Then, one day, you find yourself inside one of these things, looking out. It’s a different view. Not one I’m all that happy about having. But, well, I’m seventy-seven, and at least I’m still looking at something. At least those bloody bells aren’t ringing. At least we’re not speeding. In fact, once you get used to it, it’s almost pleasant lying back here and watching the countryside go by. The driver and his assistant call out occasionally, but most of the time they just chat away without me, mostly about the cricket yesterday. Everybody is talking about that game of cricket yesterday: the driver, the radio, even Gus the greengrocer — who doesn’t much care for the game — was talking about it while we waited in his shop for this limousine of a thing to arrive. I don’t feel the bumps, which is just as well, ’cause this hip’s giving me hell; and my throat’s not much better. Summer colds, they’re always the worst. And all the barley sugar and lemon juice in the world doesn’t seem to help. Only beer. A glass of ice-cold beer does the trick every time. For a while. In fact, I wouldn’t mind one now. Not that there’s any beer to be had around here. They’ve got everything else, mind you.
At this pace, and we’re going nice and slow, we won’t get to Vic’s till evening. He’ll have something cool in the fridge for this throat. Summer colds. I always get them, and they’re always the worst. I don’t know why I couldn’t have just stayed where I was. But he insisted, this young bloke, a nice bloke — he insisted I have some family around me till the hip gets better. And I said the only family I’ve got is Vic. That’s my son. My sisters, Katherine, Frances — they’re gone. Agnes, well, she’s in Adelaide. She’s a nun, I said. And they nodded. Agnes, I said. She got the beautiful name, she got all the looks that the rest of us never much had — and she gave it all to God. Which leaves Vic. They all nodded to each other again. The next thing I know I’m sitting up in this thing enjoying a slow, quiet ride to town. On the inside looking out. It’s not a view I’m happy to have and I’ll be glad to see Vic. I’ll be glad to see anybody. I’ll be glad to just get out and be part of the world again, rather than lying back here and looking at it go by. I’ve never been one for watching things go by, and I don’t like the feeling. The feeling that if I let it keep going by for too long it just might not come back. The sun’s dribbling into the hills over there like the yolk of a big, country egg. I always loved sunsets, when I was young. I loved a good sunset. But they make me uneasy now. It’ll be dark soon, and I don’t like the idea of arriving in the dark. There’s something wrong about arriving in the dark. Shifty types arrive in the dark. Kings that aren’t kings any more arrive in the dark. Strangers arrive in the dark. But not me. So I wish they’d just get the whole thing over and done with and speed up a bit.
13.
Two Photographs
There is only one sound that matters. Speed. It is the day after Gannon’s visit and the house has been cleaned so that no sign of his presence is left. And as the ambulance containing Vic’s mother moves slowly and steadily towards the suburb, slowly and steadily so as to avoid the bumps, Michael throws a ball down the yard and hears it smack against the back fence. There are still times in summer when he takes to the yard and resumes his destruction of the back fence. Behind him the house is lit up, open to the night. Tension is always there, like it was tonight. You don’t think it’s there and someone tries to do a simple thing like take a photograph and it all comes out. You wonder where it comes from because it comes so fast. But there’s no point asking. It’s just there — the rattle of a dish, the closing of a door, the sudden thud of a book landing on the newly carpeted lounge-room floor — it’s always ready to strike. That’s why it comes so fast. Radio and television fill the house with talk and music, but when the tension is bad neither the television nor the radio help.
Yes, it’s always there and it takes very little to make the tension speak, like it did tonight when Rita tried to do a simple thing and take a photograph of everyone. The family. Rita has a new camera. She is not someone who goes in for gadgets — not that a camera is a gadget. But this camera — which she recently bought in the country on one of her trips demonstrating washing machines and new electric fry pans to stores full of country housewives — comes with a device. Two, in fact. It develops its own photographs and you can look at the photos minutes after having taken the shot. The photographs are not good quality, not the same as the photographs that come back from the chemist in the Old Wheat Road. But it’s fun to look at them straight away. Or it should be. The other little trick this camera has is the switch next to the shutter release button. This is the time delay, and when activated it allows the person taking the photograph to be in the photograph.
It is a game. And tonight it was meant to be a game. A bit of light-hearted fun. A lark with the new gadget. The television was switched off. The radio silenced. Rita arranged Vic so that the armchair in which he habitually slumps after dinner was turned away from the television and towards the camera, which was propped on a kitchen stool. His right arm hung by his side, still clutching the newspaper he was reading before Rita arranged the scene. In his other hand he held his reading glasses. Tonight he is wearing a mustard-coloured pullover Rita knitted for him years before, for they are experiencing one of those odd summer evenings when the temperature suddenly drops and they are back to winter. It is a pullover he often wore to work and which still has the faint smell of steam and cinders, still has the capacity to bring the smell of the job into the house; back from the dead and into life again. Perhaps this is why he continues to wear it, in preference to other, smarter pullovers. But Vic is not one for smart pullovers. The old jumpers will do. Rita knew it would end up in the photograph and as she arranged everyone for the shot she’d wished all over again, like she often does, that she’d never knitted the damn thing. Michael had been dragged away from the cushion that he always rests his head on while reclining on the floor, and sat beside his father’s armchair.
Rita instructed Vic and Michael to remain perfectly still, then rehearsed what she had to do. Satisfied, she’d then told Vic and Michael that she was now ready to take the photograph. And as she pressed all the necessary buttons she instructed them both to smile, not realising that neither Vic nor Michael had followed her instructions. Vic’s jaw was set firm and he eyed the camera with the glum expression of a man whose time was being wasted. He was still gripping his paper and glasses, impatient to resume his reading. Michael too stared blankly back at the camera as if eager to be somewhere other than in the picture. But Rita, who slipped onto her seat on the count of four, saw none of this and beamed back with the same bright-eyed smile she always kept for the camera when she was a girl.
When the shot was taken, Vic replaced his glasses and opened his paper at the article he was reading before the photograph intervened, and Michael slumped back onto the floor, resuming his study of the sports pages. Rita had lingered by the square hole in the wall — the servery that connects the kitchen with the lounge room — and, still smiling, had jigged slightly from one foot to the other while the photograph was developing. She heard the crisp newsprint of Vic’s paper as he turned the pages, noted the absent-minded thump thump of Michael’s foot on the lounge-room floor. She’d watched the minutes tick by on the kitchen clock then peeled back a layer of thick, developing paper to reveal the photograph beneath, and the smile had fallen from her lips the instant she did. And with the smile, the expectation too drained from her face. Her hand, still holding the photograph, fell limply to her side.
‘What’s the bloody point,’ she was suddenly muttering.
It was then that Vic had looked up over the rim of his glasses and Michael had turned from the paper. Rita glanced at the photo once again, the glum face of Vic, the moody — what is it? sneer almost — of Michael. And that silly smile of hers. Why bother? Why bloody bother at all? It was the very thing she didn’t want to see — a portrait of an unhappy family, a snap of a failed marriage, and she wasn’t going to have it in the house. It was then that she h
ad drifted into the kitchen, torn the thing into strips and dumped the unhappy jigsaw in the bin. The lid of the bin snapped shut and the kitchen chair upon which she sat for the photograph was flung back to its place at the table.
‘What’s the bloody point?’ Rita offered the room again, only louder.
Michael had then entered the kitchen and stood beside her. Yet even now, walking back to his mark in the yard, he has no memory of rising from the floor, from the sports pages, and taking the journey from lounge room to kitchen in order to be by his mother’s side. But he had. And, suddenly, there he was.
‘We’ll do it again,’ he’d said.
‘Forget it.’
‘No, we can do it again,’ he’d repeated, looking at his father through the servery. ‘Can’t we?’
‘Of course,’ Vic nodded, out of his chair and standing on the carpet, eager to make amends.
But Rita had just shaken her head.
‘Is it too much to get a smile out of you lot?’
‘We can do it again. And we’ll all smile. Look!’
Michael had grinned then. An idiotic grin, and the flicker of a smile returned to Rita’s face and before she had time to object any further she was pressing the time delay button once more and counting the seconds before assuming her seat in the group portrait.
When she peeled the second photo back the first thing she saw was Vic’s smile. It was a big smile, alight with laughter, as if the photographer had just told him a particularly amusing tale. A real smile, she could see that. She’s seen all his smiles come and go and she can tell when he means it. He meant this one, all right. This was one of Vic’s old grins, the kind of smile he was full of once, but the kind of smile she sees too little of now. And Michael had that idiot grin of a boy playing with the idea of laughter, playing with the whole notion of having to smile for a camera and having so much fun doing so that in the end he couldn’t help but smile. So it was with Rita. Her smile was awkward, as if the whole business were just a bit too silly really, and she’d been dragged into a bit of tomfoolery that she hadn’t counted on, and because of that she had this smile on her face, that — if it were a laugh — would be a titter.
Within minutes an unhappy family had been transformed into a happy family. It is precisely the kind of photograph that, in years to come, she will look back upon fondly and see only the smiles and remember only the laughter.
And why not? Why bloody well not? If that’s what it takes to get on with things, she muses, then so be it. Why bloody well not? A little bit of forgetfulness here and there. It’s not a bloody crime. And everybody takes two photographs, don’t they? Just in case the first one doesn’t work out. Even the happy families. Don’t they? She poses the question to the silence of the kitchen, the photograph lying on the table, and receives only silence in reply.
There is a sudden crack, like a rifle shot, and inside the house Rita jumps as a worn cork ball, still retaining a few smudges of red paint, ricochets from the back fence to the side fence and onto the lawn. This fence, where the white stumps have been painted, has already been repaired many times, and will need to be repaired again. The whip crack of the ball hitting the fence pierces the still, summer air the way it always did, and alerts the whole neighbourhood that Michael is at it again, for nothing travels like the sound of speed on a summer’s night.
In the hazy twilight the painted stumps glow at the back of the yard. Soon it will be dark, but darkness comes slowly on these nights and there is time for one more delivery, and one more after that. The sound of the ball hitting the fence pierces the still, summer air and seems to be everywhere. He has already trained today but the tension has driven him out into the yard and he is convinced that he hasn’t bowled so fast all day. That he is bowling at his fastest when he should be exhausted, and he is becoming gradually convinced that he has never bowled so fast in his life.
As he bowls, the twilight settling into darkness, he is learning a few things about tension. If it can do this, maybe it isn’t all bad. He is beginning to learn that you can use it; that it can be the difference between being fast and not being fast. Not all houses have this thing, this tension, and maybe he will one day learn to be grateful that his does. Tension, like speed, just might be a gift too. And if you receive the gift of tension, you should learn to use it, and nurture it, because in the end it will give you speed. Perhaps enough to give you that little bit extra that turns heads.
It is then that the flyscreen door opens, and he turns to see his mother standing in the doorway.
‘That’s it,’ she calls. ‘Enough! I don’t want to hear that sound again tonight.’
She slams the door shut and returns to whatever room in the house she came from. He tosses the ball into the bucket by the shed. It is dark now, the stumps, fence and fruit trees in the yard are all in shadow, and he is suddenly exhausted.
The next morning there is pain in his back. Just a nagging thing. Everybody bowls with pain. The great Lindwall did. Behind all the poetry of the perfect action was pain — and tiredness. And just as no one saw the tiredness, no one would have seen the pain that must surely have been there after a lifetime of speed.
The best will be at the district training session. Not just from his suburb, but all the suburbs around them. If he is going to bowl with the kind of speed that turns heads, he will need to summon up everything he has. And the pain will simply become something that everyone has. Something to be carried and forgotten and not remarked upon because it is unremarkable.
He has bowled at the local school throughout the spring and summer, and every step he has taken is now recorded on the ground. Every step he has taken has left a worn patch in the dried field, and the history of his summer is written in the grass.
14.
Hay Ride
What was a swaying field of ripe wheat until a few days before, is now flat paddock. The faded red harvester, its job done, sits motionless in the distance beside the farmhouse. Rectangular hay bales dot the landscape and the still evening air is drenched with the sweet smell of recently cut hay. The field is dry, the smell is a damp one. The ground they are walking on has been flattened by machines and feet, but the stubble is still springy. Leftover straw is strewn all about them.
Kathleen Marsden is carrying a dinner the sisters of the Home have prepared for her — sandwiches in a brown paper bag and a banana. She holds the bag like someone who doesn’t quite know what to do with it, as if she would gladly throw it away if only there were somewhere to throw it, but there is only the wide open field beaten flat by machines and feet. The old cart that has just dropped them off is rolling slowly and a little uncertainly back to the farmhouse, the tractor that pulls it weaving in and out of the hay bales.
It is the last Friday of the year, the day before New Year’s Eve. Summer heat is upon them and the evening is still light and warm. The church for which Michael plays cricket has organised the event. The small tractor labours back and forth, from the farmhouse to the open field, gradually dropping the party in small groups where a long table stands, already cluttered with church food.
The farm is north of the suburb. The city has not yet reached it, but it has the look of a place that is about to disappear and pass into local history. The rusted machinery by the distant wire fence is clearly from another time; as are the rhythms of the farm itself. Although the work is completed for the moment, the rhythms of the farm are imprinted on the place: in the slow, weaving motion of the tractor, the leisurely breeze, and the drawl of the farmer when he greeted the party of visitors at his gate. The city may not have reached the farm yet, but the frontier of the suburbs is ever moving and moving closer with every day. Michael and Kathleen Marsden stroll past the table, ignoring it. Like an arrow that has already been fired, the city is heading towards them, and it is not difficult for Michael to imagine streets and salubriously named avenues being carved out of the open field upon which they are now standing.
There is a pond near the wire fence, clos
e to the road they came along in their procession of church cars. Trees too dark to name rise from its banks, and when Kathleen Marsden stops briefly and asks where they are going Michael stares at the pond and nods in its direction. It is still early in the evening, but already — even from the distance at which they stand — Michael can see the occasional flash of white shirts and bright tops, hear laughter as clear as church bells, and spot the flare of struck matches and the tips of cigarettes, blinking their signals of invitation out across the open field. Michael can see and read these signals, so too can Kathleen Marsden. This is why she has stopped.
Again she asks where they are walking to and again he simply nods in the direction of the pond. But this time she asks ‘why?’ and he has no answer. She has no desire to cross the field to the pond where the others are smoking cigarettes and laughing in the dark, and neither does Michael, but he feels that they ought to be going there. Even from where they stand he can recognise some of that distant laughter, and just as he has no love of the team or the crowd, he has no desire to troop off in a gang and join that group by the pond whose distant laughter he knows and doesn’t like. As they stand there, both recognising that neither of them really wants to go to those shady trees near the pond, Michael looks down at the right hand of Kathleen Marsden, clutching the brown paper bag containing her sandwiches and the freckled banana. He imagines those sandwiches being prepared and carefully cut by the sisters of the Home, he imagines Kathleen Marsden taking them, and saying thank you, but not wanting them, and he imagines her plotting to ditch that brown paper bag and freckled banana at the first opportunity. But no opportunity came along and now after being collected from the Home in the same car in which Michael was driven, she is still bearing her burden.
The Gift of Speed Page 6