Clickety-click by Ian C Smith

I still read about wanderlust though my nomadic days have dwindled.  Reading about the swish current Melbourne-Sydney train, the XPT, kindles a memory of The Spirit of Progress, the titan of the tracks from my boyhood.  When I first rode it at thirteen, paddocks of silvery grass shivered, wan morning light breaking over imagined desperadoes’ campfires, rural Victoria flying past like life, silent stations a blur.  Ticketless, wearing sad belligerence’s long overcoat, I rehearsed my tale.  This account was not for my furious parents’, but my schoolmates’ ears.  My burgeoning description of speeding back in custody for daring crime when skipping school, and the resulting vivid arse-whipping, having hitchhiked from big trouble, would consolidate my schoolyard status.

Stooping at a street corner drinking fountain I sensed the cop’s shadow after foolishly – I believed – confessing my flight from home to a kind guy, the last driver who stopped for me.  Crossing the NSW border from Victoria presaged a Waltzing Matilda future that in later years became a fascination with reaching termini, the more distant or difficult, the better. Nearly broke, I had to hand over some stolen tailor-made cigarettes I lied about before the cop’s wife, another kind person I was unused to, fed me prior to whirligig dreams in the unlocked, otherwise empty, cells, a gallery of misspelt uncouth etchings.  At dawn the cop escorted me to rendezvous with the famous train.  Miffed that he used no restraints, I was a juvenile delinquent hobo riding the rails, or Billy the Kid, or starring in an atmospheric train scene to rival The 3.10 to Yuma, or High Noon, in my mind’s movie.

A boy strides towards a distant beach wearing a school jumper and gaudy bravado he will always remember, cold, trembling from his latest thrashing, his body black and sore under heaven’s roar.  The gravel road lies quiet except for one car, a writer’s.  He lives beyond the boy’s family, has his own light plane and airstrip.  This writer who always looks but never offers a ride, has finished a book about the fraught end of our beloved world, later to be filmed in this area.  Here, English emigres, snobs, like the writer and the boy’s parents, settled the domain of kookaburras and copperheads.  The corner property swoons, immaculate, Kensington Park’s white horsey fences gleaming before the pale moon and its jewels.  That car’s sound faded and gone, the boy’s thoughts about the writer meld with shadows at a field’s edge.  A stray dog passes him, then turns to follow ten yards behind, its gait steady, the boy’s mind adrift in a dreamlike future, that unknown pinprick of light we each grope for.  He has thirteen pounds stolen and stowed, a pouch of tobacco, a rage to live, to succeed.  He thinks he could hitchhike to Sydney.  In imagination’s kingdom he sees a truck stop, a jukebox, hears songs about lonely far-off times.

A toasty smell.  Surfaces glittered.  I could see my pimples.  Disfigured, I thought.  That cop, too nice for a cop, I also thought, irritated, whispered in the dining-car lady’s ear, her large earrings swaying.  He laughed, warning me about the terrible fate awaiting escapees.  Instead of handcuffs, except in my dreamt-up scenarios, there was bacon and eggs on railway china with weighted cutlery, the condemned allowed to order whatever they liked.  I considered slipping away when and if the train stopped once my belly was filled.  I had eaten little since fleeing my own private hell.  Longing to be racing on the Spirit’s golden-winged return journey, Sydney-bound for a new beginning.  I felt my freedom was banjaxed whether I jumped train or remained aboard.

Without speaking to, or knowing her, my mother would criticize and condemn the dining-car lady’s dyed hair, pencilled eyebrows, mascara, bright lipstick, and twangy Aussie accent, if she could see her listening to my sorry tale, tousling my begrimed hair, her eyes shining.  I was talking too much.  Lonely.  My self-image teetering, words almost choking into tears, I pretended to swallow the wrong way as she tactfully reacted with more toast.  There was a hunger about her, different from mine, watching me eat.  She gushed that if I were hers, oh, how she would love me!  All those years before I knew how to even pronounce cliché, her voice was seized with pity, for me, for herself, for the boy she never had.

As she talked, the way she called me ‘love’, flooded me with yearning for her to find a way for me to live with her in The Rocks, a tough area then in the shadow of the great bridge she said was home.  She also told me she was married to her constant shiftwork job.  Perhaps we could work together, I hoped, because we got on so well.  If so, I silently vowed to quit most of my artful dodges, but knew this was kid-like reasoning.  I wished she was my mother, wished I could swap mean adults for kind, her hard life for ease, wished I had started shaving, wished my socks didn’t stink as we sped clickety-click towards vicious parental wrath again, my parents’ maelstrom of misery in that toxic wasteland of grotesque grasping from which I eventually escaped forever to navigate some of Earth’s far corners, its many restorative wonders.

Ian C Smith

Image: John L. Buckland (d), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons – black and white image of the Spirit of Progress train in Australia.