Lot 185 was The Aspire. Its selling point was its fifty per cent glass frontage. ‘Rooms Filled With Natural Light!’ the brochure said. Fat Frank had come up with that himself. That’s why he was the site manager and Antonio wasn’t anymore, because he could cut the costs of building a place in half by replacing bricks with much cheaper materials like glass and then he could work out how to sell it to the customer like it was something they wanted: ‘Rooms Filled With Natural Light!’
That kind of shit was always bringing Antonio down but it was Lot 185 that finally undid him after forty years in the construction industry. If he was being honest with himself maybe he’d admit that it was really something that started a long time before, maybe even as far back as those early days on the factory floor with Nico, maybe even further back than that.
It might have started back in the Nissen huts at the Villawood Migrant Hostel. Nico had it down, even then – the ability to stand larger than other people. Nico had arrived in Australia not too long before Antonio, but he knew about things like where to look for a job and what land to build on and how you talk to Australians.
The weight of the heat inside the huts had drawn everyone to the yard, even in winter when it was damp and mouldy and the whole place smelled like shit. There were English and Irish and Italian and Polish and German and Greek, entire villages from places he’d never been to just materialised like that, out of nowhere. Nico walked the perimeter and Antonio walked with him. Nico knew exactly when Antonio’s mind wandered off to some dark place. When that happened, Nico touched him silently on the upper arm. They walked. Nico brought him back.
Everyone knew who Nico was, of course. But on the day Nico died he was fat and graceless and no one wanted to listen to what he had to say. They laughed at him when he walked across the construction site. Nico had become a nobody and part of that nobodiness had rubbed off on Antonio.
If he could he’d ask Nico to forgive him but it was probably far too late for that. Antonio took another of the painkillers his doctor gave him out of his pocket and swallowed it with a gulp of his whisky. He kicked a loose piece of concrete on the ground with one of his crutches. He had that tightrope sensation again, that terrible hunger for air. He crouched down slowly and picked up the loose pieces of cement lying there. One by one, he threw them at the newly fitted windows and watched the glass crack in spirals.
Nico showed up beside him. He looked light, unbroken. He had a bucket of concrete chips and they threw them together at that house, at the eaves on the roof, at the gold plate they had started applying on the stair railings. Nico shook his head. He’d survived the Allied forces bombing his village three times, had taken a boat to the other side of the world, worked twelve hours a day, made something of himself. And now he’d come undone.
He said, ‘You know, I was everything they told me to be, I did the jobs they told me to do, never complained, worked hard, stopped speaking my own language, looked the other way when they called me names. Now, everything is different, what a waste. They laugh at me when I speak.’
In some part of his mind, Antonio had known what would happen if he tried to lift Nico that day after his fall on Lot 185, but it was too late to stop all that from happening now, and it was only just the beginning.
3.
7:30 a.m. Friday. Clare walked because she liked to walk. It didn’t matter that it took her an hour from Surry Hills to Newtown. She liked looking. The women in tight skirts went barefoot on Devonshire and Belvoir, carrying their heels home from the nightclubs on Oxford Street. She walked under the overhangs of shops and looked through their windows at full-skirted 60s dresses, bright red plastic underwear, posters about the hazards of cigarette butts finding their way into drain pipes, people who spent hours in coffee shops reading newspapers and books. She was born to these city streets, even though she wasn’t really born in the city; she was made to be born here and when she walked these streets she told herself that she was.
Someone who was really born in the city – her mother. Clare knew exactly which terrace she had lived in but she could never picture her there. When her mother described the home she grew up in, it was always a dull and grey and silent image in which she was in a threadbare pinafore next to her stony, ruddy-faced English mother, no smiles to be seen.
Now, someone had picked out the details of the window frames and guttering in a bright blue. On the bottom balcony there were long rectangular pots of herbs and on the top-floor balcony they had a wrought-iron set of two red chairs and a table with a giant Buddha face hanging from the wall behind. Walking past there at night, Clare could often see the shadows of people behind the windows. Behind the front-door grates they had bicycles with baskets on the front like the ones women in French movies ride to the markets. Her father still called her mother ‘Rose of the Hills’ when he was feeling affectionate, as though she was from some far-flung mountain village and not here, not impossibly hip Surry Hills.
Clare stepped onto Cleveland Street; a dog barked somewhere. She was going to be relaxed today. She had resolved not to get uptight about anything. Last night she had called home several times to speak to her little brother. At twenty-three Francis was not really little anymore, but Clare could not seem to think of him as anything but a perpetual adolescent. Perhaps it was the seven-year gap between them, or perhaps it was because he was so damn immature – either way, in her mind, he was always in primary school, always in school shorts with his socks pulled up to his knees. Her father’s retirement party – why should she even need to remind him that it was this Saturday? In the house in which Francis still lived? She turned onto City Road. Not her problem. She was not going to worry about anything today.
In Parramatta, right now, her father would be sitting on a chair on his concrete front lawn, arms folded across his chest. Her mother would be sitting on a chair on the front lawn of their neighbour Lucy’s perpetually half-built house, drinking tea and eating macaroons and joining in a running commentary on everyone that walked down the street. Her brother would still be out of it, getting over the night before.
Here, walking down King Street, things were quiet. The only people out were small men with big dogs and women with dreadlocks and yoga mats. King Street! You could lose yourself here somewhere between a second-hand clothes shop and a Thai restaurant. She liked to read all the posters on the light poles as she walked by them. There were share houses that needed a sixth roommate and Socialist Alliance meetings about freeing the refugees and bands full of boys with long faces and pouty lips. ‘Interesting,’ her mother always said in response to everything she saw here. It was her mother’s favourite word, interesting.
At the bookshop she unlocked the door, turned the sign around to ‘Yes, We’re Open’ and switched on the lights. The first few customers drifted into the shop around nine. Always, it was middle-aged women at this time of day. They came in and ran their fingers up and down the spines of books and carefully considered their covers. She knew this kind of woman. They were looking for the book that would define who they were, the book of their life. It wasn’t there. She could save them the time and money by telling every one of these forty-something women outright, but they’d never believe her. She took their money and wrapped their books in brown paper bags. They believed in stories.
At ten, things went down a different road entirely. He walked in, a Vietnamese kid looking no older than fifteen, with his tight jeans and Vans sneakers. He walked straight up to the counter and looked startled once he arrived, like he’d taken a wrong turn and gotten lost.
‘Oh Miss,’ he said, trying to shove his fists into the too-tight spaces of his jean pockets. ‘Miss Martone.’ He smiled and stood there looking at her. Clare smiled back. She could never remember their names, not even when she was still teaching. She tried but there wasn’t enough space in her head after she’d learnt everything there was about every book, made matching worksheets and scrawled red marks across her students’ essays. As if it mattered; it didn’t matt
er in the end, what she really needed was the ability to put names to faces.
‘Hi,’ Clare fingered her name tag feeling embarrassed, like she’d been exposed.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ He had the kind of hair that was becoming trendy among the metrosexuals on King Street – that long sweep of fringe to one side that constantly needed to be flipped out of the eyes. He was thin, impossibly tall. His pants sank too low below his abdomen.
‘I was in your class, Year Ten, about six years ago.’
‘Right.’ That year, her first year of teaching, was a bit of a blur. ‘I do remember you but I’m not sure I remember your name.’ It was the line she used when she was caught on the outside.
‘Paul. Paul Nguyen.’
‘Right, well nice to see you again Paul, best of luck with everything.’ She smiled a short sweet smile and then looked in the other direction. This was the part where they were meant to go away so she could stop feeling like she was on display.
He put on a face like he’d been caught doing the wrong thing before he stammered. ‘I’m here to work. I start today. Ben hired me.’
‘Right,’ she said. But it was not right. Ben should have known better.
She didn’t want her past around her today, so she sent him off – to the storeroom to unpack and tick off books, to the back shelves that needed sorting and cleaning, to the coffee shop around the corner. But every time she sent him off he was back again asking what he could do next. One time when he came back to the counter she thought she could remember him for a second, some image of him being quiet and alone on the playground with a book. Quiet and alone: he had the words stamped all over him. Vietnamese, but he didn’t hang with the maths kids. He was usually alone.
He called her Miss throughout the day, even though she asked him not to, and he spoke quietly, like he was in a library. She watched him, absorbed in a graphic novel, turning the pages carefully, until he remembered not being alone, and put it back on the shelf. When she looked at his face she could see that he looked older than she had originally thought. There was a faint line beginning in the middle of his forehead.
The rest of the day was much the same. In between customers she flipped through the pages of a coffee-table book on houses and considered buying it as a retirement gift for her father. He liked houses, building them, looking at them. She would like to know what had happened at the site of the last one he was building. Then again, maybe she didn’t want to know the whole story, not exactly. It didn’t make sense when he was trying to explain it to her from his hospital bed, something about the importance of dignity. Then again, her father had never made much sense to her.
Their shifts ended at the same time. She stayed back, closed down the cash register and locked the back doors. When she walked out of the shop he was still there staring at the display in the window.
‘Well,’ she said, looking at him, standing there, inspecting the books on display in the window as if he’d never seen a bookshop before. ‘That’s it for the day.’ She wasn’t so sure what else she needed to say to him. He hung around and looked from the books in the window and back to her again.
When she began to walk, he walked beside her. He didn’t say anything, just walked, his feet dragging, too heavy, his Vans going slip slap on the pavement. She wondered if he was waiting for instructions. She felt the need to say something, ‘How are you getting home?’
‘Train, another train, walk.’
‘You still live near Parramatta then?’
‘Yeah. Near there, Merrylands.’
‘Long way for a part-time job.’
Slip, slap. They walked down King Street towards the train station. ‘You don’t teach anymore then?’
‘No. I work in a bookshop.’ The condescending tone of her voice made her wince at her words. These were the things that he wasn’t understanding: that she was not a patient person, that she was a very efficient teacher but not a loving one, that she had left that all behind when she moved to the city. This was her life now. Alright? She didn’t need to explain it to anyone.
Even Paul’s feet next to her had gone quiet. She had this effect on people sometimes. She tried to be nicer.
‘So why are you working all the way in the city then?’ she asked.
‘My parents think I’m studying law at Sydney Uni but I dropped out – I thought, well, at least I could get a job in the city, you know. It feels a little less like I’m lying when I leave the house every day.’
He pulled on the black spikes of his hair. ‘I like books.’
‘My parents think I’m still a teacher,’ she said softly and made a point of looking him in the eyes like she was really listening.
So here they were, former teacher, former student, both liars.
‘Well, here we are,’ he said and smiled. ‘I’ll see you at work next week.’
She shouldn’t have told him anything that personal. She felt embarrassed by it now and even though he wasn’t in front of her, she knew her face was turning red. She watched him go as he turned and headed towards the stairs at Newtown Station.
4.
Now that Antonio wasn’t getting up early, neither was Rose. She wasn’t sleeping that well anyway. When her husband left their home late at night, a sense of absence woke her. He thinks she doesn’t know what he gets up to. She even followed him the other night, watched him throwing things into the windows of half-built houses. Once, she had had to collect Francis from a police station when he was caught doing the same thing. Antonio was disappointed that Francis didn’t grow into the same man he was, but he didn’t realise they were two sides of the same coin. She knew a lot of things her husband did not. This is the problem with men, her friend Lucy always said; they think women know nothing.
Other things he thought she didn’t know – that those letters just kept on arriving, the ones from WorkCover, from the bank, from the construction company, from the CFMEU, from the police, from some legal company that sent out envelopes printed with crushed cars and the slogan ‘No Win, No Fee’. He shoved them under the bed as if all this business would go away if no one read them. But Rose did.
From those letters she now knew they had three investment properties, not just the one she didn’t want in the first place: 12 Woodlands Drive, Villawood; 8 Blackheath Drive, Smithfield, and 67 West Fairfield Road, Fairfield. She predicted that the two new additions would be like the first – old sturdy brick of the 1960s era, a quarter-acre block. Antonio was more sure of these kinds of houses than he’d ever been sure of anything, but when the first one was set on fire they’d almost gone broke. She got it. They’d both come from nothing and he wanted something better than that. But at what cost? Mortgaging, remortgaging. He took imaginary money and put it into bricks and mortar, which must have looked close enough to his idea of real wealth.
It didn’t seem to make their real lives any better. Not that she’d had much to complain about until now.
While the morning crept into the early afternoon, Rose watched him sleeping. People didn’t talk about men having beauty, but her husband was a beautiful man, even at this age, more beautiful than she ever was. His body still had a lean, olive-coloured symmetry. In her mind, she’d had him hundreds of times, in the park, in the car, at work, before she’d ever had him in the flesh. She had met him at sixteen. She recalled being full of desire and invincible back then; remembered feeling exactly this: that if she married this man, she would always be this way.
She got out of bed, wrapped her nightgown tightly over her body and made her way downstairs. Her family had left evidence of their presence around the place: the half-moon imprint of Antonio’s thumb in the paint in the hallway, the floral blinds Clare helped her to sew, Francis’ shoes stranded in the middle of the hallway for the last twenty-three years.
But for now, she felt alone.
In the kitchen downstairs the dishes from last night’s meal were still in the sink. She stared at their soggy innards before plunging her hands in
to the now cold water and pulling the plug. Don’t think she hadn’t noticed his eyes looking at those dishes when she had just left them last night. If he could have put his plastered arm into the sink and done them himself he would have. The problem with Antonio was he’d mistaken her for some sort of domestic woman from the very beginning. Not such a hard thing for him to imagine – he had watched her for two years working in the industrial kitchen of the Villawood Migrant Hostel before he got up the nerve to ask her out.
But Antonio hadn’t looked at what she was doing closely enough. Rose was never afraid to lift heavy pots, chop pounds and pounds of vegetables, to stand in the summer’s heat under corrugated iron, in front of a stove. What she never liked was the cleaning, the feel of her arms reaching down into sinks full of murky water littered with the remnants of food, or kneeling on cold, tiled floors, scrubbing; the smell of harsh chemicals and the carbolic and bleach forever stuck to her skin.
When she’d been over the sink, up to her elbows in suds, she had often thought of her mother. Her mother had believed in very little other than that the Japanese were going to invade during the war, and that one’s home should always be clean and sanitary. Her mother hadn’t loved people so much as she kept them clean, which to her had probably been a kind of love in itself. Perhaps that’s why Rose’s father had left them. She didn’t blame him and her mother didn’t seem to care anyway – she just opened up her doors and turned the terrace they were renting into a boarding house for all those men, shattered and needing a cheap bed after the war. Together, they’d cleaned up after them. If she could go back in time she’d ask both her parents if it was worth it, up-ending their lives from one slum town in England for another slum town in Australia, but her mother was gone and she’d never found out what happened to her father.
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