by A L McCann
Albert, who was always at his calmest and most reasonable in the presence of his brother, didn’t disagree, but merely avoided direct eye contact, sulking in a way that acknowledged his high aspirations would have to be put aside for the time being.
“I should have lived in another century, Robert,” he said.
His brother looked at him, but Albert sensed that Robert, a mere journalist after all, a scribe more than a writer, a simple recorder of the everyday rather than a quester for the truth behind it, would never understand him.
“What century would that have been?”
“Never mind. It’s curious to think that we are so worn out. The place is barely a hundred years old and the country seems completely exhausted. All that settling, felling and digging has taken an awful toll.”
“You used to sing a different tune. You and your mate Sid.”
“Did I?” Albert asked, looking at his brother with an expression of mild surprise.”I can barely remember.”
“Albert, you need to take that job. You can’t expect Anna to keep spending the little bit of money she has supporting the children while you fritter away your time in the library. If you wrote articles I could maybe organise some sort of freelance work for you, but …”
Robert knew he couldn’t finish the sentence without insulting his brother. With the thought still hanging he signalled to the bartender and ordered another round.
But working as a conductor was not like working in an accounts department. At the insurance company there had been a constant stream of bureaucratic detail to attend to. There was no relief from it, no time to think, no time to be oneself. As the trains swayed and bumped between Melbourne and their various provincial destinations, however, Albert found that he had time to spare. In the contraction of space between two points, as the locomotive sped between cities, a contemplative expanse opened up in which he could meander from one abstraction to another. The regimentation of the railway, the constant adherence to schedules and timetables, was also a relief. The administrative erasure of free will in the measurement of miles, hours and minutes, meant that he was spared the burden of having to concentrate too hard on the job at hand. It was simply a matter of turning up on time and then letting the mechanised ensemble of man and machine run itself. Whereas the work of a clerk involved the constant exercise of will, until there came a point at which will gave out altogether, the life of a train conductor was an automatic one. As the machine moved through space, the conductor moved anonymously through the train’s compartments and carriages without the burden of identity or responsibility.
Later, after his shift had finished, Albert struggled to remember what he had done. He was usually physically exhausted by the time he got home and could recall only strange, disjointed impressions of landscape, darkness and rushing light, of sleeping passengers, the sound of his own footfalls, the vision of a beautiful woman alone in a compartment gripped by the motion of the machine, the light caught in her hair like a nimbus.
CHAPTER FIVE
Towards the end of summer Albert took Paul with him on a trip to Ballarat, thinking that the novelty of train travel would interest his son. It was a quiet weekday and the train was almost empty, enabling him to spend a good few hours sitting with his son instead of patrolling the carriages. Paul was a taciturn and self-absorbed child and had brought a pad and a handful of coloured pencils with him. Even before the train started moving he was drawing what he could see through the window.
“What are you sketching, Paul?”Albert asked.
“Just tracks and stuff. And people.”
As the train gathered speed the child’s hand became less steady. At first Paul gripped his pencil and concentrated more earnestly on the integrity of line and form. But the jolting motion of the locomotive became more intense and the scenes passing outside the window more rapid, until finally the cityscape rushed by in a blur. His hand gave in to the movement of the carriage, producing a chaotic series of jagged, plunging lines. Having finished with something that looked like a record of seismographic activity, he gave up, letting his eyes settle on the stream of images outside the window.
“How do people draw on trains?” he asked his father.
“Usually they don’t.”
“That’s because everything moves so fast and the train is always bumping you,” he said sagely.
Albert looked at his son, wondering what the boy knew. He could divine little from the child’s features, which as yet were too unformed to reveal much of his character. Ondine was, if anything, more opaque to him, but the fact that she looked so much like her mother suggested that the girl would grow up to have the same remote demeanour, the same passivity, the same dread-inspiring aura of Lutheran purity. That Albert barely knew his wife didn’t occur to him. He was confident that he understood her thoroughly, despite the obvious distance that separated them. Empathy wasn’t necessary for him to grasp the deadening, Nordic chill of such women.
When Paul got used to the movement of the train he tried drawing again. This time he didn’t bother looking out the window, but drew from his imagination. He didn’t try to exert a strict control over the movement of the pencil either, but let the train exert a degree of influence on the shapes and forms he drew.
“What’s that, Paul?” Albert asked, looking at the crude farrago of faces and bodies that his son was producing unselfconsciously before him.
“It’s the arrival of midnight in the city of Melbourne,” the boy said.
Albert could make out the post office clock tower, the streamers and banners, and the rudiments of a crowd. The whole thing had a grotesque, comic energy that could have been the result of the boy’s lack of skill, or of the train’s chaotic effect on the steadiness of his hand. The faces in the crowd were outlandish, warped little blobs stuck on bloated bodies. Some had animal fangs, chattering skeleton teeth, hollow eyes, or sharp, vulture-like beaks. Some looked like bears, wolves or dingos. Some wore top hats, carried swords, waved flags or were busy vomiting a nasty melange of liquid and assorted garbage into the street. The sky was dark and in the distance the child had drawn flames dancing around the revellers, and a scarlet moon. Paul’s hand jerked with the jolts of the train, adding further distortion to the brutality of the scene, as forms closed in on each other creating a menacing jumble of activity. As Albert watched his son’s seemingly random pencil strokes he saw the relentless chaos of plummeting movement. Coherence gave way to disintegration, ordered form to compulsive distortion, yet the drawing had more life in it than anything he could imagine producing himself.
When Paul and Albert arrived home in the evening, Hamish was in the living room playing dominoes on the floor with Ondine, while Anna and Sarah drank tea in the kitchen.
“That’s an eight,” Hamish said gently.
“Oh,” the girl said, snatching the tile back and replacing it with a matching nine.
Paul sat down beside them. “You wanna see what I drew on the train?” he asked.
Ondine put her arms around him and diverted herself away from Hamish, who was clearly peeved at his demotion in her attentions. Paul showed them the picture, which now had the title written in crude letters underneath it.
“That’s awful,” said Hamish.
“I think it’s beautiful,” said Ondine.
“No it’s not, it’s ugly.” He might have added that Ondine herself was beautiful, that her mother was beautiful, that each of them was the embodiment of a beauty more radiant than any of the princesses or sprites in the stories that Anna had read to them.
Albert watched the children debate the merits of the picture and then strolled into the kitchen where his wife stood up, kissed him on the cheek and poured him a cup of tea.
“Did Paul behave himself?”Anna asked.
“He worked most of the day and sat quietly in the depot office in Ballarat. Good as gold, so to speak.”
The ease with which they both slipped into the rhythm of the evening sometimes astounded Anna. S
he would have preferred it if Albert had looked at her like a quivering madman, but he didn’t. His usual manner had nothing really exceptional about it, the demeaning uniform aside, and the casual observer would not have sensed that there was all that much out of the ordinary.
“Hungry?” Anna asked as Sarah finished her tea and made to leave.
“Yes,”Albert said.
“I’ve got some chops, fresh.”
“That sounds good.”
The surface of things had its own comforts, and sometimes they could both feel at ease in it, as long as neither of them dwelt too long on the deception.
“Can Hamish stay for tea too?” Paul asked from the living room, catching the mention of food.
“He’s got to come home to his own dinner,” Sarah said before Anna could consent, as she inevitably did in these situations.
“These children are really inseparable,” Sarah said under her breath.
“You can say that again,” said Albert.
Anna liked Hamish and the way in which he interacted with her own children. The boy had taken to German and once, when she read them a Heine poem about the Lorelei, he asked her whether Australia had a Lorelei of its own, which she took to be a revealing question, indicating the boy’s intelligence. While other children played cricket in Draper Street, Hamish was content to read or be read to, and his presence turned what might have been the loneliness of a mother and her children into something like the feeling of company. That, years ago now, he had looked into her eyes, seen her so cruelly exposed and then concealed the fact of such intimacy within him, never mentioning or even hinting at what he had witnessed, also filled her with warmth at the thought of his loyalty. Paul, Ondine and Hamish had grown up together, and though Hamish was older, the bonds between them seemed quite unbreakable.
Albert, on the other hand, was not so trusting. He thought a boy of twelve, nearly thirteen, was too old to be playing dominoes with a girl of seven. He could see that Hamish was infatuated with Ondine and it troubled him.
One evening Albert had come home to find Hamish nervously looking at an old issue of the Bulletin, fixing upon a provocative illustration by Norman Lindsay depicting “The Poet and the Muse”. The former was a forlorn, world-weary man, leaning bent and broken over a writing desk. The latter was a winged maiden, her rounded breasts drawn with precise detail, leaning over the poet sympathetically, as if to guide him. Hamish quickly closed the magazine when Albert appeared at the door, but not before he could guess what the boy had found so engrossing.
Later, according to Sarah, the boy had asked his parents what a muse was.
“What did you say?”Anna asked.
“Well, I don’t really know. Like an inspiration, wouldn’t you say? That’s what Jack said to him anyway.”
Albert promptly produced the very issue of the Bulletin that contained the sketch, which he showed the women, and read the accompanying poem about the sacred secret of infinity burning in the beauty of the rose, and the soul of the radiant maiden who breathes light and meaning into the visible world.
“Overblown rubbish,” he concluded.
“But better than the usual woman-hating stuff they come up with,” Anna rejoined, snatching the magazine out of his hands.”Listen. This from the wisdom of Nietzsche on the Red Page:‘Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? Mud is at the bottom of her soul.’”
She blushed as she read it, wondering why it seemed so repulsively resonant to her.
“He was a lunatic,”Albert muttered.
Anna dropped the magazine on the table sensing that Albert felt exposed.
“Anyway, it’s nice to have a muse,” she said finally. “Hamish has a romantic temperament, which in this day and age is a good thing.”
Albert slouched into a chair, resenting Hamish all the more. Anna treated him as one of her own children, not perceiving the stranger so close to their daughter. At the back of his mind Albert harboured the tremulous thought, which he knew he dare not explore, of the boy, chubby, freckled and with lumpish white hands, and Ondine, only seven, yet still on the verge of the cold sensuality that he imagined in his wife.
Years later, when Hamish McDermott dwelt upon his childhood, he’d recall parts of the city as if they were enchanted. He couldn’t be sure of the extent to which his imagination had invented the phantasmagoric city of his youth. Sometimes, when he had time, he’d go for walks through the streets and lanes looking for places that he had known as a child – a cyclorama, a dilapidated arcade, or a used-book stall selling banned literature – and not find the place, which made him suspect that it had never been there at all. Even so he never tired of the streets, which would wink at him with the promise of his childhood and draw him out into forgetfulness. To the casual passer-by it must have looked as if he walked in a completely aimless manner, with no apparent destination. And in a way the aimlessness of these walks was their pleasure. With no ostensible goal or object in mind, he’d meander off the main thoroughfares and find himself confronting some unfrequented lane or dusty window where time seemed to have stood still and an eerie calm prevailed.
“Ich wei nicht, was soll es bedeuten, da ich so traurig bin.” He recalled the poem about the Lorelei that Anna had read to the three of them, Paul, Ondine and him, when they were children. In the poem a beautiful maiden with glittering jewels in her hair sits on a cliff overlooking the Rhine and sings a song of such intoxicating power that a sailor is lured off his course onto the rocks and drowns. The poet who tells this story describes it as a tale from olden times. In the gloomy absence of the Lorelei’s song, the song of death, he is inexplicably sad, and this sadness is the mystery explained by the description of the song’s violent power.
When he was thirteen Hamish and Paul had run off into the city to look at near naked mannequins in the window of a ladieswear store in the Royal Arcade. The plaster figures stretched their smooth, white limbs into various postures of arousal. Behind the glass window, which caught reflected light from the other shops and the glowing white orbs suspended from the ceiling, they seemed to be swimming in a sea of stars.
“That must be what the Lorelei looks like,” Hamish said to Paul. He paused. He was on the verge of adding that he loved Ondine. He wanted to tell someone. He was bursting with the secret of his innocent desire, but put off by the closeness of the brother and sister, and the awkwardness he felt being excluded from their blood bond, he caught himself.
Instead he put the question to Paul:“Do you love Ondine?”
The younger boy smirked at him, shrugged and said nothing.
When a passer-by disturbed the moment of reverie the boys withdrew from the window and headed back towards Bourke Street. Hamish couldn’t remember what happened next, but the image of the mannequins and the tension he felt would often resurface, luminous with its promise and possibility, through all the dark times that subsequently crowded around it. It was a moment that never left him, even though he knew, in the years that followed, how delusional it had been. The celestial shopfront of naked female forms, the glassy mystery of the arcade, flooded with light, yet still harbouring a darkness that had been gathering for decades, might have been what he was searching out on his many walks through the city. Whenever he returned to the arcade it was heavy with the memory of those mannequins. Even though the place had fallen into disrepair, he still imagined that, amidst the flaking paint, the cracked walls and the broken windows, he could hear the song – pure, primal sound, calling him away from the profane shimmer of electric lights and the din of motor car traffic into some watery Rhineland dream.
After this visit to the arcade Paul returned to his pencils with a head brimful of imagery. He was almost frantic as he sat down, dangling over the clean, white page before him, anxious about the appearance of the first line. Ondine sat opposite him on the floor, moving a toy spindle around her hand, occasionally glancing up at her brother. The two children looked alike at a fundamental lev
el. Both were pale and slender, both had delicate hands and faintly freckled skin, but Ondine’s flaxen hair was a stark contrast to Paul’s jet black. Nevertheless they barely noticed this difference, instinctively dwelling on the sameness between them as a source of enormous comfort and security.
Paul looked at his sister, who was careless of his attention, and then looked down at the paper again. The arcade, he thought, was like a cathedral, or a cavern, or a vast grave site, a catacomb full of aloof figures ghosting up and down its length. He imagined crosses and candles. If he drew the arcade it would be a place that had a large crucifix at one end, that was lined with candles and bathed in a weird, orange light. He drew the smooth, hairless pudendum of the mannequin in the shop window with long lines curving around the pristine whiteness of the page. Then, on another sheet, he tried to draw the arcade itself, using straighter lines and angles. But he found the control and the economy of these drawings tiresome and soon his hand began to move faster and more erratically as he jerked the pencil in short, sharp movements across the page, drawing the shopfront as a chaotic ensemble of lines and limbs and hastily composed objects. He tried to capture the effects of the light, starting with simply drawn rays emanating from a lamp and then, unsatisfied, tried to shade in parts of the window with heavier, more densely concentrated pencil lines until the whole composition seemed far darker and more crowded than he had wanted it to be.
The drawing turned out much like his picture of midnight in the city of Melbourne, entirely destroying the sense of light and glass he had wanted to capture, turning the mannequins into fearful things of terror, leering out of the thickly drawn darkness like ghouls. Realising his error he decided to finish the picture by adding more extreme and grotesque features to the figures, giving them bulbous red eyes and exaggerated, gaping mouths. In the space around the window he drew a mass of tiny objects hovering in the air like a cloud of insects. Diamonds, coins, combs, scissors, a dagger dripping with blood, a crucifix on a chain, a gun, a glove, a little doll with its hair sticking up erect, a spider, a snake, a pair of bloodshot eyes, a coffin, a skull, a saucer and cup, could all be made out of the frantically drawn minutiae encircling the harpies in the shop window like a halo of detritus. The picture finally nauseated him. It was as if something had gripped him and his hand, quite mechanically, had run out of his control. He had wanted calm, and instead he’d drawn a kind of sick, sensual anarchy.
