A Sense of Loss
Short Story
by Stephen Collicoat
They were arguing.
They often argued now.
At night, when they believed their children couldn't hear. In the
bedroom, where their children couldn't see. Night after night, the same
miserable litany. The same petty squabbles. The recitation of a thousand
faults. Her biting contempt for his weakness. His whining justifications.
Tonight however there was something fresh to argue over.
'I can't understand you,' she began.
Silence.
'Can you hear what I'm saying?'
'Yes, I can hear you. The whole neighborhood can hear you.'
'I said I can't understand you.'
'You never could.'
'Oh yes,' she laughed bitterly. 'I understand you all too well. Noone
understands you better.'
Mark's father fell silent, retreating into his familiar, resentful cave
of pain.
'But this, I don't understand. Why now after so many years?'
'It's the right thing to do,' he responded stubbornly.
'The right thing,' she mimicked his tone. 'Yes, the right thing is
always so important to you, isn't it?
'How long have we been married? Don't turn away when I'm talking to
you. I said, how long have we been married?'
'Look, will you belt up and let a man grab some sleep? I'm dog tired
and have a heavy day tomorrow.'
Mark Caldwell in the next room heard and hated every word. He felt
guilty. Dirty. Ashamed. An unwilling witness to his parent's shabby
secrets.
I'll never marry, he promised himself. The thought gave comfort. As did
another thought: One day, the imprisonment of childhood will end.
I'll never be my father's son. I never want to be my father's son. No,
too cruel. Parts he'd like to keep. Parts he'd like to lose forever.
He thought of his father's work. I disappoint him. He doesn't say, but
I feel it all the time.
Brian Caldwell was a man of silence. Sitting in his shed, smoking,
listening to the radio. The radio that generally droned a kick by kick
commentary of the football match, the announcer occasionally shrieking in
excitement when a goal was kicked or a mark fumbled.
After a while, Brian Caldwell would finish his pipe or stub out his
hand-rolled cigarette that was always poorly made: a thin, lumpy tube,
tobacco dripping from either end. Then he'd fire up the spirit lamp. He'd
uncork a thick brown glass bottle and pour acid over two ends of metal,
the liquid spitting like a cat's curse. When the lamp was glowing hot,
he would place a soldering iron so that its tip rested in the sharp
blue arrow of flame. Then he'd take the iron and a bar of solder and begin
the joint.
Or he'd plane wood. Sharpening the blade on a whetstone. First a
coarse-grained stone, then medium, finally fine. The blade so sharp that it
could slice paper. Reassembling and adjusting the box plane. The first
sweep. Adjustment. Then the long, easy, confident sweep, a fine shaving
of wood curling over and over until it tumbled out of the well of the
plane onto the bench, sliding onto the floor. Unwinding the vice.
Checking the edge of the wood was straight with a square. A glimpse of light
and he'd lightly mark the section with a penciled cross, then plane and
check again.
Or he'd boil up glue, made from horses' hooves - foul smelling stuff,
dabbing it in to strengthen his carefully fashioned, tight-fitting
mortise joints.
It was all male territory. Tobacco, football, tools - box planes,
spokeshaves, tenon saws, grinding wheels, bench saws and sanding belts.
Brian's world. Not Mark's. Never Mark's.
Sometimes Mark tried to talk to his father. It was always hard. The man
hid behind his radio and his work. It hurt at the time. Later, well
after Mark passed the age his father died, the memory of this silence made
him both angry and sad.
But it was also a cultural thing. His father lived on the margin, but
no more so than tens of thousands of Australian men in the nineteen
fifties. In many ways, they were still boys. They bought home their meagre
paypackets and their wives would give them an allowance - some
pocketmoney for fags or the occasional beer, perhaps a modest flutter at the
races. Money was always tight. Women knew best how to handle cash. It was
the Age of Scrimp and Save.
Women lived in the house. Men lurked in their sheds until they were
called to tea. They would wash in the yard. Cold water in a basin. Pink
soap. The wonderfully evocative old carbolic smell. None of that sissy,
perfumed soap of the stars. Lather for men. Lather for an era of heavy
leather razor strops and cut throat shaves. Drying off on a rough ragged
edged towel, rubbing hard until the skin of the face shone.
Then in to tea. To her world. A world of books and music. Demands and
ambiguity. The problems of the day. Sometimes laughter. The kids evasive
about their schooldays: wolfing down their food with one eye on the
clock, keen only to be away to the lounge to fling themselves down on the
sofa and listen to their favorite radio serials: 'Hop Harrigan',
'Superman' ('Lois is in trouble! Down! Down!'), 'Tarz - z -zan, Ki- i-i ng of
the Apes' ('Aihee -e-e-e'e a - a a!')
'Sit up Mark,' his mother would snap across the table at tea.' Do you
want to grow as round shouldered as your father?' and Pat, Mark's
sister, older by three years would giggle. Pat always sided with her Mum.
Mark tried, but knew he wasn't normal. Normal boys liked football. The
roughhouse mateship. welcomed company. He was awkward. Fumbled when he
tried to mark the ball, kicked it in a weak, loopy way. The kids at
school would groan if he were ever picked for their team, the teacher
smirking at their protest.
Mark bought a football and for hours kicked it up and down the quiet
street outside his home. He kicked it down the street and over lampposts
or into neighbor's yards. His father never played with him. Brian was
always too late for games, cycling home from work in the dark, his heavy
bicycle casting a weak pool of light ahead, the dynamo whirring softly
against the tread molded into the side of the tyre.
Once father and son went to a suburban football match. Mark was quickly
bored but tried hard to appear interested. Clapping, calling out advice
or insults to the players. All the manly things. But he caught a cold
and that evening as they rode back on their bikes, Mark began to shake.
His mother, seeing him, rushed him to bed. He heard her berate his
father. 'Couldn't you see the state he was in? Why didn't you bring him
home before it got cold?'
'Oh, for crying out loud. It was only a football match. He should have
said something. What's wrong with him, anyway? Have I raised a bloody
wimp as a son?'
'Don't swear in the house! I won't have it.'
'I'll tell you one thing. I'll never take him to the footy again. He's
a waste of space.'
A long time later, however Brian unbent enough to take his son to work.
The single occasion stayed in Mark's mind for the rest of his life. He
never felt closer to his father than that day.
In 1953, Victorian train carriages were often divided into a series of
separate rooms. Known as 'dog boxes', they offered no communication
with passengers in other carriages, the train driver or the guard. It was
only after a number of women were raped and men beaten up on long
express journeys that the authorities finally bowed to public outrage and
began replacing then with a more open, safer configuration. Trains were
divided into first and economy classes and smoking or non-smoking
carriages. As soon as the train pulled into to the Melbourne suburb of
Carnegie, Brian took Mark with him to a smoking dog box.
Brian Caldwell traveled the same journey to work for 20 years. The same
working men, all wearing hats, all carrying battered old kit bags,
would greet each other. They smiled or sulked their way together past the
twenty stations to town year after year knowing little of each other
and, in that oddly incurious way of men, never trying to find out more.
That day, there was a lot of good-natured ribbing. 'I guess you like
the footy, son? Who do you support?'
'The Lions.' It was Brian's team.
'Nuh. Haven't a chance for the championship this year. Useless the lot
of them.'
'You'll see,' Brian cut in loyally. 'There's some good kickers there.'
'Not worth a pinch of salt since Tony Ongarello hung up his boots.'
Mark enjoyed the journey. Noone was unmanly enough to suggest opening a
window in the smoke-choked carriage. When the train arrived and the
doors were flung open, thick smoke billowed out.
The council depot where Brian worked was at the top end of town, behind
the brewery. Brian went to the forge where he worked and placed his kit
bag on a bench. He opened the bag and took out that day's 'Age', cut
lunches for Mark and himself, a dog-eared Zane Grey paperback ('His guns
spat lead. The outlaw spun, clutching his chest, blood oozing from
between his fingers. Then he slowly fell into the dry powdered dust of the
street') and his freshly washed, neatly pressed blue boiler suit. Brian
changed. He broke up a small, wooden packing case with a hand axe and
heaped the shattered boards on scrunched up paper on a bed of coals in
the forge.
Everything seemed vivid to Mark in his youth, even to the sharp
pungency of sulphur in the igniting match. The fire took and when the flames
were burning fiercely, turning the coals red, Brian began to work the
great bellows of the furnace. Soon all the coals turned scarlet. He then
filled an iron kettle. When the water boiled, he swilled out a chipped
brown teapot and carefully ladled out measures of tealeaves. ('A
teaspoon per cup and one for the pot.'). Then he set out three mugs, beside a
bottle of milk and sugar bowl.
Another man, around Brian's age in his early fifties, wandered in.
'Jack Mellors. My son, Mark.'
'Goodday Mate. Going to be with us today? You'll have to watch your
step, Brian.'
Mellors like Brian Caldwell was a short, sturdy man. He too was almost
bald. Unlike Mark's father however almost half of his face was
disfigured by a birth mark that burst like a ripe plum above his brow and
dripped down in frozen, angry color across the bridge of his nose and
covered most of his right cheek. Mellors was an excellent man to work beside,
being quiet, tolerant and dependable.
Sitting there watching the two men work, Mark felt pleased his father
was an engineering blacksmith, rather than holding down some dreary
white collar job. It was fascinating to watch his father heating and
hammering metal, shaping it on his anvil, checking angles and clearance with
metal calipers. Finally satisfied, Brian would take the metal that
turned from clean red to ash grey and thrust the metal into a barrel of
black water, where the metal hissed in sharp protest, sending out a cloud
of steam.
Blacksmithing demands strength and precision. It was the trade of
Brian's father and his father and his father before him. It was the family
tradition carried out from Cornwall to Australia. A tradition that Mark
would break. It was dirty, dangerous work. It was also a dying trade -
one couldn't survive the modern age of diesel burning furnaces and
steam presses. At 53, Caldwell hoped to squeeze 12 years more from the work
before he retiring on an age pension at 65.
In fact, he was to die three years later from emphyaesamia, partly
caused by smoking as well as a lifetime breathing in coal fumes.
Brian Caldwell was born in 1900 in the Victorian country town of
Castlemaine. As late as the 1920's business was still brisk for blacksmiths.
There were horses to shoe, carts to make and ploughs to repair. Even in
this backwater however, change had begun. Gradually, cars and tractors
were mechanising rural life and the need for blacksmiths were dying.
Tom Caldwell, Brian's father was as tough, dry and mean as the gum tree
scrub that ringed the town.
He wasn't always so.
Once Tom was kind and loving. A man who was quietly proud of his young
wife, growing family and developing business. He built a fine, brick
house on a large allotment in Barnard Street. He was becoming a man of
consequence.
Then his wife died after a painful, prolonged illness. Tom grew
increasingly bitter. He left his young daughter the responsibility of raising
the three boys, of whom Brian was the youngest. Tom retreated deeper
into himself: a gloomy tryant, feared and hated by his children.
When ten years had passed, he married a woman older than himself. A
vinegary spinster, she was one of two daughters of a moderately wealthy
apple orchardist from Shepparton. She had passed childbearing age and
resented Tom's children. Unable to win their affection, she determined to
make their lives a misery.
More years passed. Shortly before Brian was 21, he was called to his
father's study. He had been keenly anticipating this interview. It was
time that all the work he had done would finally be recognized. He was
the only son to have taken on the trade. Now he expected his reward.
'Sit down or stand up, whatever you please,' his father said in curt
acknowledgment. ' This won't take long.'
Brian sat. After all, they were to become partners.
'I'm going to sell the business.'
'W-what?' Brian stuttered. 'Sell our business?'
'My business. Mine to keep or sell. That's all I want to say.'
'What do you mean? You've been telling me all these years that you
wouldn't pay me a wage, but that we'd become partners when I was 21. Now,
you want to cheat me of my right?'
'Call me a cheat and I'll knock your head off!' Tom roared.
'I'll call you what I damn well please! I trusted you as a father and
you've shafted me.'
'You should be grateful that I taught you a trade.'
'What, and grateful that because I was never paid a red cent, I'm poor
as a church mouse? You mongrel! Go on then, sell the business and much
good may it do you!'
'I won't have my son speak to me like that! If that's your attitude,
you can pack your stuff and clear out.'
'Believe me, I won't stay a moment longer under the same roof as a
cheat and a liar,' Brian snapped, storming out of the room.
He went to his bedroom and tore his few clothes from their hangers in
the wardrobe, stuffing them into his suitcase. His stepmother darted out
into the corridor as carried the suitcase toward the front door,
blocking his way.
'You should feel ashamed talking to your father like that,' he hissed.
'After all he's done for you...'
'Get out of my way, you old witch,' Brian roughly ordered. She stood
aside in amazement as he pushed past.
Going to the garage, he wheeled out his old 'Indian' motor bike.
Strapping the suitcase onto the pillion seat, he mounted the bike, switched
on the ignition, opened the choke and gave the starter pedal a savage
kick. The engine roared into life. He let out the clutch, kicked down
into first and accelerated out into the quiet street.
Minutes later, Brian reached the outskirts of Castlemaine, heading
toward Melbourne.
He never spoke to his father again and grew increasingly bitter as the
years passed. The pent-up anger surfaced each time he suffered cramp.
He would jump out of bed and hobble around the room, cursing the pain.
'The only thing Dad gave me was these bloody legs,' he cried.
'Oh, for heaven's sake!' Mark heard his mother explode. 'Can't you get
past that?'
'Well, it's true. He diddled me.'
'So, what can you do about it now? It was thirty years ago. Are you
going to moan on forever about what happened to you when you were 21?'
'If I had been made a partner, I'd be wealthy today. Not working my
guts out for other people.'
'Maybe you would. Maybe you wouldn't. We'll never know.'
'I should have stood up to the old man!'
'You should have done a thousand things. You should have hired a lawyer
and fought for your rights. I don't know. I wasn't there at the time.
But you didn't. You let him best you. When it came to a fight, you ran
away and you've been running ever since.'
Mark in the next room, wished his father had used disappointment as a
spur, not a crutch. He fantasized how his father, angered by the
decision, had vowed to succeed. How he had worked and saved, putting together
some capital. How he was farsighted enough to see that the future lay
in motor cars, not the blacksmithing trade. How he had diligently
learned the new trade, and gradually bought a chain of businesses. How he
returned to Castlemaine a wealthy man, showing everyone how mean and
stupid Tom Caldwell had been.
But it was a dream. Brian Caldwell wasn't an able man of business. He
was a trusting man. A man, who others used, then threw away.
Tom Caldwell left Castlemaine, moving to the beachside suburb of
Brighton after the death of his second wife. The news reached Brian through
one of his brothers. It made no difference. Although Brighton was less
than a 30 minutes bike away, neither father nor son contacted each
other.
Now finally Tom Caldwell had died.
The voices rose again. Mark buried his head in a pillow, but it was
useless. His parents' voices came clearly through the thin wall.
'Just explain why you want to go to your father's funeral.'
'It just seems the right thing to do.'
'When did your family ever care about the right thing? How many from
your side even bothered to come to our wedding? There's only been two -
your sister and one brother - who have spoken a word to you in all these
years.'
'It's not much of a family,' Brian admitted. 'But it's all I have.'
'Alright, go to his funeral if it makes you feel better, but why drag
Mark along?'
'I'd like to take my son. It's his grandfather who's died.'
'And what about Pat? You have a daughter as well. He's her grandfather
too.'
'She wouldn't be interested. I'm not a fool and I'm not blind. She's
made it very clear what she thinks of me and my side of the family.'
Mark heard his mother sigh resignedly.
'Oh, take Mark then. Go if you must. Just don't expect me to trail
along. If it were up to me, I wouldn't touch that whole rotten gang with a
10-foot pole.'
Brian arranged with the council depot to take the day off. A note was
sent to Mark's school excusing him for the funeral. The day came. Mark's
mother went to work, while Pat caught the bus to school.
Mark washed the dinner and breakfast dishes, while his father changed
into his best suit.
When he had finished the washing up, Mark went to change. He sat in the
kitchen in his Sunday best - tight collar that left an angry red ring
around his neck. Itchy trousers. Shoes that gleamed and creaked their
newness each time he walked. He sat at the kitchen table, watching the
clock.
Finally, when his father didn't return, he went looking for him. He
found him sitting in his shed, puffing reflectively at a cigarette.
'It's time to go, Dad.'
'We're not going. You can change now if you like.'
'But why aren't we going?'
'Go away, Mark. I just want to sit here by myself for a while.'
Mark looked at his father. He saw a defeated man.
A Sense of Loss© COPYRIGHT 2004 Stephen Collicoat.
Reproduction prohibited without permission from the author.
10/15/04
