He wears a sunny smile, his eyes bright with the moment, lightly touching the rows upon rows of faces that stare back at him from this concrete and steel city-within-a-city. Frank Worrell is no longer alone. The weight he carried all through the summer is off his shoulders.
50.
A Self-Taught Woman
In the evening Michael sits in the kitchen, upright in his chair, mindful of his back. She has the voice of the self-taught, this grandmother he barely knows and who he has barely noticed throughout the summer. He heard the voice of the self-taught often when his father’s driver friends came to dinner. It is the way they pronounce certain words, words they get all wrong because they have only ever read them in books or journals and never actually heard them pronounced the way they ought to be. And as he sits listening to his grandmother, Michael reflects that they are all of an age and a type, the self-taught, and for all their knowledge, they always betray themselves.
She is used to commanding the attention of a room, he can see that. And with that nose, that jaw and those eyes (in which he sees the face of his father, and possibly himself), he can see that she was born to. She might well have commanded a lot more than the attention of a room had the times into which she was born not made her one of the self-taught who always betray themselves.
Her bedroom smells of age and her legs and hands are weak. But the twinkle hasn’t left her eyes. That will be the last thing to go. And although she is weak, she has dragged herself from her room so that she might talk with everyone, and although the twinkle hasn’t left her eyes, the effort of dragging herself here is visible. She is tired, that deep tiredness that even other people can feel. But she is here in defiance of her tiredness, a cool beer in her hand. The day before she couldn’t raise her head from her pillow. Tonight she has mustered all the life left in her just to be in the company of people. And although her voice is weak, she talks and talks, about everything — the prime minister’s eyebrows, the summer cold that won’t go away, the awful whack young Michael’s cricket ball makes against the back fence. Why does he do it? she asks as if he’s not in the kitchen, addressing herself to Michael’s mother and the woman from the house behind theirs, whose shared fence he shatters and who has been coming to the house in the evenings lately because she is a nurse and she knows a few things. Although nobody says what these things are, everybody knows. And his grandmother’s eyes, the eyes that look lost but which miss nothing, settle on this woman who has been coming to the house lately, and those eyes know exactly why she’s here. Even if she does keep up the game, saying she can’t understand for the life of her why this woman, Dorothy, Dot to her friends, should bother coming by. All this fuss for a simple summer cold. There are sick people out there, she adds. Those eyes that miss nothing soften as she looks upon Michael, seated at the same table, and asks why he does it. And even though she asks the whole room with a smile in her eyes, it’s important to her, and she asks again and again, as if the boy were a riddle and the key to solving him were to be found in knowing why he bangs that ball against the back fence, day in day out. She passes from topic to topic, sipping from her beer with tremulous lips, but always returns to the same question. Nobody can tell her why to her satisfaction, least of all the boy himself. He is her riddle, and riddles don’t talk, she says with a laugh.
It is not long before Dot addresses the grandmother by her name, in the casual-familiar way of an old friend. Mary, she says, it’s your bedtime. And Mary looks at the clock and laughs. She laughs saying that if she thinks this is her bedtime, then she doesn’t know her. She, Mary, is famous for seeing everybody out. Isn’t she? She turns to Rita for confirmation and Rita nods more than she really needs to, and Michael can see that even now his grandmother is still a powerful woman. Powerful enough to have his mother nodding in agreement with her just a bit too eagerly and just a bit more than is necessary, and powerful enough to play games with this nurse, who clearly knows her way round difficult customers.
But she is not powerful enough to resist the summons to bed because she knows it is right. She might once have seen everybody out, but not now, and she eventually rises from her seat with a feigned air of reluctance that barely masks her exhaustion and relief. For the comfort of bed, at this moment, is what she craves. Before departing she studies the room closely and everyone in it, her eyes lingering on each of them, one by one. She declines Dot’s offer to support her arm, and she walks to her room, back straight, head high, carrying the embroidered doily she uses to cover her chamber-pot.
But as straight as her back may be, and as high as her head might be, she will not emerge from that room again. Even as she walks to it, she realises in some part of her that it is more than sleep she craves. And when Rita takes her a small cup of beer later that night, Mary’s face has visibly shrunken, as if sucked in, and she can barely lift the head that she held so high just a few hours before. She can only take a few sips before allowing her head to sink back, deep, deep into the soft-piled pillows beneath her. And as her head sinks into those soft, cotton-covered clouds, there is a delicious sense of falling that she can’t resist any longer.
She will lie in that room, drifting in and out of sleep, all through the next morning and afternoon. In the cool of the evening, while Vic instructs at the Railway Institute, Black will join Rita and together (the matter out of human hands), they will look on as the Distinguished Guest enters the room. His invitation will be offered, the struggle will be short, and the old woman’s decline as dramatic as he suspected. And as he watches, as life is wrenched from her, as the brute fact of the Distinguished Thing at work reveals itself divested of all the fancy talk, he will note as he always does that the body dies hard and that the Old Master may have got it right after all.
51.
A Bad Time to be Talking
The house is quiet. Not because the television and radio have been silenced, or because the family that lives inside has stepped out for a stroll in the soft summer night. Or because those who live inside have long since ceased to have anything much to say to each other. No, the house is quiet in the way that houses are when something has left it and silence has settled on the house in the same way that mourning settles on the shoulders of those who are left behind when someone dies. Black has gone. Rita sits motionless in the kitchen.
When the front door opens out onto the street it does so slowly, so as not to disturb the dead, and shock them back into life. A man in a checked summer shirt, Richard (Dick to his friends), husband of Dot, steps across the lawn in front of the lounge room and onto the gravel driveway.
It is late, still warm, and he walks the length of the street, past the Englishman’s house (where George Bedser lives in quiet retirement from work and the world), and on to the main street of the suburb that leads up to the station. To his right, in the streets that run off the main road, the Girls’ Home is quiet and empty and the tennis courts lie still in the night in readiness for the following morning. He is the only figure on the street, everything is still and heavy, the entire suburb is in deep mid-week sleep, and for a time he feels as though he is wading through a dream. The feeling that the world is unreal is nothing new to this man because he believes in another one. A better one. He attends his local church every morning, he prays every day. God, prayers, something else beyond all this. He believes it all and he is comfortable with this feeling that the world — its houses, streets, suburbs and cities — is unreal. It reaffirms his faith, his belief that there really is something else out there besides what you see. So when the trick solidity of the world dissolves like an ice-cream in the sun, he is comfortable with the feeling.
He passes the war memorial and the flour mills and eventually comes to the asphalt path that leads up to the railway station. The ticket office is closed, there is no one else about and he stands in the blue shadows of the Arrivals platform, waiting for the 9.50 p.m. from the city that will be carrying Vic home from one of the night classes that he occasionally takes at the old yards
.
Soon he sees the yellow headlights of the old red rattler coming towards him up the incline leading from the preceding suburb. He has often heard this train on clear summer nights lying in bed, but he has never seen it. It has always sounded like an empty train, but as it pulls into the platform he sees that it is not. The red wooden carriage doors are flung open, snapped shut, and soon there are three people walking towards him. He sees Vic immediately, his shoulders hunched, his body leaning forward.
‘Dick.’
It is neither a question nor a greeting, but an observation. A simple statement of fact. However tired he might be after three hours of explaining the inner workings of the Westinghouse brake to trainee drivers, Vic’s eyes are suddenly alert and scared, for there is no good reason why his neighbour should be standing at the ticket gate to greet him at this hour on a Wednesday evening. But the look on his neighbour’s face says it all. Vic could ask him what he is doing here, but he skips all that.
‘Mum?’
The other passengers have gone. The two men are alone on the platform and Vic watches as his neighbour closes his eyes and nods. He had come to break the news to Vic and along the way had gone over in his mind what he might say. But, in the end, he said nothing. Shortly afterwards they leave the platform and the two men walk back through the dreamy suburb in silence.
In the house he meets Rita’s eyes and without speaking to anybody, drops his bag at his feet, walks towards the room that has been his mother’s for the last month and ever so quietly opens, then closes the door behind him.
She doesn’t look alive, but she doesn’t look bad. This is what frightened him most as he closed the door and approached the bed. That she might be a stranger to him, a face made unrecognisable by it all. But she’s not. And with the summer, and the night still hot, her hand is warm as he holds it. And although he knows she won’t suddenly speak to him of some minor, niggling matter that crossed her mind a few days before, she’s not lost to him either. Not yet. She is still sufficiently with him to talk to, and sufficiently gone for him to see it.
There are no tears, there is no great flood of memories, there is barely any feeling. His mind is blank the way it always was after a long shift. There is just this, this fact that she is gone. And not anywhere, so that you might feel comforted that some part of her has gone on. No, there is none of that. There is just this simple, enormous fact that she is gone. He’s never been able to stuff that simple fact into his brain — that people go and don’t come back — and he always thought that at times such as these he might be able to. But instead his mind drifts back to the demonstration brake that he had lectured on that evening, the tea break, the killing of time before they could start again, and it occurs to him that it must have been while he was pulling the brake apart earlier that evening in the Railway Institute classroom, that it happened. While his mind was occupied with the intricacies of the task at hand, of dismantling and reassembling the entire brake system. It was a pleasant time, and it was pleasing the way all the parts fitted back together. That and the sweet breeze that came in over the South Dynon yards and in through the open windows.
It doesn’t take long to put all this together, a second or two. He doesn’t dwell on it. Nor does he feel he had no right to take pleasure in those few hours in the classroom, during which he imagined that in another life he might well have enjoyed being a teacher, and might well have been a good one.
Over the next hour that he sits with her — this woman who took the roll of notes they pushed onto her, who took her son with her wherever she went and against all advice, but who took him nonetheless because they both had no one else in the world but each other, who took all the stupid, funny looks, and gave him a place in life when he would have had none — over the next hour that he sits with her he is still unable to stuff that simple, enormous fact into his head. That the thing that was her, the spirit that stood up against the whole rotten, bloody bunch and kept her boy when everybody told her to farm him out, has gone. Ma, Mama, Mother. Gone. And as much as he needs to stuff this simple fact into his head, he can’t. And so, when he finally leaves the room, when he finally closes the door behind him, after sitting with the corpse of his mother for over an hour, there is some absurd part of him that is still carrying on as though he is simply saying goodnight.
From his spot deep in the backyard where Michael has shattered the fence, Vic can see that the lights in his neighbours’ house are still on. Not friends, he notes, but good people. Good enough to help them through what had to be got through. Their jobs done, they have retired to their house, to their children, their children’s pets, the mess in the kitchen that hasn’t been cleaned up because they’ve let it slide. And so, he notes, things go on. He nods to himself, acknowledging the inevitability of it. That while some of us pause for death, life moves on.
Rita emerges from the shadows of the apricot tree in the centre of the yard and stops next to him. She’d touch him, but he doesn’t want to be touched. Nor does she say anything; he’ll talk when he wants.
He looks round from the fence and the lights of his neighbours’ house.
‘Her struggles are over now.’
He’s pretty sure they’re the first words he’s spoken since getting in. Not much, five words. If he could, he’d take them back. Anybody could have said them, about anybody else. She wasn’t just anybody else, but he’s using words that anybody could. Yet, as much as he wants better ones, he knows that he meant exactly what he said. And for the moment, that’s enough. It’s a bad time to be talking. Whatever you say, you’re going to regret it. You’re going to wish you’d said something better, rather than something that you meant.
They walk back to the house together, through the shadows of the apricot tree, past the passionfruit and the plums, and Vic momentarily wonders what on earth the time might be as he checks out the stars before the flyscreen door closes quietly behind him.
Vic’s mother will lie in her bed until the next afternoon, when the long, black funeral car will come for her. This funeral car will be hours late, and the sealed room in which she lies, in the February heat, will be heavy with the smell of death — the sheets, bed, floor, those wondrous white walls and the windows. And when they have taken her and she is gone, the room will be stripped and washed. All of it. The windows will be left open in that February heat until the funeral a few days later, when the soap, the disinfectant and the wind have done their job and the smell is gone.
Finale
City of Melbourne, 17TH February 1961
‘…a gesture spontaneous and in cricket without precedent, one people speaking to another…’
CLR James, Beyond a Boundary
‘Never has it been more apparent that the game is greater than the result than in Melbourne on 17 February 1961. Commerce in this Australian city stood almost still as the smiling cricketers from the West Indies, the vanquished not the victors, were given a send-off the like of which is normally reserved for royalty and national heroes.’
Wisden
52.
Finale
Everywhere, everyone, along with their best clothes, has brought the best of themselves. The city is wonderfully strange. Where is the street? Where are the footpaths, the familiar shopfronts and doorways of the everyday world? Michael can see nothing but people, dressed in their best summer clothes as if for a party, for church or some family celebration.
Along Swanston Street the police, in their white summer helmets, hold the crowds back as the slow procession of cars passes through the thin strip of cleared road. Women in floral dresses and floral summer hats blow kisses, men and boys in suit trousers and starched white shorts wave or simply stand and stare at this slowly moving cavalcade. Above them all, streamers fall from the sky, from the open windows of the buildings looking over the street where office workers wave small flags and let fall from their fingers the ticker-tape of shredded newspapers and magazines.
Michael is standing in the thick swaying cro
wd on the footpath opposite the Town Hall. This procession, which has brought the residents of the city’s suburbs out of their lounge rooms and streets and shops and clubs, is slowing down at the Town Hall entrance. And as it slows down the players, sitting up on the back seats of open cars, open to the streamers and the sun and the pale-blue sky, come into clear view.
Behind his dark glasses Frank Worrell is crying. Michael had not thought he’d see Frank Worrell crying when he woke this morning. But you can see he’s crying because he is constantly wiping the tears from his face, and for a long time Michael ignores the other players as he can see only the crying face of Frank Worrell behind his dark glasses. And even when he stops wiping the tears away, Michael knows that he’s still crying. It’s not that the tears have stopped, it’s simply that he has given up wiping them away. He is light, this Frank Worrell. He has shed the weight that he carried all summer, and with the weight he has shed the loneliness. Now he is light, and with every tear that he wipes or fails to wipe from his face, he feels his lightness and is uplifted by it as he reaches out for a shred of confetti fluttering down towards him. Just behind Worrell, the dark-blue suit of Alf Valentine is covered in bright-red lipstick kisses, and he wears his kisses as if they were medallions.
The Gift of Speed Page 20
