by Craig Ensor
Excuse me, sir, we’re closing up for the day.
It was a young man, robed in white, standing in the aisle with four or five bibles under his arm.
Sorry, I’m getting slower these days, I said, moving awkwardly along the pews.
Your hand. It’s bleeding. The dean has a first-aid kit out back. Let me get it for you.
No, it’s fine. It’s a minor cut. Just looks bad.
You sure? It won’t take me long to fetch it.
We were standing face to face in the aisle, the young man and I, him looking at the blood veining down my wrist and me looking at his clear pale face, looking for something in his features which gave him away as a believer.
I’m fine. My wife will fix me up. No problems. Thanks again, I said.
I made my way out of St Davids Cathedral along the Cloisters, stepping out into Cathedral Close and the warmth of the late afternoon. I stepped out into the relieving shade of autumnal plane trees, their leaves as cracked as mud after a long rainless summer, my shoes kicking and crackling through the heaps of leaves until they departed the Close. Afterwards, those shoes headed across town, through the Salamanca Markets, which had closed down while the seawall was being extended to two hundred metres high, finally stopping at my official destination, the local real estate agent on Hampden Road.
MOVEMENT III
Mawson, Antarctica
1
Within the span of a single generation April and I and many others ran from the brutality of the Hobart sun to other countries, as many from past centuries had run from corrupt governments. The place we ran to, the inevitable place, was Mawson in Antarctica, which was the capital of an Australian province that had grown out of Mac. Robertson Land along the northern seaboard of Antarctica. By the time we arrived, building a uniform block-shaped house in Aurora, one of the elevated grid suburbs inclining towards the Framnes Mountains, Mawson was already a city of one million, civilised with hospitals and sewers and roads and shopping malls and one university where I commenced lecturing and tutoring on the history of classical music. While many of the canonised artistic subjects had been scrubbed off the Mawson State University curriculum, replaced with subjects of advanced science and engineering, the history and technique of playing music, of making sounds with an instrument in the absence of electricity, had somehow survived the savage test of relevance in Antarctica, which, but for the relentless wind, and the sound of the wind through the instrument of the city itself, was the most silent of the remaining habitable lands. It was not for me to question or even understand but I had this sense that someone, or even a collective of someones, had imagined the end, the day when the seas took back the earth, and could not tolerate the thought of it happening in silence. They had, that collective, dreamed or otherwise imagined a lone bugle or violin playing on the last of the mountain peaks. Then there was the most practical of all concerns – what would we do when the power stopped? What would we do for cultural enrichment? So I, when so many others had not, stayed relevant to the changing world. And April, whose career had been spent exploring the inner world, how we all coped or failed to cope in dealing with change, had no end of patients, starting up a clinic on the outskirts of Mawson city about a ten-minute walk from our house. In between lived Smith and Bly, Smith living in a small apartment with his wife and newborn baby while Bly rented with two or three friends in a place so uncivilised that April politely refused to visit when anyone other than Bly was home. Smith had graduated through the University of Tasmania, obtained an engineering degree, and worked for a building company who was responsible for many of the new skyscrapers that were taking up the Mawson skyline. Bly was still studying and working as a paralegal at a small law firm where she programmed computers to produce legal answers to simple factual disputes.
Those years, those early years of building a life in Mawson, were filled with newness and purpose and energy. As new migrants arrived from all over the world and the city sprawled its way up towards the Framnes Mountains, that energy seemed to sprawl and bound its way prolifically. It was the very opposite of resignation. And it seemed to me, particularly that day when Smith and I worked at the pergola in our backyard, afterwards sharing a beer while overlooking the perpendicular suburbs of Mawson and the harbour thriving with dockless ships, that we lived in a collective state of late flowering, like a composer, like Janáček or even Speare, who sensed death was nearing and, with heightened creativity, produced work so sublime it would outlast their very death. Our muse, like theirs, may have been the new, the thrill of the new, but it seemed altogether too deeply felt and lasting to be that. And yet, even then, we did not have that consolation of outlasting, and so there seemed to be some deeper creative force at play. To me – and not many would have agreed, not even April – it looked like denial. And an innate will not to lose.
Smith and I had built the pergola so that April and I could enjoy the mild Antarctic sunshine and avoid the chill and squalls of rain that so often passed over the Prince Charles Mountains. That day was like so many others in Mawson during that time. It was the kind of weather where we both started work with a jumper and took it off and put it on several times over. It was a mild, crisp early autumn day, the sort that had once been lost to us, and yet had been found once more on the poles of the earth, which felt, to all those that lived there, to be as central to civilisation as Rome or Paris or London had been in past centuries.
Bit cold, don’t you think? Smith said at one point, as we drilled in the joists to the roof.
You complaining? I said, my father somewhere in the halfness of the smile I gave Smith.
No, just saying. As a fact.
You wish it was warmer.
Sometimes I do.
You’ll get your wish in a few years, I said, and reached for the drill.
When we were done we pulled over a couple of chairs from the verandah and sat back with a beer, admiring the pergola between sips. We stretched and rested our eyes over the view from the pergola, which spanned from the pine forests of Mac.Robertson Land to the largest skyscrapers of Mawson. By autumn the days were shortening and already, in early afternoon, the sun was setting over the snow-capped ranges to the west, casting the city in a pure sharp-edged light that made Mawson look as rich and primary as a painting. Birds, sparrows and mynas, the ones easily imported from Hobart, broke into chirping darts in the light falling through the Japanese maples that leafed our square of backyard in yellows and reds, the fiery colours of cold.
They’re building the Arcs down near the old Amery Ice Shelf, said Smith.
Arks? They can’t come up with a more original name than that?
No, Arcs with a c. Not a k.
That makes a difference. Some people just can’t shake the Bible loose.
What are they making them from?
Old cities and towns. Steel and glass and wood from the old industrial wastelands. Old bits of Sydney and Melbourne. There’s centuries of material ready to be re-used.
Silence passed between and over us for a while, the birds darting over to the nest of orange and lemon trees growing in our neighbour’s yard. Some large ships were anchored out at sea, others anchored deep in the womb-shaped harbour, all from Hobart or Davis or further away – Palmer and the other American and Chinese cities in West Antarctica.
See those ships? They’re heading to Amery. Full of materials from the old country.
I nodded, sipped at my beer.
We’re going to reserve a place on one, Zeng and I. And the little one.
Reserve a place. What does that mean?
They reckon they’ll be built in ten years or so. They’ll be ready to leave shore, or wherever the shore is by then.
So, it’s like a luxury cruise, is it?
No, it’s life. It’s the world. Look at what’s happening to the seas, Dad. The rate. In fifty years this house will be under water. Maybe less. Then where do we go?
It’s not that bad.
It is. I’ve read all t
he data.
We’ll be long gone, I expect.
Maybe, but my kids will still be alive. We’re having more, you know. Two, three, four. Whatever it takes.
Whatever it takes? It’s not a competition, you know, I said.
It’s the opposite of that. That’s the problem. There is no competition. No-one’s having children.
I grabbed another two beers from the esky. Inside, April had switched on some lights and was reading something by lamplight, sitting in one of the old chairs that had followed us down from Hobart, her glasses tilted down, a threat of grey in her hair. I cracked the top and handed over a beer and stood, placing my hands on the chair, staring out over Mawson and the light which seemed to drop from the sky suddenly, as if the sun at that latitude lacked the quality of setting, leaving us with the bluntness of a light switch.
Sit down, Dad. We need to talk about this. These Arcs, they’re not boats, luxury cruisers. They’re worlds. New worlds. As big as the CBD of Mawson. Bigger.
Sitting down, I said, and how much will this world cost you?
Two million each. Kids are free.
Sometimes, with Smith, it felt like it took every bit of good breeding, every bit of common decency in him, to restrain himself from telling me how much he earned.
At what point does money become worthless? We must be getting there. It must be coming soon.
Dad. This is not the end. There will be a whole new economy on the Arc. People will have apartments and jobs and there will be schools and hospitals and grassy green farms and trees. They say the Arcs will last for centuries, millennia even.
Millennia? What about those who can’t afford it?
There won’t be a place for everyone. But how is that any different to the past?
What about the storm cells out there?
There’s a safe orbit around the poles. The storms are north of it. Dad, they’ve got it all figured out.
A door slid open from behind us.
It’s getting dark out here, boys. And cool.
Smith’s leaving us, April. Taking his family out to sea. Captain Smith.
I know, April said, and came across to her husband and son sitting in the half-dark, sheltered by the roofless pergola.
You know?
I’ve spoken to Mum. She thinks we’re doing the right thing. Everything’s moving too fast, Dad. Today, a minute goes and it’s ancient history. Ten years will be on us in no time.
So you agree with this?
We need to consider it, honey.
We. Consider it. Are you kidding? That’s just admitting defeat. I came into this world on the land and I’ll leave on land. We’re not made to be bobbing around at sea. That’s no life, no future.
Dad, these Arcs are land. They are the new land.
Land, seriously. We stay together. As a family. Until the end. Whatever and wherever that is.
Finch, we can talk about this later.
You just keep running away, don’t you? What about loyalty?
Loyalty to what? Finch, to what?
To the past, I said.
I kicked the chair back and stomped my way through the house and out the front door and onto the street, deserted but for the early flickering of evening streetlights and the waft of beef casserole, which April had been cooking since early afternoon. Those last words came out all sharp and directed, as something my father would say while gripping on to his knife at the dining table back home and, looking back, as I walked through the cooling streets of upper Mawson, it was something which I too was bound to utter. To that day I still felt the influence of my father on how I came at the world, the deep influence felt by an only child of his only parent. For so long as a child I knew of only two gods to be obeyed, my father and the sun, and the sun only ever had one truth which it preached all day and every day, lashings and welts of truth across the flesh. But my father’s truths were indoor truths, many and subtle, working under the darkness of the flesh to give me the form and substance I would take as a man. These truths, my father’s, now mine, may have been out of place and time, but that did not make them wrong.
I walked downhill along the narrow streets, each named after an Australian town which no longer existed, lost through heat or sea water or both, and those street names, like my last words to April, seemed out of place in this new world of Mawson, where the past, to survive in the present, had to be either forgotten or forgiven. The snow-chilled air off the mountains pricked through my shirt and I realised, in that moment, that the sun had not yet succeeded over Antarctica. It had not been deified by the Mawsonians. For those who had made Mawson their home, there was time to build a life through the generations without having to consider spending a lifetime stranded at sea. As I walked through the streets I began to shiver, a sensation I had not felt since I visited my mother’s grave in Hobart almost fifty years ago, but I felt a sense of continuity to it all, a consoling sense. There was plenty of time. Plenty of time before this cold would shift to intolerable heat. As the night sank with cold, I began to enjoy the difference of it on my skin, the way it shrank and roughed my skin, furred the hairs on my arms, the cold making weapons of flesh to fight against its own elemental dangers. We adapted. We changed physically to cope with cold as we did with heat. And we could continue to adapt as Mawson moved from ice and snow to sun and beach. As I walked along Bega Street and turned left into Noosa Road, I became confident in this fact, in the immortality of humans, and I began humming one of Speare’s compositions, a late violin concerto from his neo-baroque period. For how long I walked and hummed I cannot remember but when I stopped walking I was in front of Bly’s share house, facing it, looking up at her bedroom window and the sympathetic light that shone there.
2
Summer days in Mawson had a feeling of the eternal, the sun low and ever-present in a sky often clear or veiled with high cloud. Those days were the closest we would get to immortality, to the feeling of time not passing, and yet so many Mawsonians complained about that very quality, secretly longing for the days around the winter solstice, when the dark streets and parks and houses were all lit with the stored energy of the summer sun, like a sunburn radiating from the skin after dark. Technology had played its part in the great descent towards a warming world, in the relentless rise of the seas, but it also played its part in making that descent tolerable, in harnessing the one universal source of energy, sunlight, and bringing light to a world slipping into darkness. Before and during my lifetime the use of technology matured as a wise elder would mature, picking its uses and devoting its time sparingly to things that mattered, to saving and nurturing lives, prolonging them if possible. It retreated from places where it had interfered unnecessarily, unauthentically, places such as the arts and human relationships, with these aspects of our condition returning to a state of pre-technology that existed several hundred years ago. Music, classical or folk or any other, was played with instruments that were powerless but for the power given to them by the player, and although recordings were made they were played mostly to audiences in concert halls and studios and pubs. People met at places like this. Relationships evolved within no other medium than the air between two people. The time, which technology had, for so long, spent interfering with such relationships, and the industry with which it had done so, shifted to larger and more pressing pursuits, to the possibility of finding a similar planetary home and, when the impossibility of that dream was finally conceded, to the Arcs being built at both ends of the earth.
By 2270, over the course of two hundred and fifty years, the population of the earth had decreased to fewer than two billion. There had been no war or epidemic and the deaths from heat and drowning were a statistic no more alarming than deaths from cancer. Antarctica, larger than Australia and, with the thaw of the glaciers and permafrost, expected to be as fertile as old Europe in less than a generation, had resources and space capable of accommodating at least half and possibly all of this population. Yet the cities around the North Pole, p
laces like Longyearbyen and Narsaq, welcomed the other half out of the need for market sustainability as much as generosity of spirit. We had become cornered in our own home; our response was to cling to the certainty of technology and the nurturing of each other in the absence of any other godly assistance – and the inadequacy of our response revolved around the question of whether the world was worthy of children or even worthy of waking into the day that followed. And it became a world that had abolished the distractions that had owned it for centuries, as primary and serious a world as the one in which I had spent my childhood, elemental, in the sense that sun and food and water and family and work are elemental. And we responded, at all times, pragmatically, as if the childlike part of our imaginations had been stripped of fairytale, of nonsense, replaced with a hard, practical edge. This I could see in April and myself. Over time I could see it in our two children. Our grandchildren too.
One day I was minding my grandson, Beck, by then about four years old, when I pointed out the half-moon in the southern blue sky.
What’s that there? I asked.
The moon, he said, in a tone that seemed condescending. It moves, you know.
Really. How does it move?
Got an engine in it.
An engine?
Solar powered with turbo blasters. From the sun. It zooms around the night when we aren’t looking.
When I was a child, maybe between four and six, the night sky was one great night-dimmed rock pool, full of tiny silver starfish, the moon an urchin that morphed in shape and colour, that tossed and turned around the pool of night and fell asleep in unknown places, the covers of night pulled up to or over its face. It did not need an engine. It moved as anything born of the earth would move. And yet, despite all that had happened to the earth, despite the shift in the stories we told ourselves about it, the moon had not changed. It was lifeless. It was immortal. It was as indifferent as ever.