David Malouf: The Great World

She saw all this very clearly, though as yet she possessed not a single one of these things. She had nothing at all. Every least bit of it however was already there, just waiting to be gathered, and would go to the making of her life; and when she was dead she would sit grandly content and justified in the midst of it, her children and grandchildren about her and each item at last in its place, even the meanest redeemed out of ordinariness and alive again in the eternal, yet recognisably and tangibly itself.

She tried to pass this vision on to Digger and Jenny as a way of explaining to them why it was that she hung on to things. She did succeed with Digger, but he took the idea and interpreted it in his own way. His vision too was literal, and it was a good while before she saw that it was not at all like her own. She had made him a priest all right, but of his own religion.

It was in this spirit of making and gathering, this dedication to the religion of getting , that she set about reviving the store.

She had a head for figures, orders, invoices and such, and took no more nonsense from the travellers who turned up with samples than she had from the drinkers at the pub she had worked in. When the store was ready she got to work on the house. From the David Jones catalogue she chose curtains and wallpaper; then later, a utility set for them to eat off, Wood’s Ware, not cheap Japanese, and a set of celluloid serviette rings with initials.

Billy watched all this with suspicion. Her orderliness made him uneasy, and her tendency, as he thought of it, to put on the dog — maintaining a bit of decency was how she would have put it — enraged him. He had married a plump little girl with blonde curls and a bit of colour to her mouth, and had ended up with a woman who could run things. She tried to run him.

He submitted at first. Anything for a quiet life, that was his motto; women were odd, you had to humour them. But when she tried to rule him he rebelled. He didn’t want to be cleaned up and made respectable, it didn’t suit him. He hated the neat little curtains she hung, the amount of washing she put out and the new poles he had to cut for her lines, the floors he couldn’t walk on in his hobnailed boots, and all the other evidence of what hampered and restricted him, this domestication she expected him to be grateful for.

Wasn’t she making a home for him ? That was the song she sang. Well, he could do without, he didn’t want it. He resented all these little wants she had, that were in fact criticisms of the way he preferred to live. He even resented, at last, the success she made of the store, because of the strength it gave her. It put him in the shade. He could support them. He didn’t need her to do it, and to show him up with how clever she was, and with manners she had picked up from people who were not their kind and that he had no time for and no wish to imitate, and all the palaver as well that went with them. Like serviette rings! She cast a gloom over him with the life she was making. So did the Crossing. He hated it, always had. Her passion for it was exaggerated. He took it as another form of rebuke to him, another criticism. Everything he wanted, everything that gave his spirit scope and made his blood beat, she forbade or cast scorn on.

He set himself against her. He wouldn’t have done; he was easy-going by nature, and at the start he had been genuinely fond of her, had wanted her to have whatever it was that made her happy. But she had set herself against him .

He would sit out on a stump and curse when he was supposed to be chopping firewood for her copper, deliberately dawdled over jobs he could have finished with one hand tied behind his back, not to give her the satisfaction of having him always on call. He stayed out with the boys when she was expecting him on the dot for tea, and complained bitterly to his mates, when he had had a drink or two, of the haste with which he had put himself in harness. What a fool! At twenty-one his life was finished.

Back there in the trenches, even if you ran the risk of extinction, and maybe most of all then, you were alive. He had known the full power of his own presence, breath and balls and fingers and the small hairs at the back of his neck. It had spoiled him, that glimpse of what a man might be. The life he was living now was nothing. Maybe it would be different if he had someone who knew what he was on about when he wanted to talk.

Then Digger came along, and he had someone at last that he could be himself with, a mate; an ally too against the world that she was mistress of, that took no account of a man’s world because it had no use for it, only for the dumb, animal side of a man, work, and the bit of pleasure he would be allowed in the getting of a kid. All they wanted beyond that was to make a dummy of you, with a lot of rubbish about clean collars and toenails that didn’t do damage to the sheets, and serviette rings and God knows what other useless lah-de-dah lady’s business.

These were some of the things he raved about when he had Digger alone. But when the anger left him at last he had other things to pass on to the boy.

They were inseparable from the start. As a toddler with his nappy sagging and their dog Ralphie at his heels, he trotted in the father’s footsteps or squatted beside him with a toy hammer in his hand, imitating the father’s muttered curses and his way of holding his head to one side and sucking in his cheeks as he got set to belt a nail.

He was good with his hands, Billy Keen. Everyone knew that. He could knock up anything you liked, a table or a medicine chest, dovetails and all; or hang a door or fix a roof. He was good with machines, too. Machines, people said, would talk to him, start purring and singing the moment he laid a hand on them. It was a gift. Digger had it too, or by intuition had picked it up from him.

Machines were alive to Digger in the same way Ralphie was; and he was so close to Ralphie that it had taken him ages, when he was little, to see that they were of different species. The mother, who could not always be on the watch — she had Jenny as well as the shop and house to care for — was forever having to snatch Ralphie’s feeding dish from him. ‘Leave that, you little grub,’ she would tell him, ‘that’s Ralphie’s. Here, spit that out right now.’ In a storm once he had crawled into Ralphie’s kennel, out under the pepper tree, while thunder rolled, lightning blasted and the whole yard turned to mud. He had never felt so safe or warm. In dreams sometimes he found himself back in the dark, animal smell of the kennel, with Ralphie’s warmth against him, and felt he had arrived at a place where he knew at last where he really was, had rediscovered, in the individual grains of dirt he was pushing into his mouth, what it meant to be on the earth. It was the same way with machines. He understood the workings of them as if they were continuous in some way with his own nature. They purred for him, they sang, as they did for his father. There were no words for this.

At barely ten, a scrawny kid, tough and hard-heeled, with a skin so pale you could see sunlight through it, he would relieve his father at the wheel of the ferry, feeling the huge power in his arms as the barge, with its load of vehicles, swung out into midstream. His father, leaning back against the machinery and blowing smoke, would direct him.

‘One day,’ he told himself, ‘this job will be mine.’ He had no thought but to follow in his father’s footsteps.

He watched his father, picking up from him mannerisms he thought of as being essential to the man, and acquiring thus a set of gestures that were not individual to the father at all. Billy Keen, as a lad of fifteen, unsure of himself and eager to be recognised as a man, had picked them up from older fellows in the army in France. So at seven Digger had already the loose slouch that is the soldier’s stance when he is off-duty or between moves. He would sit on one heel and narrow his eyes at the distance before there was any distance much to be seen.