Pernickety about symmetry he even balanced pictures, photographs, in others’ homes when they weren’t looking. His kitchen clock hung from a framed calendar, a double dose of days disappearing. Unable to resist, he corrected horizontality once too often instead of plunging guilty hands into pockets. His repair job was pathetic for a fussy man, off-centre, the flimsy frame’s corners fixed with elastic. The crashed clock, batteries restored, still ran, but backwards, as if in opposition to the calendar.
In their paddock he hand mowed an area to play football with his growing sons. His turn going uphill, the boys attacked his goal. To turn the tide he attempted a dropkick, by then a puzzling relic of the game. Mistiming, he kicked solid earth, his fitness going downhill. Limping through darkness to the toilet deep in the night he strained to recall what he had just dreamt about yesteryear’s game, its slower, stop-start tempo, the elusive ebb and flow of far-off fortune.
If this was on film the cinematography would be gloomy and still. His clock salutes the past now on the fridge in his beloved crumbling home. Like Dali’s melting timepiece it mocks the persistence of his memory, a desire to retreat from the despotism of time for a second chance. Time in reverse possesses infinite possibilities. He masked the bared calendar hook with a Picasso print. Time after time he glances up to see a woman weeping at odd angles as if pitying his OCD.
Long left with their mother, those boys, grown now, expect him at her place. Anxious to avoid relinquishing all connection, a better person now, he just keeps getting older surrounded by silence, regarding their discarded children’s clothes like Yeats’ sacred cloths of heaven. Dabbing on their Christmas gift aftershave, he selects a clean shirt, pockets pills, bangs dirt from his shoes imagining marines psyching up for a landing. He knows his cobwebbed van’s battery, sparingly used, might be low, while rust, time’s networking crony, ever gnaws at what was once a paint job, but this van’s beauty is it always starts.
Although well-meaning he has history. Punctual, repeating his ex-drinker’s fading memory check: switches, locks, wallet, comforts him, the fluency of rules, that cousin of security, his shield. The van, bought to transport a load of kids, faces a wall, behind it a short driveway, a cattle grid, then gates. Only one second’s slight lurch greets him when he turns the key. There is no other vehicle, no neighbour. He hates asking for help anyway.
Where they once argued lies on a curving slope down to a river. Foolhardy a familiar adjective, ignition on, handbrake off, out of gear, full choke, his back braced by the wall, he grips the bull-bar, rocks to roll it, trusting a straight course. Wasting muscles awakening, he tangoes the grid, cobwebs and rust be damned. Through the gates now he scoots around, hauls himself in pulling on the steering-wheel reaching for his seatbelt, the silent van gathering speed like happiness. On time, he guns it, hits the music – Moby’s Mistake – eases his foot back crossing the river’s surface-shimmer, farts, stretching his gas, making it last and last.
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