Read Online Remembering Babylon by David Malouf - Free Book Online Page B

had worked down the mine – imagine that now! The house with a little backyard not big enough for a cat to jump in – and here they were with twenty acres. The father and four brothers, all miners. Janet saw them, in her mother’s telling, sat down at tea together, still in their pit dirt, black-fisted, noisy, only their eyelids, when they fell to eating, and their teeth when they grinned, showing white in the sooty masks, till one after the other, in the dark little scullery off the yard, they ducked their heads in a tub, soaped their backs and shoulders, and too big now in their whiteness for the low-ceilinged parlour, came towelling their heads and larking about and laughing, and were restored at last – she saw that too – to their separate, recognisable selves: Willie, Ewan, Jamie, Rob.
    Her mother as a girl had kept house for them all, washed their shirts, darned their socks, listened to their growls andgrumbles, but she hated the pit life and was determined that when she found a man of her own he would never be a miner. She had watched them grow up, each one, from eager, affectionate little lads into coarse fellows who pushed down and extinguished everything that was fine in them. On Saturday nights they were no better than any other of the Airdrie men. They got into fights, came home bruised but elated, then lay stupefied.
    When their daddie turned up – Janet, glancing up, saw him grin, very pleased with himself and looking twenty years younger – it was just in time, she told them. She was already twenty-four and on the way to being an old maid. One of her brothers brought him in after a football game, but she had seen him already in a tug of war team the summer before. A big, raw-boned, fair-skinned, sandy fellow. Silly drunk and a bit ashamed of himself, he was still as a stockfish on that first occasion, though he was bold enough later. He worked as a gardener, like his father, on a big estate. Her brothers warned her, teasingly, that he wasn’t as tame as he looked, that he liked a dram, had an eye for the girls; but she had seen that for herself. She wasn’t put off.
    Janet listened to all this in a kind of dream, as she always did when her mother spoke of things that brought the world back there alive in her; she clung to every detail, she couldn’t get enough of it. She was in love with this other life her parents had lived; with Scotland and a time before they came to Australia, before she was born, that was her time too, extending her life back beyond the few years she could actually recall, and giving reality to a world she had need of; more alive and interesting, more crowded with things , with people too, than the one she was in. This cousin who was coming would bring some of that with him. He would still have its light upon him, alive and actual. He would have its speech in his mouth.
    But when he arrived he showed no gratitude for the chance they were offering him, and wasn’t at all pleased to see them. He was a stocky, tough lad of nine, a town boy. Airdrie, he told them loftily, was a toon . The bush – it wasn’t even country – was of no interest to him, and Janet saw, becausehe set out in his superior know-all way to make her see it, that the things they had been saving to show him, all their little treasures and secrets, were in his eyes poor – she had not seen till now just how poor. She felt humiliated, as if the poverty was in them. It did not occur to her that he might be protecting himself; that his refusal to enter into their world might be a fear of losing, more than he had done already, the one he had left and was heartsick for. He scoffed and swaggered. Nothing here was good enough for him.
    He began every sentence with ‘At hame in Scotland’ – yet at home, as she knew from her mother, they had been starving. She would harden her heart and mock him. ‘Oh, at hame in Scotland,’ she would sing, imitating his accent, which she also loved. He went red in the face and