The Warming

by Craig Ensor

  Yes, on the lips, said April. We were at university. Our second date after seeing each other after all those years. Your grandfather played me a song on his piano, a beautiful song he wrote for me, and I just had to kiss him. We haven’t been apart since.

  Where, back in the old country?

  Yes, in Hobart.

  Only then, as April told the story of our first kiss, a kiss which was not our first, but our second, second to the kiss we shared in the cave under God’s Gates, did it occur to me that our relationship, our marriage and love, was not a story common to both of us as I had always thought it was. She had her story of our love. And I had mine. And although, at that stage, she was starting to show signs of early dementia, I was certain that she had not forgotten our first kiss through some neurological disorder. She had chosen not to remember it. For so long I saw that kiss as being one of the great moving events of my life. Yet for her, so it became clear, that kiss was something shameful. She was married. She was trying – or not trying – to have children. I was fifteen years old, a boy in his first few minutes of becoming a man.

  How old were you, Grandpa?

  I thought about it for a while.

  Twenty-two, I said.

  Awesome. And you, Nan?

  A little bit older. But we were both young. Something clicked then and there, she said.

  Only later, after they had all left and we were preparing for bed, did it occur to me that April, who seemed at that time and for all time since to be pure of values and temperament, was not only married but married to William D. Speare. And it occurred to me that, as we kissed, a kiss with all the awkwardness and surprise of tongues of a first kiss, Speare, her husband, was in the beach house playing the piano, composing a sonata for the love of his life, for April.

  Can we play now? said Harry.

  Just finish your vegetables.

  Harry forked them down and the children headed off to the lounge room at the front of the house, where, on occasions like this, they would play some interactive sports games that April had bought them last Christmas.

  So, how’s retirement, Mum?

  While April thought about the question, I topped up all the glasses with red.

  Probably retired too early. I miss my patients.

  Keep it down in there! Smith yelled.

  I was supposed to be helping them but I think they helped me. They taught me a lot.

  What, Mum? asked Bly and reached across the table to top up her wine glass further, as if I had failed her in that. She seemed agitated: drinking, not talking, dousing red wine over the kindling of her thoughts.

  Well, you get to understand how people feel, generally, about what’s happening to them within. They were all different but their concerns were more common than different. They had issues with the light: full light in summer, darkness in winter. They worried about the future. Everyone was the same like that. And some wanted to talk about other planets, leaving earth, back when that was still a bright idea. But most slowly realised what is so obvious, at least to me. That we can’t leave this planet, no more than a mountain or a tree can leave it. We can’t leave because we are the planet. We grew out of it like a tree. It kind of dawned on all my patients at one point or another. We are stuck here. We rejoice that we have air to breathe, like it is some sort of gift or miracle, but the air needs lungs as much as our lungs need air. It is the opposite of a miracle.

  That’s one good thing about the rising seas – oxygen. The ocean makes oxygen like trees make it, said Smith. But there will be plenty of trees on the Arc too.

  So what does that mean for them? That realisation? asked Bly, ignoring her brother.

  It’s humbling. Culturally we’re born and raised as individuals, thinking we’re mobile and self-contained and capable of going anywhere. Thinking we could pick up and leave the planet like we pick up and leave our family home. And our minds and culture fooled us into thinking we were not part of the planet. So most, their thinking just shifted back, to this planet, to family and community, for some meaning. For others it was thinking about how to survive because it was too late for anything else.

  Exactly, Mum. The Arc. It’s the answer.

  It’s the only answer, said Zeng. I feel like your patients feel.

  It’s not the only answer, said Bly.

  What’s your solution, sis? Another glass of red? said Smith, who had a habit, since the time he was a teenager, of inflating his chest when he felt like he was about to say something important.

  Well, bro, it’s probably more realistic than yours, she said.

  Having spent her whole life migrating away from the heat, having lived on the edges of sun-damaged days, Bly’s skin was pale and shining and as smooth as it had been when she was a teenager. But the terseness with which she spoke at Smith, the first time I had seen their differences on this subject made public, agitated the skin around her eyes, made her soft eyes look burdened with wrinkles, with wisdom.

  There’re plenty of elevated places, I said. The whole interior of Antarctica is at elevation, I said.

  But there’s going to come a time, Dad. Watch this. See this empty wine glass? I’ll pour, Smith said, and poured wine into the glass slowly but steadily. That’s the rate the sea is rising. It’s no life drifting from one mountain to the other.

  It’s not rising that fast. That’s ridiculous, son.

  It is. Look at Mawson. The streets are already under water.

  It’s just a new harbour line. The CBD has shifted with it. We adapt. We survive. On land.

  We came from the water, said April.

  Yes, we came from it. Came. We evolved out if it. Now we’re pretending to be Noah and hoping the seas will recede, I said.

  Dad, we’re not hoping for that. The Arcs will last thousands of years. Longer. They’re self-sustaining. The sun is everywhere. Wind everywhere. We have limitless power. Look at the earth. It’s always changing shape. Ice ages come and go, tectonic plates shift, volcanoes create new islands. Australia and Antarctica used to be the one continent, said Smith. This is just the latest.

  The heat, though … this is different, Bly said.

  Hot. Cold. We’ve survived extremes before. By moving. We need to keep moving.

  We were starting to become louder than the children, who were jumping and laughing at some virtual skiing game. April was staring down at her chicken, half picked at, and at her vegetables, which looked like they had been raked and mushed into food fit for a mewling baby.

  Mum, you get it, right, Smith said.

  I just want us to be together. In the time we have, April said.

  The truth is, said Bly, holding up the glass of wine, almost flaunting it in front of Smith, you think that you and Zeng are the bravest people in the world. Pioneers, I’ve heard you say. And you think I’m weak, passive. No husband. No children. You think I’m a loser. But you’re wrong. It takes more courage and bravery to face reality than to keep chasing a dream on the water. What Mum said, the planet made us, it will determine when it destroys us. Brother, you’re the weak one.

  Weak, really? Smith said. Having hope is weak, is it?

  Hope is the greatest, Bly said, taking a long problematic sip of wine. Hope is the greatest form of denial.

  Grandpa, said Harry, who had appeared at my shoulder, his sister in support behind him. Can you play a song on the piano?

  Without further prompting, the family all gathered around the old upright piano. For hours I played, some classical pieces from centuries ago and some from recent times, but more dancing tunes, ballroom and rock and bluesy riffs, and the family, fuelled by wine or chocolate cake, danced and sang along, requesting another random song when the last one was done. For the most part I knew the song and was able to play it to some extent from the backlist of memory. April danced with Beck. Smith danced with Bly. Meah and Harry danced with their mother, hands joined, twirling to one bluesy riff after another, a few of which I sang along with badly, the other more popular ones sung by a
family chorus. At times, when I looked at April, she was alone in herself, staring at the piano while the dancing and singing happened around her, and, at those times, I went for a familiar song that would pull her back from the darkness of her thoughts. That night was something special. It was something we had not done in years, and ended only when, near eight at night, Zeng remembered that the children had school the following day. And there it ended, with children as the priority, as it should be and should end. The presence of them, they who would inherit what had become of the earth, their vital presence, kept the grief and fears and tears inside us, bottled but showing, as if we were all each a rock pool, our watery skins showing everything that moved us and moved within us.

  6

  All my life I was able to see things that others could not. Not things of another world or time, or those who have passed, although one night, still young enough to sleep with a bedside lamp, I thought I saw my mother at the end of my bed, placing a hand on my cold feet, feet which fell colder with her touch. And not being able to see things far off in the distance, things like trucks and planes, though I had a talent for that kind of seeing as well, so my father said. I mean the close things, details, the things between and around those I knew and others who were just passing through the clutter of our lives.

  What I have in mind are the three notes tattooed behind April’s ear, which was at first a tattoo or blemish or birthmark behind the fall of her hair, but then became something more, a tattoo of notes, and something even more mysterious when she touched it with her fingers as if to play those notes. I could see that she touched it whenever she appeared to be in thought, but it was only much later that I could see the nature of those thoughts.

  For Speare it was the fingers, he gave away everything with his fingers. The way he coddled them in the morning, sat on them before the piano as if to warm some inspiration into them, the way he cooled them in the ocean when the inspiration had left, clapping the sea water as if to freshen them back to ordinary-feeling hands, after which those hands would go looking for April, rarely finding her near or at all. In the early days when they touched I would grow to envy and hate those fingers. Later I would feel their sadness as they reached to touch her and she turned or brushed them away.

  Then there was my father. There were so many things that made him, but the one that stayed with me the most, the one which drew my pity, was the way he kept a comb by the B-Coder. Whenever a woman came into the store, which was almost as rare as rain, he would reach for the comb and fix what was left of his hair, perfecting what could be perfected in the small mirror he had arranged between the cigarette packets. In that manner he got a few dates, but I never saw one of those dates at the breakfast table.

  As I got older, I became more and more aware of the things that I could not see or hear. The things I could not see or hear but feel. In those early days in Mawson the sound that filled the city was the sound of thought, the sound of thoughts being thought with all their unacknowledged complicity, and the all-pervading sound of wind. The sound of wind rattling and lifting and passing over things like the curious fingers of children. And less and less the sound of children, the wailing of babies and toddlers, their scarcity requiring a kind of listening, acute listening, which I had mastered in my career but not in my life. In my life there were things that only April could see and hear, things that mattered to her and to us, which she wanted me to see and hear of my own choice but I could not. Things I overlooked because I could or did not see or hear or was otherwise preoccupied with seeing or hearing the wrong things. We lasted because she would tell me, in anger or tears or both, but still tell me, and I was sad enough inside to open my eyes that much wider for her rather than shut them out of pride or stubbornness or defeat. And we lasted because I, like the sound of Mawsonian thought, kept silent on the things she had overlooked.

  7

  As a couple we celebrated the anniversary of the day that we first met at the beach house and not the day we were married. Over time we grew to honour the formative appeal of it, even though the day itself, as I remember it, was embarrassingly plain. The morning heat bundling my skin into nerves of sweat as I raised a fist to knock on the beach house door, the grocery bags dropping and fumbling about me, April appearing at the door wearing a black bikini and a scowl, a scowl which turned into concern when she saw her groceries spilling towards the sand. She would remember the muscles in my arms, strained by the groceries, the surprising maturity of them. I would remember the softness of the touch of her hand – delicate manicured nails painted a sharp turquoise – and the mark those nails made when she placed the money in my hand, the soft indent in my palm.

  In Hobart we had celebrated with late-afternoon picnics down by the Derwent before children, and through small meaningful bedside gifts after children. In Mawson we would spend the day down near the Amery Docklands which, with the retreat of the glacier, reminded us partly of the black cliffs that pincered the beach house, where the waves crashed into God’s Gates. Between a bushland reserve and a zone of wind farms, there was an open and grassy park that overlooked the cliffs of Prydz Bay and Amery Harbour, a harbour where the second Arc was in the last stage of completion and where, along the foreshore, the windows of a lost street of apartments were crashed through with waves. We felt safe, sitting high in the park on a picnic blanket overlooking all this, wondering what forces drove those who built the apartments only decades earlier, presuming them to be the same forces which built the Arc. That day, like so many before and so many after, held within it its own childish naivety, a day so brilliant, so limitless in sunshine, so mild and blue and light of breeze, the childish part of me could imagine that such a day was still a possibility in the old northern cities and towns lost to cataclysmic heat. And, like children, we went about the day as we always did, naively, as if there would always be another day such as this one. We bought a kilo of unpeeled prawns from the local co-op. We brought a bottle of pinot from home. We laid down our blanket in the same spot that we had the year before.

  You okay? I said.

  April had an unpeeled prawn in her hands, staring at it then staring out at the Arc sheltered in the harbour.

  April.

  I can’t do it.

  What, sweetie?

  I can’t … get it out.

  Here, I’ll get you rolling. The head goes, then the shell and tail. See? Then the vein comes out like that, I said and handed her the prawn ready to eat.

  Thank you. I just had a … it was like I hadn’t seen a prawn before.

  April took the peeled prawn and dunked it in some creamy sauce and ate it. We both ate, staring out at the ocean in silence, the sea breeze pleasantly light and undecided.

  We should see the doctor tomorrow.

  You’ve got work.

  I’ve got a class and meetings in the afternoon. We can go in the morning.

  There were a few couples and families in the park, scattered in among the trees and footpaths that crossed through it. Most of the people were near the southern side of the park, the area that looked down over the Arc and the industry of workers that were, at that stage of completion, building universities and hospitals and apartments along the flat half of the sphere, the flat part almost as tall as the World Bank building. In the places between, so Smith made clear, were parks and farms rearing cattle and sheep and chickens and all sorts of livestock, others growing hydroponic vegetables and fruit for the new world. Many helmeted men and women, all dressed in yellow, were coming in and out of the entrance of the Arc, which was part of the hull of the Arc and lowered as a ramp onto the dock like a huge medieval drawbridge. Not until later did I see the old man, on the other side of the park, bent and shuffling, pushing a shopping trolley towards us along the footpath.

  Remember that time we put prawns in his piano? April said.

  I looked at her. She rarely spoke of or even acknowledged the existence of Speare, his place in our history, but there he was, suddenly between us in the park o
verlooking the Amery Docklands, raised as part of our collective memory. But my memory was blank.

  Remember, we had caught prawns in a rock pool and he was up composing on the cliffs. Remember? We played a trick on him. Put prawns in the piano.

  Yes, that’s right, we did, I said, the memory, which was her memory only at first, somehow sharing back through me.

  He complained about the smell for days. Gave up playing, it was that bad.

  That’s right. That was pretty nasty. Childish of us.

  We were kids back then. I was still a kid. And he was working all the time, even when he wasn’t at the piano. The prawns didn’t stop him for long.

  I remember now. I took them out. They stank so bad. Almost made me spew. One night I took them out and threw them into the sea.

  You felt guilty?

  I did. It’s how Dad raised me. Raised on meat and vegetables all smothered with guilt gravy.

  Anyway, my memory is not so bad, is it? she said, her voice, by then, cracked and vulnerable where once it had been strong and husky.

  I did not respond but opened the wine and poured out two glasses and went about peeling the rest of the prawns.

  That’s what you had back then, April said. Still do.

  What, great looks?

  That, yes. But you were always with me. Attentive to the moment. In the moment.

  These words, which had been said so many times before, always rankled through me, for I saw them for what April did not: as a lack of depth, of being unable to draw deep from some well of the imagination that necessarily ignored the present, as Speare was so capable of doing. Those words made me aware of my career, teaching, bobbing at the watery surface.

  Is that the Arc out there? Smith’s Arc?

  I put on my glasses and squinted out to the horizon. There was a grey shape on the horizon, which could have been the Arc, Humanity One, or a ship from the other Antarctic cities or the cities of the North Pole, but was probably, as a matter of geography, one of the Kerguelen Islands.