The Time We Have Taken

by Steven Carroll

  Madeleine possesses a beauty that is not of the Age. Not that it doesn’t call her beautiful, but it is not a beauty that the Age calls its own. Her beauty is distant, like old films. It is a beauty that the world might imagine touching, but only in the way that you can touch the celluloid — not the fact.

  Then the look is gone, but its work is done. An eerie calm settles on the park. She has changed everything with a look. Bunny Rabbit and Pussy Cat no longer gaze upon her with playful amusement in their eyes but with a kind of marvel that wasn’t there before. Even trepidation, for they are almost wary of her as they quit the park and wave goodnight, leaving Michael and Madeleine alone. There was even, for a moment, the briefest of exchanges between Madeleine and Pussy Cat, a look that not only said ‘Well done’, but acknowledged some sort of understanding. Michael is left wondering just what it was that Pussy Cat was acknowledging in Madeleine that she had not seen until now. And he quickly concludes that what Pussy Cat saw in Madeleine was the kind of strength that comes from having sung songs of Experience, not Innocence. And his impulse, on evenings such as these, to see them as that rare thing, an old-fashioned couple in a radical age, looks silly.

  13.

  Lurch

  Midway through the next morning, as Madeleine goes about her duties at the hospital, and Bunny Rabbit and Pussy Cat either rise from or take to their bed, Michael is walking down the corridor of his old school. Even after a month of being back (and he never applied for his old school, but simply accepted his appointment as evidence of the invisible hand of Fate at work), there is still a distinct feeling of discomfort at walking through the door in front of him. The schoolboy Michael always waited outside that door marked ‘Staff Room’ all his schoolboy life. Michael the teacher enters. The years in between aren’t all that many, but they’re enough. Enough for the lifeblood of the corridors to have experienced a complete transfusion and now be populated with what seem like intruders. Every now and then, on a bench here and there or a study that once served as a Senior Master’s office, he’ll see himself being detained for some minor misdemeanour, the nature of which has long since been forgotten by everyone concerned but which seemed so grave at the time.

  It is one of those schools that the frontier suburbs got. Grey, flat, porous brick slapped onto match-stick frames. All of them flung up overnight. Built to fall down a generation later. In fact, in the years to come, when the generation that made the school a necessity has moved on and a new generation of young families follows the frontier further and yet further inland, the school will be bull-dozed and match-stick townhouses will spring up on the site in the place of a match-stick school.

  Michael pauses before passing through the door, gazing down the corridor. The years in between aren’t all that much, but enough. Enough to have him musing on the difference between then and now. For there is a difference. A quality lacking in what he sees around him. He calls that quality Order, and everywhere, in the classrooms, corridors, playing fields and even in the streets surrounding the school, he sees the demise of the Order that characterised his years at the school. Something, long destined to cave in, was, in fact, in the process of caving in. And it wasn’t just the slapped-on grey bricks and match-stick frames of the building itself that were falling apart; something else was.

  And it is while Michael is contemplating what the decline of his old school might herald that he sees his old geography teacher turn the corner at the general office and into the A Block corridor; the tall, stooped, slow-moving figure of ‘Lurch’. With his hair still resolutely parted down the middle, a hint of greying sideburn being his only concession to the passage of time and the arrival of fashions other than those that fashioned him, he is a figure from another world. And he always was. Even then. He hasn’t changed, not much. But the corridor through which he moves has changed utterly. Whereas he once moved — and ‘moved’ is the word, it occurs to Michael, for Lurch never really walked, but progressed (like a warm or cold front, depending on the day) from one point to another — through these corridors in complete possession of them, he now wanders about them like a stranger. And with that vague, lost look in his eyes that strangers in a strange place have. The look that people have when the world around them moves on and they are left gazing about for signs of the Old Life to hang on to.

  No student ever called him Lurch to his face back then (although word would undoubtedly have reached him, even though a character from an American television comedy would have meant nothing to him), and the name has now fallen into disuse.

  As he nears, Michael nods good morning, and Lurch looks at him at first wondering who on earth he is. Then there is recognition. The faintest hint of a smile, and Lurch is once again in possession of at least one small part of the corridor. And as he nods back it strikes Michael that he is one of those signs of the Old World that the Lurches of life, caught up in changing times, look for to hang on to, so that the world they find themselves inhabiting will not seem so strange after all.

  There is even a touch of the old irony in the raised eyebrows and wrinkled forehead, as he tacitly shares his observations of the corridor with Michael. But it is communicated in such a way as to suggest that his trademark irony isn’t much called for these days. That, indeed, irony is wasted on days like these.

  Michael leans his hand on the staff-room door, pushes it open, and watches as the tall, stooped figure enters the room, the stoop more pronounced than he remembered. Lurch, it seems to Michael, is a bit like an old vine that will, in the not-too-distant future, require the stake of a walking stick.

  At his desk, Michael is thumbing through an English textbook that he used as a student when the headmaster taps him on the shoulder and drops a letter in front of him. It is, he says, slightly amused, from something calling itself the Centenary Suburb Committee and they’re looking for someone who is young and who grew up in the suburb. With that the headmaster turns to leave, suggesting as he goes that there might be a bit of time off in this for the young Michael. Then he adds, correcting himself, a bit more time off, aware of the concessions the teacher in charge of the school’s timetable has made so that Michael might complete his studies.

  Low clouds of cigarette smoke hang in the air, groups cluster about each other’s desks as if having been arranged that way by some resident Dutch master, and in the reflexive way of the herd that suggests this happens every day. And while he notes that he just might get to like these routines (for he has always been one for routines), he also senses that a bit of time off out there mightn’t be so bad. Even for this odd thing that calls itself the Centenary Suburb Committee.

  14.

  A Letter is Written

  Less than a mile from the school, as Michael sits at his staff-room desk and Lurch (cryptic crossword in front of him) lights the kind of old-fashioned cork-tipped cigarette that Vic smoked at formal social occasions, Rita takes Florentine writing paper from her bedroom drawer and begins with a simple ‘Dear Vic’.

  She is then distracted by the day. A bright, autumn thing. Her roses, glowing in their second blooming like the whole street’s. The leaves of the birch, silver and green, in the centre of the lawn. The street is mid-week quiet, except for the stocky figure of Mrs K across the road pounding the summer dust out of a rug with hands and meaty forearms that look, equally, like those of a strangler and a pastry cook, for she is well known along the street for her heavy Ukrainian doughnuts that come with at least three eggs. Having given the rug a thorough belting, she pauses and wipes her brow, for all the world like a peasant in a field of swaying wheat. She seems, this woman from a far part of the earth, to be no particular age. Or, one of those women who grow old while still young. She was old when she came here, not long after Rita, Vic and Michael did, and she’s just stayed that way. She hasn’t aged, because she was aged in the first place. But, Rita reflects, the poor woman might only be in her forties or less. She’s never really asked herself before how old Mrs K might be, and she now concludes that it’s
impossible to say.

  None of this goes into the letter. Dear Vic. At first it was odd to be writing to him, then she got to like it, and now (after seven quick years) she’s quite attached to what has become a weekly ritual. Did you know, she opens, that we’re a hundred years old? Not us, the suburb. Somebody’s got it into their head that this is the year — God only knows how — but it’s official. Centenary Suburb. That’s us. It’s going to be stamped on all official letters, she says. There’s going to be posters. Street signs will be altered. Names will be changed. There will be events. And she can see Vic laughing at all this because she is too. Then she adds that someone will do well out of all this — that mayor for a start. That the whole thing has a bit of a smell about it.

  From there she moves on to the topic of the Webster house and Mrs Webster, then to Michael, who now talks to her like one of his students (and she wishes he wouldn’t). And the house. Michael is always telling her to sell it and go. And it’s always good when Vic says stay there, girl, if that’s what you want, in that way of his — and she can always hear his voice coming off the letter. The voice of her Vic, conjured up by his words, so that she doesn’t so much read his letters as hear them. And it doesn’t matter what he says; they’re usually about nothing much in particular. They never really told each other much anyway. It’s just good to hear his voice, and every time she opens his letters (and he’s a good letter writer), that voice is there. Vic’s voice. Vic’s words. No one puts words together in quite the same combinations and order as Vic does. So when she reads his words, his words are inseparable from his voice. And it’s not always like that, she pauses, reflecting on letters and styles. Most people don’t have a voice at all when they put words down. You can’t hear anything. But not with Vic. When he puts words on the page, he seems to throw the whole of himself into it — his whole body — like he does when he laughs. His whole body laughs when he’s really laughing, and his whole body writes when he’s writing.

  And, as she finishes her letter and slips it into the envelope and addresses it to that little box of his at the post office, she wonders if he hears her voice as clearly as she hears his. And there is also that part of her that wonders just how Vic is. How he really is. Because he never says. And she’s not sure if it’s her imagination, but his handwriting lately looks a little shaky. And it never did before. He always had such beautiful handwriting. Firm, flowing and confident, just like Vic. But it’s looking, well, it’s looking a bit old lately. And she can’t help but ask herself if the Vic she remembers, her Vic, is the same Vic who writes the letters and reads hers. Or has he changed like his handwriting? There’s nothing sadder than watching a big booming man grow old and shaky, until the boom goes out of him altogether. She’s seen it happen in others, big booming men, with booming laughs, and she couldn’t bear to see it in Vic. And there’s the silences between letters. They can go for weeks. And during them she’s always half waiting for the inevitable phone call in the night. For he lives alone, with a bunch of strangers for friends who’ll only talk to him as long as he’s propped up at the bar (and who probably couldn’t care who’s propped up at the bar beside them as long as someone is), and sometimes it can take days for anybody to find you. If something happens, that is. And that’s why she jumps when the phone rings at night. There’s a fatalistic part of her (which she sees in Michael too) that immediately tells her it’s bound to be bad news. Only it rarely rings at night, and she’ll be happy if it stays that way.

  So when she writes these letters, she never says just anything, as though you’ve got all the time in the world to write a proper one later. Each letter counts. And every time she drops them in the post, she’s got to be content that she’s written the right letter.

  She seals it and looks up. Mrs K has gone, the dust from the rug having been expelled into the still autumn air, and now, presumably, has settled onto the lawn and the flowers of her garden.

  Such is the life of the street, and all the streets around it. And such is all she has to report. A rug is aired, a letter is written, and the voice of a loved-one returns for a moment while a silver birch glistens in the autumn sun and somewhere out there a committee prepares to sit. All around, the infinitely complex organism of the suburb is going about its business, unnoticed, and as unconscious of itself as the birch is of the pleasure its shining leaves give to anyone who cares to pause long enough to observe it.

  15.

  The Search for a Crowning Event

  She knows who he is, all right, the way you know things around the suburb. This is Rita’s boy, although he’s hardly a boy any more. She’s seen him round and about the suburb over the years. This is the first time they’ve met. And it’s an unsettling meeting. If that’s the word. Although his hand is shaking hers and his lips are turned up into a smile, his eyes are doing something else. They’re watching. No, more than watching. They’re judging. And although the smile is there, it comes with the shadow of a sneer. He is a teacher at the local school and he is on the committee because he is young. He is what they call the younger generation. Mrs Webster’s round from home to factory and home again rarely takes in Michael and his kind, and this is the first time she has ever officially met him, or them, and both he and they have got her back up already. ‘Smug’ is the word that first comes to her, and ‘smug’ is the word that stays with her throughout the meeting. His lips curl into a smile as his hand shakes hers, but his eyes are judging her, and, she is convinced, he doesn’t approve of what he sees. And, what’s more, it is a judgment delivered with an air of invulnerability.

  You can’t touch me, that look says. You ride through our streets like cardboard royalty, and, as you nod and greet the passers-by released from your factory floor or on their way to it, you register their weekly worth: Charlie Monger, foreman, forty-two of these new-fangled dollars and thirty cents; Les Lott, machinist, twenty-eight dollars and no cents; Teresa Krylov, secretary, not much. You ride through our streets like cardboard royalty and calculate the total cost of the labour you pass along the way. But you can’t touch me. I’m beyond your touch and your calculations.

  This, sure as eggs, is what the look says as he smiles and shakes her hand, and this is what the look says to all of them throughout most of the meeting. He has this thing — they all do, this generation. This thing that is written into their features, this thing that enables them to smile and judge simultaneously, this air of knowing more than they let on — this learning. For, in the end, it wasn’t speed that took Michael out of his street and his suburb — and, yes, she remembers how cricket-mad he was, as did the whole suburb. No, it wasn’t speed that got him out in the end; it was a university degree. And she inwardly pronounces the two words with deliberate, bouncing irony. It was this learning. The learning that they take with them wherever they go, and, yes, they will go places, this lot, for their learning is written across their faces. And there is a word for faces like Michael’s, the one that first comes to her and the one that stays with her throughout the meeting. And, for the one and only time in her life (if what his smile says is at all true — that he is beyond her touch), she deeply regrets that another human being is beyond her grasp. For, although she has affection for Rita, she has to confess that she would dearly love to wipe the smugness off her son’s face. Off all their faces, for that matter. Yet, as soon as she registers this thought, she corrects it. And not out of fairness or some inexplicable rush of generosity. No, it is simply that she knows such thoughts are the thoughts of the old, of those who, like her machines, have been superseded, and Mrs Webster is not yet prepared to call herself old.

  It is not only Mrs Webster who is looking at the room differently now. So too are the others. Whether it’s the hair, the sideburns or the amused look in his eyes as he takes in all their names, they can’t tell. But ‘smug’ is the word that occurs to all of them, although no one says as much. And Mrs Webster is seriously wondering if the damage to her dining room will be permanent. For it seems as though thi
s revolution of which they all speak, this lot (and he does wear a red badge mysteriously inscribed with the word ‘moratorium’ on his coat lapel), in the same way, it seems to her, that the mayor talks of Progress, has already occurred and its representative is now seated among them, not so much as an equal member but as an inspector, here to report back later to all the others who, like himself, wear the red badges and amused grins of their kind. Their kind, and this Whitlam of theirs, who speaks to the whole country in the same way that Michael and his kind speak to the rest of us. This Whitlam of theirs of whom they speak as if he were not so much a person as a historical Movement. And, although she would never let on to Michael, she has, in fact, met this Whitlam of theirs at the opening of a new wing at a nearby hospital. He seemed, to her, to move about the room like a mountainous statue on wheels. And this mountain on wheels, she knew even then, was History. This much she felt compelled to concede. This Whitlam of theirs, this mountain with the gift of speech, who moved about the room like a public monument that knows its moment has come, was History. The streets have not yet prevailed, but this young man is an intimation of what it will be like when they do. His presence is a disruptive one and there is a part of her that is not quite sure if she will ever be able to look at her dining room again without picturing the slightly raised eyebrow that she is observing now as the mayor (no doubt an amusing old geezer in Michael’s eyes, although only forty-three) explains the task of the meeting.