by Craig Ensor
While I worked on completing ‘For April, Forever’ throughout my university years it occurred to me that I had twenty or thirty years of composing the same notes, the same sequence of notes, ahead of me, before those notes became respected as my own. And it occurred to me that repetition in life worked so differently to that in music. The repetition of my childhood days living with my father in the old weatherboard house bolted on to the general store, the tedious birth and death of a given day, from waking to sleep, from breakfast to dinner, from shop opening to shop closing, from sun-up to sundown, first class to last, all of which seemed to be meaningless. Repetition, to a child, seemed to be an adult name for boredom, or rather the powerlessness of childhood.
In among this life of repeated days came the mysterious repetitions of April’s life: the walks, the swims, the cooking, the showers, the way she watered the sapling jacaranda at dawn and dusk with bore water, kneeling before it and gently handling the water onto its trunk. The way the piano would pause between notes, as if it needed to breathe a deep, silent breath, and when they were not fighting, he would come down from the verandah to stand by her side and arm her in close. The way they would both look at the jacaranda for signs of growth and they would find them – a branch, a leaf, a flower – with such togetherness, knowing that these small moments of repetition could and would never be repeated because they would always be a day older, a day closer to a death that could not, despite all our progress, be repeated.
2
In the between years, time grew out my bones and flesh and gave me sense to know that life, for me, could not be what it was for my father. In all my years there would not be a finer memory than the week before the first semester, when my father drove me the two thousand kilometres south along the coast in the dark of night, crossing Bass Strait on the ferry and gunning it through the midland plains until we arrived at the University of Tasmania. Days before, when I accepted Dad’s offer, he said he wanted to give the ute a long drive, clean out the motor, loosen its joints. But I knew otherwise. Since I was a baby he had put aside most of his takings from the general store for my education, a real education as he put it, one with real teachers, real books, real girls. He wanted to see where his money was going. I knew that. But the wiser part of me knew that he was proud of me. Most parents would drop their children off in the main car park, but he conned the guard into letting him drive us up through the cast-iron gates along Aberdeen Street and past the manicured lawns and gardens until he pulled up, having taken all the time that the ute would afford without stalling, out the front of the great oak doors of the Arts College. We sat in the car for a while, in silence, as if Dad was waiting for a valet to collect our bags.
Well, son, this better bloody get you a job one day.
Do you want to take a look around?
No, it wouldn’t be right.
Do you want to hang in the car?
Just for a bit. It feels kind of important, doesn’t it? What’s that over the door?
A gargoyle.
I thought only churches had them. We should get a photo in front of the door.
The Great Door, Dad.
Yes, the Great Door, Dad said, giving his usual smile, which was no more than a pleasant crack in his face.
My father recruited one of the students walking by to take our image in front of the Great Door and the sandstone gargoyle that guarded the door. Then he grabbed my clothes bag from the back of the ute, and I grabbed the shoulder bag that held all my piano scores along with the sheet music Speare had ripped up on the verandah of the beach house all those years ago. The piano would arrive later, carried on one of the many cargo ships that migrated up and down the east coast in those days. He gave me the bags then stood and looked at me, his eyes sitting back as if resting on a troubling thought. Then, for only the second or third time in my life, he pulled me in for a hug and kissed my hair. He held the hug for a long time like it was all the hugs he wished he had given me over all those years crammed into the one last hug.
Hours later, as I registered on the fourth floor of the Arts College, I saw through the window my father walking between the rose gardens and the southern cloisters of the Arts College, looking up at the spires and the domes of the plane trees, mouth open, like a baby would look at the world. The sky was blue and clear that day. On certain winter days in Hobart, before the great acceleration of warmth over the next few decades, as the last of the polar ice melted, the sun came at the people of Hobart soft and indecisive, almost apologetic in its concern for those it shone upon. That day, as my father walked with his eyes upwards through the grounds of the university, was such a day. The breeze gusted in from the south, so cool that some students wore jumpers and others wore scarfs. Birds quarrelled between the plane trees, birds so bright and exotic they made my father reach for his glasses, while branches moved with the flow of students from faculty to college, registering for the semester ahead. The afternoon sun, which made no demands, which seemed, that day, to be a thing of reason and care, seemed to want to hold on to the day almost as much as my father did.
3
In the first semester of my third year at university, when I thought I saw April lying on the grass under the dappled brilliance of a jacaranda in the grounds of Domain House, I could see, as I looked away, the beach house and the jacaranda they had planted, but I could not hear the waves tear and thump on the sand or hear the wind pipe through the needle clusters of the she-oaks or hear the piano searching for notes as beautiful as moonlight washing over dark water. The memory came only in colours. As I walked by the jacaranda, my fingers cracked loose for my mid-semester recital, I saw – and only saw – the rainbow umbrella and her lying on a towel under the late-afternoon shade with her elbows propped to read a book I would only later learn was about motherhood. In this memory, she did not hear a fifteen-year-old skulk for cover in among the dull and limp branchlets of the swamp oaks, casting a casual look over her left shoulder through hair which was neither dull nor limp, which ascended in the breezy sunlight. This look seemed to last the whole of my teenage years but must have only been a few seconds in her world. She must have thought me to be the wind, because she went back to her book, stretching her legs out to let more sun or breeze or both between as if she was the only person in the world.
As I passed by the jacaranda, I looked back at this woman and willed her to look up over her left shoulder, finger away a lock of hair (darker then, or was it the clouds that made it so?) and confirm the accuracy of my memory, but something on her V-Pad held her concentration. The memory clung with such shape and colour that it made me deaf to the present, and the present, on that day, was the questions being put to me by my girlfriend, Pavi, who was walking alongside me to the Recital Hall.
What are you looking at? Pavi asked.
Nothing.
Nothing. Is that her name? Nothing.
It’s nothing.
Is her last name Lying?
No, no, no, Pav. I was looking at the jacaranda. It reminds me of home, that’s all.
Pavi, who understood what it meant to leave a home behind, to long for all its lost consolations, took my hand and gripped it and smiled.
Throughout the recital my fingers felt large, cramped, first-date jittery, and my playing wandered with my mind to the question of whether that student was in fact April or not. By the end of the recital I was convinced that it was not her. Apart from Pavi’s ovation, the staggered applause went to the violinist.
4
In the early twenty-first century, Australian universities were among the first institutions to deal with the warming seriously and they had been dealing with it seriously for two centuries afterwards, each year more seriously than the one before. They had climate scientists as board members. They had all the evidence. They had charted the projected rise of the oceans, the momentum of carbon emissions, the acceleration of the rise with thermal expansion and the thawing of the polar caps. But they lacked believers more than evidence, and
the many believers they had were not prepared, in a sacrificial way, to give up the old institutional comforts. By the time I arrived at the University of Tasmania, over two hundred years after the first scientific acknowledgment of the warming, the universities had accepted the fact that there would be no stay or reversal. There was no technological solution. The warming had a momentum that no amount of political change or technological advancement could stop. The solution was simple: to move. As we had done for thousands and thousands of years. Move from land to land. Southwards. Or northwards, for those on the other side of the equator. Two choices.
One by one the mainland universities relocated to Tasmania, turning the old sandstone colleges into vast university towns of concrete and glass lined with avenues of Moreton Bay figs, which cracked the footpaths with growth while, in Sydney and the other lost cities of the north, those same figs withered to hollow stumps from heat or the salt rot of sea water. The University of Tasmania was the oldest of them all, some four hundred years old, and Domain House was the matriarch of the university, branching off to create the Arts College and the Recital Hall and the grand neo-Gothic buildings along the north-eastern flank of Aberdeen Street. So popular was the university with the thousands of migrant children of the north that they could charge a semester fee that was more than my father would make in a year. When I asked my father how he paid for it, he said the store made a decent profit and as a card player he was often underestimated. For twenty odd years he had been heading off into town on card night, wiping the table and banking away his dollars in a biscuit tin I was never able to find. All those years I had thought Dad went to card night to escape our world, to escape the obligation of me, and yet it seemed he made the trip to town every Friday night so that the promise of me could one day be fulfilled.
In the cooler south, where rain and mist and drifts of snow squalled across from the Southern Ocean, blackening the beach-rinsed stone of the colleges, blackening the wardrobes of the students, the campus flourished with music and art and drinking and deep, cool thinking about the warming world. Within the next generation the student’s parents followed them south, and by my third year at university the number of students was so great that plans were made for a new university on the great Antarctic continent, built in a thawing valley near the Australian settlement of Mawson. By then, in the last semester of my third year, the task of finding the girl I had seen lying under the jacaranda, in a campus of sixteen faculties and one hundred thousand students, was almost impossible. And yet I looked for her every day on the grass banks that stepped down from Domain House. I looked for her when the jacaranda bloomed and when it did not. In the morning I looked for her among the sleepy-eyed current of students flowing between the boulders of Flanagan’s Bar and the Science Institute. In the evening on my way back to Westella College, with flying foxes bustling and shrieking in the figs overhead, I looked for her among faces full of learning and the apricot make-up of dusk. I looked for her in the library. I looked for her in the cafeterias. I looked for her even with Pavi by my side.
Pavi and I had met six months earlier in a music theory class, where we seemed to sit habitually together yet alone along the aisle, three rows back from the lecturer, where habit became familiarity and familiarity became a kind of convenient ritual of drinking and sleeping and playing music together, me on the piano and Pavi on the cello. She was born in the city of Khulna in Bangladesh, and was one of the few children born of a city which, at nine metres elevation, had been radically lost to the rise of sea waters, born from a country that had collapsed socially on the question of children. With their homeland lost to sea water, with the insufferable heat, Pavi and her parents and aunties and uncles, like so many others, accepted the welcoming embrace of Australia. And Pavi seemed to accept my welcoming embrace with a smile and bounce which at first had charmed me into offering that embrace. Like so many of our friends we had an understanding which felt provisional, but she had a key to my dorm and a toothbrush on my vanity and a small area of a drawer for her sleepover clothes, and to that extent she was permanent to me and I was permanent to her.
One warm day, just on dusk, we were heading with a group of our friends to one of the university bars for a drink. On the way we passed by the Science Institute, a glass building with a philosophy against privacy such that all the students attending class could be seen from the adjacent street. In one of these classrooms I saw April, or a woman I thought to be her, at a desk by the glass with her hair gathered into a knot on one side so that her neck showed. Then I saw the tattoos: the line from Kierkegaard on the soft part of her arm, the tattoo on her neck. The three notes just behind her ear, which, later that night – drunk, overjoyed – I worked into a three-note song for all my drunken friends to sing while leaning into the piano in Flanagan’s. Later that night the talk deepened, ending up where it always seemed to end up: the warming.
Where do we go next? said Alex.
What about the Drunken Admiral? said Tash.
Let’s go home, said Pavi, quietly to me, touching some skin under my shirt, home being what Pavi had begun to call my dorm at Westella College.
Not a pub, said Alex. Where do we go when Hobart heats up? Dries up like all the others. Becomes uninhabitable.
We head further south, I said, and played the three notes.
They’ll find an answer by then, said Pavi.
An answer. Running away is not an answer. We can only go so far south, then we’re heading north again, said Hans.
Let’s go to the Admiral, I said.
Finch, said Pavi, her fingers pinching.
Just one more, I said.
And we did; we went to the Drunken Admiral, the south-ernmost pub in Hobart but also the only pub open at that hour.
5
The recital for my final-year examination was held in the Great Hall on a mild evening in the August of traditional winter. Greyish clouds huddled over the Derwent, dirty footprints in the carpet of bluish-pink sky, but we all knew southern weather well enough to know that it promised more than it delivered. The wind moved easily from the Derwent up through the university colleges and alleys and courtyards. Weather mattered for the Great Hall, an amphitheatre built from sandstone and steel and glass between the rose garden and the grandeur of Domain House. Behind the stage loomed the harbour, blinking with ships and the suburbs that made an ambitious run for new foreshores like all the dead cities of the north once had. If the weather turned, either through rain or heat, the Great Hall transformed itself at the push of a button, walls and roof growing from the ground like the roses that hedged it, so that, within a matter of moments, the audience of five hundred or more were sheltered in this vaulted hall of steel and glass. It was acknowledged as one of the great buildings of the century. It embodied what was remarkable for the age. With the world in a terminal state of ill health, human aspirations did not fall into the makeshift and temporary as they may have done in past centuries of darkness. Unlike in the past, when the fear of the unknown led to superstition and a shunning of knowledge, a personal fear born into a diseased and war-wracked life, these times were different. There was no unknown. The great southern and northern universities, clustering around the poles, did away with any unknowns. The deniers were all dead or living mad thirsty lives in deserted cities on the Australian mainland and in other northern countries. And for all born into this age the imminent passing of the world was not their own personal death to fear and be overwhelmed by, but the larger death of their name, their family, their country, their existence, within only three or four generations. Humans only saw the best of themselves in times of tragedy. Or the worst, my father would have said, but that was rarely seen in my days at the university. Rather, the university and the world at large had resigned themselves to living in a permanent state of tragedy while – and this was where this time departed from other dark ages – having all the luxuries of a civilised technological society. A new age of togetherness, grace, tenderness, which was the last dyin
g age, took over the world, where the diminishing few were all bonded in diverting energy from petty squabbles and war and into the survival of something greater than their own small lives. The world was no more than a dying parent, around which its people maintained a tender handheld vigil. The universities, funded by the wills of so many childless benefactors, bustling with thousands of the brightest students, were the places where hope was seeded to grow, and the Great Hall was the building that gave the brightest flowering of hope. Buildings of that stature did not get built unless there was a future, and because it had been built there must be a future. So the thinking went. And we all went along with it to some degree.
Playing the three piano pieces for my examination in the Great Hall is a memory that is its own spacious room in my mind: there I was, dressed in suit and tails like a nineteenth-century gentleman, my fingers clammy but loose, ready, the audience dressed formally as well – my father in the front row dressed in the only suit he owned, which was the one he wore to weddings and funerals, Pavi beautifully seated beside him in a lime-green dress – the chatter of lorikeets as a lasting mood of pink delighted the evening sky and the first of the recitals began. I was one of the last to perform. I had selected Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which, back at the beach house some seven years ago, was Speare’s warm-up sonata and was capable, with the delicate touch of those first three notes, of lifting my eyes and ears from the rock pools of Sandy Rip. Then came Philip Glass’s Opening followed by Rain Variations by Jerome Weinstenberg. After a few clunky notes, I warmed into a state of playing which took me into a world outside the Great Hall, beyond the audience to a state that always gave me some personal hope or delusion that there was another world beyond this one. When I finished the last sustained note of Rain Variations, the audience stood and applauded, my father clapping like he had been sneaking nips of whisky and Pavi sprouting to her feet among them in her green dress, and I knew I had done more than pass.