David Malouf: The Great World

‘Well,’ he would say, ‘at least you won’t have to face that, Dig, not that. It won’t happen again. Can’t. We finished it once ’n fer all. It can’t happen twice — not that sort a’ thing.’

‘Can’t it?’ Digger asked himself. ‘Is there a rule?’

He looked at his father’s youthful shoulders, the jaunty way he stepped over the sleepers, and thought: ‘Well anyway, he come through it. I reckon I will.’

He did not think this in a superior way. For all his mother’s criticisms, which she did not hesitate to present the moment she had him alone, he knew his father’s qualities and admired them. He took no part in their war.

‘I’d watch out if I was you,’ she warned him. They would be out under the pepper tree where he was helping her hang out, shifting the props, or it might be Friday nights in the back of the shop where she was making up deliveries, weighing out salt, flour, rice, tea in brown paper packets, while he read to her from the order book and packed each thing as she handed them to him in a butter-box. ‘You’ll catch his disease if you don’t watch out. You’ll be a dreamer like him.’

‘Is Dad a dreamer?’

He wouldn’t have said so. Action was what his father was in love with.

‘What else would you call it?’

She plonked another bag on the scales, settled the half-pound weight, and poured in another dozen grains. She was precise about these things.

He took the bag from her, folded the top down and settled it in the box.

What she was really warning him of was the difference between what she called reality, or duty, or fate — she had different names for it on different occasions — and a hunger he had, and which his father had too, for something that began where her reality, however clear and graspable it was, left off. Something he knew existed because he had already got glimpses of it, from his father; from fellows too who talked to him at the open doors of their cars during the six-minute ferry crossing; from books; from the pictures he had been to; and from some physical stirring as well in his own belly.

What it had to do with was the sheer size of the world, and the infinite number of events and facts and objects it was filled with. Things you could touch and smell, but other things too that were just thoughts; which were real enough, and could even be put into words and turned this way and that, but you couldn’t see them.

There was no set of scales in existence that could measure all that, and no number of little paper bags would be enough to contain it, but your head could. That’s what he had seen. Your head. Which was the same shape as the world, and really was the world, only on an infinitely small scale; an inch to a million as on the globe he loved to look at, where the tip of your finger could cover an area of thousands of square miles, and whole cities with millions of people in them, but only because in your head you could see this. Didn’t she know these things? Didn’t she want to know them or want him to? He saw the scared look on her face.

‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ he could have assured her. ‘I’ll be all right.’

But that wasn’t really the point, and he knew it. So what he said, putting his arm round her waist and hugging her, was, ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I won’t leave you.’

‘It’s not me I was thinking of,’ she told him, and pushed him off. ‘You know that.’

‘Who then?’

‘You know.’

He did, too. She meant Jenny. But more than that, the Crossing. But what she really meant you couldn’t put a name to. It was so powerful that when she summoned it up he could accept and bow his whole life before it, yet at the same time he wanted to break and run.

Jenny.

There was no moment he could recall when this sister of his, this big soft girl who was three years older, with her milky breath and bubbly lips, had not been at his side.

When he was very little she liked to look after him.

‘Now you watch Digger,’ the mother would tell her, ‘there’s a good girl,’ and just to be safe, so as not to lose sight of him, she would haul him on to her knee and hold him so tight he would go breathless.

‘No, love, I said watch baby, don’t squeeze him like that. He’s a baby. He won’t go away.’

But she had seen others and they had gone away. She kept hold of him, and if she didn’t, and he began to crawl off, she would go running on her stumpy legs to their mother: ‘Digger! Digger’s under the dunny! Digger’s eating dirt! Digger’s getting away !’

But by the time he could talk Digger knew that he was the younger only in years. Whatever they pretended, he had on all occasions to look after her . To be an interpreter between her and a world that would always go too fast for her or come to her in forms she could not comprehend.

The fact that there had been others, and that in one way or another they had failed to live on, was a warning, and accounted, he saw, for the fear with which their mother guarded them, and for her intense possessiveness.

He resented these others. She would never let him forget them; never a day went by without her evoking one or other of them, May or Pearl or James or Leslie.

Pearl was just a name to him, a small dissatisfied spirit that each time he went to his mother’s breast was already there, fighting him off. May, just weeks before he was born, had pulled a kerosene tin of boiling water off the stove. Her howls, he suspected, were often in their mother’s ears, even when she was trying to keep her temper and talk quietly to him. She was their mother’s favourite, the daughter whose company she had longed for, since Jenny was not able to provide it. She had never trusted herself after what happened to May. She had become over-cautious, terrified of the capacity of even the most ordinary objects to turn murderous on you, and the house was full of them.

Of the others, the three boys, only Billy had been round long enough to be quite real. Digger had nursed and petted the others, but Billy had been old enough to follow him round the yard, and they had played together, all three. Billy had had time to develop features and his own smell in the room where they slept, all in the one bed; a voice, demands, little oddnesses that took your heart or raised in you an antagonism that reinforced your separateness and for that reason stuck.

Billy had wandered off into the river. The river after that had a new meaning to them, the sound of it at night, the cold touch of it when you reached a hand in. It was no longer just a boundary that let you say which side you were on, or the broad stretch of sunlight in motion that their father, and later Digger too at times, sent the ferry out on. Even dropping a line into it became a different act.

‘Watcha doin’?’ Jenny had asked him once when she saw the line trailing. ‘Are you gunna find Billy?’

She often said things you had thought of but never quite come up with, and when you did, bit off.

These deaths made the house more crowded than it might otherwise have been, but also emptier, exerting a pressure all round that forced him and Jenny, who, as his mother told him over and over had only one another, into a space that was too narrow and which he felt at times was another sort of coffin. Their having survived imposed a heavy responsibility on them: of living not just for themselves but for the others as well, and in this way letting them get another go at the world, a second breath. Since Jenny was limited, and always would be, the main weight was on him.

‘It’s not me, Digger,’ his mother would insist when he bucked at the unfairness of it. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Do you think I would want to put a thing like that on you? It’s not me. It’s life!’