by Craig Ensor
The piano kept playing, a phrase of notes that seemed to run itself into circles, and circles inside circles, until he stopped and bent over the sheet music to pen down those notes.
Help! she screamed.
But as he hunched over the piano he did not seem to hear her scream, while I could hear every part of her through my ears and heart and stomach more than a hundred metres further away. Moments before I heard her scream I had cornered a blue-ringed octopus in one of my rock pools and was moments away from netting it. It would have been my first octopus in three months. But the piano lifted once more, the notes circling as before and doubling back again and again as if stuck on the same stubborn indescribable thought. Kneeling by the side of the whale, she went to roll it back down the beach, screaming out when she realised she was not strong enough.
Dad reckons you dig a trench, I said, panting to get those words out. So that the whale has a way out when the tide comes in.
I remember the large brown eye of the whale, as large as my fist, because it had the same look as her blue eyes: wide, trapped, some vast sadness underneath.
Here, I’ll show you, I said.
I knelt down by the dorsal fin and dug a trench with my hands down towards where the water spilled up the beach. She joined me and together we worked a trench of several metres through the sand. Then we stood up and looked at the whale. Neither of us heard the piano stop. We heard the surf crashing. We felt the tide leaving. We crouched by its face, looked into its eyes. It had the pimply skin of a teenager around its face. And it made sounds, coughing, gurgling, whimpering, all of which made its eyes look suddenly human.
He’s suffering, April said.
He’s drowning. The air’s drowning him. That’s what happens.
We need to end it for him.
Then, from nowhere, the man was beside us, holding two buckets full of water, one of which he poured over its face and the other over the white belly.
What are you doing? You’re too late. Get out of here.
He ran down towards the shoals and scooped another two bucketfuls.
You’re too late. Where were you fifteen minutes ago? Go back to your fucking piano.
It’s not too late. We need to keep it wet.
It’s too late. It’s over. Finch, does your father have a rifle?
Yes, but I’m not allowed.
A rifle, he said, pouring a long slurp of water down the back of the whale, over the lip of its blowhole. We can save it. Don’t just stand there. Help me keep it wet.
It’s in pain. The tide’s going out.
We can make a stretcher from a bedsheet.
Finch, go and get your dad’s rifle. Go! she screamed.
I ran to where I had stashed my bike, then rode like a maniac until I got to the store. Dad had strict rules. Without good reason there was no way he would let me take the rifle, but there was a softness in him that could not let another thing suffer, and such a thing, in the past, had been a nest of baby crows giddy from the heat or octopuses and crabs I brought home from rock pools, never a baby whale. When I told him about the beached whale he cursed for a bit, cursed out words that would have cost me a fortune in the swear jar, all while loading two bullets into the rifle and putting the closed sign on the door and ripping out the charging plug from the ute.
As we drove through the gate and down the steep gravel drive of the beach house, I pointed through the windscreen to where the whale was stranded, but I found myself pointing at an empty beach. The whale was gone; only the leavings of the trench we had dug to the sea remained. A wet sandy sheet slumped over the verandah railing. The man sat before the piano, playing those same circling notes, his back hunched over the keys as if they too were stranded on the verandah with fingers there to revive or relieve them from the sadness he was making. As a fifteen-year-old I could not in any way tell which of the two, although Dad seemed to be able to tell. In silence he judged the situation. He then touched the brakes lightly before easing the ute into reverse, backing slowly up the gravel drive until we were out of view of the beach house, a key pulling from a lock without a turn. On the northern rocks of the beach I could see April, looking out to sea for the hump of the whale breaching through the sea chop, the fluke of its mother waving nearby.
24
When April opened the shed door, I was behind it, waiting for her evening shower. A light stuttered to full brightness. I kept as still as exams. Through the chinks in the old palings I saw her go to a cupboard, one of those brown wooden ones where the drawers were all difficult, as stubborn as the man, in the months afterwards, complained that April could be so often. From the beach house came the sound of piano – sometimes slow and vengeful, other times louder, played with fingers stiff and barnacle hard – and at those times she stopped with the drawer, listened with her eyes looking left and upwards. When the piano slowed, she worried the drawer back a couple of times, then reached in for something. She pulled out a box. From within the box she pulled out a square of foil. She popped a small white pill from the foil and swallowed it down with a gulp from a water bottle. She gulped down another pill while the piano played immaturely, like a child would play: fingers clubbed, down one end. She stopped. And something in me stopped too.
Then, after a few moments, the music became lighter, welcoming, and she seemed to pick up the joy of it and skip across the warmish sand to the back porch while clutching her nightgown at her breasts. I moved too, to my place beside the shed, behind a banksia as prickly as Dad could get after a loss at card night. The sun had set over the western ranges, the day leaving grudgingly in a temper of oranges and pinks. If there were birds around, they would be chirping, busy, restless, because that was what Dad’s books said happened at dusk, back before the warming, before the dark cawing of crows became the only birdsong. But there were no birds, only the piano and the torn metre of the waves, only her evening shower.
The bathroom light sputtered on. The window fought and whinged as it opened, as it always did. The steam of the shower, running to warmth before she stepped into it, gusted out into a night so warm it lapped up the steam within moments. Before her shower, she spent a long time in front of the mirror, looking for something in her face which, only years later, would I know to be another face, the face of her past and, when not her past, her future. With a finger she flicked the straps of her dress loose from her shoulders. Then she shook her hair out and down so that it fell onto and over her shoulders like the waterfalls I had seen in one of Aunty Jean’s old books. Through the open window I only saw the top of her shoulders down to where her breasts began to lift, to where the jade stone in her necklace fell. Every Friday evening, the one night that Dad had to himself, heading into town for card night, I waited by the shed hoping for more than shoulders, hoping that the beach house, the sill of the window, could somehow drop like a dress to the sand.
25
The arguing picked up as I neared the front door, which was jammed open with a suitcase. It was different to how Dad and I argued. April’s voice high-pitched, rapid, firing from room to room, husky with shrapnel. His exploding from the kitchen, the verandah, even as far away as the beach. She had more bullets than he had, and she used them a lot after his voice bombed somewhere. Dad and I argued like there was a tomorrow, and we would both be in it together, battling on and over the bones of yesterday’s argument. They did too, until that day. That day was different.
It’s not working. We’re not working. We can’t fix what’s broken, April said.
The world is broken, honey. Not us.
The world. Yeah, that’s great, blame the fucking world. Blame everything but us. It’s us. We caused it. It happened. We can’t go back to where we were before.
We fucking can. We have to.
I’m leaving. We’re done. We can’t do anything more than what we’ve done.
Two sad notes sounded on the piano.
Can you leave that fucking piano alone for one fucking moment? You’re always fucking work
ing. I’ve had it. I’m leaving. Does that mean anything to you?
So you’re giving up on us. You’re giving up on everything. Come here.
It happened.
I know but there’s love here. In this house. Between us.
It’s gone. We can’t go back.
It’s here.
The voices dropped, became like secrets, bed close.
But it happened. It cursed us.
I love you too much for this to be it.
I love you too. But it’s not enough.
Some words were snatched away by the breeze and I lost what was said.
I placed the groceries down by the front door and stepped back into the sunlight. The foundations of the beach house and the frames of the windows and front door were made of sandstone from a nearby quarry. Back when my father was my age, the quarry was a swimming hole for the children of the town after a storm drenching, but was then, only a generation later, a junk pile of metal scraps and tyres and the skeletons of animals who once drank there. Over the front door was a square of sandstone with the date ‘2021’ within a border of engraved vines. As a child, and later as a man, I always took pause whenever I walked by an old building with a date carved into its own makings, its date of birth, knowing, unlike us, unlike my mother, that there would be no second date, and that it would last for as long as we or the weather allowed it to or for as long as we lasted. And so, when it came time to choose a university, I chose a university made of sandstone in Hobart, with dates over old oak doors made back in the centuries of sailing ships and governors and convicts. After pausing, I walked up the drive backwards for a while, as quietly as the land would allow me to walk, eyes on the front door and the sandstone date. While those dates made me wonder what had changed in two hundred years, they made me wonder more about what had stayed the same and what would stay the same in the future.
When I got to the top gate, I looked back. The groceries were gone, the front door shut, the suitcase somewhere safely tucked inside. Long afterwards it came to me that those two sad notes were made accidently, by a man accidentally leaning against a piano, a man who, with all his reason and control, had somehow lost his balance.
26
One morning, just before class was about to start, the man walked into the store with his head down, lifting it only to ask Dad if he could buy some flowers. I bolted down my cereal and ducked around to the storeroom to my usual listening spot.
Flowers, Dad said back at the man.
The biggest bouquet you’ve got.
Mate, the only thing living in this store is me and you.
Where can I get them, then?
Other than going back in time, don’t know – maybe one of the southern cities. Canberra would be your best bet. I think there’s still a few old farts like me down there who grow and sell flowers in the mountains. But I don’t know if they bother with trucking them up this far north. We’re not real flower people up here.
There was silence for a while, that nothing kind of silence that customers liked, then the rolling of fingers on the counter, which I figured were his. Dad liked to keep one hand on the B-Coder so that the other one could point to where things were in the store.
Let me make a call. How much you want to spend?
Doesn’t matter. Whatever their best bouquet is, I need it.
Dad made the call to somewhere, probably Canberra, and spoke into the B-Coder for a bit, then listened to the other side while those fingers rolled along the counter.
You hear that? Flowers will take three days, Dad said.
Three days. Shit. That’s too long.
You must have done something real bad. Or you’re going to.
Ask them about express delivery.
Dad spoke into the B-Coder, his voice changing again to that posh city tone he put on sometimes when the situation demanded it.
They can do tomorrow evening. Five hundred. You got bank ID?
Yeah, here, he said, and ran his thumb over the B-Coder.
Then the bell for my first class rang from my room.
The screen on the B-Coder processed the transaction, giving up his name as William D. Speare. After that Dad called him Daffodil for a while, after a few beers rubbed some of the hard quiet from him – reckoned that was what the middle initial stood for, even though he wanted roses, white roses, not daffodils, even though his middle name was David. Later on, Dad grew to like him a bit more, sided with him, reckoned he stood for more than just that, although I never knew what that was until long after they had left the beach house and long after my father had passed away.
27
Because for so long so many things had changed, Dad made us have dinner at the dining room table every night, because for so long so many things had changed and the family dinner was not going to be one of them. Face to face we sat, like we were about to play chess or something. But we were eating, not playing. When dinner clunked on the table, Dad switched off everything with a real or virtual screen and arranged the pepper and salt and sauces in chess-piece order in the middle of the table. It seemed strange, this contest of eating. Before I was born and for a few years afterwards, Mum and Dad sat at this same table, face to face, Mum in the chair where I sat. I used to wonder if they ate like we did, chicken or meat, some tinned peas and carrots and mash, packet gravy to ease it all down, and I used to wonder whether they talked about stuff and what they talked about, what was the nature of their contest.
Although we were set up to talk, Dad and I hardly ever did. Every night he would ask me if I learned anything at school. Yes, I would say, and he would eat for a bit then ask what. Then I would make something up or tell him about something I had actually learned at school. Something like the migration north and south from the countries along the equator, the global open-door policy, so Mr Choi called it with a sense of achievement. Or perhaps thermal expansion, the heat bloating of the great oceans, or the tilting of the poles, but Dad seemed to eat and drink faster whenever I started to talk in that direction. He thought Mr Choi exaggerated things a bit. Dad never talked about himself. He talked about the food. More salt. Less salt. Overcooked. Undercooked. Or he talked about the weather – how it used to be, the storms he saw as a child, the rains as fatal as the sun – the last act of a weeping old man no longer relevant to the warming world.
For weeks I had been carrying around the prescription box in my pocket, waiting for the right moment.
Dad.
He finished getting down some steak before he said, Yes, son.
Can I ask a question?
Sure. Pass the salt.
He shook lots of salt over his mash. The mash glistened like snow pictures from Antarctica.
What is it?
I put the box on the table.
What’s this?
Dad stopped chewing.
He swallowed then said, Where’d you get this?
Found it.
Where, but?
On the side of the road.
Dad picked up the box and read the small typed writing on the label. Then he looked at me and read me, as if I were something that could be read and read easily.
Son, where’d you find this?
On the road.
On the road. You sure?
He read my face, eyes squinting like he needed his glasses.
What is it?
Dad read the label again.
What is it? Is it drugs?
Probably. Eat your dinner, Dad said, and placed the box down beside his knife.
Many months later, but not long after the couple had left the beach house, Dad and I were heading to the rubbish tip on the other side of town, to dump some of the things they had left behind, and somewhere between the store and town Dad thought he would bring up the box.
Remember that pill box you found?
Yep.
I never told you what the pills were for.
No, but I know.
You do, eh. You didn’t find them on the side of the road
, did you?
I shook my head and looked out the window at the long wide silence of brown and blue, hoping that the bigness of that silence would find its way between us, hoping that it would silence his line of questioning.
28
Thinking back, so much of their time at the beach house was about her, about April, and only after they left did I think of Speare as someone other than a part of her. The way he looked at me over his shoulder, always doing other things, as if I was a distracting noise, a jarring note: this I remember. That nothing he said was ever straight, but always tangled, long and tangled thoughts that turned my mind into an inside-out shirt. All I knew was that we had a deal, me and him. Even after he had words with Dad about me bothering them, we still had a deal.
Near the end of their time, when April was on one of her long afternoon walks from beach to beach, and he was alone, he would play the piano, long repeated notes, as slow moving as childhood days, and wide apart like they could not be stepped over, wider than the cracks between crab-lurking rocks. Every time he would play these notes, it would be my cue to come out from behind the rocks with the Scotch and newspaper and other things he did not want her to know about. One day I asked him why he wanted the newspaper when all that information was available at the flick of a virtual switch.
You trust power?
Power?
Electricity. The thing that runs the world. What happens to knowledge when it goes?
We remember it, I said. Up here.
All of it. You must have a good memory. All you need to motor this is sunlight, he said, shaking the limp pages of the newspaper.
Speare liked the old-style newspapers from Hobart, which blackened my fingers and still got published for those who liked to feel words with their fingers or had no access to V-Pads. He shook it out so that it covered the piano keys, the words sharp with the niggle of dawn light.
And there’s plenty of sunlight, he said.
But mostly we talked about music. And mostly when we talked about music we talked about Beethoven.