“So?” he said.
“So someone, sometime, has to go through with it.”
“How do you mean?”
Luke set his mouth and did not elaborate, and Hughie, out of loyalty to an old understanding between them, did not push for an answer.
They had known one another since they were five or six years old. It was, in terms of their short lives, a long friendship, but Hughie had begun to perceive lately, and it hurt him, that they might already have grown apart. There was in Luke something dark, uncompromising, fanatical, that scared him because it was so alien to his own nature. He was incapable of such savagery himself, and might be the shallower for it. His mind struggled to grasp the thing and it hurt.
“Listen Luke,” he began, then stopped and was defeated. There was no way of putting what he had seen into words. He swallowed, picked at his toe. Luke, hard-mouthed and with brows fiercely lowered, was staring dead ahead. “Hey, Luke,” he called across the narrow space between them, and knocked the other boy's shoulder, very lightly, with the heel of his hand.
“What?”
“I don't know, you seemed — far away.” He screwed his eyes up and looked out across the burnished water. The idea of distance saddened him.
“Thanks,” Luke said softly after a moment, and Hughie was relieved.
“For what?” he answered, but it wasn't a question.
They grinned, and it was as if things between them were clear again. Luke got up. “I'd better get going,” he said. “I'll give you a hand with the kites.”
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.