Remembering Babylon (15 page)

Once, in the night, a fierce-eyed little ragman comes, and takes him by the collar, and tries to push him into a sack. He
breaks away, climbs a rope, tumbles into a box, and falls dead asleep.

When he wakes cold sunlight is on his cheek. The box has no lid. But he lies very still as he usually does in this particular dream and waits for Willett to find him: ‘Ah, so that’s where you’ve got to.’

But it isn’t Willett. It is a big, tow-headed fellow of eighteen or nineteen, in a blue knitted cap and with dirty stubble on his cheek and no teeth, who hauls him up by the scruff of his neck so that he hangs like a rabbit outside a poulterer’s shop. The youth’s nose is on a level with his own; his legs are dangling. Then the mouth opens: ‘Captain!’ it bellows.

He had not meant to set himself loose in the world. He had not meant to end anything. He felt himself swinging now where the blue-capped youth held him in his fist, first one way, then another, and what he saw over the youth’s shoulder terrified him: no gas-lamps, no houses, but a vastness of an ashen grey colour crawling with smoke as if the whole world was burning behind him.

He would learn to live with this crawling emptiness, but the first glimpse of it made his belly squirm. He had cast himself loose and the world had run away with him; he was lost, he was dangling, and would remain so till Willett, in an odour of char, with his eyebrows ablaze and his scorched boots hanging from their laces at his neck, turned up again to curse and wallop him, then, with a growl, take him back. He never ceased to expect that event and to fear it. He expected it still. A world from which Willett had entirely disappeared was inconceivable to him.

Willett’s boots had reappeared: utterly real to him, every crack in their leather running with flame, the laces trailing, the tongue-flaps loose. It was Willett he could not find, though he heard him often enough, grumbling in the corners of the room, and smelt him there, a mixture of char and sweat, then at last the garden smell. He lay with his eyes closed, hands folded on his chest, his cheeks in the hot dark wet with tears. ‘Ah, boy, so that’s where you’ve got to!’

Where? Where had he got to?

Two years he was at sea. Or three. On one ship, then another:
The Gannet, The Star of Newcastle, The Charleston
– those were some of the names; last of all
The Pamukale
. He made himself small, had a full belly, was often bullied and worse by the others. Mosey. The Irish.

Old Crouch,
The Pamukale’s
carpenter, was a good ’un. He liked to sing hymns while he worked and had two daughters, one a seal – a silkie he called her; she could change herself into a seal. He learned to use a chisel, a plane, a spirit level. Then, one day, too ill to care what happened to him and with no knowledge of what part of the world he was in – how would Willett find him here? – they put him overboard; he moved out of the shadow of the ship that tilted and creaked above him, out of its coolness, away from the faces at the rails. Burning alive down there, he felt the sun leap out, a single flame. All he had known shrank to a black dot jigging in his skull.

These visions that dragged him back and racked his body with the reliving of what he had already endured a first time, left him weak and shaken. Despite the kindness Mrs Hutchence showed him, and Leona’s many attentions, he grew heartsick for his lean-to at the McIvors’, and for the children, especially Lachlan. Meg and Janet he also missed, though he saw them almost daily. At Mrs Hutchence’s they were absorbed now in a new life, the group round the kitchen table, where the presence of Hector and the schoolmaster, and the rapid talk, and so much laughter and play, confused him, kept him off. He began to sicken, and saw at last that what he was suffering here had to do with the sheets of paper where, months ago, Mr Frazer and the schoolmaster had set down his life. It was from there that the events of his former existence came and demanded to be turned back again from magic squiggles into the pain, joy, grief he was torn by, and which his present body was too weak to endure.

More and more now he was haunted by those sheets, seven in all, he had not forgotten the number, that Mr Frazer had folded and put into his pocket, and which he had never seen again; till he was convinced that the only way to save himself
from so much racking, and despair and sweat, was to get them back again. They would be in one place or the other, those sheets; either at Mr Frazer’s or at the schoolhouse. All he needed was the strength to get there. But that was just what their magic had drawn from him.

W
HEN LACHLAN BEATTIE
looked about, it seemed to him that his whole world had come apart. The group of younger boys he moved among was all edge and shove. Their code was the same one their fathers used, but their fathers had seen enough of others’ and their own deficiencies to draw back from unyielding absolutes. They could not. Lachlan, though he was smaller than the rest, had till now held authority over them and commanded fellows like Jeff Murcutt and the younger Corcorans. They saw their chance now and were after him.

He had always been a firebrand. When he first came among them it had amused the older fellows to taunt him. At the least touch he would fly red-faced to the attack. The others would strike back, but in a lazy fashion, condescendingly, since they were so much older. ‘Lay off,’ they would drawl, ‘you mad bugger!’ Very fast on his feet, he would duck in under their fists and leave them winded. They learned then. ‘Honest, Locky,’ Hec Gosper would tell him as they started off home, ‘you’re bloody mad!’

Hector, in those days, had not yet moved up into the group of older fellows, young men almost, who hung about the verandah of the store. Though convention decreed that he should ignore a mere ten-year-old so long as they were in company, Hector had from the beginning taken the younger boy under his wing. Lachlan, who was unhappy in the new place, was grateful for it, but wary too, at first. His accent was the point on which he was tormented, and he was concerned that what Hector might have in mind was a shared impediment.

It was a mean thought, and when he saw, as he did almost immediately, how open Hector was, how little of his own indirectness there was in the other boy, he was ashamed. There was always this seed of self-consciousness in him that made him suspicious and spoiled things. He grew fond of Hector and depended on him, so it was distressing when Gemmy’s coming raised a conflict between them.

For the others, taunting Gemmy had become a new way – the old one had become stale by now – of provoking him, a new form of fun. These were the days when Gemmy was always at his heel, and he, still full of his moment at the fence, tended to swagger and show him off.

Hector did not join in these boyish scrabblings in the dust, he was too old for that; but he too was under the influence of that first day, and so long as others were about, kept up his grudge. It had put Lachlan in a spot. It was a matter of honour with him to stand up for Gemmy whatever the cost. He ignored Hector’s gibes as long as he could, but the time came at last when he had to protest.

It was foolish of him. There were too many interested bystanders. Hector, furious that he had broken what he had thought was an understanding between them, could do nothing but respond. ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What’s that?’, and there was, on the first sound, as it burst from him, a little hissing through the nose that was the last of a defect he had eliminated save when he was out of control.

Lachlan was stricken. He would have given anything not to be the occasion of such a lapse. ‘Com’ awn, Gemmy,’ he said and walked away, but the damage was done. There was, after that, an embarrassment between them that made it necessary, so long as others were about, to keep up a show of hostility that each knew was a pretence. When they were not observed they fell back into their old intimacy, though it was constrained. On these occasions, Gemmy, who did not understand the rules they followed, was puzzled, and hurt too at times, by an inconsistency in Lachlan that he could not account for.

But Hector, at last, dropped out of the group of younger boys, keeping with fellows now who were his own age.
Lachlan, not quite thirteen, was in between. He would leave school at Christmas, be free at last of the indignity of ink-stains on his fingers and the company of kids like Jeff Murcutt and the Corcorans, and littlies, and girls. In the meantime he began to test his welcome among the group at the store; he developed a talent for launching gobs of spit further than any of his fellows, laughed louder than the loudest of them at any sort of raw joke, and smoked and swore.

It was one of the conditions of his move into an older group that Gemmy could not appear, and he had, gently at first, then coldly, to discourage him. He was sorry for it. But it was absurd to have Gemmy always tagging at his heels, and he blushed now to recall a time when he had regarded it as a sign of his power. How puffed up he had been with his own importance! What a fool he must have appeared to the very fellows he had meant to impress!

His enlightenment had begun with the humiliations the schoolmaster had heaped upon him, and though he did not thank the man for it, he saw now that having set his face in the direction of manhood, he could not turn back. What he distrusted in himself was a tendency, a girlish one he thought, to let his affections rule. It was a weakness he was determined to stamp out. Still, there were days when he could not bear the look Gemmy wore, and would have given anything to step back a year and tell him, ‘A’richt, Gemmy, com’ awn then’ – but what good would it do?

It was about the time of Gemmy’s visit from the blacks and the series of accidents that had begun with the broken fence. Christmas was two months off. He was in the playground with companions he had outgrown.

‘So where’s yer mate,’ Jeff Murcutt asked, ‘yer shadow?’ And then, looking about with mock surprise, ‘Oh, I didn’t see ’im!’ Leo Corcoran had begun a little lopsided walk around them, with an expression so like Gemmy’s that three or four younger boys, who were watching, rolled about in the dirt at such a show of brilliance.

‘Shut your jaw,’ Lachlan hissed.

‘An’ if I don’t?’

Lachlan began to walk away.

‘An’ if I don’t? What’ll you do, eh? Get Gemmy t’ set ’is blacks on us?’

He turned at that.

‘You should hear what my Pa says. It’s a wonder someone don’t do the right thing, one a’ these nights, and pot the bastard!’

Leo at that began his lopsided walk again, and Jeff Murcutt, with a grin, brought his arm up like a shotgun and followed Leo round the circle. There was a breathless moment in. which boys of ten, eleven, some of them almost thirteen as Lachlan was, were soul-struck as he himself had been, that first day at the fence, by the evocation of arms. Jeff Murcutt stood empowered in the midst of them, actually changed, himself impressed almost to awe by what he was reaching for, and Leo hovered. Then Jeff’s lips moved. ‘Bang!’ he said, not loud.

The puff of air out of his mouth struck Leo in the chest. He hung in the air, mouth open, head thrown back, one hand at his breast, and they watched him, slowly, buckle at the knees and fall.

It was in the same playground circle, two days later, that he heard of the night attack.

He had known at breakfast that something was amiss but nothing was said, and it was a sign of how things had changed among them that he dared not ask. His aunt fussed and looked strained, his uncle was soft with him. He kept looking from one to the other waiting for enlightenment.

‘I hear you had a bit of strife last night,’ Jeff Murcutt announced. The others looked interested; they knew no more, Lachlan saw, than he did. He narrowed his eyes and did not respond, but felt his heart knock against his ribcage and knew, from the sudden dizziness he felt, that he had gone pale. Let Jeff Murcutt tell, if he knew something. But all he did was stand smirking, with his head down and his toes scuffing the dust.

It was Jed Corcoran, poor dumb Jed, who did the asking. He thought he was the only one who did not know.

‘What strife? What happened?’ he said in his babyish, snot-thickened voice.

‘
He
knows,’ Jeff Murcutt told him.

Jed Corcoran turned his soft eyes on him. ‘What Locky? What happened?’

Lachlan turned and strode away. ‘What?’ he heard Jed ask again. ‘I din’ hear nothing.’

He felt betrayed on all sides. That Janet had been there, and he had not. That he had slept through it like a mere kid. That they had let him sleep, as if he could be no help, and had afterwards kept it from him!

It was his aunt who told him the details at last, white-faced, taut as a wire, speaking through clenched lips. He understood how his uncle felt because he too felt the power drain from him and the stab of fear; not at what he might have to face – he would face anything, he was brave enough – but at what he might have to admit of the way the world was, and how his failure to see it was a weakness in him.

He did not go to school. He took his gun and went off into the bush, but all he did was sit, hunched up with the gun in his lap, trying to see how they could go on now, how their life, his life, could ever be settled and ordinary again.

It was out here that Hector found him.

‘Wha’ do
you
want?’ he called.

Hector, a little way off, squatted on his heels. He plucked a grass-stalk and put it between his crooked teeth.

‘Well?’ Lachlan demanded. He had to fight to keep back tears.

Hector continued to sit, his hat down over his eyes, the lip showing clear under his pale moustache.

He knew what Hector was doing. He had decided to sit, saying nothing, since there was nothing words could say, and wear him down. And it happened. The hostility he felt melted in him, and after a little, still without speaking, Hector got to his feet and walked away.

With Gemmy’s removal to a distance a kind of normality did come back to them in a pretence on all sides that what had occurred was a misunderstanding and no harm done.

His aunt, always a realist, went along with it. When her neighbours turned up, full of high spirits, to gossip or bring recipes or ask for help with a bit of sewing, she welcomed them, frostily at first, and never quite in the old way; she had a kind of reserve now that would never leave her. They knew it and took her as she was.

Things were not so easy for his uncle. Lachlan saw this because he too felt it. Something had been destroyed in him that could not be put right. He watched his uncle drift back after a time to his friends, to Barney Mason, Jim Sweetman, but the days of unselfconscious trust in his standing among them, and the belief that to be thought well of by such fellows was the first thing in the world, were gone. He was watchful now. There was always a little niggling worm of denial in him, a need to seek out, even in the straightest of men, some hint of crookedness that might be the truth even they did not know. He was quieter these days. He had moved away into a distance in himself that even Lachlan felt he could not presume on, and what he experienced there began to engrave itself in lines upon him, though he too kept up the pretence that life, in something like the old form, had resumed and would go on.

Lachlan did not believe it. He was still at the stage where everything presented itself in the absolute, as a possibility to be carried blithely into the future or done with, once and for all. When he was forced to qualify, as with Hector, he felt uneasy. He was so changeable himself he wanted the world, even in the bitter form in which he now saw it, to be fixed. So when he went to visit Gemmy at Mrs Hutchence’s, a little shamefaced at having left it so long, he was surprised to walk in on a noisy company whose existence he had had no conception of, though Janet, and Meg too, had tried to tell him of it. And here they were, all, seated at a table among teacups and crumbs – Janet, Meg, Gemmy, Hector, even the schoolmaster – with Leona pouring tea out of a blue pot. They turned to face him, looking up out of the same mid-sentence, whose unfinished hilarity hung in the air, and he saw with a pang that in all these last weeks, which had been
such misery to him, they had been happily settled, even Hector, in this lighted corner of the world.

They made a place for him. Leona introduced herself, and gave him tea. There was a little cake too, with raisins in it, which crumbled in his hand when he bit into it. He looked up, very self-conscious, to see if it mattered, but it appeared not to, and he added to the scatter of crumbs.

Just the same, he felt awkward. They went back to their lively chatter, which was all half-joking banter that the others seemed practised in and which he did not know how to enter; all its terms were unfamiliar to him. He sat glum and silent and only Gemmy, he thought, amid so much jollity, moved in the same dark strand with him.

But he felt displeased with himself. There was, he saw, some other lighter way of responding to things. These others had found it. What was wrong with him that he could not?

He kept an eye on Hector. He had expected the older boy might be abashed at being caught like this in the company of women, and girls – not to speak of the schoolmaster. He kept waiting for Hector to tip him off, with a wink, that his part in it was a kind of foolery. But Hector was the noisiest among them. Didn’t he know what a clown he was making of himself, with his slick hair and his empty gallantries, or that Leona, to whom they were addressed, made fun of them and was too old for him? He blushed for his friend. Only slowly did it occur to him that some of Hector’s showing off was for his benefit; he was expected to be impressed.

What puzzled him most was the presence of the schoolmaster, who said very little. Was he embarrassed at being discovered here, as Hector might have been and was not? But after a little he saw that Mr Abbot too was included in Leona’s teasing, and did not mind it any more than Hector did, and that Hector’s sallies, in a joking way that suggested an understanding between them, were meant to be measured against what Mr Abbot could produce.

He produced very little. It was Hector who set the pace – Lachlan was astonished, where had he learned all this? – and was the more unconstrained, the more skilled too, at answering Leona back and provoking and pleasing her.

She tried the game, briefly, with him. She had a different tone for each of them, and he thought he detected in the one she chose for him a degree of mockery – for his youth, was it? – that brought a flush of indignation to his cheek. She saw it and drew back, but when he was ignored he took offence. She saw that too, but did not know how to help him.

And Janet?