David Malouf - The Great World

But as the time got closer and the rumours wilder and maybe nearer the mark, old needs and desires began to reappear for no other reason than that they might be capable again of fulfilment; he was racked. And with them, quite unsought, came visions, so real at times that his whole body would be filled with such sensual warmth and yearning, raw need, happiness, and sudden choking emptiness, that he thought he might pass out. Was that what it was to be like?

The visions appeared of their own accord, and in no particular sequence: a stockinged foot, a hairpin, the unbuttoned strap of a suspender. They were the ingredients of spells, his body practising its own form of witchcraft, or they were the symptoms of madness — that’s what he thought. But their power was overwhelming. His blood raced and burned, he hardly dared close his eyes. And they came as well when his eyes were open. His mind, or his body, was an infinite storehouse of such vision, of acts and objects he had pushed down into the dark and which were reappearing now to claim connection. Was this madness or some deep healing process? Either way it was a torment to him.

One image especially kept coming back and back, a kind of waking dream. It was of the house at Strathfield, the hallway just inside the front door, with its high white ceiling and pavement of blue, white and brown terracotta tiles.

A radiance as of the westering sun filled it — but that, his reason told him, was impossible: the house faced south. Still, there it was and there he was.

As the light settled out and his heart, which appeared to be the real source of it, slowed at last to normal pace, and since it had been free-floating, came to rest again under his ribs, he saw that Lucille was there, just turning on the second step.

Something had caught her attention. She was looking towards him with a little line of puzzlement between her brows, as if she knew someone was there but was too dazzled by the unaccustomed light to see who it was. He knew he could not call out to her. But his heart was beating so loud he thought she might hear that.

After a moment, still puzzled, she turned and went on up and he was left standing, but quietly now and full of contentment, as if some sort of assurance had been given him.

None had, of course, and with the part of him that was rational and clear-headed he knew it, so what was he doing?

Still, the image, or the dream, or whatever it was, stayed warm in him and kept coming back.

VIC, FRESHLY WASHED and combed, in clean shirt, clean shorts and a new pair of boots, a bit light-headed just with the knowledge that he could go anywhere he pleased, down this alley or that, was out walking in the freed city. They were all out somewhere, rushing here and there like kids in a fairground, not knowing what to try first.

He had come out alone and was in a part of the town he did not know, along a foul canal. He didn’t know anywhere in Singapore, not really. He had never had a chance to.

It was a low place, all peeling walls, coal smoke from kerosene tins, and footpaths filthy with squashed fruit and dog-turds and cinders and bloody-looking spit. He had wandered down here looking for he didn’t know what. Nothing. Anything. It wasn’t any place he had intended to be.

Bicycles passed in droves, all honking. Children sat half-naked on the ground. Salesmen, squatting, had laid out on upturned butter-boxes, or low tables covered with a cloth, the few things, whatever it was, that they had to sell. Suddenly he stopped dead and stood stupidly staring.

What had caught his eye was a pyramid of six cotton-reels on a tray, one of them a sickly green, another royal blue, the rest white, but all dusty and soiled looking. The only other thing on the tray was a packet of needles.

The old woman squatting beside them glanced up under heavy pads of flesh, happy to have attracted his attention. She was preparing to call out to him. But the look he was wearing, or the threatening bulk of him, must have warned her of something. Her hand moved out to cover the single reel at the apex of the pyramid she had made. To save it. She sat staring up at him.

He was in a rage, a kind of madness, and close to tears.

In the left-hand pocket of his new shorts was the length of thread he had kept. His fingers went to it. He hadn’t thrown it away — you never know. Its value to him, anyway, was absolute. And here now, in this dirty bit of a place, this old crone of a Chinese woman had six reels of it on her mean little tray, six whole reels — and beyond that, on shelves somewhere in a storehouse, there would be cartons-full. They were common as dirt. He had a vision suddenly of how small it was, all that had happened to him.

The old woman’s hand, which was yellow and wrinkled like a duck’s foot, kept hold of the reel, expecting this crazy boy to use his boot now and kick the whole tray aside. They were like that, these blond ones. But instead he let out a cry of rage, flung something out of his pocket and ran off.

She watched him go, her hand still protecting her wares. Then she leaned forward over the edge of her tray a little to see what it was. A bit of dirty thread. Nothing.

Minutes later he was back. With his eye crazily upon her, he stooped, snatched up the bit of cotton as if she might be intending to rob him of it, and was gone.

ON HOT NIGHTS late in Darlinghurst Road Digger found what he had always been in search of, a crowded place with the atmosphere of a fairground, but one that did not have to be knocked down and set up again night after night. It was simply there, another part of town.

It was a rowdy place, the Cross. It could be violent, sordid too at times, but it had put a spell on Digger just as Mac had told him it would.

Girls, some of them toothless and close to sixty, worked out of mean little rooms up staircases smelling of bacon-fat or sharp with disinfectant. The pubs were blood-buckets.

You would see a couple of fellows come hurtling through the door and in seconds a full-scale brawl would be going on, right there on the pavement, with passers-by ducking aside to get away from it or standing off on the sidelines to watch.

Often it was seamen; but mostly it was young blokes, louts, who had come in on motorbikes to roar about and see what was doing, keen to get a reputation and discover how tough they were.

They wore second-hand air-force jackets, duck-tailed Cornel Wilde haircuts and wanted blood.

They would roam about putting their shoulders into the crowd, waiting to be challenged, with a Friday night ferocity in them that had the pent-up frustration of a week’s work behind it, and would only be content at last when the man they were bludgeoning was in the gutter and they heard his ribs crack — ‘Ah, that’s it, that’s the sound’ — or when they had gone down themselves and were sitting with their head in their hands, hearing a whole lot of new sounds in there that might be permanent and with their palms wet with blood.

Occasionally it was a woman you saw, still clutching her handbag but with her mouth bloody, one arm like a broken wing, and the man who had done it shouting right into her face, spitting out obscenities but weeping too sometimes, justifying himself. This was peacetime again.

And in between these savage episodes the delivery boys would be out and old people, or women dragging a suitcase in one hand and a reluctant child in the other, would be going about their daily affairs. Well-dressed ladies walked pug dogs. Kids sucking sherbet sticks dawdled back and forth to school. Old fellows slept it off on benches or stood with their sleeve up to the elbow in bins.