The Art of the Engine Driver Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  Saturday evening

  1. Group Portrait

  PART ONE

  Saturday evening

  2. The Art of Engine Driving (I)

  3. Pausing by the Paddock (I)

  4. Pausing by the Paddock (II)

  5. Studying Ray Lindwall

  6. The Bruchners

  7. Speed

  8. A Slight Accident

  9. The Big Wheel

  10. Albert Younger

  11. Patsy Bedser

  12. The Grand Mal

  13. Diesel and Steam (I)

  14. The Arrival of a Bicycle

  15. Pay Day

  16. Smoothing the Rails

  17. Papa

  18. Ten Lousy Shillings

  19. Don’t Be Cruel

  20. The Endless Sky

  21. Mr Van Rijn

  22. The Art of Engine Driving (II)

  23. The Six O’Clock Swill

  24. Mr Malek

  25. Diesel and Steam (II)

  26. The Red Letter Box

  27. Love Songs

  28. George Bedser

  29. The View from Pretty Sally

  30. Night

  PART TWO

  Saturday night

  31. Bedser’s Front Yard

  32. Vic and Evie

  33. The End of the Double Bed

  34. Vic’s Women

  35. The Slap

  36. A Solitary Game

  37. The Speeches

  38. Mother’s Girl

  39. The Laugh

  40. The Last of Vera

  41. Diesel and Steam (III)

  42. Dancing with Evie

  43. Steam and Diesel

  44. Bloody Michelangelo

  45. The Last Dance

  46. The Invitation

  47. The View from the Schoolyard Pines

  EPILOGUE

  Sunday morning

  48. The Bells

  Acknowledgements

  About A&R

  About the Author

  Other Books by Steven Carroll

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Saturday Evening

  1.

  Group Portrait

  They’re walking down the old street again, Rita, Vic, and the boy, Michael. It’s summer, a warm breezy evening, and they are walking under a cloudless peach sky, ripe and glowing. The sun is low and their shadows almost stretch back to the family house at the golf course end of the street.

  They’ve reached that point in their walk, the halfway mark, where the houses and yards suddenly taper off into Scotch thistle and open, swaying grass. The sun has nearly dropped to earth and the three of them have stopped, staring out across the blades of whispering grass and thistle, across to the flour mills and railway lines, as if expecting a low, distant thud.

  Vic’s white, open-necked shirt is more in keeping with the late 1940s than the late 1950s. But Rita’s dress, yellow and black, with bright flowers and one dark bold strap, is a garment of its times. For this suburb, a garment ahead of its times. Her hair is dyed, with a faint suggestion of red, and bounces occasionally about her neck as she walks. Michael is wearing his best shirt. Short sleeves, short pants. Rita turned thirty-three last autumn, Vic is forty, Michael is twelve. There they are, still as a photograph, listening for the distant thud of the sun as it prepares to drop from the sky, out there, somewhere beyond the railway lines and the flour mills.

  But, behind the mills, the sun stays on a little longer than usual, the vacant paddock glowing white and gold beyond its allotted time and, for a moment, everything promises to go on forever; sunsets, afternoons, Saturday nights, marriages, and lives. No fates to be met because nobody is going anywhere. No turning earth beneath the dirt footpath, no movement in the sky. No setting of the sun. No waning of the moon.

  The family moves on, towards the Englishman’s house at the bottom of the street – where an engagement party is to be held. George Bedser’s daughter, Patsy, is getting engaged and the whole street has been invited. All around the recreation of the day is now complete, the tennis courts, the golf course and the cricket grounds are empty. The stumps have been drawn, the nets, rackets and clubs put away. The players have gone home and are dressed for Saturday night.

  Now, slowly, one after the other, the front doors and front gates of the street are opening out onto their lawns, footpaths and nature strips, as all the families, like a well rehearsed ensemble, step onto the dusty dirt road and form a modest procession, trailing perfume, aftershave and the faint whiff of mothballs.

  As the stars take their places, the long, white tail of a comet becomes visible. By now everybody is used to the sight of this comet burning its way through space. At first the street had gazed up to the sky in wonder. But it wasn’t long before everybody forgot to look up and the wonder disappeared. For the comet had made slow progress across the suburb all summer.

  The three of them pause by the swaying grass of the vacant land and Rita looks up and squints.

  ‘It’s like a tablet.’ She’s laughing, pleased with herself.

  The whole family looks up and nods. So it is. Like a tablet dissolving in a vast, liquid sky. Although the comet had made slow progress, and even though it never appeared to be moving at all, everybody was assured that it was moving all right. The more it moved, the more it dissolved. And, sooner more likely than later, somebody would casually look up to the sky on their evening walk back from the station and find it gone.

  At that moment Rita is staring at Vic, and Michael is now watching her. Rita looks puzzled, as if silently asking the question of Vic, ‘Who are you?’ She knows and she doesn’t know. She has known him for years and she’ll never know him. He’s an engine driver. He’s funny, a bit of a poet, a dag. But he drinks too much. It’s all that life he’s got in him. Doesn’t know when to stop. And he should because he’s a lousy drunk. But she knew that before she married him.

  Rita works with motors too. She demonstrates washing machines to buyers. From the heavy-duty factory machines to small domestic tubs. She’s often in the country for a week or more, talking into a microphone to hundreds of housewives at a time in large country stores. She complains about the travel. He complains about the engines, wants to be done with them, but she knows he’d be washed up without them.

  The suburb is new, built around an old farming township. The bluestone farmhouses still control the few vantage points of the low, broad valley on which the community sits, but the new lines of the suburb are taking shape. Streets and salubriously named dirt avenues have been carved out of the paddocks and houses have begun to appear; red roofs, white weatherboards and instant gardens, sprouting like fold-out models. Cattle refuse to accept the newly drawn suburban boundaries and graze where they always have, even if it is now somebody’s front yard, and even if it means a diet of yellow roses instead of clover.

  The main street – an old wheat road that leads to the mills, and then, by rail, to the Melbourne warehouses only nine miles away – contains two imposing, double-storey shops, all that remain of the 1880s land boom, when big plans had been made for the area. But the boom never happened as the estate agents had promised, and the shops became dusty and run down, selling Indian Root pills, shovels, picks, fence wire, fly powder, starch, shirt collars, yeast tablets, cornflour, broken biscuits, and whatever else would keep them going.

  For the next seventy years nothing much changed. After the war a factory was built on cheap land near the railway station, and the owner built himself a large house on expansive grounds not far away. And now every day, over dirt roads, he travels to and from his facto
ry in a chauffeur-driven Bentley. Slowly, so that the dark figure in the back, like royalty that has only recently paid off his title, can survey the flat expanse of his domain with ease. Slowly, so that the suspension of the Bentley won’t be damaged by the potholes in the street. Slowly, so that everybody he passes on the footpaths and corners will pause, staring at the shining black majesty of the Bentley as it makes its daily pilgrimage from mansion to factory to mansion.

  With the factory came workers, new houses, new shops. And with the success of one factory, came another. And another. Estate agents, the eager grandsons, returned to create the land boom their grandparents had anticipated seventy years before and promised all their young buyers exactly the same again. A district of dignified houses, profuse gardens and shaded avenues. Everybody looking good in this Toorak of the north. And all for a hundred quid a block.

  All around, a suburb is being born. But it won’t be the suburb the agents guaranteed. Like all booms it will soon turn into a rush, a land grab, and, within a few years, cheap workers’ homes will be thrown up by builders who are always starting another house even as they are finishing the one they’re on. The city is spilling out across the coastal plain and time will eventually catch up with the area.

  As Vic, Rita and Michael make their way down to the Englishman’s house that time is still travelling towards them, part of a future not yet fully formed, and the community is still hovering between town and country.

  Before them the road dips into a slight hollow and, to their left across the open paddocks, the red-brick buildings, the cream wooden shelter sheds and the asphalt playgrounds of the school are visible through the tall pines and peppercorns. The morning before, Michael and all the assembled students of the school had marched into their classrooms, two by two, with recorded brass music in their ears. A few moments before, Michael had watched from the shade of the shelter shed as three boys from the sixth grade approached three of their classmates. These three boys had been selected to have the shit beaten out of them by the Camp Pell kids. They had paired off, one side to be beaten, the other to do the beating, when the bell went. The school assembled, the brass music began, the six boys dropped their arms, joined the assembly and soon after entered the cool, chalky quiet of the classrooms. Now, the quadrangle is empty, and only a slight breeze ruffles the pines.

  Even as it does, in the back yard of a house in the next street, one of the boys who had been selected for a beating is standing with his mother on the dirt patch that will become their lawn. The mother is teaching the boy how to box. She is teaching him how to raise his arms and protect himself. How to block the blows. How to watch, how to wait and when to strike. They are circling each other, mother and son, on the dirt patch that will become their lawn, the mother slapping the boy about the ears every time he drops his arms, hardening the boy’s heart, so that he won’t whimper, and he won’t cry, and he won’t be hurt when she’s not there.

  And so, oblivious of the sky, unaware of anything special in its colour, the mother and son continue circling each other well into the night, while out on the dirt footpath of the next street up, Vic, Rita and Michael are standing by the long swaying grass of the vacant paddock. Before them, in the hollow at the end of the street, the lights of the Englishman’s house are already on, its windows crisp, distant squares of pale yellow.

  Years later, Michael will dream of this evening. It will be vivid. He will go back to the suburb in dreams, stand on the street and see them all again as they are this night, walking down to the Englishman’s house under the last of the summer sky. He will see the lines across Vic’s wide forehead, the hair parted down the middle, the dark waves brushed to the sides. He will see the sparkle in Rita’s eyes, the bounce of her hair and note the glitter of her seashell earrings. He will observe himself, wearing the good white shirt with the button-down collar that he loved so much but had forgotten all about until his dream took him back to the old street. They will all be there before him again, clear, solid, alive.

  But even with hindsight, even in dreams, he will still comb through the wreckage of this night in search of another ending, one that will cheat fate and shift the course of their lives. But it won’t be there, and what was always going to happen, will happen, again and again and again.

  At the moment, however, Vic, Rita and Michael are standing perfectly still under a miraculously peach-coloured sky. All around them, the front doors of the houses are open to let the breeze through. Venetian blinds flutter briefly, lounge-room curtains lift like billowed sails, then settle again. Mrs Miller calls to her husband for her new locket, the telephone in Mr Van Rijn’s study rings, Bruchner’s dog yelps at an unapologetic black cat perched on the back fence, Mr Malek steps uncertainly up to his front gate, Evie Doyle begins washing another stack of dishes in the golf course kitchen and Patsy Bedser switches on the new hi-fi in the lounge room before the guests arrive.

  In that clear summer air it is possible to see into the hallways, the rooms and back yards; possible to hear the loud, the low and the murmured voices, both inside the houses and out on the street.

  Part One

  Saturday Evening

  2.

  The Art of Engine Driving (I)

  There is a train out there somewhere. Vic lights a cigarette, drops the match then turns his head to one side, facing Rita, so as to hear it better. With his ears to the west, and his eyes on the still figure of his wife lingering by the long grass of the paddock, he listens to the train.

  He knows it’s a goods. And, by the time of the evening, he can judge where it’s come from, the stops it’s made on the way. He knows how full it is from the thud of the wheels hitting the rail joints just as he knows the class of the engine from the sound of its motor. And when he’s put all this information together he might even be able to tell you who the driver is. For he knows their styles, most of them, the best of them, the artists. He knows their characteristics, their defining touches, the signatures that they leave on the rails, there to be read by those who know how, as clearly as a painter’s on a canvas.

  Vic can visualise the scene in the cabin. The gauges are all lit up before him in the night. The speed, the steam, the air pressure. All there before him, but he never reads them. Driving is a gift. Physical. Something you’ve either got or you haven’t. Some drivers watch the needles bobbing about in front of them all night, the needles, the gauges and the numbers. They drive by the book, but he threw the book away the first night he got in the cabin and sat in the driver’s seat.

  You can stick your numbers and gauges. I don’t trust them. I never have and I never will. Oh, you can drive by the book, take the curves and the descents at regulation speed and you’ll arrive on time and everybody will call you a good driver. But a great driver drives with his fingertips and his arms, his shoulders, his stomach, the back of his neck, his intestines, his entrails and toes. You don’t need gauges, your body’s full of them. It’s telling you what you need to know, all the time. But only a few listen. And that’s the difference between a good driver and a great one. The great drivers listen.

  When I’m out there in the night, in the rainy hills and the soaked cuttings and there’s another train coming towards me, its headlights making a yellow path through the forest and clouds, I know within seconds if I’m watching a great driver. By the speed, the controlled daring, or the way a driver prepares for a sudden, clean descent. The great drivers will leave their individual stamp all over the move. They won’t be reading gauges, they’ll be listening to their bodies and listening to the engine. And all the time, all through the journey, as they scatter the cattle and the low mist before them, the boast will be, and the boast will be true, that the full metal mug of tea sitting beside the driver’s seat was never once disturbed.

  Driving begins with shaving, once, then twice. A good sharp razor and lather. You can’t drive without a clean face.

  When you come to the curves and bends, lean out of the window and turn your face to the wind
, and the air on your cheek will tell you all you need to know. It will tell you the speed of the engine more accurately than any instrument. If it’s too fast or too slow. Then look down to the sleepers flying past beneath you and pay attention to what your eyes and the clean-shaven side of your face tell you.

  There are times, coming down through the mountains with a trainload of ballast behind me, when I forget the instrument panel altogether, forget the speed regulation notices by the side of the rails along the way, and take all the winding curves that lead down into a waiting station by feel alone. The trees are rushing by in the night, the train’s creaking and groaning behind me as the weight shifts from side to side, and I can feel the wind on one cheek and the glow of the furnace on the other, as the forest parts and the low clouds get out of the way. The speed regulation signs go by so fast I couldn’t read them if I wanted to. Then, when we hit the incline I always knew was there – because the first thing you do in this game is learn your roads and gradients by heart – the engine hums up the hill and takes it in one mighty wallop, and we take that last ride down onto the plain, using the wide, sweeping curve of the rails to slow the train. And by the time we hit the flat that leads into the station we’re back to regulation speed again. No one knows how I do it, and I’m not telling. That’s my business. All I can say is it’s like dancing. You never doubted that your feet would take you where you wanted them to be. That’s driving too. And you don’t do it by following the book. I know the guard’s been hanging onto his seat back there in the van, and the stationmaster’s slowly shaking his head in the light of his lamp as we ease into the platform because he heard us roaring down through the hills like we were going to take the whole station with us.

  From there on it’s flat land and level track. In a few hours the sky starts to lighten, yellow and rose, and we’re driving into the best part of the day. The part nobody sees. The city laid out before us. Wide and flat. Street after street, front yard after front yard. In the distance I’ll see my own suburb, picture my house, my family asleep inside. I’ll sleep through the day, then rise in the afternoon, wash and shave, fill my bag with tea and tinned stew, tobacco, cakes of yellow soap and swabs. All in readiness for the night again; for the hills, the curves, the cutting, and the stations that will stay lit up because they know we’re out there.