David Malouf - The Great World

At the table, still shirtless in the heat but with the grime and ash washed off him and peroxide on his cuts, he listened in a numbed way to her talk, which was ceaseless as she went over the list of her grievances: the same bitter anecdotes and illustrations of the hardships she had put up with and his father’s many deficiencies. Her war with him had intensified. He was a more powerful presence to her now that he was gone than he had ever been when he was sitting out on a stump somewhere in the dark, sulking and cursing, or when he was traipsing mud from his boots over her floors.

What she could not forgive was his refusal to knuckle down to the hard truth of things: which for her meant marriage, home, family, all she had spent her spirit over the years in amassing and preserving, and which she had expected they would share.

‘He’s a conquering hero now,’ she told Digger. ‘Lording it over the Japanese. I ask you!’

Digger felt sorry for her. There was no end to the injustice she felt, and since no story she told in illustration could contain the whole of it, no story was ever finished. It opened out at one point or another into a new one, approached some new and deeper injury, and that one led on to the next. The worst of it was, he wasn’t even here to face her. He had escaped even that. Digger learned to listen and not to hear.

She told him as well what she knew of Jenny. It wasn’t much. She was in Brisbane somewhere.

At the end of the week, when the yard was cleared and he had dealt with the roof, Digger made his own enquiries, took the train to Brisbane and brought her back.

So there they were, all three, united again. Back, Digger thought, despite the seven years and all that had happened, in a life that was barely different in its essentials from the one he had left.

His mother still weighed out and packed orders each Friday night in the room behind the store, and a boy called Cliff Poster came on his bike at eight on Saturday morning and went back and forth, as he had, making deliveries.

She still had her garden, and a war now with the cats. She set Jenny to watch out for them if she couldn’t do it herself. A bucket of water was kept ready under the clothes-line to slosh at them.

She still did the washing out in the yard, using a tin tub and a scrubbing-board, and ironed in the kitchen late at night.

She and Jenny shared one room now, and Digger slept in his old bed on the other side of the wall. They could talk right through it if they wanted.

He was surprised, lying on the narrow cot and looking past the windowsill at the same moonlit view, to recall how light-headed and restless he had been in the old days; waiting, fully awake and counting the seconds till the rest of them were asleep, then easing himself off his cot so that the springs didn’t squeak, pulling on his pants, and tiptoeing out, his boots in one hand, his shirt in the other, to finish dressing in the dark.

The difference now, he thought, lay in the load of ballast he had taken on; none of which might be measurable in real terms. He could still have made the grade as a featherweight, and none of what he was carrying would have registered on his mother’s scales, out there in the shop. But it made a difference just the same.

He worked as an odd-job man, and, since it was all word of mouth up here, soon had a reputation as the man to get: ‘Get Digger. He’ll fix it.’

He had a way with generators, old fridges, every kind of engine, and since the day his father first put a hammer and nail into his hand, and gave him a slab of four-by-two to practise on, had been a dab hand at all sorts of carpentry.

Building restrictions were still on in the early days, so it was repair work mostly, and it remained so, even when the bans were lifted and they moved into a boom. People who wanted new homes got a contractor from Gosford, or brought their pet architect and builder up from Sydney. He worked with other men’s blunders, patching and restoring; or with what the weather ruined — they got too much rain up here, too much sunlight too: replacing floorboards, closing in verandahs, hanging doors. He took over the tools his father had left — however careless he may have been in other respects, he was a scrupulous workman and they were in excellent nick. He was happiest when he was straddling the line of a roof with the whole river-country laid out below him; in summer expansive and glittering, on early mornings in winter trailing a line of heaped cloud between its forested bluffs, while up where he was, crouched on the side of a fibro roof and hammering, the sun on his shoulders would be making him sweat.

On Thursdays he went up to town and spent the night at Bondi Junction. He did it without fail, not missing a single Thursday in twenty-six years.

He would walk round to pick Iris up at the cake shop and they would stroll home together, have tea with the boys and maybe go to a show. But more often than not they just sat like a long-married couple and listened to the wireless, while Iris mended socks or did a jigsaw puzzle, and Digger took a toaster to pieces and put it together again. Around eight, Ben and Amy Fielding came in and they would have a game of five hundred or a bit of a sing-song while Iris played.

He began to read his way through Mac’s library. There were, he estimated, about seven hundred volumes. Mac had intended them for his retirement, and it pleased Digger that, even if he made not a single addition of his own, there was reading enough on the stacked shelves, and in the unsorted books that were piled under the bed, on top of the wardrobe and round the walls of the little closed-in porch beyond, to keep him going for the rest of his life.

He didn’t push himself, there was no need. He read steadily through biographies, travel books, books of history; the collected writings of Wilhelm Stekel, and Adler and Freud; the whole of Havelock Ellis; the novels of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett and Conrad and Theodore Dreiser, including the book the Human Torso had given him, novels by Balzac and Stendhal and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, wondering, as he went, how often he was travelling a path Mac had already been on, and, when he came on something that challenged or shocked him, what Mac might have made of it.

Occasionally, in turning a page, he came on a slip of paper that Mac had put there to mark where he had left off reading — or was it so that he could come upon it, five, ten, fifteen years after his death?

Once it was a list of birds.

What was that doing, Digger wondered, in the scene towards the end of War and Peace where young Petya Rostov, with his fondness for sweet things and his ten pounds of seedless raisins, does ask after all, in spite of his embarrassment before the older men, about the little French drummer boy, and has him brought muddy-footed into the tent.

Mac’s presence, as Digger turned the page and interrupted his reading, imposed itself on the scene. So that for ever after, recalling it, he would think of Mac as having actually been there along with Denisov and Dolghow, and the actual birds, unlikely antipodean angels — the white throated honey-eater, a flock of fire-tails, a Regent bower bird among others — would also be there, flashing about the courtyard where young Petya hangs down from the saddle and Denisov grips the railings of the fence and howls his grief.

At other times it was tram tickets, and Digger would look at the numbers to see if they were in any way significant.

Once, with a dirty mark along the crease where Mac had used a thumb blackened with ink off the tickets he had been pulling, it was an official letter from the tramways office, in reply to a complaint he had made.

These relics moved Digger, and reminded him, if he was ever tempted to forget, of the continuity between Mac’s life and his own, which had not been broken after all in the godown that morning. He would look at one of these scraps of soiled paper, taken out of a back pocket or from Mac’s wallet when he was called to collect a fare on some late-night run out to Clovelly, and feel the other man’s presence as a physical thing, a heat in him that was different from his own, something added. Till it faded in him, the pages he read had a sharper meaning. It was a private thing. Not secret, but he found no reason to speak of it.