Brigitte

‘ In the previous cricket series, the child had grown up very swiftly. The Australian team won easily, because it had a new champion, Mr Bradman ...’

Sam grinned. ‘Don!’

Brigitte glanced at him, intending to quell, if possible: ‘... who made more runs ...’

She paused. ‘There is a psychological dimension to this which I cannot explore today. Why are all these men gaining credit by running? It is very odd, if you think about it!’ Some of the group laughed, others were puzzled.

‘Anyhow, he made more runs than anybody had made before. This is something he did for the whole of his career. How could the English stop him? They thought of an idea. Bowl the ball very fast straight at him. Frighten him. Frighten the Australians. I am sorry to say that it is an idea that would occur very naturally to a European power with an empire ...’

More laughter, mostly from Karl and Max; Stephen wondered where the thing was going. ‘Years ago,’ Brigitte said, ‘I was teaching tennis to a girl who did not know how to play. It was pleasant. But she had more natural ability than I had, and once she had the idea, she started to beat me. Then she beat me easily. I found an excuse to stop playing. It was only a good game while I was on top! This is what happened to England. The colony became too good. It began to think it was superior. Now, you will say, this is only cricket. Was this also happening in business? Was Australia thinking of starting an empire of its own? The answer is no. No. But a crack, once it is opened, can widen very easily. Cracks have to be closed. The English thought of an idea. They called it leg theory. I am sorry, there are so many terms that are strange to me, perhaps you know them better than I do ...’

‘Bowl at the batsman,’ Sam said, ‘and put half a dozen fieldsmen around him so if he tries to hit the ball to leg, he’ll get caught. They changed the rules to stop it, but that took a while!’ He was pleased with himself. Brigitte listened, then tried to restart. ‘The Australians were not ready for this attack, for that was what it was. The crowds who watched became angry. At least two things are happening at the same time here. The new self-esteem of the colony is not being allowed to grow as the colony wishes, because the mother country wishes to stop the colony’s development. And the means used by the mother country to stop the development look, to the eyes of the people who go to watch the cricket, very like the means of the wealthy people in England to keep the colonials paying their debts. As we would say today ...’ a smile flitted across her face ‘... they felt screwed!’

‘A word with another meaning,’ Max put in.

‘I know. “Who is he screwing?” A strange expression, because the word doesn’t suggest the action it refers to.’ Lou laughed. ‘Good one, Brigitte!’ Brigitte said, ‘I must return to my path.’ She took the edge of a sheet of paper. ‘Now, what I have been telling you about is a family quarrel, I think I shall call it. But what about this? Here is something written fifteen years later, still about cricket, but there has been a huge war in the meantime. England has suffered. Its empire is breaking up. It will never dominate the world again, but it can still play cricket, if not very well. The Australians can beat it easily now.’ She paused. ‘What I am going to read is about the last time the two countries were close in the old way. After the moment I am going to describe, they grow apart. The maturing I spoke of has become a separation.’ Some of them could sense a personal sadness in her voice as she read.

The nature of the welcome given to the Australian team in all parts of the country was quite remarkable. Conventional language scarcely does justice to it. It was, I believe, much more than the traditional welcome to our brethren from overseas; it was in some measure a thanksgiving that one of the great institutions of our common life had been restored. The great crowds that gathered wherever the Australians appeared did more than testify to their love of cricket; they did more than pay their affectionate tribute to a consummate captain of a great team; they did more than give expression to their joy in seeing that team once more in their midst; they gave utterance to their deep-seated satisfaction, after years of darkness and danger, that cricket had once more come into its kingdom in these great and historic encounters.

Brigitte paused, then tried to go on. She got a few more words out before she stopped. For not the least of the deprivations of war is that the glory and ...

Something prevented her. She raised a hand as if to touch her heart, then lowered it. The group looked at her. She swallowed. Something was wrong. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. She tried to cough. ‘Give me a moment, if you please.’.

> back to TOP

Sam

They had dinner in a roadside hotel. Sam wanted to drink, but Ola let him have two glasses. ‘That’s your limit,’ she said, and he stared at her, not bothering to reply. She sipped once, but left the glass standing; her lips felt too dry. She wanted to go on, but he wanted to wait until it was dark. She sensed that if she hadn’t been there he’d have drunk himself silly and driven into the night to find his end against a tree, a telephone post, the wall of something near the road. She was with him, wanting to restrain, knowing that if she exerted a force on him he’d fight it, and her end would be as certain as his.

It was dark when they left. She dared not ask where he’d stop because there was no answer. It could only be when a process inside him reached its end. He drove reasonably for the first half hour, then speeded up. He put the wireless on, something he’d rarely allowed himself, even in his driving days, because it didn’t help his concentration. His agitation showed in the endless pressing of buttons to change stations, sending the figures on the dial in crazy sequence until another burst of booming sound came through the speakers. ‘Sam!’ she said, in a moment when she lost control, but it only excited him: he wanted her fear to help him overcome his own. There were cars and frequent trucks; Sam overtook them wildly, veering in front of them to express contempt. ‘Letting them know I’m leaving them behind!’ he yelled. The changing of stations speeded up, then his probing fingers led him to something that mirrored the frenzy inside him: drums were rolling, attacking the minds of listeners, and orchestral protests cut across; a quarrel of gargantuan proportions was being argued in their ears, the drums releasing destructive energies that expressed themselves in the rabid fury of the car. Ola saw a small, poorly lit car some distance in front; Sam pushed his foot down to consume this wayfarer, but as he was swinging out to overtake, a truck came over the brow of a hill, storming forward without thought of swaying from its path. In an ecstasy of destructive rage Sam took them in front of the truck, flicked the wheel so their tail dodged the car they were passing, in which a terrified man took his hands from the wheel and covered his eyes - Ola saw this, looking away from what was rushing at them - and, late in returning to their side of the road, forced the mighty truck to wobble, its multiple wheels straining to react properly, to remain stable though almost over the edge of track, the music, all this time, roaring in its quarrel - civilisation faces the darkness it carries within itself, and surges when it senses triumph, the madness of war giving way to purposeful, intelligently-driven life.

Ola felt her husband go limp. ‘Pull over,’ she told him. ‘Not here, on the highway. In the next town. Turn down a side street, so nobody knows who we are! We’ll stop. You’ve come through. You don’t deserve it, but you have!’.

> back to TOP

Danny

As classes drew to an end, the system was preparing to roll over for the long vacation, and the semester that would follow, when summer had come and gone. ‘I need a job,’ Danny told Ruby, ‘to keep up the rent if I stay here, or to pay for somewhere else if I move. Maybe I should say when,’ he said. ‘I’m starting to lose my way.’ Ruby had got herself a job as a make-up consultant at a city store. The kitchen was full of magazines about how to make yourself attractive, how to have multiple orgasms, which of the female figures of the day said they wanted to have babies, and how many, and who they’d prefer as the father. Or fathers; some thought that multiple babies meant multiple men. Fidelity was a virtue that filled only occasional columns. Infidelity was what sold. ‘Those girls that come into the shop,’ Ruby told Danny, ‘they’re changing. They know what make-up is. It’s a mask. If you want to do something risky, you need something to hide behind. That’s what I sell’em. That’s what we talk about. How much longer are we living here, Danny? Aren’t you going to make a pass at me? Juliet’ll never know.’

He’d thought of it, because Ruby had a good body, and a way of advertising sex in placing herself, whether close or standing back, but he felt - he believed: he had faith - that Juliet was thinking of him, and that she’d write. She wouldn’t know any other place to write to, she didn’t know any of his friends and, come to think of it, he didn’t have friends any more because he wasn’t drinking at McAdam’s or anywhere else. He was waiting. He couldn’t leave his house, between twenty nine and eighty seven, until she’d released him.

Then it came. A pink envelope and handwriting he knew well. The postmark was Darwin. He put it in his pocket and went for a walk. Something guided him to a park in process of revegetation with native trees and grasses. He took himself to a monument to some explorers, hardly more than a pile of rocks, but possessing a lingering craziness that seemed right for their adventure, and he sat at the bottom, his back against the stones. ‘I’m putting craziness behind me,’ he told the air about him, and, worried, relieved - scared, really - he opened the envelope. It was only a page, nothing on the back, her name written at the bottom. ‘I love you, Juliet’.

‘Dearest Danny,’ it began. ‘I’m so far, far, far from you but we both know we’re close. How can that be? According to the nuns, Jesus said, “I am always with you”; that makes sense to me. Mum - how does she manage it every time? - found a nuns’ school for me, even here, but they only run it, the teachers are, well, half normal. They live in the top end and they work for nuns! I have to study and pass, and go on to study some more and if I keep passing one day I’ll be free. It’s getting closer, I know I’ll last the distance. I want you to last the distance too. I’m sixteen now, Danny. That’s the main thing I wanted to tell you, and the other is ...’

He read her last three words, and her name. He whispered them to the air, then he stood up and shouted them to the city he could see at the edge of the park, the powerful skyline surrounding him. ‘I love you, Juliet!’ He shouted it three more times, holding the letter scrunched in the grip of his hand: ‘I love you, Juliet! I love you, Juliet! I love you, Juliet!’.

> back to TOP

Lou

‘ Ken?’

‘What is it Lou?’

‘Ken, do you like this desert?’

‘I can’t live without it Lou. I brought my wife out here once, not long after we were married. In our car, not the truck, and we went camping. Down by the sea, I’ll show you the turn-off, and we had a look in one of the underground caves. There’s quite a few, as you probably know. Tina’s got a lot of spirit, she was game to go down, though she knew even less about it than I did. I made all the mistakes in the book! However, luck was on our side, we didn’t get into any trouble, but when we’d done the cave, swum in the water down there, done a bit of exploring with torches, all that, and came back up, she said to me that it wasn’t her thing. All our holidays since then have been in places where there’s people. She’s very social, my Tina. Now that’s all right, but she said to me that day when we were back on the surface ...’ he paused, and this time his eyes roamed the horizon, as if looking for a trace of what had happened ‘... she said to me, “Ken, I want us both to be happy, but I know I have to be careful how I make that happen.” Notice what she said? I have to be careful how I make that happen. Then she said, “I don’t want to reduce you, Ken.” Reduce me. I asked her what she meant, but she couldn’t say. But she’s given me my freedom, though I know she’s lonely a lot of the time. The kids are starting to lead lives of their own, it won’t be long before they’ve left home.’ He looked at her through his dark lenses. ‘I don’t know if they’re going to study like you, Lulu. Maybe they will, after they’ve had a wild time, a lot of young’uns do. Here’s hoping, anyway.’

His eyes were back on the road. Lou said, ‘Do you feel big out here, Ken? Increased? That’s the opposite, isn’t it?’

He nodded. ‘I do and I don’t. I have to say I’m selfish. That’s another way of saying I’m lucky. I’ve got what I want. An enormous space with nothing in it except me and my rig to give me something to do. So far so good. It’s the life I always wanted, but it broke Tina’s heart when she had a look, and saw that it was ... strange to her. Distant. It didn’t touch her. It didn’t give her what she wanted. We bought a good house after I’d had a few years on the road, she’s made it look nice, I feel proud of her when I’m home, but I think she’d give it all away if she could take possession of this cabin.’ He paused, as if he’d said too much, but, Lou felt, it was as if she’d been allowed a space in his mind when she was allowed to sit in his truck.

‘Men like to be isolated. Women hate it.’

He nodded. ‘Most of the truckies I know think the same. They all say you can’t live with women and you can’t live without’em. Bloody silly, isn’t it?’ Again, he looked to see what her response would be. She nodded, as she felt he wanted, then she said, ‘When I was lying up there a minute ago, I was thinking ...’

‘Whoops,’ he said, looking at some tyre marks veering into the sand, ‘someone went to sleep for a minute. Not too bad, by the look of it. Buggers think they can drive on pills. Fuckin ridiculous. Sorry Lou, you were saying?’

> back to TOP

Angela

She arranged to have lunch with Carlo afterwards. He asked her to meet him at Tessa’s: ‘We can take a taxi from there. We’ll go somewhere special, a long way away.’ She knew he was thinking of Rome; they were still full of hopes. He met her across the road before the talk, wished her luck, and went to his sister’s room to add his energy to what she was doing. Tessa was there, and surprised to see him. ‘What’s bringing you here this morning? It’s not your usual time!’ Carlo told her, ‘It’s a big morning for Ange. She’s got to give a paper. I’m backing her up.’ Tessa had never heard him say anything like this before. ‘Getting serious, are we? Is there going to be an announcement soon, maybe? Huh?’ Carlo said nervously, ‘Might be. We’ve got things to work through first.’

Tessa left him, and he realised he had brought nothing to fill the time. He looked around his sister’s room. There was a newspaper on the table, opened out. It featured a photo of a man singing, his arms extended in a gesture that would be silly offstage. In the background was a woman with a coiffure so elaborate that he wondered how long she’d sat before the performance having it arranged. Idly he scanned the column. ‘David Symmonds’ rendition of the tenor aria in the middle of Act 1, the opera’s turning point, was rousing to the point of being overwhelming, the most notable performance in this country since the late Donald Smith thirty years ago. I asked myself if Strauss and Hofmannsthal meant it to be so energetic, or simply a graceful distraction, and found it hard to make up my mind. Symmonds certainly achieved the purpose of the aria, which is to divert us from what’s going on inside the Countess. The production underlined the trick being played on the audience by reminding us, only for a moment, by using a searing beam of light, that the true action was elsewhere.’

Carlo studied the picture. ‘The true action was elsewhere.’ He could relate to that. How was she doing, the woman who shared his sister’s bed with him? Were they going to marry? He sensed that if she gave him the chance to ask, then he’d be accepted. Some men - males, boys - he realised, would be happy with what was already happening; the sex would be enough. ‘I’m being joined to her,’ he told himself. ‘I went into this not knowing what was going to happen.’ It struck him that if he wanted to escape, he had a little less than an hour to do it, and if he was still in the room when Angela arrived, he was hers. At her disposition. He saw, too, that this joining sometimes took place by one person capitulating to another, and sometimes by negotiations that took years. He looked at the trees in the college garden. Everything was still, shaded, and the flowerbeds were well-groomed. The place where Tessa was a resident was old by local standards. Would he and Angela ever get to Rome together? He hoped so, and then it came to him again: if I want to get away, it has to be now.

Now!

He stood stock-still in the middle of the room, wishing impossible things. That he could hear what Angela was saying. That he could sing like the man in the photo, commanding attention with the power of art. He’s got music pouring through him, Carlo thought, so where does that leave me?

He searched himself. He had no wish to move. He was in Angela’s hands. He looked at the critic’s words again. ‘The trick being played on the audience.’ ‘The true action was elsewhere.’ Angela could do with him what she liked. That was the position he’d placed himself in. He wasn’t going to run. ‘It’s my fate,’ he said, ‘and I wish I knew how she’s going.’

As twelve o’clock came closer he became restless, trying to work out how long it would take her to walk to the college. Would she get away quickly, or would someone keep her talking? Would her body be readying itself to press against him in the room they’d made their own? To his surprise, he noticed a taxi swing into the college grounds. It stopped below Tessa’s window, and Angela got out. She said something to the driver, then looked up. Seeing him, she beckoned him down. They’d never been in a taxi before, and it struck him as strange in a way that he could only interpret as a warning. He looked back, in the moment before closing Tessa’s door, and saw his sister’s bed, neatly made, as if it had never a thought in its head about who would use it next.

> back to TOP

Karl

He went into the next room, fiddled with the video, and came back. The sound of commentators’ voices came through.

‘Nice ball. Well left though. He picked up the swing the moment it started, which was much later than we’ve seen so far this morning. And he let it go through to the keeper. Now what’s the bowler doing? I think he wants a change in the field. He’s signalling ...’

‘What’s all this about?’

Ronny lifted a finger, meaning wait. The commentators babbled for another three or four balls, then a deep drone came through the speaker of the set, and into their kitchen, filling the room, the flat ... Karl banged down the knife he was using on his toast. ‘Shit!’

Ronny was amused. Karl felt he’d been taken over, body and soul. He’d asked for a day and a night away from love, and now there was something else. ‘What is it?’

Ronny got up, Karl followed. Ronny squatted on the floor not far from the screen, grinning. Karl pulled over a chair. It was a cricket match replayed from years before. Though not a follower of the game, Karl knew that the signage on the players’ clothes was out of date. Australia was playing somebody, and the ground, he could see, was Adelaide. The camera kept panning, trying to locate who it was that was filling the stadium with sound. The commentators were at first nonplussed, then they realised that what they were hearing was a didgeridoo. ‘What a ... what a ... what a noise!’ Karl said. ‘Fuckin fantastic,’ Ronny returned, in charge of their relationship at last.

Karl’s eyes were on the screen. ‘Where’s it coming from?’

‘Keep watchin.’

The camera continued its search, passing quickly, for once, over skimpily clad young women, children with dobs of cream on their noses, old men with wrinkled faces comparing the players with their efforts of years before. The cathedral crept across the top of the screen as the camera searched. Eventually it located a man with a wooden pole somewhat longer than his legs. His cheeks were puffed with the air he was pushing down the pipe. The cricketers, when the camera returned to them, batted and bowled as if nothing was happening, but everything was happening. Everything was changing. ‘Nothing’s ever going to be the same!’ Karl yelled. ‘Thought it might getya,’ Ronny said. He was grinning. ‘How long have you had this?’ Karl wanted to know. ‘Coupla weeks now.’ Karl thought. ‘How did you get onto it?’ Ronny reverted to his normal self. ‘Huntin through the replays one night. Couldn’t sleep, they had this on. Fortunately I was tapin it. No good decidin you like somethin and then turn on the tape, ya miss the best part of it.’

Karl looked at the accidentally but amazingly preserved record of a moment that was changing his life. Wwwwwoooaaaoooaaaoooaaa ... The sound was so deep that it lay below any normal music. It was scarcely more than a reverberation, but it seemed to be booming off something both close and an infinity away. Though the camera lingered on the man - was it a white man? - playing the tube, it was as if he was only miming, pretending to locate what came from a mental space, a vast collective of all the minds that watched over, and received the magic of his country. Their country. Our country. My country..

> back to TOP

Neville

Neville knew everyone in the room was with her, with the exception, perhaps, of Stephen. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said, ‘but they couldn’t think of anything better, and it was consistent with the way they imagined the universe to be. Heaven and earth. Hell and damnation. Eternity in pain, or eternity in bliss, illuminated by the Almighty. This is the heart of what I want to say.’ He leaned forward, the humour that had tinged his presentation disappearing, though none of them noticed: ‘Most of what repels us about that prison was simply a part of the time. Most of the rest can be put down to stuff-ups, bad planning, those on high not wanting to know what those lower down did with the problems they dumped on them. Imagine trying to run a prison system, hard enough at any time, when the orders come from the other side of the world, and in a sailing ship at that! Foul-ups and confusion were inevitable. It’s common to blame the people who ran the prison. That isn’t fair.’ He tapped some books he had on the table. ‘Governor Arthur, O’Hara Booth ... they couldn’t stop British problems being shipped to the arse-end of the earth, excuse my French.’ He looked at Brigitte and felt stupid. She glanced at him with fire in her eye. ‘A silly expression,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, I wasn’t thinking ...’

When he got home his mother asked him how his talk had gone. ‘Not too badly,’ he said, ‘but really I don’t think I convinced anybody.’ His mother looked shyly at him, a sign he knew of a challenge. ‘Perhaps you weren’t fully convinced yourself?’

His answer came quickly. ‘It isn’t that. My problem is that I don’t know yet how to make people take seriously what I say. They think they can brush it off, so they do. It’s a way of reducing the load of things they carry, I suppose. What I said overturned a lot of what those people’ve been saying in their talks, but I don’t think many of them bothered about that because they don’t even know it’s happened. Oh well.’ His mother said, ‘Can I make you some coffee, darling? And those biscuits you like ... there’s still a few left.’ She looked tenderly at her son. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll go upstairs. There’s a bit of music dad plays that I like very much. I came home one night when he thought he was on his own. Well, he was, you were at Hilda’s, and this music was playing, and I caught a bit of it. I want to hear it all, properly, from beginning to end.’ He looked at his mother. ‘I think it might help. Balance me up again, or that’s what I hope.’ She said, ‘Your father’s got hundreds of discs in his cupboard.’ She laughed. ‘I’m not allowed to touch them. He says I’ll get them out of order if I go near them. What sort of order they’re in I’m blessed if I can tell, but somehow he finds what he wants. Do you know what the music was?’

‘It was music that put everything in order,’ her son replied. ‘It was very precious. I could tell, even from the bit I heard, that the man who wrote it had to lose everything else to become what he managed ... no, I mean struggled ... to become. It was music ...’

His fingers were trembling and his teeth on the verge of chattering; his mother watched him shrewdly, and with concern.

‘... that says that any cost is worthwhile, if your goal is big enough, or grand enough, dainty or delicate enough ...’

She saw that he couldn’t finish; he was too young to conclude anything yet. ‘Go and put it on, darling, nice and loud, so I can hear it down here. And when you’ve finished listening, come down and talk to me, if you feel ready. I’d love to hear what you’ve got to say.’.

> back to TOP