All through the winter and the spring the paddocks are green and lush with tall grass, thistles, prickles, wild shrubs, wild flowers and red berries. When the paddocks are moist and abundant, Rita can imagine them being part of wide, open country, as they were before the suburb arrived. Skinner’s farm, just beyond the next street, is only a hint of what it once was, before the only remaining family member, the ageing snowy-haired son, unmarried and childless, sold most of the land to developers, retaining only the bluestone farmhouse, a few acres and a handful of cattle to keep him interested in life.
He’s got a farmer’s face, the son. Red and ruddy from being out all day, and his hair is white and springy. He wears old clothes – canvas trousers, collarless shirts, clothes that nobody wears any more, clothes that nobody has worn for years – as he ambles about the street with that slightly pigeon-toed walk, leaning to one side, saying hello to anybody who passes and mumbling to himself as if he’s wondering where on earth he is, and what all these people are doing wandering around where his farm used to be. Simple, the suburb says. Too old, too much sun. Harmless enough, but quietly off his head. But Rita knows he’s not. He’s just outlived his time. Anybody who outlives their time looks funny to everybody else.
Old stock, Vic calls him. A dying breed. Vic talks to him, and Rita’s now slowly turning round to Vic. She wants to ask him what they find to talk about. But he’s looking away and for a moment she’s worried something is wrong again. She is tempted to ask if he’s all right, then she sees that his face is calm. He’s all right. He’s just looking out towards the flour mills and railway station, lost in his thoughts, working towards an observation that he will soon share with her the way he often does. He’s not having a turn. She decides to let him be. There’s no need to bother him. Not tonight.
It starts way out there, Vic thinks, beyond the mills, beyond the houses. Out where there’s nothing but paddocks of Scotch thistle, where the road itself begins. The main road, the one that splits the suburb, and runs in a straight line for over a mile. There’s a curve just after the shops, but it’s nothing. You can do a lot with a road like that. And it’s made too. Paved. The only made road in the suburb.
I never notice where the sound begins when I’m lying in bed at night. A faint glow at the edges of the window from the streetlight on the corner, the bedroom black, no branches swaying in the wind. Nothing. The kind of silence that hums. Suddenly there’s a low groan out on the road. Coming from out there, beyond the railway line, and the houses. This low, rumbling groan, tearing along the road.
The engine’s got a big note that spills out over the suburb, growing in volume with every second, and I can tell exactly where the car is. I can hear him passing the mills, passing the shops, hear him slow down ever so slightly for the curve at the top of the street, then hear him emerge from the bend and simultaneously put his foot to the floor as he settles into that mile of uninterrupted, straight, flat road. The main road is the next up, parallel to this, and as he passes I know he’s moving. I know a thing or two about speed.
There’s a brief tremor of sound at the bedroom window, a flutter among the venetians as he passes. Then he fades into the night as the drive takes him along the entire northern boundary of the golf course.
It’s one or two o’clock in the morning. I don’t know who he is. Then again I may have met him. But I doubt it. He takes care of that car. It’s tuned like a musical instrument. You can tell he’s taken it apart and put it back together, again and again. He must have to make a sound like that. He knows every part of it. And when he drives it he can visualise all the moving parts.
I know that much. And I know what takes him out there at this time in the morning. The road is completely his. He can push his car to the very limits. He can either accelerate into life, or accelerate into death, and there’s nothing to stop him.
The groan dies at the end of the golf course fence, then suddenly starts again. Back along the length of that thin, black strip of road, past the golf course, past the house, sending another brief shiver through the venetians, and onto the curve at the top of the road where the car slows ever so slightly, begrudgingly, then past the shops and the flour mills, and back out to wherever it was it came from in the first place, till the groan of the engine merges with the hum of the silence that’s settled on the bedroom again.
Two, three times a week Vic hears that sound. He’s come to expect it. Come to listen for it. When he wakes at night the silence is everywhere. Until that car comes along and the sound starts again.
Yes, he’s all right. She’ll leave him alone. Wherever his memories or thoughts have taken him, he wants to go there by himself for the moment. So Rita lets him be. Besides, she’s counting the years. He’s walking slowly beside her, looking beyond the street out towards the mills, his eyes partially closed like people do when they’re listening for something. But what could he be listening for out there? The train’s passed. She can’t hear anything now. She could ask him, but she’s busy counting the years they’ve been together. Even though she knows, she adds them all up again. Fourteen. Then she counts backwards, all the way back to the first year, the first night. The one that led on to all the others. All fourteen of them.
She’d seen violence before. But not up close. She’d heard stories of violence. Her mama often went into people’s houses and looked after those who were too old or too drunk to look after themselves. She’d go with her at nights because she was too young to be left at home alone. When her mama was finished her rounds they’d walk back up Greville Street to the police station where she would report to the police on the drunks and the fights and the alcohol. Sometimes Rita heard about the violence her mama might have seen through the day, but not often. Everybody knew her mama. Whenever they passed the pubs, the drunks outside on the footpaths would stop swearing and fighting, and raise their hats as they passed. So Rita never really saw violence up close until the first time she met Vic.
We were dancing that first time, Vic and me. We’d never met before. We’ve never danced together before. I can still hear the song, smell the perfume, the aftershave and the soap in that big, stuffy dance hall. Neither of us were talking, then he told me his name, introducing himself, and I liked the sound of it. It sounded right. Just the kind of name I’d been waiting to hear. I was nineteen and felt like I’d been around forever waiting for something to happen. And while I was thinking about the sound of his name I was watching him talk. I wasn’t really listening, you can’t when you’re trying to take everything in at once. But I knew he was trying to be funny and I’d laugh every now and then.
What I noticed was this, he could dance. I mean really dance. And he wasn’t afraid to hold me. I could feel his hips and his arms. There was energy there. He was talking away but he was throwing himself into the dancing. He had life, Vic. And all this with his good looks. No wonder I wasn’t listening to him. Besides, when he told me his name and it sounded right, I said to myself, this is it. And while I was listening to that voice inside my head, saying this is it, there was another voice telling me I’d never said that before. I’d always been one to um and ah in the past. But not that night. That night it was, well, it was like the movies.
Mama always told me I had a head full of movies. Too many. If I wasn’t at one, sitting and dreaming in the dark, I had my head in a movie magazine. I knew all about their lives, all of them. The stars. And mama was always dragging me out of the shops where all the shop owners knew me, saying the movies weren’t life. That if the movies were like life nobody would go. Did I understand? And I’d nod. I’d nod as she would lead me off to some dark, old house, where she washed and cleaned all the grey old women who were too old and tired to wash themselves. And I’d sit and help in those old rooms that smelt the way old peoples’ houses do, with their drawn curtains blocking the world out, the air heavy and dark, and the bedrooms always stinking with the stale smell of old woman’s urine coming up from the potties they kept under their beds. And no matter how much they covered their potties in fine lace doyleys, with flowery borders and glass jewels to weigh them down, the rooms always smelt of urine because they were all too old, too tired and too past it to empty them. So it was left to mama, even though she wasn’t much younger than the people she looked after.
So when she told me that the movies weren’t life I knew exactly what she was talking about and why she was saying it. I’d nod when she asked me if I understood, but deep down I figured the movies could be life. If you waited. If you believed. So when mama and everybody else said they weren’t, I just nodded to keep them all happy while I went on believing.
And I was right. It was happening. There we were dancing like we’d been doing it forever. I’d danced myself right into a movie. The right name, the right face, the right song, whatever it was. Everything was as it should be. And then someone pinched my bottom. I jumped. I knew it wasn’t Vic. Impossible. We’d known each other for ten minutes and I knew straight away it wasn’t him. So when I jumped I said, someone’s just pinched me on the bottom. He said who? I looked around and there was this bloke I’d never met before, dancing with a woman I’d never seen before, smiling and waving at me as they drifted away across the dance floor. While the song was still playing Vic stopped dancing, and walked up to the other couple. And this was when I saw violence up close for the first time.
Afterwards somebody said it was nothing, but it didn’t look like nothing to me. At first there was just the three of them, then four, then seven, then I lost count. I stood on the edge of it watching. Me, the one who got her bottom pinched. Not that I could see much because everybody else just kept on dancing. They cleared a space and let the fight work itself out. And it did. Soon Vic came back with his shirt torn, hanging loose out of his trousers. And he was rubbing his hand, telling me it didn’t hurt and trying to grin. I was too stunned to do anything but follow him onto the lawn at the front of the dance hall.
Outside the palms were swaying in the wind. Before the fight happened I could have imagined an orchestra under the palms, but now all I could hear was the cold sound of the waves in the bay splashing onto the beach behind the bluestone walls at the bottom of the street. I looked at my watch and it was quarter past nine. By my calculations we started dancing at quarter to. Maybe less. We’d known each other for a little over twenty-five minutes. And when I thought about it like that I told myself I shouldn’t feel any compulsion to stay. I asked him if he wanted me to stay, and he said yes. But he didn’t want to go back inside, and I said good, I’ve had enough of dancing.
It was cold as we walked down to the beach. I had a sly smile on my face just for mama. He looked good on the beach in his suit. His coat lapel torn, and his tie still flung over his shoulder. He told me what he did. That’s why they called him Vic, not Victor, he said. Vic for Victorian Railways. VR for short. It was a joke. He was standing there talking away, still rubbing his hand, and I was hoping I looked good.
Later, when we walked back up to the dance hall he said can I take you home and I said yes. Yes, you can take me home. Soon, I was sitting up between the handlebars of his bicycle with my legs either side of the front wheel and my dress pulled up so it didn’t blow everywhere. He pushed us all the way to South Yarra. All the way up the hill at the end of Tivoli Street. With that salty wind in my face and the tramlines shining before me under the streetlights, I felt like I’d just started to live.
Rita shrugs her shoulders and gives up on the years. It doesn’t matter in the end. The years led here. They were always leading here. A new suburb out on the edges of the city. A dirt road, a dirt footpath. The sun low on the swaying grass in the open paddocks. She eyes Vic beside her. His cigarette’s gone out and he re-lights one of his cork-tipped cigarettes that he keeps for special occasions. She’s watching his hands as he cups the flame. What happens to it all? What happens to all that life? All that time? Where does it all go? One moment you feel like you’ve got all the years in the world to live, and the next you feel like you’ve lived them. One moment you can’t wait for everything to start, the next you’re counting back through the years like it’s the only thing left to do.