David Malouf - The Great World

So when Sunday came round and he did appear as promised — she heard the bell, then the clamour they were making in the hall, even Meggsie and Aunt James — she did not go down immediately. She took a little extra time, not on herself, she spent no time at all on herself, but on the child. When she came to the door of the front room they were all gathered around him, Ma, Pa, Meggsie, Aunt James (Ellie was still out at her tennis match), in a close family group. He was the lost son come home; they were making a royal fuss of him. She felt shut out. Had she always, secretly, been resentful of his place among them? Was Ellie? But when he turned, and she saw the quick, clenched look of him, she felt ashamed. She went up quickly, holding the child and relying on his warmth and weight to steady her, and kissed him on the cheek. She was shocked. He was no thinner than in the old days but he had a flayed look that went straight to her heart.

The others, Ma, Pa, Aunt James, were watching. She told herself that she had to be careful now of her own emotions. The moment was critical.

His hair, which was brutally short, shaved right up above his ears, gave him the look of a convict. Was that deliberate? She was moved by this but warned herself that she could not trust him. They stood very close, with the child between them, who was crowing and working his fingers in the air.

‘How old is he?’ Vic asked.

He was staring at the child in a perplexed way, as if he had not expected him to be quite real or had underestimated how much innocent energy and egotism he would possess. The child was laughing and looking from one to another of them with no doubt at all that he was the most important person here.

‘Hello, cobber,’ Vic said when the child reached out and made a grab for his shirt.

‘Alexander,’ she told him.

‘So you see,’ she wanted to add, ‘we’re no longer the youngest ones — not any more.’ She thought this might reconcile him a little, make him see things, as she did, in the longer view.

He put his hands out then and took Alexander from her. She felt the weight go, saw how rough and scarred his hands were, and was surprised by his gentleness, but did not lower her guard. The child had knocked him off balance, that’s all. He would be looking now for a way of restoring himself. The child was on his arm and Vic was hefting him up and down as if assessing his weight.

It made her want to laugh, that. He could not enter into rivalry with a fourteen-month-old child. It was too undignified and the odds were too much on the child’s side. He was looking for a way round. ‘What funny creatures we are,’ she thought, and relaxed a little. ‘So transparent.’

‘He’s heavy,’ Vic said, and all the time the others were quiet and watching.

‘Oh, he’s heavy all right,’ she thought. ‘ I could have told you that.’

She did laugh then. She was filled with such a wave of joy at the weight he added to the world, which she felt even when she herself was not holding him, and in the rush of it felt an affection for him too, for his hands that were so scabbed and swollen and for the sureness with which they held the child.

‘Listen,’ she wanted to say, ‘can’t we make this easy? There’s been a war. Extraordinary things have happened. A boy came all the way from Mississippi to sleep with me; drafted into it by the War Office in Washington. He was nineteen. He had never left home. Now he’s gone again, and it may be months before I can go to him, and Alexander is here, and the whole world is different. But it’s all right. We’re all fine — we’re alive , aren’t we? You can see just by looking at him how easy these things can be.’

He was very quick. She saw from his eyes that he had caught her moment of weakness towards him. He passed the child back, and when he put his hands in his pockets there was a little smile at the corner of his mouth, though he tried to conceal it. He had felt his strength again and was preparing to be difficult. There was a lightness in him and a little buzz, she could hear it, coming off the surface of his skin. She drew away.

She could say none of the things that just a moment ago had come to her lips.

He had felt like a ghost coming back here.

When he got off the train he had walked up and down the platform for a time consulting the timetables, the adverts, and deciphering the graffiti in the glassed-in waiting room; giving a good imitation of a man who had another train to catch.

What he was doing was hanging on to his last moments in limbo.

On a railway platform you can wait without question. You walk up and down with your hands in your pockets; stop to light a cigarette or unwrap a new stick of gum, and that’s the limit of it; no obligation to justify yourself, or to greet others or even acknowledge their presence. You stand lifting yourself up and down on your toes and whistling. You stroll to the end of the platform and look down the quarter mile of lumped gravel that serves as a shunting-line. You turn and stroll back. Only when you have passed the boy in the cap and waistcoat who idles at the gate, given up your ticket, gone down the stairs to where taxis are waiting, have you arrived. ‘I could stay here all day,’ he thought when he had read the timetables twice, and the Bible message, and the ads for Vincent’s APC Powders and Bushell’s tea, ‘or I could catch the next train back.’ But suddenly, without thought, he walked to the end of the platform, took the stairs, and before he knew it was in the street.

It was a good walk to the house, but he knew every step. Only four years ago he had been a schoolboy here.

He stopped once to peer through the fence of a canning factory where he had gone with other kids to collect metal scrap.

Just beyond it was the ghost house, a verandahed ruin set far back behind beds of cannas and rusty-looking palms. It had been inhabited then by a batty old girl who wheeled a pram with a Pomeranian in it about the streets. The house was empty now and boarded up.

At the corner of Crane Street there was a place where eight or nine years ago, when he was thirteen, he had used his house key to scratch his initials, V.C.C., into the wet cement. They were still there under the prints of a dog’s paws.

But there was a quickening in him as well, the re-emergence of a sense of himself that had been there from the moment he first told Ma that he would come.

The familiarity of the walk itself began to work on him, as his body, which had a memory of its own, slipped back into the easy knowledge of how many steps it was from the station to their front door. When he got there, he found himself, out of habit, feeling in his pocket for the key.

Two surprising things occurred when the front door was at last thrown open. Meggsie hugged him and burst into tears, and Aunt James, for the first time, recognised him as himself. ‘It’s Vic,’ she called, just behind Meggsie in the hall.

‘My God,’ he thought, and felt a bubble of laughter rise in him. ‘If she knows me I really must be a ghost!’

There were other changes. Pa announced them, a little too quickly, Vic thought, before he could discover them for himself, adopting a humorous tone that gave no indication of what he might really feel.

‘I’m retired,’ he told Vic. ‘Put out to pasture, I reckon. Though officially it’s so I can get on with my book.’ Ma was making little sounds of disavowal, keeping up the game Pa made of it. ‘Meet the new manager.’

‘It’s true,’ she said, rather shy about it. ‘I took over three years ago. Now there’s a surprise for you!’

‘Got rid of me first thing she could,’ Pa said. ‘Sacked for incompetence. For loafing on the job.’