The Time We Have Taken (22 page)

As Mrs Webster pulls out into the street, there is a sudden growl from beneath the hood, the briefest of ceremonial farewells, before disappearing into the night. Quite alone, on the still, smooth footpath, Rita turns to face the house that was once ‘us’. The house that, simultaneously, will always be ‘us’ and yet not ‘us’ any more.

Rita is left with an overwhelming desire to be alone. Not to speak, not even to think. But to simply stand in her front yard and stare at the silvery rooftops, the paling fences, the trees and stars; feel the ground at relative rest beneath her feet but spinning madly towards the sun and whatever the day holds. My world, she marvels to herself. My world. From the golf course to the station, from the Webster estate back to the Old Wheat Road. A rectangle no more than a mile long and a half mile wide. Not much, but big enough to contain all their stories. And even as she stands, quietly marvelling at this vision of the street that fell upon her in wondrous slowness, even as she stands, drawing its many stories to her into one complete picture, there is also a vague sense of loss — both troubling and
tantalising. A sense of having finally lost the thing she struggled against for so long.

They will all leave the suburb, and the place that was once theirs will become someone else’s, the suburb itself someone else’s suburb. But whoever they may be and however long they may stay, they will never have seen the thing born.

T
he sub-tropical darkness falls suddenly. Out there, his little town is combing its hair, dousing itself in perfume and aftershave, and slipping into its dancing shoes. These are the cabaret hours, the hours to which the day was leading all along, that mark the conclusion of every day, and the Twin Town Services Club — nothing much to remark upon during the day — is now dressed in the glitter of its party clothes.

From his kitchen, while Rita waits to set out for Mrs Webster’s estate and while Michael sits in his room contemplating that hour before meeting Madeleine for the last time, Vic has a clear view of the club and the lure of its lights. The beers from the pub at lunch and the beers that followed the conclusion of
the day’s golf are wearing off, no longer lift him, and there is a stale taste in his mouth that the fresh tea takes away. The club calls, the nightly dance of the cabaret hours, and the beers that will lift him once more. They’ll all be there, the usual crowd.

Vic closes the door behind him and nods to the blinking eyes of the club. We have an appointment, you and I, the nod says. Every night we have an appointment. Your table, by one of the wide club windows overlooking the town, is waiting. Your chair. Your accustomed place that allows you a full view of everything that matters. Come, Vic, come to the cabaret.

As he walks down the hill, in short sleeves, for the night air is summer warm, there is music in his ears. Songs, the bits and pieces left over from all the other nights like this are playing in there, as if having gone into both ears and never quite come out, which is what happens to songs. And one of them in particular (which he heard that morning in his kitchen) won’t go away, keeps nagging him, and he wonders why until he realises that the song (a light, sentimental thing like they always are) once moved him in the kitchen back in the suburb one bright morning long ago. And he now remembers the annoyance he felt then at being moved by a cliché. But cheap music does that. Takes you by surprise and gets under your guard. And he is annoyed once more,
because some part of him is moved all over again. Only more so. And it is, he tells himself, because the song comes with baggage now. He is not simply being moved by a cliché any more, he is being moved by his memories of it, and the house which he left for which he now feels a sudden tenderness. The kitchen that he sat in then now appears to him, as he strolls down the hill to the club, in remarkable detail: the round green table, the smart new chairs, the servery looking through into the lounge room, the Laminex bench and the small plastic radio on it from which this song once issued (and he remembers telling Michael what a load of slop it was at the time) — this song that got under his guard one weekday morning years before for all the wrong reasons and became one of
those
tunes. The ones that come back at you with baggage when you least expect it and just when you thought you’d left your baggage behind.

Inside, it is the music he hears first. Each week it is a new singer — artists, they call them — and they all have names, but needn’t have. They’re all one. Male or female. It doesn’t matter. They all say the same things, they all sing the same slop, and all manage to look the same. As Vic shows his membership card to the man at the door and watches other members signing guests in (as he himself did for Michael when he made his one and only trip up north to see the old man a few years
before), he notes that this is the way it ought to be, after all. If each day is indistinguishable from the rest then so must each night.

In the main room he turns to where his table and his place will be waiting by the long, wide windows that overlook the town. And he can visualise them all, the same shifting crowd (retired bankers, teachers, builders and all the rest), without even clapping eyes on them. The same shifting crowd that comes together every night, the evolutionary history of which nobody remembers now. But it’s distinctly possible that this crowd — albeit with different faces — has always sat at the same table. That the table has seen them all come and go. And it occurs to Vic that if they were all assembled — all of them, from all the years — it is just possible that they all might bear a sort of family resemblance.

But even as he nears the table, he knows something is wrong. And he’s not sure what it is. It’s there all the same, though, and it’s wrong. As he gets closer, he sees it. His seat. His spot is occupied. How? Everyone sits in their places. Everyone at the table knows to sit in any other place than his, the one with the unimpeded view across the town. It is, the table knows, a one-man seat. And nobody has ever made the mistake of sitting in it, until tonight. This stranger has slipped into his seat — and the table has allowed it to happen — while he was walking down to
the club, contemplating cheap music and baggage. Of course it shouldn’t matter, he tells himself. One chair is just as good as another. But these things can throw your whole night out, and it has.

The only seat available is against the window looking back towards the table and the whole roaring mass of the room with its piped music, laughter and poker machines. It is a view of the table and the room that he is unaccustomed to, but (once he was over his initial annoyance) it very quickly becomes an intriguing one. And, because the conversations around him are intensely animated and he can find no way into them, he is given a feeling of distance from the whole thing that he’s never had before. Suddenly he is looking at the table and the room differently. More precisely, looking at his seat differently. The one that he would be sitting in right now if this stranger hadn’t slipped into it while he wasn’t here.

At first he resents this woman — whose name he is told upon sitting down but immediately forgets. And it isn’t the fact that she is sitting in his seat; it is the way she is doing it. She is leaning forward talking to one of the usual crowd (a former banker’s wife), in a flowery summer number with legs crossed, utterly oblivious of the casual manner in which she has done this thing which has never been done before. And, for a short while, this casual demeanour of hers is an affront — an insult.

Then something odd happens. The feeling of distance gives way to a feeling of invisibility. Which again, strangely, he likes. Vic is a big talker. He likes to talk, especially with a beer in his hand. And every night, at this table, in his usual chair, the talk and the beer flow in equal quantities. But not tonight. Tonight he is invisible. And the feeling is new, but good.

He watches their mouths open and close. At first he hears what they are saying as they drink their shandies, sparkling wine and beer and eat their — what do you call them? — pretzels. But at some stage, and it is quite early in the evening, he stops listening. He looks from one to another then settles on the woman in his chair. And soon he isn’t even looking at her. He is looking at that anonymous steel chair, the padding of which, he imagines, has moulded itself over the years to accommodate his buttocks. And he falls into calculating the nights, the number of occasions he has dropped into it, but no one occasion stands out. A couple of evenings, good and bad, eventually surface. And it occurs to him that he could spend his life (or what’s left of it) in that chair or one just like it and never really be able to distinguish one night from another, or one song or singer from another. That what’s left of his life could pass in a routine blur until one night he either rises from the chair and never sits in it again, or sits in the chair and never rises from it again. People die in
chairs as much as they die in their beds. And this chair of his, which until now had been acknowledged by the table as his and his alone, has the look of a chair in which someone could live a slow death. It is now that kind of chair. And he has never noticed before because he has never seen the table and the room from this angle and therefore never looked closely at his chair the way a stranger might. And he finds himself thanking the nameless woman who has so casually occupied his place and thereby given him this altered view.

And all the time a faint, nagging voice is saying — this isn’t like you. This isn’t Vic. Bloody Christ, look at yourself. Vic, the life of the cabaret hours, always the centre of things in your accustomed place, and here you are not even listening. On a hot spring night with your dancing shoes on and a glistening beer that mysteriously appeared before you — and you’re not even drinking.

And it is then, while they are all engrossed, utterly lost in this talk of theirs to which Vic is not even listening, that he quietly departs, like a train giving the platform the slip. Before he knows it, he is out once more in the balmy night. Behind him, in the club, at his accustomed table, there is a space where he had just sat. And at some stage the table will notice this space and ask each other if anybody saw Vic leave. And the space he has created will be an
awkward one for a while, until somebody comes along. With that in mind, he ambles back up the road he strolled down only an hour or so before, and soon he is sitting on his doorstep, looking out over the town.

Then the breeze is upon him. He turns his cheek to it and he is driving again. The glow of a long-ago furnace illuminates the cabin and Vic has his head out the window, his freshly shaven cheek (shaved twice, even now, as he did every time before a shift) open and alive to the constant rush of air as the engine speeds through the night. His hair is blown back, his eyes aglitter. The beam of the headlight parts the night, the moon hovers over an open field, and, as he breathes it all in, the cinders, the cool air and the warm scent of freshly brewed tea, he is no longer Vic. He has simply become the moment as he always did when he drove from midnight into morning with the wind on his face.

Sitting on his doorstep, now oblivious of the view, he smiles upon the Vic that was. Was he ever so alive as he was then? And was his life ever so full of purpose as when he was doing, and utterly absorbed in, the thing he was born to do? Was he ever so complete as he was when he had it, this gift of the art of engine driving? For there was a time when he had it, a deeply privileged time when he had this thing to which he could go — in the mornings, evenings or whatever
time the shift took him — and enter moments that were so complete he felt no need of any others.

And no matter where he goes, for all the grog and the way he stuffed everybody around, for all the bloody stupid drunken things he did just when things would be looking good, there is at least this to say of Vic in the end: that he once had it, this thing that enabled him to stand and stare up at the vast, indifferent heavens (as he does tonight) and not feel small. And it will always be a source of wonder to Vic that it was his job, his labour, that gave him this, and through which meaning entered his life. And as long as he can feel it all again as he does now, as long as he can summon it all up again, he can also remind himself that, once acquired, the art of engine driving is never lost or forgotten.

Out there, while Rita is discovering that at the heart of speed there is a wondrous slowness, the town has its dancing shoes on. But tonight it can dance without him. Tonight he is content with his memories, for they bring with them the reminder that he once had it. Something equal to the vast rolling eternity of this sub-tropical night, which the night itself acknowledges, and in recognition of which it now tips its hat.

T
hey are careful. Both of them refraining from even the most oblique of hints that this is their last night together. He has lived the hour before meeting Madeleine for the last time. He has swirled the hot chocolate round and round in his blue, plastic mug for the last time. He has risen from his desk, upon which sits George Johnston (read, and waiting to be re-read and shared, but, oddly, not with Madeleine), the book that will give him a place to go when a place to go is needed in the hollow years afterwards, and has left the house to meet her for the last time, as though it were just another night together.

They talk in the same way as they always do, and their easy conversational manner is the manner of two people with all the time in the world before
them. It is a quiet Monday night, not their usual night. Her plane leaves on Wednesday, their usual night. She is wearing new clothes — new jeans, flared jeans. Madeleine is not someone who wears jeans often, certainly not flared jeans. But tonight she is. She is wearing new clothes, new fashions, as if she were wearing a new self, the self she is taking away with her. And, already, this change is a hint of all the changes he will never see. That and all the other selves that she will wear and shed from now on, just as she will never know the various Michaels that he will put on and take off over the years. Or what this succession of selves — together — might have amounted to. They will never know any of this. They have known the days, and the days are almost over.

The evening passes in its usual manner (pizza, Italian soft drink) and soon they are sitting on the bed in his room, backs against the wall, holding hands and staring out through the French doors that open onto the balcony and look down over the street. It is a damp, cool start to spring and the windows are closed. They have, by now, given up talking altogether. It is enough to sit and hold hands, and contemplate the occasional passing headlights of a car or the street laughter of a world that goes on and will go on, indifferent to what is taking place in Michael’s room.

He is, he knows, on the brink of something momentous. That longed-for ending, the only ending
open to them, the one that has been waiting throughout the year, is at hand. Minutes away. And after the minutes come the seconds, and, beyond that, the margin that was before him will be behind him and the brink will have been traversed. And already he is reminding himself once again that pain, after all, is a red, red ball. And the trick of feeling nothing, when nothing is required, is still good, like the wise counsel of the child he once was who learnt the trick young, and, having learnt it young, never forgot it.

Soon they will each rise, leave his room, descend the stairs, close the front door behind them and meet their ending. And when they have, when they have enacted it and lived the last of the seconds they have left together, they will stroll right off the page of what has been lived and known and go their separate ways.

Michael has always been one of those who looks back on a moment even as he is living it. He closes the purple front door behind them and it is doors that he is contemplating: his, hers, and the length of doors that once opened and closed daily on his old street. The clear Nordic pine of Bruchner’s front door, the dark rectangle of old man Malek’s, George Bedser’s that once opened to everyone in the street for his daughter’s engagement party then clammed shut forever after. These doors, the doors of his life, they are all vivid. And he can, too, quite clearly,
imagine himself at some distant point in time when this night is behind them, standing on the footpath some bright spring or winter’s day, contemplating Madeleine’s old front door, as it will be then, and the time they once shared.
How terribly strange to be seventy
. It is doors, the doors of his life that preoccupy him as they walk to the corner of his street (while Vic rediscovers the art of engine driving on his doorstep a thousand miles to the north of them, and Rita receives the gift of slowness), past Charlie’s milk bar, closed and dark, then left to the bank corner where the taxis pass. They have pulled one door behind them, and are about to close another.

It is either late in the evening or early in the morning (neither of them is conscious of the time), the streets are deserted and a chilly wait in this cool, damp start to spring seems inevitable when the pale light of a taxi turns the corner. This is good. This is as it should be. No time to say all the things that ought to be said that are probably best left to silence.

It is upon them. They have used their allotted months, weeks, days and hours — and now they are drawing on the last of their seconds. This is how a year ends. The taxi pulls into the kerb outside the all-night petrol station. Michael knows it will take less than a minute for the whole thing to be over, that the presence of the cab, the only vehicle on the street, will
hasten the process, hurry them when they might have lingered and said all the things that silence says better.

All night they have been on the brink of something momentous. They eye the cab, the dark figure of the driver inside, then return to each other, knowing without need of speech that this is as it ought to be — for the thing to be done quickly. From the moment she slips into the cab and closes the door, the dwindling of their time will cease and the whole process will begin again in reverse. For the momentousness of the situation is this: that it creates a before and an after. Old time gives way to new time. And in between they now each traverse this no-man’s land in which they are simultaneously together and alone, two and one, the selves they have known and not known for the past year giving way to the selves they will never know.

They must have spoken, they must have said something to each other, they may or may not have embraced and kissed. He would assume they did, but, in the hours that will follow in his room, he will retrieve no memory of any such act. The only thing he knows for certain is that he is watching the last of Madeleine, her legs (clothed in the new jeans of her new self) disappear into the taxi as she slides across the back seat. The petrol-station attendant reads and smokes in his booth, the traffic lights change from red to green on a deserted intersection, and the taxi
pulls swiftly out into the street. As it does, she quickly turns and glances back through the rear window and it is all as it should be, all written into their ending, this final glance. You’d have tired of me, it says. You’d have tired of my eyes, which you call green or blue, depending on how you choose to look at them, for their colour would become inconsequential. You’d have tired of my hair, which shines for you like gold in the morning sun now, but which you would cease to notice by evening. You’d have tired of my lips, and my kisses, and the whole of my body, which you have moved and troubled in ways that you shall never know, and which I would gladly have given you, if only for this — that you’d have tired of me when it was all done. Her face is sad and still, with that goodbye look in her eyes that she was always giving him and which she is now giving for the last time. And his head is shaking. Do you know me so little? But her stare is steady with sadness. You know you would, not now, but in that older, wiser heart that you carry with you and which will wake you one morning and tell you she was right, your Madeleine. In that older, wiser heart that will tell you that the boredom would have come, would have crept up on us day by day, until we became just like everybody else. And I couldn’t have borne that because it’s not our ending. I could never have borne watching us slowly turn into everybody else. I can with all the others that will follow — if they’ll
follow at all; maybe I’ll live and die alone — but not with you. I could never watch
us
turn into
them
.
That
is their ending, not ours. Believe me, she knows what she knows, your Madeleine. I could have given it to you, the boredom of bedrooms that have given up, and given you their ending, not ours. But, look, I have given you so much more.

Her eyes remain upon him until the taxi disappears. The lights turn from green to red for nobody in particular, and when the taxi is gone he swings round to face the way he came and prepares to enter that part of his life that will be measured with such words as ‘afterwards’, ‘since’ and ‘once’. It is done. He has lived a story. They have their ending.