The Complete Stories (28 page)

They knew quite well he wouldn't be sitting down, as they were, to chops and boiled pudding, but it kept him, even if all he was doing was pushing a few spoonfuls of sticky rice into his mouth, alive and in the same moment with them.

When St. Patrick's Day came round she would say: "Sweet peas. They're your father's favourites. You should remember that, Jack. Maybe by the time they're ready he will be home.”

One year, struck by one of the models in a Paton and Baldwin pattern book, she knitted a cable-stitch sweater for him. Jack held the wool when it was wound, watching the yards and yards it would take pass over his hands. Twenty skeins! When all the parts were finished and had been assembled into the shape of a sweater, his mother held it up to her shoulders. “Look, Jack.”

He was astonished by the bulkiness of it. He hadn't remembered his father's being so big. In a moment when his mother was out of the room he held its roughness to his cheek, but all he could smell was new wool.

Collapsed now between layers of tissue, it lay in a drawer of his father's lowboy acquiring an odour of naphthalene.

But as the months slipped by and they still had no news of him, no
postcard or message on the radio, Jack saw that his mother's assurance had begun to fail. She still spoke as if his father were just out of the room for a bit, at a football match or having a drink down at the boat club, but she was pretending. For his sake—that is what he felt—and it worried him that she might realise that he knew. They would have to admit something then, and it was imperative, he thought, that they should not. If she no longer had faith, then he must. If his father was to survive and get home, if he was to hang on to whatever light thread was keeping him in the world, then
he was
the one who must keep believing. It was up to him.

“Now, Milly
!
You can't just sit around mooning. Stan wouldn't want that. You're young, you need a break. You need to get out and have a bit of fun.”

This was his aunt Susan speaking, his father's sister. Jack wondered how she could do it.

“Look,” she said, holding his mother's hair up, "like this. You've got such lovely bones.”

They looked into the mirror, his aunt lifting the thick hair in her hands like a live animal, their two bodies leaning close.

His mother regarded herself. “Do you really think so?” she said dreamily. “That I could get away with it?”

Jack frowned. Don't, Mum, he said silently.

The two figures in the mirror, his mother smiling now, her head turned to one side, disturbed him; there was a kind of complicity between them. When they looked at one another and leaned closer, their eyes full of daring and barely suppressed hilarity, he felt they had moved away into a place where he was not invited to follow. Other rules applied there than the ones he knew and wanted her to keep.

“Well, I don't know,” his mother was saying. But she looked pleased, and his aunt Susan giggled. “Maybe,” she said. “What do you think, Jack?”

He looked away and did not answer. She must know as well as he did that his father hated anything of that sort—rouge, painted toenails, permed hair. What was wrong with her?

For the past few weeks she had been working one night a week at a canteen. Now, under his aunt Susan's influence, she changed her hair-
style to a glossy pompadour, put on wedgies, and, drawing Jack into it as well, began to teach herself the newest dances. They tried them out with old gramophone records, on the back verandah; Jack rather awkward in bare feet and very aware that he came only to her shoulder. I'm only doing it to make her happy, he told himself. He felt none of the pride and excitement of the previous year, when he had gone along each Saturday night in a white shirt and bow tie to be her beau at the Scarborough dances.

Americans began to appear at their door. Escorts, they were called. It had a military ring, more formal, less personal than partner. They brought his mother orchids in a square cellophane box and, for him, "candy,” which only Americans could get. He accepted, it was only polite, but made it clear that he had not been bought.

His mother asked him what he thought of these escorts and they laughed together over their various failings. She was more critical than Jack himself might have been and this pleased him. She also consulted him about what she should wear, and would change if he disapproved. He was not deceived by any of this, but did not let her see it.

And in fact no harm was done. New dances replaced the old ones every month or so, and in the same way the Rudis, the Dukes, the Vergils, the Kents, were around for a bit and sat tugging at their collars under the tasselled lamps while his mother, out in the kitchen, fixed her corsage and they made half-hearted attempts to interest or impress him, then one after another they got their marching orders. Within a week or two of making themselves too easily at home, putting their boots up on the coffee-table, swigging beer from the bottle, they were gone. The war took them. They moved on.

M
ILT,
Milton J. Schuster the Third, was an air force navigator from Hartford, Connecticut, a lanky, fair-headed fellow, younger than the others, with an Adam's apple that jumped about when he was excited and glasses of a kind Jack had never seen before, just lenses without frames. Jack took to him immediately.

He wasn't a loud-mouth like so many of the others, he did not skite. And for all that he was so young, he had done a lot, and was full of odd bits of information and facts that were new to Jack and endlessly inter-
esting. But most of all, it was Milt who was new. He was put together with so much lazy energy, had so many skills, so much experience that he was ready, in his good-humoured way, to share.

“Jack,” his mother protested, "give us a break, will you? That's the fifty-seventh question you've asked since tea.”

But where Milt was concerned Jack could never get to the end of his whats and whys and how comes and who said sos, or of Milt's teasing and sometimes crazy answers.

Milt was a fixer. Humming to himself a tuneless tune that you could never quite catch, comfortable in a sweat-stained singlet with the dog-tags hanging, he would, without looking up from the screwdriver he was spinning in his long fingers or the fuse-wire he was unravelling, “Hi, kiddo,” the same for Jack and his mother both, and just go on being absorbed. It wasn't an invitation to stay, but it wasn't a hint either (Jack was sensitive to these) that you should push off. He accepted your presence and went on being alone. Yet somehow you were not left out.

In fact the jobs Milt did were things Jack's mother could do quite well herself, but she was happy now to have Milt do them. When he made a lamp come on that had, for goodness knows how long, failed to work, he wore such a look of beaming satisfaction that he might have supplied the power for it out of his own abundant nature, out of the same energy that fired his long stride and lit his smile.

So what was his secret? That's what Jack wanted to know. That was where all his questions tended. And what was the tune he hummed? It seemed to Jack that if he could only get close enough to hear it, he would understand at last Milt's peculiar magic. Because it was magic of a sort. It put a spell on you. Only Milt didn't seem to know that he possessed it, and it was this not-knowing, Jack thought, that made it so mysterious, but also made it work.

Milt was twenty-two. In the strict code of those times it was inconceivable that a woman should be interested in a man who was younger. Jack could imagine his mother breaking some of the rules, smoking in the street for instance, or whistling, but not this one. So he had come to think of Milt as
his
friend.

When Christmas came they took him to Schindler's.

They had been going to Schindler's for as long as Jack could remember. His mother and father had spent their honeymoon there. Unlike the other guests, who ate in the little sunlit dining room at midday and half past six, they took their meals at the big table in Mrs. Schindler's kitchen, and Jack had permission to go in at any hour and ask for milk from the fridge, or an ice-block, or one of Mrs. Schindler's homemade biscuits. On days when they went fishing at Deception, Mary, the Schindlers’ girl, packed them a lunch-tin with things only the family ate: salami, sweet-and-sour gherkins, strudel.

The soil at Scarborough was red. So were the eroded cliffs, which you could slide down and whose granular, packed earth could be trickled through a fist to colour sand-gardens. So were the rocks that formed a Point at each end of the beach, and the escarpments of the reef that at low tide emerged from the dazzle about sixty yards out, where fishermen, standing on the streaming shelf, cast lines for rock-cod or bream.

When the tide was in, the Points were covered, the beach was isolated. But at low tide, walking on what had just an hour before been the bottom of the sea, you could go round by the beach way to Redcliffe in one direction or Deception in the other.

No need to consult the
Courier Mail
for high- and low-water times at the Pile Light. When the tide was coming in your sandfly bites grew swollen and itched. When it went out, they stopped.

The beach at Scarborough was a family camping-ground. Bounded on one side by a grassy cliff-top—where at Christmas there was a fairground with hoopla stalls and an Octopus and a woozy merry-go-round—and on the other by a storm-water drain, it was a city of tents; or if not a city, at least a good-sized township, where the same groups, established in the same pozzies each year, made up a community as fixed in its way as any on the map.

It was a lively and relaxed world. When the tent flaps were up people's whole lives were visible, the folding table where they ate, the galvanized or enamel tub where they washed their clothes and did the dishes, the primus stove, camp-stretchers and carbide or petrol lamps. Jack spent his whole day moving from tent to tent asking if his friends could come out, or being gathered into the loose arrangements that were other people's lives. There were a dozen families where he could
simply step in under the flap, which would be golden where the sun beat through, and be offered a slice of bread with condensed milk or, in the afternoon, a chunk of cold watermelon.

At home in Brisbane, people's lives were out of sight behind lattice and venetians. Here, it was as if, in some holiday version of themselves, they had nothing to hide. All you had to do to be one of them was to make yourself visible; and if, in tribute to settled convention, you did “knock, knock,” it was a kind of joke, the merest shadowy acknowledgement of the existence elsewhere of doors and of a privacy that had already been surrendered or was dissolved here like the walls.

“Come on in, pet.” That is what Mrs. Chester or Mrs. Williams would call, the comfortable mothers of his holiday friends. And if strangers were there, other women like themselves, barefoot, in beltless frocks, they might add: "This is Jack. He's one of the family, aren't you, love?”

It was a manner of speaking, a temporary truth like all their arrangements down here. Rivalries, gangs, friendships existed with a passionate intensity for the six weeks of Christmas and two more at Easter, and for the rest of the year, like some of the rivers they drew in Geography, went underground, became dotted lines.

Jack loved these broken continuities. They were reassuring. You let things drop out of sight, then you picked them up again further on. Nothing was lost. Even a single day could have that pattern. For a whole morning, while you played Fish or Ludo, you were one of the Ches-ters. Then in the afternoon you became a loose adjunct of the Ludlow family or returned to your own.

It was his own family that was the puzzle.

The way Jack saw it was this. He and his mother were two points of a triangle, of which the third point was over the horizon somewhere in a place he could conceive of but never reach, though there were times when his whole body ached towards it, and so intensely that he would wake at night with the torment of it. Growing pains, his mother called it. And it was true, he was growing; he had shot up suddenly into a beanpole. But that wasn't the whole of it.

Down here at Scarborough, where he was most keenly aware of his body as the immediate image of himself, the sun's heat, day after day, and especially in the early morning when it struck the glass of his hothouse sleepout, would draw him in a half-waking dream to some tropic
place where everything grew faster. His limbs would be stretched then across three thousand miles of real space till every joint was racked, and he would experience at last the thing he most hungered for: a smell of roll-your-owns as sharp as if his father were actually there in the room with him, or a light-headed feeling of being hefted all along the verandah-boards on his father's boot, the two of them laughing, Jack a little out of fear, and his father shouting: "Hang on, Jack, that's the boy. Hang on!”

It was the voice he found hardest to keep hold of. He strained to hear it, vigorously lifted, under the beating of the shower, "All together for the Floral Dance,” but got nowhere. When he did sometimes discern the peculiar line of it on a stranger's lips it was in one of the phrases his father liked to use: "fair crack o’ the whip" “you wouldn’ credit it.” He would try for the tune of it then under his breath.

S
O HERE
they were at Schindler's; Jack, his mother, and Milt. Jack was in his element.

Even Mrs. Schindler, who had treated Milt at first with a kind of coldness, was won over by the drawling stories he told, a way he had of kidding people that was rough but inviting. By the end of their first meal together she adored him and from then on insisted on making all his favourite dishes, waiting breathlessly, like a girl, for him to taste and approve. Once it had been Jack who was consulted on whether the precious dessert-spoons should be used for ice-cream or for pudding. Now it was Milt. And Jack didn't mind at all. How could he be resentful of someone he himself was so eager to see pleased?

Milt kidded Mrs. Schindler the way he kidded Jack's mother, with a mixture of courtliness and plain tomfoolery. He hung around the kitchen benches, beating eggs and dipping his finger into bowls. He set up a little speaker so that Mrs. Schindler could listen in to the news from the lounge-room wireless while she helped Mary wash up. He danced her all round the kitchen, on the black-and-white tiles, “Wiener Blut.”