At the front gate he swings about and looks back at the house and the grounds, everything as still and quiet as it was when he arrived a mere ten or fifteen minutes before. But he has travelled far in that ten or fifteen minutes. He has travelled to another country — this other country that exists behind the walls of Webster’s mansion and he wouldn’t be surprised to now learn that it was days, not minutes, that he was away.
40.
The Empty Home
In the late afternoon the Home ought to have been at its busiest. The windows should be lit with a summery glow, there ought to be voices, silhouettes passing behind curtained squares of yellow light. But there is none of that. The Home is still and silent. A shell, the life it once contained gone.
A week before he could never have stepped onto the circular gravel driveway of the Home and strolled about its gardens, but now he does. The cottages are quiet, the trees motionless on a still summer’s day. Michael is the only moving figure in that afternoon glow, and he moves slowly and respectfully. The ground-floor doors, the verandah, the cast-iron balcony are all in partial shadow. The late sun catches the white railing of the balcony, the windows are dark and soon the whole house will be sleeping by itself, back from the street, in the vast expanse of its own night. If houses dream, surely this one does.
Once it was where Kathleen Marsden lived, now it houses the memories of when she did. He has her letter in his drawer at home. The first love letter she has ever written, the first he has ever received. It is a love letter, but a practical one acknowledging that the place to which she has been thrown may just as well be on the other side of the earth as the other side of the city; a letter of farewell as much as love. And as he stands in the grounds, he remembers her smile that bright Saturday morning when he came to see her play.
If he wanted he could climb the cast-iron column onto the balcony, stare into the window that was once hers and onto the white metal bed that will still be there and which was silent witness to the private life of Kathleen Marsden.
The Home has been empty for over a week and has the look of a house that has only just been vacated. Small objects here and there — a comb, a book, a woollen hat, either under a shrub or left lying on a step — all bear the signs of a recent departure. He can imagine the orderly confusion. Girls, matrons and removalists. Bags filled with everything they have. The small girls all talking at once, the older girls, who have had no other home but this, taking one last look. He can imagine all this with only the crunch of the gravel under his sandshoes to disturb his thoughts and the insistent, distant sound of a hammer on some far-off tin roof.
He wants to see if the place has changed, and it has. He also wants to know if the mystery has gone, and it hasn’t. There is more of it. This will always be the place where he found something other than speed to fill his days and fill his mind, where Kathleen Marsden became Kate, and he discovered that there were other gifts in life to be given and received. And when the time comes, when he is able to put things together a little more clearly than he can now, he will understand that this is also the place where he fell just that little bit in love with Kathleen Marsden, and just that little bit out of love with the world of speed. In time, but not yet. For the realisation is still travelling towards him, slowly, like the old red rattlers that creep out of the city on days such as this and lumber up those deceptive inclines that lead into his suburb. At the moment he still takes it for granted that he is at his happiest when walking back along his run to his bowling mark.
He will not see Kathleen Marsden again. And it is not simply the distance between them. All that was ever going to happen has happened. She discovered for the first time in her life the ordinary happiness of knowing that there really was someone out there after all. Someone outside the confines of the Home who would come to watch her play and to whom she could go and for whom she could release the smile that she knew was somewhere inside her just waiting for its time and place of release; someone with whom she could feel less thrown. And he too had glimpsed for the first time that there was something out there beyond the sealed, self-enclosed world of speed. That the walls and towers of that world he had constructed and over which he had complete control could crumble one hot afternoon in a disused stable, and that a part of him would watch it all fall down and not care. There was another world entirely out there, and if he really wanted to, he could let it in.
This was their gift to each other. Now, the gift was given, and there was nothing left to be done. It was enough to know that if such moments could happen once, they could happen again. The moment at the hayride when she had read his thoughts, the afternoon in the heat of the old stable when he silently acknowledged that here was fine, here was good and all the yearning to be elsewhere could finally stop. When he suddenly wasn’t exclusively living for that faraway moment when he would feel the ripple of the perfect delivery pass through him and which would tell him that he had the gift of speed. When he wasn’t straining towards that moment with all his strength, but happy to simply stand still and not want anything more or wish to be anywhere else. It is another way of doing things that makes him feel light in his feet and legs and shoulders. A lightness of being that makes him aware for the first time of the weight he carries round with him, that he never knew was there. But at this moment it is still just a glimpse. And he might be told (on this particular evening in front of the empty Home with Webster’s ten-pound note still stuffed in his pocket) that his world has shifted, that he has been nudged in ways that he hadn’t counted on when the summer began, but he won’t hear because he’s not yet ready to hear — and that lumbering red rattler that is carrying the news is still travelling towards him up those deceptive inclines that lead into the suburb.
41.
A Thief in Your Own Home
It’s come to this. Games. Tricks. Michael wanders freely around the grounds of what once was St Catherine’s Girls’ Home, Vic works in the front garden in khaki shorts and sandals, and Rita slowly opens the drawer in which Vic keeps his handkerchiefs, cork-tipped cigarettes and spare change. Vic is clearly visible through the bedroom windows. She can see him, he can’t see her. She’s opened this drawer a hundred times before and never felt like a thief, but today she does. It is the guilt doing all this, she tells herself — the slow tentative manner in which she opens the drawer, the way she looks about the room to make sure she is still alone in the house (or that his mother hasn’t wandered out of her room again), and the cautious way she picks through the spare change and the cigarettes until she finds what she wants. It is at the very bottom, underneath one of the notepads in which he writes those odd bits of poems and quotes from books. She wasn’t looking the first time, but now she is. And, for this reason, she feels like a thief in her own home.
She takes the postcard out from under the notepad. The real estate agent’s card is under the postcard. It might mean something, it might mean nothing. She stares at the postcard and once again realises how much she likes the look of this town. Slowly, slyly, she slips them both into her dress pocket and smooths the contents of the drawer, to make it look like no one has been there — then wonders if, because everything looks so orderly and neat, that it looks like someone has. But she shuts the drawer firmly If it means something she will hear, if it doesn’t she won’t.
It is a sad communication, but a communication all the same. She walks through the kitchen to the bin. It’s come to this, games and tricks. But sometimes you’ve got to know these things, haven’t you? Surely everybody comes across these odd little bits and pieces, those little things that tell a wife something about her husband’s life that her husband never told her, or those things that tell a husband something about his wife’s life that she never let on about. Little things, but things that nag at you until you end up feeling like a thief in your own home. This happens to everyone, even the happy couples. It’s like taking two photographs. Everybody does it. It doesn’t mean anything. Time passes. And before you know it you’re
having a quiet laugh to yourself and it’s soon forgotten.
Later that afternoon, the gardening done, Vic goes to his drawer for the cork-tipped cigarettes, and from the moment he opens it he knows that something is different. More than different, wrong. The contents of the drawer either look too neat or too deliberately ruffled. Whatever, a hand other than his has been here today. At first he thinks of Michael taking his cigarettes. But Michael, to the best of his knowledge, doesn’t smoke. Then he counts the loose change, and it all seems to be there. But something is gone. It is only when he picks up the notepad at the bottom of the drawer that he realises what it is, and knows straight away who took it.
He is motionless, his eyes fixed on the drawer, but blank. While they were there, in the drawer in this open way, these cards were not an issue. And they weren’t at first. He just threw them there when he’d come back from his trip, with some vague notion of returning one day to this place, to visit or stay. He didn’t know. It was only in the weeks that followed that the memory of the town and the idea of living there got into his bones and took hold — so much so that he knew that one day he would indeed return. By then it was too late to take the cards away and hide them somewhere, because that would look suspicious. So he left them there in his drawer, in this open manner. A couple of harmless mementos.
Now this. It is, he acknowledges, a communication. Rita’s way of asking a question because she needs badly to know the answer. But it is not a question she can just come out and ask herself, is it? Not her. Not them. So, she has found this way of posing the question to Vic. He knows straight away that his answer can take one of two forms. He can say something, or he can say nothing.
If he says something he may, by his willingness to speak of them in an open way, confirm that the cards are simply harmless mementos. In such an event his tone would be casual and light. She would look up from her magazine and either know something about their disappearance or not. And the matter would be closed. But he also knows that it would be a dangerous conversation to begin, because it may continue and he could never be sure just where it might end up. There may be more questions, and he may have some awkward explaining to do. Of course, there is only one response. And that is to say nothing. The question has been asked, and he will answer with silence; the way they do in this house.
He removes the cork-tipped cigarettes from the drawer, then leaves the bedroom. Rita is sitting in the lounge room reading a magazine. When he suggests that they open the windows to let the breeze through she looks up over her magazine and fixes his eyes for a moment in silent scrutiny. She reads his look, concludes that he has either noticed or he hasn’t (Vic is not sure), then she nods.
There. It is done. They have communicated. It is, he reflects, a sad communication, but it is done, and as he lights the cigarette, he notes it has been done in the manner of the house. No one and nothing has been disturbed, except for the venetian blinds responding to the late-afternoon breeze.
42.
Lindsay Hassett’s Sports Store
That evening Michael sits in his room examining the ten-pound note. He has seen ten-pound notes before but never owned one. The note had been slipped into his shirt pocket almost as an afterthought, but he knows it isn’t. The question Michael goes over and over again in his room is what to do with the money. He could give it to the club, to the team. He was, after all, collecting for the club, and had it not been for the club he would not have been on Webster’s property in the first place. So the club should get it. Really. But there were two payments, he points out to himself while dragging the edge of the note across his cheek as if he were shaving (which he now does irregularly). One for the club, one for Michael. And even when Webster had called him a good team man, it was said in such a way that suggested Webster had found, in Michael, one of his own, someone who goes alone and prefers it that way. A tone that suggested a man would be a fool to play for the team, that if he had any brains at all he would take the money and keep quiet, and that he best looked after the team by looking after himself. Webster, had never played for the team — which is why he is Webster and everybody else is just everybody else. He could call it Webster’s gift, but it is not a gift. Webster does not give gifts. Although he doesn’t know the Websters of the world, all the other Websters, that is, he knows that they’re out there and that they don’t give gifts.
He will give the coins to the club and keep the paper for himself. It has fallen into his lap with the neatness of something that was destined. It is out of his hands. The money has a pre-determined purpose and he will see that it meets its destiny.
Outside, through the open louvre windows of his room, the voice of Mrs Barlow carries across the fence, across the yard, and across the whole suburb for all he knows. The house is wrong, she wails. The street is ghastly. The suburb is stuck out on the edge of the world. She is ashamed of the address. Ashamed of him. It is always the same. He knows it all by heart now. Further up the street Bruckner’s dog howls periodically in the still night to the accompaniment of Younger’s hammer. He is out late, Albert Younger, with nothing better to do than piece the scraps of his house together.
Michael snaps to his feet, slips the ten-pound note into the old brown wallet he inherited from his father, and places the wallet on his bedside table. The club clinic, the training session for which he has practised throughout the summer, is now only days away. The ten-pound note has fallen into his pocket with the neatness of things destined to be. So when he steps out onto that wide, green oval in two days he will have feet. And with the feet will come speed, and everything else.
The next day the basement shop is cool and quiet like a library. Summers will come and go, but the smell of this shop in the years ahead will always be synonymous with the smell of summers past and of afternoons that stretch out forever and drive people underground. Michael has come straight from school. He knows what he wants. As he moves through the shop the radio voice of Hassett blends with the sleepy tranquillity of the place. He passes the sleeveless sweaters that can only be found here, passes the trousers and caps and socks, and stops at the boots.
They are white, new and crisp, and the rich smell of fresh leather rises from the boxes before him much as it does from a new football. He knows exactly which boots he wants, drops his school bag on the floor and soon finds them. But something is wrong. Some part of him suspected throughout the day that there was always going to be something wrong because it was so late in the season. As much as he tries he can’t find his size, the boots that were here the last time he was in the shop are gone. There is no size even near his. They are either children’s boots or giant’s boots. He lightly stamps his foot on the floor, enough to disturb things.
He hears Hassett’s voice and wonders who the question might be addressed to when he realises that Hassett is standing beside him.
‘Can I help you?’ he is saying, and Michael turns slowly towards him attempting to simultaneously register the nearness of Hassett as well as the content of his question. Hassett is patient, a quiet smile in his eyes, and Michael is surprised and pleased to see that the twinkle the newspaper articles refer to is there in life. It is while he is contemplating this that he suddenly blurts out a two-word response to the question.
‘The boots.’
‘Yes?’
‘They’re too big, or too small.’
Hassett nods as he eyes Michael’s feet, then checks the sizes printed on the remaining boxes.
‘That’s right. You’re a common size.’
‘Do you have any more?’ Michael persists.
‘No.’
‘But you’ll get more in?’
Hassett shakes his head.
‘You’re out of luck, I’m afraid.’
How can Michael tell him that all summer he has contemplated those boots. That if he is to have feet, he must have them. For a moment his annoyance — the same helpless childish rage that consumed so many of his father’s boozy Saturday nights — controls him. For a
moment he forgets that he is talking to the man who was once captain of Australia. For a moment the patience and genial understanding of Hassett threaten to drive Michael up the walls of his crummy little basement shop — as does the famous twinkle in Hassett’s eyes, and suddenly Michael is behaving as if Hassett were just another shop assistant who doesn’t know his job.
‘Why not?’ Michael stammers, rousing the curiosity of the shop.
Hassett remains calm, his manner still genial, the twinkle still in his eyes, as he shakes his head a little sadly.
‘It’s the end of the season.’
Michael stands, his hands on his hips, staring at the floor, without speaking.
‘You’re a bowler?’
‘Yes.’ Michael doesn’t even look up.
It is in the short silence that follows, while Michael is looking down at the floor, that he sees them. Boots. Not the boots that he wants, but his size and he wonders why he didn’t notice them before. He impulsively reaches out and holds one up.
‘These?’
‘They’re batsman’s boots,’ Hassett says, all patience and geniality.
‘Does it matter?’ Michael asks, but Hassett shakes his head.
‘They’re too heavy. Look, there’s no spikes in the heels. They’re batsman’s boots.’
Hassett takes the boot from Michael as if removing an unnecessary temptation and places it back in its box. He looks up from the boots with a smile on his face.
‘You’d be a fool to buy them. And I’d be a crook to sell them to you.’
It is then that another customer catches his eye and he is gone. The matter of the boots is concluded.
But Michael doesn’t move. He must have them. When nobody is watching him he tries them on. They fit. Even with his grey school socks they fit. He places them back in the box and waits until Hassett is occupied at the other end of the shop discussing bats. He is talking to a man of his own vintage, and from the tone of their conversation he can tell that they will go on for some time. It’s enough for Michael to slip quietly up to the counter, where an assistant is standing at the cash register. Enough to pass the ten-pound note across and slip out up the stairs.
The Gift of Speed Page 17