But then the two things met: his grandfather’s axe and the hard trunk of one of its trees, and the first letter of a syllable cut into it. Keen meant sharp. The axe’s edge was Keen. So the place got a name and he and it had found a connection that was unique in all the world. The shared name proved it.
Years later, in some of their worst times in Thailand, this connection would sustain Digger and help keep him sane, keep him attached to the earth; to the brief stretch of it that was continuous with his name and, through that, with his image of himself. He could be there at will. He had only to dive into himself and look about.
Time after time, in his own shape, or taking on the secret shape of some four-footed creature that could move freely past the guards, he would start running, and, with the air streaming behind him, leap bushes, rivers, over seas at last, and come down through the moonlit trees to where the store stood back from the edge of the river, with the great sandstone ridge behind it, and on the other bank a forested bluff rising sheer to the stars.
He was there now, sweating a little after his run; having come down again from where his fever had dragged him. He stood in the trees at the edge of the clearing and watched while his mother hung out the wash.
She wasn’t expecting him, except that he was always on her mind; so she was, too. When he stepped out between the trunks he would not alarm her.
In a moment he would do it. But just for a bit he stood panting, letting the big drops of sweat roll off him, and watched her lift up and peg one wing, then another, of a sheet.
V
1
VIC, WITH THE drowse of afternoon sleep still on him, stood in his undershorts, one bare foot on the other, his elbow against the dusty wall. The telephone receiver was loose in his hand. He stood with his head dropped, shaking it hopelessly from side to side. Round the old-fashioned speaking-horn fixed to the wall were scribbles in indelible pencil, numbers, names (some of them horses), an irregular heart doodled in a waiting moment, which was bleeding purple at the tip. Down the hallway a race was being called.
It was a men’s boarding house in Surry Hills. He had been summoned to the phone just before tea.
Sprawled on his back in the airless heat, legs spread, mind empty, his body as flat as paper — one of a string of such fellows cut out of a single folded sheet — he had been tempted to call out ‘Not in,’ but had staggered up, still half in a dream, scratched his head and applied the receiver to his ear. It was Ma. Every Friday night she rang and they had the same three-minute exchange.
She wanted him to come home, of course; but after the first time she had never again tried to persuade or bully him. But she rang each Friday at the same hour, and though he was often tempted not to, he took the call. She was clever, Ma, and had infinite patience. Eventually he would give all this up and come back. She knew that and so did he. In the meantime, as lightly as possible, she hung on.
Sunday dinner — that was the open invitation, a surprise for Pa; no pressure, but the invitation was always there. One Sunday, yes, he promised, but he continued to put her off.
Back in the room he lay on the bed, not thinking, and stared up at the stamped-tin ceiling with its design of circles within squares, and inside the circles, fleurs-de-lis.
In these last years, when the population of the city had very nearly doubled, the big front room of the place, with its long sash-windows and fifteen-foot ceilings, had been partitioned with three-ply to make smaller rooms, he had no idea how many, each with its bare bulb hanging, its wardrobe, washbasin and cot. The long gap between the top of the partition and the ceiling meant there was no privacy here. All night you heard other men coughing, hawking, turning the pages of the Zane Greys they were reading, shifting on the rusty wires and groaning in their sleep. You participated, whether you cared to or not, in their dreams.
He was earning good money now and could easily have had a room of his own. But he couldn’t sleep in a room of his own. He wouldn’t have admitted it, even to Digger, but he couldn’t get through the night. The one time he had taken a room in a hotel and tried it, he had woken in a cold sweat, filled with a panic he could not contain. He had had to go out and sit with the tramps at an all-night pie stall.
The proximities of this place, the indifference, the low-keyed despair of the other men, who were mostly older, were what he wanted; they suited him. So did his job.
For six months he had been out west, moving on from one township to the next and picking up any work he could get; as a greenkeeper in one place, a fencer in another. Out past Bathurst to Orange, then to Moree, Walgett and across the Queensland border. He had done that to lose himself for a while, but in the end had worked his way back. He was employed by the council now as a ganger on the roads, spreading gravel in front of a steamroller, all day in the heat and reek of tar. It was fierce work in the December sun. His hands were calloused and black. There were burn-spots where the hot tar spat. Some nights his arms felt as if they had been torn out of their sockets. But it was what he wanted.
He was home, he accepted that. It was a fact. But some stubbornness in him, a sense of outrage that he would not relinquish, still kept him captive, not to a place but to a condition. He did not want to be free of it. To be so would be to accept at last that what had been done to him could be ended and put behind him, and he could never accept that.
He was back, and could have whatever he wanted now, a room of his own, a girl, what Ma called a normal life. But he chose not to. The right to choose, even if the choice was against his own interest, was important to him. By living as he did now he made what had happened to him ‘up there’ — the deprivations and shame he had suffered, the misuse he had been subject to — that much less of a violation. ‘You see, I might have chosen it anyway. Like I’m doing now.’
But he also chose, out of pride, not to let the Warrenders see him like this; however fond they were of him and whatever allowances they might be willing to make. He did not want allowances made. When he saw them again it had to be in his old self as he was before he went away. Those were the conditions he set.
In his last days in the camp, among other letters from Pa and Ma and Ellie, had been one from Lucille. It was written in a style that had immediately enraged him, which pretended to make light of the facts it had to tell and was entirely false. She was married, that’s what she had to tell. To a Yank. And had a child.
He accepted these facts. He had a high regard for facts. What he did not accept was their finality. Like the things that had happened to him, they were a result of the extraordinary conditions of war, and were to that extent accidental. He chose himself not to be a victim of accident, in this case or any other. He would in time reverse these facts, but only when he was strong enough to take hold of things with something like his old power. Till then, he would have to wait.
The other men in the house were mostly winos. He met them in the dark hallway or on the steps outside, tottering home with a bottle of port in a brown-paper bag, or stopped halfway up the stairs and lolling. ‘G’day, son,’ was all they ever said. But one or two of them were old fellows, respectable enough, who had nowhere else to go. No woman any longer, maybe a son or daughter somewhere who had no room for them; or they had never had a family at all. They read the papers, took an interest in the races, exchanged cheap mystery books. To these men all this was normal. They did not look at him and wonder what he was doing here. They assumed he was as they were — only a few years earlier on the road.