He also knows as he looks to the ground that his bones won’t take the fall. He’s sixty-four and his body is no longer capable of enduring a tumble like that, however happily he might land. In his own mind he can already see and hear his old bones shattering on impact with the ground like fallen glass. And there are the passengers on the Spirit, currently dozing in the night or sipping warm tea from their thermoses, oblivious of the situation. If a collision takes place at this speed people will die, he is certain of that. As his foot lands back on the cabin floor he knows what he must do. He knows that if he jumps now, and somehow lives, and if people die because nobody tried to stop the thing happening, he knows that the whole of his driving life will have been for nothing. All of this takes no more than a few seconds.
It is then that he turns round to the fireman. You jump, he can hear his voice calling out to the fireman, but calling from far away. I think I can make it, this voice is calling. And as soon as he utters those words, as soon as he calls them out into the speeding summer air, as soon as he hears his own voice calling from far away as if he were already a spectator to his own actions, as soon as he hears and notes all this, he knows he is about to die.
The fireman jumps. The driver is alone. Perhaps five or six seconds have elapsed since they first saw the Spirit. He knows what he must do. He rushes back into the cabin and immediately adjusts the speed. And, instantly, he feels the engine respond. He has faith in this engine and he is backing that faith now. As he stands at the window, staring straight at the approaching headlights and frantically calculating the distance between the Spirit and the loop, he is backing this engine to beat death. Diesel and steam. Steam and diesel. It’s come to this.
44.
Bloody Michelangelo
Rita is well ahead of Vic, Michael is still on the other side of the street keeping his distance. The sky is black and the comet is a ball of flaming light in the sky. It’s the first thing she sees when she finally turns, and she stands staring at it in the dirt street, with her cheeks still burning and her eyes still stinging. She knows she’s as bright with the desire to live as that comet. It’s big, and bold, and reckless, and she’d rather blaze across the sky for one summer only, than spend a lifetime of summers trailing after a drunken Vic and slowly dying. She runs her fingers down the soft, black material of her dress. She’ll wear this dress again. But not in this backwater of a street where it’s a crime to want to look good and everybody looks at you sideways if you try.
It’s then she lowers her eyes to Vic plodding up the street, one of the tailor-made, cork-tipped cigarettes that he keeps for social outings in his mouth, and she rehearses what she’ll tell him.
I’ve had you Vic. I’ve had enough. In fact, I’d had enough years ago. I just stuck around hoping things would get better, but they only got worse. So you can do what you like from now on. You can stuff your own life up all you like because I’m going. And why not? Everything has gone. The love, yes remember that? Well it’s gone. You wore me down, Vic. And I never thought I’d live to say it, but it’s gone. It’s really gone.
But there’s no point telling you now. You’re too drunk to take it in. And even if you do, you won’t remember in the morning anyway. I’ll wait till you’ve slept it off. Till you’re sitting down in the kitchen like you always do, staring down into your teacup with that bloody spoon going round and round. Then, I’ll tell you. Vic, I’ll say. Why couldn’t you see it coming? Why? Because I’ve had enough for years now. I’ve had enough of spending my life trailing after some drunken bloody fool who imagines he’s the bloody Michelangelo of engine driving. I’ve had it up to here. They’re just bloody engines Vic. They’re just bloody trains. And it’s just a bloody job. But the whole thing, it all means more to you than I do, doesn’t it Vic? It must. And that’s why I’m going. That and the grog and the stupid bloody things you do just when we could have a good night. I’ll tell you all that in the morning, Vic. But not before. I’d be wasting my breath.
Tonight there is nothing left to say and she turns away from Vic, away from the long, swaying grass of the paddock they’d all stood staring into only a few hours before, and she walks back towards the golf-course end of the street, the white gums growing bolder with every step.
45.
The Last Dance
From the gusts of laughter and the occasional clatter of applause, Jimmy can tell that the speeches have begun. Even from the car. And after an hour and a half of chain-smoking and listening to the radio, he has at last decided upon his moment. When the speeches are concluded and the applause has ceased, he will join the party, having specially selected from the stack of forty-fives beside him the record he will place on the hi-fi he sold to Patsy Bedser the previous autumn.
But for the moment he lights another cigarette and turns the radio up while the speeches continue. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, while he looks around at the flat, square houses that are gradually beginning to fill the vacant spaces left over from the old farms. Music, like that which leaps from his car radio and from the hi-fi’s of the shops. Music like that, once in a lifetime music, doesn’t come from suburbs like these. Nothing comes from places like these. You must follow the music. You must follow it back into the speakers from which it comes. You must crawl back into the speakers, along the cables and wires along which it runs, to the hi-fi itself, to the arm and the needle, and spin with it all until the record finishes and the needle takes you back into the hole at its very centre, then you must disappear down that hole, like Alice, until you finally reach the source of it all. And once you are there, you will have arrived at the only place on earth that matters, because nothing matters more to Jimmy than the music that daily leaps into his life from the radio of his car and the hi-fi’s of the shops that he visits. This music is calling him, and he is determined to follow it all the way back to its source. And when he is there he will be at the centre of things, at the centre of this sound. For, at the moment, he knows he is sitting at the extreme edge of it.
Light applause and cheers issue from the open windows of Patsy Bedser’s house. Soft music begins and Jimmy knows that the speeches are over. He takes the record he has chosen from the top of the stack beside him, pushes the car door open, and steps out onto the dirt footpath. The car door creates a faint thud in the night as Jimmy closes it. He drops his cigarette on the footpath and begins the short walk to Patsy Bedser’s front door.
At first nobody notices him. Or nobody cares. He’s just walked in through the front door and he’s standing in the lounge room with the record in his hand. He looks around the room, eyeing the faces for Patsy and noticing that he is beginning to attract a bit of attention because the guests are all realising that individually and collectively nobody seems to know who the young man is. He is, the relay of shrugging shoulders suggests, a stranger. But, of course, nobody is a stranger. And those of the party who are not dancing or deep in conversation, continue to stare at the young man either expecting him to explain himself or expecting the riddle of his presence in George Bedser’s lounge room to be solved any second. And it is.
Patsy, he suddenly says. She’s holding a tray of sliced cake and offering it to somebody in the corner of the room when she hears her name called. When she turns the first thing he notices is that her dress is all wrong. It makes her look like she’s already been married a lifetime. Like she was always married. And all she can say when she turns and sees him is oh. And then, you? They’ve only spoken three words between them, but they’ve got the whole room in. Including George Bedser and the young man Patsy’s just got herself engaged to.
Jimmy holds the record out to her. It’s a present, he says. Congratulations. I hope I’m not intruding, he adds. But I was in the area and it seemed wrong not to congratulate you on such a special day. He’s still holding out the record but Patsy Bedser hasn’t accepted it because she’s still staring at Jimmy like she’s stumbled into a dream. And it’s not hers. Take it, he says. It’s an import. A first
pressing. In fifty years it’ll be a collector’s item. Believe me.
And she does, because Jimmy knows his music. In the silence that follows, because the record on the hi-fi has just finished, she suddenly suggests they put it on. And when the music starts it is unlike anything that has been on the hi-fi that evening. It is a disturbance and the music confirms the unspoken suspicions of everybody in the room that this young man is trouble. And, aware that the whole room is watching, desperate to say something, to do anything but stand there and talk with the whole room straining forward to listen as this song pours out from the speakers into the room and then through the open windows and over the dark, swaying paddocks of the suburb, she suddenly curtsies before him as if inviting him to waltz, to dance. And then, suddenly, they are dancing.
That’s when the room clears, creating a large space for the two of them in the centre of the lounge. Within seconds, Patsy and Jimmy are dancing like two well-rehearsed professionals. Like two people who are used to dancing with each other. This doesn’t escape the party. Nor does it escape George Bedser who is now looking at the floor, wondering who on earth this young man is while knowing all along that he is trouble because he knows his type. He knows them already. He’s seen them before. These slick, smooth poetic types that have no guarantee in them, like the shoddy goods they sell. And the more the music imposes itself on the party, seeming to render them all either obsolete or at the hour of their death, the more George Bedser wants to smash it.
But the dance continues and neither Bedser nor the puzzled young man who is her fiancé, can believe that the young woman dancing in the middle of the floor is their Patsy. And, of course, it isn’t. It’s another Patsy altogether, but they’ve only just discovered that.
And then, after a seemingly eternal two and a half minutes that bring with it a change so fundamental that the mood of the party is irrevocably altered, the music finally finishes and the dancing ends.
On the front porch a few moments later, Jimmy explains to Patsy that he’s leaving the country. Her mind still turning round in circles as if she were still dancing, she asks where. And when he says Nashville she asks him again, convinced that she couldn’t have heard right. But she did. He’s going to Nashville because that’s where the music comes from, and he wants to follow the music. He’s tired of standing in hi-fi stores, listening to the most important thing that has ever happened in his life, from this impossible distance. He wants to climb into those speakers and follow the sound back along a pathway of connecting wires and leads, for as long as it takes, until he finally arrives at the source of it all. And that’s why he’s going to Nashville. He’s no singer, he knows that. No performer. But, one day, perhaps, he just might be able to make those records whose music leaps out at him through the speakers of the hi-fi’s he sells.
Then he’s gone, with a wave and a kiss for luck blown through the air, his long legs crossing the street in easy strides, those cowboy lopes that she knows so well and is watching, she knows, for the last time. And as Jimmy’s car passes, he waves again from the open window.
Broken-hearted melody …
She might have no desire to follow Jimmy, but she also knows now that she has no desire to return to the party. The soft, romantic music now playing on the hi-fi that Jimmy sold her is not her music, and the Patsy Bedser who, ten minutes before, was handing out slices of engagement cake to the guests, is now alien to her. And always was.
And so she sits, vaguely aware of the talk of her neighbours near her on the front lawn, and searches for the words she knows she will have to find.
46.
The Invitation
The first thing she does when she walks in the door is switch on the front porch light. It’s an invitation.
The house is quiet the way an empty house is quiet and Evie takes a bottle of beer from the fridge and walks to the lounge room at the front of the house. There she switches the light on and sits with the venetians up so that the room is visible to the street. She knows that Rita must pass the house on the way back to hers, and so the house is open.
Her husband will be back in three days. He will stay for a week before he leaves again on another interstate trip. Normally, the empty quiet sound of the house doesn’t bother her, but after the noise and music and confusion of the party it does.
Ten minutes before she was dancing with Vic, and as she leans her head back against the armchair she wishes it was one dance she’d never had. It was a foolhardy, stupid bloody thing, and God only knows how it happened. A bit too much grog, a bit too much time spent in an empty house. Who knows? But suddenly they weren’t just dancing. And she wishes, more than anything, that she could have those ten minutes back again. And she would tell Rita all this. That it was a stupid thing, a stupid bloody little thing. But she can’t have those few minutes back. They’re gone. And she can now only tell Rita what she couldn’t at the time. That it was just a nip. Just a peck. Does it need to matter all that much? But she knows it will. And as she sits contemplating all this she sees the figure of Rita step into view on the other side of the street.
But Rita doesn’t turn. She acknowledges neither the house, the porch and lounge room of which are lit up and open to the street, nor does she acknowledge her friend, visible to her, sitting in her armchair and waiting for her to cross the street and join her so that she can explain it all. Rita turns her head away and walks the entire length of Evie’s block facing the other side of the street as if the house and all its lights didn’t exist.
And so Evie watches the only friend she’s got in the street walk by. She lifts her beer, noting as she does, that there are two glasses on the tray beside her. Two glasses, like there always are, when Rita comes by on hot nights and they talk.
A few moments later Michael passes, staring down at his feet like he too has been forbidden to look upon the house of his mother’s friend. Then Vic. And for a moment Evie could almost laugh. Ten minutes ago he was the smoothest, the most elegant of dancers on the floor at George Bedser’s house, now he is a rubber man, swaying from one side of the dirt footpath to the other as he plods on by.
When they’ve all passed she switches off the porch light and sits back in the lounge room with only the dull glow of the reading lamp. She could write a note, she could post a letter, but she knows it wouldn’t make any difference.
Outside, in the street, she can hear the scattered sounds of families making their way back from the party. There are calls of good night, farewell and goodbye, the sounds of occasional laughter, the tooting of car horns, a line from a song, a whistled tune left lingering in the night air. All along the street she can hear the sounds of the party breaking up. But inside, the house is quiet, the way an empty house is quiet.
47.
The View from the Schoolyard Pines
They began the night, the three of them, walking down the street together. Now they are scattered on separate sides of the road, the sounds of the party becoming more and more faint. Michael sees his mother ahead, his father following, back near Bedser’s. But they are shadowy figures in the dimly lit street.
It’s always like this. They’re always leaving somewhere suddenly; a weekend visit to a country town, a railway picnic, a quiet drink at friends. Something always goes wrong and they’re suddenly leaving, putting their coats on, grabbing their bags. Like tonight.
At the beginning of the night everything was as it should be. They were walking to the party together, like all the other families, and Michael was aware as they walked along the street that all nights should be like this. But they never are. Something always goes wrong and they wind up out in the street feeling their way back home in the dark.
Michael doesn’t know what happened, what it was that caused them all to suddenly leave, but because his mother had deliberately looked the other way when she passed the lighted house of her friend, he concludes that he too should ignore the woman, and he senses that somewhere inside that house is to be found the cause of their sudden
departure. So when he passes the house he looks down to the footpath, as if to look up, and nod or wave to the woman, like he would on any other night, would now be an act of betrayal. So he looks down until he is sure he has passed her house. When he does he checks behind him and sees the white-shirted figure of his father labouring home up the slight incline near the Bedsers’.
The night is over. And all the expectation they took with them at the beginning of the evening, as they walked along the street while the sky was still light with a golden peach glow, has come to this. All around him, the far-off sounds of the guests leaving, the bicycles left out on the lawns, a paper party hat dropped on the dirt footpath. All about him, everything has the look that things have when something is over. What they were at the beginning of the evening, what they had all looked forward to in their own private ways, has now become the past. And all the things that could have happened, all those things the night could have produced, all the possibilities it contained, have come to this.
Soon they will enter the house, one at a time. And when they do it will be filled with the familiar silence that comes to a house when nobody’s talking. For a few moments, as they walked along the street earlier that evening, as they paused by the long grass of the vacant paddocks, the night seemed to contain the promise that things would be different. But it was never going to be different. Michael knows that. It was always going to end like this.
The Art of the Engine Driver Page 16