Peter is silent. The bakery van departs, a bus belches smoke into the air.
‘Then she just stood up, turned back into the room and closed the door. Not a word, not a look at me, or a nod. I wasn’t there. We were already in different worlds. And that was it. Goodbye Pussy Cat.’
Michael pauses, looking at the silent, withdrawn figure of Peter, just a few feet away but in another world. ‘I was always just a bit in love with Pussy Cat.’
‘Weren’t we all.’ Peter speaks like a dreamer waking from sleep. ‘Weren’t we all.’ His eyes are vague, almost as though he’s not sure whom he is talking to. And Michael wonders if Peter has understood anything he has just said, or if he has been speaking to himself, more or less, the whole time. And for a moment Peter seems to hover on the verge of saying something about Pussy Cat, the frown and the intake of breath suggesting that he is about to go on, still in that hazy zone between dreaming and waking, but he snaps back into life with one of those automatic smiles that says, well, we could go on, couldn’t we, but let’s leave that to another time.
He takes another deep breath and checks his watch. Then he is standing and shaking Michael’s hand. And once again it’s the everyday Peter in front of him, back on duty. Smiling face at the ready to meet the faces … he meets.
‘The offer’s still there. Don’t lose the card, you never know. One of those rainy Mondays, the final notice for the power on the table — things might look different. And remember, you’ve got surprising friends in high places. They like your style.’
They shake hands and walk off in different directions. Michael, to the airport to see his mother off. Peter to a meeting, he says, then back to Canberra. Peter, an ‘advisor’, of whom bigger things were once expected. Back to the land of power, to the land of ‘the minister thought this, and the PM thought otherwise’. The card is still in Michael’s pocket, the prospect of a Monday morning rainy enough to make him pick up the phone too distant to contemplate.
Driving to the airport to see his mother off is a rehearsal for leaving the country. Except that he imagines that when he leaves there will be no one to see him off, which is the way he wants it. It’s not some Romantic impulse to become the lone voyager setting off for distant lands. It’s just a desire to slip, almost anonymously, out of the country. Like slipping away from a party without farewell: you’re gone and halfway home before anybody notices, if they notice at all. There’s freedom in such anonymity, like being invisible. This morning’s drive, he now decides, is not so much a rehearsal for leaving as an intimation. And the closer the freeway takes him to the airport the more liberated he feels.
His mother seems somehow smaller as she leaves her suitcase at the checkin counter and walks towards him. And he eventually concludes that it’s the fact that she’s in unfamiliar surroundings. She’s been to airports before, but not as a traveller. Only ever to see someone off. And already she has asked him a number of times what she should do now, and where does she go after that. And is there anything they’ve forgotten? She has already strayed from her group, the group that she will be travelling with, before they’ve even left — and, Michael suspects, it won’t be for the last time.
What she doesn’t know is that, not so long from now, she will be leading these travel tours and she will be the one to whom all the anxious questions of first-time travellers will be directed. But for the moment she’s asking them of Michael. She is in his hands. Like a child asking questions, curious about the world. And is this the way things go, he muses? How they’ve always gone? Eventually our parents become children again and we guide them through a changed and constantly changing world like they once did, for as the world becomes more and more curious, they grow younger and younger until they are children again. The older they grow, the younger they become. The younger we all become, our children patient or impatient with us the way we were patient or impatient with them. The process has already begun, and somehow it makes her look smaller. It’s her wide eyes and her questions and the trust she places in him that is doing that. She’s not really smaller; the world is just becoming larger.
They sit at a café table and order coffee and tea, and she eyes the group, her party, in the distance, in the same way, Michael imagines, that she once eyed the old street. The way she eyed it and always found it unsatisfactory. No, worse than unsatisfactory — a step down. If Vic had married ‘up’ in the world, had she married ‘down’? And did it always show? And was the street always going to be beneath her? For the street read disapproval in her eyes — and in the dresses she wore, which were always too good for the street and which the street always took as a snub. And he has no doubt she has already found her travelling party wanting and unsatisfactory in the same way that the street always was. And, no doubt, the party will read this in her eyes and take it as a snub. And so it goes, on and on.
Michael looks across at them. ‘Shouldn’t you join them soon?
Rita looks at them dubiously, as if delaying a duty or an appointment with the wrong side of the family.
‘Not yet.’
And he can’t blame her. They are so clearly a travelling party, looking forward to their voucher meals, smorgasbords and hotel breakfasts, which will be all or most of what they remember when they return — the blue-vein cheese breakfast here, the hotel room and the Italian TV variety show there. At least, that’s the way he’s summed them up. Already. At a glance. And is it fair? Does he really ever remember anything much more than that himself? Isn’t their talk of travel, his and his friends’, always about a wonderful meal in some unassuming little country town or the view from a hotel window? Are they really any different? But the more he glances at them (and possibly through Rita’s eyes), the more they have that look of, well … dependence. All looking up to the tour guide, following her about, trailing behind her like a group of school children on an excursion. But perhaps — who knows — there are other Ritas among them, who have reluctantly given up their independence too.
At the same time he’s wondering if she’s ever fitted in anywhere. She’s never trooped off with a gang because the gang has never been worth trooping off with. She has never felt at home with them — unlike Vic, who always did. Who was always bumping into a mate somewhere or other. No, she was never at home with them. Only ever at home at home. With the door closed and the world of the street shut out. But at the same time there’s her desire for the great world beyond the street, beyond the city and the country; the curiosity that has brought her here for her late morning flight. Here, where time means something, before it becomes a succession of time zones and calculations — of mornings departed and mornings flown into, flying from today into yesterday, depending on where you’re standing.
‘I’ll call you from Rome. I arrive at …’
She searches her itinerary and names the arrival time there and the matching time here, and they eventually reach a formula for calculating time here and time there — and the balancing of daylight hours and night-time, of convenient and inconvenient hours to call, begins. And already, time, time that her mind and body have always responded to and by which her waking and sleeping hours have always been measured, is slipping from her. Rushing from her or rushing towards her as new time, to which her mind and body will have to adjust. And suddenly, it seems to Michael that all those scientific theories — and even the less scientific ones — start to make sense. A man sits on a riverbank observing a bend in the river. An eagle circles above. Beyond the man’s view, back along the river, there is a willow tree; ahead of him, further up the river, a waterfall. But the man sees only the bend in the river in front of him, not the willow or the waterfall. Whereas to the eagle it is all one: past, present, future. Stay in a Jumbo Jet long enough though, he muses with a bit of a laugh, and you eventually become the eagle.
They go over her list, a last check of all the things she ought to have. And when they have gone over everything again, she finally stands.
‘Well …’
He fo
llows her to the group and watches as they all introduce themselves to one another. And he can see that she’s smiling as she shakes hands and chats — and that she’s trying. But her heart’s not in it. And she looks at Michael from time to time as if to say she can’t do this. But she can. And he steps back and watches the whole business see itself through.
And then it’s done. When everyone is present and accounted for, their tour guide checks her watch and directs them all to the departure door. And he watches as she joins the flow of the touring party, reluctantly surrendering her independence. And at the last moment, just before disappearing through the door, she turns, checking that he is still there, and waves. And somehow she’s smaller again. Like a child waving. And, although in a group, alone. She always looks alone. How does she manage that? Even fragile. And then he suddenly realises that he is all she has in the world.
And as she waves there is a hint of a smile that says, I can’t do this, but … of course I can. That and a suggestion of a departing Baaa! I know what they’ll say. Sheep. All sheep. I know what they’ll say … Then she is gone and he knows without a doubt that on the other side of that door she will be in the group, but alone.
That intimation of what it will be like to slip out of the country unseen, of being liberated, doesn’t diminish on the drive back, a feeling that is accentuated by having taken the day off work to farewell his mother. The hum of the airport, that sense of imminent departure and the stolen nature of the day combine to prolong the feeling. A feeling like … what? Of course, like skipping school. And because the day is his, and because he’d like to prolong that sense of departure, he doesn’t drive home but back to that Little Europe where he’d met Peter earlier in the day.
The fruit and vegetable shop is quiet in the early afternoon. It is a clean shop. And orderly. In its stillness, a retreat from the world. Certain shops have that effect. And the effect they have is sometimes more important than the goods they contain. This is such a shop.
The owner stands by the cash register. Motionless. Someone else, a young woman, hovers at the back of the shop. Michael has just entered and stopped where he now stands as if arrested by the stillness of the place and that feeling of leaving the familiar world behind and suddenly being elsewhere. The owner smiles, the curving of her lips, it seems to him, the only movement in the shop. Here, there is no need of speed. Take your time, choose thoughtfully, with due consideration given to each of the items you choose. And as foolish as it seems he could simply linger in the shop and dwell upon the goods it contains for longer than it takes for a commercial transaction to be completed.
Outside, a black spring cloud passes over the sun and sudden heavy rain falls. He will need to take refuge longer than he intended. His mother will now be flying high above blue seas or wrapped in white cloud, making conversation, doing her best, or simply reclining in her seat wondering what on earth she’s doing there. He moves slowly about the shop, selecting this and that, admiring the way everything is arranged and placed. For it denotes care, and must take considerable time to arrange — only, in the end, to be meddled with by customers, whose purchases the owner must view, in some part of her (at least, so Michael imagines) as an intrusive disruption. Her arrangements requiring constant rearrangement. And he wonders if she would be content for customers to enter the shop, survey the goods on display, stand for that moment in frozen, still appreciation of the way the goods are arranged, then leave. And he thinks that if the shop could effect just such a calming stasis in people its existence would be justified. Commercial exchange, money for goods, would almost be rendered unnecessary, a mere excuse for experiencing the shop itself.
All the same, the rain has stopped, he has selected his goods and he moves slowly towards the owner at the cash register at the same time as the other customer, whom he has barely noticed until now. If they were to continue as they are they will collide at the counter, so he steps back and gestures — a wave of the hand, almost comically regal — that she should go first.
It is then that she looks up from her cane basket (which the shop provides) and everything that follows happens very quickly. Stasis gives way to sudden movement. For the young woman, whom he has barely paid attention to, is Mandy.
And although everything takes place very quickly, it also happens with such speed that speed meets its opposite — and becomes slowness. Like an accident. An accident that takes place in a split second, but which also takes place in the kind of elastic time that the sheer intensity of events stretches to breaking point, before rebounding and snapping the participants back into the measurable present where events are, in fact, taking place.
But by the time he is snapped back, Mandy has left the shop. She was there in front of him for a moment, and then she was gone. Her basket, the contents abandoned, has been left exactly where she placed it, before looking up at Michael in response to that vaguely regal gesture.
He remembers speaking her name. And she may or may not have responded with ‘Hello’. He may be imagining that she spoke. She then rushed past him, her head down so as not to catch his eye (or allow him to catch hers) and ran out the door onto the footpath, disappearing into the afternoon.
The shop owner, eyes wide with curiosity, looks at Michael, not expecting an explanation, but knowing, all the same, that he is in possession of one. Her shop, over the years, has witnessed a variety of stories — happy, sad, comic, the full range of feeling — and that was one of them. As he is leaving, she picks up the abandoned basket then catches his eye in the doorway as he glances back, and the look says: You don’t have to tell me. It’s you, isn’t it? You did this. She ran from my shop because of you.
And she is right. He did do this. For it was hurt that caused Mandy to abandon her basket and leave the shop as quickly as possible. And that, too, was why Mandy’s eyes were fixed on the floor as she left, so he shouldn’t see that hurt. So as not to confirm that he had the power to do such a thing. To hurt her. But he had. And why had he? Because ‘casual’ Mandy had never slipped into ‘serious’ Mandy, the way ‘casual’ Madeleine had become ‘serious’ Madeleine. And, in the end, was her only fault that she wasn’t somebody else?
Suddenly he knows what it was to be Madeleine, who expressed her deep gratitude (and ‘gratitude’, as she used it, was neither light nor dismissive) for the days they’d had together all those years ago, but who also carried the weight of knowing that gratitude could only sustain them for so long. And so Madeleine, her gratitude exhausted, had left. As Michael had left Mandy. We are left, and we leave. It is the way of things.
But as he walks towards his car, the street fresh from rain (that feeling of being liberated washed away by the events of two or three minutes before), it is simply not enough to tell himself that the weight of leaving shifts from bearer to bearer through the years, that we all leave and we are all left, and that the same story has been enacted on the same shop floor or the street corner where he is now standing, and always will be. No, it’s not enough, for this is his story, her story, their story. A particular story. With a particular cause. And no recourse to eternal re-enactments, or solace in universal verities of the same story playing over and over again throughout time with only the players themselves changing, can correct this or make him feel better. For the shop owner was right. You, you did this. You were the cause. And it hits him with the sudden force of an illumination: a wrong has been done. He has done it. And nothing can atone for that but an act of correction.
Telephones, like the numbers you dial, change over the years, but the idea of a phone call itself remains the same — its ring stirring excitement, annoyance or dread, but never indifference. And speaking through a telephone and hearing a voice at the other end always carries with it that residual hint — from those days when it was a source of wonder — of communicating with Mars. At least, it still does for Michael, for he came from a home that showed great respect for the telephone. Even deferred to it. There was a correct way to deal with it: never spe
ak too long, and only ever telephone for a reason. Not only was the telephone expensive, it was not invented for social calls but for meaningful communication. Social calls demeaned the whole achievement of the telephone and did not show it the respect it deserved.
Michael is sitting on the couch in his lounge room staring at the white plastic telephone perched on the arm of the couch, because he is about to call Mandy. It has been two hours since he saw her in the shop and, in that time, the need to speak to her has become more and more pressing, to the point that it now feels urgent. He must speak to her. And so, without further delay (for she must be home by now), he dials the number, which — and this surprises him — he knows by heart. It rings for a long time and he is convinced she is not in, but then a voice that he doesn’t recognise answers, and he leaps to his feet. He asks if he can speak to Mandy, and the woman (one of those with whom she shares the house) tells him that he can’t. That she doesn’t live here any more. The woman’s tone is light, even casual. He hadn’t expected this. And, already, he can see events slipping from him — or, rather, the power to control events. And Mandy’s world, which he imagined he could slip back into with a few considered words of correction, has changed while he wasn’t watching. Damn! And when he asks for her new number he notices that there is an urgency in the way he asks, almost in a rush. And the woman senses this — or he imagines she does — and so she asks who is calling.
‘Michael.’ There is silence on the other end. ‘Mandy and I used to—’
‘Yes, I know. She doesn’t live here any more.’
From the moment he gives his name, the woman’s whole tone changes. She is now abrupt. And in response, Michael’s tone, too, becomes abrupt.
‘Well, can you give me her new number?’
‘I don’t know it.’ Again, there is a pause. ‘She didn’t leave one.’
‘Well, where is she? Can you give me her new address, then?’
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