David Malouf - The Great World

But a moment later Digger saw him, big-eyed and wild-looking, shovelling the stuff into his mouth. Their eyes met and Digger looked quickly away.

More than ever now he clung to Mac and Doug. Only in those who were close to you was there any continuation of cleanness and sanity. But now they had Vic as well and were an uneasy foursome, unbalanced, as they never had been when they were three. Forever looking about to see what you might be thinking of him, Vic was all little burrs and catches, always uneasy with himself yet at the same time cocky, and anxious at every opportunity to put himself forward or to get the better of you. Digger couldn’t stand him.

‘Oh, Vic’s all right,’ Doug would say. ‘Take no notice of ’im.’ But the foursome began to split into unequal twos.

Digger missed Doug. He missed his lightness and good humour. He was civil enough to Vic but resented his butting in. He and Mac thought alike on this. They thought alike on lots of things.

He was an odd bloke, Mac. When he was in the mood for it he could talk the leg off an iron pot. Not like Doug, who loved an audience and to joke and pull people in, but in a quieter, more reflective way.

He was full of stories, odd anecdotes and theories he had picked up from meetings or lectures he had attended or fellows he had heard on Sundays in the Domain; or from books, or from conversations he had had up at the Cross.

For a time he had had a flat there and known all sorts of people: radicals, poets, fellows who wrote for the Herald and Smith’s Weekly . It was an education. ‘Sydney wouldn’t be Sydney without the Cross,’ he told Digger. ‘That’s where you oughta head for when you get outa this. The Cross. No place like it.’

It seemed to Digger he had seen nothing really, for all the places he had been. Not after what you heard from other men. Mac’s tales of life round the city and on the trams, the different depots, and the runs he went on out to Bondi, Bronte, Clovelly, Watson’s Bay, the best pubs and pie shops, and Sargents, where his sister-in-law worked, which made the best cakes — all this brought Sydney to life for Digger and fed his hunger for a world of ideas and talk and action that he thought he would never get enough of, not if he lived till he was a hundred and three. He took in every detail, and each one was sharper for his having to picture it in his own head.

The walk up the long gully at Cooper Park, for instance. Could any place be greener on a nice Sunday afternoon? Mac and Iris and the boys would go for picnics there, and after an hour or so, when their meal had gone down, Mac would coach the younger boy, Jack, in the high jump.

‘I dare say he’ll be out of the juniors,’ Mac would say a bit regretfully, ‘by the time we get back. Grows like a beanpole, that kid. No stopping ’im. He’ll be five three or four by now, I reckon. You should see ’im take off — the spring he’s got!’ Digger could see it: the boy’s legs scissoring as he went over the bar, Iris seated on the grass with a chequered cloth spread out in front of her, and the scraps from their tea, with maybe a bottle of pickles. In time, out of Mac’s bits and pieces of description, and stories and instances, the whole household came into view.

The house itself, in Bon Accord Avenue, Digger could see as if he had lived his whole life there.

Mac slept on the side verandah in a room he had closed in himself with the help of a mate, another trammie. It was floor to ceiling books and there were more books in stacks under the wire frame of the bed and along both sides of the hall. Mac had not read these books, or not all of them; they were for his retirement. But the majority of them he had at least dipped into. How could you resist? On the way home, last thing Friday nights, when he had just picked up a new lot, he would take a good long look and be content then to have the rest of it stored up and waiting for him.

Technical manuals on everything from book-binding to telegraphy, novels, journals, books of travel, psychology, history — that’s what he liked. He’d been reading since he was a kid, like Digger — anything he could lay his hands on: Shakespeare, Shaw, Dickens, Jack London, Victor Hugo. They swapped favourite characters, told over incidents, laughing, and Digger, a bit shyly at first, recited out of his head from Hamlet or Henry the Fifth . They were Mac’s favourites.

‘Amazing, that is,’ Mac would say. ‘Ruddy amazing. Honest, Digger, you oughta be in a sideshow. What I wouldn’ do with your gift!’

‘What?’ Digger wondered.

It had become clear to him, even before any of this happened, that his ‘gift’, as Mac called it, even if it turned out to be the one thing that was special to him, was not to be the source of any fame or fortune. It would never be useful in that way. It had some other significance, or so he thought, that was related to the image his mother had put into his head, that room where all the things were gathered that made up your life. He was a collector, as she was. He hung on to things. But his room was of another kind, and so were the things he stored there.

Mac had been married — still was, in fact. Two years it lasted. The girl left him; not for another bloke, as it happened, but to live her own life and run a nursery in the Blue Mountains.

‘She got fed up with me,’ Mac told him, and put on a humorous look; but Mac’s humour, Digger knew by now, was a way of protecting himself, and you too sometimes, from the pain of things, ‘I never understood what she wanted, really. I reckoned I did, like most blokes, on’y I never had a clue really. She had a bad time, poor girl. Me too.’ When his brother died in a shipping accident in the Islands he had moved in with his sister-in-law, who was glad of the extra money and to have a man’s help with the boys. Mac got letters from her and had a pile, five in all, that he read over almost every night.

‘If anything happens to me, Digger,’ he said once. ‘I’d like you to have ’em.’

It was a solemn offer, and Digger, who felt the weight of it, was moved. ‘OK,’ he said.

He had had only one letter himself, from his mother, an angry one. His father had got himself wounded in Crete.

But more important to Digger in the end than Mac’s yarns, and the passionate and sometimes pedantic flights that put him pretty firmly, as Doug said, in ‘the ratbag brigade’, were the times when they just sat cleaning their gear or doing a bit of mending; saying nothing much, just quietly enjoying the company.

Self-possession. That was the quality in Mac that drew Digger. It was rare, and seemed, the more he thought about it, to be the one true ground of manliness. It was a quality he had never attained himself, and he wondered sometimes if he ever would. He had ants in his pants. That’s what his mother would have told him. Everything grabbed his attention and led him away from himself. He was always in a turmoil, never steady or still. The world was too full of interest. He got lost in it.

One of the things Mac introduced him to was music. It stood, for Mac, in some sort of middle position between talk and silence, with similarities, if you could imagine such a contradiction, to both, and it was this, Digger thought, that explained the link he felt between music and Mac’s particular brand of self-possession. If you understood the one, perhaps you would get a clear sight of the other.

He encouraged Mac to talk about the pieces he liked. Mac, who was a born teacher, was only too pleased to introduce him to bits of opera and things by Chopin and Fritz Kreisler.

‘ Nessun dorma ’, ‘none shall sleep’; that was a good one. They heard that one night during their first week in Malaya, in the early days before the Japs landed. Digger was amazed. It was in the open, under the stars, and almost a thousand of them had been sprawled there on the grass. But there was a lot of music to be heard at Changi, too. Fellows who had carried their records with them would bring their favourites along, and dozens of men, hundreds sometimes, would come in out of the dark to listen. Digger would sit back a little and take his cue from Mac.