David Malouf: The Great World

She could have turned her head then and seen him, but she had to protect herself; she didn’t want him to become too real. If he did she would only miss him when he was gone again or he’d start growing up and become a nuisance. If she let that snuffling little kid with the stream of snot in his nose (which she would not turn and wipe) start growing, he’d end up being sixty years old and right here with them. Then she’d be in a pickle. More sheets to wash, another couple of potatoes to peel, another smelly towel beside the tub, more snores and sniffles. He’d butt in.

‘What’d he die of?’ she would ask, to get it over and done with. It was kinder in the long run. ‘Was Billy diftheria?’

Kind and quick. She wished she’d done that with Vic, ages ago, but Billy was easy, he was dead.

The trouble with Digger was, he remembered too much. Give him long enough and he’d remember everything .

NEWCOMERS TO THE Crossing, calling on Digger to discuss a bit of work they needed doing, a sundeck extended or a new roof, took it for granted that he had got his name from the war. He was lean-jawed and leathery, said little, was never without a fag in the corner of his mouth and a spare one, newly rolled, behind his ear.

In fact he had been Digger from birth, or very nearly. They had called him that, with no special foresight, before there was any hint of a new war he might be growing up for.

Albert was the name his mother had picked out for him, meaning to call him Bert. But to the father, from the very first, he was another man about the house, a little offsider and mate.

‘Right, dig,’ he would tell the boy when he was barely old enough to understand, ‘we’re gunna take a look at this greasetrap. Are ya with me? Geez! Not so sweet, eh?’ Or: ‘C’mon, digger, we better be makin’ tracks or the ol’ lady’ll rouse on us. We wouldn’ wanna be in ’er bad books.’ The name became Digger and stuck. After a time even the mother used it, since that was what he answered to, but she regretted Albert.

She had thought of him as Albert, Bert, all the months she was carrying him; had had conversations with him under that name, and believed later, he was such a knowing little thing, that he must remember this and the secrets she had confided to him. But once he was born the father’s needs prevailed. He became Digger and that was that.

Their first little girl, Jenny, was slow. The second, May, was already gone before Digger was born. So was the third, Pearl, who survived just long enough to become another absence to tug the mother’s heart. She had been banking on Bert.

Back home in England, in the orphanage where she grew up, she had had a brother called Bert. He was the only thing she had that was in any way her own. A stocky, dark little fellow, two years younger than herself, she had fussed over him and come to believe he couldn’t get on without her.

Because he had no memory of their real home, or of their mother, she had set out to give him one, to impress upon him by constant telling and retelling all she could remember of their dark little room and the life they had lived there. There wasn’t much, but some detail, she hoped, a yellow dress their mother had worn, a picture she recalled of two long-haired cows in a mist, might take life in him and become memories of his own. She owed it to him. To their Ma as well.

But when she sat him down on a form opposite, their knees touching, she could recall very little and he was too young to listen. What she found herself doing was searching his face for some resemblance that would link them and make solid a vision of their mother’s pale, pinched features that had already gone ghostly for her. She was assuring herself that she was not alone in the world. Her intensity at these moments scared him. He would hide to avoid her.

Her last sight of him was in a line of other boys, all big-eyed and bony-kneed, shuffling about in the cold, on the stone steps that led up to the schoolroom. She stood below in a made-over dress and with a little bundle they had given her. She was eleven and was going out to begin her working life. In service.

His dark face above the curve of the banister rail was the last she would ever see of him. He was on tiptoe, frowning. Then he raised his hand and waved. When she went back three years later he had gone to be apprenticed in Liverpool.

So when what she knew was proved at last and she had a boy, she had fought for him, from the first day searching his face for some likeness to his namesake, Albert, Bert, and for some hint that her own family, about whom she knew nothing, had come through. But in the end she had given in. Her heart got the better of her. She knew what loneliness was, and how this man she had married, this boy, longed for a form of companionship that she could not give him or which he was not able to accept. Digger, she told herself, wasn’t so much a name as an assurance that he would have it at last. She could not deny him that. But before she knew it Digger was a name. The child answered to no other. Albert, Bert, the gesture she had made to a past that was beyond recall, was just the name in a register that he would never use.

He wasn’t the last. A year later there was Bill, then James, then Leslie, but by then Albert was used up. And they didn’t survive anyway, these boys, any more than the girls had. In the end there were just the two children. Digger and Jenny.

*

Billy Keen had run off to France when he was fifteen. By the time he got home again, a survivor of Pozières and Villers Bretonneux, he had already, at just eighteen, had the one great adventure of his life. Though married and more or less settled as chief ferryman at the Crossing, he continued to live in spirit, since he was barely out of his lively boyhood, at that intensified pitch of daring, terror and pure high-jinks that would forever be his measure of what a man’s life should be when he is at full stretch. Anything else was a tameness he could not endure.

History had conspired, for a time, to set him in a world where risk, up to the very edge of extinction, was a point of honour, and animal energy had scope. It was his natural element. After that, life at the Crossing seemed to him like daily punishment. He hated the regularity of it, the timetable the ferry ran on, the six-minute crossing, then the same time back, his having to be home, and already washed and brushed up, for dinner at twelve and for tea at six, the fuss about knives and forks and the state of his socks. It meant nothing to him that Keens had been at the Crossing for a hundred years and that the place bore his name. He was too young, he felt, for the responsibilities that were put upon him by a household that had arrived from nowhere, had simply crept up on him (that’s how he saw it) while he was dreaming at the wheel. She was the trouble, the girl he’d got.

He had met her the first week he was back. She was a barmaid in a city pub. He had taken one look at her and told himself: ‘She’ll do.’

He said this thoughtlessly, because he was eighteen, wanted a girl of his own and didn’t know any better. He was home now, and the next thing to do was get married. It was what blokes did . What else was there? He knew nothing about her except that she was lively, had newly arrived in the place and had a soft mouth with just a touch of colour to it. He had spent three years dreaming of that colour. She ruled the rough clientele of the pub, which was a waterside pub at The Rocks, in an easy, no-nonsense way that impressed him. You could play up to her but there was a line, and she soon let you know if you tried to cross it. He was amused by that.

She knew what he was after. He was no different in that from the rest. But there was something in him that appealed to her. He was like a cricket, very chirpy and always on the dare. His military bravado took the civilian form of impudence, especially where girls were concerned. He would look you straight in the eye with so much confidence in his own attractions that she was tempted to laugh outright. ‘Yes, it’s me,’ the look said. ‘I’m a bit of all right, eh?’ He would wink then and you could see the utter satisfaction he felt in himself. ‘Well, that oughta do it.’