There are voices behind them. Rita, Michael, and finally Vic, all glance backwards to the golf course end of the street as they continue their walk down to the Englishman’s house. They can’t see their own house from here, but they can see the pale gums that run along the edge of the golf course. The wire fence that follows the western boundary of the course is rotted and falling down, a barrier to no one. Michael and his friends from the street are always in that vast, open park even though they know they’re trespassing. The wooden gate through which they pass, onto the sandy pathway that leads out to the first tee and the cream and green weatherboard clubhouse on the left, has long since fallen down and its rotted frame now lies on the pine-needle bed beside the fence. Built just before the first war, the whole course is in a slow state of collapse.
Vic, Rita and Michael momentarily fix their eyes on that luminous row of ghost gums, as if half-expecting them to suddenly uproot themselves and join the slow moving procession of families strolling towards the house at the bottom of the street, when there is a faint, metallic click in the night.
Albert Younger has just closed the front gate behind him, and, with his wife, Mary, is now walking along the thin dirt footpath. He wears a starched white shirt, a black tie, and navy blue suit trousers. He is a small, slight man, while Mary is a dark haired, creamy skinned, dark eyed Irish woman. She is twenty-seven and already has five children.
Their house is constructed from wood, cement sheet and pressed boards. It’s crowded and Albert is building a new room. He’s been building it for a year in his spare hours after work. Every night he walks home, a kitbag in one hand and something for the house under the other arm. Sometimes it’s a plank of wood, sometimes a square of masonite, a roll of lino, a tile, a quarter tin of paint or a bag of nails. Bits and pieces. Somebody else’s scraps. Some other family’s leftovers, the off-cuts and discards of another home, left lying around the construction sites after the builders have gone.
Every night he carries a piece of his home back with him. And if he meets somebody in the street on his walk from the station, his steps always long and evenly spaced as if he were constantly pacing out the measurements of this room and all the other rooms he would eventually need to build, he lowers his head as he responds to their greetings quietly. When the children of the street say, ‘Hello, Mr Younger’, eyeing off the salvaged material he is carrying, he nods with his eyes still on his feet as if not wishing to interrupt an important calculation.
Even now, as he walks arm in arm with his wife towards the Englishman’s house, Albert Younger is counting his steps.
By winter, bit by bit, piece by nailed piece, the room will be finished. And it won’t have cost him a penny. Not even the paint, a dark green, military mixture that will cover all the awkward joints, the jigsaw of shapes and the varying textures of the planks and boards. But no sooner is the room complete than another becomes necessary. Albert Younger is always striding back from the station with a piece of his house under his arm.
When a flyscreen door snaps in the night, Vic turns around and quickly recognises a familiar voice carrying across to him from the other side of the street. The door snaps again and a family, the Millers, assembles on the porch of the house directly in front of them. Everybody waves to each other and the young family of four, in bright, starched clothes, walks in unison to the front gate and steps onto the footpath. The two families then walk parallel to each other on different sides of the street, exchanging greetings, glances and nods.
The husband’s name is Doug. He’s a machinist at a nearby factory, in another suburb. He’s the happiest married man in the street, but he will die the next week in a car accident. He smiles and waves again before turning to his wife. Under the last of that peach sky they’re safe. Nothing can touch them. They stop as the young girl kneels and adjusts her sandal. There are no fates to be met because no one’s moving. But as soon as the girl finishes adjusting her sandal, they’re off again, moving forward to that moment, a few hours later next Saturday, when a carload of drunks will drive through a red light.
He’s twenty-eight, she’s twenty-four. He’s just bought her a small, stone pendant, especially for this night. But as much as she loves that pendant, she’ll never wear it again. Within weeks the house will be sold and a new family will arrive.
As they walk Rita glances at the young wife, Nell. Being almost ten years older she thinks of her as a young wife, a young mother, and she sees the contentment in her face, her gestures. A serene confidence that all the days and all the nights will go on just as they are now, and that the course of their lives will simply unroll like new lino, tapering to a distant point too far away to bear thinking about.
You may think your life goes on forever Mrs Miller, Rita is thinking as she watches them. But I’m thirty-three and you make me feel old. I’m thirty-three and I can see that there will be an end to it all. And, Mrs Miller, nothing frightens me more. Being dead. Cooped up in a box. All alone. Everybody going on as usual, without you. But what else can they do except go on as usual? Rita glances at Vic who is reading the hands of his railway fob watch. I’m thirty-three and she makes me feel old. Why is that? Vic closes the face of the watch, slips it into his pocket and stares ahead as if calculating the minutes that must be made up if they are to ease into the platform of the Englishman’s house on time.
The Millers are still standing on the other side of the street. Looking back up towards the golf course again, Rita nods to the approaching figures of Albert Younger and his wife. The curved brick corners of the Bruchners’ house are indistinct. The thin, pale figure of Joy Bruchner, if she’s not already at the party, will be chain-smoking inside. Sometimes, when Rita passes her house, Mrs Bruchner is sitting outside on the porch steps staring down at her feet, or gazing at the dried lawnseeds that never took root. But when Michael says hello, she immediately looks up, often running her fingers through her hair to smooth it down, to smarten herself up a bit before she returns the greeting. At these moments Rita sees the brittlest of smiles, the saddest trace of light in Mrs Bruchner’s eyes, as if she is counting herself lucky enough to have brushed with some blessed normality.