Remembering Babylon by David Malouf Read Free Book Online Page A

getting on the wrong side of his friends might in the end be more dangerous to him, he thought, than the open hostility he met in the settlement, where he was always under suspicion, and always, even when no one appeared to be watching, under silent scrutiny.
     
    What had brought him to them? Even after weeks in which he had become a familiar sight around the settlement, they continued to put the question to one another, or, more darkly, to themselves.
    Was he in league with the blacks? As infiltrator, as spy? Did he slip off when they were not watching – they had work to do, they could not always be watching – and make contact with them? Did they visit him secretly at night? Maybe they did not even come in the flesh but had other, less visible ways of meeting and passing information that a white man would not recognise because it was not in a white man’s mind to conceive of it. Even those who were well-disposed to the fellow found him unnerving.
    He wasn’t all there, that’s what people said; they meant he was simple. But there were some among them for whom the phrase, light as it was, suggested something darker: that even when he was there, in full sunlight, refusing to meet your gaze but engaged, so far as he was capable of it, in conversation,he was halfway gone, across a line, like the horizon, that was not to be fixed in real space, and could begin anywhere.
    ‘He’s makin’ mugs of yous,’ Ned Corcoran asserted. ‘You k’n say what you like about ’im. He don’t fool me.’
    They frowned and looked away.
    You learned up here to make allowances, but Ned Corcoran was not a man they had much respect for. His idea of neighbourliness was to send one of his boys across (he had a whole mob of them), usually the soft-eyed eight-year-old, to borrow some implement or other that then found its way into his store. Months later, out of pure generosity, he would lend it out to some other fellow as if it was his own. He’d get it back, too. He’d send the same shamefaced eight-year-old to ask for it, who would stand with his mouth open, breathing, while you fetched it for him. They were indulgent of this little eccentricity but resented it when Ned assumed a superior tone and told them bluntly that the black white-feller was trading on their goodwill.
    Was he?
    Thwarted by their failure, most of the time, to grasp what the codger was after, and suspecting that his giggling and sidling and hopping about on one foot was meant to make a fool of them, some men would grow hot under the collar and begin to push him about; to the point at times where they had to be restrained. Even those who felt sorry for the man found themselves dismayed by what they called his ‘antics’. They felt an urge, when he went into one of his jerking and stammering fits, to look hard at the horizon, and when that yielded no satisfaction, to give grave attention to the dust between their boots. He was a parody of a white man. If you gave him a word for a thing, he could, after a good deal of huffing and blowing, repeat it, but the next time round you had to teach it to him all over again. He was imitation gone wrong, and the mere sight of it put you wrong too, made the whole business somehow foolish and open to doubt.
    Poor bugger, he had got lost, and as just a bairn too. It was a duty they owed to what they were, or claimed to be, to bring him back, if it was feasible, to being a white man. But was it feasible? He had been with them, quite happily itappeared, for more than half his life: living off the land, learning their lingo and all their secrets, all the abominations they went in for. Were they actually looking at a man, a white man, actually putting a knife into his hands and passing him bread, who had –
    They broke off, unwilling to let the shadow of it pass their lips and become a fact in their world. If he had, he showed no sign of it, none at all. There was nothing in his snub-nosed, squint-eyed looks and the innocence with