by Craig Ensor
3
On weekends, when the weather was clear and warm, April and I took long walks through a local forest on the outskirts of Mawson, two or three hectares of juvenile sequoia planted when Mawson was first designated as a future Australian city. The walk often ended with one or both of us tossing a silver coin into a pool of water that gathered several runs and leaps of water from the ice melt of the David Range. The pool water looked like mercury, so many were the coins, all bought at the entry to the forest by way of contribution to its upkeep. The days on which we took this walk were in summer, mostly sunny and windless, and I remember this one being no different, finding the pool of water with a fine spray of sweat across our brows.
What about you, sweet? I asked. Does your wish ever come true?
Funny, I don’t usually make a wish. You do, don’t you?
All the time.
We had been holding hands but the sweat started to grease down between us so April pulled her hand away.
What do you wish for, hon?
That we’ll be back next weekend. Making another wish. Smell that, I said, breathing in a warm current of dank rotting air. I said, I never get used to that smell.
Mawson had two smells: the smell of newness, of new steel and concrete and glass and wood, and the bog rich smell of a continent in thaw, of a new continent in the making.
What do you think it smells like? I asked.
The sun sucking the soul out of the Antarctic landscape. The smell of a soul leaving a body.
That’s a bit bleak.
A bit, April said and took a deep breath and smiled. No, some say that. Some of my patients say that. I think it’s the smell of the sun impregnating the land with sunlight, with life.
I prefer that. Like the sunlight itself is the seed.
Yes, like that.
We moved around to the other side of the pool in the shade of a sequoia that was as wide as the two of us holding hands, our arms outstretched. On warm days like this one Mawson gave off a strange polarity of comfort; our faces were reddened by the light burn of the summer sun while our feet chilled in the ever-thawing permafrost. To walk through the forest, even in sturdy heeled shoes, was to feel the history of our climate, its extremities, within our own flesh, within a moment in time. And yet, there was a balance to these extremities, vastly different to the imbalanced heat of the beach house, which scalded the soles of my feet as much as the scalp of my head.
I do have a wish, said April.
What is it?
April paused and took back my hand and said, Your song, your composition, I wish you would finish it. It’s such a burden on you. You sat at the piano all morning and not a single note. It makes me sad.
It doesn’t feel finished, though. I can’t just abandon it. I want to finish it for you.
But it was finished. The day you first played it for me in your dorm. It was finished for me then. It was perfect.
For me it needs more.
Well, let me make a wish for you, April said, and held a silver coin up in the air between her thumb and forefinger and closed her eyes to make the wish. She said, I wish you all the inspiration you need to finish it.
April threw the coin into the pool. It plonked and drifted in the shallows to find a place on the clear bottom where no coin had yet rested. Then she pressed up against me and kissed me on the lips, lips which were mute from April’s thoughtfulness and the shame of knowing that I could not finish ‘For April, Forever’ because I did not start it. For years I had sat before the piano hoping that a sense of an ending would miraculously offer itself to me, inspiring my fingers to play the necessary chords and notes, and by that clean away the thick dust of shame which seemed to settle over me more and more every year. But nothing. For years, nothing. If April were to make a wish for me, a wish that would bring closure to ‘For April, Forever’, which could swab away the dust, she should have wished for Speare to be reborn from the dead and for the original sticky-taped music sheets to be put before him, for him to finish what he started at the beach house almost fifty years ago.
4
Most times, on most days, everything I did felt like a first attempt, like I was a baby wearing the flesh and bones of an ageing man, such was the pace by which the world was changing. The flux of people, of all colours and all countries, who moved through Mawson, some settling down to make a life and others moving on to other cities of the Antarctic, was astounding: the sprawl of Mawson towards the Framnes Mountains; the immensity of the skyline, cranes on every second building, appearing, from the pergola in our backyard, to be basic string instruments, an orchestra of harps drawn by kindergarteners; and the World Bank building, being the tallest skyscraper in Mawson at almost a kilometre high, throwing a cloud-dark shadow across our house a suburb or two away.
Other times I felt old, comfortably old, like we were changing back to the logic of an earlier time. Planning our day together at the breakfast table, and not having the sun simmer our eyes; even though, in the decade or more that we had been living in Mawson, the sun had changed during summer from a mild, softly spoken presence, an observer sitting in the corner of every day whether clear or shrouded in high cloud, to, on some days, the overbearing bully it had started to be in Hobart. The trees planted along the newly gridded streets became tropical rather than deciduous, poincianas instead of plane trees. The snow in the springtime mountains was predicted to be gone within several decades, a prediction which sounded older than me. Everything in thaw, everywhere the smell of bog and marshy grass, seeping up between the apartments and houses and making the air overworked, sweaty. In summer, long protective clothing gave way to skirts and shorts. The affluent citizens of Mawson installed pools rather than saunas. All this, all this change, I had seen before in Hobart. Old vocations – dressmakers, cobblers, smiths – vocations demanding the alchemy of hands and craft with fire, returned to the world not out of nostalgia, but out of an imminent practicality, anticipating a powerless working day. All while the world became so digitised and complicated that April and I, sitting at our breakfast table as the first sunlight stabbed a lance of orange light at the ceiling, simply denied the fact that, at the command of our programmed voices, there was a virtual world we could invest in, transact by, without leaving the four walls of our house. At times, more often as we grew older, we sought respite in resisting change, in turning it off, sitting quietly as I played the piano and April read. And so, when Bly, over thirty at the time, asked to move into our house after her relationship with Paulo had ended, to live in the spare bedroom, our hearts – for when it came to our children our hearts seemed as one – broke open for her as simply and widely as an opening door.
It won’t be for long, Bly said.
As long as you need, sweetheart, April said.
It’s just … it’s just going to be hard. I can’t be in our place.
Too many memories, said April.
We understand, I said.
April sat bedside Bly on the lounge, one hand on her knee, while I stood and fiddled with the blinds. No matter how much she aged, her face, the troubled look of her eyes, seemed to always reflect the innocence of the three-year-old I had scolded by the shores of Port Arthur. And I felt younger standing there. I felt energised, like I was a father capable of protecting her from those who would make her so sad.
So what’s his problem? I blurted out. You’re beautiful, talented, smart. He’s not good enough for you.
Dad, it’s not that.
Well, what is it? Five years you’ve given him and he does this.
Dad, Paulo hasn’t left me, she said, and broke down crying in her mother’s arms.
I left the blinds alone and went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
I’ll make some tea, I said.
Finch, she doesn’t want tea.
I need to do something.
What is it, sweetheart? What’s going on?
There was quiet for a while in between the sobbing. The kettle started to boi
l, to disturb the quiet insensitively, so I switched it off and walked around to the lounge, sitting on the other side of Bly. I put my arm around her and kissed her shoulder. The kiss had an awkwardness to it, a half-heartedness which was the opposite of the way I felt. What I felt and what I wanted to do was to throw my body over her, to protect her from the blast of the world. Then she peeled away from both of us and sat forwards on the lounge with her face cupped over her hands, dry and bitten fingers fidgeting with sweaty cold.
He loves me. We love each other. But we’re not having children. We’ve decided. We worry about what’s left. What the future looks like. He worries more. He’s decided.
Decided what?
To be De-born.
Suicide, I said, standing up again and pacing back to the kitchen.
Dad, don’t call it that.
That’s what it is.
Finch, just calm down. You know this is different.
He’s checked himself into a De-Birth Centre, Bly said.
Selfish prick. This government’s gone nuts. How could they fund this?
Finch, it’s his choice. We all have the choice these days, April said.
Giving up is not a choice.
It’s not about giving up, Dad. It’s about giving in, said Bly, her voice meekly raised.
What’s the difference?
Courage, Dad.
I found myself over near the piano and lifted the lid and, without thinking, lowered a finger over middle C.
Don’t you dare. Don’t you touch that piano.
I wasn’t. I was just …
When, sweetheart?
Next Wednesday. His birthday. Can you believe it? Of all the days, he’s chosen his birthday.
There are many things I regret but I do not regret missing the moment when Paulo, Bly’s partner of five years, left the world in a state-funded ceremony, a celebration – for that was why he wanted it on his birthday – ending with a deep moment of sadness, which everyone, despite me, seemed intent on celebrating. April was with Bly, and her many friends. Smith, who was aggressively against this trend of being De-born, was not told. April never forgave me for not being there. Bly did. She gave out forgiveness as much as she craved it. But I was there in a way.
For almost six hours I waited outside the centre, sitting on a nearby wooden bench in a park overlooking Mawson city in the persistent ache of late summer sunlight. Thinning clouds swept across the sky as if it were brushed with a comb. On a branch of a Port Jackson fig perched a kookaburra, and on one of the light posts dotted through the park was another. They laughed, first one then the other, as if their happiness was simple and contagious. There were other birds, some recognisably Australian but others from South America and Africa, all of which had made the migration by wing or boat to Mawson, pecking at the ground or chittering in the branches or winging gracefully between the figs. All of them seemed intent on life, on the business of living.
Even at that hour the sun had a faint aftershave-like sting on my face, which I evaded by moving around on the bench to another branch of shade. I played my music, the whole of Philip Glass’s collection of piano works, on the device implanted behind my ear. In book form I dipped into a new biography of Speare that passed briefly over his marriage to April and his time at the beach house, noting that that period of Speare’s life had produced no compositions. At such moments I went back to the composition that he had composed, ‘For April, Forever’, which to that day only I knew of, and hummed a new line, which was always a lesser variation of the theme he and he alone had conceived. At other moments, moments which became hours, I watched the construction taking place in Mawson, the seawall being built along the foreshore of Holme Bay, the bridges built between the skyscrapers four levels above the water level anticipated for the decade ahead, and beyond that to the harbour mined from the thaw of the old Amery Ice Shelf.
There, deep off Prydz Bay, was the Arc, this monumental hemisphere of steel and glass almost five kilometres wide, the same one which Smith and his family would make their home in less than a year. Closer to shore at the Amery docklands was another half-completed Arc, which the government had scheduled for occupation in a decade or more. And every other moment I looked back towards the centre, at the glass doors where my eyes had watched April and Bly enter and through which my heart hoped they would leave.
5
The day we had a farewell lunch for Smith and his family, the week before they left to make their home on the Arc, was a day unlike any other. It was the middle of winter. Although the winters were becoming milder every year, the latitude of Mawson was such that on certain days of the year the sun stayed in the bed of night all day but for a few inconsequential hours when it reared its head, as if it was suffering from some otherworldly depression. On such days, and for all the harm that it had done, the absence of the sun was felt, its relentless light missed with a fondness that was often difficult to reconcile.
By then Smith’s children were ten and seven and five. The children all sat around the table with Smith and Zeng, Smith’s wife, and April and me and Bly, who still lived with us in the spare bedroom and, but for a few mysterious relationships, had not, so April would have it, bothered with the complications of finding another partner. April had set up the dining room with candles and lamps and our best cutlery and plates while I cooked up a roast chicken and vegetables, all grown from the hydroponic gardens and wind farms along the plains that footed the Prince Charles Mountains. Smith brought several bottles of wine. Bly had made a pavlova. It looked like any other family dinner we had had over our time in Hobart and Mawson. Although April and I had agreed that we did not want it to be mournful, that we should treat it no differently from the time they first left us, moving from Hobart to Antarctica, there was a different feeling to this move, a feeling of finality which April and I could not distinguish from grief. Yet we vowed not to show that grief, other than for me to recognise the occasion with one or two practised words before we started to eat.
Before we eat, I just wanted to say a few words, I said, and bowed my head. We are gathered here today …
Bly sighed instantly.
Dad, we aren’t dead. We’re moving house, said Smith.
It’s more than that, Smith, said April.
Everyone can visit, said Harry, Smith and Zeng’s middle child. They’ve got helicopter pads.
Okay, it came out the wrong way. Words aren’t going to advance things. Let’s just eat.
And so we did, tucking into lunch in the usual way, which seemed to have been handed down from the way my father and I ate at the dining table, all silence and intensity, as if eating was too important to trivialise with words. Even the children bolted down their food intensely, slurping, chewing, cutlery clashing with their plates, their mouths, which were always glutted with questions, otherwise sated with the complete answer that abundant food provided. Almost half my lunch was gone before I noticed that April had not started eating, but was staring at her plate, the fork hovering, even shaking, over the mashed potatoes.
April, you okay, hon? I said.
She kept staring at the mash.
Mum, Bly said, and gripped her hand holding the fork, at which time her eyes lifted, recognising the table and her family who had, but for the children, all stopped eating.
Sorry, just forgot where I was for a moment.
Do you need something? Your tablets? I said.
No, just a senior moment, that’s all. Keep eating, everyone, please, she said, and plunged the fork into the mash. Harry, what are you looking forward to the most on the Arc?
They still just going with the Arc? I said.
They’ve given it a name. Humanity One or something. But everyone’s calling it the Arc anyway.
With a silent f, said Beck, their eldest.
Beck, said Smith, and fired a look at his son.
Harry?
Harry, like his older brother, had hair all long and dishevelled. It seemed to be always at the point where h
e needed a haircut, even after he had had a haircut. Both looked like Smith, before he was refashioned by Zeng.
The waterslides, he said. They’ve got kilometres of twisting waterslides.
Really? That sounds fun. You, Meah?
Meah, the youngest, was always dressed perfectly, like her mother: combed and pigtailed hair, pink-and-apple dress matching her stockings and hair clips. When she spoke her voice came out as cute as she, her words all clear and polite, combed through of any grammatical knots by her mother.
The rainbow kites.
All the advertising has kids playing in the park with kites, said Zeng.
Rainbow-coloured kites.
Yes, rainbow coloured. That’s important, said April. And you, Beck?
The school looks awesome. Footy fields too, he said from under the hood of his hair.
Sounds fantastic. Sounds like one big holiday, I said, positively, as April had sworn me to be. You must be going to miss something?
The ocean, we think. It’s bloody ironic but we’ll miss the water, said Smith.
It’s everywhere around you but you can’t swim in it, said Zeng.
I asked, So they haven’t created a beach?
It needs to be sealed. For safety reasons, said Smith.
Your grandparents first met on a beach, you know, said April.
Really, with sand? asked Harry.
Yes, lots and lots of sand and rock pools and a beach house, said April.
Did you kiss?
Yes, much later, said April.
Where, on the lips?
Harry, said Smith, and directed his son to finish off the last of his vegetables.