The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

by Elspeth Davie

  ‘Wait!’ he said. ‘Did you look at those weeklies?’ His peremptory tone made the other man gape. ‘I gave you the lot, didn’t I? Read the lot!’

  The other’s annoyance increased dramatically. ‘Here – take them! Did I ask to have the whole damn load dumped on me?’ He took the pile of papers, delivered them with a thump to the other seat and retired into his corner. After some minutes he took an engagement diary from his pocket and absorbed himself in it.

  Molson stared across at him, struck by a chilling thought. He began searching for his own diary – through every pocket of his overcoat, in the zipped side-flaps of his briefcase. The search was pointless. The book, he knew, was where it always was and always would be, year after year – in the left-hand inner pocket of his jacket. He dreaded finding it. Amongst the remembered voices of that day one rose clear above the rest: ‘Not many blanks there!’ Mrs Woodlock had exclaimed on sight of the diary. With what venomous sarcasm she had uttered it!

  Molson drew out the flat, green book and laid it on his knee. For a long time he stared at it, willing its contents to be intact. The diary was still warm from being close to his chest. It was a heart of a kind – reliable and exact. No matter if each year there was a change of heart. In essence it was always the same. Molson opened the first page, and his heart leapt. His name, his address, his phone number, his car number – all there, thank God! On the second page and third – Driving Licence, TV Licence, Credit Card and Passport Number, Bank Book and Blood Group, Date of Birth and Glove Size. He was not totally annihilated. Still, with fearful caution he turned other pages. It was as it had always been – the names in black and red, underlinings and circlings, scribbled letters and block letters. Page after page he turned. He found no gap. His timetable stood firm and clear on all its lines between the red dates.

  ‘Not a blank in the whole book – see for yourself!’ cried Molson to the man in the corner and he waved the diary in the air. ‘Crammed to the covers. Not a space, not a gap, not a chink!’

  But the other was still smarting from their last exchange. ‘And what about it?’ he replied. ‘Couldn’t I say exactly the same myself? Amn’t I up to the neck in it this year, next year and well on into the next again? If it comes to that I could fill up a three-year diary any day you wanted it. No trouble at all. Oh no, don’t talk to me about blanks!’

  Molson wasn’t listening. He was trying to crush a massive wad of papers into the narrow space under the seat. He was not absolutely successful. A corner of one paper still protruded, but he put his heel on it. Unbelievable vacancies haunted his mind, but his own cosmos was safe. He took out his pen and double-lined certain dates in his diary. His stroke was tremulous to begin with but it gained firmness as he went on. Once in a while he paused to sharpen up an asterisk star, and here and there where the nebulous circles had grown faint, thickened them with a darker line.

  The Night of the Funny Hats

  THE BUS – THREE days out from Perth in Western Australia and en route for Adelaide – was now crossing the great empty expanse which skirts the Nullarbor Plain. There was one more overnight stop and a full day’s travelling still to go. ‘You asked for a wilderness – you’ve got it!’ the driver called back defiantly to his passengers as they penetrated further and further along one of the longest and loneliest stretches of the Australian continent. He was an excessively conscientious man and he had need to be, for his responsibilities were heavy. The passengers behind him were a mixed crowd. Many of the Australians were tourists crossing by bus for the first time, others were the ordinary travellers from the west and north-west of the country visiting relatives on the eastern side. There were married couples amongst them, pairs of friends and people travelling on their own, a few elderly persons and one child. Amongst the visitors there was a young woman teacher from Yorkshire, two German tourists and an American geologist. The road they were now on, the Eyre Highway, had been sealed three or four years back and its surface was good, though there were still stretches of deep dust and a few cracked, warped patches where flood and heat had got the better of it and repair work had been going on. There were some on the bus who had covered hundreds of miles of dirt road in their time, or had set foot in the red deserts and tropic places of this land. Even now they thought of themselves as explorers of a kind. And there were some, on the other hand, who’d taken one long look through the window and withdrawn their eyes. Briskly they had begun to discuss the well-kept gardens of their home towns and the difficulties of keeping a green lawn. It had been a time of long, fierce drought. They talked of the regulations on watering, of hoses efficient and inefficient. For in this country from its beginnings, water had been the constant common topic down the years. Water – the struggle to find it and preserve it, water for animals and crops, water for hundreds of thousands of acres of land. As if to keep them always in mind of this, a great pipeline had accompanied them on the earlier part of their journey from Perth for some hundreds of miles, sometimes running parallel to the road, sometimes snaking its way around outcrops of rock or disappearing off into the far distance. Occasionally it would dive underground for a time, only to reappear suddenly a few yards away.

  The horizon at which they stared with dread or longing grew no less strange as hour after hour went by. Where land met sky there was a dark blue line, dead straight and endless, giving the illusion of a distant sea. Yet water had once been here and the immense limestone plateau they were crossing had been built up by an ancient sea. This landscape, though flat, was a subtly changing one. During the last hours they had covered regions which were almost desert, and others where a low scrub grew, or where sparse, reddish grass alternated with great tracts of saltbush and bluebush whose colour varied from soft grey-green to blues and dark greens against the cream-pink earth. There were areas covered with white stones as far as the eye could see, and growing here and there along the ground by the roadside, a few low-spreading blue flowers. The perspective of this landscape and its light was such that every object in it appeared to exist by itself in total separateness from the rest. Each bush, tree, stone and flower lived in the naked light with its own black shadow sharply defined – a shadow which would grow longer and sharper as the sun went down. Certain passengers could not get enough of the silent singleness of these things. They stared out beyond the verge of the road as though they had never looked at a stone or at a bush before. Only when light began to leave the landscape would they draw back again into the warm, lit world of the bus.

  It was their last full day on the plain. Late tomorrow, after their overnight stop, they would be back to civilization. At intervals throughout this day the bus had stopped to let them stretch their legs, and then it was not only space that stunned them. It was silence. The thing was palpable. It was not a silence they had ever known before. It beat upon the ears. At their second stop on the road one or two travellers walked off some short distance on their own in order to see the full circle of the horizon. Others, amid a steady clicking of cameras, drew closer together and attempted to crack the silence. There was a lively discussion on the making of roads, on the date and construction of the giant water-pipe. There were shouts and laughter when an unwary one, wandering a few yards off the road, put his hand upon a rounded, cushion-shaped bush and snatched it off with a shriek as lethal spikes stabbed him. Others, to bring the unknown into focus, tried to describe in sober detail what they were looking at. Their determined voices died a little. Each human description seemed at once deflected from its object. The place existed for itself. Soon silence closed in again.

  The driver allowed them all to have their full fifteen-minute break, but on the wanderers especially he kept a wary eye. They were all tired; their legs were still cramped as they finally climbed back into the bus again. When it moved off, their driver’s face – or what they could see of it in the mirror – looked more than ever strained. Nevertheless, on and off throughout the day he had reminded them of some festivity that had been planned for their last n
ight. Now he reminded them again. Each time there was a flatness about his voice as he spoke of it. He was a serious, even a rather melancholy man. Very early on in the journey he had told his passengers that he was first and foremost a good driver, not an entertainer nor a clown. It seemed that he was comparing himself with certain younger, jokier drivers and that he felt some resentment at what might be expected of him. For it was obvious that long ago, during his training, he had been warned that not only jokes would be needed on the road, but that fun and games would be expected at the last meal of any long, outlandish journey. He had been told that a Funny Hat Night would always go down well – it was a painless thing and very easy to plan. Many times he had managed it before. Wearily he brought it up again.

  The passengers had listened to the first announcement of this event in silence. They had never needed to be reminded that this man was no clown. From the start they had known him only as a painfully conscientious driver – and one with other unenviable duties on his shoulders. Every morning he loaded the heavy luggage underneath the bus, shifting the stuff again to make room for last-minute bags and boxes, or carting the unwieldier items round to the other side. He sorted out arguments over seats, listened to grievances about beds. At stops throughout the day, he saw to it that his charges never wandered far into the unknown bush – counted them, consoled them, gave them the facts about certain rocks, certain plants, and at night pointed out the kangaroos that pounded away on either side from the headlights of the bus or the occasional dingo dog loping off into the darkness. He made sure of their overnight stops, told them about weather, about water – the water that could be drunk, the water that could not be drunk, mentioned their distance from hospitals, the difficulties of radio doctors, stopped the bus for those who in spite of warning had drunk the water, thanked those who praised him, warned the boorish amongst the men, warded off persistent charmers amongst the women. And now again in his serious, conscientious voice, he mentioned hats.

  ‘Hats?’ shouted one woman from the back. ‘What hats? We’ve got no hats!’

  ‘No, of course you’ve got no hats.’ The driver spoke patiently into the mouthpiece which enabled him to be heard to the very end of the long coach. ‘That’s the point. You make your hats out of anything you can lay hands on – scarves, ribbons, ties, stockings. Decorate them with twigs if you want, or leaves – anything you can find out there. Or drinking straws and paper napkins – whatever you can pick up at the next café stop. And don’t forget the men are in it too!’ Having done his duty, the driver was silent for a while. But at intervals he spoke of the coming night.

  As the time came up to midday, the passengers had looked at one another’s heads and thought of hats. There was an unreality about this thought as there had been about everything else on the journey. They could not conjure up a hat made out of ribbons or ties, far less from anything that might be found in the impenetrable landscape outside the bus window. The region they were now passing through was sparse and sandy, with a scattering of small pink-and-white stones. The line of distance was still a deep sea-blue. For a long time they had seen neither animal nor bird. There was no breath of wind. There was no cloud in the sky and there never had been a cloud for months on end. At one o’clock they stopped at a small place on the roadside – not much more than a drive-in café beside some lorry repair shacks and a petrol pump. There was little time to eat, for the driver had a schedule to keep to and there was a long way to go before their last stop that night. In less than an hour some of the passengers were already making their way towards the bus, or standing outside for a few moments to draw in an oven-breath of air before starting off again.

  There were only three passengers travelling on their own – a mining engineer who’d come to this country from Bristol over fifteen years ago, the young exchange teacher from Yorkshire, and an elderly woman who made the journey from Perth to Adelaide every other year to visit her son, his wife and her two grandchildren. These three tended to come together more by chance than by choice, or occasionally because it was convenient to sit at tables with one another rather than intrude on the tighter groups. This afternoon they came separately from the café and each walked a short way out into the wilderness beyond the road. They seemed at the same time totally isolated and yet connected, for each threw a sharp, dark shadow on the ground, a shadow linking them with one another and with the nearby stones and bushes – though not in the human way. This was a beautiful and fearful place for human beings to stand alone in. Once it had been a place for pioneers, adventurers and explorers of crazy, unimaginable courage. Even now desperate people might come here, longers after loneliness, addicts of silence and of the receding horizon, and the three persons in the midst of it now drew instinctively together as though suddenly aware of this.

  ‘Well, have you started to get busy on your funny hats?’ said the engineer, turning to the two women. It was a harmless enough question, yet by breaking so profound a silence it had taken on a mocking tone.

  ‘I doubt if I’ve ever worn a hat in my life, funny or not,’ said the younger woman quickly. ‘And anyway – what about your own?’

  ‘Never thought about it and don’t intend to,’ he said. His expression, far from being satirical, was sombre. As for his body, it gave the uncomfortable impression of fineness and thickness mixed. He was tall, heavy in build, with a large, round head of black hair set upon narrow shoulders. His arms were ponderous, his hands thin. There was a thickness about his cheeks and jaw and puffy purple circles about his eyes. These eyes were blue – startlingly protuberant and bright, as though by-passing all the heaviness of the rest.

  ‘I suppose,’ said the grandmother, ‘at my age they’ll be waiting for me to turn up in some sort of fancy Victorian bonnet. Well, they can wait. One reason being that I’ve no intention of covering my head if I can help it. I happen to be deaf in one ear. The left one. People who know me tend to speak on my right.’

  Behind her the young woman moved over unobtrusively to the right side. The man stood where he was.

  ‘Do you have to travel a lot in your work?’ said this woman, who’d heard something of the engineer’s job.

  ‘A good deal.’

  ‘And of course this must be one of your longest journeys?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not here for the work this time.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, then,’ she said.

  ‘A complete break away from it all,’ added the older woman knowingly.

  ‘It’s the silence I’m after,’ said the man. There was complete silence for a moment.

  ‘Stupidly I’d imagined we’d be off the bus for much longer periods,’ said the older woman. ‘Well, we could certainly do with more time to stretch our legs. I know I could. I get cramp here in my calf if I sit too long. And you can’t stand up in the bus on these roads. If you stood for a second you’d be hurled around like a ragdoll.’

  ‘It’s the silence I’m after,’ said the engineer again. ‘Total and utter silence. I’d like to go right out and stay out.’

  And now there was total silence. No breath from the great plain. No human breath, for his companions did not care to speak. Nevertheless, after some time the older of the two said in a very low voice to the other: ‘Of course I have some idea what I could make it from. For instance, I’ve a long, nylon scarf in my case and a couple of brooches. I suppose I could make do with that if I had to. But of course I don’t have to, so I certainly won’t do it.’

  ‘The only thing I can think of is my bathcap with some kind of made-up bow,’ said the other. Her description was of a pantomime cap, but she did not smile. Indeed her face was very serious, like that of someone contemplating not the clown in herself but the phantom.

  Some of the passengers were still in the café, some had disappeared into the lavatories on either side. A few were already on the bus. The driver now sounded the horn three times – a long, warning bray. He was not an aggressive man and had seldom had to shout, but the pressure of time had
grown tighter and tighter around him as the miles went by. Most of the passengers came quickly to the summons.

  ‘Are we all here?’ The driver stared round at them as they took their seats. His eyes were red through staring at night and day, and at the bright and dark of the road. ‘All here! All aboard, skipper! All set! Ready for the road!’ the voices answered him. But the driver took nothing on chance. He walked slowly up and down the bus, his lips moving as he made the count. The two women who were on their own had sat together throughout the journey, changing seats now and then to get the window side. And now the younger one looked round quickly. ‘Is he in?’

  ‘Of course he’s in.’

  ‘He went to the lavatory last thing.’

  ‘Well he’s here now. Right there at the back.’

  ‘The stories you hear of someone left behind!’

  ‘Not on this line you don’t. Not with this driver.’

  ‘Do you know what he was getting at out there?’

  ‘No, I didn’t hear the half. He was on my deaf side, remember? Silence – he was on about that. Well, he’s from Sydney. Maybe those in the cities can do with a bit of silence. Now where I live, I’m far, far out. Most of the time it’s quiet as the grave. I could do with some noise. Everyone needs something different of course, depending on what they’ve got.’