David Malouf - Fly Away Peter

He freed himself of Ashley’s support, and staggered towards them. The earth smelled so good. It was a smell that belonged to the beginning of things, he could have put his nose down into it like a pig or a newly weaned calf, and the thought of filling his hands with its doughy softness was irresistible. To have dirt under his nails! Falling on his knees he began awkwardly to knead the earth, which was warm, damp, delightfully crumbly, and then to claw at it as the others were doing. It felt good.

‘That’s it, mate. That’s the style! Dig!’

Jim looked around, astonished. It was Clancy Parkett, whom he had last seen nearly a year ago, and whom he believed was dead, blown into so many pieces that nothing of him was ever found except what Jim himself had been covered with. To give poor Clancy a decent burial, some wit had said, they would have had to bury the both of them. And now here he was quite whole after all, grinning and rasping his chin with a blackened thumb. Trust Clancy. Clancy would wriggle out of anything.

‘I thought you’d been blown up,’ Jim said foolishly. ‘You just disappeared into thin air.’

‘No,’ Clancy told him, ‘not air, mate. Earth.’ And he held up a fistful of the richly smelling mud. ‘It’s the only way now. We’re digging through to the other side.’

‘But it’ll take so long,’ Jim said reasonably.

Clancy laughed. ‘There’s all the time in the world, mate. No trouble about time. And it’s better than tryin’ t’ walk it.’

Jim, doubtful, began to dig. He looked about. Others were doing the same, long lines of them, and he was surprised to see how large the clearing was. It stretched away to the brightening skyline. It wasn’t a clearing but a field, and more than a field, a landscape; so wide, as the early morning sun struck the furrows, that you could see the curve of the earth. There were hundreds of men, all caked with mud, long-haired, bearded, in ragged uniforms, stooped to the black earth and digging. So it must be alright after all. Why else should so many be doing it? The lines stretched out forever. He could hardly make out the last men, they were so small in the distance. And Clancy. Clancy was no fool.

He began to dig in earnest. He looked about once, seeking Ashley, but Ashley Crowther was no longer in sight.

So Jim dug along with the rest. The earth was rich and warm, it smelled of all that was good, and his back did not ache as he had expected. Nor did his knees. And there was, after all, time, however far it might be. The direct route — straight through. He looked up, meeting Clancy’s humorous gaze, and they both grinned. It might be, Jim thought, what hands were intended for, this steady digging into the earth, as wings were meant for flying over the curve of the planet to another season. He knelt and dug.

IMOGEN HARCOURT, STILL carrying her equipment — camera, plates, tripod — as she had once told Jim, ‘like the implements of martyrdom,’ made her way down the soft sand of the dunes towards the beach.

A clear October day.

October here was spring. Sunlight and no wind.

The sea cut channels in the beach, great Vs that were delicately ridged at the edges and ribbed within, and the sunlit rippled in them, an inch, an inch and a half of shimmering gold. Further on, the surf. High walls of water were suspended a moment, held glassily aloft, then hurled themselves forward under a shower of spindrift, a white rush that ran hissing to her boots. There were gulls, dense clouds of them hanging low over the white-caps, feeding, oystercatchers darting after crabs, crested terns. A still scene that was full of intense activity and endless change.

She set down her equipment — she didn’t intend to do any work; she carried all this stuff by force of habit and because she didn’t like to be separated from it, it was all she had, an extension of herself that couldn’t now be relinquished. She eased the strap off her shoulder, set it all down and then sat dumpily beside it, a lone figure with her hat awry, on the white sands that stretched as far as the eye could see, all the way to the Broadwater and the southern tip of Stradbroke in one direction and in the other to Point Danger and the New South Wales border. It was all untouched. Nobody came here. Before her, where she sat with her boots dug in and her knees drawn up, was the Pacific, blue to the skyline, and beyond it, Peru.

‘What am I doing here?’ she asked herself, putting the question for maybe the thousandth time and finding no answer, but knowing that if she were back in Norfolk there would be the same question to be put and with no answer there either.

‘I am doing’ she told herself firmly, ‘what those gulls are doing. Those oystercatchers. Those terns.’ She pulled her old hat down hard on her curls.

The news of Jim’s death had already arrived. She heard it by accident in the local store, then she heard it again from Julia Crowther, with the news that Ashley Crowther had been wounded in the same battle, though not in the same part of the field, and was convalescing in England. Then one day she ran into Jim’s father.

‘I lost my boy,’ he told her accusingly. He had never addressed her before.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m very sorry.’

He regarded her fiercely. She had wanted to say more, to say that she understood a little of what he might feel, that for two whole days after she heard she had been unable to move; but that would have been to boast of her grief and claim for herself something she had no right to and which was too personal to be shared, though she felt, obscurely, that to share it with this man who was glaring at her so balefully and with such a deep hatred for everything he saw, might be to offer him some release from himself and to let Jim, now that he was dead, back into his life. What did he feel? What was his grief like? She couldn’t tell, any more than he could have guessed at or measured hers. She said nothing. He didn’t invite sympathy. It wasn’t for that that he had approached her.

She sat on the beach now and watched the waves, one after another, as they rose, gathered themselves, stood poised a moment holding the sun at their crests, then toppled. There was a rhythm to it. Mathematics. It soothed, it allowed you, once you had perceived it, to breathe. Maybe she would go on from birds to waves. They were as various and as difficult to catch at their one moment.

That was it, the thought she had been reaching for. Her mind gathered and held it, on a breath, before the pull of the earth drew it apart and sent it rushing down with such energy into the flux of things. What had torn at her breast in the fact of Jim’s death had been the waste of it, all those days that had been gathered towards nothing but his senseless and brutal extinction. Her pain lay in the acute vision she had had of his sitting as she had seen him on that first day, all his intense being concentrated on the picture she had taken of the sandpiper, holding it tight in his hand, but holding it also in his eye, his mind, absorbed in the uniqueness of the small creature as the camera had caught it at just that moment, with its head cocked and its fierce alert eye, and in entering that one moment of the bird’s life — the bird was gone, they might never see it again — bringing up to the moment, in her vision of him, his own being that was just then so very like the birds, alert, unique, utterly present.

It was that intense focus of his whole being, it’s me , Jim Saddler, that struck her with grief, but was also the thing — and not simply as an image either — that endured. That in itself. Not as she might have preserved it in a shot she had never in fact taken, nor even as she had held it, for so long, as an untaken image in her head, but in itself, as it for its moment was. That is what life meant, a unique presence, and it was essential in every creature. To set anything above it, birth, position, talent even, was to deny to all but a few among the infinite millions what was common and real, and what was also, in the end, most moving. A life wasn’t for anything. It simply was.