I must confess it. He has given me a fright. Perhaps it is only that I am cut off here from the use of my own tongue (though I have never felt such a thing on previous travels, in France, Greece, Egypt), but I find it necessary, in the privacy of my little room with its marble-topped washbasin and commodious jug and basin, and the engraving of Naomi bidding farewell to Ruth — I find it necessary, as I pace up and down on the scrubbed boards in the heat of a long December night, to go over certain words as if it were only my voice naming them in the dark that kept the loved objects solid and touchable in the light up there, on the top side of the world. (Goodness knows what sort of spells my hostess thinks I am making, or the children, who see me already as a spook, a half-comic, half-sinister wizard of the north.)
So I say softly as I curl up with the sheet over my head, or walk up and down, or stand at the window a moment before this plain that burns even at midnight: rogn, vainoti, spiseskje, hakke, vinglass, lysestake, krabbe, kjegle …
Out of the Stream
The boy stood in the doorway and was not yet visible. The others were at breakfast. He stood leaning against the refrigerator, which was taller than he was, a great white giant that made ice, endlessly made ice, and whose shelves (the brightest place in the house) were packed with bowls of asparagus tips, beetroot, egg-custard, roll-mops, tubs of Neapolitan gelati, cheesecake, pizzas, T-bone steaks. No one bothered to look up.
He would step out soon — but as what? A stranger from the streets, filthy from sleeping on building-sites or at the end of alleys among the rubbish-tins and piss; demanding that they take him in and feed him, or find a place for him in their beds. As a courier of the air, one of those agents of apocalypse that are for ever in course about the planet, bearing news of earthquake, epidemic, famine, and the coming now of the last invaders. As an exterminating angel swinging a two-edged sword and bringing them back to the first things of all, to blood and breath. As anything but the fourteen-year-old he was, descending only from a night among the hot sheets and a room whose Cat Stevens poster (which belonged to the time when he was a Cat Stevens fan), and his dictionaries, calculator, tape-recorder, and head-set — and the silhouettes of all the ships of cruiser class in the Japanese navy of forty years ago — might define the whole of his interests and what he was.
He stepped out of the lee of the white giant, in T-shirt and jeans, his hair combed wet from the shower. The two-edged sword went swinging.
“You're late,” his mother complained, without even looking to see who it was.
“It's all right,” he said. “I don't want anything. Just tea.”
His mother poured it with her back to him, where she was preparing salads for their picnic, and he came and took it from the bench.
His father was eating toast, snapping clean rounds out of it with his teeth and devouring the Sun. Michael was on the floor with the comics. Only Julie, all in white for tennis, her shoulders brown and bare, was sitting up straight and eating the way people were supposed to eat; and doing it beautifully as she did everything.
She was sixteen, two years older than Luke, and did not know how extraordinary she was. Her presence among them was a mystery. It had always amazed him that they were of the same family, especially in the days before Michael when there had been just the two of them. People were always proclaiming in that silly way, "What beautiful children!” But they had meant Julie. Any likeness between them was illusory, and when Michael appeared and was such an ugly duckling, Luke had felt easier, as if a balance was restored. He had a special fondness for Michael's batlike ears.
“Well, are you coming out or aren't you?” his father demanded.
“No. I promised to see Hughie.”
His mother made a straight line with her mouth. Hughie was the son of the man who had made the sails for their boat. She didn't approve of that. It was all right when they were just kids at primary school, but now he was supposed to have other friends. He did not.
“But you said you would,” Michael wailed. “You promised! I don't want to go either.”
Michael was eight and still said exactly what he felt. It embarrassed Luke that Michael was so fond of him and did not dissemble or hide it. He felt Michael's affection as a weight that he might never throw off. He hated to hurt people, and was always doing it, whichever way he turned — Michael, Julie, his mother.
“I can't,” he said again. “I promised Hughie.”
Michael turned away and his mother gave him one of her looks of silent reprovaclass="underline" he was so selfish.
He had in fact made no promise to Hughie, but ten minutes later he came round the harbour path with its morning glory vines and its wall of moss-covered, dripping rocks to where the Hutchins's house was built above the water, with a slatted ramp beside it. The walls of the house were of stained shingles, and at night you could hear water lapping below and the masts of pleasure-boats tapping and clicking.
Luke had known it always. It was a big open house full of light and air, but since Hughie's mother died, six months ago, had been let go. There were cartons in the hallway crammed with old newspapers and boating magazines that no one had bothered to move, already cob-webbed and thick with dust. In the kitchen, away to the right, flies buzzed among open jam-jars and unscraped plates where T-bones lay congealed in fat and streaks of hardened tomato sauce, a bottle of which, all black at the rim, stood open on the oilskin cloth. It was all mess — Luke didn't mind that; but beyond the mess of the two or three rooms where Hughie and his father camped, you were aware of rooms that were empty, where nobody ever went. They gave your voice in this house a kind of echo — that is what Luke thought — and made Hughie, these days, a bit weird. As if all those empty rooms were a part of him he could no longer control. “Is that you, Luke?” he called now, and his voice had the echo. “C'mon through.”
He was the youngest of three brothers. The eldest, Ric, was a panel-beater. He lived in the Western suburbs with a girl who was just out of school. The other had got in with a drug crowd, and after a period of hanging round the city in a headband and waistcoat, had gone to Nim-bin and was raising corn. Hughie was the baby. Spoiled and petted by his mother when she was alive, he had been drifting since. He spent his days in front of the TV or up at the Junction, barefooted in boardshorts, with the Space Invaders.
An excessively skinny kid, always tanned but still unhealthy-looking, he was sprawled now on the vinyl lounge in front of the TV, wearing the stained blue boardshorts that he never changed and with his fist in a packet of crisps. He took his hand from the packet and crammed a fistful into his mouth, then licked the salt from his fingers before it dropped. “Want some?” he asked through the crunching.
Luke shook his head. “Why do you eat that stuff?”
“Because I saw it on TV,” Hughie answered straight off. “And because I'm dumb and don't know any better. Besides, it beats ice-cubes.”
A few months back there was never anything to eat in this house except ice-cubes. They used to suck them in the heat while they watched the cricket. “There's a choice,” Hughie would tell him, "icecubes boiled or fried or grilled. Take your pick.” That was while Mrs. Hutchins was still dying in the next room. “I figure,” Hughie told him now, "that if I eat all that stuff they eat on television — you know, potato crisps, Cherry Ripe, Coke, all that junk, I'll turn into a real Australian kid and have a top physique. Isn't that what's supposed to happen?”
“Maybe you'll turn into a real American kid and stay skinny.”
“Y’ reckon?” Hughie's hand was arrested in mid-lift.