He wrote to his mother nearly every week and she sent back sharp replies. His father was in Japan now, a hero of the army of occupation. Jenny had run away, she didn’t know where. Yes, he assured her, he would come back, she knew that. But from week to week he put it off, still dizzied by all that was going on here, all he saw and was trusted with. Once he went back he would be caught. For a little time longer he wanted to be off the hook.
People trusted him. He didn’t know why.
A man he hardly knew, though they might have spoken a couple of times, would thrust an envelope into his hand. ‘Here, mate, keep this for me, willya? Don’t worry, I’ll find you. Next week or the week after. Somewhere. Just keep it under ya pillow, eh?’
Digger would sock the thing away behind the mirror of the little room he had at the Pomeroy and forget about it. A week later the man would come up to him in a pub, fool about for a bit, then say casually: ‘How’s the bank vault? — That envelope I give you, Is’pose you still got it.’ With the envelope safe in an inside jacket pocket he would slip Digger a twenty. ‘Thanks, mate. I’ll do the same f’ you some time.’
What had he been part of? He didn’t ask. That’s why he was trusted.
Someone who had heard that he knew how to look after himself and was handy with his fists put him on to one of the clubs. He got a job as a bouncer at thirty quid a week, working from seven till five in the morning at a place where sly grog was served, and in a room at the back, poker and blackjack were played. He helped clean up afterwards, went out and got himself a cup of tea at an all-nighter, then, in the early-morning coolness, walked home.
He loved the Cross at that hour. Greeks would be setting up fruit stalls, apples and oranges in glossy pyramids. Men in shorts would be unloading fresh flowers, setting them out in buckets on the pavement and sprinkling them from a can against the coming heat. He would buy a paper and scan the morning news.
‘Haven’ you got any better place to go than this, feller? You don’t want to hang around here.’
The man who offered him this advice was a cop, a thick-set fellow with close-cropped straight black hair and freckles. Mid-thirties, a bit flash, with a good overcoat, a soft grey hat, and eyes Digger had taken a liking to. They were very steady and blue. He could offer the advice because he did it lightly. It was a joke between them. His name was Frank McGowan.
Digger had seen him about often enough and they’d got talking. He didn’t mind having a drink with him, though he knew he was breaking a code.
‘I seen you drinkin’ with that dingo McGowan,’ one of his acquaintances observed. ‘Is’pose you know what ’e is.’ There was a little beat of silence. ‘Yair, well, ’e’s a cunt. An’ ’e’s crooked as shit, you ast anyone! SP — they’re all in on it, you ast anyone!’
Digger listened but did not reply. It was all such tales up here. The Cross was a village, full of intricate alliances and drawn lines. A thing had barely happened, they’d hardly picked the body up off the pavement, before it was in the mouth of every barber’s boy and saloon-bar lounger. McGowan was in the Vice Squad. That was enough. It embarrassed Digger sometimes that McGowan should take an interest in him, but he did not believe it was a ploy. He was no use to McGowan.
‘So,’ McGowan would say each time they ran into one another, ‘you’re still here. Go an’ get lost, why don’t you?’
But once, in a darker mood, when they were sitting quietly together, he said: ‘I don’ understand you, Digger, a feller like you. What are you doin’, hangin’ about with this sorta rubbish?’
Digger looked up, a shadow of doubt in his eyes. His experience in the camps had given him an ear for the various forms of self-hatred that men go in for, and he thought now that some of the venom in McGowan’s voice was directed at himself.
McGowan saw the look. ‘Yair, well,’ he said, and made a brusque movement with his thumb across the tip of his nose. There was a grossness in it that was deliberate. He had given himself away and was drawing back again. Digger too withdrew.
It was the word he had used, rubbish, that Digger wanted to go back to. What came back to him at times, and too clearly, was that break in the forest and the fires he had tended there. It had given him such an awareness of just what it is that life throws up, and when it has no more use for it, throws off again. Not just ashes and bones, but the immense pile of debris that any one life might make if you were to gather up and look at the whole of it: all that it had worn out, used up, mislaid, pawned, forgotten, and carried out each morning to be tipped into a bin. Think of it. Then think of it multiplied by millions.
What he would have wanted, given the power, was to take it all back again, down to the last razor blade and button off a baby’s bootee, and see it restored. Impossible, of course.
He wanted nothing to be forgotten and cast into the flames. Not a soul. Not a pin.
He said none of this to McGowan, but wished later he had done and taken the risk.
‘I’m like one of those old blokes you see poking about the bins,’ he would have had to say, making a joke of it. But he was serious.
‘Not a soul,’ he would have said. ‘Not a pin.’
2
ONE SATURDAY AROUND three o’clock he did something he had been meaning to do for weeks. He got himself ready and took a tram out to Bondi Junction to find Mac’s sister-in-law, Iris. He carried with him the letters Mac had given him. It was all he had to pass on to her.
He recognised the house easily enough from the description Mac had given him, but the woman who opened the door was not at all what he expected.
He had seen her often enough. He had stood behind the door in the kitchen and seen her come in, turn on the tap, pour herself a glass of water, and then, with wonderful slowness, drink it, all the time looking out through the window in a dreamy way at the stars.
That woman had worn her hair in a style he remembered from before the war. She was very sober and tall. This one, with the light of the hallway behind her, was shorter, heavier too, and she stepped out of a moment of hilarity that had to do with something that was still going on in the depths of the house. There was a radio playing. He heard thumps from back there and saw the flash of a blue shirt — one of the boys that would be — between the hallway and the back stairs.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said in the midst of her laughter. ‘Come on in.’
He stepped into the narrow hallway. He was cleaned up, his hair combed, his feet washed — that was normal now. But he wore a tie as well, feeling the constriction of it, and had the letters, in a clean envelope, in his right-hand breast pocket.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘let me take your hat.’
‘Oh — good,’ he said. He had been just standing there, staring about.
He had thought he would know the place, and he did in some ways; Mac’s sleep-out would be the bottom of the hall to the right. But the whole house was lighter than he had imagined, more airy. More cheerful, too. Mac had described only the things his own plain taste would have put here; the rest he had left out. A lot of what Digger saw now was fancifuclass="underline" a tall Chinese vase with umbrellas on it, and a little Alpine house with a man and woman in peasant costume, who came out, the one or the other, according to whether it was fine or would rain.
She settled him in the front room, then went out to turn the wireless down, put a kettle on, and at the same time to shout something through a window into the yard. Digger had a chance to look about.
Above the upright piano, which was covered with a green velvet cloth, was a certificate showing that Elizabeth Iris Ruddick had her letters from the Trinity College of Music in 1921 — the year, as it happened, of his birth. There was a metronome, a bust of Beethoven, a bronze rose bowl with a wirework lid. Another object that took his eye was an ornamental tray in mother-of-pearl. On it was a young fellow in olden-days dress, a satin coat and breeches, who sat with two shepherdesses in a moonlit ruin. In a corner, on a little lacquered stand, was a basket of a kind he had seen before only in the foyers of picture theatres, where it would have been filled with gladiolus spears. This one had half a dozen dolls in it, their spangled skirts fixed to bentwood crooks.