by Craig Ensor
I need to hear it, she said.
By the time we made our way down to the university it was nearing dusk. A sky of rain-logged clouds had moved over the city from the south. As we walked along the avenue of figs in the old quarter, rain started to fall, a rain so faint and misty and whispered, so close in conversation with the leaves and paths and iron gutters of the old buildings, that it felt as if we were still talking about our lives when, in fact, there was only silence between us. Within moments the rain started to pelt down. We huddled under a fig that twisted and clawed from the earth like the limbs of lovemaking. We stayed dry under the thick skin of leaf until the rain eventually sopped through and fell in wet shivers onto our faces and clothes.
There’s a piano in the Recital Hall. We could sneak in.
Are we allowed?
Then it occurred to me. I said, I have one in my room.
Where?
Westella College. A few blocks into town.
For most of the way we dodged around people and under shop awnings to avoid the rain. Near the college we huddled under a dripping fig, then, when the rain eased to a sprinkling, we ran across the road with my backpack held up over her head – her long rain-scented hair – towards the foyer of Westella College. Under cover we took in some deep giggling breaths. Then I led the way up the stairs, to the third floor of the college, where my bedroom overlooked an empty park bench between a couple of plane trees, their leaves in budding green and the grass around their trunks seeded with spores. She was on her way up to my bedroom, which would, on that day, give her access to all of me and my world. She would not recognise the piano that had spent six months of its time on the verandah of the beach house, maybe because it was Speare’s, because his memory seemed somehow erased from her consciousness, or perhaps because the blisters and cracks had been sanded back, repainted to a glossy black. She would sit on my bed because there was nowhere else to sit. She would listen to me play her song. She would not recognise Speare’s melody, the tumbling fall of notes before the uplifting codetta, which I had modulated with unrelated keys and transitioning melodies over the last three years at university. She would be moved, I hoped. The rain would be deep in conversation with the iron gutters and awning and leaves outside my window. Everything would feel at home. And she would be sitting, maybe reclining, on my bed, perhaps lying facedown looking up at me. And I was twenty-two years of age. And she was only twenty-nine.
And later, after she had dressed and left, after we had shared a kiss at the doorway, I stood by the window and watched it rain, the rain falling so quiet, so fidgety, sopping the leaves that branched up to my window, and at that moment I felt the world to be the most beautiful and solemn of places. This moment was as great as my life would ever get and it put me in the company of the truly blessed. No moment of greatness in my career could ever compare to this moment: kissing down the canal of April’s back and over those two perfect rounds, bemused by the teasing clench of them, but knowing that all those kisses, all those thousands of kisses, the repetition of them, the place and desire, could never be perfected into boredom.
9
When the last semester of my honours year ended, April and I took the long drive north to spend a few weeks with my father, mainly to give him a hand with some listed jobs around the store that his ageing hip and back refused to pitch in with. By that time we had been together about a year, at first on weekends, then every second weekday, then every day, so by the time I hired a heat-shielded car to head north to see my father I knew she would be with me – as real as my presence in that car – sitting warmly in the passenger seat, painted toes up on the dash, taking in the enormity of the heat-bleached land to the west and the storm-blown sea to the east.
Can we take a look at the beach house? she said, as we passed through the last town before the store.
Of course. I want to show you something there.
On dusk, as the beach became a soothing place of shadow and light, we drove out to the beach house. Holding her hand, I walked her down by the front door and along the lounge room windows to the verandah, and she looked the house over, this place of change for her – change, for I knew no other word for it, even though the house had not changed in seven years other than to shed paint and become the colour of sunlight and hunch further towards the ocean, towards the timeless death that empty houses endure ever so stoically. And beyond the verandah the surf pounded up towards the stone foundations, the old beach largely under water, full of tide or the rising or probably both, and I held her hand as we walked down to the jacaranda that she had planted that summer long ago. While the beach grass that once spiked the dunes was dead, the jacaranda stood tall in all its lush greenery with small lilac flowers, silent bells on the tinkering breeze. The jacaranda was almost eight years old, a healthy thriving thing stranded in the middle of a world that knew only how to make death or be death.
I can’t believe it. This is the same tree I planted. It’s a miracle.
I know. I don’t know how … I can’t explain. I knew it meant a lot to you. And him.
Him. It meant more to me.
She shook out her hand and touched the sweetness of its trunk, then put her shoulder and cheek up to it. She looked close to crying. The last of the sun turned the green spines of leaf to a jaundiced colour, and the sea breeze curved the stems to breaking, a purple flower falling down to land on her shoulder as softly as a mother’s kiss.
I’ve changed my mind, she said.
About what?
Children.
10
My father saw death as a nuisance. The thought of it he would swat away like a pestering blowfly. So unconcerned was he about the whole business, he gave the impression that death would not bother with him until it really had to, after it had sorted out all the others. But even then, with my father living so far away, I knew that there would only be a finite number of times I would see him before the end, before he would no longer give that fractured smile which for all my childhood years I mistook for a disapproving frown.
It so happened that the first time he would see April and me together as a couple, eating together at the dining room table, would be one of a handful of remaining times I would see him. I would see him for graduation after my honours year, for our wedding, and another time in hospital after his first heart attack. A few more times here and there after I graduated and started tutoring at the university. The last time he was no longer my father, just a body there on the floor of the hospital. But that night he first saw us as a couple he made us lamb chops with mash and vegetables and packet gravy, and he pulled out a bottle of shiraz that he said was from down near our way, the cooler realms, where grapes did not shrivel to sultanas within half a day on the vine.
Why don’t you sell up and head down south? We can set you up near us, April said.
Why don’t you, Dad? You’ve held out long enough.
My father shrugged and knifed at his chop.
Don’t you miss the rain? she asked.
No, never much liked the rain. I’m used to the heat. It’s dependable.
Nearly everyone is gone, Dad. Most of the shops in town are shut.
Yeah, they chucked it in. Not me, though. I’ll be here to the end. Death will be my one and only move.
We finished the bottle of wine and opened up another of the same label and sat around watching some documentary on a floating city being built by a coalition of like-minded countries up near the North Pole. It would take ten, maybe fifteen, years to build. Nearly a million people could live on this floating city. Near midnight April headed off to bed and Dad went to open another bottle, pouring it while some engineer explained how the city worked like a giant iceberg, though this iceberg was made of concrete and metal and would never melt.
Dad said, What do they do when a storm hits?
They’ll have something worked out. We’ve got some serious weaknesses but technological capability is not one of them.
Technology? They’ll need
a miracle.
We saw one today. At the beach house. That jacaranda has grown. It’s all green and has flowers. It’s survived with no water.
It’s no miracle, son. I water it. Every third day I drive out and pump the bore water into a bucket and water it.
Why?
Because he asked me to. Speare. When he left he asked me to keep it alive, the jacaranda. He paid me too. Sends me a cheque every year.
A cheque?
A few banks cash them, if I wanted to. Anyway, I kept my word.
Why?
I didn’t ask. Not my business. The jacaranda matters to him. That’s all I cared to know.
The engineer had made a hologram model of the floating city, all the housing low-rise so that it would not topple over in heavy seas. There were paddocks of green with tiny trees planted along the borders and water fountains and park benches too. On the outskirts of the city were large fields of green with tiny model cows and sheep projected onto the green. He said there were plans to build hundreds of these floating cities.
You know, I wouldn’t tell April about me watering the jacaranda.
You don’t think?
No. Sometimes the truth is bad company. I might head off to bed now, son. You staying up?
I might watch this a bit longer.
Okay, goodnight, son.
Night, Dad.
There were other scientists interviewed, scientists who explained how the city could harness the power of the sun and wind and generate electricity to sustain the million or so people who lived there. Another scientist compared the city to a boat. He was convinced that the hull of the city could be a world in itself, a space for public transport networks and schools and hospitals. There was a virtual scene of children in a playground, the sun slicing down through heat-tempered glass slabs, the children smiling and laughing and playing with balls and ropes. The scientist, who spoke with some kind of European accent, had a full head of scruffy grey hair and large old-lady glasses, a pen tucked behind one of his pointy ears. He wore a lab coat, coffee stains on the lapel. He looked mad with hope.
When the documentary finished, I poured another glass and restarted it to watch again.
11
Sometimes the past that defines us is not a part of our own remembered past but part of those close to us. Late one night, back when they were staying at the beach house, my father heard a noise and came into my bedroom to make sure I was all right. He found my bed empty, the window open. He found my torch gone, a milk crate jammed under the window. It took him a dozen or so years to tell me about that rip of memory, during one of my trips north to the store as we fished for bream and flathead in a reach of water running from the rock ledge off Sandy Rip, several years after the recital when April came back into my life.
You didn’t say anything. You knew all the time.
Yep.
Really, you could have grounded me, put a lock on the window or something.
I should have.
You didn’t, but.
No, I didn’t.
Why?
Don’t know. At the start I thought about grounding you. But you lived so much of your life in that bedroom. By yourself. I kind of understood. Wanting to get out, and that. I forgave a lot back then.
Like what? I said.
Like the whisky, chocolate and papers you used to take them secretly.
I charged them for it.
I know. The B-Coder always balanced. Just as well. Otherwise I wouldn’t have looked the other way.
Dad baited my hook, like he did back when I was a boy, though taking longer to thread the bait. He passed it to me readymade for casting.
You know I could have been kidnapped.
My memory’s going, son, but I do remember that you changed out of your pyjamas. Kidnappers don’t normally bother with a change of clothes. And of course there was the girl. April. She explained a lot back then. Still does, he said, half smiling.
That evening we only caught one flathead, but it was plenty for both of us. We drank two or three beers each and sat around the dining room table in the kind of silence which had not changed in all those years. Only I had changed, converted by a world where technology had become the hostile enemy of silence, where silence was mistaken for boredom, a vacancy to be filled.
Still nothing virtual, Dad?
Not interested. Not good for any of us.
Me too, I guess.
You had school. That’s all you needed.
I guess. I had the beach. But I couldn’t figure out why you punished me as I got older. Nothing with other kids my age.
My father gulped down a long throat of beer and looked at me.
It wasn’t about you. It was your mother.
What did it have to do with her?
That’s how we lost her. The virtual world. V-Pads, V-Worlds, whatever they call it. I knew it but I just ignored it. Thought it wasn’t real. But she thought it was? And this other life she left for was all virtual.
Virtual?
She thought it was real on the other side. And she was right in the end, Dad said, the beer empty, his fingernails picking off the wet label.
Is that why she left?
It didn’t happen by itself, he said, and took both plates to the sink and went about scrubbing them clean. After a while, he said, there were real things on the other side, the rain, the city, leaves changing colour, him.
Him?
The surname she took. The man next to her grave.
Later that night, asleep in my old bedroom, my old bed, feet poking over the end, I remembered the shoebox of precious things that I kept hidden under the carpet in my wardrobe. And, when I looked, it was still there, just as I had left it many years ago: her pink underwear, dusty, frayed, but as sun bleached as ever from its last moments on the washing line. And as I lay back on the pillow I felt as I did back then, as a teenager: I felt excited. I felt ashamed. But then, as a man, with April as my lover, I felt vindicated in my shame.
12
During the year that I proposed to April, I rented a cabin overlooking Macquarie Harbour for a weekend I had composed with the formality of a piece of music, the light falsetto of wineries and the dark tones of boating through the lower Gordon River; then, on the last night, dinner at a restaurant in Strahan where a moment, the crescendo moment, would reveal itself in the exquisite form of a diamond ring. Other than taking Friday off work and some last-minute packing, April knew nothing of this composition, but there was a sense of expectation as we took the Lyell Highway out of Hobart that played out between us in ways that were beginning to define our relationship. We played the music democratically, her choice then mine. We were compatibly organised with coffee and bottles of water. We talked through the issues of work and friendships until the incline to Tarraleah, all while April’s bare toes tapped away on the dash until the heat became intolerable, after which she hooked them over the gears to play between my legs. There were moments when I had to push away the distracting tease of her toes, to avoid an accident. Other moments when I conceded, and hurriedly pulled the car over to the verge and unbuckled my belt.
In Tarraleah we stopped to recharge the car in a general store on the descent from the township, and while looking for some sweets in an aisle I saw a man I recognised, by the sensitive poise of his long fingers, to be William Speare. But it was he who recognised me first.
Finch, isn’t it? From the beach house, he said, reaching out those fingers to shake my hand.
Mr Speare, I said, taking his hand.
Mr Speare, he said, and laughed. Haven’t been called that in a while. Not since you did, what, ten years ago now?
Eleven this summer.
So what do you do now?
Went to university. In Hobart. Mastered in classical music. Teaching now.
Great. I hope I taught you something.
Something? More than that. Anyway, I’m teaching your work at the moment, The Perigian.
Really? Thought the universitie
s hated me.
They do. I teach it anyway.
Good man. I wrote that not long after the beach house. It’s a sad one. Bit depressing. Can’t bring myself to play it.
My students think the same.
And you?
I like the sadness of it.
You should stop by the studio. I’m always in need of good musicians.
We spent another few minutes not talking about April, but when I think back, everything we said that day in the aisle of a general store no larger than my father’s store, every note we struck, had April in between or otherwise sustained into the silence. We fell back on the one thing we had in common, music, because the other thing was unmentionable to both of us for different reasons. When we were finished with music we talked about the weather, which had shifted radically in the time we were talking in the store, a cool Antarctic change rolling in clouds and moist air from the south-west. After shaking hands, I left him pondering a variety of chips in the aisle, moving towards a young woman up near the fridges who wore a white dress cinched by a lipstick-red belt, a woman I probably looked at longer than I rightly should. I went to the counter and paid and left the store as quickly as possible in order to return to that one thing we had avoided mentioning, with all its implications, waiting in the charging bays outside the store.
At some point down along the Lyell, heading out of Tarraleah and towards Lake St Clair, April said, Where’s my ice cream, hon’?
Sorry, honey. I honestly forgot.
You forgot.
There was silence for longer than there deserved to be silence.
Do you ever listen to me?
Sorry, sweetie. I was in a rush.
A rush from what? You were in there for ages.
Nothing.
April hooked her legs over to the other side of the car, so that they pressed firmly against the armrest. She looked out the window. The window was blurred by the mist that had taken over the Lyell and the wilderness beyond, the thick lush green that once fleshed the thin bone of road through the highlands now infected by the mist passing by us, mist the colour of nausea. We passed through several bends and turns as we drove down from Tarraleah, the mist around us thicker than the mood of negation that had taken over inside the car. The bottle of water that I did buy April remained untouched, sweating in the drink holder. The silence, a silence that she, for all our days together, could use more eloquently than words, was intolerable.