Michael stares at the stationary figures of his mother and father; his mother looking quizzically at his father, his father still with his ears turned towards the railway line, listening to the train as it passes. He’s here but he’s not here, Michael thinks. The sun is low and the three of them stand bright in the last of that Saturday night sun.
Just as the train fades, the ripe bells of St Matthews swell in the close air, two notes slowly following each other at even intervals. One overlapping, then succeeding the other, before being succeeded itself. It is a small wooden church with a weatherboard belfry and stands on the corner of the main road, back towards the railway line. It is near and the bells are clear. To Michael these bells always called from another time, even another country. And they always sounded like the end of something, but he could never tell what.
His parents are the length of a cricket pitch apart, and Michael, in the middle, can observe them freely, for they seem to have forgotten all about him. They could be meeting for the first time. They could be strangers and he has the sudden, uneasy feeling that he doesn’t really know who these people are. When they stand like this, separate, silent, in their own worlds like statues on museum lawns, he is seeing something of who they were before he came along.
The previous winter, after school one evening, when his father was at night shift and his mother was at work and he was alone in the house, he took the shopping trolley and wheeled it along the dirt path that led to the station. By five it was already dark and he stood outside the ticket collector’s gate and watched the yellow lights of the train as it pulled into the platform. In the waiting room some of the passengers took their good work shoes off and changed into their old shoes, for the waiting room was lined with the old, dirty shoes that everybody used for the muddy walk back from the station. When the passengers strode out onto the asphalt path keen for home, he looked for his mother. But the last of them came and went and she wasn’t there. He stood in his cardigan, hunched over the shopper, and waited for the next train.
When it arrived and its red doors swung open he watched the crowd once more heading towards the waiting room for their shoes, then on to the ticket collector’s gate.
She didn’t see him at first. Nor did he immediately recognise her. She looked different. What she is, he guessed, during the day when she’s working. He stood near the ticket gate, with the red-brick Post Office behind him, watching the people in their hats and coats, carrying their bags and clutching their evening newspapers, and wondering if he should be there at all, the only child at the station. But then she saw him and smiled and he knew it was all right. She put her bag in the trolley and together they took the asphalt path down to the shops.
In the butcher’s shop he stood back against the wall, playing with the sawdust at his feet while his mother talked to the butcher. They laughed and talked like old friends and once again Michael felt like he shouldn’t be there. When his mother took the chops and the mince, the butcher called her by her name, Rita, as he waved goodbye and Michael connected that name with his mother as if learning it all over again.
When she closed the vinyl lid of the shopper, she smiled and told him what a good idea it was to bring the shopping trolley to the station, and they walked back along the dirt path, Michael pushing the trolley, his mother nodding in the dark street to his comments, saying yes or no to his questions. Sometimes she was silent. During those silences Michael occasionally looked up from the trolley at her, making out her features in the dark, the hair, cut and combed like an actress, the make-up, the lipstick red in the shadows. And even though he thought she might turn at any moment and catch him staring, she didn’t. She was looking ahead, along the street, and he wanted to know what she was thinking.
It is then that Rita calls out to Vic, across that imaginary cricket pitch that divides them, and tells him to wait. They should all walk to the party together, she says. Like a family, she adds. And so Vic waits as Rita joins him. As soon as she does Michael begins his run, slowly accelerating, his shoulders level, his paces even as he nears his delivery stride. When he hits the point of delivery Vic and Rita step back quickly to make way as Michael bowls an imaginary cricket ball into the twilight like the great Lindwall. Michael is cricket mad. The fence at the back of their house, against which he bowls every day, bears the marks of his madness. Michael stops and stares into the distance following the path of the invisible ball. He then turns back to his parents and they continue their walk down the dirt footpath to the Englishman’s house at the bottom of the street.