A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  GOURLAY: Oh, it happens when I’m lying in bed with nothing to do before I go to sleep.

  Adrian marked both Gourlay and his friend in black—the friend because of the guilty way he had laughed at Gourlay’s joke.

  He took only a few minutes to colour all the mortal sinners. There were about a dozen. This still left nearly thirty boys unmarked. Adrian puzzled over some of these. They were well grown with pimply faces and they shaved every second or third day. They had been seen to smile at dirty jokes and they always looked bored during Christian Doctrine periods. Adrian would have liked to colour them black to boost the numbers of his own group, but he had no definite evidence that they were habitual sinners.

  In the end he put a pale grey shadow over the initials of all the remaining boys as a sign that their souls were discoloured by venial sins.

  The Christian Doctrine period was still not finished. Adrian drew a yellow cloud above his chart to represent heaven. Down below he drew a black tunnel leading to hell. There was room at each side of his page for more of the universe, so he put a grey zone at one side for purgatory and a green zone opposite for limbo.

  He sat back and admired his work. The colours around the initials indicated clearly where each boy’s soul would go if the world ended suddenly that morning before any of them could get to confession or even murmur an act of perfect contrition.

  None of them could go to limbo, of course, because that was a place of perfect natural happiness reserved for the souls of babies who had died before baptism or adult pagans who had never been baptised but had lived sinless lives according to their lights. But Adrian had included limbo in his chart because it had always attracted him. A brother had once said that some theologians believed limbo might be the earth itself after the General Judgement. They meant that, after the end of the world, God would remake the whole planet as a place of perfect natural happiness.

  Sometimes when Adrian realised how unlikely it was that he would get to heaven, he would willingly have traded his right to heaven for safe conduct to limbo. But because he had been baptised he had to choose between heaven and hell.

  He slipped his chart into his desk and looked around the room at the fellows he had marked with black. They were an odd assortment, with not much in common apart from the sin that enslaved them. They even differed in the way they committed their secret sin.

  Cornthwaite only did it in total darkness—usually late at night with a pillow over his head. He claimed that the sight of it disgusted him. His inspiration was always the same—the memory of a few afternoons with his twelve-year-old cousin Patricia when her parents were out of the house. The girl’s parents had told Cornthwaite afterwards that he needn’t bother coming to the house again.

  Adrian often asked Cornthwaite what he had done to the girl. But Cornthwaite would only say it was nothing like people imagined and he didn’t want bastards like Sherd even thinking dirty thoughts about his young cousin.

  O’Mullane preferred to do it in broad daylight. He swore he didn’t need to think of women or girls. He got his excitement from the feel of whichever lubricant he was using. He was always experimenting with butter or hair oil or soap or his mother’s cosmetics. Sometimes he stung or burnt himself and had to give up doing it for a few days.

  Seskis only used film stars. He didn’t care whether they wore bathing suits or street clothes so long as their lips were red and moist. He sometimes went to an afternoon show in a theatre in Melbourne where he could sit in an empty row and do it quietly through a hole in the lining of his trousers pocket while some woman parted her lips close to the camera.

  Ullathorne looked at National Geographic magazines with pictures of bare-breasted women from remote parts of the world. He had once offered to lend Adrian one of his best magazines. Adrian admired some bare-breasted girls from the island of Yap until he read in a caption under a photo that Yap women sometimes had spiders and scorpions living in their voluminous grass skirts.

  Froude used a set of photographs. The man who came to his house to teach him violin used to slip a photo into Froude’s pocket after each lesson. Each photo showed a different boy standing or sitting or lying down naked with his penis erect. The boys were all about thirteen or fourteen years old. Froude had no idea who they were. He had asked his music teacher and been told he would find out in good time.

  Adrian had seen some of Froude’s photos. They were so clear and well lit that he told Froude to ask the music teacher if he had any similar pictures of girls or women.

  Purcell used the nude scene from the film Ecstasy starring Hedy Lamarr when she was very young. He had read about the film in an old copy of Pix magazine and torn out the picture of Hedy Lamarr floating on her back in a murky river. He admitted it was hard to make out Hedy’s breasts in the photo, and the rest of her body was out of sight under the water. But he said he got a colossal thrill just from having a picture of one of the only nude films ever made.

  The other habitual sinners were mostly unimaginative fellows who simply made up adventures about themselves and some of the girls they knew. Adrian considered himself luckier than any of them, because he used the whole of the USA for his love life.

  The Christian Doctrine period ended at last and the class stood and recited the Prayer Between Lessons. The boys in mortal sin looked no less devout than the others. Perhaps they believed, like Adrian, that one day they would find a cure that really worked.

  Adrian and his friends sometimes discussed cures for their habit. One day Seskis had turned up at school with the story of a novel cure.

  SESKIS: I was reading this little booklet my father gave me. It was full of advice to young men and it said to avoid irritation and stimulation during the night you should wash and soap well around the genitals in the bath or shower.

  CORNTHWAITE: Whoever wrote that must be crazy. Did you try it?

  SESKIS: Two or three times in the bath. I soaped the thing until I couldn’t see it for suds and bubbles. It stood up the whole time and nearly drove me mad. So I had to finish it off right there in the bath.

  O’MULLANE: Like the time a priest told me in confession not to eat hot spicy foods for tea or supper. So I only had a slice of toast and a glass of milk for tea to see what happened. Next thing I woke up starving in the night and had to do it to put myself back to sleep.

  SHERD: Sometimes I think the only cure is to get married as soon as you’re old enough. But I reckon I could stop it now if I had to sleep in a room with someone else so they’d hear the mattress squeaking if I did anything at night.

  O’MULLANE: Bullshit. When our parish tennis club went to Bendigo for the big Catholic Easter Tournament, Casamento and me and two big bastards were in bunks in this little room. One of the big bastards tried to get us all to throw two shillings on the floor and make it a race to do it over the edge of the bunks. Winner takes all.

  CORNTHWAITE: Filthy bastards.

  O’MULLANE: Of course the one who wanted the race was the bastard they call Horse from the size of his tool. He would have won by a mile.

  SHERD: Tell the truth and say you were too embarrassed to do it with other people in the room. It proves what I said about my cure for it.

  O’MULLANE: I would have backed myself with any money against bastards my own size.

  CORNTHWAITE: The only cure is to get hold of a tart and do the real thing to her. O’Mullane will end up a homo the way he’s going. And Sherd will still be looking for a cure when he’s a dirty old bachelor.

  After school each day Adrian Sherd walked from St Carthage’s College half a mile along the Swindon Road tramline to Swindon railway station. Then he travelled five miles by electric train to his own suburb of Accrington.

  From the Accrington station Adrian walked nearly a mile along a dirt track beside the main road. It was 1953, and outer suburbs like Accrington had few made roads or footpaths. He passed factories whose names were familiar—PLASDIP PRODUCTS, WOBURN COMPONENTS, AUSTRALIAN CARD CLOTHING, EZIFOLD FURNITURE—b
ut whose products were a mystery to him.

  Adrian’s street, Riviera Grove, was a chain of waterholes between clumps of manuka and wattle scrub. Each winter, builders and delivery men drove their trucks over the low scrub, looking for a safe route, but the only people in the street who owned a car left it parked each night on the main road, two hundred yards from their house.

  On one side of the Sherds’ house was a dense stand of tea-tree scrub thirty feet tall with only one narrow track winding into it. On the other side was the wooden frame of a house and behind it the fibrocement bungalow, twenty feet by ten, where the New Australian Andy Horvath lived with his wife and small son and mother-in-law.

  The Sherds’ house was a two-year-old double-fronted weatherboard, painted cream with dark-green trimmings. It had a lawn with borders of geraniums and pelargoniums at the front, but the backyard was nearly all native grass and watsonia lilies. Along the back fence was a fowl run with a shed of palings at one end. Near one of the side fences was a weatherboard lavatory (cream with a dark-green door) with a trapdoor at the back where the night man dragged out the pan each week and shoved an empty pan in. Sometimes the pan filled up a few days before the night man’s visit. Then Adrian’s father would dig a deep hole in the fowl run and empty half the pan into it. He did it furtively after dark while Adrian held a torch for him.

  On the opposite side of the yard was a fibrocement shed with a cement floor and a small louvre window at one end. One half of the shed was filled with bags of fowl feed, garden tools and odd pieces of broken furniture. The other half was left clear. Leaning against one wall of the shed was a plywood door left over after the Sherds’ house had been built. A model-railway layout was screwed onto one side of the door. It was a Hornby Clockwork layout—a main track with a loop and two sidings.

  The Sherds’ house had three bedrooms, a lounge, a kitchen, a bathroom and a laundry. The kitchen floor was covered with linoleum. All the other floors were polished boards. The lounge room had an open fireplace, two armchairs and a couch of faded floral-patterned velvet, and a small bookcase. The kitchen had a wood stove and a small electric cooker with a hotplate and a griller. There was an ice chest in a corner and a mantel radio over the fireplace. The table and chairs were wooden.

  The only other pieces of furniture were the beds and wardrobes and dressing tables—a walnut-veneer suite in the front bedroom and oddments in the boys’ rooms. Adrian’s two younger brothers slept in the middle bedroom. Adrian had the back bedroom, which was called the sleepout because it had louvre windows.

  As soon as Adrian got home from school he had to take off his school suit to save it from wear. Then he put on the only other clothes he had—the shirt and trousers and jumper that had been his previous school uniform but were now too patched for school.

  Adrian’s young brothers had been home from school for an hour already. (They travelled a mile and a half by bus to Our Lady of Good Counsel’s parish school.) Adrian found and cleaned their school shoes as well as his own. He filled the woodbox in the kitchen with split logs that his father had left under a sheet of corrugated iron behind the lavatory. He filled a cardboard box in the laundry with briquettes for the hot-water system. Then he split kindling wood and stacked it on the kitchen hearth for his mother to use next morning. If his father was still not home, Adrian fed the fowls and collected the eggs.

  Sometimes before tea Adrian climbed over the side fence and looked around in the tea-tree scrub. He visited a bull-ants’ nest and tapped a stick near the entrance. The ants came storming out to look for the enemy. Adrian dropped leaves and twigs on them to tease them.

  There were possums’ nests high up in the branches of the tea-tree. Adrian knew the possums were hiding inside, but he had never been able to scare them out. The tea-tree had no branches strong enough for climbing, and the sticks that he threw got tangled in the twigs and foliage.

  When Adrian had first discovered the ants and possums he decided to observe their habits like a scientist. For a few days he kept a diary describing the ants’ habits and drew maps to show how far they travelled from their nest. He thought of becoming a famous naturalist and talking on the radio like Crosbie Morrison with his program, Wild Life. He even planned to dig away the side of the ants’ nest and put a sheet of glass inside so he could study them in their tunnels. But he didn’t know where to buy glass and he found he couldn’t dig a hole with straight sides anyway.

  If he walked on through the scrub he came to the Gaffneys’ side fence. The Sherds knew very little about the few other households in Riviera Grove. They were all what Adrian’s parents called young couples, with two or three small children. Adrian sometimes saw a mother in gumboots pushing a load of kids in a pram through the muddy street or chasing a child that had waded too far into a puddle. One day he had spied on Mrs Gaffney through a hole in her fence. She was wearing something that he knew was called a playsuit and hanging out nappies on the line. He had a good view of her face and legs but he decided it was useless to compare her with any film star or pin-up girl.

  After he had set the table for tea, Adrian read the sporting pages of the Argus and then glanced through the front pages for the cheesecake picture that was always somewhere among the important news. It was usually a photograph of a young woman in bathers leaning far forward and smiling at the camera.

  If the woman was an American film star he studied her carefully. He was always looking for photogenic starlets to play small roles in his American adventures.

  If she was only a young Australian woman he read the caption (‘Attractive Julie Starr found Melbourne’s autumn sunshine yesterday too tempting to resist. The breeze was chilly but Julie, a telephonist aged eighteen, braved the shallows at Elwood in her lunch hour and brought back memories of summer’) and spent a few minutes trying to work out the size and shape of her breasts. Then he folded up the paper and forgot about her. He wanted no Melbourne typists and telephonists on his American journeys. He would feel uncomfortable if he saw on the train one morning some woman who had shared his American secrets only the night before.

  When tea was over Adrian stacked up the dishes and washed them for his brothers to dry and put away. At six-thirty he turned on the wireless to 3KZ. For half an hour while he finished the dishes or played Ludo or Snakes and Ladders with his brothers, he heard the latest hit tunes, interrupted only by brief advertisements for films showing at Hoyts Suburban Theatres.

  Adrian always made a show of being busy at something else while hit tunes were playing. If his parents had thought he was listening to the words they might have switched the wireless off or even banned him from hearing the program again. Too many of the hit tunes were love songs about kisses like wine or memories of charms or touches that thrilled.

  But Adrian was not really interested in the words. Nearly every night on 3KZ he heard a few short passages of music that seemed to describe the landscape of America. The opening notes of a romantic ballad might have just the right blend of vagueness and loneliness to suggest the Great Plains states. Or the last hectic chorus of a Mitch Miller record might put him in mind of the sensual Deep South where it was always summer.

  The wireless was switched off again at seven. No one wanted to hear the news or the serials and musical programs that followed it. Mr Sherd went to bed early to finish one of the stack of books that his wife borrowed each week from the library behind the children’s-wear shop in Accrington (Romance, Crime, Historical Romance, New Titles). Mrs Sherd sat by the kitchen stove knitting. Adrian’s brothers played with their Meccano set or traced through lunch-wrap paper some pictures from the small stack of old National Geographic magazines in the lounge room. Adrian began his homework.

  The house was quiet. There was rarely the sound of a car or truck in Riviera Grove or the streets around it. Every half-hour an electric train passed along the line between Melbourne and Coroke. It was nearly a mile from the Sherds’ house, but on windless nights they heard clearly the rattling of the bogeys and the whi
ning of the motor. As the noise died away, Adrian’s brothers called out ‘Up!’ or ‘Down!’ and argued over which way the train had been heading.

  Adrian worked at his homework until nearly ten o’clock. Every day at school three or four boys were strapped for not doing their homework. Their excuses astonished Adrian. They had gone out, or started listening to the wireless and forgotten the time, or been told by their parents to sit up and talk to the visitors. Or they had been sent to bed because there was a party going on at their house.

  In the two years since the Sherds had moved to Accrington, they had almost never gone out after dark. And Adrian could not remember anyone visiting them at night. The boys who had other things to do instead of homework came from the suburbs close to Swindon—places with made roads and footpaths and front gardens full of shrubs. The suburbs had dignified names such as Luton and Glen Iris and Woodstock. Adrian imagined the houses in these suburbs full of merry laughter every night of the week.

  When his homework was finished Adrian went out for a few minutes to the back shed. He switched on the light and lowered his model railway track to the floor. On the wood beneath the tracks was a faint pencilled outline of the United States of America. Adrian wound up his clockwork engine. He lowered it onto the rails near New York City and hooked two passenger coaches behind it. The train sped south-west towards Texas then around past California to Idaho and on across the prairies to the Great Lakes. At Chicago there was a set of points. Adrian switched them so that the train travelled first around the perimeter of the country (Pennsylvania, New York state, New England and back to New York City) and then, on each alternate lap, down through the Midwest and the Ozarks to rejoin the main line near Florida.

  After four or five laps of the track the train slowed down and came to a stop. Adrian noted carefully the exact place where its journey ended. Then he put the engine and coaches away and went back to the house and got ready for bed.