by Alex Miller
He left everything else out to be washed.
He slid the drawer back in and closed the wardrobe door and he walked across to the window. The wardrobe shook behind him, the floor uneven and the boards loose, the mirror door swinging open again. He struggled with the window and managed to get it up a few inches before it stuck again. The roar of the city rushed in and a small breeze carried the leafy smell of the garden into the room, a smell laced with exhaust fumes. He leaned down and looked through the narrow opening. A smart little green car was parked on the gravel at the far edge of the elm copse.
4
Two older men were seated at the kitchen table eating eggs and bacon and drinking tea when he went down in the morning. It was not the Irish woman but another woman, darker and more silent, who was in the kitchen. The men greeted him and he told them he was looking for work. They said they had just come off the night shift on the bottle line at the Abbotsford Brewery and he was welcome to go in with them that evening and the foreman would be sure to put him on. ‘The night shift always has places for starters,’ one of them said and they both laughed.
That night he went to the brewery with the men. The foreman had a clipboard and shouted his questions at Robert above the rattling and grinding of the returned bottle line. Robert yelled back his name and the foreman pointed to the line and told him to get over to it. Robert stood shoulder to shoulder with other men on a raised platform receiving the crates of empty bottles. They set the bottles upside down onto the constantly moving conveyor belt that carried them into the washing plant. Standing there plucking the empty bottles six or eight at a time from the crates and flicking them upside down onto the line had a knack to it. Robert mastered this trick in an hour and after that it was nothing but repetition hour after hour throughout the night without a pause or change in the pace of it.
Carlton & United brewery trucks were backed up to the unloading ramp, their trays stacked high with thousands of crates of empty bottles. Work went on at an urgent pace, as if there was a terrible hurry to get it done. The machine set the pace. As soon as one truck was emptied another truck backed in and took its place. When the unloading fell behind, there was a bank-up and the foreman and drivers started yelling and swearing at each other. The empty bottles of one night shift were identical to the empty bottles of the previous night and might well have been exactly the same bottles going round and round in an endless circle from the brewery to the bottle shops and drinkers in the city and back to the line again to be washed and refilled with beer.
The same bottles night after night. Millions of them.
Robert stood at his station on the line all through the long nights, the dark and the clatter and the warm stench of fermenting beer from the great vats and the shouts of the men and the hurrying demand of the ever-advancing line. He was half stupefied with it by the time the shift ended in the grey dawn and he was released from the grip of the machine.
In the chill early hours of the morning on the sixth night he stepped down from the line and walked away. He said nothing, just collected his jacket and the cash owed him. He walked out into the night past the waiting trucks with their loads of empties and went on through the dark streets with a feeling of lightness and liberation. Then the thought came to him that as a boy he had made the leap and claimed his freedom; now here he was, out of work and living with a bunch of single men who had no plans for their lives but simply to exist from week to week on their pay packets, their minds lit up by the chance of backing a winner once in a while. And as he walked those dark streets he saw that he was to be counted among men such as these. The weight of it stirred in him like an old curse come back to life.
He kept walking till he came to the bank of a river. He stood looking down at the black surge of water and he wondered how long it would take to drown. A man walking his dog along the river path said good morning and Robert came out of his despair and said good morning back to the man. He walked on and thought then of his mother and father and their belief in him. In foreseeing the leap he must make to liberate himself, it had never been his aim to betray or to forswear his origins, but to transcend the poverty of his situation and to seek a grander destiny for himself elsewhere. When it came to the point, the boys at school who had claimed to share his dream had fallen silent and had accepted their fate, like the men in the boarding house. He was on his own again.
He walked back to the boarding house and had a shower and put on a clean shirt. Then he walked into the city and called in at the government employment office. They sent him to the Myer store. He stood in line and waited. Standing in that line he knew himself to be among the people living at the margins of society in this city and he had no answer to the question of how he was to move from those margins to a place where his life might have a more noble purpose. He knew no one he could speak to about what was in his mind. He was glad of one thing only: that Frankie had not been free to follow his lead and suffer this humiliation.
He was given a job as a probationary day cleaner on the confectionary floor and was sent to the cleaners’ room to see the foreman and to get a uniform. The job was weekdays and Saturday mornings. Sweeping the floor. That was it.
He went in next morning and opened his locker and changed into his uniform and he picked up his broom for the day and he pushed that broom around and told the people, ‘Mind the broom, please,’ and they got out of his way. That’s all it was.
On Saturday afternoon he went into the grandly proportioned room on the ground floor of the boarding house and had a look around. It must have been one of the principal reception rooms in earlier times, reserved now for the single men as a common room. There were old armchairs and couches and several tables. The place stank of stale beer and tobacco and men’s sweat. Four men were sitting up at a table drinking beer and playing cards. The races were on the radio, the voice of the race caller competing with the noise from a black-and-white television set propped on a pile of old encyclopaedias in front of a black marble fireplace.
Robert said good day and the men nodded and greeted him and went on with their game. The two men from the bottle line weren’t there. He went over to one of the tall French doors with elegant arched fanlights. Beyond the glass was a broad verandah with tessellated paving. The small coloured tiles of the paving were broken and lifted in places by damp and tree roots. Lofty decorative iron columns ended in elaborate arched cast-iron work, supporting a second-storey verandah above, making of the lower verandah a covered promenade. Guests must once have felt invited to step out on spring evenings to take the air. Standing at the window looking out onto the verandah, Robert saw it as a place for romantic meetings between well-dressed ladies and gentlemen.
From where he was standing he could see the neglected garden with its elm copse over to the right beyond the broken tiles of the verandah. From this low angle he might have been looking into a leafy forest. It was a European view and unlike anything he’d seen on the great cattle stations of the north. He turned around from the window and watched the men playing cards. His fear of their fate hung on him like a smell.
He swept the floor each day. He was like a man with a disease, the thing progressing step by step inside him. Sweeping that floor strewn with lolly wrappers and other rubbish that people had discarded. He existed inside his bulb of silence. Pushing that wide broom around he knew, with a deep intuition of its approach, that something final and bad was going to come out of his anger and frustration and that he would not have the power to oppose it. Wide awake at midnight in his narrow bed in the corner of his room, the band around his head tightened its grip. Wide awake, he lay waiting for the crack in his skull that would bring this thing to its end.
He was walking down Swanston Street to catch his regular tram back to the boarding house when he could go no further. The crowds of people hurrying home to make the most of the weekend pushed past him. He had been standing there for some time when he saw he was in front of the window of an art supplier’s shop. He must have w
alked past that shop every day since he started working at Myer but had never noticed it before. He stood now looking in at the lovingly arranged display of pencils and paper and paints and sketching pads and all the other wonderful things that were familiar to him from his childhood painting days with his father. After his father returned home from the war he took Robert out into the Kentish countryside every weekend. Father and son spent their summer days and evenings drawing and painting together. They spoke very little to each other during those times, and never of the war. They spoke only of art. Their love for each other then was perfect, a harmony between them they had never known before and were never to know again. Robert stood looking in the window of the art shop thinking back over those days with his dad, and he wondered why he had never tried to make another drawing ever again after he left home.
He went into the shop. He knew what to ask for. He watched the man behind the counter wrap the sticks of ochre pastel and half-dozen sticks of charcoal and the sketching pad and the two 110B pencils. Watching the man wrap the things with care in brown paper and tie them into a small package with string, Robert saw how the man’s respect for the task spoke of his love of these things, and Robert felt touched by the fine world of that respect for things that he had shared with his father. The man handed Robert the package and smiled at him. He said, ‘Good luck, son.’ Robert would have liked to shake the man’s hand but the man did not offer it and Robert was too shy to offer his own.
In his room back at the boarding house Robert rescued the solitary hard-backed chair from its isolation in the far corner and he sat at the low table in front of the window. With the ochre pastels he began to frame a drawing on the first sheet of the sketching pad. An hour went by, silent except for the light hissing of the pastel against the grain of the paper. He was working up an image of a naked man, building the muscular figure up layer on layer with the ochre pastel against a charcoal background that grew darker and more dense towards the base of the picture, until at the very bottom it was so dark it resembled a swirling black mist rising from below and obscuring the man’s lower legs and feet. The red ochre man was fighting down this dark threat rising up to engulf him. Robert was lost in the task.
He worked without pausing all through that afternoon and on into the night, shaping and reshaping and rubbing out and shaping again, finding details and moments in the drawing that surprised and excited him. His energy for the work was vast. He was happy. He was free again. He even forgot to smoke.
That night he slept scarcely more than a couple of hours. He rose before the dawn on Sunday and started on the drawing again. He forgot about everything else but the drawing of the fighting man that was materialising under his hands. From time to time he stood back from the table and walked about the room and remembered to smoke a cigarette and he looked out the window at the light of the morning on the elm leaves. Then he was pulled back into his drawing and he looked down at it and saw with excitement how much might still be done to fully realise its presence on the page. The naked figure emerging on the sheet of paper was half turned away from the viewer. His right fist and right leg were raised threateningly, the hairless globe of his skull catching a highlight from some hidden source of illumination as he bent forward, gazing down at the black mist below him, his cock and balls tight and firm as if carved from red stone.
He worked on through Sunday afternoon. He longed to give to his figure the power and poise it possessed for him in his imagination. As the hours went by the drawing became overworked in complex tones of terracotta, the movement and tension of muscles revealed with the ochre stumps and the pads of Robert’s fingers, as he had seen his father do. Eventually the repeated rubbing and scrubbing back produced a luminous patina on the surface of the heavy paper, lending the drawing an illusion of age and substance and depth that delighted and gratified him.
Then, so suddenly he was shaken by the abruptness of it, there was no more to be done. It was over. He stood staring at the drawing, his heartbeat thick in his throat. His throat was so dry and sore he couldn’t swallow. The drawing looked like something that had always existed. It did not look like something he had made. He asked myself how he could have made it. Rendered in the glowing subdued redness of his inner fury, the naked man stood alone against the darkness and fought for his life. It possessed the appearance of something that had survived the wear and tear of the ages, a drawing long forgotten, battered, neglected, retrieved from the deepest layer of memory. A chance survival from some other place. Robert was moved and couldn’t believe it was the work of his own hands.
He examined the pads of his fingers, as if he would see in their grainy lines the source of his inspiration. He knew, with a deep intuitive self-assurance, that if he ever again attempted to do something like this drawing, the attempt would fail. The drawing was unique. He knew it. He touched it with the tips of his fingers. Perhaps he would send it to his father. He needed someone to admire it. He wanted to know it made sense to someone else so that he could believe in its reality himself. If someone asked him, why did you do it? he would have nothing to say to them. And yet he was proud of having done it.
His shirt was rank with stale sweat. He took it off and dropped it on the floor and went down the passage to the bathroom and had a shower. When he got back to his room he didn’t look at the drawing but put on a clean shirt and went out and walked to the Greek cafe on Glenferrie Road and sat in a booth. His stomach was aching with hunger. He ordered a T-bone steak with eggs and chips and slices of white bread and butter. While he was eating he was seeing the sketching pad lying open on the table by the window of his room.
He was at the cash register paying his bill and buying cigarettes when a woman got up from one of the booths on the other side of the cafe and came over and stood beside him. He felt her looking at him and he turned to meet her amused gaze.
‘So you’re not going to say g’day?’ she said, her tone edged with a defensive sarcasm.
There was something familiar about her. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t recognise you.’
She laughed. ‘You wouldn’t have a clue, would you?’
‘I’ve only ever seen you wearing those overalls with your hair in that bandeau, or whatever it is.’ She usually came in to clean the cleaners’ change room at the Myer store when he was leaving, pushing her cart and collecting the rubbish. She only came in Monday to Wednesday. She was a good few years older than him and he’d never taken much notice of her. Today she was wearing a pale green dress open at the throat with a wide leather belt and a short brown jacket. He said, ‘You look very different with your hair like that.’
She said, ‘So what are you doing here?’
‘I live just across the road. What are you doing here yourself?’
‘This is what you do on your weekends? Come in here all on your own?’
‘I’ve been drawing all weekend.’
‘So you’re secretly an artist. I knew you’d be up to something. I know a lot of artists.’
‘I’m not an artist.’
‘You spend your weekends drawing. Who does that except artists?’
‘Only this weekend,’ he said.
‘Would you like to show me your drawings? I know something about art.’
‘I’ve only done one drawing.’ He was imagining her in his room looking at his fighting man. ‘You’re on your own too,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘It’s a lonely world.’
People were beginning to crowd the cash register area and Robert and the woman moved away towards the door. ‘It’s just one picture,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ The idea of her in his room admiring his drawing excited him.
She considered him. ‘How about you let me decide that? Or is it a secret? For your eyes only.’ She laughed and snapped open her bag and took out her cigarettes. She shook a cigarette out of the packet and offered it. He took the cigarette and she lit it with a lighter. They stood smoking and looking at each other. Her smile was self-mocking, or was
maybe mocking him. He wasn’t sure. The situation seemed to amuse her. In a moment she would be gone. ‘If you’re really interested, I suppose you could have a look.’
‘So let’s go,’ she said.
He caught then a sense of her nervousness and it made him nervous too.
She said, ‘How many cleaners do I know who spend their weekends drawing?’
He opened the door for her. ‘I live just up the road here.’
They went out of the cafe and walked back to the boarding house. As they were crossing the broad stretch of Dandenong Road she put her arm through his, her hip and shoulder touching him lightly. Her confidence confused and excited him. He had been alone so long he hardly knew how to behave. He said, ‘Are you married?’
She laughed and squeezed his arm. ‘What a question.’
‘Are you?’
‘We’re separated.’
‘So it didn’t work out between you?’
‘For God’s sake, who wants to talk about that shit?’ There was a warning in her voice.
He wondered if she had children. He didn’t ask.
They turned in at the broken gate and walked up the drive. He was worried the landlady might object to his inviting a woman into the house. He opened the front door with his key. There was no one in the hall. The noise of the television in the lounge room. He was nervous and clumsy and bumped against her as they started up the stairs. He whispered an apology and she laughed, their shoulders touching again. They went up the stairs and he opened the door to his room and stepped aside to let her go in first. He went in after her and closed the door. He stood watching her, his room charged with anxiety and hope.