It was August and cold: high dry skies, the westerlies blowing. He wore a navy blue air force greatcoat of his father's, who had been a Spitfire pilot in the war. It was belted and double-breasted with wide lapels, and when you turned the collar up your ears were covered. The skirts were so long that what Charlie saw in the long wardrobe mirror in his room (he'd been reading War and Peace) was a French cavalry officer in the Napoleonic Wars in flight from Cossacks. Anticipating his first day in camp he had been down to Sam Harker and had his hair cut short on top and shaved at the sides. When he stood and contemplated himself in the mirror, he really looked the part.
He had a routine. He got up late, ate the breakfast his aunt made for him, which doubled as lunch, then sat for a couple of hours in warm winter sunlight in the window of the pub. Always in the same place, looking out across the veranda rails to the median strip of the town's one main street, with a schooner of beer at his elbow on the chocolate-brown sill, and beside it, as a way of making himself at home, his pen, his wallet, the paperback he was reading, and the makings of the roll-your-owns he liked to smoke — papers, Drum tobacco in a plastic wrap, and an oblong tin not much bigger than a matchbox that contained the simple mechanism for turning them out. He took trouble over this, giving the roller a practised spin between forefinger and thumb, and when he ran his tongue along the edge of the paper, putting just enough spit into it for the spill to be dry but perfectly, almost professionally, sealed. He smoked a little, read a little, wrote in his notebook.
He was keeping notes. Not a diary exactly, just random thoughts. As they came to him in the drowsy sunlight in the slow early session after midday, and as they took off, the moment he began to set them down, and led him into all sorts of unpredictable and shadowy places where he was pleased to roam. Bemused speculations.
If he tired of writing, and had no book at hand, he would read the contents of his wallet: his library card and driver's licence, several torn-off corners of a notepad or newspaper with names and phone numbers on them that he could barely decipher, ads from magazines that he must have thought, when he folded them small and tucked them away in one of his wallet's many pockets, might one day come in useful. With a cigarette at his lips, the sun on his hands, a crease between his brows, he would give these exhibits his solemn attention, as if this time he might catch, in the evidence they offered of unfulfilled needs and momentary promises, some reflection of himself that till now had subtly eluded him.
Occasionally when he looked up he would find upon him the pink-rimmed, rheumy eyes of one of the old-timers, pensioners and retired tradesmen or storekeepers, who were the regulars of this hour: thin-faced, silent fellows with elongated ears and noses who had been turned out of the house by their daughters or daughters-in-law, and towards two or two thirty in the afternoon dropped in, very formally attired in coat and hat, for a beer and whatever talk might be going. In the early days one or two of them had enquired from a distance what he was writing. They seemed ready to start a conversation. Charlie put his pen down and let them go on.
It wasn't really a conversation. What they wanted was to tell him their story — well, not him exactly, anyone would have done.
He listened. That they had a story, and took it for granted they did, confirmed him in the assumption that he too had one. But he was glad when they drifted off at last and went back to their beer, and after a time they ceased to be curious about him. He had become one of them.
They were becalmed at the end of their lives, that's what he saw, and he was becalmed in the middle of his, but nearer the beginning. Waiting out these last days as if they were an enforced holiday, which was why his aunt let him sleep till past midday and did not complain, as she would have done earlier, when the breakfast she made him was also his lunch.
Afternoons had always been a trouble to him, going right back to when he was little and had to take a nap each day beside his mother on a high double bed in their cool spare room. He would play afterwards on the lino and watch his mother laugh on the phone or do her nails on the back veranda, or with her skirt hoicked up and her bare feet propped on the rail, sit tanning herself while the radio played, "Music, music, music,” and willy-wagtails switched about on the grass.
Time passed slowly after midday, before tea. That's what he had found. The air grew thicker. There was a weight that dragged. It had something to do with the clouds, loaded at times with thunder, that at that hour gathered and rolled in over the Range. Summer or winter, it made no difference: trees, houses, grass, sky — the whole world seemed to be waiting only for the coming on of dark.
Lately, that quality he had felt of a whole world hanging on what was to come, nightfall, had become the keynote of his own existence. He had waited. First for his birthday to come around, then for his name to come up. He was waiting now for the last days to pass before his induction. All that time had been a mixture in him of restless impatience for each day to dawn and pass, and a kind of inertia which, if he had not deliberately taken a hand, would have made a sleepwalker of him, just when he needed to be most fully awake.
The truth was that Vietnam, and his going, was the certainty he had needed to give his life direction; to close off an open and indeterminate future where he might have gone on stumbling about in a maze that had no end. He was going. He would see action — the phrase brought a prickle of excitement to his skin that scared and at the same time gravely enlivened him. Meanwhile, though others need not see it in this light, he had organised a small carnival for himself.
Around four in the afternoon, with the sun gone from the sill where his empty beer glass sat — he never had more than two — he set out on his rounds.
HIS ARRIVAL on their doorstep puzzled some people. They had not seen him in a while; in some cases, a long while. They did not immediately recognise the crop-headed boy in uniform greatcoat who loomed in the door frame as if he had come to deliver something official, and stood smiling and stamping on the doormat in the assurance of being invited in. They had difficulty remembering who he was.
They did remember at last — and would have known the name anyway, because of his grandfather — but could not guess why on earth he had called, and why, when he settled, his long legs extended, the skirts of the greatcoat open like dark wings, he looked from one to another of them with so much wide-eyed alertness — in expectation of what, they wondered.
More than puzzled, some of them were embarrassed. But Charlie wasn't. He knew very well what he was after. He wanted to know, before he went away, what impression his having lived here for a whole twenty years had made on people. Not much, he guessed. But that was just the point. They would remember his going. They would remember that he had come to say goodbye.
One or two of them were old friends of the family who had known him when he was little and whom his aunt had mentioned. They were surprised to see him after so long but soon made him feel at home.
In other cases they were fellows a little older than himself who, two or three years back, had been on the school swimming team with him but could not, when he turned up now, come up with his name.
“Who did you say he was?” he heard a girl whisper out in the kitchen while he sat alone in the front room with a round-eyed baby and the TV. “Have I met him? Was he at the wedding?”
In households where he had, for a time, been the schoolfriend of a son or daughter now lost to the city, it was recalled that he had always been odd — old-fashioned they had called it then; a consequence of his having no one to bring him up but his grandfather and an old-maid aunt.