David Malouf - The Great World

Digger tried, against the great hissing sound they made, to speak his own name, but his mouth was dry and he had no breath. He tried to think it, but his head now was filled with their names, and he had given his word, officially, and was afraid in his weakened state that he might forget one of them, let it slip. How could he ever face the man, knowing he had let go of him so that he was no longer present and accounted for?

But his own name was safe enough. It was buried somewhere. He would dig it up again later.

He had to survive. If he didn’t, how could they, since so many of them were now just names anyway, with no existence save as syllables in someone else’s head? In his head.

His mind went back to that swarm of tiddlers in the river. He felt the touch of the stream, then the tiddlers striking and striking in fury as they tore at his flesh; but with a touch, though it was all selfishness and savagery on one side, that on the other was the gentlest healing. It could also be like that.

His eyes clapped open. The voices now were roaring up from the street. There must be a huge mob down there, all shouting their names and holding their faces up like empty bowls.

A face tilted towards him. Hands brought a coolness to his brow. She was here. No, it was a man’s hands. Vic’s. The whispering rose in a great shuddering wave and he was swept under again, and he battled with it, half-drowning in scald.

He blinked, opened his eyes again, this time on silence, then lapsed a moment, rolling back months into wet heat; then blinked himself back again into the room.

‘So. You’ve decided to come back to the living.’

It was Frank McGowan. He was looking up over a newspaper, with glasses halfway down his nose. He lay the paper aside and took them off.

‘How you feeling?’

‘I’m all right,’ Digger said weakly. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Playing nurse. Any complaints?’

‘Was that you?’ Digger asked.

‘Yair. You want to try an’ eat something?’

He got up off the cane-bottomed chair and busied himself for a bit at the gas ring with a little saucepan and a tin of soup. He was in shirt-sleeves and braces.

He brought a bowl and spoon and sat on the edge of the bed, preparing to feed Digger with the spoon, but Digger put his hand up. He put the spoon back in the bowl.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Not too long. You’ve been sick for three days.’

He opened his mouth and let McGowan feed him warm pea soup.

‘I suppose I’ve been saying things,’ he said after a moment.

‘Not much. Here, you should try and get a bit more of this down you.’

‘How did you know?’ Digger asked. ‘That I was crook. The room and that.’

‘Oh, I’m a cop, remember?’ He met Digger’s eyes with his own and there was a flash of humour in them.

‘I should be at work — it must be nearly six.’

McGowan took the bowl away. ‘It is,’ he said. ‘Six in the morning . Anyway,’ he added, ‘you’re out of a job.’ He was fussing about at the gas ring. He turned and faced Digger.

‘The club was raided,’ he explained. ‘Wednesday night. Stroke a’ luck, really — f’you. Being crook when it occurred.’ He seemed pleased with himself.

Digger frowned. He didn’t need anyone to take charge of his life.

‘Nah, that was just good luck,’ McGowan said, as if he had seen what Digger was thinking. ‘Or maybe you’d prefer to have been taken in.’

‘I’d be safe enough,’ Digger said sharply. ‘I’ve got friends in the force.’

McGowan looked at him and laughed. But Digger was failing. In just seconds he was delirious again. But he saw what McGowan was now. He was an agent for his mother. How on earth had she recruited him?

WHEN DIGGER WAS in the third grade at primary school, and the teacher allowed them for the first time to take home books, he had for several months been obsessed with atlases and maps of every sort. Kneeling up at the kitchen table to get closer to the lamp, he would screw his eyes up so that he could read even the smallest print, and making himself small, since whole towns in this dimension were no larger than fly-spots, would try to get hold of what it was here that he was dealing with, the immensity of the world he had been born into, but also the relation between the names of things, which were magic to him, and what they stood for, towns, countries, islands, lakes, mountains.

Countries, for instance, the shape of them.

Each one was its own shape entirely, cut out of the whole, out of earth and water, and resembling nothing in nature but itself. The shape was random, determined only by the way a bit of coastline ran or the course of a river, or by the language people spoke, or by battles that had been fought whole centuries ago; but once you were familiar with it you couldn’t imagine how it could be otherwise — Spain or Italy or Australia — any more than you could imagine a different shape for the things that nature had evolved or that men had designed to fit a use. A moth, for instance, a sleeve. And the names also fitted. ‘Moth’ was perfect for the furry thickness and powdery wings of the creature, as ‘sleeve’ was for what you slipped your arm through. But ‘Italy’? ‘Australia’? Yet once it was in your head the name perfectly evoked the shape of the country and contained it; the fit was perfect.

Patagonia , the Pamir Plateau , the Great Bear Lake . You let these names fall into your head and, by some process of magic, real places came into existence, small enough to find a place there with other names and places, as they also fitted on to a page of the atlas, but existing as well in a latitude on the globe that you could actually travel to, where they were immensities of water and rock and sky.

The world was so huge you could barely make your mind stretch to conceive of it. It would take days and nights, months even, for your body to cover in real space what you could spread your fingers across on a page; this is what Magellan and Vasco da Gama and Abel Tasman had had to prove. Yet whole stretches of it could be contained as well in just two or three syllables. You spoke them — it did not have to be out loud — and there they were: Lake Balaton, Valparaiso, Zanzibar , the Bay of Whales . And among these magic formulations, and no less real because it was familiar and he knew precisely what it represented, Keen’s Crossing .

It wasn’t in any atlas. You could hardly expect it to be. How could you get yourself small enough even to contemplate it, when a city of millions like Sydney was just a dot? But it was there all right, even if they hadn’t put it in. He was sitting there. At a table, with the atlas open in front of him under a lamp.

He would fall into a dream. Letting his mind expand till it was as diffused and free-floating as a galaxy off at the limits of space, he would rove about, searching till he had located the world, a pin-point of light, far off and spinning. He would home in on it then, till he could see the exact point on its surface, in New South Wales, where he was: Keen’s Crossing. He would find Broken Bay first, the mouth of the river; then, moving high up over it in the dark, follow the twists and turns of it till he saw the wharf, the store, the lighted window, his head like another globe bent low over the atlas, and could slip back into it.

His mind would be dazzled, like a moth that had been drawn in out of the dark and was at the centre now, dazed but excitedly fluttering. Around him, in pitch darkness, the Scotch firs soaring sixty feet towards the stars, the pepper tree, the clothes-lines touched with moonlight, the beginnings of an immensity of scrub.