Everywhere, everyone, along with their best clothes, has brought the best of themselves. The city is wonderfully strange. Where is the street? Where are the footpaths, the familiar shopfronts and doorways of the everyday world? Michael can see nothing but people, dressed in their best summer clothes as if for a party, for church or some family celebration.
Along Swanston Street the police, in their white summer helmets, hold the crowds back as the slow procession of cars passes through the thin strip of cleared road. Women in floral dresses and floral summer hats blow kisses, men and boys in suit trousers and starched white shorts wave or simply stand and stare at this slowly moving cavalcade. Above them all, streamers fall from the sky, from the open windows of the buildings looking over the street where office workers wave small flags and let fall from their fingers the ticker-tape of shredded newspapers and magazines.
Michael is standing in the thick swaying crowd on the footpath opposite the Town Hall. This procession, which has brought the residents of the city’s suburbs out of their lounge rooms and streets and shops and clubs, is slowing down at the Town Hall entrance. And as it slows down the players, sitting up on the back seats of open cars, open to the streamers and the sun and the pale-blue sky, come into clear view.
Behind his dark glasses Frank Worrell is crying. Michael had not thought he’d see Frank Worrell crying when he woke this morning. But you can see he’s crying because he is constantly wiping the tears from his face, and for a long time Michael ignores the other players as he can see only the crying face of Frank Worrell behind his dark glasses. And even when he stops wiping the tears away, Michael knows that he’s still crying. It’s not that the tears have stopped, it’s simply that he has given up wiping them away. He is light, this Frank Worrell. He has shed the weight that he carried all summer, and with the weight he has shed the loneliness. Now he is light, and with every tear that he wipes or fails to wipe from his face, he feels his lightness and is uplifted by it as he reaches out for a shred of confetti fluttering down towards him. Just behind Worrell, the dark-blue suit of Alf Valentine is covered in bright-red lipstick kisses, and he wears his kisses as if they were medallions.
The tired looks of a few days before gone from their faces, the players step from their cars — from the bright sun shower of streamers and coloured tape — into the pillared shade at the entrance to the Town Hall. One by one they gather, a team, before disappearing up the wide, marble steps and into the Town Hall itself. For those few moments that they are gone from view, the street is silent, the flags in the office windows cease fluttering, the streamers pause in mid-fall, and everything is still as the eyes of the crowd turn to the balcony. Slowness falls upon them all. The ticker-tape floats on invisible currents as if it will never touch ground. Heads, arms and hands are at various phases of beginning and completing impossibly drawn-out gestures, and the very sound of the day is delayed on lazy summer waves out beyond the city. This slowness that is falling upon them, this clearing in the cluttered rush of the day, opens for inspection the passing moment, and, while the hands of the Town Hall clock slow to a crawl, for all the world resisting time itself, Michael is held in its thrall.
Then it is gone, this glimpse of slowness, of the moment, and when the players emerge from the shadows of the building it seems to Michael that they are less human and more distant than at any other time that summer. Their eyes are alight, their faces shine all along the wide, grey balcony. They are, indeed, the ones who have been lifted up and swept away from their streets and towns and into that pure world of speed and rhythm and action. With their smiles that speak of faraway lands, they wave to the crowds below on the street, to the crowds hanging from the windows of the Manchester Unity opposite the Town Hall, and even, for all Michael knows, to the crowds they can’t see out there in the suburban depths of the city, where, at this moment, the room that was once Michael’s is being cleansed, the grandmother he barely knew having been removed from the house. These farewell waves may, for all he knows, extend that far.
Green city trams jingle their bells as they pass through the narrow strip of the street the police have cleared; the cars that follow sound their horns and a part of the crowd beside Michael is suddenly singing.
Will ye nay come back again?
He didn’t notice when they started, or if they started at once or if one voice only had started them off and they all became a spontaneous chorus. But the crowd and their song, the jingling trams and car horns, fill the street and float upwards to the pale-blue summer sky. And all of it is music, an accompaniment to this song, its words drifting through the air and echoing down the deserted, honeycomb network of cool, dark arcades that lie behind the city’s streets.
Will ye nay come back again?
It is an old song, or it must be an old song, for Michael has never heard it before. But the crowd knows it, and they are singing loudly, unreservedly and unself-consciously in perfect unison. And it occurs to Michael that he has never heard singing in these streets before, let alone singing such as this. And it further occurs to him that these people have never in their lives sung like this, that some part of each of them has waited a lifetime just for this moment when they could release themselves into song and sing like they have never sung before. To be seen singing old songs in public places is not the usual practice of these people. Michael knows this with absolute certainty, because, at the age of sixteen, he may not know many things, but he knows his city and he knows the people who live in it. Today they have found their voice and they have found their song — this brooding, Scottish-sounding thing about coming back again. They will remember, each of them, on some dull distant day given over to remembering, the day they found their voice, found their song and sang it without restraint. And while they are singing, the waving hand of Wesley Winfield Hall stops, and he leans towards that part of the crowd from which the song is rising, and he listens as if hearing the ghosts of his Scottish past singing back to him across the years. And for a moment, the same song flows through them all like the same blood.
Amid the lines of jingling-jangling trams, the hooting cars, the singing, the streamers and shredded strips of newspaper and magazines that are falling from the sky, everybody is waving. It is a way of speaking. The singing, the waving, the just being here — it’s all a way of speaking. And as Michael raises his arm he knows he is not just waving goodbye to the figures on the balcony of the Town Hall, but the whole summer — this summer and all the summers, all the years, months, days and hours he spent chasing speed but never catching it. In the end this is as close as he gets. Staring up with the crowd and waving goodbye to the world that he could once have imagined as his, if only and if only and if only.
Yet even as he waves, he knows it’s all right. And he doesn’t know where this feeling of it being all right comes from. But it’s there, whether in the singing, the song, or the city itself that is now so wonderfully strange. For he has been close to it all afternoon, he has seen it and brushed with it, this world of speed, and now, at last, he can let it go. And besides, he’s happy to be part of this crowd, who, along with their best clothes, have brought the best of themselves.
The usual, quiet rhythms of the Old Wheat Road prevail. The newsagent waves to the chemist as he carries the evening papers into the shop. The bicycle repair shop owner, the butcher and the greengrocer are all inside their shops and the twilight commerce of the suburb goes on unseen. Only Nat, the barber, leaning against the lollipop stick at the front of his shop, a tailor-made cigarette wedged into his peanut teeth, is out to catch the changing colours of the street.
The carnival has come and gone, its music — those Saturday-night xylophones, tin drums and island voices — already fading. The street is closing back in on itself, and the procession that day, like the whole of the summer, will soon be remembered like a party at which everybody went slightly mad for a short time and about which everybody feels slightly silly afterwards.
Except that something is still there that wasn’t before. The rhythms of the street have returned and life goes on as if nothing has happened, but something has. Michael can’t point to it, or touch it or picture it, but it’s there. Something happened over the summer, and everybody knows it happened. And no matter how much they try to return to the ordinary rhythms and rituals of the street, there will always be a trace of something left over that wasn’t there before. Because of this they will always be haunted by the knowledge that, for a while, they were just that bit better than they thought they were.
And the light, slanting across the shopfronts and rooftops, piercing the venetian blinds of all the lounge rooms beyond the street, is a different light. It is part of the something that is still there and which won’t go away. For Michael, standing at the top of the Old Wheat Road, with the flour mill and the railway station just behind him, there will always be a trace of this summer left behind. Something you can’t point to or touch or neatly frame. But it’s there all right, and once it’s been it doesn’t go away; this vague, nagging feeling that we all just might be a bit better than we thought we were.