Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  In those days, my wife left for her place of work long before the children left for school and she arrived home long after they had arrived home. When she arrived home on the day mentioned in the previous paragraphs, she had no way of knowing that our son had not been to school that day. Even our daughter did not know. She went to the same school, but she was some years younger than her brother and usually left early for school after her girlfriend and her mother had called for her in their car. On the Monday evening after my son’s absence from school, neither he nor I spoke of it to his mother.

  My son did not attend school on the Tuesday or any other day of the week mentioned above. On every day while he was at home, he kept to his room and I heard no sound from behind his door. On the Friday, I asked him while we were in the kitchen together at lunchtime whether he had been reading his schoolbooks that morning. He told me that he had not been reading any sort of books that morning. I reminded him that he would have fallen somewhat behind when he returned to school. He told me that he would not be returning to school.

  On the Friday evening mentioned above, I told my wife that our son seemed to have decided to give up going to school. She spent much of that evening trying to learn from our son the reason for his decision and to persuade him to change his mind. She telephoned an educational counsellor and made an appointment for our son to consult him, but our son said that he would not keep the appointment. Throughout the weekend, my wife appealed to our son, but he would not relent. On the Sunday morning, when I was preparing to take the family’s wastepaper to Fairfield, he told me that he wanted to go with me. He carried out of his room a large cardboard carton that seemed to be filled with newspapers and put it into the boot of the car. While he was carrying his carton from the car to the chute at Fairfield, the wind lifted what I had thought was the topmost of many newspapers in the carton. The newspaper that I had seen was the only newspaper. The rest of the carton was filled with my son’s schoolbooks. They were all new books, bought only a few weeks before. Many were hard-covered books, but one on the top layer was a paperback, the cover of which had curled back somewhat. While my son balanced the carton on the sill of the chute, I could see that a corner of the flyleaf of the book had been cut away.

  My son was out of the house on many days during the next four months. He would not tell his mother or me the details of what he was doing – only that he had registered for unemployment benefits and was looking for a job. Five years later, he let slip to me that he had been interviewed as an applicant for many jobs after he left school but that most interviewers had been no longer interested in him when he could not show them any of his reports from school, which he had burned in our backyard on the first day after he had stopped attending school.

  In June of the year when he left school, my son found a job. At first he told me few details. I learned only that he was a process worker in an engineering works five kilometres from home. On fine days, he rode his bicycle to and from his place of work. On wet days, I would take him in my car in the morning, and he would travel home on two buses. When he travelled in my car, he would never allow me to drive him to the doors of his place of work; I had to stop around the corner and let him out so that he could walk the rest of the way. He worked in a large industrial estate. Towards seven in the morning, at which time he started work, the footpaths of the estate were crowded with women factory workers walking from bus stops, and the roads were crowded with male workers’ cars, most of them early models and scratched or dented.

  In the later months of the year when he left school, my son went on working in the same place. He told me that his job was only a semi-skilled job but that he had been told when he began that he might be offered an apprenticeship in one or another skilled trade in the future. I asked him why he had chosen the job he was doing when he might have found a white-collar position, but he would not answer me.

  Each night when my son arrived home from work, I resisted the urge to question him. He was always tired and short-tempered when he first arrived home, but I learned that he was more willing to talk after he had showered and eaten a meal. I was eager to learn that someone from the front office, as he called it, had taken him aside one day and had told him he would shortly be offered an apprenticeship in a skilled trade or even some other course the details of which I could not imagine but the result of which would be that he would be qualified for positions in management. My son never told me news of this sort, but he began to tell me each night about the people at his place of work.

  According to my son, the owner of the engineering works, who had inherited the business from his father, was too often absent and too easygoing with his staff. Too many people were employed in the place, but no one had been dismissed while my son had been there. My son said he could name several men who ought to have been sacked.

  Whenever my son named one of his fellow workers as an idler or simply as the teller of a good joke or the perpetrator of a prank, I struggled to picture the man or to recall anything that my son might have said previously about the man. As my son talked more of an evening, two of his workmates became more distinct in my mind. One was a man of about my own age who was sometimes an adviser and protector to my son. This man will be called from here on the kindly man. The other workmate seemed from my son’s descriptions to be a few years younger than myself. This man seemed from my son’s first descriptions an idle and malicious man. My son first described the man as small and thin and dark-haired and as spending much of his time on cold days sitting near one of the gas-heaters in a corner of the building and teasing and insulting the apprentices and the youngest of the process workers. When my son first mentioned this man to me, he, my son, told me he could not understand why the owner of the place had not sacked the man long before. My son told me that the owner had seen the man sitting in front of the heater one day but had not seemed to notice anything amiss. The man had been sitting in front of the heater with his chin in his hands, and the owner had walked past the man and had even seemed to greet the man. But a few nights after my son had reported these details to me he told me that the man had cancer. My son then corrected himself. The man had previously had cancer and had been away from work for many months being treated for the cancer, which was in his jaw. A few weeks before my son had begun to work at the place, the man had returned to work, and word had passed around that the man had been cured of his cancer. But on cold days, the man sat in front of the heater with his chin in his hands and teased or insulted my son and other young workers, and my son had heard some of his workmates saying that the man had not been cured of his cancer. This man will be called from here on the man with his chin in his hands.

  During the days after my son had first told me about the man with his chin in his hands, I saw from time to time in my mind one or another image of a small, thin man with dark hair. Sometimes the image was of the man sitting hunched over a heater in a corner of an engineering works. At other times the image was of the man running with long strides through grass that reached to his hips in countryside consisting of grass for as far as I could see.

  After I had seen in my mind the images mentioned above, I began to look for opportunities to ask my son about the man with his chin in his hands. By this time, my son was no longer riding his bicycle to and from his place of work. The kindly man, who lived in a suburb adjoining my suburb, would stop in his car each morning to pick up my son from a street corner about a kilometre from my son’s and my home. Each afternoon, the kindly man would drive my son to the same corner. On wet mornings or afternoons, the kindly man would often call at my house. My son was less tired and irritable after work, and spoke more willingly about his workmates. I asked him during a succession of evenings such questions about the man with his chin in his hands as whether or not he was married and a father; where he lived; whether or not he owned a car; what interests and hobbies he had; and what details or anecdotes he sometimes reported from his past. I learned from my son that the man with his chin in his
hands seemed to be only a few years short of my own age but had never been married; that the man lived with his mother in a rented flat in the suburb of Fairfield; that the man had a sister who lived with her children elsewhere in Fairfield; that the man did not own a car, and travelled by bus between his home and his place of work; that the man seemed to spend his evenings and his weekends watching television programmes on his and his mother’s television set or watching films by means of their video cassette recorder and that he sometimes boasted to his workmates that his and his mother’s television and video recorder were the best available; and that the man never spoke about his past, although my son understood that the man had been employed for many years in the engineering works. When my son first told me that the man lived with his mother, he, my son, went on to say that I should not suppose the man was gay. My son told me that the man was too ugly and too ill-natured to have had a wife or a girlfriend.

  In the last week of August, when the hailstorms that always fall at that time on the suburbs of Melbourne had stripped the pink blossoms from the prunus trees on the nature strips in the suburb where I live, my son told me one evening that the man with his chin in his hands had not been seen at work for several days and that his workmates were saying that the man’s cancer had flared up again. On the same evening, my son explained to me why he had arrived home much later than usual on that afternoon, even though he had been driven to his front gate by the kindly man. My son explained the matter as follows. When the kindly man had driven away from their place of work on that afternoon, he had not driven in the usual direction. He had explained to my son that he, the kindly man, was going to call at the home in Fairfield of the man with his chin in his hands. The kindly man used the word mate when he spoke of the man with his chin in his hands. The kindly man, so he said, was going to drop in on his mate and lend him a few books to cheer him up and pass the time away while he was laid up at home. The kindly man had pointed his thumb over his left shoulder when he mentioned the books. My son looked over his own shoulder and saw on the back seat of the kindly man’s car a cardboard carton almost full of books. In time, the kindly man had stopped his car outside a shabby block of flats between decaying weatherboard houses. The whole of the area surrounding the block of flats was paved with cement and was marked into parking areas for cars. Several cars were parked on the cement and seemed to have been parked there for many hours. This and the shabbiness of the cars suggested to my son that the owners of the cars were unemployed. My son stayed in the kindly man’s car while he carried the carton of books to the front door of one of the flats. My son could not see who opened the door of the flats and let the kindly man in. He was inside the flat for about five minutes. He came back to his car without the books. He told my son that the sick man had been pleased to receive a visitor but that he was not at all well.

  When I had heard my son’s report, I asked him what sort of books had been in the carton. While I asked this question, I kept my face turned away from my son.

  My son told me that the books in the carton had been old-looking paperbacks. In my son’s words, the books had been westerns and thrillers and a lot of rubbish.

  Books are a load of crap

  At the time when my son was born, I worked in an office building at the edge of the city of Melbourne. Before my son was born, I used to spend my lunch-hour on each day from Monday to Thursday at my desk, reading the book that I was currently reading. During my lunch-hour on each Friday, I used to look through the books in one or another of several bookshops in the city. In the week after my son was born, I began to spend my lunch-hour reading a book published by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. The book contained the publication details and a short description of hundreds of books considered most worthy to be read by children in each of several age groups. As I read the book, I put a mark from time to time beside the title of one or another book. After I had done this for three weeks, I had read every page of the book and had marked the titles of more than a hundred books. These books, many of which were described in the book I had just read as children’s classics, I intended to buy at the rate of one each fortnight so that my son would have the beginnings of an impressive library by the time when he began school.

  I did not succeed in buying all the books that I had marked in the book mentioned above, but I bought many of them, and I bought as well other books that I saw in bookshops or read about in book reviews (some in the TLS). After my daughter was born, I bought books for her also, although I preferred to let my wife choose what would appeal to a girl. I went on buying books each few months for both children, but especially my son, for more than fifteen years. I bought paperback books and hard-covered books in equal numbers, except that each child received several expensive hard-covered books at Christmas and on birthdays. I bought fiction and non-fiction books in about equal numbers, even after both children had told me, when they were aged twelve or thirteen that they were less interested in fiction. When the children were in the upper years of secondary school, each had a part-time job and each received a weekly allowance from me. By then, I had to pay for music lessons and sports coaching and for most of the children’s clothes, and I could hardly afford to go on buying books as I had bought them previously. I told the children one day that I would still buy them books at Christmas and birthdays but that they should use part of their allowance or of their wages to buy any other books that they wished to buy. So far as I was able to observe from that time onwards, neither of my children bought any book.

  When the children were in the lower years of secondary school, they and their mother overruled me in the matter of whether or not we should have a television set in the house. Before then, as I used to say, I had kept the house free from spurious imagery. After the day when I was overruled, my wife and children watched dead images from cameras instead of living images from their own minds, as I often told them. To their credit, they seldom watched for more than an hour or two each day, and occasionally the set was left turned off all evening, but from the day when the television set was installed, I never referred to our house as I had often referred to it in the past; I never again told my children that they lived in a house of books.

  For many of the years when the house was a house of books, I used to read to my children every night. I began to read to them before they themselves could read. I sat between them on the couch in the lounge-room and read from large picture books and from books in the series that we knew as Ladybird books. I believed from the first that the words and the pictures that came from books would produce in the minds of my children images of such richness and such power that the children would never afterwards be impressed by the contrived images that might come to them from cameras by way of cinema screens or television sets. I expected that the clearest images in my children’s minds throughout their lives would be the images produced by the words of the books that I had read to them as children. The images produced in their minds by the illustrations in the books I had read to them would be of lesser power, since those images had come to them by way of the minds of the persons who had made the illustrations. The images that came to my children’s minds by way of the screens of cinemas or the tubes of television sets, having come to their minds by way of machinery, would be of hardly any power. So I thought in the house of books.

  During the years when I lived in the house of books, reading book after book myself and reading from books each night to my children, I saw an occasional film. Sometimes a friend of my wife would recommend one or another film to us, and if the film was being shown not at a cinema in the city but at one or another cinema in a suburb not more than a half-hour’s drive by car from my house, I would sometimes go with my wife to see the film. Because I have seen so few films during my lifetime – fewer in the past fifty years than most persons in the suburbs of Melbourne would have seen during the past year – and because the images on the screen of the cinema are always so large and so brightly lit, I would see often in my mind duri
ng the first few days after I had watched one or another film one or another image from the film. I always expected that most of these images would have disappeared from my mind before a few days or weeks had passed. I thought of my mind as passing these images through itself as my body would have passed through its digestive system some pebbles or buttons that I might have swallowed. I was prepared to accept, however, that a few of the images of the film would remain in my mind. I believed that I might not see these images in my mind for so long that I would hardly remember the origins of the images when next I saw them. I believed that some of the images just mentioned might have been so changed during the many years while they stayed out of sight in my mind that I would suppose the images had first come to me while I was reading one or another book.

  Soon after I had first seen in my mind, as was reported in the previous section of this story, the image of the man running with long strides through grass, which image I had first seen soon after my son had first told me about the man with his chin in his hands, I understood that the man running with long strides had the face and the body of an actor whose name I had never learned who played the part of a small, thin man with dark hair in a film with the title Midnight Cowboy or The Midnight Cowboy, which was one of the few films that I had watched during the years when I lived in the house of books. Soon after I had first seen the man running with long strides in the grass in my mind, I remembered that the man in the film had run with long strides along a seashore in his mind, having been cured in his mind of all the ailments that he suffered from. Even after I had remembered this, however, I believed that the man I saw was the soul or shade or spirit of the man running through grass in his mind, the body of the man having already died.