David Malouf: Fly Away Peter

At either end of the boat they held a balance. That was so clear there was no need to state it. There was no need in fact to make any statement at all. But when Ashley wanted someone to talk to, he would come down to where Jim was making a raft of reeds to attract whistlers, or laying out seed, and talk six to the dozen, and in such an incomprehensible rush of syllables that Jim, often, could make neither head nor tail of it, though he didn’t mind. Ashley too was an enthusiast, but not a quiet one. Jim understood that, even if he never did grasp what Wagner was — something musical, though not of his sort; and when Ashley gave up words altogether and came to whistling, he was glad to be relieved at last of even pretending to follow. Ashley’s talk was one kind of music and the tuneless whistling another. What Ashley was doing, Jim saw, was expressing something essential to himself, like the ‘sweet pretty creature’ of the willy wagtails (which didn’t mean that either). Having accepted the one he could easily accept the other.

Ashley did not present a mystery to Jim, though he did not comprehend him. They were alike and different, that’s all, and never so close as when Ashley, watching, chattered away, whistled, chattered again, and then just sat, easily contained in their double silence.

THE WAR DID come, in mid-August, but quietly, the echo of a shot that had been fired months back and had taken all this time to come round the world and reach them.

Jim happened to be in Brisbane to buy developing paper and dry plates for Miss Harcourt and new boots for himself. By mid-afternoon the news had passed from mouth to mouth all over the city and newsboys were soon crying it at street corners. War! War! It was already several days old, over there, in countries to which they were not linked, and now it had come here.

Some people seemed elated, others stunned. The man at the photography shop, who was some sort of foreigner with a drooping moustache and a bald skull and side-tufts, shook his head as he prepared Jim’s parcel. ‘A bad business,’ he said, ‘a catastrophe. Madness!’

Maybe, Jim thought, he had relatives there who would be involved.

‘I’m a Swede,’ the man told him, Jim didn’t know why. He had never said anything like that before.

But others were filled with excitement.

‘Imagine,’ a girl with very bright eyes said to him at the saddlers where he got his boots. ‘I reckon you’ll be joining up.’

‘Why?’ he asked in a last moment of innocence. It hadn’t even occurred to him.

The girl’s eyes hardened. ‘Well I would,’ she said fiercely, ‘if I was a man. I’d want to be in it. It’s an opportunity.’ She spoke passionately, bitterly even, but whether at his inadequacy or her own he couldn’t tell.

When he stepped out of the shop with his new boots creaking and the old ones in a box under his arm he saw that the streets were, in fact, filled with an odd electricity, as if, while he was inside, a quick storm had come up and equally swiftly passed, changing the sky and setting the pavements, the window-panes, the flanks of passing vehicles in a new and more vivid light. They might have entered a different day, and he wondered if there really had been a change of weather or he only saw the change now because that girl had planted some seed of excitement in him whose sudden blooming here in the open air cast its own reflection on things. He felt panicky. It was as if the ground before him, that had only minutes ago stretched away to a clear future, had suddenly tilted in the direction of Europe, in the direction of events , and they were all now on a dangerous slope. That was the impression people gave him. That they were sliding. There was, in all this excitement, an alarming sense that they might be at the beginning of a stampede.

He went into the Lands Office Hotel for a quiet beer; it was where he usually went; it was the least rowdy of the Brisbane pubs.

He found it full of youths who would normally have been at work at this hour in government offices or insurance buildings or shops. They were shouting one another rounds, swaggering a little, swapping boasts, already a solid company or platoon, with a boldness that came from their suddenly being many; and all with their arms around one another’s shoulders, hanging on against the slope.

When he went into the back for a piss, one of them, one of the loudest, was leaning with his head on his arm above the tiled wall of the urinal, his body at a forward angle. He seemed to have been like that for a long time.

‘Are you alright?’ Jim enquired.

‘Yes, mate, I’m alright,’ the youth said mildly. He tilted himself upright, buttoned up and staggered away. Outside Jim saw him arguing with another fellow, his face very fierce, his fist hammering the other fellow in the upper arm with short hard jabs, the other laughing and pushing him off.

Later, round at the Criterion, it was the same. These were fellows from the law-courts, clerks mostly, wearing three-piece suits, but also noisy. Jim took one look and slipped into the ladies’ lounge with its velvet drapes and mirrors, its big glossy-leafed plants in jardinières. He had never dared before. All this excitement had made him bold, but given him at the same time a wish for something softer than the assertions and oaths of the public bar. He met a girl — a woman really — with buttoned boots and a red blouse.

‘Are you joining up too?’ she asked.

‘I dunno.’ he lied.

She summed him up quickly. ‘From the country?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘the coast.’

‘Oh,’ she said, but didn’t see the difference.

They got talking, and on the assumption that he too was off to the other side of the world and would need something to remember before he went, she invited him to go home with her. He wasn’t surprised, he had known all along that this was where their conversation would lead. She was a warm, sandy-headed girl with a sense of humour, inclined to jolly her young men along. She looked at him quizzically and didn’t quite understand, but was used to that; young fellows were so different, and so much the same. She touched his hand.

‘It’s alright. I won’t bite, you know.’

He finished his drink slowly, he wasn’t in a hurry; feeling quite steady and sure of himself, even on this new ground. Perhaps it was an alternative.

‘Right then,’ he said, and she gave a wide smile.

Outside the lights were on and there were crowds. Walking up Queen Street they found that in the windows of some of the bigger shops, the department stores where your cash flew about overhead in metal capsules, there were pictures of the King and Queen with crossed flags on either side, one Australian, the other the Union Jack. And the streets did feel different. As if they had finally come into the real world at last, or caught up, after so long, with their own century.

Taking a short tram-ride over the bridge, they walked past palm-trees and Moreton Bay figs till they came to a park, and then, among a row of weatherboard houses, to a big rooming-house with a latticework verandah. He waited on the step while the girl plunged into her leather handbag after the key, and his eye was led, among the huge trunks of the Moreton Bay figs down in the park, to a scatter of glowing points that could have been fireflies, but were, of course, cigarettes. There was some sort of gathering. Suddenly, before the girl could turn her key in the lock, the stillness was broken by a vicious burst of sound, a woman shrieking, then the curses of more than one man.

‘Oh,’ she said, surprised that he should have stopped and turned, ‘abos!’ Then repeated it as if he hadn’t understood. ‘Abos!’

There was an explosion. Breaking glass. A bottle had been dashed against a tree-trunk, and a figure staggered out into the glow of the streetlamp, a black silhouette that became a white-shirted man with his hands over his face and blood between them. He weaved about, but very lightly. He might have been executing a graceful dance, all on his own there, till another figure, hurling itself from the shadows, brought him down. There were thumps. A woman’s raucous laughter.