The Art of the Engine Driver Page 13

  You pass a familiar station. A familiar stop. And then suddenly you spot a side track you’ve never really noticed before. It might only run for a mile into a wheat silo. It might run for a hundred. Suddenly it looks good. You could go off the rails. No section clearance, no staff in your hand, no permission. Bugger the lot, you might say. And before you know it you’re off. And you could be gone and back in a flash. No harm done. Nobody to know anyway. Or you could just take that track and never come back at all.

  I see you in another time, sugar. I can see you in another room. With another me. And I hear your talk the way it might sound there. And it sounds good. And suddenly, another time, another place, don’t seem so far away.

  33.

  The End of the Double Bed

  Rita is still standing by the front gate staring out across the paddocks that are slowly swaying in moonlight and shadow. The three men standing on the dry lawn near the house are slowly becoming muttering drunks. She doesn’t speak to them, they don’t speak to her. Past the houses, the low grassy paddocks go on forever. If only there were some trees. Something to break the flat lines of the paddocks, the dirt streets and the square houses that sit on them. But there aren’t. The trees have all been swept away to make room for the square houses.

  The music of the party is not inviting. She’d like to dance. In her new dress, she’d like to be dancing. The way she used to. The way they used to. There are times when she thinks she was never so happy as when she was dancing. But Vic has started drinking and already she can tell there’ll be no dancing tonight.

  He can dance, all right. He’s one of the best. When he wants to be. Not that he ever dances with me any more. The only dancing he ever does at home these days is when he comes to bed drunk and he’s trying to get his trousers off. He does this little jig, hopping from one foot to the other. Sometimes he does a low whistle to accompany himself, and it could even be funny, but it’s not. It happens too often, this little jig of his. Then, when he stops hopping from foot to foot, and he finally gets his trousers off, he flops into bed on his back and snores all night. He starts off low, but then he gets into his rhythm. Pretty soon the snores rattle the venetians and the room stinks of grog. Like the stink of a public bar. Not that I’ve been in one for years, not since I was a child and my mother dragged me through some pub in Prahran one afternoon looking for my papa. But sometimes I’m passing a pub in the city, the door flies open and the stink pours out like bad breath from a drunk’s mouth. And that’s the smell that fills the bedroom in minutes. Along with the snores. He’s on his back with his nose in the air. And sometimes, sometimes the snores come out of him like steam from a train’s stack. He’s getting a real hooter on him these days. And it’s getting bigger and fleshier with the years and the booze. Pretty soon we’ll be able to stand him in the hallway and use him as a hat stand, ’cause he’s getting the kind of hooter you could hang your hat on. And just when he’s sleeping quietly he snorts, wakes himself for a few minutes and mumbles something in the dark. Then he bounces around on the bed like there’s nobody else in it, before he’s snoring again and filling the room with all the grog he’s just filled himself up with. So there’s no more dancing in our house. Just a drunken jig as he takes his pants off before bed and a night of snoring.

  That was the end of the double bed. Even as I said it to him one morning, after he’d snored his way through the night and I’d lain there beside him trying to sleep in between the snores. Even as I said it, even as I opened my mouth and my speech crossed the kitchen table towards him, I could hear my mama’s words in my ears saying once the double bed is gone the marriage is gone.

  But I didn’t care, and that old, dark, stained, barge of a bed, that took up half the room anyway, was taken apart and carried out the front door in bits. I hated it anyway. It reeked of old rooms. Old people. Old bones, old skin and old breath. I’d watched my mother slowly dying in a bed like that, and now I felt like I was doing the same thing. Going the same way. We bought it second hand and even when we bought it the thought occurred to me that people died in beds like that. And some nights, I swear, I could still see the ghosts of all the old things who’d ever slept and died in that bed, sitting up in it, white-faced and white-haired with their potties in their hands and their doyleys over their potties, just like mama. No, I was glad to see the ugly thing go. It gave me the creeps.

  So the old bed went out in bits, and in came two single beds of clear, varnished pine. As soon as they were assembled they lit the room up. I picked them because I knew they would. And I could see them with clean sheets and blankets, and the bright new quilts I’d bought the week before.

  I had my own bed again. My own bedside lamp. My own corner of the room.

  Rita’s eyes leave the vacant paddocks and turn back to the party. She can see the silhouettes of the guests through the windows of the house as they dance and move about from room to room. There’s an old song playing and she can hear Bedser’s English friends singing along the way the English do when they all get together and an old song is played.

  This makes her smile, and as she’s smiling Evie opens the screen door and steps back on to the front path. She has a brown bottle of chilled beer in her hand and smiles at Rita as she walks towards the front gate.

  ‘No luck’, she says. ‘I’ll try him again when we’ve drunk this. I know where he is and he doesn’t look like he’s moving.’

  Evie tilts the bottle and pours the chilled beer into Rita’s glass. And as Rita listens to the sing-along inside, and as she watches the dancing bubbles in her glass rise to the surface, she’s glad of the company. And the beer tastes good. She might even have another. Not that she can keep up with Evie, because Evie is throwing them back a bit.

  34.

  Vic’s Women

  ‘Bye handsome,’ she says, still holding that beer glass and making her way through the party and back out to the front yard.

  She’s an impressive woman. And she knows she is too. A woman who grows on you. The more you see of her, the more impressive she is. You don’t see women like that now. Not often. At least I don’t. Not with that kind of look. They went out with the war. All except her. She’s the last of a kind.

  I used to know women like that. I don’t any more, but I did. I used to get them around the backs of the dances. And in the back lanes. Anywhere quiet and private. I’d pull their pants down. Their slippery nylon pants. Their frilly pants. Their lily-white pants. In the back streets, up against a fence. Anywhere quiet. I’d pull their pants down and empty out the old sago bag right there.

  Afterwards, we’d go back to the dance hall and we’d dance some more, or listen to the band, or lose each other in the crowd. Those were the days. Now, as soon as I hear someone say to me it’ll be just like the good old days I know it’ll be bulldust. It’s one of those lines that gives the game away straight off. The fact is we don’t have days like that any more. And we don’t have women like that any more. Except for her. ‘Bye handsome,’ she says, with that look in her eye. And she knows exactly what she’s doing. And I thought her type went out with the war. Get a woman like that and it just might be like the old days. It just might.

  But what have I got now? Huh? A single bed. A bloody single bed. I’ve got mine, and madam’s got hers. Two bloody single beds.

  Vic is leaning against a wall, away from the party, near the back door. Evie has just left the lounge room. She quickly disappears, leaving the dancing and all the talk behind her while she returns to the front yard of the house to rejoin Rita.

  Vic is now leaning against a wall by himself. He is filling a large pot glass with beer and watching the foam settle before taking a large gulp. He has reached that point in his drinking when his humour begins to fade, when the smiles begin turning into sneers. When his eyes lose their affability and harden. When nothing is right, and there’s everything to gripe about. When he’d prefer to be by himself. When he’d prefer to be what he was. Precisely that point in the evening wh
ere he should stop drinking. But he doesn’t. Instead, he watches the foam settle in his glass, then takes a giant swig.

  Outside, on the front lawn, the two women are silent. There is a song playing on the record player. A slow song. A familiar ballad that is already old enough to be layered with memory. Evie is swaying slightly to this song, swaying her hips from side to side, as if she were dancing with an invisible partner.

  Rita is looking down at her feet oblivious of the music, of her friend and of the party until she is suddenly drawn back into the world by the sound of a worn tennis ball hitting the wooden pickets of Bedser’s front fence.

  35.

  The Slap

  The ball rebounds and Michael pockets it. He has been in the front yard for an hour now and that black car hasn’t shifted, nor has the driver left it. Michael eyes it, perched at the corner of the street, as he walks along the path to the front door. The shadow of a driver is barely visible behind the windscreen.

  Inside he passes the quiet figure of Mr Van Rijn who is looking lost without his wife. He nods and Mr Van Rijn returns the greeting without smiling. Perfume and cigarette smoke hang in the still air of the lounge room. Men, their faces shining with fresh haircuts and close shaves are smiling and laughing under the light. The women, in summer dresses, with strings of imitation pearls and coloured stones about their necks, are seated along a row of chairs along the far wall or standing near the windowsills to catch a breeze.

  As Michael approaches a large drinks table and pours himself a glass of lemonade he spots his father talking to their next-door neighbour, Mr Barlow, beside the refrigerator. With one look he knows that his father has already drunk too much. He knows the slouch, the lost look beginning to appear in his eyes, the mechanical jangling of loose change in his trouser pocket, the grip of the beer glass. He knows it all. And every now and then he hears his father’s booming laugh carrying across the kitchen to the lounge room. His father may be laughing, but he knows his father’s laughter can disappear as soon as it erupts.

  Someone beside him suddenly slaps their arm and holds up the remains of a mosquito for the examination of those around him. The man then drops the dead insect into an ashtray and the conversation behind Michael resumes. But Michael still hears that slap on the arm.

  There was a sound like steaks being slapped down on a bare laminex table. When steaks are thrown onto a laminex table, with force, the impact produces both a slap and a thud. Two sounds, but simultaneous.

  He remembers a hot night, like tonight. Possibly, even, a Saturday night. Michael was small. Much smaller than he is now. He had walked from the kitchen into the hallway that leads up to his parents’ room. It was dinner time but the empty plates were still sitting on the kitchen table.

  His father had returned late again that evening with the dirt of the street all over him. He had walked into the kitchen with a cheery hello as if nothing were wrong, as if he hadn’t brought the smell of the public bar with him, and as if he weren’t covered in the dust and dirt of the street. When he disappeared into the bedroom Michael’s mother had followed him, and that was when it started.

  It all happened quickly. One moment he was seated in the kitchen waiting for his dinner, the next he was drawn into the hallway by this sound, like raw steak being slapped onto a table.

  The door to his parents’ room was shut but he could hear their voices and as he neared the door they become louder. He heard his mother’s voice, then his father’s. And standing at the door he could even hear the words they were using.

  ‘You’ll drag us all down to the gutter with you. You were in the gutter when I first met you – and I wish to God I never had – and you’re still there. Look at you.’

  His father’s voice was weary. Almost bored.

  ‘You’re a nun. It’s like living in a convent. No wonder you haven’t got any friends.’

  ‘Look at yourself. You’ve got the gutter all over you. That’s where you belong. In the filth. If you love it so much go back to it. But you’re not taking us there. You’re all gutter, aren’t you? From head to foot. Wherever you go you bring the gutter with you. You bring the gutter into our house. It’s never far away, the gutter. Any gutter.’

  It was then that his father had snapped and his voice became loud. He was telling his mother to stop it. To shut up. But his mother just kept going on about the gutter. And dirt. And filth. Then she was crying. And his father was saying, shut up, shut up, shut up. But his mother kept crying. And although Michael knew he shouldn’t open the door, he did.

  His mother was sitting on the side of the bed. His father was standing in front of her. His mother was still crying and his father was still telling her to stop it. But the more he told her to stop it, the more she cried. Then, with great force, his father’s hands came together. He was standing in front of his mother telling her to stop it, when one palm suddenly hit the other palm. And the sound it made was like steaks being slapped down on a bare laminex table.

  It was then that his mother looked up and noticed Michael standing at the door. At first she quickly turned away, as if she didn’t want Michael to see her face. But he had, and just as quickly she turned back to him, waving her hand in the air, and telling Michael to go away. His father’s hands were still together, glued at the point of impact, the sound was still in the air, and his father’s eyes were blank as he stared at Michael in surprise. His mother waved Michael away again, and he quietly closed the door as he left.

  He didn’t turn the light in his room on. Instead he let his footsteps be guided by the moonlight entering the window through the open curtains at the side of the house. Slowly, he pulled the eiderdown back, and, after removing his slippers, climbed onto the bed.

  In the wonderful, quiet darkness of his room, he lay down, pulled the eiderdown over his head, closed his eyes, and imagined that he was sleeping.

  Michael eyes the dead insect lying amongst the butts of the ashtray in front of him. He hears his father’s laughter again, listens briefly to the conversation behind him and notes the English accents of Mr Bedser’s friends or the people he works with. Bubbles rise to the top of his glass as he fills it again with the lemonade. When the bubbles have gone he drinks it all at once then turns and walks back out into the front yard. The party sounds fade as the flyscreen door slaps against the house in the night and Michael stands before the front fence once more and takes the worn tennis ball from his pocket, while quickly glancing at the dark car parked at the corner of the street.

  36.

  A Solitary Game

  Mr Bruchner is drunk. He is demonstrating and Michael turns from the front fence in time to see Mr Bruchner’s demonstration. His voice is loud and he is speaking to Mr Younger as one would to a child or a trained animal. His hand is raised high above his head and he brings it forward rapidly, hitting an imaginary wall again and again as if he were holding a hammer.

  ‘You see?’

  The thin figure of Mr Younger nods and watches once more as the imaginary hammer hits the invisible wall. Their crisp, white shirts, rolled back up past their elbows, are already beginning to crumple. Bruchner drops a cigarette onto the lawn and flattens it with his foot. His mass of matinee curls is falling over his forehead and his eyes are beginning to take on the lost look that drunks have.

  ‘You see?’

  Mr Younger sips his lemon squash and nods once more, but Bruchner is not convinced and he begins the demonstration all over again.

  When he is finished Bruchner slowly turns from the imaginary wall and tells Mr Younger that his house is no good. That it’s a hut. A hovel. A humpy. Ready to fall down. He is telling him that if he had any sense he’d kick the lot over and hire someone who knows what they’re doing because he, Mr Younger, is just a bloody storeman who shuffles cardboard boxes around all day and doesn’t even know how to hammer a nail in properly. Bruchner, with one of those drunk’s smiles that is a twin to a sneer, is enjoying himself. He is telling Mr Younger that his house, if you can
call it that, is a disgrace to the street. Or the biggest joke in the street, depending on what type of character you were. Personally, he, Bruchner, can’t see the joke, but plenty of others can. The whole street is either laughing or shaking its head. But not Bruchner. He is a tradesman. A plasterer. A perfectionist. And the scrap heap Younger calls his house is an insult. Something that he takes personally. And every night when he drives home from work he’s got to look at it because Younger’s house is opposite his.

  Bruchner then returns to driving his imaginary nail into the night, with increasing force, in the hope that Younger might learn something about the simple art of driving a nail in properly. All the while Mr Younger watches, nodding patiently, his lemon squash in his hand.

  Michael watches too, suddenly transfixed by the spectacle of an imaginary hammer being brought forward again and again into imaginary impact with an invisible wall. He watches, again and again, his eyes on the hammer, until, eventually, he can hear the sound it would make.

  When he is finished Bruchner offers Mr Younger a cigarette, but Mr Younger doesn’t smoke. Bruchner has forgotten that. Or never bothered remembering. Besides, he was only offering the cigarette because Younger was there. Not because he cares. But now that Younger has refused the cigarette, Bruchner has taken it personally. The same way that he takes the offence of Younger’s house personally. Younger’s offences are mounting and it is then that Bruchner points to the half-empty pot of squash in Younger’s hand and says what’s that?

  He repeats the question, with obvious distaste and tells Mr Younger about his house all over again. Variations on the theme of Younger’s house swirl around inside Bruchner with the beer, then spill from his mouth. And when it is said again, when his wide, heavy lips mouth the words that have been swirling round inside him all night, the comments are accompanied by the first of his sneers, the smile falls from his face, and Bruchner, the drunk, has arrived.