Em’s descriptions over the years have been good. It’s as if I’ve already registered the changes to the streetscape while I’ve been away. The two-storey Criterion Hotel is still there on the right with its red corrugated-iron roof and a sign for counter lunches between 12 and 2 o’clock. It’s a miracle fire hasn’t yet taken it like it has most of the old pubs in most of the towns in the valley. To the left is the post-office and the RSL club. Directly opposite me, running away to the south where the storm clouds are breaking up over the Border Range, is Railway Street with its grassed median strip and its line of jacarandas sewn at regular intervals all the way to the highway. Pride of place, at the start of the jacaranda avenue, a stone’s throw across the intersection at the dead centre of town, is The Springs’ war memorial: a large tapered sandstone obelisk with a sphere mounted at its top.
As I finish my pie and rise from the bench a man pushes open the swinging doors of the public bar of the Criterion and steps down onto the footpath. He is small and wiry and leans his elbow on the outside window-ledge as he stands in the verandah’s shade and looks out across the intersection towards me.
I crumple the brown paper bag and drop it in the rubbish bin and cross the road to the monument. I read the names of the dead. All our wars are there, most of our families. I begin walking around the memorial, half-looking for Jack’s name.
The man across the road straightens, then takes a few slow steps, moving to a verandah post where he repositions himself, leaning his shoulder hard against the timber, his arms folded, half of him in sunlight now. I lift my head to look at the ball of sandstone balanced upon the names of wars and men. I see then, for the first time, that it is not merely a sphere, but is planet Earth itself, hewn from local stone. The continents are smooth – Africa and America and Australia – but the oceans are rough, pocked by hundreds upon hundreds of light chisel strokes, the sculptor’s turbulent seas. He’s done well, I think, has captured the movement nicely, found the dark.
The man watching me steps out onto the street, no more hurried than the sun across the sky. I wait at the memorial as he ambles across the intersection, my back turned against his approach. When he steps up off the bitumen onto the grass and is just a few feet away, he stops. I can hear him breathing, but still I don’t turn. I stay facing the memorial until ignoring him becomes, itself, a challenge.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he says, an even drawl, no curiosity in it, something else. I turn and now that he’s closer I recognise him and know his daughter in the store has rung through to the pub. He was one of my father’s old drinking mates, used to drive trucks for the munitions factory and had been on committees around town. His wife ran the cent-sale out of the hall each year, my only memory of her a faded mosaic of floral dresses, thick ankles and musk perfume. His daughter in the shop was one of three girls, all older than Jack and me.
‘Reading the names,’ I say.
‘What do you want to do that for?’
‘Just interested.’
‘You . . . looking . . . for . . . anyone . . . in . . . particular?’
He says each word with an impossible slowness, eternity between them.
‘No. Just interested . . . Generally.’
It isn’t my answer he weighs, but me. He puts me on some set of scales and I know I am heavy. Whatever else he has on the other side. Does one ever know?
‘There are some bloody fine names up there, mate. Bloody fine names.’
He lets it sit, his judgement. I understand it. I feel it too in that hard moment. That I deserted both the town and my father. That my father lost both his boys. And now that I’m back it might be all too late. But I know this too: it isn’t my fault I’ve survived.
EIGHTEEN
I stand outside the front gate and see for the first time the garden beds Em described in her letters, notice that the rainwater gauge has been moved to the side fence, and that the mailbox is new, its copper numerals still untarnished. Em isn’t home yet, will still be at the hospital. I take a deep breath and make my way down the driveway beside the house.
I guess my gear will be in the garage, and sure enough when I swing its doors open to let in the light, I find it all packed away in a corner – a stack of taped cardboard boxes covered in dust and stained by years of possums. I slit the masking tape of the first box with my pocketknife and peel back the flaps. As I lift a mallet out a cascade of cockroach droppings falls off its head and patters back into the box. My chisels and pins are there too. My gloves and chalk and goggles. A decade-old dust mask disintegrates at my touch and the spare teeth I bought for my claw chisel just before I left are now rusted. I fold down the flaps of the box and step back out into the afternoon sun.
I blink and I blink until I see it.
My great unfinished block of sandstone is exactly where I’d left it down by the back fence. It is still cloaked by its tarpaulin – a frayed and weathered shroud, the colour leeched out of it now. I kick away the four bricks that have held down the corners of the tarp, their rectangular shapes pressed deep into the earth after the weight of so many years. I grasp the tarp-edge in both hands and pull it back in one quick movement.
His shoulder! The shock of that muscle and that bone struggling to get out, powerful still. Desperate, forceful. The layer of mould that has grown over the stone is a mere patina of age. Is nothing. That youthful, urgent shoulder still pushes forward, that exact moment of exertion I’d left all those years before. That primal creature, his unwearied head and neck, his rusted necklace, his thrusting vitality. I run my hand along his nape. I place my palms upon his spine and feel his grain beneath my fingers. I find chisel marks and know them as mine. I press my cheek against his flank, the sun on his back once again and know, now, it is done. Is complete. Was, in fact, perfect a long time ago.
A sculptor should know when to stop.
I climb the back fence, skirt the paddock of termite mounds, and enter the bush. I need to be immersed in it, loud around me. I crunch among the eucalypts, those same sounds, all the buzzing and rustling and crackling bark and leaf-litter underfoot just as I remembered it. As I dreamed it. Wrens flit between branches, flashes of blue. A willie wagtail drops to the ground for the briefest of moments before darting away in a flurry of wing and tail. Somewhere a kookaburra. I pull a eucalypt leaf, long and succulent, from a branch, break it and hold it to my nostrils, something of Jack in its scent.
A long, thin strip of bark peels off a gum beside me and crashes to the forest floor. I reach for the tree’s newly exposed flesh and find it soft on my fingertips. I trace the scribbly tracks hidden till now beneath the bark. Their different texture, the henna-dark trails of some unknown insect winding back and forth across the tree’s bare skin. Both the symmetry and the chaos of its pattern.
I come out again into the paddock of anthills, and the rusting cans lying scattered in the grass at the feet of the tallest of them. I run my hand over the mounds, all that compacted earth, the feel of them on my palm, crumbling now. The ten thousand suns these mud towers have stood beneath, the storms, the winds. Yes, all things collapse, I think, in time. Eroded by the sky’s mercy. And the earth’s compassion, and the breath of God who refuses to emerge from rock and soil, but abides there like truth itself, near inseparable. As near as I am likely to get.
There are holes where Jack and I practised our aim with his air rifle. I finger them, looking for pellets, but can’t get deep enough. I am working at one of the holes with my pocketknife in the falling light, all my concentration on the task, when I hear a sound behind me, a creak. I turn. And there at the fence, caught in my gaze, is Em.
She has a hand on the top of the timber fence-post, one foot on the bottom strand of barbed wire, and is utterly still. She is so small. The narrow shoulders I remember, the points of them as sharp as ever. Her wrist is thin. Her hair has greyed and is now cut short. But there is som
ething beyond the years, something in her face I see even from here, something in the stillness of her eyes. As if her body has been transformed and is composed of a new substance: some form of sadness, solid and formidable. We remain there for what seems an eternity, me standing motionless beside the anthill, Em frozen with her hand on the fence-post. This long act of recognition, of trying to fit so many things into their proper place.
The kookaburra sings out again from deep in the bush, breaking the stillness.
‘Hang on,’ I call and I move towards her, ‘let me . . .’
When I get to the fence I push my boot down on the bottom strand of wire, taking the tension from her. I pull the next strand up as far as I can, opening a gap. Em bends her back low and steps through, careful not to catch her uniform on a barb.
‘Thanks.’
She is strong, I realise as she straightens and we stand beside each other there in the afternoon field. It is me who feels small.
‘When did you arrive?’ she asks.
‘This morning.’
‘I would have left the key out if . . .’
But she knows it is unnecessary and lets it fall away.
‘Here you are, Bas,’ she says eventually. ‘Here you are.’
‘Here we are, Em,’ I answer, smiling. ‘Out in a paddock beyond right and wrong.’
Her eyes begin to shine, and I reach for her, and fold her to me and grasp her tight.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction.
In the 1990s, however, a United Nations peacekeeping force was established in Western Sahara, refugee camps arose on the border between Western Sahara and Algeria, and Algeria itself was beset by internal conflict. This novel has been informed by those events.
The letter on p. 247 was, with only minor changes, written by an Algerian family in 1996 after an event similar to the one depicted in this novel. The letter was taken from John W. Kiser’s The Monks of Tibhirine, published by St Martin’s Press Griffin. Much earlier, in 1918, a French priest named Charles de Foucauld, formerly a legionnaire, was killed at Tamanrasset in the remote Sahara. That priest is mentioned in this work, and some of Jack’s journal writings have been sourced from Foucauld’s letters, translations of which appear in Robert Ellsberg’s Charles de Foucauld, published by Orbis Books. Inspiration for the master carver of Washington National Cathedral and for dialogue in Chapter Thirteen, Part Three, was drawn partly from Marjorie Hunt’s excellent non-fiction work The Stone Carvers: Master Craftsmen of Washington National Cathedral, published by Smithsonian Books. The line ‘Out beyond ideas . . .’ on p. 286 is by Rumi, the translated version by Coleman Barks. The quotations from the Qur’an are from the English version by Marmaduke Pickthall in the Everyman’s Library edition.
For their great generosity, I am indebted to Sarah Bendall, Steve Foley, Fiona Guthrie, Rhyl Hinwood, Peter Jensen, Justin Malbon, Jenny-Maree Marshall, Simon Moran, Dirk Moses, Alicia Toohey and Natasha Ziebell. Any errors and all responsibility are, of course, my own.
At UQP Madonna Duffy, John Hunter, Rebecca Roberts and all the team have been unstintingly marvellous, for which I am grateful. And my special gratitude to my editor, Judith Lukin-Amundsen.
Most of all, my deepest thanks are to Alisa.
First published 2012 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.com.au
© 2012 Simon Cleary
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Closer to Stone / Simon Cleary
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