Currawalli Street

by Christopher Morgan

  Number six is the home of Norm Norman. He is the owner of Bruiser the dog, the unofficial guardian of the street. Norm appears to have always been old; he looks the same as he did when Jim was a toddler learning to walk. Jim can think of no other way to describe him; Norm is a nice man. As a word, nice has lost the effect it used to have; now it’s another way of saying ineffectual, or neutral, or even dull. But Norm is nice in the traditional way, generous with what he has, trustworthy, and he doesn’t ever take sides. Jim has always liked Norm. Everybody has always liked Norm. People are viewed with suspicion if they say they don’t like him much.

  But now the house looks faded, as if no one lives there anymore.

  Number four belongs to the Alberto family. Old Joe Alberto died when Jim was thirteen. His daughter, Rosa, now lives in the house with her own husband and two children and Old Joe’s widow Gina. Old Joe was such a strong presence. It still feels as if he is standing at the front gate.

  Lower Lance lives alone at number two. He doesn’t talk to many people. He is a quiet man. Not rude like his father was. When Edward ruled this house, people crossed the street rather than walk past it. When he eventually had a heart attack on his front lawn and died, people in the street were secretly relieved.

  Jim, without conscious thought, speeds up as he walks past. Most people do.

  As he rounds the corner, Jim can see the bustle of the shops up ahead. He walks into the grocery store still undecided and begins a circuit, looking for inspiration. It comes quickly: steak, egg and mashed potato. While he waits at the cash register, the young woman from number nine comes in, her head down, searching in her bag. She walks straight into an exiting woman who lives in Borneo Street. They both apologise and laugh. The sound fills up the front of the shop like little bells tinkling. For a moment it makes everybody smile.

  The afternoon traffic is building up as Jim walks home. He has to wait to cross at Little Road. Halfway across the road, the shopping bag hits the back of his knee. It is only a tiny knock on an unprotected part of his body that he wasn’t previously aware of. He shakes his head in resignation and turns into Currawalli Street; while he is walking towards the honeysuckle, he watches a funeral procession leave the church and drive towards him. The pain in the back of his knee from the grocery bag begins to resonate up his thigh. At the front gate of number ten, he looks at the house with new eyes. He imagines that he is seeing it the same way that his father had each day when he came home from work. I think I will paint it a different colour, he says to himself. Halfway up the front path, he suddenly remembers his father coming in the front door and calling to his wife: ‘What about green?’ or ‘What about yellow?’

  The house had never been painted. But now Jim can understand the reason for the sudden inspiration and why it didn’t last for very long. Once his father closed the front door behind him, there was a house full of more important things to deal with. Besides, he had never liked the smell of paint. His childhood bedroom, the one that had become Jim’s, always smelled of oil paint and turpentine no matter what his mother did to make it go away.

  He walks down the hallway to the kitchen. He has seen a movement out of the corner of his right eye but there is nothing there. He touches the telephone while he is looking around. It rings. He jumps.

  ‘You all settled?’

  ‘Getting there.’ He doesn’t recognise the voice. A girl. He needs to hear more, so he asks, ‘How are you?’

  ‘Alright, I suppose. It’s nice of you to ask.’

  There is only one person this could be. Jim stiffens. ‘You’ve got a cold, Jenny?’

  ‘Yes I have. For two weeks. It won’t go away.’

  ‘What are you ringing me for?’ Jim asks brusquely.

  ‘I don’t know. I know you’ve come home from the war and you’re staying at your old house in Currawalli Street. I guess I want to let you know that I still think of you. Not in a girlfriend way. Just in a . . . connected way.’

  ‘I thought you severed that connection before I left?’

  ‘Sometimes it seems severed. Sometimes it seems pretty solid. I suppose this is one of those solid times.’ Her voice begins to falter.

  Jim notices that he is pulling his stomach muscles tight. He has a memory of this somewhere in his mind. He asks, ‘How did you know I was back?’

  ‘My mum was told by Lukewarm’s mum. I thought I should ring.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I wanted to hear your voice. I wanted to know if it still did anything to me.’

  His stomach muscles remain tight. He remembers now what this reminds him of. Forcing himself back to the conversation, he asks, ‘Oh. Does it?’

  ‘I can’t tell. I knew the phone number off by heart though.’ She tries to say it lightly.

  ‘That’s something.’

  ‘Did you think about me over there?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘But some?’

  ‘A little. Jenny, is this all you rang me for?’ Jim asks coldly.

  ‘Yep. That’s it. Doesn’t seem like a good idea now. I wish I had rung someone else instead.’

  Jim knows that she is about to burst into tears. That knowledge, and many other things, makes him say, ‘I wish you had too.’

  She hangs up. Jim scratches his chin as he thinks about the phone conversation and the memory that had come to him. In a tent one night by the light of a hurricane lamp, he listened to a classified operations soldier tell him and a few of his comrades that men expecting they are about to be tortured tighten their stomach muscles in such a pronounced way that before beginning any interrogation, torturers will amuse themselves by having the men take off their shirts. Jim was struck at the time by how the shadows climbing on the soldier’s face made him look suddenly sinister, as did the delight he took in recounting the information.

  Jenny once had a special place in his life. When he was someone else. She was his girlfriend. She left him because he had been conscripted into the army: being the girlfriend of a soldier was as uncool as you could possibly get. Jenny didn’t want to be uncool. She dropped him. He put on his uniform with a broken heart. He eventually found out that he was not alone; many of the young men in his outfit had been dumped before they left Australia for Vietnam and some even after they arrived in that strange, dangerous, beautiful place. It was a cruel thing, being a soldier.

  The truth is he forgot her pretty quickly over there and only thought seriously about her once, in Mai’s room, when the afternoon sun ran across a torn newspaper on the floor, highlighting a photograph of a girl whose hair ran down onto her shoulders like Jenny’s did.

  By the time the steak is in the vertical grill that he found at the back of a cupboard, overlooked by the cleaners, Jim’s equilibrium has returned. He is surprised to learn that Jenny’s voice is still in his head; surprised that, after the things he has seen, she can still have any effect on him at all.

  He turns and sits down on a chair. His Saigon radio is sitting on the table. He turns it on, listens for a moment and then turns it off.

  Advertisements are starting to hurt his head.

  Just as he is finishing his meal there is a loud knock at the door. He walks down the hallway to open it.

  Patrick is standing on the porch. ‘Welcome home, Jim. Here’s a present. It’s a book.’

  Jim looks down at the wrapped gift in Patrick’s hand. He invites Patrick in. The book is thrust into his hands as Patrick crosses the threshold.

  ‘The kitchen in the same place?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ Jim looks across the road and sees Mary standing inside her screen door, watching. The veranda light is on. Jim can see the moths circling it. She waves. Jim waves back and looks up at the sky as he closes the front door. It is dark but he has known darker. It looks like rain. He is about to say this to Patrick but by
the time they reach the kitchen it has begun to fall. For a few moments, the drops are small and gentle but then, as the noise on the corrugated-tin roof grows louder, the rain becomes a summer torrent. Enough to stop conversation. Patrick and Jim sit contentedly together and watch the rain through the window. After about two minutes, Jim holds up the teapot and Patrick nods his head. They conduct their first over-the-kitchen-table conversation in silence. The rain thunders down for twenty-five minutes. It is so loud that neither of them would have heard the phone if it rang. When the rain stops it does so just as suddenly as it began. Jim’s ears are distantly ringing in the sudden silence. Patrick puts both hands onto the table and hoists himself up. He is leaving.

  ‘Do you think it will rain?’ he asks dryly.

  ‘No, I don’t reckon,’ Jim answers in a similar tone.

  ‘Oh well. I’d better water the roses.’

  It’s an old joke that Patrick used to say to Jim’s dad. It still works well as an end to a conversation. Together they walk down the hallway, then Patrick turns at the door.

  ‘I have walked down this hall many times. And not once have I had cause to say goodbye. I was here the night before . . . just for a cup of tea. Like now. I should have said goodbye then, but I didn’t know . . . what was going to happen. They were nice people. I liked them. I still do. Oh well . . . goodnight, Jim.’

  Jim can only nod his head. He watches Patrick pick his way through the puddles on the path. The moon is reflected in the water.

  This time Jim walks into the lounge room and sits cross-legged on the floor facing the window. Empty, this now feels to be more his space. The only items left to link it with the past are the old piano and the photo that has always sat on the music stand on the lid. In it, Grandmother is standing behind Grandfather as he sits looking at the camera.

  Because the piano has always been in that spot, Jim looks on it as if it is a wall or a door, solid and neutral. He still feels connected to his grandmother and the photograph on the stand.

  This house had been his grandparents’. His father had grown up in it. The residue left by years of laughter and yelling and talking and crying, of bitterness and anger, of affection and contentment, of confusion and coldness is always going to be in the corners and on the windowsills of this room. No amount of dusting would clean any room of that type of familial dust.

  Jim looks up, sensing something watching him, surprised that his head had absently dropped to his chest. Thomas the cat is at the window. Neither of them is alarmed at the sudden eye contact. The orange cat mouths something and then withdraws into the night.

  Jim leaves the curtains open. As the night becomes blacker, he settles in and waits for the ghosts. But they don’t come. Maybe they know they no longer belong inside. He will keep the trees and flowers the same for them outside; they can walk around out there. They all can live in this place together.

  He shakes himself. He is still too young to have so many dead people in his life.

  Trust me.

  Jim thinks at first that he has heard the words spoken aloud. But there are no ripples in the silence around him. It is unbroken; nothing has been said. Those words were scratched into the footpath outside the supermarket this afternoon and, like the echo of a bell, they must have resonated in his head. And then he remembers Mai said them to him once when he hesitated before going with her down a crowded alley behind her parents’ house.

  He dismisses the memory sadly and decides to go to bed. Bed is on the floor in the lounge room. He is not ready for anywhere else yet. Before he falls asleep, he hears a long freight train go by beyond the back fence. It rocks him to sleep, as it has always done.

  When all is said and done, Patrick knows what his job is. He knows what is needed. He has done it all his adult life. And even though he can do it without thinking, he prefers to put a lot of thought into it.

  Being a stationmaster is a science. A stationmaster needs to know the exact timetables; what unexpected delays may occur to his trains (a good stationmaster calls any train that passes through the station ‘his’); which driver to approach to ask for a child to be given a birthday treat of a drive in the front cabin; how many carriages each train will have; which carriage of any approaching train is the emptiest; and to be alert for any mother struggling to alight with a pram, or any elderly veteran or widow trying to measure the drop of the step. He also likes to know how the weather is panning out. (He keeps a dozen umbrellas in his office to lend: they are always returned.) He tries to remember everybody’s name. A brisk ‘Good morning, Mr Chard’ can put a sudden spring in the step of someone reluctantly heading into a new day.

  And he likes the platform to be kept clean; the first sweep in the morning he always does himself. People smile more easily on a clean platform: that’s what he tells the station assistants, and isn’t that what their real job is? Isn’t that what everybody’s job is? To make each other smile? The response from his assistants has always been blank stares.

  There was only ever going to be one problem with the job. He knew it was coming. But it still surprised him when it did. Patrick was retired from the railways one year ago.

  There is a new stationmaster, a former senior assistant from Flinders Street Station in the city. Patrick has known Brian McGuinness since he started work there, young and keen, a stationmaster in the making.

  But Patrick wasn’t ready to give Brian his station.

  As he always has, Patrick still goes to his station every morning to sweep the platform, between the 6.08 and the 6.18 (stopping all stations except North Melbourne). The customers expect to see him, the new stationmaster expects to see him, the train drivers wave to him as they always have. But then, at around ten o’clock, his wife or one of the neighbours comes to get him. He is resigned to leaving the station in Brian’s hands; although he is an inexperienced young man, all in all he has the makings of a good stationmaster. But if only Brian McGuinness was somewhere else. This is Patrick’s station. Everybody knows that.

  Brian McGuinness knows it. He allows Patrick to sweep the platform every morning and stand at the gate and greet the peak-hour passengers. He is happy for Patrick to keep on wearing his stationmaster’s uniform. Brian realises that it makes his own job easier.

  But it doesn’t make Mary’s job any easier. She sends Patrick off every morning, cut lunch in hand. At ten am, after dropping in to the shops, she walks up to the station. She always says hello to Brian, watching his face for a hint of displeasure at Patrick’s morning routine, but never finds one. On the days she can’t walk up to the station herself, she asks a neighbour to collect her husband; sometimes, if they happen to be going up to the shops, one of them will ask her whether she would like them to get him. Patrick then eats his cut lunch on the front veranda, and she watches as his mind evaporates with each cheese sandwich.

  Patrick studies the current timetables at night while Mary watches the television. Mary sometimes looks across at him during the advertisements. He doesn’t generally notice but when he does, he smiles at her quietly as he has always done. That is what makes Mary continue to support his habits. She doesn’t know why the rest of the street offers support but she suspects that Patrick is well liked.

  The afternoon sun is hot. Jim is standing in front of the statue of the soldier, looking absently at the names. Suddenly he can sense someone coming towards him. The birds have stopped singing. They know there is danger about. The jungle is still.

  He doesn’t try to stop the tension as it runs down his neck muscles into his spine, rushing through his arms until it reaches his fingernails, then racing down the tendons of his legs to the soles of his feet. His hearing becomes acute. His eyes no longer see the statue. He concentrates on the movement of the wind on his body and the sounds of the person approaching, trying to register any change that might signify an attack. Inwardly he tightens everything, ready to spring in whatever d
irection his intuition tells him. His hands are clenched, his jaw is tight.

  ‘Hi, Jim.’

  Breathe out. Wind everything down. Blood rushing through body. Wait for a moment. Smile at statue. Use the face muscles. Lift the toes. Use the calf muscles. Pretend to be chewing gum. Find a release. Think about Mozart.

  Come back. You are safe.

  ‘Hi, Maddie. What’s happening?’

  ‘Nothing much. I was coming home from uni . . . saw you standing here . . . came over to say hello properly.’

  ‘You going to uni? That’s great. Doing what?’

  ‘Arts. Everybody is doing arts.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Seems like it. I don’t know what to say, Jim,’ Maddie says, her voice suddenly quiet.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About you going over there. About your mum and dad. About . . . anything, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t worry. There’s not really anything to say. Life is going to go on, whether we like it or not.’

  ‘I don’t have any words . . .’

  ‘Is that bloke your boyfriend?’ Jim tries to sound light.

  ‘Oscar? Yes, I think he is. You know, Jim. Once I used to . . . think you were . . . pretty cool. I had a crush . . .’

  ‘Did you? I thought I was imagining it.’

  ‘So you knew? It was that obvious?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t obvious at all. I didn’t really notice until your brother brought it up.’