David Malouf: The Great World

‘What’s going on?’ Jenny wailed. ‘What’s ’e doin’, comin’ down here all the time? What does ’e want ? And don’t tell me nothin’ again, cos I don’t believe it.’

VIC STIRRED AND woke. The jolt he felt had taken place in his sleep. For just the space of a breath back there he must have been free of gravity. He came to earth now but the sense of strangeness he felt, of estrangement even, was of being in a body that was not his own. His hand when he lifted it seemed further off and had a new weight at the end of his arm. Or maybe it was still, as they say, asleep. He worked it a little to take off the numbness.

He knew clearly enough where he was. It was the bedroom at Turramurra. But what he was chiefly aware of was not the space he was in but the space that was inside him. Echoes were coming up from it, and it was these that gave him a sense of how vast it might be. Something like a stone had fallen a huge distance in there. From where it touched bottom the sound was still travelling upward, having the power, the unusual one, of belonging to a dream but going on past whatever barrier exists between sleep and wakefulness so that he could still hear it.

What was all this? On the one hand the feeling of being lifted free of gravity like a bird, and on the other of an even swifter descent in the opposite direction, a long plummeting and the rush of air around a stone.

And if it wasn’t a dream but some purely physical occurrence, why all this business of gravity and stones?

He shifted his body on the bed and lay a while with his eyes open and very still in his head, fixed on the ceiling. A moment later he was asleep.

But at moments during the day, which was otherwise normal, his dream, or the sensations surrounding whatever had happened in there, kept coming back to him. He could not shake them off. For whole minutes at a time there was a luminosity round the edge of everything he looked at or touched, even the most ordinary objects, a coffee-machine, a polystyrene cup.

It was the light out of his dream, in which everything, including his body, had been soaked, he saw now, in a phosphorescence whose stickiness accounted for the heaviness he had felt, and still felt, in his limbs, and accounted too for all this shining. It wasn’t at all unpleasant, but it was strange and he was changed by it. He felt a tenderness in himself that was childish since it attached itself to things it was foolish for a grown man to feel so much for. The propelling pencil he took up, for example, and the way it fitted his hand, the sun rings thrown on his desk by a water-glass. ‘What is happening?’ he wondered.

These moments, which came in waves, were states of acute happiness, but of a kind he had scarcely known before, and there was, so far as he could see, no reason for them. They brought with them a lightness of heart that he associated with youthfulness, with some image he had had once of what it was to be young and in love.

Where did that come from? It did not seem like a memory of his own. It was new to him. Yet there was a quality of nostalgia in it too, as if he had broken in on the recollections of another man’s life and was as moved by them as by his own. The bursts of happiness came and came, and were so unconnected with any cause he knew of that they might have been the after-effects of a drug.

All this surprised him, but he liked the mood and surrendered to it.

He did all the things he usually did: checked the market reports that had come in overnight from New York, then the Hong Kong and Tokyo prices, then the local ones. Everything was fine, couldn’t be better: Cavendish was up two cents, Cathedral steady, Randall’s up three. It was going fine, better even than predicted.

For a time he had been anxious that the market might be playing them up. But his advisers, who were all very clear-headed, sceptical fellows, statistics freaks, not at all star-gazers or voodoo merchants, had assured him that the upward trend was steady and would continue. They were experts. He was paying them in hundreds of thousands for their opinions. It was crazy to do that and not listen to them.

There was a time, a while back, when he would have followed his own hunches, tuning in to the small hairs at the back of his neck. But the market forces these days were too complex for one man to grasp. Even he had to admit that. What happened here was dependent on what they did in Tokyo and New York. You needed advice at every point. Still, it went against the grain with him.

The good thing was, in three or four days now it would be over. They would be out.

Just on eleven, as always, he called Alex. These consultations were ritual. They made them by telephone since they could gauge better that way the little evasions they practised.

Vic joked today, he was in a buoyant mood, and this put Alex on his guard. He was difficult to talk to, Alex, unless you stuck to figures, but he had no suspicion of what was going on, he was certain of that. ‘Watch it, Alex,’ he said. It was his routine farewell.

He left the office at two to get a breath of air and was surprised to find, when he stepped into the street, that his mood had translated itself to the whole city, and he wondered if it wasn’t this that his body had caught wind of, some meteorological occurrence high up in the atmosphere, the first stirring of an air current that had been gathering there and had only now begun to move in over the edge of the continent.

It was mid-October, and balmy. Girls were out in short-sleeved dresses, young fellows carried their jackets over their shoulders, joggers were about. Lemony sunlight made the edges of buildings and low walls luminous. He had a sense of being not only in deep harmony with all this, but maybe even responsible for it. How good he felt.

He dropped in on Felix. He hadn’t done that for quite a while now. They had a coffee and talked. Brad was out on his own these days so it was easy for the old man to brag about him. He did it shyly. Brad was in the car-hire business, and was married and doing well.

When he got back to the office he decided, for no reason, to ring Ellie.

‘No, nothing’s the matter,’ he said when she came to the phone at last from somewhere far off in the garden. He felt foolish. He wanted to tell her simply how happy he was, but she would hear that in his voice. It seemed foolish to make so much of it. ‘I was just ringing,’ he told her, ‘that’s all.’

At three he called down and had them bring his car up from the parking lot. He would drive up and spend an hour or two (he was still, he felt, on the track his dream had set him on) with Digger, at Keen’s Crossing.

Impossible to say when, but at some point in the fifty-kilometre drive the light changed, his mind darkened, and as on other occasions the high state of elation he was in revealed itself as no more than a mood, some condition of mind or body that passed now as quickly as it had appeared, as inexplicably too. His heart tightened, till the cramp in his chest was so painful and his arm so numbed that he could no longer trust himself to keep hold of the wheel. He pulled over on to the rough verge, rested a moment, then turned into a break in the scrub. He sat hunched over the wheel in almost total darkness. ‘I should go back,’ he thought, and opened the door of the car and got out.

He must have slept or passed out for a moment. In the lapse of consciousness he found himself back in his dream; except that he saw now that it wasn’t a dream at all but an actual moment of his boyhood he had come back to. He was in his own nine-year-old body again, standing barefooted in old serge pants and braces, his whole being drawn taut as a bow, at the edge of the dunes, with the day just on the turn and lights coming on all down the shore. One of those occasions when, in the assurance that he had the power to leap out of himself into an imaginable future, he had stood still, and feeling the animal in him crouched, ready to leap, had let himself go with it.