Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  No, nostalgia is not the longing for home or the past — it is the longing for youth itself. And the object is not to ease that longing by returning, but to bottle it and, in so doing, preserve those memories.

  Did Amerigo Vespucci succumb to the same longing on those long, lonely days on the open sea, sailing to the New World — and, if so, did it draw him back or drive him on, knowing full well there was no going back? And at what point does the adventure of setting out for New Worlds become an exile?

  Art wanders about his studio, the smell of the gum leaves still heavy in the air, putting the canvases back into place, stacked where they were before Sam’s visit. All put away for the time being, the sunken city in the process of being re-created — brick by brick, building by building, street by street.

  And it is as he is wandering around the studio that he turns one of the paintings round — an old painting, one he did when he first came here. It is an interior study, one of those paintings that take you through the front door and inside a house to its interior life. It is, in fact, the kitchen of the house he grew up in, on the day he left. Art and his parents are seated at the kitchen table: his father in his singlet, newspaper opened in front of him and a big cup of tea (even in the January heat), his mother in her apron, tea, too, in front of her. There is a cake and special plates and dessert forks on the table. A typical kitchen scene, except for the cake and plates and cutlery. It is these things that tell you this is a special occasion. Nobody appears to be talking. His father stares at the newspaper, blank-eyed. His mother looks directly at the viewer, puzzled. And Art, at the end of the table, removed from them as if already having left, has that unmistakeable look of someone who can’t wait to leave.

  It never occurred to him at the time that his father, a Tramways mechanic, and his mother, a shop assistant, were well aware that they were not simply saying farewell, but goodbye. But the blank eyes, the puzzled look, the silence and the sliced but untouched cake all tell you this without need of it being said. They were, his parents (like all of them in that cluttered workers’ suburb by the sea in which he grew up), no-fuss people, and so nobody in the painting lets on that this may not just be a trip to foreign places, and a farewell, but goodbye. The Art in the scene is all impatience, his mind elsewhere, on imagined horizons, barely registering the kitchen or what his parents may or may not be thinking.

  Art had already left home anyway, already been married and separated (quite young), and only ever came home on Sundays, and reluctantly at that. Small. Smallness. Suburbs as closed as mediaeval villages. Suffocating. Depressing, maddening. This is how he thought of it all then, and how he still does. Small lives jammed together, lived and ended within the walls of that cluttered little world that rarely looked outward, and when it did, did so with suspicion.

  His mind in that scene is on imagined horizons, for he is going out into the great world. The world that the likes of his parents would never venture into, and not only because of the expense but because this was their world. All they were given, and all, in the end, they asked for. A world of ‘cuppas’, ‘white with two’, of calling each other ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’, of drawn blinds and dark rooms in summer with the front room always shut and only ever opened on special occasions. A world of defined comings, goings and rituals — work, pub, Sunday leg — that would never change because they were beyond change. A world that constantly sought to draw you in, to make you one of them, so that it would, this world, go on and on … As if there were no other way, as if it were their and your natural condition. And the more they drew you in, the more the naturalness of this condition became confirmed and, therefore, beyond questioning. To seek more, to seek out the world’s edge, to set out after new and uncharted lands, was not only a betrayal of all this but an insult.

  But none of this was spoken that day. The only thing to be done with that world was to leave it. Impatience defines him in that scene, and it was one of the first paintings he completed when he settled here, to remind him, should he ever need reminding in the years that would follow, why he left in the first place.

  And it was only after news reached him of the death of his parents a few years later, one after the other, that he remembered the occasional trembling of his mother’s lips that day as she smoothed the tea cosy, and her occasional sighs that spoke of things they didn’t speak about. That, and the fifty pounds his father placed in his hand as they all stood and made their way to the front door: the fifty pounds that proudly proclaimed, never let it be said we don’t look after our own; that and the brief, no-fuss farewell that the sadness in their eyes betrayed.

  These impressions were only finally registered as the years passed, but are not visible in the painting, for his youthful impatience to be shot of that house and the city framed the whole scene.

  He puts the painting, face in, back against the stone wall of the studio with all those other stacked works that will eventually comprise a complete portrait of that sunken city. He then turns to the door, the smell of gum leaves still in the air, and remembers the thrill of setting out as he stepped onto the boat later that day and watched the port recede and heard the squawk and cry of the great world beckon.

  Outside, he closes the door of his studio, for it is too late in the day for further work, and stares across the green valley, to the hill on the other side and the village that sits on it.

  His father had placed the envelope filled with pound notes in Art’s hand in such a way as to suggest that the matter was settled. No protests. But he knew from the moment that he took the envelope that it contained a large sum. No doubt a substantial part of their life savings. And he almost spoke, almost protested, but the look in both his parents’ eyes reminded him that they were no-fuss people.

  And he can see that house now as clearly as he can see the village opposite. That house and all those small box houses surrounding it, and the street that ran all the way down to the bay that flowed out into the open sea, the smell of which reached him and called to him from where he stood that last day.

  That bay-side workers’ suburb has now become, his friends tell him in their letters, a home to the new rich. For the sons and daughters who make up that post-war generation that grew up in the frontier suburbs of the city are now returning to those cluttered inner-city workers’ suburbs their parents fled and are making them their own. They’re renovating the suburbs their parents came from. Renos, they call them. And, often enough, these letters tell him, their marriages fall apart under the strain of these renovations, but the houses themselves emerge re-invigorated and re-created. And History, its job done, throws its tools and ladders and lunch-boxes into the back of an old ute and moves on. And what was is re-invented, though still discernible, for those looking, under the new paint and new colours of a new age.

  And there is an odd sense of possessiveness that comes with this knowledge, the conviction they have no right to do it, this young, rich generation that once sang and danced for this Whitlam of theirs and once dreamt mountainous dreams and which now does renovations and repossesses those inner-city suburbs that the likes of Art once called home. And with the word ‘home’, that ache like a longing returns — and not, he realises, not just for his youth and all their youths, but for the place itself. An odd pity for the place. What have they done to you; what have they turned you into? A smart young thing, no doubt, street after street of smart young things, where there once lived no-fuss people.

  And it is then, staring out over the green hills and valleys around him, that this longing, summoned up by the magic of gum leaves, becomes not simply a longing for the lost domain of youth but for the lost domain itself — for the place that makes you and never leaves you. And with that comes the recognition that there will always be this reluctant possessiveness, even resentment for those who occupy the space you left on departure and who transform the place you once called home into something else that they call home, because they’ve no right to. But, of course, he knows that it is unstoppable His
tory that drives those utes and that the new, young rich are simply History’s agents. Just as he knows that History, wearing the khaki overalls of Progress, will always be throwing its tools, ladders and lunch-boxes into the back of an old ute and moving on. And on. An individual’s longing we call desire. But the longing of a whole society we call progress.

  But it is, he also acknowledges, a longing that cannot be satisfied. For the drug of nostalgia works most powerfully in exile, preserving those mythic memories that his return would only renovate.

  And he’s left, as the hills begin to take on a late-afternoon glow, to contemplate that blurred zone, that noman’s land that you cross without knowing and which leads from adventure to exile, and which, having been crossed, makes return impossible. Not because you won’t, but because you can’t without giving up that lost domain itself, so perfectly preserved in the aspic of memory. And this is all you need, and all you want, until some bastard comes along and waves the drug of nostalgia under your nose, and a part of you is left wondering what on earth you’re doing here so far from home after all these years. And it’s a lonely thought that leaves you, for a time, looking out over the hills and valleys as if they were some foreign place you’ve suddenly woken to. Damn Sam. Damn bloody Sam and his bloody gum leaves.

  PART THREE

  Election Day Saturday 10th December, 1977

  11. The Shadow Line

  The uncertain weather is gone. It is a humid day. Light cloud will come and go. The sun will sparkle on the steeples of St Paul’s and St Patrick’s alike, on row upon row of suburban rooftops and country towns, then pass into cloudy shadow. It is mid-morning and still cool, but the day will slowly warm to its task and reach a top temperature of twenty-six degrees. There is a light wind, with an afternoon sea breeze predicted and the possibility of a late-afternoon shower. It is, in short, a typical early summer day.

  The winds that rioted through the park in spring have exhausted themselves. And even when the afternoon sea breeze arrives it will pass over the city like the gentle breath of some pagan god whose brief it is to blow the air into sweet, refreshing movement. The sun will light the streets where cars stalk Saturday-morning parking spots outside cafés, markets and parks, and shine into open doorways where people will look up to the sky questioningly and quickly decide that the revolution of spring has passed and that the stability of settled weather and settled days is upon them, chaos has given way to order, and the day, where cats stretch out on lawns and nature strips and birds walk the footpaths untroubled, holds no surprises.

  Michael is driving to a suburban park to see his old band play. Already he thinks of it as his ‘old’ band, even though it hasn’t been long since he left. But almost as soon as he did, music, the band and all those songs that anybody could make up all receded, almost instantly, into a completed, distant past. The Michael, the self that he was then, already taking on the appearance of somebody else, the way old selves do.

  Churches, schools and public halls along the way are draped in banners proclaiming them polling booths for the day. Men and women stand on the footpaths holding how-to-vote cards; photographs of Whitlam here, Fraser there, stare back from fences and walls, both in these streets that he is now driving through and all over the city. Over all the cities, the towns and the countryside beyond, they stare back with steady eyes that say, I will give you days like these that hold no surprises — for you have felt the upheaval of spring and desire now only long, summer days, and I will give them to you, the joyous days of blissful indifference. Days that are indistinguishable from one another, and which are calmly taken for granted; days, months, years, that roll across an untroubled sky from dawn to dusk. You desire only the lost paradise of settled times, and I shall return paradise lost to you.

  There are queues along the footpaths, early voters honouring their duty and so clearing the day for cricket, golf or the garden. And the smiles on the faces of those waiting patiently in lines and on the faces of the men and women handing out their party flyers, and the laughter (inaudible from the closed compartment of the car in which Michael sits) all create a festive air. As though it could just as easily be a school bazaar or a church fete as an election.

  They are everywhere, these makeshift polling booths, all along the streets that lead Michael to the suburban park where his old band will soon play. Smiling faces, inaudible laughter, posters of candidates promising more days like these — all come and go like the sun through the trees or the waves out there on the bay where the high-water mark will be reached by two in the afternoon and the low by nine that night when everything will have been decided.

  Somebody, in some local council, had the bright idea of harnessing all that festive spirit, and putting on a free concert in the park for the people on this people’s day. And so his old band was hired. And it occurs to him, as he turns into the street where the park is and hears the familiar echoes of a sound system being checked, that these may well be the last days in which rock ’n’ roll and politics are thought of in the same breath. The whole decade has been defined by music and politics, politics and music, but the decade, which found its voice in the music that shakes things up, the music that smashed art but which will soon become art, is leaving its radical past behind and coming to a close. The seventies will become the eighties, the difference between being in your twenties and being in your thirties. And in time, no doubt, the children of this decade will look back upon their long hair, their flared jeans and those interminable songs they danced to until the early hours of the morning and pronounce them all silly. The sort of thing youth does before growing up. And all their young marriages, which came and went with the explosive brevity of the Whitlam government itself, will be thought of in the same way. An experience. A youthful one. A sort of growing up. For the decade is closing and its explosiveness is all but exploded.

  Michael thinks of it like that because he is re-reading his Johnston. Not Samuel, but George. Who said something similar about his earlier explosive times. Johnston, who travelled (as Michael will the following week), who lost himself and found himself in his travels, and left the record of his journey in his books. Johnston, whom he discovered at university, who turned Michael’s city of boring milk bars and familiar, ordinary suburban houses into something new. Johnston, whom he carries now in his coat pocket, and who has been his touchstone these last few years, in the same way that those jingle-jangle songs of earlier times were to the younger Michael. Times explode, times settle. Explode and settle. It is the nature of things.

  As he reaches the park, noting with relief that there is a crowd come to listen, as apart from a few scattered drinkers doing their best to look like a crowd, the band starts. And it occurs to him that it’s probably the first time he’s actually heard them. For when you’re in the midst of a sound, you don’t hear all of it; not really. Not the way the crowd does. Now he is in the crowd and feels as though he is hearing them for the first time. And they are good. Their imitations are good, their copies — the test of all cover bands — close to the record. But there is also that lingering feeling of disquiet in the fact that they are a cover band. That he ended his jingle-jangle days in a cover band, which wasn’t the way it started. But was, nonetheless, the way it ended.

  As much as he thought there may have been regrets in coming here, that seeing his old band would prompt regrets about leaving, there are none. As he watches them he is reassured about the rightness of his decision. Any earlier and the time would not have been right. Any later, and he would have missed his new calling, his new self, the self that will soon walk out of this decade and into the next. No, the timing, for once, was right. And so he listens, noting that they are better than he ever realised, and noting that the crowd is a happy crowd, enjoying the gift of someone’s bright idea to provide music in the park, and enjoying those last days in which politics and music would be thought of in the same breath.

  As the crowd builds, for the very sound of music draws a crowd, he moves to the
front and, catching the eyes of the band, he waves. And they smile and nod back, the singer calling out, ‘It’s Joyce fucking James!’ in between lines as he waves; the drummer, too early in the day to be drunk and so secure on his stool, twirls a drumstick of hello and goodbye. For it is, they know and Michael knows, goodbye. Simple. No fuss. A farewell to those jingle-jangle days that promised so much and led you to believe that anybody could do this when all the time they couldn’t, a farewell to those days of politics and music, music and politics, those times which, no doubt, the crowd will come to think of as part of the silliness of youth with its long hair and flared jeans.

  Mr Whitlam has that goodbye look in his eyes, his mother is saying on the telephone. And she doesn’t think it’s because the way she looks at him on television and in the papers and posters. No, she’s not giving him that goodbye look, he’s just got it. And, when pressed, Michael says that may or may not be the case. But he hasn’t called to talk about that.

  It’s late in the afternoon; the shadows are long on the cricket field in the park opposite his flat. The voters voted early, then put on their whites and became cricketers for the afternoon. And there they are, timeless white figures on a green playing field. And for a moment, while his mother’s voice continues on the telephone, he’s remembering those endless hours in his youth that he spent in the nets pursuing speed and the perfect ball, and those long summer Saturday afternoons that were never Saturday without becoming a white figure on a green playing field and replicating the feats of the great Lindwall. And then remembering how he simply left those fields of play one late afternoon like this, with the shadows long across the ground, and never went back because there were other things in the world to distract him, like the jingle-jangle world of jingle-jangle songs. And it prompts the thought that we are never one life, but a succession of lives; never one self, but a succession.