The Warming

by Craig Ensor

  In those days, examinations for recitals were not a question of marks. They were audience judged, and the Great Hall had the latest technology, sensors in each of the seats able to tell how each audience member felt about the recital: were they moved, uncomfortable, bored, distressed? The audience, so the associate professor told me during my review, were in a state of wanting, wanting to be moved, saddened, uplifted, because I had put them in or near that state throughout. This, so the system had it, was one of the highest states, worthy of a first-class honours degree. After the recital, the students and their families and friends milled around silver trays of champagne and canapés on the lower stage area, a quarter-moon parting the clouds and the music of fig-chewing flying foxes in the garden around, a violin to the cello of sound made by the celebrating audience. My father was comfortable on the edge of the crowd, a short walk from his ute parked on Aberdeen Street, proudly lapping up some praise from the dean. Pavi was between my father and me, talking to the dean’s wife about the flower arrangements for her recital in two weeks time. Then, out of the din, came a voice that I knew at once.

  Finch. Finch, isn’t it?

  And there she was: April, stepping forwards from the crowd, near my father’s shoulder. The dean and his wife looked down and sipped at their drinks. Pavi looked up at me, her smile reversing. My father reached for his glasses.

  I heard the Beethoven piece and I thought of the old beach house, April said. I thought of you. Then I looked up and you were there, playing, right before my eyes. But you were no longer a boy.

  I stood silent for a long time. I wanted to hug and kiss her, but the feeling that ran through me, which was in itself the rawness of wanting, came out only as awkward silence.

  So this must be the incredible April, said Pavi, who always thought silence was something to be owned not endured.

  Yes, April. Sorry. This is Pavi. And you know my father.

  Hi, April, my father said. You’ve not changed at all.

  A little older. A lot wiser, I hope.

  A night breeze tickled off the harbour and up through the university gardens and over the ribbed seating of the Great Hall. Some of the audience wore coats and cardigans. It was one of the last mild nights I could remember, a clear cool night back at a time when winter still had some meaning, before the great acceleration of warmth, before we had to head further south to keep that meaning alive, to keep the very word winter in use. But April’s skin, when she approached me that night of the recital, when her voice fell out of the sky like rain, was the colour of warm.

  6

  On the first day of spring, Pavi and I took our morning walk along Flannery Wall, a seawall built between the tips of Battery Point and the Cenotaph beyond Hunter Street. Residents and tourists could walk along the seawall as if it were a bridge, looking back towards Sullivan’s Cove and the city of Hobart at sea levels from the early twenty-first century, the sandstone old town of warehouses and halls along the dock all conserved while the steel and glass skyscrapers climbed towards Mount Wellington. This body of water, preserved in time, was almost fifty metres below the top of the wall. On the other side of the wall, the Derwent slapped and washed against the concrete, the waves touchable with a curious or disbelieving hand. At that morning hour, the first day of spring, the temperature was already up in the high twenties, and I remember feeling distracted and unbalanced as we walked towards Battery Point, which may have been the heat or the disorientating levels of sea water on either side, or may have been the way I was feeling.

  Pavi said, Finch, are you listening to me? Did you hear what I said?

  No, sorry?

  I was talking about visiting my parents this afternoon.

  Sorry, it’s the heat.

  Somewhere close to the middle of the wall, Pavi stopped. Around us there were other people exercising, taking virtual snaps of the Hobart skyline. Some had declared Hobart the city of the future, such was the density of skyscrapers and the speed with which it became a hub of multicultural trade in the southern hemisphere – a city which, like the lost Asian cities near the equator, became a place where, in the fug of summer, the faces of residents and tourists alike wore a sweaty mask, feverish, as if the warming was an incurable sickness.

  The heat. Really. Just be honest. It’s April. You’re thinking about her. You’re still just a fifteen-year-old boy, aren’t you?

  There were two things I regretted that morning. The first was telling Pavi, back before we became a couple, about the beach house, about Speare and the gift of music he gave me, and about my first love, April. The second was the way it all ended, publicly, with tears and shouting, hurting Pavi so deeply when I knew, if I was being honest with my twenty-two year old self, that April had been on my mind, or on the edge of it, all that morning and for every morning since she appeared at the recital.

  Pavi, I said, and held her by the shoulders. You’re right. April is there. She’s on my mind. But she’s always been there. Even before I met you.

  Well, get her off it.

  I can’t, but it’s not about her.

  What, then? You seemed to like me a lot in bed this morning.

  The others on the seawall, sensing something serious, something outside the everyday, drifted over to the other side of the wall, the Hobart side.

  Well, yes, but … for me to fall in love, to be in love, I need to be like this with the thing I love, I said, and made a ball with my fist.

  What are you talking about?

  I don’t think we’re like that.

  Like what?

  Like that, I said, and made a ball with my hand, a whole.

  A fist? You want to be like a fist.

  No, a whole.

  It’s been six months. We’re still growing.

  But you know, by now, whether this, I said, holding out my balled hand, whether this will be forever.

  Forever? Who’s asking for forever? No-one’s expecting that. She’s just an ideal – you know, she’s not real. It’s April or me. I’m real, here, and she’s just something in your head. Choose, Finch. Choose.

  I’m sorry.

  You’re a fucking jerk.

  Pavi punched at my balled fist and took off down towards Battery Point, stopping only to take the spare dorm key from a pocket in her leggings and throw it at my head. The key flew straight over my head and landed in the deep black water of the Derwent.

  At times like this, and other times, the future would beat inside me like a second heart that I feared would be broken in the distant present, the present of my future. Even as a student, without the concerns of career and family, I seemed to make decisions with that second heart, when it would have been so much easier to listen to my first heart, the one that loved and lost solely in the present. But I do not regret ending it with Pavi that day. She would arrange for a friend, a particularly hateful friend, to collect her toothbrush and clothes, and she would sit on the opposite side of music class to me for the balance of the semester, but I do not regret that. I walked back along the seawall towards the Hunter Street end, reading over and over the message that April had sent to me after the recital – When can I see you again? – with a sense of hope in the future that most would either envy or deny.

  7

  That day, in many ways the first day we met, April and I agreed to meet at the Book Cafe in the old quarter of the university, a retro wooden-chair-and-table kind of place which had been restored out of the basement of the Philip Smith Training Centre. It was her favourite cafe, and I said it was mine too even though I had only been there once before and thought it pretentious, too intense, the sandstone-framed windows only ever letting in a misleading light. As it turned out, the light in the cafe was so deliberately obscure, given only by candles held in sconces on the walls and on each of the tables, that my eyes took a while to adjust and find her seated at a corner table with her candlelit face deep in a paged book. Her hair – for that still, at that time, defined her for me – was pulled up into a studious-looking
knot, and the square-rimmed glasses she wore reminded me that she was, so the years would have it, older than me, but no less beautiful than the day I first saw her at the store. I had the perfect first line memorised, which my throat forgot as I neared her table.

  What are you reading?

  She looked up. Her eyes, framed in those glasses like a precious painting, made my throat close even more.

  The Principles of Psychiatry. For my degree. I keep my V-Pad as a bookmark, though. In case my brain gives up and I need a distraction, April said.

  Her voice still had that cool duet of lightness and huskiness, although edgier than I remembered. I was too nervous to laugh or respond with something charming or witty. I think I may have been staring as a child would.

  So should I stand too or are you going to sit down?

  They have all the texts in the Skybrary, you know, I said, the words jarring, know-it-all, again childish.

  Thanks for the tip. I like books, though. Born into the wrong century, I guess. Sit down, Finch. So, where have you been all these years?

  We each drank three cups of coffee that afternoon, sharing the stories of our past since the time I had sat on my bike on the highway and watched her hitch a ride south to a place which my fifteen-year-old heart could not understand but still, deprived of any understanding, could not bear. As for April, she had meandered south like so many others, moving from relationship to relationship – nothing serious – and from job to job – even less serious – until she decided she would go back to university and complete the degree she started as an eighteen-year-old. The desire to be a psychiatrist, to help people deal with the tragedies of their own inner lives in a time when individual needs were being sacrificed for the collective, had never left her. For her, in a world grieving over its own nearing death, we needed, more than ever, to understand how to cope with that grief. She had saved enough money to board in Corinda College, and worked in a bookstore down near Salamanca Markets which, four hundred years ago, was nothing more than a port for sailors or drunks or in most cases both, all on their way to the moneyed north. In that year, the year of 2228, Hobart was a heritage-listed city of five million. Of all the remaining cities, it was one of the most southern until all the great polar cities started to grow from the ice thaw during the mid to latter half of that century.

  Throughout her story I listened like I was hearing something new about the world for the first time. And I also listened like an adult, listening for a name or reference to some other – a partner, boyfriend, husband – which would switch an awkward light on the dark intimacy of this sharing. But there was no other, just me and her, and the light that shone between us was only candle light, serving the original purpose.

  Then April said, And what about you? A girlfriend. That girl at the recital. She was beautiful.

  Well. We broke up.

  Sorry to hear that. Hope it wasn’t because of me.

  Partly.

  Which part?

  The major part, I said, and watched her face lift, creating shadows that smiled in the candlelight. We then went back to staring at our coffees.

  I have to confess something, I said. It’s been bothering me since the time of the beach house.

  What is it?

  April took off her glasses, as if to mark the fact that she would not need her eyes for what I was about to confess, and a clef of soft hair loosened down over her ear.

  Remember when you walked all the way to the store and made the calls in the phone booth?

  She nodded and sipped at her coffee.

  I told Speare. Told him you did that. That you called someone. Then after that everything went wrong and you left. If I had only said nothing like Dad said, but something made me do it. I knew it was wrong but I did it and I ended up losing you.

  It came out like that, as if the relationship was mine to lose.

  I know, she said, and reached out to put her hand on mine. I knew all along. It wasn’t you. Our problems were too deep, too many. It’s not worth going into it. I was too young.

  Can I ask you something else?

  She nodded almost reluctantly.

  Who did you call in the phone booth?

  Who? Who do you think I called? Another man?

  I don’t know but you broke the rules.

  The rules. His rules. I called my father, if you really want to know. I called my father.

  And who did you call the second time?

  My father. I called him again but he didn’t answer that time, she said, and looked down at her closed book.

  I reached across the table and put my hand on top of hers. In that moment, hearing that, the door which, because of my father’s view of the world, was only kept ajar, and perhaps eternally ajar, was swept wide open. Perhaps it should only have been opened halfway, circumspectly, but I slammed it open with all the energy of a twenty-two year old who had returned to the front door of his childhood home.

  But everything went wrong from there, I said. The day I interfered it all went wrong.

  April looked up and said, I’m glad you interfered. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I, sitting here with you?

  You may have been married still. With children.

  No, I wouldn’t. It was never going to end up like that for us.

  How do you know?

  I have done things wrong in the past too. But I have no regrets. I had to do them. And I’m here. This is where I want to be. Here. Learning. At university. Living the life I want to live. Reunited with an old childhood friend.

  If she still did not have her hand on my hand, her parted fingers falling down between, soft flames overlapping softer flames, I may have heard in her words the echo of the letter my mother wrote to me all those years ago; I may have taken the word friend the wrong way; I may have walked out of the cafe and headed towards Westella College, regretfully alone.

  8

  The following Sunday we met by the jacaranda beside Domain House and took the three-hour-long hike up to Mount Wellington, which was born, wild and bare, out of the belly of Hobart. During the winter months of the last century snow could be seen and felt on the mountain, and postcards sold in antique shops still showed this remarkable sight. These days the mountain was a bald and bumpy skull of dolerite with tufts of flowering heath between the bumps, shrouded in mist when the clouds lowered over the mountain in winter and otherwise snowless for a century or more. Even so it was the best place to view the city and the Derwent and the long passage north-east that so many had not taken and never would. The day was dry and cloudless. It was a perfect day in early spring, but I could feel, day after day, year after year, the sun peel away the cool sweater of air that once was spring in these parts and throw it away like old fashion. When we got to the deck, having passed hundreds of walkers on the way up the mountain, there was no-one else around, just April and me and the growing warmth of the sun on and between us. I sensed the moment, moved towards it.

  With both arms on the railing, she said, That’s my college down there. Corinda. See?

  Everything looks possible at this distance.

  Sure does. Simple too. Look at the ships waiting to come into the harbour.

  In those days, the days when Hobart grew, in three or four generations, from a small provincial town to a city of five million people there were ships lined up waiting to dock in the port down harbour, off-loading goods and immigrants from all over the world. The old fear of other people taking what was ours never took hold in the way it usually did. While the immigrants came and came during those early generations, they came in smaller numbers year after year as if the world, like with the clouds, had dried itself of people. No amount of immigration or fertility research would reverse this trend, the trend of a declining population. To have a child or not was a matter of personal choice which the governments of the day could and would not dictate. They would not harvest children, either through forced coupling or biological technology. A generation later, the ships would be heading furth
er south to Antarctica, one of the last of the temperate lands, in ever smaller numbers.

  April, I have a present for you.

  She turned away from the city and looked at me. There was a story to be told. The story of Speare, who by then was becoming one of Australia’s leading composers. The story of his composition, ripped up into pieces on the verandah of the beach house, and a better version of me sticky-taping those pieces back together with a design to give it to Speare one day and for him to complete it and give to her as an expression, not a reduction, of the love they shared. There was even the story of the teenager who grew up to learn to play the piano and study the history of music at university, who learned the craft of composition to a point where that young man attempted to complete the piece himself. Then there was the story I told April at the summit of Mount Wellington.

  I’ve been working on a sonata over the last few years.

  That’s great.

  It was inspired by you. By our time together at the beach house.

  Really? I must have made some impression.

  You did.

  A sonata. You’ll have to play it for me.

  I opened up my backpack and pulled out the composition, a score of some twelve pages, rewritten in my own hand, and I unpicked the string that tied it into a scroll. She looked at the title, ‘For April, Forever’, and her eyes went through the staves of notes as if she could understand the piece and was playing it in her mind.

  I can’t read music but it looks beautiful. This is so sweet. You were writing this for me and you had no idea you would see me again.

  I had a feeling I would. The world is getting smaller. We all seem to be heading to one or two places.