Digger frowned. He didn’t need anyone to take charge of his life.
‘Nah, that was just good luck,’ McGowan said, as if he had seen what Digger was thinking. ‘Or maybe you’d prefer to have been taken in.’
‘I’d be safe enough,’ Digger said sharply. ‘I’ve got friends in the force.’
McGowan looked at him and laughed. But Digger was failing. In just seconds he was delirious again. But he saw what McGowan was now. He was an agent for his mother. How on earth had she recruited him?
4
WHEN DIGGER WAS in the third grade at primary school, and the teacher allowed them for the first time to take home books, he had for several months been obsessed with atlases and maps of every sort. Kneeling up at the kitchen table to get closer to the lamp, he would screw his eyes up so that he could read even the smallest print, and making himself small, since whole towns in this dimension were no larger than fly-spots, would try to get hold of what it was here that he was dealing with, the immensity of the world he had been born into, but also the relation between the names of things, which were magic to him, and what they stood for, towns, countries, islands, lakes, mountains.
Countries, for instance, the shape of them.
Each one was its own shape entirely, cut out of the whole, out of earth and water, and resembling nothing in nature but itself. The shape was random, determined only by the way a bit of coastline ran or the course of a river, or by the language people spoke, or by battles that had been fought whole centuries ago; but once you were familiar with it you couldn’t imagine how it could be otherwise — Spain or Italy or Australia — any more than you could imagine a different shape for the things that nature had evolved or that men had designed to fit a use. A moth, for instance, a sleeve. And the names also fitted. ‘Moth’ was perfect for the furry thickness and powdery wings of the creature, as ‘sleeve’ was for what you slipped your arm through. But ‘Italy’? ‘Australia’? Yet once it was in your head the name perfectly evoked the shape of the country and contained it; the fit was perfect.
Patagonia, the Pamir Plateau, the Great Bear Lake. You let these names fall into your head and, by some process of magic, real places came into existence, small enough to find a place there with other names and places, as they also fitted on to a page of the atlas, but existing as well in a latitude on the globe that you could actually travel to, where they were immensities of water and rock and sky.
The world was so huge you could barely make your mind stretch to conceive of it. It would take days and nights, months even, for your body to cover in real space what you could spread your fingers across on a page; this is what Magellan and Vasco da Gama and Abel Tasman had had to prove. Yet whole stretches of it could be contained as well in just two or three syllables. You spoke them — it did not have to be out loud — and there they were: Lake Balaton, Valparaiso, Zanzibar, the Bay of Whales. And among these magic formulations, and no less real because it was familiar and he knew precisely what it represented, Keen’s Crossing.
It wasn’t in any atlas. You could hardly expect it to be. How could you get yourself small enough even to contemplate it, when a city of millions like Sydney was just a dot? But it was there all right, even if they hadn’t put it in. He was sitting there. At a table, with the atlas open in front of him under a lamp.
He would fall into a dream. Letting his mind expand till it was as diffused and free-floating as a galaxy off at the limits of space, he would rove about, searching till he had located the world, a pin-point of light, far off and spinning. He would home in on it then, till he could see the exact point on its surface, in New South Wales, where he was: Keen’s Crossing. He would find Broken Bay first, the mouth of the river; then, moving high up over it in the dark, follow the twists and turns of it till he saw the wharf, the store, the lighted window, his head like another globe bent low over the atlas, and could slip back into it.
His mind would be dazzled, like a moth that had been drawn in out of the dark and was at the centre now, dazed but excitedly fluttering. Around him, in pitch darkness, the Scotch firs soaring sixty feet towards the stars, the pepper tree, the clothes-lines touched with moonlight, the beginnings of an immensity of scrub.
How much of all this was contained by the name he could not determine. There was no visible border. Not enough, clearly, to make a showing in the atlas, but quite a lot if you thought of all the dust you had to wade through to get from the ferry to where the highway crested the ridge; or considered the millions of ants that were scurrying about over the dried-up leaves and twigs of it.
He did see a map at last on which Keen’s Crossing was marked. A fellow at the ferry showed it to him, a government surveyor, unfolding the big sheet across the bonnet of his car while they rode across. A dotted line showed the river-crossing, and there was a dot, a red one, to mark the store. Beside it, in italics, Keen’s Crossing.
So there it was: his own name, Keen, making an appearance in the great world. On a map, along with all those other magic formulations, Marcaibo, Surabaya, Arkangel.
There was a tie, a deep one, between the name as he bore it and as the place did; they were linked. And not just by his being there. He could leave it — he would too, one day, he was bound to — but the link would remain. The name contained him, from the soles of his feet to his thatch of roughly scissored hair, wherever he might go, whatever might happen to him, as it contained as well this one particular bit of the globe, the Crossing, the store, all the individual grains of dust and twigs and dead leaves that made up the acres of the place, along with the many varieties of ants and insects and spiders, and the birds that flew in and out of it; all covered. There was a mystery in this that he might spend the whole of his life pondering, beginning at the kitchen table here; except that it was just one of the mysteries, and he knew already that there were others, equally important, that he would have to explore. Still, this one was enough to keep him going for the moment, and he saw, regretfully, that he might have to forgo all those other places, Mont St Michel and Trincomalee, however attractive they might be, if he was to get hold of this one, which he was linked to because he was born here, and because his name was on it, or its name on him.
What had Keen’s Crossing been, he wondered, before his grandfather stopped here and claimed the crossing and built the store? Did it have any name at all? And, without one, how had anyone known what it was or that it was here at all?
It had been here, and pretty much as it was now, if you put back the trees that had been cut down to build the store and the ferry-landing and to make way for the road, and if you took away the clothesline, the three Scotch firs and the rosebushes and gerbera his mother had planted: the same high ridge of sandstone with its forest of flesh-coloured angophoras.
Nameless it would have been; untouched in all time by the heel maybe of even a single black. But here all right. And not even in the dark. You couldn’t say that, just because people had no knowledge of it.
The same hard sunshine would have beat down on it, the same storms and slow winter rains. The same currawongs and magpies would have been here, blue finches, earthworms, tree snakes, frogs. But it was not Keen’s Crossing. It wouldn’t have known that there were any Keens, to drive their horses across the river and cut down the first tree and make a camp. It hadn’t been waiting.