David Malouf - The Great World

The crack of half-light widened. It was Vic. She could see the shape of him poised there at the threshold, his body so alert that you could feel the energy of it like a new kind of heat in the room. She drew back against the wall. He wasn’t so much looking as setting himself like an animal to catch a scent. His body was hard-edged, separate, intent.

She had seen this quality in him, or thought she had, from the very first day Pa introduced him, and he had stepped out, very sturdy and solemn, to shake hands; looking, with his hair chopped off short as it was again now, and his ears sticking out, very tough and little-mannish, but watchful too, as if for all his squareness and solidity he could be hurt. He had been hard-edged even then, aware of the precise point where he left off and a world began that might not be entirely well-disposed towards him, and which for that reason he had always to be on his guard against.

He was standing just inside the door, compact, firm, tense with the effort of feeling about for some other presence in the room, his eyes in the darkness taking up the light there was, oily-bright.

‘Like a cat,’ she thought.

Caught like this, with her heart beating fast, she too felt like some creature, a rabbit perhaps, but was determined not to be mesmerised.

Then something happened. He gave up playing, that’s what it was; and having decided there was no one there, simply stood, his body eased, in the belief that he was alone and unobserved.

He stood where the light fell. There wasn’t much, but Ellie was accustomed now to the dark. He was looking straight to where she was but did not see her. The curtain rose and fell like a veil, brushing her face. And something in the way the breeze moved and the leaves of the trees clattered gave her the feeling that they were not inside, not any more, but out in the dark somewhere on an unlighted road, and she had come upon him by accident, sleepwalking there. She was looking past his known face to one she had never seen. It was the one he wore when he was too deep in himself to be aware any longer of what he might have to conceal; the face he showed no one, and which even he had not seen.

She heard him sigh. He was very close. Then, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, he turned on one heel so that he was in profile. He might have been deliberately showing himself to her: first full-face, now this. She was tense, but the little touch of panic she had felt at the beginning was gone. She had given herself up entirely to looking.

She must have made a sound of some kind, just a breath. He turned his head sharply and his face was covered again. He leaned towards her in the dark.

‘Who is it?’ he said, his voice very low. ‘Ellie? Is that you?’

His brow was creased but he was not perturbed, or did not seem to be, that she had seen him. He put his hand out. She froze.

This was the game now. There were rules and they were in operation again. The tips of his fingers came close to her face. He did not touch her but she felt that he had. Her skin tingled.

There was a smile on his mouth. What light there was, which was really no more than a transparency of darkness, was full on him. But what she was seeing still, behind the smile and the clear roundness of his pupils, was the look she had seen earlier, an afterglow as when a bright light has imprinted itself on your eyeball and remains for long seconds after you have looked away.

‘Ellie?’

There was a note of amusement in his voice.

In just a moment now, as the game required, he would grasp her wrist, give a shout, ‘I’ve found Ellie,’ and bring the others into the room; but he did not want that, not yet.

He brought his fingertips to her cheek, through the light gauze of the curtain, and she flinched. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t be scared.’

They stood for a moment longer, neither in the game nor quite out of it, very still, with the breeze moving and the curtain lifting and falling with her breath. She had seen him, he knew that, and for some reason it did not bother him. If anything he felt relieved, as if a weight had been taken from him. Only one other person had ever seen him like that, and that was different. It was a man. It put you at risk, of course, but Digger had not let him down.

He took Ellie’s wrist, very gently at first, and they stood a little longer without moving. Then he tightened his grip and called.

DIGGER’S FIRST DAYS back at the Crossing were spent clearing an infestation of blackberry canes that had invaded the open area between the store and the river and overgrown all that remained now of the ferry, the old wheelhouse and its machinery and the planked approaches to the wharf. Stripped to the waist in the November heat and armed with a machete, he waded into the massed entanglement of it. He used a gloved hand to push aside the barbed shoots, hacking at trunks as thick in places as his own wrist and grubbing out strand after strand of fibrous roots.

It was a single dense growth, its root-system as extensive and as deeply intricate below ground as above. Somewhere at the heart of it was the tap-root, but he never found it. Over and over again he thought he had; he put the machete in and dug out a fleshy tuber. But further in there was always another, tougher stock. At the end of the day his arms, chest and back were criss-crossed with scratches, and despite the gloves he wore his hands were torn, but the work was a pleasure to him. It was a way of getting down to the ground of things. In his sleep that first night he went on with the work, moving with almost no effort now and scarcely feeling the sting of the thorny shoots as they whipped out and clung to him. He saw the bones of small animals that had got trapped in the undergrowth, bandicoots, bush rats, a feral cat; turned up objects he had thought never to see again, that shone out of the over-arching growth with an unnatural luminescence, as if they had managed somehow to preserve the last ray of sunlight they had been touched by, or the last moonlight, before a new shoot launched itself, knitted into the thicket and shut them in.

There was a sun-bonnet of his mother’s that had once been blue and was sodden and stained now to a colour he could not name. He tossed it on to the pile he was making, along with a smashed storm-lantern, the crumbling head of a spade, some bald tennis balls, and from deep under, where so little light got in that the undergrowth was hollow, the battered pudding basin that had been Ralphie’s water-tin. He saw it glowing like a full moon in the half-darkness, reached in, pulled it out, and sent it clattering on to the heap.

His mother came out to bring him cups of scalding tea or jugfuls of iced water, and would stand there while he drank.

She took no interest in the progress of the work. She would have preferred him to begin on the roof, which leaked in places, or to put in new slumps for her lines, and he would get around to these too, in time; but it was the blackberries that had priority. So when she stood waiting for him to finish drinking it wasn’t the work that held her, it was him: the fact that she had him here. Gulping down cold water, he watched her over the rim of the glass, hungrily taking him in.

At the end of the day, casting his gloves aside, he set fire to what he had hacked and torn out and dragged to the bank. The thorny strands crackled and burned fast. The place began to resemble the Keen’s Crossing he had left, though there was much that could not be restored. The Crossing now was a dead end. The highway had moved a mile downriver and there was a bridge, a three-spanner, high above the stream.

It surprised him, given this and the war and all, that his mother had been able to hang on so long, but she would, of course, if anyone could. He was struck again by her tenacity, that strength in her that he too had drawn on ‘up there’ and used to pull him through, and was conscious once again of how alike they were, and how different.