The Time We Have Taken (15 page)

I
t was something of a surprise when Mulligan (the name that he signs on his works) approached the mayor, suggesting that if the mural were to be a history of the suburb then the story of the suburb ought to finish in the present day — and would His Worship, as a community leader, like to be in the painting? Mulligan, in the paint-spattered trousers of his trade, sat opposite the mayor, bulging eyes peeping through the fringe of black hair that was forever flopping over his face.

Until then, if the mayor had bothered to think much about this artist the committee commissioned for the mural, he would probably have pronounced him a prick (barely looked at the committee, or the mayor, only had eyes, and pretty weird ones at that,
for the wall). And, of course, nobody wants to hire a prick. But, after viewing his folio, they’d all had to concede that — though a prick he might be — he could paint. So, he got the job, despite the vague, uneasy feeling that they’d let someone into their ranks with — how did they all put it? — a touch of the ticking bomb about him.

After Mulligan had approached him, he found himself re-appraising the man. Perhaps they got it right, the committee. Perhaps, even, it was an inspired choice. Here was a man, after all, who had studied in the great schools of Europe and who was now informing the mayor that there is a long tradition of such public portraiture. Rembrandt did it. The rest of the Dutch masters did it. They all did it. Only back then, of course, public figures paid to have their faces in the paintings of a master. It was, Mulligan had explained, their stab at immortality. For if the master’s work lasted into the centuries to come, so would they, through their faces up there on the walls of their cities and the framed canvases in their galleries. That, he further explained with a smile, is why they always wore their best clothes.

And that explains why the mayor is now wearing his best suit. In an empty room at the back of the town hall, with the curtains drawn back and the afternoon light streaming in through the high windows, the mayor is standing, looking intently into
that future where his painted face will live on long after the suit has fallen apart and the body inside it has turned to compost. He has been standing like this long enough for his back and neck to begin aching. Not that Mulligan notices. He works frantically with charcoal and paper, large sheets of butcher’s paper strewn about him on the floor. None of which the mayor is permitted to see. Even when he asks.

‘Only ever show children and fools unfinished work,’ Mulligan explains, not even looking up from the easel, ‘and, I assume, you are neither.’

And so it goes throughout most of the afternoon: the mayor, dressed for immortality in his best suit (and with a new-found interest in the group portraits of the Dutch masters), and Mulligan, layering sketch after sketch upon the floor, as he commits the eyes, ears, nose, forehead, mouth, chin, trunk and limbs of His Worship the mayor of Centenary Suburb to paper, so that, when the time comes, he can, without thinking, commit it to the wall in the foyer of the town hall, where it will stay for as long as the town hall does.

When they are finished, Mulligan rolls the sheets up and secures them with string. At no stage is the mayor permitted to see any of it. And, the artist explains, it will be the same with the wall. He explains that when he finally begins work on the real thing he will work behind a large drape. And it will
stay that way until he has completed the job for which he was commissioned. No sticky-beaks, no prying eyes, no unwanted, intrusive observations floating up to the decking upon which he will stand or recline, intent, his body motionless, fingers only, brush in hand, silently scuttling across the wall behind the drape. No one else, just the artist and this wall for which, he is convinced, he has been destined all his working life. He, Mulligan, and not a committee, will paint this wall.

The mayor returns to his office as the day shuts down outside (winter is only a month old, yet seems to have been around forever), contemplating this Mulligan, Michael and the whole bunch of them. They seem to be more of a giant club than a generation. A very big but exclusive club. They all seem to recognise each other — Mulligan, Michael and their kind. And this Whitlam of theirs, around whom they gather. And it is then that he sits at his desk and seals the official letter he has written to this Whitlam of theirs, requesting that he open a new sports ground. Harold Ford trades in politics, but he doesn’t believe any of it. He has seen them come and go over the years, and he has a nose for History in the making. He has looked at Michael, Mulligan and this Whitlam of theirs, and he sees History heading straight for him like the
Spirit of Progress
on bright new shiny rails. You mightn’t like this particular
train, Harold Ford (he tells himself), but you’ve got two choices: you can stand there and get run down by it, or you can book a first-class seat right now and be there when it pulls into that platform marked Destiny. And for this reason he has invited this Whitlam of theirs to Centenary Suburb.

The mayor will not be the only one to sit for immortality. Over the next few weeks, the local member will sit for Mulligan, along with a councillor or two and the aptly named Charles Draper, whose clothing store has fitted the school, the sporting clubs and the families of the suburb for two decades. Their faces, trunks and limbs will be committed to sketching paper after a series of sittings, and, when the time comes, their distinctive features will join a group portrait on the town-hall wall, their images part of the grand narrative of the suburb, and upon which the children of the future will gaze. But they will all, at a later date, concur that there was always something vaguely unsettling about sitting for Mulligan. Something unsettling about the way Mulligan looked at them, as though they ceased to be community leaders, and, under his scrutiny, became curiosities. As though there was something inherently amusing about them standing up there in his makeshift studio in the town hall for hours on end in their best clothes. And they all confessed to a certain feeling of, well, silliness afterwards.

It was, however, a small price to pay for immortality. And each of the sitters, in turn, shrugged this vaguely unsettling feeling off at the conclusion of each sitting, convinced that they were imagining things.

W
hile Michael is being driven back from the school by the kindly maths master who has designed the teaching timetable to allow for Michael’s studies (and who likes a chat and likes the company), Pussy Cat is set to pounce upon her Bunny Rabbit in the shambles of their room.

‘I was watching you. When you didn’t think I was. Your eyes were crawling all over her.’

Bunny Rabbit, who is studying law, is learning, day by day, the need for words to be exact. People get into all sorts of muddles — his case studies tell him — simply because they think they’ve said what they mean, and they haven’t. And, more than just acquiring
a growing respect for precision in language, he is also rapidly acquiring an intolerance of sloppiness.

‘Eyes don’t crawl,’ he taunts. ‘Have eyes got legs? Or arms? Or any other implements of crawling?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘No, I don’t,’ he continues, still taunting her. ‘And neither do you. Eyes don’t crawl.’

Pussy Cat is studying literature. She respects words for the possibilities inherent in them every bit as much as Bunny Rabbit respects them for their precision. She is happy to be ambushed by the unexpected and arrested by the inexplicable. She gives words licence to break the rules.

‘Yours do.’

He laughs, then continues to taunt her. But he is composed. Part of him has had enough of Pussy Cat’s funny little ways — which are becoming funnier and funnier by the day — and is genuinely angry. The other part is detached enough to feel a certain satisfaction at the words coming so effortlessly from him. He is even finding time for a quiet, private chuckle before uttering them. He is, in short, performing. He is taunting his Pussy Cat, but he is also honing his skills. The skills that will stand him in such good stead in those days in the future when he is a well-known barrister, an important back-room boy on the conservative side of politics, famous for his courtroom jibes and the cut of his French suits. But, for the moment, he is still
wearing flared jeans and shirts purloined from his father’s wardrobe. His long, dark hair — which he will lose very quickly (along with the droopy moustache), making him virtually unrecognisable in later years, even to those who knew him well — hangs down to his shoulders. There is a square of hash the size of a piece of chocolate in his shirt pocket. A song is playing on the portable hi-fi about the marines landing on the shores of Santo Domingo. A well-thumbed, popular poetic study lies open on the desk, while the voluminous eighteenth-century novels, anthologies and law journals fraternise on the floor. He is a child of the Age. But, even as he taunts his Pussy Cat, he is aware of the fact that he is honing the skills that will make him master of another, less poetic age. And he will know his skills are honed when the poetic age of youth is sufficiently enough behind him to be amusing. Far enough behind him to become the stuff of light, confessional anecdote.

Pussy Cat, or that part of Pussy Cat that is not trembling with anger about the way he lectures her on what her words do and don’t mean, can see all this. The flourishes, the hand gestures, the sheer acting of it all is leading to one place only — that future of his, already rolling out like a carpet before him, and across which he will stroll with accepting ease into the horizon of good fortune. And when he has crossed that imaginary line that separates today
from tomorrow, he will have assumed what he will, by then, come to think of as his true condition, his true self. But Pussy Cat knows better. She knows they are trembling between two conditions: what they can be, and what everything and everybody tells them they will inevitably be when they finally grow up. She won’t accept that Bunny Rabbit has already chosen. And so, standing there in what she sees as the endearing shambles of their room (and which he proclaims a mess), the part of Pussy Cat that isn’t shouting at Bunny Rabbit at the top of her voice is moved by something so shattering she can barely contain it. Or barely name it. Then she can. For she has heard and been drawn by the most haunting of calls: not the desire for love, or to kill the thing you love, but the desire to save him. One part of Pussy Cat won’t accept that her Bunny Rabbit has already chosen. The other part, the part that is shouting and on the verge of spluttering tears, would dearly love to tear his crawling eyes out.

It is late in the afternoon, a dead, dreary time. The mayor has completed his sitting and consigned his best suit to the office wardrobe, and Michael has just finished school. He stamps his feet as he mounts the stairs, but Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit don’t hear. They fight often now. There are raised voices coming from their room every day and every day they fail to notice what is outside the confines of
their room. So he walks past and slams his door and they continue, it seems to Michael, like the loud, unhappy couples from his old street, when, it seemed, there were days when everybody was fighting and nobody’s lives were private.

Even in his room, with the door closed, he hears them. They go on and on. It’s in his eyes, she says. In his eyes he is leaving her. And the more he taunts, the more she shouts. Until she is swearing, she is swearing once again — as she has before — that she will kill herself, or both of them, if his body ever dares follow his eyes. And he taunts her once more, Bunny Rabbit taunts his Pussy Cat. Do it, he cries. Do it. There is a short, tense silence and Michael is listening more to the silence than he was to the fighting. Then Bunny Rabbit’s voice returns, cool and restrained. But you know you won’t. I know you won’t. Those who talk about it never do it. And as Michael listens to his sad taunts, a chill passes through him. There is a story — and he has long forgotten its name or who wrote it — in which a man says he will kill himself, and his friend, bored with the all-too-familiar threats, says the same thing: that those who talk about it never do it. And, from that moment on, the man who threatened to kill himself knew he had to, otherwise his life would just amount to so much talk. A handful of words. And this is why Michael experiences this sudden chill, because he is
convinced that exactly the same thought, at exactly the same time, is passing through Pussy Cat’s mind.

The silence that follows this final taunt is succeeded by quiet sobbing, and the sound of what Michael assumes to be drawers being opened and closed. Nothing is said. The drawers are opened and closed. Bunny Rabbit stomps about the room. He ceases to stomp. And Michael knows, without being witness to the events inside the room, that they have reached that point they can no longer avoid.

A door opens. He hears Bunny Rabbit scurrying down the stairs.

‘I will! You just wait. I will!’

A door slams. The house is silent. For a moment. The sobbing starts again. Soft, then loud. So loud, Michael concludes that Pussy Cat has opened the door in order to sob to the house. It is, he knows, an invitation. A call for company. An inquiry if there is anybody out there after all. And, of course, there is. There is Michael. And he knows he can’t ignore the call, and so he rises from his desk, opens the door, and finds her sitting on the landing. She looks up, this Juliet who should be leaning from her balcony with carefree, provocative innocence, then pulls her long, dark hair back from her temples and forehead. Her face is smudged, her eyes red, her look is — and this is the only word Michael can find to fit her face — lost. No longer Pussy Cat, Louise, Lou, looks about as if
having just been thrown into the world for the first time and not sure where she is or what is expected of her. And, for all this, that face is more entrancing, more beautiful than ever. And more distant.

‘I’ve lost my pills,’ she says, her eyes more blank than lost now.

‘What pills?’

‘
My
pills. Don’t you know?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve looked everywhere.’

Michael looks about in the stairwell for other signs of life in the house.

‘Where’s Peter?’

She doesn’t answer. She simply rises, looks at Michael and nods, almost dismissing him. ‘I’ll find them. They can’t be far,’ she adds, more or less to herself, before closing the door.

Michael pauses for a moment, lingers by the door, then decides to leave her alone. Decides that this is what she wants, and that she is beyond any words he might have at hand and that he could offer, anyway. He is, he tells himself, close at hand.

A song rises from her room — already it is hers, not theirs — as he steps into his own. Over the next hour — the day is golden, one of those eternal winter afternoons and he has lost track of time — she plays it again and again and he drifts into a doze listening to its slow, almost dirge-like rhythms.

On the floor beside the bed (he has no bedside table) is a book he has just begun to read. Lurch approached him that afternoon in the staff room, and in the quiet, understated manner that is his hallmark informed Michael that he reads too much of the black-spined classics by authors with unpronounceable names. He had, it seemed, been observing Michael’s reading habits and concluded that he didn’t read enough of the books about his own place and time. And this surprised Michael, because he always thought of Lurch as Victorian and withdrawn, with the reading habits and tastes of the withdrawn Victorian. But he had thrust a book into Michael’s hand and said, ‘Here, try this.’

As he lies on the bed, the sobbing of Pussy Cat and the dirge-like music rising and falling, he reaches down to the floor for the book. He stares at the cover, the title
My Brother Jack
(not a good title), the author’s name, George Johnston (he has never heard of him), then opens the book where he left off. He has only just begun to read it, but he already knows he is doing more than just reading another book. There is something about the reading of this book that feels like what he can only call an event. He is not simply reading another book; it is, he knows, much, much more than that. For when he reads this book, he sees, for the first time in his reading life, the world from which he comes. His world — his
past and present (and quite probably his future) — has been made different by a book. And that is the event. It is a special book in the same way Mr Maugham had written a special book (just, it seemed, for him), and he knows that one day he will share this book with the right person, but, oddly, he is not so sure he can share it with Madeleine in the same way that they had shared the Maugham. And this is a puzzling thought because it implies that the person with whom he will share this book he has not yet met. And that is puzzling because he does not
want
to meet anyone else. He has met Madeleine.

He does not know that the writer, this George Johnston he has only just heard of, is a dying man living his last days in Sydney and who saw his death foretold in X-rays the previous month while Michael bared his unfashionable jealousy for Madeleine to see. Two people cross a tram line and enter a picture theatre; a dying man, skin on a stick, refuses to enter a hospital because he wants to die among friends; the book he wrote a few years before is thrust into Michael’s hand from an unlikely source; and already the dying man lives on.

The dirge-like music in the room opposite stops. Michael’s eyes move from line to line across the page, his mind moves upon silence. The music starts up again, but he doesn’t notice. He is lost in the event of this book. He is somewhere else, someplace
else, at once familiar and strange. He is somewhere else, both home and not home. Like it or not, want it or not, he will carry home wherever he goes, will be forever going back to it, or being dragged back to it, while forever just wanting to be rid of the whole damn place. And it is, he knows, the same for the character in this book, and its author, this Johnston, this skin on a stick who will die before winter finishes.