Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  The stereo plays on and his mind drifts back from the public world of politics to Mandy, already wishing he’d done things differently or not at all, and already replaying the scene as he would now have it. The lounge-room window both reflects the room and all its contents, a ghostly reflection, and is also a dim window onto the world outside, the park, illuminated here and there by the occasional lamp, the lights of the government buildings and the black sky hanging above it all.

  The view will be the same when he is not here. And not the same. Things will change, and nothing will change. The world doesn’t need you, not really. Not Michael, not Whitlam or Fraser. The world just is. And it will not register his or their departure any more or less than it will a bird’s or a tree’s. He might even have already left. The wind that only yesterday blasted blossoms and birds from their perches and tossed them into the sky, and which returned earlier this evening, has now settled. The animals that went to ground have returned: the roving cats, stray dogs, foxes and all the little things the park plays host to that they prey upon. Things will change, and not change. The wind is resting, but will return. And the blossoms will once again be blasted from their branches, next week or next year. Buildings will go up and buildings will come down. Trees, already unstable, will be ripped from the ground by spring winds, and the possums and birds will find new homes and perches.

  As he rises and turns to pull down the blind he catches his reflection in the window. Gone is the long hair, and gone the beard that he wore when beards were worn and hair was long. His hair is short now, not as short as his father’s was, but not so much longer. New Wave. It is the last of those young, fashionable phrases that will ever come naturally to him. From this point on, and this will only occur to him later, if he were to talk in youthful, fashionable phrases he would only sound like his mother saying ‘my thing’ or ‘your thing’ or ‘their thing’. New Wave. It is the last time he will ever be in step with fashion.

  And as he stares at his reflection in the window he notes, as he has increasingly over the last year, that he is beginning to look like his father. And it’s not just the looks, it’s the mannerisms too. How often has he caught himself lately, sitting in that old student armchair that he can’t bear to part with, legs stretched out, newspaper on his lap, his eyes vacant as he stares out the window, and said to himself: this is how my father lounged in his chair, newspaper on his lap, and stared vacantly out the window through dull afternoons like someone waiting for the real living to begin. And for that moment he is his father. And with that sensation comes the possibility that he is thinking his father’s thoughts. And the mystery that he so often contemplated as a teenager — the mystery of just what his father might have been thinking as he gazed vacantly out the window — is solved. Probably nothing much at all, just the lingering feeling that the real living was waiting for him out there, somewhere beyond the window, beyond the neatly trimmed lawns and nature strips of a suburban street, which it may well have seemed to him was more interesting when it was dust and thistles, when their homes were unpainted stick houses, and days were either filled with dust or clogged with mud, and Bruchner’s dog howled like something out of the Middle Ages.

  How terribly strange to feel that you have become, however fleetingly, your father. Gone is the long hair, gone the beard. Gone that feeling that he was just himself, unique, and nobody else. A clean break, free of everything — your parents, their parents — that went before. The whole past.

  Michael pulls the old, tattered blind down. His image disappears. The telephone is silent now but the memory of Mandy’s sobs returns. Are you happy? Are you … The song, on a continuous loop of tape, plays on. The singer proclaiming to anyone who cares to listen that he is not in love. In a flat suburb to the north of the city in a grandly named hotel the toys will dance on without him, and when they finish they will collapse onto their seats, all animation gone from them. Until, one night, those five young women will grow out of their routine and leave the pub and never go back. New toys will come along, new bands will replace the old, old waves will give way to new waves, and young foxes will sniff the park air for the first time, everything fresh.

  Michael reaches for the light switch. We come, we go. Get used to it. And the sooner the better. He lies in bed in the dark, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. Out there, deep in the suburban night, a loose gate slaps back and forth in the dark for no one. Three figures assemble on a dirt street, long ago and far away. We come, we go. And yet we never go. For there they are, always assembling and reassembling on streets dripping with longings that will never be relieved, awaiting their moment of release. Awoken by memory. Long gone, but always there. Assembling and reassembling. Going round and round, in and out of the years, like a love song on a continuous loop. Are you happy … Or are you waiting for the real living to come along? Are you happy, Michael, are you … Or does that even matter? The world doesn’t need you, not really. No more or less than it needs rocks and stones and trees. It just is. Even as you lie here in the dark, while out there the stars stretch out forever, it is worlding. And what does your happiness matter to it, after all?

  2. Chinese Whispers

  They could be a painting. In fact, Peter has the distinct feeling of sitting in one. A famous painting. Two men in their everyday clothes. Late in the last century. A tablecloth spread out on the grass — food and wine on the cloth. And a naked woman sitting beside them. Peter smiles to himself. Of course, there would be a naked woman beside them. The scene is set in a Paris park, after all. And this famous painting he has in mind is a work of art, after all. But his smug dismissiveness aside, he knows better. He knows what the painter was doing. He was, as a popular old student phrase would have it, demythologising the naked female body. Extracting it from mythology, where people had given themselves licence to look upon it, because it was ‘nude’ not naked, ideal not real — and returning it to the everyday, to a city park in the harsh glare of the midday sun. A scene made all the more shocking to the shocked eyes of the day by the fact that the two men are clothed, but ‘clothed’ in a way that they could almost be naked — and the woman fully dressed.

  Yes, he knows all that. But he’s not sitting on some lawn in a park in late nineteenth-century Paris. Rather, he’s in a plain, modern flat in Canberra. He is sitting in the lounge room of one of those square blocks that pass for architecture, and there are, in fact, not one but two naked women in front of him. One, the older woman, is sitting in an armchair, legs crossed casually, smoking a cigarette as if this sort of thing happens every day, and perhaps it does. The other, a younger woman, is lounging on a couch, facing Peter, front leg stretched the length of the couch, the back leg raised for support, hand resting on her knee, as if she were, indeed, posing for a painting and Peter were the painter.

  The older woman is called Beth. Elizabeth, but always Beth. And never Liz or Lizzie. Peter and his university friends (like Michael, whom he doesn’t see any more, not since they went their separate ways and took their separate political paths; Peter from student radical to the conservative side of politics) all knew Beth in their university days, even though she was older and had already become a tutor by the time they arrived. They sat in on her tutorials — Peter, Michael and whoever else tagged along — and they got to know her a bit. Beth was a bright young thing — that’s why she was a tutor. Then again, they were all bright young things, weren’t they? She’d risen through student politics. Edited the student newspaper and eventually became a journalist. Somewhere along the line she married. Acquired a husband, someone of whom Peter has only the foggiest of memories, who at a party once ironically addressed him as ‘comrade’, gave him a bowl of olives, took Peter’s bowl of crackers and made some comment about distribution and exchange, meaning, Peter assumed, that they should each pass them on. And that was it. Did they ever meet again? Probably not. Like all those marriages, which seemed to come and go with the explosive brevity of the Whitlam government itself, it dissolved soon afte
r. Peter and Beth were never friends. But their paths continued to cross. And so fate (or something like it), rather than friendship, kept them in touch.

  She wore overalls back then, and drank and smoked her way through tutorials. In fact, Peter is currently noting, he has rarely seen her without a cigarette in her hand. And he is also noting that she has lost her youthfulness and is starting to take on the look of Marguerite Duras in her prime. And it suits her. Not old, but no longer young. Her forehead creased, her face bearing the lines of a lifetime smoker. Yes, Madame Duras indeed.

  When he first arrived in Canberra, Beth had a reputation. She was the journalist to whom all other journalists deferred. Especially the young. But the young acquired reputations of their own, stopped deferring, and at some point she started looking like yesterday’s woman. Stories of drinking, getting things wrong, getting sloppy, began to do the rounds like a running popular joke. Something along the lines of ‘Oh, did you hear …?’ There was even talk about fits of temper, which he has never seen and doesn’t believe. All the same, she was slipping, has slipped, and could do with a good story. And Peter has one. Which is why he is here.

  He’d knocked on their door and Beth had opened it wearing a bathrobe. It’s all right, she’d called from the hallway, it’s only Peter. And she’d led him into the lounge room where the young woman, Trix, was lounging naked on the couch, pretty much as she is now. And as he sat down, Beth removed her robe, and so, suddenly, he was sitting in a room with two naked women. It is, he assumes, what in the language of the day is called a ‘statement’. This is us, the nakedness says. We hide nothing. We go through the world naked. Two women who have chosen to live together and who hide behind nothing — not even clothes.

  As Beth had lowered herself into the armchair, crossed her legs and lit a cigarette, he had been aware of the eyes of Trix upon him. Studying him. Scrutinising him. Almost waiting to pounce. They have met, not often, but often enough. And he has felt from the start, whether rightly or wrongly, that she doesn’t like him. Even distrusts him. As if, on any such occasion as this, he might have come to steal Beth from her. Which she knows, and he knows, is not true. But it might be. Perhaps that’s it — the mere possibility that it might be true being sufficient to stir distrust. For they have a past, Beth and Peter. Not much of one, but a past all the same. A past that Trix doesn’t share because she wasn’t there. And so when Peter visits he brings that past with him, and in so doing brings with him that implicit bond to another Beth altogether — a Beth Trix doesn’t know because she wasn’t there, and who is, by definition, not ‘her’ Beth. And so whenever he visits, he takes her Beth away. Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps not. All the same, he’s keenly aware that her eyes have not left him from the moment he sat down.

  And so he is sitting in a room with two naked women — one suspicious, even jealous; the other vaguely indifferent. And it might almost be a kind of compliment — that although they might not (in spite of their ‘statement’) reveal themselves entirely to the greater world, they do to him. For the moment, he chooses to take it as such.

  To distract Trix from her unyielding scrutiny, or to distract himself, he looks around the room. There is a Balinese rug on the floor, photographs of the two of them in various places, Asian figures, and glassware on the sideboards, and books, books … shelves of them. And not the usual paperbacks, but a serious hardback collection, many from Beth’s university days. The room is testimony of another life, a face other than the public one. The inner life, he tells himself. The one most people don’t see and, again, there is almost a sense of privilege in being invited in to see it, for he has the distinct impression that they live in a self-sufficient world that neither requires nor desires the outside one. It’s a poster on the wall that his eyes finally come to rest upon. It is one of those posters that, no doubt, will one day become a collector’s item. A window onto an age, onto a generation, capturing its statements and beliefs. In this case, his generation. A generation that has no doubt as to the validity of its pronouncements. Harbours no indecisive second thoughts. And brushes aside all resistance with a resolve that says the matter is settled. Whitlamesque. Indeed, it is the style of the day not so much to put propositions forward, but to make pronouncements. As if it were all obvious. And objections could only ever come from fools, and to question is to pronounce yourself a fool. Whitlamesque. Does the age express itself through him or did he give such uncontradictable expressiveness to the age? In the poster a woman is lying on the ground. Defenceless, violated. It is a graphic, disturbing image. The poster reads: ‘Rape is a political act’.

  After a moment of contemplating the poster, Peter turns to Beth. ‘Why is it political?’

  She stares directly at him. ‘You would ask that.’

  He pushes on. ‘It’s a violent, inhuman act. But why is it political? Why does everything have to be a political act?’

  Beth inhales from her cigarette. ‘Because everything is. You’ve heard of the patriarchal society?’

  ‘I’m a member, aren’t I?’

  She exhales. ‘It’s not a club, and you don’t have to sign up. And this is not a game.’

  She is eyeing him in a way that says don’t disappoint me, and he has the feeling of being in one of her tutorials all those years ago and of asking those questions that automatically pronounce you a fool. UnWhitlamesque. How many of us become our own adjective? Whitlamesque. The word floats once more across his mind and he is reminded of why he came here in the first place. He’s also asking himself if it weren’t for the Whitlams of this world — not just the actual Whitlam but all the others who constitute this Whitlam generation with its unshakeable self-conviction — if it hadn’t been for all that, would he ever have crossed to the conservative side of politics, when such a crossing was seen as not just a political betrayal but a betrayal of a whole generation’s sense of destiny? Would he have crossed? Did he walk or was he driven? And, if so, who was driving?

  It’s a question he’s thought about, usually a passing thought, in spare moments in airport lounges, taxis and planes. Whitlamesque. Grand. Shakespearean. Unshakeable and uncontradictable. Is that the way to do things, after all? If you’re going to change things in such a way that they will never be the same again, change things in such a way that what was once questioned becomes birthright — never to be questioned again — if you’re going to achieve this, if you’re going to achieve a before and an after in a nation’s life, is that the way to do it? And for the moment he’s admiring of this Whitlam of theirs, the style not the politics — this Whitlam of theirs, who was once his, but isn’t any more.

  Beth dips her fingers into a bowl beside her and slips an olive into her mouth. And when she has finished and deposited the pip on the table beside her, she looks round for a napkin, for her hands are messy with oil, and Peter, noting her discomfort, takes a handkerchief from his pocket and passes it to her in a manner that contains the mutual familiarity of old friends and shared old times, and perhaps is even suggestive of a middle-aged couple, who can read each other’s minds without need of asking. All of which, he is sure, Trix notices.

  ‘It’s clean,’ he says.

  Beth wipes her fingers and lips and passes it back, without so much as a thank you, because old times don’t require thank yous for such things. And Trix, he senses again, is aware of all this.

  By now he has ceased to notice that he is sitting in a room with two naked women. They are simply sitting and talking as people will. And as he is contemplating the question of whether he walked or was driven to the conservative side of politics, he turns back to Beth (not sure how long his silence has lasted) and, to shift the topic from rape and political acts as much as anything else, asks, ‘Are you ever tempted to go back? You know, to the academic life?’

  She shakes her head and pronounces somewhat biblically, ‘We were what we were, but we aren’t any more. There’s never any point going back. There’s never anything to go back to.’

  At this point
Trix turns to him. ‘Would you like to go back? Do things differently?’

  And it’s not a teasing question, not one of those ‘game’ questions, but one of almost dispassionate interest. Curiosity.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘“Not really”,’ Trix repeats, ‘but you think of it?’

  ‘Don’t we all?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Peter stares at her and her eyes don’t flinch. She’s sharp, this Trix. There’s a touch of the fox in Trix. A quick, brown, young fox.

  ‘It’s just that,’ Trix continues, ‘you always ask that. Well, not always, but often enough.’

  Peter shrugs as if to say do I?, but doesn’t speak.

  ‘What takes people back?’

  Trix rolls onto her back as she poses the question to the room. And, as she does, Peter notices Beth’s eyes resting upon her. The unmistakeably tender eyes of someone in love, of someone counting her blessings and who counts her blessings every day. Eyes that the world never sees, but which Trix does and which he does now. The tender eyes of this Marguerite Duras in her prime resting upon this fox that has wandered into her life and changed it utterly. But at the same time he can’t help but feel (rightly or wrongly) that there is a certain sadness in Beth’s eyes, as if asking herself how long this might go on for, how long might her luck last and how long might she keep this quick, brown, young fox. And he is contemplating this as Trix repeats her question.

  ‘Well, what does?’

  Peter shrugs. Beth is still staring at her and has stopped talking, a cigarette that she seems to have forgotten smouldering in her fingers. Trix is gazing up at the ceiling, oblivious of them both.

  ‘Is it regret about having taken the wrong path and lived the wrong life? Or is it guilt? Or is it guilty regret? What takes people back — or makes them think of going back? Some people, more than others, live in the past. Why? Nostalgia or guilty regret? Do people talk about going back because they want to rectify something or other? You know the sort of thing? One of those silly, drunken stunts,’ she continues, ‘like locking some poor girl out in the snow then falling asleep and waking to the tragic consequences? Or those stories where someone does something excessive, a drunken prank that goes all wrong.’ She turns to him. He tries to stare directly back but his eyes keep shifting, evading hers like they do her question. ‘ Just a thought.’ And she rolls onto her side and stares at him.