It is late in the afternoon, a dead, dreary time. The mayor has completed his sitting and consigned his best suit to the office wardrobe, and Michael has just finished school. He stamps his feet as he mounts the stairs, but Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit don’t hear. They fight often now. There are raised voices coming from their room every day and every day they fail to notice what is outside the confines of their room. So he walks past and slams his door and they continue, it seems to Michael, like the loud, unhappy couples from his old street, when, it seemed, there were days when everybody was fighting and nobody’s lives were private.
Even in his room, with the door closed, he hears them. They go on and on. It’s in his eyes, she says. In his eyes he is leaving her. And the more he taunts, the more she shouts. Until she is swearing, she is swearing once again — as she has before — that she will kill herself, or both of them, if his body ever dares follow his eyes. And he taunts her once more, Bunny Rabbit taunts his Pussy Cat. Do it, he cries. Do it. There is a short, tense silence and Michael is listening more to the silence than he was to the fighting. Then Bunny Rabbit’s voice returns, cool and restrained. But you know you won’t. I know you won’t. Those who talk about it never do it. And as Michael listens to his sad taunts, a chill passes through him. There is a story — and he has long forgotten its name or who wrote it — in which a man says he will kill himself, and his friend, bored with the all-too-familiar threats, says the same thing: that those who talk about it never do it. And, from that moment on, the man who threatened to kill himself knew he had to, otherwise his life would just amount to so much talk. A handful of words. And this is why Michael experiences this sudden chill, because he is convinced that exactly the same thought, at exactly the same time, is passing through Pussy Cat’s mind.
The silence that follows this final taunt is succeeded by quiet sobbing, and the sound of what Michael assumes to be drawers being opened and closed. Nothing is said. The drawers are opened and closed. Bunny Rabbit stomps about the room. He ceases to stomp. And Michael knows, without being witness to the events inside the room, that they have reached that point they can no longer avoid.
A door opens. He hears Bunny Rabbit scurrying down the stairs.
‘I will! You just wait. I will!’
A door slams. The house is silent. For a moment. The sobbing starts again. Soft, then loud. So loud, Michael concludes that Pussy Cat has opened the door in order to sob to the house. It is, he knows, an invitation. A call for company. An inquiry if there is anybody out there after all. And, of course, there is. There is Michael. And he knows he can’t ignore the call, and so he rises from his desk, opens the door, and finds her sitting on the landing. She looks up, this Juliet who should be leaning from her balcony with carefree, provocative innocence, then pulls her long, dark hair back from her temples and forehead. Her face is smudged, her eyes red, her look is — and this is the only word Michael can find to fit her face — lost. No longer Pussy Cat, Louise, Lou, looks about as if having just been thrown into the world for the first time and not sure where she is or what is expected of her. And, for all this, that face is more entrancing, more beautiful than ever. And more distant.
‘I’ve lost my pills,’ she says, her eyes more blank than lost now.
‘What pills?’
‘My pills. Don’t you know?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve looked everywhere.’
Michael looks about in the stairwell for other signs of life in the house.
‘Where’s Peter?’
She doesn’t answer. She simply rises, looks at Michael and nods, almost dismissing him. ‘I’ll find them. They can’t be far,’ she adds, more or less to herself, before closing the door.
Michael pauses for a moment, lingers by the door, then decides to leave her alone. Decides that this is what she wants, and that she is beyond any words he might have at hand and that he could offer, anyway. He is, he tells himself, close at hand.
A song rises from her room — already it is hers, not theirs — as he steps into his own. Over the next hour — the day is golden, one of those eternal winter afternoons and he has lost track of time — she plays it again and again and he drifts into a doze listening to its slow, almost dirge-like rhythms.
On the floor beside the bed (he has no bedside table) is a book he has just begun to read. Lurch approached him that afternoon in the staff room, and in the quiet, understated manner that is his hallmark informed Michael that he reads too much of the black-spined classics by authors with unpronounceable names. He had, it seemed, been observing Michael’s reading habits and concluded that he didn’t read enough of the books about his own place and time. And this surprised Michael, because he always thought of Lurch as Victorian and withdrawn, with the reading habits and tastes of the withdrawn Victorian. But he had thrust a book into Michael’s hand and said, ‘Here, try this.’
As he lies on the bed, the sobbing of Pussy Cat and the dirge-like music rising and falling, he reaches down to the floor for the book. He stares at the cover, the title My Brother Jack (not a good title), the author’s name, George Johnston (he has never heard of him), then opens the book where he left off. He has only just begun to read it, but he already knows he is doing more than just reading another book. There is something about the reading of this book that feels like what he can only call an event. He is not simply reading another book; it is, he knows, much, much more than that. For when he reads this book, he sees, for the first time in his reading life, the world from which he comes. His world — his past and present (and quite probably his future) — has been made different by a book. And that is the event. It is a special book in the same way Mr Maugham had written a special book (just, it seemed, for him), and he knows that one day he will share this book with the right person, but, oddly, he is not so sure he can share it with Madeleine in the same way that they had shared the Maugham. And this is a puzzling thought because it implies that the person with whom he will share this book he has not yet met. And that is puzzling because he does not want to meet anyone else. He has met Madeleine.
He does not know that the writer, this George Johnston he has only just heard of, is a dying man living his last days in Sydney and who saw his death foretold in X-rays the previous month while Michael bared his unfashionable jealousy for Madeleine to see. Two people cross a tram line and enter a picture theatre; a dying man, skin on a stick, refuses to enter a hospital because he wants to die among friends; the book he wrote a few years before is thrust into Michael’s hand from an unlikely source; and already the dying man lives on.
The dirge-like music in the room opposite stops. Michael’s eyes move from line to line across the page, his mind moves upon silence. The music starts up again, but he doesn’t notice. He is lost in the event of this book. He is somewhere else, someplace else, at once familiar and strange. He is somewhere else, both home and not home. Like it or not, want it or not, he will carry home wherever he goes, will be forever going back to it, or being dragged back to it, while forever just wanting to be rid of the whole damn place. And it is, he knows, the same for the character in this book, and its author, this Johnston, this skin on a stick who will die before winter finishes.
33.
Vic Eyes the Horizon
It’s the socks in the variety-store window that catch his eye. White, knee-high and good quality. Golf socks. And going for a song. Vic rarely stops here, but he needs new socks. And so, while Michael begins his last class of the day before going home and witnessing the final, sad scene in the adventures of Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit, Vic is entering the front door of the variety shop. At first he takes only one pair, but, on his way to the counter, he goes back and picks up a second, because that is his way. If something’s worth getting once, it’s worth getting twice.
An hour later he’s out on the fairway, his feet snug inside the new socks. And it’s odd how a little thing like a new pair of socks can make you feel good and lift your whole day (it’s not often, after all,
you think about your feet). So, when Vic tees off he’s got socks on his mind, and congratulating himself that he had the foresight to buy the second pair. And when the ball is sent skyward (a sweet meeting of club and ball, not one against the other but a pleasing result achieved by their collaboration), Vic puts it down to the firmness of his stance, the good feeling in his feet, and the socks that made it all possible. As he watches the ball arc across the fairway, he feels part of a sweet, continuous act that will end only when the ball finally plops down onto the grass. And, for those few seconds, he is aware of that small touch of what he can only call the sublime.
It’s while this sudden intake of wonder is flowing through his veins, alerting him to the sparkle of the moment, that he feels a familiar shortness of breath coming on as his chest tightens up and a cold, dramatic sweat breaks out across his forehead. He drops his club, taking in short, sharp mouthfuls of air, while he reaches for the pills he always carries in his pocket. And as he drops one into his mouth and chews on it, he feels, almost straight away, the magic pill performing its little miracle once again and in a few minutes his breathing is better and he wipes the sweat from his forehead before bending down carefully to retrieve his club from the ground. His playing companions, having already set off as soon as Vic’s ball was launched, have their backs to Vic and have not noticed anything, being so caught up in the tasks at hand, walking to their balls, finding them, and deciding what to do with them. Though they play together often, the four of them (different types united by the game), they rarely have anything to do with each other outside the golf course.
As he drops the club back into the bag, he leans against the buggy, exhausted, dwelling upon this all-too-familiar intrusion. Vic has mixed with various types all his life. He likes to mix, likes to move among people — not only to feel their variety, but because he likes to find the best in them. And that can take some finding, for, when you mix, you come up against rough company from time to time. As much as you don’t want to. But they’re out there, rough company, and they will intrude. Even when you’re happy. Especially then. They don’t like to see you happy. And just when you are, just when you’re watching a harmless white ball doing all the things you’ve ever wanted it to do, this rough type intrudes and tells you he doesn’t like the happy look on your face. And you could tell him why he doesn’t but you’d be wasting your breath. There’s only one response, and that’s to ignore him. To turn your back and walk away. But, even as Vic takes the handle of his buggy and walks quietly away from the tee (the rest of the foursome by now turning to see where he is), he knows there comes a time, and will always come a time, when the rough company that life throws up won’t let you go that easily, won’t cop the insult of your turned back. There are times when it wants action, for no good reason. Vic waves the rest of the foursome on, indicating that he’ll catch up. The thug of Death there on the tee lets him be for now, but he’ll be back.
As he strolls onto the fairway, the world opens up again, as it always does out here, and the horizon looks good: the long, sweeping fairways, the distant view of the coast, and, running alongside it, the black stitching of the railway line.
He knows the sun will shine and that the surf will be good on the day that he dies. Or, if it is at night, or in the early morning, he knows that the air will be balmy. Sweet even. And he knows that the pain will be more than he can bear. And he will know the moment is upon him when he can see no way through the pain, and that the only way to ease it is to submit to it. And so, in sunshine or in balmy night, he can picture this world of his on the day he leaves it. And the very predictability of the occasion, during this quiet, reflective break on the golf course, has the effect of making Death just something else he will do that day.
What he doesn’t know about are the black plastic rubbish bags. How they will be sitting outside his flat by mid-afternoon waiting to be collected so that the next tenant can move in (Progress having not yet done its job, and small, cheap flats such as Vic’s being at a premium). How they will contain the few things he needed to kick on from day to day — the hairbrush with his grey curls still caught in its teeth, the shaver with his whiskers still wedged in between the twin razors, and the new, unwrapped pair of knee-length golf socks that he never got around to opening because he still hadn’t worn out the first pair.
The white caps in the distance tumble and crash into one another, and somewhere out there on the wide, rolling fairways of the golf course, voices are calling. As his eyes leave the horizon and he turns in their direction, he realises they are calling his name. And, as he turns to them, the rest of the foursome now gathered on the green and waving him on up the fairway, he observes the group, this once-or-twice-a-week order of friendship, with distant eyes.
34.
Speed and After
There is an odd calm surrounding Mrs Webster. She sits at the kitchen table looking out over the front path and the gardens (ignited by the mid-winter spring) of her domain. She sees it all, and she does not see it. The sway of the eucalypts, the shimmer of the shrubs, the quiet industry of the gardener are all perfectly visible to her. But the world they inhabit does not impinge upon hers. Mrs Webster has the quiet calm of someone who has been away, and never quite come back. The abstracted air of someone who has been somewhere mysterious and never wholly returned, the air of someone over whom a question mark hovers. She knows full well that if she were to walk out into the garden she would feel upon her face the breeze that ruffles the shrubbery, smell the air and hear the distant rattle of a suburban train if one were to pass. But, for all this, the world does not touch her. She’s been somewhere, and not wholly come back.
Earlier in the morning, and it is a work day, the gardener had spoken to her about a clump of winter flowers he had recently introduced to the gardens and had invited her to inspect his handiwork. And she had accepted his invitation and followed him, all the time knowing that the gardener and his handiwork belonged to another earlier dispensation. She has begun to understand the temptation of speed, the lure of utter obliteration, and with that has acquired a glimpse of Webster that Webster himself had never offered her. And she has begun to know why. He had been somewhere and never wholly come back. And each time he went, less and less of him returned. Until, finally, he never came back at all.
In those last days, before Webster left forever, she remembered waking in the early morning as he slept, remembered staring at the strangely alien figure of Webster beside her, and for the first time in her life asking consciously, ‘Who are you?’ It was, she knew, not an uncommon question for couples to ask. But it was one that, until now, others had asked. Not her. Or — and of this she felt sure — him. She had then rolled over and returned to sleep. Although hardly apparent at the time, she now thinks of it as an intimation. As though some part of her sensed that she didn’t really know him at all, not where it mattered, and something was out of whack. But what?
In the months that followed his death, she went through all his possessions — papers, photographs, letters, notes, cards (no diary, he never kept one) — repeating again and again the same question she had posed herself in the early morning while he’d slept beside her, only now it was couched in the past tense: ‘Who was he?’ And the more she looked, the more she realised that there was nothing to be found in all of it that might even provide a glimpse of an answer. Most disturbing, most striking of all, was the realisation that in the personal papers of Webster, there was no hint, not even the slightest trace, of something revealing. Nothing that was utterly personal. No sign that might foretell what was to happen. Nothing that could conceivably be the source of some deep unhappiness, loss or shame, were it to be discovered. No irrelevant, sentimental observations. Nothing. And all of these papers and notes and cards and letters (the carbon copies of which he had retained) that should have been personal were utterly impersonal. Could have been written by anyone. Did not need the hand of Webster to be written. And the source of that emptiness — which she knows mu
st surely have existed — which only speed could fill was nowhere in evidence. No sign of its source to be revealed in any of his papers, all of which read like the public records of a public figure whom she knew to be Webster.
The fashionably dressed figure of Rita (too fashionable for this suburb) glides by the wide windows of the lounge room, to which Mrs Webster has moved. This woman with a flair for rearranging things, as she is currently doing with the old Games Room, seems to drift across the gravel pathway like someone, it occurs to Mrs Webster, used to living in the retreat of the imagination; like someone who is also hovering between two lives — what is and what can be dreamt, what she has known and what she doesn’t yet know. And what Rita doesn’t yet know, and which Mrs Webster suspects, is that she is leaving the past behind faster than she realises. It is, Mrs Webster notes, the kind of intimation that friends have of each other. Rita drifts across the pathway unaware that she is being observed. Soon she will arrive at the front door, ring the bell, and Mrs Webster will be required to talk. But, as much as she has the sneaking feeling that this woman could become her friend, she is also in no mood to talk. She continues to wear the look of someone who has been somewhere, and not quite returned.
The Time We Have Taken Page 15
