Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  He rises from the kitchen table, the Sunday papers under his arm. His wife neither responds nor looks up. The voices of children and occasional laughter inhabit the garden. The French kitchen is still the French kitchen. The house is shaken, but the house will settle.

  In his study he opens the papers. The mountain of Whitlam and the rock-face of Fraser stare back from the desk like some abstract portrait of the times. The election will come and go. And the scandals and the issues and the minister who said such and such and the PM who thought otherwise will fade into the past and eventually be forgotten. All will pass and all will continue. If he trusts anything right now, he trusts this. It is the way of things, and things will have their way.

  8. Mandy’s Silence

  How did this happen? What was the order of events? A hike. Time in the country, away from everything. Friends had suggested it, with the best of intentions. They were thinking of her. And because they were thinking of her, and because their intentions were good, she agreed. Even though she was not excited by the idea, she could see they were. It was all for her. Poor Mandy, who had broken up with her Michael and whose misery had gone on for weeks now. For too long. Enough, her misery needed distraction. It was never said, but that was the thinking. So she went along. Carried by the current of positive feelings and good intentions, which eventually led here.

  Mandy is sitting up in a hospital bed. There is a full moon, and through the window she has a good view over the tree-lined street outside and on to the university. The hospital is quiet and even the occasional buzzing sounds coming from the beds and the soft shuffle of nurses’ feet padding up and down the corridor seem part of that quietness. Voices, too, are distant and vaguely comforting. And the dimmed lights of the ward, somehow blue, it seems to her, cast a dreamy film over everything, like the moonlight on the streets and the university outside.

  How did it happen? What was the order of events that led here? They were walking, a morning hike up into the hills. She was chewing chocolate and nuts and sweat was pouring down her neck, arms and legs, and it was good to be out walking in the country. She wasn’t so much happy as indifferently calm. Each step up into the hills, and the effort required to take each step, drawing her further into that blissful indifference. Nothing mattered. She was a tree, she was a passing bird, she was a fallen branch. She was just one other thing in a forest of things. And whatever she may have felt, the lingering sadness and anger of those last minutes with Michael floated free of her and she became part of this indifferent forest in which the passing bird feels neither joy nor sorrow, the fallen branch no despair. And the further she climbed up into the hills the more those things she may have felt, and which had weighed heavily upon her until now, floated free of her and she was left with this calm indifference. She was things. And things were her.

  Then a large rock appeared in front of them. There it was, like some guardian of the hilltop, saying, thus far and no further — a giant rock pushing up through the soft, mossy ground. And it was obvious to all that they would have to go around this rock. But as they were calculating the best way round the rock without incurring its displeasure, someone suggested they simply pass over the face of the rock and continue. As if there were no rock. And for no particular reason, everyone agreed. Such was the feeling of adventure they had all come to feel. And what’s an adventure without a touch of daring? She remembers following the others, climbing the rock face and almost reaching the top where her friends sat calling her up and urging her on. And then her foot slipped and she ran out of memory.

  She fell, but she has no clear memory of falling, only the memory of realising she was about to. Although at the time she must have said to herself, I am falling, I will land. She fell, she landed, and the fall stopped here. That was the order of events. She tumbled from the face of the rock, incurring its displeasure, onto this hospital bed where she now sits in dreamy blue light, gazing at the moonlit trees of the street outside and the dark shapes of the university buildings.

  Her head aches. A dull ache. As well as her shoulders and hip, but nothing more. No great pain. Just this dull ache. Above all, she is aware of a sort of suspended feeling. Of floating. As if the blue light surrounding her is outer space and she is sitting in a space capsule passing through it. Safe. In a sort of crib. There are voices, distant and indistinct. And the soft, padding feet of the night-duty nurse in the corridor. Then footsteps approach.

  She looks round from the windows and sees a young man in a white coat and a nurse standing beside him. He smiles.

  ‘How’s the head feeling?’

  ‘Bit sore. But not much.’

  ‘And the hip?’

  ‘Same.’

  ‘You had a fall.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘You were knocked out.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  He smiles. ‘You wouldn’t.’

  He then goes on to explain that they have done all the tests they needed to do and that all is well. No damage. A big knock on the head, though, and that head will ache for a while yet. Along with the hip. So, all things considered, she’s a lucky girl. Could have been worse. Then he drops that white-coat smile and his face turns serious. ‘So, that’s all good news. But …’

  The coincidence of the word ‘but’ and the sudden change in his expression concern her, but not overly. She is floating through blue space in an invisible capsule. And it is with mild concern that she waits for the pause to pass and for him to finish the sentence.

  ‘But,’ he continues, ‘I’m afraid you’ve lost the baby.’

  ‘What!’

  Everything stops — voices, shuffling feet, occasional buzzing for the nurses. There is just this silence. In the blue semi-light, her eyes are wide as she stares at the doctor.

  ‘Baby?’

  He nods. He is young and this is clearly awkward.

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  She continues slowly shaking her head. ‘Baby? How can that be?’

  He looks at her, carefully choosing his words before speaking.

  ‘It was tiny. About six weeks or so.’

  Her head stops shaking and she looks at him, blank-eyed. ‘A baby?’

  Her head falls back onto the pillow. There is nothing more to say. And even if there were, she has no desire to go on. And then she’s remembering that last night at Michael’s, not long before he broke it off. That last night, which, of course, she never thought of as their last night. Only now does she think of it like that. That last night, when they had fucked and fucked and fucked, like two people do when they first meet — or when they are parting. That must have been it. They had fucked and fucked, and neither of them had so much as thought of being careful, or of taking precautions, because when you fuck like that you don’t. And she on that night (which she knew full well, but threw caution to the wind) as fertile as the Nile Delta. That must have been it. Must have. The young doctor is telling her something. Something about rest and seeing her in the morning, but she is barely aware of his words. Baby? There for six weeks or seven — now gone, and she never knew. How can that be? Was she so absorbed in her own misery that she wasn’t even aware of her body? Unaware that her body was talking to her while her mind was going round and round with the same thoughts, too absorbed in her misery to listen.

  The doctor is speaking but she hears only the sound of his voice. It is soft, like the distant voices of the night staff and the padding of their feet along the corridor. She is suspended. She is floating. In a capsule. Far away. The world is distant, spinning in space under a silvery moon. Small and far away. And she is floating through space gazing upon a distant earth.

  A life comes and goes in six weeks or so and nobody knows. And it’s not so much the brevity of the life, the short passage from birth to death, that she can’t shake off. It’s the fact that nobody knew. We’re born alone and die alone — nobody else can do either o
f them for us. But, in between, we seek the comfort of company, so that we are not alone. But to be both born and to die, and for nobody to know, is to be alone at the beginning, the end and in between. A lifetime of loneliness, however brief it may be. For, just one person knowing, Mandy is sure, makes all the difference. Or would have. Affection may, after all, transmit itself — perhaps as a hand gently rubbing the belly. It is a comfort, she is convinced, an act of care that is surely registered by that six-or seven-week-old life growing inside her. But to Mandy, more important than this, is the simple fact of knowing. Knowing confirms the existence of someone or something. You are! Your existence is registered, and you are no longer alone. But not to be known at all, to be born and die and for no one to know, is to bear the kind of loneliness that no one or nothing should be asked to bear. For it is infinite loneliness, loneliness that is never broken. And it’s the weight of that loneliness that now presses down on Mandy as she lies in her bed, gazing vaguely out the window to the trees green in the morning sun, taking in the hum of the traffic, while the world goes on oblivious of what has happened.

  There is a television above the bed. Whitlam appears for the midday news. But the volume has been turned down and, while his lips move, no sound emerges. What of it? Casual Mandy is no longer casual Mandy and will never be casual Mandy again. Not that she was ever casual Mandy in the first place. It was a way of being in the world that she just fell in with because Michael wanted it. But it was never her. It was him, it was them. The whole they-world she fell in with. But never again. Never again will she just fall in with what ‘they’ want. All is now changed. And it will never be the same again.

  And while she is contemplating those six weeks or so of infinite loneliness, she is also recalling those moments at the market just after she’d broken up with Michael when the memory of the melon’s scent, the exquisite kiss, stopped her where she stood. That night when she was also, more than she would usually be, aware of the presence of children, darting here and there, along aisles laden with fruit and vegetables and wedges of yellow cheese, aware more than she would usually be of the hands that held their hands and guided them through the crowd, for the world is big and they need a guiding hand while they grow into it. And, at the same time, she is contemplating the possibility that, in some unacknowledged part of her, she did know. And if she did, was that infinite loneliness of the baby broken after all? And did the baby know, in ways that only the infinitely young and wise can?

  Whitlam disappears from the screen. As he will soon disappear from public life. Five years ago they danced in parks and lounge rooms with the chairs and tables pushed back and drank in restaurants to the mountain of Whitlam. Now the mountain is withdrawing, with the sound turned down.

  And it is then that her housemates arrive. Her fellow hikers, those who carried her and walked her down the hill to the car and the ambulance that eventually brought her here. And she sits up and is suddenly in the midst of conversation. Having to talk, when all she wants to do is drift through space. But she can’t. So she is saying things such as yes, she is well. Nothing wrong. She will be leaving tomorrow or the day after, and they tell her that they are happy to hear it and that it will be good to see her back home. And that the dog will be pleased too. And then she remembers, of course, the dog. And with the mention of the dog and the house and the yard, it seems that an image of a distant life and a distant self assembles around her. And she knows instantly, gazing at her friends, at their shining faces and familiar voices, that it is the past. A past life to which she will not return. It is one of those instant decisions from which, she knows, there is no going back. But she doesn’t tell them, not yet. Just as overnight she has resolved not to tell them about the lost baby who came and went and of whom nobody knew. Or did she realise, after all, in some part of her that knew before her mind did? Perhaps. She has resolved not to tell anybody. Not them, not Michael. It is enough, now that she knows. She has resolved to keep it to herself. To keep it in her care, the lost life that came and went.

  Her friends leave and, it seems, take her former life with them. Casual Mandy, who was never casual and will never be casual Mandy again. And who will never just fall in with what ‘they’ want ever again. And nobody will know of this life that flowered for six weeks or so. Not her friends. Not Michael. Had the baby lived, were it still alive, she would tell Michael, and she would hear what he said, and read in his eyes what he thought. But not now. She will keep it in her care, think of it from now on and forever as hers and hers alone, and visit it each day with flowers of care, this small, well-tended grave that is her secret.

  She is contemplating the glow of the fresh vegetables at the back of the shop and wondering why it is that they lift her heart in ways that it has not been lifted lately. These greens, yellows and reds of the new season vegetables — the green luminous, the red shining as if the colour itself had only just been invented. And each year they return, all these fruits and vegetables, as if each new year were their first.

  And it is not only the new season vegetables and fruits that lift her, it is the shop itself. Outside it is an unruly spring day. Wind, rain and sun. But inside, soft string music playing in the background, the shop is a retreat, a world unto itself. She discovered the shop in her undergraduate years and has been coming here since. Not just for the wonders it contains, but for the care with which everything is arranged. For it is an ordered world, everything in its place. A glimpse of how the world ought to be. Each item so carefully arranged that it is almost a travesty to select any one of them and thereby disturb the arrangement. But, slowly and carefully, she begins to fill her basket, noting as she does not only this lifting of the heart but the power of the shop to soothe.

  She has been coming here for years, introduced the place to her friends, and to Michael. She is aware of the woman who owns the shop standing by the cash register, still and calm, like this little world she has created. And she knows the woman well enough to nod to and smile at, and the woman returns her nods and smiles in a way that says, I know you. And I have watched you change since you first came here. But their knowledge of each other has never gone beyond that. And Mandy likes it that way. For it is almost as though the spell that the shop casts would be broken should they become more familiar. The familiarity, she imagines, that takes things for granted.

  And so she slowly fills her basket, vaguely aware of the shop owner patiently waiting at the front counter. And she also becomes aware of another presence in the shop. A shadow almost. Someone has entered the shop. It is raining outside. How long has it been raining? She continues, slowly and carefully, placing her selections in one of the baskets the shop supplies, her back to the shadow.

  Mandy left the hospital over a week before, or was it more? She’s not sure. She is not teaching (she has time off) and has lost track and has since left her home and found a new one. Amazing how quickly you can find a house when you really want to. So it was all very fast. Which was good. It kept the mind occupied. No time for thinking. And all for the best. For to go back to the old house was merely to go back to the old life. As if nothing had happened. But something had and has, and there is no old life to go back to. She now has a house to herself in the suburbs. And she is, for the time being, content with that.

  And it is then, her selection complete, the basket filled, the shower outside passed, that she turns, and, vaguely aware of this other presence in the shop, moves to the front counter.

  Then all is movement and disruption. And she is hurrying along the footpath, wet from the rain, and turning into a laneway so that she is no longer visible on the footpath and cannot be followed. She’s not sure at what point the shadow turned into Michael, but she looked up from her basket and he was there. Her selection of vegetables was complete, the shower outside had passed, she moved to the front counter — and now she is hurrying along the laneway.

  Did they speak? Probably not. What, after all, was there to say? We had this gift and we never knew. This gift
was given to us. And now the gift is gone. And whoever ‘we’ were has gone with it. There is nothing to be done and nothing left to say. And do not take this, my sudden exit and my downcast eyes, as hurt. For I am now beyond hurt. Once, when casual Mandy became serious Mandy and realised she had been all along, she cried on the telephone for you. Just as she cried unheard tears all night for you. But now she cries for something gone that is neither her nor you, and of which she will not speak because the time for telling you has passed. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. Your precious Mr Wittgenstein. And yes, I know what he really meant. I know all that and I don’t care. I will read it my way. Once, there might have been cause to tell you; now all that’s left is silence. A gift came and a gift went and nobody knew. And is that not a picture of infinite loneliness? To say any of the usual meaningless things would be a betrayal of everything that has happened. So you see, Michael, Mandy said nothing because nothing is better. Because when there is nothing left to say the only thing left is silence.

  At the end of the laneway she turns and looks back, but there is no one there. No shadow pursuing her. Just the wind and the tumbling dark clouds above.

  ‘She doesn’t live here any more.’

  Mandy’s friend, with whom she shared the house until recently, is speaking on the telephone. Mandy is standing in the lounge room listening to the call, holding a few odds and ends she forgot in the move. It is a few hours after she encountered Michael at the shop, and she has come by to collect a reading lamp and a pair of blue jeans left on the clothes line — jeans she bought one Friday night with Michael in that world of Friday nights past when she was another Mandy.

  ‘No,’ her friend says, glancing at Mandy with a raised eyebrow, ‘we don’t know where.’