The Art of the Engine Driver Page 8

  And I swear, I’m certain, that if I ever leave, if I ever go, Michael will know why. He will be told what happened, and he will know why people drift apart and leave each other, and he won’t spend the rest of his life wondering why. He won’t spend the rest of his life trying to understand something he knows he never can, because everybody who could possibly tell him what happened is dead.

  18.

  Ten Lousy Shillings

  His father’s wallet contained an odd collection of bits and pieces. There was never much money there, for Michael had flicked through it on a number of occasions. Sometimes it was filled more with scraps of paper that had bits of poetry written on them than anything else. Something his father had read, something he’d heard somewhere, something that impressed him enough to want to write it down and carry with him. There was, in fact, a line of poetry he felt sure was in his wallet. They had been talking earlier to the Millers about the sky and Vic had been about to catch that sky for all of them with a line of poetry, the way he liked to. But the poetry had suddenly deserted him and the line wasn’t in his wallet when he went to look for it. He could have sworn he’d written it down. But no. There were trees, rivers, bullocks, beaches, mountain ranges, towns, trains and strange birds in that wallet, but no skies. Even now as they walk along the street he examines the wallet, puzzled as to where the line might be and even tries to remember it. But the moment for it has passed. Michael watches as his father returns the wallet to his trouser pocket, along with the cork-tipped cigarettes and the lighter.

  Three of them. There were only three of them. There always seemed to be more than three. But one day Michael numbered the members of the family and was shocked to discover that there were, in fact, only three. No more. He’d never looked at it like that before, and suddenly three was a small number. The house, with its radio, and dishes and talk makes them large. But the arithmetic is true. They are only three. And sometimes, when his mother’s work takes her away, they are only two. Then, when the house is empty at night, one. There always seemed to be more than there are, but suddenly one is never far away.

  Michael had waited up most of the night by himself. He knew the pattern. His mother went to the country for a week working, his father got drunk. His mother called in the evenings and asked if everything was fine and Michael always said it was. She would ask again and he would tell her once more that everything was fine.

  It was late, damp and cold. The lawn was sodden and the plum tree at the back was sagging under the weight of the night’s rain. Then there was a sudden clatter, a tumbling, falling sound like the briquettes being delivered and his father was home.

  He was slumped up against the wall, sitting on a foldout garden lounge, when Michael stepped from the kitchen into the closed-in porch. Vic looked up and nodded, Michael just stood there, studying his father, deciding there and then that if his father was too drunk to get himself to bed then he could just sleep on the banana lounge. He asked Michael if he’d had dinner and he said yes.

  ‘What did you have?’

  ‘Chops.’

  ‘Were they good?’

  Michael shrugged his shoulders as if to say they were chops.

  Vic nodded, the lower half of his jaw falling away slightly from the upper half. He was staring at the wall. His wallet was open on his lap, his pay packet beside that.

  ‘Let me explain something.’ He held up a handful of pound notes. ‘A little lesson.’

  Michael had heard it all before and wasn’t interested. His father continued, still holding up the handful of notes. ‘That’s the mortgage, on this place.’ He looked about the porch shaking his head then put the money to one side. ‘And this,’ he held up more notes, ‘is your school.’

  Gradually, he moved all the notes from his pay packet to the other side of his lap, itemising each one as he went, until he was left with a single ten shilling note and some small change.

  He shifted on the banana lounge and watched pound notes and silver coins fall to the floor. But he kept the ten shilling note in his hand and held it up to Michael. ‘And this. This is what I’m left with. I’m up in the middle of the night driving those filthy bloody engines for this?’

  Michael nodded, knowing exactly what was coming next. Vic knew he’d heard it all before and could see the bored look on Michael’s face, but continued all the same.

  ‘This is what happens when you get a house and a family. You wind up with ten lousy shillings. Never get a house and a family. Stay free.’

  He looked for a reaction from Michael, but he only nodded. Vic then leaned his head back against the wall and gave a slight grunt through his nose, the stale smell of the night’s beer coming from his nostrils.

  Michael watched him, knowing that he would be asleep soon and that he’d be impossible to move.

  ‘You should go to bed, before you fall asleep.’

  ‘Did your mother call?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I told her everything was fine.’

  His father nodded and turned silent.

  ‘You shouldn’t stay here,’ Michael said, leaning against the flyscreen kitchen door.

  ‘You go,’ his father’s eyes opened slightly, registering his child’s disapproval. ‘You go. I’ll just sit here for a while.’ His eyes remained momentarily clear as he stared at Michael. ‘You must learn’, he added, with the sudden clarity and precision of a sober man, mindful of the judgement in Michael’s eyes, ‘you must learn to respect my weakness.’

  He closed his eyes again, his kitbag, his notes, his coins at his feet on the floor. Then, slowly, Vic rolled to one side and lay down on the plastic banana lounge. Michael wavered near the kitchen door, deciding whether to speak again. He left and returned with a blanket, with which he covered the sleeping figure of his father. He then gathered the scattered money up from the floor and put it all back inside the pay packet; the pound notes, the silver coins, the copper coins, and the ten lousy shillings.

  Michael made sure the back door was locked, turned the porch light out, and closed the kitchen door slowly, so as not to make a noise. In the bathroom he brushed his teeth and prepared for sleep. The toothbrush and the running water, the only sounds in the house. He calculated the days of the week remaining. It was Wednesday. The next day was Thursday. Soon, soon the week would be over and they would number three again.

  Later, in his room, he mulled over the night. Noting how the moods change, from day to day, from week to week. Some days, after the drunken pay nights, it takes all his father has just to drag himself to work and face those filthy bloody engines again, and he can’t wait to be finished with them and let somebody else take over. On these days he always told Michael never to drive engines. To leave trains to mugs like him who were good for nothing else. But Christ, he would add, Christ we can drive those bloody things.

  Other days, like a warm afternoon the previous week, he would be happy. No more talk of filthy engines, that day he was pleased to be going to work. He had a good train, good weather and a good shift. Just like it would always be when he finally joined the Big Wheel. It was at times like these when he was at his happiest, when he was preparing for work.

  Michael recalled the day clearly, in all its detail, because he had never thought about his father as being anything other than his father. That was all that was needed. But as he recalled that day he saw, once again, his father sitting on a small stool in the laundry at the back of the house. It was where he kept his bag, his swabs, his soaps, his manuals, his work coat and overalls. And for this reason the laundry, for Michael, always had the smell of soap, cinders, tea and steam. Especially, the smell of steam. It was a smell that told a story in itself for it brought the job into the house. The overalls that hung from hangers, the blue cotton caps, and the open leather bag, a Gladstone, filled the room with the smell of completed shifts, with the residual particles of those days and nights when things went well and they’d steam through warm nights
into brilliant summer sunrises while the towns and suburbs slept, when the engine would drive itself and Vic would be doing the thing he does best with such ease that his mind was barely conscious of the little tasks he was constantly performing and there was only a moment’s distance between driving through the country and arriving at the city yards. Or they brought with them reminders of when things went badly, of when they sat in country sidings for hours waiting for engine parts to arrive, drinking tea and Vic swearing all the time that he’d leave those filthy engines the first chance he got.

  But on this particular afternoon his father was happy. Michael stood in the doorway watching as his father polished his work boots. And it was then he realised that the picture he saw of his father at that moment, was a complete one. There, on the small stool in the laundry at the back of the house, polishing his boots and preparing for the work he does best, was somebody who lacked nothing and asked for nothing. He was happy.

  And it was then that Michael, calmly and matter-of-factly, told his father that he couldn’t imagine him doing anything else. That he couldn’t imagine him being anything other than an engine driver. And his father paused from polishing his boots and looked up with a broad smile across his face and nodded to Michael as if greeting a friend. They were both silent then and Michael leaned against the door while his father completed the task of polishing his boots. Michael didn’t tell his father that he didn’t think much of engines himself. He didn’t tell him that that was his father’s world, not his, and never would be. Besides, you didn’t get a girl like Patsy Bedser driving engines.

  Years afterwards, when Michael thought of his father, he would see him packing his work bag then carrying it up their street, with a hunch and a lean to his stride, as he walked to work. And that would always define him.

  He would always be striding away. Just out of reach. A big smile, a big laugh, and a big flourishing wave of a big hand before striding away. A walk that knows only one direction. And always just out of reach – this night, as they walk along their street to the Englishman’s, and years later, after he had died in a one-bedroom flat in Tweed Heads at three or four in the morning with no one else around him to whom he could give one last big smile or one last flourishing wave of a big hand, before striding away forever.

  By then his possessions – a few shirts, a good pair of trousers, his everyday shorts, the white, knee-high socks he wore on the golf course and his leather sandals – would all fit into a couple of black plastic garbage bags. A box of his books, among them titles like Take Me To Russia, which at this moment sits on the bookshelves in the lounge room, will eventually find their way into Michael’s possession, along with a Larry Adler Professional 16 chromatic harmonica. The golf clubs that he won in a raffle after buying all the tickets because he didn’t have the heart to lump them onto his mates, will travel down to Melbourne a week after his funeral, ferried overnight in the luggage van of the Spirit. The garbage bags will disappear into the back of a van, the books will wait with the caretaker, and the old-furnished, one-bedroom flat will be cleared and cleaned in the one day, ready for a new occupant.

  And that’s the way his life will end. A quiet funeral. Rita, Michael, and a few of those sympathetic strangers he would call friends throughout those last years. A couple of drinks afterwards. A short drive to the cemetery. And a nice spot in a tropical garden for the urn full of dust that he will become.

  But none of this has happened. Not yet. The suburban sky still contains the last of its peach glow. And that spring morning in late October, that dark hour, estimated by the coroner at being around three or four o’clock, when he would wake in enormous pain and know that his time was up, is still years away. And Vic and Rita are still strolling along their street ahead of Michael, both oblivious of whatever it is they may be in for.

  Michael stops in his tracks a moment and watches them. His mother rests her hand on her father’s arm. She is asking him a question. His father snorts into laughter. They look almost happy. Maybe tonight they are. Even at this age Michael knows that his father should never have married. But he did. And now the three of them are walking down their street on a Saturday night to an engagement party. Soon somebody else will be married.

  His mother’s hand falls from his father’s arm, her fingers slide down his shoulder slowly, stopping at his forearm where his shirt is rolled, staying there for a moment, like they don’t want to leave. Yes, Michael decides, tonight they are happy. And he is happy. His right arm rolls quickly over as he hurls another imaginary ball into the night. Another, faster than the one before. And another, faster still. Perhaps they won’t leave each other, after all. Perhaps they’ll stay. And what he heard the week before as his parents were sitting in the kitchen and he was standing at his bedroom door was just talk.

  19.

  Don’t be Cruel

  The car drew into the siding in front of the church, like it had throughout most of that winter and spring. The car knew its way by then. It must have, for often she had no memory of the drive, so familiar was the landscape that she failed to notice it. As she stepped into the doorway, and as the door closed behind her, she was aware of leaving behind all the things that were familiar to her. Every time it was the same sensation, the same thrill, the same fear that she may never return to it.

  But not that day. Patsy had come to a decision. And she’d come to tell Jimmy. Jimmy. The hi-fi salesman with the long legs and the cowboy lope. All through the winter and the spring, when her work shifts made it possible, they’d met here. But it was always going to end. Her plumber had proposed to her through the week and she found herself saying yes.

  Jimmy’s fun, but there’s no guarantee, no future in Jimmy. And so she arrived early and wandered about the church working out just what she was going to say. Because Jimmy wouldn’t like this. She worked out all sorts of ways of saying it. Understanding ways. Matter-of-fact ways. Sad ways. But Jimmy had no sooner than arrived and she blurted it out. All of it, right down to the summer engagement party.

  At first he laughed, thinking it was a joke. But she wasn’t laughing. With his hands on his hips he looked down at his black, pointed boots and slowly shook his head from side to side. Then he eyeballed her. Thanks for giving it to me gently he said, and looked at his watch. It was only a minute or so ago that he had stepped in the door. He walked around the old church a bit, stamping his heels on the floor with his hands on his hips and sighing. He was cranky. She could see that. She didn’t say a word, didn’t move. She let him wander around. He stopped every now and then as if he was about to say something, but he shook his head instead, and stared intently at a flock of stained-glass sheep.

  He asked her if it was final and he could tell from the way she answered that it was. He looked at the sheep again and nodded to himself. That was when he casually turned around to her and suggested they had plenty of time for one last root before they went their separate ways. One last what? she asked. That was when his voice changed and all the crankiness started coming out his mouth in a rush. One last root, he said, louder. That’s what we’ve been doing all winter, he yelled. We’ve been coming here and rooting each other. Or don’t you like the sound of that?

  She knew why he’d said it. So they could have a fight. So he could blow his top, call her a dumb slag and be the first one to leave. But she didn’t give him the chance and she was out the door before he could start up again.

  He followed her and outside he was shaking his right hand at her and telling her she was a fool. She kept walking. He kept following her. His voice was louder, loud enough to disturb the birds in the trees. She was worse than a fool by then, she was a dumb bitch, and a lousy root anyway. Just like all the other dumb bitches around the place. That was when he called her a slag as well and she shook her head because she knew it had been coming all along. But by the time she reached the Morris he’d blown off a bit of steam and was leaning over the open car door, asking her to stay. She said no. He asked her again. She shook her h
ead. And that was when he said please and kicked the car tyre. He was still talking when she started the engine. She heard the word please again, quieter this time. His voice wobbled. He could almost have been singing. And she knew then that he called her a root to hurt her the same way she’d just hurt him. She knew she meant more than that to him and wished she didn’t. Almost wished she was just some dumb root he’d met along the way. Then nobody would get hurt. But if she were she’d probably be stupid enough to fall in love, and then she’d be the one saying please and Jimmy would be doing exactly what she’s doing now.

  She might have started crying at this stage or later on during the drive back. She was never really sure, but she shook her head one last time and left Jimmy standing there. That was it. Afterwards, whenever she played a record on the hi-fi she’d see the reflection of Jimmy in her rear-vision mirror and hear his last please being blown away in the dust.

  But part of her always knew that it was going to take more than a cloud of dust to blow Jimmy away. One day, one night, he’d be there again in front of her, brushing the road off him and singing something about a teddy bear.

  20.

  The Endless Sky

  The sky is darkening. Michael spots the comet, the stars gradually assembling around it, and he walks along with his eyes turned upwards. He knows the street will end somewhere in the thickening light ahead of him. Beyond that the schoolyard ends, and the old wheat road beyond that. The suburb itself ends where the houses give way to Scotch thistles and open paddocks. Even the open paddocks end. But not the sky.

  Paddocks eventually run into deserts, or forest, or cliffs and simply fall into the sea. But look to the sky in any direction and it never stops. Michael swivels on his heels, completes a full circle while still looking up, taking in the dying peach glow as he does. All of it, in whatever direction the full circle has him facing, continuing forever.