David Malouf - The Great World

There were coffee shops, continental, with mock-cream cakes in the window, and other, darker ones downstairs where it was rumoured that satanic cults were being practised. The paintings on the walls, which were pretty bold, gave you a hint of what they might be: a woman with her legs round a shaggy male figure with horns above his ears, another in which a girl was coupling with a gigantic cat.

Then there were the milk-bars, all fan-shaped mirrors and chrome, spaghetti places where men in business suits lined up for lunch, and barber shops, some with a dozen chairs; always with two or three fellows lathered up for shaving while the barber, razor in hand, harangued them while others, further down the room, would be snipping and chatting or showing a customer the back of his head in a glass, and in the doorway one of the idle assistants hung on a broom.

Barber shops, billiard saloons, dark corners in pubs — this was where the SP bookies followed their trade, using runners and a ‘nit’ to watch for the cops. But everyone up here had something to sell: petrol, stuff without coupons that had fallen off the back of a truck, nylons, second-hand cars, pre-war of course, and girls.

Towards five, with paperboys shouting the headlines and running out barefoot to cars, working men, still in their singlets, would be strolling home with the Mirror under their arm, taking it easy and eating a Have-a-Heart or a Grannie Smith apple; going back to a room in a boarding-house, or up three flights to where a girl was cooking sausages in a two-roomed maisonette, the only place they could get in the housing shortage.

This was the rush hour, the hour before closing. Sailors would be up in mobs from the ships you could see moored at Woolloomooloo, and along with them came fellows, newly demobbed, wearing suits you could pick a mile off (Digger had one) that they had been given to start them off in Civvy Street, but still with their old army haircut, and with the half-expectant, half-lost look of men who were waiting for life to declare a direction to them, now that they were free to go wherever they pleased.

Digger kept away from these fellows. They depressed him. He knew their story. It was his own. They were men who for one reason or another had never gone home — or had done so and come straight back again, one or two of them on the first day. They hung about feeling sorry for themselves and keeping close to one another, looking on at a show they were not part of, not yet, and wondering if they ever would be.

Digger felt that too, on occasions. He hadn’t been home either, but not because he was scared of what he might find there. He was putting it off, that’s all; enjoying himself, getting back into the stride of things. There was such a sense abroad of streets being swept for a new day, of ties off, sleeves rolled up, girls walking with a new bounce to their heels and their handbags swinging, full of what the world might offer them now and what they could do with it. ‘Me too,’ Digger thought. ‘The war is over and we won!’ — Except that it wasn’t quite like that.

‘We didn’t win our war because it wasn’t a war we went to. It was something else. It’s victories that are all the go now. This is a victory parade. No one wants to know about us .’

There were men who were bitter about that, and not just on their own behalf. Digger shared the feeling but would not give in to it.

He wrote to his mother nearly every week and she sent back sharp replies. His father was in Japan now, a hero of the army of occupation. Jenny had run away, she didn’t know where. Yes, he assured her, he would come back, she knew that. But from week to week he put it off, still dizzied by all that was going on here, all he saw and was trusted with. Once he went back he would be caught. For a little time longer he wanted to be off the hook.

People trusted him. He didn’t know why.

A man he hardly knew, though they might have spoken a couple of times, would thrust an envelope into his hand. ‘Here, mate, keep this for me, willya? Don’t worry, I’ll find you. Next week or the week after. Somewhere. Just keep it under ya pillow, eh?’

Digger would sock the thing away behind the mirror of the little room he had at the Pomeroy and forget about it. A week later the man would come up to him in a pub, fool about for a bit, then say casually: ‘How’s the bank vault? — That envelope I give you, Is’pose you still got it.’ With the envelope safe in an inside jacket pocket he would slip Digger a twenty. ‘Thanks, mate. I’ll do the same f’ you some time.’

What had he been part of? He didn’t ask. That’s why he was trusted.

Someone who had heard that he knew how to look after himself and was handy with his fists put him on to one of the clubs. He got a job as a bouncer at thirty quid a week, working from seven till five in the morning at a place where sly grog was served, and in a room at the back, poker and blackjack were played. He helped clean up afterwards, went out and got himself a cup of tea at an all-nighter, then, in the early-morning coolness, walked home.

He loved the Cross at that hour. Greeks would be setting up fruit stalls, apples and oranges in glossy pyramids. Men in shorts would be unloading fresh flowers, setting them out in buckets on the pavement and sprinkling them from a can against the coming heat. He would buy a paper and scan the morning news.

‘Haven’ you got any better place to go than this, feller? You don’t want to hang around here.’

The man who offered him this advice was a cop, a thick-set fellow with close-cropped straight black hair and freckles. Mid-thirties, a bit flash, with a good overcoat, a soft grey hat, and eyes Digger had taken a liking to. They were very steady and blue. He could offer the advice because he did it lightly. It was a joke between them. His name was Frank McGowan.

Digger had seen him about often enough and they’d got talking. He didn’t mind having a drink with him, though he knew he was breaking a code.

‘I seen you drinkin’ with that dingo McGowan,’ one of his acquaintances observed. ‘Is’pose you know what ’e is.’ There was a little beat of silence. ‘Yair, well, ’e’s a cunt. An’ ’e’s crooked as shit, you ast anyone! SP — they’re all in on it, you ast anyone!’

Digger listened but did not reply. It was all such tales up here. The Cross was a village, full of intricate alliances and drawn lines. A thing had barely happened, they’d hardly picked the body up off the pavement, before it was in the mouth of every barber’s boy and saloon-bar lounger. McGowan was in the Vice Squad. That was enough. It embarrassed Digger sometimes that McGowan should take an interest in him, but he did not believe it was a ploy. He was no use to McGowan.

‘So,’ McGowan would say each time they ran into one another, ‘you’re still here. Go an’ get lost, why don’t you?’

But once, in a darker mood, when they were sitting quietly together, he said: ‘I don’ understand you, Digger, a feller like you. What are you doin’, hangin’ about with this sorta rubbish?’

Digger looked up, a shadow of doubt in his eyes. His experience in the camps had given him an ear for the various forms of self-hatred that men go in for, and he thought now that some of the venom in McGowan’s voice was directed at himself.

McGowan saw the look. ‘Yair, well,’ he said, and made a brusque movement with his thumb across the tip of his nose. There was a grossness in it that was deliberate. He had given himself away and was drawing back again. Digger too withdrew.

It was the word he had used, rubbish, that Digger wanted to go back to. What came back to him at times, and too clearly, was that break in the forest and the fires he had tended there. It had given him such an awareness of just what it is that life throws up, and when it has no more use for it, throws off again. Not just ashes and bones, but the immense pile of debris that any one life might make if you were to gather up and look at the whole of it: all that it had worn out, used up, mislaid, pawned, forgotten, and carried out each morning to be tipped into a bin. Think of it. Then think of it multiplied by millions.