David Malouf - The Great World

The one thing he kept clean was the edge of the axe. He would stand stripped before the bit of broken mirror in the outhouse wall and make a muscle with his arm, the right one. A hundred times, in fantasy, he went through with it. Without these acts of assertion he might never have been able to tolerate it, the muck they lived in, and the look on his father’s face when he sat in his singlet on the bed with one dirty foot across his knee, sore-headed and sorry for himself.

‘Givvus a hand, son. Git yer dad ’is boots, eh? There’s a good lad.’

‘Fetchem yerself,’ the boy would tell him, pulling on his shirt for school and jerking in the belt of his hand-me-down trousers.

‘Yer a callous bugger,’ the father whined, while Vic stood at the window chewing a bit of crust and taking a good swig of tea, and the whine was enough to close the boy’s ears if he had been inclined to respond. ‘You don’t give a bloke a chance, do you?’

The roof of the house had no lining. You could look up at night and see, under the corrugated iron peak of it, the bare rafters with mice skipping along them. It was, Vic had thought when he was younger, like living inside a huge tree, all branches. An owl lived in this tree, and sometimes, in his childhood sleep, it flew right into his head, and quietly, very quietly for all its heaviness, flopped about there among the rafters woo-hoo-ing and blinking its yellow eyes. He would feel its warm droppings come down. He would wake sometimes with his arms flailing to keep the big bird off.

He had not had that dream for ages. Now the big bird reappeared. It flew about, its wings beat, warm droppings fell. But when he woke in his dream and looked, the owl had a mouse in its beak. The droppings were blood. He woke with warm blood in his mouth and was too choked to cry out.

*

A night came when his father brought a woman home, a big girl of seventeen called Josie.

Vic had seen her round often enough, with three or four littlies, her brothers and sisters in tow, and had heard stories about her from the older boys. She roots .

At breakfast, which she had ready by the time he got up, she looked at Vic without hostility but without attempting to win him over either, as if she already owned the place and he came with it. She had, it seems, laid her hand on everything she needed, the right teapot, the only one with a decent spout, and had solved their curious way with labels — tea in the cannister marked sago, sugar in the one marked rice. She had chopped her own wood, too, and laid a proper table. She was the sort who got on with things and knew how to make do.

Vic resented the ease with which she had discovered the oddnesses of their male housekeeping. He was embarrassed — as usual he had woken up with a horn — at having to dress in front of her, though she paid no heed. When he came in at lunchtime she was still there and was cleaning the house. He was furious, but realised, when he saw the windowpanes clear again and the floorboards scrubbed, how important it was to him, this orderliness and the smell of suds.

His father did not change and Josie did not demand it. She took things as they came. Vic could hear them at night, and the fury of it tormented him. He was nearly twelve.

She was soft with him, but expected nothing in return. She was a person, it seemed, who had no expectations of any sort, and this touched him but he held back. He was wary of her. He resented the way she took over things his mother had treasured and changed their use.

She kept the house clean, did their washing and sang a bit as she shifted the clothes-props and hung it out. In the afternoons when he came in she would be reading a magazine, Photoplay or Pix , with her bare feet up on a chair, and was glad to have someone to talk to at last. Putting the magazine aside she would ask him about school, and despite himself he was drawn into talking things over with her.

‘No,’ she admitted, ‘I never was much good at parsing. Algebra I am — that was my long suit.’

Occasionally she read things out to him: ‘Myrna Loy and William Powell,’ she read, ‘are close friends, both on and off the set. Since appearing together in The Thin Man . .’

Sometimes they played Ludo, which was the only game she seemed to know.

When boys at school, or outside the pictures, taunted him, he found himself standing up for her. This was just what they wanted. ‘Gettin’ a root now, are ya Curran?’ the older boys jeered. He reddened and went for them.

He continued to exercise at the woodpile. She thought he was doing it for her, a boyish gallantry, and his fantasies became more complicated: she kept getting in the way of what had been a simple act of violence. What it was now he could not quite determine. The fantasy was its own satisfaction. He did not want to give it up.

In the end it was taken out of his hands. One night his father, who had lately become combative, got into a brawl. A man came to the door to call Josie, and she and Vic went running. For once, it seems, he had stood up for himself, refused some piece of self-abasement no worse than others he had complied with (but who can tell how he saw it?), struck out with an empty glass, and the other fellow, one of his persistent tormentors, infuriated that he should be challenged, and by a fellow for whom everyone had contempt, struck the top off a bottle and took his guard.

No one could say what happened then. The man’s account was that Dan Curran had thrown himself at the jagged edge and cut his throat. When Josie burst in, with Vic behind, though rough hands tried to hold him back, he was dying. There was a six-inch gash in his throat and blood all over.

Vic was astonished. The blood in his own throat thundered. He looked at his hands.

The men were standing back in a ring, their boots making a cordon round the head with the long open wound across its throat, the cheeks and brows grey as mutton-fat, and the sawdust floor like a butcher’s shop all pooled with blood.

People were kind to him. They took him aside and gave him a nip of something that burned and brought tears to his eyes, but it was this unexpected kindness, not grief, that made him weep.

Josie was inconsolable. They sat at the table together under the branching rafters and he looked up for the owl. He had shown no grief.

‘You’re a real shit, Vic — you know that?’ she told him fiercely.

She was white-faced and looked childlike in her big-girl clothes. They had the house to themselves.

‘Don’t you worry, mister high-and-mighty virtuous — you’ll find out, one day.’ She saw the look on his face and laughed. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, though he had not spoken. ‘Well, there’s a lot you don’t know.’ She leaned close and for a moment he thought from the scornful look of her that she might hit him. If she did, he would not defend himself.

He was shaking. Her face was very close now. Two inches closer and he could have kissed her.

They sat like that for a full minute, then she burst into tears and he put his arms round her till she cried herself out.

Later, when she had crawled into bed, he went out to the woodpile and sat. The axe was where he had put it, with a good swing, when he had chopped the wood for her at teatime. In the block.

His father’s blood. It had stunned him, that, the thickness of it, the liveliness. He had had a vision of his own blood rushing with a thump to his heart, swirling through him, pushing out into the roots of his hair, swelling the veins in his wrists.

He felt obscurely, and not for the first time, some limit to his imagination, his grasp on the complexity of things, that sent a wave of depression over him. You could be so wrong! His mother had warned him of that. He felt himself butting against something, some wall that would not yield. He might never discover now what was on the other side of it, though he knew there was a wall and that his failure to penetrate it was important. Without thinking, he smelled his hand.