Free Remembering Babylon by David Malouf Page A

will.
    But he saw after a time, for all his stubbornness and pride, that if he was to get on here he would have to know the place. He set out, in a dogged way, to learn all the little skills and tricks of bushcraft, and because he was quick and had to be first in everything was soon as much a bushman as the best of them, with a grit, and a fierce little-mannish tenacity that even Jim Sweetman grew to respect. Jock McIvor was proud of him. They tracked and hunted together, shot scrub turkey, and bronze-wings and topknots and fruit pigeon, and in the ti-tree forest on the margin of the lagoons a dozen varieties of duck.
    It was a flame in the boy, this power he had acquired over the world they moved in. He gave up being contemptuous, since he was the one now who ‘knew things’, assumed an easy, masculine air that he had picked up by imitation from his elders, and was so good at it that it looked like nature. And what of me? she thought. I am as brave as he is. I could do all that. Being in possession now of so many skills, and the code that went with them and belonged to men, he had put himself beyond reach. And she was still, if only by an inch now, the taller!
    She resented bitterly the provision his being a boy had made for him to exert himself and act. He had no need to fret or bother himself; only to be patient and let himself grow and fill out the lines of what had been laid up for him. The assurance of that, and of his own will, gave him a glow you might never have guessed at from the thin-faced, thin-shouldered town lad he had been when he first came to them. He would grow quickly now. The vision of what lay before him would square his shoulders, deepen his voice, give him room.
    She had no such vision of her own future. All she saw laidup for herself was what her mother presented, a tough pride in competence, in being unflagging and making no fuss. She admired her mother but the narrowness of it was terrible to her.
    All silent mutiny, she would stand punching at a lump of dough at her mother’s table, and might have gone on doing it for ever – stood there with one bare foot on the other on the dirt floor, punching away at her own dull lump of a soul. Her mother watched and was concerned. She looked up and smiled, a wan attempt. Her mother was not fooled.
    She pored over books, anything she could lay her hands on that offered some promise that the world was larger, more passionate, crueller – even that would be a comfort – than the one she was bound to.
    She sat over a piece of simple needlework, and worked as if her life was in every stitch; as if one day the angel of the Last Judgment would hold up the pot-holder with its design of forget-me-nots, point to a stitch that was too small, or not straight, and say for the whole world, all the gathered souls of all the ages to hear: ‘Janet McIvor, did you do this?’
    One day, hunched in the shade of a scrubby lemon tree, picking idly at a scab on her knee, she was amazed, when the hard crust lifted, to discover a colour she had never seen before, and another skin, lustrous as pearl. A delicate pink, it might have belonged to some other creature altogether, and the thought came to her that if all the rough skin of her present self crusted and came off, what would be revealed, shining in sunlight, was this finer being that had somehow been covered up in her.
    When she got up and walked out into the paddock, and all the velvety grass heads blazed up, haloed with gold, she felt, under the influence of her secret skin, suddenly floaty, as if she had been relieved of the weight of her own life, and the brighter being in her was very gently stirring and shifting its wings.
    In a particular vibrancy of light that on another occasion might have given her a headache, all the world shimmered and was changed.
    The paddock of standing wheat when she wandered outinto it boomed with a flaminess that bounced and struck out flares, then was quenched by a passing