Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  The gallery recedes, the parks go on and on, and the tram veers off the main road and into a tangle of streets that was once a working-class suburb but is now moving up in the world. This is not her old suburb, but she knows it well enough. Rita, by a mix of chance and her mother’s cunning, grew up south of the river. South of the Yarra. In that place which, as a consequence, is simply called South Yarra. With its twin suburb Toorak, it constitutes the wealthy side of town. The right side of town. Which explains why Rita, in the department store to which she is not going this morning, can give her advice and speak to the wives of the wealthy with a sort of equality because she grew up under the same sky in the days when the right side of town wasn’t all posh. Not in the same streets as the wealthy, but near enough. And brushed with them often enough to know that the rich were different in so far as they were richer. And which explains why Vic always imagined he’d married ‘up’, and why she never thought about it.

  The tram takes her further into this beach suburb and occasionally familiar buildings clatter by: a café that was once a hat shop here, a post-office there. And soon she is on a wide avenue and on the long, straight run that takes her down to the beach. To where the tram that speaks runs out of rail. And she must decide what to do when it does. For there is time to retrieve the morning. To tell herself that she has been frivolous enough and frivolity stops here. To arrive simply late for work as apart from not at all. And, of course, it is the right thing to do. She’s had her little adventure, and it’s time to go back. But as the tram shudders to a stop, a thought sighs into life. Not so much a thought as a feeling that something has happened. Something quite extraordinary. From which there is no going back. And it is then that the tram speaks for the second time. ‘This tram is terminating here.’ And, of course, it’s not the tram speaking, but the conductor. He is walking through the tram telling those few remaining passengers that the tram is terminating. And that from here it will return to the depot. In short, that it will not be going back, and neither will Rita.

  There is a comfortable bench overlooking the old Victorian pier, the beach and across the bay to the horizon. Rita has no clear idea how long she’s been sitting on it. The tram that delivered her here has departed, and others have since come and gone.

  At first she was drawn to the old pier, recently repainted in what she imagines to be Victorian colours, contemplating the dead feet that would have strolled and tramped and skipped along its boards on those Saturdays and Sundays off work. All once as solid and alive as she is, now underground or scattered into the air. Once strolling or tramping the pier, possibly in their best or just wearing their work clothes, bringing with them all those little and big thoughts that we carry around with us but rarely allow ourselves time to dwell on.

  There’s a popular phrase going about — ‘dropping out’ (although Michael would probably tell her that the phrase has long since ceased to be a popular one and is now old hat). She smiles to herself anyway, because that’s what she’s done, ‘dropped out’, like a hippy. Like dropping out of one of those endless circular dances — everybody, hands joined, dancing in a circle, one of those dances that people danced in other times, such as when this pier was built, and before. Going round and round, the circle holding firm, until one of the dancers breaks from it and drops out. And as she imagines an open-air, Sunday party on this very pier, and people dancing in a circle, holding hands, going round and round, she imagines one of them dropping out, and the circle closing straight away. And when this happens, when one of the dancers leaves the security of the circle and the circle closes straight away, does it ever allow the dancer back in again? For this is what she has done: she has stepped back from the circle dance, and she is now watching it.

  One life, she’s thinking. One life. And she’s lived it all in an arc of land no more than twenty miles across. Her world. Her circle, apart from trips to the country and the occasional winter holiday to the sub-tropical north of the country, where Vic eventually moved when Michael left home and they all went their separate ways. Her world, her arc of land. And suddenly, it seems small. For her eyes have now shifted from the pier to the horizon.

  She has been watching a ship coming in, a large container ship. She has been watching it slowly approach, slowly come towards her, as if about to greet her. She has watched it grow from a tiny smudge on the horizon into the recognisable shape of a ship. A foreign ship. From somewhere out there, on the other side of the horizon where elsewhere lies. And she’s suddenly aware of that world out there, in a way, she concludes, that you can’t be when you’re in the circle dance. And as she watches this ship, wondering where on earth it might have come from, she becomes aware of another ship going out to meet the horizon.

  And throughout the morning, as she sits on the bench, she sees one ship after another, at various intervals, leaving the security of the bay for the world out there or entering the security of the bay from the same world.

  At some point she rises from the bench, walks to the kiosk on the pier and comes back with a sandwich and a cardboard mug of tea. Ships come and go. The sandwich is eaten. The tea is drunk. The sun passes across the sky and now sits directly above her. The day unfolds in all its detail: ships; people and dogs on the beach; mothers and prams on the pier; sea birds wheeling across the open, blue sky. But even as she watches, the scene changes, and the wind, an awful spring wind, blowing in all directions at once, is suddenly everywhere and the afternoon turns ratty. Leaves and scraps of paper are tossed into the air, and mothers and their prams turn from the pier for home. And it occurs to her for the first time all day, as she watches them, that nobody knows where she is.

  What would have been her lunch hour comes and goes. The wind riots, and eventually exhausts itself. The air turns eerily still. When did that happen? The day begins to fade and the sun, sliding towards the horizon line, washes everything — the pier, the sea, the sand and those ships that come and go across the bay — with a late-afternoon amber light. She imagines the department store she did not go to today getting ready to close. And, as she does, she notices a young woman and her dog approaching the water’s edge, arriving at the beach when everybody else has gone. Then the young woman sheds her clothes — her jeans, her top — kicks off her sandals and wades in. The dog follows. The world doesn’t hear her splash, but Rita does. It is a distant splash, but near enough to carry. It is a cool spring day and the water looks cold. A reflexive shiver passes through her, but it’s one of delight. For it is a splash of utter abandon. Oh, to make a splash like that! The splash of life. And for all the world, Rita is right there with this young woman, the crash of the dive thundering in her ears, the bubbles of the icy seawater all around her too. And she’s aware, for the second time today, that something tremendous has happened. And she watches, transfixed, as this young woman wades back to the sand, the water dripping from her, utterly unconcerned by the cold, calling to her dog.

  Her eyes shift to the horizon, to the slight smudge of a ship in the distance and the lowering of the sun towards the same distant point — and when she looks back to the beach the young woman has gone, but the echo of her splash carries over the sand and is still in her ears as Rita rises from the bench.

  The tram does not speak to her when it arrives. It does not need to. Its work is done. The journey back passes in a blur. She steps off the tram in a city street and walks towards a travel agency she has passed numerous times before and gazed upon with curiosity and longing. The air is thickening, evening is rolling in, the travel agency’s lights are on and the shop glows, like one of those night cafés in faraway places. Like one of those cafés found on the other side of the horizon, in that elsewhere from which the ships she has watched all day come, and to which they go.

  The next day, when Rita leaves the department store and steps onto the footpath, it is with an odd sense of loss and gain. It is Friday evening. Just after five. The footpaths are filling, and as she turns and walks towards her tram stop, it is with that now
familiar clomp of the milkman’s horse at the round’s end.

  But she will not return on Monday. When, earlier in the day, she spoke to the manager, he was more concerned than annoyed about her absence the previous day (for Rita has rarely been absent in all the years she has been at the store), and she was touched by his concern. And so, when he asked why she was absent, she forgot about the excuses she’d dreamt up and simply told him what had happened: the tram, the beach, the whole day — not mentioning that the tram spoke, or the splash of the young woman entering the icy seawater. But she did add that she hadn’t phoned in because she simply hadn’t thought about it — or, if she had, had been too distracted by the day to telephone. And all of this said in a matter-of-fact manner, as though she was speaking to someone who would understand completely. No disrespect, no frivolousness. And he did understand, nodding earnestly as she told him the story of her day, like a doctor listening to a patient describe the symptoms of her sickness. And when she finished, when there was nothing more to say, he nodded again and turned in his swivel chair and stared out the window onto the facades of the nineteenth-century buildings opposite, built by gold, he may vaguely have noted, in this highly fashionable part of the city.

  There was a long pause, and they both sat, drawn to the same view, in companionable silence. And when he had weighed the matter, when he had drawn his conclusion, he returned from the view and quietly told her she needed a holiday. The store needed her, the store valued her, but the store could get through the Christmas period and the weeks leading up to it without her this time. She had been with the store many years now, and the store did not forget such things. And such service. She would return, they agreed, for the new year in February, when business started up again, when all the families and all the wives of bank managers, businessmen and prime ministers returned from their beach holidays. The store would also give her a little something to go on with. They were a family, after all, and the senior members of the family would be looked after as they ought to be. And he had nodded when he said this, almost conspiratorially, as if to suggest that his days, too, were numbered, and that we should all feel the benefit of our familial ties before we pass into history and before those, less inclined to such sentiments, take over as they surely will. We have, his nod implied, earned this, at least. Hard heads and hard hearts, his tone suggested, are coming — and you and I will soon come from that foreign land of the past where they did things differently. And it will look, his whole manner implied, to those hard heads and hard hearts of the future, like an age of sentimental business.

  And so here she is, free. And suddenly she’s not sure about freedom. Possibly because she’s never really had it before. She has always been a daughter, and a dutiful one; a housewife and a mother, and a dutiful one; an employee, in this family of the store’s staff, and a dutiful one. But she has never been herself. Whoever that is. For in being a dutiful daughter, wife, mother and employee, she’d never had to ask herself that question — who am I? — because who she was came automatically with whatever function she was performing. And this is the first lesson of freedom, that it forces upon her questions that previously had never needed to be asked. And this is why she’s not so sure about it. Even fears it. And she wonders, as she crosses at the lights, if this is the case with all of us. That we talk about freedom, and long for the days when we will be free of this and that and so much more besides, but, deep down, fear it as much as we long for it. Because freedom — and nobody tells you this, and you never know yourself until you’ve got it — comes with a sort of weight. Which makes her smile. For if it comes with its own weight, then is it freedom, after all? Is anything?

  As she approaches her stop she’s more mindful of the crowd than usual. Feels both part of the crowd and no longer one of their number. And that sense of loss and gain that she experienced at the front of the store when she stepped onto the footpath returns to her. What she was, what she is, what she may be — all mingling. But she’s also contemplating all those eyes around her, all those minds ticking over behind them. And that if she, as she makes her way to her regular stop, can be thinking all this, about the freedom she has suddenly been granted and of the unexpected sensation of weight that comes with it, why can’t they? But from the moment she thinks it, she knows they’re not. That is a view of the crowd that we are only ever granted as we leave it.

  A journey begins with maps. And brochures. At least Rita’s does. She’s never been one for maps, but tonight she is. They are spread out over the table in the lounge room, the maps and the brochures her travel agent gave her the day before.

  Michael has just left after the unusual event of a Friday-night dinner, and she traces with her fingers lines denoting motorways and railways to and from foreign places that, for her, have only ever existed in books and films and television, and with the glowing, glamorous look that you know can’t be real. Which may, in fact, be better than reality. Which is why, she imagines, some people only ever travel in their minds. What do they call them? She looks around the room, to the window, the garden light and the street light beyond it out there on the road, where the restless spring wind is blowing once again, and registers, somewhere in the distance, the banging of someone’s gate. Armchair travellers. Yes, that’s it. Those who travel the world from their lounge rooms, never rising from their chairs. And she can understand it. This reluctance to lose these cities of the mind. For to see them, in fact, is to take their mystery from them. And to take their mystery from them means that they are no longer elsewhere, but could be just anywhere.

  But that’s like falling in love only in your mind, because the reality will always disappoint. She raises her eyebrows for no one. She’s only ever fallen in love once, and perhaps it might have been better to leave it in the mind, like a bit of wishful thinking that never happened. Kept as a sort of plaything to be taken out from time to time and toyed with, then put back in the toy-box of dreams. That way it stays forever true. And young.

  But that’s not living. At least, not the kind of living that ever steps outside imagined worlds or cities of the mind. No doubt, there are those who find this living enough. Living in a world of loves that stay strong, and cities of the mind that never lose their mystery and remain forever elsewhere. She’ll always rather blunder in, always rather have love go wrong: for she will always choose the experience of Vic rather than no experience at all, the experience of love gone wrong rather than never having it at all; rather have cities lose their lustre upon being touched than not touch them at all.

  And that sense of freedom she had on the footpath earlier in the day returns to her. That sense of freedom and the unexpected weight that comes with it, and she’s wondering if it wasn’t always like that at various times in her life. When her marriage ended and Vic went north, was she more than simply ‘left’? Was there freedom, too, in the anticipation of what came next? Freedom that you don’t ask for. Even something to be feared. But a kind of freedom all the same. Your life is suddenly yours. You are no longer a wife and a mother, and a dutiful one. But what will you be? You decide. And isn’t that the weight that comes with the freedom, the responsibility of deciding — when for most of your life there was nothing to decide because the decisions were made for you? And so she has felt a sort of freedom at various times in her life, but not with such urgency as when she stepped out onto the footpath at the front of the store this afternoon, knowing that she might never step back in again. Splash!

  A young woman dives into the icy seawater and the sound she makes as she breaks the waves is the splash of living. Rita runs her fingers along lines denoting motorways and railways, joining places she has only ever imagined, but will soon see. Even if it is only a twenty-one-day bus tour. And she spends the next hour tracing lines on maps, opening brochures and gazing at foreign places, at images of the great world, that ‘elsewhere’ on the other side of the horizon.

  And when she finally lies back in her bed in the darkness, she feels, for the moment, ligh
t. Almost weightless. The momentary weightlessness of having cast off the protective layers of a routine life, built up over the years, and which now leaves her feeling like some creature without a shell. Noticeably lighter, but vulnerable to cold and wind. And the creature — say, a tortoise — is apprehensive, even puzzled for a time, until it decides that an overcoat will do just as nicely. Rita smiles. But the lightness of the moment passes and the weight returns. The night closes in. The hours of the night will tick by until she wakes to the first light of morning and the new day. And all the others that will follow. Free days. Days both longed for and feared.

  5. Art

  That village, across the valley, on the opposite hill, has been there for a thousand years. Amerigo Vespucci set off from there in 1491. The next year he met Columbus and later sailed for the New World, eventually giving his name, Amerigo, to the Americas. Every day tourists drive or walk through that hilltop town, which still has the look of a fortress, in search of the house where he was born and where he grew up. Others barely notice the place. History tells you he was born in Florence; the locals tell you otherwise.

  Art has just finished watering his garden, set back from the road behind a high stone wall, and is standing on the side of the road looking out over the valley. The country all around is a folded quilt of valleys and hills, the even lines of vineyards stitched into them and stretching as far as he can see. But it’s the town — or is it a village? — on the opposite hill that he’s looking at. There must have been a time, in its thousand year life, when the very idea of a New World didn’t even exist. A thought, like that world itself, waiting to be discovered. When did we start thinking of New Worlds and Old? And how old does the New World have to be before it, too, becomes Old? Or does it stay forever New? Growing old, by definition, an impossibility. And will Amerigo Vespucci always be setting out from that village across the valley, his ships moored in Seville, waiting to set sail?