Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

Adrian had never seen one woman of this kind in Accrington or anywhere in Melbourne. Yet he learned from films that thousands of them sat waiting at hotel tables from Maine to California — and even in foreign cities. If Adrian had had a girlfriend of his own at the time, he could have rejoiced to see films showing other people achieving the same kind of happiness that he himself enjoyed. But those were the days before he had met Denise. When the films were over he went home to his lonely bed and envied the men who met these young women on their travels.

What happened next was only too familiar to the man Sherd. He remembered it and did penance for it every day. In the heat of his lust he had invented a sequence of events that was a travesty of the films that inspired them. Like the male stars of the films, he had met eligible young women. But instead of courting them patiently and waiting for some sign of encouragement before he kept exclusive company with them or ventured to kiss them, he had undressed them and defiled them only hours after their first meeting. It was all so absurd compared with what really happened in films.

After years in the peaceful Catholic community of Our Lady of the Ranges, Sherd could see clearly all the faults of modern life in Australia. He knew there was something very wrong with a society that made it so hard for young men to meet young women with a view to marriage.

A young man growing up at Our Lady of the Ranges was free to choose a girlfriend from one of the families he mixed with every day. Their affection for each other grew steadily over the years. A smile from her at morning mass or a few words as they met on a rustic pathway would inspire him to work like a Trojan all morning in the potato paddocks or bend over his books of theology and church history all afternoon in the library. The years passed quickly until the fellow was old enough to call on her parents and ask for the young woman’s hand. From then until the day of the wedding, the young couple would sit together by the riverbank on Sunday afternoons, within sight of their elders but far enough away to talk privately together.

As more and more people left the cities and settled in co-operative rural communities, there would be fewer young women in any country who had to spend hours doing their hair and putting make-up on their faces and then sitting alone at hotel tables waiting for the right man to turn up. And of course there would be fewer single men walking past those tables and noticing the women sitting there. But best of all there would be fewer young men who had to spend years of their lives as solitary sex maniacs because they could only watch those single men and women meeting in films and never get the chance to do the same thing in real life.

During a House football match one Wednesday, it rained so hard that the brother who was umpire sent the boys to shelter under trees. Adrian Sherd and his team-mates crouched under the dripping branches and looked for a break in the weather. The sky was unnaturally dark. Someone started talking about the end of the world.

The boys of Adrian’s class often discussed this topic when no brother was around. One or two of them had tried to bring up the subject in Christian Doctrine periods, but their teacher had always ended the discussion before it got interesting. The brother would agree that the world was going to end some day, but he insisted that no one — not even the most learned theologian or the holiest saint — knew whether it would happen tomorrow or a thousand years from now. The brother would allow that parts of the Apocalypse described the last days of the world and the signs of the coming end, but he said it was a risky business trying to look for these signs in the present day. All a Catholic boy had to do was to live each day of his life as though it was his last day on earth, and leave it to God to work out His plans for bringing the world to an end.

A boy looked out at the sodden football ground and said, ‘We know He won’t destroy the world again by water or send a terrible deluge again because in the Old Testament He showed Noah the sign of the rainbow when the flood had gone down.’

Another boy said, ‘It can’t happen yet because the prophet Elias hasn’t come back to earth. And there was someone else in the Old Testament who didn’t die properly either. Elias went up body and soul in a fiery chariot, and the Church teaches that he has to come back to earth again and die properly. I’ve heard he’ll come back when the Church is really in trouble and lead us in battle against our enemies.’

All the boys around Adrian joined in the discussion.

‘The Antichrist is going to be the Church’s worst enemy. But he hasn’t come yet, and the world can’t end until he does.’

‘Will Elias know he’s Elias when he comes back? Or will he grow up thinking he’s just an ordinary Catholic schoolboy? He could even be one of us now.’

‘He’d have to be a Hebrew, though, wouldn’t he?’

‘Wouldn’t he more likely come back the way he went up? I don’t mean in a fiery chariot, but roughly the same age.’

‘His body is somewhere in heaven right now. Seems creepy to think about it.’

‘That’s nothing. Our Lady’s body is there too according to the dogma of the Assumption.’

‘But what about the Antichrist? He won’t call himself that, will he?’

‘I used to think Stalin was him, the way he persecuted Catholics. But he’s dead now and the Church is still going strong. Anyway, isn’t the Church supposed to be defeated or nearly die out just before the end of the world? That’s not happening now, is it?’

‘There are four hundred million Catholics all over the world.’

‘Our Lord said, “Behold I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world.” The Church can never be defeated.’

Stan Seskis joined in and said, ‘Listen. My old man’s a nong most of the time. But he’s right when he talks about Communism. You droobs don’t realise what the Communists are doing in Australia right now. When my father heard the Russians were coming into our country during the war he packed everything into a little leather bag and my mother carried me and my little brother in her arms and we got for our lives. After the war we sneaked across the border of Germany into the West. We had to cross a ploughed paddock and I was bawling the whole time because my shoe fell off and I couldn’t go back to get it. That’s all I can remember — I lost my shoe. I wonder what the Reds did with it if they ever found it. But my father knows what Communism means because he’s lived with it.’

Seskis kept talking. No one wanted to interrupt him. ‘And you know all this Petrov business and all the facts about Russian spies in Australia? Well, my old man’s known all about it for years. He knows the names of dozens of Communist spies in all the unions and the Labor Party and if it hadn’t been for him and his anti-Communist mates, the Commoes would have taken over Australia already. When I was a kid and we had all those strikes in Australia and grass was growing on all the train-tracks and tramlines for months, well my father came home one night and told us the Communists were just about ready to overthrow the government. He said it could happen any day, only this time they weren’t going to drive him out of his homeland a second time — he was going to stay and fight. And if you saw the list of Communists in his secret notebook (they’re all written in code) you’d be amazed how many enemies we’ve got all round us.’

Another fellow said, ‘That Bishop from China who spoke to all the senior forms that day — the one with the white beard who wrote Chinese words on the blackboard and showed us his chopsticks — didn’t he say the Chinese Communists had a plan to come down through the islands to Australia? That’s why these terrorists are fighting in Malaya right now.’