The Gift of Speed

by Steven Carroll

  Black is a Jamesian doctor and it is often said that he bears a striking resemblance to the frog-faced transatlantic American whose complete works he has read over and again. At one stage during his studies literature almost took over, to the point that he nearly threw in medicine and a life in general practice, for the life of the famous literary doctors of the past. But in the end it was never a difficult decision and instead of the writer’s life he found himself a practice in a frontier suburb because no one else would go there and because the place needed a doctor. A suburb called, and the doctor in Black, not the writer, answered.

  The Distinguished Guest. It is a phrase he delights in and uses often. It was with a shock that he went back to the source one night in the Oxford Book of Quotations and discovered that the great master had on his deathbed not referred to the imminent arrival of the Distinguished Guest, but the Distinguished Thing. Thing? It was not a word he would have imagined Mr James ever using. But he had and Black had got it wrong. Or, perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he had got it right and Mr James had got it wrong. Perhaps the writer in Black the doctor had rejected the word ‘thing’ in the same way that a body rejects a heart. Gazing through the dusty windscreen he contents himself that it was not so much a travesty as an improvement.

  With the change of lights, taking in Michael’s bouncing lope and still simultaneously appalled at and intrigued with the nonchalance with which Vic treats the Distinguished Guest, Black continues on his way to his practice at the top of the main street; to his practice, and the life he has chosen, while Webster and one of his workers blow cigarette smoke into the blue, suburban sky.

  6.

  Frank Worrell Alone

  Frank Worrell is alone. On the other side of the country while Michael is departing Webster’s factory, Frank Worrell is alone because he wants to be. In the players’ room of a private school in Perth, he sits in a cane chair looking out over the playing field at his team in training. A small crowd, mostly schoolchildren and teachers, is gathered round the white boundary fence. He watches his players in the nets. From the faces of his players and this small crowd he can see the signs of laughter and excited talk. And from the silent strokes of his players, he knows that this laughter and this talk will be punctuated by the gentle clock clock of bat hitting ball. But he hears none of it. The room in which he sits is sealed. The door is firmly closed, the windows shut. The room is shaded and cool, the afternoon sun is bright. The silent scene outside may as well belong to another world. Frank Worrell is alone, a world unto himself. His fingers drum softly on the long wooden table that runs almost the entire length of the room. Pads, bats, gloves, newspapers, cigarettes and sweet drinks lie on the table, boots and shoes across the floor. But he pays no attention to any of it. Frank Worrell is dressed in his whites ready to join his team, but he doesn’t.

  He needs to sit. To be alone. And when he is done with sitting and being alone, he will join his team. But not yet. At the moment he is perfectly still in his cane chair. His eyes, unblinking, are fixed on the playing field, his fingers continue to drum softly on the wooden table. You have to strain to hear the sound of his drumming fingers, but it’s there — rhythmic, steady, barely touching the surface of the table, as if, instead of a wooden table, his fingers are idly drumming the skin on a bowl of water. The skin is the surface tension that enables a fly to walk on water. And throughout the summer Frank Worrell must learn to think like a fly walking on water. He can make no mistakes or he will break the surface tension that he walks on, and drown. This cricketer must also learn to speak the language of diplomacy. He must learn to speak it quickly and fluently, and he needs to be sure of everything and everyone around him. So he is alone for the moment, in this quiet time before it all begins, in this room shut off from the noise of the world. His mind is working silently, and the only sign that the invisible activity of thinking is taking place is the drumming of his fingers in the hush of the room.

  The island politics, the manoeuvrings, the intrigues, the deals — from Antigua to Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, from which he always remained distant — are all behind him now. The fight is over. The battle has been won. Frank Worrell is captain. The first black man to lead his country. And he feels the weight of it, now, sitting at the table of the players’ room of a private school in Perth, his mind moving in silence. He will feel that weight throughout the whole summer. It has come down to him. He is the one who must make it work and the one to whom everyone will turn when difficult decisions have to be made. He accepts it all because it had to come down to someone. All that he asks for at the moment is this quiet time before it all begins, so he can accustom himself to the newness of it, feel it, and silently tell himself to get used to it. To wear this weight as though it is the most natural thing in the world to carry with you every minute of the day and night. To wear it so naturally that nobody notices the weight is upon you. And somewhere inside his head, not worth uttering now, not worth uttering any more because the fight is over and the battle won, is the barely fathomable thought that it took until this summer, this summer of 1960, for it to happen. If there is any anger, it does not show, and it will never show. It doesn’t matter now. Frank Worrell is captain. Behind the ever-present sunny smile, the bright eyes, the quick riposte, this weight will be there. And so he sits, still and silent, watching his players through the wide windows of the school’s clubhouse rooms. And the question he is asking himself is the same he has often asked since the captaincy passed to him: who is a team man, who is not? It is a concern of utmost significance, more significant even than victory. This is the first question Frank Worrell asks himself when he looks at his players, because Frank Worrell plays for the team, and this summer his team will be playing more than just cricket. The burden of making this thing work has fallen to him and he must know before he even walks onto an arena that the most minute of his directions will be carried out because his players will be team men. And they will show the islands of their home what a team can do. There must be no disagreements on the field, no hint of controversy. No sniff of failure. He must handle this thing, this captaincy, this weight, not as well as everybody else who has gone before him or anybody who might have had his job this summer, but better than anybody else. They will be playing more than cricket this summer and the silent, still figure of Frank Worrell, his fingers drumming the surface of the table ever so softly as he takes in the low, slanting sunshine through the schoolyard elms, knows this.

  It is a weight that can’t be shared, and so he chooses this quiet moment before everything begins to sit and dwell on what must be done. Frank Worrell is alone. And there is a part of Frank Worrell that will, throughout the summer, remain alone. The part that can’t be shared.

  When he’s done with the sitting and the thinking and his fingers stop their drumming, there is a sudden silence in the room. It is the kind of silence that follows when a sound is so subtle it is only noticed when it ceases. His fingers stop their drumming, he rises from his chair, shakes the stillness from him, and steps out through the clubroom door into the bright, afternoon light, the line of the sun touching the tops of the schoolyard elms.

  The noise of the world rushes up to him; its urgency, its immediacy, its inescapability. The excited talk, the laughter, the clear, sharp clock clock of bat and ball are suddenly upon him and all around him. On the walk down to the playing field, now surrounded by students from the school and members of the public, signing autographs with the sunny smile back on his face and waving to well-wishers, Frank Worrell is alone. And he will stay that way throughout the summer.

  7.

  The Girls’ Home

  The Girls’ Home is a place of mystery — set back from the street in a world of its own, a world of cast-iron balconies, tall, closed doors and wide grounds upon which no girls play. With its picket fence enclosing the grounds and its front gate shutting the rest of the neighbourhood out, it is a distant building, the most distant in the suburb.

  Michael, the c
rushed tin ashtray from Webster’s factory still in his pocket, need not pass the Girls’ Home on the way back from school. It is one street further on from the one he would normally take. It is neither on his way nor out of his way, but he is aware of breaking his routine on these afternoons when he does not turn right at the usual street, but walks straight ahead to the new, red brick Catholic Church at the corner, before turning right and eventually passing the distant windows of the Girls’ Home.

  And it is not simply that the house is set back from the street that makes it a place of distance and mystery, nor the fact that no girls play on its wide lawns — at least, not when Michael passes. It is also the girls inside.

  The Home has always been there. And when it wasn’t a Home it was a hospital for returned soldiers and before that somebody’s private house. But it has been a Girls’ Home for as long as Michael can remember. And in all that time — whenever he had walked or ridden past on his bicycle and observed that long, cast-iron balcony with its wide windows flickering between the trees and shrubs that lined the front fence — he has thought very little about the place, apart from knowing intuitively that it is a place of intrigue. It was always the house where girls who had no parents lived. Those whose parents — and this was a mystery too — were missing. Those whose parents were forever to be marked ‘Not Present’. Even though all the students at the school played in the yard and on the ovals together — and Michael has known their faces from his early school years — he has always been aware of the fact that at the end of the day these girls went back to the Home. When people spoke of the Home it was never in the same way you normally spoke of home, and whenever the girls strolled through the streets of the suburb or wandered the playing field or quadrangles of the schoolyard, they always carried the mystery of the place with them. And they always had that look in their eyes, that they too knew that come the end of the day everybody else went home to their own houses, yards and families while they went back to the Home. As familiar as they might be in the schoolyards and streets, once they stepped inside the front gate of the Home, once they strolled across its wide, open lawns and into the house, they became a mystery again.

  Kathleen Marsden is one of those girls who has no parents and lives in the Girls’ Home. Michael has known her for many years, although he is not sure how many. At some stage during his life she slipped into the playground, into his classroom and was suddenly there. And he would be aware of her in the same way that he would be aware of the familiar faces in his class — just as part of him would always have been aware that when she left the school she returned to the Home. But nothing more than that.

  Now, more often than not, instead of walking back from school the usual way, he walks past the Home. And there is no particular reason for this change, which is made all the more significant by the fact that Michael is already a boy of habits and routines, someone who likes his routines and rarely changes them. There is nothing that he can point to with conviction and say that is why. That is why I walk a new way home. Only a look. A look he observed one day on Kathleen Marsden’s face, a smile, not directed at him, but to a friend on the far side of a shelter shed. And not even a recent look, but an old one, a very old one. A quick smile from years before in the days when they all played in shelter sheds on rainy days and the sheds were always crammed and hot and filled with the noise of a hundred voices. A smile from years before that he recalled just a few weeks ago when he was watching her sitting with her friends on the main oval of the high school to which they had both gone. Kathleen Marsden was sitting on the oval with two of her friends, their long winter uniforms spilling over the grass, and that rainy-day smile was suddenly there again on her lips and in her eyes. It was not as though he had deliberately sought her out. No, he had simply turned round for no particular reason and she had been there. And when he saw her he had silently noted that that was Kathleen Marsden and she was smiling. And he thought nothing of it until later in the day when he found himself remembering the same smile from years before when they were children and played in shelter sheds on wet days and hit each other to show their affections. And this memory came as a puzzle because he knew only too well that her smile had not been for him. But at some stage during the afternoon it slowly dawned on him that that was it. What had touched him and stuck to him and lodged in him was just that — that the smile had not been for him. A part of him had silently longed that it had been, and some silent, long-ago longing was only now being registered in his head or his heart or his bones, or whatever part of the body it is that tells people that they long for something and that the bittersweet burden of caring for someone has fallen upon them.

  He slows his pace — for it is not speed but slowness that he now wants — as he passes the Home.

  It is late in the afternoon, he is looking forward to training at the school nets, hungrily determined to become faster and faster each day. But now, as he passes the Home, he consciously slows his pace. The slowness he adopts, and which doesn’t come naturally, allows him the chance of catching a glimpse of her. The windows from the balcony of the Home are half up to let the breeze through. They would all be in there, but no talk carries to him — the Home is too far from the street for talk to be heard — and there is no laughter. Nothing loud that might disturb the quiet mystery of the place. But he knows that Kathleen Marsden is in there, behind one of those half-opened windows, in one of those quiet rooms. Doing something, or simply doing nothing.

  8.

  In the Nets

  There it is, the only sound that has ever mattered. Speed. Summer has not yet come to the suburb and the afternoons have not yet become endless. For an hour now he has been bowling in the concrete and wire cricket nets. Already the light is fading, and soon it will be too difficult to bowl, for the transition from half-light to darkness is still swift, like it is in winter. Not that he hasn’t bowled in the dark. Not that he hasn’t bowled when it has been so dark that he may as well have been bowling blind. Soon, this half-light will be gone, he will make the short walk home, and the best part of the day will be over.

  Tomorrow he will once again return to that forgetful world of rhythm and speed, to the oblivion of bowling. At all other times of the day or night he is either looking forward or looking back, but not in the nets. In the nets time ceases to matter and it is only the fading light that tells him that somewhere out there in the everyday world time is, in fact, passing. The light, and the six o’clock bells of St Matthew’s tell him this. But, even so, those bells and that fading light both belong to another world. The sun sinks on other people’s days, the bells of St Matthew’s ring for other people’s ears. Not his. Not in the nets.

  This is the part of the day that belongs to him entirely. And those instruments that measure the passing of time and the day, all those daily occurrences that mark the passage of the hours such as lunch, the last lesson and the seven o’clock news, don’t matter here. And when the last ball is bowled, when he steps back into the everyday life of the suburb, he always has the feeling of stepping back into some foreign world that was never meant for him and which has merely claimed him again for the time being.

  As he walks home along the illuminated bitumen streets to his house, the ball still in hand, his school bag over his shoulder, he dwells on the summer that will soon be upon them — the cricket, the end of school and the long, warm evenings to come — and he is already looking forward to it all, just as, by the end of the summer, he will be looking back on it all. The time in the nets, that wasn’t time at all, is gone.

  The lights of the golf-course clubhouse shine brightly to his left. Inside, their faces red from the sun, the last of the weekday golfers will be at the bar filling up as quickly as possible before returning home, not enough presence of mind left in them to know that the time for coming and going has already passed and that they are in that curious state of being drunk before they know it. He hears the occasional sounds of motor cars along the main road behind him, sees the bare fram
es of new houses popping up on the few vacant blocks that remain, while overhead an aeroplane drones across the suburb, its lights quickly fading into the darkness.

  Beyond the golf-course clubhouse, the ghost gums, the ferns and the low pines that line the eastern fence of the course, stand silently watching everything — slow, steady growers in a puzzling world of speed.

  Part Two

  14TH — 31ST December 1960 2ND January 1961

  9.

  Lindsay Hassett’s Sports Store

  Michael has just left the gaping mouth of Flinders Street Station behind him. In the cool arcades of the city, in the shaded lanes and in the ‘little’ streets that parallel the major ones, everybody has taken off their coats and cardigans and loosened their ties. It is cool in the arcades, but it is coolest in the basement shops that run off them.

  The lunch-time crowd moves all around him, but Michael doesn’t notice them. He is lingering at the shop sign in front of him that says Lindsay Hassett’s Sports Store, before following the arrow that points down into the cool depths of the basement shop. He always pauses before this sign, always waits that second or two before descending.