David Malouf - The Great World

Once, when she was about eight years old, Jenny had gone up to the highway above the house and somehow or other got herself to the other side. This was forbidden, and she knew it. Why had she done it this time? Anyway, once she was across her courage entirely failed her and she dared not cross back.

It started to get dark and, lost out there, she began to whimper and call. He heard her, crept up under cover of the bushes, and sat there, well hidden on the other side, and watched to see what she would do. She would come up to the edge of the road on her stumpy legs, screw up her courage to cross, then sit down again and weep; then come to the road again and walk up and down the edge of it as if just minutes ago it had ceased to be dirt and gravel and become a deep-flowing stream. He watched for a long time, appalled, but fascinated too by her helplessness. Finally she sank down in the growing dark and in a hopeless way sobbed his name. Over and over, ‘Digger, Digger’ — it gave him the creeps. At last, pretending he had just arrived, he stepped out into the middle of the road, stood a moment, then went quickly and took her hand.

He was a long time silent after he told this.

‘Where is she now?’ Iris asked.

‘That’s just it,’ he said, and realised why it was that the occasion had now come back to him. ‘She’s run off somewhere. My mother thinks Brisbane. She’s terrified — mum, I mean. She’s scared we’ll all do it, go off one after another. Dad did. Now Jenny.’

‘What about you?’

‘Oh, I haven’t gone off. She knows that. I’m different.’

He told her stories of his mother, too, and was surprised to see from her reaction that he had made his mother fearsome, whereas what he had meant her to see was what a fierce grip on life she had — how she had given that to him too at times up there, when it was her presence, her demands on him, that had got him through. She sounded hard, but she wasn’t, not by nature. It was circumstances that had made her hard.

‘We think the same way,’ he explained, partly to himself. ‘On’y she doesn’ see that. Because the things I’ve got to hold on to aren’t the same as hers. Some of them are. But most of ’em aren’t. She can’t see it.’

He described the things his mother held on to and told Iris of the room she believed she would sit in one day surrounded by all her worldly possessions; only by then they would be otherworldly . Still real and touchable, useable too, but as she too would be then, past all possibility of loss.

‘Just ordinary things,’ he explained, in case the picture wasn’t clear to her. ‘She’s not grasping, it’s not that. She does want the things for what they are now, but what she really wants them for is what they will be then. What they will show about her. Her life.’

Iris looked at him rather hard. ‘And what about you?’ she asked. She was only indirectly interested in what he had to say of his mother. ‘What are the things you need to hold on to?’

He told her a few of them. At last he told her how the two officers had come and asked him to keep a list of the names — the names and what happened in each case, insofar as it was known, to the men: a record, a kind of history. That was one thing.

Billy, James, Leslie, May, Pearl — that was another.

Then he told her, as well as he could, what he hadn’t told McGowan, and actually said the words: ‘Not a soul. Not a pin.’

The flames he was thinking of were the ones that had leapt up round the teak logs in the clearing at Hintock Pass, which was just one fire of the many into which all the cast-offs, all the refuse and broken-down and worn-out rubbish of the world, goes when its newness has worn off, and those who have scrabbled to get and keep it no longer care whether it goes up in flames or down the sewer, or simply gets stamped back into the earth.

You couldn’t save it from destruction. And you couldn’t make it whole again. Not in fact. But in your head you could.

She listened. She touched his cheek, and lay the tips of her fingers to the place, just above the line of his hair, where a vein beat, feeling its steady throb.

He also told her at last how Mac had died. She listened without looking at him, holding his head against her so that his breath, while he spoke, was on her flesh. After a time she asked quietly: ‘Was he buried?’

‘What?’

The question surprised him.

‘No,’ he said at last. ‘We never saw him again, the body or that. The Japs would’ve buried ’im.’

‘The word they sent,’ she told him, ‘was that he was missing. That’s all we ever heard.’

‘No,’ Digger said. ‘I saw what happened to him.’

She was silent a while, then sat up a little and told him a story of her own.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘When I was little, ten or eleven, maybe, we lived up near Gympie in Queensland. My dad had a farm. There were four of us, four girls, I was the second eldest, and my mother’s mother, our grannie, lived with us. She was very difficult. She and my mother never really got on. She had asthma and was too weak to get about. She’d sit all day out on the front verandah, and what I remember best is the rug she had. I’d never seen the sea then, but it was sea-colours, all blues and greens and purples in waves. She’d crocheted it herself, so they must have been her favourites.

‘They used to tell me I was like her. I mean, I was supposed to be difficult too. My mother would say: “You’re just like your grandma,” but in fact I didn’t like her very much, and if my sisters said it, you know, copying her, I’d pull their hair. Can you see me doing that?

‘Anyway, there was a flood. They came out to warn us. Our place was out of town, so we had time to save things. I remember they put a whole lot of furniture, beds and chairs, a sideboard, our sofa with a birdcage on it, on the grass in front of the house waiting for a wagon to take it. I remember how strange it looked. But the river came down quicker than they expected, and in the end there was a real panic. We had to get away in the night, and all the chairs and the sofa and that were swept away. I saw the water take them, it was amazing.

‘The thing is, grannie wouldn’t go. Or there was a quarrel or something at the last minute and she wouldn’t get into the boat. I don’t remember exactly, and later the story my mother told was different somehow. When we went back there was no sign of her. But for some reason I kept expecting her to turn up. I’d hear her wheezing in the middle of the night and get up and go to the verandah rails and expect to see her there.

‘My mother got furious with me. I was just, you know, at the most difficult, growing-up stage, and we didn’t get on either and she was upset by it. Maybe I was being difficult on purpose, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t accept that she was really dead.

‘All our other relations were buried right on the property. We used to go off and play funerals there and pick flowers and put them on the graves. You could read the stones. Being buried was what dead was, and we had never buried grandma. We’d never even seen the body. You can’t bury people in water, and water comes back, those floods did. You’d see the light of them off in the trees. I used to go out in the moonlight and look at the light there in the paddocks, under the trees, and the strangeness of it, to me, had somehow to do with my grandmother.’

That was the story. She did not add to it, and he saw after a while that it was her husband she was speaking of, though she did not name him.

What they were doing with the things they told was revealing to one another, in the only way they could, all that was closest to them, but tracing as well the limits of their freedom.