The Art of the Engine Driver Read online

  Throughout these repeated episodes of yelling and crying and coughing Michael’s eyes are focused on the three stumps painted onto the fence. There are times when he feels almost nothing, neither the weight of his being nor the strain on his legs and back. Times when he is completely oblivious of the instructions flowing from his mind to his body, when he is almost a spectator to his own bowling. And the picture that he sees, from the curve of the back, to the grace of the bowling arm describing its delivery arc and the velvet follow-through, is an exact replica of the great Lindwall in frozen action. And what he sees is made all the more powerful by the certain knowledge that, at the end of such a perfect delivery, there will be damage.

  At times like these he is sure he has the gift of speed. And if he does he must nurture it, for in his bones he knows that true speed is a gift. Not something to be squandered and lost. Knows that when a gift is given it must be received with care. And knows that, if he nurtures it properly, it will be speed that will one day carry him along his street, out of the suburb and into the world of the great Lindwall. This is the importance of being fast, for the kind of speed that turns heads can do all that.

  But for the time being he will practise every afternoon in his yard until the fence is shattered and another three white stumps will need to be painted on the remaining palings next to the damaged section. He will follow the instructions of the great Lindwall until action becomes second nature, and the instruments of bowling – his legs, arms, eyes, heart and head – are all one.

  When this happens, he will bowl the perfect ball and it will become known as the ball that Michael bowled. The red train will stay just that moment longer in the platform before departing, the mill kittens will cease to gambol, the milk bar owner will look up, suddenly distracted from his lime spider and the dream will meet reality. And even those who don’t care much for the game will pause on the footpaths and streets of the suburb in general acknowledgement that this is an event.

  6.

  The Bruchners

  The cigarette butts are piled high in the ashtray beside Mrs Bruchner. She has no sooner finished one than she has started another, the smoke still rising from the last imperfectly stubbed butt.

  She is a tall woman, big boned, but plain in the face, with unfortunate breasts that fell flat to her stomach from an early age, and consequently has no figure to speak of, although she is only twenty-nine. Her hands tremble when she raises the cigarette to her mouth to light it. Her hands always tremble, especially when she raises her lighter, which she often does. Even when she smooths her brittle hair, her fingers will sometimes become ensnared in her curls and they will stay there briefly, trembling, until she frees her hand and places it back in her dress pocket where she keeps her lighter.

  From her lounge-room window she can see the procession of families passing along the street to the Englishman’s house. She is wearing her best summer dress, which hangs loosely over her shoulders and falls undisturbed from her neck to her knees, no swells or curves to invest it with shape. She has long ceased to care about fashion, especially summer fashion. At least in winter she can wrap herself in cardigans and jumpers and feel as if her body has shape. She suffers the summer.

  Lipstick stains the filtered tips of the cigarettes and the smoke mingles with her perfume. In her mind she can still hear the dog howling. Her husband, a short, stocky man with a head full of tumbling black curls that he brushes back, with a part down the middle, in the style of a matinee idol from the previous decade, is still in the bathroom. He is broad across the shoulders and chest, with thin, spindly legs. This tapering effect, from shoulders and chest to feet, augments the sense of physical power that he brings to a room, despite his shortness of stature. He is humming to himself now, but all she can hear is the dog.

  Every time he feeds the dog, a large Alsatian, he will make it crouch on the grass at the back of the house as he lays a large piece of fresh meat before it. The meat will be no more than a foot away from the dog’s nostrils, but the dog will not be allowed to devour it until the instruction is given. And, more than often, Bruchner will keep the dog waiting, especially for the amusement of visitors. Its hind legs will shift about in anticipation and its front paws will claw at the grass while its eyes will look up to Bruchner, listening for the word ‘Now’. But he will always keep the dog waiting, pointing to the shifting hind and front legs, and boasting that the dog would never move without his instruction.

  Until today. Bruchner, a plasterer, was showing off the ritual to a fellow worker earlier that afternoon. As always, he lay the meat before the crouching animal then stood back, chatting to his visitor as the dog eyed the fresh meat. He won’t move, was Bruchner’s boast, until I say. And we could stand here all afternoon, Bruchner boasted again, and the dog still won’t move. To prove the point they stood before the crouching beast longer than usual, until the dog’s front paws began to claw up the grass in front of it to reveal the dirt beneath. And yet still they chatted casually of that Saturday morning’s work, pretending to ignore the dog. Then they weren’t pretending to ignore the dog any longer, but became intensely involved in a discussion of considerable technical detail. And while they were lost in the details, while they were animated and engrossed in the technicalities of their current contract, the dog suddenly leapt forward and began devouring the meat.

  At first Bruchner looked down at the dog in silence, but then he heard the laughter of his workmate as he pointed to the hungry animal, then to his wristwatch, indicating that he’d stayed long enough and that it was time to leave. And it was then that Bruchner first hit the dog with his bare fist. Once, then twice, he hit the dog on the side of the head, then the side of the jaw, for it was now his belief that if the dog could at least be forced to drop the meat from its mouth, then something of his boast might yet be salvaged. And so he belted the dog again until it did, indeed, drop the large lump of meat back onto the lawn. But when Bruchner looked up his fellow worker was already waving goodbye and the dog’s subservience went unnoticed.

  It was then, with his workmate now strolling along the driveway and out into the street, that Bruchner took a stick that he kept in his shed and set about teaching the dog a lesson.

  These are the howls that Mrs Bruchner can still hear as she sits in the lounge room with the piled ashtray beside her, lighting one cigarette after another with her shaking hands.

  The beating went on, the dog crouched again whimpering before the semi-chewed meat, taking one blow after another. And even when Joy Bruchner opened the kitchen door and begged him to stop, Bruchner had merely looked up for a moment and replied that the dog must learn, before returning to the beast.

  When the beating finally stopped, the dog slouched to a corner at the back of the yard and licked its hind legs and front paws without sound.

  That silence, Mrs Bruchner now notes, as she lights another cigarette and listens to Bruchner walk from the bathroom to the bedroom where he will put on the new summer shirt she ironed that afternoon, that silence is almost as disturbing as the howls themselves, just as the stillness that came over the yard afterwards was a menacing stillness.

  As he is buttoning up his shirt Bruchner is piecing together the fragments of the afternoon, still puzzled by the dog’s actions. For some reason he is going over the conversation he had with his workmate. He had been making an important point. In the past, he said, contracts were often hard to fulfil because materials were hard to come by.

  ‘Now,’ he had said, with emphasis and with his finger raised, ‘it is no longer the case.’

  Bruchner suddenly realises why the dog pounced on the fresh meat. So simple. The dog had waited for the instruction after all, and all he has to do is point that out to his workmate. He will do so on Monday morning. In the meantime the dog will have forgotten all about the beating. And when he steps outside to feed the animal it will bound towards him and crouch low, its hind legs shifting about in anticipation, its front paws clawing at the grass, waiting for the ga
me to begin all over again.

  The Bruchner house was constructed in anticipation of children, but no children came. The lounge room is wide, with curved corners, and the floorboards, of the best Tasmanian hardwood, are polished and shiny like glass. The plastered walls are perfectly finished. In the evenings their footsteps echo throughout the house. As she pushes a half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray she can hear Bruchner’s approaching footsteps in the hallway, and she realises how much she loathes that sound.

  Outside, through the curtains, she sees Vic, Rita and Michael pausing by the paddock opposite. If she weren’t so worn out she could have sobbed. Just one, she is noting, just one makes all the difference. Just one more makes a couple a family, and she dwells upon that simple fact as she reaches into her dress pocket for the lighter and Bruchner enters the room.

  7.

  Speed

  All through the winter and the spring the paddocks are green and lush with tall grass, thistles, prickles, wild shrubs, wild flowers and red berries. When the paddocks are moist and abundant, Rita can imagine them being part of wide, open country, as they were before the suburb arrived. Skinner’s farm, just beyond the next street, is only a hint of what it once was, before the only remaining family member, the ageing snowy-haired son, unmarried and childless, sold most of the land to developers, retaining only the bluestone farmhouse, a few acres and a handful of cattle to keep him interested in life.

  He’s got a farmer’s face, the son. Red and ruddy from being out all day, and his hair is white and springy. He wears old clothes – canvas trousers, collarless shirts, clothes that nobody wears any more, clothes that nobody has worn for years – as he ambles about the street with that slightly pigeon-toed walk, leaning to one side, saying hello to anybody who passes and mumbling to himself as if he’s wondering where on earth he is, and what all these people are doing wandering around where his farm used to be. Simple, the suburb says. Too old, too much sun. Harmless enough, but quietly off his head. But Rita knows he’s not. He’s just outlived his time. Anybody who outlives their time looks funny to everybody else.

  Old stock, Vic calls him. A dying breed. Vic talks to him, and Rita’s now slowly turning round to Vic. She wants to ask him what they find to talk about. But he’s looking away and for a moment she’s worried something is wrong again. She is tempted to ask if he’s all right, then she sees that his face is calm. He’s all right. He’s just looking out towards the flour mills and railway station, lost in his thoughts, working towards an observation that he will soon share with her the way he often does. He’s not having a turn. She decides to let him be. There’s no need to bother him. Not tonight.

  It starts way out there, Vic thinks, beyond the mills, beyond the houses. Out where there’s nothing but paddocks of Scotch thistle, where the road itself begins. The main road, the one that splits the suburb, and runs in a straight line for over a mile. There’s a curve just after the shops, but it’s nothing. You can do a lot with a road like that. And it’s made too. Paved. The only made road in the suburb.

  I never notice where the sound begins when I’m lying in bed at night. A faint glow at the edges of the window from the streetlight on the corner, the bedroom black, no branches swaying in the wind. Nothing. The kind of silence that hums. Suddenly there’s a low groan out on the road. Coming from out there, beyond the railway line, and the houses. This low, rumbling groan, tearing along the road.

  The engine’s got a big note that spills out over the suburb, growing in volume with every second, and I can tell exactly where the car is. I can hear him passing the mills, passing the shops, hear him slow down ever so slightly for the curve at the top of the street, then hear him emerge from the bend and simultaneously put his foot to the floor as he settles into that mile of uninterrupted, straight, flat road. The main road is the next up, parallel to this, and as he passes I know he’s moving. I know a thing or two about speed.

  There’s a brief tremor of sound at the bedroom window, a flutter among the venetians as he passes. Then he fades into the night as the drive takes him along the entire northern boundary of the golf course.

  It’s one or two o’clock in the morning. I don’t know who he is. Then again I may have met him. But I doubt it. He takes care of that car. It’s tuned like a musical instrument. You can tell he’s taken it apart and put it back together, again and again. He must have to make a sound like that. He knows every part of it. And when he drives it he can visualise all the moving parts.

  I know that much. And I know what takes him out there at this time in the morning. The road is completely his. He can push his car to the very limits. He can either accelerate into life, or accelerate into death, and there’s nothing to stop him.

  The groan dies at the end of the golf course fence, then suddenly starts again. Back along the length of that thin, black strip of road, past the golf course, past the house, sending another brief shiver through the venetians, and onto the curve at the top of the road where the car slows ever so slightly, begrudgingly, then past the shops and the flour mills, and back out to wherever it was it came from in the first place, till the groan of the engine merges with the hum of the silence that’s settled on the bedroom again.

  Two, three times a week Vic hears that sound. He’s come to expect it. Come to listen for it. When he wakes at night the silence is everywhere. Until that car comes along and the sound starts again.

  Yes, he’s all right. She’ll leave him alone. Wherever his memories or thoughts have taken him, he wants to go there by himself for the moment. So Rita lets him be. Besides, she’s counting the years. He’s walking slowly beside her, looking beyond the street out towards the mills, his eyes partially closed like people do when they’re listening for something. But what could he be listening for out there? The train’s passed. She can’t hear anything now. She could ask him, but she’s busy counting the years they’ve been together. Even though she knows, she adds them all up again. Fourteen. Then she counts backwards, all the way back to the first year, the first night. The one that led on to all the others. All fourteen of them.

  She’d seen violence before. But not up close. She’d heard stories of violence. Her mama often went into people’s houses and looked after those who were too old or too drunk to look after themselves. She’d go with her at nights because she was too young to be left at home alone. When her mama was finished her rounds they’d walk back up Greville Street to the police station where she would report to the police on the drunks and the fights and the alcohol. Sometimes Rita heard about the violence her mama might have seen through the day, but not often. Everybody knew her mama. Whenever they passed the pubs, the drunks outside on the footpaths would stop swearing and fighting, and raise their hats as they passed. So Rita never really saw violence up close until the first time she met Vic.

  We were dancing that first time, Vic and me. We’d never met before. We’ve never danced together before. I can still hear the song, smell the perfume, the aftershave and the soap in that big, stuffy dance hall. Neither of us were talking, then he told me his name, introducing himself, and I liked the sound of it. It sounded right. Just the kind of name I’d been waiting to hear. I was nineteen and felt like I’d been around forever waiting for something to happen. And while I was thinking about the sound of his name I was watching him talk. I wasn’t really listening, you can’t when you’re trying to take everything in at once. But I knew he was trying to be funny and I’d laugh every now and then.

  What I noticed was this, he could dance. I mean really dance. And he wasn’t afraid to hold me. I could feel his hips and his arms. There was energy there. He was talking away but he was throwing himself into the dancing. He had life, Vic. And all this with his good looks. No wonder I wasn’t listening to him. Besides, when he told me his name and it sounded right, I said to myself, this is it. And while I was listening to that voice inside my head, saying this is it, there was another voice telling me I’d never said that before. I’d always been one to um and ah
in the past. But not that night. That night it was, well, it was like the movies.

  Mama always told me I had a head full of movies. Too many. If I wasn’t at one, sitting and dreaming in the dark, I had my head in a movie magazine. I knew all about their lives, all of them. The stars. And mama was always dragging me out of the shops where all the shop owners knew me, saying the movies weren’t life. That if the movies were like life nobody would go. Did I understand? And I’d nod. I’d nod as she would lead me off to some dark, old house, where she washed and cleaned all the grey old women who were too old and tired to wash themselves. And I’d sit and help in those old rooms that smelt the way old peoples’ houses do, with their drawn curtains blocking the world out, the air heavy and dark, and the bedrooms always stinking with the stale smell of old woman’s urine coming up from the potties they kept under their beds. And no matter how much they covered their potties in fine lace doyleys, with flowery borders and glass jewels to weigh them down, the rooms always smelt of urine because they were all too old, too tired and too past it to empty them. So it was left to mama, even though she wasn’t much younger than the people she looked after.

  So when she told me that the movies weren’t life I knew exactly what she was talking about and why she was saying it. I’d nod when she asked me if I understood, but deep down I figured the movies could be life. If you waited. If you believed. So when mama and everybody else said they weren’t, I just nodded to keep them all happy while I went on believing.

  And I was right. It was happening. There we were dancing like we’d been doing it forever. I’d danced myself right into a movie. The right name, the right face, the right song, whatever it was. Everything was as it should be. And then someone pinched my bottom. I jumped. I knew it wasn’t Vic. Impossible. We’d known each other for ten minutes and I knew straight away it wasn’t him. So when I jumped I said, someone’s just pinched me on the bottom. He said who? I looked around and there was this bloke I’d never met before, dancing with a woman I’d never seen before, smiling and waving at me as they drifted away across the dance floor. While the song was still playing Vic stopped dancing, and walked up to the other couple. And this was when I saw violence up close for the first time.