By Keren Heenan.
Whisper is down by the train tracks, sniffing out old haunts, old hurts, holding them up to his memory mirror.
It still burns, Whisp. Still tears and twists and makes your innards squirm.
From around the bend comes the heavy rocking, the long hooting whistle. Whisper takes a step back, eyes dead ahead at the space that will fill. The train breaks into his peripheral vision, hurtles closer, the horn shrieking a warning – that’s too close! He takes another step back, hard up against the embankment. All the fury and weight of the engine and carriages passes in a blur, images skidding by in micro seconds. His head is full, with noise and the startled cosmos of him, like a shattering of glass, the breath knocked from him. Then it’s gone, and he staggers forward, hands on his knees.
Still rips at you, Whisp. Stay away!
Whisper crosses the tracks, follows the worn path through yellow grass, head down, eyes charting the steady pace of his feet. Looks up when he reaches the road. Up at the thuggish mountains brooding over the town. Everything in him topsy-turvy – flailing and flapping and fretting. He’s not himself today.
Stay away, Whisp.
He hasn’t always been Whisper. He was Benjamin once, and lived in a house, with his wife and daughter on two hundred acres, sheep, two dogs. Town show once a year, his wife winning best jam or sponge award, daughter on his lap in the cart rides, horse all dressed up in baubles and fringes pulling them around the showgrounds in the cart. Happy then, in the shadow of the mountains on the outskirts of town.
But things change. Things happen. And Benjamin stopped talking – above a whisper anyway. No one could look at him after things happened. Easier to cross the road. Easier to find something of interest in the shop window at the last moment. No one knew what to say to him, couldn’t hear him if he did speak. He doesn’t have much to talk about anyway. Simply existing doesn’t generate stories for conversation, and he’s long passed the time for sympathy. So Benjamin became Whisper. Even to himself, because that’s what he hears in his head. Just whispers.
When he arrives back from the train tracks, Whisper sees there is a stranger waiting for him, leaning on Whisper’s truck. The stranger has an easy lean on him; elbow on the bonnet, one leg crossed over the other at the knee and the toe of his boot tipped to the ground. He’s wearing a smart grey suit, jacket buttoned up, no tie but the collar is turned out clean and white. Hair neatly groomed, his moustache sleek and dark.
Down at the tracks again, Whisp. Are you going to do this forever? You don’t have to you know.
Whisper looks into the stranger’s eyes. There is nothing remarkable about those eyes, yet was there a flicker of lilac flame, just then. Whisper looks away. No one can help. Not even the passing of time has blunted the ache. He reaches out in his mind for the memory – his wife at the sink peeling potatoes in the sun, singing to their daughter kicking chubby legs on a kitchen chair. His wife turns and comes towards Whisper, smiling, curl of hair over one eye. His mind stretches to continue, but she’s gone – the image, the song, the warm sun gleaming on the sink, the window. He is left with a vast feeling of nothingness, but not of the painful kind. Then into that nothingness comes the truck, the house, the thought of heading inside, to make a meal and prepare for the night, and a feeling of satisfaction with a day’s work behind him. And he does not question what work that was. There is no hole, no loss, no great aching chasm. But he only realises this as the memories crash back into him, sudden and heavy like a locomotive.
Whisper looks back to the stranger who has straightened from his lean on the truck and stands with one eyebrow raised, a questioning curl to his lip, and again, that flicker of lilac flame.
You could have that. At a cost.
Whisper turns away. Stares at the ground, his hands dead weights on arms tight by his sides. Although he thinks of this figure as the stranger, he feels he’s seen him before, or felt his presence; down near where the road crosses the train lines. But never clearly, always as if he’s looking through water at a pale and shapeless image. Then it’s an impression of a figure, then it’s gone. Here now though, the stranger is a solid figure.
Whisper glances back and the stranger has gone. He knows not to look about for him, he won’t be there.
Inside, he sits at the kitchen table and looks out the window, the distant horizon a blur of land and purpling sky. Whisper thinks of no memory, feeling its lightness. Closes his eyes and soars a moment in pale air. He hangs here on a tightwire of the memory of no memory. Then into this moment slides the memory of his wife at the sink in the sun singing to their daughter. One can not exist with the other. One has to go.
Under the blankets that night, eyes wide open to the dark and the memories. Images as if on video repeat pass across his mind’s eye: the dry baked earth, dead sheep, empty dams empty wallet empty fridge – yet she still tried to sing, stand in the light, find something to smile about. Until she couldn’t.
Whisper knows he’ll be back – the stranger. Won’t leave him alone until he gets an answer.
Morning light is palely bleak – no gold, no rising disc of the sun, only a grey creeping light, a squalid limping dawn. Where is the glimmer when you crave it? That savage fire of the sun burning over the mountains and down into Whisper’s cold grey dawn. But there’ll be none of that this morning, and Whisper clambers from the fug of sleep and dream and stumbles out to the kitchen. Leans on the sink and peers out the window. Sheep huddle together at the fence line, heads bent forwards. Whisper wonders if they have memories – of yesterday, the day before, of others who are no longer with them. Are they any worse off than him for the not knowing? The no memory?
The land on the other side of the fence, where the sheep cuddle into each other, used to be Whisper’s land. He hasn’t enough land for a flock now. Just the house and the shadows behind it, the tank and the fence and the track to the road in front. The farmer who bought the land from him was generous. Whisper got to keep the house. It was this or the bank taking the lot. But he looks at the sheep now and remembers purpose, jobs to be done: flock to check, dogs to feed, fences fixed, dams to watch for sheep stuck in the mud, returning at dusk to wash off the dirt, stomach ready for a hot roast or rich stew.
But that was then. And Whisper doesn’t know how to repair the great gaping hole of the absence of then. He is fastened to the very place he wants wiped clean from his memory. Forever in the claws and teeth of his own failure and guilt.
How light he’d felt when the golden memory came to him, down there by the tracks, the hoot of the train no more than a distant whistle then. How he’d straightened up and flung his hand to his throat in relief. How precious they were to him, his wife and child. They relied on him. And he’d looked to the mountains with the sun streaming across its flanks, and he’d backed away, hands and arms hugging his body, blubbering at the thought of what he might have done. What he’d said to his wife.
But while Whisper was having his grand epiphany down by the train tracks that day, charged by the memory of his wife by the sink in the sun singing and smiling, she had already left the house with the child and made her own way down to the tracks looking for him. His threat that morning, still ringing in her ears her head her heart – I’m no use to you, I may as well be lying on the tracks in front of the 4.21. By the time Whisper felt the light of something huge burn away the hollowness, his wife had already slipped, the child tottering forward, rolling down the incline, while the train hooted and charged up to the bend. By the time Whisper had had his one bright moment and stepped back to view it in the shadow of the mountains, his wife had run down to the train tracks and scooped up the child, and the grinding shrieking metal filled her head. But the brakes on a freight train moving at 55 miles an hour take a mile to stop after they’ve been activated. And Whisper’s grand and golden moment just the other side of the bend was dispelled. Recalled now with such bitterness and derision – nothing more than the pompous posturing from a shallow and gutless man. Unable to own his epiphany just as he can’t own his decision to go to the tracks in the first place. And yet. Something had held him back that day, from the light-as-flight freefall to the tracks. Still holds him now.
Out the window, a slender hyphen of light glimmers on the horizon. As if in response, three of the sheep lift their woolly heads in its direction, then bend to the scant grass and pull and chew. Whisper watches – the sheep, the sun – feels a shift in the air. Sees a shimmer out in the soupy morning, over near the truck.
He’s there again. The stranger, leaning on the truck. He turns and looks at Whisper through the window.
Thought about it?
Whisper turns away. Closes his eyes.
Hmmm?
He doesn’t have to look to see the raised eyebrow, lilac eyes, the cocked head and twitch of the dapper moustache.
One word, Whisp and it’s yours. Blessed oblivion. Just like you’d wanted down at the train tracks that day.
Whisper turns back to the window and sees the light from the pale sun has cast a thin gleam on the sink. From the taut silence in the kitchen comes the tremulous notes of her singing, the gurgling roll of the child’s chatter. ‘I’ve thought,’ he says, out loud to the air, the song, the shine of the morning. ‘And it’s my pain. I’ll keep it.’
He looks back to the truck and there is no one and nothing there. Just a palely gleaming shine on the bonnet of the truck, a hum in the air, and no whispers in his head.
