David Malouf: The Great World

‘C’mon, Dig, Digger, tell us somefing.’

In the beginning he told her everything he knew. His voice, velvety in the dark of their little room, was what made the world real to her. A lot of what he told was made up. She could not tell the difference.

‘For God’s sake, Digger!’

Hearing his voice rise as it often did to a point of dangerous excitement, their mother had come from her sewing, stopped a moment in the shade of the door, and heard him. The moment he saw her he knew how angry she would be. But he couldn’t help himself. Coming to the edge of some extraordinary possibility, he would let himself claim it, put it into words; if he didn’t, the force of it, huge and expanding in his head, might make him go flying off from the centre of himself. What he did now, shamefaced at being caught, was explode in giggles.

‘Jenny, love,’ she said, ‘be a good girl and see if the postman’s been.’

‘He hasn’t,’ Jenny said, ‘I been listnin’.’

‘Don’t you answer me, Miss,’ the mother spat, ‘If I say go, you do it. Quick smart!’

‘You little bugger,’ she said when Jenny was out of earshot, but her anger had died before the shamefaced look of him. ‘How can you do that, Digger? Scaring the poor kid. What gets into you? You know what she’s like. I should box your ears.’

Instead she reached out and touched the corner of his mouth with her thumb as if there were a crumb there. Sobered, he looked up at her. He never knew what she was after. She was so unpredictable.

She drew her hand away. She had been reassuring herself yet again that he wasn’t simply a child of her wishing. She could not imagine sometimes where he had sprung from. He wasn’t like her, or like his father either, not really. He was like no one she had ever known. Tell him something once and it was there forever. He remembered things she didn’t even know she knew till he recalled them to her. ‘You remember, Mum. You remember,’ he would insist, and he was right, she did. Talk, facts, happenings from away back, the names of things, whole pages of any book he had read. Where did it all go in the skinny arms and legs (she thought of it as other mothers might think of food), all this knowledge he picked up and swallowed.

One night, hearing him reading aloud to his sister long after they had been told to go to bed, she had burst in in a fury.

‘Digger, I’ve told you a thousand —’

But there was no lamp alight, no book. He was reciting the pages off, sentence by sentence, out of his head. He looked up at her, all innocence. He was nine years old.

She had known then that it was too late, that she could not hold him. It was already in there, the world she wanted to keep away from him, and expanding at a rate she could not control. She did not know enough to keep up with him.

He came at times like a small child, hugging her waist and hanging on. ‘None of that,’ she would tell him. ‘You’re all kidstakes. That’s all that is.’

She believed he would leave her, but she never said it outright. She was protecting herself against loss.

‘No I won’t,’ he would have assured her, ‘how could I leave? Ever?’

He meant it and he did not.

*

‘Tellus somefing, Digger,’ Jenny would whisper in the dark of their little room. ‘They’re asleep, they won’t hear.’

He no longer told her everything, but he did tell her some things.

People he saw on his deliveries, for instance, like the Breens: Mrs Breen in her old felt slippers, who always gave him ginger ale in a peanut-butter glass, sitting him down at the kitchen table, then sitting down herself, right opposite, and watching him drink.

Mrs Breen had Eddie, a big fellow nearly twenty who was a mongol. All the time he was there Eddie would be hanging about in the hallway outside. Sometimes he would poke his head round the corner and grin. ‘Hullo Digger,’ he’d call, too loud. Other times he would be scowling, as if he begrudged Digger his mother’s attention and the mouthful of sweet soft-drink he was getting. Once, when Digger looked up, Eddie had his dick out and was playing with it. He looked quickly at Mrs Breen and she pretended not to notice, or she really didn’t notice, she was too intent on him . As if there was something miraculous in his just being able to drink a glass of ginger ale without spilling it.

Then there were fellers he met at the ferry, commercial travellers some of them, and the stories they had to tell, including jokes; and things he got from older boys down at the river, where there was a deep pool and you could swing out over the swirling blackness on a rope. Later, when he ventured to the pictures at the School of Arts, and to dances where he hung around outside with the older blokes, smoking, swapping yarns, there was news of visits some of these fellows had made to Sydney or to the Riverina to pick fruit.

He would slip away to these dances, or to the picture shows, in secret. Not much more than fourteen, he would wait till he thought the others were asleep, then, getting up softly in the dark, pull his pants on, and with his shirt and boots in his hand creep away to finish dressing in the yard.

‘Where y’ off to, Digger?’ she would whisper, sometimes, in her sleep.

‘Sshh. I’ll tellya t’morrer.’

Beginning softly in the dark, he would tell her things. He would start in a whisper, but quite soon he would get excited, break into giggles, or his voice would crack in squeaky shouts.

‘Shuddup in there, get ta sleep,’ their father would shout through the wall, ‘or I’ll bloody come in an’ make yer.’

Then, after a moment, their mother’s voice:

‘Go t’ sleep now, Digger, you can tell that t’morrow. It’ll keep.’

‘SO,’ DIGGER SAID, ‘how’m I doin’? Still on top?’

Vic grinned. ‘You’re doing OK. Want a statement?’

‘Nah! I’ll trust ya.’

Exchanges of this sort between them had become ritual in these last weeks. They were jest. There were subjects still that they steered clear of, where they would have felt shy and constrained with one another, but there was no lack of trust between them.

Vic, elbows on knees, looked past Digger to the river and its dancing swarm, bits of winged life in millions whose bodies at moments caught the light and made a second river up there, as if the first had thrown off a lighter variant of itself, all living particles, with the freedom to hover, prop, dance on the spot, while the other, earthbound, could do nothing but flow on. Occasionally the oily surface broke. A pair of jaws rose up and snapped down a dozen of those lives, or a hundred — whatever it could get. He watched Digger jiggle the handline.

‘Waddabout you?’ Digger asked.

‘I don’t know, I think I’m winning. But they’re crafty buggers. I can’t be sure.’

‘They still after you then?’

‘Yes,’ Vic said. He had caught the hint of scepticism in Digger’s tone. ‘They’re still after me.’

Digger pretended to be occupied with the line. After a moment, falling back on an older game between them, he said: ‘I don’t know why you don’t pull out while the going’s good. I would. I don’t know how you put up with it.’

There was at times, Vic thought, something prim and old-womanish about Digger. ‘These are just the sort of things,’ he thought, ‘that mothers must say. Looking just like that, too. Half-horrified, half-impressed.’ This side of Digger was a source of amusement to him.

‘And young Alex?’

Young Alex, as they called him, was Vic’s nephew, though in fact he was no longer young. He was forty-three.

Vic frowned. ‘Oh, he’s against me, I think.’ He made it sound a matter of no concern. ‘Only I can’t be sure of that, either. He doesn’t give much away.’