The Time We Have Taken (19 page)

S
pring is in the air. On this last day of winter, although it is late in the afternoon, the darkness that always descends early in the thick of winter does not. Mrs Webster’s gardens are still light and so too is the mood of the committee as they gather at the front door.

There is an air of congratulation. What seemed to be an improbable proposal when first put forward by Peter van Rijn that steamy January morning had now bloomed and blossomed like the flowers in Mrs Webster’s garden. It was — and they had all eventually confessed their pleasant surprise to each other throughout the year — actually working. The suburb was more alive with events and celebrations than anybody could remember, for, once the idea had taken
off, everybody wanted to be part of it. Small groups and societies that nobody even knew existed were writing to the committee applying to be part of the celebrations. A Scottish group was suggesting that the suburb be made the twin or sister town of a village somewhere in the highlands where the original sheep farmers who settled the suburb came from. Not to mention a statue of a farmer in the main street to remind everybody of their agrarian beginnings. Tiny religious organisations that seemed to have mushroomed overnight, sporting groups, amateur science foundations, reading groups — it was a revelation to the committee just what was going on in the suburb — were all writing to the committee for one reason or another, asking for money. The whole place was humming.

Michael, pleased to have the afternoon off teaching, is gazing out over the gardens, towards the garage in the far corner (out of view) where, as a teenager, he’d collected money from Webster for his cricket club, surprising him as he was cleaning the sleek, black sports car that was his one trifling infidelity — his one little secret that had been casually discovered by Michael, who had left with silver coins in a money bag for the club, and a ten-pound note in his shirt pocket for his silence. Webster’s estate had felt like another country back then, and it still had that air, even though Webster
and that sleek, black little sporting job of his were long gone.

And while he is dwelling on those days that seemed so distant, almost innocent now (although he knows perfectly well that no time ever is), the vicar of St Matthew’s remarks on what a fine job Rita did with the exhibition. How everybody said so, and what a fantastic success the whole thing had been. Beyond anyone’s imaginings. In fact, so successful had it been that it looks set to go on and on. It had touched a spot in the suburb that the suburb didn’t even know was there, because it’s easy to overlook the ordinary, familiar things that are around you every day of the year, because, well, they are. Until someone or something alerts everybody to the possibility that they just might not be so ordinary after all.

So, with spring already in the air, the mayor, Mrs Webster, the two priests, Peter van Rijn and Michael (the local member is ‘sitting’) all breathe in that hint of the new season and quietly congratulate each other on a job well done.

As they are about to break up, the mayor remarks on the mural. Still under wraps. Nobody allowed to look. Even peek. Bit odd, isn’t it? What’s Mulligan up to? For there is still a general feeling of unease about this artist who spends his days up the wall, suspended on a pulley like some latter-day Michelangelo. But aren’t all these artistic types oddballs in one way or
another (and here they all turn to Michael)? It is then that the mayor casually mentions to Michael that this Whitlam of theirs will be coming to the suburb soon to open a sports ground. Michael eyes the mayor as if looking upon an entirely different person, and the mayor, quietly, inwardly, congratulates himself on having knocked the smug smile off Michael’s face. Catching, as he does so, the hint of a smile in Mrs Webster’s eyes that says, ‘Well done, Harold.’

With the year rapidly closing in on them, they all agree that their next meeting (and possibly their last) should finalise a date for the unveiling and that the artist should be told of the deadline. It is, after all, the Crowning Event of the year and will take a bit more planning than anything else so far. Speeches will have to be written, guest lists compiled and invitations sent out. The committee, of course, will all need to be there. And again they turn to Michael who, when the time comes, will be at one of those moratoriums that Mrs Webster (standing in her doorway and farewelling the committee) finds both amusing and annoying and that sum up Michael and his kind. For Michael, his kind and this Whitlam of theirs are a wave, she imagines, a wave that has been steadily building over the years and will not be stopped. They
are
History, their every word and gesture tells you. Michael and his kind, and she quickly looks him up and down, they’re a bit like
those kings who crown themselves without having the decency to wait for the hands of History to do it for them.

The group disbands and drifts back into a suburb contentedly humming with a new-found sense of itself, as the commerce of the Old Wheat Road prepares to shut down for the day and the street lights and house lights flicker and pop into existence on this last evening of winter.

P
ussy Cat is at it again. The sobbing goes on night after night. It has been going on for weeks. Bunny Rabbit does not return. Pussy Cat, who will only ever fall in love once, sleeps through the days and will not answer her door. Nor does anybody see her come or go. During the days she is silent, and in the evenings it all begins again. Pussy Cat howls for her Bunny Rabbit in the night. But Bunny Rabbit has moved on and now nibbles ears other than hers.

She howls in the night, perhaps really believing that somewhere out there his ears will prick up and hear her call, her call that comes to him not only across the rooftops and chimneys of the city, but across those endless nights that have intervened
since she last saw him. And perhaps she is also remembering, as she howls from her room, those times — and there were all too many of them towards the end — those times, those days and nights when they could do nothing right and it was clear that the adventures of Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit were over. Those nights when she bristled at everything he said or did, and the more he tried to smooth her fur the more she arched. Those nights when she offered him the choicest roots and clovers of her love, and his nose twitched and his eyes turned to the horizon. When taunts led to tears and tears to taunts, and they could each do nothing but wrong.

Michael falls asleep to the faint sounds of her sobbing. Downstairs, Mulligan walks loudly from his room to the kitchen, slamming doors, for Mulligan has only one thing on his mind. He has no time for anybody’s sobbing. But the sobs continue. And it is like this the following evening, and the evening after. Then one night all the sobbing stops. Silence. The sorrow has run its course, she has run out of tears. The capital ‘L’ of life, Michael assumes (eyeing the closed door of her room before leaving in the morning) can begin again. The September sun has done its work. Pussy Cat will shed the burdensome fur of winter and spring into Life once more.

But when Michael returns later in the day from school, Bunny Rabbit is sitting on the landing, head
in his hands. Pussy Cat’s door is open, the room is empty.

When Michael stops halfway up the stairs upon seeing him, Bunny Rabbit lifts his head to speak, though he barely seems to notice Michael. It is the look of someone profoundly unprepared for the eventuality of life turning serious. And as soon as Michael sees that look in his eyes, he knows what has happened.

‘She didn’t mean it.’

It is as though having told her so often that she wouldn’t do it, Bunny Rabbit couldn’t conceive of the fact that she actually had. It was not written into her. It was not written into them. Therefore, it had to be a mistake, and his taunts, his careless words, had not killed her. Not, that is, if the whole thing had been an accident. Not if she didn’t mean it.

Michael sits on the stairs below him and watches as the disbelieving face of Peter plops back into his hands. He had been Bunny Rabbit, she had been his Pussy Cat. Together they’d had the most wonderful adventures. And it occurs to Michael that they had had their innocence, after all. That, for all their talk and their ways, their joints, their drugs and their loud and frequent copulation, they were at heart — these children of the Age — more innocent than he’d ever imagined. Now his Pussy Cat was gone, and he would never play her Bunny Rabbit again. Not for her, or for
anybody else. From now on, he would simply have to walk through the world as Peter. And those wonderful adventures he’d known in another incarnation — when love had metamorphosed them into storybook animals — would become the touchstones for measuring the value of all subsequent adventures.

Michael leaves him sitting on the landing at the top of the stairs. He retraces his steps and leaves the house. To simply go to his room and read, as he usually would at the end of the day, would be to act as though nothing had happened.

So we’ll go no more a-roving
. He can’t remember who wrote it or even if he’s got it right. Who cares? Pussy Cat is dead. And Bunny Rabbit and Pussy Cat will no longer go a-roving. Whatever that means. But it doesn’t matter what it means. The right words have come at the right time. These, at the moment, as he crosses the street, past the hotel opposite, and through the drab playgrounds of the housing commission high-rise, are the only words that matter, even if their sense isn’t readily apparent. For what the words are telling him — and which he will only realise much later — is that the poetic age of youth died in Pussy Cat’s room, either late last night or early this morning. And, like old friends, these words come to us and stay with us until the thing that needs to be taken in is taken in.

As he leaves the high-rise grounds, he notes that
the playground is deserted in the way that playgrounds that are rarely used are deserted.

And Bunny Rabbit? Bunny Rabbit will get over all this and eventually become what he was always destined to be. A lawyer. And a very good one. He is from a family of lawyers and his life will unroll before him like a carpet, and he will walk away from these aberrant days, from this landing upon which he is currently sitting with his head held in his hands, and meet that glittering horizon where he will find the prized life he was always destined for.

It will be a relatively easy stroll from here to there, from the poetic age of youth to the
real-politik
of the grown-up world. From time to time Michael will see his name in the papers, for he will achieve a kind of fame in the courts and in conservative politics. He will become especially well known for his courtroom taunts. And Michael will inevitably wonder — whenever he reads these reports in the papers — if he ever reflects on the days when he lived for other adventures. Indeed, whether he ever looks into himself and finds in the public figure some long-denied vestige of the days when he played Bunny Rabbit to his Pussy Cat. And then he will also wonder if those skills — that gift for a telling courtroom jibe that now brings him newspaper fame — were the same skills that he honed in the room opposite Michael’s and which killed his innocence.

His Pussy Cat was carried from the room earlier in the day. There was already a sheet over her when he’d arrived, after having been called to the house. He never looked into her dead eyes, for he couldn’t bring himself to. But if he had, he might possibly have seen, written into them, the final realisation that, as much as she might have longed to, she couldn’t save him and preserve him as Bunny Rabbit forever, because he was already out of reach and that was why, in the end, she stopped sobbing.

T
he afternoon sun, higher in the sky this time of year, slants through the double door of the garage, catching the cobwebs, the peeling paint on the walls and freshly cut flowers in a basket on the workbench. The day is sharp and tangy, and mingles with the smell of grease and oils, ancient and new. Mrs Webster pulls the old tarpaulin back and drops it on the smoothed brick floor. Rita has never cared for cars. Neither did Vic, or Michael. None of them did. Cars were no more a topic of conversation than a washing machine or a lawnmower. They all had functions, to clean or to cut. And the motor car’s function was to carry you from one place to another, and, beyond that, there was nothing more to say. But this thing before her now, which seems to be
crouching half asleep, ready to spring at any moment, is more than simply a vehicle that transports its cargo from one place to another. It is almost as though the fact of the car is not important; it is what it brings. It brings the possibility of speed. It brings the possibility of accelerating into life or into death, of going somewhere, and never quite coming back. Neither woman speaks. The sun continues to catch the cobwebs and peeling walls of the garage, the car remains crouching, half asleep, ready to spring into life.

What moved Mrs Webster to invite this woman into the garage? She had been standing in the gardens picking the first of the spring flowers when Rita appeared. Had she forgotten Rita was coming, or assumed she had more time? Whatever, she had been caught off-guard. They exchanged greetings and as they did Rita eyed the garage in the distance, just over Mrs Webster’s shoulder. She had neither asked about the building nor spoken of it. But curiosity was in her eyes and Mrs Webster — dreamily, the basket of flowers in her arms — read the question there and turned to face the garage with her. What the hell, she’s already seen the thing!

‘Let’s walk,’ she said, and, without knowing why, directed Rita along the path that led to the green, wooden shed in the corner of the estate. Why? She would contemplate this later that night, but perhaps
the time had come to share what she’d found with someone who would understand — and perhaps Rita was that someone. Perhaps, and the practically minded part of Mrs Webster scoffed at the idea, perhaps there was harmony in the person, the place and the time. And, without questioning the impulse (one that sprang from being caught off-guard), she had decided on sharing her experience with this woman who might yet be a friend of sorts. Decided that she could not or would not lie to this woman again as she did when Rita had, quite candidly, asked what he, Webster the factory, was
really
like.

So, when they reached the garage, Mrs Webster opened the doors on to the private world they hid and led Rita in, placing her flowers on the workbench and pulling the tarpaulin back in one swift, smooth movement.

‘At first you ask yourself what on earth you’re doing out there on the highway.’ She laughs. ‘Highway, they call it! Nobody else about. Just you. And the dark. Oh so dark. You really wonder if you haven’t slowly gone round the twist, after all, only you haven’t noticed. And then you think, I don’t have to. If I just turn around and quietly slip back, none of this will have happened and I won’t really be mad. No one saw me go, and no one sees me come back. I’m the only witness and I’m not telling. But then you think,
I’m here. I’m not going back now only to lie in bed all night wondering what it might have been like.’

It is only a few minutes since they entered the garage and Mrs Webster can’t even remember when she began talking. She pauses now, eyeing the freshly cut flowers in the basket as if wondering who on earth left them there. It’s a long pause and Rita thinks she’s finished. But when Mrs Webster starts talking again, it’s as though there has been no break in the conversation at all.

‘You can’t imagine the kind of speed you can find out there. Everything beside you is a blur, but if you look straight ahead you could swear you’re standing still. And so you press down on the pedal even more because, whatever you’re doing, it’s not enough. And the faster you go, the more you press the pedal down. And you keep at it and at it until you could swear your whole body is about to just blow away — and you’re left with just your mind. No body. And as much as you’re convinced you’re barely moving at all, you’re really about to take off to the moon. And the moon’s just out there, over the next field. Not so far away. Not really.’

She stops and in the silence that follows Rita can almost hear the car humming in the afterglow of the tale. The garage is still, neither of the women speak. Mrs Webster is talking the way people talk in books again, only this time Rita doesn’t mind. This must be her way, she concludes.

Outside, the doors closed and the basket of flowers once again through her arm, Mrs Webster gazes about the estate, the trees and flowering foliage ignited by the spring sun.

‘I’m in no rush to die,’ she says, ‘but it’s like driving to the point where you almost could, then coming back. I can see how you could get to like that feeling, how you might even come to need it or get to the point where you don’t really care if you come back or not.’

Here she casts a knowing glance at Rita, and Rita knows she’s not talking about herself any more. And it’s at a moment like this that Rita could tell her about the box that fell from the bookshelf in the Games Room, the business diary and the funny poem inside. For, although she’d concluded then that Mrs Webster wouldn’t want to know, Rita’s not so sure now.

Then the moment is lost. Mrs Webster points Rita back along the same path in the direction of the house, Rita wondering, if, apart from her afternoon greeting, she’s since opened her mouth. At the house, Mrs Webster slips behind the wheel of the old Bentley and nods briefly before departing along the wide gravel drive out into the suburb. Rita turns and walks into the house to start the cleaning. Through the rest of the day (after Pussy Cat has been taken from her room, and Michael has encountered the
disbelieving figure of Bunny Rabbit on the stairs), it is the look on Mrs Webster’s face that stays with her: the almost ecstatic glow, the flush of someone looking about at the world from a great height, the look of someone who has been somewhere and never wholly come back.

The sun is dropping through the trees of the estate as Rita leaves. She has never been good at making friends, nor, she suspects, has Mrs Webster, which explains why she is still Mrs Webster, her employer, and not Val, her friend. For all her confidence, her position, her money, she doesn’t seem to have friends nor does she talk of any. And, perhaps, this is what she sees in Rita, a woman — like herself — without friends. Precisely the kind of woman to whom she can talk. One who will not tell others because there is no one to tell. And Mrs Webster — who had to tell someone because the momentousness of what she had experienced demanded telling (there had now been a number of midnight drives) — had found her perfect listener. The perfect ears into which she could pour her confession. But, even this, Rita notes (as she turns into the wide street the estate fronts, and which will soon become Progress Avenue), is something to value. At the bottom of confidences such as the one Rita has just heard is the kind of trust that friends have for each other; the trust that she won’t blab, and
not just because she has no one to blab to, but because she is not the blabbing type. The thing Mrs Webster had experienced demanded to be told. For (like Webster himself, who told no one) she could see how you might become so entranced by the feeling of going away that one day — like Webster — you might not come back at all. Was this her fear? And did she look about for someone to share her fear with in order to release it?

This woman may or may not be a friend. She may, after a lifetime of not really having friends (of having lived the public life with public company for friends), be past the idea of friendship. But, all the same, they might still be a help to each other. Company. And this just might be a kind of friendship; the kind that cautious people allow themselves, without naming it so.

And if this is true, then she is more than happy to help Mrs Webster. To be a discreet ear. And not to blab. To be the kind of person upon whom the compliment of trust is bestowed. And, at the same time (as she rounds the corner into her street), it also occurs to her that Mrs Webster, having already found trust in Rita’s taste for colour and material, found the next step no great matter.

That faintly rhapsodic glow on Mrs Webster’s face as she spoke still preoccupies her, even haunts her, and Rita is left wondering just what it’s like to
feel as though you could almost take off, and to feel that the cool, distant sphere of the moon isn’t so distant after all. And, as the weeks pass, this casual speculation will occupy her thoughts more and more and become a longing. An impatient one. And, as the ratty, spring winds pick up, this impatience will eventually demand to be spoken.

That same afternoon, Mrs Webster sits in her office overlooking the irrelevant industry taking place out there on the factory floor. Production is going on all around her, but, at the centre of it all, she sits unmoved. What on earth possessed her? She was, it now seems looking back on it, not so much talking as thinking out loud. And to a stranger. Well, more or less. She is not the sort of woman given to thinking out loud, only ever to Webster (and now she wonders if he was ever listening anyway), but this morning she did. Yet, somehow, she knew that the need to speak and the time to speak had come together. The moment was right, and she had no regrets.

Far from it, for as she had closed the doors of the garage that morning she had also realised that she felt no desire to open them again. She’d found what she wanted. She’d been to that place where Webster went — to which he had gone and never wholly come back, until eventually he had never come back at all. Now she knows. She’s been there.

Her eyes pass over the factory floor below. What was once a brute was now a decaying beast, dribbling its way into extinction, the unmistakable reek of death all around. The natural death she’d always anticipated could take years, and she didn’t have years to throw around. The time had come — and had she just reached this conclusion? — the time had come to put the thing down. To silence the noise Webster had brought to the suburb all those years ago when the suburb was being born and the world, like the endless paddocks of thistle, was wide.

Oblivious of the still, silent figure in the chair, the activities on the factory floor continue as they always have: giant machines, dreadnoughts of a bygone industrial age, pressing scrap metal into parts, parts, parts. To become a whole object that, sooner more than later, will break, fall apart and become scrap metal all over again.