Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

Even if they went to church, the garden suburbs people only sang Protestant hymns or listened to long sermons about Hospital Sunday or gambling or being converted in your heart. Their sons went to Eastern Hill Grammar and enjoyed themselves at parties or looked forward to years at the University and careers in the professions, while Adrian prayed to God every night to put off the end for a little longer so he could enjoy a few years of happiness as the husband of Denise McNamara.

But it wasn’t unfair that thoughtful Catholics had such worries while non-Catholics enjoyed themselves in their spacious homes. It was far better to look at the future realistically than to live for the pleasure of the moment. Adrian and his classmates had been brought up to think deeply about the things that really mattered. Their Catholic education had trained them to use their reason — to probe beneath the shallow surface that Protestants and atheists never questioned. And if the price that Catholic intellectuals had to pay was to worry about the terrible times ahead — well, at least they would have the last laugh one day when the Communists took over the garden suburbs or the armies of Elias and Antichrist drew up for battle on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Adrian hoped that all these prosperous doctors and solicitors and their spoilt sons and daughters would have time before the end to apologise to the Catholics and admit they were right after all. Of course the fools would spend all eternity blaming themselves for their folly anyway, but it would be very satisfying to have some big golden-haired Eastern Hill fellow come up to the boy he hadn’t even noticed on the trams years before and say, ‘For God’s sake, why didn’t you Catholics tell us what was coming?’

The answer to the fellow’s question, of course, was that he wouldn’t have listened anyway. All over Australia, Catholics like Stan Seskis’s father were trying to warn people about Communists in the unions, but how many listened to them? Only forty years before, Our Lady of Fatima had worked one of the most spectacular miracles of all time — the sun had danced and spun around and floated down towards the earth in front of 60,000 witnesses — but how many people were doing what Our Lady had asked, and praying and offering up penance so that Russia would be converted?

Even while the non-Catholics of Melbourne were sitting in front of their electric fires and their wives were fiddling with their expensive pressure cookers, a holy woman in Germany was still alive after fasting for twenty-five years — but who listened to her prophecies or took notice of her visions?

The tram climbed the last hill towards the Swindon Town Hall. Adrian looked back at the miles of dark-red roofs and grey-green treetops and the mass of rain-clouds above them. He knew it was wrong to gloat over the fate of thousands of people who had never deliberately done him harm. But he whispered into the breeze blowing past the tram that they were all doomed. And he saw the end of the world like grey rain bearing down on suburb after suburb — Oglethorpe by its winding creek, Glen Iris on its far hills, yes, and even Camberwell, the leafiest of them all — and the people in their last agony crying out that if only they could have had a Catholic secondary education they might have seen it coming.

Early in the third term, the boys of St Carthage’s started practising for the House Sports Meeting. Adrian Sherd decided to train for the B Grade 880 yards. Three nights each week he got out of Denise’s compartment at Caulfield and went to the racecourse to run. On those nights he always let his bag dangle open in the train so Denise would see his sandshoes and running singlet and realise he wasn’t deserting her for some frivolous reason.

He thought of her all the time he trained. In his last year at St Carthage’s, after he had started to talk to her on the train, she would tell a white lie to her teachers and turn up at the Swindon Cricket Ground to see him run in the A Grade 880. Meanwhile he improved his stamina by hissing her name under his breath as he ran.

One night three other boys agreed to run a trial 880 yards with him at the racecourse. Adrian dropped out well behind them in the early part of the race. His breath came easily and he barely whispered Denise’s name. With about 300 yards to go, he began his run. The effort to reach the others made him puff. He hissed the beloved name fiercely and didn’t care who heard him.

The other runners were stronger than Adrian had expected. In a last desperate effort to catch them he fixed her face, pale and anxious, a little to one side of the winning-post and punished his weary body savagely for her sake. A few yards short of the finish he caught and passed one of his rivals, but the other two were already crossing the line.

When the runners all stopped and looked at each other, Adrian suddenly heard the strange noise he had been making. It was always hard to fit the word ‘Denise’ into the rhythm of his breathing, and in the strain of the last hundred yards it had changed to a meaningless gasp, ‘Nees-A! Nees-A’ that was no help at all to him.

That night, for the first time since he had met Denise, he wondered if her influence over him might be weakening. A few nights later Sherd and his wife were climbing down towards a lonely riverbank in the Otways. It was Sunday afternoon and they wanted to be alone for a few hours away from the people of Our Lady of the Ranges. They were surprised to hear squeals coming from the river. They got to the little beach in time to see a naked man and two naked women dash out of the water and sprint towards a big beach umbrella and a heap of towels and clothes.

One of the women was a tall leggy brunette, and the other was a blonde with ample curves. Each of them kept an arm across her breasts and a hand between her thighs as she ran, so that Adrian was not forced to shield his eyes from them. But he flung himself in front of his wife to save her from seeing the man’s big hairy organ flopping up and down.

Sherd took his wife to the far end of the beach, but he kept thinking of the man and the two women. More than once he was tempted to stroll over and start a friendly conversation with them. He tried to convince himself there would be no harm in it, since the women would almost certainly be fully dressed. But when he remembered he was a married man with a beautiful young wife beside him, he came to his senses and admitted he was experiencing an impure temptation.

The boy Adrian Sherd was as shocked as the man when he realised how close he had come to turning his back on his wife and going into an occasion of sin. A few months before, the thrill of chatting to his wife in her bathers would have been so powerful that he could have kept his back turned all day on a beach full of naked film stars.

He realised that the married life of the Sherds was becoming too remote from the daily life of the young Adrian Sherd. Mrs Denise Sherd was a wonderful wife, but perhaps a boy in Form Five needed someone nearer his own age.

Adrian decided to act. On the very next night, he lay down in bed as usual, but instead of reaching out a hand to stroke the long black hair and the pale shoulder of his wife, he leaned across the compartment in the Coroke train and said to Denise McNamara, ‘Excuse me, but I’ve been meaning to speak to you for some time.’

He wasn’t brave enough to look her in the eyes as he spoke. He watched her hands and was encouraged to see her fiddling with her gloves and exposing the creamy-white skin of her wrists. When she answered him, her voice was just as gentle and sincere as he used to dream it might be when he sat opposite her in the train and waited for them both to grow older so he could talk to her and begin his long patient wooing.