Remembering Babylon by David Malouf Read Free Book Online

handled the comb.
    But there were times, too, when he felt an uneasiness in the older girl, as if she saw that he could not be treated as a child or plaything. He would catch her regard upon him, it was solemn, and an odd feeling would come over him that she was trying to see right into him, to catch his spirit, aware, as the others were not, that he was not entirely what he allowed them to see.
    He was surprised. If anyone else had looked at him that way, he would have felt his bowels go soft. But her gaze was so open and vulnerable that he felt no threat in it, and in himself only a stillness, a sense of tender ease at being exposed a moment – not to her, but to himself. Then a cloud would come to her brow and she would glance away.
    For her, too, he thought, it was that moment when she hadfirst seen him balanced up there on the fence that she was looking towards, and he felt in the concentration of her gaze that he hung there still. Something, in that moment, had been settled between them, as it had between him and the boy.
    He went back and back to it. In the strange flickering light of the empty afternoon, with the sky ablaze on his shoulders, his belly empty, little insects opening and closing their wings over the still grass heads, the long, wavering note of crickets endlessly extended, he would stand gripping the fence rail with his toes, trying to stay up there long enough to take it all in, with the tendency to overbalance growing and growing in his upper body as if it was his heart that had been thrown off balance, and the three children staring: the boy, eyes narrowed, jaw set, with the stick at his shoulder; the dog in midair, also suspended, his tongue dripping; the gawky, fair-haired girl with one hand raised against the sun, the thin wrist arched, and for the first time that puzzled look in her eyes that might, he sometimes felt, just in itself have held him there, never to fall, so intense was the power of her gaze. If he had given himself over to that rather than to the heaviness of his own body, he might have stayed up there for ever. That was what her look meant. Only at that moment he had failed to grasp it.
    She was a puzzle to him. He could never be sure what she was thinking. He knew the boy’s thoughts because he wanted them known. His power lay in your recognising that he possessed it. It was the power that belonged to him because he was a boy; because, one day, the authority he had claimed in raising the stick to his shoulder would be real. It made him both easier and more dangerous. There was always in your dealings with him something to be taken account of: his concern for those whose eye he was trying to catch. The girl’s power was entirely her own. She needed no witness to it.
    As for the adults, he soon developed for Ellen McIvor, the mother of the little girls, an affection of a kind he had not known before; he had so little experience in his life of either the domestic or the feminine. It pleased him to find things he could do to make her life easier, and all the more to see the shy, offhand way she accepted them. The desire he had togive her pleasure had in it none of the anxious need to placate that lay behind every gesture he made towards the man of the house. It was free. He felt lightened by it.
    Jock McIvor, on the other hand, was from the start uneasy with him. He tried to be fair, to be patient, but his heart was not in it.
    When Jock came to him with a request, or more likely a complaint, he felt like running. He shuffled, turned his shoulder; Jock immediately took it the wrong way. ‘For God’s sake, man, Ah’m no’ gonna hit ye. Ah jist want t’ tell ye again, ye’d better no’ follow the bairns aboot – Ah’ve telt ye a hunner times. An’ ye’d better no’ gang wand’rin’ on the Masons’ side either. Ah’ve telt ye that as weel. Barney’s nervous. Ah dinnae mean t’ tell ye again.’
    The man was troubled. Gemmy saw it and was watchful. Jock’s fear of