by Craig Ensor
I normally keep quiet around the bridge. It gets people thinking. Sends them inwards, said Jonno, after a long run of silence.
It’s frowning, said Bly.
How’d they make it? asked Smith.
Started at the ends and moved to the centre. Steel and rivets. More men died making that bridge than from the warming. Look over there.
Where?
Out east. See the dorsal fin in the water?
About one hundred metres away to the east was a large white fin slicing through the water, surrounded by four or five boats. Jonno steered towards the fin and picked up some speed, the waves clucking against the hull and the dawn light bouncing off the shards of water to blind us to what looked like a whale or large shark feeding, it seemed, given the fact that it moved predatorily among a flock of boats and seagulls.
There, my friends, is what’s left of the Sydney Opera House.
It’s not a shark? asked Smith.
No, that’s the tallest of the tiled shell peaks of the Opera House. Here is where old Jonno gets a hand from technology. Watch this.
Jonno pressed a button and a three-dimensional film started playing on a screenspace in a dark corner of the cabin, giving a short guide to the history of the Sydney Opera House, its design and purpose, its architect, followed by current underwater footage of one of the auditoriums with kelp and crayweed growing from under the chairs and schools of rainbow-scaled fish moving towards the stage, moving through dissolving verticals of light.
There’s sharks down there, Jonno said to Smith.
Really? What sort?
Bull sharks.
Can we move on? said April, shielding herself and Bly from the sun with the blanket.
Certainly – these tourist attractions get boring. Let’s head up George Street. There’s shade there.
While most of the other boats headed further east to Watsons Bay, which was then an island where people could get out of the boat near the Hornby Lighthouse, Jonno took us into the city itself, steering the boat down streets as a car would have done many centuries before, along George Street then left down Hunter. It was a relief to be in the shadows of those buildings. We looked with curious eyes through the windows, some of which were salt smeared and corroded while others were clear. We saw desks and chairs and photocopiers and one or two old V-Pads and other office equipment that could not be sold or moved easily. We drifted from one office to the other down Hunter, then along Pitt.
They haven’t done anything touristy here. Just moved the street signs up on the buildings above the water level. So you know what street you’re on.
Most of the offices are so neat and tidy, said Bly.
Yes, I expected it to be a mess, said April. Like there would have been be a panic or something.
No, no panic, said Jonno. Over time offices were asked to pack up and leave because of the water rise. They did. Finished their work and went home. I guess a few workaholics expected to be back the next day for work. Then, one day, no-one was let back into the city. See, up here, the building shaped like a cone? My great-grandfather worked as a lawyer there. Fifth floor. His office was near that windowpane.
What happened to him? April asked.
Hard worker, he was. Apparently he was still working at his desk with sea water lapping at his black polished boots. They had to bring in a boat and force him out of the office. Physically, I mean. There was a scuffle.
Where did he go to work?
Moved to Canberra. They had an underground office there. Let’s take a left here and head up Martin Place.
The boat puttered slowly along the northern shadow of Martin Place, towards Macquarie Street, and as we passed the water turned in colour from a deep bluey green to a lighter green-yellow. The water became clear in parts, a mosaic of lemony-lime sunlight, and we could see the granite tiles of Martin Place and the steps leading down to subways about a metre or so below this mosaic of water. By the time the boat made it to Macquarie Street there was only a metre of water under the hull and our destination, Parliament House, sat above the waterline, water lapping at its sandstone steps. On the upper verandah there was a large red tarpaulin and a tent with bits of washing hanging out to dry on the railing. Tied to the railing was the red and yellow and black of the aboriginal flag. From one of the crossbeams hung a brass shipping bell.
Excuse me, folks, said Jonno. Just need to drop off some food to the leader of this bereft state.
The leader? April asked.
Self-proclaimed but as good as any we’ve had in the past. Jonno grabbed a bag and hooked a rope around one of the parliamentary pylons and stepped off the boat onto Parliament House.
Gunda, you there? Is parliament sitting?
No, it’s on a break. Bunch of lazy buggers.
An elderly aboriginal man with white hair came out from one of the tents and looked down over the verandah. He was shirtless. When he saw the rest of us in the boat, he grabbed a shirt from the railing and dragged it over his head.
These are my friends. The Taylor-Rossi family.
Welcome to Gadigal.
So what’s on the agenda today?
Same as every other day. More cleansing.
You ready?
Yep.
Jonno tossed the bag up to the second-level verandah and Gunda caught it with one hand.
Chicken sandwiches today. My wife thought you needed a change.
I need something.
No, you’re doing great work. Have they come to see you?
Soon, they say. Paperwork or something holding it up. The sun’s gettin’ up. You whities better get out of here before you turn into blackies.
Thanks, Gunda. Always looking out for others, aren’t you?
Not everyone’s cut out for this land.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
Tomorrow. I’ll see you when I see you.
On the way back to Emu Plains, April sat up the front near Jonno while Smith and Bly looked like stowaways, cowering from the sun in scraps of restless shade and otherwise staring out at the marooned suburbs all around them. April wanted to know more about Gunda. Did he think he was running the state? What did he mean by cleansing? For Gunda, Parliament House was just a convenient shelter; he did not believe in politics. He believed in land, the Gadigal land, and surviving the cleansing. The government were considering giving the land back to the Gadigal people of the Eora territory with Gunda as their representative, and he was waiting for them to arrive with the paperwork. As for the cleansing, he believed that the warming was necessary, that the land needed to be scorched and flooded to remove what was not necessary, and there would come a time, when this process was completed, when the descendants would restore order, cool the sun and dry the tears from the earth. Like many other clan members, he did not expect to see that day but it gave him comfort that it would happen. It gave him comfort that others would see it, even though he had no children and he had no wife and he knew of few others that did.
20
During our last years in Hobart we loved nothing more than sitting out on the verandah of our Battery Point apartment, which looked down over the old town of sandstone and slate and corrugated-iron roofs, sipping at a cup of tea with a shortbread biscuit ready to be dunked. We liked how the cup of tea had survived, survived through generation after generation, when so many things and people had not. A cup of tea at the ends of the day, just after dawn and just before dusk, those small periods of time when the unbearable sun did not have dominion. In those days the harbour was a chaos of trawlers and liners and cargo ships full of metal containers, the majority of which were headed south to Mawson and Casey and other new cities of the Antarctic. Only a few years before, Smith and Bly had left on one of those ships, looking to find work and an education in a place where snow still closed the mountain roads during winter, and the summer sun fell as softly as the misty rains that moved in from the Transantarctic Mountains at evening time. Children, whether to have them or not, whether to bring a life i
nto a mortal world, was still the issue of the day, and one which we and younger couples discussed more than any other. Having a child was no longer a matter of biology, but a matter of hope. We had felt it and the generation of our children felt it even more so. Some did not want to bring a child into a world that may not outlast them. Others did not want the scraps of time they had left taken up with the obligations of parenthood. In that sense nothing had changed from the time before the warming, other than the acuteness of the concern. Smith and Bly were born out of hope that the love we had found and shared would one day be theirs, and the world would last long enough for that love to last. And yet, for most born into the generation after, the last great act of love was an act of denial, to not create that which could only be loved so unconditionally.
One morning, as the sun crouched behind the Tasman Peninsula, we sipped at our tea and shared bits of the newspaper, a specialised hard copy delivered to our door, which, like tea, had somehow found a place in a world that had outgrown it.
Hon, sad news. Bill Speare passed away, I said. Last Tuesday.
Three or four times I had played with Speare and some of his musicians, but after Bly was born I had no time for secret sessions at Muse Studios. I had not seen Speare in twenty years or so yet I played his music almost every day. And, of course, he would, every now and then, appear in my memories without invitation but welcomed all the same, and for these reasons and others his death shocked me as if he truly was a close friend, a friend whose hand I had shaken only days before.
Really, April said, and sipped at her tea, thinking. What happened?
There’s a double-page spread here. Found near a beach house south of Sydney. A tourist bus found him by the side of the road.
Where? April asked.
The description could have been anywhere along the east coast of Australia, including the road that ran off the highway down towards the beach house, especially that road.
Doesn’t say exactly.
When’s the funeral?
Wednesday. We should go?
April thought for a long time, then said, Don’t think so.
Really. Says here he died alone. Three marriages and no children.
How many piano concertos? How many sonatas?
Says here thirty-seven major pieces, I said, knowing that, in fact, it was forty-six, not counting ‘For April, Forever’.
They’re his children, she said. He needed to be alone to conceive them.
Don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on him? I said. I’ve always felt …
What?
You know, that I owe him something.
You don’t, she said, and packed up the empty cups and biscuits. He got what he wanted. The sun is starting to burn. We should head inside, sweet.
But I did feel I owed a debt to Speare and it bothered me that April was so dismissive of him, how she would run away from the thought of him in the same way she ran away from the beach house that summer. And I had felt somehow responsible for what happened at the beach house from the time that it happened. It seemed that we had made a pact, Speare and I, a pact which we did not know we were making, but which was made in any event in the triangular pull of wants that summer, ending with him dying alone, surrounded by the famous compositions he had written, and me dying with a modest career as a music teacher behind me, surrounded by April and our children. And what of our children? Or rather their children, or their children’s children? Or even the children of that generation, if the world lasted so long? What if one of them was the last person alive, standing on top of the highest peak of Antarctica, Mount Vinson, the once great polar ice caps turned to water as warm as a bath, water lapping at their feet, rising, day by day, up their ankles to their shins and knees and beyond. And what did I hope for my descendants? I hoped for time. More time. Millions and millions of years to get to this point, the point of lastness, the point of no tomorrow, and when I hoped for something, I hoped for more time.
You coming inside? April said, a gravelly tone of command in her voice.
You got him wrong, you know. Speare. You know that tree you planted, the jacaranda? It was no miracle that it grew and kept blooming. Speare paid my father to water it. My dad watered it four times a week until he died.
I know, Finch. There’s no such thing as a miracle.
You knew? And still.
It just makes it worse. It wasn’t his to keep alive. Let’s get inside, sweet. This is stupid, fighting over this. The sun’s starting to burn.
The sun was up over the Peninsula. It was already fiery. There was no warm-up into the morning; the world went from the calm agreement of night to the burning argument of the day in the time it took to boil a cup of tea. No amount of technological advancement, robotic genius and space probes trawling the universe for other planets in the habitable zone was able to change that brutal fact. The sun was fact. It was politics. And it was morality. It was always right, as right as April seemed to be most of the time. But not this time. She was wrong about Speare. He was a good man. And perhaps even a happy one. Perhaps he died a happy man, searching for a place where he was the happiest, happy in the knowledge that he had not brought children into a world that had turned on its own so grievously.
I’ve been thinking, April said. We should move down south. To Mawson. Be nearer the kids. Hobart’s getting too hot for us now, April said.
And I knew, at once, that she was right in that thought, for most of what she thought arose from the givings or misgivings of a heart firmed into thought, and my following heart, as it usually did, particularly when it came to our children, simply closed around that thought and made it a hard fact of our lives together. But not with Speare. With Speare I held my own facts close to my heart.
21
William D. Speare was given a state funeral in St Davids Cathedral. When he died he was the most famous composer Australia had ever produced and was critically acclaimed worldwide. His concertos and sonatas were played in orchestras in all the surviving cities clustered around the North and South poles. And yet one day, long ago, when he was unknown, he found time to teach me the first three notes of the Moonlight Sonata. And with that small kindness he changed the life of a fifteen-year-old boy profoundly, perhaps even more profoundly than first seeing April lying on the beach did – although I would never admit that fact to her – for only a memory born of respect is more profound than one born in shame.
On purpose I arrived late, so that I could slip inside the church and take a quiet seat on a back pew without being seen. April thought I was at a local real estate agency, seeing about selling the apartment. From one of the ushers I took the funeral programme and did not realise, until I was settled on one of the back pews beside the cloisters, that the paper had cut my finger. There was blood all over my hand, stamped across the white of the page. I staunched the blood with my handkerchief and hid my bloodied hand down by my side.
Throughout the ceremony they played his major concertos and sonatas, violin and cello mainly but some piano, and a few other minor pieces. They played his music instead of giving readings and eulogies, with the reverend leading the formal prayers between. It was hard to tell if it was the thought of William D. Speare that made most of the mourners cry or rather the music itself, those notes which were his notes, his and no other’s, each note a stitch which seemed to clothe everyone there in a finery only felt by the hairs on their skin and, when the last stitch was sewn, in the damp withdrawal in their eyes. It was like no other music for me, so special I was forced to play it at work and alone in the car, far away from April. By the end of the ceremony my hand had not stopped bleeding. There were drops of blood on the pews and wooden floorboards, some drops falling through the knife-thin gaps between the slats into the darkness under the cathedral. So much blood was there, I had to wait until everyone had left before I felt I could leave in obscurity.
There has never been a god in my life – my father had seen to that for the most part – but there was a p
eacefulness to being alone in the cathedral that day, something which a believing kind of person could mistake for acceptance. Perhaps it was the high ceilings, the space, the harmony of echoes whenever my shoes shuffled on the wooden floor, which made me feel this way, and feel that I could tell my story into this vast musty space of stone and stained-glass windows and know that my story would stay there, sealed into quietude for as long as the cathedral remained such a place. Or maybe it was because I had no-one else to tell my story to. No-one else to tell about the shame of knowing that Speare and April had suffered so much and not made it, and I had benefited from that suffering, having April, having Bly and Smith, the children that could have been theirs – that our wave and not theirs took us all the way in to shore and washed us on the beach safely. The shame of knowing his place of death, seeing it, through the landscape of deep memory, the longing he felt to risk the vengeance of the sun, the longing he felt to die near or at the beach house of all places. The shame of knowing that the sonata by which I serenaded April back during our university days, ‘For April, Forever’, was Speare’s work, and that the changes I made were no more than mere pedantry, academic punctuation around the vitality of its original themes. No-one else to tell of the shame I felt that Speare, and not I, had held on to an idea of himself, had not given up that part which was most essential to him, when I so easily did, choosing April and everything that came with her above all else. In a way we were two halves of the one extraordinary life, but a life, given the limits of what a life could be, that could never be lived by the one person.