Читать книгу Walter - Ashley Sievwright - Страница 6

Walter felt a raindrop on his cheek. He put his hand out and looked up at the sky. In the east the sky was blue and the early morning sun was lazily low and heavy on the horizon, the colour of an early morning wee. But directly above was a dark cloud which was now (yes, another drop, and then another fell on his hand) raining on the suburb of Wintergardens. It rained upon the umbrellas of the early morning commuters who were on their way to the train station; upon the windscreens of the cars backing out of driveways and making their way to the on-ramp of the nearby freeway; upon the roofs of the houses which were bright orange in the wet sunlight; upon the grass and other foliage which was virulent green, sleek and wet, as if it was visibly, palpably photosynthesising before his eyes. The raindrops themselves were picked out mid-flight by the sun, like chipped diamonds—they looked as if they would hurt, but of course they didn’t. Everything looked shiny bright and new, as if the entire suburb was fresh out of the automatic car-wash.

Walter rolled his eyes and made a dismissive sound with his tongue. Sun-showers. This wasn’t weather, he thought, as he walked through the rain towards the train station, this was somewhere in between weather, unreal and undecided and totally, what was the word? Yes that was it— totally unconvincing.

It didn’t seem to him an odd opinion to have. He didn’t wonder how it was he remained unconvinced about something that actually existed, something real and tangible that he was walking through.

Of course he knew it was real. He could feel the sun on his face and the raindrops on the back of his hand. These were fact—hard meteorological fact. This was weather. It was happening. But these facts, he felt, still didn’t make it aesthetically convincing. He actually said the words in his head, aesthetically unconvincing.

Walter often had his own internal monologues going on. Not voices inside his head as such, not other people or entities talking to him or telling him to do things, nothing like that, nothing crazy. Just a running monologue of his own voice, his own thoughts, in his head—himself, inside, looking at things, considering, summing up, sorting, categorising, commenting, pigeon-holing, judging and critiquing the world around him. Walter was a pedant, a fiend for accuracy, for boiled-down pithiness, and it made him feel good to find the right words, the right way to express himself, even if it was only in his head. But everyone had that, didn’t they? It was called thinking wasn’t it? Everyone thinks, Walter thought to himself.

OK, so his internal monologues weren’t always only internal. Sometimes he would say something out loud, sure, talk to himself. Everyone did that too, didn’t they, on occasion? On the road, for example, in the car by himself, he would say things out loud, as if speaking to other drivers—criticise their driving, or point out their mistakes, or just rant at them, call them names. One time he lost his temper with a slow driver in front of him in the fast lane of the freeway and he came out with: do you have to drive like such a pussy? This so amused him at the time, the fact that he had described someone as a pussy—what was he, ten years old?—that he couldn’t help laughing at himself. He then said: pussy-driver over and over again, enjoying the sound of it, the silliness of it. He even did it in different accents, starting with a BBC announcer kind of voice, and ending up as Samuel L Jackson.

He wasn’t really a swearing kind of person, and as a result he came out with the strangest things, co-opting as his own a whole heap of slightly inappropriate (for him) catch-phrases or insults he had gleaned from television or books, magazines, film-clips shown on early morning weekend television, and all of them, without a doubt every single one of them, sounded foreign coming out of his middle-class, conventional mouth. This was the other side of the well-spoken pedant, the Walter who could call someone a pussy-driver.

Sometimes his internal voice might rehearse conversations he would have, if he could ever work up the courage, with his Supervisor (a young Indian man called Devadarshan or Dev for short—a ‘youth’ Walter called him, fifteen years his junior). Things he might say to his wife Maggie (but you didn’t, as a rule, say things to Maggie). Or he might practice what he was going to talk about at his next appointment with Dr Feldman (his psychiatrist— but again, no, he wasn’t crazy).

If anyone ever noticed him, ever saw him snigger to himself as he made a joke in his head, or make an odd facial expression as if coming to a conclusion, or if they heard him in his car, calling out strange adolescent insults at other drivers, then, yes, they might not be quite so sure that this was all normal and there was nothing-to-see-here. They might, as a matter of fact, suspect, just quietly, that Walter was a bit of a kook.

His full name was Walter Kovak. It was, perhaps, an old-fashioned first name for a man of only forty-two years of age, but his parents, Poles who had immigrated to Australia in the 1950s, had named him after his grandfather, whose name had actually been Waclaw, the Polish for Walter. He was thankful he hadn’t been lumbered with Waclaw. His parents had been quite old when he was born, a late and unplanned baby, and both had since passed away.

There were traces of his Polish ancestry in Walter’s face. He had a heavy jaw and a wide forehead. He had a strong rather big nose, well-shaped lips and big, watery eyes. His hair grew dark and thick and square across his forehead—he combed it to the back and generally parted it on the right side although it never stayed. His skin was quite pale and pasty, and if he did get sun he would usually turn pink, sometimes burn and peel without turning brown.

He was of medium height and regularly proportioned, thick-set without being overweight. He was hairless on his chest and arms, but as hairy as a goat around his privates and on his legs—well perhaps not as hairy as a goat, but almost, although this wasn’t perhaps as immediately obvious to the general observer. He had collapsed arches, so purchased running shoes specifically designed to support his feet and inner soles for his other shoes—as a result when he walked he walked correctly, on the outside edge of his feet, down onto the balls of his feet and off the toe. Aware of a propensity for lower back pain, at work he sat stolidly with legs slightly apart, bent at the knee, his feet flat on the floor, his back straight. In general, there was no sway in his hips, no swing in his gait, no rhythm in him at all it seemed. Walter was essentially ergonomically correct.

Mick, a workmate of Walter’s, a young man who regularly slumped casually at his desk, often slipping right down in his chair, just clinging on to the seat with the bones in his bum, and who would have rocked backwards on it had it not been on wheels, said of Walter:

‘There he goes, sweeping the floor again.’ He meant, so he explained to a workmate, that the way Walter walked it looked as if he had a broomstick up his arse—unfair, perhaps, but also accurate.

Walter worked in the city, at an insurance firm, and he travelled to work every day on the 7.15am train from Wintergardens, an express train into the city and through the Melbourne City Loop, and got off the train at Flagstaff.

During the working week Walter wore the accepted corporate attire, but there was something slightly not quite right about that too. The suits he wore, invariably navy or grey, but never quite the right navy or grey, were not well-fitted and were shiny around the seams, firstly from being cheap and secondly from being dry-cleaned too often. His ties were cheap and lumpy. His shoes, black, designed for comfort rather than looks, were thick-soled and chunky. His socks were the sort with strategically placed elastic so that they stayed up—All Day Socks, they were called, and he had monitored this the first day he’d worn them, out of curiosity, to see if at any point he had to pull up his socks. He had not.

The above is a comprehensive description of Walter, but it must be said that no-one, not a single person, noticed each and every one of these things about Walter. Certainly some people noticed one or two things, but no-one noticed all of them, because there was something else about Walter, perhaps the most important aspect of him. He was completely inconsequential. Inconsequentiality covered him like an invisible lacquer. He was the sort of person you would look through rather than at, the type you would pass by in the street without noticing, the type you could see time and time again in the lift at work without actually knowing what he did or what his name was and think: Does he work for us?

He was the type to be overlooked by waiters and shopkeepers. Over the years so many service-people had either taken so long to notice him, or ignored him altogether, that he had developed quite a thing about it. It had got to the point where he expected to be ignored. Moreover, he seemed sometimes even to will it upon himself. Where a raised hand and an ‘excuse me’ might have worked wonders, Walter would instead sit there, or stand there, quietly, waiting his turn, and in his head he’d be telling himself that they weren’t going to see him or say anything to him or serve him, and he would be counting the moments of this affront, this indignity, this injustice, on an imaginary stopwatch in his head, thinking: typical—bloody typical! And if it went on long enough he might stalk out of the shop or restaurant or wherever it was on the balls of his feet, and tell himself in a stern voice inside his head that he would never to go back there. They may never know it, whoever they were, whichever business had shunned him, but they were from that moment on denied his custom, which over the years may have added up to a significant amount of income. This was how he made a stand, such as it was.

When Walter arrived at the city bound platform of Wintergardens station the sky was still grey and clouded over, but the rain had stopped, the sun-shower was over. He put his umbrella down and tapped it on the ground a couple of times to clear it of moisture.

The men and women surrounding Walter on the train station were mostly the same type as him, in that they were dressed in the rather lazy version of corporate wear that passed muster for the majority in Melbourne, but otherwise, Walter felt, the only thing he had in common with his fellow commuters was that they all lived in Wintergardens. Just like other manufactured suburbs on the outskirts of Melbourne and other Australian cities, Wintergardens had not had time to establish a personality of its own—or, perhaps more accurately, it had multiple personalities but none of them had so far exerted themselves as dominant.

People had come to Wintergardens mostly for the same reason—the house and land packages were, if not cheap, then at least quite affordable. So there were young families making a start with their first home, unable to afford anything in an inner city suburb where prices for even the most basic of townhouses or units had skyrocketed. There were retirees who had perhaps found that their superannuation was not as much as they hoped for or needed. And there were a high ratio of immigrant families, mostly from the African and Arab nations which seemed, Walter thought, to be where most of the immigrant traffic came from these days. And India, he amended in his head, thinking of Dev.

This multiple personality was beginning to make itself felt visually up and down the streets of Wintergardens. Most properties were treated with the utmost care and respect, with neat little gardens, carefully cleaned windows and bleached white stone between twin concrete strips of the driveway, but gradually there emerged a house here and there with overgrown lawns, two or three cars in the driveway, and smeared windows with the curtains all bunched up because of furniture pushed against them from inside.

Walter noticed two Somali men who lived just around the corner from him in one such house. Brothers he thought, with skin as black as his own nugget-polished shoes. They were very tall and incredibly lean, with shiny suits in dark blue and deep purple, worn very loose-fitting. A woman a little way away from them wore a full veil covering her hair, neatly pinned with multiple hair pins. She also wore a fashionable woollen skirt and jacket cut so close-fitting as to be eye-popping. There were people from many other cultures on the platform, but who could tell anymore what they were or where they were from, Walter thought? Unless they were fresh off the boat it was sometimes difficult to tell. Either they were from mixed parentage, or they were second generation immigrants (like Walter himself), or they were first generation but totally homogenised in some way. That was what Australia was now, Walter felt, a hodge-podge of different cultures adding up to a cultural non-identity. Not that he was racist, he would have said—which is what everyone who is a little bit racist does say.

The truth is that Walter, with his back straight and his chin up, his eye fixed on some vague spot in the middle distance, exuding an air of superiority and disapproval, not about anything in particular, was, without knowing it, out of place in his own suburb. He was, essentially, white bread—middle class, second generation immigrant Australian. Not that there weren’t others like him, there were, and they tended to stick together; but they didn’t notice that in a suburb like Wintergardens they were not in the majority.

Walter had probably seen most of his fellow commuters on other weekday mornings at approximately the same time at this train station, but he was not familiar enough with any of them to be on speaking terms. He was not the sort of person to be over-familiar with work colleagues or speak to strangers on the street or at the train station. So it was a bit of a surprise to him when one of his fellow commuters spoke to him that morning—a man, standing just next to him on the platform.

‘I think the rain’s going to hold off for a while,’ said the man, looking up at the clouds.

‘Just a sun-shower,’ Walter said amiably. Then he raised his left arm and jerked his arm forward to bring his watch out from his shirt cuff. His watch showed 7.14am exactly. He turned and looked down the tracks for an oncoming train—there wasn’t one.

The man next to him made a clicking noise with his tongue.

‘Late again,’ he said.

Walter made a non-committal sound, but said nothing.

‘It’s good for the garden at least,’ said the man.

‘Yes,’ Walter agreed. Save me, he thought, from these boring pleasantries. He looked down the tracks again and this time saw that the train was approaching.

It was then that Walter’s fellow commuter, from behind him, said something else, something Walter wasn’t quite sure he heard properly. He spun around and looked at the man directly, looked at him properly for the first time—an older man, grey-haired, with crow’s feet by his eyes, but an otherwise unlined face, grey suit, white shirt, red tie, briefcase. He had a mild, ordinary kind of face, and blank, light-blue eyes. Like Walter he didn’t seem to fit. He should have been at a train station on the other side of town, in one of those leafy middle-to-outer suburbs. He wasn’t looking at Walter, he was looking towards the approaching train.

‘What was that?’ Walter asked. ‘What did you just say?’

The man looked at him with a polite smile.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he asked.

‘What did you say? Just then? About the train?’

‘About the train?’

‘This train.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean.’ The man smiled again, but not as politely, not genuinely. He gently but firmly shook his head, signifying that as far as he was concerned the conversation was at an end.

Walter had heard correctly. He knew he had. His hearing was perfect. The man beside him on the platform had said to him, quite close and clear behind him, as if he’d even leaned in a bit closer to say it:

Don’t get on the next train.

The train pulled into the station and the displaced air rushed over the platform and through the waiting commuters. When it had stopped completely they began to shuffle forward and into the carriage. Walter unconsciously took a step towards the carriage along with them, alongside the man who had spoken to him. He was going to say something to him, but before he could the man stepped inside the carriage and was lost to Walter amid the other commuters. Walter stepped forward to follow him, but hesitated, stopped. He was suddenly aware of the dampness in his shoes and trouser cuffs from walking through the rain, an uncomfortable dampness that made his leg hairs stand against his trousers.

After a moment he realised that he was the only person left on the platform. Everyone else had entered the train, but he remained rooted to the spot, just a step away from the open carriage door, his feet planted firmly in his comfortably soled shoes, his upper body moving slightly forward and backwards, like a praying mantis on a twig.

A couple of people from within the carriage noticed him, hesitating as he was, and their eyes focussed, they looked at him. Walter felt a flush of embarrassment mount in his cheeks as another and another of the people in the train carriage noticed his mantis-like hesitation, met his eye and became, as one, slightly wary, as if thinking: Why is this man not getting on the train? Why is he behaving in this unexpected way? And then finally: He isn’t going to delay the train is he?

But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t move.

Then, hovering, stuck as he was in the middle of such a horrible social faux pas, a terrible breach of train etiquette, the moment was broken by the beeping warning from the train that the doors were about to close. He stepped backwards, gingerly, away from the train, back behind the yellow line. The doors closed, the train slowly pulled away from the station and the carriage-full of people looking at him was borne away. He was alone on the completely empty platform and the moment was over.

He closed his eyes.

Don’t get on the next train.

But why had the man said such a thing? As a warning? Against what? What possible reason could there be for such a warning? What possible danger could there be to him, Walter, if he had boarded that train? His rational mind, and he was a very rational man, rebelled against the very idea of what had just happened to him—and yet there it was, the man had warned him not to board the train and as a result he had not boarded the train.

Walter felt annoyed with himself, foolish, edgy and agitated. It was a familiar feeling. Well, not as familiar lately, but still familiar. However, with a concerted effort and a deep-breathing technique he had learned from Dr Feldman, Walter attempted to put aside the feeling.

Imagine your fear, he told himself in his head. Do you see it?

‘Yes.’ He nodded.

Would you like to get rid of it?

‘Yes.’ He nodded.

Then imagine screwing it up into a little ball.

His right hand made a fist.

And throwing it away.

His right hand made a somewhat muted throwing gesture.

It never worked, not really, but as he opened his eyes he was aware, not that he had got rid of his fear, but that he had mastered it, had forced it back down and snibbed the lid closed on it, and that was enough to be getting on with.