Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

As Adrian got to know the Eastern Hill men better, he discovered that some of them weren’t perfect. There was one chap who was on the training list for the first eighteen in the Public Schools football competition. One day on the tram he was limping. He told his friends the story of the torn ligaments in his knee. Each time he said the word ‘torn’ he winced ever so faintly. It was the first time that Adrian had caught an Eastern Hill fellow doing what the boys at St Carthage’s did so often. It was called putting on an act.

But when an Eastern Hill man put on an act it really worked. The fellow with the injured knee limped up to a group of Canterbury girls and told his story again. Each time he winced, the concern in the girls’ faces made Adrian almost wince himself.

Sometimes a Canterbury girl put on an act too. One day Adrian heard some girls talking about a debate. They thought their own side should have won. The topic of the debate had been ‘That the introduction of television will do more harm than good.’ At St Carthage’s any boy who tried to talk about schoolwork outside the classroom would have been howled down, but the girls in the tram chattered eagerly about the effect of television on family life and reading and juvenile delinquency.

Then a girl who was angry that her side had lost the debate said, ‘Illogical. The opposition’s case was utterly illogical.’ The big words embarrassed Adrian. The girl was putting on an act.

Some Eastern Hill boys joined the girls. A tall fellow with a voice like a radio announcer’s said, ‘What are you so excited about, Carolyn?’

Adrian listened hard. The Eastern Hill boys never discussed schoolwork on the tram. What would the fellow say when he realised the girls were only talking about a debate?

Carolyn explained exactly why the opposition’s case had been weak. When she was finished, the tall fellow said, ‘I quite agree with you,’ and looked genuinely troubled. Carolyn smiled. She was very grateful for the fellow’s sympathy.

Late in the year the elms around the tram-stop at the Swindon Town Hall were thick with green leaves. When Adrian boarded the tram after school the sun was still high in the sky. In the non-smoking compartment the wooden shutters covered the windows, and the Canterbury girls sat in a rich summery twilight. After Adrian left the tram it turned sharply in the direction of St Kilda and the sea. He always watched the tram out of sight and wondered whether the young men and women still on board could smell salt in the evening breeze.

The Eastern Hill fellows had begun to talk about the holidays. They were all going away somewhere. Some of them said they would try to catch up with each other on New Year’s Eve, but God knew what they might be up to that night. The way they chuckled about New Year’s Eve was not quite gentlemanly.

The girls were going away too. They were talking about beachwear and party frocks. Adrian wished he could warn them to be careful of their friends from Eastern Hill on New Year’s Eve.

It was the athletics season at St Carthage’s. On House Sports day the weather was as hot as summer. Adrian noticed a strange girl watching the races with O’Mullane and Cornthwaite. Nobody introduced her properly but Adrian worked out that she was O’Mullane’s sister Monica from St Brigid’s College, the girls’ school along the street from St Carthage’s.

The boys from St Carthage’s rarely saw the girls from St Brigid’s. But on St Carthage’s sports day any St Brigid’s girl with a brother at St Carthage’s was allowed to miss the last period and visit the sports. (The girls had their own sports afternoon on the lawn behind their tall timber fence. Boys walking past heard them cheering politely but saw nothing.)

Adrian wasn’t brave enough to talk to O’Mullane’s sister but he wanted to impress her. He developed a limp. He explained to O’Mullane that his ligaments were probably torn somewhere. He sat down and ran his fingers along his calf and thigh muscles. The girl took no notice, but O’Mullane glared at him when his fingers moved above his knee.

Adrian tried to amuse the girl. He called out, ‘Come on, Tubby,’ to a plump boy struggling in a race. He told O’Mullane he would love to see some events at the sports set aside for the brothers — speed strapping contests, or sprint races with all competitors wearing soutanes. Monica O’Mullane looked at him but didn’t smile.

Cornthwaite went onto the arena and left his tracksuit behind. Adrian tied the legs of the tracksuit together. When Cornthwaite came back and tried to pull the suit on he fell with all his weight against Adrian. Adrian lost his balance and knocked O’Mullane against his sister. The girl dropped her gloves and program and had to pick them up herself.

No one laughed. Cornthwaite said loudly, ‘You pathetic idiot, Sherd.’

After the sports Adrian walked alone to the tram-stop. He caught a tram much later than usual. He saw none of the young men and women he knew, but in one corner a strange fellow from Eastern Hill was chatting with a Canterbury girl as though they had been friends since childhood. Adrian heard part of a story the fellow was telling — something about him and his friends greasing the horizontal bar in the gym just before someone called Mr Fancy Pants started his workout. The girl thought it was the funniest story she had ever heard. As she laughed she almost leaned her head on the fellow’s shoulder.

Adrian Sherd knew very little about Australia. This might have been because he never saw any Australian films. As a child he had seen The Overlanders , but all he remembered about it was how strange the characters’ accents sounded.

Australian history was much less colourful than British or European or Bible history. The only part of it that interested Adrian was the period before Australia was properly explored.

In those days there was no reason for a man to go on being bored or unhappy in a city. Just across the Great Dividing Range were thousands of miles of temperate grasslands and open forest country where he could live as he pleased out of reach of curious neighbours and disapproving relatives.

Adrian had an old school atlas with a page of maps showing how Australia had been explored. In one of the first maps, the continent was coloured black except for a few yellow indentations on the eastern coast where the first settlements were. Adrian drew a much larger map with the same colour scheme, except that the dark inland was broken by tracts of a sensuous orange colour. They looked small on the map, but some of them were fifty miles across. They were the lost kingdoms of Australia, established in the early days by men after his own heart.

One fellow had chosen the lush plains of the Mitchell River near the Gulf of Carpentaria. On a low hill he had built a replica of the Temple of Solomon. The walls were hung with purple tapestries and the servants beat the time of day on copper gongs. The women went bare-breasted because the weather was always pleasantly warm.

Another man had chosen the park-like forests of the Victorian Wimmera. On the shores of Lake Albacutya he had set up a township copied from Baghdad in the days of Haroun Al Rashid. Each house had a fountain and a pool in a walled courtyard where the women were free to remove their veils.

In a valley of the Otway Ranges one man had a palace in which the walls were covered with copies of every obscene picture ever painted. A large tract in the Ord River district of Western Australia had been turned into Peru, with its own Inca and Brides of the Sun. Somewhere in Bass Strait was an island exactly like Tahiti before the Europeans found it.

Adrian had never seen any of the places in Australia where these palaces and cities might have been built. He had only been outside Melbourne two or three times. Those were the few brief holidays he had spent on his uncle’s farm at Orford, near Colac, in the Western District of Victoria.