Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  The early twilight that carried with it a hint of summer has faded. The night settles in over the park. Darkness fills its corners. A lion roars its discontent, then falls into silence. And, gradually, the distant hum of traffic floats across the park from the city streets and the freeway, bringing with it the sounds of the trams and taxis and cars that will take Mandy to and from her new life, the mountain of Whitlam to a public meeting, and Peter from the airport to his home; everybody rushing to and from their destinations, lives won and lives lost in living. One vast, constantly moving organism, evolving as it moves and always moving. It ‘worlds’, he smiles. The thing itself. It worlds. It is worlding.

  7. Frankenstein’s Monster

  The sky has clouded over in the brief time it took to drive from the café where Peter has just met Michael to their old student house. He would normally have driven straight to the airport, but not this time. All that talk of Pussy Cat. Some days these things matter more than others. Some days they sneak up on you and spring, the way Pussy Cats do. He has only a vague idea of how long he has been here. Long enough for the sky to cloud over, long enough for the street to be winter-blank in spring. He looks up to the balcony they once sat on through summer days and nights; the afternoons reading, the drinks, the parties. And Pussy Cat, forever leaning over the railing with provocative innocence, calling out something to him below on the footpath. Here Bunny Rabbit’s eyes will forever wander, here Pussy Cat’s heart will forever be broken. He has not seen the house since their student days. Either by design or by destiny. And all the things that took place here, in the intervening years have remained locked away behind that door. More or less. And still there, locked away inside, is the Peter who existed then but doesn’t any more — another Peter, whose actions and deeds cannot touch him now because they were the actions and deeds of someone else. Or so it seems. He sits in the car contemplating his former self as if it were a character in a book. Faintly familiar, but distant. Somebody he once knew.

  He has been staring at the old front door since he parked and switched off the ignition. Still purple. Still, it would seem, a student house. And still there, directly opposite the house, the pub where, in the public bar from time to time, the Italian men who gathered there sang like a heavenly choir and kept them all warm on winter nights. And those years that intervened, between then and now, the years that marked the difference between being in your twenties and being in your thirties, seem to have gone in the blink of an eye. And as he dwells on the door, it suddenly opens.

  A young woman, looking down, hair falling to her shoulders, is examining the contents of her bag. Then she is joined by a young man — long hair, jeans and well-worn coat. The two of them could be any number of the young men and women they all once were. Timeless students. They linger for a moment, close the door behind them, step onto the footpath and walk down to the corner with the easy strides of those with no pressing engagements. The slow, steady drizzle that has begun to fall doesn’t touch them because they don’t notice it.

  Doors open upon doors upon … He looks up at the front room. The old room. They are still there, both of them. Sealed off from time. Louise, all tears and rage and Pussy Cat love, and Peter, with his Bunny Rabbit eyes forever wandering, on the brink of walking out — and all that once happened stands ready to happen all over again, two people standing on the brink of discovering death, caught and frozen there, just before death arrives.

  He sees them, still up there, just as he sees his hand reaching out and snatching Pussy Cat’s medicine bottle from her side of the bed: one last spiteful act, one last prank before disappearing into the night with every intention of returning in the morning before she even realises it’s gone. But youth being youth, he forgot. And when he did return, Pussy Cat’s body had already been removed from the house. And as he gazes at the house he seems to enter it and take that familiar walk up the stairs to their old room to find Pussy Cat still there. After all these years. Everything poised to be re-enacted. He winces as he waits for the blow to fall. For the farmer’s rake to come down upon little Peter Rabbit. But it doesn’t.

  One moment Pussy Cat is a frozen figure. Oblivious of him. Seeing nothing. The next she turns to him with an all-knowing tenderness, wise beyond her years, seeing everything, and is grasping his hand before it can snatch the pills. ‘Stop!’ her eyes say. ‘Stop now. Enough,’ wise Pussy Cat says. ‘You were young. Weren’t we all? Weren’t we all younger and older than we knew, and older and younger? Weren’t we all? Silly beyond belief, and wise beyond our years. We knew everything, and nothing. Full of love and hate and goodness that we’ll never have again, and spite that knew no bounds. And we did things, we all did such things.’ And it is both a young voice and an older voice that is speaking to him. The younger Pussy Cat and the older one she never grew to be. ‘Yes, we did things. We all did such things. But time to let go. We can’t continue to blame ourselves for things we did a hundred years ago. Time to let be. Enough. Stop. Stop now.’

  And Peter, sitting in his government car opposite the house, takes in every word and believes every word. He has conjured her up from the past, as he would have her, the Louise whom he needs to hear or chooses to hear. And she is right, of course she is. She is only telling him something he should have told himself ages ago. And, together, they don’t so much airbrush old times as agree to close the book on them. At least, this part of old times. You have to be light to live, and too much past weighs you down. We did things. We all did such things. This is what she would have said. This is Pussy Cat as he would have her. For he knew his Pussy Cat better than them all, and this is what she would have wanted. What she would have wanted to say. For beneath her rage was the Pussy Cat who purred to his touch in those days when they all did such things; beneath her Pussy Cat rage was the generous Pussy Cat who would have said that the time has come to let it all be. That they could continue to blame themselves for things they did a hundred years ago only for so long. ‘Yes, you used my weakness. You did. For when I told you of my medicine and my moods I handed over, in trust, my weakness. But that was then. These things pass. They must. Time to let be.’ This is what his Pussy Cat would say, and this is how he would have her stand and leave. A final gift of forgiveness in her Pussy Cat eyes. A sort of absolution. Eyes that say, there, it’s done, it’s over, and we need trouble each other no more. For he knew his Pussy Cat better than them all.

  The clouds move on, the day is slowly brightening. Peter drives away, the old student street receding in the rear-vision mirror. Let be, let be … Time does its work. These things recede like the view from the rear-vision mirror. We need trouble you no more. Enough. Let be, let be …

  On that same Wednesday afternoon, while Peter is driving away from the past, which is rapidly disappearing from the rear-vision mirror as if it never existed, Love is hard at work.

  Some parts of the flat are in boxes (books, mementoes and certain favourite, framed photographs); other parts are exactly as they were: records in stacks, a coat and a hat on a hook that she hasn’t had the heart to remove, as if the body of Beth were somehow still inside them, and her shoulder bag, which always contained her work, on the floor directly beneath the coat where Beth last dropped it. It is, the scene Trix looks over, an odd conjunction of staying and going.

  But Trix is going. For how long, she’s not sure. She didn’t have the strength to pack up the whole flat and sell it (which is what she’d like to do) or the heart to stay. So she’s taking just those things that she needs to take and moving, in a week or so, back to Melbourne, where she was born and where she went to school, the same select school, endlessly producing and reproducing the same select circles, that all her cousins went to. Which was half the reason she left in the first place. She is, she knows, responding to a sort of homing instinct. Home, a place to repair yourself. What did someone say? Home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. Not that she is going to the home she grew up in. No, her parents have long since sep
arated and sold the old house. And she hasn’t seen her cousins for years. No, she has friends who have a house, a large house with a spare, sunny room. And Trix, a book editor who can take her work wherever she chooses to go, will stay there in a large house, in a large room full of sunlight, for as long as it takes. She goes with few hopes and no illusions, but the thought of a large room filled with sunlight lifts her for a moment.

  Then she looks about the lounge room in which she is now standing and up the hallway of the flat and it suddenly hits her without warning, as it has for weeks and weeks: this is where they lived, but don’t any more. And won’t again. And just when she thinks she’s done with sadness she looks at the coat and the hat and the bag and another wretched wave of longing passes through her and she has, yet again, the helpless feeling of floating out of her depth and not being able to stop herself, of never having been this far out before, of being capable of nothing other than just staying afloat and riding the waves — waves that she can only assume will eventually take her back to shore. But which shore?

  Even though she’s not packing up the flat and selling it, she’s cleaning it all the same. Making it ready for when the sheets are thrown over the chairs and tables and the couch. And it is while she is dusting one of the armchairs that she comes across a handkerchief stuffed down the side of a cushion — a white handkerchief with some sort of coat of arms in the corner, and a faint red smear across it. And she’s puzzled for a moment, then she remembers. Of course. It’s Peter’s, and the smear of red is Beth’s lipstick. For all her radical ways, Beth was an old-fashioned girl who wore the red lipstick of other times. There it is, the colour and the faint smell of Beth. And she remembers how it got there. Beth dipping her hand in an olive bowl, fingers sticky and looking for a napkin; Peter passing his handkerchief to her, saying it’s clean, and Beth passing it back after wiping her fingers and lips. And Trix remembers it all because, for a moment, for a crazy moment, they looked like they could so easily have been husband and wife, so casual and yet intimate was the exchange. One of those moments of irrational jealousy that lent the moment enough intensity for the memory to linger. And here it is, the fallen handkerchief. Still here. And with the sight and scent of it comes not only another wave of sadness but anger as well. And a desire, not for revenge (for she knows exactly the tempting nonsense that he fed Beth that night and which Beth couldn’t resist), but for a touch of justice — because nobody should be allowed to play with people’s lives and then walk away as if nothing had happened. For, she is sure, Peter is one of those (they all are in this town) who are good at walking away, at granting themselves absolution as if nothing happened and no one did anything.

  And so she sits and stares at the handkerchief, wondering what to do with it, then slowly folds it into a square and flattens it out with her palm. The fallen handkerchief has fallen into her hands. She rises and places it on the kitchen table and reaches for an envelope at the same time as reaching for Beth’s address book. And there it is, where it ought to be, for Beth was methodical like that. Two addresses: the Canberra one and, because of the old times that connected them, the Melbourne address. Very convenient. And Trix knows the area, because it’s her side of town — the plush side of town, the select side of town that it would be so easy to slip back into after a week of playing with other people’s lives and then walking away as if nothing had happened.

  Her first impulse is to write Peter’s name and address on the envelope and post it — but then Peter will receive it, throw the envelope away, pocket the handkerchief and, indeed, nothing will have happened. No, best to post it to his wife.

  Later that day, driving those few boxes of books and odd favourite things to the post office where they will be sent on to Melbourne, she drops the envelope into a post-box.

  There are those who walk away and imagine they’ve forgotten whatever it is they want to forget. There are those who are good at that. But Love doesn’t forget. Love has long and clear memories. Nor, when it chooses, does it let others forget. So while Peter goes about his duties, now back in Canberra, Love is hard at work. And love’s work awaits him, although he doesn’t know it yet.

  The rest of Peter’s week passes, light and fast. A time-devouring round of election meetings and election speeches, for the election has now been called and the first casualty is time. And when he finally settles back into his seat on the Friday afternoon flight home, his body, drained from the weight of the week’s hard work, sinks deep into it. And as he stares out the taxi window a little later, speeding along the freeway through the early evening, he is just one part of the general hum of traffic that carries over the surrounding suburbs to Michael, strolling back through the park from his tram stop after tapping the wrong girl on the shoulder and speaking the wrong name.

  It is a familiar scene inside Peter’s house. The end of the working week. An air of liberation: the children in these warmer evenings passing from the house into the garden and back in repeated cycles; music coming from the stereo; shopping bags on the kitchen table. Kate looks up from the lounge-room couch, switches off the television and greets him, while the two children acknowledge his arrival with a quick wave on their way out to the yard. All is as it should be.

  He sits with Kate on the couch, kicks his shoes off, a deep sigh indicating the measure of his tiredness, and small talk follows. All is well. But as the talk continues he notes that his wife’s tone lacks the lightness of small talk. The talk is small, but the tone is not. There is reserve in her voice. She is saying one thing and thinking another. And he is contemplating asking just what that something else is, when she says: ‘Oh, this odd thing arrived today.’

  ‘Odd thing?’ He is curious and mildly amused.

  ‘Yes.’

  She rises from the couch and takes a small, opened envelope from the kitchen table and drops it on his lap.

  ‘Wouldn’t you call that odd?’

  He looks at the envelope. It is addressed to his wife, in writing he has never seen before. Distinctive writing. Almost like calligraphy, the way the writing of some people can look. He is puzzled, but that’s all. Then he takes from the envelope what he assumes will be a letter and is suddenly staring at a handkerchief. At first he doesn’t recognise the handkerchief, and then he does. It’s one of his. He looks at his wife, the puzzled look acquiring a frown.

  ‘Open it out,’ Kate says.

  He does so, and as he is staring at the square of what is otherwise a clean handkerchief he sees there is a smudge in one of the corners. It’s not blood, but what is it?

  ‘How do you explain that?’

  He looks from the piece of cloth to his wife, utterly baffled.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What’s the mark?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Jam?’

  ‘No,’ she says, and it’s clear she has the answer, as it is also clear that she has had ample time to study the object. ‘It’s lipstick.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Believe me. Smell it.’

  He does and there is a faint, but clear, cosmetic smell.

  ‘You wouldn’t want that on your toast.’

  He slumps back on the couch, staring at the handkerchief.

  ‘So,’ his wife says, returning to the original question. ‘How do you explain that?’

  To which he replies with exactly the same answer. ‘I can’t.’

  And he can’t explain it because he has completely forgotten how it happened. It is his handkerchief, there is lipstick on it, but he has no memory of where it may have been left or how it came to acquire the faint red smudge. He has, quite genuinely, no memory of passing the handkerchief to Beth, or of Beth wiping her fingers and then her lips before passing it back. He had, after all, much larger things on his mind. And he was, it must be said, sitting in a room with two naked women at the time. And they were discussing matters of grave political concern. The passage of a handkerchief, from one person to the other, in such circumstances, passed, more or less, unnotice
d. Rated no mention in the memory’s dispatches. And so may as well never have happened. And as much as there must be an explanation somewhere, neither Peter nor his wife is in possession of it. Furthermore, she believes him when he says he can’t explain it because he believes it.

  He folds the handkerchief, puts it back in the envelope and drops it on a cushion beside him, looking round at his wife when he is finished.

  ‘Someone’s having a joke.’

  He goes on to surmise, quite genuinely, that he must have left it lying round the office, somebody found it and thought they’d play a joke on him. And he knows just the types who would. It’s been a long, intense week. The troops need to amuse themselves occasionally. It’s a joke, he says again.

  ‘Somebody’s read too many plays,’ he adds, with a weary sigh.

  ‘All the same, odd.’

  ‘There are some oddballs up there.’

  No, it’s a joke, and he’ll find out who the joker is on Monday. That’s if the joker owns up.

  They rise from the couch, leaving the envelope lying on the cushion. The fallen handkerchief, once more, left to be forgotten. Not worth any more of their time. They dine on take-away pizza, they doze in front of the television, they sleep and then wake up to a bright Saturday morning that finds Peter with his feet up reading the papers.

  Peter rises from his kitchen chair. He is getting on with things. There is an election in a few weeks and the campaign machinery (with all its various parts, including Peter) is in frantic motion. The kitchen table is covered in Saturday’s newspapers, as it always is on a Saturday morning. Kate is reading, listening to music, tracking the sounds of her children’s voices, mindful of the smell of toast and contemplating the taste of jam — all at once. The mind gathers it all, discards what it no longer requires, then moves on. There is no further mention of the handkerchief, left in the corner of an armchair for weeks, and now forgotten all over again, as if never having been dropped. And that moment when Peter passed it to Beth and Beth passed it back, which Peter has completely forgotten because he had far greater things on his mind, never existed. Or may as well not have. Just a joke dreamt up by someone. A prank that he may or may not look into when he gets back to work on Monday, if he remembers.