Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  But from the moment he answers, heavy, involuntary sobs rise up in her and fall into the mouthpiece of the telephone through which she might have spoken to him. Instead of words there are only heavy sobs, like those heavy drops of rain that signal a downpour. And within seconds she is beyond talking, and simply sits there and sobs into the phone, as the song (which she’d forgotten to switch off in her eagerness to act before succumbing to second thoughts) starts up again, a continuous loop of beginnings and endings. The tape going round and round, and Mandy’s sobs as endless as the song. For what she had not anticipated was not so much the sound of Michael’s voice, but the perfect picture that came instantly with the sound of his voice: the arm of the couch upon which the telephone sits, the couch by the front window of the flat in which Michael will be sitting, the table, the sideboard, the books (which she can visualise and name), the rug ending at the doorway, and the floor onto which they once sank — the whole familiar scene, in all its simplicity, comes to her in a rush that takes the words from her lips and leaves her sobbing once again. And suddenly she hasn’t even got the energy to hang the phone up. And so she sits on the edge of her bed and sobs into the silence at the other end. And she knows that he is listening under sufferance and that he will listen until she either stops or hangs up. And while she has no desire to detain him any longer, she has lost the will to move.

  She doesn’t really know how long she sits there while the song ends and begins. But at some point the sobs stop and that curious sense of hope with which she picked up the phone returns to her, and she knows that, at last, she can speak. She can do it. And the thought that she once brought a kind of happiness to him returns to her with this confidence and she determines to ask him if there is any happiness left in him at all, and, if there is, might it still be ‘her’ happiness, the happiness that she knows she once brought to him. And, if so, does the Mandy and Michael that they once were still exist, still live on somewhere in the blur of the day? That is when she asks him: ‘Are you happy?’

  Straight away, registering the silence on the other end and the absurdity the words assumed on being spoken, she wishes she’d never said it. And as the silence on the other end lengthens, and as the song swells and that voice goes on and on, intoning to the world that it is not in love, the sobs return and the deluge begins all over again.

  She can’t remember hanging up the phone. But it is back in place and her hand is resting on it. Then her fingers slide from the phone towards the hash. A minute later she lies back on the bed, lights the joint and slowly, luxuriously, inhales oblivion.

  At some point in the morning, at three or four, she wakes to a darkened room, the song still on its endless journey through this endless night, and finally has the will to switch it off. She returns to her bed, to darkness and silence, and waits for sleep. The darkness will turn to light, the night will end, and somehow she will get through the day.

  The silence is good. She can, for the first time, see the day that has just passed with a touch of distance. Like looking back on a bad dream. For it was a day that passed in a blur, but it is impossible to see the blur for what it is while you’re in it. But in the silence and the darkness, and with her head now clear of the hash, she can see the day for what it was. Time, she muses, will do its work. It always has. Distance will come. It always does.

  But, for the moment, she must sleep and gather herself for the day to come. A working day just like any other — and not like any other. She studies revolutions at university: one term, France; the next, Russia. She studies them, and now she feels like she has been cast into a revolution. She is the clambering crowd, she is the order of things collapsing. Her whole body, from the suburbs of her fingers and toes to the nerve centre of the heart, is in revolt. And Mandy is swept up in the tumult. But, for now, she must sleep and gather herself for the changed life she will wake to.

  Are you happy, Michael? Am I? Are we? Will we ever be? The lot of us. Can a whole generation have it so good, that in wanting it all and believing we can have it, we lose it all? At least, the things that matter? And will we go grumpy into that good night because we never found the thing we wanted when it was there all the time? She smiles in the darkness at the thought of going grumpy into that good night, the first light thought she’s had all the long day, then slides into a deep sleep.

  The market is crowded and colourful and humming with Friday-night life. Couples and families wander slowly along the stalls and she especially notices — has she ever really noticed it before? — the excitement of the children, holding their parents’ hands or darting here and there among the shoppers. The children liberated from school, the parents liberated from work. Everybody radiating that air of liberation, which, on Friday evenings past, Mandy would have too. But not tonight.

  The market is haunted. The ghosts of Michael (currently at his mother’s for an early dinner) and Mandy, as they were when they were at their happiest, haunt the stalls. She sees them. Now here, now there. She sees them on one night in particular. One night when she’d bent forward to smell the melons at a fruit stall. She’d picked up a full, round melon and had bent forward to smell it and was just inhaling the rich, heady scent of the fruit when she felt his lips on her neck. And the two combined, the scent of melon and the sudden surprise, even the shock of the kiss, ran from her neck through her whole body, washing up, spent, at her feet.

  How long had his lips rested on the back of her neck, how long had the wave taken to travel through her, how long had she held the melon to her nose? The movement of the market was frozen for those few seconds, the hum of the stalls silenced. The clock stopped. A wave of deep, unutterable pleasure passed through her. Perhaps the whole idea of seconds, minutes, hours and days is no good for such moments. No, another form of time had opened up to them. And not even another measure of time, but immeasurable time. They’d stepped out of the usual calculations of such things.

  It was, she imagines, standing still and staring at the same market stall with its new-season fruit all carefully arranged, a glimpse of forever. She will go on and even grow old, living through days measured in the usual way, but the kiss will stay forever there, on the back of her neck. And the moment can never fade or be taken from her because it didn’t take place in ordinary time and is not subject to time’s erosion, but exists, instead, in some pocket of experience where they measure things differently. Or don’t measure them at all. And there, preserved in that pocket of experience, she will always be bending forward, her nose touching the melon, inhaling its scent and being, simultaneously, surprised by the kiss.

  And, even now, that wave of pleasure passes through her, not with the same unutterable intensity it did then but enough to stop her where she stands, and enough for the movement of the market around her to cease and the hum of the stalls to be silenced.

  There they were and there they are. And when the wave had spent itself the world returned; movement resumed, the hum of the stalls rose from the silence and the clock started again. Just as it does now, and she looks about as if wondering where on earth she is and what brought her here. A single shopper. A young woman wandering the stalls, her bag still empty, wondering just what it is she wants, if anything at all.

  She fills her bag and barely registers what she fills it with or what she’s paid. There they were, there they are. The hidden laughter of children playing under the stalls rises to meet her, and as it does a pang of urgent emotion accompanies the laughter. One that she can’t quite put her finger on. But it’s there, all the same.

  There they were, there they are. And did she know, even then — from the moment she lifted the fruit to her nose — that she could play this game of ‘seeing’ each other for only so long? That the kiss told her, or should have told her, that she was doing something more than ‘seeing’ Michael? For ‘seeing’ each other doesn’t include experiencing the exquisite. And ‘casual’ is never sublime, just as ‘casual’ never cries. No, something had happened. But she was the only one to
realise it that night and, being ‘casual’, kept that moment to herself and didn’t, as the song says, make a fuss.

  The market is haunted, and she seems to float along the stalls to the exit, leaving the ghosts of what they were behind her. But the kiss … and the memory of lifting a blossom from her hair, which automatically brings with it all the anticipation of seeing Michael — these are the things that are left to her and which stay, long afterwards, preserved by memory, forever living on in some pocket of experience where they measure things differently, or not at all.

  She throws the shopping onto the front seat of the car, hears the engine rumble into life and sits, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, watching the crowd come and go under the glow of the market lights. And when she’s done, when she feels sufficiently back in the world and ready to relinquish the one that the ghosts of the market plunged her back into, she moves quickly out into the street and drives back to a rented room in a rented house to a Friday night alone and the gathering sensation that things can’t stay like this.

  The sky is still. The parks are no longer in riot, revolution is no longer in the air and the sudden showers have stopped. Fresh green leaves sparkle in the sun. The summer is coming. She can see it and smell it. Another summer.

  Mandy is lying in bed. It is early, just after seven. The sun is bright. The room is bright, and she likes that. The curtain is partly drawn to let the light in, and she likes that too for she doesn’t like to sleep in a tomb. The sun will become strong as the day gathers and on the streets people will discard their coats, car windows will be down, and a holiday atmosphere will gradually enter the last few months of the year — this morning containing a first hint of those long summer holidays that once stretched out forever. And she’d love to be uplifted by the thought of it all but she is distracted by the sound of the rubbish truck slowly making its way along the street outside. And as she lies there, covered only by a sheet, she can almost calculate where in the street the rubbish truck is. Which house, and how long it will take to reach the front of her house.

  Mandy isn’t normally mindful of the rubbish truck, and would normally be drifting in and out of sleep at this hour. But not this morning. It has been two weeks since she last saw Michael. And the previous evening she came to a conclusion. That if things were to move forward, and if she were not to remain on the same continuous loop, endlessly repeating the same things until she sank into endlessly repeated days in an endlessly repeated life and eventually drowned in repetition, then things would have to change. And change starts in the smallest ways.

  The previous night she bundled together all the things that were hers and Michael’s. They were everyday things. Things that everybody has. There were theatre tickets with their sad dates stamped on them. Sadder still, she found she could remember all of them. Not just the plays, but the occasions themselves, even what she wore. There were postcards, the odd letter and the bracelet he’d given her. And she shook her head looking at them. So, there was a time when he wrote letters to her, sent her postcards and gave her things. The postcards were hurried, but there was a sort of dashed-off care in them. And she remembered receiving them, all of them (not many, but enough to call ‘all of them’), when he went to places without her because he liked to see places alone, and, often as not, he was better off alone. Or so he said. What else was there? Oh, they went to somebody’s wedding. Some friend of his. A film, here and there, a picture program that she can’t even recall keeping. And the odd photograph.

  It’s surprising how much happens in a year, because it never seems like much at the time. No, she’d corrected herself, it always did. It always felt like something was happening. Something, and she’d paused for a moment, looking round the room, thinking of a nicely detached way of putting it — something uncommon. Something that just might not come again. Now she was left with the common everyday things that everybody ends up with. She’d bundled them all together and put them in a bag — along with a cassette tape that a friend had made for her, of the same song going round and round, endlessly repeating itself, proclaiming to the world that nobody was in love. All of it went into a bag. Not such a big bag, but big enough. Then she’d taken it to the rubbish bin and dropped it in.

  And she knows it was all a bit of a play — bundling everything together, putting it in a bag and ceremoniously dropping the bag into the bin. Yes, a sort of performance. But who for? Herself, yes. But it has to have been for more than just her. Just as a diary is written for more than just the benefit of the diarist. There’s always this imagined someone, isn’t there? And so, even if someone’s diary is never read there’s always this imagined someone who is reading it as it is being written — and that amounts to a sort of reading. And a sort of reader. And so it is with her little performance of the night before. That little one-act play of hers — performed for this imagined someone. A way of saying, There, I’m done with you, I’m done with her, I’m done with us. Do you see?

  Nor is this little performance finished. The rubbish truck is near, and as it approaches she throws the sheet back, leaps out of bed and moves to the window. She watches as the truck appears then comes to a stop at the front of her house — and because she has the front room she has a good view of the street and the whole spectacle. She can put a face to the rubbish collector himself as he leaps, almost in scripted movements, from the back of the truck to assume his role in this little play of hers. Indifference is stamped all over his face. That’s good. Just another bin. Just another ‘us’ unloaded and ready for the tip. The bin is deposited back on the nature strip, and the collector, heedless of his audience, leaps onto the back of the truck as it moves on up the street with the last of Mandy and Michael in a small bag in the back along with all the other throw-aways. And so ‘seeing’ each other never became ‘knowing’ each other. ‘Casual’ never became serious, and she knows now that it was never going to.

  Then the truck passes from view and she returns to her bed, the little performance concluded. The play done. A way of saying to an imagined someone — there, I’m done. Do you see?

  And as she lies back in her bed she’s noting how a goodbye needs that. Needs to be a sort of ritual for it to be properly done with. To be convincing. Sometimes we do things, little acts, not because we want to, but because they complete the goodbye and will look good when we remember them years later. There’s always someone watching. So goodbyes require a little crafting, to be made just that touch untrue, in order to become true.

  The sound of the truck fades. Familiar street sounds return; the squeak of a gate, birds, car doors. The world goes on. Everything starts up, once again, while the last of Mandy and Michael makes its final journey to the tip.

  4. The Trams of One’s Fancy

  As Rita steps off her tram at the intersection, another arrives. She has travelled, from her unit, through the eastern suburbs to the city. This other tram, which arrives as Rita is stepping from hers, is going south. Through the city. It is the Number One tram and it travels all the way to the South Melbourne beach. It is a weekday morning. The city opening for business, a sight she has watched for just over thirty years: office workers, sales assistants, managers of banks, public servants, street cleaners, newspaper sellers, café owners, chiefs of staff … the whole intricate mechanism of the city’s commercial heart coming to life. And Rita, part of that mechanism. Her body, like a milkman’s horse, knows exactly what to do: step from the tram, cross the street and follow the footpath up the hill, to the exclusive department store where she has worked for much of her life (four days a week, Wednesdays off). A store at which the wives of prime minsters shop, the wives of army generals and of distinguished newsreaders, and all the quietly wealthy who come to this store from the other side, the south side of the river, by taxi or car, leaving their drivers at the front to wait until the morning’s transaction is completed.

  And they ask Rita’s advice, these wives, on coats and hats and perfumes. They ask her advice and she gives it, an
d the exchanges that take place are between one who knows, who possesses knowledge particular to the purchase, and those seeking to know. In this way a sort of equality is established between the wife of a prime minister and a shop assistant for the fifteen or twenty minutes it takes to acquire the required article. And this is something Rita has also noticed over the years she has worked at the store — that although money is exchanged, they don’t seem to buy, these women; they acquire. And the articles of clothing they come for are not desired articles, but required ones. They are wealthy, these wives, but they are not frivolous, and desire stirs only the frivolous. And they all come to this store, the one that Rita’s body, with the reflex and faithfulness of a milkman’s horse, should be taking her towards.

  And, as in all the mornings of her working life, this is how it would be, with neither anticipation nor misgiving. But this morning, as she steps from her regular tram, this other tram arrives as she steps off. The beach tram. And it arrives almost with a sense of urgency. Here I am, it says. I am desire. Be frivolous.

  She has little memory of stepping onto the beach tram. But here she is. The tram arrived with a sense of urgency and she boarded it as if having been summoned. As though the tram were more than simply a tram. As though it were something from a strange tale in which things (chairs, balloons, steam engines) take on a sort of life. As though it could speak. And it did. Didn’t it?

  So, instead of crossing the street and following the footpath up to the store at which she works, she is travelling in the opposite direction on a tram that speaks. Or, at least, speaks to some. Like a messenger with a message, and an urgent one. She passes Flinders Street Station, crosses the bridge and slips into the parkland on the other side of the river, to her left. To her right is the newly completed gallery and the theatres that they call the Arts Centre. She’s never been there, but she will, sooner than she thinks, when a painting of Vic’s aunt, who lived in a tent on the outskirts of the city many years ago, will come to the city as part of a travelling exhibition and be displayed in this new gallery — the painting not only bringing with it memories of the whole vanished world of Vic, the young Michael and the ‘them’ that they were but aren’t any more, but itself a remnant of that world.