Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  Something else about the children on the calendar unsettled him. Some detail such as the bagginess of the boy’s trousers or the shapes of the bows in the ribbons in the girl’s hair made him, the chief character, often suppose that the photograph had been taken ten or more years earlier. He was not unfamiliar with what had been worn in the late 1930s. He had once found under sheets of linoleum torn up from the floors of the rented house many sheets of newspapers from the year before he had been born and had studied the drawings in the advertisements, especially the drawings of children. He had been curious about the children who had seen the sky over Melbourne dark with smoke on the day when his mother had thought the world was about to end but whose lives had not then ended. He could hardly blame the grinning boy or the girl whose eyes were on the horse if they were unaware that the place where they were playing would be soon destroyed by fire. But he expected that one at least of those couples outside the boundaries of the illustration on the calendar—one of those couples who had fallen in love, although their parents had never suspected it—would sometimes imagine a blue-grey mountain on the horizon to be smoke moving towards them.

  On a certain Saturday afternoon in the early autumn in his twenty-third year, the chief character of this story sat for several hours beside a young woman in one of a number of enclosures of green canvas in the upper deck of the public grandstand at the racecourse in Caulfield, a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. Each of the enclosures of green canvas was described in advertisements authorised by the club that conducted race meetings at Caulfield Racecourse as a luxuriously appointed private box, with drink waiters in attendance, available for hire to members of the public on race days. He, the chief character, had paid for the hire of a box for two persons a sum of money equal to one quarter of his weekly earnings after tax.

  From time to time during the past three years, he had fallen in love with one or another face in his mind, but he had always gone back to thinking of himself as a bachelor before he had begun to feel unduly anxious or unhappy about the person whose face kept appearing in his mind. During his twenty-first year, he had enrolled in a subject for which evening classes were offered at the university and had obtained a pass as his final result. He had become somewhat tired of reading out-of-the-way books in his room by night but having to spend his days among persons who had not opened a book since they had left school. On a few evenings, he had tried to write poetry but had given up and instead had read some of the poems that had most impressed him at school, especially “The Lotos-Eaters,” by Tennyson, and “The Scholar-Gipsy,” by Matthew Arnold. While he read certain lines of “The Lotos-Eaters” and watched images of places drifting into his mind, he would feel as he believed he would have felt when he had formerly looked at landscapes of Helvetia in his mind. While he read certain lines of “The Scholar-Gipsy,” he felt as he supposed his bachelor-uncle must sometimes have felt in his bungalow.

  At the time of his outing with the young woman to Caulfield Racecourse, he had begun to study a second subject at university and had been promoted at work to a more responsible position in which he was required to proofread some of the contents of booklets and leaflets informing the public about certain forests and foreshores and parks. When he had taken up this position, he had moved to a higher floor of the building. The face of one of the young women that he met on the higher floor had entered his mind at once. She was only a few months younger than he. She was well-mannered and popular, but she was quick-witted and was not afraid to join in the debates that began among several men in her office—all of them senior to her—whenever one or the other man made a comment on something he had read in the morning newspaper. He, the chief character, understood from her arguments at these times that she was a fervent Catholic. He himself no longer went to church, but the face of the young woman in his mind persuaded him to believe that he could live as a Catholic in the future with her as his wife. As a Catholic, she would not want to practise what she would call artificial birth control, and he and she might become the parents of four or five or six children. He could accept this, but he could not foresee himself providing for such a number of children and also buying a house in an outer suburb of Melbourne. He foresaw himself instead settling with her in the future in one of the large country towns where his department had branch offices. In each of those towns, the senior officers paid a small rent for modest but comfortable houses built by the Housing Commission of Victoria. When he tried to foresee which large country town he and his wife would settle in, he understood that the town would not be in Gippsland. He had learned from maps published by his department that the word Gippsland denoted a region larger than he had once supposed and that the region contained much forest. But ever since the day when he had looked eastwards from the summit of Mount Donna Buang, he had seen Gippsland in his mind as a narrow green margin along one side of an extensive zone that appeared sometimes blue-black and sometimes blue-grey and sometimes pure blue. The town where he and she settled would not be in the south-west of the state. He believed that the young woman was the ideal Catholic wife that his bachelor-uncle had never found, and he, the chief character, who had so often thought of becoming himself a bachelor in a place like a bungalow, did not want to seem to be boasting in front of his uncle. The town would have to be in the north of the state, in the region where he had never been: the region of old goldfields and box-tree forests that he had never yet visited.

  He did not own a car, and he called in a taxi at the address that she had given him. She lived in her parents’ house in an eastern suburb of the sort that journalists called comfortable or middle-class, in a street of the sort that they called leafy or tree-lined, but the house was built of weatherboards, and when he was approaching the front porch he thought that her house was no more spacious and solid than his own parents’ house, except that it had been built in an outer suburb with few trees and with many of its streets still rutted and swampy. She answered his ring at the doorbell. She was dressed for the races, with her handbag on her arm, and she stepped outside and closed the door behind her.

  She was as much a talker as himself. On the way from her home to the racecourse, he told her that he had always envied the people of the eastern suburbs for having lived ordered lives among pleasant surroundings. She then asked him to name the particular families that he envied. He then told her that he had visited an aunt in a house with paintings on the wall in an inner eastern suburb for many years when he was a boy, but he knew while he told her this that he had never envied his aunt and her family in their house without books. He then told the young woman that he had grown up in a suburb with no persons of his own age. She then told him that every Catholic parish in the suburbs of Melbourne had at least one organisation for young persons to meet one another.

  A few miles short of the racecourse, she pointed out her old school. It was a cluster of brick buildings no larger than his own school, but the hill where her school stood seemed to offer a wider view around. She reminded him that his and her schools were in neighbouring suburbs and that senior boys from his school had sometimes been invited to social evenings at her school. He then told her that he had been anti-social and eccentric when he was at school.

  Soon after they had been shown to their private box at the racecourse, he told her that Caulfield Racecourse had been called many years before the Heath, and that the grassy racecourse in their view had been cleared from an expanse of dense scrub. She then told him that the racecourse had been used during the Second World War as an army camp and that her father had spent much time in a tent somewhere in the grassy expanse in front of them.

  He had brought with him the pair of powerful binoculars that he always took to the races, and he began to point out to her what he called his landmarks and then to invite her to look at the landmarks through the binoculars. He showed her first the roof of his parish church, four miles away to the south-east. He then showed her the treetops on the golf course where he had worked as a caddy while he was at
secondary school. His own street, he told her, was somewhere just beyond the far side of those trees. She then said that the trees made it seem as though he lived in a clearing in a forest. He would have liked to let her look through his binoculars at Mount Dandenong, but the grandstand at the racecourse faced south, and the mountain was somewhat to their rear and out of view. He showed her instead the dark-blue ridges of the Lysterfield Hills, which were halfway between Dandenong and Mount Dandenong and which he had thought were the southern aspect of Mount Dandenong itself on his first few visits to his girlfriend at Dandenong. The young woman beside him at the racecourse said she had lived all her life in Melbourne, but she still thought it strange that Mount Dandenong and Dandenong were two quite separate places far apart. He asked her how often she and her family had been to the Dandenong Ranges during her childhood. He wanted her to say that hardly a Sunday had passed without their going deep among the mountain-ash forests and the treefern-gullies and the waterfalls and all the sights he had never seen, but she only answered that she had been there often enough.

  She aimed his binoculars to the south and asked him what was the low blue ridge far away in that direction. He told her it was Mount Eliza, with all of the Mornington Peninsula lying behind it. He wanted her to say that she and her family had gone for three weeks during every Christmas holiday to the camping-ground beside the beach at Rosebud or Rye or Dromana on the peninsula, but she only recited to herself the names Rosebud, Rye, and several other names of places where families from the suburbs spent their summer holidays.

  He had wanted to hear that she had gone often to the Dandenongs or to the beaches on the Mornington Peninsula. He believed already that he had been deluded to suppose that the young woman was interested in him in the way that he was interested in her. He intended to ask her, when he said goodbye to her outside her house later that afternoon, to go with him to a cinema on the following Friday or Saturday evening, but he believed already, while they sat together in their private box before the first race at Caulfield, that she would politely decline to go with him on any further outing. He expected that he and she would go on talking pleasantly for the rest of the afternoon, but he had become again a bachelor in his mind before the first race had been run, and he expected to remain a bachelor for longer than he had ever previously been. He wanted to remember as a bachelor that the last young woman who had allowed him to keep her company had been one of the many persons who had spent their childhood dreaming of places no further than the Dandenong Ranges or the Mornington Peninsula.

  He did not consider himself superior to such persons. He had always seen Melbourne and its suburbs as a resting-place that his father had found on his way from the grassy countryside of the south-west of Victoria to some place much further afield. He, the son, had never supposed that his father had been travelling eastwards with only the map of Victoria in mind, so that his goal was no further than Gippsland in his mind. He, the son, had sometimes supposed that his father was travelling from west to east in his mind on a map of Helvetia in his mind. Whenever the son tried to imagine the place that his father supposed he was travelling towards, he, the son, saw the place as peopled by the tall girl-women and boy-men from the books that his aunts had kept all their lives. When he had thought of these personages only as characters in his aunts’ books, he had been angered by the innocence of the personages, but when they appeared to him as the inhabitants of the eastern region of Helvetia, with their untroubled faces and their sexless bodies, he would have liked to stand with them on the verandas of their farmhouses or at the edges of their small townships in that region where no one fell in love or married in his or her mind and to look out across the grassy countryside that reached to the horizon in every direction.

  At the time when the chief character sat with the young woman overlooking Caulfield Racecourse, his father had travelled as far to the east as he would travel, although he, the chief character, did not know this. (His father died in the south-west of Victoria only a few months after his elder son had married and had gone to live in a northern suburb of Melbourne.) At the time when the chief character sat at the racecourse, his father had been for as long as the chief character could remember what most people would have called a good father, but the chief character decided soon after his father had died that he ought not to have married and become a father. His father, so the chief character believed in the last part of his life, had been better fitted to live as a bachelor than as a husband and father and ought never to have left the district of grassy countryside where he had been born and ought to have lived there as a bachelor throughout his life.

  He, the chief character, had been born in a suburb of a city that had been built on a bank of a river near its entrance into a large bay, but throughout his life he seldom noticed the river and he always avoided the bay. He always thought of Melbourne as an inland city with one or another range of mountains or hills visible from every suburb. In his later life, he looked out for published accounts of the childhoods of persons who had been born in the suburbs of Melbourne and had lived there during the ten years and more before his own birth. When he was nearly forty years old, he found and read the books Goodbye Melbourne Town and The Road to Gundagai, both by Graham McInnes and both published in London during the 1960s by Hamish Hamilton. The author of the books had been born in England, had arrived in Melbourne as a boy, had lived there during the 1920s and part of the 1930s, his home for much of that time being in an eastern suburb with views of Mount Dandenong (the same suburb in which the chief character of this story attended secondary school), had left for Canada as a young man just out of university, and had written the books mentioned while he remembered Melbourne from far away and thirty years later. Somewhere in one of those books, he, the chief character of this story, read a passage in which the author named all the mountains or hills that he always remembered as having appeared in the distance around Melbourne.

  He, the young man sitting beside the young woman in the grandstand at Caulfield Racecourse, was far from despising anyone who remembered as the sites of their falling in love with certain faces in their minds places with views of mountains or hills to the south-east or the east or the north-east or the north. He believed that he himself would have been such a person if he had not been born and had not spent his early years on the level and grassy side of Melbourne and if he had not thought of that place as the eastern edge of the countryside where his father had been born and where he, the father, ought to have lived as a bachelor throughout his life.

  At some time in mid-afternoon, when he had assured himself that the young woman beside him in the enclosure of green canvas would fall in love at some time in the future with one or another young man who had spent many a Sunday afternoon in the Dandenong Ranges and would later marry that man and would live with him after their marriage in one or another outer eastern suburb of Melbourne, he, the chief character of this story, having decided that he would be a bachelor for the remainder of his life, began to relax and to tell the young woman things that he would not have told her if he had still been in love with the image of her face in his mind.

  He told her that he had sometimes dreamed of owning a racehorse. Being a public servant on a modest salary, he could not afford to be the sole owner of a horse during the foreseeable future, so he told her, but after about his fortieth year, when he had been promoted several times, as he could reasonably expect to be, he should be able to spend on a racehorse what another man of his age would spend on his wife and children. He spoke as though she did not need to be told that he was going to be a bachelor for the remainder of his life, and she did not interject that he should have been married and a father by his fortieth year. He supposed that she was as well aware as he was of the unspoken rule binding young persons of the suburbs of Melbourne at that time while they were together on outings as a result of the young man’s having, in the words used at the time, asked out the young woman: the rule that neither young person should use the word marria
ge except in such a way as to suggest that the speaker had never once in his or her lifetime entertained the least possibility that he or she would, in the words used at the time, become serious about another person (least of all the person he or she was, in the words used at the time, going out with), much less consider marrying. He told her that he often foresaw an afternoon far into the future when he would stand in the mounting yard of a racecourse in a suburb of Melbourne and would watch his horse walking or cantering onto the course proper ten minutes before the start of a certain race. He did not name the racecourse when he told her this. None of the three racecourses then in use in the suburbs of Melbourne had ever seemed to him to be the racecourse that was the site in his mind of the race far into the future. That race had always seemed to be about to take place on one of the racecourses at which his father had attended meetings during the years before his, the chief character’s, birth, but which had long since closed. The racecourse was Sandown Park, which had been halfway between the suburb where he had lived from his thirteenth year to his twenty-ninth year, and Dandenong, the place that had for long been a town at the western edge of Gippsland but had later become an outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. The old Sandown Park racecourse, so his father had told him, had seemed to be surrounded by scrub, and from the grandstand a person could look out at the Dandenong Ranges. He, the chief character, told the young woman at Caulfield Racecourse that the sunlight on the afternoon that he foresaw had a peculiar mellowness such as he noticed each year in the light over the suburbs of Melbourne on certain afternoons in the last week of February or the first weeks of March. (The day when he told her this was a day in early March, but the sky was cloudy and a breeze was blowing from the south-west.) He told her that the sight of this mellow light each year caused him to forget for a few moments that he was in one or another suburb of Melbourne and to suppose that he was in one or another region of a country that he had imagined as the boy-owner of a collection of stamps from places whose whereabouts he did not know. (He did not name Helvetia when he told her this.) He told the young woman that the first occasion when he had seen the peculiar mellowness in the sunlight had been, so he believed, in midsummer rather than in autumn. This occasion had been one or another of the afternoons during the first weeks of his life when his mother had lain him in a bassinette in a shaded part of the backyard of the boarding house in the western suburb where his parents had lived when he had been born. He told the young woman that he had been born while the smoke still hung in the upper atmosphere after the terrible Black Friday bushfires that she must surely have heard about from her own parents; that he had seen a photograph of himself lying in his bassinette between two trees with the back door of a weatherboard house in the background but that the photograph was, of course, in black and white although the date in his mother’s handwriting on the back was a date only three weeks after Black Friday. He told the young woman that the sight of the peculiar mellowness in the sunlight caused him sometimes as a young man to suppose not that he was in an imagined country but that fires were burning throughout some region far away and that the smoke from the fires still hung in the upper atmosphere.