Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  That was how it went. He entered the shop and he left the shop all in a matter of minutes, the hand that held the case now light. His arms, his head, his legs, all light too as he walks away from one life towards another, as though occupying that ill-defined time and space between incarnations.

  But that other life is now waiting to be assumed. For when he was not playing in those grandly named pubs he was discovering the deeply thrilling, private world of his desk. Of pen and paper, words and stories, the lamp at midnight and, outside, the world in all its darkness. Far removed from vast pubs and echoing sound systems. That is the life that calls now. And he knows the moment is right. Had he tried earlier, and made the change earlier, the moment might not have been right and nothing would have come of it. For he would not have been ready. But the timing is right, and now he is. And there is that odd sense of loss and gain, and that exhilarating sense of not knowing what comes next, as he makes his way back to his car.

  ‘I saw the beach tram and just got on.’ Rita is staring at Michael with a look of quiet wonder in her eyes. ‘I followed it right through until the end of the line and spent the day at the beach.’

  Rita keeps staring at Michael as if half-expecting some sort of disapproval from him, a look that suggests his mother has gone a bit funny in the head. But he gives her no such look. Instead, he is smiling. Good. People should do this more often, the smile says. Live differently. See a beach tram and jump on it and spend the whole day at the beach instead of going to work. Of course, everything would fall apart if everybody took to jumping on the trams of their fancy. But, he muses, not everybody does. Which leaves room for some to. Michael has been jumping on the trams of his fancy for as long as he can remember. People should do it more often. For this is, he tells himself, the hardest thing in the world — to live differently and to act spontaneously. And if things fall apart, what of it? If things fall apart it’s because they deserve to fall apart. He knows he’s slipping into something he recognises as Lawrencespeak. Lawrencethink. And even though Mr D H Lawrence is slipping out of fashion — and fast (in fact, it will be a fall from grace faster than the devil’s) — he follows the runaway tram of Lawrencespeak anyway. Yes, everybody should do this. Napoleons of industry, directors of the banking system, company heads, politicians and prime ministers should do this — jump on the trams of their fancy when they appear and just live. And if things fall apart, so be it. Let the waiters and waitresses drop their trays and follow their fancies out into the street, leaving their orders behind them and the customers to help themselves. Let the shop assistants drift away, the school teachers skip school, university lecturers and public intellectuals trail off in mid-sentence … the taxi drivers desert their cabs, the train drivers, the tram drivers … Ah, there’s a thought. What if the tram driver jumps off somebody else’s tram of fancy? What if they all did? Leaving no trams of fancy to be jumped upon? And it is while he is dwelling on this complication that Rita breaks into his thoughts.

  ‘I just sat there looking at the ships coming in from the sea and going out to sea.’

  How long was he gone? How long was he not listening? He returns, a little bit annoyed at his mother’s intrusion (the way her intrusions always annoy him, especially lately, and why is that?), from this truant world he has conjured up and concentrates on Rita talking about … what was it? Ships coming in and ships going out. Yes, that’s it. He nods, as if to say, go on.

  ‘And when there were no ships to stare at I stared at the horizon. Perhaps I bought a sandwich at some stage but I don’t remember eating one. Perhaps I didn’t.’

  Michael has come for dinner, a rare thing on a Friday night when, she’s probably thinking, he has more interesting things to do and more interesting people to see. But the fact is he hasn’t. No more band. No more nights lost in the vast and vacant spaces of suburban beer barns. No more Mandy, whom, like so many of the girlfriends of his life, his mother has never met because she would always be the ‘wrong’ girl — like that dirt street and that dusty suburb they lived in, always bound to be a disappointment or met with disapproval. And so Mandy never met Rita. They belonged to separate worlds. And with no Mandy and no band, there is nowhere else he needs to be. No one else he has to see. He’s on his own, for the time, and better off alone. In any case, he’s sick of cooking for himself. So, here he is.

  There is a lull in the conversation and his mother looks around the lounge room of this villa unit she now lives in, at the table, dinner finished, the plates still on the table, then to the paintings and photographs on the walls, as if, Michael can’t help but think, observing somebody else’s room and the trappings of somebody else’s life. ‘It’s odd how you can stare at the horizon for so long and not get bored. I must have stared at it all day.’ She swings her head back to Michael, her eyes sharp and focused. ‘I’m not going to stare at the horizon any more. I’ve been staring at it all my life.’

  She picks up a travel brochure from the small table beside her, flicks through its pages, then hands it to Michael opened at a marked page, also explaining that she has taken what she calls a sort of holiday from work. A long one.

  He nods as he takes in her words, registering for the first time that something serious has happened, something a little more than jumping on the wrong tram and skipping work for the day. He stares at the brochure. It is a brochure published by a well-known travel company (with one of those solid, English names), which conducts tours to places all over the world. Just for people like Rita. The page Michael is staring at details a twenty-one-day tour of Europe. Bus and train. Rome. Florence. Paris. And so on. He looks up and she half-smiles and raises her eyebrows.

  ‘I know, you wouldn’t do it. It’s not your …’ And here she pauses. ‘What do you call it? … Your thing. It’s not your thing.’

  ‘Nobody says that any more.’

  ‘Yes they do. I heard it on the tram the other day.’

  He looks back at the brochure. She is serious about this. And he is happy for her, even if her attempts to assume the language and phrases of the young are ten years out of date and momentarily annoy him.

  ‘Truth is,’ she continues, ‘I’m not so sure it’s my thing either. I’ve never liked trooping off in a gang.’

  He tells her that it is her thing — at least, this particular thing at this particular moment. The very thing she’s waited years to do. And she agrees. She knows and she doesn’t know what’s on the other side of the horizon, she murmurs. But it’s far away and full of foreign places, the very places she’s yearned for all her life, where they speak the languages that migrants speak. But they won’t be migrants there. They’ll be home, and she’ll be the migrant.

  Other people, she now tells Michael, explaining her choice — families and couples — they can travel together. But even if Vic were alive and they were a couple, they would never have travelled because Vic would never have left the country. Couples can travel, and they are their own comfort. But she can’t travel to these foreign places alone. And she speaks of the brochure and the tour with a slight sigh. A self-conscious one. As if giving in to a cliché. I know, I know, the sigh says, everybody laughs at you. Sheep, they call you. But how else am I to go? And she stares at him as she smooths her frock. Are you laughing? It’s a stare, not a statement. And he returns the stare: no, he is not laughing. It is true, you have never trooped off in a gang; true that your dresses were always just a bit too good for the street, and that the street always disapproved, just as the gang is likely to. But how else are you to go? Indeed, how else?

  As he passes back the brochure he notes, for the first time, the dates of the tour, only a few weeks away.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, following his eyes, ‘not long. Why wait any longer? I’ve waited long enough.’ And her eyes are shining as she speaks and gazes upon the brochure, almost wistfully. And besides, she continues, she doesn’t have to troop off in a gang — she can give them the slip. Go her own way. As if they’re not there. Not all the time, bu
t enough of the time. And she can be a real traveller. Discover little streets and little cafés that those travellers who travel as couples or alone discover and which they call their own — their little cafés, their shops, which they take photographs of and bring home with them, images of the places they made theirs in a way that the gang never can.

  He nods as she talks, believing her and not believing her. But as much as he feels sure that it will all fall short of her hopes (it always does; everything does because nothing is perfect), and that the gang just won’t go away, she is happy and her eyes are shining. So he keeps this thought to himself. She has followed the tram of her fancy and she will now, finally, embark on the very journey she has dreamt about all her life.

  And as he remembers the dates of this tour he notes, with a quiet relief, that he will not be there in Europe. That he will not yet have left Australia. And the obligation of showing her about foreign cities, should their paths have crossed, will not fall to him.

  ‘I know,’ she says, standing as she speaks, for he is about to leave. ‘I know what they say. Sheep. If it’s Tuesday we must be in … where is it again?’

  ‘You’ll be too excited to care.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  He nods.

  ‘At least …’ she says, glancing up at him with a quiet sense of wonder at the grown Michael in front of her (who, with the beard gone and the long hair cut, is looking more and more like his father every day), and is momentarily distracted by the question of when did this happen and was she watching, was she really watching, and when did he become, well … complete. And with that quiet sense of wonder there is a quiet sense of accomplishment at having done it, for she always felt she was never born to be a mother, unlike all the other mothers she saw about her when she was round-bellied and walked the splayed duck walk of the mother duck. And as well there is a sense of loss that Michael now lives in a world of which she knows nothing. A world of no confidences, when once he was a torrent of them. ‘At least,’ she continues, picking out the spoken thread of thought from the unspoken, ‘I’ll be there. Finally. Who cares how? I’ll be there, and that is exciting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, nodding. ‘It is.’

  She then looks down at her dress pocket, fishes out a coin and shows it to Michael. And he sees straight away that it is an old penny, from the old currency. A kangaroo is leaping across a copper coin and he can even see the year stamped on it: 1957. ‘I’ll toss this in the Trevi Fountain.’ She looks up at him, eyes bright. ‘It’ll be the only one there. Not many of these left now. I kept it.’ She puts it back and pats her pocket.

  He leaves her at the door, a yellow light fanning the doorway, the unit lighting up well in the night as all the houses of her life have. The wind is back, wrenching the trees and shrubs this way and that. He waves. She waves, then steps back quickly, shutting the wind out and switching off the front light, returning, no doubt, to the coloured photographs and coloured maps of the brochure. The promised world that the tram of her fancy has led her to. The tram that everyone should jump on when the fancy takes them, but which few do.

  He is standing on the nature strip at the front of his mother’s unit, suddenly distracted. Something is out there. Somewhere out there in the suburban night there is an insistent slapping sound, like a gate being blown open and shut. Or a loose shutter, only the windows don’t have shutters here. It’s a gate. Banging back and forth in the night. No, more of a slap. A sharp, slapping sound. And as he stands on the nature strip, the inside lights of his mother’s unit lit behind him, he is drawn into the sound. But why? He doesn’t want to be. He doesn’t like it. But it draws him in as he stands there. It is a puzzle, for a moment. What is this thing?

  For with the slapping sound, a memory is forming. Two hands, two hands coming together with great force. And then the memory assembles and he sees that the two hands are those of his father. His father, drunk and enraged, is standing in front of Michael’s mother in the bedroom of that house they all called home all those years ago, and he is bringing his hands together with great force. She is crying and her crying is noisy, and Vic wants her to shut up. Just shut up. And so he is bringing his hands together with great force to show her what he could do and what he might do if she doesn’t just shut up.

  And the noise, this slapping sound and the crying, have woken up and drawn the five-or six-year-old Michael to his parents’ bedroom and he stands there in the doorway observing the scene, until they both finally turn and see him, and his father stops slapping his hands together and his mother rushes to him, her eyes a mess of tears and anger and shame. That was the night the wise child invented himself. He kissed his mother goodnight, said goodnight to his father, and went back to bed as if nothing had happened.

  Memory awakes. The image stays, that whole world comes back, and then one image is replaced by another, and another. That’s the problem with memories, one thing’s always leading to another, and suddenly he’s seeing three figures — his mother, father and himself — standing on that dirt street in that frontier suburb that was theirs, staring at the swaying khaki grass of a vacant paddock and waiting for the setting sun to land, ears tuned for the sound of a distant thud when it does, on a summer’s Saturday night long ago and far away, that started well and ended badly, as they always did. They’re walking down the old street again …

  A gate bangs in the night. Memory, an unwanted memory, walks again. A moment before he was standing on solid ground, now this unwanted memory kicks it out from under him. It happens like this, the past rising up out of nowhere and with no warning. Three figures assembled on a dirt street in front of a vacant paddock, lives full of longing that will never be relieved and eyes full of tears and anger and shame that will never go stare back at him, still out there on that long-ago dirt street of stick houses. Must we stand here forever on this dirt street, assembling and reassembling night after night, going through the same bloody night time after time, with no release?

  Do these things ever go? That slapping sound in the night, those three figures that they once were assembling and reassembling on the old street with no release? Or are they always there, just waiting for the right scent, sight or sound to spring back into life? And why the bad memories all the time? It’s not true what they say about people only ever remembering the good times. Too often you only remember the bad. And why is that? Why always those memories of his father that don’t bring back the best of him, when he knows full well that the best of him was there most of the time. Those times when the ten-or eleven-year-old Michael would sit on the floor at his father’s feet in their lounge room as they watched the latest American television show and say, ‘Dad, I’ll always sit here.’ Why don’t those memories come back as often as they should? Why is it so often those memories that don’t bring back the best of his parents?

  They must have been happy once, his parents. And not just sharing patches of happiness, but deliriously happy. Why not? They must, at some stage, have been deeply in love. But we never see that — our parents in love — and so those memories aren’t there to bring back. We just see what comes afterwards. At best, the affection that comes after love, but not those crazy days that must have existed when they couldn’t see enough of each other, or keep their hands and lips off each other, and every waking moment was spent either with each other or thinking about being with each other. No, we never see that. Only the bits that come after love. And too often they’re the bad bits, and they’re the bits we remember.

  A gate bangs in the night. Slap. A memory comes back. A bad one. It’s not true what they say about only remembering the good times. The wise child he once was takes his hand. Together, they blink. The bad memories go. The slapping sound stops. The three figures on the old street disappear. There. Simple. All gone.

  As he eases his car from the kerb he is once again contemplating the stolen season of his mother’s day. Let the waiters drop their trays, the public intellectuals trail off in mid-sentence �
�� The houses and units and flats of the suburb recede into darkness, oblivious of the world of truant trams that may strike the fancy of any one of them at any moment.

  Later in the night Michael sits in his lounge room. Alone. The telephone is silent, a song plays softly on the stereo. He has just switched the television off. The face of Whitlam had briefly passed across the screen, as had the face of Fraser. Although it has not been called yet, he suspects there will be an election soon. And when it comes, the face of Whitlam will fade from his screen, from all their screens, for the last time. In the coming weeks, however, their faces, Whitlam’s and Fraser’s, will be everywhere, and soon after, these years — which have already acquired the title ‘The Whitlam Years’ — will officially end. And, when he thinks about it, it is like watching an explosion settle — those years, those Whitlam years, were an explosion of energy that had to happen. Explosive times, now all but over.

  On the kitchen table is a sealed and stamped envelope with something in it that Michael wrote a few days before. A little essay of sorts, prompted by the increasingly frequent appearances of Mr Whitlam and Mr Fraser in the newspapers and on the television. A little something he did one afternoon, more an amusement than anything. But something that might, all the same, make a little money for him. So he’s decided to send it to the newspaper, the one he reads, that is. So it’s sealed and stamped. If they take it, well and good. Money for the trip. Beyond that he gives it little thought.