David Malouf - The Great World

She knew it all; where everything was. Only up here was new to her.

And why had she left it thirty-three years to come up here and see it?

Because she didn’t want to see things too clearly, that’s why.

And why had she done it now?

Because she did.

She had left it till the very last, not to disappoint herself. She could face it now. She was past disappointment.

Far off, forty miles it would be as the crow flies, in a soft haze in which houses, whole streets of them, and trees and harbour water were smudged to the same pastel blue, as if it was a lake not a city, and just the highest towers were visible above the surface of it, was Sydney.

That wasn’t what she had come to see. She hadn’t even known it would be visible. In her mind it was further off than that. Halfway to England, practically. Thirty-three years off. She had knuckled under and hung on here — somebody had to; kept things together, turned her back on the rest of the world, taken on its name, Keen, and would now be buried under it.

But suddenly, just this afternoon, she couldn’t bear to be in the house any longer, in the stuffy little back bedroom, on a day when the wind was up. Everything, every stick of furniture, every inch of the curtains she had ordered and sewn and hung in their three rooms, every teaspoon, and the wedding picture of her husband’s parents on the sideboard, and the bags of sugar, rice, salt, and the scales in the back room on which for thirty-three years she had weighed them out in pound and half-pound packets — all that, and her kitchen chairs and saucepans, and the bucket and mop behind the door, and Jenny flopping on the counter, and all the ghosts of the others, squeezed into a corner by the stove and sucking a rusk or pushing ashes into their mouths, Leslie and James and May and Billy — all that and more, weighed on her heart and crushed her. She could have set a match to the lot of it in this high wind and watched it blaze up in a roar of smuts.

So what sort of woman, at last, did that make her?

The very kind she had set out not to be.

Tearing off her bedclothes she had rushed out barefoot to the kitchen, snatched up a box of matches and struck one and threw it down, then another, and looking wildly about her said, ‘This is the sort of woman I am.’

But the box fell from her hand, the matches spilled. Without looking back she had broken out of the house and, plunging off into the scrub with no thought in her head, only the wind and the high clouds flying, begun to climb.

Once she was actually climbing she was all excitement and haste, as if she had wanted to do this every day of her life and was to see at last what she had for years been held back from. She pushed past ledges of rock where she had to use both hands to haul herself up, and the big, flesh-coloured angophoras with their fat-rolls like naked angels, till she was high enough to get a grip on the dimension of things. She wasn’t a coward. No one could have called her that. She could face anything.

When she reached the summit, she looked about, took it all in, then, hunched on an outcrop among scratchy, waist-high grass, and with her arms hugging her breast, chewed on the bitterness of things.

Now that it was about to occur, the thing she had dreamed of, the descent of peace and the gathering around her of all the objects of her life, she did not want it, any of it. She did not want her life — the fifty-four years, so many days and days and the disappointments and defeats and little silent triumphs — to be made visible at last and piled up around her so that she had to say: ‘So this is what it comes to.’

That’s what she had wanted to get away from, and had, in her head, already burned the evidence of. Not to have, forever, to sit at the centre of it.

Gibbons. That was the name she had been born to.

‘My God,’ she thought, looking about at the spiky heads of the blockboys, ‘where is she? Where’s Marge Gibbons? And Bert. Marge and Bert.’ It disturbed her that she could no longer actually see them: two hopeless little kids she had let wander off and get lost. They had been so real in the world, and still were, in her mind somewhere, if she could only get back to them past all the things she had accumulated that shut them out.

She began to pluck at the wool of her bedjacket. Little bits of pink fluff blew about in the air and joined the light little seeds and balls of pollen that were streaming and tumbling. The wind could not tell the one from the other of them.

Keen . She had taken that name, and the result was she would be buried under it.

And him? Billy? He was off chasing another war, and had found one too, in Korea this time. He would go on till he found the one that would do for him. She had known for years now that he would not come back.

She plucked at the bedjacket, pecking at it with the hard tips of her fingers. The pink stuff rose up and sailed. But suddenly there was a barging about in the bushes close by, then a wailing, and she was found, which was just how it had been the first time. The big blubbery girl found her and kept clutching and clutching and would not let her be.

*

‘She won’t come in,’ Jenny told Digger. ‘She says she never wants to. Ever again.’

She was wheeling about in the yard under the clothes-line and wringing her hands. Their mother, wrapped in an eiderdown, was in an old cane chair that had been chucked out as rubbish, her back to the house and shivering.

Digger put his tool-box down. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, but his calm was pretence. ‘You go in an’ make us a cuppa tea. I’ll talk to ’er.’

He did, but she remained woodenly silent, as if she could no longer hear.

Jenny brought tea. She took a cup, but just sat with it while he drank, and Jenny, who was terrified, kept well away on the kitchen step.

But she would not go back into the house, and though he talked and tried to tempt her with things she had once cared about, she did not hear or would not listen. When it got dark he brought more blankets, wrapped her, put on another sweater himself, and they continued to sit as night deepened and the stars came out, and Jenny, behind a lighted window in the house, looked on.

Jenny brought him something to eat. It wasn’t much. She was too upset to make anything proper. Digger sat on an upturned can and ate potatoes with a fork, with bread and a bit of gravy, and their mother continued to sit with her back to the house. It was ashes in her head. The house, the store and all its contents. She had put a match to them, whether or not the flame had taken. Digger could do nothing with her.

He had faced this sort of thing before but had not expected to see it again in his lifetime, and not here. She was willing herself out of the world, and she would do it too.

It was a strange thing, to have the house there, all lighted, and her sitting in the dust in front of it in a broken chair, with the scrub and all its night sounds around them.

Towards dawn he dozed off and she did at last begin to speak to him. The things she told him were terrible. He had not known she was in such despair. Bert, she called him. ‘No,’ he wanted to say, ‘that’s not my name. I’m Digger. Remember?’ but he was afraid of interrupting her.

But he was wrong, or she did not remember or did not want to. ‘Bert,’ she called, and he woke, and the conversation they had been having went deep down into him and was gone.

*

‘Digger,’ Jenny said. ‘Would you mind if I ast you something?’

She had come out to where, in an old pair of shorts and with his shirt off, he was at his workbench in the yard. There was a smell of freshly sawn timber.

‘Fire away,’ he said without looking up. He had thrown himself into work as a way, for a time, of not thinking. He needed a little time always to recover himself, and had settled now for the pleasure of putting a saw into soft wood, the smell of it, very sweet and spicy, and the warmth of the sun on his back.