The Complete Stories (12 page)

Lately he had found himself looking at the world—at people—as if he had developed another sense, beyond the usual five, for what was happening around him, for what was being said. Listening, really listening, was a kind of looking. For the way a glance passed from one person to another, or a soft mouth was compressed into a hard line, as Josie's was now, or cheeks were momentarily sucked in. As often as not that was where the real conversation was being conducted.

The younger boys of the family, Luke and Jack, came crashing into the room. They were eleven and fifteen. Barefooted, in out-at-elbow woollies, they had been tempted in by his arrival—and the promise of Tim Tams—from practising hoops at the basketball ring where he and Brian had spent long afternoons just a year ago.

“I've seen you riding,” Luke told him. His eyes went to the greatcoat.

Jack, the older boy, laughed, as if this intended more than it said.

“CZ,” Luke said admiringly.

The greatcoat and the bike, that's what they saw.

What Josie saw was a warmonger.

“I suppose you're proud of yourself,” she accused, "going off to blow a lot of women and children to pieces who've never done you any harm.”

He was surprised by her vehemence, but when he looked he saw that her eyes were bright with something different.

“Leave Charlie alone now,” her mother told her. “Have another Tim Tam, love.”

“Can I?” Luke asked.

“He's had two already,” the older boy protested.

“Don't be a tittle-tat,” his mother told him.

“Well, he has!”

“She's a real Tartar, eh?”

This, proudly, came from the father, who had just stepped in from work and overheard the scene. “Good to see you, son.”

He shook Charlie's hand, and they stood a moment in what might have been manly solidarity while Josie scowled.

“He's going to Vietnam,” Luke told his father.

“Hmmm,” Mr. Whelan said.

He gave Charlie another look and accepted the mug Josie was passing him.

“Well,” he said gravely, "I suppose someone's got to go. Good on you, son.”

“No they don't,” Josie insisted.

“Josie's been on demos"—this was Luke again—"in Sydney.”

“That's enough, Luke,” his mother told the boy.

But Josie was not so easily silenced. She gave them her opinion of various politicians, local and overseas, and in no uncertain terms stated her convictions about wars in general, men, and this war in particular.

“I told you she was a Tartar,” her father said with a laugh, and Charlie wondered what side he was on. “Hope you've got your crash helmet handy.”

Charlie was amused. He enjoyed being so immediately the centre of attention here, and the little sensual kick he got from her high colour and excitement. He'd never looked at Josie in this light. She had always been “Brian's sister.” But there was something as well that confused him. All this talk of politics, all these fierce convictions.

He had no convictions himself and did not consider what he was about to do as involving him “politics.” There was nothing in the notebook about that. His going or not going concerned only himself. It had to do with where he stood with the world and what it had put in his way, the claims
that
made on him. With how he saw himself and wanted others to see him. With what he could live with. Maybe—though he believed this would not be demanded of him—with what sort of death he might make.

Josie's insistence that what really mattered was some larger question of right or wrong made nothing of all that. And made nothing too—this is what affronted him—of his presence here, a little heated as he was by all the sensations of the moment and the turmoil of these last weeks. As
if his life,
his
life, the one he felt so strongly pulsing through him, was of no account.

“You've got no imagination,” Josie accused.

“And you have, I suppose,” he shot back. Surprising himself.

“That's it, son,” Mr. Whelan laughed. “You speak up for yourself.”

“Enough of a one,” Josie told him mildly.

Charlie tried not to show how angry he felt. The implication was that his rude good health, his youth, his high spirits, put some things that she saw with blinding clarity beyond his comprehension. That something boyish and crudely warlike in him, male bravado, the rush of hormonal mayhem, made him insensitive to the price that others would have to pay—women and the old, and little helpless terrified kids—so that his brand of swagger and mindlessness could have its way. He felt acutely, under her gaze, the bunched muscles of his shoulders in the old school sweater and eased them a little.

But the fact was, he did see these things, and no less clearly perhaps than she did. He
knew
about blood. His own, just at the moment, was very much present to him, in his forearms and wrists, in the veins of his neck. He meant to keep it there. But also, if he could, to preserve his honour as well. That was
his
argument.

It involved words it would have embarrassed him to use. Things that could be thought, and warmly felt, but not stated. There was no way he could lay claim—or not openly—to so much for himself. But he was sorry just the same that she had not seen it.

There were ways in which she too was insensitive—and she didn't see that either.

Still, all this intrigued him. He kept coming back.

“A glutton for punishment, eh, son?” was how Mr. Whelan put it.

At home in his grandfather's house they never argued about politics. They never argued about anything. If his grandfather and his aunt had convictions he had never heard them. His aunt's view was that some things, most things as it turned out, were better left unsaid, and Charlie had learned to see the point of this, having learned early that a good deal that went unsaid was too cruel, or too painful, for speech. The unspoken, in his grandfather's house, had mostly to do with his father. Charlie had few memories of his father, and none of them substantial.

The earliest was a character called Charlie that his mother and aunt spoke of in passionate whispers, and ceased to discuss the moment he appeared. He had assumed at first that they were speaking of him (he must have been three years old) and wondered what he had done that they should be so disturbed; his aunt so angry, his mother so weakly tearful. Only over time did it come to him that
this
Charlie, whose shadow fell so darkly over the house, was his father. Who had, it seemed, once more
failed
them—but mostly himself—and whom his aunt sometimes defended, and sometimes his mother, but never both at the same time and never in front of his grandfather.

Sometimes, when his grandfather laid a hand on his shoulder and asked sadly: "So how's it going, Charlie? How are they treating you?” he understood that it was not really him that his grandfather was speaking to but that other, who once, before he failed them all, had also been young, and had not yet discovered, or not yet revealed, that failure was what he was inevitably heading for. His father seemed frighteningly present then in his own name and skin.

There was a photograph on the piano in the front room of a young man in RAAF uniform and cap, much the same age as Charlie was now and bearing a resemblance to him that Charlie found unsettling. He looked out of the frame with such a guileless sense of his own presence and future that Charlie, on those occasions when he was led to take a good hard look, felt—along with curiosity and a shy affection for this stranger who was so uniquely close to him—a pang of doubt about his own too easy optimism.

No hint of failure there, or of failings either. What clung to the image was the romance of a period when his father had been a hero fired with a belief in his own physical survival into a time to come. It was in this spirit, it seemed, that he had got hold of Charlie's mother; the suggestion being that she had been deceived.

But perhaps, Charlie thought, she had wanted to be. And wasn't his father also deceived? By a belief that the high spirits that had swept him up, and the high action he had been involved in, were an aspect of his own nature rather than of the times; were in
him
rather than in the air, and could be confidently extended. And that the old weakness in him had been burned away. By a boyish delight in immediate danger and the nerve with which, in mission after mission, he had met it and come through.

Charlie was inclined to identify with this youthful warrior, and had developed, from what he knew of his own doubts and confusions—his own anxiety about getting what he was, or might be, out into a world that was so undependable and chancy—an understanding, a sympathy even, for what might have gone wrong in the man, though he did not mean to repeat it.

Perhaps the dramatic excitements of that brief year of scrambles and dogfights and ditchings had exhausted what was in him. He had made demands on his spirit that he could meet only once, and could not match under other, more ordinary circumstances.

But then he had never seen, as his mother had—his aunt, too, perhaps—what weakness was
like
close up; the sly deceits and fierce self-justifications that were the daily accompaniment of it.

The clearest sense he had of his father's actual presence was of standing—he must have been six—at his father's grave.

Men in dark suits, their hats clasped to their chest, hair plastered to their skulls and sweating, stood on the far side of the grave and all around it, looking hard at him and frowning. The ladies at their side wore gloves and were also looking, but their eyes were hidden under wide-brimmed hats that they were allowed to keep on.

It was hot. The midsummer sky was a blanched yellow-white, and the gum trees at the edge of the cemetery shimmered as if they were not real trees at all, only their reflection in water.

He stood very still, trying not to shift his feet, but could not tell if he was standing the right way, and thought he must be doing it wrong, which was what made people over there look at him so hard, and frown.

He had frequently been encouraged by his aunt to be a good little soldier in the matter of grazed elbows and bloodied knees, and plasters that had to be ripped off, but no one had told him how it would be at his father's funeral and how he should stand.

His grandfather was close behind him. His hand, blotched, with lumpy veins, rested on his shoulder, and occasionally drew him in to the soft belly and the hot smell of his woollen suit.

His mother and his aunt were on the other side of him, his aunt crying. He had never thought of his aunt as a woman who cried.

His mother cried very often, and noisily. She was what his aunt called theatrical. When his father met her, in London, she had been on
the stage. Being theatrical was something, later, when his mother was gone, that he would be severely warned against; as he was against being, like his father, weak—it was the double inheritance he must constantly fight against.

But at his father's funeral his mother did not cry, she simply stood, and he thought of her later as having already left, as he understood by then she must already have decided to do. So that what he recalled of that day was his aunt's tears, the weight of his grandfather's hand on his shoulder, and the dry, peppery smell of the bush, along with a ladies’ smell of talcum powder and sweat.

The white gravestones all around pulsed with light and might have been preparing to rise straight up like rockets. Which was just what was required, he thought, to free him from the scrutiny of the strangers over there and the need to hold himself so strictly to attention. Then suddenly the trees on the skyline exploded. Dozens of snow-white, sulphur-crested cockatoos flocked skyward, the noise of their shrieking so fierce, so like the sound of souls in torment, that all the people turned their heads.

That was his father's funeral. His father had always been absent in one way. Now he was absent in another. And beginning then, at the edge of the open grave, so was his mother. She went home to her family in England. From where she rang regularly twice each year, on his birthday and at Christmas, long distance, tearfully. And sent presents in elaborate wrappings that his aunt resented and referred to, though never to him, “extravagant.”

He had heard often enough from his grandfather that every man had his justifications, though one did not have to believe that they were always good; and since every man clearly meant every woman too, he wondered what his mother's might be. For having left him— temporarily at first, then permanently—in the charge of his grandfather and aunt.

Had she already given him over so completely to them and what they had to offer that she felt her own claim was weak, and that by taking him with her she would deprive him of more than she could give— even in the matter of love? Was he unlovable? Did he remind her too much of his father? Was she simply—he felt the implication of this in his aunt's silence on the matter—
weak?

The word hung in the air so often, though unspoken like so much else, because his grandfather, and even more his aunt, were so fond of the “strong.”

He felt the house was full of watchers. Not just his grandfather and aunt, but those presences, invisible but by no means to be underestimated, who were watching
them
—which was as far as his grandfather went in the matter of religion.

But all this meant was that the forces under whose watchful gaze they were living—who missed nothing, he came to feel, and were pitilessly demanding—had no names, no faces, and were difficult therefore to get a hold on, to approach and reason with. No doubt they too had their justifications, impossible to challenge.

He wondered sometimes, since his grandfather did not actually refer to them, how he had got so clearly into his head, and so early, that they were there. As palpably there as the furniture—big old-fashioned dining chairs with high backs, ample seats, solid legs, bedroom suites with mirrored wardrobes and dressing tables—that his grandfather had had made in Brisbane, and which, as newly-weds, his grandparents had brought up here after the First World War.

He reminded himself that his father too had grown up among these heavy presences. Perhaps it was the furniture, and the shadow it cast, that had alarmed his mother and driven her from the house.