The shabby building with rats living in holes beneath it was a pigsty where about fifty pigs lived in small muddy pens. The liquids that drained from the pigsty downhill into the swampy ground that lay in 1943 in the place denoted by the words STREAM SYSTEM were partly composed of leavings from the troughs where the pigs ate. The food that was put into the troughs for the pigs to eat was partly composed of leavings from the tables where the hundreds of men and women ate in the wards of Mont Park Hospital on the high ground north-east of the swamp and the pigsty. Of the men who stood around the pigsty on the day that I remember, all except my father and the man with the drooping moustache lived at Mont Park Hospital. My father spoke of the men as patients and warned me to speak of them only by that name. My mother sometimes called the men, out of my father’s hearing, loonies.
The man with the drooping moustache gave orders to the patients only on that one day when he came to drive the rats from the pigsty. My father gave orders to the patients every day from mid-1941 to the end of 1943. During those years my father was the assistant manager of the farm that was part of the Mont Park Hospital for forty years until the cowyards and the haysheds and the pigsty and all the other shabby buildings were knocked down and a university was built in their place.
When no more rats seemed likely to come out from under the pigsty, Fat Collins and Boy Webster and the other patients began to aim the jets of water from their hoses at the dead rats lying on the grass. The patients seemed to want to send the dead rats sliding over the wet grass and downhill into the swampy ground. My father ordered the patients to turn off their hoses. I thought that he did this because he did not want the bodies of the rats to reach the swampy ground, but in fact my father only wanted to keep the men from wasting time. When the hoses had been turned off, my father ordered the patients to collect the dead rats in kerosene tins. The patients picked up the dead rats in their hands and carried the rats in kerosene tins down the slope that leads today to the yellow-brown water denoted by the pale blue in my map.
The outline of the bodies of pale blue resembles not only the moustache of my father’s father and the moustache of the owner of the fox terrier dogs. Sometimes when I look at the outline of the body of pale blue that comprises the bodies labelled STREAM and SYSTEM and the narrow body connecting them and also the two small bodies at either side, I see in my mind the item of women’s underclothing which is called by many people nowadays a bra but which I called during the 1940s and for some years afterwards a brassiere.
On my way this morning from my front gate to the place where I am now, I went, as I said before, a little out of my way. I followed a roundabout route.
After I had stood for a few moments south-east of the place that I am going to call from now on STREAM SYSTEM, I walked across the bridge between the two largest bodies of water. I walked, that is, between STREAM and SYSTEM. Or I walked, if you like, across the narrow connecting part between the two cup-shaped parts of a pale-blue (or yellow-brown) brassiere (or bra).
I kept on walking roughly north-west up the sloping land that had been forty-five years ago the wet grass where Fat Collins and Boy Webster and the other men had aimed their jets of water at the dead rats. I walked across yards where rows of motor cars stood and past the place that you people know as NORTH ENTRY.
Just short of Plenty Road I stopped. I turned and faced roughly south-west. I looked across what is now Kingsbury Drive at the house of red bricks on the south-eastern corner of the intersection of Kingsbury Drive and Plenty Road. I looked at the first window east of the north-eastern corner of the house, and I remembered a night in about 1943 when I had sat in the room behind that window. I remembered a night when I had sat with my arm around the shoulders of my brother while I tried to teach him what a brassiere was used for.
The building that I was looking at is no longer used as a house, but that building is the first house that I remember having lived in. I lived in that building of red bricks with my parents and my brother from mid-1941 until the end of 1943, when I was aged between two and four years.
On the night in about 1943 that I remembered this morning, I had found on a page of a newspaper a photograph of a young woman wearing what I thought was a brassiere. I had sat beside my young brother and put my arm around his shoulders. I had pointed to what I thought was the brassiere and then to the bare chest of the young woman.
I believe today, and I may even have believed in 1943, that my brother understood very little of what I told him. But I believed I had seen for the first time an illustration of a brassiere, and my brother was the only person I could talk to at that time.
I was talking to my brother about the brassiere when my father came into my room. My father had heard from outside the room what I had been saying to my brother and he had seen from the doorway of the room the illustration that I had been showing to my brother.
My father sat in the chair where I had been sitting with my brother. My father lifted me onto one of his knees and my brother onto his other knee. My father talked for what I remember as a long time. He spoke to me rather than my brother, and when my brother became restless my father let him down from his knee and went on speaking only to me. Of all that my father said I remember only his telling me that the young woman in the illustration was wearing not a brassiere but an evening dress, and that a young woman would sometimes wear an evening dress because she wanted people to admire some precious piece of jewellery hanging from her neck.
When my father told me this he picked up the page of the newspaper and tapped at a place on the bare chest of the young woman, a little distance above the top of her evening dress. He tapped with his knuckle in the way that he might have tapped at a door that stood closed in front of him.
This morning when I remembered my father’s tapping with his knuckle at the bare chest of the young woman, I thought of the top part of the evening dress as being the body of pale blue labelled STREAM SYSTEM. I then saw in my mind my father tapping with his knuckle at the face of his father and also tapping at the yellow-brown grass where the dead rats had once lain before my father had ordered the patients to collect them in kerosene tins and to dump them in the swampy ground that was denoted, many years afterwards, by the words STREAM SYSTEM.
After I had looked at the building that was once the first house that I remember having lived in, I walked back to the slope of grass that had once been the place where the dead rats had lain but was now, according to my map, the bare chest of a young woman wearing an evening dress, the place where my father had tapped with his knuckle, the place where the young woman might have displayed a precious jewel, the face of my father’s father.
While I stood in all those places, I understood that I was standing in still another place.
As a child I could never be contented in a place unless I knew the names of the places surrounding that place. As a child living in the house of red bricks, I knew that the place to one side of me was Preston, where I sometimes sat with my mother and my brother in the Circle cinema. I had been told by my father that another of the places surrounding me was Coburg, which was the place where I had been born and where I had first lived although I had never remembered it afterwards.
Whenever I stood at the front gate of the house of red bricks and looked around me, I seemed to be surrounded by grasslands. I understood that I was surrounded finally by places, but grasslands, so I saw, lay between me and the places. No matter what place I heard of as being in this or that direction away from me, that place was on the far side of a grassland.
If I looked in the direction of Coburg I looked across the grassland that lay, during the 1940s, on the western side of Plenty Road. Where the suburb of Kingsbury is today, an empty grassland once reached for as far as I could see to the west from Plenty Road.
If I looked in the direction of Preston I saw the grassland sloping past the cemetery and towards the Darebin Creek.
If I looked in the opposite direction from the direction of Preston, I saw only
the farm buildings where my father worked each day with the patients, but I had travelled once with my father past the farm buildings and the hospital buildings to a place where the land rose, and from there I had seen more grasslands and on the far side of the grasslands dark-blue mountains. I had asked my father what places were among those mountains and he had said the one word Kinglake.
After I had heard the word Kinglake I was able to stand at my front gate and to see in my mind the places on the far sides of three of the grasslands around me. I was able to see in my mind the main street of Preston and the darkness inside the Circle cinema. When I looked in the direction of Coburg I saw the dark-blue wall of the gaol and the yellow-brown water of Coburg Lake in the park beside the gaol. My father had once walked with me between the dark-blue wall and the yellow-brown lake and had told me that he had worked as a warder for ten years on the far side of the dark-blue wall.
When I looked in the direction of Kinglake I saw a lake among the mountains. The mountains around the lake were dark blue and the water in the lake was bright blue like the glass in a church window. At the bottom of the lake, surrounded by the bright-blue water, a man sat on a gold throne. The man wore a gold crown and pieces of gold jewellery on his chest and his wrists and gold signet rings on his fingers.
I have mentioned just now three directions that I looked in while I stood at the front gate of the first house that I remember having lived in. I have mentioned the direction in front of me, which was the direction of the place where I had been born, and I have mentioned the directions to either side of me. I have not mentioned the direction behind me.
Behind me while I stood at the front gate of the first house that I remember having lived in was the place where I described myself as standing on the first of these pages. Behind me was the place where I stood this morning looking at a body of yellow-brown water that had been denoted by a body of pale blue in my map, according to what I have written on these pages. Behind me was the place that was the slope of grass where the dead rats once lay; the place that was also the bare chest of a young woman who might have worn an evening dress so that she could display some precious jewel; the place that was also part of the face of a man with a drooping moustache; the place that was also a place just in front of the lips of a young woman who was about to be kissed. Behind me was still another place apart from those places. Behind me was the place that I came from this morning when I set out for the place where I am now. Behind me was the place where I have lived for the past twenty years – where I have lived since the year when I wrote my first book of fiction.
One day while I lived in the house of red bricks, I asked my father what place was in the direction that I have been calling just now the direction behind me. When I asked my father that question he and I were standing near the slope of grass that seemed to us then only a slope of grass that drained the water and other things from the pigsty into the swampy ground. Neither my father nor I would have seen in either of our minds bodies of yellow-brown or of pale blue.
My father told me that the place in the direction that I had asked about was a place called Macleod.
When my father had told me this, I looked in the direction that I had asked about, which was the direction ahead of me at that moment but which was the direction behind me when I looked in the direction of the place where I had been born, and which was also the direction behind me when I stood as I described myself standing on the first of these pages. When I looked in that direction I saw first grasslands and then pale-blue sky and white clouds. On the far side of the swampy ground the grasslands rose gently until they seemed to stop just short of the sky and the clouds.
When I heard my father say the word Macleod, I believed he was naming a place that had taken its name from what I saw in the direction of the place. I saw in my mind no place such as Preston or Coburg or Kinglake on the far side of the grasslands in the direction that was in front of me on that day. I saw in my mind only a man standing on a grassland that had risen towards the sky. The man stood on a yellow-brown grassland that had risen towards the pale-blue sky and had come to an end just short of the sky. The grassland had come to an end but the man wanted to go where the grassland would have gone if it had not come to an end. The man stood on the farthest point of the grassland just beneath the white clouds that were passing in the pale-blue sky. The man uttered a short sound and then a word.
The man uttered first a short sound like a grunt. He made this sound while he sprang upwards from the edge of the grassland. He sprang upwards and gripped the edge of a white cloud and then he dragged himself onto the cloud. His gripping and his dragging himself onto the cloud took only a moment. Then, when the man knew that he was safely on the white cloud that was travelling past the edge of the grassland and away out of sight of the man and the boy on the slope of grass below, the man uttered a word. This word together with the short sound made, so I thought, the name of the place that my father had named. The man uttered the word cloud.
During the years when I lived with my parents and my brother in the house of red bricks between Coburg and Macleod and between Preston and Kinglake, I often watched the men that my father called patients. The only patient that I spoke to was the young man known as Boy Webster. My mother told me not to speak to the other men that I saw around the place because they were loonies. But she told me I was free to talk to Boy Webster because he was not a loony; he was only backward.
I spoke sometimes to Boy Webster and he spoke often to me. Boy Webster spoke to my brother also, but my brother did not speak to Boy Webster. My brother spoke to nobody.
My brother spoke to nobody but he often looked into the face of a person and made strange sounds. My mother said that the strange sounds were my brother’s way of learning to speak and that she understood the meaning of the sounds. But no one else understood that my brother’s strange sounds had a meaning. Two years after my parents and my brother and I had left the house of red bricks my brother began to speak, but his speech sounded strange.
When my brother first went to school I used to hide from him in the schoolground. I did not want my brother to speak to me in his strange speech. I did not want my friends to hear my brother and then to ask me why he spoke strangely. During the rest of my childhood and until I left my parents’ house, I tried never to be seen with my brother. If I could not avoid travelling on the same train with my brother I would order him to sit in a different compartment from mine. If I could not avoid walking in the street with my brother I would order him not to look in my direction and not to speak to me.
When my brother first went to school my mother said that he was no different from any other boy, but in later years my mother would admit that my brother was a little backward.
My brother died when he was forty-three years old and I was forty-six. My brother never married. Many people came to my brother’s funeral, but none of those people had ever been a friend to my brother. I was certainly never a friend to my brother. On the day before my brother died I understood for the first time that no one had ever been a friend to my brother.
During the years when Boy Webster spoke often to me he spoke mostly about firecarts and firemen. Whenever he heard a motor vehicle approaching our house along Plenty Road from the direction of either Preston or Kinglake, Boy Webster would tell me that the motor vehicle would be a firecart. When the vehicle proved to be not a firecart, Boy Webster would tell me that the next vehicle would be a firecart. He would say that a firecart would soon arrive and that the firecart would stop and he would climb into it.
In the year when my brother died, which was forty-one years after my family had left the house of red bricks, a man was painting the inside of my house in Macleod. The man had been born in Diamond Creek and was living in Lower Plenty, which means that he had been moving roughly west from his birthplace towards my birthplace while I had been moving roughly east from my birthplace towards his. The man told me that he had painted during the previous year the insides of buil
dings in Mont Park Hospital.
I told the man that I had lived forty-one years before near Mont Park Hospital. I told him about the farm that was now a university and about the patients who had worked with my father. I told the man about Boy Webster and his talking mostly about firecarts and firemen.
While I was talking about Boy Webster the man put down his brush and looked at me. He asked me how old Boy Webster had been when I had known him.
I tried to see Boy Webster in my mind. I could not see him but I could hear in my mind his strange voice telling me that a firecart was coming and that he was going to get into the firecart.
I told the painter that Boy Webster might have been between twenty and thirty years old when I had known him.
Then the painter told me that when he had been painting one of the wards of Mont Park Hospital an old man had followed him around, talking to him. The painter had talked to the old man, who said his name was Webster. He told the painter no other name. He seemed to know himself only as Webster.
Webster had talked about firecarts and firemen. He told the painter that a firecart would soon arrive on the road outside the hospital building. He told the painter about the firecart every few minutes and he told the painter that he, Boy Webster, was going to climb into the firecart when it arrived.
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs Page 10