Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘What?’ And he adds, his voice rising with the realisation that events are slipping away from him, ‘She can’t have just vanished!’

  ‘I told you, she didn’t leave a number or an address.’

  ‘She must have. You must know.’

  ‘I don’t. Nobody does. Mandy left without giving one,’ the woman continues, her voice rising with Michael’s. ‘She was upset!’

  ‘I know she was upset.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I must speak to her.’

  ‘I’ll pass that on.’

  It is not simply the feeling that events are slipping from him that he is keenly aware of now, but also a feeling of powerlessness. That all the will in the world will not persuade this woman to give him Mandy’s new number. And this, in turn, gives way to exasperation.

  ‘I don’t think you understand. I have something very important to tell her!’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘No, you’re not!’

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘I have something very—’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The line is suddenly dead.

  ‘Bitch!’

  He throws the phone onto the couch and brings his hands together with great force, creating a loud, slapping sound. And with the sound he looks down at his hands, stares at them, almost in disbelief — the sound of the impact still fresh as if hanging in the air — then lets his arms fall to his side. He knows that sound. And suddenly he is asking: is this how these things not only return, but live on? And do those sudden sensations of not only being like his father but becoming his father include the best and the worst of Vic? So that, out of the blue, he is suddenly shouting ‘bitch’ into the air and re-enacting those very actions he witnessed as a child, but which have now become his actions. And is he breathing new life into old fights? Giving them new rooms to inhabit, and new tears to add to the circle game of eternal return. Michael calculates that he is, more or less, the same age now that his father was when he witnessed that scene in his parents’ bedroom all those years ago, and he is left wondering, as he slumps back onto the couch, if it really is true, that there are parts of the mind that lie dormant for years, never gone, which go into a kind of hibernation, but which nonetheless have a clock, an alarm clock — and has the alarm just rung?

  He looks at the telephone lying on the couch where he threw it, still emitting its mechanical buzz, and hangs it up properly. And at the same time as he is staring up at the ceiling, as if having just seen rain fall from a clear sky and asking himself where did that come from, he is also telling himself that it is imperative he speaks to Mandy. As if to address the hurt that he has done and correct whatever it is that can be corrected were in some small measure a way of waking up to the alarm that has just sounded. Hearing it, and not missing it. He is not in love with Mandy (the song is true of them, and it now sadly seems to be ‘their’ song), but he has caused hurt and harm. For her friend was right; although he knew Mandy was upset, it had not registered with him, not properly, until today. And her friend’s question, ‘Do you?’, was justified. He knew, but it hadn’t touched him. Now it had. Besides, it is no way to leave the country, as he soon will, with a wrong uncorrected, for the weight of uncorrected wrongs travels with you. And so, for any number of reasons that will gather with the days, it is suddenly vital that he speaks to Mandy.

  But how? Clearly the woman, her old housemate, knew the new number. Mandy would not have left without leaving a number and an address. But the woman, no doubt, was under instructions not to give the number or the address to Michael, should he ever call. Her loyalty, and he is calm enough now to concede this, is with Mandy. And that is right. This, as it should be, is the loyalty that friendship demands. And she would have been perfectly aware of what has happened, and her words — Mandy was upset — echo the unspoken sentiments of the shopkeeper. So there is no point calling back. The world doesn’t stay still for long. In a few weeks, while he wasn’t watching, it shifted.

  He concludes, at the same time, that his need to correct a wrong might be driven purely by selfish motives. For if he can’t correct the wrong, then the wrong stays with him. And she, Mandy, will never know that he tried. Will never be aware of his efforts. Will take his lack of recorded effort as indifference. And will think badly of him. The wrong will stay with him, even define him, and she will think badly of him ever after. Is that it? Is it about him, after all, not her?

  Why should it matter that someone thinks badly of you? Because, he concludes, a ‘you’ then exists that you don’t like. And so all your efforts are directed towards replacing the ‘you’ that you don’t like with one that you do. There is a portrait, a picture of you out there, and while it might exist only at the moment in one person’s head, it may also be shared. Has been shared, for she must surely have told her friends about the manner of their parting. So there may, eventually, be a number of people who, when they think of Michael, think of the Michael he doesn’t like when, all the time, he imagines he’s better than that. That the image is false. But is it? Maybe it’s right, after all. Maybe he is a shit. He has acted like a shit, but somehow clung to the notion that he wasn’t. So is the Michael that he doesn’t like, in fact, true (and that’s really why he doesn’t like it) and is the Michael that he thinks he is, in fact, false? And has he always clung to this falsity? It’s a mess.

  And he is beginning to feel like a mess. The order of things is shifting, and the more it does the more urgent it becomes to correct a wrong. However shady the motives may be. For he is rapidly coming to the conclusion that if he can only correct some part of that wrong or have his efforts and his care registered as apart from his apparent indifference, the ‘you’ that he doesn’t like can, in Mandy’s mind, become more likeable and some semblance of the Michael that he imagines himself to be can emerge. And suddenly, he’s remembering that short essay he wrote for the paper, remembering the playfulness with which he speculated on the workings of the prime minister’s mind, about the guilt and the assuaging of guilt, and is asking himself if he was really talking about the prime minister at all.

  He has to get out. The flat is too small. But no sooner has he locked his door and stepped onto the footpath for a stroll through the park, no longer in uproar but late spring still, than he hears the telephone ringing from the arm of his couch. Normally, he would shrug. Too difficult. But he is convinced it is Mandy. She has heard that he tried to contact her. Her former housemate phoned her, and enough of Mandy has melted to call him. And that is the sound of her call. And so he turns and rushes up the path to his front door, fumbling for the key in his haste, the telephone ringing all of the precious time that he fumbles. And when he finally opens the door and is ready to spring onto the couch and lift the receiver, it stops ringing and he thumps the arm of the couch with his fist, the telephone lifting into the air with the impact and falling to the floor. He picks it up and puts it back in its place. Silent, no longer calling. Of course. The ending was written into the whole exercise. Rushing for a tram, rushing for a telephone — it is always futile.

  He closes the door again and makes his way back to the footpath. It could have been anyone. All the same, he can’t shake off the conviction that it wasn’t.

  He paces into the park, the sun now low over the freeway behind him, the need to correct things no less imperative — in fact, more urgent than it ever was before he picked up the telephone to call Mandy and discovered that the order of things had shifted and that he could no longer control events. And it is with a sort of short-term nostalgia that he remembers the lightness of his heart earlier that day as he drove out to the airport, not so much a different part of the day as a different day altogether.

  Later that evening he is staring at the television. An election is coming. The name Whitlam is inescapable. So, too, the name Fraser. As are words such as ‘democracy’, ‘vo
te’, ‘people’ and ‘trust’. These, and more like them — important words, but which, when trotted out for public consumption, ring hollow — are the key words from which all sentences flow: from the mouths of politicians, in the papers and on the television. Words have been captured and harnessed and put to work like a mill horse walking round in circles, grinding out the white powder of news. The white powder of Power’s words.

  Michael cares about the anarchic power of words and their capacity to surprise, shock and delight. But Power, which lingers in back rooms making plans and which inhabits its chosen representatives the way the soul inhabits the body, seeks only to control them and own them and grind them into white powder. And not because it has any great love of words. Power, rather, has a deep fear of words; for words, Power knows full well, are the seeds of its making and unmaking and so Power inevitably turns them into white powder ground out by blinkered mill horses.

  He is about to switch the television off when he notices, in the background, directly behind the PM (who thinks, often as not, otherwise, when his minister says such and such), the shuffling figure of Peter. His bowed head only lifting now and then to sniff the atmosphere, his nose twitching like the rabbit he once was. He is, of course, and has been for some time, one of those who harness words and put them to work in the mill house, where the life is ground out of them. Peter, who was Bunny Rabbit in the house they all shared, who once played songs of the Spanish Civil War on the portable stereo in his room and who could recite them by heart if the moment arose, who talked poetry and who treated his Brooks Brothers shirts with all the casual contempt of a working man donning a top hat after the revolution; Peter, who with the rest of them was warmed on winter nights by the sound of the Italian men who sang like a heavenly choir in the public bar opposite their house, and who was stirred by songs whose words and meanings were all the more stirring for being utterly mysterious, now harnesses words and has them walking round in circles all day.

  And there he is on the screen, shuffling in the background, a back-room boy not wishing to be seen, not wishing to draw attention to himself; Peter, whose work (like God in his universe) is everywhere in evidence, but who is nowhere to be seen. Until now. There he is, up on the screen. And it is, indeed, a little like seeing the face of God and realising you’ve already met.

  Michael blinks. The image is gone. The news moves on — or is it round and round? — and new images appear and newly harnessed words are heard. And it occurs to him that for all the speed with which these news items come and go, for all the attempts of the newspapers to make their news entertaining (as everything, it seems, must be), there is a tired, repetitive look to it all. And for all the smiling faces who occupy the screen, and who chat and laugh and whose chatter and laughter is, presumably, meant to enliven and lighten the mood of all the lounge rooms in all the cities and towns across the country, the image they project is that of a worn-out world trying to convince itself that it’s not. And it is draining and wearying just to stare at it all. He switches the television off. The room is silent. And the silence is preferable.

  When did the world grow tired, when once it was young and every day was a fresh journey into the arches of wonder and untravelled lands? How does this happen? When did everybody start looking tired and the emotions grow stale? You look like you’re ready to eat the world here, somebody recently said of him, comparing two photographs of Michael (one taken in his student years, the other not so long ago), and here, the speaker went on, you look like you’ve had enough. When did that happen? And since when has he been better off by himself?

  He rises from his old student armchair and approaches his desk, idly gazing upon the accumulated bits and pieces gathering dust upon it. And then he is staring at an earthenware beer mug, a birthday present years ago from Madeleine that he has held on to. He brushes the dust off the silver lid and reads the date. That’s all there is. Just a date. No indication of who gave him this present. It could be from anyone. But it’s not. And it casts its spell as it always does. Lifting that silver lid is like lifting the stopper on the very essence of those days. Days that stayed up all night and walked home in the dawn and never knew the meaning of tired, days in which those times spent on your own were lonely. But Madeleine disappeared into the great world and he never heard from her again. And sometime in the years that followed, the world started to feel tired, and being alone felt not so bad.

  He yawns. It has been a long day — seeing Peter, farewelling his mother and colliding with Mandy — and now he is feeling the effect of it. Somewhere out there in the night the blinkered mill horse of Peter’s art will be going round and round in circles, as this white-powder world grinds on. He runs his hand through his hair as he closes the lid of the beer mug. New Wave. Old world. Tired world. Time to go. Time to set off. A good time to be gone. Into the arches of wonder and untravelled lands, if they still exist.

  A life without Madeleine. Somehow, after all this time, he still feels as though he is missing an arm or a leg. Still feels that he will one day recount to her the years he lived without her and ask, ‘How did that happen?’ One life, and it will pass, he knows, in the blink of an eye. We come, we go. And the sooner we get used to that, the better. The world spins on. Are you happy, are you happy, Michael? He turns away from the desk and the beer mug sitting on it, the last remembered days of Madeleine stoppered inside, and walks towards the bathroom. He brushes his teeth and spits the day out then hangs his toothbrush on the wall. The day is done: a day that started full of life and ended in weariness. The world spins on and doesn’t need you, not really. It just is. And does your being happy or not happy really matter at all in the end?

  The order of things has shifted, slipped from his control. To an extent, he is like a child discovering for the first time that the world is not an extension of himself. That people are not held forever on a string, to be reeled in at will. That they act independently of his desires, and that they will go their own way. And, thereby, slip from his control.

  It is two weeks since he attempted to telephone Mandy. Since then the days have warmed and the summer that will soon see him leave the country is coming. He has sent a letter to the school at which Mandy teaches, saying that he has something very important to tell her and that he wishes to correct his wrong. But wants, asks, nothing more. He says that he has no intention of imposing himself on what is clearly a new phase of her life. But there has been no reply and he can’t even be sure she received it.

  He is currently in the city. It is a balmy Friday night, the newsstands full of election talk, and he is buying winter clothes. He is alone and this, for the moment, suits him. He can pass along the footpaths, mingle with the crowds, but stay separate. It is also, he tells himself, the way he likes to travel. No one else to blame if things go wrong. There are those who like to enter the life of a place and know it, however briefly, from the inside, with friends and companions. Michael prefers the view from the edges. It is a view of a place that the place itself rarely sees. So for the moment he is happy enough alone, buying winter clothes in summer for the winter he will soon fly into.

  He has just left an army disposal store where they sell good, thick naval coats and is making his way back to his tram stop. When there she is. A little further on, walking, quite briskly, away from him. And he immediately hurries towards her. Dodging people here and there, hurrying in case she turns off the main street and slips from view only to disappear into a large store or taxi. He moves quickly, possibly even running, not sure what to say when he reaches her, but content, all the same, that he will be in a position to at least say something. Things may have slipped from his control, but chance has delivered some semblance of control back to him. She is near now, and he reaches out and touches her on the shoulder, at the same time calling her name.

  ‘Mandy!’

  And it is then that a stranger turns round, surprised, possibly even startled, by a stranger’s touch.

  ‘Oh …’ He stops and the young w
oman recedes from him while still looking back. ‘I could have sworn …’

  And with this, the young woman smiles, understands the situation — and is there a hint in that smile that she’d rather it had not been a mistake, before she turns and resumes her path?

  He is left standing there, the uncompleted sentence he might have spoken suspended in the air. He would have gone on to say that he is travelling soon, for who knows how long, and that he wishes to correct a wrong before he goes, for that is no way for two people to part or for him leave to this place — and that is why he tapped her on the shoulder and called her name. In the end, the wrong shoulder, the wrong name.

  The odd thing is he will remember this encounter, which lasted two or possibly three seconds, too fleeting to even be called brief, for years to come. Years from this pleasant Friday night, when he thinks of Mandy and those wind-blown, topsy-turvy days in which they parted, he will also think of that young woman and wonder just who she was, what became of her and what she might be doing at any moment of remembrance. Odd, what the memory selects to file away to be recalled, especially whenever he thinks of these days. Days that saw parks thrown into windy uproar — birds, blossoms and lives tossed into the air.

  The tram is crowded and when the doors open at stops along the way passengers seem to burst from it, rather than leave it. All the same, it is a happy tram — a travelling community that sheds its members and gathers newcomers as it goes. The shopping bags of coffee and cheese from the market, the warming chatter, the lights of the park through which they are passing, are each the possession of all.

  He leaves the tram stop, animal sounds erupting from time to time from the zoo behind him as he strolls down the tree-lined avenue to his flat. A lion roars, a monkey screeches. The lights of the government buildings go on and off. And, out in the world, taxis collect their fares from street corners, bands are setting up on the stages of sticky-carpet pubs or in the vast beer barns of grandly named hotels, and the girl he mistook for Mandy will be out there too in some pub or café, having forgotten all about the young man who tapped her on the shoulder, only to discover that it was the wrong shoulder and the wrong face.