The Gift of Speed

by Steven Carroll

  As the bicycle repair shop owner leaves the shop — waving to Michael for the first time in memory — Michael takes his place in the barber’s chair and Nat smiles broadly at him through two rows of peanut teeth.

  In the nets, as the last of the day’s sunshine fades to twilight, there is pain in his back. Some pain is always there. That is to be expected. It is also expected that the pain will go as the day progresses. But as Michael prepares himself for the final training session before the weekend game (his first with the seniors, with grown-ups), the day has progressed but the pain has not passed. He rubs liniment into his back — a football smell, not a cricket smell — and watches the deep-green pines of Skinner’s old farm, and, beyond, in the distance, the white walls and grey slate roof of St Catherine’s.

  One must always expect a certain amount of pain. The great Lindwall felt pain — that perfect action, the grace, the balance, the liquid smoothness of it all, was performed in pain. The trick is not to notice it, to be so involved in the business of bowling, that the pain that is there at the beginning of the day disappears when the mind is utterly concentrated on the task of propelling a red, leather ball through the air at speed.

  But for the first time in memory Michael bowls with pain. For a moment (something he has never contemplated before), Michael thinks about what it would be like to live a life without speed. What would fill his days? For the days would need filling. But this does not occupy his thoughts for long. They are not young thoughts — and Michael is young. He is simply putting himself in the position of someone older and imagining what it must be like to lose the thing that fills your days; and then he sees the image of his father in the laundry at the back of the house, polishing his boots, packing his bag and preparing for the thing that he did best — the very thing that he can’t do any more.

  As the shadows lengthen across the oval the pain gradually goes. He doesn’t note the point at which the pain disappears, but there comes a moment in the training session when he picks up his ball and counts his paces back to the top of his run and realises that the pain is no longer there.

  When he paces back to his marker in this endless procession of pacing, running and bowling, when he walks back to his marker to begin the task all over again, he breathes in the scent of the lawn clippings and the pine trees along the boundary, feels the cool evening breeze on his back, and realises that he is happy. He is happy because he is doing what he does best. This task, this pursuit of speed, fills his days and it occurs to Michael that he just might be at his happiest when he is taking the long walk back to the top of his run, when he is preparing himself to run in, to bowl, and to lose himself utterly in the world of action, rhythm and speed.

  35.

  Tracing the Black Line

  As Michael is sitting in Nat’s shop listening to the radio, Rita traces the black line of the railway as it wriggles its way along the coast on the map spread out before her, at one moment almost running on the water, at another withdrawing inland, keeping its distance from the shades of blue that represent the Pacific Ocean. On it goes, wriggling up through the neat blue squares of — what do they call them? — longitude and latitude, in and out of named and nameless harbours and coves. They’d have names, of course. But not on the map that Rita is looking at, her index finger tracing the winding course of the railway line as it mimics the coast, then steps back and hugs the foothills of the inland, until it finally passes through a small harbour town on the New South Wales border.

  She doesn’t have to imagine what the place looks like, she knows from the postcard. It’s as pretty as a picture. But not cute. A real town. The sort of town that happy couples go to in their later years when they’ve done the right thing by nature, when they’ve fulfilled their biological function — had their children, brought their children up and watched them leave. The sort of town that people go to when they once more become what they were before they ever had children — a couple. To make a new life with what’s left of things. It’s also the sort of town that unhappy couples go to, in one last, desperate fling at the way things ought to be. Happy and unhappy couples, all putting together the bits and pieces of their lives after having been families. It’s that sort of town.

  Vic has his eyes on this town. He may even have plans for it — but he’s never told Rita. Not for the first time since seeing the postcard, she contemplates the possibility that his plans — if they exist — might not include her. She knows him, and she doesn’t know him. There are times when Vic seems like a simple creature, easy to know. And other times when she can’t even begin to understand him, when he’s a complete mystery and all those simple creature games like the jokes he loves telling — that used to be fun but aren’t any more — are just a disguise, a role he plays so that his mind can dwell on other things — like this small town — without being watched too closely.

  Part of her says if he wants to go, let him. Good riddance. But the other part says you don’t walk away that easily. Not from twenty years. There’s always something else to try. Always another way of doing things — isn’t there? Besides, Rita’s not the sort of person to be left. She’ll do the leaving if it has to be done. She would have once and she could again. But being left, that’s another thing. She knows women who have been left, and they’ve all got the same look about them — a scared, tired look — and she’s in no hurry to get that look. Besides, there’s a large part of her that will always be hopelessly in love with Vic — against all good advice — a part of her that is forever ready to have another crack at things.

  Maybe he hasn’t got plans at all. Maybe he just liked the place and kept the card the way people do, the way she has from time to time. A memento. Something to go to and stare at when you need to. And why would he leave it lying around if it really meant all that much? It would be like leaving the photograph of some, some tart lying around. Wouldn’t it? Some cheap tart he happened to meet some bloody where or other. He just wouldn’t do it. Not if it really meant something. He wouldn’t be that open about it — or that stupid. Besides, this isn’t a cheap tart of a town. It’s a real town. The sort of place where couples go to start their lives all over again.

  She no sooner allows that thought to pass than she acknowledges that men and women really do things like that. That people really do leave things like photographs and letters and bus tickets lying all around the place because they just don’t think, or don’t care — or in some guilty part of them want to be found out anyway.

  She rises from her chair beside the bookshelf and ambles about the house. It’s late on a Wednesday afternoon. Vic’s at the golf course, Michael’s at the barber’s. Mary is sleeping. The house is hers. It happens, she says, nodding to herself. She thinks about all this while she contemplates the lounge-room window, one part of her becoming excited with the prospect of French windows and curtains and drapes, another part wondering what the point of it all is.

  Vic is standing on the tee of the seventh hole. The fairway runs down into a low dip where the creek that once ran through the whole suburb trickles on as it did before the suburb came. The trick is not to land in the drink. Vic should be thinking about this as he prepares to tee off, but he’s not. He’s thinking about the art of shooting through. It’s all in the timing. Like golf. At the right time and place you can shoot through and almost make it look like you’ve just ducked out for the shopping or a quick round, when, in fact, you’ve shot through. The right time and place can make it look like that, and the time, Vic senses, isn’t far off.

  He mightn’t give a cracker about dying, as he said one afternoon at Black’s surgery, but he does care about making the years he might have left count — for he knows that the end is nearer now than it’s ever been before. He carries this sense of the end being near in his buggy with his clubs as he roams the fairways of the golf course. The time for shooting through is almost upon him, and the last of his living will only be done once he has. But right now, it’s still there waiting to be grasped, this mome
nt when he will shoot through and make his last charge at being happy enough — before he shoots through forever.

  It must be done alone. He knows that. He could stay, and the world will call him a good enough man when he’s gone, but he knows only too well that he wouldn’t be worth a crumpet to himself or anyone else. That’s why Vic’s got this little place picked out, up north. Far enough away to almost be another country. Another life, at least. He’s got it into his mind that there, and only there, will he be able to see the whole show out the way he imagines it. He doesn’t imagine being there with anyone — a woman, a friend. When he thinks of the town he sees the harbour, the sea, the horizon, and knows that he wants to look at it for every day of what remains to him. A solitary figure on a beach. To some people that might be loneliness. To Vic, as he leans over the ball and prepares to give it a big slap, it’s freedom. And that’s what he likes about this place up north that he’s picked out. It’s got that kind of promise.

  From the sound of the club hitting the ball he knows that it’s all wrong. The sound should be crisp and clean, but it’s like he’s slapped the ball with a wet lettuce. That’s what you get, he thinks, as he watches a small splash erupt from the creek. That’s what you get for taking your eye off the ball.

  36.

  The Blessed Years

  It’s the blessed years I dream of now, the beautiful blessed years, when he was too old to be called a baby and too young to know what was going on and how things worked. I knew those years were blessed when we had them there in front of us, day after day after day, and I knew they’d go, and they went all right — but I still can’t believe they did. Now they come back to me in dreams, and every time I close my eyes I pray — not that I pray any more, and God only knows who I pray to — but I pray that when I close my eyes I’ll slip back into those dreams because I’m living it all again when I do. And if I have to die, let me die in one of those dreams, when my boy is back, and all the years are blessed again.

  I hear them out there, out there in the lounge room, drinking and talking and laughing. I hear them, and I don’t. Tonight I have my memories. These are the years that I slip back into, the blessed years. Not the ones that followed when he’d woken up to what was going on and given up his wide laughing eyes for the glum look the schoolyard gives a kid when he discovers that everybody has a mum and a dad. One day he came back with that look on his face because he knew everybody had something he didn’t. And that was when he moved from the centre rows of school photographs to the edges.

  I watched his face change and there was nothing I could do — and he didn’t ask me to do anything. I gave him the photograph, the only one I’ve got, the only one I ever had — and said here, this man, is your father. His six-year-old head nodded with the seriousness of a boy grown up too soon. A boy whose blessed years were too short. If I could have done anything, I would have — but what could I do? All I could do was show him the photograph. It’s a bad photo. Viktor, the man who gave me fifty one-pound notes in a roll that night the cart took me away from his family estate because I was about to become an embarrassing member of the domestic staff. Viktor, who is now gone. That’s the boy’s name too — without the ‘k’. He took that photo away and never spoke of it, and never asked me anything about him again.

  Something left him and it never came back. Even when he started hitting the grog a bit more than anybody should — and I’d say you’ll kill yourself like that one day, and he’d say I couldn’t care less (and he meant it) — I knew that his nature had turned and that he hated this man — his father — who never wanted him. His response was never to ask about him — and he never did after I first told him — just to let me and whatever invisible witnesses that might be present know, that just as this man, his father, had never wanted to know him, he too would never seek to know his father. He never said as much as this, but his manner did, that even if this uniformed stranger — preserved in a silly studio photograph from somewhere in South Melbourne, when the war was too old to want him, and he was too old to go anyway — even if this uniformed stranger were to seek the boy out as they sometimes did, the boy would never forgive him. He learnt how to hate early, this boy of mine, and I saw all this from the moment his face changed and he brought that glum look into the house.

  But we’ll always have those years when he didn’t know a thing, and the smile on his face lit the whole of that dark house of ours. And these are the ones I go back to in dreams now. The years we got for free, the ones we had before he shrugged that private world of ours off his shoulders (like he was always going to) and found out that something was wrong, and that it could never be put right.

  37.

  The Gift of Kathleen Marsden

  ‘I’m going away. I thought you should know.’ There is an old stable at the back of the Home. It is a relic, a thing left over from other times when Skinner’s farm dominated the community. It is neither part of the new technical school nor part of the Home grounds, but seems set in some no-man’s land in between them both on the thick khaki grass where cows once grazed. And perhaps because no one really knows whose land it sits on now, or perhaps because nobody could find the energy or a good reason, the thing has never been knocked over.

  It is late in the afternoon. A stinker, and the day is at its hottest. The sky, like the enamel of a car that has been too long exposed to the elements, has been bleached by the white sun which lights up the stable through the half-opened door. The papers of the world out there are filled with the exciting news of the cricket the day before, and photographs of the heroic Slasher Mackay, with his bruised chest, are everywhere. But in this stable they have left that world behind them. Kathleen Marsden is leaning against the stairs, still solid, that lead up to the old hayloft. She is in uniform (they both are), and her long summer tunic falls over her like a sack, down below her knees. In her hand she holds a straw hat, the school badge sown into the front of it, and occasionally she fans herself with it. And Michael, whose head rests on the same wooden stairway — but on the other side of Kathleen Marsden — can almost feel the heat coming off her cheeks and forehead, as well as the smell of the lemon-scented soap with which she has washed.

  ‘Did you hear?’

  Of course he had, and of course it had registered with him, but he is slow to respond. It is the day, it is the drowsy happiness that runs through him. And he either finds it too hard to shake this drowsiness off or he doesn’t want to break the spell they are under by speaking. But he heard all right, and nods when she questions him.

  ‘They sold the Home. We’re all going.’

  ‘Where?’

  The drowsiness is all but gone now and he is leaning towards her, one of his elbows resting on the step beside him. Still fanning herself with the straw hat, she names a suburb on the other, far side of the city — a suburb that is only faintly familiar to him and may as well be on the other side of the earth.

  ‘I’ve known for weeks.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He wanted to say more than ‘Oh’ and could hear his voice in the old stable, sounding as flat as if someone had just told him that his tea was cold. Part of him feels compelled to ask why she hasn’t told him till now, but another part of him isn’t sure that he has the right to be indignant, and so it comes out ‘Oh’.

  ‘I should have told you.’

  He shrugs. She stops fanning herself, watches his reaction, sums up the shrug and doesn’t take offence. It’s not that he doesn’t care, she knows that by now. He’s just not being pushy.

  ‘It’s true. I should have.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  She lets out a hot, summer sigh that, under any other circumstances might have been read as boredom, but is anything else but that. She is leaning back against the stairs, her long summer tunic falling over her like a sack. But he can see her. The sack of the school tunic doesn’t matter. He can make her out under the sack and she knows he can. He isn’t sure how long the silence has gone on, but she picks
up the conversation as if the silence doesn’t matter anyway — and it doesn’t.

  ‘I was putting it off. I thought that if I didn’t talk about it or even think about it, that it wouldn’t happen. But it will.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  If he’d stopped to catalogue what he was feeling — and, of course, he wouldn’t until much later — he would have been amazed to discover that all of these things were in him. And he might also have wondered if they’d always been there, just waiting to be touched and stirred by the loss of Kathleen Marsden — or if they hadn’t existed before her at all, and that she had brought them into existence simply by being the brightest thing he’d ever seen, and then buggering off just when his eyes had got used to the light. Or was it that they were all there, always were, and always are, these feelings that pop up when the floor drops out from under you. It was another record, another set of grooves, but wasn’t it still playing the same bloody song it always had? The only thing he knew for sure was that this time he really was annoyed.