The Time We Have Taken (11 page)

The suburbs have given way to the city now. The eyes of the old street will have turned inward and will now be focused on their televisions. The protesting
voice of Mrs Barlow will have been silenced for the day. The khaki grass of the vacant paddock will be silver under the moonlight. Inside the carriage, the city beckons and Saturday night awaits them. But as much as the prospect of the evening excites Michael, Madeleine is subdued, even sullen now, and still more than a little annoyed at having been bundled out of the house. She has said all she wants to say about this town she came from, and now she wants to just sit. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is witnessing, for the first time, the unreachable Madeleine. The Madeleine who goes somewhere in her mind and doesn’t take him, because she doesn’t want him there. And, already, he is wishing he’d never taken her back to his old street. Everything goes rotten on the old street, and as much as he might just have viewed it through a sentimental lens, he is now cursing it, for it has given him this new, this unreachable, Madeleine, and he is convinced that he is cursed to carry the street wherever he goes.

F
rom the moment she enters the house on the Sunday evening, she knows someone else has been there. Michael had told her on the phone that he might drop in, and he has — but someone other than Michael has entered the house too.
Her
house. And the instant she asks herself why she knows this, she puts her nose to the air and smells it. Perfume. And not her own.

She’s been visiting her sister on the other side of the city. And as much as she is happy to visit her sister, she is always happier to be home because Rita is not one of those people who settle easily — or at all — into other people’s houses. Even if only for the weekend. And so she has been looking forward to this homecoming. When she would once more be
surrounded by familiar walls, prints, chairs and all the carefully chosen decorative objects that give the place her touch — as well as the distinctive sounds and smells that make a house a home.

But the smell is all wrong. And she picked it as soon as she opened the front door and stepped inside. Michael had said he might be coming out to the old place (might ‘drop in’ he’d said, with the same casual air, it seemed to Rita, that these friends of his ‘drop out’), but he didn’t mention that anybody else would. And she knows it must be this young woman he’s been seeing. The one Rita hasn’t met yet, because she hasn’t been introduced. And her nose is out of joint about that. But even if Michael were to explain to his mother that their house was never that kind of house, it wouldn’t matter. That their house was never the kind of house to which he could bring a girl back and introduce to everyone, that throughout the whole of his adolescence he knew it was not written into the laws of the house that a girl could be brought back to it, because it would always be the wrong girl. The wrong sort. For the girl — apart from surely bringing with her the wrong laugh, voice and clothes — would always bring with her the possibility of Michael’s closed bedroom door and Rita would always be bursting that door open. Because some closed bedroom doors are unnatural. Not that Vic would care. Let him, Vic would say. Let
him. If Rita were to just pause and think, she would recognise that it was always this way, and her nose shouldn’t be out of joint because this girl of his hasn’t been introduced. They never were. And she knows this even now, standing in the hallway of her house with all the wrong smells around her. At least, part of her does. The part that she doesn’t talk to. And behind it all, there all the time (and once again Rita knew it then and knows it now without need of Michael telling her), there was always this business of the weight. The weight that she took from Vic and placed upon Michael, the weight that they could have called love but never did. The weight that eventually landed on Michael. Who else? For when love turns to weight, somebody has to carry it. So, the girl would always be wrong. And, throughout Michael’s adolescence, no girls ever entered the house. If Rita were to just pause, she would see that it was always this way. But she doesn’t. She’s got the cheap reek of some tart’s perfume up her nose.

And so Rita, dragging this ancient weight about with her and wishing she wasn’t, now walks about the house smelling only the scent of intrusion. Of a stranger. Of deception. And, as she walks about the house, she is now aware of other smells, of cigarettes, yes cigarettes — and beer? She’s sure she’s got the whiff of old beer in her nostrils. She knows that smell, stale beer, from the night before — any night before. The
smell of previous-night’s-beer is unmistakable. And with the whiff of old beer she is simultaneously seeing Vic falling through the front door, stumbling through the house, and that old familiar feeling of wretchedness is upon her once again, and the memory of that wretched madness that swelled her heart to the point of exploding all those years ago is now more than a memory. It’s a smell. And smells make things happen all over again. And she knows she doesn’t want these memories again, but knows they won’t go till the smell does. Then she sees further signs of disruption, even as she’s dwelling on this business of smell and weight and love and why it had to be like that. For she has entered Michael’s old bedroom, which has changed little since he left, and noticed immediately that the bed has been disturbed. Slept in. And with the observation comes an involuntary shiver. A half-hearted attempt has been made to make it, a quilt thrown over the bed almost contemptuously. Brazenly. And as this stranger’s perfume — which she knows to be a common, cheap scent that young girls these days go for — as this stranger’s perfume mingles with the sight of the shabbily remade bed, the word ‘tart’ comes to her again. And she is convinced that Michael has not only sneaked back into the house when she was not there like some creature with guilt written all over its face, he has dragged a tart back into
their
house,
her
house, with him. And she knows straight away that this is not the
act of
her
Michael, upon whom she rested the weight of the love she was left with (when Vic wouldn’t carry it any more),
her
Michael who had always told her that her dresses were just right when the street sneered. No, it wasn’t him, but some other Michael with a tart in his ear.

She has been at her sister’s all weekend, looking forward to being back in her own house. With its own sounds and smells, but now all that has been ruined. And, although it is chilly, she is opening the windows of Michael’s old bedroom and pulling the quilt, blankets and sheets from the bed. And as she lifts the sheets she notices that the perfume — this common drop that, no doubt, common girls go for — rises, stronger than ever from the pillow slip. And soon, the whole intrusion, the whole violation, is bundled up and dropped into the washing machine in the laundry where the scent can be washed from it. The thought of some girl that she’s never met sleeping in the house — if ‘sleeping’ is the word — without Rita even being consulted is not only an intrusion but a betrayal. And, if he can treat this place like some kind of doss-house, she is also asking herself just how well she knows this other Michael who mixes with all his university types and the sorts of girls — that she can well imagine — who hang around them.

For an hour — or is it more? — she’s wretched. Ridiculous. As angry with herself as she is about the
bed and everything else. She’s spent all her life either waiting for the men in her life, or watching them move on, just wishing they’d stand still long enough for her to get a grip on them. And noting, more sad than angry, the happiness with which they move on, when they finally do. And maybe all the staying when everybody told her to go, all the care she poured into the house, was just another way of telling herself, and telling the street, that the world hadn’t expired the day Vic moved on. A way of telling herself and everybody else that the house was still here, she was still here, things would go on, and the damage wasn’t so bad really. But, perhaps, in the end, the only one she convinced was herself.

Later, when the bed has been changed and the evening breeze has done its work, when the kettle is boiling and kitchen smells fill the house and the television is creating its own distinctive sounds (for each television is different), she tells herself that the house is
hers
again.

For a moment it slipped from her, its ghosts rose up from where they were resting and she felt the weight of old love doing its work all over again. And with that moment, possibly acknowledged for the first time with any sense of inevitability, or even urgency, was the feeling that Michael might be right after all, that her sister might be right, they all might be right — that the ghosts of the house would be
forever in residence. And so, after all the care she’s showered on the house and the sense of home the house gave her when a sense of home was needed, after all that, the time for parting company might be upon them.

She looks around her, wondering what the feeling might be like — to finally say goodbye to the place — and if (for the memory of old love and old wretchedness has exhausted her) she would ever have the strength to do it.

T
his is the part of Vic’s wanderings through the town that he doesn’t have to take. But for reasons he is not quite sure of, he does. And perhaps ‘reasons’ isn’t the right word, for he is driven by the kind of impulse that an animal might be driven by, uncomprehending, but utterly accepting. Therefore, once a week (usually a Monday, as it is today), even on those midsummer mornings when nobody should be about, Vic goes out of his way and strolls past the funeral director’s in a small street behind the post office.

He has, in fact, just come from the post office and on this day there is no letter from Rita (currently noting that the whiff of intrusion has been expunged from the house overnight). He enters the side street that takes him round the back of the funeral parlour. The roller doors are up, a long, gleaming hearse sits
waiting for its hour, and near it a beautifully polished and lacquered coffin has been placed on a metal stand. Three men in white shirts and dark suit trousers, and a woman in gumboots, all stand about in a circle, chatting, laughing and smoking, the way anybody would before work. They could just as easily be a road gang taking a break, or drivers in between shifts.

As he passes he nods and they all return the greeting, but it is the tall, grey-haired, senior member of the group who makes eye contact with Vic. An amiable face, a grin that is happy enough. But at the still centre of his smiling face are the eyes that know a few things about Death. We greet Death in the mornings, this man’s eyes say. We mix with Death’s family and friends, we drive Death to a lonely plot and we bury it. Or we burn it, and put it in a jar. But before we do all that, we like to hang about out the back here and have a bit of a smoke and a laugh.

On this morning though, Vic recognises something more than all that in his eyes. The coolness on the dark side of the affable undertaker. A professional interest, and Vic the object of his interest. It is a passing moment of scrutiny, of calculation. Up and down the length of Vic’s frame. Of measurement. In short, a fitting. Unspoken, but there. They all come to us in the end, the look says. Whether you like it or not, we will, you and I, do business one day. And Death does a steady trade in this town.

Has he got a smell about him? A smell that Vic himself can’t pick up, or anybody else for that matter, except for those who deal with bodies every day. Vic could swear, as this affable undertaker narrowed his eyes, he also lifted his nose as if detecting the unmistakable scent of business.

He walks by, the men put their suit coats on and prepare to go to work, and the woman in gumboots gives the tyres of the sleek, dark limousine a final squirt with the hose. Vic remembers, years before, the doctor in the suburb telling him that the pills for his head and his heart were useless with the grog, that he’d die, and he remembered telling him he couldn’t care less. And he still doesn’t. But when the buggers start sniffing you out from the crowd, when you’ve got some sort of scent on you that you can’t even smell yourself, you know that it really is getting near dying time. Dying time, that’s what Vic calls it. And when the time comes, Vic, like any animal, will know what to do. Find a nice spot and just lie down and let it happen. If it doesn’t ambush him.

He doesn’t have to pass by the funeral director’s, but once a week he takes that detour, goes out of his way to pass the back of this place, just so he can look upon it and the men in the dark suits of their trade who stand about in between jaunts, smoking and laughing and chatting about all the usual things. He doesn’t have to pass this way, but he does. And they’re
all acquainted with one another by now. They’re all, more or less, on familiar terms.

By the time he hits the bottom of the street, he’s ready for a beer. And it’s always the same after this little detour. The bar always glows in the morning light, and that bold, crass and wonderful sub-tropical sun always pours in through the stained-glass windows of the pub and lights it up like a vast cathedral. Light is brighter, warmth warmer, and when he raises that first beer of the morning, when his lips kiss the glass, part and receive the blessing of malt, hops and barley, he knows he will feel more alive at that moment than he will be for the rest of the day.

M
ichael is standing alone on the footpath near the taxi rank outside the city hospital. It is a cold Friday evening, the first of the bad nights, and it seems to come without warning. The first of the nights when Madeleine pronounces everything wrong, and Michael can’t understand because everything is right. More right than it’s ever been. The first of the nights when the unreachable Madeleine he’d glimpsed that last weekend in the train carriage stares at him with that sorry look in her eyes that he will now see more and more of. Just as he will know more and more of the unreachable Madeleine.

Nine miles to the north, the weekday business of the suburb is concluded: the school is closed and
dark until Monday; Lurch has returned to his home, his wife and daughters (something Michael is surprised to learn, for there is a touch of the eternal bachelor about him); with a flick of the switch Rita brings the full-moon lights in the garden to Friday-night life; and the sleek, black beast in Webster’s corner waits to be sparked into motion.

And here, at the front of the hospital, Madeleine has just driven away in the taxi that was meant for them both. The taxi that would take them to the city station, and then on to that jumble of rooms by the sea where her parents and sister lived and where she and Michael were to spend the weekend. But the bag he packed earlier in the afternoon is at his feet and this Friday is now going to be different from the one he imagined when he packed it.

Then he is conscious of it for the first time. Perfume. It does not suddenly overpower him, this scent. It is infinitely more subtle than that. It does not regale him, but gently taps him on the shoulder, saying (as it will whenever he smells it in the years to come when Madeleine is long gone from his life) remember me? He is oblivious of it one minute, and the next he is drawn to it to the extent that he is now oblivious to everything around him. He knows this perfume. Knows it now, and forever. And from the moment that he inhales it he sees once again the deep blue cashmere sweater she wore tonight, sees once again
her neck and the simple gold cross suspended round it. He closes his eyes and breathes her in, Madeleine.

She is physically close again. Close enough for him to feel her warmth, and close enough for him to smell the faint trace of wine left on her lips from the six o’clock evening mass from which she came this evening before meeting Michael (and as he tries to imagine her in church, he can’t; he sees only a shadowy, kneeling figure, whispering in candlelight, another mystery again). Around him the world goes on, but, as he breathes deep on the scent, he feels it slipping from him, as if he were slipping irresistibly into a dream or a narcotic doze.

Suddenly Madeleine is there in front of him, looking down at the footpath, the taxi rank behind her, the Friday-night taxis lined up in the chilly evening air in front of the cream-brick hospital which is lit up in the night. She is shaking her head and telling him that everything is wrong as he hears his imitation leather bag fall at his feet and watches again as she walks to the taxi alone. Watches as she alone takes the taxi they’d both been waiting for, glances at him with that soon-to-be-familiar sorry look in her eyes that she will always be giving him, then slides into the back seat and is gone.

Now standing on the same spot, Madeleine gone, he’s wondering how it is that he can smell her perfume as if she were in front of him, and he concludes that
because the air is so calm this invisible cloud of perfume has remained, hovering round him, and he is reluctant to leave because as long as he has the scent of her he still possesses some part of her. He still has her. But this scent stays and stays, and taxis come and go, and it seems that he’ll have to either give her up or be prepared to stand all night on the same spot, delirious, in the midst of a cloud that, to the rest of the passing street, isn’t there. For, anybody strolling by would simply see a young man staring up at the cross-hatched branches of the bare trees that line the street for an inordinate amount of time and for no apparent reason. Longer than the street would deem normal.

And just when it seems that he will have to stay all night, he lowers his head and the scent becomes even stronger. It is then that he lifts his woollen pullover to his nose and realises that the scent is there, that there is no cloud, that the perfume is on him and he carries it with him. He remembers now her face resting on his chest, pressed into his pullover, just before she told him that something wasn’t right tonight and that she’d rather spend it alone. Just before she’d told him how good he was to her and how rotten she was to him (when he knew he was never so good, and she was never so rotten), and just before she turned and took the taxi they had both waited for.

No longer captive to the invisible cloud of Madeleine, he is now free to move. He carries her
with him. And so he picks his bag up and walks away, happy.

But in those years waiting for him, after Madeleine has gone, this perfume, whenever he smells it on the street or in shops or trams, will always be the scent of absence and will always work on his senses and his mind with all the power of a magic potion. If he knew what it was, even now, walking back from the taxi rank, he would buy it and have Madeleine in phial — to be drawn in and inhaled like some sweet narcotic at will. But, even as he plays with the thought, he knows he doesn’t want it. Knows that if he were to have his Madeleine in a phial by his bed, to be inhaled at will, that the sweet narcotic of instant remembrance would surely lose its potency, and like all such potions would eventually lose its power altogether. And Madeleine, the Madeleine that he now draws from his pullover into his lungs and arteries, would be forever lost to him.