David Malouf - Fly Away Peter

Next day, just on the offchance, he took Miss Harcourt to the place and they waited, silent for the most part, and talking about nothing much when they did talk, while Jim covered the area with his glasses.

Miss Harcourt rather sprawled, with her boots at the end of outstretched legs and her great skirt rumpled, not at all minding the dust. Her bonnet was always lopsided and she didn’t mind that either. She had her own rules and kept them but she didn’t care for other people’s. Jim’s father thought her mad: ‘That old girl you hang about with,’ he sneered ‘she’s a bit of a hatter.’ But she spoke like a lady, she didn’t hit the bottle and had, except for her passion for photography and the equipment she lugged about, no visible eccentricities. People found her, as a subject for gossip, unmanageable, unrewarding, and she oughtn’t to have been; they resented it. So his father and some others called her mad but could not furnish evidence. She refused to become a character. In the end they left her alone.

Jim chewed a match, working it round and round his jaw.

At last it was there. It had stepped right out of cover into a break between reeds. Raising a finger to warn her, he passed the field-glasses.

‘By that clump of reeds,’ he whispered, ‘at ten o’clock.’

She took the glasses, drew herself up with some difficulty, and looked. She gave a little gasp that filled out and became a sigh, a soft ‘Ooooh’.

‘What is it?’

She sat back and lowered the glasses to her lap.

‘Jim,’ she said, ‘it’s a dunlin. You couldn’t miss it. They used to come in thousands back home, all along the shore and in the marshes. Common as starlings.’

He took the glasses and stared at this rare creature he had never laid eyes on till yesterday that was as common as a starling.

‘ Dunlin ,’ he said.

And immediately on his lips it sounded different, and it wasn’t just the vowel. She could have laughed outright at the newness of the old word now that it had arrived on this side of the globe, at its difference in his mouth and hers.

‘But here ,’ he said.

He raised the glasses again.

‘It doesn’t occur.’

But it was there just the same, moving easily about and quite unconscious that it had broken some barrier that might have been laid down a million years ago, in the Pleiocene, when the ice came and the birds found ways out and since then had kept to the same ways. Only this bird hadn’t.

‘Where does it come from?’

‘Sweden. The Baltic. Iceland. Looks like another refugee.’

He knew the word now. Just a few months after he first heard it, it was common, you saw it in the papers every day.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we should try and get a photograph. Imagine if it’s the very first.’ He longed to observe the squat body in flight, to see the wing-formation and the colour of the underwings and the method of it, which had brought the creature, alone of its kind, so far out of the way. But he didn’t want it to move. Not till they’d got the photo. He kept the bird in his glasses, as if he could hold it there, on that patch of home ground, so long as he was still looking, the frame of the lens being also in some way magical, a boundary it would find it difficult to cross. He was sweating with the effort, drawing sharp breaths. At last, after a long time, he didn’t know how long, he laid the glasses regretfully aside and found Miss Harcourt regarding him with a smile.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said self-consciously, aware that his intensity sometimes made him a fool.

‘Nothing, Jim. Nothing’s the matter.’

She had been watching him as closely as he had watched the bird.

Next day she came with her equipment, her ‘instruments of martyrdom’ she called them, and took the photograph. It wasn’t difficult. Jim sat, when it was developed, and stared. It seemed odd to her that it should be so extraordinary, though it was of course, this common little visitor to the shores of her childhood, with its grating cry that in summers back there she would, before it was gone, grow weary of, which here was so exotic, and to him so precious. The way he was clutching the picture! She was amazed by this new vision of him, his determination, his intensity.

‘I was the first to see it,’ he told her, ‘I must be, or someone would have left a record. Miss Harcourt, we’ve discovered something!’

Rediscovered, she might have said, speaking for her own experience; but was moved just the same to be included.

The most ordinary thing in the world.

She had come so far to where everything was reversed that even that didn’t surprise her.

ONE DAY BERT, Ashley Crowther’s aviator friend, offered to take Jim up for a ‘spin’.

Jim hesitated, but recognizing that it was really Ashley’s doing, and had been intended as a gift, he felt he couldn’t refuse, though he had no real curiosity about how things would look from above. New views of things didn’t interest him, and he realized, now that it was about to happen, that he had a blood fear, a bone fear, of leaving the earth, some sense, narrow and primitive, derived maybe from a nightmare he had forgotten but not outgrown, that the earth was man’s sphere and the air was for the birds, and that though man might break out of whatever bounds had been set him, and in doing so win a kind of glory, it was none the less a stepping out of himself that would lead to no good. Jim was conservative. He preferred to move at ground level When he raised his eyes skyward it was to wonder at creatures who were other than himself.

But he appeared at the appointed time in the big paddock beyond the house, with his hands in his pockets, his jaw set, and his hat pulled down hard on his brow.

The flying machine sat among cow-pats casting a squat shadow. It had two planes mounted one above the other and four booms leading out to the tail, which was a box affair with rudders. The place where you sat (there was room for two sitting in tandem) was on the main plane, and the whole thing, as if no one had considered at the beginning how to hold all the various bits of it together, was crossed and criss-crossed with piano-wire. It looked improvised, as if Bert had put it together especially for the occasion. Jim saw nothing in it that suggested flight, no attempt to reproduce in wood, canvas, metal, the beauty of the bird. It looked more like a monstrous cage, and he wasn’t at all surprised to hear Bert refer to it as ‘the crate’.

Jim regarded it in a spirit of superstitious dread; and in fact these machines too, in the last months, had entered a new dimension. After just a few seasons of gliding over the hills casting unusual shadows and occasionally clipping the tops of trees, new toys of a boyish but innocent adventuring, they had changed their nature and become weapons. Already they were being used to drop bombs and had been organized, in Europe, into a new fighting arm. Bert was shortly to join such a force. In a week or two he would be sailing to England and soon afterwards might be flying over France. In the meantime they were in Ashley Crowther’s dry paddock on a hot day towards the end of June. The air glittered and was still.

‘Right you are Jim,’ Bert said briskly. He was wearing goggles set far back on his head, which was covered with a leather skull-cap. He looked, Jim thought, with the round eyes set above his forehead, like some sort of cross between a man and a grasshopper. ‘Just put these on, old fellow,’ he said, offering Jim, with all the jolly camaraderie of a new mystery with its own jargon, and its own paraphernalia, the chance of a similar transformation, ‘it’s a bit breezy up there, and you’ll want to see what there is to see, won’t you? That’s the whole point. Let me show you how to get in.’