The Complete Stories (60 page)

Two hours later he was getting down at the empty northern station with its cyclone-wire fence strung on weathered uprights. The view beyond was of the sea.

He made his way along a tussocky path that led away from the main settlement, and along the edge of the dunes to where his grandfather's shack, grey fibro, stood in a fenceless allotment above rocks. There were banksias all leaning one way, shaped by the wind and rattling their dry, grey-black cones. It was a desolate place, not yet tamed or suburban: the dunes held together by long silvery grass, changing their contours almost daily under the wind; the sea-light harsh, almost brutal, stinging your eyes, blasting the whole world white with salt. Inland, to the west, great platforms of sandstone held rainwater in rusty pools and the wild bush-plants, spiky green now but when they were in flower a brilliant white, thrust clean through rock.

His grandfather was a fisherman. It was his grandfather who had led Luke to the sea, and his grandfather's war (or rather the Occupation Forces of the years afterwards) that had led him, through yarns quietly told and a collection of objects too deeply revered to be souvenirs— touchstones rather—to his consuming interest of this last couple of years. He had touched every one of those objects, and they had yielded
their mystery. He had listened to his grandfather, read everything he could lay his hands on, and had, he thought, understood. He felt now for the key, on a hook by the water tank, and let himself in.

A shack, not a house, but orderly and to Luke's eyes, beautiful. Washing-up was stacked on the primitive sink. There was a note on the kitchen table: "Luke—be back around five. Love, Pa.” Luke studied it. He took a glass of water, but only wet his lips, and went through to the one large room that made up the rest of the place. It was very bare. Poor-looking, some would have thought. Everything was out and visible: straw mats of a pale corn colour, still with a smell; his grandfather's stretcher; the hammock where Luke himself slept when he stayed overnight. On the walls, the tabletop, and on the floor round the walls, were the objects that made this for Luke a kind of shrine: masks, pots, the two samurai swords, and daggers.

He went straight to the wall and took one of the daggers from its hook—it was his, and walking through to the open verandah, he stood holding it a moment, then drew the sharp blade from its sheath.

He ran his finger along the edge, not drawing blood, then, barely thinking, turned the point towards him and made a hard jab with his fist. It was arrested just at the white of his T-shirt.

He gave a kind of laugh. It would be so easy. You would let each thing happen, one thing after the next, in an order that once established would carry you right through and over into—

He stood very still, letting it begin.

At the moment of his first stepping in across the threshold out of the acute sunlight, he had entered a state—he couldn't have said what it was, but had felt the strangeness of it like a trance upon his blood, in which everything moved slowly, slowly. He was not dulled—not at all—but he felt out of himself, free of his own being, or aware of it in a different way. It came to him, this new being of his, as a clear fact like the dagger; like the light off the walls, which was reflected sea-light blasting the fibro with a million tumbling particles; like the individual dry strands of the matting.

You fell into such states, anyway he did, but not always so deeply. They began in strangeness and melancholy—you very nearly vanished— then when you came back, it was to a sense of the oneness of things. There was a kind of order in the world and it was in you as well. You
attended. You caught a rhythm to which each gesture could be fitted. You let it lead you out of your body into—

It had begun. Slowly he removed his watch—it was twelve past four—and laid it on a ledge. Then he took off his gym-shoes, pushed his socks into them, and set them side by side on the floor. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and, folding his jeans, made a pile of them, jeans, T-shirt, shoes. They looked like the clothes, neatly arranged, of one who had gone into the sea or into the air—how could you be certain which?—or into the earth. The sea was glittering on his left and was immense. He did not look at it. Earth and air you took for granted. Wearing only the clean jockey-shorts now, he knelt on the verandah boards, carefully arranging his limbs: bringing his body into a perpendicular line with his foot soles, and thighs and trunk into alignment with the dagger, which lay immediately before him. He sat very straight, his body all verticals, horizontals, strictly composed; in a straight line with sea and earth, or at right angles to them. He began to breathe in and out, deeply, slowly, feeling the oxygen force its way into his cells so that they exerted a pressure all over the surface of him where his body met the air, in the beginning muscles of his forearms and biceps, in his throat, his lips, against the thinness of his closed lids. He clenched his teeth, the breath in his nostrils now a steady hiss, and took up the dagger. All there was now was the business of getting the body through and over into—

He paused. He set the point of the dagger to the skin of his belly above the white jockey-shorts (death was so close—as close as that) and all the muscles of his abdomen fluttered at the contact. He felt his sex begin to stiffen, all of itself.

A wave, not very big, had begun making for the shore and would reach it soon with a scuffling of pebbles, one of which, the one in his mouth, had a taste of salt. He sucked on it, and over a long period, after centuries, it began to be worn away, it melted, and his mouth, locked on the coming cry, was filled with the words of a new language, on his tongue, his tooth ridge, as a gurgling in his throat: the names of ordinary objects—tools, cookpots, baskets—odd phrases or conversations on which a life might depend, jokes (even crude ones), lyrics praising the moon or lilies or the rising of a woman's breast, savage epics—

“That you, Luke?”

The boy came back into himself, the wave passed on. He opened his eyes, picked up the sheath, pushed himself to his feet, and with dagger and sheath still in hand, walked barefoot, and naked save for his jockeys, to the door.

His grandfather was there. He had a heavy sack over his shoulder and a rod and reel.

“Hullo, Luke,” he called. He swung the sack down hard on the concrete path. “I had a good day,” he said. He gave a crack-lipped grin. “Take a look at this.” He lifted the end of the sack, tumbling its contents in a cascade of shining bodies. Luke was dazzled. Some of them were still alive and flipping their tails on the rough concrete, throwing light.

The boy restored the dagger to its sheath, rested it on the edge of the sink, and stepped down among them. “Terrific,” he said.

“Yairs,” the man breathed, "pretty good, eh? You stoppin’ the night?”

Luke nodded, moving quickly away to catch a fish that was flapping off into the coarse grass. It continued to flutter in his hands.

“Good,” said the man. He went off to fetch buckets and knives. “We'll get started, eh?”

While his grandfather went through into the kitchen to get clean basins, Luke took one of the buckets round to the side of the house and filled it from the tank. He came back staggering.

“Good,” his grandfather said. “Let's get into it.”

They seated themselves side by side on the step and worked swiftly.

It was a job Luke was used to, had been skilled at since he was nine years old. The blade went in along the belly; the guts spilled, a lustrous silver-blue, and were tossed into the one bucket; in the other you plunged to the forearm and rinsed.

The work went on quickly, silently; they seldom talked much till after tea. Luke lost himself in the rhythm of it, a different rhythm from the one he had given himself to earlier. A kind of drowsiness came over him that had to do with the falling darkness, with the repeated flashing of the knife and his swinging to left and right between buckets, and with the closeness of so much raw flesh and blood. His arms and bare legs were covered with fish-scales. His face, neck, chest were flecked with gobbets of the thin fish blood.

At last they were done. The fish, all scaled and gutted, were in the basins. One bucket was full of guts, the other with water that was mostly
blood. The doorstep too was all shiny with scales (Luke would come out later and flush it clean).

“Good,” his grandfather said. “We've done well.” He carried in the basins of fish, then took the two heavy buckets and poured them into a dip in the sand where they could be covered. Luke sat, too drowsy to move; but stirred himself at last. He went round to the side of the house and let water run over his legs, and washed the scales from his neck and arms.

It was almost dark. You could hear the sea washing against the rocks below, a regular crashing; but further out it was still, and he stood a moment, clean again, drying off in the breeze, and watched it. He felt oddly happy—for no reason, there
was
no reason. Just happy, as earlier with the kites. It was like a change of weather, a sudden transformation, that might not last but for as long as it did would fill the whole sky and touch everything around with its steady light. He was back in the stream again—one of the streams.

He went in and began to dress: jeans (not caring that he was still half wet), T-shirt. His grandfather was frying fish for their tea. The fish smelled good and he was hungry.

“Set the table, Luke,” his grandfather told him. “She'll be ready in a jiff”

So he set the two places at the kitchen table, then stood for a moment at the open door and looked out into the dark. It seemed larger, more comprehensible, because it lay over the sea and you saw it as an ocean whose name you knew and knew the other shore of, glittering full under the early stars; though the dark was bigger than any ocean, bigger even than the sky with its scattered lights.

“Right,” the old man called. “We're all set, Luke. You hungry?”

The boy turned back to the lighted table. His grandfather, humming a little, was just setting down the pan.

I
t was dark in the church, even at noon. Diagonals of chill sunlight were stacked between the piers, sifting down luminous dust, and so thick with it that they seemed more substantial almost than stone. He had a sense of two churches, one raised vertically on Gothic arches and a thousand years old, the other compounded of light and dust, at an angle to the first and newly created in the moment of his looking. At the end of the nave, set far back on a platform, like a miraculous vision that the arctic air had immediately snap-frozen, was a Virgin with a child at her knee. The Michael-angelo. So this church he was in must be the Onze Vrouw.

“Excuse me.”

The voice came from a pew two rows away, behind him: a plain woman of maybe forty, with the stolid look and close-pored waxy skin of those wives of donors he had been looking at earlier in the side panels of local altars. She was buttoned to the neck in a square-shouldered raincoat and wore a scarf rather than a wimple, but behind her as she knelt might have been two or three miniatures of herself—infant daughters with their hands strictly clasped—and if he peeped under her shoes, he thought, there would be a monster of the deep, a sad-eyed amorphous creature with a hump to its back, gloomily committed to evil but sick with love for the world it glimpsed, all angels, beyond the hem of her skirt.

“You're not Flemish, are you,” she was saying, half in question (that was her politeness) and half as fact.

“No,” he admitted. “Australian.”

They were whispering—this was after all a church—but “Ah,
the
New
World" was no more than a breath. She made it sound so romantic, so much more of a venture than he had ever seen it, that he laughed outright, then checked himself; but not before his laughter came back to him, oddly transformed, from the hollow vault. No Australian in those days thought of himself as coming under so grand a term. Things are different now.

“You see,” she told him in a delighted whisper, "I guessed! I knew you were not Flemish—that, if you don't mind, is obvious—so I thought, I'll speak to him in English, or maybe on this occasion I'll try Esperanto. Do you by any chance know Esperanto?” He shook his head. “Well, never mind,” she said, "there's plenty of time.” She did not say for what. “But you
are
Catholic.”

Wrong again. Well, not exactly, but his “No” was emphatic, she was taken aback. She refrained from putting the further question and looked for a moment as if she did not know how to proceed. Then following the turn of his head she found the Madonna. “Ah,” she said, "you are interested in art. You have come for the Madonna.” Relieved at last to have comprehended him she regarded the figure with a proprietary air. Silently, and with a certain Old-World grandeur and largesse, she presented it to him.

He should, to be honest, have informed her then that he had been a Catholic once (he was just twenty) and still wasn't so far gone as to be lapsed—though too far to claim communion; and that for today he had rather exhausted his interest in art at the little hospital full of Memlings and over their splendid van Eycks. Which left no reason for his being here but the crude one: his need to find sanctuary for a time from their killing cold.

Out there, blades of ice slicing in off the North Sea had found no obstacle, it seemed, in more than twenty miles of flat lands crawling with fog, till they found
him,
the one vertical (given a belltower or two) on the whole ring of the horizon. He had been, for long minutes out there, the assembly-point for forty-seven demons. His bones scraped like glaciers. Huge ice-plates ground in his skull. He had been afraid his eyeballs might freeze, contract, drop out, and go rolling away over the ancient flags. It seemed foolish after all that to say simply, "I was cold.”

“Well, in that case,” she told him, "you must allow me to make an appointment. I am an official guide of this town. I am working all day in a government office, motor-vehicle licences, but precisely at four we
can meet and I will show you our dear sad Bruges—that is, of course, if you are agreeable. No, no—please—it is for my own pleasure, no fee is involved. Because I see that you are interested, I glimpsed it right off.” She turned up the collar of her coat and gave him an engaging smile. “It is okay?” She produced the Americanism with a cluck of clear self-satisfaction, as proof that she was, though a guide of this old and impressively dead city, very much of his own century and not at all hoity-toity about the usages of the New World. It was a brief kick of the heels that promised fun as well as instruction in the splendours and miseries of the place.