Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

No one could think of a suitable prize for the winner, but they agreed the competition was a good idea. Adrian said nothing. Seskis asked him to rule up cards for them to mark their scores on.

Adrian had no intention of telling the others how his life had changed. He ruled up the score-cards during a free period in school. There were fifty blank squares on his own score-card. When he returned to school there would still be no mark on them. He was sure of this. The women who had tempted him to sin in the past were only images in photographs. The woman who was going to save him now was a real flesh-and-blood creature. She lived in his own suburb. He had sat only a few feet from her in his parish church.

For too long he had been led astray by dreams of America. He was about to begin a new life in the real world of Australia.

Every afternoon in the last weeks of 1953, Adrian Sherd caught a different train home. At each station between Swindon and Accrington he changed from one carriage to another. He looked in every compartment for the girl in the Mount Carmel uniform but he could not find her.

Adrian realised he had to endure the seven weeks of the summer holidays with only the memory of their one meeting in Our Lady of Good Counsel’s Church to sustain him. But he swore to look for her each Sunday at mass and to go on searching the trains in 1954.

He spent the first day of the holidays tearing all the unused pages out of his school exercise books. He planned to use them for working out statistics of Sheffield Shield cricket matches and drawing maps of foreign countries or sketches of model railway layouts or pedigrees of the white mice that his young brother was breeding in the old meat-safe in he shed. It would all help to bring February closer.

Adrian’s soul was in the state of grace and he meant to keep it that way. He was ready for his passions if they tried to regain their old power over him. He was sitting alone in the shed with a pencil and paper in front of him when he found himself drawing the torso of a naked woman. As soon as he saw his danger he whispered the words ‘Earth Angel’. Then he calmly turned the breasts of his sketch into eyes and the whole torso into a funny face, and crumpled the paper.

In bed that night he joined his hands on his chest and thought of himself kneeling in church beside the girl he loved, and fell asleep with his hands still clasped together.

On the second day of the holidays, Adrian’s mother announced that none of the family would be going to her brother-in-law’s farm at Orford in January because her sister had just brought home a new baby and the Sherd kids would only be in the way.

Adrian’s brothers rolled around on the kitchen lino, howling and complaining, but Adrian took the news calmly. All year he had been looking forward to the bare paddocks and enormous sky of the Western District. But now he was secretly pleased to be spending January in the suburb where his Earth Angel lived.

That night Adrian thought of himself sitting beside the girl and listening to a sermon on purity. He felt so strong and pure himself that he let his hands rest far down in the bed, knowing they would not get into trouble.

He looked for his Earth Angel every Sunday at mass and rode his bike for hours around unfamiliar streets hoping to meet her. After Christmas when he still hadn’t seen her, he decided she had gone away for the holidays. He wondered where a respectable Catholic family would take their daughter for the summer.

The wealthier boys at St Carthage’s went to the Mornington Peninsula. Adrian had never been there, but every day in summer the Argus had pictures of holiday-makers at Rye or Rosebud or Sorrento. Mothers cooked dinner outside their tents and young women splashed water at the photographer and showed off their low necklines. Adrian began to worry about the dangers his Earth Angel would meet on the Peninsula. He hoped she didn’t care for swimming and spent her days reading in the cool of her tent. But if she did go swimming he hoped the changing sheds were solid brick and not weatherboard. He lay awake for hours one night thinking of all the rotted nail-holes in wooden changing sheds where lustful teenage boys could peer through at her while she undressed.

All round her in the shed the non-Catholic girls were putting on their twopiece costumes. But what did she wear? Adrian couldn’t go to sleep until he had reassured himself that she chose her beachwear from the range of styles approved by the National Catholic Girls’ Movement. (Sometimes the Advocate , the Catholic paper, showed pictures of N.C.G.M. girls modelling evening wear suitable for Catholic girls. The necklines showed only an inch or so of bare skin below the throat. There were never any pictures of bathers suitable for Catholics but girls were advised to inspect the approved range at N.C.G.M. headquarters.)

One morning the front-page headline in the Argus was HEAT WAVE. In the middle of the page was a picture of a young woman on a boat at Safety Beach. Her breasts were so close to the camera that Adrian could have counted the beads of water clinging to the places she had rubbed with suntan oil. All that afternoon he lay on the lino in the bathroom trying to keep cool and hoping his Earth Angel kept out of the way of men with cameras. He thought of some prowling photographer catching her as she stepped from the water with a strap of her bathers slipping down over her shoulder.

At night he had so many worries that he never thought of his old sin. On New Year’s Eve he remembered the boys of Eastern Hill Grammar School. That was the night when they all went to parties in their fathers’ cars and looked for girls to take home afterwards. One of the Eastern Hill fellows might have seen Adrian’s Earth Angel on the beach and tried to persuade her to go with him to a wild party. Adrian tried to remember some incident from the lives of saints when God had blinded a lustful fellow to the beauty of an innocent young woman to protect her virtue.

One day in January Adrian went to a barber’s shop in Accrington. One of the magazines lying around for customers to read was a copy of Man. Adrian studied the pictures quite calmly. The naked women were trying to look attractive, but their faces were strained and hard and their breasts were flabby from being handled by all the photographers who worked for Man— and probably all the cartoonists and short story writers and the editor as well. One glimpse of his Earth Angel’s hands and wrists stripped of the beige Mount Carmel gloves had more power over him than the sight of all the nude women in magazines.

Late in January Adrian felt strong enough to take out his model railway. He sent passenger trains round and round the main line and the loop, but he was careful to snatch up the engine each time it slowed down. He still remembered clearly all the landscapes around the track where the train used to stop in the old days. So long as the train ran express through the scenes of his impure adventures he felt no urge to enjoy America again.

But one hot afternoon he was staring through the shed door at the listless branches of the wattle scrub over the side fence when he realised the train had stopped. He stood very still. The only sounds around him were the clicking of insects and the crackling of seed-pods on the vacant block next door. He was almost afraid to turn and see what part of America he had come to.

He was far out on the plains of Nebraska. The long hot summer had ripened the miles of wheat and corn. For just one moment Adrian thought of grabbing the first American woman he could find and wandering off with her into the hazy distance to find some shady cottonwood tree beside a quiet stream.