Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  My father is standing near me, but I cannot see him because I will not take my eyes away from the sky. My father is grazing his chestnut gelding, which is still a maiden after a long career in racing. I cannot see the horse, but I can hear its teeth tearing at the rye-grass.

  My father tells me the sky is the blue that it is because we are on the other side of the Great Divide. He says the sky over the places where he and I were born is not the true colour. Over Melbourne and Warrnambool the sky has been watered down; the sea has drained the true colour out of the sky. But here at Bendigo the sky is its true colour because it has nothing but land beneath it – and not just any land but soil and grass that are mostly golden orange, which of all colours brings out the richest from blue.

  I discuss with my father the true name for the colour of this sky of the inland. My father finds rather conveniently near his feet a few small flowers of a kind I have always taken for weeds. He tells me that these are cornflowers and the sky is cornflower blue.

  I cannot quite see in the sky overhead the blue of the flowers my father calls cornflowers. Yet I am pleased that my father has claimed to see that sort of blue. I understand that I am free myself to see in the sky a colour from earth.

  I have to admit that the sky here, north of the Great Divide, is an incomparable blue, but its colour makes me sometimes uneasy. The deep, pure blue is a little too deep and too pure. I would lie more comfortably on the soil of Bendigo if I knew that the powerful blue is not all there is to the sky.

  And so, privately, I decide that the sky over the inland leads back to a layer of lilac. Although no such thing has yet appeared to my eyes, I declare my belief in a delicate lilac underlying the deep blue. With my head resting against the soil, I trust that the sky will ultimately give way to the colour I see in the clusters of small flowers (each cluster shaped like a half-opened parasol) on the roof-high shrub behind my house each year when the first north winds blow.

  I am standing on the solid soil of Bendigo and staring at the sudden shining or dulling of tiny creases and rumplings in a silk jacket as they catch or lose the light from high in the darkness above the Showgrounds trotting track. The silk jacket is worn by a man with a faintly Chinese face. His name is Clarrie Long, and I wish I had used that name instead of Harold Moy for the jockey in the first work of fiction I ever wrote, and the name Bendigo instead of Bassett for the city in north-central Victoria where that work of fiction is set.

  Clarrie Long’s jacket and the jackets of the five other drivers are the first racing colours I have seen, but I know already that I am going to study racing colours for the rest of my life. I will still stare at skies and lilac bushes, but only to help me understand racing colours.

  I am sitting at my table in a room of a house in a suburb of Melbourne. On the south wall of the room, just to the right of the window, a page of a calendar shows rows of black numerals in white squares below a picture with the caption: Snow gums on the Gorge Nature Trail, Mount Buffalo National Park.

  A week ago I asked a man who has lived for much of his life at Kangaroo Flat, on the south-west outskirts of Bendigo, what he remembered of the photographs in the old country trains. He said without hesitating that he remembered mostly pictures of snow and ice and granite boulders and the Chalet at Mount Buffalo. That man has never seen this room. He had no way of knowing that I would sit down one day to write about the interiors of compartments on the Bendigo train in a room with a scene from his own railway journeys above me on the wall.

  The father of the man from Kangaroo Flat, by the way, died as my own father died – suddenly in his fifties. Each of the two men was, in his own way, a good Catholic; so each body lies now – the body of my father beside the calm, brown Hopkins and under a pale-blue sky, and the body of the man from Kangaroo Flat in the trusty soil of Bendigo and under that unforgettable blue – waiting, in the words of the Apostles’ Creed, for the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

  I am sitting at my table, with my back to Bendigo, and facing the window in the south wall. The sky outside the window is the colour of the water in Bass Strait, with grey-white clouds appearing continually from behind the calendar-picture of Mount Buffalo. I am wondering how I have come at last to be staring at a sky no different from the sea after all the richness I have seen in skies.

  I am sitting at my table and reading a letter from a man who has gone to live in Tasmania. For the sake of those people who have to read a story about the past as though they are watching a motion picture, I will mention here, and in each of the remaining scenes of this story, a calendar with the ordinal number of a year showing on it or else a scrap of newspaper with the date showing in the corner. In this scene, the page of a calendar marked 1986 is visible. (I am not scornful of the people who want to know this sort of detail. Even though time has been abolished from my world, some of the old words have been left in place, like signposts pointing to towns long since submerged under man-made lakes.)

  In his letter from Tasmania, the man writes about the peculiar colour of the sky over the place where he now lives. He writes that some of the pale blue has drained away into the green of the plain around his house. I wonder how anyone could write in this way about Tasmania. But then I look through my collections of maps, and one map is drawn to such a scale that I see the man now as having found the one district in all Tasmania that can rightly be called plains.

  The man who wrote the letter was born in the hills near Hurstbridge, Victoria. This is the district that I called Harp Gully in a work of fiction. The narrator in that work of fiction looked forward to spending the last part of his life at Harp Gully.

  The man who now lives in Tasmania has written a work of fiction of his own set in a place called Harp Gully. Before he wrote his fiction he asked me if I would allow him to use the name Harp Gully, but I told him no one should claim to own the name of any place in a true work of fiction.

  I am standing at my table in the room with a window on its south side. The sky is a watery colour, but I am not wondering whether the blue has been lost to Bass Strait or to the green plains of Tasmania.

  I am looking at two rhombuses, each measuring diagonally about 1.5 centimetres, cut from silk of the same colour as the sky outside the window at my back. I am holding one of the pieces of pale-blue silk between a pair of tweezers and trying to fit the piece into a collage of pieces of silk. When this and the other rhombus of silk are in place, the pattern of the collage will be complete and I will then cover all the pieces of silk carefully with a sheet of transparent and adhesive plastic. All the pieces of silk have been cut with a blunt razor blade from ribbons of silk bought at Myer Northland.

  The shopping centre known as Northland is built on what was once the first patch of open grassland I saw and afterwards remembered having seen. The grassland was visible from the windows of the yellow bus that travelled between Bundoora and the East Preston tram terminus when I lived at Bundoora in my third and fourth years and just before I was taken to live at Bendigo.

  The finished pattern of coloured silk, held firmly under the clear plastic, is the best likeness I have prepared of the colours that represent me.

  I do not own a racehorse or a share in a racehorse. Even if I had the money to buy the least share in a horse, I would use the money instead to buy ten or twenty sets of racing silks, each of which would be a slight variation of the colours I have almost decided on in this room with the south-facing window and the calendar showing the numerals 1-9-8-2. Having bought the racing colours, I would spend the rest of my life studying each of the different patterns in different lights. I would study the patterns in this room in June or July, with a watered-down sky behind me. I would study the patterns in a room facing east in March, when the light of summer has begun to soften and I can make out separate dark-blue treetops on the first of the folds of hills between here and Hurstbridge. And I would study my patterns by a window facing north in September, when the first hot wind blows over Melbourne. (‘Please do
not close the window,’ said the Reverend Doctor Backhaus to his housekeeper in Brighton, Victoria, on a hot afternoon in the last year of his life. ‘That wind is the north wind,’ said the exile. ‘It comes from Bendigo.’)

  Only one room in this house has a window that looks north, and before this calendar in the corner is taken down from the wall, men shouting day after day in a foreign language will have torn down the old garden outside that window and built things called units in the bare dirt. But the sunlight in September will still reach the window, and the north wind will still flap the orange-gold holland blind.

  One day, all the other people in this house will have gone away and left me to do what I have always wanted to do. For most of my life I used to think I would spend my days, after I had been left alone, draping over beds and chairs and floors all the variously coloured jackets and sleeves and caps from the collection of racing-silks bought with the money that a different sort of man would have called his life’s savings. I used to see myself walking backwards and forwards in every room, always with my eyes on the silks, and stopping suddenly at any one of twenty different places to study some combination of colours in yet another light. The man I used to see in all the rooms of this house, in the light of windows looking towards all the places where the sky or the soil or the flowers or leaves of plants have mattered to me – that man is (I write is rather than was, because he is present to my eyes again) about to choose after fifty or sixty years of study the pattern of colours that has always been his own, although he has taken a lifetime to recognise it.

  This is the man I used to see, especially in the room facing north, where masking-tape holds the edges of the blind against the window frame, and the light through the blind is the same light which is all that Doctor Backhaus sees now of the place he wants to go back to before he dies, because his housekeeper has drawn the blind against the sun and closed the window against the wind from the other side of the Great Divide.

  This is the man I used to see. But now, at this moment against a backdrop of 1-9-8-2, with a tiny patch of sky-blue silk between my tweezers, I wonder why I have to put this sky-blue in the place reserved for it high up on the sleeve, so that the brown sleeve will have a sky-blue armband.

  Clarrie Long leans comfortably back in the seat of the sulky behind the horse Great Dalla near the fence around the outside of the gravel track for bike races or trotting races at the Bendigo Showgrounds. Clarrie Long is talking to my father, who is a spectator on the other side of the fence from Clarrie. No calendar is conveniently near, but my father probably has in his hand a program for the Easter sports meeting. Or someone seeing all this as a scene in a foreign country might notice a scrap of the Advertiser blown along the gravelly ground with the numerals 1-9-4-6 on a corner.

  Clarrie Long and my father are talking, but I am not listening. I am beginning to feel a grave lack of something.

  In many other places with many other calendars on view, I will feel this same lack. I will then believe I have to look into the face of woman after woman (preferably when her eyes are not on me), as though I might see there what I lack. Here, however, under the lights around the Bendigo Showgrounds, I believe I lack a silk jacket and cap of my own colours.

  Clarrie Long’s jacket is brown with pale-blue stars. Under the lights of the Showgrounds, the pale blue is unevenly silvered like many a sky in all the years I am going to spend away from Bendigo.

  I am aware of more than colours. A row of buttons runs down the front of Clarrie Long’s jacket, with each button wholly wrapped in silk and most buttons brown but some, because the stars of the pattern are scattered at odd intervals, silver-blue, and one unforgettable button parti-coloured: a border town with differing flags on either side of the main street; or a poor mulatto brindled and haunted by his separate links with earth and sky.

  The spread of the pattern over buttons and seams tells me that devisers of racing silks take no account of garments – or even, perhaps, of the men who fasten the colours onto themselves. The man and the garment are meant to be hidden behind the colours and the pattern. And the man and the garment I may never see again, but the pattern I will go on seeing.

  In all the places where I feel my lack, with calendar after calendar by window and sky, I try to see my own pattern. Mostly I see Clarrie Long, with faintly Chinese features, and the wife of Clarrie Long, the first woman I have seen who looks like a film star and the woman who appears as Mrs Harold Moy in the book in which Bendigo is called Bassett. I see the pattern of colours of the man whose wife is the first woman I have seen wearing sun-glasses. I see the wife watching a trotting race by daylight at another Bendigo Easter Fair, with images in her dark glasses of the man in the brown with pale-blue stars: the man who has fitted the colour of sky into the colour of soil.

  I ask my father what he sees in the sky, and he turns to the small symmetrical shapes of the cornflowers.

  In place after place, in front of every sort of calendar throughout my life, I scrape coloured pencils against white paper. I make one or another of nearly a thousand small sketches of a pattern suitable for my racing colours, and then I take each sketch to the open window, or I draw the blind, or I stare with my eyes wide open, or I cock my head and squint at the colours and the pattern.

  Now, at last, I am here in this room with a window looking towards the sky over Tasmania, and the sky itself being continually renewed from the direction of Warrnambool. I have a scrap of blue ready to insert into the last of the thousand patterns I have made in place after place. I have decided on my colours at last. I am no longer sketching with pencils. I am about to make a pattern of silk pieces under clear plastic and to keep my colours where I can see them every day.

  My colours are lilac and brown with two small patches of what I call sky-blue.

  But before I insert the sky-blue to complete the pattern, I stop to wonder why my father looked down at the cornflowers instead of looking more deeply into the sky.

  I am standing, or I am lying on my back, or I am sitting in a railway compartment. Wherever I am, I am staring into the sky and waiting for the blue to turn into some other colour. And now I hear the voice of a woman.

  A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies…too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around the horizon – or is it around the rims of the eyes?

  I hear these words in many places, wherever I stop to look at the sky and to wonder what I can learn from blue. The words were written by Elizabeth Bishop, but I have lost the piece of paper telling me where she first wrote them. I found the words in the book pages of the New York Times, which are sent to me by ship across the blue half of the world.

  No matter what colour the sky, I can nearly always hear the scream behind it. I hear the scream, and I think how easy it would have been for my father to tell me the sky is the colour of the mantle of Our Lady.

  I see myself looking high above me in Saint Kilian’s Church, Bendigo, or in the Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo. I am looking among the colours of windows for the blue which is Our Lady’s colour. I am whispering to Our Lady that she is my mother and that I love her, but secretly I am looking in the glass around me for colours other than the mournful blue of Our Blessed Mother. At heart I dislike the hunched woman, and I dread to hear her sniffling and moaning, and to see her white tunic or shift, or whatever she calls the thing under her blue mantle, all stained and damp from her sorrowing.

  But my father does not name Our Lady. And just now I notice for the first time in my life that my father in all his life never mentions Our Lady or any such woman.

  I hear the scream where I lie on the utterly reliable soil. I hear the scream, but I have to see many more places beneath many more calendars before I understand that what I hear is the scream.

  I get up from the grass, and I climb the fence from the yard behind the hall into my own backyard. I kneel down on t
he bare soil under the lilac bush and I go on with my task of building a dream-racecourse and naming dream-horses to race on it and devising for the owners of dream-horses jackets and sleeves and caps of dream-silk patterned with dream-colours.

  I go on with the task that occupies me for the rest of my life.

  The patch of sky-blue drifts down from my hand, down past the page of a calendar showing a month in 1982, and down to the carpet, which happens to be an earth-brown colour. I leave the patch of sky-blue lying on the brown where it fell, and I pick up the other patch that was going to be the other sky-blue armband. I drop this patch too from the height of my upraised hand, and this sky-blue, like the other, drifts down past a month of 1982 and settles on the earth-brown.

  The patches of blue are far apart on the brown carpet, and each patch is a rhombus, which is not a conventional star-shape. But I leave the patches where they have fallen, and I even press them – firmly, but not fiercely – with my shoe deep into the earth-brown.

  I stand at the table with swatches of silk and a razor blade, and I cut out and fit together and seal under the transparent plastic the lilac and brown colours that have satisfied me since. I have no more to do with the colour of screams or of sorrowing women. All that matters of sky has drifted down and has settled on the brown of Clarrie Long’s jacket. I no longer feel my old lack. Now I can stand in my dream-colours beside Clarrie Long. And if the wife of Clarrie Long should happen to look at me once again from behind her dark glasses after all these years, she would see the two men as equals – he in his soil-and-sky, and I in my soil-and-lilac.

  In the railway compartment the lights have come on – yellow-white and dull. We are in the tunnel under Big Hill, which my father assures me is the last outcrop of the Great Divide. In the windows is an image of our compartment with darkness around.