Where There's Smoke

by Black Inc.

  Retrieving a bucket and trowel from the shed, Paul began mixing up tile glue. He half filled the bucket with water from the garden hose and shook some adhesive in from the bag. Some of the grey powder stayed on the lip of the bucket and he tapped the side with the toe of his boot to get it in. He used the trowel to work it all into the water and kept adding the powder until he had it right. When the batch of glue was ready, he took the bucket inside and put it on the bathroom floor.

  Paul set up a stringline across the floor and then he began tiling. He worked his way out from the floor waste and by the time he was too tired and hungry to keep going he’d tiled three-quarters of the floor. Trowelling the last of the glue onto the floor, he set another couple of tiles and bedded them in with the heel of his palm. He got up slowly; his back ached. He rubbed at the patches of glue that had begun to dry on his knees, and saw that he’d almost worked himself into a corner. He took a long step out over the tiles and stood in the hallway looking back into the bathroom feeling pleased with himself. It was getting there.

  In the kitchen he washed his hands and made a sandwich, and from there he went straight to the spare room. The moment he sat at the desk he opened the notebook and wrote: I do not know what to tell her.

  *

  They were at the kitchen table. Paul had finished his dinner, but Sarah was still labouring over hers.

  ‘Not hungry?’ he said.

  She put her knife and fork on her plate and looked up at him. ‘I don’t feel like eating,’ she said, pushing her plate into the middle of the table.

  He picked up both of the plates and took them to the sink.

  ‘Paul. Why aren’t you working?’

  ‘I have been,’ he said as he came back to the table.

  ‘At school, I mean. Why aren’t you working at school?’

  ‘I needed a break,’ he said, rubbing his thumb over his lips. ‘I just needed a break.’

  ‘Why do you need a break? Did something happen? If there’s something I should know you need to tell me now.’

  ‘I nearly hit one of the kids.’

  She stared at him, unable to form words.

  ‘I nearly did,’ he said, as though the emphasis took something away from the intent. ‘One of the Year 12 boys had a story that he wanted me to read – something for the school magazine. A couple of weeks ago I gave them an exercise, just a short exercise for them to complete in class and this one kid kept writing. He made a story out of it and he wanted me to read the story.’

  Sarah got up from the table. ‘What was it about?’

  ‘It was about a teacher who couldn’t teach anymore because he realised that he knew nothing.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well’ – he drew together the logic for her – ‘I thought the story was about me.’

  ‘About you?’

  ‘I thought it was about me. It made sense that way. I asked the kid who he was writing about and he said he’d made it all up. And then he laughed in my face.’ Paul got up from the table and went and leaned against the sink. ‘The kid just laughed. I could see that he didn’t really mean to and that it didn’t really mean anything, but I couldn’t stand to hear him laugh. I did want to hit him – I did. I had my hand up to do it but I didn’t. I swear that I didn’t.’

  Sarah sat looking at him like she did not know him at all.

  Paul turned towards the window; it was getting dark outside. ‘I was the one who decided I needed to get away from it. That was my decision.’

  In the morning Paul got ready to tile the walls. He drew up the levels, set the stringlines and laid the first row of tiles. He decided to let them sit for a while before working his way up the walls. Out in the shed he got some lengths of timber, and from the spare room he got a couple of the boxes. He held the timber against the face of the tiles and pushed the boxes up against it. The tiles probably weren’t going anywhere but he wanted to make sure of it.

  He made coffee and took it into the spare room where he sat and read from one of the boxes: fragments of poems, scraps of stories. He opened the notebook again and wrote: He waited even though he didn’t know what he was waiting for. Then he scratched the words out and pulled the sheet from the notebook. He looked at it and then tore it in half, then in half again and dropped it into the bin beside the desk.

  He was still at the desk when Sarah came home for lunch. ‘How’s the bathroom?’

  ‘The first row is on the walls,’ Paul said. ‘They need to dry for a while. The rest of it should follow on without too much trouble.’

  ‘I hope so. I don’t like to shower at Ray and Pam’s.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not our home.’

  ‘It’s nice of them to let us.’

  ‘It is,’ she admitted. ‘But it will be nicer when we can shower at home. Will you get more done today?’

  ‘Not sure,’ Paul said. ‘It needs to dry. It all takes time.’

  ‘Maybe we should get someone to finish it.’

  He got straight up. ‘I’ll finish it,’ he said as he left the room. He mixed another batch of glue, took it into the bathroom and got to work fixing the tiles to the wall. He stayed with one section of wall and the rows built up quickly. He stepped back, sat on the edge of the bath and watched as the tiles began to shift under their own weight. Five or six of them fell and broke. ‘Damn it,’ he said, the words coarse between his teeth. ‘Damn it.’

  Sarah came in and found Paul kneeling on the bathroom floor with broken pieces of tile in his hands.

  ‘I can’t do it.’ He looked up at her. ‘I can’t do it. I just can’t.’

  ‘You can, Paul. You’re almost there.’

  He let go of the pieces of tile. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t go back. I don’t want to.’

  She looked at him for a moment and then got down on the floor and held him.

  Late the next day, he was on his knees rubbing grout into the spaces between the tiles when Sarah put a tin of paint down in the doorway.

  ‘I think it should be mauve,’ she said.

  ‘What should be mauve?’

  ‘Our bedroom. I think it should be mauve.’

  He stopped rubbing the grout in and dropped the sponge into the bucket of grey water. He got up. ‘What’s wrong with the way it is now?’

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What colour is it now?’

  Paul shrugged and looked away.

  ‘See. You don’t even know what we’ve got now.’

  ‘We don’t have to change the colour just because I don’t know what it’s called.’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ Sarah said. ‘We don’t have to change it just because you don’t know what it is called. We have to change it for a million other reasons. It’s drab. It’s empty. It’s lifeless.’

  He rubbed his hands together. Dry grout fell from his palms onto the bathroom floor.

  ‘How long would it take you to repaint the bedroom?’ she asked.

  Paul looked at her and grinned. ‘As long as it takes.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘I’m not coming back until the walls are mauve.’

  ‘What do you mean? Coming back from where?’

  ‘My sister’s. The other night I told her how things are at home with you and I said I might want to get away for a while.’

  Sarah went up to the bedroom and pulled a suitcase out from under their bed. Paul heard her opening and closing doors and drawers. He was mixing the last batch of tile grout when she came back down and stopped outside the bathroom. She had the suitcase in her hands.

  ‘You’re really going?’

  ‘I am,’ she said and walked out.

  Paul heard the car pull away from the kerb. He stood looking down at the tin of paint and the grey sediment under his nails.

  Paul spent the night reading from the boxes, and in the morning he began taping them up. At first he ran two lengths of tape over the lids of the boxes, sealing them tightly, but when he saw that he was running
out of tape he just tucked the flaps in and left it at that. As soon as one box was up in the cupboard he reached for another, and another. But then he stopped. The remaining boxes were spread out around him. There were so many boxes, too many. He took down the ones from the cupboard and then carried them all outside and he dumped them on the footpath.

  He sat on the front verandah running a length of dowel around inside the paint tin, which sat between his feet. Sarah drove by, parked a short way down the street and walked back along the footpath. Her gaze shifted from the pile of boxes to Paul. ‘Take a look,’ he said, nodding his head towards the open door.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ Sarah said and she stayed on the footpath, her pale fingers holding onto the railing as she talked about her sister’s children – his niece and nephew – and how they were a joy to be around. ‘They are lovely,’ she insisted. ‘I know that you’ve said they are loud and …’

  ‘Energetic.’

  She laughed. ‘Yes. That’s it: they are lovely and energetic.’

  Paul pulled the dowel from the tin and let the paint run back into it in loose strings. ‘Didn’t Jackson Pollock make a fortune doing this?’

  ‘It’s just a bedroom,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t have to be a work of art. It’s just something that needs to be done. And once it’s done …’

  He waited to hear what she was going to say, but she did not finish. ‘Once it’s done?’ he asked, but she just smiled and shook her head at him. She leaned across the railing to kiss him and he moved towards her, his back and knees aching from all that he’d already done.

  After Sarah had gone Paul went inside to get his notebook. It feels like I have been waiting all my life for this moment. She is coming home, he wrote and he was going to keep writing until he had it all just right – the way her fingers held the railing as she leaned towards him; the soft comfort of her lips; the way she smiled, shyly, as she turned away. He was going to keep writing until he knew what it felt like to have the rest of his life ahead of him.

  RINGROAD

  ALEX MILLER

  Now that the time for such a visit is already in the past, it seems that I really am going to visit Vienna at last and will be able to walk around the Ringroad as my hero, Sigmund Freud, once did every morning for his constitutional. Richard talked me into the trip. He was so pressing and insistent that despite my reluctance to commit myself to such a journey I had no alternative in the end but to tell him I would go. I was afraid he would be ill if I resisted him any longer. ‘Be sure you do go,’ he said as he turned to leave my office. ‘I want to see the ticket.’ I have been putting off a visit to Vienna for thirteen years and I had no substantial reasons left to offer him for not going. In three years I shall retire. I shall go alone of course. I have lived alone since Annabelle left me nearly seven years ago. After my wife left me I made several unsuccessful attempts to form new relationships with women. But there were too many difficulties. So to settle the problem of sex once and for all, last year I decided I would remain celibate. It has not been as difficult as I had thought it was going to be. Indeed it has been easier than giving up smoking, which is something I managed to do more than twenty years ago. In getting rid of my beloved Dunhill pipe and throwing out my last packet of fragrant Erinmore I suffered greatly and still consider giving up smoking to have been the one truly heroic renunciation of my life. And I’m not a young man. I’m in my fifty-seventh year and have had time and opportunity for heroism. It was Annabelle, my wife, who made me give it up. She disliked the smell of it so much that she began to find me repulsive. It was either my wife or my pipe. I struggled for quite a while to resolve this dilemma, but in the end I had to decide for Annabelle and against the Dunhill. No more sitting alone in my study reading and puffing away on my pipe. The brief affair I indulged in with one of my honours students following this act of self-deprivation, the event indeed that triggered my wife’s abrupt departure from our home, ended by causing me a great deal of grief and unpleasantness in addition to the long-term suffering associated with the loss of my wife, Annabelle, whom I loved and whom I still love and believe I shall always love.

  After Annabelle disappeared into the hinterland of North Queensland with an Aboriginal stockman – an unlikely story but true nevertheless – I decided my life would be easier if I dispensed entirely with the problem of women and sex. Beginning new relationships is complicated and difficult for a man of my age. I know that Simone de Beauvoir has assured us that men’s bodies don’t matter and that women don’t make love to men for their physique. But I’m not sure that I’m convinced by Beauvoir. I am, to be perfectly frank, rather overweight and am sensitive about my appearance. I know I do not repel women and from time to time one of them will even demonstrate an eagerness to get to know me. I have never made the first move in any relationship, whether with a man or a woman. In fact I find it difficult to respond even when a friendly overture is made towards me. The desire to have friends and lovers is not lacking. It is just that the reality is always so much more complicated and difficult than one had ever imagined it might be as one lay in one’s bed alone in the middle of the night dreaming of a companionable companion. The truth is, I would never have married Annabelle or had the affair that ended my marriage if both women had not been as insistent as they were.

  It is difficult for me to imagine anyone finding me attractive. I’m six foot three in the old measure. I don’t know what that is in centimetres. I have narrow and rather rounded shoulders. Some might say that this is from all the years of poring over books, but the truth is I’ve always had narrow rounded shoulders. I had them in primary school. I think I was born with them. From the outside looking on, that was me. I also have very thin legs and a rather distinctive manner of walking. My distinctive manner of walking began when I was thirteen and was in my first year at a new secondary school. During that year I grew almost twelve inches and became a stranger to myself. I ceased, during that year, to be the person I had always been. In order to compensate for my immense height and in an attempt to return to my old familiar self, I began to effect a crouch and to develop an extra long stride. I’m sure that ergonomic engineers have tabulated the optimum stride length for a given height or length of leg and that this optimum is usually arrived at unconsciously by the normal walker. I set out to override the unconscious optimum and to exceed it in order to bring myself down a little. The unforeseen result of the combined crouch and longer stride was that as I walked I bobbed up and down, as if I were running on the spot in neck-deep water, or was imitating an English comedian whose name I can’t at this moment recall. I also developed a fixed stare, which was no doubt due to the concentration required from me to override the natural and unconscious rhythm of my body. My parents were already sensitive to the fact that I had suddenly become six inches taller than they, and were so alarmed by my new way of walking, the purpose of which I had not thought to explain to them, that I abandoned the slight crouch almost at once. I have, however, retained the lengthened stride to this day and it would probably require many probing sessions of psychoanalytic therapy for me to recover my repressed optimum stride length. But would it be worth it at my age? I do wonder, however, if this determined repression of my own normal walking style may not have had other effects on my personality of which I have remained unaware. But the intention in writing this autobiographical account is to tell the strange story of my visit to Vienna, and is not to assemble ideas about my attractiveness or lack of it for the opposite sex, or indeed for my own sex, or how it is that I walk in a way that draws upon me the curious stares of complete strangers and the ridicule of young students, who imitate me, some with such virtuosity that I have once or twice over the years imagined I saw my companion-self bobbing along ahead of me through the cloisters.

  I didn’t play sports when I was a boy and have always felt this to have been the cause of a certain weakness in my character. I have a considerable stomach. I struggle to control it. It varies in size as the struggle varies in int
ensity, larger as my morale sinks and I abandon the attack and smaller as I gather my resolve and assert the firm discipline of a new campaign. I believe my stomach is with me, however, for good now and will be buried with me when I go. Although I would never admit as much even to my closest acquaintance, since Annabelle’s departure, my stomach has become a substitute for the friend and companion of my bed. I caress it when I am lying alone at night under the sheets and I often find myself confiding little confidences to it as one would to an intimate. My standing silhouette resembles rather the silhouette of that great Frenchman, General de Gaulle. I don’t believe I need be ashamed of this.

  When I decided on celibacy, as a precaution I told my students it was a principle of mine never to make friends with students. So as to preserve my objectivity in the matter of marks, I said, for how could one bring oneself to give a poor mark, no matter how deserved, to a dear friend? Or, and I did not add this, a lover. But of course when you are faced with a group of ten or twelve fresh new honours students at the beginning of the year, some of whom are young women with golden skin and who gaze at you as if they are already in love with you, to renounce the possibility, the dream and illusion even, of friendship is by no means an easy thing to do with conviction. I will say however that I managed it for seven years. As I said, giving up sex has not been as difficult as giving up smoking. As the reasons for this are not obvious I shall go into them in some detail later. For now I must cut to the chase, as Richard always says.

  Richard is the dean of our faculty. He is a decent, honourable man and not at all like deans usually are. He likes to read and even to write and was much happier as a professor, but he allowed himself to be talked into the promotion. So now he has become an administrator and no longer has time for reading or writing and this has made him sad. He is one of the new managers and it does not suit him. He is deeply alone and unhappy among the accountants and marketing people and pro-vice-chancellors and the other deans. Richard has become spiritually isolated at the prime of his life. I feel sorry for him. But there is nothing I can do to help him. Our situations are so very different that we have lost our old intimacy and we can no longer share a joke without a certain sadness coming over us, a nostalgia for the old days when he was at liberty to laugh at himself.