Free The Complete Stories by David Malouf Page B

attractions. She was flattered, moved, and in the end felt a small glow of triumph at having so much pleased him. For a moment he entirely yielded, and she felt, in his sudden cry, and in the completeness afterwards with which he sank into her arms, that she had been allowed into a place that in every other circumstance he kept guarded, closed off.
    She herself was dazzled. By a quality in him—
beauty
is what she said to herself—that took her breath away, a radiance that burned her lips, her fingertips, every point where their bodies made contact. But when she tried to express this—to touch him as he had touched her and reveal to him this vision she had of him—he resisted. What she felt in his almost angry shyness was a kind of distaste. She retreated, hurt, but was resentful too. It was unfair of him to exert so powerful an appeal and then turn maidenly when he got a response.
    She should have seen then what cross-purposes they would be at, and not only in this matter of intimacy. But he recognised her hurt, and in a way, she would discover, that was typical of him, tried out of embarrassment to make amends.
    He was sitting up with his back against the bedhead enjoying a smoke. Their eyes met, he grinned; a kind of ease was re-established between them. She was moved by how knocked about he was, the hard use to which he had put his body, the scraps and scrapes he had been through. Her fingertips went to a scar, a deep nick in his cheekbone under the left eye. She did not ask. Her touch was itself a question.
    “Fight with an arc lamp,” he told her. His voice had a humorous edge. “I lost. Souvenir of my brief career as a movie star.”
    She looked at him. The grin he wore was light, self-deprecatory Hewas offering her one of the few facts about himself—from his childhood, his youth—that she would ever hear. She would learn only later how useless it was to question him on such matters. You got nowhere by asking. If he did let something drop it was to distract you, while some larger situation that he did not want to develop slipped quietly away. But that was not the case on this occasion. They barely knew one another. He wanted, in all innocence, to offer her something of himself.
    When he was thirteen—this is what he told her—he had been taken by his mother to an audition. More than a thousand kids had turned up. He didn't want the part, he thought it was silly, but he had got it anyway and for a minute back there, because of that one appearance, had been a household name, a star.
    She had removed her hand and was staring.
    “What?” he said, the grin fading. He gave her an uncomfortable look and leaned across to the night table to stub out his cigarette.
    “I can't believe it,” she was saying. “I can't believe this. I know who you are. You're Skip Daley!”
    “No I'm not,” he said, and laughed. “Don't be silly.”
    He was alarmed at the way she had taken it. He had offered it as a kind of joke. One of the
least
important things he could have told her.
    “But I saw that film! I saw it five times!”
    “Don't,” he said. “It was nothing. I shouldn't have let on.”
    But he could have no idea what it had meant to her. What
he
had meant to her.
    Newly arrived in the country, a gangly ten-year-old, and hating everything about this place she had never wanted to come to—the parched backyards, the gravel playground under the pepper trees at her bare public school, the sing-song voices that mocked her accent and deliberately, comically got her name wrong—she had gone one Saturday afternoon to the local pictures and found herself tearfully defeated. In love. Not just with the hard-heeled freckle-faced boy up on the screen, with his round-headed, blond, pudding-bowl haircut and cheeky smile, his fierce sense of honour, the odd mixture in him of roughness and shy, broad-vowelled charm, but with the whole barefoot world he moved in, his dog Blue, his hardbitten parents who were in danger of losing