Closer to Stone

by Cleary, Simon

  I carve the writhing serpent beneath the saint’s foot. Its head is upturned. Even as it struggles to free itself, it wants to know the man who will subdue it.

  *

  When the fever breaks, and the long sleep which follows is over, Antonio comes with me to the workshop. He unlocks the studio door and disciplines himself not to look immediately. Rather he goes through his routine as if nothing has changed: flicks on the light switch, opens the windows for fresh air, puts on the jug of water. Finally he approaches his bench and the saint. Antonio leans forward to touch his limestone, moves around it, face close, before bringing his weathered left hand up to rest across his chin. I watch as he stands there weeping softly, until he turns and kisses me silently, one cheek then the other.

  *

  It’s close now. Night and day, I am sanding by candlelight, with a dozen large beeswax candles on stands of varying heights. Sophe moves in the warm glow and I lean in to her. The line of her neck. The stillness of her head, its serenity. The down on her arms glowing from the hammam. Her breast rising and falling with her heart.

  When I am done for the night I wet my forefinger and thumb with spittle and snuff the flames. There is hiss and smoke, and the wax is warm and sweet. Sophe darkens, candle by candle, until she loses all definition. The walls of the workshop are stark, and the windows appear like tombstones in the night. Is this the blood-room once again, that same dark?

  I close the workshop door and lock it. Mount my bike. Feel the cold on my cheek as I coast down the hill.

  *

  ‘Remember,’ Antonio says at my side, ‘if you any good, you know when to stop. A bad carver, he can’t help himself. He work until he loses everything: the light, the dark, the breath of the stone. A bad carver, he can kill a piece.’

  In the candlelight I begin again to remember my childhood. I am drawn back beyond the workshop, and Antonio, and the Beards. Beyond Sophe even. Back and back. At the base of the sandstone cliffs, there are shards of sandstone, purple and grey, bigger than my small hands. Jack leaps from boulder to boulder ahead of me. ‘Here,’ he calls out, ‘here’s one you’ll like, Bas.’ And he skips back towards me, holding up a piece of quartz. My father’s voice is there too, behind me, rolling deep along the cliff-face, and I stop and wait for him to join us. The quartz is sparkling as Jack turns it over and over, catching the light. My father laughs, and his footsteps are close, and I see his shape from out of the corner of my eye. But the hand that reaches out and rests on my shoulder is not his. I feel the warm hand, and tilt my neck so my cheek is pressed against it, that soft hand of my mother.

  *

  Finally I wipe the last dust from her cheekbones and her nose, and finish her with water, smoothing her flesh with carborundum, softening her, gently rubbing her close, trickling water from a watering can across her hair, down her face, off her shoulderblades.

  ‘Is good,’ Antonio says.

  He cups her cheek gently in the palm of his hand, and lingers, looking at her.

  ‘Is beautiful, your angel. Very beautiful.’

  He feels the back of her head, and follows the long folds of her robes with his fingers, feeling their texture.

  ‘Is bad luck to touch an angel’s wings, you know, when you finish?’

  I nod.

  I feel something like satisfaction, perhaps even pride, but it is only passing. This is not Sophe, I know that. Know, ultimately, that the moment of my statue’s completion is also the moment of my failure.

  ‘Now,’ he says, turning to me. ‘Now what?’

  I shrug. I am exhausted.

  ‘Now your brother? Are you ready to carve your brother?’

  I see him. I see me. I see my hands on his shoulders, Jack on the edge of a desert precipice. The beauty, he whispers, the beauty. I see my brother there at his mountain abyss, turning, that longing in his eyes.

  ‘No,’ I groan. ‘No.’

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Am I going to lose you again?’ Antonio says when the bombs go off in Bali.

  How can I know? I feel nothing of the rush I felt after the planes, none of the same inexplicable excitement. But if I have to answer him, I will break.

  I sit with Gianni and Antonio and watch the bodies go home. Medical evacuation planes flying into Darwin and Perth and Sydney, my cities. So many interviews with so many relatives of the dead. That strange accent on the television which Gianni tells me is mine. And journalists moving between hospital beds, interviewing doctors and nurses and embassy officials. I watch it all, every interview, with every survivor.

  Em, I know, will be watching from the living room back at The Springs.

  Their faces are broken by grief. New lines cracking open before our eyes. But they have each other, I see, the survivors and relatives of the Bali bombing.

  There’s solidarity, and in some of them another quality. Some aura, beyond either anger or acceptance. Something gained. That’s how it strikes me – that something has been received by them. And they carry it for us whether they want to or not. We recognise a part of ourselves when we look at them, that which they bear for us. Perhaps that is all we see.

  *

  A girl in her early twenties is interviewed, the sister of a surfer who’s been killed. Though exhausted, she is composed. The journalist’s questions are respectful, just enough to draw the young woman on, and she does her duty, calmly expressing her family’s grief to the world. Then, suddenly, she snaps and her composure turns to rage. The trigger isn’t the visceral horror she is revisiting, but a slip of the journalist’s tongue – her brother’s name is not John, but Josh. The woman is transformed, unleashed: her brother’s name is the one detail that matters. The only thing that matters. If that is wrong, if his name is not acknowledged, if history won’t accord her brother that small dignity, then nothing matters. Nothing. The dead man Josh’s sister sets herself upon the journalist in primal anger – the enormity of the world there before her, all of its insensitivity, how small her brother might become, her single duty to protect him from that.

  *

  ‘I’m going back,’ I say to Antonio.

  When he doesn’t turn I switch off the transistor radio on the bench, and repeat it.

  ‘I’m not deaf yet,’ he says.

  He continues polishing the stone before him, his squinting eyes closer to the piece than when he’d first taken me in two years ago.

  ‘I’m sorry, Antonio.’

  He takes a deep breath and his shoulders straighten and he swings around to face me.

  ‘Is good, Bas. Is right.’

  He clasps me to himself.

  ‘And your angel, Bas?’

  ‘She is yours.’

  SIXTEEN

  I land in Sydney, its soft sandstone cliffs crumbling into the water. The beauty and the sadness of that. There’s anxiety too, not so very different from how it felt when I touched down in Africa all those years ago, though in reverse. This foreign land I’m returning home to. Do I have anything to declare? No. No, I am far too tentative, unsure still about what I’ve learned. Everything feels unsettled, and if not exactly false, then not yet true: the shuddering vibrations of the carousel as I lift my bag off its dark-curving scales, the slippery bank notes from the Bureau de Change, the different smell of the exhaust fumes in the street. My accent is all around me, but how much the customs officials and shopkeepers and radio announcers and hotel receptionists are a mirror of myself I can’t yet tell.

  I hitch my way up the inland route, so many eucalypts rushing past after so long. Forests and wildlife corridors and paddock boundaries filled with them. They bring flashes of Africa. All those desert towns with their men hacking off branches with crude axes for fuel and their women stripping the leaves to dry. Swathes of ringbarked gum trees appear on either side of the highway, stretching for miles, an honour
guard of skeletons in the midday sun. But I can’t think like that.

  ‘What about those Bali bombers?’ I ask the truckie who drives me through the middle hours of the night.

  ‘Pricks,’ he says, his thick tattooed arms hugging the steering wheel high above the road. He has a moustache and wears a cap from one of the rugby league teams whose name I’ve forgotten.

  ‘They call it a holy war,’ I say.

  ‘Well, they can get stuffed. Those kids who were killed were just minding their own business, enjoying themselves. End of year footy tours. Christ! So you can get yourself bombed just for having a drink these days! Could have been you or me.’

  ‘. . . you or me . . .’ I repeat, turning the words over in my mouth.

  ‘Fuck oath.’

  ‘Been over there yourself?’

  ‘Was thinking about it, but not now. Too dangerous. Better off staying home. Best country on earth, anyway, ours. God’s own.’

  ‘You reckon?’ I say, not meaning anything by it, just tired. But he turns his head to face me.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  It’s some sort of challenge, but I can’t remember how to read it. If ever I knew.

  ‘My brother was killed.’ I answer.

  ‘Bali?’

  ‘No, Africa. You wouldn’t have heard about it. Ten years ago. Same thing, though – Islamic fanatics. Before it all got really crazy.’

  ‘Fuck. Sorry to hear that, mate.’

  He puts a country music disc into the CD player as the truck rumbles on. It is a peace, of sorts. An hour or so later he pulls into a truck layby.

  ‘I need some sleep. Thirty minutes, that’s all.’

  He climbs into the bunk at the rear of the cabin.

  I step down from the truck and out onto the road. The headlights of another semi are growing in the south, though the breeze is against it so I can’t yet hear the engine. Leaving the bitumen I lever myself over a fence and into a paddock. The grass is shin-high, and though the moon is old, I can still make out the shapes of cattle beneath a pepperina in the far corner. One of the beasts detects me on the wind, rises to its feet, and groans. The truck from the south roars past. The Hereford looks across at me after it has gone, but is soon reassured. It drops its massive head, and folds its legs back to the ground. The sound of the truck becomes a purr in the distance, growing fainter.

  Only now do I look up at the sky and see the Southern Cross. I close one eye, reach out my arm and trace its shape with my forefinger. I see the two pointers. I see familiar Orion and his star-studded belt. I think, what else? I say to myself: look, imagine. I close both eyes tight. I count to a hundred and when I open them the night is a blur. Before the stars settle back into place I see dust storms swirl around the Milky Way. I see trees and tents and towers. I see camel heads and serpents’ eyes. Boulders and burning bushes. I see human figures and I see angels’ wings. I start to hum, some song I can’t yet remember.

  The driver honks his horn, and I make my way back to the truck.

  *

  The last of my lifts is down the Great Dividing Range from Toowoomba with some students on their way to Brisbane. They want to talk but I have to save myself. It is still morning. Their little car hurtles down the range, gathering speed, passing slower vehicles. The range was so high before I left, so imposing back then. We pass Table Top and its crown of swaying grass, before they drop me off at the rest stop on the western outskirts of The Springs.

  The three old picnic tables set into their concrete slabs in the shade of the camphor laurels are exactly as I remember them. A young couple is changing a baby on one of the tables. I pull my hat closer over my head in case they recognise me – an irrational fear given how long I’ve been away and that they’re probably just passing through themselves anyway. I sling my bag over my shoulder, and set off on the thirty-minute walk to the cemetery.

  How much returning is there in a life? Though this isn’t exactly a homecoming – I’ve denied too many too much for that, including Em. Especially Em. And because my father has already died, there can be no prodigal son. I think of Michelangelo’s life in Rome, and his great longing to return home to Florence. How when he did, it was too late, and it was just his body that was carted back along a narrow highway in a covered wagon. Of the two of us, Jack left first, but I stayed away longer. It may not yet be too late for me, I think. One can think too much.

  The clouds are thickening, folding one upon the other, much earlier in the day than normal. This is something I know without needing to remember. A breeze starts up, blowing into my face. There are no cars on the back road, so I walk down the middle of the bitumen, the table-drains half full from recent rain. I take my shoes off at the weir, wade through, then dry my feet with my socks on the other side. I pass three or four small farms, their spring vegetables already in, then, getting closer, I reach the overgrown oval, and the intersection and the blue road sign pointing to the cemetery.

  The wind is gusting now. I know exactly where to go. I pass through the cemetery gate and step between the names of all the other local families towards mine.

  I hear a tinkling, but it vanishes in the strengthening wind. I step forward again. Another tinkling, closer. I turn – as glass sprays across the surface of a tomb, the crystals still settling. A vase shattered by a gust, and its plastic flowers spread like votive fingers on the sandstone. Then, there before me, are my three graves. Mum in the centre, Jack and my father either side of her. How little space they occupy in the earth.

  I read my father’s inscription, the words Em has selected for history: John Adams. 1937–2001. Husband of Catherine, deceased, and Miriam. Father of Jack, deceased, and Sebastian. That surprise. I haven’t expected to read my own name in the stone, our stone. Because I recognise the grain and the colour immediately, and know not just that it’s come from our quarry, but know exactly which ridge it’s been cut from, this last stone. Then, below the facts, carved by the hand of a local mason I’m sure to know: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing is a field. I’ll meet you there.

  I kneel on the ground in the whistling wind. A pee-wee blows out of the branch of a bunya pine and careens past, riding the mad gust. For a long time I kneel. I watch a trail of ants make its way into a crack in Jack’s gravestone as the sky darkens. Big, heavy drops of rain fall hard on my back, then stop. I take the statuette of Sophe from my bag, and stand her on Jack’s grave, positioning her in the middle of the ant trail. I watch their confusion, see them bump into each other, turn, rise on their legs, and scramble over each other before finding some order and detouring around Sophe to continue their march out of the rain.

  When kneeling grows uncomfortable I shift position and sit on the grass, leaning back on my arms. Sheets of rain hang like silver curtains in the south. I eat a sandwich I bought from a café in Toowoomba, then lie on the ground, using my bag as a pillow. I look up at the great brooding sky above me. Its dark underbelly doesn’t split but passes slowly overhead, and I am washed in purple light.

  SEVENTEEN

  When I wake I’m hungry again. I rise, and sling my bag across my shoulder. I follow the road where it crosses back over the creek, then climb the bank to the town.

  In the railway store the cigarettes are displayed exactly as they always have been, the sweets beneath the counter the same collection of cobbers and bullets and jubes I knew as a kid. There is even a handwritten list of prices pressed between countertop and glass like there always was, and I wonder how much the cost of a sausage roll or a bacon-and-egg burger has risen in the years I’ve been away.

  ‘Just a pie, thanks,’ I say to the woman behind the counter. She is big and fleshy and seems to lean, rather than sit, on the stool beneath her body.

  ‘That storm was close wasn’t it?’ she says cheerfully. ‘Not that we need any more rain. The country’s looking pretty good, isn�
��t it?’

  ‘It’s green alright.’

  She peers at me and furrows her brow, before turning to the pie oven and sliding open the door. She reaches in with a pair of tongs, lifts a pie out and pops it into a brown paper bag as she must have done a thousand times.

  ‘Sauce with that?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She slips a plastic tub of tomato sauce into the bag. Before I’d left The Springs she would have poured it over the pie out of a bottle, and it would have been no extra cost.

  ‘You’re Jack Adams’s brother, aren’t you?’ she says, and I realise she’s the same storekeeper who ran the shop ten years ago.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  The silence that follows seems to suck all air and space and time into it, a void I’m powerless to fill. I can do nothing but wait for whatever is at the bottom.

  ‘Terrible what happened,’ she says, eventually.

  I wonder what the town knows, what it imagines. What story my father told about Jack and about me. Whether it was true what Em had said, that he didn’t blame me. When a full minute passes I take my pie and thank her, and quietly make for the door.

  ‘Just terrible,’ she says again, a blessing of sorts as I’m moving away.

  I nod and step from the doorway down onto the footpath.

  ‘Good to see you, Sebastian,’ she calls out after me.

  I sit on the wooden bench out the front of the store. The timber is worn smooth from years of people buying their flavoured milk and drinking it there under the awning. I lived an entire childhood in The Springs, and never sat on that bench: it was owned by others, Jack and his mates, their throne. I look out now at the town.