David Malouf - The Great World

How much of all this was contained by the name he could not determine. There was no visible border. Not enough, clearly, to make a showing in the atlas, but quite a lot if you thought of all the dust you had to wade through to get from the ferry to where the highway crested the ridge; or considered the millions of ants that were scurrying about over the dried-up leaves and twigs of it.

He did see a map at last on which Keen’s Crossing was marked. A fellow at the ferry showed it to him, a government surveyor, unfolding the big sheet across the bonnet of his car while they rode across. A dotted line showed the river-crossing, and there was a dot, a red one, to mark the store. Beside it, in italics, Keen’s Crossing .

So there it was: his own name, Keen, making an appearance in the great world. On a map, along with all those other magic formulations, Marcaibo, Surabaya, Arkangel .

There was a tie, a deep one, between the name as he bore it and as the place did; they were linked. And not just by his being there. He could leave it — he would too, one day, he was bound to — but the link would remain. The name contained him, from the soles of his feet to his thatch of roughly scissored hair, wherever he might go, whatever might happen to him, as it contained as well this one particular bit of the globe, the Crossing, the store, all the individual grains of dust and twigs and dead leaves that made up the acres of the place, along with the many varieties of ants and insects and spiders, and the birds that flew in and out of it; all covered. There was a mystery in this that he might spend the whole of his life pondering, beginning at the kitchen table here; except that it was just one of the mysteries, and he knew already that there were others, equally important, that he would have to explore. Still, this one was enough to keep him going for the moment, and he saw, regretfully, that he might have to forgo all those other places, Mont St Michel and Trincomalee, however attractive they might be, if he was to get hold of this one, which he was linked to because he was born here, and because his name was on it, or its name on him.

What had Keen’s Crossing been, he wondered, before his grandfather stopped here and claimed the crossing and built the store? Did it have any name at all? And, without one, how had anyone known what it was or that it was here at all?

It had been here, and pretty much as it was now, if you put back the trees that had been cut down to build the store and the ferry-landing and to make way for the road, and if you took away the clothesline, the three Scotch firs and the rosebushes and gerbera his mother had planted: the same high ridge of sandstone with its forest of flesh-coloured angophoras.

Nameless it would have been; untouched in all time by the heel maybe of even a single black. But here all right. And not even in the dark. You couldn’t say that, just because people had no knowledge of it.

The same hard sunshine would have beat down on it, the same storms and slow winter rains. The same currawongs and magpies would have been here, blue finches, earthworms, tree snakes, frogs. But it was not Keen’s Crossing. It wouldn’t have known that there were any Keens, to drive their horses across the river and cut down the first tree and make a camp. It hadn’t been waiting.

But then the two things met: his grandfather’s axe and the hard trunk of one of its trees, and the first letter of a syllable cut into it. Keen meant sharp. The axe’s edge was Keen. So the place got a name and he and it had found a connection that was unique in all the world. The shared name proved it.

Years later, in some of their worst times in Thailand, this connection would sustain Digger and help keep him sane, keep him attached to the earth; to the brief stretch of it that was continuous with his name and, through that, with his image of himself. He could be there at will. He had only to dive into himself and look about.

Time after time, in his own shape, or taking on the secret shape of some four-footed creature that could move freely past the guards, he would start running, and, with the air streaming behind him, leap bushes, rivers, over seas at last, and come down through the moonlit trees to where the store stood back from the edge of the river, with the great sandstone ridge behind it, and on the other bank a forested bluff rising sheer to the stars.

He was there now, sweating a little after his run; having come down again from where his fever had dragged him. He stood in the trees at the edge of the clearing and watched while his mother hung out the wash.

She wasn’t expecting him, except that he was always on her mind; so she was , too. When he stepped out between the trunks he would not alarm her.

In a moment he would do it. But just for a bit he stood panting, letting the big drops of sweat roll off him, and watched her lift up and peg one wing, then another, of a sheet.

VIC, WITH THE drowse of afternoon sleep still on him, stood in his undershorts, one bare foot on the other, his elbow against the dusty wall. The telephone receiver was loose in his hand. He stood with his head dropped, shaking it hopelessly from side to side. Round the old-fashioned speaking-horn fixed to the wall were scribbles in indelible pencil, numbers, names (some of them horses), an irregular heart doodled in a waiting moment, which was bleeding purple at the tip. Down the hallway a race was being called.

It was a men’s boarding house in Surry Hills. He had been summoned to the phone just before tea.

Sprawled on his back in the airless heat, legs spread, mind empty, his body as flat as paper — one of a string of such fellows cut out of a single folded sheet — he had been tempted to call out ‘Not in,’ but had staggered up, still half in a dream, scratched his head and applied the receiver to his ear. It was Ma. Every Friday night she rang and they had the same three-minute exchange.

She wanted him to come home, of course; but after the first time she had never again tried to persuade or bully him. But she rang each Friday at the same hour, and though he was often tempted not to, he took the call. She was clever, Ma, and had infinite patience. Eventually he would give all this up and come back. She knew that and so did he. In the meantime, as lightly as possible, she hung on.

Sunday dinner — that was the open invitation, a surprise for Pa; no pressure, but the invitation was always there. One Sunday, yes, he promised, but he continued to put her off.

Back in the room he lay on the bed, not thinking, and stared up at the stamped-tin ceiling with its design of circles within squares, and inside the circles, fleurs-de-lis.

In these last years, when the population of the city had very nearly doubled, the big front room of the place, with its long sash-windows and fifteen-foot ceilings, had been partitioned with three-ply to make smaller rooms, he had no idea how many, each with its bare bulb hanging, its wardrobe, washbasin and cot. The long gap between the top of the partition and the ceiling meant there was no privacy here. All night you heard other men coughing, hawking, turning the pages of the Zane Greys they were reading, shifting on the rusty wires and groaning in their sleep. You participated, whether you cared to or not, in their dreams.

He was earning good money now and could easily have had a room of his own. But he couldn’t sleep in a room of his own. He wouldn’t have admitted it, even to Digger, but he couldn’t get through the night. The one time he had taken a room in a hotel and tried it, he had woken in a cold sweat, filled with a panic he could not contain. He had had to go out and sit with the tramps at an all-night pie stall.