Free The Complete Stories by David Malouf

rugby at the weekends or belonged to a surf club. Their partners—they were sometimes married, mostly not—worked as arts administrators, or were in local government. A Mitchell Maze house was a sign that you had arrived but were not quite settled.
    Airy improvisations, or—according to how you saw it—calculated and beautiful wrecks, a lot of their timber was driftwood blanched and polished by the tide, or had been scrounged from building sites or picked up cheap at demolitions. It had knotholes, the size sometimes of a twenty-cent piece, and was so carelessly stripped that layers of oldpaint were visible in the grain that you could pick out with a fingernail, in half-forgotten colours from another era: apple green, ox-blood, baby blue. A Mitchell Maze house was a reference back to a more relaxed and open-ended decade, an assurance (a reassurance in some cases) that your involvement with the Boom, and all that went with it, was opportunistic, uncommitted, tongue-in-cheek. You had maintained the rage, still had a Che or Hendrix poster tacked to a wall of the garage, and kept a fridge full of tinnies, though you
had
moved on from the flagon red. As for Mitch himself, he came with the house. “Only not often enough,” as one of his clients quipped.
    He might turn up one morning just at breakfast time with a claw hammer and rule at the back of his shorts and a load of timber on his shoulder. One of the kids would already have sighted his ute.
    “Oh great,” the woman at the kitchen bench would say, keeping her voice low-keyed but not entirely free of irony. “Does this mean we're going to get that wall? Hey, kids, here's Mitch. Here's our wall.”
    “Hi,” the kids yelled, crowding round him. “Hi, Mitch. Is it true? Is that why you're here? Are you goin’ t’ give us a
wall?”
    They liked Mitch, they loved him. So did their mother. But she also liked the idea of a wall.
    He would accept a mug of coffee, but when invited to sit and have breakfast with them would demur. “No, no thanks,” he'd tell them. “Gotta get started. I'll just drink this while I work.”
    He would be around then for a day or two, hammering away till it was dusk and the rosellas were tearing at the trees beyond the deck and dinner was ready; staying on for a plate of pasta and some good late-night talk then bedding down after midnight in a bunk in the kids’ room, "to get an early start,” or, if they were easy about such things, crawling in with a few murmured apologies beside his hosts. Then in the morning he would be gone again, and no amount of calling, no number of messages left at this place or that, would get him back.
    Visitors observing an open wall would say humourously, "Ah, Mitch went off to get a packet of nails, I see.”
    Sensitive fellows, quick to catch the sharpening of their partner's voice as it approached the subject of a stack of timber on the living-room floor, or a bathroom window that after eleven months was still without glass, would spring to the alert.
    As often as not, the first indication that some provisional but to this point enduring arrangement was about to be renegotiated would be a flanking attack on the house.
    “Right,
mate,
“ was the message, "let's get serious here. What about that wall?”
    Those who were present to hear it, living as they did in structures no less flimsy than the one that was beginning to break up all around them, would feel a chill wind at their ear.
    All this Jo had observed, with amusement and a growing curiosity, for several months before she found herself face to face with the master builder himself.
    J O WAS THIRTY-FOUR and from the country, though no one would have called her a country girl. Before that she was from Hungary. Very animated and passionately involved in everything she did, very intolerant of those who did not, as she saw it, demand enough of life, she was a publisher's editor, ambitious or pushy according to how you took these things, and successful enough