Mick, a workmate of Walter’s, a young man who regularly slumped casually at his desk, often slipping right down in his chair, just clinging on to the seat with the bones in his bum, and who would have rocked backwards on it had it not been on wheels, said of Walter:
‘There he goes, sweeping the floor again.’ He meant, so he explained to a workmate, that the way Walter walked it looked as if he had a broomstick up his arse—unfair, perhaps, but also accurate.
Walter worked in the city, at an insurance firm, and he travelled to work every day on the 7.15am train from Wintergardens, an express train into the city and through the Melbourne City Loop, and got off the train at Flagstaff.
During the working week Walter wore the accepted corporate attire, but there was something slightly not quite right about that too. The suits he wore, invariably navy or grey, but never quite the right navy or grey, were not well-fitted and were shiny around the seams, firstly from being cheap and secondly from being dry-cleaned too often. His ties were cheap and lumpy. His shoes, black, designed for comfort rather than looks, were thick-soled and chunky. His socks were the sort with strategically placed elastic so that they stayed up—All Day Socks, they were called, and he had monitored this the first day he’d worn them, out of curiosity, to see if at any point he had to pull up his socks. He had not.
The above is a comprehensive description of Walter, but it must be said that no-one, not a single person, noticed each and every one of these things about Walter. Certainly some people noticed one or two things, but no-one noticed all of them, because there was something else about Walter, perhaps the most important aspect of him. He was completely inconsequential. Inconsequentiality covered him like an invisible lacquer. He was the sort of person you would look through rather than at, the type you would pass by in the street without noticing, the type you could see time and time again in the lift at work without actually knowing what he did or what his name was and think: Does he work for us?
He was the type to be overlooked by waiters and shopkeepers. Over the years so many service-people had either taken so long to notice him, or ignored him altogether, that he had developed quite a thing about it. It had got to the point where he expected to be ignored. Moreover, he seemed sometimes even to will it upon himself. Where a raised hand and an ‘excuse me’ might have worked wonders, Walter would instead sit there, or stand there, quietly, waiting his turn, and in his head he’d be telling himself that they weren’t going to see him or say anything to him or serve him, and he would be counting the moments of this affront, this indignity, this injustice, on an imaginary stopwatch in his head, thinking: typical—bloody typical! And if it went on long enough he might stalk out of the shop or restaurant or wherever it was on the balls of his feet, and tell himself in a stern voice inside his head that he would never to go back there. They may never know it, whoever they were, whichever business had shunned him, but they were from that moment on denied his custom, which over the years may have added up to a significant amount of income. This was how he made a stand, such as it was.
When Walter arrived at the city bound platform of Wintergardens station the sky was still grey and clouded over, but the rain had stopped, the sun-shower was over. He put his umbrella down and tapped it on the ground a couple of times to clear it of moisture.
The men and women surrounding Walter on the train station were mostly the same type as him, in that they were dressed in the rather lazy version of corporate wear that passed muster for the majority in Melbourne, but otherwise, Walter felt, the only thing he had in common with his fellow commuters was that they all lived in Wintergardens. Just like other manufactured suburbs on the outskirts of Melbourne and other Australian cities, Wintergardens had not had time to establish a personality of its own—or, perhaps more accurately, it had multiple personalities but none of them had so far exerted themselves as dominant.
People had come to Wintergardens mostly for the same reason—the house and land packages were, if not cheap, then at least quite affordable. So there were young families making a start with their first home, unable to afford anything in an inner city suburb where prices for even the most basic of townhouses or units had skyrocketed. There were retirees who had perhaps found that their superannuation was not as much as they hoped for or needed. And there were a high ratio of immigrant families, mostly from the African and Arab nations which seemed, Walter thought, to be where most of the immigrant traffic came from these days. And India, he amended in his head, thinking of Dev.
This multiple personality was beginning to make itself felt visually up and down the streets of Wintergardens. Most properties were treated with the utmost care and respect, with neat little gardens, carefully cleaned windows and bleached white stone between twin concrete strips of the driveway, but gradually there emerged a house here and there with overgrown lawns, two or three cars in the driveway, and smeared windows with the curtains all bunched up because of furniture pushed against them from inside.
Walter noticed two Somali men who lived just around the corner from him in one such house. Brothers he thought, with skin as black as his own nugget-polished shoes. They were very tall and incredibly lean, with shiny suits in dark blue and deep purple, worn very loose-fitting. A woman a little way away from them wore a full veil covering her hair, neatly pinned with multiple hair pins. She also wore a fashionable woollen skirt and jacket cut so close-fitting as to be eye-popping. There were people from many other cultures on the platform, but who could tell anymore what they were or where they were from, Walter thought? Unless they were fresh off the boat it was sometimes difficult to tell. Either they were from mixed parentage, or they were second generation immigrants (like Walter himself), or they were first generation but totally homogenised in some way. That was what Australia was now, Walter felt, a hodge-podge of different cultures adding up to a cultural non-identity. Not that he was racist, he would have said—which is what everyone who is a little bit racist does say.
The truth is that Walter, with his back straight and his chin up, his eye fixed on some vague spot in the middle distance, exuding an air of superiority and disapproval, not about anything in particular, was, without knowing it, out of place in his own suburb. He was, essentially, white bread—middle class, second generation immigrant Australian. Not that there weren’t others like him, there were, and they tended to stick together; but they didn’t notice that in a suburb like Wintergardens they were not in the majority.
Walter had probably seen most of his fellow commuters on other weekday mornings at approximately the same time at this train station, but he was not familiar enough with any of them to be on speaking terms. He was not the sort of person to be over-familiar with work colleagues or speak to strangers on the street or at the train station. So it was a bit of a surprise to him when one of his fellow commuters spoke to him that morning—a man, standing just next to him on the platform.
‘I think the rain’s going to hold off for a while,’ said the man, looking up at the clouds.
‘Just a sun-shower,’ Walter said amiably. Then he raised his left arm and jerked his arm forward to bring his watch out from his shirt cuff. His watch showed 7.14am exactly. He turned and looked down the tracks for an oncoming train—there wasn’t one.
The man next to him made a clicking noise with his tongue.
‘Late again,’ he said.
Walter made a non-committal sound, but said nothing.
‘It’s good for the garden at least,’ said the man.
‘Yes,’ Walter agreed. Save me, he thought, from these boring pleasantries. He looked down the tracks again and this time saw that the train was approaching.
It was then that Walter’s fellow commuter, from behind him, said something else, something Walter wasn’t quite sure he heard properly. He spun around and looked at the man directly, looked at him properly for the first time—an older man, grey-haired, with crow’s feet by his eyes, but an otherwise unlined face, grey suit, white shirt, red tie, briefcase. He had a mild, ordinary kind of face, and blank, light-blue eyes. Like Walter he didn’t seem to fit. He should have been at a train