David Malouf - The Great World

When she took them out of the oven she couldn’t believe it. And just a minute ago she had been feeling so good! She held the hot tray and stared at what she had done. At what someone had done. It’s what happens, what always happens, when you start getting too sure of yourself. She couldn’t believe it. She stared so long that the tray began to burn her fingers through the worn linen of the teacloth. She cursed and dumped the thing down on the sink, then screwed her mouth up, hugged herself a little and counted, using her finger this time. It was still thirteen. How? How had it happened? She was always that careful. Someone — but who? — must have slipped the extra one in while her back was turned.

So who was it for ? That was the question. Whose bad luck was it? And which one of them was it? They were all so alike, all nicely raised and browned. She was good at scones. It was her long suit. There was no way of picking it.

But she had to. It was either that or chuck the whole lot to the bloody magpies, and all the philosophy and practice of sixty-nine years went against it. Waste not, want not , that was the rule. If you did waste, then one day you would remember these scones and starve for ’em, and serve you right!

Quite fearful now of making a second error (if it was really her that had made the first one), but trusting too in some agency in herself that would work when she needed it, she squeezed her eyes shut, stretched out her blunt fingers, which were freckled and thickly padded round the nails, and let her palm hover over the scones. Then, when her mind was emptied of all thought, she took one.

Well, it had better be it! She had good reason to believe it was. She could work these tricks when she had to. Only where the hell, she wondered, had her mind been — what had her good sense been doing, sleeping ? — when she made up that lot of dough in the first place and let the one extra in? If she had.

So what now? What should she do with it? Throw it back on the coals?

She looked at the scone sitting there on the sink. Innocent, it looked.

With a little sideways slew of her mouth she took it up rather gingerly, put her shoulder to the screen door and stepped out. The magpies were there, big black-and-white buggers the size of cats. They had already caught sight of her looming at the back door, but didn’t let on that they were watching. ‘Well,’ she thought, this’ll fix ya!’

‘Here I come,’ she sang to herself as she crossed the yard, ‘here’s yer ol’ mate Jenny. You don’t know what I’ve got in me hand, do yer, eh? Look at this. Which one of yez is it for? Which one of you greedy buggers is gunna swaller bad luck ?’ She tossed the nicely browned, crisp little scone like a soft stone into the midst of them, and the great black-and-white creatures rolled towards it and flapped and scrabbled, beaks going everywhere, wings too, tearing at one another and squawking.

One of them got it and she watched it gobble the thing down and the others go in under its wings for the crumbs.

‘So,’ she said, feeling a kind of satisfaction now at playing with such powers, bad luck and the possibility of a choking or worse, and of setting things right as well, getting them back into order again, since that extra scone had definitely been a mistake.

It wasn’t her fault which one got it. Somebody else would be deciding that. All she’d done was throw the bad luck to them, she didn’t choose. Greed had chosen. The greediest and strongest of them had got it.

She looked at the big bird, which was preening itself, and chuckled. She knew something the bird did not, ‘A cat’ll get you now,’ she thought, watching it strut. ‘A feral. Or some kid with a shanghai. Well, good riddance!’ She didn’t care. The main thing was, she’d got the bad luck off Digger and herself.

She would have liked to keep a watch on that bird and make sure, only she didn’t have the time. She slumped back to the kitchen, and when she saw the tray sitting there, on the edge of the sink, had a sick feeling. Maybe she ought to have tossed the lot out anyway. But if you started that sort of caper, tossing good stuff out just because you were scared and couldn’t tell good from bad, you’d be lost. You’d end up tossing everything out.

She’d made a choice. That’s what you were supposed to do, make a choice and choose right, by instinct. If you started worrying about mistakes, you’d make one, and if you made a little mistake, well eventually you’d make a big one.

That’s what had alarmed her so much when she saw that one extra. That it might be the beginning of something.

She was pegging out clothes an hour or so later when she saw the birds making a commotion in the scrub. ‘Aha!’ she thought. She pinned up the other end of the sheet she was hanging, which billowed and filled with light, and, leaving the remainder in the basket, went off through the grass a little to see what was doing. This would be proof now. The big birds were excited.

But what presented itself when she parted the grass on the overgrown track was not a bird at all but a cat, a big feral, black with reddish lights in its fur, and when it turned on her, snarling, she gave a gasp. Half its face was gone. Someone had sliced it away with the edge of a shovel. Some feller who was sick of having his chooks taken, no doubt. It looked up at her with such a dumb, suffering look, in spite of the snarl, that she was stricken. It was in agony, poor creature.

She turned away to find a rock or something to finish it off, and saw something else. A hand coming out of the grass.

‘Jesus,’ she thought, ‘what a day!’

With her heart beating she pushed the grass aside and a man rolled over and looked right up at her.

It was Vic.

She was in real panic now. Was he poisoned? Had she done it? But she’d given that scone to the magpies. She’d seen one of them eat it.

She hung over him, very scared and moaning a little, and his eyes rolled, following her movements, his mouth wet and the tongue moving, but no sound coming from him.

She knelt to loosen his collar, which seemed to be choking him, and the hand grabbed hers and tightened on it. She wrenched her hand loose, jabbering, and when she got it free she had hold of a smooth little stone about the size of a kidney, same colour too, which she thought for a moment he might have sicked up. She stared at it.

About the size, too, of a scone. It was warm.

He rolled over now on his side, drew his legs up like a baby, and lay curled up in the grassy nest he had made by rolling about there.

‘What is it?’ she said.

The thought of a child, a baby, had softened her.

She took his hand. With her other hand she stroked his face. After a moment she squatted, lifted him a little, and took his head in her arms. She began to rock him, and the cat, opposite, watched with its one eye. He yielded in her arms and she forgot now all that she had against him. She forgave him for it, whatever it was, and she did not even know what it was. It didn’t matter.

He had his face down between her breasts. She could feel a wetness. She began to weep. She could feel his mouth down there and wished, if that’s what he wanted, that she could feed him, but she had no milk. She had had no milk now for more than forty years. They had pumped it out of her with a machine. She had begged and begged them, those nuns, not to take it, and all that night had dreamt of mouths pulling at her, and she didn’t care in the end what they were, babies or poddy calves or little lambs or what, that were feeding off the rich stuff her body had stored up, which had been meant to feed a creature , not to be squeezed out with a machine. And all the time, out there somewhere, her own little baby was going hungry; or if it wasn’t, it was being fed some other milk, not the one that had been made for it special in all the world; and for the whole of its life, poor thing, it would know that and feel the loss — that the world had stolen something from it that it would never have. She had looked around wherever she went after that, believing she would recognise the face of that little kid she had had the milk for, and who might be looking for it still.