The Gift of Speed

by Steven Carroll

  He tells Michael his daughter’s name. Does Michael know her?

  ‘No’, says Michael. ‘I don’t know her. I’ve never met her.’

  ‘But you will,’ Gannon continues. ‘When you visit. Won’t he, Vic?’ He turns to Vic as if having completely forgotten that his host was there.

  They then fall into a discussion of the man’s daughter, his house and his swimming pool. All the time his father’s face wears a look that Michael has seen all too often before and which he can only describe as idiotic. A look of idiot admiration covers his face, already glowing from too much beer and too much sun. And, not for the first time, Michael is ashamed of the idiot grin on his father’s face. His father, he knows, is not an idiot. His father has a way with words and a subtlety of thinking that the Gannons of this world will always sniff at with distrust. Yet his father is nodding admiringly and approvingly at the stories, the house and the beautiful daughter that all belong to their guest, this man, Gannon, who is a short, square animal. Whom Michael has never met before and hopes never to meet again — who makes Bruchner, their neighbour, look like a sook.

  Once, at times like these, his father might have been drinking with his work mates and they would discuss their work — steam, diesel, engines and the art of driving. Now he brings the likes of Gannon into the house.

  When their guest rises to leave — as perfectly at ease in the hallway as he was in the kitchen — he extends his hand to the boy and Michael feels once more its crushing strength, like the metal hammers in Webster’s factory that press scrap into spare engine parts or ashtrays.

  The first thing that comes back to Vic when he wakes in the middle of the night is the look on Michael’s face that evening when he slobbered his silly drunken words to an indifferent Gannon. They observe each other frequently now, more than they have in the past, and Vic is increasingly aware of the disapproval in his son’s eyes.

  But it is not the disapproval in his son’s eyes that is occupying his thoughts at this mad hour when no one ought to be thinking. It is something else quite different. What is occupying Vic’s mind, what he is dwelling on in the darkness, is the confidence the boy exudes more and more lately. The confidence he displays — when he isn’t looking, that is, with disapproval upon his poor old dad — is something that makes him almost untouchable, and Vic is wondering where on earth he got it from. There is a sense of great expectations in those sixteen-year-old eyes that Vic never had at that age or any other. Or, if he ever did, the years wiped it away, and he has since forgotten. The boy has his dream. Michael never speaks of it, but he doesn’t have to. And Vic is happy for him, even if he wishes it was golf, not cricket — about which he knows little. Vic gave Michael his old set of clubs and taught him how to play whenever the boy would let him. The boy knows his mind, always has. And it was never going to be golf that he took up in the end, but this cricket, which Vic never played and which is a mystery to him. Not an interesting mystery; the mystery to Vic about the game is why anybody bothers with it. But the boy does. It’s where his dream lies. He’s got the certain concentrated look of someone confident of living it. And he just might, thinks Vic. He just might.

  Maybe that’s the way it works. Each generation gets better, moves further away from all the faults, the petty flaws, the traps and the sheer bulldust that shagged their parents’ chances of ever living up to their dreams. That, and all the odds that seemed to be constantly stacked up against you. The buggers who were born into their dreams and treated dreams as if they owned them all, and made it plain that only a precious few got to live them because there were only so many dreams to go around. Perhaps each generation gets better. Gets smarter, gets something that the poor buggers who went before didn’t have. That something extra that doesn’t take shit for an answer and doesn’t cop, for a moment, all the bulldust that there are only so many dreams to go around and they’ve all been sold at birth anyway. Maybe, just maybe, it all rises and falls, like good times and bad. And perhaps, in time, from time to time, a generation comes along that gets what it wants. Perhaps Michael’s is that generation. The one that all the work was for, the one that it was all about — the shame, the slog and the being shagged over time and again by smart bastards. Perhaps the look of great expectation in Michael’s eyes was always going to be at the end of it all. Even if to everyone along the line, who had to work their lives away in order to bring that look into existence, it was never apparent. But perhaps it was the thing that dragged them all, the generations that went before, from day to day anyway, even if they didn’t know it. The generations were refining themselves, smoothing out their rough edges, slowly casting off the look of the born loser for the confident eyes that spoke of great expectations. That very look Michael now wears more often than not.

  Yes, Vic rolls over in bed as the thought rolls through his head, perhaps Michael’s look is the point of it all, and always was. Perhaps his is that generation that comes along every so often and gets what it wants: and he’s the one, out of all of them, the whole family history, the lucky bastard who’s going to live his dream. And good luck to him if he does. But as soon as Vic thinks this, as soon as he finds himself quietly smiling at the prospect of it all, he’s suddenly thinking of engines and diesels and dreams, and the way things always turn out lousy in the end, the way they did for him. In this world of theirs that will, of course, never change. And, just as suddenly, all that contagious confidence in the sixteen-year-old eyes of his son evaporates, and his whole being is heavy with all the old doubts that dragged his lot down, those who start out with dreams of a kind, not big dreams, not grand dreams, but dreams enough to occupy a mind of modest ambition, and wind up with the likes of Gannon in the house.

  11.

  Webster is Restless

  In another part of the suburb, Webster is restless. He roams about the many rooms of his house, from the dining room to the billiards room, the lounge room and the library, but never stays any more than a few minutes in any one of them. His house has many rooms but in none of these rooms does he feel at ease. All of these rooms, the library, the games room, the sitting room, were intended — and Webster chose the house for its many rooms, so he has no one to blame — to put him at ease. To relax him, to allow him to indulge himself in the many interests he assumed he would cultivate in his mature years. Webster is fifty-eight years old and although his hair is grey at the sides, it is still thick and wavy, a good head of hair, the head of a man with considerable life left in him — and at this stage of life he ought to be indulging himself in those little interests which he always promised himself he would eventually cultivate.

  Webster has four factories. The last of these being the one he built at the intersection of the two main streets of the suburb. They all crush or cut metal into parts that are useful to other factories, who eventually press them and screw them and bolt them into objects that are useful to people. That is the stuff of his life. Some of these objects — a lawnmower, a washing machine, wheelbarrow — find their way into his house and back into his life. It’s not something he takes any particular pride in or interest in. They are just objects, and they work or they fall apart as these things do. But this is his gift. He is good at providing the parts that combine with other parts and become indispensable domestic objects. He has never had to work particularly hard at it. He has four factories and he employs hundreds of people. And although he could have lived anywhere, he chose to live in this suburb because he liked the wide look of the land. And there was no shortage of wide rambling mansions left over from the previous century when the suburb was a farming community. Here he could have the mansion and the sprawling grounds that he’d always sought, and which he found not far from the factory site itself. He bought it all just after the war. The mansion and the grazing land that surrounded it belonged to the descendents of an old pioneering family, a family that had once possessed wealth and power. They weren’t happy about selling up, but in the end Webster persuaded them with the sheer weight of
his money, and the mansion and the sprawling grounds that surrounded it became his. He should have been happy. Or, if not happy, then at least content.

  But tonight, like so many nights, Webster is restless, and he roams through the many rooms of his rambling house, never lingering any more than a few moments in any one of them. His wife is reading in their bedroom, a wide, spacious room that looks down over the gardens. The cook-cum-maid is cleaning up after dinner before withdrawing to her room at the back of the kitchen. He is happy with his wife and has never sought the company of other women. It is, he knows, a good marriage — and he knows he can expect no better. There are no children in the house but he has long since accustomed himself to this and feels no sense of loss or sadness. It is not, in fact, something that he thinks of all that often. The cause of his restlessness that won’t let him linger in any one room is not to be found in this or anything like it, in any of these mere personal matters. Nor is he bored, like those characters in the plays that his wife drags him to. Those continental types who mope about the stage complaining that their lives are boring, and so on and so forth (as the smarter characters say in these plays that call themselves ‘slices of life’). No, it is none of that either for he knows he can expect no better life than the one he is living. It is, quite simply, the unrelenting, irrefutable sense of the utter uselessness of it all. His life, that is. And the objects that he makes. These objects that are useful to people and utterly meaningless to him. He can’t remember when it first came upon him, this feeling, but he can’t remember not having it. He is doing, he knows, what he is best at and he can’t imagine doing anything else. But this sense that it is all utterly useless — no matter how well he might do it — came out of nowhere one day and settled upon him (possibly just after he moved into his house), and it hasn’t gone away. It is there, in greater or lesser degrees, every day. And on nights such as these it leaves him, not sad, depressed, anxious or bored, but restless.

  Webster tells his wife that tonight he will work late. He tells her he will sleep in one of the rooms set aside for guests so as not to disturb her in the night. She smiles and nods and thinks nothing of it for it is the custom of Webster to sleep in the guest room on such occasions. It is, she tells him, unnecessary, as she is a deep sleeper. He won’t disturb her. Webster knows it takes a lot to disturb his wife’s sleep but he takes his pyjamas to the spare room all the same.

  The house sinks into silence. Mrs Webster lays the book she is reading down beside her on the bedside table, switches the lamp off, and the house sinks into darkness. Soon after, Mrs Webster sinks into a deep sleep. Everything sinks: the last image that passes through her mind being that of her husband hunched over his desk in his study below, silently labouring through the night, submerged in work.

  There is a full moon and a silvery film falls across the garden. Webster follows the winding, gravel path down to a shed in a corner of the grounds, a considerable distance from the house. The most relaxed he has been all evening, Webster strolls through his gardens — which are as big as a modest public park — as if it were the middle of the afternoon. A small army of gardeners created these gardens out of the farming paddocks they once were. Where cows once roamed, Webster now strolls. A team of gardeners works through the days and weeks of the year, mowing the lawns, caring for the shrubs and trees, the out-houses, the gardener’s sheds, and occasionally dredging the small lake in one of the corners of the property.

  The grounds of Webster’s house may be as large as a modest public park, but he always strolls through them with absolute confidence and assurance. And when he stands long enough in one spot to take them in, he stands with the same proprietorial certainty that he does whenever on one of the four floors of his four factories. The gates of his driveway are always open, anybody can enter at any time — for whatever reason — and sometimes do. But this is Webster’s property, nothing can touch him here, and he is at his most relaxed when strolling through its gardens — day or night.

  At the shed he unlocks the doors and opens them up to the light of the full moon. And the instant he does a silver light falls across a canvas tarpaulin. He slowly pulls the canvas back and the gleaming white chrome and black enamel of a long, low, sleek sports car become visible. He stands for a moment admiring the lines of the thing, then folds the tarpaulin and drops it on the ground beside the car. He has the only key to the shed and no one except for his chauffeur — who regularly cleans and tunes the motor — knows what is in there. He has never told his wife. It is his one, secret indulgence. His one infidelity in an otherwise faithful marriage. And if she has ever wondered what is inside this locked, uninspiring gardener’s shed in a far-flung corner of the gardens, she has never said so. Either because she doesn’t particularly care about the contents of a remote gardener’s shed, or because she senses that this is his one secret indulgence, his one trifling infidelity in an otherwise faithful marriage — and chooses to keep it that way.

  It is a still, warm night and he winds the driver’s side window down, and quietly taps his fingers on the leather-covered steering wheel before turning the ignition key. It is possibly the one moment he prizes over all the other moments to follow, when his hand, the slightest of tremors just visible, reaches out for the key to bring the beast to life. After savouring his moment he turns the key and the rumble is instantaneous. But straightaway the engine settles to a hum. The car is as still as the night, the engine barely appears to be on at all.

  Slowly, so as not to disturb the night too soon, he eases out of the shed and quietly follows the winding gravel pathway out into the suburb, noting as he does that nothing in the house has stirred. Its many rooms are dark, the moonlight falls across the slate roof like moonlight from a dream, and the lights at the front of the house illuminate the steps leading up to the front door as they will throughout the night.

  12.

  An Ambulance Arrives

  A silly thing to do, to go falling over like that. How many times have I crossed that street? You wouldn’t think you could fall over just crossing a street, but there it is. I wasn’t watching where I was going, I don’t remember what I was thinking. I just remember catching my foot and thinking that that was lucky, I could have fallen over, and then I did. Suddenly I was face down in the dirt. I let my basket go, with my purse and my keys, and it was upside down in front of me. It was the sight of my things all spilt out on the road that bothered me most at first. Well, I thought, can’t lie around here all day, old girl. You tripped, you fell. A silly thing to do. Just silly, that’s all. Hardly important. Time to get up, brush yourself down and pick up that basket. You fall down, you get up. You’ve done it before, you can do it again. It’s been happening all your life. That’s what I told myself. But I couldn’t. And that was when I felt it. This pain. I don’t remember feeling it when I was lying there. But as soon as I moved, as soon as I said, c’mon old girl, lift yourself, as soon as I naturally went to do what comes next, I felt it. It nearly took my breath away, and on stinking hot days like these I don’t have too much breath to give away. You can be old, and still be thinking young. It’s a trap. I wasn’t watching, I wasn’t thinking. I fell. And as much as I said, c’mon old girl, lift yourself, I couldn’t. Every time I tried, this pain stopped me. It was all I could do to just roll on my side, look around the street, the town, and wave someone over. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I kept on saying to Gus the greengrocer. I think I’ve broken something, Gus, I can’t move. I’m sorry. He kept saying it’s all right, Mrs C, it’s all right. It’s good of him to call me that because I’m not a Mrs, am I? There’s no ring on my marriage finger, and there never has been. But he’s met Vic. From those days when Vic and Rita were living in the next town — a railway town — and would ride their bicycles down every Sunday to see me. We’d go for a slow walk through the town on the warm days, and when we met someone we’d stop and I’d say, ‘This is my son.’ I couldn’t help it. It’d just burst out of me whenever we met someone. That’s how it was with
Gus, the first time I introduced Vic. He was loading his van with crates of vegetables and we stopped and I said good afternoon, Gus, this is my boy, all six foot of him. I must have stared too long at Vic then because he said that’s enough, Ma, he always calls me Ma. I embarrass him a lot you see, in public. I don’t mean to. It just bursts out of me, all this talk. From then on, whenever I went to Gus’s for the greens — which was every other day — he called me Mrs C. He didn’t have to because he could see there was nothing on my finger. But he called me Mrs C from then on. So, there I was lying face down on the road with my basket upside down beside me, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Gus.’ And Gus was saying, ‘It’s all right, Mrs C.’ But I knew it wasn’t. He couldn’t move me without hurting me. That was when he called for his helper and they both carried me into his shop.

  Now I’m sitting in the back of this thing, I’m saying farewell to the town, I’ve got the key to the front door of my little house, and I’m wondering if I’m ever going to use it again. You see these things go past in the street, roaring off with their bells ringing, and you think, ‘Oh God, some poor coot’s in there.’ Then you don’t think any more of it. And by the time you get to the shops or the bank, or whatever it is that you’ve set out to do that day, the poor coot that’s inside could be dead. It happens. Every day. Ambulances come and go. But you’ve stopped thinking about it, and just as well. It’s no good going about your business thinking things like that.