The Warming

by Craig Ensor

  I picked Smith up and sat him on my lap and I placed his fingers on D major, another uplifting chord, and placed my large sun-freckled hands over his tiny pale fingers and pressed down. Then I shifted his fingers across to F minor and pressed down, but his fingers squirmed and wrestled from under mine, as if they were looking for other keys to play, other notes and chords of distraction, but when I released his fingers they left the keys altogether and he wriggled to stand on the stool and open the top-hood of the piano.

  Dad, where does the sound come from? In here? From its hat?

  Smith stood on my thighs to peer down into the open lid.

  It comes from inside the piano.

  But how?

  How? You don’t want to play.

  How does it?

  Well, here … stand on the stool.

  We both looked down into the open lid of the piano, into the cool explanation of it.

  See those strings? When you press a key a hammer hits the string. The string vibrates and makes the sound. See? Watch while I hit a key. I hit this key and it makes this sound. That key and it makes that sound.

  Here, let me try, let me try, Dad.

  But he was too small to touch the key and see the hammer strike the string and make the sound, and I spent the rest of the morning trying to help him see the sound a piano makes. He was six years old. Like most children, he fleshed out the large gaps in experience with imagination, and yet that day, and for what seemed to be every day afterwards, he would not allow his imagination to flesh that gap. With his own eyes he wanted to see how it worked, and tears consoled his eyes when it seemed that it could not be achieved. So I stood him up on a chair beside the piano and he used his big toe to push down on one of the keys, to feel the key give under the switch of his toe, while he looked down into the mechanics of the piano with wonder, as if the inside of the piano had all the mystery of a rock pool flush with starfish and octopuses and fish, creatures so many and colourful a six-year old boy could run out of fingers and toes in counting them all.

  18

  In those days, and the days that went before, among the first things that were lost to all of us, before the sea water crept into homes and buildings in seaside towns and along the foreshore of the cities, were the beaches. The rising sea simply claimed the beach as a new seabed and the waves either crashed among rocks or dumped through coastal heath and scrub, uprooting it like a backhoe, while wind-stunted gums and pines perished from salt rot. April and I were of the last generation to walk along the white sands of Wineglass Bay, or even, in an earlier time, to play hopscotch on the sands around the beach house, sand which was once as plentiful as sunlight along the coast of Australia. And we wanted that for our children, that connection, as April would have it, between land and water, as the sand and rock met the sea, where to move from one element to another was fundamental to the human story, a story which was deep within us and demanded to be told and retold. For April, because of this, the place where sea met sand was a place of contentment, where the complications of the world were simplified, lulled into sleep by the rhyming chorus of wave crash on spit and shoals. And she wanted Smith and Bly to have that, as we did, even though we did not have it as our parents did and their parents before them. During January school holidays when she was not working at the clinic, we would set off to a place near Coles Bay where the government had reconstructed twelve kilometres of beach by clearing out the banksia and drooping she-oak and dumping truckloads of sand to form a beach that had a natural wave break – not large, but large enough for a seven- and ten-year-old to play among the white wash and collect shells in those few hours either side of the day when the sun was rising out of the sea or departing over the western ranges.

  We spent many holidays at that beach, until the sea took it as well and another beach had to be constructed on higher land up near Bicheno, and the memories, when I think back to those days, seem to fuse into a single day at that beach. That day April and I were sitting on our towels, watching the sun launch from the ocean as Smith tried to master the two-foot waves breaking on the shore – waves which, to our ears, were not artificial but had that crisp rip and crunch of natural waves breaking – all while Bly picked up shells where the water shoaled, too fearful to enter the water beyond her ankles. With this particular memory, I had my arm around April and she had her hand on my leg, our bodies still wet and the sand crumbed to our feet as we squinted towards the rising sun and our two children playing in the rolling suck of waves.

  How long?

  Probably an hour. Maybe a bit more, I said.

  Look at Bly. She still can’t trust the waves.

  She has trust issues. It’s not the waves’ fault.

  For that hour, the hour after dawn, the beach was fairly crowded, with clumps of families and older and younger couples scattered on towels along the sand, and yet it was unremarkable for that hour, the second busiest hour of the day, second only to the hour or so before sunset. The sun had risen out of the sea, large and fiery with glare and intent, and already its sharp light fanged at our legs and faces. April squeezed some sunscreen into her hands and rubbed it over her legs.

  What’s that there?

  What?

  On your leg, I said, and pointed to a mole-like freckle on the side of her calf, dark in areas, asymmetrical.

  It’s just a freckle.

  How long have you had that?

  Don’t know.

  Let’s get it checked out. When we’re back home.

  Smith had found another little boy to play with. The other boy had a cricket bat and was whacking a ball into the surf where Smith was diving to catch it. Bly looked on, then skipped on the thin spill of water up the packed sand, content in her own world, which she had, ever since we had been coming to this beach, safely designated. One ball flew sideways and hit her shoulders and she turned and thought about crying but somehow, hardened by her joyful confidence in the predictable sweep of water, went back to skipping.

  Hey, Smith, be careful, I yelled out.

  You put sunscreen on them, didn’t you?

  Yep, back in the hotel.

  Thought so.

  Their faces?

  Everywhere.

  We sat there in silence for a while. April lay down on the towel, flicking through some old images on her Phoglasses, while I watched the children play. They were oblivious to the sun, which had risen up higher and was firing a squinting light off the water into their faces. They played and splashed and screamed and skipped in naivety to its immense brutality. They were oblivious to the waves too. Each wave reaped a violence, our children learning how they could step and dive and swim at the mortal edge of safety. And yet the mortality wrought by the sun and ocean were my concerns to bear, and I was glad for that. They feared nothing. And so it should be that way. For it was the role of a parent to carry the burden of all fears for as long as possible, and in those days there were a lot of fears to be burdened by, perhaps too many for some. I checked the time. We had another fifteen minutes before the sun would have risen an hour into the day. April sat up and put her head on my shoulder and her arm around my waist and we both looked out to sea, beyond our children, to the malignant creep of the sun.

  What you been doing?

  Looking at old images of them.

  Yep.

  At this beach. It’s scary how they’ve grown.

  Scary?

  Seeing time. Time gone. How the beach has shrunk.

  I put my arm around her and held up a hand to shade my eyes.

  April said, Should we have another?

  Another what?

  What did you think I was talking about? Ice cream? A child. I’m talking about having another child.

  I dropped my hand and searched for the right words.

  Well, I thought we decided on this, I said. We’re probably too old now anyway, hon.

  I’m too old, you mean.

  No … I mean financially too old.

  I don’t know. Been thin
king about it a lot lately. We have just replaced you and me. Without another there is no growth. No future.

  Let’s think about it, I said.

  But I did not need time to think about it. We had done our part. We had made two children when so many had chosen not to make any. And the diminishing world could only cope with so many people, as they slowly made their way north or south to the cities that hugged the poles like distressed children clinging to the legs of each of their parents, as so many set up small lives in compact apartments in cities reared from country towns or mere research stations a few hundred years earlier. That day on the beach I do not remember giving another thought to April’s question, for the hour had expired and the sun was fully loaded in the sky and ready for the onslaught of the long day. The other families and couples had already packed up or were packing up. And our two children were the only two left near the water, their skin sickly in the fever of sunlight while their faces told of a moment of resounding limitless joy. Some things had not changed. The originality of its beauty, the slow rip of surf break, the scale-like flash of sunlight on the water, the wave swirl rushing and sucking by Bly’s feet in a pattern which, in millions of years of surf spilling up sand, had never repeated itself, all these things had not diminished or changed through ageing. But, with the sun as its accomplice, the violence of the water seemed to be greater; perhaps that was my age showing or perhaps not, for how could any of us expect the great reclaiming of the land to be a matter of peace and not violence?

  19

  At first it was the heat which drove the bulk of the populations of Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne and Perth southwards, some stepping from city to city and others crawling along the coastal towns in between, and others leaping their way straight to Hobart or Strahan or Southport in Tasmania. Within another generation, for all those disposed by flesh and temperament to tolerate the heat, it was the water that drove people south, the Brisbane River rising multiple stories high by 2250 and the beaches and boutique shops of the Sunshine Coast turned into aquariums where rays and snapper shopped for shrimp and sea worms among racks of abandoned clothes. Being a city largely at sea level, Melbourne was one of the first to be taken by the rising waters, waves lapping at the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges and sea wrack drifting as far as Bacchus Marsh. As for Sydney, almost fortified with sandstone cliffs, the sea came into the city through the chinks in the sandstone armour, through Bondi and Brighton and Cronulla, through the harbour itself all the way up the Parramatta River, flooding the low-lying suburbs of the Sydney basin, turning suburb after suburb into a street-long mooring of floating roofs, overseen only by the raised chins of telegraph poles, turning the upper stories of apartment blocks into the headstones of the underwater graves of railway hubs. Within two generations, only a few hundred thousand people remained in Sydney along the north shore, suburbs like Mosman and Killara rendered into provincial outposts for mostly elderly residents who either believed that the seas would recede or did not believe in anything at all. Quaint towns at elevation, such as Katoomba and Leura became the places where tourist expeditions of Sydney were launched. Such was our collective resilience, these towns created their own growing economy, became affluent suburbs sprawling out towards Blackheath and down the western ranges to Lithgow. Like everywhere else, the heat was brutal, but at a thousand metres elevation the air was several degrees cooler and life on the edges of the day was as manageable as a chronic illness. The one time we visited Sydney as a family the children were both teenagers and we stayed in a place overlooking the Jamison Valley, our bedrooms with views of the blood-orange cliffs that dropped as sheer as an elevator down to the valley floor and the bluish haze of gums which supped with straw-like roots from the bore water running deep through the ancient valley.

  We hired a boat and a tour guide named Jonno, setting off from Emu Plains at about five, an hour or so before dawn. At that time of the morning there was a whole industry of boats setting off from the dock, hundreds of them, from small hire boats to larger cruise boats where breakfast was served in air-conditioned comfort. The boats headed east, keeping mainly within a corridor of silver buoys that seemed to lead all the way east to the skyscrapers rearing in darkness against the prelude of morning light. I sat up the front of the boat with Jonno while April and the children, who were still half asleep, sat at the back and looked out dreamily at the expanse of water around the boat.

  Lots of people this morning, I said to Jonno.

  Yep. Half of them aren’t staying within the lights.

  The lights?

  The lights of the M4. The road’s underneath us. The bloody fools will hit a roof or submerged tree.

  Jonno looked like he was in his late sixties. He wore khaki shorts and a blue-collared shirt with the name of the hire company embroidered on the pocket. His skin was brown and dry and so hard it looked like it was plated, as if the sun had no way of penetrating its hardness. His gold bracelet looked out of place against his hard skin, so out of place that I figured there was some deep loss or joy attached to it. For the first part of the trip he was largely silent, shaking his head at things on the water that were against the rules, charters veering off towards the skyscrapers of Parramatta, many of which were falling or crumbling into the sea. When another boat, a luxury boat with a mahogany hull, sped by him, throwing a wave surge towards our boat, he shook his head and punched at his horn.

  This skylarking pisses me off, Jonno said. They think it’s a bloody amusement park. This is a cemetery. It’s a dead city. They think it’s a joy ride.

  I shook my head and looked at Jonno. His eyes were blue, a kind of seafaring blue as if all the water he had seen had somehow been absorbed into them. They had a wet look like he was on the brink of crying even though he looked like a man who did not have a lot of time for crying. At some point Smith moved up to the front of the boat and sat in the seat behind me and Jonno.

  What’s that? Smith asked.

  That’s the Olympic Stadium, said Jonno.

  It looks like it’s moving.

  It is. Nesting seagulls. They breed there in the thousands, this time of year. Painted the stadium a nice shade of white shit.

  What sort of motor you got? Smith said.

  One that goes, son.

  No, the make. The brand.

  No brand. Pulled it together from all different parts. It’s reliable, not fancy. See that? That’s the arch of the Gladesville Bridge. That’s the way we’re going. Along the old harbour route.

  April and Bly were snuggled against each other – a blanket across their legs, for the wind passing over the morning-dark water had a chill to it, relatively, when marked against the daytime heat. They were looking towards the skyscrapers of Sydney and the orange warning of pre-dawn light behind them, the skyscrapers forming, in the words of my daughter, a bell curve on a graph, though with most of the buildings clumped around the mean. On either side of the boat were islands of streets and abandoned houses, places like Hunters Hill and Gladesville, some houses with only the roofs showing, others with sea water as high as dining room tables and chairs which were still visible through windows, some standing, others floating against ceilings.

  What happened to all these people? Bly asked.

  What happened to them? said Jonno.

  Did they survive?

  No-one died, Jonno said. The rise quickened at the end, when the polar ice melted, but it still took decades and decades. Centuries really. Everyone left. Mainly because of the heat. Went to higher ground, south to Tasmania or New Zealand. I’ve been doing this tour for twenty-odd years and the water rises about this much every year.

  Jonno held his sun-pocked hands apart, to measure the distance of the water rise, and there came a memory of my father on our six-foot tinny back home telling me about the size of a fish, a flounder he once caught out at sea before I was born. The sight of his outstretched hands; the width by which they grew apart year after year, as if the fish had not been caught and eaten but lived
and grew an inch or two every year that the story demanded to be told. I remember my father smiling just enough so that the telling would not be seen as gloating, but Jonno, unlike my father, frowned at his hands as if the space between them was not a matter of achievement, but of loss and shame.

  That slowly?

  I’m no mathematician but it all adds up.

  It’s sad. That no-one died. That everyone just left quietly, said April.

  Not many say that. They normally say, At least no-one died, as if it’s something to be thankful for. But you’re right.

  We’ve lost a lot more lives for less of a cause, said April, staring back over the water.

  We passed under the Gladesville Bridge, down towards the western end, and Smith reached out to touch its concrete underbelly.

  Hands in the boat, son. It’s a museum, remember.

  As we neared Greenwich, Jonno pointed out a luxury house overlooking the harbour, built above the waterline on a street where other houses were in various states of submersion. There was a couple on the balcony, naked, talkback radio blaring from somewhere, waving crazily at the fleet of boats heading east as the first bites of dawn light were felt across the city. Apparently, about a decade ago, they began squatting in the abandoned house on the street, the highest in Greenwich, and lived off supplies dropped off by tourists for that long. Hooked up on the balcony were placards with writing on them, large childish block letters, unreadable from the distance of our boat.

  Early on, the government tried to evict them, Jonno said. Then they realised they were good for tourism.

  What are they protesting?

  They don’t believe in the warming. In their minds the waters are receding. Going back to normal. They think the rest of us are crazy.

  The Sydney Harbour Bridge looked as it did in all the images that I had seen of it. Even though the bridge bled rust from its rivets and was streaked along the pylons and crossbeams with white gull droppings, there was a sense of awe to it, especially as we passed only metres over the road and rail tracks of the submerged deck and between the arch trusses in the middle of the bridge, the arch sitting proudly above the harbour like some lone survivor, as solid and reliable as the day it was built, over three hundred years ago. The dawn light caught in angles on the ironwork so that the bridge itself seemed to blink and rouse from a troubled sleep, and I could see through the shallows of jade-green water where thousands of people once crossed the bridge in cars and on trains and on foot on their way to and from the city. At that moment, as I looked back on it from the eastern side, the bridge looked lonely, like it had suffered as much as any of those who crossed it. The skyscrapers of the old Sydney business district had each other, shadowing each other from the ruthless sun, but the bridge stood apart and unprotected, alone, and as we passed through the bridge, we all seemed, by reference to the silence that fell between us, to feel its loneliness.