The Art of the Engine Driver Read online

  It is a walk that almost defines a generation in itself, for Vic was born at the end of the first war and grew up during the Depression. His hands as he strides up the street to the Englishman’s house are in his pockets, his shoulders are hunched, and his head is lowered. It is a winter walk in summer. Above all, it is a walk that only knows one direction, and that is forward. A walk which assumes that everything left behind is not worth going back to, and everything to the side, anywhere within the range of peripheral vision, is a potential distraction. But it is not a walk that embraces the future. Rather, it is one that reluctantly presses forward, as if there is nothing else to be done, no other way, a walk that always acknowledges in its hunched wariness, the distinct possibility that any one step might mark the return of disaster and misery. One learns to walk like that in difficult times, and once the walk is learnt it is never forgotten.

  27.

  Love Songs

  The final house before George Bedser’s does not have a number. It has a name. Eden. It stands for Evie and Dennis. The Doyles. Together they make Eden. It’s a kind of joke. The couple has only been in the street for six months.

  He is a transport driver. When he is not at home sleeping, he is driving along the highway at night. He drives to all the big cities, sleeps in the truck while it is unloaded, then drives back when it is loaded again. She washes dishes at the golf club. When she is finished, more often than not, she comes back to an empty house.

  Evie, is young, twenty-seven. In summer, when she returns from washing dishes, she leaves the front and back doors of the house open, turns the radio on, sits on the front porch, and drinks and smokes till the night is cool enough for sleeping.

  Michael’s mother is not very good at making friends. Sometimes, she can look like she prefers to keep to herself. And sometimes, like tonight, she wears dresses that she, and everybody else knows, are just a bit too good for this street. So she doesn’t make friends much. But if his mother has a friend in the street at all, this woman who sits on the front porch of her square, weatherboard house with the black wrought-iron name ‘Eden’ screwed to the boards below the front light, listening to the radio while her husband is on the highway, drinking and smoking till it is cool enough to sleep, this woman is her friend.

  One night, a few months earlier, the first of the warm nights, Rita had to get out of the house. Vic had been late back from the bar in the golf club and the house was silent because nobody was talking, and suddenly Rita had to get out. She threw her apron onto the floor and slammed the front door as she stepped out onto the dirt road and began walking, not sure where she was going or how far she would walk before the anger left her. Near the bottom of the street she heard a radio and a nameless song and slowed as she passed the house. On the front porch she saw a young woman, drinking beer and smoking. She knew this was the new couple’s house, and, as she slowed, she introduced herself.

  An hour later, Rita walked back towards the golf course end of the street towards the silent house and back into her kitchen where she picked up the apron again with the faint smell of beer on her breath.

  Now, when Vic is away working at night, and when Evie’s husband is also away, the two women sit on the front porch together, while Michael sits in the lounge room staring at the new television that is barely watched. Evie has no interest in it. She prefers the songs on the radio, and her husband is rarely home at nights. So, with the lounge-room windows open to catch any breeze that might come along, Michael slumps on the couch with a lemonade and biscuits, and watches whatever appears on the screen.

  Evie, whose hair, short and wavy, is always brushed, and who always looks made up as if ready to go out at any minute, drinks cool beer on the porch. Michael’s mother either sips soft drink or a mixture of lemonade and beer. And the only time Michael has seen his mother smoke cigarettes is on the front porch of this woman’s house while they talk quietly and confidentially the way friends do.

  Sometimes, when nothing is being said on the television, Michael can just hear what they are saying through the open lounge-room windows. And usually, Evie speaks of going somewhere. But when his mother asks where, she says she doesn’t know. And then she adds that she keeps on forgetting she’s alive. Then she tells his mother she should remember that too, and they talk a lot about going places. Together and alone. But they never say exactly what it is they are so intent on leaving. Or if they do it is when they speak low because they know that Michael is just next door in the lounge room, that the windows are open, and that he has ears like a young elephant and a memory to match.

  On those nights, when Evie rises from the porch and walks back into the house, into her kitchen to take beer from the refrigerator, she will pause by the lounge-room door and ask Michael if he wants more lemonade or biscuits. And when Michael tells her he doesn’t, she informs him that she will close the lounge-room door so that she can turn the radio on without disturbing him.

  Michael always shrugs his shoulders and says he doesn’t mind, but she quietly closes the door on him all the same. When the music is playing he can still hear the two women talking, but he can no longer distinguish their words. They are talking about staying and going, he knows that. But he won’t hear their words any more because the radio is playing.

  Now, walking past the house, the wrought-iron name lit up for the street to see, Michael hears the sound of beer glasses tinkling from past nights, he hears the tearing sound of a match being struck. And as he stares at that porch, he hears once again their serious, private words, spoken low.

  And even now, as they leave her house and approach the Englishman’s front gate, Michael can hear music on the front porch. They are songs about love, about the lovers who leave and those who have been left behind but who stay lovers anyway, because they fall in love with their memories. And, underneath these songs, years from now, he will hear the two women, hear the murmur of their voices, through the songs and the singing, the guitars and the violins. He will always hear their voices, but not their words, and the porch will remain a place of mystery.

  At that moment Evie is standing at the sink in the golf course kitchen. The dirty dishes are stacked on the side of the sink and when the kitchen door swings open the waitress adds to the stack. The noise of the dining area comes in with the waitress. Evie turns in time to catch a glimpse of the large room where the club members, their wives, children, grandmothers and grandfathers all sit stuffing schnitzels and steaks into their mouths before drawing on the large mugs of chilled beer on the tables. It’s a hot night, everybody’s out eating and the dishes will keep coming till the kitchen closes and the members and their families spill out into the car park for the uncertain drive home. In the warm darkness later that night the restless young lovers of the suburb will tumble over and round each other, rolling on the golf course greens or inexpertly grappling with each other’s buttons under the ferns that line the tees, leaving the discarded evidence of their Saturday night for the gardeners to clean away on Monday morning.

  Evie returns to the dishes. She always has a cigarette on the table behind her. Most of the time it burns down to the filter, but occasionally she pauses and drags on it through rubber gloves while staring out through the kitchen window onto the bins outside. She’s twenty-seven. She feels old. A harmless tumble on the green with some young fool seems like a good idea. Evie returns to the dishes. The sooner they’re done, the sooner she can go to Bedser’s party. She is a kind person with a generous nature. A good friend. But Evie sometimes does rash things. And tonight – with the heat, the endless bloody dishes, and her husband out on the road again – is just the night for a bit of rash behaviour.

  Rita glances at the front porch of Evie’s house. The front door is closed, the windows are shut up, and, apart from the porch light which illuminates the name, the house itself is in twilight. Beside her, Vic grunts quietly as he contemplates the bloody fool idea of calling anything Eden.

  28.

  George Bedser

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sp; George Bedser’s house sits in a small hollow at the end of the street. It is made from plain weatherboard, painted white, and has a small rose garden which is struggling to survive the summer. The front door is open, and inside, the voices of the first guests can be heard. The colour has left the sky now and the white paint of the house has turned to grey and dark shadows. But the lights of all the front rooms are turned on, and the porch light and the party lights across the front hang in the air like fake fruit.

  As Vic, Rita and Michael enter the front gate and walk up the newly concreted pathway that leads to the front door of the house, they see George Bedser, in his starched white shirt, waiting for them on the porch.

  He is a small man, five feet four, his hair is thinning and grey and he has a cautious smile. He is a shipbuilder from Liverpool, a welder who spent twenty-three years in the shipyards of the city welding giant sheets of iron to the frames of trawlers, tankers, ferries and ocean liners. The famous, the forgotten, the numerous coal boats of the city, it was all the same. He was born in the city, married in the city, and spent all his life there. His family, his brothers and sisters, and all their families are still there. And he would be too. But his wife suddenly left him one day for a spiv. No warning, no tell-tale signs. Suddenly she was gone, with a drifter in a slick suit who sold something or other door to door. He heard things from time to time, but never saw her again. Nor did he want to. What was the point? She wasn’t his Vera any more. She was someone else. And George Bedser loved his Vera.

  Patsy was just fourteen then, now she is twenty-one. They spent two more years in Liverpool while they were waiting for permission to emigrate. Finally, one drizzling June day the two of them boarded the Otranto and left England for good. He had never sailed before but he was unconcerned by the journey. He knew a good ship.

  Tonight his daughter is getting engaged, and, in the absence of his family, George Bedser has invited the street. And why not? He and his daughter have lived in the street for five years now, longer than most. He found work easily on the docks when he arrived, but he is a quiet man, one who has always stuck to his family and is unused to making friends, and so he made none at the docks. If he has a sense of family now, of community, it is the community of the street he has come to live in. Even if he never indulges in long conversations with his neighbours, even if he never much hangs about at the local shops passing time, he has still come to regard the street, and the people in it, as his.

  As Vic, Rita and Michael step onto Bedser’s small front porch, shake his hand and meet the shy, cautious smile in his eyes, they compliment him on the look of the house; on the coloured lights, the ribbons on the door, and the white, yellow and red roses along the front fence. He nods, raises his eyebrows and is about to respond, to make some comment about the dry soil, when his daughter joins them and he is distracted. His eyes become bright, as if bright with wine, even though he has had nothing to drink.

  Patsy wears a bright, swaying summer dress; her hair, cut with a fringe and held in place by a velvet band, is auburn; her eyes are green. Her skin has the translucence of a young woman and, immediately, Rita admires that skin and remembers what it was to be twenty-one. Patsy welcomes the three guests, shakes their hands, winks at Michael, then turns to her father, grinning, and Rita can see there’s cheek in that grin. But it’s George Bedser that Rita is really watching, for he hasn’t taken his eyes off his daughter since she stepped onto the porch.

  There he is, George Bedser, his eyes on his daughter, his eyes only for his daughter, and she’s looking away. He can’t take his eyes off her because he probably never thought he’d be able to get her this far by himself. But he has. I wonder if Vic sees the look in the old man’s eyes too, but he’s only looking at her. She’s talking to me, she’s talking to Vic, she’s talking to Michael and I wish she’d turn just once and catch the look in her father’s eyes.

  Patsy is being called from the hallway of the house. She hears her name but does not respond. Patsy is puzzled, not so much by the sound of her name as the voice that is calling to her. She looks out across the yard, to the darkness beyond the suburb, and for that moment the party smile leaves her face. Her eyes are suddenly sad and Michael watches the line of those eyes, calculating the direction she’s looking in, somewhere out beyond the mills, beyond the station. But her party eyes return as quickly as they went, she finally responds to the call and a young man steps out onto the porch.

  ‘There you are.’

  This is Allan, the young man who is going to marry Patsy. On hearing his voice George Bedser takes his eyes off his daughter and scrutinises the young man with a slight smile in his eyes. Patsy’s young man is twenty-one, his hair is a little long and brushed back in the modern style. But he’s no lair. Bedser nods quietly to himself. He’s a good lad. A local lad. Quiet. Some might even call him gormless. In fact, some of the locals do. But he’s just quiet. Besides, that doesn’t bother George Bedser. He’s seen the flashy types, the loud ones, come and go, at work, at war, and they’re usually the first to disappear when they’re needed. More than likely, it’s the gormless ones who get the job done when the job needs doing. They have their time, quietly meet their moment, without too much fuss, then go back to being the gormless types who sit in corners at parties and dances, content to watch. No, Bedser doesn’t mind the young lad at all, though he’s never said as much.

  It is then that George Bedser gestures to the inside of the house, talking of pies, rolls, biscuits, beer and sparkling wines. As they all step inside a slow song begins on the record player, and in the far part of the lounge room a couple is already dancing.

  George Bedser is summoned to the front door again the moment they’re inside. And for the next ten minutes the street, family by family, enters George Bedser’s house and the party begins.

  29.

  The View from Pretty Sally

  Jimmy’s car approaches the top of the hill, the name of which has always amused him. Pretty Sally. He changes gears and the car lurches forward. And as he leaves the thick darkness of the river valley behind him, as he finally reaches the top of the hill, he slows the Austin Wolseley briefly. For there, spread out beneath him, washed up onto the wide coastal plain below, are the foaming lights of the city. And the nearest of those lights, some thirty minutes away, is the suburb to which he is travelling.

  He’s been selling hi-fi’s door to door in the country through the week, now his week is finished and he’s driving back to the city. He knows the highway will take him on to Patsy Bedser’s suburb. He has been thinking about nothing else all day.

  The Wolseley noses over the hill and rolls down the long, winding slope that leads onto the plain. The car is simply rolling like a large ball. Jimmy’s foot is on the brake, slowing the car at the curves then easing off the pedal when the road straightens out. It is a long, gradual descent and the car feels for a moment like it is falling out of the sky. There is a cigarette in Jimmy’s mouth and from time to time he flicks the ash out the open window without taking his eyes off the road. The radio is loud.

  It is a clear night, no cloud, no rain, as there nearly always is on this hill. But it is getting dark and Jimmy occasionally squints into the glare of oncoming headlights. At times he catches his reflection in the suddenly illuminated rear-vision mirror. His hair is long. Brushed back. He takes pride in being a teddy boy. And when a voice quietly insists that he not take the turn-off to Patsy’s Bedser’s for there is no place for him at the party, he ignores it, singing to the songs that come on the radio, occasionally thumping the dashboard as if it were a drum. On the seat beside him he has a small stack of the latest forty-fives. They come with the job. Jimmy is driving with one hand on the wheel.

  The lights from the houses gradually become more numerous, less scattered. Jimmy is on the coastal plain now and the lights of the city are only noticeable for the glow they create in the sky. He is approaching that hazy boundary where the darkness of the country merges with the illuminated city night
. Jimmy is tired. He stares at the road in silence as it follows a small creek then turns left up the last of the hills before reaching the edges of the city.

  As the Wolseley crosses the railway lines, the red, asphalt pathway that leads up to the station, the rail siding, and the flour mills on his left, Jimmy slows the car and studies the intersection in front of him.

  He turns right and as he slowly drives along the old wheat road he notices that the television repairman’s shop window, usually aglow with the blue light of his television display, is boarded up with cardboard and wood. He passes the war memorial at the front of the RSL where a large bunch of fresh flowers lies resting at the base of it. There are, he reflects, always fresh flowers at its base. At least, whenever he has passed it.

  The black Wolseley glides slowly past the old, double-storey Victorian terraces that house the greengrocer and the butcher. On the opposite side of the street, to his left, is the weatherboard Presbyterian church. At the dirt intersection before him he will turn left, then right at the playing field of the school.

  Above him the comet moves slowly across the suburb, while the Wolseley quietly advances, and while Jimmy inspects the tall pines that line the northern border of the school as they sway in the moonlight.

  The Wolseley is now parked in the shadows at the corner of the street. The engine has not been long idle and is still warm from the journey. The radio is turned low. Jimmy is sitting in the dark, behind the wheel, smoking and watching the house at the bottom of the street. All its rooms are illuminated and coloured party lights, red, green and yellow, are hanging from the guttering at the front of the house. The porch is lit-up, the windows have been opened, and music from the hi-fi that he sold to Patsy Bedser last autumn is audible, even from the corner of the street where Jimmy sits inside the black Wolseley.