Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  He was never able to take in the plots of the films that he and his girlfriend watched each week. Either he was thinking of something he had said to her recently and of how she might have misinterpreted it, or he was thinking of something he would have to say to her when they had left the cinema. Or, again, he was dreading the appearance on the screen of the first scene in which a male character and a female character expressed in words their love for one another or embraced and kissed.

  Whenever he and she walked the last few hundred paces from the bus stop to the front gate of her house after they had alighted from the picture bus, and whenever they walked the same distance on their way home from the parish dance, he would hold one of her hands in one of his hands. In all his later life, he never laughed or even smiled at any spoken or written comment that seemed intended to mock or belittle the feelings of young persons for one another. If ever he had become a writer of fiction, he would never have written about any young person as though to suggest that his or her love, as he or she called it, for one or another young person was of any less account than any state of mind of any person who was no longer young. In short, he believed for the rest of his life that his reaching out for his girlfriend’s hand on certain evenings as he and she picked their way along a gravel footpath in an outlying street of Dandenong, which was at that time in the way of changing from being the nearest to Melbourne of the towns of Gippsland to the furthest suburb from Melbourne in the direction of Gippsland, and her letting his hand find her hand and her letting her hand lie in his hand until they reached her front gate were, at the very least, equal in meaning to any other events that occurred in the lives of any other persons in the world during his and her lifetime. While he was sitting beside her in the cinema, he was preparing himself for the moment later that evening when he would reach out for her hand. Their holding hands was one of a few subjects that he would never have spoken about to her, although he did talk to her about other subjects while they walked hand in hand. He would be hoping, in the cinema, that she, while she sat beside him, was looking forward to his taking her hand later that evening and was hoping that he understood that she understood that they had come to the cinema that evening only because a visit to the cinema was one of the few outings possible for a young man who owned no motor car and a young woman whose parents wanted her to be always in a crowd of young persons whenever she went out with her boyfriend on a Saturday evening in a place that was changing from being a town in the countryside to a suburb of a capital city. And while he was so hoping, he would see on the screen in the cinema the first of the scenes that he had been dreading.

  Throughout each of the many love scenes that he watched with his girlfriend seated close beside him (he never offered to hold her hand in the cinema), he wished that he could have had the courage to tell her afterwards that he would never expect her to fall into his arms when she had hardly got to know him, as American women were expected to do; that he would not give in to his passions (to use the term favoured by Catholic philosophers and theologians) before he had explained himself to her down to the last detail. He was bothered even by the gestures of the men and women in the love scenes: their sighs, the staring of their eyes, the clutching of their hands. He would have liked the young woman beside him to know that his regard for her was so complex and that he was so distinctive a person that he could never express himself by such means as gasps and moaning sounds.

  On the shady side of the house where he sometimes looked at the picture of the man in the Gippsland forest, a treefern grew under a roof of dark-green lattice. At some time during each of his visits to the house, he would stand under the shade of the lattice, touching the fronds of the fern or stroking the hairy trunk. One day he was halfway along the side of the house on his way to the treefern before he saw the oldest of his girl-cousins (she was about nineteen at that time) standing in the shade of the treefern and staring up into the face of the young man who had recently become her fiancé. The year was the last year of the 1940s, and few young men owned motor cars. He had often seen young couples with arms around one another in laneways or in parks but always in darkness. His cousin and her young man were standing only a few paces from him in the light of afternoon, shaded only by the lattice and the fronds of the treefern, and they did not know he was watching them. He stood there, expecting to learn in the next few moments more about the behaviour in private of men and women than he had learned from all his reading and speculating. The two persons in their shady corner then hugged and kissed, but only, so he saw, in imitation of what they had seen in American films, and he tiptoed away, feeling embarrassed for them.

  Even a few months after he had seen for the last time the person who had been his girlfriend for a few months, he could remember no more than some of the names of the films they had watched together. He remembered for the rest of his life much of what had passed through his mind in the cinema, but almost everything that had passed in front of his eyes was lost to him. Likewise, from the hours that he spent at the parish dance on one evening each month he recalled for the rest of his life only his feelings of unrelieved misery and embarrassment.

  He and his girlfriend, together with her sister who was still unengaged and her boyfriend, would set out from his girlfriend’s house. Her mother would stand at the front door until they were out of the front gate. She would call out to them to have fun and to enjoy themselves. He still hoped, until the moment when she had stepped back inside and closed the door, that she might call out to him that she had noticed during the past hour that he had not looked well; that his girlfriend might say to him that she had noticed the very same thing; and that his girlfriend and her mother might together urge him not to go to the dance that evening but to stay with his girlfriend’s parents in their lounge-room, watching television and talking. Every month, as the date of the dance drew nearer, he rehearsed a speech to his girlfriend in which he told her that he did not want to monopolise her company and to keep her from meeting other young people of her own age; that he intended in the future to take her to the doors of the parish hall on the evening of the dance and to call for her after the dance had finished but to spend the intervening time with her parents. What kept him from delivering this speech was his believing that he did not deserve the exquisite pleasure of walking back to her house with her hand lying in his hand unless he had first endured the torture of attending the dance.

  When he and his girlfriend had still been meeting on the train from school and when she had mentioned that she liked dancing, he had quietly begun a course of dancing lessons in a large upstairs room in the shopping centre near his school. He had continued the lessons for nearly six months and had paid much money to the middle-aged woman who taught him for half an hour for week after week. She seemed to be the only teacher in the studio, as she called it, and he seemed to be her only pupil. She did not require him to hold her in the usual dancer’s hold; he and she kept at a little distance from one another with hands on one another’s shoulders. She seemed to be in her forties or fifties, and he was able to relax somewhat with her, although she told him several times that he was a difficult pupil. When he told her at the end of one of his lessons that he was going with his girlfriend to a dance for the first time on the following Saturday evening, she told him to have fun and enjoy himself.

  During the first ten minutes at the first parish dance he attended, he understood that his lessons had been a waste of time and money. The press of people left only an oval space for dancing instead of a rectangle, so that he forgot at once all he had been taught about half-turns and quarter-turns. He was even more confused by having to stand so close to his partner and by not being able to look down at his feet or hers. None of the music played by the band had the simple rhythms of the tunes that his teacher had played for him on her portable record-player. On his first night at the dance, he danced only with his girlfriend and her sister and with a friend of each of them, and he danced only one dance with each of those four, and he se
nsed that each of his partners was doing her best to help him, but he knew that what he was doing did not deserve to be called dancing. He talked ceaselessly to each of his partners to distract her and himself from what was happening below the level of their waists. When the progressive barn dance was announced, and he understood that he would be required to dance with dozens of strange young women, he left the hall and walked in the darkness outside for ten minutes.

  He could hardly believe in later years that he had stayed to the end of not only the first dance but five others. At the last dance he attended, he was no less incompetent than he had been at the beginning. He danced nearly always with the same few partners, stumbling or shuffling around in a trance of embarrassment and babbling at them all the while. He always went outside before the barn dance began, and he was always grateful to his girlfriend and her sister for never having remarked to him afterwards that they had missed him during the progressive barn dance. Even the long periods that he spent at the side of the hall were of little relief. He felt obliged to look always as though he was quietly contented, in case his girlfriend or her sister should look at him from out of the crowd. When either of them stood or sat with him for a short while, he suspected that she was only feeling sorry for him or he felt guilty at keeping her from the enjoyment that he supposed a person got from being actually able to dance.

  At the fifth dance he attended, he danced for the first time with a new partner. In each of the back corners of the hall was one of two groups that he called in his mind the Bachelors and the Spinsters. Members of each group were older than the average person in the hall, some bachelors or spinsters seeming to be in their late twenties. He envied the bachelors, most of whom seemed to know one another and to have much to talk about. Some bachelors seemed never to dance and yet not to be ashamed of this. Even more noticeable than the age of the spinsters was their plainness in appearance. He had thought at first that the spinsters would have been clumsy dancers also, but when one of them was asked to dance, as sometimes happened, she seemed no less skilful than any of the regular dancers. He was often touched by the sight of the spinsters. While he stood watching the dancers, shifting from foot to foot and trying to keep a half-smile on his face for the sake of his girlfriend, he could at least pretend that he did not feel inclined to dance. No one was likely to believe that the spinsters preferred not to dance and had recently declined invitations from would-be partners. Many of them had the same awkward half-smile that he could feel on his own face. He tried not to catch the eye of any spinster. He thought it would have been cruel to give her some hope that he was going to ask her to dance. But at the fifth dance, and again at the sixth, he danced several times with one of the spinsters.

  His girlfriend knew many of the persons in the hall. She was talking to a young woman who might have been twenty-five or even older, and he was standing beside the pair of them, when the band began to play and his girlfriend went to dance with someone she had promised to dance with. He and the woman went on standing together. He hoped she would walk back to the spinsters’ corner where he had seen her often, but she asked him to dance and he was too afraid to refuse. Stupid as he was in many matters, he did not suppose that the spinster was interested in any romantic way in an eighteen-year-old boy. She seemed like a youthful aunt, and he understood that she presented herself as a sort of adviser and wise older sister to his girlfriend and a few other young women. He should have felt at ease with her after she had said to him, when they had only just begun to dance, that the hall was much too crowded for dancing proper steps and had thereafter moved her feet in such a way that he was able to move around the floor in whatever gait he chose without so much as touching a toe of her shoes, whereas he had never previously tried more than three or four steps without having trodden on a toe or an instep of his partner. He should have felt at ease, but he did not like her way of calling his girlfriend a sweet young kid; the spinster seemed to be hinting that his girlfriend was too young and sweet to be pestered by such an odd person as himself.

  He danced twice with the spinster on the night when she first asked him to dance, and he sat with her for a little while in a seat halfway between the bachelors and the spinsters. At the next dance, a month later, he asked her to dance soon after he had danced the first dance, as he always did, with his girlfriend. He still did not like the spinster. He still believed she was preparing to give him some unpleasant advice. He had even thought several times that his girlfriend might have arranged for the spinster to become friendly with him so that she could deliver to him some message that his girlfriend could not bring herself to deliver. And yet, he was much more comfortable shuffling around the floor with her than standing foolishly at the side of the hall. He had even begun to be silent for short periods while he and the spinster were moving around together. And in the periods of silence, he had even begun to think some of the thoughts about the future such as he usually thought when he was near his girlfriend: such a thought as that he would ask his girlfriend after she had become engaged to him never to require him to attend any place where the chief activity was dancing, or, perhaps, that he would ask her after they had become engaged to spend a few hours alone with him in the lounge-room of her home when no one else was in the house and to teach him the beginnings of the baffling art of dancing.

  At every dance he had attended, one or more couples had fallen to the floor. Some subtle change would take place in the slow eddying movement of the dense throng of dancers; two or three young women would cry out; couples would stop dancing all around the hall and would look in the direction of the commotion. Only those nearest the fallen would know how many had gone down or who they were. He, the chief character, since he was hardly ever one of the throng of dancers, had seen only a few couples struggling to their feet or being helped up. When the first fall had taken place at the first dance he attended, he had expected to hear howls of laughter, but onlookers seldom laughed. On the contrary, the people around the fallen were sympathetic and solemn and even, so he believed, rather embarrassed. He himself had always been troubled by the resemblances between dancing and sexual intercourse, and when he first noticed a couple disentangling themselves on the dancefloor and then getting to their feet with flushed faces among onlookers who seemed anxious to put out of their minds what they had just witnessed, he had prayed that he would never be seen lying on top of some young woman on the floor of the crowded hall in his girlfriend’s parish.

  He was always sure that the fall had been caused by someone far ahead of him and the spinster, but no one had ever mentioned the matter afterwards, and he never knew whether or not his girlfriend had thought he was in any way responsible for the fall. He had not fallen far. Some other couple already down had broken the fall of the spinster, and she, being his partner and directly in front of him when those ahead fell, in turn broke his own fall. He had seemed to fall a very short distance and to have been soon upright again. And yet, he seemed to remember having leaned forward for a long time with his hands, which, of course, he had flung out in front of him, each neatly in place and cupped a little around the mound of each of the breasts of the spinster.

  On the second Saturday evening after the events reported in the previous paragraph, he stayed at home before rising early on the Sunday and riding his bike to his girlfriend’s house in time for eight o’clock mass. He and his girlfriend and her sister and her boyfriend walked to mass carrying a picnic hamper and wearing casual clothes with thick sweaters and scarves over their arms. After mass, they and fifty and more young persons from the parish seated themselves in two buses in the churchyard. The young persons were going on what had been advertised as a picnic to the snow (we hope!!!) at Donna Buang. He, the chief character of this story, had had to learn from a map that Mount Donna Buang was east-north-east of the city of Melbourne whereas Mount Dandenong was almost due east; that Donna Buang was almost exactly twice as far from Melbourne as Mount Dandenong; and that Donna Buang was only fifty feet short of being twic
e as high as Mount Dandenong.

  On either side of the aisle in the bus that he and his girlfriend travelled in were seats that each held two persons. Most of those seats were occupied by established couples, with the girl sitting nearer the window and her boyfriend nearer the aisle. At the rear were several long seats, each with room for half a dozen persons. On these seats sat four or five unattached females and more than twice that number of unattached males. In the bus, as in the parish hall on dance-night, he thought of these groups as spinsters and bachelors.

  His girlfriend had sat down at once in one of the window seats, and he sat down beside her, but he believed that this would be the last occasion he could consider the young woman beside him his girlfriend. He was prepared to hear her say when they arrived back at her home from the trip to Donna Buang that he should visit her less often; that he was becoming too serious. He had already heard her say that morning, in the first show of irritation she had ever made towards him, that he sometimes talked too much. He felt sick and foolish as he sat beside her during the first hour of the trip. He was trying to call to mind images that would enable him to see himself once again as a bachelor—not as one of the guffawing bachelors at the rear of the bus who were looking out for the next attractive female who had broken with her boyfriend, but the sort of bachelor he had formerly dreamed of becoming. In the past, whenever he had been sick with anxiety over some girl, he had had a sudden glimpse of himself as a bachelor and had become strong at once.