He walks by, the men put their suit coats on and prepare to go to work, and the woman in gumboots gives the tyres of the sleek, dark limousine a final squirt with the hose. Vic remembers, years before, the doctor in the suburb telling him that the pills for his head and his heart were useless with the grog, that he’d die, and he remembered telling him he couldn’t care less. And he still doesn’t. But when the buggers start sniffing you out from the crowd, when you’ve got some sort of scent on you that you can’t even smell yourself, you know that it really is getting near dying time. Dying time, that’s what Vic calls it. And when the time comes, Vic, like any animal, will know what to do. Find a nice spot and just lie down and let it happen. If it doesn’t ambush him.
He doesn’t have to pass by the funeral director’s, but once a week he takes that detour, goes out of his way to pass the back of this place, just so he can look upon it and the men in the dark suits of their trade who stand about in between jaunts, smoking and laughing and chatting about all the usual things. He doesn’t have to pass this way, but he does. And they’re all acquainted with one another by now. They’re all, more or less, on familiar terms.
By the time he hits the bottom of the street, he’s ready for a beer. And it’s always the same after this little detour. The bar always glows in the morning light, and that bold, crass and wonderful sub-tropical sun always pours in through the stained-glass windows of the pub and lights it up like a vast cathedral. Light is brighter, warmth warmer, and when he raises that first beer of the morning, when his lips kiss the glass, part and receive the blessing of malt, hops and barley, he knows he will feel more alive at that moment than he will be for the rest of the day.
22.
Perfume (2)
Michael is standing alone on the footpath near the taxi rank outside the city hospital. It is a cold Friday evening, the first of the bad nights, and it seems to come without warning. The first of the nights when Madeleine pronounces everything wrong, and Michael can’t understand because everything is right. More right than it’s ever been. The first of the nights when the unreachable Madeleine he’d glimpsed that last weekend in the train carriage stares at him with that sorry look in her eyes that he will now see more and more of. Just as he will know more and more of the unreachable Madeleine.
Nine miles to the north, the weekday business of the suburb is concluded: the school is closed and dark until Monday; Lurch has returned to his home, his wife and daughters (something Michael is surprised to learn, for there is a touch of the eternal bachelor about him); with a flick of the switch Rita brings the full-moon lights in the garden to Friday-night life; and the sleek, black beast in Webster’s corner waits to be sparked into motion.
And here, at the front of the hospital, Madeleine has just driven away in the taxi that was meant for them both. The taxi that would take them to the city station, and then on to that jumble of rooms by the sea where her parents and sister lived and where she and Michael were to spend the weekend. But the bag he packed earlier in the afternoon is at his feet and this Friday is now going to be different from the one he imagined when he packed it.
Then he is conscious of it for the first time. Perfume. It does not suddenly overpower him, this scent. It is infinitely more subtle than that. It does not regale him, but gently taps him on the shoulder, saying (as it will whenever he smells it in the years to come when Madeleine is long gone from his life) remember me? He is oblivious of it one minute, and the next he is drawn to it to the extent that he is now oblivious to everything around him. He knows this perfume. Knows it now, and forever. And from the moment that he inhales it he sees once again the deep blue cashmere sweater she wore tonight, sees once again her neck and the simple gold cross suspended round it. He closes his eyes and breathes her in, Madeleine.
She is physically close again. Close enough for him to feel her warmth, and close enough for him to smell the faint trace of wine left on her lips from the six o’clock evening mass from which she came this evening before meeting Michael (and as he tries to imagine her in church, he can’t; he sees only a shadowy, kneeling figure, whispering in candlelight, another mystery again). Around him the world goes on, but, as he breathes deep on the scent, he feels it slipping from him, as if he were slipping irresistibly into a dream or a narcotic doze.
Suddenly Madeleine is there in front of him, looking down at the footpath, the taxi rank behind her, the Friday-night taxis lined up in the chilly evening air in front of the cream-brick hospital which is lit up in the night. She is shaking her head and telling him that everything is wrong as he hears his imitation leather bag fall at his feet and watches again as she walks to the taxi alone. Watches as she alone takes the taxi they’d both been waiting for, glances at him with that soon-to-be-familiar sorry look in her eyes that she will always be giving him, then slides into the back seat and is gone.
Now standing on the same spot, Madeleine gone, he’s wondering how it is that he can smell her perfume as if she were in front of him, and he concludes that because the air is so calm this invisible cloud of perfume has remained, hovering round him, and he is reluctant to leave because as long as he has the scent of her he still possesses some part of her. He still has her. But this scent stays and stays, and taxis come and go, and it seems that he’ll have to either give her up or be prepared to stand all night on the same spot, delirious, in the midst of a cloud that, to the rest of the passing street, isn’t there. For, anybody strolling by would simply see a young man staring up at the cross-hatched branches of the bare trees that line the street for an inordinate amount of time and for no apparent reason. Longer than the street would deem normal.
And just when it seems that he will have to stay all night, he lowers his head and the scent becomes even stronger. It is then that he lifts his woollen pullover to his nose and realises that the scent is there, that there is no cloud, that the perfume is on him and he carries it with him. He remembers now her face resting on his chest, pressed into his pullover, just before she told him that something wasn’t right tonight and that she’d rather spend it alone. Just before she’d told him how good he was to her and how rotten she was to him (when he knew he was never so good, and she was never so rotten), and just before she turned and took the taxi they had both waited for.
No longer captive to the invisible cloud of Madeleine, he is now free to move. He carries her with him. And so he picks his bag up and walks away, happy.
But in those years waiting for him, after Madeleine has gone, this perfume, whenever he smells it on the street or in shops or trams, will always be the scent of absence and will always work on his senses and his mind with all the power of a magic potion. If he knew what it was, even now, walking back from the taxi rank, he would buy it and have Madeleine in phial — to be drawn in and inhaled like some sweet narcotic at will. But, even as he plays with the thought, he knows he doesn’t want it. Knows that if he were to have his Madeleine in a phial by his bed, to be inhaled at will, that the sweet narcotic of instant remembrance would surely lose its potency, and like all such potions would eventually lose its power altogether. And Madeleine, the Madeleine that he now draws from his pullover into his lungs and arteries, would be forever lost to him.
23.
The Artist Meets With His Wall
For many years he has been one of those people who are only ever known by their surnames. Mulligan. He has other names but nobody ever uses them. Not Michael, nor Bunny Rabbit nor Pussy Cat. Mulligan — like Rembrandt — says it all. And so, on this overcast Friday morning, Mulligan gazes upon the wall with bright, hungry eyes. He has sought such a wall all his life. He has seen such walls during his travels and his studies in foreign countries, but they were never his. A wall such as this, he knows only too well, comes along once in a lifetime. It is high and wide and dominates the entire foyer of the town hall. Once done, he knows, his name will live as long as the wall itself and this wall looks like it’s not going anywhere in a hurry. It’s only just come into the world
.
Mulligan is in his early thirties, not old, but old enough to feel immortality slipping away from him. Besides, he has a pact with himself that if he doesn’t make his mark by the time he’s thirty-three he will give up and accept the slow suicide of the public service or teaching. Or, he just might hasten the whole process and do himself in altogether on the spot. Thirty-third birthday. He’s not sure. He has been at it — painting, that is — for most of his life and as he stares up at the vast expanse of wall before him he suspects that this is what the labour was all for. This is where the study and the sheer slog of learning his craft were leading all along. The wall was waiting for him. And there is an unmistakable sense of the twain converging, wall and man, meeting for the first time as they were always destined to. For this is his wall, and if it hasn’t got his name written all over it, it soon will.
He paces back and forth across the foyer, black beard shining, black hair flopping over his forehead, intense, glinting eyes that, at times such as these, bear a striking resemblance to a Rasputin who never quite found his patron — a resemblance that has been commented on before. He did, in fact, train to be a Catholic priest when he was too young to know any better, and the significance of choosing his thirty-third birthday as his year of reckoning has not escaped him. He continues pacing about, ignoring the committee members gathered about him, as he contemplates just what he will do with this gift of a wall, this wall that has come to him and was always meant to.
The committee, in turn, eyes him with a mixture of wariness and intrigue, not quite sure of what it is that they are letting into their midst, but the two priests recognise in this man the religious zeal that fired their youthful ambitions, and Mrs Webster recognises the look. She had seen it in Webster from the first, this will that seeks to impress itself on the world, and she sees it in this young painter, now gazing up in wonder at the wall.
When he is gone and they all confer, after viewing his folio, complete with photographs of his previous works, they all agree that there is indeed something curious about him but it wouldn’t be the first time a curious character got a council contract. Besides, that is artists. That is their way. They can be a funny bunch. But no funnier than others. Just as long as he can do the job, and the evidence is that he can.
24.
Paths That Cross and Uncross
That night Mulligan and the whole house (as they often do on Friday nights) drink in the pub opposite. It is a simple pub owned by an Italian family, and on most nights, towards closing time, the older Italian men at the bar, who drink little and talk a lot, sing like a heavenly choir and warm the pub and everybody inside. They have not yet begun to sing. Mulligan is loud, talkative and expansive. He has found his wall. Michael is silent. He has just lost his Madeleine (driven away alone in a taxi that was meant for two), the first of the many times that he will lose her before losing her altogether. Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit are restless at the end of the table at which they all sit.
Rita, vaguely aware of that Friday-night feeling out there in the streets and houses of the suburb, puts her feet up on the coffee table in the lounge room and sips wine while eyeing the empty rooms of the house and listening to the television. Mrs Webster, her chosen whisky in hand, stands at the drawing-room window dwelling on the corner of the gardens where Webster kept his one trifling infidelity, the keys to the newly installed resident in her dress pocket. Peter van Rijn, having stayed back late, shuts the door of his shop, while the lights of the Chinese take-away burn brightly and the evening bells of St Matthew’s roll softly over the dark streets of Centenary Suburb. Travelling south, on the last part of the long train journey down to where her parents and sister live by the sea, Madeleine sits in an empty carriage staring at her reflection in the window beside her, sad to acknowledge that she is happy being alone tonight, while, a thousand miles to the north of her, Vic sits in his usual chair in the Twin Towns Services Club and looks out through the wide windows of the club, onto the sprinkled stardust of the town’s lights, his hand wrapped round one of the evening’s many beers.
Lives cross and uncross, meet, merge or go singly through this Friday night. And those, like Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit, who sit restlessly beside each other, are, in some part of their wandering minds, preparing themselves for those Friday nights that will be spent separately. While those, like Michael and Madeleine, who crossed and parted on the one night, gaze from separate windows into the blackness and wonder just how many times there are left for their lives to cross and part before parting forever.
Everybody, looking forward or looking back, on this late-autumn Friday night, the last of the sodden leaves trampled into the footpaths outside, the low clouds of winter already settling in for the season. Everybody, either looking back to a not-so-distant time when the adventures of life were new and fresh enough to sustain storybook identities, or, like Madeleine, looking forward to when ‘real’ life can begin, or those like Mrs Webster and Rita, hovering over that blurred line that separates what was from what might be. Needing only the slightest of nudges to cross over. But not tonight. Tonight everybody takes a deep breath. It’s Friday evening. The harking back, the straining forward, can stop for a few hours and everybody can give themselves over to the bright face of television, lose themselves in the noise of crowded places or in chosen solitariness.
Mulligan floats over it all, buoyed by the day. Mulligan doesn’t need people. He doesn’t need the past or the future. Mulligan has his wall, and this wall of his isn’t going anywhere in a hurry. He calls to the table for more beers. And it is then that they start up, the older Italian men at the bar who drink little and talk a lot. One moment they are ordinary drinkers at a bar, changed out of their tradesmen’s overalls and dressed in their Friday best, and the next they are a heavenly choir and the whole pub lifts with their voices.
And all the time, the living suburb is constantly evolving, through night and day, weekend and working week, sunshine and rain, ever forward, ever onward, until that perfect day arrives, surely not too far away, when the straight line of History can lie down in its perfect summer gardens and pronounce its job done.
Part Three
Winter
25.
Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit Copulate, then Talk Afterwards
It begins slowly and quietly. A low moan, followed by ripples of laughter. But it is clearly the beginning of something. Of some secret ritual, inadvertently made public. Without knowing any more, without being told anything and without speaking, Michael and Madeleine (both sitting on Michael’s bed) know that this is the beginning of the thing. And soon they will hear the sound of two people at it.
It is late in the afternoon and clearly Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit think they have the house to themselves. Michael and Madeleine heard them tramping up the stairs, push open the door, then neglect to close it. And, even though Michael’s door is closed, the sound travels easily from one room to another when doors are left open. First there is the sound of heavy objects (shoes, possibly) hitting the floor, then the first of the low, quiet moans and both Michael and Madeleine know it is just starting.
And, although they have done nothing but be in Michael’s room at this particular hour (and not be noticed), they are now compromised. Two people have begun to copulate in the room opposite, while two people sit on a bed with no choice — seemingly — but to sit, listen and wait for an opportunity to leave discreetly. And Michael knows the noise will grow louder because he has heard them copulate before. That and because of the structure of the house itself. It is a Victorian terrace and upstairs there are three rooms: a large balcony room facing the street, which is Michael’s, another on the side of the stairs (in which Mulligan stores his paints and materials) and another facing the back yard. This last room is the room of Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit. Its door faces the stairwell, and when the house is quiet, as it is this afternoon (Mulligan is with his wall), the stairwell amplifies all the sounds that come from their room. With the door open, every
movement, every utterance, every moan, echoes and swells in the open air of the stairwell. And, along with these sounds, the distinctive scent of tobacco and hash flows into the house.
And although the moans and laughter begin quietly, they soon grow in intensity and volume. Michael and Madeleine are caught. They could, it is true, rise quickly and leave the house, whistling on the stairs and in the hallway to announce the nonchalance of their departure. Or Michael could simply close Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit’s door, confident they would scarcely notice or care. Or, they can simply wait for it all to be over. Without speaking, they choose the last of the options and prepare to sit it out. It is a decision that automatically compromises them, as though they have chosen to remain near, chosen to listen to these sounds that are growing louder and more insistent by the minute.
And soon it seems to be all around them, as though the two lovers are right there in front of Michael and Madeleine and not in the room opposite them. The grunts of effort and labour and the squeals of pleasure mingle and pour through the open doorway into the ears of Michael and Madeleine. And as much as they never wanted to be eavesdroppers, they are now. Each drawn irresistibly, if guiltily, to the sounds that tell them that a process older than words, older than laughter, is now taking place. And they can’t help but listen. Its elemental simplicity demands their attention, and so they sit in silence, an almost childlike fascination written on their faces while the mystery dance unfolds.
Michael is staring out the window, Madeleine at the floor. And although they try to avoid each other’s eyes, they can’t. And the look in Madeleine’s eyes (that mixture of the troubled and fascinated, in spite of everything) is surely mirrored in his. Had they been watching Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit going at it in their room, had they been sitting beside them observing the spectacle, it could not have been a more awkward matter. For that mixture of the troubled and fascinated has been made all the more intense for not having been witnessed but imagined. They both avert their eyes from each other, then find other things to look at in the room. And, as they do, there is a sudden collapse of sound, a sense of bodies flopping in the dying afternoon light, and of the thing being done.
The Time We Have Taken Page 11