by Craig Ensor
THE WARMING
THE WARMING
CRAIG ENSOR
First published in 2019 by Impact Press
an imprint of Ventura Press
PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia
www.impactpress.com.au
Copyright © Craig Ensor 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-925384-72-7 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-925384-71-0 (ebook)
Cover and internal design by Alissa Dinallo
For Ali, Bronte and Tess
MOVEMENT I
A beach house south of Sydney
1
The couple arrived late on a Sunday afternoon in what would have been, in the childhood days of my father and his father before him, early spring, but was, in those parts, from that time on until the end of days, one long year of invincible summer. They pulled up out the front of the general store in a taxi with southern plates, towing a trailer with an upright piano there in it – the piano gagged with foam, roped down like it had been kidnapped. Only the man got out of the taxi. He checked the tightness of the rope, checked the piano – for scratches, dust – patted it like he would the head of an obedient child. Like most from down south, he had trouble moving gracefully through the rainbow-coloured fly-strip door, blue and red ribbons tangling up in his ears. He swatted the strips away like they were blowflies.
In that endless summer there were few things the heat had not parched from my memory, but this was one: those large listening ears, confused by the tongue lashing of the fly strips. The other was his hands, fingers as long and slender as the arms of a starfish, though frightened somehow into a knuckled grip around a square of paper – a list of things, groceries and the like – which he unfolded onto the flat of the counter. Only later, much later, did I notice the sadness that was about to change the shape of his eyes.
We need some things. Your old man here?
Yep, he’s here, Dad said, stepping out from the storeroom behind the counter, palming sweat against his shorts.
Got a list of groceries and things here. Can we get them delivered to the old beach house down the road every Monday? the man said, and pushed the list forwards on the counter.
Dad picked up his glasses and looked over the list. As he read he legged me out from behind the counter, and I drifted along the bread and cereal aisle, looking out through the shop windows at the taxi. The taxi driver stood by his open door, standing thinly in the shade of the store’s awning and plucking some air through his sweaty shirt, a thought that had to come from elsewhere, some rainy place down south, smiling through him.
Don’t have matches. This store hasn’t sold matches since …
What about the rest?
The rest I can cobble together. Every Monday. It’ll cost you. The fresh stuff will have to come from Tassie. So it’ll be Wednesday this week.
How much?
Even though the B-Coder could scan and calculate numbers without thinking, Dad went for his old solar calculator and started pointing in the numbers finger by finger. In the past something bad had happened to Dad with computers – betrayed was the word he used – and he kept both of us away from them and their dark world as if the betrayal was not the kind to be forgiven.
Meanwhile the woman had left the taxi and drifted a long way towards the ocean, standing up on a rock in the crunch of sunlight and looking across the stretch of sand and old-man banksia and swamp oak all the way down to the water. She seemed to handle the sun better than most from down south. She wore tight-fitting jeans and her hair was long and sand coloured, ripples of wet and dry sand, and it was out straight and fine to the waist of her jeans. It did then, and always would, remind me of the strings of a cello, her hair playing out on the sea breeze and reprising, as the wind tacked from the north, around the slender part of her neck, revealing a birthmark or a hologram tattoo of three birds or music notes behind her ear – exactly which, at that point, I could not tell. She palmed her hair away like it was a face she did not want to be kissed by, then scrunched her hair into a bun, a tight fist of hair, and walked, with arms crossed, back towards the taxi. There were muscles on her arms showing in the shadows of glancing sunlight, which surprised me for a woman. Back then so much of my life was about waiting – waiting for school, for tourists, for the midday sun to pass, for rain – but there was a feeling then, at that very moment and at all moments from that time on, that the wait was over.
Four hundred and forty. Plus ten per cent for delivery, Dad said.
Sure.
So four eighty-four. Where’d you say?
The old beach house. About ten –
I know it.
Start tomorrow. Monday.
Monday, tomorrow, but for the fresh stuff. My boy will deliver. And your name?
I’d rather not say. My wife and I would like to keep our privacy. I’ll pay cash. On delivery.
Cash.
Is that a problem?
No. Unusual, that’s all. I can trust cash.
At that point, the purchase complete, Dad taught me always to say thanks, to smile with the ends of my teeth, but that was not what the man did. He just walked straight out of the store, checked the rigging around the piano and got into the front seat of the taxi. Somewhere between the road and the taxi the woman had come across a butterfly, the brown short-winged variety, rugged enough to deal with the relentless windy sun of the north. She had somehow charmed it onto her finger, turning it in the sun like girls do with diamond rings. Within moments the horn on the taxi jolted her and the butterfly back to the purpose of their journeys, and, once back in the taxi, she watched through the window as the butterfly was taken by the breeze to a place where she wished she might be.
When I looked across at Dad he was still combing his hair, which was short and leaving in places.
2
There are times even now when, as an old man, looking out over the moon-cool harbour of Mawson while sipping at a cup of tea, I think back to those days of traipsing from one rock pool to another, my head tucked down, eyes puckered, to scour the pools for something new but also to shelter my face from the wallop and lash of the sun. There I was, a fifteen-year-old boy who somehow knew in his own childlike way the breaks and rips which would pull him and so many others southward, from one life to another, whether wanted or not. The two largest rips, the fear of change and the need for change, would push me from one rock pool to another, from one song to another, from one place to another, one job to another, then pull me back again to those same songs and places and jobs of before, for all my time there and elsewhere. It all began with those weekends along the shore between the general store and the beach house, looking beyond the urchins and starfish for some new species, something which would do away with boredom. More often than not that something was the blue-ringed octopus, a kind of superhero of the rock-pool world: shy, rare, humble, but as deadly as a virus if it was wronged. Dad had come across a few in his time, as blue as my old Aunty Jean’s eye shadow, so he reckoned, and he reckoned that I should be as scared of the octopus as I was of my Aunty Jean.
But then, on the day after the couple arrived, as I turned around Sandy Rip Point, I saw her lying there on the beach. I looked for a bikini. I looked once more, but there was not one to look for or otherwise the bikini was made of skin. She was lying between the surf and the beach house, facedown, no towel, the dawning sun flush down the length of her legs and thighs, the small of her back in shadow and her shoulders broad with the grope of the sun. Like she had washed up there overnight,
driftwoodlike, perfectly placed on an otherwise empty beach, the footprints which got her there either washed or blown away.
Then I heard the piano, notes from something I had no idea about, but would later learn during my university days to be Nyman’s ‘The Heart Asks Pleasure First’. Playing that melody, a melody that seemed to be instantly mesmerising and familiar, was always his way of waking up, of yawning and stretching into the warming day. She had jam toast and tea. He had Nyman. Then the piano stopped. From nowhere he appeared, shirtless with khaki shorts, trudging down through the steepness of grassy dunes to the beach and to his wife lying as she was on the beach. And this, as he knelt down beside her and touched the shadow in the small of her back, was the first time I learned that life was about narrowing the distance between where I was and where I longed to be. From Sandy Rip Point I was too far away to hear their words, to see whether she smiled or frowned at him, to see how he touched her within that shadow, but I was close enough to make assumptions, the assumptions of a fifteen-year-old boy, and they were all wrong. His shorts came off, punted loose onto the sand. He lifted her to her feet with a single hand, muscles knotting up the sun with shade, and they went down to where the surf spilled across the sand as if drawn from a compass. They waded out to where the water passed around their waists and he held her there, waist to waist, as the swell rocked them back and forth and her long hair, rinsed the colour of dawn, cast and reeled back through the water. They held this way for a long time, stuck together waist to waist, eyes flinching or closed against the threat of the sun. Then, from the distance of Sandy Rip, they looked to be laughing even though the rip and thump of surf shushed what they were laughing about, and they looked, from that distance, to be conjoined twins, a mistake of birth, with one set of legs and their upper halves in some sort of disagreement which ended with a confusing kiss.
Then, as simply as they came together, they parted. Out beyond the dumping waves he swam while she caught the following wave in to shore, her legs clamped together, everything pinched as she came from the surf. Once she got to the dry sand she fell down on her back and lifted from the hips so that her toes pointed straight and high to where the morning sun would be in a few unbearable hours. She held that pose for as long as it took him to catch a wave back to shore and wade through the surf to catch another and thigh back up the dunes to sit before the piano, fingers dripping with sea wash, and reprise ‘The Heart Asks Pleasure First’. But her legs; if the past had left me nothing more than those legs, as long as sunlight, tickling the belly of the forever sky, I would have no cause for regrets.
3
More often than not, when I woke from a dream at three in the morning and felt for the absence beside me in bed, the dreamed image of the couple, waking in the beach house in the morning blast of light, seemed the sharpest reality of my past, sharper than any reality that had shaped me since that time and even, at times, sharper than the reality of the present, the reality of a half-made bed. On weekends the dawn woke them and they woke with the dawn, the searchlight of sun through the windows, under-door inquisitions of light. It made me think they had done something, something wrong, to deserve all this attention, all this scrutiny of light. The sun, the world, had questions for them, and the sun in that part of the world did not concede many answers. It wanted to know the answers they were not telling. They woke with hands blocked at the sun, as if its light could somehow be answered with a simple bodily choice. He went for the blinds, she the kettle. In the early days they wore nothing, his bits as loose as sleep, hers a slip of nothing that was everything. Sad, it is, the way a life offers up only a few memories from childhood, but less so because they were almost all of her. Memories as full as a feeling, as everywhere as the blush of nerves I would feel around every beautiful girl at school and university and beyond from that time on. Over time she used her hands and arms, one across, the other cupped down as if catching the butterfly she had befriended on the day she arrived. Then she wore something, something brief, then, later, after the shouting, something long and cotton and protective. On weekdays, when I was preparing for school at the start of the week, I thought back to the weekend before and what I saw from behind the rocks. Near the end of the week I thought only of the weekend to come. And this was how weekends came and went for days and days on end until their last day at the beach house.
4
Have you seen my binoculars?
It was the first and only time Dad had interrupted virtual school.
What? I said.
Mr Choi, my teacher, carried on with the lesson: algebra, adding letters to letters to produce numbers that might as well be letters for all I knew.
They’re not in the kitchen drawer, Dad said.
Don’t know, I said, the projection of Mr Choi and the whole class curving around me parabolically in three-dimensional depth, all of them paused with the interruption. Dad’s fingers on his right hand started to tap, as if rapidly playing a two-key piano.
Well, they haven’t got legs. Where are they, son?
Dad, I’m in class.
There’re two kookaburras on the back shed.
For a man as hard and blunt as my dad, it always seemed strange that he was a birdwatcher. Even stranger that there were two kookaburras on our back shed. Since the warming, most of the birds that once nested along this coastline flocked south to the lands where there were four seasons and the trees where they built their nests had leaves that fell in the colour of sunsets. I had seen one kookaburra before, not long after my seventh birthday. It hunched on the roof of our house, seemingly lost, and Dad and I watched it through the binoculars as dusk put the sky down into night, Dad predicting its outrageous laugh as pink light tucked itself into the bedding of the sea beyond. But it never laughed. It flew away north, to Sydney or some place beyond – the wrong way apparently, the unforgiving way. And I remember Dad not talking much that night. Later, I would know that he took that as a sign: a sign to stay put.
Dad, the binoculars aren’t here.
Okay, okay, he said, apologising to the projection of Mr Choi against my wall, his hand still twitching.
The binoculars were not in my bedroom. They were not anywhere in the house. They were where I had left them the day before. Safe in an old set of drawers under a corrugated-iron sheet, both of which I had found on the side of a road and housed together with a rug and a few cushions from the garage. This was my cubby house, protected by a rock ledge overlooking Sandy Rip Point and the things to be seen and not seen in the beach house.
5
During that year I had taken to closing my bedroom door, to pretend to do homework but in truth to listen to music and bludge and avoid Dad hassling me about chores I had not done. Dad hated the closed door, or at least I thought he did at the time. Only now can I see what it meant to him: the end of my open-door childhood, the beginning of some new uncertain period of time, the beginning of secrets, the push to and through the door of fledgling adulthood, which was largely closed to him. Still, it was his house, and often he knocked and opened the door so quickly the question of rights and ownership were never up for debate. One day only his face appeared between the door and the jamb, an arm swinging through to toss a magazine onto my bed.
Here, he said.
What’s this? I said, looking up from some grammar test.
You’ll work it out.
Then he shut the door. I had no idea what he was talking about. I had seen some old magazines before, ones in antique stores in town, but this magazine was new, glossy, the girl on the cover looking hungry for something. The pages smelt of new plastic toys. Felt as smooth and kissable as skin. I laid the magazine down on the carpet, opening the centrefold out so that the girl for January – blonde, tanned, beach sand worn like revealing clothes on her hips and breasts – lay on the carpet beside my V-Pad, under, looking up. I was fifteen years and thirty-three days old. That magazine, and the few words fumbled around it, was the first and last time Dad and I had ever come close
to discussing the question of women; although later, much later, we would talk about a woman in particular, as if the survival of all depended on it.
6
There are deep things that even a child knows about his father. That he was a gentle but hard man, gentle by nature, keen to simplify the incomprehensible world outside the general store into the hardness of reliable facts, this I knew. Then there were the things that I knew only when I too became a father: the feeling of loss that each of his generation felt, felt communally in bars and offices and living rooms, watching footage of another irreversible change, skeletons in waterless creeks, fleets of polar ice leaving shore for a trip that would end as water. And, through all this, Dad came at the world in the gentlest of ways.
Only twice had I seen him go the other way. Once, on the way back north from Aunty Jean’s place, Dad pulled into a hotel somewhere for a beer or two because there was no such thing as just one. Leafless poplars staked the way into town like giant fish bones skewered to the roadside. The old hotel stood alone on a street corner, scabbed with peel and sun rot, bits of the cast-iron balcony around the hotel gapped like childhood teeth. Inside the hotel a man who looked sauce coloured from grog or sunstroke or both pointed to a sign that I was too young to read, slurred something about my mother, who had left us earlier that year, something about her looking after me outside. Then it happened. A bar stool clanged to the floor, Dad’s fist took his collar, his face all urgent and fanged, his eyes looking hard and boiled white in their pits. Some dribble ran down his chin and I felt scared to see him that way, my father, the only god I had known as a child.