Along black train pulls into the station, exhaling clouds of steam and cinders over the platform that quickly rise and evaporate into the night sky. These are the engines of Michael’s youth, although Michael is still two months away from being born. His eyes are yet to focus, however blurry at first, on the face of the driver of the train that has just arrived, a little past eight in the evening, after an all-day journey from the state border. But when his eyes do open upon the world and focus on the face of this particular driver, he will become familiar with it, for this is his father. Although the word will come much later, he will come to know this face, currently looking back from the cabin window up the platform, in the same way that he will come to know the face of the woman he will call his mother. He will come to know and instantly recognise her face because she will always be there, just as the man looking back up the platform on this starry winter’s night will be there when he is not driving engines. And Michael will also learn the names by which they are known to the world, even if he will never call them Vic or Rita. Just as he will eventually learn that his name is Michael, and that, together with Vic and Rita, they will become an unhappy family. None of this has happened and he has not yet opened his eyes upon the world. But it is, nonetheless, the story that awaits him when he does.
Vic is looking back up the platform from the driver’s seat, while his fireman, young and eager to leave, is packing his bag. Vic lingers, eyeing that platform as the train doors open and the passengers step into the smoky, crowded station. It is a dirty station, grimy and gritty because the sequence of sad and violent years that everyone simply calls the war, but which is more correctly known as the Second World War, has recently finished. And although six years may not seem a long time, everybody looks tired for it has been a long six years and a long war. And, in many ways, this war will not end for years yet. For, just as Michael’s eyes will soon open upon the tight, unhappy family he, his mother and father will become, they will also open upon a world that will become known as the post-war world. Years that will become the post-war years, and a whole generation, of which he will be part, that will become the post-war generation. The war has finished but the war will go on. The damage will not be confined to those six sad and violent years that constituted the war, for the damage too will be passed on and the effects of this war will be felt long into the future.
And as Vic looks up the length of the platform, he sees the damage stepping off the train. For this is a troop train (and Vic is more than familiar with the sight of troop trains because he drove them all through the war). These are the last of the returning soldiers, and the people on the platform are the families who haven’t seen them for years, and the children who have never seen them, these gaunt figures who are their fathers. And their arms go out, those who have waited and who now receive not only their sons, husbands and fathers back into their lives but receive their damage as well. For these men cannot help but bring their damage back with them.
And these are the lucky ones. Vic is motionless as he surveys the platform. The station is eerily quiet. It is not silent: there are carriage doors still being opened and slammed shut, occasional whistles and announcements. This and the sounds of young children. But not much of it, for most of the children, who until now may not have known what damage is or looks like and who may be seeing it for the first time, are simply staring. There is little grown-up speech. Not that Vic can hear. No one seems to be talking much. Those gathered to meet the returning troops and those stick-figure troops themselves (for even though their return has been delayed because they were too thin to travel, and even though they have been carefully fed, substance comes back slowly to their stick frames and it is even possible that some will never lose that bony look) have somehow, without speaking, all agreed that words can wait. That whatever words may be spoken at this moment will be the wrong words — the words they all might have used before, the words of a time, of a way of living, that once existed but doesn’t any more. And that for this new age new ways of speaking will have to be found. Or ways of using the old words that don’t exist yet. And although Vic would never say it like that, the eerie quiet on the platform tells him that everybody has decided to scrub the words for the moment because they wouldn’t be up to the job demanded of them. And whatever things they all imagined they might have said they leave inside their heads and now greet one another in silence or muted welcome. Occasionally, Vic notes, someone’s lips move, indicating that more extended speech has taken place. A young woman suddenly sobs, then stops herself — an act of will that is more moving than the tears. And there is the odd smile, even a laugh — the sort of prepared happiness you see in newspapers. But this is a night arrival and only those who have to be here are, and no one smiles or laughs for the cameras because there aren’t any. Not that Vic can see.
They may, Vic is thinking while his fireman leaves the cabin, they may even be his old mob. And Vic is as much looking back through the years as back up the platform to the time he spent in the army before being called back to drive engines. To the life he might have lived had he stayed a sapper. Could they be his old mob? He discovered, when the war was over, where they were sent. Singapore, just in time for the fall and just in time to be taken prisoner, more or less, without firing a shot. All of them. That was what became of his mob, and that would have been his fate too. Taken, more or less, without firing a shot and sent off to the prison camps where one in three died. A one-in-three chance that the child who is about to open his eyes upon the world would never have been conceived.
Slowly, the crowd begins to thin. Soldiers who still have that stick-figure look are led like children through the platform gate. And, as they walk back into the world they left behind in another age altogether, the children take their damaged hands. And so it begins, the process of passing the damage on. For out there are the quiet suburbs to which they will return, where fathers will sob uncontrollably in their bedrooms, fly into sad violence without warning or sit listening to jaunty songs about love discovered or sombre songs about love lost, or, when the time comes, be found lounging in front of television screens gazing upon quiz programs or American westerns about wagon trains and cavalry, all of which will be the face of this other, this post-war, world to which they returned but which they know, in that part of the mind that ticks over without thought, will never be their world because they don’t really have one any more. And there will be a creeping feeling that this world, this age of Progress, didn’t, in the end, need them to exist any more; a creeping feeling that History found them useful for a time and that those six sad and violent years were part of a larger process that was always moving forward to just such a moment. And once the longed-for moment is reached, History continues, on and on, leaving those who were useful for a while to gaze upon these bright, shiny new worlds with faintly puzzled eyes.
This will all unfold out there in the world to which they have returned: the sobbing, the violence without warning, the silence and the puzzled curiosity. And all to the accompaniment of jaunty little songs about catching falling stars, coming from plastic radios in kitchens and lounge rooms and bedrooms, or wherever the damage takes itself to be alone in those quiet and unquiet suburbs.
Vic waits in the cabin, and can’t help but wait, for he is increasingly drawn to the possibility that this was his old mob, or part of it, and their fate, somehow, still his fate. So he waits until the platform clears, apart from the station staff and the guards gathered together in a small group, talking quietly.
And only when they have finished talking and the group has broken up does Vic rise, pack his leather bag, leave the cabin and step onto the platform. In the immediate distance, over the vacant platforms, he sees the Spirit of Progress. It is, for all the world, moving, even as it is standing still. Pointing like a blue and yellow arrow into the distance of the future.
In this drab part of the city, on the corner of Spencer and Bourke Streets, stick-figure soldiers are climbing on to trams under silvery street lights at the stop opposite the station. The occasional car, for there aren’t many and they are old ones at that, some still carrying charcoal burners, passes by. The trams leave, the cars go and Vic is left standing on the corner, staring at the intersecting streets of the city he has lived in all his life, streets that should look familiar but which, at this moment, have the shadowy deserted look of streets in dreams.