The Complete Stories (11 page)

Then there were his shirts, his shorts, his jeans—they would go to the Salvos—and the new things she had bought, which lay untouched in the drawers of his lowboy, the shirts in their plastic wrappers, the underpants, the socks still sewn or clipped together. Maybe Josh. She had a vision of herself arriving with these things on his mother's doorstep. An opening. The big man's pleasure as he stroked the front of his new poplin shirt, the sheen of its pure celestial blue.

She sat again, the small horde of the rolled socks in her lap, the spent match and the strands of wire in a tidy heap. A beginning. And let the warm summer dark flow in around her.

C
harlie Dowd spent the last weeks before he was inducted and went to Vietnam riding round town on a CZ two-stroke, showing himself off to people and saying goodbye.

It was August and cold: high dry skies, the westerlies blowing. He wore a navy blue air force greatcoat of his father's, who had been a Spitfire pilot in the war. It was belted and double-breasted with wide lapels, and when you turned the collar up your ears were covered. The skirts were so long that what Charlie saw in the long wardrobe mirror in his room (he'd been reading
War and Peace)
was a French cavalry officer in the Napoleonic Wars in flight from Cossacks. Anticipating his first day in camp he had been down to Sam Harker and had his hair cut short on top and shaved at the sides. When he stood and contemplated himself in the mirror, he really looked the part.

He had a routine. He got up late, ate the breakfast his aunt made for him, which doubled as lunch, then sat for a couple of hours in warm winter sunlight in the window of the pub. Always in the same place, looking out across the veranda rails to the median strip of the town's one main street, with a schooner of beer at his elbow on the chocolate-brown sill, and beside it, as a way of making himself at home, his pen, his wallet, the paperback he was reading, and the makings of the roll-your-owns he liked to smoke—papers, Drum tobacco in a plastic wrap, and an oblong tin not much bigger than a matchbox that contained the simple mechanism for turning them out. He took trouble over this, giving the roller a practised spin between forefinger and thumb, and when he ran his tongue along the edge of the paper, putting just enough spit
into it for the spill to be dry but perfectly, almost professionally, sealed. He smoked a little, read a little, wrote in his notebook.

He was keeping notes. Not a diary exactly, just random thoughts. As they came to him in the drowsy sunlight in the slow early session after midday, and as they took off, the moment he began to set them down, and led him into all sorts of unpredictable and shadowy places where he was pleased to roam. Bemused speculations.

If he tired of writing, and had no book at hand, he would read the contents of his wallet: his library card and driver's licence, several torn-off corners of a notepad or newspaper with names and phone numbers on them that he could barely decipher, ads from magazines that he must have thought, when he folded them small and tucked them away in one of his wallet's many pockets, might one day come in useful. With a cigarette at his lips, the sun on his hands, a crease between his brows, he would give these exhibits his solemn attention, as if this time he might catch, in the evidence they offered of unfulfilled needs and momentary promises, some reflection of himself that till now had subtly eluded him.

Occasionally when he looked up he would find upon him the pink-rimmed, rheumy eyes of one of the old-timers, pensioners and retired tradesmen or storekeepers, who were the regulars of this hour: thin-faced, silent fellows with elongated ears and noses who had been turned out of the house by their daughters or daughters-in-law, and towards two or two thirty in the afternoon dropped in, very formally attired in coat and hat, for a beer and whatever talk might be going. In the early days one or two of them had enquired from a distance what he was writing. They seemed ready to start a conversation. Charlie put his pen down and let them go on.

It wasn't really a conversation. What they wanted was to tell him their story—well, not him exactly, anyone would have done.

He listened. That they had a story, and took it for granted they did, confirmed him in the assumption that he too had one. But he was glad when they drifted off at last and went back to their beer, and after a time they ceased to be curious about him. He had become one of them.

They were becalmed at the end of their lives, that's what he saw, and he was becalmed in the middle of his, but nearer the beginning. Waiting out these last days as if they were an enforced holiday, which was why
his aunt let him sleep till past midday and did not complain, as she would have done earlier, when the breakfast she made him was also his lunch.

Afternoons had always been a trouble to him, going right back to when he was little and had to take a nap each day beside his mother on a high double bed in their cool spare room. He would play afterwards on the lino and watch his mother laugh on the phone or do her nails on the back veranda, or with her skirt hoicked up and her bare feet propped on the rail, sit tanning herself while the radio played, "Music, music, music,” and willy-wagtails switched about on the grass.

Time passed slowly after midday, before tea. That's what he had found. The air grew thicker. There was a weight that dragged. It had something to do with the clouds, loaded at times with thunder, that at that hour gathered and rolled in over the Range. Summer or winter, it made no difference: trees, houses, grass, sky—the whole world seemed to be waiting only for the coming on of dark.

Lately, that quality he had felt of a whole world hanging on what was to come, nightfall, had become the keynote of his own existence. He had waited. First for his birthday to come around, then for his name to come up. He was waiting now for the last days to pass before his induction. All that time had been a mixture in him of restless impatience for each day to dawn and pass, and a kind of inertia which, if he had not deliberately taken a hand, would have made a sleepwalker of him, just when he needed to be most fully awake.

The truth was that Vietnam, and his going, was the certainty he had needed to give his life direction; to close off an open and indeterminate future where he might have gone on stumbling about in a maze that had no end. He was going. He would see action—the phrase brought a prickle of excitement to his skin that scared and at the same time gravely enlivened him. Meanwhile, though others need not see it in this light, he had organised a small carnival for himself.

Around four in the afternoon, with the sun gone from the sill where his empty beer glass sat—he never had more than two—he set out on his rounds.

H
IS ARRIVAL
on their doorstep puzzled some people. They had not seen him in a while; in some cases, a long while. They did not immediately
recognise the crop-headed boy in uniform greatcoat who loomed in the door frame as if he had come to deliver something official, and stood smiling and stamping on the doormat in the assurance of being invited in. They had difficulty remembering who he was.

They did remember at last—and would have known the name anyway, because of his grandfather—but could not guess why on earth he had called, and why, when he settled, his long legs extended, the skirts of the greatcoat open like dark wings, he looked from one to another of them with so much wide-eyed alertness—in expectation of what, they wondered.

More than puzzled, some of them were embarrassed. But Charlie wasn't. He knew very well what he was after. He wanted to know, before he went away, what impression his having lived here for a whole twenty years had made on people. Not much, he guessed. But that was just the point. They would remember his going. They would remember that he had come to say goodbye.

One or two of them were old friends of the family who had known him when he was little and whom his aunt had mentioned. They were surprised to see him after so long but soon made him feel at home.

In other cases they were fellows a little older than himself who, two or three years back, had been on the school swimming team with him but could not, when he turned up now, come up with his name.

“Who did you say he was?” he heard a girl whisper out in the kitchen while he sat alone in the front room with a round-eyed baby and the TV. “Have I met him? Was he at the wedding?”

In households where he had, for a time, been the schoolfriend of a son or daughter now lost to the city, it was recalled that he had always been odd—old-fashioned they had called it then; a consequence of his having no one to bring him up but his grandfather and an old-maid aunt.

Well, he was even odder now. The way he had of just sitting and looking. With his ears sticking out above the lapels of his greatcoat. And the greatcoat itself. What was that? What was that about?

For all his affability, some older men looked him over and were put off. They had been to a war themselves. They hadn't gone around making a song and dance of it, parading about in what looked like fancy dress. He was young of course, but no younger than they had been. Young people these days made too much of themselves. That came
from the sort of pop music they listened to, and from the TV. Life for them was all play-acting, dressing up. Sideburns, old double-breasted suits and striped collarless shirts they'd raked up from a deceased uncle's lowboy or picked up cheap at the St. Vincent de Paul's. Fleecy-lined bomber jackets, and if the leather was cracked and worn so much the better. Camouflage battledress and other fads. Sergeant Pepper Band uniforms!

In a way that would never have occurred to them at that age, this feller was making a show of himself, and enjoying it too. What gave him the right to prance around drawing attention to himself?

All this would have surprised Charlie.

He
was
enjoying himself, and it was true, he did want to be noticed. But play-acting? He was on his way to Vietnam. Wasn't that real enough? There had been a ballot, a lottery. The world had cast him one of its backhanded prizes, and since he had no notion himself of what his life was to be, he had accepted it. Not passively, but without complaint. He'd let a roll of the barrel decide things. Given himself over to hazard, to chance. In a spirit, as he thought, of existential stoicism.

The war itself, when he got to it, would present hazards of a different sort. He had seen something of that. Body bags, statistics, fellows who brought back, in one way or another, a good deal less of themselves than they had taken away. He had no illusions. But chance in that case was tempered with something else. Something you yourself brought to the bar.

Guts. A feeling for where to put your foot down and where not. The good-luck charm of life itself—the one you were intended for. He believed, though none of this, of course, had yet been tested, that he was the possessor of all three.

Beyond that you could present yourself as you wanted to be seen and then try to live up to it. With a rough outline in your head of a story, you could do everything in your power to act it out; to incorporate the accidents that hit you into its form, as he had incorporated the lottery and his conscription. Later parts of it, in his case, included Paris, which he definitely saw himself visiting one day a language or two he meant to pick up, a wife of course—he had a whole list of things he'd barely started on. He had already read
War and Peace,
but he had not, as yet, fired a gun or been up in a plane. He had never tasted Tokay, or
champagne or oysters, or slept with a girl or been further from home— this small town tucked into a hollow behind the Range—than Brisbane once on a rugby trip while he was at school: he had been sick, both ways, on the coach. But he was young, and believed, even with Vietnam up ahead, that he had time.

He had discovered in the eyes of others, beginning with his grandfather, an affectionate wish that all things should go well with him. It was partly out of a desire to extend to as many people as possible the privilege of exercising their large goodwill towards him that he appeared on so many doorsteps of what was still, for the time being, his own little world.

One of the places he liked to go was a household where he
was
known; the family of his best friend Brian Whelan, who at the end of the previous year had decided on university and was away now in Brisbane.

The Whelans had known him since he was ten years old. The difference, when he went there now, was that Brian was gone and his sister Josie, who was three years older and had been away, was back. It was Josie who had opened the door to him when, after a six-month absence, he turned up one weekday around five in the afternoon, a little lightheaded from the two beers he had drunk and with his hair, and the hairlike filaments of the greatcoat, touched with tiny droplets of moisture, silvery and weblike from the drizzling rain he had driven through.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Josie announced to the lighted room behind her as he stood stamping on the threshold.

It was three years or more since he had last seen her. She had changed. She was thinner with longer hair. But her voice had not changed. It still had its edge of dismissive irony.

She had never really liked him, that's what he felt. His closeness to Brian had shut her out. He had never intended that and was sorry for it. He wished now that he had known her better and that she was more pleased to see him.

“Come in, love,” Mrs. Whelan called.

In a little while there were mugs of tea and his favourite Tim Tams. The greatcoat was draped over the back of a chair.

“I'm going to Vietnam,” he announced.

“Oh,” Mrs. Whelan said, and Josie, who was standing with her back against the sink, made a huffing sound.

“Brian's older than you,” Mrs. Whelan said after a bit. “Isn't your birthday in March, love?”

“May,” he told her.

“Yes,” she said, "Brian's is February the ninth.”

What she meant was that Brian's birth date had put him in a previous ballot; he was safe. She held out the plate of Tim Tams, as if offering him a small consolation, and when Charlie saw it he wanted to laugh. He had, he felt, grasped so clearly what was in her mind.