And it is while he is idly turning these idle morning thoughts over in his mind, seated at a makeshift desk overlooking the town, his typewriter, notebooks and reference books all arranged with a neatness that won’t be there in few weeks, that he becomes aware of an insistent sound coming up from the street below. A loud, whacking sound. A crack that cuts through the stillness of the morning and shatters all his idle thoughts about the neat divisions of time — of yesterday, today and tomorrow, and the eagle’s view that makes no distinction. Curious, he rises from his seat and opens the window, the sound rising to meet him — louder and sharper — as he does. And as he looks down, his curiosity is satisfied.
Directly below him, on the opposite footpath, a stout and strong-looking woman has brought a rug out into the street to clean it. She is shaking the rug, and every time she gives it a good shake this loud snapping sound cuts through the still morning and dust rises into the air. At first it is a pleasant, vaguely amusing sight, for she has strong arms and looks as if she could shake up some unfortunate troublemaker as easily as a rug. But as she continues to shake the rug and the sharp, cracking sound returns again and again, it becomes vaguely disturbing. Something is happening and he doesn’t particularly like it. But what? The woman shakes the rug, and every shake creates this sharp, cracking sound. A sound like what? And it is while he is contemplating this, as the woman with the rug pauses for a moment to allow a neighbour to pass, that he answers his question. A sound like what? Like a slap.
And immediately he is standing at the doorway of his parents’ room all those years ago. And his father is shouting at his mother in a drunken rage, telling her to shut up. Just shut up. And every time he tells her to shut up he brings his hands together, making a loud slapping sound, showing her just what he could do if he chose to. And in that same moment the stick houses and the dirt street that he once called home come back as clear and sharp as the cracking sound of the rug being shaken out below him on the footpath. And as they do the image of three people standing on that dirt street in front of a vacant paddock, one long-ago summer evening, returns as well. And as they assemble, their eyes turn to him in sad question. How long must we continue to assemble here? And when shall we be released? Must we continue to return? Forever? To this spot, to this dirt street and this vacant paddock, ears tuned to the horizon, just beyond the flour mills and railways tracks, for the sound of the setting sun as it drops to earth? A summer stroll without end, always pausing here in front of this paddock? And they continue to stare, eyes in sad question — Vic, Rita and the twelve-year-old Michael that he was — frozen there on the dirt street, their night of immortality leaving them forever where they stand. No escape. No setting of the sun, no waning of the moon. No fates to be met because nobody is going anywhere. They are walking down the old street again … They will always be walking down the old street. And always, always poised at this point, staring back, eyes in sad question, like those gods who tire of forever and yearn for mortality.
The woman on the footpath has gone inside, the rug dusted. Michael closes the window and returns to his makeshift desk: typewriter, notebooks and reference books all neatly arranged, awaiting the first words of the morning. The toy-town below twinkles in the morning sun, the blue sky above them is still, clouds blown in from the Atlantic a few miles away loom over the tree-tops of the nearby forest. But the trio — his father, his mother and the twelve-year-old self he once was — linger on, reflected in the glass. They are walking down the old street again … They will always be walking … What else can we do, they say. You call us, and we come. Every time. To this spot, and this place of stick houses, dirt streets and thistle paddocks. You call us and we come. And so here we are, walking down the old street again. His mother’s eyes stare back, a look direct and imploring; his father offering an apologetic shrug suggesting, What can I say? What can we say? Only this. Tell our children, all our children, if they should ever ask, that we tried, in our way, and that if we ever hurt them it was not for lack of trying not to. That we were damaged before we came to them, and if we failed to keep our damage to ourselves it wasn’t for lack of trying. Tell them how it was, behind the flying ducks and the laughter; behind the quaint feature walls and shadow boxes and ornamental boomerangs; tell them how it really was, if they should ever ask. That on these dirt streets and in these stick houses we lived the wrong life that they might live the right one. Tell our children, all our children, if they should ever ask …
A sudden gust of wind lifts the bare branches of the trees just beyond the town, flinging birds into the sky. The wind comes without warning. The birds are flung upwards, float on the wind, then settle back on the bare branches from which they were thrown. They are flung, they fall. Clouds roll in from the sea, the forest is moving. The pace quickens on the town’s streets beneath Michael’s window. Street vendors, shoppers and townspeople hurrying to work look up. The forest heaves, the wood’s in trouble. The wind is indifferent. It tosses us — blossoms, birds and lives — into the sky and we are thrown back. We land and look about — earth, wind and sky — before picking ourselves up. It is us, we are it. The thing itself. It worlds, it is worlding.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the following for their help during the writing of this novel.
The Australia Council for a two-year fellowship in 2012.
To Shona Martyn, Catherine Milne, Denise O’Dea and Amanda O’Connell at HarperCollins, Jo Butler, and my agent Sonia Land and all the gang at Sheil Land for their support and enthusiasm.
Finally, my special thanks to my partner, Fiona Capp, for her constant support, suggestions and advice, not just in the writing of this novel, but all of them. And to Leo – the lion-hearted boy.
About the Author
Steven Carroll was born in Melbourne. His first novel, Remember Me, Jimmy James, was published in 1992. This was followed by Momoko (1994), The Love Song of Lucy McBride (1998) and then The Art of the Engine Driver (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Miles Franklin Award in 2002 and France’s Prix Femina literary award for the Best Foreign Novel in 2005, The Gift of Speed (2004), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2005, The Time We Have Taken (2007), which won both the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the South-East Asia and South Pacific Region and the Miles Franklin Award 2008, The Lost Life (2009), which was shortlisted for both the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award and the ALS Gold Medal 2010, and Spirit of Progress (2011), which was longlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award, and A World of Other People (2013), which was shortlisted for the South Australian Premier’s Award 2014 and was co-winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2014.
Steven Carroll lives in Melbourne with his partner and son.
Praise for A World of Other People
‘A World of Other People is a powerfully imagined, elegiac homage to love, heroism and poetry … an intimate private drama, set against the immense and tragic backdrop of European civilization tearing itself apart.’
Prime Minister’s Literary Awards Judges, 2014
‘A fine, absorbing novel – darker than The Lost Life but equally eloquent and assured. Carroll’s re-creation of a distant and now long-lost world is vivid and tactful.’
Andrew Riemer, The Sydney Morning Herald
Praise for The Time We Have Taken
‘Carroll’s novel is a poised, philosophically profound exploration … a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives’
Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges, 2008
‘The result is a deeply satisfying encounter with the empty spaces that the suburb failed to fill both between people and inside them. The surface of Carroll’s writing is deceptively calm … Carroll takes time to tell an untidy story with a gentle sense of wonder. His prose whispers loud’
Michael McGirr, The Age
‘It is the creation of a larger concept of suburban life in all its transcendent possibilities that makes this
novel so special. Carroll’s revelations of these beautiful insights into our utterly ordinary world make him a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised’
Debra Adelaide, The Australian
Praise for The Gift of Speed
‘Carroll’s gift for evocative storytelling … had me captivated’
Australian Bookseller & Publisher
‘A novel of tender and harrowing melancholy’
Le Nouvel Observateur
‘Carroll’s a rare beast in that he writes with great affection and understanding about life in the suburbs … A lovely rites of passage novel that is oh so carefully crafted and captures the evanescence of time to perfection’
Jason Steger, The Age
‘Carroll’s writing is astonishingly assured’
James Bradley, Australian Book Review
Praise for The Art of the Engine Driver
‘Subtle, true and profoundly touching’
Le Monde
‘A veritable gem … a beautiful discovery’
Elle France
‘An exquisitely crafted journey of Australian suburban life … fresh and irresistible’
Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges, 2002
‘a little masterpiece’
Hessische Allgemeine
Praise for The Lost Life
‘Carroll’s prose is limpid and assured … [a] poised and beautifully burnished work. Carroll’s control is masterly’
Andrew Riemer, The Sydney Morning Herald
‘Carroll’s ability to turn an ordinary moment into something sacred makes this novel a profound exploration of human desire, endurance, maturity and regret’
Bookseller & Publisher
‘This novel will consolidate Steven Carroll’s reputation among Australia’s literati … Carroll is as much the literary ringmaster as novelist in The Lost Life, but remains as “rewardingly eclectic, intelligent and involving as ever”’
The Week
‘[a] brilliantly envisaged novel … few novels begin with such measured elegance’
The Sunday Tasmanian
‘its capacity to evoke a kind of sharp, sad nostalgia for an unlived past takes you by surprise. To enter the narrative is like entering into a slightly faded but exquisitely tinted photograph encased in gilded frame’
The Canberra Times
‘this is not so much a departure as an arrival … Carroll’s fiction is distinctive for the way his clean prose decelerates experience, puts aside the urgings of linear temporality, to reveal a richness that habitually evades us … his beautiful and poetically attentive novel retrieves a warm, beating heart from Eliot’s haunted, stark, magnificent work of art’
Australian Literary Review
‘Carroll’s prose has a sublime rhythmic quality … almost as if he has sung the words on the page’
Australian Book Review
Also by Steven Carroll
Remember Me, Jimmy James
Momoko
The Love Song of Lucy McBride
The Art of the Engine Driver
The Gift of Speed
The Time We Have Taken
The Lost Life
Spirit of Progress
A World of Other People
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2015
This edition published in 2015
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Steven Carroll 2015
The right of Steven Carroll to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Carroll, Steven, 1949-author.
Forever young / Steven Carroll.
ISBN 978 0 7322 9122 8 (pbk)
ISBN 978 1 7430 9972 8 (epub)
Australian fiction.
Australia – Politics and government – Fiction.
A823.3
Cover design by Darren Holt, HarperCollins Design Studio
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Author photograph by Rebecca Rocks
Forever Young Page 27