This Is the Grass by Alan Marshall

Author:Alan Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2012-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

4

Each Sunday night I returned to East Melbourne. I alighted from the train at Jolimont and walked to the boarding-house which was some distance from the station. I carried a small suitcase filled with washed clothes and writing materials. It was heavy and I found it difficult to manage.

After experimenting with different ways of carrying the suitcase—a rope through the handle and hooked over the top of a crutch; knapsack fashion tied to my back; held with my hand on the crutch grip—I found the simplest and least tiring method was to hold the handle in my mouth, the weight of the case being taken by my lower jaw.

The walk from the station was always in darkness and I never met many people. If I saw a person approaching, I rested the case on the ground and waited till he or she passed. It saved me startled glances and backward looks of curiosity which I was still young enough to resent.

I felt like a retriever dog bringing home the newspaper and amused myself by imagining situations where I extended the idea to some ludicrous climax. I was tempted to continue past people with the case in my mouth, then suddenly drop it and bark like a dog or sit up in a begging position, whining. I wondered whether, in all the world, there was some understanding man who, when confronted with such an act, would join in with it and say obligingly: ‘Look, follow me home and I’ll give you a bone.’ I would have welcomed him.

City life had introduced me to exhaustion, an almost constant companion to the cripple walking city streets, pushing through jostling people, catching trams and trains. But I came to accept it as part of living and soon learnt so to order my progress that intervals of rest could be snatched in most places—a projection on a wall upon which to lean for a space, a rail to grasp, places in which I could brace a crutch so that it took the weight from limbs.

Stops to rest were never conscious; untroubled thought on other matters went on while the body automatically seized every opportunity for respite. Thus, my Sunday-night walks to the boarding-house were marked by motionless pauses, the gripping of fences, a leaning across rails, behaviour that to an average observer would have suggested a feeble mind.

On Sunday nights the boarding-house was usually bright with singing and music. It was a middle-class boarding-house patronised by men and women guarded by a feeling of superiority from the troubles of the people on the streets. But it had acquired an atmosphere of its own.

The boarders either sang or played musical instruments for their entertainment, preserving a state that must have been developed by the influence of some previous music-lover in the house who had encouraged a procession of boarders with similar interests.

There was a lived-in, home smell about the place. The smell of frying sausages, gas, mothballs, airless, dark rooms and musty linen in hall cupboards was absent.

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