They had. Each used to walk carefully. Going up the road Waldo remembered how their father, to amuse, had told them about the bank messengers in London, in their top hats, the bag chained to a wrist. Later on, when the custom of the walk to the station had been established, and it was not always possible to shorten it by visiting the dunny or remembering books, Waldo felt in his bitterest moments he would have died willingly while performing his regular act of duty. With Arthur it was different. There was no escaping Arthur. At best he became the sound of your own breathing, his silences sometimes consoled. But you might have thought of an escape from Dad, if you had been cleverer or brutal. Fathers are no more than the price you have to pay for life, the tickets of admission. Life, as he began in time to see it, is the twin consciousness, jostling you, hindering you, but with which, at unexpected moments, it is possible to communicate in ways both animal and delicate. So Waldo resented his twin’s absence and freedom as he walked with their father between the throng of weeds up Terminus Road, George Brown lashing out with his gammy leg, to keep up with the son holding back for him.
On one occasion Dad said: “You run on ahead, old man. I’ll take my time.”
And Waldo had. Literally. Spurted up the road on twisting ankles, arms jerking, books thundering in his half-empty case.
Afterwards when they were seated whiter together in the train, they hadn’t spoken, but probably wouldn’t have anyway.
Dad who had been good for stories for little boys, myths of ancient Greece and Rome, to say nothing of recitations from Shakespeare, grew silenter in the face of silence. He had taken up Norwegian, to “read Ibsen in the original”, or to protect himself in the train. Waldo used to watch the words forming visibly under the raggeder moustache. Dad leaned his head against the leather, and closed his eyes. The eyelids looked their nakedest. For many years Waldo could not come at Ibsen out of respect for the private language in which he had written.
Dad, though, was not unaware, so it seemed, painfully, of some of the responsibilities he shirked. Laying down Teach Yourself Norwegian on the seat in the Barranugli train, he opened his eyes one morning and said:
“Waldo, I’ve been meaning to have a talk. For some time. About certain things. About, well, life. And so forth.”
The spidery train was clutching at the rails. The smuts flew in, to sizzle on Waldo’s frozen skin.
“Because,” continued George Brown, “I expect there are things that puzzle you.”
Nhoooh! Waldo might have hooted if the engine hadn’t beaten him to it.
It wasn’t the prospect of his father’s self-exposure which was shaking him. It was the train, shaking out every swollen image he had ever worked on.
“The main thing,” said Dad, sucking his sparrow-coloured moustache, “is to lead a decent, a life you, well, needn’t feel ashamed of.”
O Lord. Waldo had not been taught to pray, because, said Mother, everything depends on your own will, it would be foolishness to expect anything else, we can achieve what we want if we are determined, if we are confident that we are strong.
And here was George Brown knotting together the fingers which had learnt to handle the pound notes so skilfully. Who had nothing to feel ashamed of. Except perhaps his own will.
O Lord. The Barranugli train bellowed like a cow in pastures not her own.
“For instance, all these diseases.” George Brown found himself looking at his own flies. He looked away.
Waldo, though he did not want to, could not help looking at his father, at the sweat shining on the yellow edge of his celluloid collar.
“There’s a bit of advice, Waldo,” he was saying, “I’d like to give any boy. You can’t be too careful of those lavatory seats. I mean, the public lavatories. You can develop, well, a technique of balance. And avoid a lot of trouble. That way.”
When he had sweated it out George Brown turned again to Teach yourself Norwegian. Waldo could recognize by then the shapes of the repeated phrases: Hun hoppet i sjøen …1 Han merest det og reddet henne …2 Jeg har span penger for a kiøpe en gave til min søster …3 Because Dad had frightened, then embarrassed him, which was worse, he grew angry. He began to relate the solemn idiocy of the recited words to the unrelenting motion of the train. He would have liked to shout: A pox on old lavatory seats! Or worse — the scribbled words he had seen on walls. He sat looking sideways at his father. Min bloody søster! He sat there muttering: I fucked my auntie Friday night.
In the varnished box in which they were sitting George Brown shifted on the parched leather, while holding down the pages of the book the draught was agitating. Hun hoppet i sjøen … Han merket det … It looked as though the only way was to memorize.
While Waldo, it seemed, was all memory and brutal knowledge. Tell me, Dad, he was tempted to make a challenge of it — tell me something I don’t know.
The raucous train gave to the unuttered words the cracked accents of insolence. The more scornfully Waldo rocked the more the obscene upholstery swelled, in contours of bulbous women, and opulent crutches of purple men. One serge gorilla, tufted with orange hair, passed his gold-and-ruby ring under a corsetted bum in Shadbolt Lane. No man is all that attractive, she said, that there isn’t a copy or two of him about. The man called her his copy-cat, and both laughed to bust their guts, to split the narrow stairs up which they were feeling their way.
Night thoughts, struggling from under the cestrum, floated on the surface bloated and gloating. The cestrum was at its scentiest at night, filling, and swelling, and throbbing, and spilling, while all the time rooted at a distance in its bed. Its branches creaked, though, enough for Arthur to breathe your dreams.
Sitting in the train Waldo suddenly looked straight into his father’s face. The train sniggered smuttily. Waldo might have leant back to continue enjoying the escape he had made, if his clothes tightening hadn’t constrained him, together with the fear that freedom might be the equivalent of isolation. So that in the end he would have liked to touch his father’s goodness, but could only be touched by it. His narrow body began not exactly to shiver, it was the train, running them over the outskirts of Barranugli, past the seeding docks and rusty tins, the tethered goats, and in their back yards, women whose pale skins still showed traces of night and mutton fat.
Dad was stuffing his book into his pocket — Dad alone must have kept the pocket editions going — and they were getting out at Barranugli. Amongst the other arrivals at the station Waldo usually saw to it that they drew apart gradually, to avoid what, for both of them, would have been the embarrassment of saying good-bye.
If George Brown threw away Teach Yourself Norwegian it was not because he no longer needed it. He could never rely on himself to sit in the train without a book. He began Thus Spake Zarathustra, and shortly after, went over to The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, which he had picked up, he was proud to tell, the one for ninepence, the other for sixpence, second-hand.
As far as Waldo was concerned the journey to Barranugli repeated itself for more than years. Towards the end, not by choice, he was growing his first moustache. The truth was: they wouldn’t give him the money for a razor to shave it off.
“Arr, why?” he shouted at them angrily, in the house which had grown too small for him.
His father put on his gravest expression, and said in his most prudent voice: “Men who start shaving too early always regret it. Besides,” he said, “at your age most young fellows get a lot of enjoyment out of cultivating a moustache. Moustaches are in fashion, I would have thought.”