David Malouf: The Great World

It took off in a long arc. He went with it, and found himself suspended, outside gravity, at the high point, and with the new moment yet to declare itself. But he must have come down that time, one of those times, in the wrong life. That was the only way he could explain now the otherness he felt in himself. The wrong life . So that everything that had happened to him, from that moment on, all of it, had occurred in another existence from the one he had till then been moving in and was intended for.

Was that possible? Everything?

It was all real, it had happened all right. It had happened to him . It was fact. Part of the real happenings of a world that takes note of such things; that records events and enterprises and makes a life of them, and if they are big enough makes history of them. Only none of it had been intended for him, that’s what he saw. What had been intended was something quite different, and he had wrenched himself, by sheer willpower, out of the way of it.

In the deepest part of himself he had always known this. He had felt it in the presence of that boy who had appeared each morning to push his big feet into his shoes, and left dirt marks on the collars of his shirts. Later, hanging about the streets and watching with a bad conscience the lines of men waiting for handouts, he had seen quite clearly the gap in the line where he ought to have been, and had wondered when he would have to pay the price for getting away.

Thailand was different. That was intended. At that point the two lives somehow crossed. He had seen so clearly, up ahead, that old, white-headed fellow (‘The one I am now,’ he thought) who had passed clean through him. He had been in the right line that time.

He thought of all those mornings when, still heavy with sleep, he had sat in Meggsie’s kitchen feeling for the contours of an existence, some other one, that his body might fit more neatly (more clumsily that is) than the one he was in. Not an easier life. It wouldn’t be easier, he was certain of that. But one that was continuous with something in himself that he was afraid of losing contact with yet could not grasp.

Now, once again, he felt that nine-year-old body prepare to leap in him. He took off. He hung a moment free of gravity, and in the long breath in which he was suspended got a glimpse of what it was he was about to fall back into; which was his own life waiting to reclaim him — that other, harsher life that went back to its beginning in his father’s life, in his mother’s. But gravity was too strong. He could not stay up there long enough to make out the details of it. Once again he felt the force of things take hold and tug him down. And the life he came back into was the one he was in. He took the weight of it again, against his chest, in his belly and groin, and fell with the full force of his body on stones, little sharp-edged ones, and it stayed with him.

Later, when he came back to consciousness, he was surprised to find himself in deep night, with no light anywhere but where the first stars were showing themselves. ‘Where is this?’ he thought. He was unsure as yet whether it was a place or another condition.

But when he gathered his senses together he was aware of sharp-edged little stones under him, and there was a great climbing edifice of sound as well, though what the creatures were who were making it he could not guess. Frogs? Night crickets?

He sat up a little and looked about, but there was nothing to be seen.

It occurred to him then that he must have got out here by car, but there was no car in sight, and the light was not strong enough to judge directions.

He recalled, because his body did, a period of sharp pain. He still felt the aura of it, not at this point as a physical thing but as a sense of his limbs being not quite returned to him, or not in their solid form. He had difficulty making judgements about things that ought to have been simple. Like where exactly his fingers were. And along with all this were sensations that were unrelated, so far as he could see, to any fact. A softness of spring weather, delicate breezes blowing about on the bare arms of girls, all of which seemed to have nothing at all to do with the weather but to be a movement of his spirit. He was sitting in the middle of nowhere and had no idea which way to move.

The decision was taken out of his hands. Suddenly a new and terrible anguish gripped his heart, or it was a physical agony, he could not tell which, and he was crushed, his cheek to the hard edge of stones that cut his flesh. He was on his side and writhing, pushing himself into the smothering blackness of the night or some other, deeper darkness, which was all he desired now, a sack that he could crawl into and pull over his head, and where he could kick out to the end of his breath.

He must have been crawling. He had come a long distance, pushing himself deeper and deeper into the grass. He lay now in a nest of it that he had made with the working of his limbs, in an agony of spirit that left him breathless.

The sun was up. Big birds were flopping overhead. He rolled his head a little and saw that he was not awake after all. In the dream he was in, his agony, which was something quite separate from him, had taken the shape of a cat with matted fur that was lying just inches from where his outstretched hand was curled. It had the brutal head and overgrown coarse fur of a feral, gone back, after a generation or more, to wildness, and was lying just beyond arm’s length and watching him.

But when he blinked and looked closer, it wasn’t a phantom, it was real. Its head had been split by the blade of a shovel, maybe an axe, and half its face was sliced away. It had crawled in here to die. It snarled now, its one fierce eye glaring at him; though the sound it made might not have been hostile after all but a plea for aid. Flies were swarming in the rawness of the open wound and the creature used its paw with the savage claws to keep them off.

Vic lay with his head on his extended arm, watching the cat, and the cat lay two yards away in extreme agony.

‘I have seen all this before,’ he thought, ‘many times. I got out of it then. I survived. I always survived. I know about survival.’

But the cat, he saw, was dying. He looked at it. ‘Poor bugger,’ he thought, ‘I’d help you, if I could. I’d put you out of your misery.’

He and the cat looked at one another, quite close like that, for a long time, and the cat went through agonies but did not die. It was suffering, but in what way, he wondered. What sort of consciousness does a cat have? Does a cat have consciousness?

‘I’m sorry for you, mate,’ he said out loud, and was surprised to hear his own voice.

The cat did not hear, or did not understand. It made no difference to it, one way or the other. It just watched him with its one eye, and he had no idea what it thought.

IT WAS TEN in the morning. The range was drawing just right, making a good heat, and Jenny was feeling unusually pleased with herself, which in her case meant pleased with the world, the way it settled around her this morning as if she was, for once, just right for it. She was waiting for a batch of scones to come out of the oven.

It was hot but not too hot. October. The yard was dancing a bit where heat came up in waves off a sheet of corrugated iron that Digger had left out there. The leaves of the pepper tree were also dancing. Half a dozen magpies were under the lines. They were excited. Something, some worm or that, or a smaller bird, was getting it. Magpies, Magpies! Watch yer eyes! They would come diving at your head if you passed too close under their nests. Watch yer eyes!

She dreamed at the windowsill, her mind on the yard but also on the oven: the big birds at their business, getting it over with, quick, quick now, Geez, heat dancing up off the iron sheet, and further back in her head, but not too far back, the scones on their tray which were for Digger’s morning tea, rising nicely now and going crisp on top then browning. They would be ready in about five minutes. She shifted her heavy bulk on the chair.