would get back fast to hear the end of whatever it was his father had been telling. It was a secret between them — Jimmy, his father and himself. The bottles came in loose straw jackets and they went out and burned them quickly in a corner of the yard so that his mother wouldn’t find them, a real blaze. The empty bottles they sent sailing into the dunes.

But Jim Hardy the publican got to hear of it and told his wife, and when she told Vic’s mother, she cried and was angry with him. Didn’t he know, couldn’t he see what was happening?

He did see then. His mother and father, who had always been so lively together, began to have brawls, and in no time at all, or so it seemed, were forever clawing at one another.

‘You’re a bloody wowser,’ he complained when she refused to drink with him. ‘I din’ expect that. I din’ expect you t’ turn into a bloody wowser. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a bloody whingein’ woman an’ a wowser!’

He would come home belligerent now, ready, on a point of honour, to take offence at everything.

‘You shoudn’ be sewin’ for bloody Sam Goddard’s bloody wife,’ he bellowed. ‘ That bitch! Here, gimmee that,’ and he would wrench the bit of work, whatever it was, a skirt to be let down or a new blouse, right out of her hands. If she resisted he would hit her.

Now, when his father tried to get around him, Vic used his elbows to push him off.

‘You git away from me,’ he would hiss, quite prepared to fight if he had to. ‘I won’t do yer scroungin’ for yer.’

He would go out in the dark and sit on the woodpile and look at the axe swung down hard into the block. There would be a breeze from the sea, cooling the sweat on his upper lip, and he would sit there letting it cleanse him.

But when he went back in his mother would say: ‘You oughtn’ta speak to ’im like that, Vic. Don’t think you’re doin’ it for me.’ She would have a cut on her lip or a puffy eye, and still she said it.

He hated that. The way she found excuses and put up with things. He was a fighter. He wanted her to be.

‘Vic, love,’ she told him, ‘you don’t understand these things. Don’t be too hard on me.’

Later, when they thought he was asleep, he would hear them in the double bed. She would be saying his father’s name over and over, gasping it, and with her cut lip kissing and petting him.

He loved her, but her weakness enraged him. When his father flung about with his fists and they were all in a savage moil, shouting and using their shoulders and elbows, he would have given his last breath for her, and was in a frenzy of such rage and blind impotence that he thought he might die of it; of being caught up with them — between them at one moment, at the next outside and beating with his fists to get in, and of shame at being so big for his age and so helpless to do anything.

In the closeness of such moments, when they were all three struggling and shouting, they were like creatures trying to give birth to something, some monster, that’s what he thought, and he saw at last what it was: a murder, that’s what it was. One day soon, as soon as he was strong enough to keep hold of the axe, he would kill this man.

Then his mother took sick. In just weeks she fell away from being a big soft woman to skin and bone. He brought her the basin, and watched her, one hand clutching her side, drag herself from chair to table to doorknob, then across the sandy yard to their dunny. His father was nowhere in sight. Never home now. He had stayed sober for a day or so, right at the start, but now he was drunk from morning to night, though he stayed quiet enough. There was no more shouting. He slunk home after midnight and went to bed in his boots.

Too young to see beyond the immediate horrors, it did not occur to Vic that his father was a man in panic: that what subdued him, drove him deeper into himself, but also kept him away, was an animal terror of what was happening here, the wasting of the big body he had clung to, so that he barely knew it any more, her pain that was like a wild thing in the bed between them, all teeth and claws. He never came near her, that’s all Vic saw. When he did, he couldn’t wait to get away again.

His mother knew what he was thinking. ‘You’re wrong about yer father, Vic,’ she told him, but her voice was no more than a whisper. She was too weak to elaborate.

She died at last. Vic was ten. His father wept and tried to cuddle him. ‘There’s just the two of us now, Vic,’ he said. But Vic was not deceived and offered no sympathy. When his father held on he pulled away.

His own sorrow was overwhelming. He dealt with it. But what feelings he had left over were for himself. He had none for this drunken bully who whined and snivelled and laid claim to him but did nothing but bring them shame.

‘You’re a hard man, Vic,’ the father said bitterly. ‘I wouldn’ wanna be in a world where you was God. God help me if I was. There’s no softness in yer. Not like yer mother.’

He was trying to get around him again. Vic shut his ears.

So long as his mother was there to see it, for her sake, and to set himself at a distance from his father’s slovenliness, since he would do nothing, Vic had tried to keep things in order, wiping the oil-cloth after they ate, rinsing the galvanised iron tub they washed up in, sweeping the floors.

It was hard enough. No matter how often you used the broom there was always a grist of sand under your feet. It settled on the skirting boards and along the windowsills, got between the sheets and scratched when you climbed in. There were always a few grains of it in a teacup when you took it down from its hook.

He had been concerned, in those last weeks, when his mother lay all day in a coma, with her mouth open, that he might come home and find her choked with it, and had nightmares of having to use his fingers to scoop sand out of her throat.

Once she was gone he did nothing. To spite his father he let the dirt accumulate as a witness to all he was responsible for. Food lay about the table, a mess of bread-crusts, open jam tins, knives smeared with fat. Flies gathered and big cockroaches swarmed and scuttled. The beds were unmade, their sheets growing filthier from one week to the next. Milk soured in the jug. Dirty socks and shirts piled up. The whole place stank of fish and sour milk and sweat, and when the windows grew thick with coal dust and salt they stayed that way. He wouldn’t lift a finger. He too stank, he knew that, worse than ever, and was itchy.

He loathed filth of every kind, but he let it accumulate, and lived with it out of spite, to torment himself and as a witness against his father.