At the Webster gate she scans that long winding driveway leading up to the pillared front door and the expansive gardens of this colonial estate and has the distinct feeling (which the young Michael did years before, although he never told her) of not so much stepping into another part of the suburb, as another country.
3.
Vic’s Day Begins: the Rabbit, the Field and the Observer
Vic, in his bed, in his one-bedroom flat, a thousand miles to the north in the town he now calls home, is dreaming. His nose is in the air, that great hooter that Rita always said you could hang your hat on, and is blowing out air as if from the funnel of any of those great engines he drove for most of his life before coming here. His body is lying down in deep sleep in the sub-tropical warmth of this town to which he has come, but his mind, free to wander, is elsewhere.
There is a rabbit in the middle of an open field. The grass is winter green under the frost. This rabbit is standing on its hind legs, its nose to the air, its ears alert to the slightest noise, its eyes to the slightest movement. Its hole and the safety of its burrow is not far away, but, for the moment, this rabbit is at its most vulnerable. Food brings the rabbit up. All that lush winter grass under a coating of white frost. A long, thin, blue metal barrel is kept perfectly still and is aimed directly at the rabbit. Vic cannot see the hand that supports the barrel, nor the fingers poised round the trigger. He can see only the barrel, and the rabbit, at the end of an imaginary line that runs from sights to target.
But even in this perfect, still morning, the rabbit is alert to something. For whatever reason, it knows that something is present in this quiet field that ought not be present, and that the very stillness of the field and trees and sky is not a natural one in which creatures and grass mingle in harmonious ease. No, it is an unnatural stillness, one that contains tension, not harmony, the kind that comes before a disturbance. The rabbit knows all of this somewhere deep in its core, somehow knows that the barrel of a .22 rifle is pointed directly at it — even though the rabbit itself is not looking in that direction.
Its ears are working frantically. Its nose is twitching in the air. It smells danger and everything about the rabbit suggests it is about to flee, to fly back down into its hole where there is no danger. But it doesn’t. Perhaps, in that same core that tells the animal it is in danger, it also realises that its moment of death is upon it and so it doesn’t move. The moving and the not moving will not alter the structure of the picture — the rabbit, the field and the observer — its time has come and nothing will alter that. It is suddenly lifted from the ground. And, simultaneous to this, the quiet of the morning is shattered by an explosive cracking sound that reverberates all around the field like a cannon shot. As the rabbit is lifted and the silence is broken, field and sky respond, and all the potential for movement that was concealed behind leaves and branches and tufts of grass is released. Birds, all black, hundreds upon hundreds, burst from the trees bordering the field and take to the sky. Hundreds upon hundreds that swell into flocks of thousands take wing. And, within seconds, the clear sky is black. The pale, mid-winter sun is blotted out and darkness falls across the field. Pitch, country darkness. A darkness so dense no normal dawn could ever wash it away.
And in the middle of the field, under the black morning sky, the fourteen-year-old Vic (holding a dead rabbit by the hind legs with one hand, and a rifle with the other), stunned by the enormity of what he has unleashed, stands, stock still, staring up at the sky, wondering where on earth the sun could possibly have gone. Or if this darkness at the beginning of the day where there shouldn’t be darkness is the new order of things. The black sky ripples with wings, from one end of the horizon to the other, and the trees bend in the disturbed air. And the boy, the centre of this disturbance, the cause of it, remains perfectly still in its midst. But he is no longer looking up at the sky. He is, through the wonder of dreams, peering forward into those years that he will live, where the Vic that he will become now lies, moving uneasily in sub-tropical slumbers.
That great hooter gushes air; sleep and the dream shudder to a halt, and Vic’s eyes snap open, at first not knowing where on earth they are. A bedroom, yes. But which of the bedrooms, of the houses of his life, has he woken to? It is dark; everything is a mystery. And if this could be any of the bedrooms in any of the houses of his life, he could be any age. And he could be waking to any of his days, lived or unlived. He has no idea where he is. Is he alone in this place or in the company of others? Although his eyes are open, his mind is still back there in the dream and is slow to catch up. Then he recognises the sparsely furnished, simple bedroom of his flat and he knows that he is alone.
He was told that age would work like this. Not that he is old, but the years of drink, ignoring the pills that the doctors over the years have prescribed him and the years of being at war with himself, have taken their toll and he feels old, old beyond his years. And this is confirmed in people’s eyes, for he can tell — if only by looking in the mirror himself — that he not only feels old, he looks old. He is tired now in a way that he was never tired before. The tiredness of the past, of youth, could be fixed with a good sleep. But now he wakes up as weary as he was when he went to bed. He is not surprised that he should be continually going back the way he does now day after day. What does surprise him is the clarity of it all. The clarity of his dreams, of his memories. And the things that his memory throws up, for no apparent reason, that he could have sworn he’d forgotten all about.
Vic lies back in his bed, darkness all around him, half a mind to walk back into that dreaming field, to the tiny hamlet where he grew up, as if he could open the back door of his flat and it would be there. He knows that field and all that lies around it. The sodden paddocks, the rusted wire and rotted wooden fences slowly sinking back into the soft earth, the deep footprints that cross the paddocks of his memory and lead back to the small wooden farm house a half mile from where the rabbit blithely skipped into the air as if breaking into a jig. He is familiar with all that is in the picture and all that is not. The intersection of dirt tracks that marks the centre of the hamlet, the three houses that cling to the tracks, the cricket ground that is no more than a cow paddock with a concrete pitch in the middle, the red-brick Swiss Family Hotel, and the faint path that leads off the road down into a deep gully where clear spring waters gurgle freely. It is all before him, the playground of his youth, the place to which his mother took him as a boy and in which they lived years that he knew, even at the time, were happy years. The dream gave him a clear picture of the field he has not seen since then but which he knows, even now, so well. Such are the wonders of dreams.
Vic is happy enough in this sub-tropical town to which he has come. It is compact, it is convenient, and all the things he requires to maintain this state of being happy enough — pub, shops, golf course, Services club, and people who are friendly without getting too friendly — are all here, a step or two away. Michael is grown. The boy, he is sure, will look after himself better than the old man ever did. And he and Rita are better off this way. It had to be done. The shooting through. It was rotted, the old life. They’re better off. There’s even a tenderness in the words they write to each other now, a tenderness that hadn’t been there for years.
He imagines a chorus of ‘Poor Vic’ from all those who knew him in the old life. Among them, those who rot back there in that stuck-up town that calls itself a city, those who rot rather than shoot through because they are too weak to live. Poor sad Vic, they might say. Even poor silly Vic. But they can stick their poor sad Vics, and they can stick their sad, rotted comforts. He never looked for them. He never wanted them. But he got them anyway. They force them on you, their comforts, he muses, stretching out in bed. Because once they’ve got you wrapped up in all their comforts, they’ve got you. And you’re not you any more, you’re them. This is the other Vic, the one who went through the motions. This is the Vic he calls the ‘they-Vic’, the Vic that fell in between ‘then-Vic
’ and ‘now-Vic’.
The sky at the window is beginning to brighten and Vic watches night give way to day. Normally, the light is there when he opens his eyes because he is a good sleeper. But not lately. Lately, he is disturbed by dreams, the same kinds of dreams. Lately, he is always back there somewhere. He hasn’t seen that field for forty years. It may still be there, may not. May be changed, may be miraculously the same. The dream got it right, though. He knew it, every detail. And it wasn’t before him, or in front of him. He was simply in it. And it was as natural as being anywhere else. Being old, being young. Being here, or there. There was nothing so surprising about any of it. Fourteen one minute, old the next. And it was so easy it was frightening. Is this what comes with age? This ability to step in and out of the phases of your life as if the show’s all over and all you’re living through is a kind of summing up? Whatever, the years are with him, and all that they bring with them, wherever his wanderings around the town may take him.
This small one-bedroom flat has been his home since walking away from the old life. It’s a modest 1920s number. Nothing fancy. Bare walls, bare linoleum floors. Sea green. A bed, a chair and a table here and there. No TV, only a small transistor radio in the lounge room, a reading lamp, books and newspapers. Clean, sparse. Sad to some, no doubt. Not a comfortable place, and that’s why he likes it. These are the digs of someone who has returned to being what he always was — a single man. He is at his most content when his life is simple. A simple flat, a simple daily round, predictable from one day to the next. The comforts of the past, the being plural, the ‘us’, the ‘we’, the ‘them’ — it was never him. They can stick their comforts. He reclines on the pillow, the morning lights the edges of the chocolate-brown holland blind that covers the window. There are no curtains, no lace, no comforts of home, for the comforts of home belong to another Vic, the Vic who spent twenty years being them, not him.
He rises from bed and prepares for the day, and each day is a duplication of the other: shopping, checking the post, a pub lunch, a few beers, golf, a few beers, home and dinner, then the club, and a few beers, and a few beers more for good measure. Every day, they all tell each other up here, is a Sunday. There’s no other Vic, going through the motions, up here, just the Vic that always was. Good-time Vic, who doesn’t need to look ahead too far and make plans because every day is more or less the same. Every day plans itself, and all he has to do is step into it, as he is now preparing to do. Vic’s day is about to begin.
4.
Mrs Webster at Work
Webster’s noise, the noise that Webster brought to the suburb when he brought the factory, is all around her but she barely notices it any more. The scene is as familiar to her now as it was for Webster, for the chair in which she sits, the mezzanine office and the view out across the factory floor were all once the possession of Webster the factory.
In the ten years that have intervened since his departure, the world outside has transformed but little has changed inside the factory. The view from the mezzanine is still the same, and, although the machines have been replaced from time to time, and staff have come and gone, the sounds, routines and movements of the place — the whole production system — have virtually remained the same. If Webster were to be ushered through the suburb blindfolded, if he were to be left ignorant of the changes that had transformed the outside world and find himself back on the factory floor, he would assume that it had only been a matter of days, not years, since he had been gone. And a brief look at those objects the place produces — the recycled scraps, those isolated parts that are destined for the factories that turn them into the completed objects that are useful to people — would confirm this assumption. Nothing has changed, and this is the problem with the factory. It is a dying factory, and the sounds she hears are the dying falls of a once energetic beast now well into the old age of industrial obsolescence. Mrs Webster recognises all this. Once overloaded with orders, the contracts are now dwindling, the profits down, the precious goodwill draining from the place day by day. But she had sacked no one. Nor will she. It is a dying beast, Webster’s factory, and she will let it die a natural death. And when this occurs, surely not many years from now, she will sell the carcass and whatever else is left, and whatever it is that Progress, by then, requires will stand on the same acre and a half of prime suburban land that Webster once ruled from.
She never took over the place to breathe new life into it, or to improve or extend it. It was never her intention, although she had seen clearly years before what had to be done. No, she wanted it to stay the same, to stay as Webster’s factory in order for her to finally know just what constituted the mystery that Webster became.
For, if she stayed long enough, if she sat in Webster’s chair, viewed the factory floor from Webster’s window, kept the same books of profit and loss, and absorbed daily the noise that Webster brought to the suburb when the suburb was being born, then she would surely soon acquire the eyes and ears and fingertip sensations that were Webster’s. And with the eyes and the ears and the sensations would come nothing less than the mind of Webster himself. Webster the factory would live once more, and the centre the suburb thought it had lost would be retained just a few years longer. And when the mind of Webster revealed itself, so too would the mystery of his death.
In the days and weeks that followed his death, it was his absence (especially the physical absence, for Webster was a tall, robust man who filled space) that she felt in every corner of the house, in every corner of the gardens, his absence that cast its shadow over every rare smile that came along in the blur of days after he walked out of the house one warm summer’s night while she slept, and drove into local history.
But, as she accustomed herself to his absence, as she adjusted to the cruel fact that the sheer energy of Webster had been extinguished overnight (and when she thought of Webster, she thought of the energy that she so missed), something else began to take hold of her mind until it grew to such an extent that there was only room for one thought — or rather, one question — in a mind that had always been capable of simultaneously balancing any number of fancies; namely, who was this man? The Webster she had lived with throughout the twenty years of their marriage — who drank only imported teas, whose marmalade was laced with marinated ginger and who kept his one infidelity parked under a tarpaulin in a distant corner of the garden — was familiar to her. But not the Webster who drove out into that summer’s night ten years ago and never came back. She was familiar with the shape and bulk of Webster, the Webster that he presumably gave to everyone else, but she was denied that part of Webster that held ultimate sway over life and death, that part of Webster that could so easily have accelerated into life, but accelerated, by accident or design, into death. And whenever she contemplated this, she always thought of that distant corner of the garden where the garage was. And with that came the impulse to guard from public eyes everything that was Webster, one minute, and the impulse to tear down Webster the factory, brick by brick, the next.
And so, as the days of her mourning passed and the life of the suburb adjusted to the loss of its centre and eventually moved on, she was left with this one relentless thought — that she had never known him. That the years of their marriage had given her no more privileged access to the mind of Webster than the factory workers or the suburb had. And it was then, not long after his death, that she walked into the factory one morning, looked out across the factory floor, listened to the noise that he had brought to the suburb when the suburb was young and in need of noise, and set about the task of becoming Webster.
She rises from her desk as the factory floor goes quiet and the machinists and staff line up to clock off. As always, she will wait until the factory empties, because Webster always did. Out there, Rita will have completed cleaning the house. It is a large house, and this woman, who has lived in the suburb as long as she has but whom she had never met until she hired her, cleans the house in such a way that is worth every cent Mr
s Webster pays her. For it is good, at the end of a day, to walk into a house that has not only been cleaned and polished but invested with something else indefinable that Mrs Webster can only call care. As the last of the giant pressing machines falls silent, she asks herself what Webster might have felt at this time of the working day, listening to the groans of his beast subsiding. Was it satisfaction or pride? Was he stirred by the sight and sound of something so elemental as production; bringing something into the world that wasn’t there before he came along, so that the accidental lives of the machinists might find direction, that money and goods might change hands, and the world spin? Or was it the weariness of watching the same repetitive process day after day — and indifference towards all those he employed, who came and went year in year out, and who would, one day, come no more? And as she watches the factory floor drain itself of working life, she wonders if the indifference she too feels at this dead hour of the day might be the doorway into the secret chamber of Webster’s mind. Then she dismisses it. Not Webster. She remembers the fire that stayed in his eyes till the last, the passion that he kept for this beast of production that he brought into being and for which he felt an almost paternalistic concern. She could never conceive of him deliberately walking away from the sheer dependency of the thing, any more than she could imagine him losing his passion for rousing the thing each day.
The Time We Have Taken Page 2
