The Time We Have Taken (20 page)

S
omewhere out there in the thistle country, just beyond the trestle bridge that spans the wide, ancient river valley, you’ll find the old cemetery of the suburb. The one that did the job until the suburb grew and another one was needed. A thousand miles to the north, while Rita is contemplating the puzzle of Mrs Webster’s confession, and not long after Mrs Webster quietly, almost casually decided to put the beast of Webster’s Engineering down, Vic looks out of his kitchen window at the top of the hill. The lights of the town are popping on, the curve of the main road leading down into the town centre is illuminated, and the neons of the Twin Towns Services Club are already glowing in the twilight.

But Vic doesn’t see the town. His eyes pass over the
glitter of the Services Club and his gaze is fixed on the thistle country somewhere out there where the cemetery, its headstones at various angles, lies spread out under the same darkness that falls upon the town. Memory, a memory never so keen as it has been lately, takes him there. Trust it, says Vic, it will take you there. Walk through the old rusty gate, which is rusted beyond closing, noting the rows upon ragged rows of the dead, and continue walking, slowly and respectfully, until, eventually, you come to a bare open grassy section of this cemetery that sits on a low hill that gives the visitor a good view of the trains crossing the trestle bridge. The ground is uneven here. There are low mounds, some barely noticeable, others less worn down by the effects of wind and rain. These are the paupers’ graves, unmarked, and barely recognisable as graves at all.

This is where they brought her, Mary Anne, to an unmarked grave in the thistle country at the edge of the suburb. Mary Anne, Ma, Mama, who kept her boy when everybody told her to farm him out, and whose voice now drifts on the wind towards him from the low, unmarked mound where her bones lie. Vic always meant to put up a gravestone, but marble doesn’t come cheap and, somehow, the money just never turned up. And, as if she were noting the inconvenience of an old wood stove and no electric lights (as it was in that last house of hers in the country where she went to be near
her boy, when Vic and Rita had fled the city drunks who called themselves mates to that broken town where even the river was called ‘broken’), as if, indeed, it was a minor annoyance and hardly a matter of life and death, these bones of hers tell Vic that she can get by quite nicely without a gravestone. She knows where she is and she’s not going anywhere. And if anybody walks over her grave, well, that’s their look-out. There are more important things about dying than gravestones. And if strangers don’t know where to find her, what does it matter? So don’t go worrying yourself about gravestones and flowers; these bones that your mama once stood up in, and carried you in, and cradled you in, are well satisfied that they did their job when the job needed doing. And who cares for the stories that epitaphs tell? You and I know our story, and, if our story dies with us, so be it. And even when both us, you and I, have left them all to it, and there is no one left to remember it or tell it, our story will still be there, will still have happened, won’t it? Because it
did
. It’s a fact, and always will be. That we took them on, you and I, and came through and did what they all told us we couldn’t do. And that’s all that matters, not gravestones and flowers. The fact that we were
us
, and stayed us. These bones are well satisfied that they did their job when the job needed doing.

As the sub-tropical darkness flows in over the town, engulfing it in balmy, playful night, Vic leaves
the thistle country and the bumpy, uneven ground of the paupers’ section of the graveyard through the same old rusted gate he came in by, contemplating the club and the routine of his day that will soon take him to the glitter of clubland.

And it could just as easily be summer or winter, for this time of the day will always find him seated here in his kitchen. All days are the same day, and this will always be the hour that takes him back to the thistle country somewhere out there on the edge of the old suburb, where trains moan in the night and the bones of his mother sing to her boy over the paddocks of scotch thistle and over the years.

T
here are no lights on in her house and he does not ring the bell. It is early in the evening. She will not be asleep. She will not be there. It is mid-week, the night of her farewell from work. Michael was invited, but he was invited in such a way that suggested it was more of a courtesy than a genuine invitation. It was a work farewell. He wouldn’t know anybody. He wouldn’t like it. He’d feel left out. These were the unspoken sentiments that came with the courtesy of an invitation. And because he agreed that he would feel left out, he had said no. But at some stage during the afternoon the no became a yes, and here he is.

With the house dark and everybody gone, he really ought to walk home and give it away. The
evening would go on as it ought to, without him. But he scans the surrounding streets near the hospital, calculating where she might be, for the area containing the university and hospital is small. Somewhere out there, in that modest square of land they have shared for the last year, she and those with whom she works will be raising their glasses in celebration of her grand adventure. They’ll be all cheers and smiles and jokes. Even those who never got on with her, for one reason or another. And Madeleine will have the eyes, the shining, bright eyes, of someone setting out on a journey. And perhaps that’s why she doesn’t want him there, because she doesn’t want him to see those eyes. Because it would be in poor taste for her eyes to shine and her whole being to glow at the prospect of leaving, for this whole business of setting out implies an exciting, new beginning, and an ending. And, with every ending, some sadsack with that left-behind look written all over his face. And that’s not the sort of face you want hanging about at a farewell when everybody’s all cheers and smiles. He leaves her house, its windows black, and walks down towards the hospital and two small pubs he knows that she and her work friends go to, from time to time, for these sorts of farewell events.

He knows he has found them without even seeing Madeleine. He is staring in through the yellow glass
of the pub at a group of people that gives every indication of having been brought together for a purpose. His eyes — as indifferent as a camera — rove over the gathered faces then come to rest on her. She is seated at the end of a trestle table, her sister on one side of her and the older married man whom he first saw at the ball in the summer (and who speaks with the same ease and eloquence on the mysteries of the kidney as he does on women and country fields) is on the other. The very sight of him should feel like a physical blow, but his indifference protects him.
Feel nothing
, a voice is saying. It is a voice from long ago, a child’s voice, a wise one. A voice that learnt years before how to keep the world at bay, and how to feel nothing when feeling nothing was required. And because it is a wise voice he listens, and the blow that might well have fallen does not. It is a trick learnt young, and, once learnt, it never goes away. The child that learnt the trick when a trick was needed will always be there beside him, ready to take his hand when required, and whisper the right words at the right time.
Feel nothing
.

Her eyes sparkle, her face is radiant, she is glowing. Happy in a way that he never is when
she
is not there — happy in a way that some part of him is convinced she has no right to be. For it is an almost liberated happiness that she glows with. There is a liveliness to her manner that he is not aware of
having noticed before: bright, flirtatious glances that he has no memory of seeing before, let alone receiving. Then again, he has never observed her at a distance before — and with this indifference. And the more he gazes upon this gathering, the more he becomes convinced that he is not destined to join them inside where there is noise and warmth and where Madeleine is happy in a way that he has not seen her happy before. It is, he concludes (as he steps back to take in the full panorama of the table and his eyes go click like a camera), a picture that is already complete, a group portrait, a
tableau
that stands as it is. One more and the balance would be lost, the harmony of the scene disturbed.

She has not seen him, but he has seen her. It is enough. The trick of feeling nothing was still good. The wisdom of the child he once was, still there and still valid. He could live with this, this departure. Feeling nothing was easy, if you learnt the trick early enough. Pain was a red, red ball, propelled through the air at speed to the other end of a cricket pitch, then propelled again and again. In the oblivion of the act of propelling it, throughout all those summers all those years before, he had learnt the art of feeling nothing. And like his father’s walk — a winter walk in summer — it was a way of being that, once learnt, was never forgotten. Control the ball and you control
everything else. A trick like that, once acquired, would forever stand its possessor in good stead.

Back in his room, he falls into his favourite armchair and is idly staring at the double windows that in summer open out onto the street. They are living a story. And this, logically, is how the story must end. Furthermore, it is the ending he wants. The gift of Madeleine was a kind of blessed ordinariness, a sense of being connected the way everybody else was, a confirmation of the belief that there really was someone out there after all, just for him. When she is gone, his consolation will be this, the consolation of the right ending at the right time. An aeroplane, a departure, the gesture of a final heartfelt letter. And, when this ending is finally upon them and everybody has gone their separate ways forever, he will be left with a deeply satisfying sadness that it had to happen. The way it does in stories where the longed-for moment is reached, hearts break on the printed page, and everybody steps out into the vast unwritten life that is left to them.

In the books that he reads, in the books that he studies and writes about, books in which lovers meet and destroy each other with their love or their lack of it, there is a common thread — that what happens happens because it could not have happened any other way. The moment, to use a fashionable student phrase of the day, is structured that way. A young
woman called Madeleine meets a young man called Michael, one discovering love, the other gratitude. Then they part, because the mixture of love and gratitude can only sustain itself for so long. She weaves the sunlight in her hair and leaves with regret in her eyes, not because she is leaving but because she could find nothing more to offer. Nor does she wish there could have been more, because that something more wasn’t in them to be discovered. Together they could only ever have amounted to what they became. And the regret is in her eyes, not because she wished for more but because she had always known that there was no more. Their story ends the way it was always going to. And with that ending he acquires — almost happily — the deeply thrilling sadness that tells him he has loved somebody. That he has known what it is to be connected and together they have known the days.

T
he mountain of Whitlam has been lowered into the back seat of a white Commonwealth car. He has been shipped to Melbourne, and is now being ferried to Centenary Suburb. This mountain, which seems to fill the entire car, has been travelling towards the suburb for much of the year. He is lowered into the back seat, the door is slammed, and the car draws away from the newly completed international airport.

Soon, the gleaming white car, bearing its monumental cargo, is speeding along the newly completed freeway, built to carry traffic from the airport (whose runways, hangars and lounges sit
uneasily upon the old thistle country north of the suburb) to the city, with maximum ease. Everywhere the signs of Progress are in evidence, as the car bearing the mountain of Whitlam travels towards its destination.

The eyes of Whitlam move from side to side, roving over the open fields. He is impassive and looks out the window as a hiker might, stick in hand, surveying a landscape from a great height. As the car moves smoothly along the shining bitumen, the houses that mark the fringes of the city pop up into view, first one or two, then in the intensifying numbers of a massed army. And although he looks upon them with the rarefied eyes of the hiker, he also knows that these fringe suburbs are his territory. It is suburbs such as these that house or once housed Michael and his kind, and it is Michael and his kind who will one day soon push the mass of Whitlam to power. This mountainous statue on wheels will roll inexorably to power in just a couple of years, and it will be Michael and his kind who will provide the motive force, just as coal and water produce steam and provide motive force for an engine to pull carriages. So, even though his face betrays no emotion, this Whitlam is acknowledging deep in his core that all landscapes, especially those as flat as the pancake suburbs around him, require mountains. And he, the mountain of Whitlam, has come to this coastal plain of suburbs
built on grass and thistle because plains cannot move, whereas mountains, housed on wheels, can.

As they leave the freeway, his eyes lower and scan the typed pages his speechwriter has just handed him. He has come to Centenary Suburb to officially open a sports ground. A minister in government might have been requested for the job, but the mayor of Centenary Suburb is a man who trades in politics, not believes in it, and he knows a mountain when he sees one, and knows that this mountain will soon command the eyes of the landscape. It is written into all of them — the mayor, Mrs Webster, Peter van Rijn, the rotting hulk of Bruchner, and Michael and his kind — that this Whitlam will one day rule. And, even though he can’t know if the length of his rule will be short or long, the mayor is convinced that the country, and therefore the suburb, will never be the same again once the mountain prevails. And so, adhering to the age-old dictum that for things to stay the same things must change, the mayor has invited this Whitlam who moves with the unshakeable conviction that he
is
History, waiting to happen. The mayor is not about to dispute this. And so, when everything changes, the mayor will have the boast of having shaken Whitlam’s hand before it did. And boasts such as that just might be enough to keep some things the same. By which the mayor means the chair in which
he sits and the office he occupies. And the wide purple tie and the long greying sideburns that he now possesses as he waits for the arrival of the Great Whitlam, are, too, the concessions one makes to change and to Progress, so that things might stay the same.

When the white Commonwealth car pulls up at the sports ground, the mountain of Whitlam is lifted from the back seat and is wheeled to the welcoming party at the front of the cream-brick building. Even as he approaches, the mayor is enjoying a quiet smile as he remembers drawing up plans for the building and the architect informing him that the first thing the builders, planners and everybody else involved would want to do is work out where the bar goes.

As the shadow that prefigures the sheer mass of Whitlam looms closer, the quiet smile fades from the mayor’s features and he is convinced that History is, in fact, rolling inexorably towards him and he is about to shake hands with it. And if Michael, who is standing just behind him, were to explain that cocktail of emotions that have overcome the mayor — and Harold Ford is an early-evening-martini man — he would, to the mayor’s great surprise, use the word ‘sublime’. He would tell him that what he is currently experiencing is that mixture of awe and terror that the great Romantic poets felt when they viewed, say, at close quarters, a snow-peaked
mountain. For the mountain of Whitlam has this effect on the mayor, even if the word ‘sublime’ would be the last that he would draw upon to describe this strangely disturbing feeling.

And such is the kick of this particularly potent cocktail that when the mountain stretches out its hand, the hand of the mayor that reaches back is, for the first time in decades, betraying a hint of trembling.

They speak briefly and together note that the bar is in a good spot, then the wheels underneath the statue of Whitlam move down the line, greeting each of the welcoming party in turn. When he comes to the distinctly unmoved figure of Mrs Webster, he reminds her that they have met before, addresses her as Val (in a way that almost shocks the mayor, because nobody calls her Val) and indulges in the light chat of old friends catching up unexpectedly. But Mrs Webster remains unmoved, even distant. And, far from being flattered that he should remember her name, she is suspicious. She is wary of anybody with that kind of gift, if gift is what it is. And, as he moves further down the line, she shows no sign of emotional involvement, her pulse and the nerve endings of her being register no hint of sublimity.

Now, face to face with Michael — who (after having sat up in his armchair all night inwardly farewelling his Madeleine) is there, like the rest of
the Centenary Committee — the shoulders of the mountain visibly relax. He knows he is shaking hands with the motive force that will propel him to power. For Michael, the lingering feeling (which will linger over the next few days, even weeks) will be an odd one. An odd feeling, in fact, that will accompany any future meetings with the ‘Great’ — that the ‘Great’ look so very human when you stand next to them.

After the tea and the biscuits, the mountain of Whitlam is wheeled back to the white Commonwealth car that carried him to Centenary Suburb, lowered into the back seat, and ferried back along the newly completed freeway to the newly completed international airport from which he came, all the way back his still, silent eyes roving over his domain and the change, everywhere in evidence, that signifies his time is upon him.