David Malouf - The Great World

But they were leaves. He had taken them for lottery tickets only in the way one’s mind works in dreams, though whether it was his dream or hers he could not tell. It was just about the time that ballots were being drawn to send young men up to Vietnam. Greg was eighteen, and he thought it might be Greg’s name he was about to draw. Or was it his own? Again? Could they ask you to go again?

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘Have you got one?’

He took one of the tickets and went to the bed and showed it to her.

‘No,’ she said, without even looking at it. ‘That’s not the one.’

He brought her another.

‘No.’ She was quite short with him, as if he were being deliberately stupid. He felt like a very young child who could not see the answer to some simple problem in arithmetic.

‘Meggsie —’ he began.

‘Go on,’ she told him, ‘you’re wasting time.’

He dipped again.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Good boy! You were always a good boy really.’ She smiled. ‘Now, don’t show it to anyone, eh? Don’t tell, or you’ll lose your luck. Don’t even show it to me . Put it in your wallet.’

He obeyed. He put the ticket, which had after all never won anything the first time around, in his wallet.

‘No,’ she said, catching the feeling of despair that had come over him, ‘don’t worry. It’s a good one. I wouldn’t give you anything that wasn’t lucky, love, you know that. Don’t you know that after all this time? Trust me.’

He did not remember it had happened till the next day when he was in the office and in conference. He broke off for a moment to check his wallet, and there was the ticket.

He told Ellie about it, but wondered later if he had made the point clear, since what it had to do with was what he had felt ; the odd sensation, when he put his hand into the drawer, that he was moving it among dried leaves, going back years, each with its number. Greg’s ballot too had been part of it.

With Meggsie’s death a prop went from the house. They all felt it and were surprised how her various forms of tyranny, which they had been inclined to laugh over, had determined the way they lived. Impossible to modernise the kitchen — that was Meggsie’s province. Part of her power lay in the fact that only she could manage its many inconveniences. Impossible to suggest that nobody these days ate puddings, a different one each night.

But when she was gone and they were free to make all the changes they wanted, they were at a loss where to begin. For the first time Vic talked seriously to Ma of selling the house and the adjoining factory site and moving. He did it, Ma thought, not because it was a necessary move, or one that any of them wanted, but for reasons of his own that for all their closeness she could not ask about.

For a long time now he had felt a kind of emptiness in him that had to do, he thought, with the way he had closed his heart in the last days before his mother’s death, had shut out so completely all the pain and loss he felt that afterwards there was nothing to go back to. Now, in grieving for Meggsie he grieved at last for his mother, in the kind of linking over and back (he was thinking of the way his mother hemmed a skirt) that made up the odd, cross-hatched line he was following.

But there was something else as well. For a time, between eighteen and twenty-one, death had been the closest of all realities to him, a daily thing, more common in that place than the sound of a woman’s voice, or a bath running, or a clean shirt. He had thought he would never get used to any other condition of life; that those ordinary things — clean shirts, hot baths, a woman’s hand — would go on being so miraculous as to be barely graspable, and only the proximity of death quite real.

The whole of his energy at that time had been engaged in pushing it off; in clinging to his own body and dragging the little bit of life in it from one day to the next. It was huge, that, but also simple. Pure, too. The effort was so pure. You knew what the other was because from time to time, when it was necessary, you held a man whose death was near so close against your ribs that his heart was just a paper thinness from your own, and the beating of it was like your own heart flopping and failing.

For years now no death had come close enough to touch him. Now Meggsie’s did, and after so long, his mother’s death too. (He was not ready yet to think of his father.) Most of all, he began once again to live with his own, but it seemed mysterious to him now because he was surrounded by so much that obscured even the possibility of it, and because when it came to him here it would, given the odds, be of a kind he had not yet faced, a natural one.

FOR MORE THAN twenty years Digger’s visits to town had followed the same pattern. Thursday was the day, because in the early years it had been Iris’s day off. Later, when the cake shop closed and she retired, they stuck to Thursdays out of habit. Digger went up on an early train, spent the night, and came back on the milk train Friday morning.

If it was one of the days when he was to meet Ellie he would not go to Bondi Junction till after lunch. Otherwise, after a bit of shopping on his own, he went immediately. They would take a picnic to Cooper Park, or eat quietly at home, and in the afternoon he would read a bit or do whatever jobs needed doing. Now that the boys were gone there was always some little thing to be set right. In the evening they took in a show, or went round and had tea at Ewen’s or Jack’s, who were married now with families of their own.

He got on well with the wives. There had never been any embarrassment about his standing among them. The children called Iris Grannie and Digger was ‘Grannie’s friend’. They called him Digger because their fathers did — he had baulked at ‘Uncle’.

They were freer with him than with any uncle. Their mothers had to step in and prevent them, the moment he appeared, from climbing all over him like some sort of natural phenomenon, an especially cooperative tree or rock. He was fond of children. He showed them old-fashioned tricks even their fathers did not know, with balls made of silver paper out of cigarette packets, that if weighted at one end could be made to dance, and how to weave pyjama-cords on cotton reels. He brought them wooden toys he had made and told them stories, serious ones, that left them struck but which for some reason they could not get enough of. Thursdays he was a family man. He spent a lot of his time during the week thinking up tricks to amuse ‘the kids’.

The whole tenor of his life on that one day of the week was different, and had been for so long, given the little changes that had taken place in it, that when he found himself at Central Station on a Monday morning, same hour but a different day of the week, he felt disorientated.

It wasn’t simply that his own routine had been broken. The whole feel of the place was different. The Monday morning crowds wore different faces. The streets had a different pace. It felt less like another day of the week than another city.

He had come up for the funeral of the poet, Hugh Warrender. He was doing it out of affection for Ellie, but also out of respect for a man he had spoken to only once, and then in an unsatisfactory way, but whom he felt he had got to know over the years, and grown close to. Iris went with him.

It was an odd gathering. There were groups of older people who Digger guessed would be friends of the family or business acquaintances of Vic’s; but there were others whose presence was so unlikely that he thought they must have mistaken the time and come to the wrong ceremony. A lot of the men were in jeans and high-collared Indian shirts, and some wore washed-out combat jackets with Chairman Mao caps. Most of the girls too wore jeans, but some were got up in full-length cotton like Indian women and had children with them in the same outlandish garb. There was a flock of schoolgirls as well, all in gingham and straw hats.