Spirit of Progress

by Steven Carroll

  For most of his life, since the death of his parents, who worked themselves into an early grave, and the loss of his brother in the Great War, Skinner had thought of himself as alone. Never mind that there were people around to whom he could talk and visitors from time to time. They were not part of his life, nor were they part of the family he had known before it was blown apart by the sad and violent years of another age. No, since then his life had become, in his mind, a solitary one. And this was the effect of Miss Carroll’s light. That first time he became aware of it, it felt like company. And with the possibility of company came a sense of comfort and with that thought his life didn’t seem so solitary. One light in the dark can do that.

  This is why Skinner is standing on the back veranda of his house. And although he is feeling the winter cold more than he ever did as a young man, he is also feeling the glow of comfort and registering the sensation that this life need not be solitary because there is now someone out there. This is what brings him here every night, this feeling of connection, of having made first contact with a world beyond his own, of having discovered a way of being in the world that wasn’t there before Miss Carroll’s light appeared. And when he thinks of it like this, part of him suspects that he might have spent too many years living alone and that those solitary years in which he, Skinner, likely as not, spoke only to Skinner about the things that mattered have done this to him. Made him imagine things, and just a bit too dramatically. Perhaps.

  And so the light in Miss Carroll’s old canvas tent brings him back every night. As it has for months now. Brings him back here to the back veranda, where he stands, an inexplicable connection between him and the light in Miss Carroll’s tent bringing comfort, unfailingly, at the end of each day.

  But if he goes too close to the light in the tent, if he responds to it as if it were an announcement, even an invitation (as a solitary light in the dark night is), and is not invited in, will the light lose its power to comfort because it will have lost its potential? And will this time that he has come to look forward to at the end of each day be lost to him?

  It is then that the light dims. With this thought still in his mind, and which he has mulled over now for some time without resolution, he steps back into the house, no longer able to ignore the cold because the energy and the strength that resisted the weather and gave him his productive years are now gone and will not be back.

  6.

  Inside Miss Carroll’s Tent

  Katherine (for she is Katherine, even if it is only her sisters who call her that, and even if it rings strangely in her ears on those rare occasions she hears her name) has had the oil lamp for over half her life now. It throws out a good, mellow light. Not too bright, harsh or dull. Soft is the word that comes to mind. She is a woman, however hard the years may have made her, who likes soft things. And this light is the softest thing she has ever owned. Soft enough to touch. Not in the way you can touch an object but in the way you can touch a shower of rain or a heavy fog. And she’s found more comfort in that light over the years than she’s found in people. Or animals, for that matter. She’s not sentimental about them either. But she is about this light. And for that reason she’ll never give it up. Not even when her sleep-out is built on the space that the tent now occupies. Certainly not for electric bulbs. She can turn it low to rest or turn it up to read, as she does now. For she has read all her life. She can barely remember not reading and one of the few concessions she has made to the passing of the years is a pair of reading glasses. The glasses and a small kerosene heater that currently warms her.

  But as much as she draws comfort from the lamp and as much as she is warmed by it whenever she lights it, she is not dwelling on the quality of its light at the moment. She is brooding on the disruption to her morning.

  How did it unfold? What precisely was the sequence of events? She was reading. She had a warm cup of tea beside her. The heater was lit. She had her book, she had her solitude, she had her quiet. Happy, the way she has always been, happy to be alone. Then there was a sound. From out there. Intrusive. A voice. Someone was calling out. And she had no idea how long they had been calling or to whom. Then the voice and the calling became louder and she realised it was calling for her. Furthermore, from the clarity and the volume, she knew that whoever was calling was quite near. On her property, in fact. And that was when she rose, threw down the book and marched outside to find a cheery young man and a glum-looking older one standing no more than ten yards away in front of her.

  Intruders. Why do they always act cheerily? But he lost the cheery look, the young one, and backed off pretty smartly when he saw she wasn’t in any mood for cheery intruders. So did the glum-looking one with the camera in his hand. Then she was shouting, or was she? She was issuing orders. She was telling them to get off her property, and they backed off onto the road. At first she thought they might have been selling things, the things that hawkers all over the country sell. Then she saw their car. A fancy car that might be full of all sorts of fancy things that people never use, but buy anyway because they like the way they sparkle.

  She soon realised they weren’t selling anything. They were from the newspaper, they said, which explained the fancy car. And they wanted to talk to her. A minute before that she had everything she needed. Her book, her solitude. Then two strangers wanted to talk to her. She knew why. It was the tent. It was her age. She was a curiosity. Oh, they didn’t say as much. But that was why they were here. And suddenly she’d felt like one of those stuffed figures in a museum. There were words. There was talk. Then the glum one raised his camera and took a photograph without asking. And that was that. She might have spoken to them. But not from that moment on. The cheek. The damned cheek. He may even have taken a second photograph before she turned and disappeared into her tent. And they were left on the road.

  Yes, that was the sequence of events. She was reading. It was quiet. Then somebody called. Later, inside the tent, everything had become quiet again, apart from the sound of their motor car starting up, quite a long time afterwards, and she’d wondered what they’d been up to out there.

  Now, at the end of the day, she has returned to her book. This lamp, which has been with her for most of her travels (and Katherine has travelled on coaches, trains, buses and on foot all over the country, not just for work, although there was always some sort of work to be found, but to see things), throws out an even, warm glow and continues to give her the comfort it always has.

  But now she is tired. She removes her reading glasses and places them on a small table beside her fold-up bed. There is a dark wooden crucifix above the bed, a porcelain Jesus, yellowed with age, nailed to the cross. Katherine, as she has done every night of her life since she was a girl in a room she shared with her three sisters, sinks to her knees, brings her palms together and closes her eyes in prayer. For the day could never close until she knelt and prayed. Her lips move in the glowing, quiet tent, and there is the faintest sound of whispering.

  Her prayer done, she rises and reaches out to the lamp beside her bed, and dims it. And it is precisely at this moment that Skinner, observing the dimming of the light from across the other side of the paddocks, turns back into the house. Katherine lies back, drifting into a doze, little realising that her light has been noted. More than noted — that her light has given comfort beyond the confines of her tent, out there, where the solitary figure of Skinner stood gazing upon it across the silvery long grass.

  7.

  The Absent Father

  Everybody now dispersed, the mob that might have been his gone, ferried by trams out to the homes they left years before, Vic leaves the quiet city intersection and makes his way back into the rail yards, that part of the vast railway world of twisting tracks and idle engines called North Melbourne Loco. This is where he has left his bicycle. Even if there was petrol to be had, Vic, like practically everyone else in the city, could never afford a car. So Vic gets about on a bicycle. And with so little traffic around at this
time of night (and it is not yet nine o’clock) it’s not difficult.

  A whole chain of events has occurred since Vic sat down in the driver’s seat earlier that afternoon and brought his train and its sad cargo into the city. While he was travelling south, the photographer and the journalist drove north of the city to Katherine’s tent, Katherine suffered their intrusion, the article appeared in the evening newspaper, a painter was stirred by the story, and a short time ago, while Vic stood in the street contemplating this new world they were all about to enter, and the mob and the life that might have been his, Skinner stood gazing upon Katherine’s light, comforted by the simple fact that it was there.

  But Vic is unaware of any of this as he cycles back through the dark western suburbs of the city and down to the wharves, to the bayside suburb of Newport where he and Rita rent a small house. Even if he were aware of his connection to the day’s events, his part in the chain, he wouldn’t give it too much thought. Vic has other things on his mind. For it is not just the great world that is about to change. Vic’s world is about to change too.

  In the night, all across the city, and out there in the greater world, young men become fathers. Possibly at this very moment. And they enter this world of fatherhood (Vic has been watching this world of fathers and their children more keenly lately) with a casual ease that he can’t comprehend. And this is because it has always been something that other people did. But now he is about to become one of those people, and he knows he will not step into that part with the casual, almost practised air of those who were surely born to be fathers because he knows he wasn’t born to be a father. He wasn’t even born to be married. But there you are, he tells himself. He is married, he is about to become a father and his small world is about to change utterly, just as the greater world out there is already becoming something else, something vastly different from the one everyone’s known up until now.

  Father — the word sits well on other people. But the thought of anyone calling him ‘Dad’ is difficult to imagine. And this is because Vic has rarely used the word. Even as a child. He never knew his father. His father was never there and so words such as ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ were never spoken because there was no one to speak them to. Unless, that is, in reference to somebody else’s father or dad. This is not because his father died tragically years before, succumbing to an unlikely accident, war or disease. No, his father simply didn’t think it was necessary to be present. Wasn’t sufficiently persuaded that there was reason enough to be there. In short, didn’t care. And so Vic learnt to live without a father, without using the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’, which is why they don’t come naturally to him. And he contemplates this, all the time knowing that his father is, more than likely, still alive. That he is not dead. That in all likelihood he is out there, doing something incidental like pouring a cup of tea right now. But Vic has never met his father and would not know him if he were to pass him on the street or sit beside him on a tram or in a train. He is convinced his father is still out there, somewhere in the Western District countryside, in a large house on a farm, indifferent to the fact of Vic existing in the world. For Vic’s mother was a domestic on his farm and was silly enough to get herself knocked up. Silly enough to give in to the feeling that somebody might care for her. Or — and late in life (for she was forty-one when she had Vic) — silly enough to give herself leave to take a chance, to live, and to have something to look back upon apart from work and a life of what the world calls spinsterhood. Silly enough to try. What did she expect, he hears this absent father’s voice asking her, what did she expect, after all, apart from the fifty quid he gave her? He already had a farmer’s wife and children, thank you very much. He needed neither another wife nor another child. That was an impossibility. She and he had had their time. Their time was brief and now it was time she ceased to exist. And that was what the fifty quid was for. It wasn’t to provide help or comfort, nor was it even a sign of care. It was to make her go away. To make the child inside her go away and likewise cease to exist. And this is why when Vic tries to imagine a father doing something at this moment, as he cycles home from work, he sees only a vague shape, who a long time ago paid his mother a lot of money to go away. To vanish. For if something doesn’t exist it’s impossible for it to be on anybody’s mind, in a good or a bad way. No doubt he told her that there were places, institutions, for the child to be turned over to when it was born. And if she was wise, she would do exactly that and then just get on with her life. Everybody told her to farm the baby out: the father, her sisters and the priests. But she kept her boy, so that even though words such as ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ do not fall naturally from his lips, the words ‘Ma’ and ‘Mother’ come as naturally as breathing because they are the first words he ever learnt.

  When the child who will become Michael not only opens his eyes upon this world but grows into it, when he goes to school and on to a university (for Michael will be the first of his family to go to university), he will, in his reading and his study, one day discover the phrase ‘the absent father’. It will pop out of a history book that has not been written yet, in the stuffy library of a university that has not been built yet. And as he reads about it he will also discover that his father’s father was not the only one who was absent. It is, Michael will discover in that sleepy library, a theme. A particularly sad little melody that not only played into the ears of his father but all those children who had been dispatched into non-existence, and who couldn’t trouble anybody’s minds because they weren’t there.

  But the phrase ‘absent father’ has never entered Vic’s thoughts because it hasn’t been invented yet, and it hasn’t been invented yet because nobody talks about these things. Such phrases belong to a world of private shame and it will be left to others, more distant from the shame than those upon whom it falls, to invent the phrase. Even if it did wander into Vic’s thoughts (and Vic is currently turning the front wheel of his bicycle into his street), the phrase would not be welcome. The phrase would be shown the door and turned out, a thought not worth dwelling on, one that would be as unwelcome as the blurred, vague, absent figure it describes, who may or may not be, at this very moment as Vic stops at the front of his house, pouring a cup of tea, indifferent to the absence he has created.

  And so, as much as the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ ring strangely in his ears when he imagines them being spoken to him as they will be one day, this much he resolves, and it is a pledge offered to open sky and which the open sky takes in: the flaws of the absent father will not be visited upon his children, the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ will not ring strangely in their ears, and absence will not be repeated. No, he decides, the sad little melody of absence will fade and cease to play from this very moment, as he nudges his bicycle through the front gate of his lighted house. However imperfectly he may be there, he will be a presence, not an absence.

  8.

  The Dancing Man

  How did it go? How did it happen? The end of things? The end that was always coming but which came as a surprise all the same. To her, to Sam.

  Tess has locked the door of her gallery. It is dark and all she hears is the solitary sound of her footsteps as she departs along the lane. The short trip back to her tram stop takes her past a café, a café that has a touch of Europe about it and which the artists of the city frequent. She slows as she passes it and looks upon the cluttered spectacle inside. She knows most of the regulars and can guess the topics of conversation. Then she notices the journalist, George, whom she sees often enough because he is also the art critic for the paper. He is wearing that distinctive gabardine coat that no doubt his heroes (Graham Greene and whoever else they are) also wear. For George thinks of himself as a writer as much as a journalist. Not that he has ever really said so, but she has noticed there is always a paperback in the pocket of his coat. And he is apt to pull whatever he is reading from his pocket in the course of conversation and share a line or two.

  It is a familiar s
cene. Too familiar. And she is suddenly distracted by the ache of old feelings. Well, not such old feelings. But old enough to make her ache. When she fell in love the previous winter with a painter called Sam she was surprised, almost shocked. But no, not shocked because that carries with it an air of disapproval. And there was nothing to disapprove of, she had told herself, again and again, throughout their winter together. She had simply fallen in love. If anything, it was the fact of falling in love that took her quite by surprise. It happens. Yes, it happens. Every day people fall in and out of love. But it hadn’t happened to Tess since she was nineteen and fallen into marriage the same year she’d fallen in love for the first time.

  Something that she’d always thought would only ever happen to other people (and quite possibly silly people at that) had happened to her. And just after it did, just after she’d been swept up and carried away as though she had suddenly lost control of her life, she’d sat in her lounge room one morning before work and watched, at the same time involved and curiously detached, as the car carrying her husband and daughter slipped from the kerb in front of her house and onto the street. Her husband, as he did every morning, drove their daughter to school then continued to work. A bank. Loans. People, she suddenly found herself musing, are like the large terrace she and her husband and daughter lived in — houses with many rooms. And she’d suddenly felt like a character in a novel, probably a nineteenth-century novel, dwelling on a bourgeois marriage that is not all it seems. A portrait of a house with many rooms. And retribution (as it would in the pages of Flaubert or Zola, whom she read in French at her school in Switzerland) just waiting to fall upon the heroine for the crime of falling in love when she had no right to. But it did not, in the end, fall upon her, and the affair ended — as she always knew it would — as abruptly as it began. And she knew it would end like that because it had to. But how did it end?