The Art of the Engine Driver Page 9

  His parents, who have moved ahead of Michael again, turn to catch the spectacle of their child spinning on the spot again and again, with his face up to the sky. He is on the point of losing his balance, of staggering off the footpath and onto the road, when his mother calls out and he stops in mid-circle.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she asks. And he tells her he is looking at the sky. ‘What part of the sky?’

  ‘The part I’m standing under. It goes on forever,’ he says, keeping his eyes on the heavens and not looking at his parents, now stationary and standing side by side on the footpath. ‘Have you thought of that?’

  His father snorts with low laughter.

  ‘It’s best not to think about that.’

  ‘Why?’ Michael’s eyes suddenly drop from the sky to his father, puzzled.

  ‘Because you’ll go mad,’ his father says, as he turns and resumes walking up the street.

  Why mad? Michael asks himself, now back to earth. Why mad? He likes the idea of at least something in this world going on forever. His parents are now slowly walking on ahead, talking quietly. He can’t hear the words from where he stands. They are talking the same way they did that night a week before, when they sat up in the kitchen talking well into the night. Every now and then Michael could hear what they said. They talked about the end of things; of the house, of the three of them living in the house together. The end of all the usual mornings and evenings, dinners and lunches. Until then the end of it all was as inconceivable as a sky that eventually came to an end. It couldn’t happen.

  He wasn’t meant to hear, but he could. He was standing by his door and he could make out the quiet, confidential voices of his parents in the kitchen. It was after ten and the light from under the kitchen door fanned the carpet.

  There were long silences, the occasional sound of a spoon in a cup, the shuffling of a chair over the lino floor. They weren’t fighting and Michael could tell from their measured and quiet manner of speaking, that it was an important conversation.

  The night before had been bad. His mother had waited at home, dressed to go out, but his father had been late from work and too drunk to go anywhere. He had fallen over onto the lounge-room floor and lay there listening to her insults and her rage with the occasional raising of his eyebrows. He knew it was coming and he didn’t care. She could say what she liked and it wouldn’t matter. Eventually, having exhausted her anger, his mother had given up. It was pointless and she had left him there to sleep on the floor.

  They were talking quietly in the kitchen, and as Michael opened his bedroom door further still he could hear his mother’s voice.

  ‘If you can’t promise,’ and Michael waited for his mother to finish the sentence. ‘If you can’t promise, then there’s nothing left for it. We may as well sell everything. Sell the house, start all over again. I’m not going through another summer like this. I’m not going through another night like that.’ And from the opened door of his room Michael could imagine his mother pointing to the lounge room as she spoke.

  She stopped then and Michael knew she was waiting for his father to speak. There was silence.

  ‘Well?’

  Suddenly a chair was shifted, scraping the floor, and Michael quickly closed his bedroom door and stepped back into the darkness of his room as the kitchen door opened and his mother walked up the hallway to their bedroom.

  As she passed he heard the words ‘No more’, then ‘Never again’. He sat on the edge of his bed in the dark and waited for his mother to return to the kitchen. When she did, she closed the door softly so that, he realised, they wouldn’t disturb his sleep. But he wasn’t sleeping. He was sitting on the edge of his bed in the darkness of his room, listening to the quiet, confidential voices of his mother and father. And although he could no longer hear the words, he knew now what they were talking about.

  Michael has ceased turning round in circles and is standing still on the dirt footpath watching his parents walking away from him along the street. He is waiting till they turn and acknowledge his absence. But they don’t turn and they don’t even notice that he’s not there with them. In a panic, he suddenly runs along the footpath and catches his parents just as they turn around to him. He takes both their hands for a moment, then swings from their elbows and catapults himself forward, into the air and onto the path in front of them. The three walk on in silence towards the Bedser’s, the music from the hi-fi now calling out to them in the clear night air.

  21.

  Mr Van Rijn

  Peter Van Rijn is closing his car door and is no sooner behind the wheel than he is backing out of the driveway and onto the dirt road, which he stirs into a dusty cloud as he accelerates towards his shop, passing a slow procession of families as he goes. At the bottom of the street he passes George Bedser’s house, where the party lights are glowing in the twilight, temporarily transforming it into a river barge, floating on the long, khaki grasses of the vacant lots either side of it. He turns left, then right, and takes the old wheat road to his shop.

  When television first came to the suburb it was Peter Van Rijn who sold them. He grew up in Delft, in a house by the river, not far from the cathedral. A print of Vermeer’s View Of Delft hangs in his workshop. An electrical engineer, he spends his working hours repairing the worn parts of wireless sets, replacing old valves and soldering broken wires back together so that the wireless will function again and his customers will be able to hear their music, their cricket and their news.

  But it was television that made him. At first his shop window was filled with wirelesses, transistors and record players, with large colour posters on the walls advertising the latest European and American gramophones. When television arrived, however, his shop window changed. The radios, transistors and record players made way for television sets, the screens of which would all be aimed at the shop window so as to catch the eyes of the people passing. It is still his weekday practice to switch one of the televisions on, between five and seven o’clock, and commuters walking home from work often pause to watch the new American serials or the old movie cartoons. On Saturday nights he leaves the television on until transmission ceases.

  It was an act of generosity and an astute strategy, for it not only allowed people to watch the televisions free of charge, it also gave them a taste for television, making the lounge room and the wireless dull by comparison when they returned home. In summer, families would go to Peter Van Rijn’s shop window as they would to the cinema. There, they would stand about on the footpath watching whatever came on. In time he sold all his televisions. And as soon as they were sold he got more. For a short time televisions transformed his shop, from a quiet radio repairer’s to the most successful business in the street. But not everybody was happy.

  He parks his car at the front, jumps from the driver’s seat, and stands running his fingers through his dark, curly hair. The glass from his shop window is all over the footpath, and while occasional shards are still wedged inside the window frame, most of the window has been shattered and the glass is either inside or outside the shop. Remarkably, as he steps forward and peers into the window, nothing has been stolen or damaged; all the televisions, radios, gramophones and transistors are exactly where they were placed. It is only when he has finished counting the items and stock in the window that he looks to the tiles below it and sees in large, red print the word ‘commie’.

  A young man, with a young family, who left Holland after the war with the precise intention of leaving all this hatred behind, he spends the next hour sweeping the glass from the footpath and taking all the stock from the window, placing it in the back workroom which he can lock. When he is finished he takes a bucket and scrubbing brush and removes the painted word from the tiles at the front of the shop. Finally, he pastes large pieces of cardboard across the broken window and returns to his car.

  There he sits for a long time, quietly listening to the car radio. The shop has taken years of patient work to build up. He is proud of
the way the shop looks, proud of the up-to-date goods he has for sale. He keeps in constant touch with all the latest trends in his business. If, he has always argued to himself, he feels good about walking into his shop, his customers will feel good about it as well, for a shop should feel good to be in. He is proud of his displays, of his posters, and of his new cataloguing system which tells him at a glance where everything is, as well as the dates of ordering, purchasing and selling.

  Occasionally people pass and pause at the now taped-up window, and he is glad that the crudely painted word has been removed. As he sits in the car he takes gum from the glove box and silently chews on it while watching the street, the shattered window of his shop looking like the shattered windows in all the bombed-out streets he left behind, and at the occasional strollers who may even have made a special trip to stand at his window. He feels responsible for their disappointment. Some of these families walk over a mile, there and back, for the Saturday-night treat of standing at his window and watching the television they can’t afford to buy. Before starting the car again he rests his chin on the steering wheel, taps the dashboard lightly with his fingers, then turns the ignition.

  As he drives slowly back along the old wheat road, past the Presbyterian church on his left, past the school, and into his street, he notes the muted lights of the quiet houses and the bare front yards in which modest gardens are struggling to grow. That afternoon, as he drove home in the late, summer sun, the scene had been a pleasant, reassuring one. Now, he passes those quiet houses oppressed by the uneasy thought that any one of them could have thrown the brick.

  As he pulls back into his driveway he nods, without smiling, to a family on the footpath opposite his house. They wave back and he parks the car, then walks inside to change for the party.

  Michael waves as the old, black Vauxhall belonging to Mr Van Rijn comes to a stop in his driveway. Michael is one of those who, after school, have often lingered at his shop window for over an hour watching the cartoons. When Mr Van Rijn is gone Michael returns his attention to his parents and the rest of the street. He slowly walks backwards, deliberately facing the direction from which they have come.

  The lights in Peter Van Rijn’s lounge room snap on. The window is open. Van Rijn’s voice is low, but his wife is clearly proclaiming, as if to the whole street, that no, she will not go to the party. She will not mix with people who could do this. And nor should he. The window shuts like a guillotine. Their voices are lost and Michael turns back towards his parents.

  A summer song is just audible. It carries from the Bedser’s lounge room along the street to Vic, Rita and Michael. The song is familiar, and although the words aren’t clear, Vic sings them in silent accompaniment. It is this year’s summer song. Every year has a summer song, and this one talks of soda and drive-ins and pretzels and beer.

  But even as he hums the tune to himself a steam engine passes over the high trestle bridge in the Scotch thistle country just to the north of the suburb. Vic closes his eyes and turns his right ear to the sound and listens like a blind man. The sound is faint, but he knows it’s steam. He knows the rhythm, the chug of a steam engine, and there are moments, his nose to the breeze, when he swears he can almost smell the thing.

  22.

  The Art of Engine Driving (II)

  The art of locomotive engine driving can only be acquired after years of study, patient practice and experience.

  Bagley’s Australian Locomotive Engine Drivers’

  Guide

  Somewhere out there they are making fire. A man, his face smudged black from dust and cinders, is standing legs astride the footplate to steady himself at high speed and he is carrying coals, broken into small pieces for even burning, from the tender to the furnace. The door of the furnace will be open and its glow will light the cabin, and the coals will fall gold and vermilion from the shovel into the furnace to make fire. And from the fire will come steam, and from the steam will come power. What is a locomotive engine? this man will, like all firemen, be asked at his driver’s examination. Vic poses the question to himself as he listens to the train cross the trestle bridge and answers as he did years before. And the answer comes as automatically now as it did then. What is a locomotive engine? A steam engine placed on wheels capable of producing motive power to propel itself and draw carriages on a railway. And that is what the man with the shovel in his hand is doing when he makes fire. He is creating motive power, somewhere out there in the thistle country to the north of the suburb where the trestle bridge spans a wide, ancient river valley.

  To stand on the footplate with Paddy Ryan was to stand in the studio of a great artist, for Paddy Ryan was acknowledged as the Michelangelo of engine drivers.

  The engine cabin was his classroom. And whatever engine they drove, it was always the same; a furnace fired in just the right way, the smell of steam, burning coal and freshly brewed tea, and all the instruments and gauges cleaned and polished well before the drive. In this way both fire and instruments glowed, night or day, winter or summer, and Paddy’s cabins always had the stamp of a master. Work was never work, nothing was ever ordinary, and the seven years that Vic spent learning the trade as Paddy’s fireman always felt like a privilege. Even the impromptu lessons he conducted, in question and answer, remained as vivid as when they were spoken.

  The drivers’ classes at the Institute told him all he could learn from books and diagrams, but it was Paddy Ryan who took him over the steam engine, piece by piece, as if it were his own private invention. Paddy who taught him the importance of a clean cabin in which to work. And it was Paddy who taught the twenty-year-old Vic all he would ever need to know about the Westinghouse brake, the pistons and the boiler, who broke it all down into its constituent parts in so clear and simple a way as to ensure that Vic knew their mechanics better than he knew the workings of his own heart, lungs and legs. It was Paddy who taught Vic how to fire an engine up, how to lay the coals out so they glowed even and hot for the longest possible time, how to use the sand on rainy mornings so that the wheels wouldn’t slip and spin uselessly on the tracks, Paddy who taught him how to ride the curves, who taught him not to be afraid of speed, and not to love it – but how to use it. How to stop a train without snapping it in half, and how to pull into a station without taking the platform and everything else with him. And Paddy who taught him how to listen to an engine, to its beats and rhythms, to the point where presence of mind became absence of body.

  To feel you were performing one, single, pure activity as well as it could be performed, to know something that thoroughly – that, to Vic, was almost the whole point of living, to find what you did best and then do it. That was the dream, and in the classroom of Paddy’s cabin, the dream always felt near enough to be lived.

  Paddy taught him all this. But he never taught Vic the tricks he learnt for himself. The ones that weren’t in the books. Paddy never taught Vic how to smooth the rails, and Vic never learnt the art, not the way Paddy knew it. And not only because it was a mystery to Paddy himself, but because that was Paddy’s signature. And it was always understood that Vic would have to find his own.

  It was also Paddy who taught the young Vic how to drink. And for this reason and this reason alone, Paddy’s name was always mud with Rita and she never allows him in the house.

  Just as it was a privilege to stand on the footplate with Paddy, it was a privilege to stand at the public bar with him. And when Paddy suggested a drink at The Railway, you didn’t hang about.

  23.

  The Six O’clock Swill

  We are the parade of the rubber men. And we know it. Don’t ever imagine that we’re not so drunk we don’t know we are. We hit the pub, The Railway, just near the yards, at five o’clock when the shift finishes and walk through the door into the roar of all the talk and the transistors, into the smoke, everybody either throwing them down or at the bar with their empty glasses plonked on the counter for quick service because every minute is precious. We walk through the do
or with legs beneath us and we leave an hour later with limbs of rubber.

  We are ridiculous. We are a joke, and we know it. When time’s up they throw us out into the street. And by quarter past six we’re all trying to find a part of the footpath that’s not moving beneath us. And when we do, we stay there for a while, till everything stops shifting about. Or we’re propped up against the walls of the pub, or having a leak into the laneways, or spewing up into the gutters. We’re not a pretty sight, and we know that too.

  Out on the street we say our goodbyes, and we try to say all we’ve got to say to each other then, because nobody gets a chance to say all that much inside when you’re pouring beers down your throat every five minutes. And besides, nobody can hear a word unless you’re screaming into someone’s ear, because everybody else is shouting at the bar for service. And then, before we know it, we’re out on the streets and they’re hosing down the floors inside the pub like it’s a zoo or something, hosing and sweeping out the muck that we tramped in with us as well as the dirt and the cigarette butts and the spilt beer that we left behind. And sometimes we’re standing out on the footpath, trying to finish the talk we never got the chance to finish inside, when the butts and the beer suddenly wash up around our feet and over our shoes, and we start to feel like we too have been hosed out into the street with the rubbish.

  But when all the talk’s finally out of the way, and we’ve said our see-you-laters, we start thinking about getting along. That’s when we lift those rubber legs of ours. We start to move and the parade begins. Legs that knew only too well how to walk just an hour before have suddenly lost the talent for it. They quiver like jelly beneath us, and each leg has a different sense of direction. And, of course, waving goodbye and walking at the same time becomes a little tricky. But we give it a go and somehow manage to convince ourselves that it’s all performed with the natural ease of just anybody heading home from work. But we know it’s not. We know it’s a fuck up. For there is a part of us that is always watching, watching from somewhere down at the back of the brain. And it’s always there, shaking its head at this once functional body making a spectacle of itself. Every night the rubber army of the six o’clock swill, our bags clinking with the bottles we bought for the return journey, is back on the street. Swaying on the corners or tumbling into train carriages that will rock us to sleep and leave us snoring and breathing the last hour’s drinking into the closed carriage for everyone to share.