David Malouf - The Great World

Red-faced and ashamed, they were let loose among them like rag pickers. He had snatched up the first thing he saw, eager to do what they wanted, choose something and get away, and had stuffed what he got, without even looking to see how good it was, down the back of a seat on one of the bus shelters along the shore. The rough wool of it still prickled and rubbed his flesh, as if he had worn it next to his skin for years.

Rags, cast-offs, the stink of other people’s sweat — all that was horrible to him. It made his flesh itch. Because for him, and for so many others too, it had been necessity. But to these kids it was just play-acting, in uniforms you could change the moment you were bored with them. Poverty to them was just another rag you could put on, if you were rich enough, to make yourself interesting, or different, or to see how it suited you.

Greg lately had taken to going about without shoes; in a suit with a felt hat, and no shoes. He choked on that. He thought of the lines of men he had seen falling in in the drizzle, to whom the lack of a pair of boots up there had meant death. He was not thinking of himself. He did not mean to refer back to his own suffering, though he felt it again, and with a sense of injustice and anger and weak self-pity that sickened him, but of what others had been through.

It would have shamed him to speak of these things. That a man, even a boy, should not know them already, was incomprehensible to him.

When he and Greg argued there was no common ground between them. Ellie felt helpless. What the boy shouted in his own defence was useless, she knew that and felt sorry for him, and Vic set his jaw and would not speak.

MEGGSIE, WHO WAS past seventy, sat down in a chair one day at her kitchen table and found she could not get up. Her legs had gone.

She was very shocked, and frightened too, but did not cry out. She thought of doing so, but it seemed so foolish that when her mouth opened she promptly clamped it shut again and sat frowning, feeling a kind of darkness come over her. She had never felt anything like it. She had her moods, but this one came from outside her, like weather, leaving the windows full of clear sunshine but darkening her mind. She felt weak and increasingly helpless and afraid, but could not bring herself to break the habits of a lifetime and shout. When they found her at last it was because of the smell of burning.

All the time she had sat there a custard had been boiling over on the stove, and she had not noticed it. The mess was awful. She kept apologising for it as they lifted her, and for the trouble she was giving them, and it was this more than anything else that upset Pa. She was the sort of woman, Meggsie, who never apologised.

Her daughters were scattered. One lived outside Rockhampton up in Queensland, another out west. The third, Vera-me-youngest as Meggsie called her, and as she had always been known to them, was married to a lawyer on the North Shore. They phoned her now, and two hours later she drove up in a Mazda.

Ma had known her as a girl and had found her very clever and offensive in those days. She was now a good-looking woman in her fifties, very tastefully dressed. Ma, feeling embarrassed at her own shabbiness, still thought of her as Vera-me-youngest, but she introduced herself as Mrs Moreton.

She was cold at first. For several years now she had wanted Meggsie to give up working and come and live with her. Meggsie was torn but had decided she was too well settled to leave the Warrenders. Mrs Moreton believed they had influenced her, and she looked about now for something that would allow her to feel superior.

She found it at last.

The cars in the drive — there were three of them — were what you might have expected. But the house! The furniture, for example. She knew what these people were worth — who didn’t? — but there was no decent furniture in the place, not a thing you could look at. No antiques. Shoddy Thirties veneer, old-fashioned and ugly. They had made no improvements. She remembered coming here once a week, when she was sixteen or seventeen, to collect her pocket money and to be given a box of handkerchiefs or a pair of gloves by Mrs Warrender when her birthday came round. In those days she had thought the place unattainably grand. She was angry with herself for having been so naive. Her own house was a dozen times more impressive.

They left her alone with Meggsie and did not hear what was said.

She wanted Meggsie to go to hospital. Meggsie refused. She was happy where she was: they had a night nurse for her. Mrs Moreton was put out. She was grateful for what they were doing but felt snubbed. ‘Don’t be silly,’ Meggsie told her.

She rang daily after that but did not come again till the end.

She was sick for nine weeks. They had the night nurse. Otherwise it was Ma and Ellie who looked after her and put up with her complaints that everything they did was done badly, that the place was going to ruin, that the new girl they had got hold of might be a dab hand at foreign cooking but didn’t know the first thing about plain food.

In the afternoon while Ellie rested Pa would drop in for an hour or two, to tease her, taste her medicines and tell her jokes. ‘Stop it,’ she would yell, ‘you’re killing me.’ Vic too liked to sit with her.

He would go out in the early morning in his dressing-gown, send the nurse to make tea, and when she came back, wave her off. Ellie would find her asleep under a reading lamp in the front room.

In these hours he did all the things the nurse might have done. ‘Vic,’ Ellie told him, ‘you don’t have to do these things. That’s why we’ve got the nurse.’ She meant to spare him something she thought men shied away from, the intimate business that has to do with bodies. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her, ‘I don’t mind. It gives us a chance, you know, to talk a bit.’

‘Did you know,’ he said one day, ‘that Meggsie was a twin? Can you imagine it, two Meggsies? The other one died of the Spanish flu. She grew up in Chillagoe, did you know that? When it had a population of 7,000. It’s a ghost town now.’

He would be half-asleep on these occasions, very tender and talking half to himself. What he was talking about, she knew, was the mystery of other people’s lives, how little we know of one another; lying very close to her, just on the edge of sleep, and almost ready, she thought, because of the softness of his mood, to put into words at last the facts and details of his own life, all that part of it that was still secret in him.

One night Meggsie called to him where he sat half-dozing against the wall.

‘Vic, love, are you there? I want to give you something — a present.’ She sometimes wandered at this hour, but she did not seem to be wandering now. ‘Go to the bottom drawer of me dressing table.’

He got up and went to the cedar chest of drawers where her photographs sat in their celluloid frames. One was of the girls when they were little, the other a composite of half a dozen faded snapshots, her husband Len out west somewhere with a lot of other fellows, all standing in a row in hats.

The drawer was stiff. He had to get down on his knees to shift it. It jerked, came open, and in the half-light from the hallway he saw with a little shock that it was full of leaves. Was he dreaming?

‘Take one,’ she said behind him.

He put his hand into the drawer in a gingerly way, afraid for some reason of snails, and rustled among the dry leaves. But no, it wasn’t leaves. It was lottery tickets, hundreds of them, thousands — every fifth share she had bought, regularly on her afternoon off, from Mr McCann the local newsagent, over more than forty years. He felt among them.