Free Remembering Babylon by David Malouf Page B

cloud.
    Grasshoppers, pinches of dust but with spring-like muscles in their thighs that allowed them to leap distances that in human terms would have been hundreds of yards, seemed made of the finest glass, and she too felt fine-spun, toughly transparent.
    Trees shook out ribbons of tattered bark, and the smooth skin under it was palest green, streaked orange like a sunset, or it had the powdery redness of blood. Glory was the word she thought of. A part of her rose into vague, bright zones where her name, she thought, ought to have been Flora; she hated plain Janet. In giving it to her they had set her too low and thus too early settled her fate. (It was Flora Macdonald she had in mind, but some other dream-figure with flowers round her hem and bright petals opening miraculously out of the clods at her feet might also have been there in the regions she moved in an inch or two above the earth.)
    But she was a practical child and sceptical of mere feelings. They blazed up a moment, then died and left you stranded, barefoot, in the grass. She did not put too much store by them, but they were important enough, these moments, for her to keep them to herself.
    Unlike Lachlan. When he was fired up with something he had to let it out. That was what made things difficult for him. Full of bright schemes for the future, heroic visions in which the limitations of mere boyhood would at last be transcended, he felt that if he could only see them clearly enough they would be there, up ahead, waiting for him to catch up bearing the details at last of place and time.
    As soon as he was old enough, with Gemmy as his guide, he would get up an expedition to search for Dr Leichhardt. Somewhere along the way he might be wounded by blacks. Gemmy would nurse him back to health with herbs only the natives knew of. He would discover two or three rivers, which he would name after some of his acquaintances, and a mountain to which he might give his aunt’s name, Mount Ellen, or the name of some place in Scotland, and they would find Leichhardt, or his bones at least, and when they got backand people wanted to put up a monument, he would insist, nobly, that Gemmy’s name should be inscribed there along with his own. Then, when all that was done …
    There was no end, no limit either, to his plans.
    Janet could not take it seriously, not because she did not believe in his capacity, one day, to do such things, but because the things themselves were so ordinary. Her view was that when real life caught up with you, it would not be in a form you had already imagined and got the better of. But she had no wish any longer to bring him down, so in this too he had his triumph over her.
    The chief sharer of his visions was Gemmy, who listened, grasped only half of what he heard, and made his own assessments.
    What moved him most was to see that he too was there in the boy’s dreams. He felt a rush of affection at being trusted and given a place in what Lachlan Beattie had laid up to himself, but also a fearful protectiveness that Lachlan, if he had perceived it, would have resented.
    He was just a child! The realisation shocked Gemmy but settled him too. It was not often here that he could reclaim a sense of himself as a grown man.

6
    F ROM THE BEGINNING there were those among them, Ned Corcoran was the most vehement, for whom the only way of dealing with blacks was the one that had been given scope elsewhere. ‘We ought to go out,’ he insisted, controlling the spit that flooded his mouth, ‘and get rid of ’em, once and for all. If I catch one of the buggers round my place, I’ll fuckin’ pot ’im.’ He jerked out the last couple of syllables, and the explosion they made, and the silence afterwards, made some men uncomfortably hot. The rest shifted their boots but did not speak. They were not so candid as Ned Corcoran, but did not essentially disagree with him. It was the quickest way; the kindest too maybe, in the long run. They had seen what