David Malouf: The Great World

The mother saw all this and began to regret the mistake she had made in letting go of him. She had thought then that she could afford to; there would be others. But the others all died on her, and though Jenny was a soft-mouthed, good-natured little thing, you couldn’t depend on her. Digger, in fact, had been her only chance.

And the miracle was that for all his loyalty to the father she hadn’t lost him after all; that was the sweetness of him. He stuck to the father, but he stuck to her as well. They were bonded. They had their own codes and passwords, that others did not recognise, even when they were at the same table. They talked in silence. And one of the things they talked about was the others, the ones who were gone now, all but Jenny, but whose invisible presence she still clung to because they clung to her. They hung on to her skirts when she was out at the clothesline wrestling with sheets. They moaned and whimpered from corners, spat out mouthfuls of porridge and chewed crusts, sat in the sooty stove-alcove and banged on saucepans with spoons. And Digger, who had barely known them you might have thought, not only saw them there but could speak to them and give you details out of their brief existence that even she had forgotten. He was extraordinary, Digger, in what he saw.

It was his ability to call up these little ghosts, and so clearly and in such detail that it broke your heart, that constituted the bond between them and made her believe that his memory might go back further still: to the time when, in her loneliness, she had talked to him in the womb.

So she too had her triumph. Let them be mates, or whatever it is these men are together! Let them! He is bound to me .

She was hard on him, she had to be. She couldn’t be certain to what extent he had inherited his father’s weakness. She believed he would see this one day and be grateful to her.

Given the choice (but who has a choice ?) she might have let him off. There was a part of her nature in which nothing would have pleased her more than to be one of the serene mothers you read about in books. But what good would that do him, or her either?

The rages she got into scared her. She did not know at times, when she struck out at him, cuffing his ear or sending a stinging blow across his cheek, what it was in him that made her so angry, except that there were occasions when his simply being there was enough to do it, the soft look he wore, the vagueness of him. She was afraid he would go his father’s way. But she was equally afraid of his brightness, his curiosity. These too might draw him away.

For all the skill he had with his hands, it was his mind he lived in, and there was no way of fathoming that . There were too many things in there, even if they were facts, that had no weight in the world; that’s what she saw and had to warn him of. If he clung to them he would drift.

The father wasn’t blind.

‘You mustn’ let yer mother put you off, Digger. I mean, women don’t know everything, you know, though they reckon they do. It’s a different world, their world. A hard one, I admit. Yer mother’s got a hard life. That’s me, partly.’ He gave a laugh as if he were in the end quite proud of it. ‘On’y we don’t tell ’em everything we do, you know what I mean? All the bits of fun we have, or what we’re thinkin’ sometimes. They wouldn’t understand. Yer mother now. I don’t want t’ speak badly of ’er, she’s a good woman in most ways. But she’s a worrier. Yer better off — you know — keeping some things t’ yerself, you know what I mean? I mean they got their world, son, and we got ours , an’ the two are chalk an’ cheese, you can’t trade ’em. Yer mother wants to hang on t’ you. She wants to spare you from life. I don’t blame ’er fer that. It’s understandable. She doesn’t want to lose you. On’y you can’t go on tryin’ to live her way forever, Dig — it’s just not possible. One day, one way ’r another, you’ll have to go out into a man’s world. Believe me, son, yer mother won’t help you then. I seen all that. Fellers cryin’ out fer their mothers in no man’s land, with half their head shot away or their guts spillin’ out. They could cry as long as they liked but I never seen no mother turn up. It was a man’s world you was in. It was other men you had to rely on. Stretcher-bearers, if you were lucky, otherwise just yer mates. That’s the truth, Digger. That’s what yer mother won’t tell yer.’

These conversations took place on Sunday mornings when Digger and his father, with Ralphie trotting behind, went out with a 202 to get something for the pot.

Not far from the Crossing was a bit of a branch line that had once served a mining village back in the hills. It ran for twelve miles through cuttings, round sheer hillsides, and was little more now than a playground for kids who liked to walk its rails like a tightrope with outstretched arms, and a scavenging place where men would come with a crowbar to tear up sleepers or gather coals.

Digger loved the line, as they called it. So did Ralphie, who would leap off down the bank on the scent of something, a feral cat, maybe a rabbit, while they called after him ‘Skitchum, Ralphie. You skitchum!’ The walk, the stopping and starting, the intervals given over to getting a bird and bagging it, imposed a rhythm on these outings that was good for storytelling but also for talk. They were not always so chatty as they were out here. They could work side by side for hours sometimes without exchanging a single word.

The stories were the same ones over and over, and Digger never tired of them. In their daring close-shaves and feats of bravado he got glimpses, quick ones, into his father’s other nature, the one that was under restraint here, the necessary restraint of the family man. In that other dimension, he was a boy not much older than Digger himself, light-footed, eager for the world, full of energy and pluck. They were of an age there, and here too once the stories got going.

‘It wasn’t all bad, Digger. There was a good bitta fun to be had if you looked out fer it. Always is. But a lotta the time it was bad, and some of it was hell. The cold fer instance. Wicked it was, you can’t imagine. But you’d be surprised what blokes c’n put up with. When you really get down to it. Well, I was one a’ the lucky ones.’ He said this fiercely and went silent, and his mouth was so grim that Digger, watching him, wondered if he really believed it.

His stories always involved the same characters and Digger got to know the men’s names as if he had known them . They were the men, he guessed, that his father was closest to, even now; closer certainly than to any of his drinking cronies at the pub, or fellows they exchanged a word with here and there at the ferry — regulars — or when they went into town to find some machine part they needed.

Wally Barnes was one. Digger saw him, for maybe the hundredth time, go sideways off the duckboards. Saw his eyes turned up white, filling with mud; his mouth already full as the weight of his boots, his pack — his own weight too, he was a big fellow — took him down. Felt at the end of his arms the tug of the fifteen stone, and would close his eyes and with a jerk, as his father had, for the hundredth time, break his grip.

Billy Keen told these horror stories in a voice that scared even himself, as if no amount of telling would ever get him used to the fact that they had happened, and he had once been part of them. He lifted his head and looked about the still place they were in, which was all sunspikes and glitters, almost soundless except for the flutter of a grasshopper’s wings, as if it was this that he needed to be convinced was present and real.

Digger too felt a chill go over him; and the father, seeing it, would feel sorry for the boy, for having dragged him so deep into things.