by Craig Ensor
What’s he playing?
Don’t know. Don’t care, she said, crossing her arms as if they were suddenly cold, her voice raspy, sharp edged.
Why don’t you play?
I’m more of a thinker.
Dad reckons I think too much, I said, but that afternoon, like so many other times alone with April, I was all feeling.
I don’t need to control my thoughts into music or words, she said. The sea questions me, he says, gets me thinking about life and where I am in the world. Overthinking, he says. If he’s right about one thing, that’s it. And it will always do that, even if the sea rises to my throat like he says it will.
In that moment her face sank to the bottom of something, somewhere deep down from where we were, legs dangling on and through the moulting skin of sea water. And I felt something sinking in me too, something I resisted with a childish urge by jumping into the water and popping my chin over the swell, making a face with bulbous eyes and puckered lips.
Who am I?
Her face lifted, as I had hoped, and her thoughts went to all the fish she knew by name.
A toadfish?
Groper, I said. What about this one?
I made a fin with a hand on my back, wriggling under water with the tips of my fingers finning out.
A shark?
Dolphin, I said.
No way. That’s a shark.
If I was a shark I would have bitten you, I said, and snapped my teeth at her knee.
For what seemed like the rest of the afternoon I chased April along the rock with my bared shark teeth as she laughed and screamed and I chased her up out of the water and into the water as she screamed and laughed. When I finally caught her, pretending a bite against her arm, the screaming and laughter slowly gave way to smiles and lungs heaving in warm sea breeze, and when we finally caught our breath I suddenly heard a sound which I came to know back then as the absence of piano, as a hanging kind of silence. I remember looking back to the beach house and seeing Speare on the verandah, all fingers gripped against the railing as if the railing had become the keys, the beach house the piano, looking at the two of us bent over with laughter, too far away to see if we were smiling or not but close enough to see if another kiss might grow out of the joy of that moment.
April, Speare yelled from the verandah. I need to show you something.
But April did not move.
37
Then, one night, came the shouting. After, Speare went outdoors and April went indoors. Two doors in, by the slamming. April’s bedroom light came on, lamp-shaded eyeliner weeping around the dark of the curtain. My ear like a whisper against the window, hearing sob after sob, the twisted sheets pulled over the dampness of her eyes. Speare went down to the beach, carrying a bottle of whisky, swigging high at the moon, kicking at the waves that frothed around his ankles. On the rock shelf to the north point he sat. From there he sang the kind of songs my dad would sing after a few Scotches and the old family photos, some ballad from old times, something that sounded like sorrow put to music. Around the piano on the deck of the verandah was his composition, torn into bits of paper, maybe twenty or so, gathering in undecided circles before walking away on the breeze off the ocean, turning down the steps like white soles departing, down the steps and into my open hands.
Later that night, I spent hours sticking those pieces back together on my bedroom floor, so long that Dad must have grown suspicious. Just before bedtime he knocked and opened the door on the pretence of wishing me a goodnight.
That your homework? he said.
What? Yeah, I said.
I pay a lot for that bloody school, son. Don’t go ripping things up.
Yes, Dad. Sorry.
He put a hand on top of my head, softly, and went to close the door behind him.
Dad.
What’s up?
Next semester I’d like to study music.
Music. Do they teach that still?
Yeah, year ten they do.
What, like guitar and that? He asked, his fingers tapping.
Maybe piano.
Piano. Really. We’ll see.
Sticky-taped together, the composition went on for six and a half sheets, a foreign poem of clubbed lines and dashes among the stave, which I had no way of reading, incomprehensible as it was to a fifteen-year-old-boy who only knew the language of his father, a mystery but for the three words scribbled on top of the sheet, ‘For April, Forever’.
38
That morning, the morning she left, was from another age. Clouds the colour of cities built up against the sky, and there was a wind from the south which had the memory of winter about it. The sun fought through the clouds, fought to find the beach it had for the taking every other day, but on that day was armed only with gentle rays and a heat as mellow as a bedside lamp. I remember feeling cold as I waited behind the rock, waited for him to play the first notes of Beethoven’s sonata, to lure me out of my place behind the rock. An hour passed as I waited. No sonata. I read the comics in his newspaper. I watched the clouds as they lied about the rain they claimed to hold, watched them draw the fight with the sun and become an overcast stickiness. Still no sonata. Then, when the sun had finally taken the beach, I ran out of waiting. I left the rock and made my way towards the beach house.
Speare sat on the top of the verandah steps with his head between his knees. I stepped up four of the stairs, knowing that anything louder than silence would be heard between the rumble of waves. Behind him was the piano, cracked and blistered with heat and sea rust, flipped over so that its black wheels faced oceanwards.
What?
Your things, Mr Speare.
I handed the bag towards him.
Fuck off, kid.
I have the Scotch you wanted.
He looked up, his face beaten red, suddenly old with tears.
Where’s April? I asked.
Gone.
Where?
I said fuck off. What part of that don’t you understand? Fuck off and don’t come back.
When I looked back from Sandy Rip Point, he was still sitting on the verandah, his head down between his knees. She was gone. All her clothes would be gone from the wardrobe. Her jewellery would be gone. Her perfumes too. It scared me, the thought of seeing the death of April in the house, seeing the death of Speare slumped on the verandah, knowing that my world that summer had been dealt its own death. Then another death, the death of my mother, fell through me from the place where it had been stuck all those years, dislodged by the moment like a ball from the fork of a tree. The sun stung the back of my neck, but something else stung my eyes, a bluebottle-like sting. It sat me down, the pain in my eyes, sat me down the way Speare was sitting, head between my knees and rubbing and squeezing the tears from my eyes. And there, then, on that rock, I could see, in the broken way that Speare sat, my father sitting on our back step on the day my mother left, his head between his knees and his shadow long and frail on the kitchen floor, his flesh hardened into a thing of grief, so hard that when I, a boy of five, went to hug and pull him to his feet, he clung to the back step like an oyster shell deep into the night, washing up on their double bed at dawn, his boots hooked over the end.
39
Of all the fearful moments of my childhood there were none more fearful than riding away from the beach house that morning, the handlebars shaking through my arms, or rather the nerves in my arms shaking the handlebars. Full pelt I rode along the gravel road to the highway, the morning sun, which had barged through the clouds, casting long shadows across the road and sand and saltbush and the graves of petrified banksia. Further beyond, to the east, was the ocean while to the west the dividing range looked like it had lain down on its side to sleep, no longer having the will or desire to be a mountain range. Among this landscape, with the sun like a plague across it, I looked for April. I rode and looked, I looked and rode. I rode so fast my skin crawled with sweat. I looked far ahead along the road, past lies of water in the hollows and crows pe
cking at squashed pats of fur and gore. I rode until the lies were found out to be nothing but pools of heat and the crows hopped away onto the sandy verge, white eyes watchful as my bike ripped past. I rode past the general store, slowing to look for signs of April, in the phone booth, her bags waiting outside, but I only saw Dad hunched over the counter, reading a stock list or something. And then, halfway between the store and town, I saw her walking in the distance: a white dress, her hair pinned up into a tight knot on the top of her head, one small bag wheeling behind her arm, bumping along on the uneven road.
I slammed on the brakes and the back tyre skidded then slid out sideways and propped so that the bike impressively blocked her way down the road.
Where you going?
Finch. What …
Where you going? April?
South.
Her face looked all sharp and hard. If she had been crying, it must have been a long way back down the road. And her voice that morning was hoarse, flat and rough, as if all the arguing had taken the sweetness from it.
But you can’t leave us, I said, and reached out a hand and held her wrist.
I’m not leaving you. I’m leaving him, she said and shook loose of my hand.
But he loves you. I know it. I saw him on the verandah.
You’re fifteen. You can’t possibly know what love is, she said, and went to step around my front wheel.
But I did know what love was. Even as a fifteen-year-old I knew what it was, how it could make one man shrivel into a ball of regrets and tears, and another ride his bike for hours through the sweating sun to see her face one more time. I knew that love was like the wind, either coming or leaving, and that you had to work hard to keep it by your side, between, swirling between always. And that if you thought love was still, still as air on a hot morning, you were too late. It was already gone.
Please, April. Don’t go. Please.
It’s over. We tried. I tried. But I need a new life.
Those words hooked through me, through the place I had heard and felt them many years before.
I’m sorry.
For what?
For getting in the way. Dad said I should stay away … that you wanted to keep the world out and I was bringing it in all the time. Walking it through the house … like dirty feet, he said.
No, no, no. It’s not you. The world got in because it was in us. Hey, don’t cry, silly. It’ll be all right. You’ll understand when you get older. This isn’t about you. You are such a caring, sweet boy. If only he was more like you.
I’m not a boy anymore.
I know.
She let go of her luggage and came up to the bike and put her arms around my shoulders. She hugged me, and I felt the determined softness of her. I felt the warming take over my insides. I remember that hug, the faint smell of sweat losing against the lift of perfume, one of the perfumes she had gathered from her bedside dresser that morning, and I remember deeply the way I hugged her back, as if I had become, in that moment at the end of their time at the beach house, a man capable of selfless consolation.
He cares, you know. He loves you, I said.
Then why are you here, and he’s not? she said, and her eyes filled with water but her face was too hard and sharp to let the water spill. Or rather the sharpness of her eyes seemed to cup any spill.
Then she went to kiss me and my lips softened in readiness for another kiss on the lips, a kiss longer and deeper, I hoped, than the one we shared in the cave, but her lips went for my cheek and the kiss she left was dry and hard and final.
You have to let me go now, she said and took the handle of her bag.
Where will you go?
South. As far south as I can go. Hobart probably.
But it’s thousands of kilometres. You can’t walk. Take my bike.
So sweet, she said, touching my face, the place where her kiss still burnt like I had fallen there, as if a kiss could somehow graze the skin to bleeding. No, the trucks come along this road pretty often. I’ll hitch.
Dad says that’s dangerous. Girls go missing along this road all the time, he says. Boys too. He won’t let me hitch anywhere.
I’ll be fine.
Dad could drive you. He wouldn’t want you hitching.
No, it’s fine, she said, and started walking away down the road. You’ve done enough. You’ve shown me what I am, what’s truly me.
What’s that?
Don’t know. Still a child, I think. But I need to find out.
About a kilometre north up the road a truck appeared on the crest, a six-wheeler truck with shiny chrome grills, heading south to Canberra probably to refill on stock then head north once more.
This is my ride, she said, and stood out in the lane with her thumb up.
The truck slowed and pulled up on the verge, then waited a moment before honking.
You know, I wish I still had my glass rock pool. I wanted to keep that, she said and smiled, and I finished her smile with my own.
Then she skipped to the door of the truck and passed her luggage up to the driver and climbed in. I memorised the licence plate, like Dad had told me to do. Then I sat there, on my bike, in the same position where I had skidded to a stop, and watched the truck for as long as I could, squinting through a light which had lost the clemency of early morning. Everything around the truck was the colour of parch, or if not parch then wither, or if not wither then death. Everything flat or at the angle of feint. And there, with everything of the land either departing or departed, I watched the truck shrink to the size of a toy along the long, straight road until it twisted left and dropped from sight into the valley, until April had departed.
40
On his way south Speare stopped the taxi by the general store and handed the keys over to Dad. There was a round of words and nods between them, most of which I could not hear from the storeroom other than that we could have anything in the house to sell or keep or scrap. Dad just had to drop the keys back with the agent in town. The following Sunday morning Dad shut the store and unplugged the ute and we headed out to the beach house. Dad worked the key into the lock and went straight inside while I stood outside.
You coming in?
It doesn’t feel right.
Let me invite you in, then. Come in, son.
All the rooms had a hot bad-breath smell to them. Dad went straight for the appliances, uncorded coffee machines and toasters and kettles, then piled them into the ute. I went into the bedroom and stared at the mattress, the sheets gone, the empty bedside drawers layered with two weeks of dust. Then I went to the bedroom, stared at the long strands of hair stuck to the wash basin, resembling letters in the shapes they made but no words of hope or consolation. I stared at the shower, the four-fingered taps, taps which once felt the hold of her hand.
What are you doing, son?
Nothing.
I know you’re doing nothing. What should you be doing?
Helping.
Good answer. He’s left the piano, you know. Do you want it?
He left it?
That’s what I said. It’s out here on the verandah.
I walked out into the lounge room. The piano was there, back on its wheels, a weary black in the abruptness of morning sun. And from that day on, the sight of that piano stayed with me, along with this sense that the piano had somehow got to its feet itself, through its own determination and resilience, its own wish to be played by other fingers.
I don’t think I can take it, Dad.
Don’t you want to take music next year? Piano?
Yeah, but …
I’ll come back and get it tomorrow. I’ll need one of the boys to lend me a hand.
We spent a few hours emptying the house, the left side of the ute for things we would keep or sell and the right for things we would take to the tip out west of town. We had been through all the rooms and the cupboards in those rooms, packing plates and glasses and cutlery into old milk crates. But there was one room that we had not been through. The
door on this room was shut, locked, and Dad had been through almost all the keys on the key ring before he found the one that opened it. He pushed open the door and went to the window to pull back the curtains. The sunlight came in, with a violence we had to turn our eyes away from. The room was set up as a nursery, a cot along one of the walls, a changing table and a cupboard full of clothes for a newborn. On a small bedside table was a framed image of a baby.
After hours of busily working around the house, Dad went still and silent. He was thinking at the photo. When Dad was thinking his hand covered his face like he was trying to hide his thoughts but even I could read parts of them. He picked up the frame.
This explains it.
Explains what?
They had a lot to deal with, he said quietly, to himself.
Like what?
Nothing. Come on, out you get. I’ll come back for this later.
Dad closed over the curtain and prodded me out of the room. He shut the door and locked it.
Let’s go, son. Son. Now. Move it.
MOVEMENT II
Hobart, Australia
1
In any piece of music the repetition of notes can give those notes a power and meaning they would not have in isolation. The unfinished composition of ‘For April, Forever’ had, at its core, a simple repetitive movement that steadily grew deeper and deeper as more accents and layered notes took it to the point of incompleteness, to the half-finished treble clef abandoned on the day Speare ripped his composition into pieces, in front of April’s tearful eyes, to prove once and for all how much he loved her. For years and years I read and played her composition before I had the feel and sense to pen a further note, which, as it turned out, was the same repetitive phrasing that had gone before, but different because the note came from my hand and not Speare’s. So it became clear to me that the power of repetition worked in two ways: the power of repetition of a note itself in the one piece of music, and the power of repetition of a note made by the same composer time after time throughout their career, so when that note was made it carried with it an authenticity that a younger composer, who had only composed that note a modest number of times, could never achieve.