The Gift of Speed

by Steven Carroll

  To share this moment would be to break the surface tension, and his mind would no longer be moving on silence. If he were to speak of it he would surely awake and find only air and space beneath his feet. It is all part of being alone. As he rises from his seat, as he picks up his gloves and his bat and walks towards the door that will lead him out onto the ground (his turn to bat has come), Frank Worrell is filled with the inexplicable conviction that a stroke, perfect in all its detail, has already been completed, that it is moving steadily towards him, and that it will join him out there on the playing field.

  19.

  Webster at Work

  It is the noise of the factory that he loves most of all. He is quite happy to call it a noise, for it is no more a sound than a smell is a scent. Webster is at home with the noise of his factory. The thump of the hammers of the giant new machines, the sound of sheet metal being crushed into shape, the clatter of bolts and engine parts dropping into trays so that they might be boxed and sent to other factories, the raised voices of the machinists shouting over the din, and the metallic echo of the loudspeaker rising over it all with directives for so-and-so at assessments or storage to report to the office … This is the world Webster made and these are its noises — full of life and energy and purpose. Without this sense of order, of organised industry that comes with the noise, the whole thing would be a mere din. A chaotic racket.

  Webster has always been invigorated by this noise, because he brought it to the suburb. It is his noise. It stirs him like music. Or, it always has. This morning, a hot and sticky Monday, he is sitting in his office on a mezzanine floor overlooking the factory. His tea and a pale biscuit are sitting on the desk. The sliding windows have been pushed open and the noise enters the makeshift room of his office unimpeded. Webster sits back in his seat, barely seeming to register either the sights or sounds of the place. He is perfectly still. He has lost track of time. His eyes blank, he rises from his seat and slides the windows shut. The volume drops instantaneously and the factory is muffled.

  Neither the noise, nor the sights, nor smells of the place stir him this morning. With dull eyes he surveys the factory floor and wonders who everybody is — even though he is normally proud to say he knows the names of all his employees. This sensation is not new, but the recurrence of it is more frequent. It is, he suspects, similar to that feeling that husbands and wives have when they look at a loved one and suddenly realise they don’t love them any more, or never did. Except, in Webster’s case, it is not so dramatic. He has merely had long-held doubts confirmed. He’s doing what he does best, and will continue to do so. To do otherwise, he is convinced, would be an impractical waste of a life. He just doesn’t love what he does any more.

  At first he took it as a phase, this falling out of love. He is, Webster knows, one of those people who is defined by what he does. His factory is not just a job, a vocation, something that can be picked up, dropped and swapped afterwards when the thrill is gone. Throughout the suburb, he knows, he is simply referred to as Webster the factory. He is this place. It is his monument.

  Without explanation and with only the most perfunctory of farewells, he rises from his seat, leaves his office and walks out of the factory. At home he spends the rest of the morning in his grounds talking to the gardeners, helping them move shrubs in the sticky heat. Mistakes had been made in the winter planting and shrubs too delicate to withstand the summer had to be moved to more shaded areas of the grounds. One of the gardeners has his transistor strung from a handle of the wheelbarrow and the cricket follows them wherever they go. It is pleasant work, and it is good to be in close contact with the gardens and grounds that he rarely sees close up or pays such detailed attention to. It is also good to be sweating. He joins in discussion about the state of the game, something he rarely does because it has never interested him. He even pauses in silence when the commentators speak of a stroke that has just been played by the West Indian captain. It is, they are saying, perfect in all its detail. As Webster listens to their descriptions of the moment and its perfect detail, there is something disturbingly familiar about it all, as though in some odd part of his mind he has already witnessed the stroke and experienced the moment before coming to the garden and experiencing it all over again. At such moments his own mind is a complete mystery to him. There are, in fact, times out there in the garden when he quite forgets who he is. Then he remembers. He is Webster. Webster the factory. And with that he remembers that his whole interior echoes because something isn’t there any more. That he echoes, like a large house that has been emptied of its furniture.

  That evening, the air still warm, the night sky extraordinarily clear, the drone of the crickets all around him, Webster sits in a cane chair under the lights of the verandah and contemplates the garden he worked in that afternoon.

  When this feeling of the utter uselessness of everything first came over him, he shrugged it off. He kept on working in his factories and his passion for the work remained with him. But the feeling came back again and again, until he couldn’t shrug it off. Now his passion for this game of his, this game that had been his life — of producing small objects that eventually became part of large objects that are useful to people — is gone.

  Outside the self-contained world of his mansion, the residents of the suburb are tossing and turning in restless summer sleep. But Webster’s restlessness doesn’t come from the summer heat. Webster’s restlessness will still be with him in the cool of the morning, in the autumn and winter, when the leaves of the peach and apple trees are mulch on the garden beds, when the fruit has been peeled and eaten and the pips spat out. No, Webster smiles for the first time all evening, if only his restlessness could be put down to the summer heat.

  20.

  Shame

  New walls. White walls. I never dreamt I’d find myself in such a room. There’s something about white walls. Always has been. There’s something about white. Always good to have it around you. Lots of white. You don’t need pictures on white walls. You don’t need fixtures. All those useless things that hang around a house, making everything dark and gloomy. And big windows. Such windows. That’s all a white wall needs, windows like these.

  My hip is better now, just from being here. If only this throat would go. But that’s the worst of summer colds. They hang about forever. Thank God, thank Jesus, Mary and Joseph, thank the man who grows the hops, and the malt and barley, who gives it to the man who stirs the brew and gives us beer. The beer that Rita keeps cool in the refrigerator — no ice box, mind you — and gives to me. She comes to me like an angel, twice a day, with a tall glass of cool beer, and waits until I’ve sipped it empty because my throat’s not so good. I’ve never been one to sip beer. Beer wasn’t made to be sipped. Beer was made to be drunk, but these days I sip the stuff. God bless you, Rita, I say, as she hands me the stuff that cools my throat. While I’m sipping it I look over the rim of the glass and I watch her eyes as she tells me about the street, this white-wall suburb of theirs, Vic, and young Michael, who seems to do nothing but hurl cricket balls through the air. And the more I see of Rita, and we get to see a lot of each other because she’s often here looking out for me, the more I see she’s not a girl any more. Not the girl I remember who was going out with my Vic, because he’d always been my Vic. But from the moment she entered the house I knew he’d become her Vic. I got over it. They say you don’t, some types, but you do. You get over these things and you find something else to do with your life. She was so young. She was a girl, but when I look over the rim of the glass and into her eyes I see she’s not a girl any more. Not the girl she was when I sat in that house in South Melbourne where Vic and I lived, when I sat there till I couldn’t stand sitting there any more. When I sat in that tiny house in South Melbourne and looked at its dark walls, till I couldn’t stand it any more. Till the shame drove me out of that gloomy house and propelled me right across the wide, spring gardens, in my best clothes — because it was a Sunday — walking all the wa
y under the plane trees, and the elms and the gums of that park that had never seemed so wide as it did that day because I never thought I’d reach that grand house in Tivoli Street where Rita and her mother and her sisters lived. Walking all the way, with my head down, wringing my hands, wondering what on earth I could say when I got there except for the truth. So, even though I had all that time to prepare something to say, I just got there and fell into a chair in front of Rita’s mother — with Rita in another room, because this was women’s talk — and I said Ivy, I can’t stand it any longer. I’m sick with it. With this shame. And I told her it all. As I was telling her, it all came back to me — the shame of being packed off in the country dark so no one would see me all those years ago, but only yesterday. In the dusk. Cold and clear and damp. Old shame never goes away.

  I remember a long, low cloud, orange and purple, the plain low and flat and going on forever, whichever way you looked. There was a touch of spring in that cloud, and in the low sun sinking into the wheat fields just beyond the farmhouse. Why did there have to be? It was winter and I remember a touch of spring and feeling good for the first time in weeks. My bag was on the back of the cart, and everything I had was inside it — clothes, letters, and little bracelets and rings I’d carried around with me all my life. And a book. There was always a book, which I read at the railway station and on the train. What was it? It doesn’t matter now. It kept me company, I remember that much, and now it’s gone. But it did its job and took my mind off things for a day. I call that a good book.

  It took my mind off that low cloud, the low fields and the farmhouse I was leaving. It took my mind off it all. That, and the touch of spring that shouldn’t have been there, and the moment of happiness that came with it that shouldn’t have been there either. We followed the damp, dirt road to the town, and by the time the farmhouse was small and I could see enough of the fields to make out different squares of green and yellow while the sky turned dull, my moment of happiness passed. That’s it. That’s all you get today, old girl, I said. And I wasn’t that old, but there I was calling myself old girl anyway. Then one of those low hills that creeps up on you suddenly took the view away — the fields, the trees, the farmhouse, the whole estate — and I never saw that view again.

  You hear stories about girls who get themselves in trouble and you think poor silly thing, or just shrug it off because it’s someone else and you’ve got a lot to do besides. Suddenly that someone else was me, and even then on that cart, being packed off in the dusk — cold and clear and damp — I could hear a chorus of poor silly thing being muttered by friends and strangers alike, when the news finally got out on the farm, in the town, and back at home in the city where I was heading.

  The sun went from the sky, that touch of spring left the air, and it wasn’t dusk any more, it was dark. I had fifty pounds in my purse. A lot of money in those days. Viktor, that was his name, Viktor placed a shawl around my shoulders because I didn’t have one, and said, here’s fifty quid. You know you can’t stay, and he said it all sad and slow, his eyes pleading — here’s fifty quid. And I looked at the fifty pounds, all rolled up in one-pound notes, and it was a weighty roll of notes, I could see that. He held it out for an eternity, saying here’s fifty quid, you know you can’t stay. And I looked at that roll of notes in his hand on the end of his extended arm, and I thought … if I take it, if I take it … what am I? And all the time his arm was held out and he was saying, you’re going to need it, his eyes all sad with that brooding look Vic eventually took on when he was old enough to know what a dad was and that he didn’t have one when everybody else did. God knows what he said in the playgrounds when they asked him, because he never told me. He just brought that glum look back into the house and it never left him. I hadn’t yet seen that look in my boy’s face because he wasn’t born then, that night I sat up on the cart and left in the dark. But when it came into his eyes and into our house I knew it was his father’s glum look, the one that Viktor had on his face the night he held out his hand to me. And so I’m staring at this roll of notes thinking … if I take it, if I take it, what am I? Then I took it, and a smile lit up his face because I’d just washed his hands of the whole affair. The shawl was for my shoulders, the fifty pounds was for my silence. The fifty pounds was for his peace of mind. It went a long way, that fifty pounds.

  That was how I said goodbye to the estate (and it’s still there, Viktor’s dead, the son’s a mayor). The cart took forever to get into town, and I kept on wishing the driver — who gave me one look and a quick nod before climbing onto the seat — would speed up and get me there. But why? What was I in such a hurry to get to? I wanted to get away, so the shame of being packed off in the night would become a memory, the way these things do. Become a memory and get old and go away. But it didn’t. It’s still there, even now, cold and clear and damp.

  Here she comes, my little angel. The door is open. The daylight streams in, the cricket crackles on out there in the kitchen. Here she comes, my little angel. The girl’s gone from her eyes all right, but she looks like an angel with that tall glass in her hands. Here, she’s saying, take this, it’ll cool you down and soothe that throat of yours. There’s nothing worse, she says, than a summer cold on a hot day.

  21.

  Kathleen Marsden Alone

  Finding a place to yourself is easier in summer. In winter, in the crowded Home, it is impossible. But in summer the garden of the Home has shaded corners that you can lose the world and gather yourself in. If someone sees you tucked away in one of those shaded corners, they’ll leave you be in summer because they’ll know you’ve gone there to be alone. While Frank Worrell is seated in his chair overlooking the playing field of the Sydney Cricket Ground, and while Webster sits dull-eyed in his factory, Kathleen Marsden has come to one of those shaded corners of the garden to be alone.

  There are different ways of being alone. Kathleen Marsden is sixteen and knows this already. There is a part of Kathleen Marsden that has always been alone, and known that there is no one to whom she is connected in the way that children with parents and brothers and sisters are connected. A part of Kathleen Marsden has been alone all her life, and that same part of her will remain alone forever. No matter how things may change in the future, there will always be the island that was Kathleen Marsden, the Kathleen Marsden who knew only herself and relied only on herself. It is not something she is sad or angry about any more; it is simply something she knows, this particular way of being alone.

  This morning, sitting in one of those shaded corners of the garden, she is alone in another way. A way that she likes, for she has withdrawn from the Home, its noise and children and chatter, because she wants to. The first way of being alone is a result of having been thrown into the world, it is a way of being alone over which you have no say. You are thrown, you land, you look about and there is nothing to which you feel connected. There is you and you alone. But this morning Kathleen Marsden has not been thrown into her shaded corner of the garden, as she was into life, rather she has taken herself there with the intention of being alone. It is a section of the garden to which she comes often in summer, and over the years the other girls have learnt to leave her be when they see her there. Only the young ones seek her out.

  But this morning they don’t. No one does. She has the place to herself, a patch of lawn under one of the old elm trees of the district, where she can sit and think and gather herself. She has learnt this morning, as they all did in the breakfast hall, that the Home is to be shut down. It is the only home she has ever had and soon, very soon, it will close. They will all move to another Home miles from the suburb on the other side of the city, and once again this feeling of being thrown about is upon her.

  Already she is looking upon the garden, the Home and its many rooms, like someone who will not be looking at them for much longer. And all the things that might once have bothered her — the sinking beds, the dull light of the downstairs rooms, the peeling wallpaper — are not a bother to
her now. Although she never speaks of her love for this rambling old place that has been her home forever, it is there. It is one of the reasons she has come to this shaded corner of the garden — her love for this rambling old house (whose history she knows in the same way that one knows one’s family history), and whatever it is she keeps in her heart for Michael. This other Michael she only just discovered. She has known him since they were children, and now they are beginning to know each other in different ways. In the last few weeks they have crossed a shadowy line that neither of them knew was there until they crossed it; a line that marked the end of their childhood ways of knowing each other and marked the beginning of this other knowledge. In those few weeks she has noted those first, wondrous feelings that come with being connected. It is as though a whole new order of feeling is being born inside her. A birth that makes her giddy, and light-headed; a feeling, she imagines, like the effect of alcohol. She has begun to feel, for the first time, that there really is someone out there after all. She is less thrown when she is with him, and although she can’t bring herself to trust this feeling, she doesn’t want to lose it, not yet. So, for this reason, she has decided not to tell Michael that the Home will soon be closed and that she will go to the other side of the city — which may as well be the other side of the world — when it does. For the first time in her life she has the feeling that there is someone out there after all, and she wants that feeling to stay, and for that feeling to stay everything around her must remain as it is. She wants everything to go on as if nothing has happened. Over the remainder of the summer she will live as though the world will not change, and she will not be thrown about once again, just when she thought she had landed.