I did know what he was feeling, but he confused me. I wanted to be free of him, of his turmoil. The nakedness with which he paraded his feelings dismayed me. It removed all the grounds, I thought, on which I could react and offer him real sympathy. It violated the only code, as I saw it then, that offered us protection: tight-lipped understatement, endurance. What else could we rely on? What else could Irely on?
I walked.
The ground with its rough tussocks was swampy, unsteady underfoot, the foliage on the stunted trees sparse and darkly colourless, their trunks blotched with lichen. I had no idea where I was headed or how far I needed to go to escape my own unsettlement. Little lizards tumbled away from my boots or dropped from branches, dragonflies hung stopped on the air, then switched and darted, blazing out like struck matches where the sun caught their glassy wings.
I walked. And as I moved deeper into the solitude of the land, its expansive stillness — which was not stillness in fact but an interweaving of close but distant voices so dense that they became one, and then mere background, then scarcely there at all — I began to forget my own disruptive presence, receding as naturally into what hummed and shimmered all round me as into a dimension of my own being that it had taken my coming out here, alone, in the slumbrous hour after midday, to uncover. I felt drawn, drawn on.
I had enough bush sense, a good enough eye for recording, unconsciously as I passed, the little oddnesses in the terrain — the elbow of a fallen bough, a particular assembly of glossy-leaved bushes that would serve as signposts on my way back — to feel confident I wouldn't get lost. I let Stuart, seated gloomily back there on his log, hugging his rifle, hugging even closer his dumb grief, fade from my thoughts, and moved deeper into the becalmed early-afternoon light, over spatterings of ancient debris, crumblings of dried-out timber. Slowly, all round and under me, an untidy grey-green world was continuously, visibly in motion. Ti-tree trunks unfurled tattered streamers; around their roots a seepage like long-brewed tea.
I walked, and the great continent of sound I was moving into recorded my presence, the arrival, in its close-woven fabric of light, sound, stilled or moving shadow, of a medium-sized foreign body, displacing the air a moment as it advanced, and confusing, with the smell of its sweat and the shifting of its breath, the tiny signals that were being picked up and translated out there by a myriad of forms of alien intelligence. I was central to it but I was also nothing, or close to nothing.
In the compacted heat and drowsy afternoon sunlight, I could have kept walking for ever, all the way to the Gulf. It was time, not space, I was moving into. Years it might be. And there was more of it — not just ahead but on all sides — than I could conceive of or measure.
There was no specific point I was heading for. I could stop now, turn back, and it would all still be here. It was myself I was moving into.
One day, far off down the years, I would come stumbling back in my body's last moments of consciousness and here it would be: crumbling into itself and dispersing its particles and voices, reassembling itself cell by cell in a new form that was also the old one remade. I had no need to go on and actually see it, the place where I would lie down in the springy marsh-grass, among the litter and mould, letting the grass take the impression of my weight, the shape of my body's presence, and keep it long after I was gone.
Away back, when I first heard about the Valley and let it form itself in my mind, I had thought that everything I found unsatisfactory in myself, in my life but also in my nature, would come right out here, because that is what I had seen, or thought I had, in others. Kids who had been out here, and whom I had thought of till then as wild and scattered, had come back settled in their own aggregation of muscle, bone, and flesh, and in some new accommodation with the world.
Nothing like that had come to me. I was no more settled, no less confused. I would bring nothing back that would be visible to others— to my father, for instance. I had lost something; that was more like it. But happily. As I walked on into this bit of grey-green nondescript wilderness I was happily at home in myself. But in my old self, not a new one.
I don't know how far I had gone before I paused, looked around, and realised I was lost. For the last ten minutes I had been walking in my sleep. The landscape of small shrubs and ti-trees I had been moving through was now scrub.
I consulted the sun and turned back the way I had come. Minutes later I looked again and changed tack. It was hot. I had begun to sweat. I took my shirt off, draped it round my neck, and set off again.
Five minutes more and I stopped, told myself sternly not to panic and, standing with my eyes closed and the whole landscape shrilling in my head, took half a dozen slow breaths.
The shot came from closer than I would have expected, and from a direction — to my left — that surprised me. How had I gone so wrong? It was only when I had got over a small rush of relief that it struck me that after the first shot there had been no other. I quickened my pace, then began to run, my boots sinking and at times slipping on the swampy ground. When I arrived back at the clearing Stuart lay awkwardly sprawled, white-lipped and holding his shirt, which was already soaked, to his bloodied thigh.
“Hi, Angus,” he said, his tone somewhere between his old, false jauntiness and a dreamy bemusement at what had occurred and at my being the one who had arrived to find him.
“Better get someone. Quick, eh?”
He glanced down to where blood, a lot of it, I thought, was flooding through the flimsy shirt.
I fell to my knees, gaping.
“No,” he said calmly. “Just run off as quick as you can, mate, and fetch someone. But be quick, eh? I'll be right for a bit.”
I wasn't sure of that. I felt there was something I should be doing immediately, something I should be saying that would make him feel better and restore things, maybe even cancel them out, and I was still nursing this childish thought as I sprinted towards the camp. Something I would regret for ever if he bled to death before I got back. Was he bleeding to death? Could a thing like that just happen, without warning, out of the blue?
In just minutes I had shouted my breathless announcement and we were back.
He was still sitting, awkwardly upright, his back against the log. I took in the rifle this time. It lay on the ground to his right. There was also the heap of dull black feathers that was a scrub-turkey He was no longer holding the soaked rag to his outflung leg. A pool was spreading under him. He was streaming with sweat. Great drops of it stood on his brow and were making runnels down his chest.
“It's all right, Dad,” he said weakly when the old man and Matt and the others reached him. “Bugger missed.”
It took me a moment to grasp that it was the bullet he was referring to.
They got his boot off and Matt slashed the leg of the scorched and bloodied jeans all the way to the crotch and worked quickly to apply a tourniquet. “You'll be right,” he told Stuart. “Bugger missed the main artery, you're a lucky feller. Bone too.” Blood was seeping out between his hands. There was a smell that made me squeamish. Seared meat. Stuart, bluish-white around the mouth, was raised up on his elbows and staring, fascinated by the throbbing out of the warm life in him. Like a child who has borne a bad fall manfully, but bursts into tears at the first expression of sympathy, he seemed close to breaking.
I was dealing with my own emotions.
I had seen Stuart stripped any number of times, in the changing room at the pool, in the noise and general roughhouse of the showers afterwards. A naked body among other naked bodies, with clear water streaming over it and a smell of clean soap in the air, is bracing, functional, presents an image too common to be remarkable or to draw attention to itself. But a single ravaged limb thrust out in the dirt, the soaked denim of the jeans that covered it violently ripped and peeled away, black hairs curling on the hollow of the thigh and growing furlike close to the groin, has a brute particularity that brought me closer to something exposed and shockingly intimate in him, to the bare forked animal, than anything I had seen when he stood fully naked under the shower. I was shaken. His jockeys, where they showed, sagged, and were worn thin and greyish. A trail of blood, still glistening wet, made its way down the long ridge of the shank bone.