The habit of motion, the warmth of skin, were so very comforting, he put out his tongue and licked the air. It might have been barley-sugar.
Arthur said: “You know when you are ill, really ill, not diphtheria, which we haven’t had, but anything, pneumonia — you can’t say we haven’t had pneumonia — you can get, you can get much farther in.”
“Into what?”
It tired Waldo.
“Into anything.”
The wind coming round the corner, out of Plant Street and heading for Ada Avenue, gave Waldo Brown the staggers. Arthur, on the other hand, seemed to have been steadied by thoughtfulness.
He said: “One day perhaps I’ll be able to explain — not explain, because it’s difficult for me, isn’t it, to put into words — but to make you see. Words are not what make you see.”
“I was taught they were,” Waldo answered in hot words.
“I dunno,” Arthur said. “I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I’ve learnt.”
If he stumbled at that point it was because he had turned his right toe in. Although she tried, Mother had not broken him of it.
“Mrs Poulter said,” said Arthur.
“Mrs Poulter!”
Waldo yanked at the oblivious hand. Mrs Poulter was one of the fifty-seven things and persons Waldo hated.
“She said not to bother and I would understand in my own way. But I don’t, not always, to be honest. Not some things. I don’t understand cruelty.”
The little flat sounds which accompanied dangerous approaches were issuing from Waldo’s mouth.
“I don’t understand how they can nail a person through the hands.”
Waldo would not listen any more, though Arthur might be tired of telling. He did tire very quickly, and, if you were lucky, might not revive for half an hour. He seemed to withdraw, to recline on the hugger-mugger cushions of an unhealthily crammed imagination.
In any case, there were the shops, there were the houses of the street you knew, providing signs that man is a rational animal. Waldo liked to look into the houses he passed, obliquely though, for on some of those occasions when he had stared full in he had been faced with displays of perversity to damage temporarily his faith in reason. From a reasonable angle the houses remained the labelled boxes which contain, not passions, but furniture: Green Slopes, Tree Tops, Gibber Gunya, Cootamundra, Tree Tops, The Ridge, Tree Tops, less advisedly, Ma Réve.
“Not mine!” he said aloud.
Waldo knew he was bad-tempered. Long ago, in the days when he was taking up Yoga, Pelmanism, Profitable Short Story Writing, and making lists of what must be achieved or corrected, he had decided to do something about his temper, but had failed as, he consoled himself, many important people had.
Watching him walk controlled along the street leading his backward brother by the hand, no one probably would have guessed he had failed, in that, at least. How convincing an impression he made Waldo knew from observing himself obliquely in the plate-glass windows of shops, and anyway, he had decided early to be his mother’s rather than his father’s son. Anne Brown, born a Quantrell, had created an impression even in one of her old blue dresses with tea-stained lace insertion, or until her last days and illness, which were beyond human control. Waldo understood that those who lowered their eyes in passing were paying homage to someone of his mother’s stock.
Many were perceptive. Others, who turned deliberately away, only wished to disguise their inferiority. Or were disgusted by Arthur. There were, on the other hand, some who hid their embarrassment in a display of exaggerated bonhommie. Like the men in overalls at the Speedex Service Station.
“Hi, mate! Hi, Arthur!” they called, raising their muscular throats. “How’s the Brown Bomb?”
Arthur loved it. He loved the service station. He loved to stare at people, and into houses, which was all very well for Arthur, Waldo allowed, because he could not have interpreted half of what he saw.
All that was steel and concrete, service stations, for example, appalled Waldo, though he would never have admitted in public, he would never have rejected any useable evidence of human progress.
Arthur loved the Speedex Service Station because Ron Salter sometimes had the lollies for him, and Barry Grimshaw on one occasion let him take the gun and grease the nipples of a truck.
“One day I’m gunna come and work with you boys. Permanent,” Arthur called, tagging back on Waldo’s hand. “Then we’ll have a ball! And improve my savings account!”
Of course the men were laughing at Arthur, Waldo knew.
The Speedex Service Station, safely past, thank God — Waldo would allow himself a lapsus linguae if the error had grown into the language — had risen out of what had been Allwright’s General Store. Exhaust fumes and the metallic idiom of mechanics had routed the indolent mornings which used to weigh so heavy on Allwright’s buckled veranda, bulging with bags of potatoes and mash, stacked with the boxes of runty tomatoes the growers brought out from under the seats of their sulkies. To protect the goods on Allwright’s veranda from the visits of dogs had been one of the extra duties of Arthur Brown. Arthur seemed to enjoy that, as a relaxation, while regretting he could not coax the dogs into a permanent relationship.
Nobody seeing the Browns now connected them except in theory with the past, because the past was scarcely worth knowing about. It was remarkable how many of those walking along the Barranugli Road on present errands had only just been born.
“Mr Allwright died lacing up his boots.” Arthur Brown clumped and mumbled, his thick white hair flumping at his collar. Then he had to laugh. “Mrs Allwright thought I’d stuck to the change from Mustos’ order. She’d put it behind the candles. Put it herself. Couldn’t add up, either, except with a pencil and paper.”
After that the road opened out into one of those stretches, a replica of itself at many other points. On the road to Barranugli it was usual for Waldo Brown to forget which bits they had passed, even going quickly in the bus. In the end the bush roads of childhood were no slower than those made by men in the illusions of speed and arrival. The same truck, the same sedan, would stick screeching, roaring, smoking, on its spinning, stationary tires, no longer in the same rut, but in the same concrete channel, the same stretch of infinity. If Waldo Brown had not been a superior man, of intellectual tastes, it might have become intolerable, or perhaps had, because of that.
He yawned till remembering why he had chosen to commit a deliberate assault on distance on that morning. He stopped the yawn. They seemed to be making very little progress. Pedestrians were overtaking them, not to mention the 8.13.
The dust-coloured bus plunged, elastic-sounding, not too rigidly rivetted, down the road to Barranugli. Look into a passing bus, and more often than not you will see something you would rather not. Smeared mauve against the window Mrs Poulter’s face was too stupid exactly to accuse Waldo.
Waldo snorted, even laughed.
It was unusual.
“What’s the joke?” asked Arthur.
“Ain’t no joke!” said Waldo in the comic voice he put on for jokes.
It was most unusual.
And obviously he did not want to tell. So Arthur kept quiet.
Mrs Brown admitted from the beginning that Mrs Poulter had her good points. A cheerful young woman with a high colour and the surly husband. Almost too deliberately on the opposite side of the road, directly opposite — two houses, you were tempted to conclude, eyeing each other for what they could see. Not that the Browns would have been so indiscreet. Excepting Arthur, who loved to talk to Mrs Poulter. He loved to ask her questions, and Mrs Poulter, curiously enough, although an inalterably stupid creature, usually seemed to find an answer. That was one of the reasons Waldo found her so difficult to put up with.