The Complete Stories (55 page)

“You should watch out f’ loose women,” one of the fellows said once. He seemed to be joking.

“I been watchin’ out for ‘em,” Slinger said. “There ain't none around ‘ere that I been able to discover.” He looked off into the shifting, stirring dark.

“No,” the third fellow said bitterly, "it ain't the loose women you need t’ watch out for, it's the moral ones. A moral woman'll kill a man's spirit. The others—” But he bit off the rest of what he might have to tell. It went on silently behind his eyes, and the others, out of respect for something personal, fell into their own less heavy forms of silence.

It was Claude who provided most of the talk.

“One time,” Claude told, "I was stoppin’ at this boarding-house in Brisbane. I was workin’ at the abatoors then, it was just after the war. Well, at the boarding-house there was this refugee-bloke, an’ sometimes after tea, if I din’ feel like playin’ poker or listenin’ t’ Willy Fernell and Mo, this bloke an’ me'd sit out on the front step in the cool. Not talkin’ much—I wasn’ much of a talker in them days. But I s'pose he reckoned I was sort of sympathetic, I din’ rib ‘im like the rest. He was a Dutchman, or a Finn—one of that lot. Maybe a Balt. Anyway a thin feller with very good manners, and exceptionally clean—exceptionally. On'y ‘e was as mad as a meat axe. I mean, one day ‘e'd be that quiet you couldn’ get a word out of ‘im, and the next ‘e'd be on the booze and ravin'. ‘E kept the booze under his bed. Vodka. Talked like a drain when ‘e was pissed, an’ all stuff you couldn’ make sense of. He was hidin’ from someone—some other lot, I never did find out who—you know what these New Australians are like. Look ‘ere mate, I'd tell ‘im, there's no politics here, this is Australia. But ‘e'd just look at me as if I was soft or somethink. And in fact he was loaded—God knows what ‘e didn’ have stacked away, jewellery an’ that—I saw some of it—'e could of lived in any place he liked—at Lennon's even. ‘E'd be in his sixties now, that bloke—I often wonder what happened to ‘im … Anyway, we were sit-tin’ out on the step one night, jus’ cool in our shirtsleeves, havin’ a bit of a smoke, when the cicadas start up. ‘What's that?’ ‘e says, jumpin’ to ‘is feet. ‘Cicadas,’ I tell ‘im. ‘Chicago?’ he says, all wild-eyed, ‘the gangsters?’ I had t’ laugh, but it was pathetic jus’ the same. The poor bugger thought ‘e'd got ‘imself to America, thought it was machine-guns.

Never seemed t’ know where ‘e was half the time. You'd think a boarding-house at Dutton Park ‘d impress itself on
anyone,
but not him. ‘Chicago,’ ‘e says, ‘the gangsters!’ God knows what sort of things ‘e'd been through—
over there
—I mean, you can't tell, can you? You look at a bloke jus’ sittin’ there an’ you can't tell. There's a lot of misery about. You've only got t’ go into some o’ them boarding-houses and see what blokes ‘ave got in ports under their beds. Old newspapers, bottles, stones. It'd surprise you. It'd surprise anyone.”

Gerry listened to Claude's tales. They were interesting but he could make nothing of them; they appeared to tell more than they told. There was a quality in Claude's voice that asked for something more than interest, and it was just this that Gerry resisted. He wanted Claude to be the foreman, only that, and preferred the dour but dignified silence of the other men, who if they had stories to tell kept them entirely to themselves.

The hut where Claude lived was divided by a partition into sleeping-quarters and storeroom. On one wall of the storeroom there were tools, very neatly arranged on hooks. They might have borne labels and been mistaken at first sight for a wall display in a folk museum, or for the elaborate fan shapes and sunbursts that native weapons assume when they have been stripped of their power of violence and become flowerlike— till you examine the points.

“I like t’ see things in their place,” Claude explained. “Order at a glance.” And he glanced up from where he was sitting at a desk doing McPhearson's accounts.

He wore half-glasses and was peering over the straight tops of them. It made his eyes a weaker blue and gave him, for all his toughness, a scholarly look, like a failed monk. To his left were heavy ledgers, and immediately before him a pile of accounts waiting to be pushed down hard on a spike. Beyond, at the far end of the room, which was dark, Gerry could see the shelves of foodstuff—jars, tins, packets—from which Claude provided the ingredients for their meals, including a whole shelf of Claude's own homemade chutney.

Claude had surprised Gerry the first time he went there by what seemed like an act of disloyalty.

“Here,” he had offered impetuously, "have a jar of peanut paste. On the house! McPhearson won't miss it. He's swimmin’ in peanut paste
that man. An’ smoked salmon, they tell me.” And when Gerry politely refused: "What about a packet a’ Band-Aids?”

Claude shrugged his shoulders and looked disappointed, and Gerry was left with a puzzle. The foreman was strict but inconsistent.

As for the other side of the partition, where Claude slept, Gerry saw that only once, when Claude cut his leg, bled badly, and sent him off to get a fresh pair of shorts. There were cuttings from newspapers pinned to the bare boards—racehorses—and on the desk a box of old stereopticon plates that Claude had already told him about and promised to show: pictures from round the world. “You can stand right at the edge and see the waters of Niagara come thunderin’ down—I tell yer, it's marvellous. I've stood there f ‘ hours and even heard the noise of it. Imagined that, of course. The pyramids, the Taj Mahal, George the Fifth's Jubilee—you name it! A man can go round the world in ‘is head with one a’ these stereopticons, and it don't cost a brass razoo.”

Gerry had looked round the narrow room, tried to make something of it—tried to make Claude of it—but saw nothing more than he already knew. He thought of his own room at home. He was untidy and his mother complained, but did his disorder reveal any more of what was going on in his head than Claude's fastidious habit of setting everything in its place? He had been able to tell Gerry, even through the pain of his wound, just where those clean shorts would be: in the second drawer to the left. Gerry had gone straight to them.

One day Claude came down to where he was working and asked him to go to town on a message. The town was twelve miles away. He was to go on Claude's two-stroke and deliver a letter. Claude drew a rough map of the town, showed him where the house was, and gave him very precise instructions about how he should open the gate, go up the four steps, and ring the doorbell—three long rings and then, after a pause, two short ones. “Like this,” Claude explained, tapping it out on a metal cup. He was to leave the motorbike in the main street and go the rest of the way—it wasn't more than a hundred yards—on foot. Claude emphasized that he was putting great trust in the boy, and embarrassed perhaps by the air of mystery he had created, suggested that Gerry needn't hurry back; he could take time off if he wanted to have a milkshake at the Greek's. The message was in a plain white envelope with neither name nor address.

The ride into town was a pleasant one. After three weeks of work Gerry was happy to have this time away, to feel released into his own body again and to be made free of the landscape and of the hot summer day.

The early part of the trip was rough. A narrow trail led upwards between thick-set pines. But he emerged at last on to a high rolling plateau where the clouds rode close overhead, struck a gravel road, then two miles before the town a stretch of bitumen. He opened his shirt and took the full thrust of the air. Crossing bridges over dry streams he heard the sound they made as he rattled across them, the
slog slog slog
of concrete balusters, a regular beating in his ear, and remembered the different rhythm—three longs, a pause and two shorts—that Claude had tapped out on the cup. Its meaning didn't concern him. It was Claude's business, or maybe it was McPhearson's. He was a messenger. He felt extraordinarily light-hearted. Perhaps because this was the first occasion in so long that he had been on his own, but also because, small as it might be, he was being entrusted with something. He had recently discovered, in the furthest reaches of himself, a capacity for what he thought of as noble action and was concerned now that it should find its proper form in the world; that when the occasion arose (as it surely must) that would demand the full stretch of his powers, he would recognise and meet it.

The problem of course was in the recognition. He was inexperienced but not romantic, and had perceived clearly enough that heroic occasions do not come ready-made, that they spring into existence only when they are grasped. You would need imagination as well as pluck. Two years ago he might have seen himself through drifts of gun-smoke bearing the colours, or as a dispatch-rider in one of the wars, vaulting shell holes on a BSA. But the next occasion wouldn't be like it, and any moment, even the most commonplace, might be either the call or the first step towards it. You had to be on the alert, and believe that when the opportunity came you would be ready for it.

All this was part of his most secret life. He let it out now that he was alone and flaring along a bitumen road—in the open air, under leaves, in sunlight; and all the more because for the last weeks he had held back, and tried among the others to seem acceptable, ordinary.

He came into the town over a bridge. Kids were swimming in the last of the season's water, among thick willows. He stopped the bike halfway across, and still easily astride it, leaned over the railings to watch. Slim bodies swung out on a knotted rope and went flying head-over-heels, their cries cut off in a splash. The sight pleased him. He was just out of that stage himself and might have allowed himself to regret it, but had set himself in the direction of manhood. He rode on into town, parked the bike, and was thirsty enough after his ride to consider going straight to the Greek's. But no, he told himself, Duty first. I'll deliver the message and have the milkshake afterwards.

The town was small and sleepy, but after his weeks up at the camp seemed to him to be bustling with life. Women clicked along the pavement in their high heels. A girl riding by on a bike with her skirt up looked back over her shoulder, and he was taken again by the various-ness of the world and the number of paths that were open in each moment of it. Later, that was for later. With the envelope safe in his shirt pocket he turned out of the main street with its row of two-storeyed buildings that went on for another quarter of a mile, all pubs, banks, general stores, bakeries, into the dusty streets behind. Crossed one, then another, till he found the name he wanted, and was about to consult numbers when he was hailed from a low verandah.

“Hey! Givvus a lift, wilya sonny?”

The man was holding one end of a genoa-velvet lounge as if he had been standing there maybe all morning, waiting for someone to come along, as Gerry had, and take the other.

Gerry hesitated—this was an interruption—but didn't see how he could refuse. The man looked expectant. The lounge, with one end on the ground and the other in the air, was ridiculous. After a moment's hesitation he took it up as directed, walked backwards a few paces, and helped the man push it on to the back of a lorry.

“The rest is a walkover,” the man told him. He was a tall fellow with teeth missing, wearing nothing but football shorts. “I'll bring the armchair, you get the smokers’ stands an’ the side table.”

He followed the man into the house and they cleared the front room and loaded it, then carried out of a second room a dining table, a sideboard, six chairs, and a framed oil painting of the Alps. The lorry by now had about as much as it would carry. Gerry held the other end of several ropes while the man strained, cursed, knotted. Then, with a
casual, "Thanks, son, I'll do the same f ‘ you some time,” he climbed into the cabin and drove slowly away. He had left the door of the house standing wide open.

Gerry wondered as he walked away if he mightn't have been assisting at a burglary. But what else could he have done? He noted the number of the house he had helped strip, in case there were questions later, and saw now that the one he wanted was just three doors off on the other side. He crossed, opened the gate with as little sound as possible, went on up the steps, pushed the bell three times as Claude had directed, waited, then rang twice more. Almost immediately a curtain twitched aside in one of the front windows and a girl's face appeared. Then she was at the open door.

“For Christ sake!" she spat out. “What are you playin’ at?” She gave an alarmed glance behind him and to both sides. “Who th’ fuck are you?”

Barefoot, hastily wrapped in a gown with explosive red-and-gold flowers all over it, she smelled of soap and had the misty look of a woman who had come fresh from the bath.

The messenger for a moment failed to find his tongue, and she softened a little at his youth, at the way he flushed, and the movement of his eyes towards the mysterious darkness behind her.

She turned her head as if following his gaze, and said over her shoulder: "It's nothing. Just some kid.” She gave him a look, half-knowing, half-ironical, but no longer alarmed. “Watcha want, son?”

“I've brought this,” Gerry told her coldly, showing the envelope. “It's from Claude.”

She took the envelope, tore it open, glanced quickly at both sides of the single sheet, and then burst out laughing. She began to close the door.

“Isn't there an answer?” Gerry asked foolishly.

“Are you kidding? How would you answer that?”

She showed him both sides of the page, and they stood at the half-open door with the blank sheet between them.

“Piss off,” she said, not urgently: and the door was closed in his face.

He rode back fast, his face still burning. He hadn't after all stopped at the Greek's, and when he came bumping into the camp and parked the
bike, and saw Claude coming down to meet him, would have turned away if he could and found work to do.

Claude came at him sideways. He screwed one eye up as if squinting at sunlight.

“Well,” he said shyly, "how was the trip? Bike behave? Dja find the house alright?”

He answered Claude's questions, he rendered account; but would not, for all Claude's soft-talk, be sweetened.