The respect, a matter of taking him seriously, Charlie thought, had come about later. A kind of concern for him too, which in Cliff's case took a particular form.
“We better set you up with a girl, eh? Before you go and get your collateral blown off.” This was a reference, witty to an extent that surprised Charlie, to a Dylan song they were fond of.
So far it had gone no further than that, the offer. In the meantime they sat with their backs to the wall and took in the music along with the grass.
The nice thing, around Cliff, was that there was no need to hurry.
SO HE CAME to the last days. He had a strong sense, as he made his rounds, of other people stopping, in the ordinary flow of their lives, to make room for him. He had made that much at least of an impression. Perhaps it was simply that they knew it would soon end: that he would in a few days now be gone. They could afford to grant him room.
He had no illusions. The moment he was no longer here their lives would flow on again without him; not because they did not care but because that's the way it is, the way we are.
He felt he existed in a space which, the moment he stepped out of it, would close behind him, and he began practising; in mind stepping out, then looking back at the space he had filled for a little with his warmth and watching it cool and give up all sign of his presence.
This sort of thinking was new to him. That there might be in you a ghostly quality of your own absence even when you were most warmly there; when you were most conscious of your long, blunt-ended fingers flattened against a mug of scalding tea, your breath visibly blowing across the earthenware rim, your smile and your last words hanging in the silence. And their eyes on you, also smiling, and telling you how substantially present you were.
He would glance briefly towards the greatcoat tossed over the back of a chair, its thick serge bunched and shapeless. His father's greatcoat. Which he had commandeered for a bit. And where was his father?
He shrugged, and the cough he gave was half a chuckle.
It was an uncomfortable feeling only for a moment. The mug was warm against the soft flesh of his palm. The coffee or tea, when he lowered his head to hide his confusion, and sipped, was hot in his mouth.
There was a design of painted flowers on the tiles behind the sink in the Whelans’ kitchen: detached yellow petals round a dob of red, with a green stem and two symmetrical green leaves — the kind of flower he remembered painting when he was first at school, the flower a five- or six-year-old paints. Not a real flower, one you've seen — they're too difficult, too complicated and raggedy. The stripped-down idea of a flower. The one from which all other flowers might have evolved.
The rightness of these flowers, each one planted in the centre of its tile and repeated all over the bit of wall, pleased him in a way he could not have explained, and centred him for a moment, but only for a moment, in a space of his own.
One afternoon, when he was leaving the Whelans', Josie followed him out to where his bike was parked under the overhanging canopy of a camphor laurel.
She dawdled, and he wondered, as he sat astride the CZ, at a hesitancy in her that was unusual and which, for all the little crease between her brows, softened her features and brought her close, in a way that created a soft feeling in him as well.
It was a time of day when everything was in suspense. The light high up in the sky just yielding to the first smokiness of dark. A hint of nighttime coldness in the air. Birds restless in the grass and beginning to flock low now over the neighbouring roofs. He waited.
Josie too had an offer to make. What she had access to, if he wanted, was a line of safe houses. In Sydney. He could, even at this point, refuse to go, declare himself an objector — and people down there, good people, would pass him on from one house to another till the war was over.
He listened quietly. To the agitation of birds. To some boys off in the distance, shouting as they kicked a ball about.
“How would I get there?” he asked. Not because he might actually do it but out of curiosity, to catch himself briefly in the light of an unexpected possibility. “To Sydney, I mean.”
“I could arrange it,” Josie told him. He was impressed by her intensity. “There's an organisation.”
He nodded but remained sceptical. She made it sound like the underground during the war. It had the air of a game.
What was no game was where he was going.
“I'll think it over,” he told her, turning his head to where the voices of the footballers were raised in a triumphant shout. She touched the sleeve of the greatcoat. “No, I will,” he assured her, "I'll think about it. I really will.”
But he wondered that she should have seen so little of what was in him. When his last visit came and he gave her his answer, feeling clumsy though he tried not to be — they were once again in the half-dark under the camphor laurel tree — she was silent and did not try to persuade him, though she accepted none of “reasons.” What he could not tell her was that since the ballot was announced his life had had a shape. He could see himself. He had begun to see, in the events he had organised for himself, the outline of what he was to be.
She kissed him lightly to one side of his mouth and turned back into the house.
He sat a moment — he was not reconsidering — he had never in fact considered — before he kicked the bike into sputtering life and went roaring off.
The other proposition that had been put to him, Cliff's offer to set him up with a girl, he did accept. He was shy, he found, about such matters, even with Cliff, and feared afterwards that he had not hit the right note between throwaway ease and the sort of eagerness that might have been expected of red-blooded youth when he told Cliff, "What you said that time — you know, about a girl — I've been thinking, and I'd really appreciate it.” Cliff seemed to have forgotten his offer. They agreed, however, to meet up at the pub on his last night.
He arrived on time but missed Cliff, who had already been there and left. He bought a beer, talked to one or two people, but after half an hour pushed his way out again and took a slow ride around town.
It was Saturday night. Everyone was out. He felt an odd affection for the place now that he was about to leave it, though it had nothing to recommend it really and he was eager to go.
The usual Saturday-night crowd of fellows and their girls was milling round the entrance to the pictures, which was all lit up; the girls with hair buffed and lacquered, a little top-heavy in their miniskirts and skintight sweaters, the boys trying not to look dressed up, but dressed up just the same in camouflage battledress or motorcycle jacket and cord flares. Some with long hair, one or two with the beginnings of a beard. A good many of those who were still at school, or worked in banks or stores, had short hair with just the sideburns left to thicken.
Charlie felt distanced from them. He rode slowly, scanning the crowd, then did a circuit of the local War Memorial.
Groups of lone youths sat on the backs of benches in the low-walled park there, and smoked or skylarked; others stood leaning against the cars parked along the kerb, making remarks to the passers-by that flared up on occasion into shouting matches. But on the whole a fairground atmosphere prevailed.
He stopped and shouted across to a group of fellows he recognised from school.
“I'm looking for Cliff Hodges,” he called. “Anyone seen Cliff Hodges?”
“You seen him?” one of them asked another.
The boy pursed his lips.
“We haven't seen him,” the first boy called. “Try the pub.”