The Art of the Engine Driver

by Steven Carroll

  Afterwards somebody said it was nothing, but it didn’t look like nothing to me. At first there was just the three of them, then four, then seven, then I lost count. I stood on the edge of it watching. Me, the one who got her bottom pinched. Not that I could see much because everybody else just kept on dancing. They cleared a space and let the fight work itself out. And it did. Soon Vic came back with his shirt torn, hanging loose out of his trousers. And he was rubbing his hand, telling me it didn’t hurt and trying to grin. I was too stunned to do anything but follow him onto the lawn at the front of the dance hall.

  Outside the palms were swaying in the wind. Before the fight happened I could have imagined an orchestra under the palms, but now all I could hear was the cold sound of the waves in the bay splashing onto the beach behind the bluestone walls at the bottom of the street. I looked at my watch and it was quarter past nine. By my calculations we started dancing at quarter to. Maybe less. We’d known each other for a little over twenty-five minutes. And when I thought about it like that I told myself I shouldn’t feel any compulsion to stay. I asked him if he wanted me to stay, and he said yes. But he didn’t want to go back inside, and I said good, I’ve had enough of dancing.

  It was cold as we walked down to the beach. I had a sly smile on my face just for mama. He looked good on the beach in his suit. His coat lapel torn, and his tie still flung over his shoulder. He told me what he did. That’s why they called him Vic, not Victor, he said. Vic for Victorian Railways. VR for short. It was a joke. He was standing there talking away, still rubbing his hand, and I was hoping I looked good.

  Later, when we walked back up to the dance hall he said can I take you home and I said yes. Yes, you can take me home. Soon, I was sitting up between the handlebars of his bicycle with my legs either side of the front wheel and my dress pulled up so it didn’t blow everywhere. He pushed us all the way to South Yarra. All the way up the hill at the end of Tivoli Street. With that salty wind in my face and the tramlines shining before me under the streetlights, I felt like I’d just started to live.

  Rita shrugs her shoulders and gives up on the years. It doesn’t matter in the end. The years led here. They were always leading here. A new suburb out on the edges of the city. A dirt road, a dirt footpath. The sun low on the swaying grass in the open paddocks. She eyes Vic beside her. His cigarette’s gone out and he re-lights one of his cork-tipped cigarettes that he keeps for special occasions. She’s watching his hands as he cups the flame. What happens to it all? What happens to all that life? All that time? Where does it all go? One moment you feel like you’ve got all the years in the world to live, and the next you feel like you’ve lived them. One moment you can’t wait for everything to start, the next you’re counting back through the years like it’s the only thing left to do.

  8.

  A Slight Accident

  Standing at the corner of the paddock with his back to the Bruchners’, Vic stirs as if suddenly waking from a daydream. He motions to the other two who have now fallen behind again and moves forward down the road, aware that his mind has been elsewhere for the last few minutes or seconds, but he is suddenly not sure where or for how long. At these moments the world around him is a puzzle, a surprise. Like it is when you wake from an afternoon doze in a strange place. Familiar faces become a curiosity. Nothing is quite right or real. The street, the houses, his mind. There is grand mal and there is petit mal. A petit mal can last only a matter of seconds, and perhaps that was all the time he drifted off for, but seconds can be eons when the mind goes elsewhere.

  It happens easily enough. It was so cold my fingers were stuck to the handlebars. My bag, slung over my back, kept bumping against my kidneys. The rain had stopped, that bloody awful misty rain that’s not even rain, just cloud. I don’t mind the rain, real rain, at least it’s got a sound. You can hear it, but not that misty stuff, not that morning. I was hunched forward on my bike to keep warm. The light wasn’t good and I didn’t like the sound of that chain. It was creaking like it was going to snap any minute, like it did the week before. And the last thing I needed going down the hill was for that bloody chain to go on me again. So I was looking at it, watching it, daring it to break. And then it happened.

  There was no sound. At least I don’t remember one. And I don’t remember leaving the bicycle or leaving the road. But suddenly I had a free view of the sky. It was almost relaxing. Part of me said make the most of it, you don’t get a view like this too often. And I swear I could see the entire length of the street. The lights hazy in the mist, ’cause that bloody rain had started again. The roofs of the houses, like rows of pyramids in the drizzle. And at that moment I could also see the lights go on in somebody’s kitchen and I knew beyond doubt there was a cup of tea on the way. I could see the new scout hall, the road junction, the moving headlights of a few cars out there on the rim of the old river valley as it winds down to the trestle bridge that I’ve crossed time and again with a full load of coal or ballast behind me and, at the same time, I could see the point where the houses stop and the darkness of the paddocks begins. It was all spread out below me as I slowly turned round in the air. And it was almost good, almost good to know that everything was going on without me for the time being. I could even see my bike, back there on the road, and I knew I was about to join it again soon. Then I thought I could see my body back there on the road too, curled up with the bike and it struck me for the first time that I might even be bloody well dead. Well, be buggered with that. I’m not. Not yet. And suddenly I was in a hurry to get back to my bike, and that grey shiny road, and a car, half out of its drive and half in.

  The road rose to meet me and the thud as I hit the ground was enough to wake the neighbourhood. I could feel my brain move. It just bounced from one side of my skull to the other and back again. Slapped up against my forehead like mince into a sheet of butcher’s paper. A car door slammed and someone was standing over me asking me how I felt. I didn’t say anything, I was just staring at him. I didn’t know how I felt and I rolled my head to one side and noticed my bike and the contents of my bag sprawled all over the road. Funny, I didn’t remember my bag leaving me. Yet there it was, and there was my tin billy with the stew inside. The lid was still on so I hadn’t lost my lunch. But the sugar jar was broken and my tea was all over the road. My bike was a bit jiggered too. The front wheel was twisted and buckled. The spokes were crooked. The back wheel was still spinning. At least my brain had stopped moving and I wasn’t feeling too bad. I could even collect my thoughts, and the first thing that occurred to me was that if I didn’t stop lying around I was going to be late for work. But when I tried to get up this bloke who was suddenly kneeling over me now said don’t move. Then he ran inside and came out again.

  Soon my bike was being dragged off the road and my billy was back in my bag and my bag was back on the footpath. By then I was sitting on the fence looking at what was left of my bike. But I didn’t remember getting there, like I didn’t remember this other bloke turning up. A doctor, I guess, because he kept asking about my bones and my head, and I told him about my brain bouncing around. Apart from that I told him I felt good. Then I asked the time and mentioned that I was due at work, but this doctor told me I wasn’t going anywhere. Then they bundled me into a car with my bag on my lap and the next thing I knew I was sitting up in bloody hospital.

  I hadn’t had a day off in years and I couldn’t help feeling I should be at work. They kept me there all morning, watching me and doing all sorts of tests, then they put me in a taxi home. Everybody was waiting for me when I got there. They looked worried and I told them to relax, that I was all right. The next day I was back on the engines like nothing had happened.

  Two years later I woke up one morning and my wife, my son, and the local doctor were all standing round my bed looking at me like I’d just come back from the dead and I knew something was wrong. I’d been dribbling in my sleep and I was sweating all over and my jaw was aching like I’d been clenching my teeth all night
. The doctor was asking me if I’d had a fall or knocked my head in the last few years. So I told him. He asked me what day it was, who the prime minister was and I couldn’t tell him. Then he asked me my name. Vic. My name’s Vic, I said. And I was going to shoot him the usual line but I knew he wouldn’t laugh so I left it at that.

  That’s when he explained what happened. I had no memory of whatever it was, but I knew something happened. He called it a grand mal. I said what’s that? He explained it to me like it happens every day of the week, and it probably does for him, but not for me. Then he left a prescription and told me to cut back on the grog or the tablets were useless.

  When everyone was outside I was still sitting up in bed staring out the window. The first thing I decided on was telling nobody at work. If they found out they’d stop me driving. And I’m not bloody well finished driving yet.

  Vic is now walking ahead of the other two, about to leave the open paddock behind. He is drawing quickly on one of the cork-tipped cigarettes he keeps for social outings, so that he doesn’t have to roll his own at formal occasions, like he would at work or at the pub.

  From the moment he first sat in the drivers’ classes at the VR school, from the first time he sat down with Bagley’s Guide and committed it to memory, page by page, asking himself the questions and chanting the answers in those routine late-night catechisms that preceded his driver’s examination, from that moment on words like ‘responsibility’, ‘mastery’, ‘devotion’, ‘judgement’ and ‘principle’ had been impressed upon him like key terms of a faith, not a profession. But as much as he knows he shouldn’t be driving, he also knows that his dream is now so near he can almost see his name on the Big Wheel roster. Probably only months, possibly weeks away. To stop now, at this crucial moment, would be a betrayal of a lifetime’s driving. He wasn’t bloody well finished with engines. Not yet. Even though all his better judgement tells him he should get out now, he can’t.

  As he strolls along the footpath he hears Rita’s voice calling out after him, asking him if he’s all right. She sounds concerned and he turns, stops and tells her he’s all right. Straight away she relaxes and he smiles. He can’t blame her asking, if she feels she has to. But behind the smile he’s a bit shitty about the whole business. The family is always watching now, always keeping an eye on him, asking him if he’s all right. And he’s not shitty with them, not really. He knows they’re only worried for him, looking out for him. But it depresses him all the same, like he’s not quite the full quid any more. Then he stops, looks up the road as he waits for Rita and Michael, thinks of the party waiting for them, and the mood passes.

  9.

  The Big Wheel

  … under no circumstances should a driver be placed in charge of passenger trains until he has had experience enough to teach him what is the best to do when extraordinary and unexpected conditions prevail.

  Human life is too precious …

  Bagley’s Australian Locomotive

  Engine Drivers’ Guide

  Paddy Ryan does not look like a big man. Not at first. It’s only when he’s coming at you, then he does. He is fifty-seven, still with a full head of hair, and has hands that can dwarf a beer glass, when there’s a beer to be had, which is often, because Paddy is fond of a beer.

  He is walking slowly along the number one platform of Spencer Street Station. It is early evening and Paddy is gazing up at the sky. Paddy doesn’t normally concern himself with such things as the sky, but tonight he does. Everybody does; the guard, the young fireman walking behind him, the porter, the ticket collector at the gate and the first of the passengers beginning to pass through the platform gate.

  Paddy is a Big Wheel driver. In an hour he will take the main passenger train between Melbourne and Sydney to the New South Wales border. There are one hundred crews on the Big Wheel throughout the State. They take the passenger trains between Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. They drive them to the border where the interstate crews take over. They rest overnight in railway huts, and they bring the trains back the next day or the next night, depending on the train. It is every driver’s dream to be rostered on the Big Wheel, because the Big Wheel drivers are the best, the elite. They are the artists of the rail system. The steam engines that once hauled the old passenger trains had giant, six-foot driving wheels. The name has been around for a hundred years. If you drive a passenger, you’re the best, you’re a big wheel. Anybody can haul coal. It is Vic’s hope that one day he will join the sacred circle of the Big Wheel. Like Paddy. Paddy is the best of them all and Vic was lucky enough to have been his fireman. There is no better driver to learn the trade from. When the Queen was here, it was Paddy who drove her train. There are no bumps on Paddy’s journeys, no unnecessary swaying from side to side, no sudden jolts. You can eat your meal in the buffet car when Paddy is driving and your plate will stay in front of you, your cup of tea will stay at rest where you last put it. The dips in the track, the need to ease off the throttle, the increase in speed or the need to apply the brakes will all go unnoticed by the passengers on Paddy’s trains. Paddy, Queen’s driver, has the artist’s touch. A driver is born with the feel that Paddy has for engines, wheel and track, and when he is driving at his best, when he is flying, when driver and machine are one, Paddy is utterly still and silent, seven hundred tons of iron and steel responding to the tips of his fingers.

  Vic was Paddy’s fireman. Seven years they were together. Seven years of watching, listening and taking notes. Seven years of learning the trade from the best there is. How to listen to the engine, how to read the rails. But more than all of this, more than the trade, Vic learnt that to be a great driver you have to bring something of yourself to the task. You have to stamp your work with your individual signature, so that anybody with eyes and ears for the trade will recognise it. For when something is given to engine driving that wasn’t there before that driver came along, driving becomes an art.

  Paddy is an artist. His great contribution to the trade is his ability to eliminate the bumps that come from the dips in the rails, from sleeper and sleeper, the ballast between the rails will slip and whole sections of rail will dip. But Paddy eliminates these dips and nobody knows how he does it. Not even Paddy. It is the part of Paddy’s driving that can’t be explained, and it is also that part of Paddy’s driving that makes him an artist.

  But, at the moment, Paddy is not thinking about any of this. He is watching the sky as he walks to his engine. He is not a man given to much contemplation of the sky, but he is currently asking himself if he has ever seen a sky quite like this. It is the kind of sky that causes people to break their stride, and stop whatever they’re doing, if only for a moment. And Paddy stops, taking in the length of the train as he does.

  His train is freshly cleaned, and the royal blue of the carriages with their gold lines above and below the window and the distinctive gold lettering, gleam under the platform lights. Set in the enclosed rounded end of the parlour-observation car is the illuminated sign that proclaims the name of the train, Spirit of Progress.

  From the moment it began service in the thirties it has been the elite passenger train of the country, indeed, famous throughout all those parts of the world where people care about trains. But, for all this, it is simply known in the trade, by the drivers, the firemen, the guards and the passengers, as the Spirit.

  There are eleven air-conditioned carriages, five first class, three second class, a dining car, the parlour-observation car that bears its name and a luggage van. Eleven carriages, four hundred passengers, two guards, five conductors, the fireman and Paddy. And the engine. But not steam. In the old days the Spirit was drawn by streamlined steam engines that were the toast of the Victorian Railways. Paddy is driving one of the new S class diesels. In recognition of the high regard in which this train is held, the new diesels all bear the same names as the original steam engines that have only recently been retired from service and sold for scrap. The brass lettering on the side of Paddy’s diesel read
s Sir Thomas Mitchell.

  10.

  Albert Younger

  There are voices behind them. Rita, Michael, and finally Vic, all glance backwards to the golf course end of the street as they continue their walk down to the Englishman’s house. They can’t see their own house from here, but they can see the pale gums that run along the edge of the golf course. The wire fence that follows the western boundary of the course is rotted and falling down, a barrier to no one. Michael and his friends from the street are always in that vast, open park even though they know they’re trespassing. The wooden gate through which they pass, onto the sandy pathway that leads out to the first tee and the cream and green weatherboard clubhouse on the left, has long since fallen down and its rotted frame now lies on the pine-needle bed beside the fence. Built just before the first war, the whole course is in a slow state of collapse.

  Vic, Rita and Michael momentarily fix their eyes on that luminous row of ghost gums, as if half-expecting them to suddenly uproot themselves and join the slow moving procession of families strolling towards the house at the bottom of the street, when there is a faint, metallic click in the night.

  Albert Younger has just closed the front gate behind him, and, with his wife, Mary, is now walking along the thin dirt footpath. He wears a starched white shirt, a black tie, and navy blue suit trousers. He is a small, slight man, while Mary is a dark haired, creamy skinned, dark eyed Irish woman. She is twenty-seven and already has five children.