The Time We Have Taken

by Steven Carroll

  Not that Vic is someone who spends too much time dwelling on the past, because, as he tells himself, there’s not too much time left in which to dwell. There’s a lot more of the past now than there is of the future, and, besides, the past is gone, isn’t it? All the same, something Rita says (a reference to the Tivoli Road hill and that big old house where Rita grew up), drags him back, as much as he doesn’t want to be dragged but there is an emotional tide drawing him back into the former life, and soon he’s not even reading the letter. He’s back there. He’s young, she’s young. Impossibly so. Her eyes bright and brown, the adventure, that glorious shot at Life about to begin. The look, the eyes bright and blind to everyone around, they both had it. The look the young always have, for it’s so easy to forget you had it too. And it is then, with a shock that moves him physically as if having been rocked by invisible hands (or the convulsion that his doctor tells him could come any day), it is then he remembers that they were once in love. He was once in love, she was once in love, they loved each other and together they spoke words of love. That this thing picked them both up and swept them along, and that they were happy to be swept along by a force so deliriously incomprehensible that it didn’t bear thinking about. They only knew that this was a time of ‘befores’ and ‘afters’, that the power of the thing had to be trusted, and all that was left for them to do was go with it. Let it take them wherever it would. And so they gave themselves up to it. And such was the power of the thing that it gave them days and days delirious with happiness (all too easily forgotten), that it gave them their son, and that, to give their son room for his long legs (which he got from Vic) to run, it took them out to the fringes of the city where a frontier community was hovering between town and suburb, a suburb in the process of being born, and where, in time, between one weekday walk to the station and another trek home, they eventually forgot that they were ever in love in the first place and could remember little of the force that had swept them all the way out there.

  Vic finishes reading Rita’s letter and there are tears in his eyes. Where did they come from? He has no memory of the first tear or those that followed. A man, just doing the shopping, sits down in a public place to read a letter from his wife (from whom he is separated, but not divorced) and cries. Such a man is an event. And Vic is that man. People passing stare openly at the event of a man crying in a public place. And, as much as he is not a man given to crying in public places, he is not concerned. Vic is no stranger to crying, or ignorant of the wisdom of tears. He told Michael, often enough in those last few years in the old house and would tell him again any time, that crying is as natural as sweating. And Vic is a big sweater. And as the tears flow, Vic happy to let them, he contemplates how it is that we can forget such things. Such things should be unforgettable, and yet all too often they aren’t. How was it that, until just then, he was able to forget the hour before meeting Rita? And how was it that he was able to forget the Vic that pedalled her back from the late-night dances, all the way up that Tivoli Road hill (an eighteen-year-old Rita balancing on the handle bars)? And how was it that he was able to forget cycling back home from Rita’s in the early hours of morning, looking up to the stars and kissing the old life goodbye? How is it we so easily forget that something momentous once happened to us? Something so momentous we know intuitively that whatever we were up to until then was the ‘before’ of our lives, and whatever was about to follow, the ‘after’.

  Vic rises from his bench, wipes his eyes and looks about the town, which is suddenly alien to him. He places Rita’s letter in his pocket. Somebody nods and wishes him a good morning, with a funny look in his eye. Vic nods back. Calls the man ‘brother’ in that familiar way of his, and returns the greeting, but is not really sure who he has just greeted.

  18.

  The Arrival of Speed

  It arrives one afternoon, a week after the Centenary Suburb Committee found its Crowning Event, under a mellow autumn sun. There are no rough winds in May. The air is autumn still. Leaves flutter slowly onto the footpaths and streets, unhurried, landing softly on the ground above which they’ve hung all through the spring and summer. It glides through the suburb in black majesty, barely noticed for the suburb is either at work or school, not on the streets. It is the perfect time for speed to arrive. The few who do notice the thing, eye it in the same way the street does Rita’s European dresses.

  It speaks of somewhere else, of that far-away world out there where wonders such as this are made. But as much as those few who stand and stare on the footpaths of the suburb are wary of this imperial beast as it glides indifferently through their streets, they are drawn to it. It is an object complete in itself. Perfect, beyond either the reproach or approval of the place to which it has been brought. But, coexisting with that part of them that still retains a capacity for wonder is a ready sneer. To be roused to wonder is to be reminded that such things are not of the suburb and come from out there beyond its boundaries.

  Just a week before (the very day public tears had turned Vic into a public event), Mrs Webster had ventured deep into Webster’s corner of the garden where, in those last years of their marriage, he had kept his one harmless infidelity. That corner of the garden to which he came whenever the dark mood took him, the one he never spoke of. Where he took that one trifling infidelity that in the end made the marriage a lie. He brought it there — the mood; never to her. She had misread Webster, Webster the factory, to the extent that since his death she had been constantly preoccupied with the question of just who this man — with whom she had lived for over twenty years — just who this man was. She only knew, in the end, what everybody else did. And, after more than twenty years together, that wasn’t enough.

  The green wooden doors of the garage had been locked. As she’d yanked the doors free of all the weather and dirt that had glued them together and light entered the garage for the first time in a decade, she saw the neatly folded tarpaulin that had concealed the black majesty of the beast the garage once housed.

  Shelves, tins, tools and cables had revealed themselves to a changed world. The scent of old oils, petrol and cleansers had risen to her nostrils, summoning another age when Webster walked from his garage with these very smells upon him and brought them into the house before changing for lunch or dinner — and making small talk that never suggested that he was engaged in anything more than a trifling indulgence. And, perhaps that is how it began, innocent enough. A trifling indulgence, until it became all-consuming and would not be denied, this need for speed.

  She’d moved about the garage (which she had secretly eyed from her doorstep as she farewelled the committee), touching the tins that were closed one day and never re-opened, the tools that were put down and never picked up again. She wiped the dust from a cylinder and the letters and colours of a brand of motor oil no longer around revealed themselves. How little time it takes. The doors of the garage closed one day, Death folded up its belongings, life moved on, and the contents of the garage became those of a lost age. Yet, in those smells and the sudden familiarity of brand names long passed into social history, she’d felt Webster’s presence with an aching intensity that she hadn’t felt for years — and those feelings that she once gave to him she gave to the objects he once touched. And, it was then that she asked herself, reluctantly, if she would ever be over it.

  Perhaps this is why she’d never opened the doors until then, because she knew what was waiting for her inside. That and a lifetime’s practice of leaving Webster’s corner to Webster. She’d moved about the shed, imagining that the musty air inside might have been the same air that Webster once breathed. Why not? The twin doors of the garage shut snugly on a concrete floor, and the windows were all locked and air-tight. There was even a brief sensation of having violated his tomb, but this passed as fresh air from the gardens circulated with the old and the last remains of Webster’s breath had been carried out into the world by the breeze.

  And it was then, while the old air was making
way for the new, that she began to look upon the place as Webster might have. The overalls still hanging on the wall, the tools either on the workbench or in boxes, the grease and oil stains on the floor, all spoke of a function. This was the core of Webster’s world, that all things had their function — humans, machines, tools. And the function of a garage was to house an automobile.

  She’d closed the garage doors behind her that day and stepped out into the dappled greens, reds, yellows and purples of the gardens. This was the foundation belief of Webster’s world, of someone with two feet planted firmly on the ground and a head full of thick hair that spoke of a man with years left in him. Before she’d even closed the garage door she knew she had resolved to bring back to the garage the very thing it lacked, and, in so doing, restore its function.

  Now, a week later, Mrs Webster sits in the wide lounge room of the mansion, looking over the gardens, as the car completes its journey from the showroom to the suburb. It is mid-afternoon and the stillness of the day seems somehow wrong for such an arrival as this. This car — famous enough to adorn the exercise books of idle schoolboys — brings with it not only wonder and grace; it brings speed back to the suburb. The day should surely be unruly. The wind should stir the trees and leaves be scattered across the sky to mark the occasion. But the day remains still, and Mrs Webster rises from her chair as the black hood of the thing noses its way into the driveway, sniffing out its new home with the same indifference it sniffed out the suburb.

  As she moves to the front door, she considers the possibility that the circumstances of the day might be right after all. That the very stillness of the day is perfect for the arrival of speed. A day, to all appearances, may remain still and yet be disturbed. As the car enters the gardens, it enters like one that has left waves behind it.

  The transfer of the keys and papers of ownership takes place on the front step, and Mrs Webster (who has taken the afternoon off to receive her guest) is soon left standing alone with the thing. With its sweeping lines, which speak of an age of mechanical elegance, this vehicle appears to be moving when standing still. And when she sits behind the wheel and brings it to life, she is conscious of acquiring the feet, fingertips and central nervous system of Webster himself. Just as when she opens the garage doors and drives it inside, bringing it to rest on the concrete floor stained with the grease and oil of the previous occupant, she is aware, once again, of restoring to the garage the function for which it was created. And when she bolts the doors, bedding the indifferent guest down early, there is a faint thrill. The suburb has witnessed its arrival (those that were about or cared to notice) and it is no secret. Yet when she bolts the doors of the garage and cages the thing in, she feels that it could be her secret, feels the thrill of such a caged prize, as though it just might be her one harmless infidelity, her one harmless indulgence.

  19.

  Madeleine on the Old Street

  The following Saturday, Michael and Madeleine are walking down his old street, under a ripe morning sun that pours its warmth onto the gardens, lawns and hedges of the suburb that Michael has brought her to see. George Bedser’s roses are coming to the end of their second blooming, yellow, red and pink petals falling upon the lawn; Peter van Rijn is about to step into his car but pauses in mid-motion, waving to Michael with a look both happy and sad, for the boy is grown now and he is asking himself where all the years went. Then he is in his car driving to his television-and-radio shop in the Old Wheat Road, and his question is answered. The metal gate of Mr Malek (Michael never knew his Christian name), the fevered rattling of which did old man Malek’s talking for him throughout his years in the suburb, is now silent. Bruchner, the street brute (every street had one), a crippled ruin after a car smash, will no doubt be sitting alone in one of the wide, empty rooms of his house, his dog long gone and the ashtrays, once piled high with the ashes of Joy Bruchner’s dreams, long since cleared from the house. When his dog, old and slow, simply expired on the footpath in front of him one hot summer’s day, Bruchner wept (the street observed) like a blubbering child, and he carried the broken beast in his once-strong plasterer’s arms back into the yard where he’d regularly beaten it to the brink of death and (the street later heard) he buried the thing in the soft, summer twilight and lamented its passing like he never did for his wife, who died of cigarettes and anxiety.

  It drew you back into it, the street. You didn’t mean or want to be drawn, but you were. Michael eyed its length and was ten, twelve and sixteen all over again. Somewhere in Madeleine’s tired eyes (she has come from an all-night shift at the hospital) she knows that the street is drawing him back and she lets him drift for the moment into that deeply private world.

  They are pausing by the paddock next to the Bedsers’. To Michael, it is a source of wonder that this vacant paddock is still a vacant paddock, and that he and Madeleine should now be pausing at the very spot they all did — Vic, Rita and Michael — when, one Saturday night, in the distant world of his childhood, they all stood beneath a timeless peach-coloured sky on the way to Patsy Bedser’s engagement party.

  It had vanished, the world that saw Patsy Bedser dance out of the street and out of their lives, and which also saw the twelve-year-old Michael consume hour upon hour of his early years bowling a worn cork cricket ball against his back fence, chasing speed and never catching it. He hears once again the rifle shot of the ball ricocheting off his old fence, and imagines once more the muttered comments of the neighbourhood warning anybody in earshot that the boy will destroy the fence before the summer’s gone. The suburb is no longer at the edge of the known world — as it was then — and that frontier bleakness is gone, for the frontier has moved relentlessly inland. The gardens have grown, the streets are paved, and the houses themselves have achieved a solidity that they never had when they were being thrown up, one after the other, when, all around them, a suburb was being born. All that really remained of that world, when Patsy Bedser had danced out of the street and out of their lives, was this vacant paddock. The tall khaki grass that had swayed that night in the summer breeze was now motionless in the autumn warmth, under a peach sun hanging up there in the sky like the last of the season’s fruit, mute witness to all that had gone on in the years that had followed.

  They move on, Michael and Madeleine, walking slowly back to the golf-course end of the street. And, as they stroll towards his old house, he is aware of the eyes of the street, in their lounge rooms, behind the shades and the drawn venetians, following the progress of the two young people out there. Those eyes will know him, a rare visitor to the street these days (which will be read as him feeling too good for the street), and their gaze will then shift to the unfamiliar figure of Madeleine. They will know that she is not of the street, and not of the suburb, for she has the look of having come from some other, quite possibly distant, place. And, for a moment, Michael observes her the way the street does, with suspicion, for she brings something with her — and they can’t put their collective finger on it — something that speaks of the great world out there. And they view her with the same suspicion that they view the great world. The sons and daughters of the new families (of whom Michael knows little) have nothing better to do on this Saturday morning but stand on the paved footpath, lean against their front fences, and eye her as she passes. Michael, this son of the street, has dragged an outsider into their midst, and however fleeting her presence may be, it is an intrusion. An affront. And since she will be judged as just a bit too fancy for the street, with the stamp of somewhere else all over her, she will also be judged as one who will never blend with the street or learn its customs in such a way that she would no longer stand out, and those same eyes will be happy to see this intrusion off their land and out of their midst. At least, this is what Michael sees.

  But as they pass the children of the street, lined up against the front fence of the Millers’ old house, Madeleine nods to two young girls and they burst into smiles as radiant as the second blooming of George Beds
er’s roses. They are tender smiles, tender because the street hasn’t got them yet and strangled the tenderness out of them. Michael imagines that once they have passed and the two young girls are inside, they will be told not to go smiling so readily at strangers.

  Michael and Madeleine move on up the street until they come to the old house. Rita is away for the weekend visiting her sister. The key will be under the mat. They pause out the front. Once again the street draws him in, draws him back, and he is four years old. Possibly less. He is standing on a muddy dirt street holding his father’s hand, looking at the bare framework that will become their house. His father, young and fit, is speaking. This, he says, pointing to the bare structure, is where we shall live. That will be your room. When there are walls and windows and a light and a bed, that will be your room and you will sleep in it. And there, he adds, pointing to another section of the bare structure, that will be the kitchen. And when there are cupboards and a table and chairs, you will eat there. And when you have finished eating in the evenings, you will go to the lounge room, where you will lie on the floor and listen to the radio. And when television comes to the street, you will sit on the floor in front of the heater (or in between your father’s legs, telling him you will always sit there) and watch television. Just as one day you will hear the ring of the telephone in that room, for good and for bad. And you will hear the raised voices of your mother and father, fighting because your father has returned late from work again, late and drunk. You will hear words spoken in these rooms that you were never meant to hear and that you will never forget. Just as you will see things you were never meant to see. This is the nature of the house.

  Later in the morning, when Madeleine has gone to sleep in his old room, in his old bed (and she will stay there most of the day), Michael wanders from room to room, observing the ghosts of the house. The three of them (Vic, Rita and Michael), as they will always be and will never be again, ghosts crossing each other’s paths.