I leave the city behind me every night after work when I take the northbound train. As we leave the station I watch the river, the bridge and the park, the palms and trees on the other side of the bridge recede. Even now I think I’ve caught the wrong train. My city is still south of the river.
All my streets, my laneways, my shops, my picture theatres, my magazine stalls with their latest movie gossip and my green, trimmed parks, all my memories, are now on the other side of the city. On warm, summer nights I would walk back from work through the gardens all the way to Prahran and into the wide, spacious house that mama bought, with my face in a movie magazine. That was me.
My sisters all stayed south of the river, the river that slips away from me every night when my train leaves the platform and we curve across the city to Spencer Street, North Melbourne, Newmarket and on. When, at the end of the suburban line, I see the flour mills in front of me towering over the flat paddocks and square houses, I should feel like I’m coming home but I don’t. And when I step off the train and see the wide, open paddocks and the timber houses, looking like they could all be swept away by a good storm, I still wonder what I’m doing here.
Rita looks at the Millers on the other side of the street. They should feel like neighbours but they don’t. The street should feel like home, but it doesn’t. They are all going to the party, and they all have the party in common. But it’s not enough. And as she eyes Vic, and Michael, who is suddenly catching up to them after having fallen behind, she wonders if the street will ever feel like home.
Don’t marry him they all said. Everybody. My mother, his mother, his aunts. All four of them. They all said don’t marry him. Naturally, I married him.
There I was standing out front of that poky little place in South Melbourne. I was standing on the footpath, the rain was pouring down, but I hadn’t even bothered to open my umbrella. He was lying in the gutter in front of me. Face down. I knew he drank a bit. But there he was, passed out. It occurred to me that he might drown, that I should shift him, but I couldn’t move myself, let alone him. Pound notes were floating along the gutter and his mother was hurrying after them, picking them up before they washed down the drain. And when she’d slipped the sopping wet notes into her dress pocket she turned back to Vic trying to get him onto his feet. She spoke to him slowly, a parent addressing an overgrown child. All her movements were the movements of someone who’d done it all before.
I’d been sitting in that little lounge room, waiting for him all night with his mother and his aunt. Vic and I were getting engaged and I’d come to have tea and talk about it all. But after an hour he still hadn’t come. After two his mother looked down at the cakes and tea and asked me over and over again if I wanted another cup. Vic’s aunt was just looking on and saying nothing. But she had the look of someone who knew what was happening.
Eventually, she said it was pay day. Pay day? What does that mean I asked her, and his mother said it didn’t mean anything. But she added that Vic could be late, so why didn’t I go home and everybody could have tea another time. But I wanted to stay. I was worried.
That was when we heard this sound at the door. A sort of clawing, like a dog or an animal of some kind asking to be let in. The next thing I was standing on the footpath in the rain and he was lying in the gutter with his pay floating all around him.
Dressed in black, in a dark hat and long coat, his aunt waved an umbrella at me. Don’t marry him, she called out through the rain. Mark my words, she called as she disappeared up the street, you’ll rue the day. And then she was gone around the curve at the top of the road and somehow I’d moved and I was helping his mother walk Vic into the house. We dumped him on his bed and she turned to me, very patient and quiet. Thank you, she said. Quietly. You’ve been most helpful, but you can leave me now. I’ll look after him, and she started to unlace his shoes. I still hear her voice. I walked back to the lounge-room table, to the tea, and the uneaten cakes. I heard her voice yesterday in the summer rain outside the station as I stood watching the lolly wrappers being washed along the gutter in front of me, and I hear it now, in this street, under a wide, warm sky. I still hear her voice, soft and sad, as clear today as it was then, when I left them together in that little room.
I’d seen drunks before, but never anybody I knew. Except for papa, of course. But he left so long ago it hardly counts. When mama took me on the rounds of the houses she cleaned, before I was old enough to stay home and look after myself, I saw drunks. I saw people too helpless to get out of their chairs or pick themselves up from the hallways where they’d fallen. But I didn’t know them. They belonged in other people’s lives. They didn’t touch me.
So, there I was that night, walking back in the rain to the tramstop saying never again. I was nineteen. I was about to be engaged, and I shouldn’t have felt like I’d been sheltered all my life, but I did. I’d lived in a house full of women. With my sisters, with mama always looking after things because papa had walked out one Saturday morning and never come back. There I was, nineteen, and still feeling like a girl.
But I was determined as I walked back through the rain that I was never having any of that again. I’d rather stay at home, at mama’s. I’d rather stay a mama’s girl than grow up and drag him drunk from the gutter every pay day.
I told mama I wasn’t going back and she said good riddance because she hated all drink. I told her I was gonna stay home, and she laughed and nodded her head. But as soon as I told her all this, I knew it wasn’t true. I knew I’d already outgrown the house. And if I’d left anyone, if I’d left anywhere, I’d left home.
The phone calls came the next day, early in the morning, one after the other. But I expected them and I told mama I wasn’t home to him. It rang again and again. Then it rang one time and I forgot that I wasn’t in and picked the receiver up. Of course, it was him.
He was promising a whole new start. A clean sweep, he called it. I said no. He called back again. Then again. No more grog, he said. We’ll move to the country when we’re married, he said. Away from all the grog, the pubs and the boozers. And mama was standing in front of me, listening to me while I said no again. She was shaking her head, over and again, agreeing with every final ‘no’ that I uttered. We’ll find a country town, he went on. Away from everybody. A clean start. A nice town, he said. Away from the city, he said again. With lots of country around it. And, somehow, I could imagine it. I knew it was mad, but I could see it. And it looked good. I was quiet as he talked. He knew he was onto something, so he went on and on about the country, and the more he went on and on about it the more I could see it. Then I nodded. I nodded my head, just the once. And I could hear the word ‘yes’ somewhere in the house, in the hall, dropping into place like a felt hat onto a stand. And mama was walking away wringing her hands.
It all happened in half a day, between a rainy night and a bright morning. That evening, a still one, with a cool winter tang in the air, I walked down Tivoli Street to meet him. The leaves were crunching under my feet and my eyes were wide open. I know they were. My strides were longer as I turned into Toorak Road, my steps were surer. I wasn’t ready for any of it the previous night, but I was now. And what I couldn’t tell mama, what I knew from the moment I woke up, with an ache in a part of my heart that had never been there before, was that something had begun and I was going to follow it through. I was going to follow it all through, whatever it came to.
The songs in all the movies had always told me it had to be love when it felt so right. That love was like dancing with the right partner. One step flowing naturally into the next. Forever. It wasn’t quite like that, I knew as much by that night. But I also knew something was happening to me. For the movies also told me that love had a look, an unmistakable look, and I knew I had it, in my eyes and all over my face. There for everyone to see. And love had a sound too. And that sound was all around me that night. The tram bells played little jingles all along Toorak Road. I can still hear them. Even now, whenever a tram passes I hear the traces of those jingles. Poor me. Poor, silly bloody me. I had the look. I heard music in the traffic. And even though all my better voices told me that the song was lying, that it wasn’t so right after all, that it was all wrong, and that the trams were just going clang-clang like they always did, I didn’t listen. And if I had it all back I still wouldn’t listen. I know I wouldn’t. What else could I do?
It’s then that she glances round at Vic as they walk along, notices the greying sides of his head, the grey temples of his trimmed curly hair, but for that moment she only remembers those dark curls as they once were. And Vic catches that look in her eyes, like he knows she’s remembering the old days, and he gives her a snort of a laugh and looks out towards the pine trees of the school.
There she was, sitting up on the handlebars, legs either side of the wheel, not saying a word. And she was light. Like she wasn’t sitting on the handlebars at all, but just above them. I felt no weight, no strain, no effort. I was pushing the bike up a hill into South Yarra. The street was clear and we rode down the middle of it in between the tram tracks. And she wasn’t saying a word, I remember that. At one point she turned around and smiled, almost laughed, but most of the time she was just sitting there. Quiet. Looking down at the tracks between her legs.
I was gliding up the hill, past all the closed shops, like there was no hill at all. The road should have been slippery and difficult from the rain. It should have been an effort to peddle the bike, but I didn’t feel a thing. She was sitting, staring down at the rails and I just knew she was smiling. I didn’t even have to ask her. We’d just met at the Palais and I’d only known her a few hours, but I was sure. And even though it had only been a couple hours, I already felt like there was a before and an after. What I was when I rode down to the dance hall earlier that night was before. The ride home was after. In between I met Rita. And I was scared. Somewhere in me I was trembling. But where was it coming from? I did a mental search as we were riding along. It wasn’t in my hands, not in my fingers, or my throat. Not in any place you could see. But where? And as I was peddling along, as the peddles went round and round, as we rolled over the railway bridge, past the station towards Chapel Street, I knew it was way down inside my best shoes. In a place so deep it wouldn’t show.
The lights at Chapel Street didn’t stop us. There was no one else on the road. We passed through the intersection and she went ‘ooh’ at the red light, then ‘ooh’ over her shoulder at me. And all the time I was asking myself the question: what do you do with a woman like this? What do you do? I was asking myself the question all along the street, as we left the intersection behind, and as we passed the gardens, the shops and the houses. I was asking myself the same question over and again because I’d never had a woman like her before. And then it hit me like an on-coming train. You marry her.
And when the answer hit me I could have sworn we’d stopped dead on the road. I could have sworn everything had stopped; the wind, the clouds, the moon. The whole show. But I looked down at the wheels of my bike and they were turning, down at the chain and the sockets and the pedals, and they were all moving. And then I looked down at my feet where I was trembling.
She raised her arm and pointed out her street. Home James, she said, and I was laughing. She was laughing. All along her street we were both laughing and I knew I was gone. You marry her, this voice was saying. You marry her. Nothing else for it. And when we finally stopped laughing and I slowed the bike at the front of that big, wide house of hers, I raised my head to the sky and took a good look at it. Then she handed me a slip of paper and disappeared through her door.
Vic is quiet. He has taken his wallet from his pocket and is flicking through its contents as if searching for the slip of paper Rita gave him that night, and the telephone number that was written on it. As if recovering that note, and looking at the scrawled telephone number, might recover the time itself.
It was the night his life turned. He knows that. It was the night he asked himself over and over the same question, what do you do? And it was the night he answered it. And when he realised that he’d really answered the question before he’d even asked it, he knew his old life was finished. Even though he’d always told himself, and everybody else had always told him too, that he’d be a fool to ever marry. He knew that even fools had their moment of truth, and this fool’s moment had arrived.