David Malouf - The Great World

There was also an old lady, an aunt of Mrs Warrender’s, who wasn’t in her right mind and thought he was someone else.

*

Mrs Warrender showed him his room and they stood for a moment, the two of them, not knowing what to say to one another. Mrs Warrender was plainly embarrassed.

‘Well, Vic,’ she said at last, ‘I’ll leave you to get used to things.’ She thought he might want to be alone with his grief. ‘The bathroom, when you want it,’ (maybe it’s only that, she thought, she wasn’t used to boys) ‘is first down the hall.’

She stood at the door, looking at him as he stood with his boots on the carpet in the middle of the room, and his look said, Don’t go, I don’t need to be alone. But she fiddled with her hands a little, then went.

He sat on the edge of the bed, which was rather high, and looked at his boots. They were heavy. His shoulders slumped and he heard himself sigh. A wave passed over him. Not grief, but desolation, a feeling of utter loneliness that surprised him after the confidence he had felt downstairs. Maybe it was the largeness and whiteness of the room, which he was afraid he would betray himself by dirtying with the grime off his hands; its emptiness, too, since he hardly thought of himself as occupying it — it was so big.

He looked at the case he had brought. It was a little cardboard one with a leather strap. His mother, in the days when she had taken in sewing, had kept buttons and snips of ribbon in it, and off-cuts she could use for patches. What it contained now were the new shirts Mr Warrender had fitted him out with, underpants, even socks. He had brought nothing out of his old life but what was all the heavier for being invisible, and he would have left that too if he could, or shoved it down the windy lav in the train; only there was no way you could get your hands on it. It came along in the roots of his hair, in the mark his fingers left on everything he touched.

Another boy, with his sour miseries and anger deep hidden, had come along with him, and would push his feet each morning into the new shoes, leave dirt marks round the collar of his shirts, soil the bed, these clean sheets, with the sweat of his dreams.

He felt the despair of that boy flow into his heart and sicken him. Getting up quickly, he went to the long mirror of the lowboy, and in an attempt to drive him off stood very straight and square, as he believed Mr Warrender had seen him, in his new clothes.

He turned sideways, and as far as he could, rolling his eyes, looked at himself from that angle too. Then he put his face close to the glass, breathed, and his features vanished in fog.

After a moment, when they came back again, he went to the door along the hall and found the bathroom. It had green tiles. Unbuttoning his shorts, he lifted the seat of the lavatory, pissed, and when he was finished stood for a time and played with his dick till it was stiff. Then he pulled the chain and watched the bowl flush.

In a china shell above the basin was a fresh little cake of soap, very smooth and white. He smelled it, then carefully washed his hands. The smell was allspice.

He looked at his nails, took a little brush, and scrubbed them. They didn’t come clean, not quite, but with soap like this they would eventually, he was sure of it.

When he dried his hands the soap smell was still on them. It was still on them when he came downstairs. He checked, in a new rush of confidence, just before he went into the room where Mr Warrender, Pa, was waiting to show him about.

The Warrenders’ was a big old-fashioned house, dilapidated in parts and modern in others, with a cast-iron verandah in front, another wooden verandah at the back that had been closed in with pink and green glass to make a sleep-out, and on either side a squat, steep-roofed tower. It stood in a garden of firs and bunyah-pines, and to the left, with no fence between, was a factory, a square brick building with bars on the windows and a paved yard behind that was flagged and full of carboys and barrels. The barrels were brought in on trucks with ‘Needham’s’ painted on the side in a flourish of gilt. When Vic and Mr Warrender came up, one of these trucks was parked at the loading bay. Two men in leather aprons were rolling a barrel down a plank.

‘Hullo, Alf,’ Mr Warrender said to the older of them. ‘How’s it going?’

Alf set his boot against the side of the barrel to steady it and said: ‘She’s right, Mr Warrender. Got a good load on today.’ He drew the back of his hand across his nose, which was running, and looked at Vic.

‘This is Vic,’ Mr Warrender said. ‘Vic, this is Alf Lees — and Felix.’

Felix was a dark youth with muscles and a smirk. He said nothing. He stood with his hands under his leather apron and flapped. Vic thought at first that this was some sort of insult. He reddened and looked about to see if Mr Warrender had noticed. But Felix was rolling his eyes up, bored, his big hands under the apron, which flapped and flapped.

‘Vic’s come to stay with us,’ Mr Warrender explained, as if these men needed to know, and Alf, with his boot against the side of the barrel, nodded.

‘I thought I’d show him round.’

There was a long pause.

‘We won’t get in the way.’

Mr Warrender’s shyness suddenly overcame him, and Alf, his boot against the barrel, steadying it, also looked uncomfortable.

Vic saw for the first time now another of Mr Warrender’s oddnesses. He had difficulty in bringing things to a conclusion. He started off well enough but didn’t know how to go on. He stood looking down at the pavement, lifting his huge bulk up and down, very rhythmically, on the toes of his shoes. After a moment, to Vic’s surprise, he began to hum.

‘Well,’ Alf said abruptly, ‘no rest for the wicked. C’mon, Felix. Don’t just stand there,’ and, ignoring Mr Warrender, he took his foot away and allowed the barrel to move on to the bottom of the plank.

Mr Warrender, relieved of his difficulty, said genially, ‘So long, boys.’

Vic, glancing back, saw that Felix, under his flop of black hair, was smirking after them. Alf made a gesture to him to get on.

The moment you went through into the dark, high-raftered gloom of the factory itself you were aware of activity; not visible activity, there was very little of that, but a brewing and bubbling that made the air tremble and produced a perceptible heat. It was like crossing the line into a new climate. The atmosphere was thicker. You began immediately to sweat.

A great vat was the source of all this. Mr Warrender led Vic up to it, and for a moment he stood regarding the thing with a kind of awe that struck Vic as surprising; the continuous low hum of it seemed to put a spell on him. He bent his head to the metal surface as if he were listening for a message there that would provide the clue to something that had long puzzled him. Only the message, it seemed, was in a language he had failed to learn.

The bulk of the thing under the high rafters, and Mr Warrender’s respectful silence, made Vic think of an altar. It was, little as he knew about churches, the only thing that would explain the sense Mr Warrender gave of being in the presence of something that was both grand and invisible.

Two men wearing white coats appeared round the side of the vat, and one of them, after a brief nod, went back again. The other, looking none too pleased, Vic thought, came on.

‘What is it?’ Vic was asking. ‘What are they making?’

The man in the white coat had come right up to them now, and Mr Warrender made a little gesture in his direction, as if the right to answer, perhaps, were his. But when the man said nothing, he was forced to go on.

‘Soap, Vic. It’s soap. In this vat here we’ve got fats — tallow mostly — that’s what Alf and Felix were bringing in — and caustic soda. That’s right, isn’t it, Hicks?’