The Complete Stories (3 page)

I would make a rambling attempt to explain who Raskolnikov was, and Sonia, and about the horse that had fallen down in the street. He would look puzzled, then stricken, then, trying to make the best of it, say, "Interesting, eh?” Waiting for some sign perhaps that I recognised the effort he was making to enter my world, and what this might reveal about
him:
about some other Stuart than the one I thought I knew, and knew only as “bad influence.” After about ten minutes of this, I would swing my legs off the bed and say, "Tea must be about ready, we'd better go out,” and to the relief of both of us, or so I thought, it would be over.

I had begun to dread these occasions of false intimacy between us that were intended, I thought, to be rehearsals for a time when we would be youthful brothers-in-law, close, bluff, easily affectionate. If he could get me to accept him in this role, then maybe she would.

Once, as he moved towards the door, I caught him, out of the corner of my eye, making a quick appraisal of himself in the wardrobe mirror.

Starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled high to show off his biceps. Hair slicked down with Potter and Moore jelly. In the hollow of his underlip the squared-off, dandified growth of hair he had begun to affect in recent weeks, a tuft, two or three degrees darker than his hair colour but with flecks of gingery gold, that I had overlooked at first—I thought he had simply neglected to shave there. When I realised it was deliberate I was confused. It seemed so out of character.

Now, watching him take in at a casual glance the effect he made in my wardrobe mirror, I thought again. What a bundle of contradictions he is, I told myself.

He gave me a sheepish grin, and stopped, pretending to examine his chin for a shaving nick. But what his look said was, Well, that's how it is, you can see that, eh, old son? That's what they do to us.

When Katie first began to go out with him I'd felt I should warn her. That he was wild. That he had “reputation.” Only I did not know how to begin. We had always been close, and had grown more so since my older sister Meg got married, but for all that, and the boldness in our household with which we were willing to air issues and deliver an opinion, there were subjects, back then, that we kept clear of, areas of experience we could not admit knowledge of.

And it seemed to me that Katie must know as well as I did, or better, what Stuart was like. She was the one who spent all those hours of fierce whispering with him in the dark of our front room.

For weeks at a time they would move together in what seemed like a single glow. Then I would feel an anger in her that needed only a word on my part, or a look, to make her blaze out, though the real object of her fury, I thought, was herself. Stuart, for a time, would no longer be there, on the back veranda or in the lounge after tea. Things were off between them. When I ran into him at the baths, or when he stopped and offered me a lift on the Triumph, he would look hangdog and miserable. “How are you, Angus, old son?” he'd ask, hoping I would return the question.

I didn't. The last thing I wanted was to be his confidant; to listen to his complaints about Katie or have him ask what she was saying about him, what I thought she wanted. These periods would last for days, for a whole week sometimes. Then he would be back, all scrubbed and spruced up and smelling like a sweet shop. Narrow-eyed and watchful. Like a cat, I thought. But also, in a way he could not help and could
not help showing, happily full of himself and of his power over her. Couldn't he see, I thought, how mad it made her, and that it was this in the long run that would bring him down?

The crisis came a year or so after they first began.

Nothing was said—my parents were the very spirit of tact in such matters—but I guessed Katie had given him his marching orders. Again.
Again.
Because for two nights running he did not appear. Then, late on the second night, I looked out and the little Anglia he sometimes ran around in was parked under the street light opposite.

It was there at nine and was still there at half past ten. What was he doing? Just sitting there, I guessed, hunched and unhappy, chewing on his bitten-down nails.

To see if she had some other fellow calling?

More likely, I thought, just to be close to her. Or if not her, the house itself. To reassure himself that since we were all in and going about our customary routine, no serious breach had occurred. Then, remembering the old Stuart, I thought, No, it's his way of intimidating her. It's a kind of bullying. Didn't he know the first thing about her? Had he learned nothing in all those hours in the dark of the lounge room or the back veranda? Did he think that because she had sent him packing on previous occasions, all he had to do now was apply pressure and wait?

I could have told him something about those other occasions. That she was the sort of girl who did not forgive such demonstrations of her own weakness or those who caused them. There was only a limited number of times she would allow herself to be so shamefully humiliated. I stood hidden behind the slats of my sleepout and watched him there. Was she watching too?

I was surprised. That he should just drive up like that and park under the street light where everyone could see him. Was he more inventive than I'd guessed?

It seemed out of character too. Melodramatic. The sort of thing people did in the movies. Was that where he had got it?

Next morning at breakfast I glanced across at Katie to see if she too had seen him, and got a defiant glare. Then that night, late, when I went out to the kitchen to get a drink, she confronted me.

“So what
do you
think?” she demanded.

It was a clammy night. Airless. Without a breath. She was barefoot, her hair stuck to her brow with sweat. We stood side by side for a moment at the kitchen window.

“He's been there now for three nights running,” she said. “It's ridiculous!”

I passed behind her and opened the fridge.

“Maybe you should go down,” she said, "and sit with him.”

“What? What would I want to do that for?”

“Well, you're mates, aren't you?”

I had turned with the cold-water bottle. She took it from me and rolled it, with its fog of moisture, across her damp forehead, then her throat and chest.

“Is that what Stuart says?”

“Not what he
says.
Stuart never says anything, you know that.”

“What then? What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said wearily. She handed the bottle back. “Let's drop it.”

“Braden's my friend,” I told her. “If Stuart wasn't here every night I wouldn't even see him from one week's end to the next.”

“Okay,” she said, "let's drop it. Maybe I don't understand these things.”

“What things?”

“Oh, boys. Men. You're all so—
tight with
one another.”

“No we're not. Stuart and I aren't—tight.”

“I thought you were.”

“Well, we're not.” I finished my glass of water, rinsed it at the sink, and went to pass her.

Suddenly, from behind, her arms came round me. I felt the damp of her forearms on my chest, her face nuzzling the back of my neck.

“Your hair smells nice,” she said. “Like when you were little.”

I squirmed and pretended to wriggle free, but only pretended. “Stop,” I said, "you're tickling,” as she held me tighter and laughed.

“There,” she said, glancing away to the window, "he's gone.”

Neither of us had heard the car move off. She continued to hold me. “Stay a minute, Angus,” she said. “Stay and talk.”

“What about?”

“Oh, not him.” She let go of me. “That wouldn't get us far.”

I sat at the kitchen table, awkward but expectant, and she sat opposite.

In the old days we had been close. When I came out of my room at night to get a glass of water or milk from the fridge, she would join me and we would sit for a bit, joking, exchanging stories, larking about. Stuart's arrival had ended that. He was always there, and when he wasn't she avoided me. Either way, I missed her and blamed Stuart for coming between us. We liked each other. She made me happy, and I made her happy too.

“I know you're on his side,” she said now. “But there are things you don't know about.”

“I'm not on his side,” I told her. “Are there sides?”

She laughed. “No, Angus, there are no sides. There never will be for you. That's what I love about you.”

I was defensive. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means you're nicer than I am. Maybe than any of us. And I love you. Listen,” she said, leaning closer, "I'm going away.”

“Where to?”

“I don't know yet. Maybe I'll go and stay with Meg and Jack for a bit. Or I'll take the plunge and just go to Brisbane.”

“What would you do down there?”

“Get an office job, work in a shop—what do other girls do? I'm doing nothing here. Reading a lot of silly novels—what's the use of that? You know what this place is like. You won't stay here either.”

“Won't I?”

It pleased me at that time when people told me things about myself. Sometimes they surprised me, sometimes they didn't. Even when they confirmed what I already knew I was filled with interest.

“I've
got
to get out,” she told me passionately, "I've
got
to. Nothing will ever happen if I stay here. I'd end up marrying Stuart, or someone just like him, and it'd kill me. It doesn't matter that he wants me, or thinks he does, or what I think of
him.
Even if he was kind—which he wouldn't be in fact. He'd be a rotten husband. What he really loves is himself. Maybe I won't get married at all. I don't know why everyone goes on all the time about marriage, as if it was the only thing there is.”

I was bewildered. She was telling me more than I could take in.

“So when?” I asked. “When will you go?”

“I don't know,” she said miserably. “I've got no money.”

“I have. I've got forty pounds.”

She leaned across the table and took my hand. “I love you, Angus. More than anyone. Did you know that?” Then, after a pause, "But you should hang on to your money, you'll need it yourself if you're ever going to get out of this dump. I'll get it some other way. Now go to bed or you won't be able to get up in the morning. It's after eleven.”

I got up obediently, and was at the door when she said, "I suppose you'll be inseparable now.”

“Why?” I asked her. “Why should we be?”

“Because that's the way he is. Once he realises this is the end, really this time, he'll want you to see what a bitch I am and how miserable he is.”

“That's all right,” I said. “I won't listen.”

“Yes you will. But don't worry—”

“Katie—”

“No, no,” she said. “Go to bed now.”

She came and kissed me very lightly on the cheek.

“We'll talk about it some other time. I told you, I love you. And thanks, eh? For the offer of the money. You sleep well now.”

That was in mid-April. The weeks passed. There was no reconciliation. Stuart stopped driving up to keep a watch on the house. Katie did not go away.

But she was right about one thing. Despite my reluctance, Stuart and I did become mates of a sort. Hangdog and subdued, he was in no mood to go out on the town with his mates, the daredevil rowdies he normally ran with, who did shift work at the cane mill, or were plumber's mates, apprentice builders, counter-jumpers in drapery shops or hardware stores, or helped out in their father's accounting business. Fellows whose wildness, which involved a lot of haring around late at night, scaring old ladies and Chinamen or the occasional black, was winked at as a relatively harmless way of letting off steam; the sort of larrikin high jinks that on another occasion might take the form of dashing into a burning house to rescue a kiddie from the flames or dragging a cat from a flooded creek or, if there was another war, performing feats of quicksilver courage that would get their names on the town memorial.

What Stuart needed me for, I decided, was to be a witness to his sorrows. Which he thought I might best be able to confirm because so much of what he gave himself up to came out of books. He was literary in the odd way of a fellow who did not read and who trusted my capacity to appreciate what he was feeling because I did. Perhaps he believed that if I took him seriously, then she would; though with a fineness of feeling I had not expected, he never once, in all our times together, mentioned her. Which made me more uneasy than if he had, since at every moment she was there as an unasked question between us, and as the only reason, really, why I was there at all.

He would pick me up in the Anglia at the bottom of our street, usually around nine when I had finished my homework, and we would drive out to some hilltop and just sit there in the cool night air, with the windows down, the sweet smell of cane flowers coming in heady wafts and the night crickets shrilling.

Stuart's self-pitying tone, and his self-conscious half-jokey way of addressing me “Angus, old boot,” “Angus, old son,” suggested more than ever, I thought, a character out of some movie, or a book he had been impressed by, and had more to do with the way he wanted me to see him, or the way he wanted to see himself, than with anything he really was.

Then it was July at last. The McGowans asked me to go out to the Lagoons. And I was going.

Just before sun-up the McGowans’ heavy-duty Bedford ute swung uphill to where I was waiting with my duffel bag and bedroll on our front veranda. Behind me, the lights were on in our front room and my mother was there in her dressing gown, with a mug of tea to warm her hands, just inside the screen door. I was glad the others could not see her, and hoped she would not come out at the last moment to kiss me or to tuck my scarf into my windcheater. But in fact, "Look after Braden" was all she said as I waved to the ute, shouted “See you” over my shoulder, and took three leaps down to the front gate.

Glen was driving, with his father and Henry Denkler in the cabin beside him. Braden, Stuart, and the dogs were in the back. Stuart leapt down, took my bedroll, and swung it up into the tray where Braden, on his feet now, was barely managing the dogs. “Hi, Angus,” Stuart said,
“all set for the boat race?” He laid his hand on my shoulder, but his glance, I saw, went to the house, in case
she
was there.