by Craig Ensor
Enough power and water for the whole continent, Bly said.
For how long?
Forever, they reckon, said Titus.
Forever, I said. That’s a nice thought.
After lunch, with an hour or so to pass before April could be picked up from the hospital, Bly and I walked down through the city, along Albany and Bendigo and through the eucalypts of Mawson Park to where the water lapped against the square of offices on Tamworth Street. It was a beautiful warm summer’s day in Mawson and for that reason alone it was menacing. For me. And for others of my age who had felt the viruslike spread of warmth towards the poles. For the children between six and twelve years of age, jumping from the windows or roofs of abandoned buildings into the sea, it was perfect – perfect weather to dry from the chill of the Antarctic waters and risk another jump. Other children were playing in pools of sea water left on the roofs of derelict buildings after the last high tide. We stood on the temporary concrete seawall they had built along Tamworth and watched the children fossick through these pools, chasing fish around in the shallows and picking crabs out of concrete nooks. As I had done down by the rock pools, they were building memories, memories that would either make those who found that same place of memory in the future, reprising what had passed with newness and vitality, or unmake those who looked and looked for the place of memory forlornly. Beyond the children mucking about and jumping and laughing, beyond the submerged buildings and the bloated stomach of water which had digested half the city, was Humanity Two, which had left the Amery Docklands a month or so beforehand, drifting on the circumpolar current eastward.
You should go with your brother. His Arc’s due to pass by Mawson next spring.
Dad, I’m not leaving you and Mum. I’ve told you that.
Some pain shot down through the front lobe of my skull.
Dad, are you all right? Bly said and touched my chin, which had dropped with the stab of pain.
Yes, fine, I said, looking up. Too much to drink.
We need to look after you too. Let’s go to the doctor next week.
No, I’m fine. I’m more worried about you. Here all by yourself.
Dad. I’ve got friends.
Like Titus?
Titus, Julie, Indira, others. We’re all in the same boat. We’re like you and Mum. Here to the end. But we’ve all decided. Hope is dangerous. We are here. We have each other. We’re not bringing others into this. This is it.
They’re building another Arc, you know. There’ll be millions of people on these things.
We know. Dad, I’m not being flippant. Something deep down is urging me to have a child. Every morning I wake and stare at the ceiling and place my hands on my belly. My flat belly. Do you know how hard it is to deny that feeling?
I pulled Bly in beside me with my arm, the smallness of her tucked within me.
As you say, Dad, maybe we’re the selfish ones.
But what about when I go?
When you go, I go.
The moment Bly uttered those words there was the sound of sirens down along Thredbo Street. We along with everyone else watched the children jump from three or four stories above the sea level, before turning towards the sirens. Someone must have called in the Carers, a group which the government had empowered to protect children from harming each other and themselves, avoiding inadvertent tragedies being their ultimate goal. They wore blue uniforms and were a mix of ages and ethnicities. One of them used some device to throw her voice, calling the children back to the seawall. But the children, who were also a mix of ages and ethnicities, all laughed and kept jumping from windows and roofs, clambering back up to take their turn once more. Separated by the chop of cold sea water, the Carers shouted out to the children to return, using reason, the weakest of all parenting styles, and the children, knowing that it would be a long time before one of them frigidly waded into the water and swam to the building, kept laughing and jumping and playing in the pools of water. Around us a hundred or so people had gathered, all laughing and smiling at the children, remembering, I felt qualified to presume, the immortal joy of their own childhoods.
14
Thinking back to my time as a child under the roof of the general store, I remember Dad receiving once or twice a year a letter from Aunty Jean and the first time I saw one of those letters in the letterbox I took it to him and asked what it was.
It’s a letter, he said. Like your beeps to Mr Choi.
What’s inside it?
Well, your aunt would say it’s her reaching out to me on God’s abundant skin.
What do you think’s inside it?
Usually some sort of trouble.
Those letters made me think of April in her bed on the day she left us. She was always the neatest of persons. Every morning she would remove herself from bed like Dad would remove Aunty Jean’s letter from an envelope, with the exactness of a sharp knife along the seam. But that day, and for the days after I found her, exhausted, wilting in the heat of midday near the shops up on Leura Street, she lay tucked in bed as neatly as a sealed envelope, her bones as thin as a three-page letter within the sheets. After various doctors and nurses came and went through the house and prescribed certain medicine and fluids, she seemed to be on the way to recovery, ever so slowly, her skin showing a hope of blood on its pallor and her dry lips able to suck on an orange-flavoured ice block. So confident were we that she was recovering to plan, Bly and I decided, after some discussion, that Bly should make the business trip to Troll up in Queen Maud Land. There was some critical transaction she needed to close with the Norwegians, some solar power plant a number of the city-states of Antarctica were in the process of committing to. So, on what turned out to be the then hottest day in the history of Antarctica, Bly left for the hour-long flight up to Troll and I spent the morning bringing various medicines and comforts to April and pottering around in the garden until the heat became overwhelming and I took refuge under the shade of the pergola.
Then, from behind me, I heard, Who are you?
It was April, her face pale and frightened, her nightshirt floating around the stake of her body. I stood up and held her, stopping her from falling.
It’s me. Finch.
Are you? Who? Yes, Finch, she said, her eyes focused, starkly blue, the recognition in them almost holding up the rest of her failing flesh and bones.
Let’s get you inside. Into bed. It’s too hot out here.
But the effort it had taken April to get out of bed and walk through the house and outside to the pergola, to walk through the heat of the morning sun, was too much. In bed her skin turned sweaty and her breathing became slow and raspy. I wetted down her skin with a flannel, brought fluids to her lips and gave the injection that the doctor had left with me if necessary. I called Bly and said she should come back, urgently. I thought of Smith, somewhere near Ushuaia in Southern Argentina. Then I paced around her bed, watching closely as her eyes half closed, her skin a slipping sort of colour, her breathing slow, burdensome, recalling the sound of my father’s breathing in his final days. The air temperature in her room I dropped to twenty-three degrees. I had done everything the doctors had told me to do. And so it was left to me, a music historian and teacher, a husband, a father, a failed composer, to keep my wife alive for as long as I humanly could, keep her alive with doses of hope and denial and, unfathomably, by wheeling the piano into her bedroom and playing, ‘For April, Forever’.
By then ‘For April, Forever’ was hundreds of music sheets long and went on for hours and hours and I sat down and played it through over and over, hearing her breathing rasp in the silence between notes, looking over my shoulder desperately for something in her face to lift, out of recognition or pleasure or even boredom. Over time it seemed to be working. As the day wore on, as the afternoon sunlight framed the curtains with fading light, a halo of light for those disposed to making belief out of fact, her face looked rested and pinkish and her breathing became less troubled. Over time the quality of my playi
ng drifted with my concentration. At those times she would wake and sputter, as if there was still some observant critic inside her, and I would reach across from the piano to dampen a wet sponge against her lips and watch for her tongue to loll and sup from it. And I would be made to refocus on the music, shifting to those parts of haunting melody, those fragments of adagio that had survived the draft that Speare had shredded on the verandah of the beach house, the most beautiful parts. And slowly her breathing would calm and her tongue would loll towards the traces of water around her lips, and slowly she would return to sleep, her face resting in the pale afternoon light. In that moment April would be restored, recovering in the smallest way, and my heart would warm through the other flesh of me with a feeling that only she had ever given me, from the day of opening when I first saw her on the beach, running naked towards the dawn-tipped waves, to this moment of closing by her bedside.
Dad, what are you doing?
Bly stood at the door of the bedroom, her skin red and sweating, eyes tormented. One of her heels was broken, and she was standing at a broken angle.
I remember looking up at her, and from Bly’s perspective I must have looked mad, mad with hope or love, although Bly, like me, knew there was no difference between the two, like me she knew that love was the greatest expression of hope.
Bly knelt by her mother’s bedside and said, Mum, Mum, it’s me, Bly.
Recognising something in her daughter’s voice, April opened her eyes one last time, and breathed, and closed them once more; and in the time it took to take another long breath, her face turned a deep ocean blue. And through all this, my eyes went to Bly’s shoes, the heel snapped off the sole, as if the heel, which could be fixed, craved all my love and pity.
15
About a month or so after April passed away, Bly and I flew up to Canberra, which by then was no longer the capital of Australia, demoted to a town supporting a population of only a few thousand, and from there we hired a heat-resistant van and made our way through the southern highlands in the stifling dark and along the coastal road, the last surviving coastal road leading up to the ruins of Sydney. For the road trip to the general store, Bly had placed the urn that held the ashes in the compartment between the two seats as if to remind us of the sole purpose of this trip. We sat in silence for most of it, moving like some experiment of loyalty through the swelter of moonless dark, the odd tourist bus passing south as we went. In those days mostly tourist buses passed up along the coastal road, full of elderly tourists from Antarctica travelling in air-conditioned comfort, guidebooks to the drowned ruins of the northern cities asleep on their laps. At some point Bly put her bare feet up on the dash.
Can you not do that?
Why?
Don’t know. It’s making me uncomfortable.
Not going strange on me, are you, Dad?
That’s old age. We all end up going strange.
We were about ten kilometres away from the general store as the sun broke the seal of the night, screaming its amber warning out over the eastern dark. By then, as one of the coastal midpoints between Canberra and Sydney which still sat dry above the rising seas, the general store had been converted to basic accommodation with a store and tourist information centre and was extravagantly called ‘Gateway to the Northern Ruins’. As the first sunlight grazed the road, we pulled into the car park where the old garage full of car shells and stacked tyres used to be. We parked in one of the oversized spots for buses. The general store and our old house were gone, replaced with a structure which was half born from the ground and protected by an enormous heat-resistant shield, umbrella shaped, capable of following the scalding arc of the sun from east to west. The cladding for the accommodation was painted the colour of rain, which was also, coincidentally, a colour suited to reflect the heat. The only thing from my past and the past of my father that had survived was the old phone booth by the edge of the road, still bearing the sign ‘The Last Phone Booth on Earth’. I got out of the car and limped towards the phone booth, the pain in my back making me bend into the shape of a smaller man as I held a flat palm up at the offensive questions put by the dawning sun.
Dad, what are you doing? We need to get inside.
I just want to take a look at it.
Bly hooded a coat over her face and followed me.
Why?
Your mother was in here once. She used the phone. Made two calls.
I opened the door to the booth. Inside it was as it had been, an old black dial phone with a receiver and a pay slot for coins that no longer existed. Her bare feet were probably not the last feet that had ever touched the concrete floor of the booth, but I told Bly that they were.
Who’d she call?
Don’t know. Maybe her father. Maybe someone else.
Her father? I thought he died when she was young.
No, he lived. Went north when everyone went south. Another thing you didn’t know about your mother? Doesn’t matter, he was dead in her mind.
We spent the day sleeping and woke at about four in the afternoon and prepared for the trip to the beach house, which we planned for the hour of gloaming between when the sun dropped into the ranges and when night came to nurse the earth after another day of excoriating heat. When Bly was not looking, I threw down one or two tablets more than the doctor had prescribed. In the restaurant we had, at five in the afternoon, what the proprietors insisted on calling breakfast but looked like a regular evening meal, and we packaged up some water and the urn and headed out to the van. At the beach house the old gate was there, rusted from sea spray and as stooped as I had become, and we both got out of the van and lifted it from where it had collapsed, an elbow of rusted gate dragging through the loamy gravel. We pushed it wide enough for the van to pass through. Then I eased along the gravelly slope down to the beach house, wind-buffed sand and blanched wires of saltbush and swamp oak along the gravel stretching all the way down to the point where the ocean had spaded away the road, halfway between the gate and the beach house. This war between land and water, waged for millions of years, was being won every day by the sea, an outcome that most conceded could not be reversed, could only be stayed by a truce that we had no part in negotiating. The beach house was gone. The only thing that remained was the brick chimneystack, the flue of which reached out above the wind-raked water like a hand looking to be saved. The bones of the jacaranda had somehow survived the relentless swell and currents, several branches poking over the wave chop, a hobbled petrification of a tree, branches in agony. In a few years or less the jacaranda would be under water or toppled to driftwood. I parked the van a safe distance back from where the gravel road had subsided into the ocean swell and we looked out through the windscreen.
That’s it? The jacaranda?
It is. I spoke to Smith yesterday. The Arc’s returning to Antarctica in late spring. Completing its orbit, Smith says.
So?
Just think about it. He’s your family. Your brother. Your nieces and nephews are there.
Dad, we’ve discussed this. I’m not going over it again.
I know. All I ask is that you think about it.
There was silence, time for thought, but I knew it was not the thing Bly was thinking about.
Then she said, Are we going to do this?
Yes, let’s go, I said, and handed the urn to Bly.
In the fading light we walked down towards Sandy Rip Point to a place where the rising seas had excavated the sand and saltbush back to bare rock, a hundred metres or more above the flat of the rock pools I had played in as a child. In a matter of decades the sea had cleaned back the sand to bare rock and gouged and smoothed new rock pools from the weaknesses in that rock. We came across a large rock pool full of sea urchins and silvery blue fish and red starfish as tense as hands and we stared at the life within it in silence, squinting to see through the darkening water. Our reflections in the pool of water, father and daughter rippling on the surface, became the place on which our eyes rested, where our
thoughts seemed to part for the moments afterwards.
Part of me wanted to ease my way into the pool and pick up an urchin and hold the beautiful certainty of it up to the doubting light. And in that moment I saw the child that I once was and, after all those years, still was to some extent. It came to me then, in my seventy-sixth year, that age was simply layers and layers of experience wrapped around the heart of childhood, and that the true wonderfulness of life was not so much to make a new layer – which was wonderful in itself – but to simply strip back those layers, open that old youthful heart to the world. But, as I knew all along, this rock pool was not and would not be a place for children. It was, along with the crippled hands of the jacaranda reaching above the water to be saved, along with the Hobart apartment where Smith and Bly were born and raised, destined to be the final resting place of the ashes of my beloved wife.
Dad, you can cry, you know?
Can I?
Just let it out.
The tears are there. They’re in me.
Then let them out, Dad, Bly said, her face shiny and puffed around the eyes.
This doesn’t sound like me, Bly. But I feel like she’s in them. She’s in every tear inside me.
Let it out, then. It’s good for you.
I’m not going to cry her out of me. What would be left of me after I do that? These tears are the only thing holding me together.
We both took turns in shaking some ashes into the rock pool and headed back along what remained of Sandy Rip Point, Bly holding my ageing bones and flesh up against the wind and the weight of the moment, serving as a crutch as April would have done for me if she was there walking beside me. We paused at the closest point to the jacaranda and each threw a handful of ashes out towards its branches. Then we made our way to the van and switched on the headlights, realising only then how dark it had become.
That night we made the trip back to the airport in Canberra. Bly, sensing the pain and tiredness in me, decided that she would drive and urged me to get some sleep as we headed west up through the Dividing Range, the moon large and turning the wreck of sandy plains into a bluish foamy white which seemed, as I stared out the windscreen, to be a prophecy of what this land would become at some time in the future. The heat of the night I could feel against the windscreen. In that part of the old country, it seemed to take the whole of night to metabolise the hot day that had passed, and even then, only an hour before the day began once more, there was a lingering burn on the chest of the night, leaving the night worn out and sleepless. As we passed along Lake George, a name and place marked by the absence of what it claimed to be, I felt more awake than I had felt in a long time, awake with an idea which I had read about in one of Bly’s links.