Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane Read online

  The letter-writer had named in her letter the order of nuns that her sister had joined and the convent where her sister still lived. I knew about the order of nuns only what I had heard as a boy: that the order was an enclosed order whose members never left their convents. The nun who had been a good friend of my father had lived in a convent in a suburb of Melbourne since the year in the 1930s when she had left French Island, where my father was releasing young pheasant hens and cocks in the scrub. In all the years since then, the nun who had once seemed to her sister as though she was being courted by the man who later became my father would have received as visitors to the convent only the nearest members of her family. The visitors would have sat in the visitors’ room, and the nun would have spoken to them from behind a steel grille set into the wall of the room.

  I remember meeting my son at the front door on the afternoon of the storm and taking his schoolbag from him and giving him a towel from the linen cupboard to dry his face and his hair. I remember making a cup of cocoa for my son while he took off his wet clothes and dried himself in the bathroom. I went into the bathroom afterwards and picked up the wet clothes and put the shirt and the singlet and the underpants in the laundry basket. My son stood in the loungeroom in front of the gas heater wearing his tracksuit and drinking his cocoa while I arranged his pullover and his trousers on the clotheshorse in front of him.

  My son accuses me sometimes of having forgotten important details from the years when I used to cut his lunches and make his cocoa and tidy his cupboards and wash his clothes and read stories to him at night. I told him one day lately the very words that he had said to me on a certain afternoon seven years ago while he stood in front of the heater in the loungeroom and drank his cocoa, but he looked at me as though I had dreamed of the dark afternoon, of my twelve-years-old son being caught in a thunderstorm, and of the mice that had failed to arrive.

  While I was writing the paragraph above that begins ‘I remember…’, I should have remembered that I would not have made the cocoa while my son was taking off his wet clothes. I would have waited until my son had done what he did every afternoon as soon as he arrived home. I would not have begun to make the cocoa until I had heard from my son’s room the chugging and the hissing of the apparatus that he called his machine.

  My son was an asthmatic who took medicines every few hours of every day. One of the medicines was a liquid that had to be inhaled in the form of a vapour. Three or four times a day my son sat for ten minutes with a mask of transparent plastic fitted over his nose and mouth. His medicine was in a plastic cylinder attached to the lower part of the mask. A rubber tube connected this cylinder to a pump powered by an electric motor. The pump forced air up the rubber tube and into the cylinder. How, I never understood, but the compressed air turned the liquid medicine in the cylinder into a vapour. Most of the vapour hung in the mask and was inhaled by my son, but some of the vapour escaped around the edges of the mask and out through the ventilation holes. When my son had first seen the strands of vapour drifting and curling around his face, he had called them his whiskers.

  During his first five years my son was often in hospital. On every day when he was in hospital, I sat beside his bed through the morning and the afternoon while my wife was at work and my daughter was with neighbours.

  The hospital was built on a steep hillside, and my son’s room was on an upper floor. At one side of his room a glass door led to a veranda overlooking the valley of the Yarra. The season was always late autumn or winter when my son was in hospital, and the days were often foggy or rainy, and no one went out onto the veranda. On those days I would sit beside my son’s bed, staring through the windows and across the veranda and trying to see the hills of Templestowe or the bushland around Warrandyte through the fog or the misty rain.

  On foggy or rainy days I read to my son from his favourite books, from his sister’s books, and from new books that I bought for him every day. I kept him supplied with paper and coloured pens and pencils, and if he was too tired to use them I drew pictures and made paper models in front of him. Each day on my way to the hospital I bought another Matchbox car to add to his collection. He and I put stuffed toys under the green coverlet on his bed and called the green mounds hills and undertook long, rambling journeys with toy cars through the pretend-landscape.

  If the weather was fine and if my son was not struggling for breath, I took him out onto the veranda.

  From the parapet of our veranda to the floor of the veranda above was a wall of strong wire mesh. My son and I pressed our faces against the wire. Sometimes the boy would be standing beside me and sometimes he would be riding piggyback with his chin resting on my shoulder. We stared at the motor traffic on the road far below, at the trains crossing the bridge over the road, at the girls in grey and blue uniforms in the grounds of Our Lady of Mount Carmel College, at the green hills of Templestowe, and sometimes – if the sky was quite clear – at the long dark-blue hump of Donna Buang, thirty miles away where the mountains began.

  On the veranda my son was usually cheerful and looking forward to leaving hospital. He would talk to me about the things that he could see on the other side of the wire. I would wait for him to ask me the two questions that he always asked when he thought about the future. I would wait for him to ask why he suffered from asthma while so many other children breathed freely, and to ask when he would be free from asthma forever.

  I had a stock answer for each of my son’s two questions, but I did not merely answer in words. I had been trained as a primary teacher after I left secondary school. I had ceased being a teacher in the year before my son was born, but for ten years before then I had taught classes of boys and girls nine or ten years old. When I talked to my son or my daughter I liked to make use of my teacher’s skills.

  On the veranda of the hospital I said first to my son that every man was given an equal amount of suffering to endure during his lifetime. However, I said, one sort of man was given most of his suffering when he was only a boy. (At this point I would describe with my hands, in the air above my son’s head, a shape that was meant to represent a dark-grey cloud. I would then fling my hands apart to represent the cloud breaking open, and immediately afterwards I would flutter my ten fingers in the air above my son’s head to represent heavy rain falling on the boy.) The other sort of man, I said, had no suffering to endure as a boy. (I lowered myself a little way towards the floor of the veranda and tried to suggest a boy skipping lightly and carelessly.) Years passed, I said, and the two sorts of boys had grown into men. The first man, the man who had suffered as a child, was now strong and healthy. (I lifted my son onto my back and rushed towards the wire and made as though to tear it apart.) The second man, however, had not been prepared for suffering. When suffering threatened this man, he fled from it and tried to hide from it and lived in terror of it. At this point, I set my son down on the floor of the veranda and moved back from him and became the man who had not learned to suffer early in life. I looked up into the air. I saw my own hand describing a broad circle just above my head, and I understood that the circle was a black thunder-cloud. Then I saw my own hand, with the index finger outstretched, darting downwards again and again through the air around my head. I understood that bolts of lightning were flashing all around me, and I fled.

  The veranda of the children’s ward had become, over the years, a dumping place for toys and furniture. Whenever I answered my son’s question, I took care to be standing in a certain place. When I played the man who was frightened of suffering, I had only to scamper a few paces to the disused hospital bed that stood in the corner of the veranda. Then I crawled under the bed in order to escape from the lightning. But the bed had no mattress or bedclothes on it – above me was only the network of fine steel that formed the wire base for a mattress. And my mime would always end with my grinning at my son from under the bed, as though the man who had fled now considered himself safe, while out of my sight just above me the index finger of one of my hands
jabbed and probed at the gaps in the sagging mattress-base.

  In answer to the other question that my son asked me, I would try to be cautious. No doctor had ever said more to my wife or myself than that a certain proportion of children experienced significantly fewer attacks of asthma after reaching puberty. But sometimes I would read in a newspaper about a runner or a jockey or a footballer who had been a severe asthmatic as a child. I would stick a photograph of the man to the door of our refrigerator where my son would see it every day.

  In the winter of my son’s seventh year his asthma was more severe than in any previous winter. Yet in the summer before that winter I had thought I saw signs that my son was on the way to overcoming his asthma. In hospital during his seventh winter, when he asked me the second of his two questions I became reckless. I told him that the worst was now over at last. Every year from that year, I told him, he would become stronger and his asthma weaker. Five years from that year, I told him, our dream would have come true: he would be free from asthma and breathing easily.

  Fourteen years before my son’s seventh year, I spent every afternoon alone in a room with the blinds drawn. The room was the loungeroom of a rented flat that had been described by an estate agent as a luxurious, fully furnished, self-contained flat suitable for a young business or professional couple. I lived alone at that time, and the rent for the flat was forty percent of my net earnings, but I had chosen to live in the flat because I was tired of sharing bathrooms and toilets and kitchens with the queer, solitary men and women of the boarding houses and rooming houses that I had lived in since I had left my parents’ house five years before.

  The flat was at ground level, and the windows of the loungeroom overlooked a gravel driveway and part of the street and the footpath in front of the block of flats. I kept the blinds drawn in the windows of the loungeroom of my flat because I wanted neighbours and passers-by to think I was not at home.

  Fourteen years before my son’s seventh year, I was a teacher in a primary school in an outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. The outer suburb had once been a seaside resort separated from the suburbs that were then the outer suburbs of Melbourne by paddocks and swamps and market gardens. As late as the 1950s, the place where I taught as a young man in the 1960s was still chosen by some newly married couples as the place for their honeymoon. The block of flats where I lived with my blinds drawn was in the older part of the suburb, where the honeymoon couples had once strolled. The primary school where I was a teacher was on the edge of the suburb, on the side of a hill from the top of which it was possible to see not only Port Phillip Bay but also, far away in the south-east, part of Westernport and even, in clear weather, a grey-blue smudge that was a corner of French Island.

  Most of the children of the school where I was a teacher lived more than two miles from where I lived. When I had first moved into the rented flat I wanted none of the children or their parents to know that I lived in their suburb. I did not want the children or their parents to know that I spent every afternoon and every evening and nearly every Saturday and Sunday alone in my flat. I did not want the parents especially to wonder why I seemed to have no friends either male or female or to wonder what I did during all the time while I was alone in the rented flat.

  After I had lived in the rented flat for a few months, some of the children in my own class learned where I lived. The children were three girls nine years old who happened to be riding their bicycles along my street one Saturday morning when I was walking home with my weekend’s shopping. The girls and I spoke politely to one another, after which I expected them to ride on their way. Instead, they followed me on their bicycles, at a distance of about twenty paces.

  When I was inside my flat and the front door was closed behind me, I peeped around the closed blind and saw the three girls standing on the footpath and looking towards my flat. A few minutes later, while I was unpacking my shopping bag, a knock sounded at my front door.

  I opened my front door and saw one of the three girls on my front porch. The other two girls were still standing on the footpath with the three bicycles. The girl on my porch asked me politely whether she and her friends could do some cleaning jobs for me in my flat.

  I thanked the girl and told her that my flat was quite clean. (It was.) Then I said that in any case I was about to go out for the day. (I was not.)

  I spoke softly to the girl and lowered my head close to hers. I did not want my words to reach the woman in the flat next to mine. I believed she was watching me and the girl from behind her drawn blinds. While I spoke to the girl I was pleased to see in her face that she was about to turn away and leave my door. But while I spoke I happened to look up and to see that a woman was passing in the street and looking hard at the solitary man who was whispering something to the small girl at the door of his flat.

  After that day I would never answer any knock at my door. I did not want my neighbours or any adult passing in the street to think I was the sort of solitary man who was attracted to nine-year-old girls.

  In fact, I was attracted to half a dozen of the nine-year-old girls in my class – and to two or three of the boys. Every day I looked from the sides of my eyes at the smooth skins of the girls, at the trusting eyes of the boys. I would never have dared to put so much as the tip of a finger on a child in a way that might have suggested something of what I felt for the child. All day while I taught my favourite children I wanted no more than that they should think well of me. But when I was safely out of their sight I often dreamed of the children.

  I dreamed that my favourite children lived with me in a mansion surrounded by a tall wire fence in thick bushland in north-eastern Victoria. The children were no longer children; they were almost adults. They were free to live their own lives in the far-flung suites of my rambling mansion. I had never forced my company on them. I lived alone in my self-contained flat in a corner of the ground floor of the mansion. But the children who were no longer children knew that they were always welcome to knock at my door. I was always pleased to take them into the room where I sat behind drawn blinds on most afternoons and evenings watching black and white and grey films of men and women in far countries of the world doing without shame or shyness what I hoped my favourite children would never dream of doing.

  In my classroom, fourteen years before my son’s seventh year, I devised projects that encouraged the children to write about themselves. I wanted to know what memories of joy or sorrow were already stored in the children’s hearts. I wondered what my favourite children dreamed about when I caught them gazing into the air.

  One day I announced to my class that I had found a pen-friend for each of them in New Zealand. I announced that each child in my class would prepare during English periods for the next two weeks a long letter to be sent to his or her pen-friend. Each child would prepare as well, for sending with the letter to New Zealand, drawings and perhaps a photograph of the writer of the letter with family and friends and pets. When every child of the forty-eight children in the class had prepared his or her letter and accompanying material, I announced, I would make up a parcel and post it to a certain teacher in a large school in New Zealand. That teacher would distribute our letters among the children in his school. A few weeks later I would receive from New Zealand a parcel comprising a letter for each child in my class from a child in New Zealand, together with drawings and perhaps photographs.

  The teacher in New Zealand was a man I had met two years before when he had been in Melbourne under the terms of a teacher-exchange scheme. Just before he had left Melbourne he had given me his address in New Zealand and had suggested that we should pair our pupils as pen-friends each year. In the first year after the man had gone back to New Zealand I had not taken his suggestion, but in the second year I suddenly thought of all the words that my pupils would write about themselves after I had told them that a class of children in New Zealand was waiting to read letters from them.

  I ought to have checked first with the teacher
in New Zealand before I began the project, but I was eager for my children to begin writing. After they had been writing for a week, I wrote a note to the New Zealand teacher to tell him that a parcel of children’s letters would soon reach him. When I was ready to post the note to New Zealand I could not find the address of the teacher in New Zealand. I found in the notebook where I kept addresses the names and addresses of people I could not remember having met, but I could not find the address of the teacher in New Zealand, and he was the only person I knew who lived in New Zealand.

  I ought to have told my class next day to put aside their letters and their sketches for the time being, even if I had not told them that I could not find the address of the New Zealand teacher. Then I ought to have found out the addresses of periodicals published for teachers in New Zealand and to have sent to the editor of each periodical for publication in the periodical a notice asking for pen-friends in New Zealand for a class of children in an outer suburb of Melbourne, Australia. But when I saw my children next day editing and rewriting their letters I could not bring myself to tell them that they might have been writing to nobody.

  After that, I knew I could never tell my children what I had done. I could not even take steps to find another class in New Zealand for my children to write to. Each day for five days I read through the children’s letters, correcting with light pencil marks their mistakes in spelling and punctuation. Each day I watched the children rewriting words and adding punctuation marks and then erasing my light pencil marks from their pages. Each day I watched children decorating with their coloured pencils the sketches they had made of their houses, their bicycles, the places where they went for their holidays. Each day I helped children to mount securely the photographs they had brought from home. Then, at the end of the week, I packed all the children’s letters into my bag and took them to my flat and emptied them into a cardboard box on the floor of the built-in wardrobe in my bedroom.