The Complete Stories (6 page)

We sat. Not much was said. Talk out here, at this hour, was not so much an exchange of the usual observations and asides as a momentary reassurance, subdued, unassertive, of presence, of company and speech. The few words, an occasional low laugh, mingled as they were with the hush and tinkle of bush sounds, lulled something in me as I lay stretched on one side on top of my sleeping bag, face to the flames, and led me lazily, happily towards sleep.

The one jarring note was Stuart.

He too said little. But often, when I glanced up, I would find his eyes on me, dark, hostile I thought, in the glow of the fire. His beard had grown. He looked a little mad. Sometimes, when I dropped some word into the conversation, I would hear him grunt, and when I looked up
there would be a line of half-humourous disdain to his mouth that in the old days would have been a prelude to one of his outbursts of baffled fury. Braden saw it too. But out here, Stuart kept whatever he was thinking to himself.

I stayed clear of him. Not consciously. But with Braden here it was easy to fall into the old pattern in which Braden and I were a pair and Stuart was on the outer. Perhaps he thought I had told Braden something—I hadn't. That I'd betrayed him in some way, and that we were ganging up on him. Then there was Matt Riley and the things he had to show. It simply happened that for the first two or three days we barely spoke.

It was my job
,
first thing each morning, to take a couple of billies down to the edge of the lagoon and draw water for our breakfast tea. Usually Braden went with me, but that morning, when I rolled out of the blanket and pulled on my jeans, he was still sleeping. I sat to tie my bootlaces, waiting for him to stir. When he didn't I took the billies from beside the fire and set out. The grass was white with frost. Pale sunlight touched the mist that drifted in thin low banks above the lagoons. Cobwebs rainbowed with light were stretched between the trees, their taut threads beaded with diamond points that flashed and burned gold, then fiery red.

Later, in the heat of the day, the bush smell would be prickly, peppery with sunlight. Now it had the freshness in it of a sky still moist with dew.

I climbed down the weedy bank and trawled the first of the billies through the brownish water, careful not to go too deep. I heard someone behind me, and thought it was Braden, but when I looked up it was Stuart who was swinging his long legs over a fallen branch and glowering down at me.

“Hi, Angus,” he said, "how's it goin'?” His tone had an edge to it. “You havin’ a good time out here?” He reached down and I passed the first of the two billies up to him, then set myself to filling the second.

“Great,” I said. “Great!”

“That's nice,” he said. He rested the billy on the log beside him. It sat there, balanced and brimming. “I been hopin’ to catch you an’ have a bit of a talk,” he said at last. “You been avoidin’ me?”

I found it easier to ignore this than deny it.

“Aren't you goin’ to ask me what about?”

“I suppose it's about Katie,” I said. I was wondering why, after so many weeks, he had broached the subject at last, and so directly. Did being out here make things different, relax the rules? Or was it that he had somehow come to the end of his tether? I emptied the second billy and for a second time drew it slowly across the surface of the lagoon. I had caught the little smile he had given me. Good shot, Angus. You got it in one. Satirical, I thought.

He waited for me to stop fooling with the second billy, then reached down and I handed it up to him.

“So,” he said, holding on to the handle but not yet taking its weight so that I was caught looking up at him, "what do you know about all this, eh, Angus? What's happening? One minute everything was fine— you saw that. An’ the next she's gone cold on me.”

“Honestly, Stuart, I don't
know
what's happened. She wouldn't say anything to me.”

He looked doubtful.

“I'm beat,” he said suddenly, taking the billy at last and hoisting it over to sit beside the other one on the log. I thought there were tears in his eyes. I was shocked.

“I just don't know what she wants out of me.”

“Stuart—”

“Yair, I know,” he said. “I'm sorry, Angus.” He sniffled and brushed his nose with his knuckled fist. “If you knew what it was like …”

I thought I did, though not from experience.

“The thing is,” he said, sitting on the low branch, his face squared up now, the cheeks under the narrowed eyes wooden, the eyes gazing away into himself, "if this goes wrong it'll be the finish of me. For me it's all or nothing. If she would just have me—let
me
have
her
—it'd be all right— my life, I mean—hers too. If she won't I'm finished. She knows that, she must. I told her often enough. So why's she doing it?”

I found I couldn't look at him. We remained poised like that, the question hanging, the open expanse of water like glass in the early light. He got up, took one of the billies, then the other, and set off back to camp.

I sat on at the bank for a moment. Then I crouched down and splashed cold lagoon water over my face, then again, and again.

Stuart's misery scared me. My own adolescent glooms I had learned to enjoy. I liked the sense they gave me of being fully present. Even more the bracing quality I felt in possession of when I told myself sharply to stop play-acting, and strongly, stoically dealt with them. Did I despise Stuart because he was so self-indulgent? Was he too playacting, but not alert enough to his own nature to know it? I preferred that view of him than the scarier one in which his desperation was real. I didn't want to be responsible for his feelings, and it worried me that out here there was no escape from him.

He tackled me again later in the day.

“You know, Angus,” he said mildly as if he had given the matter some thought and got the better of it, "you could put in a good word for me. If there was the opportunity.”

We were standing together on a shoot, just far enough from the others not to be heard, even in the late-afternoon stillness.

Braden was with his father and Henry Denkler, a little away to the left. The air was still, the ground, with its coarse short grass, moist underfoot. Steely light glared off the nearby lagoon. The dogs, in their element now, had discovered in themselves, in a way that impressed me, their true nature as bird-dogs, a fine tense quality that made them almost physically different from the rather slow creatures they were at home. They were leaner, more sinewy.

“You could do that much,” he persisted, "for a mate. We are mates, aren't we?”

I turned, almost angry, and found myself disarmed by the flinching look he gave me, the tightness of the flesh around his eyes, the line of his mouth.

I was saved from replying by a clatter of wings, as a flock of ducks rose out of the glare that lay over the surface of the big lagoon and stood out clear against the cloudless blue. But it was too late. I had missed my chance at a shot and so had Stuart. The others let off a volley of gunfire and the dogs went crashing through the broken water to where the big birds were tumbling over in the air and splashing into the shattered stillness of the lake, or dropping noiselessly into the reeds on the other bank.

“Damn,” I shouted. “Damn. Damn!”

“What happened?” Braden asked, when we stood waiting in a group for the dogs to bring in the last of the birds. “Why didn't you fire?”

I shook my head, and Braden, taking in Stuart's look, must have seen enough, in his quick way, not to insist. The dogs were still coming in with big plump birds. There were many more of them than would go into the pot.

“Good girl, Tilly,” he called, and the dog, diverted for a moment, gave herself a good shake and ran to his knee. He leaned down, roughly pulled her head to his thigh and ruffled her ears. The strong smell of her wet fur came to me.

I spent the rest of the day stewing over my lost chance, exaggerating my angry disappointment and the number of birds I might have bagged, as a way of being so mad with Stuart that I did not have to ask myself what else I should feel. Braden and I spent the whole of the next morning with Matt Riley and Jem, but in the afternoon I came upon Stuart sitting on a big log a little way off from the camp, with a scrub-turkey at his feet. I stopped at a distance and spent a moment watching him. I thought he had not seen me.

“Hi,” he said. I stepped out into the clearing. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing much,” I told him.

I settled on the log a little way away from him.

“Listen, Stuart,” I began, after a bit.

“Yair, I know,” he told me. “I'm sorry.”

“No,” I said, "it's not about yesterday. You've got to stop all this, that's all. She won't change her mind. I know she won't. Not this time.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“No. Not in so many words. But she won't, I know she won't. Look, Stuart, you should leave me out of it, that's what I wanted to say. I don't know anything so I can't help you. You've got to stop.”

“I see,” he said. “That's pretty plain. Thanks, Angus. No, I mean it,” he said, "you're right, I've been foolin’ myself. I can see that now.”

“Look, Stuart—”

“No, you're right, it was hopeless from the start. That's what you're telling me, isn't it? That I might as well just bloody cut my throat!”

I leapt to my feet. “Shut up,” I told him “Just stop all this. Bloody shut up!”

He was so shocked that he laughed outright.

“Well,” he said after a moment, with bitter satisfaction. “Finally.”

What did
that
mean? He gave me a look that made me see, briefly, something of the means he might have brought to bear on
her.
But she
was harder than I was. I knew the contempt she would have for a kind of appeal that she herself would never stoop to.

I stood looking at him for a moment. I did not know what more I could say. I turned and walked away.

“I thought you were on
my
side,” he called after me.

I had heard this before, or an echo of it. I looked back briefly but did not stop.

“I thought we were mates,” he called again. “Angus?”

I kept walking.

I did know what he was feeling, but he confused me. I wanted to be free of him, of his turmoil. The nakedness with which he paraded his feelings dismayed me. It removed all the grounds, I thought, on which I could react and offer him real sympathy. It violated the only code, as I saw it then, that offered us protection: tight-lipped understatement, endurance. What else could we rely on? What else could
I
rely on?

I walked.

The ground with its rough tussocks was swampy, unsteady underfoot, the foliage on the stunted trees sparse and darkly colourless, their trunks blotched with lichen. I had no idea where I was headed or how far I needed to go to escape my own unsettlement. Little lizards tumbled away from my boots or dropped from branches, dragonflies hung stopped on the air, then switched and darted, blazing out like struck matches where the sun caught their glassy wings.

I walked. And as I moved deeper into the solitude of the land, its expansive stillness—which was not stillness in fact but an interweaving of close but distant voices so dense that they became one, and then mere background, then scarcely there at all—I began to forget my own disruptive presence, receding as naturally into what hummed and shimmered all round me as into a dimension of my own being that it had taken my coming out here, alone, in the slumbrous hour after midday, to uncover. I felt drawn, drawn on.

I had enough bush sense, a good enough eye for recording, unconsciously as I passed, the little oddnesses in the terrain—the elbow of a fallen bough, a particular assembly of glossy-leaved bushes that would serve as signposts on my way back—to feel confident I wouldn't get lost. I let Stuart, seated gloomily back there on his log, hugging his rifle, hugging even closer his dumb grief, fade from my thoughts, and moved deeper into the becalmed early-afternoon light, over spatterings of
ancient debris, crumblings of dried-out timber. Slowly, all round and under me, an untidy grey-green world was continuously, visibly in motion. Ti-tree trunks unfurled tattered streamers; around their roots a seepage like long-brewed tea.

I walked, and the great continent of sound I was moving into recorded my presence, the arrival, in its close-woven fabric of light, sound, stilled or moving shadow, of a medium-sized foreign body, displacing the air a moment as it advanced, and confusing, with the smell of its sweat and the shifting of its breath, the tiny signals that were being picked up and translated out there by a myriad of forms of alien intelligence. I was central to it but I was also nothing, or close to nothing.

In the compacted heat and drowsy afternoon sunlight, I could have kept walking for ever, all the way to the Gulf. It was time, not space, I was moving into. Years it might be. And there was more of it—not just ahead but on all sides—than I could conceive of or measure.

There was no specific point I was heading for. I could stop now, turn back, and it would all still be here. It was myself I was moving into.

One day, far off down the years, I would come stumbling back in my body's last moments of consciousness and here it would be: crumbling into itself and dispersing its particles and voices, reassembling itself cell by cell in a new form that was also the old one remade. I had no need to go on and actually see it, the place where I would lie down in the springy marsh-grass, among the litter and mould, letting the grass take the impression of my weight, the shape of my body's presence, and keep it long after I was gone.

Away back, when I first heard about the Valley and let it form itself in my mind, I had thought that everything I found unsatisfactory in myself, in my life but also in my nature, would come right out here, because that is what I had seen, or thought I had, in others. Kids who had been out here, and whom I had thought of till then as wild and scattered, had come back settled in their own aggregation of muscle, bone, and flesh, and in some new accommodation with the world.

Nothing like that had come to me. I was no more settled, no less confused. I would bring nothing back that would be visible to others— to my father, for instance. I had lost something; that was more like it. But happily. As I walked on into this bit of grey-green nondescript wilderness I was happily at home in myself. But in my old self, not a new one.