The Gift of Speed

by Steven Carroll

  The wide sweeping lawns, the wide circular driveway, the deep green of the shrubbery, the tall shady trees and the wide open sky — there is no suburb here, only what might have been twenty, thirty, forty or fifty years before the suburb ever came. There is no sign of anybody, except for Kathleen Marsden and Michael. Kathleen’s eyes dart quickly about the grounds, to the windows and doorway of the Home itself, looking for signs of unexpected life as she leads Michael up the gravel driveway.

  The roses on stakes are in bloom, the shrubs along the driveway are not disturbed by any breeze, and the air is Saturday-morning warm. The summer heat rises from the ground in visible waves, and the Home shimmers behind the rising heat as if part of another world altogether.

  Michael gazes at it in wonder as they pass under the cast-iron pillars that support the balcony and into the shade of the wide verandah which runs all around the house. As they approach the front door Kathleen Marsden turns, her index finger to her lips. He can almost hear the walls of the house breathing, almost hear the soft sound of sheets being folded and put away in cupboards on quiet afternoons long past, the dull thud of pillows being plumped, the distant tinkle of silver cutlery — the soft sounds that houses, withdrawn from the world as this one is, always have. For houses such as this, it seems to Michael, are always filled with the quiet sounds of some other time. While the world around them changes, houses such as this stay still. And, in time, the sounds they make become the sounds of another age. His heart is pumping blood the same way it does when he walks back to his mark to bowl the first ball of a new match, and he too is keenly looking about the grounds of the Home for signs of unexpected life, but there are none. With one finger still at her lips, Kathleen Marsden turns the handle and together they enter the Home.

  This, she is saying — a self-conscious touch to her voice that wasn’t there a few moments ago — is the dining hall. Once it was a ballroom. Did he know that? When the house was grand, people danced here. As if she were a tour guide, her hand sweeps lightly through the air indicating various items in the room. It is plain for a ballroom, a bit on the dark side and cool. He can’t imagine people dancing here. For a moment, her eyes resting on a small vase containing yesterday’s daisies, he suspects that she may be ashamed of her home and he feels that he ought to have said something, or perhaps that he oughtn’t to be here. Suddenly, the whole thing is awkward. She points to four long dining tables, chairs, religious paintings, and the flag, looking down on everyone from the main wall, and stares at it all (he imagines), like someone seeing everything through two pairs of eyes. She tells him how it all works — the breakfasts, lunches and dinners — and the self-consciousness slowly leaves her as she walks round touching the tables and chairs and she becomes increasingly lost in thought.

  The light is dull, it doesn’t matter, she is the brightest thing in the room — her skin still hot from sport. Giving up to her brightness, to this light she brings to the room and the dreaminess in her voice, he dwells on her like he has never dared to dwell on her before. Not that she notices. She has drifted to a place at one of the four long tables. Before she speaks he guesses that this is where Kathleen Marsden sits. Once, when she was younger, she sat down there, she says, dreamily pointing to the far end of the dining room where the juniors sit, eyeing her old spot as if the small girl that she once was were still sitting at her place waiting to be dismissed. Now, I sit here. Her hands rest on the chair and she leans lightly against it. Her awkwardness is gone. She is lost in her memories and he can dwell on her as much as he likes. She gives names to all the other chairs — who they are, what they all say, who laughs, who talks, and who hardly says anything at all.

  ‘There,’ she says, glancing up and catching that look in his eyes. ‘It’s just a room, isn’t it?’

  She nods in the direction of the stairs as she leads him from the dining hall. At the base of the steps she is alert again, looking for signs of unexpected life in the house.

  ‘Quick,’ she says, and rushes him up the stairs. For a moment he feels as though she is about to take his hand. Perhaps she was. But she doesn’t. Then, on the landing, they lift their eyes and are looking through an open door.

  The room is bare and sad and exciting because this is where they sleep, the girls of the Home. Sleeping is a very private matter and he walks slowly about the room careful not to upset anything, observing the white metal beds (like beds in a hospital), the worn linoleum floor, the light through the lace curtains. He walks lightly, as if the girls of the Home were in their beds all around him and he is wary of disturbing their sleep. And all the time Kathleen Marsden is standing in the doorway looking up and down the hallway which is dark on a bright Saturday morning, her face, Michael is convinced, now clearly saying that she must have been mad to ever invite him in.

  This, he tells himself, this is where she sleeps. Where her eyes close and open at the ends and beginnings of her days. This is where she brings the things that she never talks about. Michael’s room is thick with memories and dreams — the raised voices from years before, the fights long dead, the dream of the perfect ball — and once there they never go away. The room keeps them. To be in the room where Kathleen Marsden sleeps and dreams is enthralling. He walks slowly about, touching the metal bed frames, brushing his fingers across the fine lace curtains where the sun streams in and eyeing the religious portraits on the wall because it is all so mysterious. This is where she comes at the end of each day, where she relaxes her mind and body and where she becomes her dreams. But which bed? There are seven in the room, the mattresses all sagging deeply in the middle from years of sleeping bodies, and he has no idea which is hers. There is nothing to tell him. There are no bedside tables. There is nothing personal anywhere in the room.

  Then, as if reading his thoughts again, she leaves the doorway and advances slowly over the smooth, scrubbed surface of the linoleum and stops at the bed next to one of the high windows through which the light streams. She touches the bed frame and says, ‘Here.’ She is the first to see the light in the mornings, she explains. She can lie in her bed by the window in her corner of the room, pull the blinds back, and be the first to see the light coming through the trees of the old Boys’ Home opposite that is now closed. As she talks about it, the dreaminess comes back into her voice and eyes. She forgets all about him and her eyes rest on that corner of the room that is hers and hers alone, but not for much longer (not that Michael knows). This rectangle of space by the window is where she brings her private self, where she succumbs to the very private matter of sleeping. And while she is gazing upon the metal frame of the bed — left over from when the Home was a military hospital — while she is oblivious of him and dwelling upon that corner of the room where she has slept since she was a girl, a car door slams downstairs and she lifts her head.

  Again, she raises her finger to her lips and they both turn to the door in anticipation of footsteps on the stairs, each knowing that there is nowhere to run. They wait in silence by her bed for the first sound of footsteps. But there is only their breathing. And she is bright again. The brightest thing he has ever seen. She is beside him, inches away, her face still warm from sport, her hands by her side, only a movement away, and he contemplates the motion required to close the gap, the sensation of his hand brushing hers, and is at the point of making that movement and bridging their worlds, when the car door downstairs in the driveway slams once more.

  She spins round to the window and is suddenly gone from him while she watches the fruit and vegetables van follow the circular drive out onto the street and back into the ordinary world of the suburb. But when she turns back to him there is a smile in her eyes, a curve on her lips. Until she turned he assumed she had no knowledge of what almost happened, but now he is not so sure for this is the smile that he saw on her face years before when they were children, the same smile that was not meant for him then, but which now is. And somewhere in that smile she knows his thoughts, and although nothing came to pass, he feels for
all the world that he has as good as touched her.

  A few moments later she leads him along the circular gravel path that the fruit van departed along, keeping close to the shrubbery and trees so that no one will see them. Saying nothing, periodically raising her finger to her lips. Even on the footpath she is wary of the world.

  ‘Well,’ she says and folds her hands in front of her as she speaks. ‘Now you know.’

  Then there is that smile again and she is gone, back into the cool dark house. Brighter than the Saturday-morning sun.

  27.

  Driving to the Match

  An hour later, while Rita is sitting in the house looking out the lounge-room window, Vic is on the fairway, and Kathleen Marsden is in a shaded corner of the Home gardens, Michael is in an overcrowded car driving to the match. He is nauseous. The drive always brings him to the point of vomiting. It’s not just the sweet smell of chewing gum, the hot plastic seats and the car exhaust. Five passengers are crowded into the tiny Morris Minor. Apart from the driver — a young churchmember who organises Sunday Bible classes — everyone is in their cricket whites, their bags and bats on their knees. Michael sits next to the rear window, his head half hanging out, the breeze fanning his face.

  They are driving to a large park next to a river. Old trees line the boundary that runs alongside of the river and there is shade under those trees. It is a ground he enjoys playing on, green and even, the way grounds in all the cricket books are — not the dusty paddocks he is used to. On such grounds he can imagine cricket being played as they play it in books and on television. Trees shade the boundary, the field is mown regularly and the lawnmower leaves circles of pleasant green where it has been, the whole ground ringed with shades of green, radiating from the centre to the boundaries like the rings of a tree trunk. The approach to the wicket is even and smooth and Michael knows he will be able to bowl without the fear of falling over in potholes.

  With his head half out of the window and the breeze on his face, Michael thinks of the ground to which they are travelling and the more he thinks of it the less he notices the sweet, sickly scent of the chewing gum that fills every corner of the car despite the windows being down. The more he thinks of the ground the less he notices the hot plastic seats, the occasional exhaust belched up from beneath the car, and the less he hears the talk around him and the motion of chewing jaws.

  But in spite of all this he is soon listening to the driver — the young man who organises Sunday Bible classes, whose nose is small and pointed and whose hair is smooth and flattened with oil. Michael is listening because he heard the word ‘Russia’. The driver is talking about fences. They have, he says, barbed-wire fences to keep the people in. And as the houses and nature strips and lawns pass by in a blur, the driver continues to talk of barbed-wire fences because these are the types of fences found in Russia. Everybody in Russia wants to leave but they are stopped by these fences. The car is silent, everybody’s jaws have ceased their relentless chewing, everybody is listening to this talk of fences and barbed wire.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s that bad,’ Michael says almost to himself as he looks out the window. But he isn’t, he is speaking to the car — or, more accurately, to the driver. As soon as he speaks, a different kind of silence settles over the car. It is different from the attentive silence that filled the car when the driver was speaking — that silence was similar to the silence of Sunday classes, when this young man talked about the New and Old Testaments, lessons Michael never listens to because he only wants to play cricket. The silence that fills the car after Michael has spoken is the sort of silence that follows when somebody has said the wrong thing, when people realise that although someone may be one of their number, they are not one of them. It is a silence that excludes him. After a long, thoughtful pause, the driver speaks.

  ‘So, you don’t think it’s that bad?’

  ‘No.’

  He doesn’t really know if it is that bad or not, but the driver drags the comment from him and Michael will gladly say it again just to see his nose betray the most minute of twitches.

  There is no other response from him though, and they drive on in silence to the ground where old trees line the boundary and provide shade. This second silence lasts the whole way to the ground. This second silence, Michael notes as block by block, brick and weatherboard houses clatter by, completes his banishment.

  He is content to be banished. Banishment is fine. They talk a lot at the club about playing for the team. But Michael has never played for the team. He has no time for teams. His cricket is personal. He has never told anybody that every time he steps out on the field he plays for himself and not the team because it is not the done thing. He plays in a team because he has to in order to play at all, but he has never played for a team. He is a bowler, and bowlers — he is convinced — go it alone. And so, Michael plays for himself — and for speed. For it is speed and speed alone that will one day lift him out of his street, his suburb and this whole sickly world of chewing gum and plastic seats.

  Larwood played for his team and look what they did to him. Only mugs played for the team. He wants to talk further about this, but keeps his thoughts to himself as the car approaches the ground, and the dark, cool shadows of the trees that line the boundary come into view.

  28.

  The Lesson of Harold Larwood

  That night Michael is sitting in his room at the small student desk his father polished and varnished for him one Sunday the previous autumn. As his father watched the desk dry in the midday sun he told Michael that he now had a place to work, that it was important that he should have a place to work, and that this was it. He was very definite about that and watched with satisfaction later that evening when Michael arranged his books on the shelf and his mother took a photograph. The scholar at work, his father said and his parents laughed. He knew that he should have joined in and laughed with them, but the time for all that was gone. He was sixteen and he just wanted them out of his room, and his face told them he wanted them out — and so they left.

  Now, the day’s cricket completed, he is sitting at the desk and where there would normally be school work there are books on cricket. It’s late, the house is sleeping. He has the lamp on beside him and he is reading. He is lost in the world of Harold Larwood. The very name — Larwood — is spoken by everybody he knows in the same way that people speak of a famous criminal. A thug. A gangland hitman who liked his job a little bit too much, and did it a little bit too well. This is the Larwood that Michael has grown up with. A name. Someone who may or may not have lived — a long time ago — but not someone who could still be living. A name, like Billy the Kid or Al Capone. A gangland cricketer. And one that Michael should hate. Instead, he is enthralled with Larwood’s world. Photographs of Larwood in action are spread across the desk, newsreel stills that break his action down to its various stages — the long approach to the wicket, low and swooping, almost as if he were in flight, like an eagle flying low, just above the ground, smooth and straight, swooping in on its prey — all finishing in the famous thump of his left boot on the pitch, and the smoothest delivery stride imaginable.

  Nowhere is there any sign of pain. Pain must be there. But you can’t see it. Pain is not something that can be pictured, it can only be spoken of. And even when it is spoken of it cannot be felt, unless the pain is yours. The pain that Michael is sure is there belongs to Larwood. But the picture before Michael on the desk only shows him the perfection, not the pain. In the jumping black-and-white footage of his imagination, Michael sees a batsman walking out to the centre of the Melbourne Cricket Ground a long time ago in the days of Larwood. Michael has forgotten the batsman’s name, but he has read what he had to say about this walk, which was very long and very frightening. Frightening because this batsman, whose name he can’t remember, is walking out to face the incomparable Larwood for the first — and, as it turns out, last — time. He stands at the non-playing end of the pitch and waits for the bowler. He does
not look at Larwood as he approaches the wicket because he does not want to, and so he stares at the batsman at the other end of the pitch and sees the fear in his eyes. The batsman at the other end is not a man who normally plays with fear in his eyes, but fear is unmistakably there at that moment. It is apparent to everyone — the batsmen, the fielders, the bowler. It occurs to him, this batsman who has just walked to the middle of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, that he has never known the smell of fear, but he is exuding fear now and is convinced that everybody can smell it. And just when he thinks that Larwood will never arrive, that the ball will never be bowled, and that this interminable moment will never be seen through, there is a sound like the sky has been torn open. A rasping, scraping thunder. And this batsman cannot place the sound, for it is sudden and seems to be all around him in an instant. Without being aware of it, his eyes have followed his ears and he is looking down at the pitch and he realises that this rasping thunder is the front foot of Harold Larwood landing on the MCG pitch. Michael tries to imagine the front foot thunder of Harold Larwood, but can’t, for it is the messenger of unimaginable speed. There must be pain in the feet and back of such a bowler, but the pain is not apparent in the photographs before him. Nor is the sound. What he sees is a silent, still study in perfection. The series of newsreel images chart the progress of Larwood’s foot slamming into the pitch. This is where the thunder comes from, for the tearing sound that this batsman finds so incomprehensible is Larwood’s front foot scraping the ground as his body continues on without any visible sign of slowing down.

  Here is the thing that Michael still can’t understand, and possibly never will. When Larwood’s front foot stretches out, when his arm rolls over and the ball is released, and even when he follows through — he doesn’t slow down. When he lets the ball go he is moving at the same pace he was during his run. The photographs show no sign of slowing. Michael studies the stills again and again, for he knows that this is the moment, the one that matters above all others — because this is his gift. This is where his speed is. Harold Larwood was a mole in the Nottingham coalmines where he worked, and a kestrel above them. He was blessed with the gift of speed, and with the ball in his hand the mole became a kestrel. You can’t hate something that perfect. The more Michael studies the stills in front of him, the more he appreciates that this is what it means to have the gift of speed. But as much as he studies the stills, as much as he isolates the moment that is Larwood’s gift, he still can’t understand how it’s done. And neither, he suspects, does Larwood himself. He would simply say that he just runs in and lets the ball go. That he gets in there and has a good try and does the best he can. That it’s for others to talk about it, for when you’re perfect you don’t have to talk — your action talks for you. But Larwood, the mole who shed his darkness, and who soared up into the daylight utterly transformed by his gift, had one fault. He played for the team. And look what it did for him.