by Craig Ensor
The other time came the day I delivered the first lot of groceries to the couple, two bags of groceries on each handlebar. As I unlatched the gate, the man came running up the gravel drive screaming at me to stay back, not to come past the gate, the gate, he said over and over, his hand conducting me up and back from the beach house. I told Dad it scared me, which was a mistake. The words sort of dissolved through him, medicine-like, then his face reddened, gripped hard around his eyes, as if his eyes were bottle tops to be opened, all before he put the ‘closed’ sign on the door of the store, told me to jump into the ute and floored it all the way to the beach house. When we got there, Dad swung open the rusted gate and drove the ute down the steep slope to the front door of the beach house, the rear tyres skidding in the gravel. Somehow I knew that the man was on the verandah, playing, because among the cranky ute noises there was the sound of piano, light, happy as the bird chirp Dad played through the speakers at home. Strangely, the piano music did not stop until Dad was out of the ute and had slammed the door, as if the music the man was composing lived in another world, deaf to this one. They came together on the stairs leading up to the verandah, Dad’s fingers tapping against his shorts.
You got no right, you know, to yell at my son. You scared him. He’s doing you a bloody favour.
I didn’t mean to. It’s my wife. You need to get back beyond the gate. We need distance. I know it sounds strange but …
The man looked back at the beach house. Some smoke nodded away from the chimney. He spoke in hushed tones, as if the house was asleep and could not be woken.
It’s no excuse, Dad said.
I’m sorry. She’s been through a tough time. I can collect the groceries from the gate. It’s no problem.
Everyone’s had a tough time, mate. It’s no way to speak to a boy. Apologise to my son.
I’m sorry …
Finch’s his name.
I’m sorry, Finch. I didn’t mean to scare you. Please go back behind the gate, he said softly, then looked back at the beach house as if those words, as softly as they were spoken, might threaten the fragility of it.
There was a smell coming from the house. The smoke seemed to carry it among us and mildly flavour the tension between my dad and the man. Something buttery seemed to swallow down through me, the smell sweet, creamy, spiced. It hugged my belly. It made me want to go inside and sit down at the dining room table and wait for hours or days for the food to plate. Then there was the washing line, down on some flat grass on the other side of the verandah, her underwear in the sunlight, pink and red and black strings and patches, the same kind worn by the girls in the magazine that slept under my pillow during the day. For some reason, I felt and knew that she was inside the house, cheek soft against the curtain, listening to my father and her husband argue in whispers, distracted for the moment from whatever kept me on the other side of the gate.
7
We had twelve in our class, and four were girls. Two from out west beyond the ranges, one from Adelaide and the other from a town in Western Australia I could not spell or pronounce. Sometimes they wore dresses but mostly they looked and dressed like boys, though with longer hair. They did not look like her. And they talked a lot when Mr Choi asked them a question, and when he did not ask them they talked even more. It was hard to imagine that one day they would grow up and down and in and out in all the places where she had grown and not grown. And it was harder to imagine that they would one day know about the world to a point where there was no need to ask questions about it – that they, like her, would just listen as she did: listen to the piano, the surf, the wind humming through the swamp oaks, the beach house cracking and popping under the heat of the sun.
Up against my bedroom walls, which Dad had painted white as prescribed by Mr Choi, were all the faces of my classmates, blue faces projected out from the system. Mr Choi appeared on the opposite wall in front of a blue-board, the full length of him walking back and forth across my bedroom. This year, because we were supposed to be old enough to understand, he wrote poems up on the blue-board, words so large I could catch them in my hands like a cricket ball. Most of the boys got into trouble for turning the words into games or wearing them as tattoo holograms on their arms. The girls seemed to behave and read the words properly. When Mr Choi asked them a question about a poem, they had an answer. Most answers were as smart as they were dumb, but they had an answer ready all the same. Mr Choi liked poems called ‘My Country’ and ‘Australia’. One day he asked me what I thought the words in the poem called ‘Australia’ meant, the bits about the ‘breast’ and the dryness of the ‘womb’, and I remember the fear of not knowing, the giggly silence of the classroom as he waited for my answer, the words as large and unknowable as adults. Then the girl from Adelaide answered for me, and Mr Choi ran with her answer and the fear passed through me and circled back as shame. She did that a few times for me. Never the other boys. As the year went on, her hair got longer and longer, and fewer and fewer questions were asked.
One night, sitting around the dining room table, I told Dad that two of my classmates had left school. One had gone to Queenstown in New Zealand. The other to Hobart. Dad nodded and chewed at what was in his mouth as if his mouth, when he was eating, was the only thing capable of thought.
Dad, why are there no more kids like me in town?
Lots of people decided it wasn’t a good idea anymore – to have them. With the heat and all. The rising seas. Not me though, son, Dad said, and reached across the table to ruffle my hair, still with the fork in his hand.
But I can remember them, back when I was little. I remember playing with other kids.
Gone south, son. Like your schoolmates. But you’re fine. We’re fine. And you’ve still got nine friends at school.
They’re not my friends.
8
One morning, during their second month at the beach house, I placed the four grocery bags down in the shade of the verandah and knocked four times on the front door. I had waited forever up near the gate – much longer than Dad said to wait – the heat, even at that morning hour, so fierce it made me hunch and squat into my bones, made me huddle for shade under the roof of my back. No sign of either of them. No piano. No hungry smells from the chimney. For a moment I thought they had gone, packed up and left like all the others who moved to the beach house did, but there was washing on the line, a household full of sheets and towels and underwear, squeaking round and round on the hoist as vaguely repetitive and simple as a nursery rhyme.
Thought you weren’t allowed past the gate.
She came from behind, her hair pulled back, sweaty, her face a lipstick red. She wore black-and-pink gym leggings with black running shoes. There was a ruler of skin between the leggings and her singlet top.
There was no-one up …
I know. We ran too far. Went up past the Gates. Had to turn back.
Her breath was failing. Her words had no running in them. She heeled off her joggers and opened the door with her right hip and that, more than anything else she did that summer, stayed with me, the way she opened doors with the knock of her hip.
He’s still running. Always has to win. Even when there’s no contest, she said.
Where do you want them? I asked, lifting up the grocery bags.
Put them on the kitchen bench. Just there.
For a long moment, I stayed put by the front door and looked at the lounge room and kitchen like I would look at a rock pool. Everywhere there were signs of life, or rather of a life that once was but was no longer. Books left open on coffee tables. Shoes kicked off at the front door. Fruit half eaten on the dining room table. A smell of garlic and lathered sunscreen. Clothes hung over the back of chairs, which looked momentarily like a large family seated around the table, conversing, their mouths sweaty with the thought of food. She walked steamy prints across the polished dark wood floor from the front door to the kitchen, where she opened the fridge and gulped down a bottle of water and two tablets. One by
one those footprints, which were like generations of children following her loyally around the house, each passed away on the dry westerly coming through the front door. Then she went down the hallway. A new brood of footprints followed her there.
The money’s on the kitchen bench, she said.
I walked the groceries to the kitchen and left them there, swiped the cash.
Sorry, I need a shower. Cool down. Let yourself out.
Your towel, I said, pointing to where she had left it on the kitchen bench.
Observant, aren’t you?
I looked down the hallway and there she was, hands full with towel and clothes and bottles, keying her hip against the bathroom door. Then she was gone, the last of her footprints stepping into the bathroom, there on the dark wood floor for the briefest of moments before they were unstepped, before the shower tap grunted on, the pipes clearing their throat of old bore water. Even from the gate I could hear the taps grunting old water through old pipes over the smooth splash of her, the newness of her, but from the road, with the click of the gears and a crush of wheel on gravel, she was gone, replaced with a feeling of irreplaceable loss. And, for what seemed like the first of many more times, I conjured her in my mind; as I legged the bike back to the general store, I remade her, showering, her soapy hands sliding over and between, the bikini of lathered soap.
Later that night, at the dinner table, I said, Dad.
Yes, son, Dad said, as if it was rude to interrupt the silence, as if the silence had a right to be heard as much as anyone.
You know memories, do you reckon God gave them to us to help? Help us remember things from the past that we’ve lost? Bring them back to life, sort of.
Dad finished chewing his steak, which seemed to take forever.
God. No, son. Memories are there to stop us from making the same mistakes. But whoever’s responsible – call it God if you like – also made us forgetful. That’s why we’re in so much trouble.
9
There are two things I remember about my grandpa, my father’s father. He had scary ears, and as those ears aged, as they got larger and larger, his hearing got worse and worse so that when I spoke to him I had to shout with my hands cupped around my mouth like I was out in the bush lost or something. The other was the old piano he kept in his lounge room, a baby grand piano, the colour of household dust, which made no sound no matter how hard I bashed at the keys. Much later Dad told me why the piano had no sound. Just after Grandma died, Grandpa had removed all the strings from under the lid of the piano, gutted it like a fish, and instead stored hundreds of bottles of liquor there, everything from Scotch whisky to ports centuries old, using the lid of the piano as a mixing bar. She played it apparently, my grandma, with a bible tucked inside to somehow tune the piano to the music of God, and Grandpa did not have the heart to throw the piano out after she passed away, nor the bible, and he did not have the room in his two-bedroom shack to run a hundred-bottle bar. So there the piano stayed until he died. A year or so later Dad got up the strength to take it to the tip with the rest of the things they had hoarded all their lives, things like umbrellas and raincoats, things from back in the days when it rained, when rain fell so hard and often everything leapt up with green and fishing happened in creeks and rivers out west in the ranges. I did not know my grandpa well, as he died not long after I realised I had one, but Dad spoke about him enough for me to know he looked and walked and smelt like Dad, but had more opportunities; that Dad and I lived in a world of opportunities not had rather than missed.
Once I asked Dad how he was able to do so much in a given day, to run the store and keep the house going – washing, dinner, everything.
He said, My parents used to pray a lot. Wasted a lot of time that way and never seemed to get what they were praying for. I don’t waste time praying, son.
Then he kept going with what he was doing, stacking pasta on the shelves or counting the receipts in the B-Coder or some other godless task.
10
In those early endless days she would walk around the beach house naked, back and forth to the washing line, unpeg the clothes she needed – pink underwear and white breezy dresses – then cleverly step her bare feet through so that no sand got on her clothes. Then, often in the smelter of daytime, she would leap and hop from the washing line to the verandah as if there were patches of sand cooler than others, as if the sun could be so considerate, after which he would come out onto the verandah and pour water onto the soles of her feet and, after that, take those same clothes off. At the time I remember wondering how she never got annoyed, given that she had just put them on. Other times she would appear barely clothed on the verandah and spread her legs and lean the soft flesh of her arms and chin on the railing, looking back over her shoulder at him before the piano, her long hair reaching out for him on the stiff breeze. In the early days, before Dad demanded that I give back the binoculars, they did it a lot. Lots in the morning – the verandah, the piano, the beach – her skin lime green as she swam through the water, cordial toned with yellowy morning, flesh rippling until his hand grabbed her ankle, jolting her to him like a hooked fish. In the late afternoons too, in the kitchen when they were cooking or reading on the lounge, their legs plaited like hair. When they finished, she stayed put and looked up at the ceiling or the sun, toes pointed upwards while he took off to somewhere else in the house. Moments later he would return with a glass of water for her, and within the same amount of moments he would be back at the piano. To me then, at that age, seeing those adult couplings for the first time, everything looked new and exciting and without routine when in truth it was the opposite.
One morning at school we had to tell a story about a colour. I chose the colour of suntanned skin, which was in fact the colour of her skin on the beach, blushed in the light of dawn or dusk as she looked out at the barrel and dump of pummelling waves. No-one agreed with me about the sun, particularly Mr Choi. They only saw the danger in it, not its beauty, the way it radiated outwards as much as inwards. Mr Choi’s skin was all pale with indoors.
11
When Dad felt like fish for dinner, we went rock fishing. This was about twice a week. Even though the birds had all gone south, the fish were not going anywhere. They were the only winners, Dad reckoned. They thrived on the rising warm seas, living off the feast of shrimp and kelp served up around the rocks to the north of Sandy Rip. One such night the moon came up out of the sea all bloated and red with embarrassment, looking how I felt a few years earlier, before my bones and flesh began to stretch out to muscle. The wind had slackened off as dusk neared and we walked out to the rock shelf clanking rods and bait and lures and buckets. After we got to our usual spot, Dad set me up with the smaller rod and watched me bait the hook and cast out beyond the wash and slop around the rocks. After that he filled the bucket with water and baited his hook and cast out towards the moon, which had trimmed down with the glow of a mild sunburn, casting with such strength that the bait flew hard at the catch of the moon, before sinking into the sharp waves beyond the rocks. From the esky he passed a bottle of water to me, took a beer for himself. Then the waiting began, the silence. The humbling silence, Dad called it. That was Dad’s favourite music. Silence. Silence but for the sound of waves on the rocks, which Dad loved almost as much as he loved silence. We could talk, but only when we had a bite, and only with the small toolkit of words needed to get the fish into the bucket. That day the silence did not have long to itself. That day the piano sounded to the north of the rocks, all dizzy and ballroom, louder than I had heard him play before.
What’s that?
It’s them, I think.
Them?
The couple.
Christ, we’re in the middle of nowhere and we can’t get any quiet.
I took a step towards the rock ledge and looked north to the beach house. They were both out on the verandah, lit up by some lamps hanging from the beams, and he crouched at the piano physically, like he was lifting the piano rather than p
laying it, stomping his foot to the riding melody. In a twirling red dress she danced around the piano, a fluted glass of something in her hand. She danced into the piano to kiss him on the lips and clink their glasses, then danced away along to the far corner of the verandah and twirled back to peck another kiss on his cheek. The music went wild and everywhere, party-like, nothing like the slow weep of sound that he worked at during the labour of every morning. She looked different too, wild with news of something or something to be, lifting herself up on the piano where she danced and danced and the red dress twirled to show black high heels and legs all the way up to where legs begin or finish.
Son, you’ve got something.
What?
Your line. Pay attention.
Dad’s voice went all croaky in the time it took to reel in the fish. A speckled fish of yellow and black and blue from up near the equator, half a metre long and so rare in these parts that Dad had to look it up in his old reference book later that night. By the time we got the fish in the bucket, the piano had stopped. They were no longer on the verandah, though the lamps still lit up the piano and the two empty fluted glasses sat together, side by side, on top of the piano.
Later that night, as we tucked into the poached fish, Dad had his old reference book open-paged alongside his plate.
It’s a speckled leatherjacket. From the tropics. Found up near Indonesia.
What’s it doing down here?
Don’t know.
It’s a long way from home.
Bloody long way.
Seems everything’s heading south, Dad.
Not us, son.
12
One Sunday morning, when I got to the southern cliff overlooking the beach house, I looked down to see the man sitting cross-legged like a child in the middle of the beach with a spade posted up out of the sand beside him. Across the length of the beach he had spaded the words ‘I LOVE YOU, FOREVER’, rutted deep into the sand, the words to be read by someone, her, standing on the verandah of the beach house. The sun was only about an hour into the day, the words black shadows on the yellow page of beach. It must have taken him most of the night to write those words. Every now and then he would look back over his shoulder, at the house, but she did not appear out on the verandah that morning. I waited as long as he did for her to appear. But she did not. The house was shut up – the curtains drawn, the chimney smokeless – like whoever once lived in the house had packed up and left, and left for a long time. Minutes went by. Hours went by. The tide crept in closer to the shore on a wind that seemed to be two winds, arguing back and forth over the air. By noon the tide wanted to see the ends of those words, erasing them one by one so that, as I left the cliff, the man was still sitting beside the spade with half of the word ‘YOU’ in front of him. When I looked back for the last time I saw the man stand and uproot the spade and head back to the beach house, his head down like he had lost something precious and was looking for it in the sand. By the time he made it to the verandah, a wave had peaked and dropped and spilled out across the beach to erase the last word, like Mr Choi’s blue hand rubbing out another lesson that I had not learned. But I had learned something that morning, something that even back then I could sense had weight – that I stayed out in the belting sun, for as long as the man stayed, not solely out of the hope that she would appear on the verandah and his love would be confirmed, requited, but more out of hope that she would not.