The Great World

  She touched his cheek very gently with her hand, then calmly turned away to where the child had his hands up to be taken.

  ‘That’s the boy, Alex,’ she said lightly, and lifted him, and took him off for his nap.

  Vic looked about. He felt let down. Something critical had occurred but his understanding had not caught up with it. He pushed his hands deeper into his pockets and began to whistle again, but his heart failed him and after a bit he dropped it. He stepped from the window and went out to the hall.

  There was no one in sight. Treating him as one of the family again, they had simply gone off without ceremony.

  He walked up and down on the coloured tiles, feeling the assurance he had built up lapse and drain from him.

  He sat down in one of the low-backed cherry-wood chairs that were ranged along the wall. They were ornamental. No one ever sat in them.

  He got up quickly and went through the house to the kitchen to see if Meggsie was about. The big tiled room was immaculate, as always, but empty, everything washed up and cleared away.

  He came back to the hallway, looked about a little, then went upstairs and tried the door to his room.

  It was just as he remembered it. Nothing had changed. It gave him an odd little start, the thought that it had been here, clean, cool, ready, all the time he was up there, always in such filth and with nowhere to lay his head. A feeling of anger and self-pity came over him. He rested his brow against the closed door and clenched his fists.

  When his passion had passed he turned back into the room and opened a drawer of the dressing table and saw socks there, underpants, too, all neatly folded.

  He stood and looked at himself for a time in the mirror, then lay down full-length on the bed.

  He did not sleep, but saw himself standing, as he had just a moment ago, at the open door, and the room he was looking into was empty again.

  After a supper of cold meat and salad and his favourite pears and junket, Ma insisted on a game of hide and seek. She was apologetic about it – it was to keep Aunt James happy, who loved to sit in the dark and hear them scampering about; but it was really, Vic guessed, for him. It was a hectic affair. They were playing at play, and to make up for their lack of commitment, banged about more than they usually did.

  Upstairs, under a net, little Alexander was sleeping, and Lucille, fearful he might be disturbed by the row they were making, kept one ear tuned for his cry. She was barefoot, her hair damp with sweat. Vic too was only half in the game.

  At first Pa was It and he found Ma; then Ma found Vic. While the others trooped off to hide he stood with his face to the wall like a dunce in school and counted to a hundred before he was free to go off in his socks and look for them. Once or twice earlier, while they were rushing about seeking places to hide, he had collided with Lucille, but he was shy of her now. He set off to check the pozzies where one or other of them was sure to be squeezed in holding their breath. He knew all the hiding places.

  He had let these rooms and their clutter of familiar objects go out of his life. But now, moving through them in the dark, his foot remembered every loose plank, he could judge without fault the precise distance from table-edge to sideboard. He never once bumped into anything. Whatever he felt for was there.

  He covered the hallway, all the rooms down one side of it, including the dining room where Aunt James sat laughing, then crossed to the other. A southerly had come up. Each door he opened set the curtains blowing, and from beyond the windows he heard trees in motion. The moon was up, but all this side of the house was dark.

  Hidden behind a curtain in what they called the piano room, Ellie saw the door open a crack and a figure appear. ‘Damn,’ she thought.

  There was a time, years back, when she would have been breathless at this point with the wish to fool whoever it was that there was no one here. All she thought now was that if she was found she would be It and they would have to begin all over again.

  The crack of half-light widened. It was Vic. She could see the shape of him poised there at the threshold, his body so alert that you could feel the energy of it like a new kind of heat in the room. She drew back against the wall. He wasn’t so much looking as setting himself like an animal to catch a scent. His body was hard-edged, separate, intent.

  She had seen this quality in him, or thought she had, from the very first day Pa introduced him, and he had stepped out, very sturdy and solemn, to shake hands; looking, with his hair chopped off short as it was again now, and his ears sticking out, very tough and little-mannish, but watchful too, as if for all his squareness and solidity he could be hurt. He had been hard-edged even then, aware of the precise point where he left off and a world began that might not be entirely well-disposed towards him, and which for that reason he had always to be on his guard against.

  He was standing just inside the door, compact, firm, tense with the effort of feeling about for some other presence in the room, his eyes in the darkness taking up the light there was, oily-bright.

  ‘Like a cat,’ she thought.

  Caught like this, with her heart beating fast, she too felt like some creature, a rabbit perhaps, but was determined not to be mesmerised.

  Then something happened. He gave up playing, that’s what it was; and having decided there was no one there, simply stood, his body eased, in the belief that he was alone and unobserved.

  He stood where the light fell. There wasn’t much, but Ellie was accustomed now to the dark. He was looking straight to where she was but did not see her. The curtain rose and fell like a veil, brushing her face. And something in the way the breeze moved and the leaves of the trees clattered gave her the feeling that they were not inside, not any more, but out in the dark somewhere on an unlighted road, and she had come upon him by accident, sleepwalking there. She was looking past his known face to one she had never seen. It was the one he wore when he was too deep in himself to be aware any longer of what he might have to conceal; the face he showed no one, and which even he had not seen.

  She heard him sigh. He was very close. Then, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, he turned on one heel so that he was in profile. He might have been deliberately showing himself to her: first full-face, now this. She was tense, but the little touch of panic she had felt at the beginning was gone. She had given herself up entirely to looking.

  She must have made a sound of some kind, just a breath. He turned his head sharply and his face was covered again. He leaned towards her in the dark.

  ‘Who is it?’ he said, his voice very low. ‘Ellie? Is that you?’

  His brow was creased but he was not perturbed, or did not seem to be, that she had seen him. He put his hand out. She froze.

  This was the game now. There were rules and they were in operation again. The tips of his fingers came close to her face. He did not touch her but she felt that he had. Her skin tingled.

  There was a smile on his mouth. What light there was, which was really no more than a transparency of darkness, was full on him. But what she was seeing still, behind the smile and the clear roundness of his pupils, was the look she had seen earlier, an afterglow as when a bright light has imprinted itself on your eyeball and remains for long seconds after you have looked away.

  ‘Ellie?’

  There was a note of amusement in his voice.

  In just a moment now, as the game required, he would grasp her wrist, give a shout, ‘I’ve found Ellie,’ and bring the others into the room; but he did not want that, not yet.

  He brought his fingertips to her cheek, through the light gauze of the curtain, and she flinched. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t be scared.’

  They stood for a moment longer, neither in the game nor quite out of it, very still, with the breeze moving and the curtain lifting and falling with her breath. She had seen him, he knew that, and for some reason it did not bother him. If anything he felt relieved, as if a weight had been taken from him. Only one other person had ever seen him like that, and that was diff
erent. It was a man. It put you at risk, of course, but Digger had not let him down.

  He took Ellie’s wrist, very gently at first, and they stood a little longer without moving. Then he tightened his grip and called.

  VI

  1

  DIGGER’S FIRST DAYS back at the Crossing were spent clearing an infestation of blackberry canes that had invaded the open area between the store and the river and overgrown all that remained now of the ferry, the old wheelhouse and its machinery and the planked approaches to the wharf. Stripped to the waist in the November heat and armed with a machete, he waded into the massed entanglement of it. He used a gloved hand to push aside the barbed shoots, hacking at trunks as thick in places as his own wrist and grubbing out strand after strand of fibrous roots.

  It was a single dense growth, its root-system as extensive and as deeply intricate below ground as above. Somewhere at the heart of it was the tap-root, but he never found it. Over and over again he thought he had; he put the machete in and dug out a fleshy tuber. But further in there was always another, tougher stock. At the end of the day his arms, chest and back were criss-crossed with scratches, and despite the gloves he wore his hands were torn, but the work was a pleasure to him. It was a way of getting down to the ground of things. In his sleep that first night he went on with the work, moving with almost no effort now and scarcely feeling the sting of the thorny shoots as they whipped out and clung to him. He saw the bones of small animals that had got trapped in the undergrowth, bandicoots, bush rats, a feral cat; turned up objects he had thought never to see again, that shone out of the over-arching growth with an unnatural luminescence, as if they had managed somehow to preserve the last ray of sunlight they had been touched by, or the last moonlight, before a new shoot launched itself, knitted into the thicket and shut them in.

  There was a sun-bonnet of his mother’s that had once been blue and was sodden and stained now to a colour he could not name. He tossed it on to the pile he was making, along with a smashed storm-lantern, the crumbling head of a spade, some bald tennis balls, and from deep under, where so little light got in that the undergrowth was hollow, the battered pudding basin that had been Ralphie’s water-tin. He saw it glowing like a full moon in the half-darkness, reached in, pulled it out, and sent it clattering on to the heap.

  His mother came out to bring him cups of scalding tea or jugfuls of iced water, and would stand there while he drank.

  She took no interest in the progress of the work. She would have preferred him to begin on the roof, which leaked in places, or to put in new slumps for her lines, and he would get around to these too, in time; but it was the blackberries that had priority. So when she stood waiting for him to finish drinking it wasn’t the work that held her, it was him: the fact that she had him here. Gulping down cold water, he watched her over the rim of the glass, hungrily taking him in.

  At the end of the day, casting his gloves aside, he set fire to what he had hacked and torn out and dragged to the bank. The thorny strands crackled and burned fast. The place began to resemble the Keen’s Crossing he had left, though there was much that could not be restored. The Crossing now was a dead end. The highway had moved a mile downriver and there was a bridge, a three-spanner, high above the stream.

  It surprised him, given this and the war and all, that his mother had been able to hang on so long, but she would, of course, if anyone could. He was struck again by her tenacity, that strength in her that he too had drawn on ‘up there’ and used to pull him through, and was conscious once again of how alike they were, and how different.

  At the table, still shirtless in the heat but with the grime and ash washed off him and peroxide on his cuts, he listened in a numbed way to her talk, which was ceaseless as she went over the list of her grievances: the same bitter anecdotes and illustrations of the hardships she had put up with and his father’s many deficiencies. Her war with him had intensified. He was a more powerful presence to her now that he was gone than he had ever been when he was sitting out on a stump somewhere in the dark, sulking and cursing, or when he was traipsing mud from his boots over her floors.

  What she could not forgive was his refusal to knuckle down to the hard truth of things: which for her meant marriage, home, family, all she had spent her spirit over the years in amassing and preserving, and which she had expected they would share.

  ‘He’s a conquering hero now,’ she told Digger. ‘Lording it over the Japanese. I ask you!’

  Digger felt sorry for her. There was no end to the injustice she felt, and since no story she told in illustration could contain the whole of it, no story was ever finished. It opened out at one point or another into a new one, approached some new and deeper injury, and that one led on to the next. The worst of it was, he wasn’t even here to face her. He had escaped even that. Digger learned to listen and not to hear.

  She told him as well what she knew of Jenny. It wasn’t much. She was in Brisbane somewhere.

  At the end of the week, when the yard was cleared and he had dealt with the roof, Digger made his own enquiries, took the train to Brisbane and brought her back.

  So there they were, all three, united again. Back, Digger thought, despite the seven years and all that had happened, in a life that was barely different in its essentials from the one he had left.

  His mother still weighed out and packed orders each Friday night in the room behind the store, and a boy called Cliff Poster came on his bike at eight on Saturday morning and went back and forth, as he had, making deliveries.

  She still had her garden, and a war now with the cats. She set Jenny to watch out for them if she couldn’t do it herself. A bucket of water was kept ready under the clothes-line to slosh at them.

  She still did the washing out in the yard, using a tin tub and a scrubbing-board, and ironed in the kitchen late at night.

  She and Jenny shared one room now, and Digger slept in his old bed on the other side of the wall. They could talk right through it if they wanted.

  He was surprised, lying on the narrow cot and looking past the windowsill at the same moonlit view, to recall how light-headed and restless he had been in the old days; waiting, fully awake and counting the seconds till the rest of them were asleep, then easing himself off his cot so that the springs didn’t squeak, pulling on his pants, and tiptoeing out, his boots in one hand, his shirt in the other, to finish dressing in the dark.

  The difference now, he thought, lay in the load of ballast he had taken on; none of which might be measurable in real terms. He could still have made the grade as a featherweight, and none of what he was carrying would have registered on his mother’s scales, out there in the shop. But it made a difference just the same.

  He worked as an odd-job man, and, since it was all word of mouth up here, soon had a reputation as the man to get: ‘Get Digger. He’ll fix it.’

  He had a way with generators, old fridges, every kind of engine, and since the day his father first put a hammer and nail into his hand, and gave him a slab of four-by-two to practise on, had been a dab hand at all sorts of carpentry.

  Building restrictions were still on in the early days, so it was repair work mostly, and it remained so, even when the bans were lifted and they moved into a boom. People who wanted new homes got a contractor from Gosford, or brought their pet architect and builder up from Sydney. He worked with other men’s blunders, patching and restoring; or with what the weather ruined – they got too much rain up here, too much sunlight too: replacing floorboards, closing in verandahs, hanging doors. He took over the tools his father had left – however careless he may have been in other respects, he was a scrupulous workman and they were in excellent nick. He was happiest when he was straddling the line of a roof with the whole river-country laid out below him; in summer expansive and glittering, on early mornings in winter trailing a line of heaped cloud between its forested bluffs, while up where he was, crouched on the side of a fibro roof and hammering, the sun on his shoulders would be making him s
weat.

  On Thursdays he went up to town and spent the night at Bondi Junction. He did it without fail, not missing a single Thursday in twenty-six years.

  He would walk round to pick Iris up at the cake shop and they would stroll home together, have tea with the boys and maybe go to a show. But more often than not they just sat like a long-married couple and listened to the wireless, while Iris mended socks or did a jigsaw puzzle, and Digger took a toaster to pieces and put it together again. Around eight, Ben and Amy Fielding came in and they would have a game of five hundred or a bit of a sing-song while Iris played.

  He began to read his way through Mac’s library. There were, he estimated, about seven hundred volumes. Mac had intended them for his retirement, and it pleased Digger that, even if he made not a single addition of his own, there was reading enough on the stacked shelves, and in the unsorted books that were piled under the bed, on top of the wardrobe and round the walls of the little closed-in porch beyond, to keep him going for the rest of his life.

  He didn’t push himself, there was no need. He read steadily through biographies, travel books, books of history; the collected writings of Wilhelm Stekel, and Adler and Freud; the whole of Havelock Ellis; the novels of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett and Conrad and Theodore Dreiser, including the book the Human Torso had given him, novels by Balzac and Stendhal and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, wondering, as he went, how often he was travelling a path Mac had already been on, and, when he came on something that challenged or shocked him, what Mac might have made of it.

  Occasionally, in turning a page, he came on a slip of paper that Mac had put there to mark where he had left off reading – or was it so that he could come upon it, five, ten, fifteen years after his death?