It’s another world in the basement. Others, such as Sam and all the rest of them, might travel to the ends of the earth to find elsewhere but George finds it right here, under his nose. In the basement of the newspaper offices, watching the first edition of the morning paper coming off the presses. George is years from dying but he sometimes imagines that if he were ever granted a choice of where to die it would be here in the basement, in this newspaper world in which he now spends so many of his days and nights.
Sam, he calculates, checking his watch, will be somewhere in the Great Australian Bight. Or so he imagines. He’s not really sure how fast boats travel. When George said goodbye the day before (telling Sam that he wouldn’t be at the docks, and Sam telling him that he didn’t want anybody there anyway) he couldn’t help but notice that Sam had the eyes of someone who wasn’t coming back, whose eyes were fixed on the horizon and the great world out there. On George’s desk upstairs is a row of books: fiction, poetry and criticism. Books that have been with him for most of his adult life, which he dates from an afternoon when, at the age of eighteen, he picked up a copy of The Great Gatsby and read it from cover to cover in one day, telling himself as he put the book down that that was it, that was what he wanted to do. That or nothing. No in between. They’ve since been read and re-read, this row of books, this private canon. But these days they represent the life that he walked away from, the life he’d committed himself to at eighteen, the ‘that or nothing life’ with nothing in between. Once it was everything. And whenever he thought of himself, throughout his university years and in the Education Corps where he saw out the last of the war, biding his time, whenever he imagined himself in the years to come, he saw himself as a solitary figure seated at a desk, head bowed in concentration, a lamp to light the page. And heaven just above his bowed head. One part of him in this world, the other above it all. Whenever he sought to define himself, it was in terms of this image. And it stayed that way until the newspaper editor offered him another possibility, another life altogether. Once, the life of the solitary artist was everything. Then it wasn’t. And, in the end, he’d like to think he chose earth rather than heaven. But he will keep those books and part of George will always hang on to that image of himself, like a snapshot of a younger self, and occasionally wonder what if … and, what if? But not really. For those books will become a record of the life he walked away from. And would walk away from again.
In the end, his steps had led him here, into this windowless basement with the continuous rumbling of the presses all around him, with the ink-stained hands of the operators and compositors, and the smell of cigarettes and ink everywhere. Rising up from the presses: noise, ink and smoke. This, to George, is the heart of things. This is where words, dreamt up in somebody’s head, meet ink and paper. Where the abstract becomes concrete, where it achieves touch and smell, dragged down from the heaven of someone’s mind and into the earthly world of sensation. Into the earthly world of newsagents, milk bars and street corners. And immediately. No waiting. No sooner thought than written and out there in the world. It’s a miracle to George. The whole world of the mind, becoming words that will enter other minds by being read. And, in being read, in entering someone else’s mind, these words fulfil their function. And the minds that dreamt them up and those that read them are less alone. And one’s experience of living is that little bit less isolated. No longer in the head but in the world. Shared. And immediately. Which is what George encountered when he first came to the paper. That shared experience of writing and reading. And readers. Readers on a scale he had never imagined possible before. And this is where it all comes to life, day after day, night after night, in this inky underworld of rumbling presses and shifting, shadowy figures such as George.
He doesn’t have to be here but he has become increasingly enthralled by the sight of this miracle coming together and rolling off the presses, so that the continuous conversation between people who have never met and who don’t know one another, but feel as though they do, may continue. No, he doesn’t have to be here but he is drawn to the place. Even fascinated by it. Here, where the abstract and the concrete meet, where they are bundled up and sent down long chutes to be loaded into waiting trucks and vans and delivered into the world. And this will not change throughout his life, nor will the thrill of being here ever leave him.
When the first of the papers leaves the offices, George takes the stairs up to his desk, picks up his coat and briefcase and calls it a day, even though it is approaching midnight. The street is deserted. The trains have stopped and the rail yards opposite the offices are quiet. The only sound is the revving of the trucks as they roll into the street and begin their rounds.
The night is January warm, and as he strolls towards Swanston Street where he will catch the last tram, he carries with him, under his arm, the first edition of the morning paper, which he will read on the tram. And with that expectation comes the thought that he may well be the first reader. And that the first reader is always privileged, a sort of Crusoe on the beach, before the first footprints appear. But as much as he entertains this speculation as his tram arrives and he steps on (for George has, and will always have, the habit of playing with fanciful speculations at idle moments), he is also mindful of Sam, rolling with the waves of the Great Australian Bight (or wherever he may be), and wondering if Tess went to the docks that morning, and, if so, what sort of goodbye they shared.