David Malouf: The Great World

But one look at Pete was enough. He and Billy might have been strangers for all they had to say to one another; and when she followed him to the woodpile, and tried to draw him out, he was scared out of his wits. He leaned on the axe and muttered, so awkward and shy she thought he might choke. He had none of Billy’s lightness. Billy stood at the door of the shack and laughed.

Pete had been living in the house as if he had come upon it by chance, and Billy came back to it, she saw, in the same spirit. The house, all this, meant nothing to them. For the remainder of the week, which he endured only to collect his wages, Pete avoided her, then was gone and they heard no more of him.

This carelessness about things she held sacred astonished her. The place after all bore their name; the house was the one they had grown up in, even if it was given over now to the bush rats whose nests were everywhere, and to big spiders with egg-sacks under their bellies, and woodlice and centipedes. Rolling her sleeves up she got the three rooms cleared and clean again, but Billy scarcely noticed and did nothing to help. He was happiest camping in one room like Pete, wearing the same filthy shirt he had worn all week and splashing his face with two fingers of water from a pail. He was, she saw now, a kind of savage, as resentful as a ten-year-old of any suggestion that he should wash his neck, or his feet at least, before he came to bed.

There were few relics in the place of any former habitation, but rummaging about one day in the bottom of a cupboard she found a stack of photographs, dusted them off, set them on the rickety sideboard and spent the rest of the morning studying them for some clue to this family she had married into — what it was that might go into her children, when she had them — and for some clue to him . When he came in she questioned him.

‘Oh, that’s Merle,’ he said lightly of a big girl, lumpish and worn-looking, whom she had taken at first for the mother. He stood easing his braces over his shoulder and peering.

‘Yair. That’s Merle. She lives up Lismore way. Or Casino. I dunno.’

Prompted, he named the others.

‘That’s Jess. Geez, what a tartar!’

‘Where’s she ?’ she demanded.

‘ I dunno. Married. Out west somewhere, I dunno. She’s no loss.’

Eric had gone to work on the railways. ‘Funny feller, Eric,’ he laughed. ‘A bit touched.’

Leslie?

‘Went ta Queensland, oh, ages ago. Just ran off. You shoulda heard dad roar! I was on’y a nipper.’

He told all this with only the most casual interest and with none of the little details that might have made any of it real. They had gone. He didn’t expect to see them again and didn’t care, one way or the other. Should he?

Her parents-in-law, the mother and father of this scattered brood, appeared on their wedding day; he in a tight-looking suit with a stiff collar, a grim-faced working man who didn’t know where to put his hands; she in a cup-shaped chair in front of him, her skirt spread and at her elbow a pedestal and urn.

She tried to find something in them, stunned to immobility as they were by the occasion, that would explain why every one of their children had gone off without a backward glance, or, so far as she could see, a twinge of regret. What brutality was it in the father? What empty-headedness or ignorance or dull indifference in the mother? What failure to hang on to things, or even to see, if Pete and Billy were an example, that there was anything to be held.

‘Yairs,’ he said. ‘That’s dad.’

He frowned, rubbed his chin with the heel of his hand, sounding resentful.

He took the photograph and peered at it. ‘Yairs,’ he said, ‘that’s me mother ,’ as if what she had been demanding of him was the identity of the woman at his father’s side, rather than some living detail of her. ‘When she was young.’

It was all he had to say, and she looked at him now and wondered what it was that had bruised all feeling out of him. Or had he never had any?

She had thought at first that he was simply lackadaisical, unwilling to be bothered, and had put this down to his youth. But the truth was that he did not care and wondered why she did. He looked at her in genuine puzzlement and was hurt, then irritated, but a moment later was all brightness and affection, whisking her about on the scrubbing boards, full of fun and boyish roughness and urging her to go to bed when it was still daylight.

‘What is it?’ he asked when they did lie down together. ‘You’re the one who wanted to come. I thought you liked it here.’

‘That’s your father’s family,’ she would tell Digger and Jenny. There was a vehemence to her voice that amounted to savagery, though she tried to hide it.

‘This is your grandma. And this is your father’s dad, your grandpa,’ and so on for each of the uncles and aunts. She was determined that they should have a family and was giving them all she had to show. It infuriated her that she had never seen any one of these people except Pete.

They might have dropped out of the world the moment their likeness was taken, for all the evidence they had left in the house, or anywhere else for that matter. No toys ever turned up. Not even a peg-doll or a home-made top. Even in the yard when she broke the soil for her garden. Not one of them had ever carved his name on a bit of furniture, or scribbled drawings on a wall, or left height marks on a door. Billy, unless urged, never mentioned any one of them, and had no tales of his childhood to tell. He might never have had one. He was born with the war.

Her own family, she was convinced, would not have given in so easily to extinction. She sent letter after letter to the orphanage in an attempt to find Bert.

It was in defiance of this almost criminal indifference in their father’s people that she began to inculcate in Digger, and in Jenny too so far as she was capable of it, her own view of things, which was fanatical. She had been famished all her life for what these people, these Keens — Billy among them — tossed away like the merest trash. She wouldn’t let her kids grow up like that.

The Crossing first: Keen’s Crossing.

They belonged here for all time now, it was marked with their name. They could see it on a map if they liked: a dotted line leading away from the highway; at the end of it a dot marking the store; beside that, in italics, Keen’s Crossing . To turn your back and walk away from it was a crime. Against yourself first of all. Then against what had been trusted to you. Then against the place itself, and if you didn’t know what that was, then just open your eyes and look around you.

Family next. That too was a kind of place, a place in time. Turn your back and walk away from that and you lost all hold on the line of things. The line was blood. Turn your back on your family and you drained the blood from your heart.

She painted a fierce picture, and Digger at least was terrified of her. It was a religion she was preaching, her own, and she was its implacable embodiment.

One more thing. At the orphanage they had got a good dose of preaching. She had been unimpressed by most of it, but one thing struck her and she had incorporated it into her own system. It was this: what you got in the next life was neither more nor less than what you had gathered and made something of in this one. So if you went through life with nothing, nothing was what you got in the next life as well. It was a harsh law but it chimed with something in her nature and she had taken it literally.

Her vision was of a room with curtains, furniture, the smiling faces of children round a table piled high with food (including pineapples), and with good cutlery laid out and glass and plates such as she had seen in the houses she worked in. A German roller in a cage would be trilling away and ducking its head in a bath and shaking off brilliant drops. In drawers, if you opened them, would be aprons, teatowels, napkins, all neatly folded, and silver serviette rings with initials; plus sugar tongs and grape scissors, embossed.