The Art of the Engine Driver Read online

  3.

  Pausing by the Paddock (I)

  Rita fixes the comet with her eyes. She squints into the sky trying to calculate the point at which the comet will become indistinguishable from the stars themselves or disappear altogether. Then the distant sound of a goods train, rattling down into the city, drags her away from the sky. Vic is lighting a cigarette on the edge of the paddock. The glow of the match is almost the colour of the sky. The faint, disappearing rattle of the engine fading in her ears, while she concentrates on the still, silent, glow of the match.

  She hears the engine in another time, the hiss of the brakes. The crunch of the gravel beneath her feet. A suitcase beside her. Sees the grey country sky and the slate on the roof of the station, shiny like glass. She hears the carriage doors closing behind her and the platform whistle as the train leaves.

  He stood there in front of me in his work clothes, not saying anything. No, of course not. We both just stood there on the platform, neither of us saying a word. Already, we’d started that childish game of who’d be the first to speak, the first to break. I was tired of it. I wanted to get on the train again and go back to my real home, back in the city, but the train had gone.

  The platform was empty. Nobody hangs around platforms, but we did. It must have been two, three or five minutes. It’s hard to say.

  ‘How have you been?’

  ‘Good.’

  That’s all. He looked away as he said it, across the rails to the shunted carriages and guard’s vans. Good. Nothing more than that. It had been two weeks since I left. Two weeks since we’d spoken.

  I wasn’t coming back. Wasn’t even considering it. Not till he’d promised this, pledged to do that. Not till he’d smartened his act up. Not till he’d given up the grog and the useless mates he drank with that only dragged him down.

  So I left and went back to mama’s. We’d been married less than a year. Poor mama. Watching over me all the time, and talking to me all the time, just to make me feel better. But she didn’t. It was either too much or nothing at all. No talk or so much it may as well be nothing. For the previous two weeks I’d been sitting in my old room, sleeping in my old room and waking in my old room like nothing had changed.

  Every day I heard my mama in the yard. I heard the creak of the clothesline, the flap of the shirts in the wind, bright in the morning sun. My old things were still in the room. Movie magazines. Everywhere, movie magazines. I’d forgotten how many there were. The old wardrobe, with all the old dresses. But none of it was mine any more and I kept on just wishing he’d write or call. After the first week I knew he was waiting for me to break and phone first.

  The country seemed like a good idea after we married. Get away from everybody. From the pubs, from the boozers. It’s no way to start a marriage, with that lot hanging around. A clean sweep, he said. And so off we went. At first I didn’t care where we were. All we could find was a half house in the town behind a fruit shop. I didn’t care. There was a yard, a vegetable patch, a fruit tree. For a while it worked. But there’s pubs and boozers everywhere.

  I smell the pubs and the stale beer. Right here, beside this paddock. Beside the swaying grass and the schoolyard pines, I smell them all. Stale and sickly. I smell them as clearly as I heard the crunch of the gravel under my feet that evening on the platform. He carried my bag and we walked up the platform to the ticket collector who’d been waiting all that time.

  I’d been away two weeks and if I hadn’t phoned he never would have written and I would have still been sitting back in my old room listening to mama. The ticket collector smiled and we walked down the asphalt path to the street. Without turning, he told me that he’d cooked dinner.

  It was late in the afternoon and getting dark and the shops in the street were lit up. It was only then I noticed he was wearing his good shoes under his overalls. That they’d been cleaned and shined, the way only black can shine. We moved along under the verandahs. The shops were shutting but I could smell the bakery and we kept it open to buy cake. We were quiet and calm. Nobody was weeping. Nobody was shouting or sighing. And, without a word being said, it was clear that nobody was promising anything they couldn’t keep to.

  And soon I was in that tiny room again at the back of the fruit shop. The one we cooked in, and ate in, and sat in for almost a year before I left. The radio was on and he was talking about work. About engines. My bag was in the bedroom, still packed.

  It was cold that first night back, country cold, but somehow that room felt good. It had no right to, but it did. And the smell of the stew as he’s dished it up. Of all the meals I’ve eaten over all the years, I only remember a few. But I remember that one. The steam off the plate, the peas and the salty smell of the gravy, like it’s under my nose now. And I shouldn’t have felt hungry, but I was ravenous. Like I could have eaten the whole pot. I didn’t know what had come over me, as soon as my bowl was finished I wanted it filled again. And he was laughing all the time, saying tuck in girl, you haven’t eaten all day. I had. I knew I had, but that didn’t stop me.

  And when I’d finished the third bowl, when I’d put the plate back on the table and licked the last of the gravy from the spoon. When I’d pushed the plate away after eating enough for two people and I was staring at the smoke rising from his fingers, with the taste of the stewed meat on my lips, on my breath, and the juices of the stew flowing through my veins and my skin tingling all over, then, I knew why I’d come back.

  Afterwards, he washed the dishes. You sit down, he said, and turned back to the sink, still in his good shoes. Mind you, he hadn’t said a word about the previous two weeks. It was like I’d been on a holiday, or never been away at all. And I was the one who wasn’t coming back. I swore I wasn’t coming back, but I did. And that night I discovered why.

  He whistled along to some song on the radio and it was a good sound. After the meal it was pleasant on the ears, so pleasant I could almost have forgotten I’d been away. Then there was the cool smell of the bedroom. My bag was by the chest of drawers and I put my clothes away. Back into the same drawers I’d taken them out of two weeks before.

  The sheets of the bed were white and cold but I knew they’d soon warm up. He was in the kitchen, still whistling. Every now and then the sounds of the radio drifted up from the back of the house along the hallway. My toothbrush was in a glass by the bowl in the bathroom, all ready for the morning, and all the mornings and all the days after that. Outside, a cloud was swept from the sky and a big, white moon pressed its face up against the window.

  Rita watches as the match flares and dies. Vic drops it at his feet on the footpath then turns to her, as if to say what’s keeping you. Rita’s not moving. She’s standing by the edge of the paddock in a dress that is just a bit too good for this street and the faint taste of that meal still on her lips.

  4.

  Pausing by the Paddock (II)

  Michael stares at the stationary figures of his mother and father; his mother looking quizzically at his father, his father still with his ears turned towards the railway line, listening to the train as it passes. He’s here but he’s not here, Michael thinks. The sun is low and the three of them stand bright in the last of that Saturday night sun.

  Just as the train fades, the ripe bells of St Matthews swell in the close air, two notes slowly following each other at even intervals. One overlapping, then succeeding the other, before being succeeded itself. It is a small wooden church with a weatherboard belfry and stands on the corner of the main road, back towards the railway line. It is near and the bells are clear. To Michael these bells always called from another time, even another country. And they always sounded like the end of something, but he could never tell what.

  His parents are the length of a cricket pitch apart, and Michael, in the middle, can observe them freely, for they seem to have forgotten all about him. They could be meeting for the first time. They could be strangers and he has the sudden, uneasy feeling that he doesn’t really know who these peo
ple are. When they stand like this, separate, silent, in their own worlds like statues on museum lawns, he is seeing something of who they were before he came along.

  The previous winter, after school one evening, when his father was at night shift and his mother was at work and he was alone in the house, he took the shopping trolley and wheeled it along the dirt path that led to the station. By five it was already dark and he stood outside the ticket collector’s gate and watched the yellow lights of the train as it pulled into the platform. In the waiting room some of the passengers took their good work shoes off and changed into their old shoes, for the waiting room was lined with the old, dirty shoes that everybody used for the muddy walk back from the station. When the passengers strode out onto the asphalt path keen for home, he looked for his mother. But the last of them came and went and she wasn’t there. He stood in his cardigan, hunched over the shopper, and waited for the next train.

  When it arrived and its red doors swung open he watched the crowd once more heading towards the waiting room for their shoes, then on to the ticket collector’s gate.

  She didn’t see him at first. Nor did he immediately recognise her. She looked different. What she is, he guessed, during the day when she’s working. He stood near the ticket gate, with the red-brick Post Office behind him, watching the people in their hats and coats, carrying their bags and clutching their evening newspapers, and wondering if he should be there at all, the only child at the station. But then she saw him and smiled and he knew it was all right. She put her bag in the trolley and together they took the asphalt path down to the shops.

  In the butcher’s shop he stood back against the wall, playing with the sawdust at his feet while his mother talked to the butcher. They laughed and talked like old friends and once again Michael felt like he shouldn’t be there. When his mother took the chops and the mince, the butcher called her by her name, Rita, as he waved goodbye and Michael connected that name with his mother as if learning it all over again.

  When she closed the vinyl lid of the shopper, she smiled and told him what a good idea it was to bring the shopping trolley to the station, and they walked back along the dirt path, Michael pushing the trolley, his mother nodding in the dark street to his comments, saying yes or no to his questions. Sometimes she was silent. During those silences Michael occasionally looked up from the trolley at her, making out her features in the dark, the hair, cut and combed like an actress, the make-up, the lipstick red in the shadows. And even though he thought she might turn at any moment and catch him staring, she didn’t. She was looking ahead, along the street, and he wanted to know what she was thinking.

  It is then that Rita calls out to Vic, across that imaginary cricket pitch that divides them, and tells him to wait. They should all walk to the party together, she says. Like a family, she adds. And so Vic waits as Rita joins him. As soon as she does Michael begins his run, slowly accelerating, his shoulders level, his paces even as he nears his delivery stride. When he hits the point of delivery Vic and Rita step back quickly to make way as Michael bowls an imaginary cricket ball into the twilight like the great Lindwall. Michael is cricket mad. The fence at the back of their house, against which he bowls every day, bears the marks of his madness. Michael stops and stares into the distance following the path of the invisible ball. He then turns back to his parents and they continue their walk down the dirt footpath to the Englishman’s house at the bottom of the street.

  5.

  Studying Ray Lindwall

  The wooden fence at the back of the yard is already splintered and broken above where three white lines representing stumps have been painted. Every day Michael bowls against the fence and the fence is slowly falling apart. He has been bowling at the fence all summer and now he can see through the opening onto the green lawn of next door’s back yard.

  From the moment he first saw the game played it was the fast bowler that caught his eye. Michael thinks of nothing else but fast bowling through the long school days, and dreams of fast bowling at night. Just one dream. And always the same. In this dream he bowls the perfect ball. He experiences its perfection from beginning to end. It is a delivery so perfect that it becomes known all over the suburb as the ball that Michael bowled. The scene is always the same. The red train at the local station is just pulling out from the platform, the mill cats are tumbling over each other in the Saturday-afternoon sun, a vase of flowers at the base of the war memorial bows to the footpath in the heat, the milk bar owner in the main street pours lemonade into a glass for a lime spider, while on the dusty schoolyard oval in the shade of the great pines, Michael bowls the perfect ball and everything stops. The train delays its departure. The milk bar owner turns from his lime spider. The mill cats look up from their games as word ripples through the suburb that Michael has bowled the perfect ball. And the witnesses, those who were there, will grow in number throughout the day and through the following weeks, till everyone will claim to have been there and witnessed the ball that young Michael bowled. And all will agree, from the moment the ball left the boy’s hand, to the moment it lifted the off stump from the ground, that it was the perfect ball and that the boy had a gift for speed.

  It is his ambition that one day he will live his dream. That one day he will feel the ball leave the tips of his thumb and fingers, know from the moment it does what is about to happen, and look up from his delivery stride to see the schoolyard crowd and everybody on the street that runs alongside the oval, pause in wonder as something of distracting perfection enters the everyday world of school bells and midday shopping. And even those who don’t care for the game will nod to each other on the footpaths, acknowledging that it is an event.

  But before that moment can be lived he will spend his days bowling against his back fence, until that part of the fence upon which the three stumps have been painted will shatter completely and a new set of stumps will need to be drawn in.

  Every day Michael kneels on the lawn with a small house-painting brush in one hand and draws a white line across the grass. On the lawn there are always two opened books lying in the sun. The pages of one contain a series of eight photographs, a series of newsreel stills that show, frame by frame, the great Lindwall’s action. Lindwall is shown approaching the crease. Michael sees the bowler gathering himself for the delivery stride. Lindwall hits the delivery stride, sliding through on the point of his right boot then transfers his weight to the front foot. The next frame is the boy’s favourite. Lindwall’s arm is high, his back is arched, and the ball is about to be released. It is in that moment, in the split second before the ball is released, that the bowler is privileged. His balance, the feel of his feet on the ground, his rhythm, his aim, the arch of his back, the movement of his shoulders and the snug sit of the ball in his fingers will tell him in advance about the quality of the ball he is about to deliver. Already Michael is living for that moment when he feels the ripple of the perfect delivery passing through him and he tastes that moment just before it happens. When it is his and his alone, before sharing it with the crowd. In the next frame the ball is released and the remaining two photographs show the smooth, even pacing of Lindwall’s follow-through.

  Michael has studied these photographs again and again, he has read the great Lindwall’s book on the art of the fast bowler. Throughout the summer the ball will hit the back fence above the stumps, and the crack of the impact will reverberate around the neighbourhood like a rifle shot, telling everybody that young Michael is at it again. He has underlined in pencil the most important points in Lindwall’s book. At the top of the run, facing the back fence with an old cork ball in his hand, the boy’s impulse is always to run in as fast as he can and bowl the ball with all the speed he can gather. But the book tells him to begin slowly, and so, against all instincts, he takes off slowly and doesn’t overstretch at the delivery stride because the great Lindwall doesn’t.

  On these afternoons, while he is slowly increasing his speed, he is vaguely aware of the sounds around him; th
e children in the yard of the adjacent house, a dog somewhere complaining each time the ball hits the fence, and his next-door neighbour, Mr Barlow, hacking his lungs up into a bucket on his back porch. But these sounds are unimportant. He hears them but they don’t concern him because they don’t matter.

  There is only one sound that matters. The sound of speed. The old cork ball barely leaves his hand when he hears the snap of the impact, sees the ball ricochet off the edge of a fence paling, fly onto the side fence and bounce onto the lawn in front of him. He is aware that the neighbourhood will be listening. He is always aware of the raised eyebrows all around him and the muttered comments that the kid will destroy the fence before he’s finished.

  During these hours Michael lives in a world of rhythm and action. He aims in turn for each of the painted stumps; the leg, the middle and the off. And he is not content until he hits each of the nominated stumps like the great Lindwall, who impresses the crowds at exhibitions by calling the stump that he hits before bowling the ball.

  Occasionally the yelling next door disturbs his concentration. Mr Barlow will have finished coughing his lungs up and his wife will yell at him. She is famous for it. And it is always the same. The house is wrong. The street is ghastly. The suburb is stuck out on the edge of the world. She is ashamed of the address. Ashamed of him. And won’t somebody tell that kid next door to stop. She will be yelling all of this while the ball hits the back fence again and again. Then she will cry like she always does, and everything will go quiet once more.