As he leaves the high-rise grounds, he notes that the playground is deserted in the way that playgrounds that are rarely used are deserted.
And Bunny Rabbit? Bunny Rabbit will get over all this and eventually become what he was always destined to be. A lawyer. And a very good one. He is from a family of lawyers and his life will unroll before him like a carpet, and he will walk away from these aberrant days, from this landing upon which he is currently sitting with his head held in his hands, and meet that glittering horizon where he will find the prized life he was always destined for.
It will be a relatively easy stroll from here to there, from the poetic age of youth to the real-politik of the grown-up world. From time to time Michael will see his name in the papers, for he will achieve a kind of fame in the courts and in conservative politics. He will become especially well known for his courtroom taunts. And Michael will inevitably wonder — whenever he reads these reports in the papers — if he ever reflects on the days when he lived for other adventures. Indeed, whether he ever looks into himself and finds in the public figure some long-denied vestige of the days when he played Bunny Rabbit to his Pussy Cat. And then he will also wonder if those skills — that gift for a telling courtroom jibe that now brings him newspaper fame — were the same skills that he honed in the room opposite Michael’s and which killed his innocence.
His Pussy Cat was carried from the room earlier in the day. There was already a sheet over her when he’d arrived, after having been called to the house. He never looked into her dead eyes, for he couldn’t bring himself to. But if he had, he might possibly have seen, written into them, the final realisation that, as much as she might have longed to, she couldn’t save him and preserve him as Bunny Rabbit forever, because he was already out of reach and that was why, in the end, she stopped sobbing.
40.
Confessional
The afternoon sun, higher in the sky this time of year, slants through the double door of the garage, catching the cobwebs, the peeling paint on the walls and freshly cut flowers in a basket on the workbench. The day is sharp and tangy, and mingles with the smell of grease and oils, ancient and new. Mrs Webster pulls the old tarpaulin back and drops it on the smoothed brick floor. Rita has never cared for cars. Neither did Vic, or Michael. None of them did. Cars were no more a topic of conversation than a washing machine or a lawnmower. They all had functions, to clean or to cut. And the motor car’s function was to carry you from one place to another, and, beyond that, there was nothing more to say. But this thing before her now, which seems to be crouching half asleep, ready to spring at any moment, is more than simply a vehicle that transports its cargo from one place to another. It is almost as though the fact of the car is not important; it is what it brings. It brings the possibility of speed. It brings the possibility of accelerating into life or into death, of going somewhere, and never quite coming back. Neither woman speaks. The sun continues to catch the cobwebs and peeling walls of the garage, the car remains crouching, half asleep, ready to spring into life.
What moved Mrs Webster to invite this woman into the garage? She had been standing in the gardens picking the first of the spring flowers when Rita appeared. Had she forgotten Rita was coming, or assumed she had more time? Whatever, she had been caught off-guard. They exchanged greetings and as they did Rita eyed the garage in the distance, just over Mrs Webster’s shoulder. She had neither asked about the building nor spoken of it. But curiosity was in her eyes and Mrs Webster — dreamily, the basket of flowers in her arms — read the question there and turned to face the garage with her. What the hell, she’s already seen the thing!
‘Let’s walk,’ she said, and, without knowing why, directed Rita along the path that led to the green, wooden shed in the corner of the estate. Why? She would contemplate this later that night, but perhaps the time had come to share what she’d found with someone who would understand — and perhaps Rita was that someone. Perhaps, and the practically minded part of Mrs Webster scoffed at the idea, perhaps there was harmony in the person, the place and the time. And, without questioning the impulse (one that sprang from being caught off-guard), she had decided on sharing her experience with this woman who might yet be a friend of sorts. Decided that she could not or would not lie to this woman again as she did when Rita had, quite candidly, asked what he, Webster the factory, was really like.
So, when they reached the garage, Mrs Webster opened the doors on to the private world they hid and led Rita in, placing her flowers on the workbench and pulling the tarpaulin back in one swift, smooth movement.
‘At first you ask yourself what on earth you’re doing out there on the highway.’ She laughs. ‘Highway, they call it! Nobody else about. Just you. And the dark. Oh so dark. You really wonder if you haven’t slowly gone round the twist, after all, only you haven’t noticed. And then you think, I don’t have to. If I just turn around and quietly slip back, none of this will have happened and I won’t really be mad. No one saw me go, and no one sees me come back. I’m the only witness and I’m not telling. But then you think, I’m here. I’m not going back now only to lie in bed all night wondering what it might have been like.’
It is only a few minutes since they entered the garage and Mrs Webster can’t even remember when she began talking. She pauses now, eyeing the freshly cut flowers in the basket as if wondering who on earth left them there. It’s a long pause and Rita thinks she’s finished. But when Mrs Webster starts talking again, it’s as though there has been no break in the conversation at all.
‘You can’t imagine the kind of speed you can find out there. Everything beside you is a blur, but if you look straight ahead you could swear you’re standing still. And so you press down on the pedal even more because, whatever you’re doing, it’s not enough. And the faster you go, the more you press the pedal down. And you keep at it and at it until you could swear your whole body is about to just blow away — and you’re left with just your mind. No body. And as much as you’re convinced you’re barely moving at all, you’re really about to take off to the moon. And the moon’s just out there, over the next field. Not so far away. Not really.’
She stops and in the silence that follows Rita can almost hear the car humming in the afterglow of the tale. The garage is still, neither of the women speak. Mrs Webster is talking the way people talk in books again, only this time Rita doesn’t mind. This must be her way, she concludes.
Outside, the doors closed and the basket of flowers once again through her arm, Mrs Webster gazes about the estate, the trees and flowering foliage ignited by the spring sun.
‘I’m in no rush to die,’ she says, ‘but it’s like driving to the point where you almost could, then coming back. I can see how you could get to like that feeling, how you might even come to need it or get to the point where you don’t really care if you come back or not.’
Here she casts a knowing glance at Rita, and Rita knows she’s not talking about herself any more. And it’s at a moment like this that Rita could tell her about the box that fell from the bookshelf in the Games Room, the business diary and the funny poem inside. For, although she’d concluded then that Mrs Webster wouldn’t want to know, Rita’s not so sure now.
Then the moment is lost. Mrs Webster points Rita back along the same path in the direction of the house, Rita wondering, if, apart from her afternoon greeting, she’s since opened her mouth. At the house, Mrs Webster slips behind the wheel of the old Bentley and nods briefly before departing along the wide gravel drive out into the suburb. Rita turns and walks into the house to start the cleaning. Through the rest of the day (after Pussy Cat has been taken from her room, and Michael has encountered the disbelieving figure of Bunny Rabbit on the stairs), it is the look on Mrs Webster’s face that stays with her: the almost ecstatic glow, the flush of someone looking about at the world from a great height, the look of someone who has been somewhere and never wholly come back.
The sun is dropping through the trees of the estate as Rita leaves.
She has never been good at making friends, nor, she suspects, has Mrs Webster, which explains why she is still Mrs Webster, her employer, and not Val, her friend. For all her confidence, her position, her money, she doesn’t seem to have friends nor does she talk of any. And, perhaps, this is what she sees in Rita, a woman — like herself — without friends. Precisely the kind of woman to whom she can talk. One who will not tell others because there is no one to tell. And Mrs Webster — who had to tell someone because the momentousness of what she had experienced demanded telling (there had now been a number of midnight drives) — had found her perfect listener. The perfect ears into which she could pour her confession. But, even this, Rita notes (as she turns into the wide street the estate fronts, and which will soon become Progress Avenue), is something to value. At the bottom of confidences such as the one Rita has just heard is the kind of trust that friends have for each other; the trust that she won’t blab, and not just because she has no one to blab to, but because she is not the blabbing type. The thing Mrs Webster had experienced demanded to be told. For (like Webster himself, who told no one) she could see how you might become so entranced by the feeling of going away that one day — like Webster — you might not come back at all. Was this her fear? And did she look about for someone to share her fear with in order to release it?
This woman may or may not be a friend. She may, after a lifetime of not really having friends (of having lived the public life with public company for friends), be past the idea of friendship. But, all the same, they might still be a help to each other. Company. And this just might be a kind of friendship; the kind that cautious people allow themselves, without naming it so.
And if this is true, then she is more than happy to help Mrs Webster. To be a discreet ear. And not to blab. To be the kind of person upon whom the compliment of trust is bestowed. And, at the same time (as she rounds the corner into her street), it also occurs to her that Mrs Webster, having already found trust in Rita’s taste for colour and material, found the next step no great matter.
That faintly rhapsodic glow on Mrs Webster’s face as she spoke still preoccupies her, even haunts her, and Rita is left wondering just what it’s like to feel as though you could almost take off, and to feel that the cool, distant sphere of the moon isn’t so distant after all. And, as the weeks pass, this casual speculation will occupy her thoughts more and more and become a longing. An impatient one. And, as the ratty, spring winds pick up, this impatience will eventually demand to be spoken.
That same afternoon, Mrs Webster sits in her office overlooking the irrelevant industry taking place out there on the factory floor. Production is going on all around her, but, at the centre of it all, she sits unmoved. What on earth possessed her? She was, it now seems looking back on it, not so much talking as thinking out loud. And to a stranger. Well, more or less. She is not the sort of woman given to thinking out loud, only ever to Webster (and now she wonders if he was ever listening anyway), but this morning she did. Yet, somehow, she knew that the need to speak and the time to speak had come together. The moment was right, and she had no regrets.
Far from it, for as she had closed the doors of the garage that morning she had also realised that she felt no desire to open them again. She’d found what she wanted. She’d been to that place where Webster went — to which he had gone and never wholly come back, until eventually he had never come back at all. Now she knows. She’s been there.
Her eyes pass over the factory floor below. What was once a brute was now a decaying beast, dribbling its way into extinction, the unmistakable reek of death all around. The natural death she’d always anticipated could take years, and she didn’t have years to throw around. The time had come — and had she just reached this conclusion? — the time had come to put the thing down. To silence the noise Webster had brought to the suburb all those years ago when the suburb was being born and the world, like the endless paddocks of thistle, was wide.
Oblivious of the still, silent figure in the chair, the activities on the factory floor continue as they always have: giant machines, dreadnoughts of a bygone industrial age, pressing scrap metal into parts, parts, parts. To become a whole object that, sooner more than later, will break, fall apart and become scrap metal all over again.
41.
An Unmarked Grave
Somewhere out there in the thistle country, just beyond the trestle bridge that spans the wide, ancient river valley, you’ll find the old cemetery of the suburb. The one that did the job until the suburb grew and another one was needed. A thousand miles to the north, while Rita is contemplating the puzzle of Mrs Webster’s confession, and not long after Mrs Webster quietly, almost casually decided to put the beast of Webster’s Engineering down, Vic looks out of his kitchen window at the top of the hill. The lights of the town are popping on, the curve of the main road leading down into the town centre is illuminated, and the neons of the Twin Towns Services Club are already glowing in the twilight.
But Vic doesn’t see the town. His eyes pass over the glitter of the Services Club and his gaze is fixed on the thistle country somewhere out there where the cemetery, its headstones at various angles, lies spread out under the same darkness that falls upon the town. Memory, a memory never so keen as it has been lately, takes him there. Trust it, says Vic, it will take you there. Walk through the old rusty gate, which is rusted beyond closing, noting the rows upon ragged rows of the dead, and continue walking, slowly and respectfully, until, eventually, you come to a bare open grassy section of this cemetery that sits on a low hill that gives the visitor a good view of the trains crossing the trestle bridge. The ground is uneven here. There are low mounds, some barely noticeable, others less worn down by the effects of wind and rain. These are the paupers’ graves, unmarked, and barely recognisable as graves at all.
This is where they brought her, Mary Anne, to an unmarked grave in the thistle country at the edge of the suburb. Mary Anne, Ma, Mama, who kept her boy when everybody told her to farm him out, and whose voice now drifts on the wind towards him from the low, unmarked mound where her bones lie. Vic always meant to put up a gravestone, but marble doesn’t come cheap and, somehow, the money just never turned up. And, as if she were noting the inconvenience of an old wood stove and no electric lights (as it was in that last house of hers in the country where she went to be near her boy, when Vic and Rita had fled the city drunks who called themselves mates to that broken town where even the river was called ‘broken’), as if, indeed, it was a minor annoyance and hardly a matter of life and death, these bones of hers tell Vic that she can get by quite nicely without a gravestone. She knows where she is and she’s not going anywhere. And if anybody walks over her grave, well, that’s their look-out. There are more important things about dying than gravestones. And if strangers don’t know where to find her, what does it matter? So don’t go worrying yourself about gravestones and flowers; these bones that your mama once stood up in, and carried you in, and cradled you in, are well satisfied that they did their job when the job needed doing. And who cares for the stories that epitaphs tell? You and I know our story, and, if our story dies with us, so be it. And even when both us, you and I, have left them all to it, and there is no one left to remember it or tell it, our story will still be there, will still have happened, won’t it? Because it did. It’s a fact, and always will be. That we took them on, you and I, and came through and did what they all told us we couldn’t do. And that’s all that matters, not gravestones and flowers. The fact that we were us, and stayed us. These bones are well satisfied that they did their job when the job needed doing.
As the sub-tropical darkness flows in over the town, engulfing it in balmy, playful night, Vic leaves the thistle country and the bumpy, uneven ground of the paupers’ section of the graveyard through the same old rusted gate he came in by, contemplating the club and the routine of his day that will soon take him to the glitter of clubland.
And it could just as easily be summer or winter, for this time of th
e day will always find him seated here in his kitchen. All days are the same day, and this will always be the hour that takes him back to the thistle country somewhere out there on the edge of the old suburb, where trains moan in the night and the bones of his mother sing to her boy over the paddocks of scotch thistle and over the years.
42.
The Farewell Party
There are no lights on in her house and he does not ring the bell. It is early in the evening. She will not be asleep. She will not be there. It is mid-week, the night of her farewell from work. Michael was invited, but he was invited in such a way that suggested it was more of a courtesy than a genuine invitation. It was a work farewell. He wouldn’t know anybody. He wouldn’t like it. He’d feel left out. These were the unspoken sentiments that came with the courtesy of an invitation. And because he agreed that he would feel left out, he had said no. But at some stage during the afternoon the no became a yes, and here he is.
With the house dark and everybody gone, he really ought to walk home and give it away. The evening would go on as it ought to, without him. But he scans the surrounding streets near the hospital, calculating where she might be, for the area containing the university and hospital is small. Somewhere out there, in that modest square of land they have shared for the last year, she and those with whom she works will be raising their glasses in celebration of her grand adventure. They’ll be all cheers and smiles and jokes. Even those who never got on with her, for one reason or another. And Madeleine will have the eyes, the shining, bright eyes, of someone setting out on a journey. And perhaps that’s why she doesn’t want him there, because she doesn’t want him to see those eyes. Because it would be in poor taste for her eyes to shine and her whole being to glow at the prospect of leaving, for this whole business of setting out implies an exciting, new beginning, and an ending. And, with every ending, some sadsack with that left-behind look written all over his face. And that’s not the sort of face you want hanging about at a farewell when everybody’s all cheers and smiles. He leaves her house, its windows black, and walks down towards the hospital and two small pubs he knows that she and her work friends go to, from time to time, for these sorts of farewell events.
The Time We Have Taken Page 19