The story behind the story: This piece was partly inspired by the dry summer we’ve had and by something else I can’t really put into words – perhaps the idea that spiritual things may coexist alongside physical things… Nonethless, such ground is new to me. I have never written anything quite like it before.

I

We saw each other when we were both still a long way down the road. The shadows were like small children playing in the street, and the old church looming behind the park, like a parent. I caught his light lounging figure swinging awkward past it, and I halted to peer at him. He was all hesitation. I just grinned while some dark, inward part of me soared at his humiliation. And then the still, small voice of conscience: you’re a beast. And he was the rabbit, caught, struggling to get free. I exalted under his writhing. We got close and I saw that he was sweating; he let his eyes reveal something and then covered it up just as quickly. I faltered at his stare. His guarded looks and hesitations spoke like the best kind of words – strung together with such beat and rhythm and dearness that I could not stop listening – and lingered. Though there was nothing about his face to keep me there, I stayed.    

‘Hello Mal.’
‘Ellen.’ 

His oddity gave himself away. He bowed to me right there in the middle of a burning street in high-summer and nodded seriously, did not smile. Embarrassed, I grew annoyed at him. I spoke something nasty under my breath. He straightened.

‘Pardon?’

‘Nothing.’

A car groaned past and blew my hair against my face. We needed rain. The whole town needed a good soaking to wash the dust off everything. Flies gathered at our backs. I could hear their annoying peals and felt the tapping of their great, dirty bodies as they landed against me. 

In the most natural way possible we both turned together and walked back the way he had come. Back towards the church. I had a horrible, damaging desire to say something blunt as Mal’s heavy tread lagged beside me, his dullness weirdly interesting in the hot afternoon, his flat brown eyes, his ruddy cheek. Irritated, I asked why he was following me.  

‘Why do you ask?’ he said, smiling stupidly.

‘Don’t be evasive,’ I said.

‘Don’t be pert.’

‘Pert?’ I laughed. Scoffed actually. I gave him a tilt of the head and continued on – I could not get rid of him. Quietly, Mal walked on beside me quite unaffected.  

‘I’m only heading home.’ I had hoped to scorn him. He persisted – his resolve like a haunting, and I got the uncomfortable sense that he knew it. And was using it blast him. The shadowy gums left marks on the dust-packed footpaths and melted into the black road. A single magpie pecked around in the dirt beneath the young shrubs. And time was forgotten while everything about the place seemed charged with a sort of drive. Off the road and standing quite straight behind sagging gums stood an old building, the stones cut into perfect squares long ago by chisel and hammer; I looked at it and saw the things I wanted. I forgot about Mal for a minute and sighed with pleasure.

‘Look at that! Takes me heavenward.’    

He gave me a curious glance.

‘Do you want some of heaven?’

‘No.’   

I shook my head. This heavy, rotating earth was enough for now. This dust. I did believe in heaven, and that heaven was bigger than the world; but the world seemed big enough. And I was in the world. And I was dust. So what of heaven and her virtuous hundreds? They did not matter to me…   

23 January –

Met her again this morning. She kept me at arm’s length, and I wondered why. She stumbled around her words. The sun was bright, whitening her skin. I saw the blue veins beneath her collarbone. I knew she was laughing at me. I do not mind nor care. For she, as a woman, is a beast. And I am only a man.    

We walked around town because she was bored, I think. We came upon this street with an old church, and she stood in front of it and seemed to get some sort of secret pleasure from it. There were thoughts going around in her head I had no part in. And they could have been beautiful, but I am afraid they were not. I am afraid they were ugliness disguised as beauty. She is a woman: therefore, I tread carefully.         

II

Sitting there, in that dried up old pew, I felt grand. The stretching day left nothing but indulgence, and I saw this as a blessing rather than a sin. Upon my crossed legs sat the familiar bible open at Romans and the spine sitting up against my thigh so that the pages slunk out just right. There was much to be done about my soul, I knew it, but hated the fact. I glanced down at the used pages. Let your love be without hypocrisy. Does that mean I must love everyone? Or does that mean I shouldn’t pretend to love people? May I simply be indifferent? Bored, I twisted my head to the back doors where the sun was coming through. What about him? To the right of the open doors sat Malcolm, light head of hair lost in all that sunlight so that he looked bald. Sitting there like some centennial. He glanced overtly at me, hiding the obviousness of an open stare, and I wondered what an earth he was thinking. His thoughts soon became frightening to me, and I stood for the last song in the rustle with everybody else and remembered, with some relief, that if you felt love for someone it wasn’t hypocrisy to hide it – and that really loving someone made the command all the easier. Though I never imagined that dishonesty could stand up black and awkward like hypocrisy did.  

And all the time afterwards it was I who avoided him while wishing with everything that was in me to talk with him about things: things we’d mentioned briefly to each other before and had found common ground in – like poetry and history and the church during the Middle Ages, and how it felt to be inexperienced and on-your-own in the world, and change. Such good things as these I missed because I hid from them, wouldn’t take them fool that I was.   

10 February –

I find socialising tiresome. It was tiresome today. Hot too – the weather made me want to talk to no one. She was a great deal too prim today. Her silliness I find exasperating. She seems in a constant state of unreality, stuck within her own story, where she’s the main character and everyone else pawns in the play. Her beauty is a thing that tugs at me and rots me from the inside out. It is all so confusing. She is too vivacious. Like a hopelessly beautiful curse.   

I approached her on the street today and caught her eye for a second. She slipped me a smile and a bright hello but otherwise ignored me, bustling on in her façade of busyness. It made me look limp. The power she holds over me in public is not right. I saw her eyes dart sideways, lest anyone we knew walk by and see us. I know she is ashamed of me.          

Walked the dogs, then home to read all afternoon. Dinner at 9:30pm and got a stomach ache. Went outside to see the last little bit of light, but was too late so I write by lamplight, denying the curse, dreading tomorrow.    

III

It had not rained for six weeks, but when it did, we got caught running in the downpour – and laughing because it was just ridiculous, our self-consciousness eaten up by the grey rain. We got to Malcom’s house and ran up under the veranda with a great galumph of sloshing and sniffing. Amid the new wet smells of bush and town, we shook ourselves off like dogs and looked down at our shoes. A gentle dripping sounded from somewhere close. I turned to Mal.

‘Have you…’

Staggering to a stop, I could not go on. Before me stood… yes, it was him – though not the same man I’d run home with. Here was light and kindness and truth. Here was all I had seen that was good in him, only made greater and larger and finally, really alive. There was something recognisable in his air which was Malcolm-like but I wouldn’t dare call him as such. Not like this. He was more of a Greatheart or a Puremind or a Nobleness or something else that needed an entire new language with more syllables and words, with dancing rhythms – perhaps I could have called him by a great song or an epic poem. The kindness of his eyes I noticed first. I would’ve liked to drink it all up if I could. I longed to cover myself because I felt so horribly naked beside him. Here I was, a dirty young thing standing so close to this clearly superior Being – and one whom I’d scorned at that. And here he stood, doing nothing to drive me away, neither revolted nor tainted by my presence. I felt a sudden need to hide my face from his because I knew how transparent my mind would look beside his own searing goodness. And then he did the unexpected.

‘Ellen?’

‘Yes?’ I whispered and raised my head to look at him.   

His eyes narrowed as if he were looking into a great distance.

‘You’re Brilliant. I’ve never seen…’ and Mal stopped speechless. Mal was one of those people who always knew what to say if you gave him time. Now there was nothing. It was a long while before we could talk, though even so words were not needed, it seemed. Between us, all competition, all dominance, all pride had simply fallen away; we could have flown off the ground we were so light from the lack of it.     

‘Ellen…may I call you that?’ he added almost softly like an afterthought. 

‘It is my name.’

‘But you hardly suit it like… like this,’ he gestured in wonderment. This is how we’ve wanted to be all along.

And I heard his thought like it was spoken. The street was empty and along the gutters ran tiny gushlets of water, full of dust, gum leaves and road grit. I looked at him and couldn’t take my eyes off his excellence. 

‘Is this God, do you think?’ I said.  

‘Has to be. Couldn’t be anything else,’ Mal said, crossing his arms across his chest in a natural, heavenly gesture.      

Time became unimportant there under the veranda; and as the sun lowered in the leftover rain it set the town to sparkling while Mal and I revelled in the innocent joy of our simple selves. We were like angels, he and I, soaked by the rain, at ease and finally – for a moment – free.  

22 February –

Got caught in the rain this afternoon. And something strange happened to me. To her as well. She was no longer Ellen. She was like Innocence or Magnificence itself, or like Light brought down straight from the stars. As for me, all my darkness disappeared and it was an agony. Now, I’m not quite sure I don’t want it back. Outside, it’s looking like rain. When next it rains… Well, I’ll be there to see it.

23 February –

To be free of the fetters of the flesh, is what, I believe, all the saints of the past ever wanted. On any ordinary day I am consumed with lust, greed and selfishness. Am I an absolute and total wretch? Yes, I suppose that wouldn’t be wrong. I want things. Want them so that sometimes I am driven mad by the wanting. And then I hear with the ears of my soul: ‘Do not lust…’ For I forget who I am – I forget that I have forgotten. But when I glance up at the new stars of a summer’s night, for one awful moment I remember that I have forgotten. But I won’t be like this forever. The curse lifts.

IV

The sun made me dizzy and the dryness of everything caught in my throat. I stepped off the curb and crossed the road, laden with shopping bags, to where my car sat waiting for me. I got in, closed the door. There was a flash of sun on steel; I burnt my hand on the seatbelt.  

‘El!’

Hearing my name distant across the street, I wound the window down and saw Mal wandering over. I waited.

‘El – hello El.’ Mal bent, grinning through the door. That very smile I had once despised, but felt strangely gentle towards it now, humble and unsure – like the earth beneath my feet were crumbling apart.

‘El, I was wondering if you had a copy of Chekhov’s plays at all? I need to borrow them for some writing or other I’m working on at the moment,’ and he waved his hand – an awkward motion.  

‘Yeah. Yes, you may – I’ll bring them Sunday.’

There was a pause.

‘You’re too kind,’ and Mal took an imaginary hat off his head and tipped it at me. He straightened and stood there by my car door. I draped my hand over the gearstick. I looked out at the glaring street. Malcolm dipped his head down again.

‘Well… see you then El.’

And he walked off, poised, self-assured. And my will finally broke. The gentled mare.

V

26 February –

This new light we both find ourselves under. Is it really only for us? I can’t believe so.

The sky dripped once again, spattering the concrete with black speckles and windscreens with clear grey. I was at home, leaning upon the old fence and smelling the rain. This heavy rotating summer, this dust was not enough. I looked out at the old world and saw my weary soul reflected upon it. I remembered a line I’d read in a book once: One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself… And then Mal was standing beside me, hands in pockets. The rain began in earnest.        

And whenever it rains, this is how it is. When the sun comes back, so too our old, terrestrial selves, though not without glimpses of our Becoming – in the joy of our faces, in the light of our eyes. Mal turns to me. He scuffles the dirt with his boot.      

‘We’re not just here waiting to die,’ he says, ‘We’re becoming glorious.’