by Craig Ensor
April, I said, what …
She turned around and looked at me as if I was some unknown quantity of fear. We had lived in places where the sun could fade the colour of eyes, turn the deepest blue of newborn eyes into a powdery aged blue, and yet April’s eyes had kept what was so startling about them, a deep seawater blue, the blue of the waters plunging to depths off Sandy Rip, even though they had become frail on the rim, red from bearing the load of all those years. And her eyelashes, which seemed so much like antennae raised out against the confusion of the world, were stuck with tears.
April it’s me, Finch.
Finch, yes.
What are you doing here, sweetie?
I pulled her in to hug me, and although the rip in my heart seemed to repair within that embrace, there was a rigidity to it, as if I was slowly moving from stranger to husband. Slowly I felt her wilt in the familiarity of my arms. Then she pushed away from me.
He’s here. We buried him here, April said.
What? Who are you talking about?
My little boy. We buried him under the tree. The jacaranda. I remember the purple flowers.
No, April. You planted a tree. Near the beach house. You planted it for him.
You don’t know. You don’t know what I did. I neglected the tree.
No, you didn’t. It was a tree. It would be under water now.
No, I shouldn’t have left it. We buried him there.
April, let’s get out the sun. Let’s go home, hon.
Where is my home? We don’t have a home.
Yes, we do. You, me and Bly.
It’s here. Where we put his ashes. Where I abandoned him, April said, and she dropped to a bundle under the shade of the jacaranda and started to weep.
This was our marriage, what it had become with time. With me kneeling beside her and my arms around her as if we were a statue worthy of this park, a statue that told of what had happened to April and I as much as the statue of Sir Douglas Mawson told of what had happened to all of us. In that moment I felt her within the shell of me, as so often in times past I and our children had been within the calming shell of her, and I felt the urgency of the sun firming on my back. She wept and I held the side of her face and mopped up some of the tears with my handkerchief.
What’s happening to us? she said.
Not me. But us. This was happening to us. And it was true. For what was happening to April was happening to me as if we were made from the same flesh and blood. There I was, down on one knee, the same knee upon which I had proposed to her almost fifty years ago, covering the collapse of her with my ageing flesh, no longer able to deny what I had until then let die through lack of questions, let die for fear of what may come between us if the answers were ever spoken. The sun burnt across the back of my neck, clawed through my weak hair. And I covered this weeping innocence with all the care of the first man covering his body around the first of fires, flesh hardened against the dark icy winds, hoping against all hope for a flame to appear from nothing. In that moment, near the end of it, a thought came of Bly wandering around the Amery Docklands, alone.
I need to call Bly, I said, and pulled April up so that we stood together, moving to the shade under the jacaranda.
I pushed the implant behind my ear and spoke my daughter’s name. She answered within seconds.
I found her, I said. Down in the CBD. In a park near the clinic. Yes, she’s fine. We’re leaving now.
Who is that? April said.
It’s Bly.
Is she all right? April said, the look of a concerned mother somehow reprised in her eyes.
11
On the night of 18 May 2276, Mawson State University held a retrospective recital for William D. Speare in the newly built Recital Hall and I, by that time one of the leading scholars on his work, was asked to organise and promote the recital and, when one of the concert pianists was taken ill a few days prior, to perform before an audience of several thousand. The old recital hall, built in the lower precinct of the university, had been taken by the rising ocean a few years back and its stone and glass had been repurposed for the new hall. That night the late autumn sky was perpetually cast in a forbearing light, with the sun for the term of the day suspended in a state of rising or setting over the cradled peaks of the Casey Range, which of the two, the rising or the setting, depending upon how the people of Mawson came at the world, how they saw the sun and the way it shackled our future more than any government or law or ideology ever had. The audience sat open to and within the night. The Recital Hall, like the one in Hobart, changed clothes with the weather as often as its audience, putting on a fashion parade of steel and glass when it rained or the heat became insufferable, and otherwise stripping off that glass and steel when the weather was kind. That night the audience wore dresses and shawls and perhaps a light jumper for the men, and among them, in the front rows, were Bly and April. Towards the back there was an image of a virtual audience, some from other cities in Antarctica or Iceland or Canada, and some from the Arcs that roamed the southern and northern oceans, charting around the catastrophe of ocean storms. In among them were Smith and Zeng and their children, a blue-tinted dimension of attentive faces in the distant seats.
Even though April had, since the time we had found each other again at the University of Tasmania, denied the existence of Speare in her life and the pervasiveness of his music in the culture, her condition had worsened to the point where we could not leave her at home by herself. So diminished was her memory that several months before that night I had retired from Mawson State University to be her full-time carer, and this retrospective would be my last night of work for the university before retirement. In the last few months her memory had diminished so greatly that Bly – who attended for me and not for any love of Speare or his work – and I were confident she would recognise neither the images of Speare appearing around the Recital Hall nor the distinctive lilting strings of a Speare violin concerto which I had described, in the programme for this performance, as the closest sound we had made to the feeling of love opening and closing within us.
The first part of the recital was devoted to a series of violin concertos that he had composed after the end of his second marriage and when Hobart was starting to become uninhabitable, and each of them had moments drenched in a kind of sorrow so unbearable that the sensation they provoked, when they shifted to a more playful bridge, was one of relief and happiness that the sorrow had ended. During these concertos I sat before the piano and looked out at the audience, at the beautiful sensitive faces of my wife and daughter, and the sky fusing orange to pink and blue and, ultimately, to the ambiguous dark of night. Within the halfness of light there were the flapping shapes of flying foxes that had made their way over centuries from the figs of Sydney to the figs of Hobart and by then to the figs which had been planted along the broad avenues of the Mawson State University in homage to those lost places. And within the dark of the half-night was the smile of a moon, which to others towards the northern pole may have been a frown, and to others elsewhere may have been an Arc drifting in the great ocean of night, the very image of what some would have the world become. But for me, that night, and for those in the audience, it was a smile. On April’s face I could even detect something of a smile, which I had assumed was not the smile from an appreciation of the music but rather of innocence, of unknowingness, the wistfulness of looking at the world as an elderly child.
Not one day passed without me trying to think of something, some image or object, which would stir her memories and bring her back to me, however momentarily. At one point I planned to return to the beach house with a glass bowl and fill it with sand and tropical fish and urchins and starfish, to make a rock pool within glass, as I had done for her as a fifteen-year-old. April had few regrets that she confessed to, but one was tipping out the fish bowl I had given her back into the rock pool all those years ago. Only weeks earlier I had committed to making the trip and returning with another glass rock pool
to place by her bedside, only to be reminded, reminded and convinced by Bly, that the beach house and the rock pools would no longer be there. I would be wasting my time. Our time. And, by then, if not long before, time had taken on all the sacredness of a religion.
After the violin concertos, I had scheduled a series of piano and violin sonatas from Speare’s late period, from the time he fell in love with his third wife and moved to Cradle Mountain. The nerves started to hollow through me. I rubbed my hands and stretched them and placed them on the keys, configured for the first chord. These were the hands of an old man. Wrinkled and sun wrecked. Sunspots and bruised flesh among the bones, the veins thick with cynical old blood. In the webbing between two of my fingers was a spot of blood, a mole that I knocked to bleeding way too often, and I mopped up a dab of blood with my handkerchief. My hands were old but they knew their way around the piano better than the hands of my youth, expert and more agile than the hands that played at my undergraduate examination in Hobart, when April appeared miraculously from the crowd between champagne and canapés. And these hands knew Speare. They knew him as intimately as if I had written the notes they were about to play.
Later that month, when I was collecting my last belongings from my office at the university, I checked the emotional responses of the audience at Speare’s retrospective. The technology had advanced to the point where it could measure cognition and depth of feeling, and map that against all members of the audience. Out of the thousands of people who attended the recital only a handful had produced a grade of full cognition, a depth and movement of feeling that was equal in intensity to suffering through the death of a loved one or the joy of birth. And out of that handful April had graded the highest.
Later that night, when I returned home, I told Bly and said, She must have realised it was Speare. Was she agitated?
No, she wasn’t. She seemed happy. She was looking at you throughout the recital. She just kept whispering your name. Finch, she would say. Finch. All the time looking at you.
12
Near the end of his life the French composer Maurice Ravel, suffering from early signs of dementia that would eventually develop into aphasia, composed his most famous work, Boléro. Ravel, displeased that Boléro had become a major success, thought of it as an experiment consisting wholly of orchestral tissue without music. When one member of the audience attending the premiere shouted Rubbish! Ravel remarked, That old lady got the message. In past centuries Boléro had been celebrated as the music of lovemaking, the hypnotic dance of repetitive movements layering towards one long and gradual crescendo, resembling the repetition of tongues and hips and hands groping towards climax. Other scholars of the day saw within Boléro’s limitations and repetitions a manifestation of dementia or some other mental illness, an obsession with repeating the same phrase or chord or theme. By 1927, when Ravel composed Boléro, he had already begun to show signs of this forgetting, the great forgetting of flesh and mind which is the darkest darkness of old age, and yet his diminished mind, limited to the repetitiveness of a disease of old age, was able to produce a work of new and lasting beauty.
Almost four hundred years later, April’s mind was suffering from this great forgetting and there was still no universal cure. Research and spending on medical cures had shifted to the cancers and diseases of the young, and everyone seemed to accept as a fact of old age that the world around us would forget us as much as we would eventually forget each other and ourselves. On any given day April would go to her library and pull out a book, one of her texts on psychiatry or one of her entertainments, and return to bed, then return to the shelves to return the book moments later, unopened, repeating this process many times over. And still there was some happiness in this. In her life she had ignored the trending technologies of the book, the visual and pharmaceutical procedures that could, in an hour-long session, have the patient deemed to have read and suddenly know all the works of great authors from the past. She held a book in her hands, even as she forgot why she held it, breathed in its pages with love and tenderness, as if the pages were the skin of a newborn baby. Books are human, she said to me many times, pages like skin, becoming thin and dry, gathering freckle-like spots on their paper spines. But most of the time during those last days she had questions. Regular questions that she repeated only moments after asking them, questions that required every bit of my restraint to stop me raising my voice in response. Each morning she would recognise my face, slowly and frustratingly, almost as slowly as she would recognise her own in a mirror, but she no longer recognised Bly, who had to reintroduce herself every day and almost every second moment. And the times that Smith and our grandchildren, four of them by then, were screened into her bedroom, sitting virtually by her bedside in human colour and dimension, she thought of them as a game, passing her hand through their faces like a child would pass its hand through the mystery of water. And I, watching this, had a number of questions that I repeated to myself not out of some forgetting but out of brutal remembering and relevance. When do we die? This question I would ask time and time again. When our hearts stop beating? When our lungs stop breathing? When those in which our memory will survive are told of our death? Or was it when we can no longer recognise our children, those creations that will outlast us? When we can no longer place a name to their orphaned faces?
13
Every day we denied the fragility of life. Not out of some weakness, I suppose, but out of some immeasurable strength; for every day we were thrown into the rip-torn fragility of our own lives and the lives of others and yet we swam through it without being broken on its rocks. But for this strength I would not have let April or Smith or Bly leave our homes in Hobart and Mawson, would not have left them to their independence, their careers and travels from the safety of home, nor left them open to the closure of death. As time wore on and April’s condition worsened this strength was slowly worn away. The day we took her to the hospital on the fringe of the city for testing, leaving her in the hands of unknown doctors and nurses, downed almost all of my last flask of denial. Bly and I left her with a nurse about midmorning and headed out into the streets. We had planned to drop into Bly’s law firm and sign a power of attorney for me in favour of Bly and have lunch in one of her favourite restaurants in Mertz, an inner-city suburb of Mawson, which was ten years above sea level on current predictions. After two glasses of wine, the concern over April and the headache that seemed by then as chronic as the arthritis in my hands had lessened, and I was able to turn my thoughts to Bly. Halfway through lunch one of her fellow lawyers appeared and introduced himself as Titus. He looked about Bly’s age, maybe a bit younger, handsome in that officious way of lawyers, and I asked him to sit down at the table, which he did after he and Bly shared some sort of bashful exchange.
So, what’s your relationship? I said.
Dad!
Bly’s my boss, Titus said.
You still have bosses in the law? Thought you were all equal before the law.
We are.
He had the guttural drawl of an Australian accent and his hands were not burdened by any jewellery. The way they moved reminded me of some of the less talented conductors I had seen at various recital halls from Hobart to Mawson. At first Bly spent a lot of time looking down at her glass of wine.
Great food, eh, he said. This restaurant’s been around for decades. Used to be down at the waterfront before the rise took it. Just picked up the chef and staff, virtually airlifted them up here.
It’s one of our favourites, Bly said.
Our favourite. Together, you mean. As a couple?
No, Dad. I mean we just both like it. We take clients here.
Right.
The menu was plentiful. I had ordered a salad that had avocados from the Indian city of Maitri, Peron tomatoes from Belgrano and honey-cured ham from the American piggeries near McMurdo and Scott. Titus ordered a coffee and a salmon and lettuce sandwich from a passing waiter he seemed to know.
It is remarka
ble. How we just pick up and rebuild, Titus said. Sometimes I wonder how the whole thing hasn’t collapsed by now?
What do you mean by the whole thing?
Civilisation, Dad. If there’s no future here, on land, and there’re fewer and fewer children to inherit what’s left, why bother? Why bother rebuilding?
Because we are who we are?
And what’s that?
Half of us think there’s a future. The other half that don’t are selfish enough to want their finite lives to be plentiful and luxurious. Either way, they’re building for the present. And we’re good at moving to a better situation. That’s our specialty. And language – we still have that.
Language? Titus asked.
Language civilises us. Words. The heat and water can’t get at them.
Your father’s smarter than you say, Titus said, and smiled as his coffee appeared from the hand of a different waiter who knew him by name but pronounced it differently.
So what’s been keeping you legal eagles busy?
We’re working on a dam up near Vostok, said Titus.
The finance documents, Bly said, as if Titus’s statement, the looseness of it, demanded correction.
I’m doing the DD. Overseeing it.
What does that mean? I asked.
Due diligence. It’s important. Computers do most of it but there’s always a judgment call. This dam’s at serious altitude.