He had frequently been encouraged by his aunt to be a good little soldier in the matter of grazed elbows and bloodied knees, and plasters that had to be ripped off, but no one had told him how it would be at his father's funeral and how he should stand.
His grandfather was close behind him. His hand, blotched, with lumpy veins, rested on his shoulder, and occasionally drew him in to the soft belly and the hot smell of his woollen suit.
His mother and his aunt were on the other side of him, his aunt crying. He had never thought of his aunt as a woman who cried.
His mother cried very often, and noisily. She was what his aunt called theatrical. When his father met her, in London, she had been on the stage. Being theatrical was something, later, when his mother was gone, that he would be severely warned against; as he was against being, like his father, weak — it was the double inheritance he must constantly fight against.
But at his father's funeral his mother did not cry, she simply stood, and he thought of her later as having already left, as he understood by then she must already have decided to do. So that what he recalled of that day was his aunt's tears, the weight of his grandfather's hand on his shoulder, and the dry, peppery smell of the bush, along with a ladies’ smell of talcum powder and sweat.
The white gravestones all around pulsed with light and might have been preparing to rise straight up like rockets. Which was just what was required, he thought, to free him from the scrutiny of the strangers over there and the need to hold himself so strictly to attention. Then suddenly the trees on the skyline exploded. Dozens of snow-white, sulphur-crested cockatoos flocked skyward, the noise of their shrieking so fierce, so like the sound of souls in torment, that all the people turned their heads.
That was his father's funeral. His father had always been absent in one way. Now he was absent in another. And beginning then, at the edge of the open grave, so was his mother. She went home to her family in England. From where she rang regularly twice each year, on his birthday and at Christmas, long distance, tearfully. And sent presents in elaborate wrappings that his aunt resented and referred to, though never to him, “extravagant.”
He had heard often enough from his grandfather that every man had his justifications, though one did not have to believe that they were always good; and since every man clearly meant every woman too, he wondered what his mother's might be. For having left him— temporarily at first, then permanently — in the charge of his grandfather and aunt.
Had she already given him over so completely to them and what they had to offer that she felt her own claim was weak, and that by taking him with her she would deprive him of more than she could give— even in the matter of love? Was he unlovable? Did he remind her too much of his father? Was she simply — he felt the implication of this in his aunt's silence on the matter—weak?
The word hung in the air so often, though unspoken like so much else, because his grandfather, and even more his aunt, were so fond of the “strong.”
He felt the house was full of watchers. Not just his grandfather and aunt, but those presences, invisible but by no means to be underestimated, who were watching them—which was as far as his grandfather went in the matter of religion.
But all this meant was that the forces under whose watchful gaze they were living — who missed nothing, he came to feel, and were pitilessly demanding — had no names, no faces, and were difficult therefore to get a hold on, to approach and reason with. No doubt they too had their justifications, impossible to challenge.
He wondered sometimes, since his grandfather did not actually refer to them, how he had got so clearly into his head, and so early, that they were there. As palpably there as the furniture — big old-fashioned dining chairs with high backs, ample seats, solid legs, bedroom suites with mirrored wardrobes and dressing tables — that his grandfather had had made in Brisbane, and which, as newly-weds, his grandparents had brought up here after the First World War.
He reminded himself that his father too had grown up among these heavy presences. Perhaps it was the furniture, and the shadow it cast, that had alarmed his mother and driven her from the house.
These were the perplexities and childish conclusions of a lively seven-year-old. But a dozen years later he had got no further with them.
SOMETIMES,in the early afternoon, he rode out to the edge of town and spent an hour or two with Cliff Hodges, who had sold him the CZ and was prepared to take it back again when he left.
Cliff was twenty-four. An easy-going fellow and a big drinker on Friday and Saturday nights, he was popular with the girls. Married women mostly, if his own stories were to be believed. Charlie was never sure he did believe them, but it didn't matter. Cliff glowed so convincingly in the aura of them.
He was a mechanic. He worked out of a corrugated-iron shed on a lot where two giant pepper trees grew out of broken concrete. A dozen oil drums and some old car parts, now gone to rust, were piled against a fence that seemed to be held up only by the woody rose bush, all out- bursts of yellow buds and creamy, extravagant blooms, that climbed in and out of its grainy slabs.
Charlie looked forward to the afternoons he spent out here; his back to the corrugated-iron wall of the shed, his long legs thrust out before him, while Cliff, sprawled out of sight, flat on his back under the car he was working on, put easy questions to which he gave his own wry answers, or launched into a live-wire account, all crude but colourful riffs and clownish avowals of contrition, of his latest night out with the boys. The desultory nature of these exchanges, the easy pace, which included a good many silences, none of them heavy as elsewhere with the unsaid, was tonic. Charlie laughed. He let go.
Very little that passed between them was personal. What they shared were the formal rituals of taking an engine apart and putting it together again, which Charlie, under Cliff's instruction, had quickly grasped and become expert in. The dexterity it involved, the easiness about getting your hands mucky, the masculine talk punctuated with shit, fuck, come on you bitch, give, which was the almost musical accompaniment to this, led naturally, while the fingers worked delicately with wires and screws, to discussion of that other area of male expertise where the parts were anatomical. Charlie was less expert here but once again looked to Cliff's instruction as a likely way ahead.
Later in the afternoon it was the Beach Boys or Cream or Hendrix that filled the air between them, when Cliff, at a point of exasperation with some bit of machinery that would not yield to him, took time out, and they sat side by side with a mug of hot coffee to warm their hands, and floated — mostly on drags of the good grass Cliff had access to.
What Charlie found so appealing in these afternoon hours was that they led nowhere and could have no consequence. Two years from now, when he got back, Cliff would be just the same, or he would be married with a kid and would be the same anyway. And he would have Vietnam behind him. Because he had chosen that, and all that it involved and would bring. To mark him; mark him off. To set the seal on a certain way of living that a man could choose, and which Cliff had not chosen and might never know. It was a difference between them that was already in operation, because in spirit he was already gone. It gave him, despite his being so much younger, and quite without experience in some matters, an advantage here that Cliff recognised and did not resent.
“Rather you than me, boy,” Cliff had said after a pause when Charlie first made his announcement.