A dream might look like this, if you could snap a dream and look at it the way you do at a photograph.
Under a clear, starry night the television sits on the lawn facing the street. The armchairs and easychairs from the lounge room have been placed on the lawn as well, facing back towards the lounge room from which they came. Likewise the coffee table and the lampshade. In the heavy, summer heat, the house has turned itself inside out. The private life of the house is on display: what they eat, what they say — and sound never seems to carry so well as it does on clear, summer nights — what they choose to watch on the television, who their guests are, what they drink and how much of it they drink. It is a spectacle housed within a spectacle — a family on their front lawn, there to be observed as they themselves observe the shifting black-and-white images on the television.
All along the street, on this New Year’s Eve, under the heavy night air, the houses have turned themselves inside out. The contents of their lounge rooms, kitchens and bedrooms have tumbled onto the front lawns like toys from a toy box. Televisions flicker amongst the shrubbery, mattresses have been dragged from bedrooms and children bounce in the moonlight. Laughter, telephones and the rattle of distant trains all hang in the air as if the sounds of the night are themselves too weary with the heat to move. Everybody’s lives are on display, but only the school headmaster and his wife — who live in the next street and are embarking on their regular evening walk — seem to notice.
And Michael, who is sprawled on his stomach in a far corner of the lawn. He watches them too — his parents, their friends, as they drink their beers, their shandies, their sparkling wine and their lemonade. They are engine drivers, all of them, past and present, retired and still working. They talk of what they did, what they do, and how it’s not the same any more. Even from where he is, Michael can see the sweat on his father’s face, the sweat on all their faces, all the men, because they sweat, this bunch. The first hint of summer, a big laugh, the slightest effort, and they sweat. A lifetime of standing in front of furnaces, of stoking fires to the point where the heat they emit can drive hundreds of tons of metal and wood, might do that to someone. Might just leave the pores of the skin permanently open so that the slightest effort, or a laugh — and they laugh with their whole body, these people — is enough to bring on a good, satisfying sweat. Although his father doesn’t work any more, he sweats as if a lifetime of working habits, habits that he just can’t break — like waking at five in the morning — are all still with him.
On and on they go, about their engines and their beer and their golf. Michael loathes all their talk. He loathes their beer that smells like vomit, and all their talk about it being the best beer in the world. All their stupid talk about — what is it again? — hops. And colour. He hears it every time his father’s friends visit. Just as he hears all about their golf — their Gary Players and their Arnie Palmers. He can just see them all, on the fairway with their silly little gloves that have no fingers and their nine irons with Sam Snead scrawled across them and their spiked Gary Player golf shoes. They talk about them — these famous golfers — as if they’re gods that just happen to be personal friends, as if they’re all on first-name terms — and all because Arnold Palmer played at the club one Saturday the previous spring. The great Arnold Palmer strode across the lawns of the club to the first tee and hit the ball into oblivion. His father and all his friends stood by the edge of the tee and watched the ball disappear. And when he’d finished, when the great Arnold Palmer had finished his eighteen holes with a club record score, when he strode back to the clubhouse, he shook the hands of his father and his friends, and from that moment on he was always Arnie. He had tossed his Spalding Dot number 1 into the air when he’d finished and Michael watched a group of young caddies clamber for the ball that Arnold Palmer had hit. Ever since then the talk has been about how good he was with the kids, this Arnie of theirs.
Golf. He loathes it and all talk of it. He lays quietly on the grass and keeps his loathing to himself. Besides, they have stopped all their talk about golf and beer and engines. They are talking about the most beautiful woman in the world. Michael studies them, and their wives, as they all in turn watch the television. On the screen black-and-white figures come and go. Women in gowns. Bright gowns, subdued gowns. They step forward, they smile, they speak briefly, they turn and return to their places. But it is the woman with the silver crown in her hair and the dark sash across her chest who occupies the screen. This woman is Miss Universe. As Michael rolls from his stomach onto his back, mentally playing with the images on the screen, he looks beyond the garden to the street and notices that all the televisions, on all the other front lawns, all contain the same image.
He returns his gaze to his front garden, to his parents and their friends gathered round the small table with its snacks and beer bottles and ashtrays. Everybody agrees that it is a good thing, a fine moment, that this woman — the most beautiful woman in the world — is ours. Her name — it is true — looks and sounds like the names of the Ukrainian family opposite, or like that of Michael’s Polish friend down the street. But she is ours, and everybody nods that it is a good thing. There is a silence, then someone suggests it’s a pity, though, that she isn’t really one of us. Silently nodding, everybody agrees. It’s a pity, this driver friend of his father’s adds — encouraged by the general agreement — that she isn’t a real Australian. This is what he meant to say, and he finally says it. Again everybody agrees that it is a pity, the nodding beginning all over again. It is good; no one suggests it isn’t a good thing that this woman is now the most beautiful woman in the world. But it is a pity all the same.
The world will hear of this woman, and, through her beauty, they will hear of us. But they will all know that she isn’t really one of us, her name will tell them that. From her name they will know — as surely as everybody else gathered in the front garden knows — that her beauty comes from a place other than here; and in their hearts, the rest of the world will wonder if this place can produce a thing of beauty all by itself. All agree, as the most beautiful woman in the world fades from the television screen, that their pride is lessened. In the darkness, those invisible figures somewhere out there in the rest of the world will see this woman of now-famous beauty and quietly notice that the seeds of her beauty lie elsewhere.
The men in their white shirts, in their golf shirts, the women in their floral dresses or their summer slacks, all return to their drinks — their squat beer mugs, their bright red, lipsticked glasses and their cigarettes. His mother switches the television off. Their talk continues. Soft, then loud with laughter, then soft again. Then a friend of his father’s — a driver who takes the big passenger trains to the border and back again — swings round on his seat and notices Michael sprawled in his corner of the garden, where he’d been sprawled all night, and asks him what he is doing there. And Michael says ‘nothing’, because he isn’t doing anything, and his father’s friend nods as the whole gathering turns to face him: his father with a pleased, drunken beam across his face, his mother with a quiet smile, the rest of the gathering eyeing the boy slowly, all knowing full well that ‘nothing’ wasn’t quite the word.
Then his father’s friend speaks to him again.
‘Well, come on. What do you think?’
Michael is confused, with everybody now staring at him.
‘About what?’
‘What do you think?’ his father’s friend grins. ‘Is she beautiful?’
Michael shrugs, wondering if it shows, this loathing of them all and their stupid questions.
‘How should I know?’
‘Well, do you fancy her?’
Michael’s mother speaks up.
‘He doesn’t think like that.’
‘Oh, doesn’t he just?’ the wife of his father’s friend says, leaning back in an easychair. ‘He gave me quite a kiss — that boy of yours — when we got here.’
There are smiles and quiet laughter, and with the television off they are now watching Michael. He turns his head away and sees their cat perched on a neighbour’s roof, indifferent to everything, and he is filled with an admiration for the cat that he can’t muster for anybody or anything else around him.
‘Is she one of us or not?’ his father’s friend continues.
Michael says he doesn’t know, perhaps a little too quickly. Then he rises from the lawn and says that he is going for a walk. Where to, his father asks, and he says he doesn’t know. His father’s friend suggests that he doesn’t seem to know much tonight and someone else says leave him alone. The last voice he hears, as he steps out onto the street, is his mother saying don’t be long.
As he is leaving he sees the white, ghostly figure of his grandmother drifting across the lawn to the party, that faraway look in her eyes that is often there, as if in her mind she’s living in another time. The party of friends has turned towards her and is transfixed by the sight of this late guest drifting towards them in the night. She has a chamber-pot in her hand. It is her way. When she empties the chamber-pot, she stops and talks to whoever is around, in whatever room of the house she may find herself, before returning to the room that was once his. His father is immediately uncomfortable, Michael can tell that from his face, for his father is never sure what his mother will say. She is a woman who likes an audience and who says things in public that make his father uncomfortable. Michael watches as his grandmother sits at a vacant chair, how she adopts the stiff-backed posture of a queen of somewhere or other, soaks up the greetings of his father’s friends and immediately takes the stage as the unease settles into his father’s features. Michael hears the words ‘happy’, ‘hot’ and ‘New Year’. Then he hears the word ‘Menzies’ and watches, fascinated, as, stiff-backed in her chair, like royalty that was never summoned to the throne, she prepares to speak.
‘Ah,’ she says, pausing and looking round at everyone, judging her moment, knowing full well they are now hanging on her word. ‘Menzies, that giant, immovable tree, whose’ — and here she smiles sweetly — ‘shall we call it shadow or shade, hangs over us all.’
She has them, this grandmother of his who likes an audience, with her sweet old lady stare and her faraway eyes that don’t miss a thing. Michael leaves behind a shifting, moving, talking, group portrait. He moves away, slowly, under the darkness of his street, the front yards and houses all around him bright with porch lights, improbably placed lampshades and televisions flickering in the shrubbery. As he passes the houses of the street he instinctively falls into the ritual of his daily roll-call, as he would if going to or returning from school.
As the names of the houses automatically roll off his tongue, he tries to remember if he has ever asked that question: if they are our names, or their names. At the end of the street, just before the dip in the road that leads down to Bedser’s, he turns to take in those distinct squares of light that represent each of the houses in the street. Each of them open to the night, but closed in with fences and gates. He continues walking and thinks of the Home and what Kathleen Marsden might be doing right now. If he went to the Home and softly called her name from the garden, would she hear? And if she heard, would she answer? And if she did, what would he say?
And then, somewhere in the country darkness of the hills and paddocks beyond the suburb, he swears he can hear music. Metallic music, island music. Rolling inexorably towards the suburb and his street, its very nature announcing that it comes from faraway places, where things are done differently.
As the music mounts, as its waves of sound roll irresistibly through the darkness, he knows that it brings with it those faraway places, and that, once here, a part of those faraway places will always stay behind. That from this point on there will be a before and an after, and this summer will be the boundary line by which such befores and afters will be measured.