The Gift of Speed

by Steven Carroll

  25.

  A New Way of Walking

  Rita can hear the low murmur of their talk in the back of the house. She can’t hear what they are saying, only the low, almost confidential nature of their talking. She is aware of it, like one is aware of music on the wireless when the wireless is low. She has been to the city this morning. She left early and went to the city because she wanted a dress of quality. You won’t find a dress of quality in this suburb. She hears Michael’s voice and sighs quietly, dwelling on the unfolding mystery of her son. Once, she mentally notes — happy at the bedroom mirror — it was the crack of that bloody ball against the back fence that drove her mad. Now it’s his constant coming and going, with his bag over his shoulder. And that look in his eyes, like he doesn’t notice anybody else any more. Maybe he doesn’t.

  Feel like I’m going to have to — she hums as the new dress falls over her — feel like I’m going to have to, what do they call it, pad up, to get his attention. He comes and goes. Always with that look in his eyes. And as the dress falls she hears him in the laundry, getting his things together so he can be gone, again. But why so soon? It is still morning, and already he is preparing to leave.

  Rita is adjusting the straps of a new dress, a dress that, like all her dresses, is just a bit too good for the street. And the street will look, but who cares? It’ll give the street something to look at, and it’ll give those tongues, all the way down to poor old George Bedser’s shuttered house, something to wag about. The street, she quietly hums to herself, can get stuffed. Although Rita is not a woman to tell anyone to get stuffed all that often, she’s happy to address the street in this manner. The dress makes her feel good, and she gets into it easily, which makes her feel good too. She smoothes the light summer cotton over her hips then swings round from the bedroom mirror and walks down to the laundry — the measured, unhurried steps of a mature woman on the outside, the impatient heart of a girl within her.

  ‘Well?’

  She’s standing in the doorway of the laundry. As she speaks Michael looks up from his bag. In the background she hears the clatter and rattle of Vic playing around with his bloody golf buggy. The golf course, that can get stuffed too. And all golfers. At first Michael’s eyes barely register her presence, and once again she has the distinct impression that she ought to be carrying a bat and wearing pads to catch his attention. Then he eyes the dress, a little like the street would eye the dress, a little like a son who doesn’t really think his mother should be wearing such a dress. It is not, the look suggests, a mother’s dress. Not that it’s daring, but it’s stylish, and Rita paid for that style. There is disapproval in her son’s eyes. Disapproval in his eyes when he’s got the time to give it, that is. As she takes this in, she tries to locate its source. Tries to see her dress, herself inside the dress, from where he is sitting. And she wonders, for one tense moment, if it’s happened, if she’s crossed that shadowy line, and if her son is looking back at a mother who not only wears dresses that are a bit too good for the street, but that are now a bit too good for her. A bit too — and she drags the word out of her and silently utters it — a bit too young. Had she become, without knowing it, that object of embarrassment to young sons — the mother who draws attention to herself? The casual damning of the street, the balancing act of the mature woman’s walk and the young girl’s impatient heart that she felt so comfortable with a moment ago, the good feeling she had as she smoothed the light, summer cotton over her hips, evaporates, and she sees the dress for what it is — a stylish piece of work, but now meant to be worn by a younger woman.

  ‘It’s nice,’ he finally says.

  ‘You don’t like it.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You think it’s too young for your mother, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t. It’s nice.’

  Suddenly she’s changing her mind and looking at the dress, at herself inside the dress, all over again.

  ‘You don’t have to say it.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s nice. Your dresses always are.’

  For a moment, while she’s changing her mind about the dress all over again, she remembers Michael, the little boy, lightly touching her new dresses when they came into the house and saying, ‘Nice Mama, nice.’

  She sees him again. Her little man in short pants who always gave her the green light to wear her dresses, and who always noticed when no one else did. He’s still there, and for a moment she has to look away in case this chat they’re having loses its light, casual tone. And what she took to be a look of disapproval in his eyes a moment ago is just the look that he wears now because his mind is always on other things; on banging that bloody cricket ball into the back fence or down a pitch.

  Then his head is buried in the school bag once more, and the eyes that don’t notice anybody or anything else are back. But it doesn’t matter. The dress is good again, and the feeling she had as she smoothed the light summer cotton over her hips in front of the mirror is back. There is nearly always tension in the house, but not today. Today their talk is as light as the cotton dress that falls over her like a floral cloud.

  It is the walk she notices. Or, the difference in the way of walking. A walk tells you a lot about someone — more than the words people speak or their gestures or their eyes. Walking can tell you more than anything.

  Vic is always walking into an imaginary wind — and a cold one. It doesn’t matter if it’s winter or summer, it’s always the same cold wind. It’s always there because he brings it with him. Wherever he goes. And he’s always looking about from side to side as he leans into his walk as if expecting to be mugged at any minute by another depression or another war, or some new disaster that he can’t name, but which he’s sure is out there anyway. Just waiting for its chance. It doesn’t matter where he is, on the street, in the yard, at the shops. It’s always the same.

  But not Michael. He doesn’t walk like that. And that’s why she notices his walk. It’s got bounce. He might have an old head, God knows he didn’t have much choice but to grow up before his time, but he’s got so much bounce in those steps of his that he seems to be walking on springs. He’s not looking about while he’s walking, or down at his feet, and he’s certainly not looking back. This isn’t a walk that is wary of the future, this is a walk that can’t wait to get at it. And it’s not just youth, is it? Vic was young once, but Rita can’t believe he ever walked any differently. No, you learn to walk like Vic in hard times, and once the walk is learnt, it is never forgotten. But if you’ve never known hard times, if you’ve never felt the floor, the footpaths, the streets of your everyday life go right out from underneath you — if you’ve never felt what it is to be suddenly walking in mid-air with absolutely nothing to stop the fall, if you’ve never had the experience of discovering that your entire world wasn’t there where you thought it was, then you will walk differently. Won’t you? Can twenty years do that? Can you, in the space of twenty years, invent a whole new way of walking?

  Rita contemplates this question as she stands in the driveway watching her son leave, as if the evolution of this way of walking were a biological marvel. Carrying his white pants, his white shirt, his white socks and sandshoes in his school bag (also containing the lunch she packed for him the previous evening) which is flung over his shoulder, her son is leaving to play cricket. Earlier than usual, and with no explanation, which gets Rita thinking.

  His strides are long, his departure rapid, and she can tell that he can’t wait to be rid of the street, and not just the street — the house, them, the whole suburb. Everything. She can also tell — and it’s not only the fact that he doesn’t look back — that he has already forgotten she’s there. She may as well go back inside, but she doesn’t. There’s the nagging thought that he might look back. And if he does she wants to be there to meet that backward glance with a wave. It’s this thought that keeps her where she is, that he might just glance back over his shoulder and she won’t be there. If she goes inside, she’ll never know
and the thought that he might have turned to her and she wasn’t there will nag at her all day. So she waits. And, of course, he doesn’t. The wave she had ready isn’t needed.

  When he peels off at the top of the street, when he’s gone and his bobbing green school bag is no longer there, she swings back to the house — a glittering white house under the Saturday-morning sun — and she knows that one day, sooner more than later, he really will be gone. Everything in his manner, in his speech, tells her this. And the walk. For it is not a walk that is wary of the future. It is a walk that can’t wait to get there.

  Why doesn’t she come inside? Every time it’s like this. She stands by the gate and watches the street until there’s nothing left to watch. Every Saturday she stands by the gate with her hands in her pockets and watches him get smaller and smaller until he’s not there any more. Vic stands by the lounge-room window and watches Rita. Michael doesn’t need her to be standing there to get where he’s going. He hasn’t needed any of them for a long time. But still, she stands there.

  It’s all that weight. She’s shifted all that weight. He could call it love. But he doesn’t, he calls it weight. She’s shifted it all. From Vic, to the boy. And he feels it, you can tell, the weight of his mother’s love. He knows she’s got nowhere else to put it now and so it all rests on him. But he shrugs it off because he knows he’s going. In his mind, he’s already gone. You can tell that too. He’s had enough of the old man, the old lady, the house and the whole bloody suburb. Two or three years. Two or three years will go in no time. Unless you’re him, of course. Two or three years is an eternity then. But not to her. She holds onto every moment. And she shifts all that weight of hers hoping that it might keep him here a little longer. But she no sooner puts it on him than he shrugs it off. Not that he doesn’t want it. It’s just that he can’t take it with him. Not where he’s going, out there into the great world, chasing life. That’s why he doesn’t turn around and that’s why he never will.

  Vic turns away from the window. He can will her to let it be as much as he wants, but it won’t make any difference. So he walks back to the kitchen where the radio is playing an old song, the way it always does when Vic is in the house. As he enters the kitchen a brief laugh erupts from him like a snort. Was it yesterday? Or the day before? Or last week? It was one of those days they laughed together, Vic and Michael. When the time came, Vic told him — and it would. When the time came to shoot through, he was going to have a bugger of a job getting out of the place. He’d laughed, and Michael had laughed. But not for long because they both knew it wasn’t a laughing matter. Not really. They laughed, but in their eyes they were frightened.

  It’s always like this. She’s always watching them walk away. Papa, his trail of pipe smoke floating briefly on the still, autumn air on the day he stepped out of the house and never stepped back in again. Vic with his golf buggy behind him, happy to be off. Vic, always happiest when he’s off somewhere. Michael, bouncing into that future that he can’t wait to get at. It’s always the same. She’s always watching them walk away, the men in her life. And it seems as though she’s spent her whole bloody life standing at some gate or other, watching them go, and waiting, waiting for them to turn — just once — and wave, so that she can wave back and her heart will be lighter knowing that they cared enough to turn. But until they do her love will be heavy — she knows — and they will all feel the weight of her love when all the time she only wants her love to be light, so she can let it rest upon them without feeling that she is crushing them.

  But to do that they’ve got to turn, and they won’t. So Rita walks back to the house, her legs and feet heavy in the newly carpeted hall.

  Later that morning while he is waiting for the time to leave so he can step out onto the fairways of the golf course, and while Rita has slipped out for a chat with their neighbour, the nurse in the house behind them, Vic has the house to himself. His mother is sleeping and places no demands on him. He is alone.

  He is not a person much given to looking back. But this morning, wandering about the yard — watering the plants that he swears sing to him when he does — he sees only the past wherever he looks. These moods come upon him and shut down the summer sun when they do. This morning it is more like a spell, one that he can’t shake off. And wherever he looks he does not see the new coats of paint, the new plants, the new room added to the house which is now Michael’s bedroom. He sees none of this. Wherever he looks he sees only signs of the old life. When he glances up the side way he doesn’t see the new path of crushed rock; he sees it when it was dirt and weeds, and remembers Michael playing one bright, innocent morning with his tin and plastic trucks, utterly absorbed in his world, chatting to himself, oblivious to everybody around him. It occurs to Vic that possibly even then Michael had reached the point where he didn’t need them any more. And, at the same time, he poses himself the inevitable question. What happened to it all? It is precisely the kind of looking back that he never allows himself. But today it won’t go away. There is no reason for it, except that he is alone in the house, apart from the sleeping figure of his mother, who sleeps more and more now, eats less and less, and whose eyes have an increasingly bewildered and lost look about them. Whatever the reason, this morning it won’t go away, this nagging question of what happened to it all. And what was he doing when it was all slipping away? Why wasn’t he looking more closely? Because, he now knows, it will never happen again — not this combination of people, time and place. They were a species unto themselves. Perhaps not a very happy one, but a species.

  A few moments later, in the house, a song is playing on the plastic radio by the fridge. Although he loathes this song, its cheap feelings and cheap strings, he stays, nonetheless, seated in the kitchen, in its thrall. What he doesn’t know, at this moment, is that he will hear this song again one morning in the few years left to him, in the small one-bedroom flat he will rent, in the small harbour town with which he associates freedom (a postcard of which is currently stored in his socks and handkerchiefs drawer). The song will ruin this morning that he has not yet lived, as well as the afternoon and evening that will follow it. He will be plagued by the past. It will sit on his back and be with him throughout the carefree day. He will remember the sadness that fills this bright, Saturday-morning kitchen, and that very same sadness will return to him when this cheap song comes back into his life via the radio. He will be annoyed and angry with himself in that morning yet to be lived, because he will know in his heart of hearts (for which his pills will be utterly useless by then) that there is nothing cheaper than being moved by a cliché. Yet he will have been, just as he is now. For this song, this harmless, airy thing that is currently filling the kitchen with its silliness, will bring with it the baggage of all his pasts, presents and futures, and what he calls freedom will be just another town after all.

  26.

  Inside St Catherine’s

  There is nowhere to go. There is never anywhere to go. She lives in the Home, he cannot enter the place and nor can he invite her back to his home. It is not the sort of home he could invite Kathleen Marsden to, for the very nature of the place and all the things that had happened inside it over the years make it impossible. They would have to wait for different days and different houses.

  There is nowhere to go and he has come to this primary school on a brilliant Saturday morning to watch her play. No one, she tells him, has ever come to watch her. So he sits and observes her from a bench near a primary school playing field. And she is good. He can see that at a glance. Very good. Like a grown-up among children. She is good at this game that is a kind of baseball, the name of which he always forgets. Her body — which is now different from the shy body that gets about the schoolyard — is fast, and decisive when she moves. But most of all she has that rare thing, anticipation. He is aware he is watching a different Kathleen. He can’t believe she needs to be told she is good, but if nobody from the Home comes to watch her, then it is possible she has never b
een told. He resolves to tell her.

  There is less of her that is unknown to him, this girl who has never known her parents and feels no loss. She is, she has told him — carefully pronouncing the official words for her situation — a ward of the state under the care of the Mission of St James and St John. She pronounces the names ‘St James’ and ‘St John’ as if they were personal guardians who stopped at the Home often and looked in on her. Once, during their walks to and from school, he dared to ask her the one question that is always on his mind — what is it like?

  ‘If you’ve never had something, you don’t miss it.’ Experience had made her practical. ‘I don’t think about it.’

  And that was that. They could have talked more because she didn’t mind. It wasn’t, as he’d imagined, some deep, awful thing that she was reluctant to bring up. No — the tone of her voice, the look on her face insisted — experience had made her practical. But even as he nodded in quiet understanding, he didn’t believe it. When she asked him to come and watch her play, he said nothing. Only nodded twice. Yes, I can. Yes, I will.

  So he sits and watches. Occasionally she looks about and catches his eye. Experience may have made her practical, but when everything stops — and the side that was fielding becomes the side that is batting — a quick smile passes across her face, the sort of smile that delights in the knowledge that, at last, there really is someone out there after all. It’s the kind of smile that may well have been locked up inside her throughout a whole adolescence of sunny, Saturday mornings, but which would have been impractical to release until now.

  Only when she is finished and he is telling her (as he resolved to do) that she is good, like an adult among children, only then does Kathleen Marsden tell Michael that the entire Home has gone to the beach and she can show him where she lives. Would he like that? Can he come? And he gives her two nods again. Yes, he would. Yes, he can.