Homecoming (2 page)

A voice shouts at him. Feet pound the side panels of the ute. A man grapples with a door handle, twisting and pulling. The vehicle shakes. Abusive words filter inside. Martin stiffens. Unmistakable traces of Asian accent. Hastily he withdraws his hand from the glove compartment. Slender figures jump on the bonnet. Hands reach the windscreen and snap at the wipers. The ute has stopped almost under a streetlight. Martin can make out that both men are wearing caps with the peaks turned to the back of their heads. Faces press against the windscreen. Catcalls and whistles. Martin crosses his arms and hugs himself. Other cars speed in the opposite direction.
This is a civilised country,
he tries to assure himself.
There are laws and modes of acceptable behaviour.
Immediately he feels foolish about such assumptions. Naked apes and demons live with artists and angels, his friend Colin Gear said to him once. Civilisations are built on human misery, chains and instruments of war. Well, Colin is injured enough to know.

Unexpectedly both men slide off the bonnet and run to their car for a getaway. Martin sits quietly, unable to control his trembling. There is a tap on his window. Reluctantly he rolls down the glass.

‘Everything okay?’ The beam of a flashlight dances inside the ute.

Martin nods, unwilling to trust his voice. He glances nervously at the glove compartment. For years he has been careless in keeping the revolver there.

‘Sure?’

‘Yes,’ he whispers.

The stranger looks at him with obvious scepticism. ‘I’m an off-duty policeman.’

‘I…I just lost control,’ Martin explains clumsily. ‘Thanks for stopping.’

‘I thought those blokes in the car parked in front of you were being a nuisance,’ the policeman persists. ‘You didn’t get their registration number by any chance?’

‘No. It’s my fault. I nearly ran into them. A mild case of vehicle aggressivity.’ Martin laughs nervously. ‘Isn’t that the term? I’m fine.’

The policeman switches off the flashlight. ‘Take care.’ He heads back to his car and pulls out from behind the ute.

Apprehensively Martin turns the ignition key. The ute coughs into life. There is a heavy noise in his ears. Fear is the most exhausting of all emotions, he concludes. A life-long adversary that people are compelled to shelter inside themselves.

He drives slowly and slides onto a grassy strip off the road. The ground is dry. The beginning of winter has not brought
any rain yet. The streetlights give him the confidence to get out of the ute. He sits on the grass, wishing for a cigarette. It is a longing for an abandoned habit. He can hear the crickets. A car pulls out of a driveway on the opposite side of the road.

Martin leans back on the palm of his hand and looks up. The night is like a gigantic umbrella that has opened slowly into an arc of darkness. He grabs a handful of dust. There were strange words that Colin would sometimes quote when they went on patrol. Something about fear in a fistful of dust. Martin lets the earth trickle down between his fingers. It all makes sense to him now.

The compulsion to eat in large quantities is often indicative of stress, the doctor keeps telling Martin. It suggests lack of harmony between the body and the inner self. Bruce Campbell is a new-age medico, keen on prevention rather than cure. He is an advocate of herbal therapy, open-minded about the merits of naturopathy, reluctant to prescribe antibiotics too readily, enthusiastic about meditation and interested in Oriental philosophy.

Martin pops an antacid tablet in his mouth. On the way back home, he had stopped to gorge himself mindlessly on a hamburger, a bucket of chips and a quarter of barbecued chicken, washed down with a couple of beers. He topped off the meal with a double scoop of vanilla ice cream in a chocolate-coated cone. He imagines Bruce admonishing him in his mild-mannered way with another lecture on weight control. More rice and vegetables, fruits and bread. Fish, at least twice a week. Fewer takeaways and no more than two standard drinks of alcohol per day. All this information is, of
course, laced with details about the damage that can be caused by trans-fatty acid, the necessity of avoiding hydrogenated oil and the benefits of HDL, the good cholesterol.

Martin feels bloated but unrepentant about the ‘overindulgence’—in his mind, an acceptable euphemism for gluttony. So he occasionally shortens his life by a few hours perhaps. Mortality on the fast track. He should never have taken his son’s advice and changed doctors. Old Doctor Richardson had the right ideas. Plenty of pills and few restrictions on eating and drinking. Martin chews another tablet, pleased about the absence of guilt. After all, he had merely rewarded himself for what had been an exceptionally difficult day.

HE HAD SPENT THE
morning in the house in a state of heightened nervousness, mumbling what he might say to Melanie Charles. And even before the road rage incident, the afternoon had not passed without incidents. On his way to see the tutor, the ute had stalled twice. Then Martin was delayed by the lift getting stuck somewhere between the fourth and fifth floors of the architecturally uninspiring building. But the interlude had given him the opportunity to reflect on the current phase of his life. Between the desire for change and the anxiety to retain the familiarity of routines lay the tension of middle-aged living. It was a point of stasis that paralleled his predicament in the lift.

There was something sacrosanct about the lack of motion, his unexpected zone of calmness, bare and without the
discordance of noise. Martin imagined a blown light fuse to enhance the insularity. There was ambiguity in the silence of darkness. Therapeutic comfort for the body and yet the fear of what the mind could regurgitate about a deeper darkness, which he had known.

He wondered if someone had alerted the maintenance staff. There were always those who were eager to keep the tools of civilised life efficiently functional. In the meantime—momentarily he shut his eyelids—these slivers of time belonged exclusively to him. No obligations. Nothing that warranted his attention. The space around him was like a patch of cleared land, a life swept clean of accumulated junk.

Suddenly he felt a slight jolt. The lift began to glide upwards again. The afternoon had been incapacitated for a few minutes and drained of its vitality. Martin deliberated about the crowded world outside, its frenetic pace and ceaseless ego-jostling. At times the sterility of emptiness was not such an unbearable alternative after all. Reluctantly he continued to contemplate how he would explain to Melanie Charles his failure in the unit on Ethics.

His tentative knock brought a cheerful, ‘Come in!’

He fingered the doorknob. His breathing was laboured. He considered walking away. A traceless disappearance would have been so much simpler.

Throughout his chequered and uneventful tertiary endeavours, Martin had never seriously considered writing assignments or taking examinations. It wasn’t that he objected to the academic ranking system, but for him, a mark or a grade had no meaning. A degree was irrelevant.
He was in his fifties and without any hankering for respectability or conventional employment. He had listened, discussed, read and learned. The purpose of education had been served.

Melanie Charles smiled brightly as Martin shuffled in. As always, his eyes wandered to the unframed print stuck on the wall behind her table. The colours had faded. The edges were curled and torn. He was drawn to the clarity of the solitary face with the oval-shaped mouth wide open in an agonised cry of recognition of the darkness of one’s soul.

What was worse, thought Martin, than the despair of turning inward and trying to know oneself? At best there were shards of images, transient and distorted. Faces depersonalised and sexless, whipped along by the feverish urgency of time. What was it that Heidegger had said?
We are ourselves the entities to be analysed.
And the end result of such scratchy attempts, Martin had concluded, was anxiety caused by the discovery that life was turbulent and confused.

He wondered if his apology to the tutor sounded genuinely contrite. He had not submitted any of the written work prescribed at the beginning of the semester.

‘Martin, you obviously read everything on the reading list,’ she observed. ‘That’s unusual. So why…? You haven’t been ill?’

He shook his head.

‘I thought you enjoyed the course.’

‘Immensely,’ he assured her hastily. ‘And I learned a great deal from you.’

Melanie Charles was visibly flattered.

‘It was something you quoted from Nietzsche that really lifted my interest in ethics. It was in the very first tutorial.’

She was unable to recall what she had said.

‘The bite of conscience is indecent,’
he reminded her.

‘Oh, I don’t remember what I was referring to then,’ she said stiffly. ‘Anyway, whatever it was must have made an impact for you to remember.’

He always veered away as soon as the connection surfaced in his consciousness: land-mined zone. Vietnam. Life and nature abused. He dropped the shutter on hideous memory.

‘I’m not much good at writing,’ Martin explained. ‘Exams make me resentful. I find written work to be an imposition.’

The tutor nodded. ‘But with minimal preparation you could have passed. You know much more than most students who receive credits.’

Martin did not respond immediately. He had no wish to sound as though he was making excuses. Then he said slowly, ‘I
know
what I have learned, and if I can apply that to my life then that is meaningful education. For me.’

Melanie looked at him as if she were envious. ‘What will you do now?’ The question did not seem intrusive or patronising.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Enrol in another course somewhere else. Next year, after I’ve saved some money. Mind you, I’ve run out of places that will accept me.’

‘What other courses have you taken?’

‘Modern Australian Literature. Renaissance History. Politics. Psychology.’ He looked at her sombrely. ‘Failed them all.’

The revelation was so casual and devoid of self-pity that it had overtones of dark comedy. The tutor threw back her head in astonished laughter. ‘Pardon me, but you sound as if failure is a natural progression in life. What will you study next?’

‘Comparative religion,’ he replied seriously and without hesitation. ‘I’d like to know more about the different forms of our greatest creativity. I want to explore what Mallarmé said in one of his letters.’

‘Which was?’

‘That we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul.’

HE SHIVERS AND
clasps his hands together to prevent them from trembling. The evening returns to haunt him. Those two men in the Falcon brought out in him a primate’s instinct for survival. For a moment he had felt as if there was no one else in the world. Fear snakes through him like a current. A cry escapes his mouth. Overwhelming panic, as depicted in Munch’s painting. Thick wavy lines of reddish-orange and yellow flash in front of him. He blinks. Meandering brown, like tree snakes. Or is it lava grey? The world on fire. Hands press against the sides of the head. ‘It’s in the past. The past!’ he whimpers. The pain of loneliness. So human. In entrapment and paralysis of will. Fragmentation. The mind in the picture is a gigantic prison chambered with crowded cells and unlit corridors echoing with menacing footsteps. That is how he is.

‘Did you by some miracle of the imagination transport yourself to the twenty-first century? Did you manage to see
the future? What was your vision, Edvard Munch, that enabled you to paint like that?’ Martin whispers. He speculates about the possible answers. Art, after all, is visual philosophy. It is one of those times when he flatters himself with the fanciful notion that the picture was specially painted for him.

Gradually he calms down. He leaves the door open to rid the spare room of its musty smell. He has already rummaged through several boxes and selected four volumes of poetry for his friend, Colin Gear. He commends himself for the diversity of choice—Rilke, Neruda, Lowell and Paz. No one could possibly accuse him of being a narrow-minded advocate of literary monoculturalism. He has deliberately avoided selecting anything local. More than likely, Colin has read everything that Martin possesses in his collection of Australian poetry.

He feels guilty about not having visited his friend for several weeks. By way of compensation he selects two more volumes of poetry. But this time, I won’t ask him about the manuscript. I won’t even mention it, Martin determines; given the opportunity, Colin talks at length about his memoir of the war. ‘There are already too many books about Vietnam,’ Martin had said when Colin couldn’t find a publisher. Colin had become indignant. ‘It’s soul writing!’ he declared. But is it encapsulated in a body, Martin wanted to ask. That was necessary for a publisher to survive. Instead he remained tactfully silent. After all, Colin had refused to let him read the manuscript.

He sits now on the frayed carpet, surrounded by boxes that have never been emptied. They are crammed with books
and newspapers dating back to the Vietnam War. Martin leans back against a leg of a large dining table, the only remaining furniture from his married days. Under the unevenly spread tablecloth is a large model of the battlefield where the Normans and the Saxons clashed in the decisive battle of 1066. He remembers the hours he devoted to the model, and his father’s inability to understand such intense passion for history.

MARTIN LEFT SCHOOL
after Form Four. His final subject reports were ordinary. The only exception was History, for which he received the highest mark in his class, along with a glowing commendation from his teacher.

‘You’ll never be a scholar, Martin,’ his father commented dryly after reading the reports. ‘And the one good one…for a useless subject.’

‘History is not useless.’ It was brave to contradict his father. Simon Godwin had a quick temper and was intolerant of views that varied from his own.

‘Won’t get you anywhere. Far better to do something useful. Something practical. You could join the army. Become a plumber or an electrician. A few honest quid to be made there, eh? But it’s also hard work, mate.’

Simon Godwin was a powerfully built man who towered over his wife and children. This licensed his authority over the patriarchal domain. It was a vast territory that kept extending. He assumed the prerogative to determine which activities his family members would enjoy in their leisure time. Martin, for reasons of gender, was encouraged to go
fishing and play cricket and football. The two girls, Erin and Gail, were guided towards ballet and music lessons—not that Simon particularly valued such cultural pursuits for their own sake, but in his scheme of things these were suitable activities for his daughters. Visits to family and friends and the occasional night at the cinema sufficed for his wife, though Simon also tolerated Megan’s once-a-month card night with her friends. A week at the beach in early January rounded off what he deemed to be a contented familial life.

In the summer months and in early autumn, Simon, accompanied by his son, regularly drove north towards Goulburn Valley. They turned right between Glenburn and Yea to fish in the Murrindindi River. Sometimes they headed for the coast, southwest to Lake Elingamite or Hopkins River. On these trips there was little communication between them. Long stretches of silence were broken by comments on the effect of the weather on the landscape. Occasionally Martin asked questions about fishing equipment that did not require elaborate replies. There was a mutual respect for each other’s privacy, as though they had figured out that they lived in separate worlds that were irreconcilably different. When Simon stopped the car and pointed to a specific spot where he wanted to fish for the day, Martin jumped out with unconcealed relief. He knew what had to be done while his father scouted around for deep holes under overhanging trees or among the growth of weeds where the best trout were to be found. Martin was responsible for unloading the Holden—fishing gear, rugs, a picnic basket with white bread, cheese and ham sandwiches,
thick slices of fruitcake, bottles of lemonade and beer, and a thermos filled with tea.

Simon had taught him where to dig for worms and Martin prided himself on his expertise in filling a jar with the fat wriggling bits of bait. Then there was the camping equipment, in case Simon felt disinclined to return to Melbourne on the same day. Once Martin had completed the chores, he dutifully accepted a fishing rod and spent the rest of the day hoping that they might go home emptyhanded. Rarely was his wish fulfilled. His father was a skilled and patient fisherman.

In the middle of April 1958, Simon decided to fish at Merri River. At Crowe’s Bridge he reeled in four brown trouts within half an hour of their arrival. As he cast a line again, his son could not restrain himself.

‘Don’t we have enough?’

Surprised, Simon turned to look at the boy. ‘Enough? Enough for what?’

‘We can’t possibly eat all that!’ Martin pointed to the fish that lay glistening in the late morning’s sun.