David Malouf - The Great World

‘Now you go and putcher feet up on the verandah, dear, and I’ll bring you a nice cuppa tea. I’m busy. I got the pudding ta think of. If I don’t, pretty soon, there won’t be any.’

Mrs Warrender went, feeling quieter, but dismissed.

‘I wish,’ she was fond of saying, ‘that my father had let me learn typing or something — or serve in a shop even. At least then I would know something and people wouldn’t talk to me as if I was some sort of dimwit. I mean, we aren’t born impractical.’

Quite soon after Vic arrived in the house she took to waylaying him in the hallway as he came in from school, and later, when she began to see in his sturdy and sometimes grave figure a kind of equilibrium that came, she thought, from ‘experience’ (and how in the world, at his age, had he come by that ?), she would at the oddest hours wander right into his room and, settling herself on the edge of the bed, start in on whatever it was that was fretting her.

Sometimes, abstractedly, as she talked, she would pick his dirty socks up off the floor and begin to roll them, or a shirt or a pair of underpants. Once she held one of his socks up to her nose and smelled it, and did not look at all offended — in fact, rather pleased. Or she would open and close the drawers of his dressing table, moving things about and seeing they were properly folded. She wasn’t spying, he knew that, because she wasn’t actually looking at things. Just touching them and reassuring herself that one article was cotton, another wool, so many pairs. It helped her order her thoughts and re-established, in a motherly way — socks and shirts and underpants were a mother’s business — her intimacy with him.

‘Mr Warrender, Pa,’ she would tell him, ‘is a wonderful man. He’s the kindest, most generous —. People don’t realise. Look how he is with Aunt James! But like the rest of us he has his limits. He can’t do wonders. They keep asking too much of him.’

Vic would sit silent and follow her restless pacing about the room, wondering at this way she had of putting a case for the defence as if she were a lawyer addressing an unseen jury, and Pa always the man in the dock.

He was too young at first, and too unused to being confided in, to do more than take it all in and hold his tongue. But he did wonder who they could be. Ma’s parents? Aunt James, Meggsie, Mr Hicks? He decided then that Ma was rather queer in the head, or overwrought, hysterical. For a time he took an amused attitude and regarded her, secretly, with a kind of affectionate contempt.

But as he got to know the household better he saw at last that she was the only one here who really thought about things. He did too, and she saw that and was grateful. As he got to be older and more responsible, their little ‘confabs’, as she called them, became serious discussions about family affairs, that took up the whole business of the factory and its running, loans, interest rates, finances. She knew more than you might expect, Ma, about loans and such things. What she knew she shared with him. They were in a bad way: that was the heart of the matter. That’s what she was trying to face up to.

They did not give themselves airs, the Warrenders — they had too much style for that. They would have been ashamed to appear opulent when around them so many others were being crushed. The car they drove, a grey Hup, was the same one they had been careering about in for fifteen years. You still had to crank it. The house was large enough, but a lot of it was in poor repair and half the rooms they never went in to except when they played games. There was only Meggsie to do anything. The girls had been brought up to think of themselves as poverty-stricken, and might have been ragged if Meggsie hadn’t taken a hand.

All that was a kind of insurance, a sop to the fates. They were not poor, not by most people’s standards, but they soon might be. Poverty these days could hit you just like that. Ma had seen it happen to others, and she was scared. What scared her was that she did not know what it was, or how, when it came, she would meet it.

Vic knew and could have told her, but what would she have learned from that? He would have had to bare at last what he was determined to keep hidden, even from her.

Occasionally, when he came in from school, there would be a man in the yard, often, as he grew, a boy not much older than himself, chopping wood for Meggsie’s stove. Normally this was his job.

Resting on the axe a moment, his shirt dark at the armpits and sticking to the small of his back, the man would draw a wrist across his brow, which was dripping, and nod under the greasy hat. Some of these fellows were not used to it, you could see that. They were making a mess of the job.

They were men out of work, battlers who came to the back door looking for any employment they could get: chopping wood, cleaning out gutters or drains. Meggsie had authority, or had assumed it, to give them something, usually bread and dripping or a bowl of soup. The work was an acknowledgement that what they got they had earned, a gesture towards masculine pride and the insistence that what they were after was work, not charity. Meggsie knew them like her own. They might have been her sons or brothers. Just the same, she kept an eye on them.

They haunted Vic, these men or half-grown boys who a few months back had been storemen or clerks in shipping offices or drillers in mines. He felt his shoulders slump a little at the sight of them. He felt humbled. When he had taken his school jacket off and rolled his sleeves, he would go out sometimes and have a word with them — nothing much, but he knew the language.

They were embarrassed. He didn’t talk like a boss, but he was at home here. So what was he? What did he want? They wished after a while that he would leave them alone to get on with it. He felt the hardening in them of something he had touched and offended, and knew what it was but could not help himself. He found excuses for hanging about the factory yard with his hands in his pockets, kicking stones under the firs.

Worst of all were the times when he came on one of them hunched over the soup Meggsie had given him, apart and feeding.

They scared him, these men. Not physically — there was very little that scared him that way. It was his spirit that shivered and got into a sweat. They were everywhere you went: hanging about with no change in their pockets outside the picture shows, the boldest of them still flash enough to whistle at girls; in lines on the pavement. You would have had to tag on to the end of one of these straggling, endlessly shuffling lines to find out what it was, up ahead, that had drawn them. He didn’t really want to know, but felt there was something wrong. He had got off too easily. He was in the wrong dream.

He went out for a time with a girl, not one of Ellie and Lucille’s friends, but a girl he had met at a dance. She lived at Granville and worked as a salesgirl in the city. She had two older brothers who were out of work, her father too, and could type a hundred words a minute and take shorthand, but the only job she could get was selling paint in a hardware shop. He was getting nowhere with her but he didn’t mind, he liked her so much; she was so lively and certain of her own competence, and so pleased with herself because she had a job. Her whole family depended on her.

But one hot night when he went out to meet her, as he sometimes did, at the tram, she was in tears and would not speak to him, just went rushing past in her neat high heels, sobbing, and when he caught up with her she pushed him off.

She had been sacked. They’d sacked her for coming in three minutes late from lunch. It had been so hot that she and another girl had stopped off a minute in the park, sitting on the edge of a fountain to bathe their feet and let the spray blow over them. Three minutes! In a mood of over-confidence set off by their moment at the fountain, which was still bubbling away in her, she had stood up for herself and the manager had sacked them, both of them — and the other girl hadn’t said a word! She was inconsolable. She just looked at him. Didn’t he see what it meant? Was he too stupid even to see that?