by Stephen Orr
‘It’s never been late?’
‘Never.’
‘Maybe it’s a coincidence?’
‘Maybe. Anyway, you’ve gotta think of it like this: your Dad’s holding things together, so you’ve gotta help him.’
‘I always have.’
‘I know.’
Silence, again.
‘She’ll get better,’ Con whispered.
The signals started and he stood up. Three cars went through on the red and he scribbled their numbers down. Then one of them stopped further up the road. Mr Hessian got out and walked back to Con. ‘Who do you think you are?’ he asked. ‘Are you even employed by the Railways any more?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘It’s exactly the point.’
And as they argued, over the sound of the bells, I sat and watched a pigeon sitting in the low branches of a plane tree. It moved its head in spasmodic jerks and looked down at us.
I looked down the tracks, towards Brompton, towards the city that lay beyond the edge of the world. Towards a future of things that always had been, and always would. Towards a world that was already starting to open up to me, promising Plato, geometry and heartbreak in equal measure. Towards old age and death and the turning of the circle, again and again, as it spun at least a few times for all of us, a few more for some. Towards Janice and Gavin and Anna, walking barefoot along the tracks, looking back and noticing me, and waving.
Epilogue
Bill and Liz are long gone. The old place got too much for them – too many memories, too many bits of unlived lives. They moved into an apartment at Largs in the early 1970s and then separated a few years later. They always stayed friends, always. It wasn’t a bust up over money or someone cramping someone’s style, as it seems to be these days. I think it was just because they had to go on living – another forty years of treading water, of waking up every morning to see that it was still 26 January 1960. It makes me too sad – or is it angry? – to think of the waste. See, that’s the real tragedy – the ones left behind.
There have been millions of words written about the Riley kids since 1960. People just can’t let them go – to rest in peace in some distant well or sand hill. That’s why Bill and Liz have had to live like ghosts, rattling the chains of memory around 7A every night as the rest of us watched Blankety Blanks.
So, let’s let it go. And that, I think, is enough about the Rileys.
I’m getting to the end of my story, but there are just a few more things to mention. As I sit here, in the room I’ve slept in for fifty-four years, sitting behind my desk looking out of my window, I can see the stump of Con and Rosa’s healing tree. I can still hear that yuppie bastard’s chainsaw. It was a September morning, the year they got rid of Whitlam. I heard the engine roar to life. I saw this fella placing the chain against the trunk. I ran across the road. ‘Listen, Mister, you should really leave that.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s hard to explain, but it was special to the Pedavolis.’
‘It makes too much mess.’
As he set to it.
Poor old Alex, and Con, and Rosa.
Eric would’ve been happy, although by then he’d been dead for years.
Then this fella dug up Rosa’s garden and filled it with pebbles, sand (which he’s always out raking), and a Japanese water feature. He rendered the old red brick and replaced the front verandah with a sunroom. Then he paved the dirt driveway and planted a silver birch beside the stump of the healing tree.
Fuck I hate silver birches.
But as for me, I’ve made a stand. Against time. Against progress. Janice would be proud of me. I’ve never fixed a gutter or painted the eaves – never even nailed down a floorboard. When did renovating ever make anyone happy? I figure they can carry me out of here in a cheap cardboard box. Then the Public Trustee can come along and say, We may have trouble selling this. They can open it to the public and some pretty little thing with a degree in business administration can buy it cheap and knock it down and build a couple of Tuscan-style monstrosities.
That’s progress. And Dad thought he was clever getting a new air-conditioner.
Come along then, I’ll show you the old place. My bedroom’s the same as it was back then – same bed, same wardrobe, same carpet, worn through where I put my feet every morning. I’ve got my few clothes, and I wash them occasionally. I’ve got fifty years of diaries (I can do them inside now) and a picture of Dad on my night table.
In the lounge room there are boxes of books everywhere. I’ve got a house full of books, and the funny thing is, I’ve read them all. Books in the laundry and books in the kitchen, in the toilet and piled up past the window in Mum and Dad’s room. In drawers and shopping bags and free-floating, in a trolley I stole from Coles, and Dad’s old tool chest. So many books that the house smells of yellowing paper, glue, ink and memories. A life of books. The equivalent of years spent sitting on my arse. For what? Don’t ask me. Ask Doctor Gunn, he got me started. And his mum, sending me books for years and years until she died of a stroke in 1986. I don’t know why she kept it up. When I opened ‘Harry’s Antiquaria’ (in her son’s old clinic) she sent me a taxi truck full of books. She visited me every few weeks, browsing, buying a few of the volumes she hadn’t given me. Not that it helped, I never sold much. Six months later they put up the rent so I thought, bugger it, and I carried my books, box by box, back to my house, putting up a sign in the shop window (where Dad had once taped up his sign) – Closed Due to Lack of Interest.
I have a couch and a telly – a flash number I bought in the 1970s. Same carpet. Same crumbling masonry. Same cracks leading into the corner – where I sat huddled up in a ball for weeks after Mum left.
Come on then, here’s Mum and Dad’s bedroom. There’s the hole in the wardrobe door that Dad punched the morning she went away. There’s the bed she laid on for most of 1961 (the mattress gone, the slats dipping under the weight of more books). And there’s the chair, still sitting beside the window, where Dad sat staring out for weeks. Mumbling. Cursing. Singing along as Bill played his ukulele. Until one day he got up and said, You can go to Rosa’s for a while, and then got in his car to go look for Mum.
But Mum just disappeared. One morning I got up and went into their room and Dad was lying in his undies, asleep. The suitcase was gone from on top of the cupboard and some of Mum’s clothes were scattered on the floor. So I sat on the edge of the bed, and thought, and eventually shook Dad’s leg.
I knew what had happened. She’d just gone, like the Rileys, never to be seen or heard of again. Not even by her son. Imagine that. Imagine how I felt. Like everything I’d ever suspected was true. Like it was my fault. Like I was not worth loving. And it took me years to work out that this wasn’t the case at all.
So Dad was left looking, again. He spent his whole life looking. In bus shelters and front yards, sand dunes and psychology textbooks that couldn’t tell him why his wife had gone or where she was. That’s why Dad was my hero, and that’s why I miss him so much. That’s why I had to write this book, as a sort of gift that comes too late. As a letter that says, It doesn’t matter, Dad. It doesn’t matter.
Which leads us to the kitchen, and the fridge, and a single photo, held on with a magnet. A photo of the tram stop on Greenhill Road. It’s still there, and it still says, 2nd Fouling Mark, and I still have no idea what it means. But, you see, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. In the end, and I think about this often, all you have are memories – the bits of life that fell between the cracks; the unsaid things; the hunches; the plastic stains on the concrete where me and Andrew incinerated our models; the sound of railway signals; the smell of fresh jasmine, as I sit under my last almond tree, waiting.
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