The Time We Have Taken (10 page)

I
t arrives one afternoon, a week after the Centenary Suburb Committee found its Crowning Event, under a mellow autumn sun. There are no rough winds in May. The air is autumn still. Leaves flutter slowly onto the footpaths and streets, unhurried, landing softly on the ground above which they’ve hung all through the spring and summer. It glides through the suburb in black majesty, barely noticed for the suburb is either at work or school, not on the streets. It is the perfect time for speed to arrive. The few who do notice the thing, eye it in the same way the street does Rita’s European dresses.

It speaks of somewhere else, of that far-away world out there where wonders such as this are made. But as much as those few who stand and stare on the
footpaths of the suburb are wary of this imperial beast as it glides indifferently through their streets, they are drawn to it. It is an object complete in itself. Perfect, beyond either the reproach or approval of the place to which it has been brought. But, coexisting with that part of them that still retains a capacity for wonder is a ready sneer. To be roused to wonder is to be reminded that such things are not of the suburb and come from out there beyond its boundaries.

Just a week before (the very day public tears had turned Vic into a public event), Mrs Webster had ventured deep into Webster’s corner of the garden where, in those last years of their marriage, he had kept his one harmless infidelity. That corner of the garden to which he came whenever the dark mood took him, the one he never spoke of. Where he took that one trifling infidelity that in the end made the marriage a lie. He brought it there — the mood; never to her. She had misread Webster, Webster the factory, to the extent that since his death she had been constantly preoccupied with the question of just who this man — with whom she had lived for over twenty years — just who this man was. She only knew, in the end, what everybody else did. And, after more than twenty years together, that wasn’t enough.

The green wooden doors of the garage had been locked. As she’d yanked the doors free of all the
weather and dirt that had glued them together and light entered the garage for the first time in a decade, she saw the neatly folded tarpaulin that had concealed the black majesty of the beast the garage once housed.

Shelves, tins, tools and cables had revealed themselves to a changed world. The scent of old oils, petrol and cleansers had risen to her nostrils, summoning another age when Webster walked from his garage with these very smells upon him and brought them into the house before changing for lunch or dinner — and making small talk that never suggested that he was engaged in anything more than a trifling indulgence. And, perhaps that is how it began, innocent enough. A trifling indulgence, until it became all-consuming and would not be denied, this need for speed.

She’d moved about the garage (which she had secretly eyed from her doorstep as she farewelled the committee), touching the tins that were closed one day and never re-opened, the tools that were put down and never picked up again. She wiped the dust from a cylinder and the letters and colours of a brand of motor oil no longer around revealed themselves. How little time it takes. The doors of the garage closed one day, Death folded up its belongings, life moved on, and the contents of the garage became those of a lost age. Yet, in those smells and the sudden
familiarity of brand names long passed into social history, she’d felt Webster’s presence with an aching intensity that she hadn’t felt for years — and those feelings that she once gave to him she gave to the objects he once touched. And, it was then that she asked herself, reluctantly, if she would ever be over it.

Perhaps this is why she’d never opened the doors until then, because she knew what was waiting for her inside. That and a lifetime’s practice of leaving Webster’s corner to Webster. She’d moved about the shed, imagining that the musty air inside might have been the same air that Webster once breathed. Why not? The twin doors of the garage shut snugly on a concrete floor, and the windows were all locked and air-tight. There was even a brief sensation of having violated his tomb, but this passed as fresh air from the gardens circulated with the old and the last remains of Webster’s breath had been carried out into the world by the breeze.

And it was then, while the old air was making way for the new, that she began to look upon the place as Webster might have. The overalls still hanging on the wall, the tools either on the workbench or in boxes, the grease and oil stains on the floor, all spoke of a function. This was the core of Webster’s world, that all things had their function — humans, machines, tools. And the function of a garage was to house an automobile.

She’d closed the garage doors behind her that day and stepped out into the dappled greens, reds, yellows and purples of the gardens. This was the foundation belief of Webster’s world, of someone with two feet planted firmly on the ground and a head full of thick hair that spoke of a man with years left in him. Before she’d even closed the garage door she knew she had resolved to bring back to the garage the very thing it lacked, and, in so doing, restore its function.

Now, a week later, Mrs Webster sits in the wide lounge room of the mansion, looking over the gardens, as the car completes its journey from the showroom to the suburb. It is mid-afternoon and the stillness of the day seems somehow wrong for such an arrival as this. This car — famous enough to adorn the exercise books of idle schoolboys — brings with it not only wonder and grace; it brings speed back to the suburb. The day should surely be unruly. The wind should stir the trees and leaves be scattered across the sky to mark the occasion. But the day remains still, and Mrs Webster rises from her chair as the black hood of the thing noses its way into the driveway, sniffing out its new home with the same indifference it sniffed out the suburb.

As she moves to the front door, she considers the possibility that the circumstances of the day might be right after all. That the very stillness of the day is
perfect for the arrival of speed. A day, to all appearances, may remain still and yet be disturbed. As the car enters the gardens, it enters like one that has left waves behind it.

The transfer of the keys and papers of ownership takes place on the front step, and Mrs Webster (who has taken the afternoon off to receive her guest) is soon left standing alone with the thing. With its sweeping lines, which speak of an age of mechanical elegance, this vehicle appears to be moving when standing still. And when she sits behind the wheel and brings it to life, she is conscious of acquiring the feet, fingertips and central nervous system of Webster himself. Just as when she opens the garage doors and drives it inside, bringing it to rest on the concrete floor stained with the grease and oil of the previous occupant, she is aware, once again, of restoring to the garage the function for which it was created. And when she bolts the doors, bedding the indifferent guest down early, there is a faint thrill. The suburb has witnessed its arrival (those that were about or cared to notice) and it is no secret. Yet when she bolts the doors of the garage and cages the thing in, she feels that it could be her secret, feels the thrill of such a caged prize, as though it just might be her one harmless infidelity, her one harmless indulgence.

T
he following Saturday, Michael and Madeleine are walking down his old street, under a ripe morning sun that pours its warmth onto the gardens, lawns and hedges of the suburb that Michael has brought her to see. George Bedser’s roses are coming to the end of their second blooming, yellow, red and pink petals falling upon the lawn; Peter van Rijn is about to step into his car but pauses in mid-motion, waving to Michael with a look both happy and sad, for the boy is grown now and he is asking himself where all the years went. Then he is in his car driving to his television-and-radio shop in the Old Wheat Road, and his question is answered. The metal gate of Mr Malek (Michael never knew his Christian name), the fevered rattling of which did old man Malek’s talking for him
throughout his years in the suburb, is now silent. Bruchner, the street brute (every street had one), a crippled ruin after a car smash, will no doubt be sitting alone in one of the wide, empty rooms of his house, his dog long gone and the ashtrays, once piled high with the ashes of Joy Bruchner’s dreams, long since cleared from the house. When his dog, old and slow, simply expired on the footpath in front of him one hot summer’s day, Bruchner wept (the street observed) like a blubbering child, and he carried the broken beast in his once-strong plasterer’s arms back into the yard where he’d regularly beaten it to the brink of death and (the street later heard) he buried the thing in the soft, summer twilight and lamented its passing like he never did for his wife, who died of cigarettes and anxiety.

It drew you back into it, the street. You didn’t mean or want to be drawn, but you were. Michael eyed its length and was ten, twelve and sixteen all over again. Somewhere in Madeleine’s tired eyes (she has come from an all-night shift at the hospital) she knows that the street is drawing him back and she lets him drift for the moment into that deeply private world.

They are pausing by the paddock next to the Bedsers’. To Michael, it is a source of wonder that this vacant paddock is still a vacant paddock, and that he and Madeleine should now be pausing at the very spot they all did — Vic, Rita and Michael — when, one
Saturday night, in the distant world of his childhood, they all stood beneath a timeless peach-coloured sky on the way to Patsy Bedser’s engagement party.

It had vanished, the world that saw Patsy Bedser dance out of the street and out of their lives, and which also saw the twelve-year-old Michael consume hour upon hour of his early years bowling a worn cork cricket ball against his back fence, chasing speed and never catching it. He hears once again the rifle shot of the ball ricocheting off his old fence, and imagines once more the muttered comments of the neighbourhood warning anybody in earshot that the boy will destroy the fence before the summer’s gone. The suburb is no longer at the edge of the known world — as it was then — and that frontier bleakness is gone, for the frontier has moved relentlessly inland. The gardens have grown, the streets are paved, and the houses themselves have achieved a solidity that they never had when they were being thrown up, one after the other, when, all around them, a suburb was being born. All that really remained of that world, when Patsy Bedser had danced out of the street and out of their lives, was this vacant paddock. The tall khaki grass that had swayed that night in the summer breeze was now motionless in the autumn warmth, under a peach sun hanging up there in the sky like the last of the season’s fruit, mute witness to all that had gone on in the years that had followed.

They move on, Michael and Madeleine, walking slowly back to the golf-course end of the street. And, as they stroll towards his old house, he is aware of the eyes of the street, in their lounge rooms, behind the shades and the drawn venetians, following the progress of the two young people out there. Those eyes will know him, a rare visitor to the street these days (which will be read as him feeling too good for the street), and their gaze will then shift to the unfamiliar figure of Madeleine. They will know that she is not of the street, and not of the suburb, for she has the look of having come from some other, quite possibly distant, place. And, for a moment, Michael observes her the way the street does, with suspicion, for she brings something with her — and they can’t put their collective finger on it — something that speaks of the great world out there. And they view her with the same suspicion that they view the great world. The sons and daughters of the new families (of whom Michael knows little) have nothing better to do on this Saturday morning but stand on the paved footpath, lean against their front fences, and eye her as she passes. Michael, this son of the street, has dragged an outsider into their midst, and however fleeting her presence may be, it is an intrusion. An affront. And since she will be judged as just a bit too fancy for the street, with the stamp of somewhere else all over her, she will also be judged as one who will never blend
with the street or learn its customs in such a way that she would no longer stand out, and those same eyes will be happy to see this intrusion off their land and out of their midst. At least, this is what Michael sees.

But as they pass the children of the street, lined up against the front fence of the Millers’ old house, Madeleine nods to two young girls and they burst into smiles as radiant as the second blooming of George Bedser’s roses. They are tender smiles, tender because the street hasn’t got them yet and strangled the tenderness out of them. Michael imagines that once they have passed and the two young girls are inside, they will be told not to go smiling so readily at strangers.

Michael and Madeleine move on up the street until they come to the old house. Rita is away for the weekend visiting her sister. The key will be under the mat. They pause out the front. Once again the street draws him in, draws him back, and he is four years old. Possibly less. He is standing on a muddy dirt street holding his father’s hand, looking at the bare framework that will become their house. His father, young and fit, is speaking. This, he says, pointing to the bare structure, is where we shall live. That will be your room. When there are walls and windows and a light and a bed, that will be your room and you will sleep in it. And there, he adds, pointing to another section of the bare structure, that will be the kitchen. And when
there are cupboards and a table and chairs, you will eat there. And when you have finished eating in the evenings, you will go to the lounge room, where you will lie on the floor and listen to the radio. And when television comes to the street, you will sit on the floor in front of the heater (or in between your father’s legs, telling him you will always sit there) and watch television. Just as one day you will hear the ring of the telephone in that room, for good and for bad. And you will hear the raised voices of your mother and father, fighting because your father has returned late from work again, late and drunk. You will hear words spoken in these rooms that you were never meant to hear and that you will never forget. Just as you will see things you were never meant to see. This is the nature of the house.

Later in the morning, when Madeleine has gone to sleep in his old room, in his old bed (and she will stay there most of the day), Michael wanders from room to room, observing the ghosts of the house. The three of them (Vic, Rita and Michael), as they will always be and will never be again, ghosts crossing each other’s paths.

In the yard at the rear of the house, the last of the summer fruit (which, to Michael’s surprise, his mother has not raked up) is rotting on the ground, the plums, apricots and passionfruit lying where they have fallen. The lawn is autumn brown. The house has
a bright new coat of white paint, and sparkles in the sun. Fancy drapes have transformed the porch, a modern clothesline has replaced the old, and a garden light that was never there before overlooks the scene. But on the back fence three white stumps are just visible, the paint having just survived the years of rain and sun, as faint as old pain. Inside the shed, a red plastic cricket ball lies on the workbench where it was casually dropped one day and never picked up again. The remains of the old life mingle with the new.

During the day he listens to music, reads, and explores the living museum he grew up in. That evening, before rousing Madeleine, he smokes in the kitchen and lounges at the table, much, it occurs to him as he blows smoke into the air, in the manner that his father once did. Likewise, he sips the beer he brought with him from the prized Pilsner glass that his father once drank from. And, for a moment, he
is
his father. And, for the course of the cigarette and for the remains of the beer, he registers the sensations that come with this, as if he is being given a foretaste of what he will become. Eventually, he extinguishes the cigarette and places the ash and butt in the wastepaper bin, drops the beer can on top of it, and turns in the direction of his old room.

He slowly opens the door and pauses, watching the sleeping Madeleine. As deep as her sleep is, he will have to disturb her soon, not only because it is time
to leave, but because the house itself, as the day has waned, has begun to unnerve him. Its ghosts are out and about. It is the very time of day, it has always seemed to Michael, when the hoo-ha’s come to get you. The hoo-ha’s, that’s his father talking. Like many of his father’s phrases, the phrases that come from his father’s age, they have stood the test of time and he is content to use it. The heebie-jeebies is another. And perhaps it’s appropriate that when he reaches for the words and phrases to describe the house at this hour he should find only those from another time, just as the life he lived here is now another life. Hoo-ha’s. Heebie-jeebies. These, indeed, are the words that the house would use. And with the hour and the vocabulary that is written into its rooms reasserting itself with such ease, the whole house and the darkening street itself have now taken on a conspiratorial air, as though they would drag Madeleine, too, into its past and claim her. And with her, claim his new life. So he strokes her shoulder, and her eyes open to an unfamiliar room, adjusting to the light and staring at the figure of Michael standing by the bed.

‘Did I call you?’ Her eyes are wide.

‘No.’

‘I thought I called you.’

‘I didn’t hear.’

‘I dreamt I called you, then.’

He shrugs as if to say only she can know that.

‘But you’re here,’ she says, now sitting up in bed and grinning. ‘I did call you. I called you from my dream and you heard. Explain that. No,’ she adds, her arms now open, ‘come here.’

The light in the room thickens, there is a chill in the air, and they stay close to each other. Then Michael hears the voice of Mrs Barlow next door, her voice with that high-pitched edge that has remained as consistent down through the decades as the things she says: the house is all wrong, the suburb ghastly and it’s all Desmond’s fault for dragging her out here in the first place. But Desmond is gone, and Michael imagines her addressing the empty room. A compulsion she barely understands herself any more, driving her to it, on and on. She has been here so long she can now no longer leave. But she can never admit this to herself, for to admit this would be to concede that she is, in fact, home. Over the years, this place and she have meshed, grown into each other, to such an extent that she would now be lost without it. Sometime, during all the years she fought so hard against the place, it became her centre. Desmond Barlow is gone (having coughed the last of his lungs into the last of his buckets) and Michael can only speculate about the scene being currently enacted in the Barlow lounge room and what (a photograph, a chair, a coat on a hook) she must be addressing.

He grins at Madeleine. She grins back.

‘Who is she talking to?’

‘Nobody.’

Her eyes pop, and she pauses.

‘Does she talk to no one often?’

‘Every night.’

‘Every night?’

‘Apparently.’

Then Mrs Barlow’s voice rises on one last wave of hopeless rage and the grin falls from Michael’s face. Madeleine turns her ear to the house next door. They are in her thrall and it is almost with a sense of panic in his voice that he coaxes her from the bed, switches the light on and brings her shoes to her. He throws the quilt over the bed and when Madeleine suggests they make the bed properly, that his mother will notice, he tells her not to bother. They must leave, he says, as the voice next door finally collapses into silence, and Madeleine, glancing from the window looking onto the Barlow house and then back to Michael, nods, as much annoyed by Michael’s high-handed manner as she is amused by the scene next door.

The autumn evening settles in. The children are out in the street, the way Michael once would have been, while Madeleine and he walk to the station, to the train that will take them back into the city and the Saturday night that awaits them. It’s dark, the hoo-ha’s have gone, and they are now safely beyond the reach
of the street and the house and all its twilight phantoms. It can’t claim them now. But she has seen it, the suburb, the world that he comes from and which he will take with him wherever he goes.

Outside the train window, the suburbs of his past rattle by; the lighted platforms of familiar stations come and go, and as they recede into the distance, they also recede into that comfortably sentimental part of the memory that sees the past under eternally honeyed street lights.

Inside the carriage, Madeleine talks about the town she left to come here. The place that she talks about often enough but doesn’t miss. And, in the years ahead, when Michael will actually go there and see this town, he will know why. For it will have the look of a place, that, if you were Madeleine, you’d want to leave. He will pause by the park opposite the station one dank November night waiting for the Liverpool bus, not knowing what to make of the place until he recognises something of his old street in it, a touch of a closed-in world, and a town that always has one eye on the flat horizon because trouble is bound to be on the way and that’s where it comes from.