The Gift of Speed

by Steven Carroll

  There is a story on the desk in front of him. Michael has read it a number of times because it contains a lesson. It is 1948. Larwood is sitting in the back room of his mixed business in Blackpool. The name Larwood is nowhere to be seen in the shop — at the front or inside. The name Larwood doesn’t exist. He sits, a little man, talking quietly, sniffing snuff, chatting to someone he once played against — the man who is telling the story. And although the room is covered with photographs of his playing days, he wants to forget it all.

  In the story they talk about the old days, about old friends and places they shared. But nobody talks of the events that made the name Larwood what it is — or the word, ‘Bodyline’, that is forever part of those events. There are words — not many — that don’t need to explain themselves. Words that are their own story. Complete miniatures. Words such as Somme and Larwood. And just as nobody mentions the events that made Larwood such a word, nobody mentions the word that accompanies him wherever he goes. These names do not arise in the quiet conversation that takes place at the back of the shop as the snuff is passed around and the tea is poured, just as the name Larwood does not appear in the shop.

  He is sad, this Larwood. There are times in the story when Michael expects him to rise from his seat, fling his snuff to the floor, and shatter the quietness of the room with everything that he has kept inside all the years. Times when Michael wants him to rise and shout — ‘Apologise! I could play again if I apologised! Well I wouldn’t and I won’t! So there you are. I’ve got nothing to apologise for!’ He would then collapse into his chair, resume his customary quiet manner, and pick his snuff up from the floor.

  But he doesn’t do any of this. No, they sit and quietly talk of the times that brought them all together, and the fact that he didn’t play again because he wouldn’t apologise is never mentioned. That turbulent time has passed. The world outside has put the whole unfortunate business behind it. And to do that they turned Harold Larwood into a nobody. This miner from Nottingham would have lived and died without raising too many eyebrows had he not been blessed with speed. And that gift should have lifted him into a dazzling, new world of light. He had the gift of speed, but he had one fault. He played for the team. And this, in the end, is the lesson of Harold Larwood. You are playing for yourself. You are always playing for yourself — because the ‘team’ isn’t your team, it’s theirs. And they’ll drop you the first chance they get. In the end they threw him away — the ‘team’ — and turned him into a quiet nobody at the back of a shop.

  Michael places his cricket books on the shelves at the side of the desk, then gazes upon the shadowy branches of the fruit trees in the yard — motionless in the still, summer air. All around him the houses, the street, the suburb itself, are quiet. The children who play their games in the street are sleeping. The girls who gather outside Younger’s house to talk in whispers about boys have gone to their beds. So too have the boys who stand near listening to their talk. The games have gone from the street and the whispers have stopped.

  With his books, his magazines and news-cuttings, Michael lives in a world outside this one. He puts his scrapbook to one side of the desk and folds this world away for the night. But he knows it is there, this world. And if he is ever in any doubt that it exists, he has only to open his folders and it tumbles out to meet him.

  It is a hot night and he cannot yet sleep. When he is done with the desk he slides his bedroom door open and ambles into the kitchen where he nods to a nurse — their neighbour who is in the house often now, keeping an eye on his grandmother. His grandmother who lies in the room that was once his, day and night, sleeping through the heat.

  29.

  Webster at Home

  The photographs on the mantelpiece of the study display, in a series of cameo portraits, the young Webster — from the teenager standing behind the counter of his father’s mixed business, to the Webster of his late twenties, standing on the floor of his first factory. In all these photographs it is the passion in his eyes that he notices.

  These are the eyes of a man who not only knew how his machines functioned, but often worked on them when something wasn’t right, or hammered some vital cog back into shape, when, from time to time, one of his great metal-pressing machines ceased to function. These were the moments he relished most of all, when he stepped from his office, removed his coat and tie, took up the hammer and set about fixing some faulty machine. He relished not only the labour and the easy transition from office to the factory floor, he also relished the effect it created — for Webster is a large man, broad across the shoulders and an impressive sight with a hammer in his hand. So when he strode from his office and hammered recalcitrant machines back into shape, he knew it was a spectacle. He knew he was creating a stir, and knew that the eyes of the factory, from the floor to the office staff, were upon him. It was at moments such as these that he knew he not only had the respect of his staff, but their admiration as well, and underlying all that was the touch of fear that a good factory needed. When the job was done he would put down the hammer, pick up his coat and tie, and return to his office.

  That was when the passion was in his eyes. But on this hot Saturday night, while Michael flicks through his scrapbooks and Vic and Rita sleep, he recalls it only as a cheap stunt, the sort of thing that young lions, like the young Webster, do. Now the memory of such occasions is embarrassing. The sort of stunt that he might have imagined laughing about in the years to come. But, in the end, the sort of cheap stunt that was embarrassing to recall. That was when the passion was in his eyes, and in the places where the camera couldn’t go, such as the heart and belly and bowels. That, he notes, is the kind of passion that builds a life’s work, the work that defines someone. When you are in the grip of a passion like that, Webster reflects, you do good things and stupid things. But now he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

  ‘You ‘re sure you’re not coming?’

  His wife is leaning in the doorway of the study, a light summer scarf in her hands. There is a movie at the local scout hall that doubles as a picture theatre. His wife is meeting friends there, the wives of local councillors whom she calls friends. It’s a warm night and she has decided to walk. They could walk together. He has forgotten all about it, but, in any case, he said no to the idea earlier that day. Now Webster shakes his head again, but he accompanies his wife along the curved gravel path that leads to the front gate. The trees that line the avenue — it is one of the few grandly named streets that lives up to its name — have all grown in the years since they came to the place. The heavy branches of the plane trees, thick with leaves and cicadas, form a canopy over the street. His wife waves as she turns at the corner. The rattle of a suburban train comes and goes. His wife of twenty-three years passes out of sight and he is alone on the street.

  As he looks back up the winding gravel path to his house among the shrubs and trees, he is aware that it is back — that this feeling is upon him again. This feeling that leaves him with neither energy nor passion. He runs his fingers through plants that he can’t put names to, as he walks back to the house. Does everybody else see it? Surely this look of having neither energy nor passion must be in his eyes as clearly as it was when he possessed them. For the first time tonight he thought he saw something quizzical in his wife’s gaze, as if she were on the brink of asking if he were all right. It’s not a thing she’s had to ask all that often in the past because he has always been a man of passion and energy, and she has always admired that in him. As much as he might have kept his secret from her and everyone else over the last few years, perhaps it is now visible in his eyes.

  He pauses midway along the driveway, contemplates the anonymous-looking gardener’s shed in a far corner of the grounds and checks the time as he jangles the keys in his pocket.

  30.

  The Stain Spreads

  Do I have too much time, lying here day in day out, with my hip aching so much at nights I can’t sleep, and this cold so bad, that, like a
ll summer colds, it just won’t go? Too much time to lie here and think. Is that it? Is that the problem? Heaven knows — wherever that is, because I can’t take these silly words like heaven seriously any more, and I haven’t for a long time — but all the same, heaven only knows, I’ve always done things. Keep on the move, old girl. Keep on the move, I’ve always said. Because once you stop moving, you’ll only start thinking, then you’ll only start brooding, and that will be the end of you. Mind you, some people can move and brood at the same time. Vic, for a start. He’s a brooder. He wasn’t always one, but he is now. And his brooding can fill a whole house. On a bright, clear day he can shut the sun out with his brooding. Just as he can light it up with that big laugh of his, when he wants to.

  At least I can get about a bit, even if it is only once a day, and even if it is only to empty this potty under the bed. I hear them talking some nights, I hear the clink of glasses, and I know they’re drinking beer and talking, and I know that life is going on out there while I’m lying in here, just as it will when I’m lying somewhere else. When I hear that life is going on out there, I have to go and look, and so I do, with my potty (doily over it, mind you), because I’ve got to have a reason, haven’t I, or else I’m just sticky-beaking — and I look at them all. The whole bunch — Vic, Rita, that boy and all their friends. I look at them and it does me good to see them. Not that Vic can bear me being in the room like that with my potty in my hands. Then they bring me back here, into this room, this bed, and I lie here with nothing to do and no one to talk to and it all starts again — this thinking.

  With the thinking comes the feeling that this thing, this stain, just spreads and spreads. That I was wrong when I was young to think that you kept your shame to yourself and when you died your shame died with you and the stain stopped. It doesn’t. Like a drop of ink onto a piece of blotting paper, you think it’ll just be a little stain, but it never stops, does it? What one, small drop can do! When you think it would have run out and stopped, it’s still moving — further and further out from its centre.

  I saw it eventually spread into Vic’s face when he was a boy and came home with that glum look in his eyes, the look that told me he’d finally worked out the way the world works and discovered that it wasn’t fair. I wished I could have gathered this stain up and kept it all with me, but you can’t. So this thing passed from me to Vic. I knew it had because I saw it in his eyes. And I see it in that boy’s eyes too — the same glum look that comes over his face, the one he wears when he thinks that no one is looking. It’s there and he wears it — when he’s not banging that bloody cricket ball against that bloody fence. Don’t tell me there’s not something more than cricket going on there. I’ve seen him throw the damn thing, I hear it crack against the fence — or what’s left of the fence — and I know there’s something going on.

  Cricket? I’ve never understood it — with its silly names. As soon as anyone starts to explain the whole damn silly business to me, I stop listening straight away and wait for them to finish. None the wiser and no more interested than I was before. But they don’t stop. They go on and on. Even from here, I hear them talking and I hear all those silly words and I know they’re all talking about it. And the newspapers, and this little wireless I have beside me here. You can’t get away from it. What is it with this cricket? I don’t know, I never have known and never will — but when I hear that boy throw that damn thing against the back fence, and I hear the fence giving way to the sheer force of whatever that boy’s got in him — I know there’s something more than cricket going on. The fact that I don’t know what that silly game is all about doesn’t matter a bit — because I know there’s something going on there that even he doesn’t realise yet; something that, at the moment, he can only roll up into a red, leather ball and hurl through the air as fast as he can. Speed. That’s all he wants. That’s all any of them want. That’s something else they can all have on their own because the faster you go through life, the faster you wind up in a room like this with nothing much to do but sit around and think.

  If I only had things to do like I’ve always had I wouldn’t be lying round here day after day with this feeling that the stain doesn’t stop with me. That nothing stops with you. That even when I’m gone, this thing goes on and on. One drop, and even though you’d think it wouldn’t go far, it keeps spreading. If I could only have gathered it all up and kept it with me so that it died when I died, I would have done it. But it’s in the house, in Vic’s eyes, in the eyes of my little angel who brings me the foaming beers that soothe this cold, and in the eyes of that boy who only knows enough to roll it all up — this thing — into a red, leather ball and fling it through the air with enough speed to crack fence palings and drive us all mad.

  In the dark room that was once his bedroom, his grandmother is sleeping through this hot, clammy Saturday evening, her mind going wherever it goes, if it goes anywhere at all. You can shut the night out, but you can’t shut the heat out. Yet in the dark of that room, which was once his and which now smells of death, she sleeps and sleeps through the stinking heat, her mind God knows where. Raking over God knows what.

  Michael’s neighbour, a nurse from the house behind theirs, is sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine while Michael wanders from room to room. His parents, worn out from looking after his grandmother, have gone to bed. Their door is shut. On the mantelpiece in the lounge room is a photograph of his father on some unknown, long-forgotten golf course. He is young, but he looks old to Michael, the way his father and his friends always look old in these photographs, as if they were never young. He is, Michael reflects, a teenager. But the word is all wrong for the photograph, and for the face of the young man casually leaning on his putter. It is a word for another age, a word that carries with it all the songs and fashions that hadn’t been invented when the photograph was taken. This word, ‘teenager’, is waiting for another time, another generation, one that will wear the word with the same ease that it will wear blue jeans and dark glasses.

  As he stares at the shot he catches a glimpse of something he never has before; that it is not so much the golf that his father loves, as the space, the openness and the freedom that comes with a buggy and a set of clubs. Perhaps he only ever loved engines in the same way. Not the art of driving, the tricks or the intricacies of the trade, but for the moment when he stuck his head out the window and breathed it all in. All that space.

  This photograph is his father in his former life, before his mother, before him. He knows his father had a life before him, that he once walked the world without a thought for Michael because Michael hadn’t been imagined, let alone been born. He knows all this, it is no surprise. But he has never stopped and properly contemplated this photograph or any of the other photographs that freeze his father and suspend him in this previous state. Now, he is. And it comes as a shock to realise that this figure, this casual golfer on the distant green of his youth, is only a few years older than Michael is at the moment. Perhaps, only one or two. The fact that his father had a life before is of no surprise, that he may, in this photograph, be the same age as Michael, is. Time. It is all about time. In front of him is a photograph of a young man leaning on a golf club in such a way that suggests he has all the time in the world, because this is what he assumes. Speed can not only measure the time it takes a cricket ball to get from one end of a cricket pitch to the other, but also the time it takes for a quick snap of a pleasant day on the golf course to become sufficiently distant for a whole new vocabulary — one that includes words such as ‘teenager’ and ‘shades’ — to have evolved. The more Michael looks at the photograph the more he becomes convinced that he hasn’t got a minute to lose, or time and speed will one day leave him staring at a photograph of himself, standing on some dusty cricket ground wondering where all the years went.

  The door to his old bedroom opens and the pale figure of his grandmother is standing in the hallway. She has the look of the lost and bewildered. One who doesn’t
know where on earth she is. Not, that is, until she catches sight of Michael through the doorway of the lounge room, and a look of recognition passes over her face with a smile; a sense of familiarity comes to her eyes that wasn’t there before, and the lost and bewildered look is suddenly gone. As the look leaves her the thought crosses Michael’s mind that she’s not staring at him at all. That, in this world that only she inhabits now, she is staring at his father on the distant green of his youth and she too is young again, the mother of a boy, once again back in the days when the biological inevitability of this half-world she now inhabits was part of the distant future. For a moment she is herself as she was then, and he, Michael, is his father.