David Malouf: The Great World

Accident? But what more mysterious force was that the name for in their inadequate language?. . Daley, Dannagher, Deeks, Dewhurst, Dixon .

He walked on. There were shops now, supermarkets with windows covered with cut-price offers for washing powders or mixed fruit, a café with video games where kids were hunched, utterly absorbed, jerking their shoulders from left to right as they swerved past the asteroids, a newsagent’s with the headlines outside on wired boards: the collapse on Wall Street, but also Vic’s name, just the last one, Curran, in giant letters. In his case that was enough.

Digger stood and looked at it spelled out there, the six letters. It meant one thing on the newsboard and another thing altogether where its two syllables were tucked away, among so many, in his head. Another thing again as he had actually known the man.

He took up the list again where he had left off. Doig, Dooley, Doone, Durani, Dwyer . . It was a long way yet to the end.

THE CHILD, HIS broad feet set firmly in the dust, sits on the bottom one of three steps that lead down from the verandah to their front yard.

It is afternoon, and hot. Across the street are other houses just like theirs, weatherboard with red corrugated-iron roofs and picket fences with numbers on the gate. Their number is six, and he is four. Six Marlin Street, and he is Victor Charles Curran, Vic.

They have lived at number six for as long as he can remember. At night people come to play poker. There is noise, smoke, laughter, and he is allowed to bring in the beer bottles in their straw jackets, and when they are empty he carts them out again and puts them with the others on the back porch. Dead marines, they are called.

His mother gets work to do for ladies. She is sitting now just to his left, on a cane chair she has brought from the kitchen. Her work is in her lap and she is very intent upon it, wearing her glasses. Open at her feet is a little cardboard suitcase where she keeps snips of all different shapes and colours.

Sometimes, to keep him quiet when he has no one to play with, she lets him take the pieces out and sort them into their different colours; but today she has given him something more difficult to do. She has given him a needle, wet the end of a piece of thread, and for the last hour, over and over, he has been trying to do this thing he knows is simple yet finds so difficult.

Now and again, just to reassure himself it can be done, he holds the needle up to see the hole more clearly.

If you bring it up close to your eye you can see the sky through it. It is a big hole and holds a lot of blue. Then if you lower it a little you see a whole house there. Jensens’, opposite, where Trudy and Jack live.

It’s odd, this. You can see a whole house in it, roof and all, but to get just a bit of cotton through is so difficult. He has been trying for a long time, screwing his eye up and setting his jaw, very determined, and the bit of thread which was white when he started is grubby now and getting grubbier. That’s because of his hands. He lays the needle down very carefully, then the thread, and rubs his hands against his shorts. Then he tries again. Then he looks through the eye of the needle again.

He sees a truck parking outside Jock Hale’s place. He sees two girls, Milly and Jane Benson, swinging on their gate. They are singing something he can’t quite hear, and swinging. He sees a boy in grey shorts learning to ride a bike. The bike keeps wobbling and he puts his bare foot down on the bitumen to steady it, then tries again. The boy is about a year older than he is, maybe six, even. It is himself!

He is puzzled by this and looks across at his mother, but she smiles and does not see anything odd in it.

Men begin coming in from the mine. Soon now it will be dark. When he holds the needle up now the eye of it is smoky. It is close to dark in there.

The boy who was learning to ride the bike is riding easily now, he has got the hang of it. He is hardly wobbling at all. He begins to show off, making figures-of-eight in the road, very pleased with himself and laughing. The light will be gone soon and still the thread has not gone through.

He concentrates and holds his hands just so and draws his whole body together.

Soon it will.

Several accounts of the experience of Australian P.O.W.s in Malaya and Thailand provided general information, hints and details for events and moral inspiration for this piece of fiction, chief among them Stan Arneil’s One Man’s War , Sun Books, 1982, Hank Nelson’s P.O.W. Prisoner of War , ABC Enterprises, 1985 (from Tim Bowden’s radio series ‘Australians Under Nippon’) and The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop , E. E. Dunlop, Nelson, 1986. I should also thank the Yaddo Foundation, Saratoga Springs, NY, and the Literature Board of the Australia Council for generous support, and Susan Chace, Joy Lewis and Brett Johnson for their advice and help.