It is then that this woman from the house behind theirs, this nurse who has been in the house more and more lately, rises swiftly from the kitchen table and speaks quietly to the pale, thin figure of his grandmother. Their neighbour leads her through the kitchen to the back of the house, and as she does, the white head of his grandmother turns and smiles at Michael.
In his room, Michael stacks his books, folders and clippings carefully on top of the desk. The stories of speed they contain are folded away, and he is finally ready for sleep. He hears the nurse leaving through the back door, this woman called Dot from the house behind theirs. Then everything goes quiet and the house slips into sleep. It has been a long Saturday. He is tired at last. With his eyes shut, he sleeps for the waking day.
31.
Frank Worrell and the Long-Legged Fly of Thought
A little over a hundred miles to the west of the suburb in the old gold town of Ballarat, Frank Worrell is alone in his hotel room. His team has just completed a country game, a pleasant jaunt. The night is hot, hotter than the suburbs. His players are either asleep or quietly drinking downstairs. He hears nothing. His hand is under his head and his eyes are fixed on the window in front of him as the lights of the town, one by one, are soaked up by the country darkness.
On the table is the selected poetry of WB Yeats. It is not his copy. The book was given to him before he left for this tour by a silver-haired, elder statesman from Trinidad; one of those who had fought long and hard to deliver the captaincy to Worrell. Worrell is Barbados born. The islands of his West Indies are scattered. It is cricket that draws them together. Cricket that prompts someone to reach across the islands, across the waters, with the gift of a book. It’s a game, of course, but this summer they have been playing more than cricket. This summer nothing could go wrong, which is why Frank Worrell has been alone all summer and why he will remain alone until it finishes. It has fallen to him to ensure that nothing goes astray, that events do not turn bad. He must not only be as good as those who have gone before him, he must be better. It was with a puzzling wink in his eye that this elder statesman from Trinidad gave Worrell the gift of his book. When he first looked into it the book fell open at the poem that has been his companion throughout the summer. And from the moment Worrell opened the book he understood the wink, for there was a marker on its page. It is the place he goes back to on nights such as this, when he cannot sleep. Even though he has read the poem so often now that he has committed it to memory, he has, over the summer, found reassurance in reading it on the page.
It is an old book, one that has been lovingly read over the years. Worrell is a writer and a reader, and the point of the poem his benefactor had selected — to stand him in good stead — is not lost on Worrell. The trick this fly has, of being able to walk on water, is not so miraculous for a fly. It is the surface tension that allows the fly to take its dainty steps across the stream. It is the surface tension that supports it, while the sheer weight and mass of the watery currents swirl beneath it. It is not so miraculous an act for a fly to perform, but to think like a fly walking on water, day after day, night after night, is another matter. One day, when the summer is over and the games are all done, Frank Worrell will relax and he will relinquish the loneliness of his captaincy, and when he does that he will know what it all took from him. He will know what the cost was, for even now he suspects that the cost will be high. That the strength that is required to think in dainty long steps that do not break the surface tension is immense, and, once that strength is spent, it is spent forever. It is a way of getting through what must be got through, and it can only be done once. Just as it is a way of doing things that can only be done alone.
Now, on this hot Saturday night, the summer coming to a close, he is beginning to feel the weight of his loneliness, and for the first time all summer he is beginning to ask himself how long he can sustain this mental trick. He is aware of being tired in a way that he has never been tired before, a tiredness so deep he can’t conceive of ever being the same again. When he returns to this book, to this poem, it is the sustaining reassurance of the words on the page that he seeks, the reassurance that the trick, the trance, can be sustained for a few weeks more, until the weight of these days will fall from him and he will know the cost.
His eyes linger on the page. The night is still. The town dark. In the warm, thick night, a passenger train on the last part of its journey rattles down towards the restless suburbs of the city. Frank Worrell closes his book, the book that has given him a place to go when a place to go was needed. He closes it now, perhaps for the last time and prepares for sleep, for the morning, and the trick of thinking in light, long-legged steps.
32.
The Postcard
She’s lying back in her bed, in the dark, with her eyes wide open. It’s after twelve. No time to be awake. It’s always the same lately, waking in the dark and nodding off just when it gets light. And he’s always sleeping in the bed next to her. He’s good at sleeping. Always has been. He’s got the knack. Rita’s always been pretty good at it too. But lately she’s been lying in the dark for hours with her eyes wide open, listening to him sleeping away while she dredges everything up. Absolutely everything — her mama, her sisters, her papa, her old house, this place, Vic — being young, being old, dying, and wondering where you go then. The way they all get up in the morning and go to bed at night like it goes on forever.
Then she’ll find herself looking at Vic, lying back in the bed with that great hooter of his stuck up in the air like a chimney, hairs sticking out like weeds. He thinks I want him to be like everybody else, she’s thinking. But that’s the last thing I want. I married him because he wasn’t like everybody else. Oh, maybe there are times when a touch of everybody else wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I ask him to take that old jumper off and put on something smarter, just once — ’cause he has got something smarter and he looks so good in it — and he snorts. It shouldn’t be a big thing — but straight away he thinks I want to turn him into Desmond next door. Which is the last thing I want. I said to him one day, ‘Let’s pick up and go’ — when Michael’s gone, which won’t be long. I really don’t know if my heart’s in it, but I say it anyway. Just to let him know that I don’t want him to be like everybody else. That I don’t want to be like everybody else. Neither of us does. So I say it, even though my heart’s not in it — and he shrugs. What for? What for, he says. We’ve got everything we want here — by which he means a railway station and a golf course. Even so, part of me is relieved. But the other part is saying, ‘Well, what do you want then?’
Then I find this postcard in his drawer. A postcard of a nice little fishing town. I wasn’t snooping. I never snoop. His drawers are his business. I was just putting some handkerchiefs away after I’d ironed them, when I saw the postcard. And that wouldn’t have bothered me. There was nothing written on it. It wasn’t from anybody. It was just a nice postcard, and I liked the look of the place, like he did, I guess. It had the look of a place you could live in. But then I saw a real estate agent’s card and I was suddenly more interested in that than the postcard. I stopped what I was doing and stood there catching my breath — because it took me like that. It might mean something, and it might not. So I decided to forget about it and close the drawer with the pressed handkerchiefs inside.
I wake in the dark and start thinking about everything — Mama, Papa, and Vic, who’s sleeping away in his bed because he’s got the knack. That’s when he’s not having a turn, and he hasn’t for a while. But still, I’m awake in the night again and the postcard comes back to me. It could mean anything, could mean nothing — and probably does. If I were thinking straight that’s what I’d say. But I’m not thinking straight, even I can tell that much. And at this hour of the morning, I convince myself that he’s up to something.
Rita turns to look at Vic and all she can see at first is that great nose of his. Then his face, in profile, becomes clearer and she wonders where his mind goes when
he’s sleeping like that. She wonders about those parts of his mind he’s never told her about — those thoughts and dreams he’s never mentioned. He’s a mystery, this Vic. It’s probable that nobody knows him better than her, but what, with that postcard, and the real estate agent’s commercial card, she’s starting to wonder if she really knows him at all. Like there’s this other Vic — always has been. And he’s up to something.
33.
The Last Train
The last train clatters over the track that leads down into the city. It is a distant sound. A hollow one, for the clatter of the wheels over the rail joints creates the hollow sound that trains make when they are empty. But, empty or full, it is there. The one thing that draws them all together, the one thing that they all hear. The hollow clatter of the last train on this hot Saturday night as it leaves the suburb on its journey to the city yards.
Webster looks up from his garden chair. It is impossible to sleep, he cannot bear being inside, and he has spent the evening contemplating his moonlit garden and the anonymous-looking shed at the far end of the grounds, the keys in his pocket still jangling, a jangling accompaniment to his restlessness.
Michael turns an ear in the direction of the railway line as he places his folders of notes and clippings back on his shelf, the nearness of Kathleen Marsden still with him. Vic’s mother, in half-sleep, is aware of this train passing through her restless dreams and interrupting her thoughts; it’s a welcome sound, a familiar comfort in this unfamiliar suburban darkness that surrounds her. Kathleen Marsden lies back in her bed, in the room and the Home that she has now secretly shared with Michael and which is now changed, while a bright, yellow moon beams back at her through the curtains. There really is somebody out there, at last, as surely as that train is out there. She has written to him, that afternoon in her corner of the garden, her first love letter, which she keeps in her school bag and will post when the time comes. Rita, watching the profile of the sleeping Vic in the dark, contemplating that postcard and thinking that she feels a bit like that train out there, a hollow sound on a Saturday night; an empty train pulling out of an empty station, but going through the motions all the same because you never know who or what may be waiting down the line. Some part of Vic, in deep sleep, still hears the thing, still receives its sound and knows that it’s out there, still registers the thud of wheels on rail joints and concludes that the train is empty. And in his hotel room a hundred miles west of the city, Frank Worrell hears his own train calling, rattling through the country darkness, on the last part of its journey down into the sleepless suburbs. It is a sound that tells him that the journey is almost over, and that soon he will be able to rest.
There they are. All poised on this hot, Saturday night. Poised between waking and sleeping, thinking and doing, coming and going, beginning and ending, while the last train slips out of hearing and they are left to their thoughts and the voices that crowd their heads, poised as they are, between one thing and another.
Part Five
1ST — 2ND February 1961
34.
Nat’s Barber Shop
A dusty summer breeze floats up the Old Wheat Road as lazy as the day itself. It is late in the afternoon and the breeze floats past Vaughan’s Milk Bar on the left, the Presbyterian Church and the Sunday School on the right, slowly lifting the warm green leaves of the young elms in the Sunday School car park and up past the bicycle repair shop, before dividing briefly round the red-and-white lollipop pole at the front of Nat’s Barber Shop. The breeze drifts on, up towards the intersection of the two main roads of the suburb, the railway station and the mills, rose and yellow in the afternoon light. Michael enters the barber shop and Nat looks up from a cropped skull and smiles through two rows of peanut teeth before motioning Michael to a seat at the back of the small shop.
There is a photograph of a town somewhere in Italy on the wall not far from the framed certificate that tells everyone that the owner is permitted by law to open a barber shop. This, apparently, is Nat’s town, where he grew up before coming to the suburb — although his history has always been a puzzle to Michael because the name Nat doesn’t sound Italian. But he is, and that’s his town, the town he returns to from time to time, but has no desire to ever live in again. This is his home now, he says. And this is his shop.
At first Michael doesn’t hear the transistor radio sitting on top of the glass cabinet containing rows of American hair oils, brushes, combs and small manicuring scissors. But slowly, he notes the excitement in the commentators’ voices; he hears familiar names and realises that a game he had long given up as lost was — remarkably — still in progress. It is then that he looks up to the transistor and then on to Nat, whose eyes are no more than a couple of inches away from the top of the customer’s skull.
‘Are they still in?’
Even to Nat, this is not a question that needs explaining — who the ‘they’ in the question are, what this mysterious ‘in’ is, and why the surprise in Michael’s voice that they should ‘still’ be in. No, there is no need to explain any of this. They are talking cricket.
The customer in the chair replies, his lips moving briefly beneath his cropped skull, without taking his eyes off the mirror in front of him. To Nat, cricket is an oddity, something incomprehensibly English, but he listens and he joins in the conversation because it’s good business for one thing, and because (and this is the main reason) he likes people. Whatever people like, he likes, because he wants to share their little pleasures. And it shows. This is his gift. He likes people. He has the gift of getting on with everyone around him. It’s natural, not forced, not a sales pitch. This is why Nat has the most popular barber shop in the suburb. This, and the fact that he also does a classy cut. The type of cut that — like Rita’s dresses — this suburb had never seen until Nat came along.
The close-cropped skull that he is working on belongs to the bicycle repair shop owner. He is a man who doesn’t like people. He doesn’t even like himself, which might explain things. He is a man without gifts. People come to him merely because they have bicycles in need of repair.
The transistor radio on top of the glass cabinet of Nat’s shop brings them all together. The man who likes people, the man who doesn’t — and Michael. They are all drawn into the dying minutes of a drama being played out on a hot summer pitch five hundred miles away in Adelaide. They’d had two days of stinkers there, and now the stinkers were heading east towards the suburb because Adelaide weather always does. From his seat in Nat’s Barber Shop Michael can imagine the heat rising from the ground the way it always does at the end of a hot day’s cricket. Nat stands still, his scissors and comb in his hands, as he stares out through the window at the peach glow of the Old Wheat Road, the deep shadows and the ripe walls of the shops opposite. He has stopped cutting and the bicycle repair shop owner seems to neither notice nor care. He is staring at the shop ceiling. Michael eyes them both, but like them, he is concentrating on the dying minutes of this drama being played out five hundred miles away. What, he wonders, is the barber so struck by that without seeming to be aware of it, he has dropped his arms to his side, scissors and comb still in his hands. It is not the cricket, for by his own admission, he knows nothing of the game. It is — he always says with a shake of the head — a mystery. It occurs to Michael that because he knows nothing of the game, because what the shrill, rising voices of the commentators on the transistor tell him means very little, he can make of the drama what he will. It is the voices of the commentators that he is listening to, the drama in their delivery, not what they are saying. Michael and the bicycle repair shop owner are listening to the dying moments of a dramatic game of cricket. The barber, Michael idly speculates in his vinyl chair at the back of the small shop, might just as easily be listening to the dying moments of a famous opera. The great Hall, the gum-chewing Mackay and the clownish hero, Kline, could all be players on a wooden stage rather than a green field.
Barely aware of having risen, Michael mo
ves towards the seated figure of the bicycle repair shop owner and the standing figure of Nat, as the commentator announces the final over of the day and the game. As he stands beside the two he looks briefly out across the street to where the butcher, the chemist and the newsagent are gathered round the butcher’s radio, and he imagines that all along the street, and all across the suburb, everybody is doing exactly the same thing.
The commentators are calm, then shrill, then calm again as they find the words that will become pictures in people’s minds. They must find words that correspond with the facts (batsman, bowler, ball, pitch, grass, sky, sun), and when they do, when the facts and the words correspond, pictures are created in the minds of the listeners; pictures that, in the end, will be more lasting and more meaningful than the photographs of the events that Michael will see in the morning newspapers. Years from now when Michael recalls this game, it will be the word-pictures currently being created on the radio that he will remember.
This last over passes slowly because the great Hall is bowling and his walk back to his mark is as long as the late-afternoon shadows Michael imagines falling across the ground. At one point the crowd pours onto the ground because they think the game is finally finished and their tensions can be released. But the game is not finished and they must all go back to their seats as the word ‘pandemonium’ rises above the crackle and the static. For the second time in six weeks Michael’s world and all those in it fall silent and still for the last ball of a cricket match — the ball that will decide if one side has lost or if it is a draw.
And when it is over — when the gum-chewing Mackay has put his body into the line of the ball and felt the thud and sting of it hitting his ribs (because you can’t get out hitting the ball with your ribs), when the crowd has spilled onto the ground for the second time in as many minutes — the barber shop, the butcher shop, and all the shops and houses across the suburb, burst into life and the tension that has been curled up inside everyone is suddenly released in a carnival of sound. For a moment, watching the smiles on the faces of everybody near him (smiles that glow with the late-afternoon light), Michael could almost like the bicycle repair shop owner — this man who doesn’t like people, who doesn’t even like himself, but who has suddenly discovered that he just might like people a little more than he thought. For this is not a victory. It is a draw. Nobody has won, and everybody has. Like the perfect ball that Michael will one day bowl, this is an event. Everybody, for a short time, has been drawn together by this thing, and it seems to Michael that everybody found something inside them that wasn’t there at the beginning of the day.
The Gift of Speed Page 14