by Craig Ensor
Also beside me on the passenger seat were the envelopes from Speare, the address facing upwards, and as I made my way towards Hobart down the Midland Highway I ordered the car to take me to that address. Even though it was a Sunday, I had a feeling that Speare would be at the studio, working, as he did every day at the beach house that summer, but I did not expect him to open the door. I did not expect him to deal with the world, with an unexpected knock on the door, that directly. He opened the door calmly, as if he was expecting me, and we shared a few words before he invited me inside. As I walked inside, I remembered back to the beach house and his lessons beside the piano, lessons about the gaps between notes, how it was unnecessary to crowd those gaps with more notes, and that words were no different.
Eventually, near an office adjoining the studio, he said, Sorry to hear about your father.
I nodded.
He was a good, kind man.
He was.
I handed over the six or so envelopes and cheques.
You knew about our arrangement.
Yes.
He would send me back an image of it every now and then. I think he was proud of its growth.
On one of the screens in Speare’s office were images of the jacaranda, changing through various stages of growth, from a sapling half my height to a thick-trunked tree with a broad canopy of green leaves and purple bells. We both looked at the growth, fifteen years or so of a tree growing into prosperity where nothing else grew.
Well, come into the studio. I’ll show you around.
This is impressive, I said.
The studio was large enough for a forty-person orchestra.
So, you teach. What about writing music? Anything?
Just one piece.
Really … ready to play it? he said, sitting down at a piano, his long fingers resting on the keys, naturally going to the chord of C major.
No, still working on it.
How long?
A long time. I’m still tinkering. Improving it.
Sounds like you may need to move on. Start something new.
No, I’ll stick at it. You married?
Married, yes. Marwen’s her name. She’s different to April. I wouldn’t call her my muse. We’re functional. Equals. April was always so much better than me. And worse.
Do you have …
Children? No, not for us. Well, I don’t think it will work out that way. So let’s play something, he said, and played the chord.
We?
You and I, of course. There’s only two of us here.
For the rest of the afternoon we played a number of Speare’s compositions, the ones I had been teaching at university and other ones I just knew from listening in places where April was not present, where I would not be forced to lie. As we played, with me playing piano and Speare violin, ideas came to me, for music, polyphonic hooks of melody that seemed original. Some ideas were tipped on from Speare, a variation on a line from one of his compositions which inspired some new variation in me, but others came from some other place or source in me which I had not plumbed since the days at university when I was trying to finish ‘For April, Forever’. As for Speare, I had no idea what he was thinking and why a composer of his stature was wasting the afternoon with the boy who had wedged himself into the cracks in his marriage all those years ago. For my part, I was thinking of the times spent standing by the piano as a fifteen-year-old, learning, times of secret indulgence taken in return for keeping his indulgences secret – music for scotch and discretion – the orchestra of waves from behind the piano, a distraction of water pitching into the sand bar as if the water itself was an accompaniment to these indulgences. And I felt that his thoughts were not too distant from mine, perhaps thinking of the time when his love for April and her love for him was as large as the ocean, when it was rising as the ocean was; or perhaps he was thinking of the composition he wrote for her, which he ripped up into pieces and cast over the verandah like ashes over a place not yet marked for death. And the more I think back to that afternoon, the more I am convinced that he had me locked in time as a fifteen-year-old boy, for the usual questions posed to any adult – whether I was married or had children or not – were never asked. And, of course, they were never volunteered. I was the boy who delivered the groceries. I was his student. I was no threat.
By the time I pulled up into the garage of our Battery Point apartment block, it was nearing dusk. April was at the kitchen table breastfeeding Smith, and there was baby food all over the floor around the chair and cartoons were blaring from the wallscreen.
Where have you been?
What? At my father’s …
All that time? You said midday, she said, her hair with a streak of custard through it.
Yes. It’s a long way.
Nowhere else after that?
Nowhere.
Right.
While April stared into the bowl of yellowy custard, my six-month-old boy, Smith, stared up at me with an unsmiling face, eyes brown and curious, looking at me like he did not believe a word I said.
16
Those days when Smith and Bly were young were days of repetition – not the repetition of an ever-flowing adagio, which grew more profound the more it was repeated, but the repetition of a dropped saucer on a kitchen floor, cluttering and spinning and making the same unbearable sound endlessly – not the recurring highs of a medieval chorale of chamber music but the chorus of children screaming and crying in disharmony. As the rest of the world outside our family sped towards coping with global change, we slowed down in the mire of not coping with the local changes of raising children. When I look back at those times, those days between birth and school, I have to squint hard to see and hold a memory up to the light, as if those memories, lived slowly and repetitively, were somehow blurred with speed, too manic to latch on to the places where memories lodge and hold. Or perhaps the daily joy and drama blended into a sameness which was not memorable, which latched on to the heart and body more than the mind, made our hearts full of love and anxiety, our bodies stooped and broken, our minds fatigued and empty.
The memories which barbed to our deepest selves were ones made out of difference: the day that Bly was born, the fever that took hold of April and then the unborn Bly through an erratic heart rate, and the tears we cried when she was born safely, naturally, twelve hours later. Or the time when Bly went missing down at Port Arthur. To this day when I look at Bly, a woman not much older than I was then, her eyes have that same cornered look as when I scolded her for chasing a duck towards the waters of Port Arthur harbour, waters so deep and dark they seemed to have a soul.
It was April’s idea. Port Arthur was a few degrees cooler than Hobart, and if we visited in the late afternoon, when the sun was nudging behind the ranges, it could be as pleasant as the time that April and I stayed near there as newlyweds, in a cabin by the black water of Crescent Bay, where we swam and drank and made love and made all sorts of plans for the future. April had also read somewhere that the seawall built around Port Arthur was leaking, mysteriously, and the rising sea would take three or four of the historic buildings within a year or so, before which the site would need to be closed down to dismantle the sandstone buildings and reassemble them on higher ground. For this reason there was a sense of lastness to her desire to visit the Port Arthur ruins, a sense which, in the mid-twenty-third century, had become all-pervasive but was no less shocking for it, and with it came, as always, a melancholic sense of urgency. By the time we arrived, the sun was setting towards the west but the temperature was still in the mid-thirties. We scrambled across the sun-parched grass to the shade of the derelict Convict Church, Smith holding April’s hand while I pushed Bly in the stroller, then headed up to the Separate Prison and the Asylum. The Penitentiary was closed because the sea rise was expected to take its foundations within a matter of weeks or days. Already excavation work had started, so we headed towards the Guard Tower where there was shade and ice cream in one of the shops betw
een the tower and the Senior Military Officer’s Quarters. While April and Smith were up looking at the old rifles and muskets in the Officer’s Quarters, I let Bly out of the stroller to stop her from screaming and, once released, she skipped and chased around in the cool sandstone shade of the Guard Tower like an escaped convict, bending over to point at the duck droppings. At some stage I had become distracted. Smith had called out from the quarters, wanting to show me a flintlock musket from centuries ago, and Bly, who at almost three loved to run away and hide whenever I turned my back, took that opportunity to do so. When I turned back around, she was gone.
At first I called out to her, expecting her to leap out from behind the door leading into the Guard Tower and roar with her hands gripped into paws as if to frighten me, which was the latest thing she had learned from her brother. She did not respond. I stepped through the doorway into the Guard Tower, and the room, a soldier’s mess, was empty but for an elderly couple admiring an old woodfired kettle.
Have you seen a little girl?
No. Have you lost her?
No, she’s playing hide-and-seek with me.
I quickly went through all the other rooms and halls of the Guard’s Tower, calling her name, not loudly, but calmly, so as not to give away that I had lost my daughter. For this reason, I stopped asking other people whether they had seen a girl, a three-year-old wearing a yellow dress, and circled back once more from room to room, coming out the door on the southern side of the Guard Tower. There was a crowd gathered out the front of the Commandant’s House – a guided tour, small children among the absorbed throng of parents and grandparents – and I headed there, leaving April and Smith up near Smith O’Brien’s Cottage. Bly was not in among the crowd, but there were lots of people in the house, people who, like us, had managed the sweltering day by taking a late-afternoon tour through the ruins of Port Arthur while they still lay in their original place. Inside the Commandant’s House were more rooms, more beds and cupboards and doors, more places for a three-year-old to hide, and in that moment, as I looked under the bed of the last room, my heart had grown so large in my chest that I felt like I was nothing but heart.
Are you all right, sir? said one of the tour guides.
Overwhelmed – by fear, by grief, my mind lost in dark predetermined places – I said, My daughter. I’ve lost my daughter.
Yellow dress?
Yes.
There was a little girl chasing a duck around on the front steps. Sorry, I thought she was with another family.
I rushed out onto the front verandah of the Commandant’s House and scanned across the Port Arthur grounds, from the Convict Church to the Penitentiary to the shores of the harbour and the jetty. Then I saw her: the yellow dress, her pale little arms rounding up two wood ducks, down towards the water. I sprinted down the path towards the jetty and grabbed her hand just as the ducks leapt off the shore and into the water, and I remember grabbing her hand so hard I thought it might break and screaming her name at her until the shocked look on her little face crumpled into tears.
You naughty girl! What have we said about running away? Come here, I said, and yanked her arm back away from the water.
Dadda, you’re scary!
Why? Why did you run away from me?
The ducks want bottle.
The what?
The ducks, Dadda.
The ducks? Well, you could’ve got me into a lot of trouble with Mummy.
Me sorry, Dadda.
And there was the moment, as my daughter looked up at me with that cornered look in her eyes, the look of being mistreated, of being judged for an act where she was innocent, that I felt my heart recede into my chest to a cold singularity. Once down on my haunches, I hugged her and held her tightly, tenderly. She was not playing games. She was not running away. She was trying to save a duck from thirst, to lead it to water. Even at that age she was the most caring soul. And yet, as I yelled at her for it, as I did violence on her little arm, I created a moment in her life that would haunt her more than any of the hauntings that roamed and clanked in the dark halls and chambers of Port Arthur. This moment would shape her – shape the conduct of her life, the quality of it, relationships with others, with herself. And I knew it at the time, and I knew that I had a responsibility to not let it be a recurring moment of affliction, some destructive moment she would repeat or avoid into adulthood.
No, I’m sorry. Daddy should have been looking after you. Will you forgive me?
Yes, Dadda.
I pulled back and looked at her teary eyes, at the gunshot spray of freckled sun on her pale cheeks, and I knew that I was not looking into eyes relieved by the softening of their father’s words and touch, but eyes that were themselves judging, judging and storing, and that I had, by trying to exhume and save the moment, dug the moment even deeper within the depth of her which, for a three-year-old, was a depth already there and there to be filled with moments such as these. From that moment on, Bly would crave that apology, that sense of forgiveness, and would be inconsolable without it; from her days as a child and a teenager to her relationships with others as an adult, she would retreat into a sulking nook when she was judged and nothing would bring her back out, nothing but forgiveness. And I had done it. Not April. Not the insensitive prod of the dying world. Her father had done it: created an overwhelming moment in her past which would give her a sense of right and wrong but also burden her with that longing for forgiveness. A burden, so it was, for this was not a forgiving world and it was not on the way to becoming one.
17
When Smith was about six I took him into the university on the weekend to teach him to play the piano, Speare’s piano, which in those days I kept stored in the corner of my office. Music, being an activity mastered indoors, had gone through a resurgence of popularity, and April, sensing in the way Smith bashed on his toy drums that he had a natural talent for rhythm, was insistent that I teach him some basic chords. She was also keen on getting him out of our two-bedroom apartment, which was three bedrooms too small for a rambunctious six-year-old. Like my father I was relaxed about the direction of their lives, their likes and dislikes, but if Smith showed a talent for playing the piano I certainly would not dissuade him from it.
About midmorning we passed up through the iron gates leading into the university and the car parked in the spot designated to me on weekends in the Davies Avenue car park, reverse parking in the same programmed way.
Dad, why do we have the wheel when you don’t touch it?
I can choose to drive with the wheel if I want.
But you don’t.
No, it’s safer to let the car drive. My father used to be a good driver.
You had a dadda too?
Remember the man with the fish on our Imagetree? He drove a ute.
What’s a ute?
It’s like a car but for only two people and the back is a huge box to put things in.
What things? Like toys?
Possibly. It would take lots of toys.
Can we get one, Dad?
The corridors leading through the Arts College to the music faculty were long and dark and cool. They had a library smell to them, even though the faculty had gone bookless decades ago with millions of titles stored in the Skybrary, some humanless place in the industrial suburbs north of Hobart. Presumably the smell had been there for hundreds of years and would take more than that to leave, if it ever did, having all the stubbornness of the ideas it embodied. Somewhere along the corridor Smith wriggled loose from my hand and started running down it, stopping at a door which, as it turned out, he had remembered to be the door to my office. Inside, after he had picked up various things on my desk and pointed out the three-dimensional image of him and his mother and Bly, I plonked him on the stool in front of the piano. I opened a blind and a window to let in the freshness of the autumn day and a warm breeze dawdled through the walkway between the Arts College and the Engineering Faculty and through the window. I sat down beside him on the sto
ol.
Put your fingers here, son. On these keys. That’s E major. Press down.
Like that? Smith said, and buttoned down with the tips of his forefingers as if the piano was a V-Pad.
That’s it. Just relax your fingers down so they’re flat. There are major and minor chords. And they run from A to G like the alphabet.
Smith began to fiddle in the chair and play with the key-lid of the piano, feeling the weight and danger of it, the contrast to the light sensitivity of the keys.
Don’t touch that, son. If it drops it’ll hurt your fingers. Listen to this.
I played a C minor chord.
Here, you try, I said, and placed his fingers correctly on the keys. Press down. There. Like that.
He did but his thumb smudged against another key and the sound was distorted.
Here, I’ll show you. There. They say it’s the saddest.
Why sad?
Don’t know. It’s a mystery.
What’s the happiest?
Probably this one, E major, I said, and played that chord.
Why can’t a machine push down on the keys and make the sound?
A machine? But what pushes down on the machine?
Another machine.
Smith looked at me like he had it all figured out, like I was the child and needed to be educated as to how things worked.
Here, sit on my lap and we’ll play together. I’ll put my hands on yours.