So, because Rose loved Antonio, she cleaned for him.
In a few hours she’d have this place clean, full of food and full of guests. She knew Antonio didn’t want the retirement party, that he had in fact been forced into retirement, though he had never actually admitted that in front of her. But she also knew the party was a good thing. It always made him a stronger man, being the centre of attention.
She polished the wood on the kitchen table and laid out bowls of olives and nuts and glasses for the wine and beer. She was cutting cucumber sandwiches into small slivers when Francis entered the kitchen in his boxer shorts, his naked chest so broad at the top that he blocked the kitchen doorway. She watched him looking at the plastic-wrapped dishes of food laid out on the kitchen counter, surveying the card tables folded and leaning up against the kitchen wall, ready to be laid out in the lounge room; she watched as he put these things together in his mind and remembered what was happening today.
‘Welcome!’ she said, turning to him with a knife in one hand, a mitt in the other, her blond hair wrapped up in a scarf to keep it from getting dirty. Sometimes when she looked at her children like this, she got a glimpse of what she must look like to them. To Francis she must look like a housewife in a 1950s movie.
‘Ohhh…too loud this early in the morning.’
‘It’s twelve.’
Francis turned and removed the milk from the fridge and the Weet-Bix and sugar from the cupboard before sitting down on the bench stool in front of her, where he ate and grunted and watched her work.
‘I’ll need your help today. I need you to take around plates and fill up peoples’ glasses.’
‘Yep. Done.’
Antonio had slipped into the back garden. She could see him from the kitchen window pruning tomato vines with his one good hand. It had always been the place where he was most calm, pruning, picking. She never talked to him when he was in that space. She imagined, in his head, he was probably somewhere in the past. When she turned back to Francis he was gone, as always. The only evidence of his having been there was a half-eaten bowl of Weet-Bix.
At four the bell rang. Rose went to the door to answer it. Clare stood there looking fresh and confident in a red dress and brown suede shoes. She cut her hair in a bob these days, just like Rose did, with blond highlights in front. At these times Rose was so glad that Clare had gotten over trying to prove some point at university by having dirty dreadlocked hair and baggy shirts with no bra.
‘Hi,’ she said walking into the room and hanging her cardigan over a chair. ‘What can I help you with?’ This was Clare, always ready to go, mind on the task ahead.
‘Well there’s the quiches on the counter in the kitchen, they need to be put in the oven and there’s some more beer in the garage that needs to be brought in.’
‘Where’s Francis?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Honestly,’ Clare said, and Rose wondered if she’d ever get a child of her own to fuss over the way she fussed over Francis. Under her arm Clare carried a large rectangular object wrapped in gold paper. Another book, Rose supposed. Clare was always bringing books that no one ever read into the house. Clare left the package on the bench, rolled her sleeves up and headed straight out to the garage.
It had been Rose’s idea to have the retirement party. She wanted Antonio to be surrounded with men who spoke loudly and freely, filling the air with themselves. She wanted to bring Antonio out of himself again, to watch him become animated, to watch him talking football and construction and the future.
When she was shopping for the party she had run into Nico’s widow, Mona. She used to have a huge, curly head of hair. Now that she’d cut it short there was a fierceness in her face that hadn’t been there before. Mona didn’t look at her anymore. Not directly, not since the funeral. Rose had tried calling her several times, had left messages that weren’t returned. The wife of another builder had called her back eventually and told Rose that Mona couldn’t handle talking to her, couldn’t handle anyone else’s guilt about what had happened, didn’t want to feel like she had to make anyone else feel alright again.
It wasn’t alright, Mona wanted that specific message to be passed on, it wasn’t alright and there was nothing that Rose or the CFMEU or the guys from workers’ comp or any of those people who came around with flowers or endless trays of food could do about it. Rose and Mona had raised their children together, at all those union family days and barbeques. They’d cried together when their eldest daughters had moved out of home and made jokes about Nico growing fat in his old age and now she’d lost both of them.
Rose had looked through the window at the local hairdressers and seen Mona there. Rose had watched her staring blankly at the mirror in front of her while the woman cut her hair. Mona’s disappointment and rage seemed to seep out from her skin so that even a few feet away Rose could feel it. Rose wanted to go up and touch her, to say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry all the time.
But she didn’t.
5.
It had rained buckets the week before Nico died. It rained so much that work on the estate had slowed down. ‘Sixty days, sixty days,’ Fat Frank kept saying, but the last one they finished took sixty-eight and the one before that sixty-five. They were running out of indoor jobs when the rain finally let up for a couple of days and they could work outside again.
Everything had a sharp, metallic, earthy smell. Antonio parked behind Lot 185 and walked down the side driveway to where he could see Nico leaning against the chain link fence smoking. Nico was wearing blue pants and an orange hard hat and he didn’t try to hide that he was sizing up every man that walked past him. Nico was as he would have been back in 1970 or 1962 or 1958. It was everyone else that was different. Vietnamese. Chinese. Cambodian. Korean. Lebanese, Assyrian, from God knows where. They wore the same uniform of white singlets and cargo pants and black steel- capped boots.
Nico offered Antonio a cigarette at the gate. When Nico raised his hand to light it Antonio could see his roof tiler’s hands, the line of calluses across the middle of the palm. Instinctively Antonio looked away and up at the roof. They already had several stacks of tiles up there in neat bundles ready for laying. He watched as the thin figure of a black-haired man climbed quickly up the stairs of the scaffold with half a dozen tiles on his shoulder. More stacks of tiles were deposited on the roof beams. He was back on the roof again with another stack before Antonio could finish his cigarette.
‘I’ll have the scaffolding up on the other side of the building by about lunchtime today so your guys can tile the other side.’ Nico nodded his head and stubbed out his cigarette under the heavy thud of his boot. He was beginning to sweat around the edges of his hat even at this time of the morning. ‘See you at lunch.’
Antonio walked off to the other side of the building where the scaffolding parts had been delivered. He counted and checked them off. On the front right-hand corner the stack of tubing had sunk partly into the mud. He would need to lift each piece out later, clean it, stack it back neatly in another place.
Then two of them showed up beside him. He’d asked the foreman for someone who was licensed but these two looked fresh off the boat. The foreman had probably subcontracted out to Koreans who had subcontracted out to these Vietnamese or Chinese or whatever they were, poor shits making $400 a week. He had to admit they were fast and strong but they couldn’t do things properly. They weren’t even trained right. They came from countries where you just whacked up a scaffold with bamboo and string and when everything collapsed you covered up the whole mess by throwing the buildings and bodies into giant holes in the ground and starting again.
Antonio pulled one of the baseplates from the stack and pushed it firmly into the ground with his foot. He grabbed a scaffolding tube and held it vertical above the plate. These things felt heavier all the time. The older-looking one followed him, grabbing a section of tube and bringing it over. He picked it up with his thin arm like it was nothing and said something to th
e younger one in their language. They were both pulling the tubes and the joiners off the pile, carrying them two and three pieces at a time. The older one inserted his tube into the one Antonio was holding down. When Antonio got close he saw that he knew his face. They’d laid concrete together when they were building the foundations. The other man had looked younger at first, but when you got a good look at him his hair was flecked with grey. The skin of his face was papery and dry. Building sites were full of these kinds of faces without names.
They could follow what he was doing, mostly. Maybe they were strong, he’d give them that, but he didn’t like how they did things. Twice he stopped them and pulled apart what they did, told them to do it again. He put the spirit level on top of one of the bars and pulled the younger one over to show him how it was slightly off a perfect horizontal. The guy looked at the tacky fake Rolex that OH&S forbade him from wearing on the building site.
‘I don’t give a shit if it takes you longer,’ Antonio said, but the guy didn’t understand or pretended not to. Either way, he got on with it. They did the job, he checked the job, sometimes he tore their job apart.
12:00. It was lunchtime and he was starving. Antonio got his lunch from the trailer and found Nico above him on a scaffold supervising the tiling. From down here he could see the fold of Nico’s belly protruding over his pants as he walked back and forth across the scaffold.
Nico and Antonio sat on a bench in front of the apartment block. Sometimes by lunchtime they were too tired to talk much, but they didn’t really want to admit it. It didn’t matter so much anymore though. They were the last of their kind. There was no one else to talk to, really; they had out-lasted all the other people like them. Now the young Aussies sat with the children of people like them who had migrated too long ago for anyone to remember that they were migrants too. If he ever saw Francis out there on the site, he was sitting with this group. Antonio could never work out where he was during the day; he always stayed away from him at work. The Vietnamese sat together. The Chinese. The everything-elses: they all sat together. The three Arab Muslim guys kept to themselves.
‘That’s not right,’ Nico said, looking up at the roof above where the two men continued to finish the scaffold. They were at the top now but they shouldn’t have been, Antonio thought. They hadn’t put the vertical safety bracing on each level of the scaffold before they climbed to the next one. It wasn’t safe. The whole thing could fall apart. He was about to say something, but the scaffold wasn’t what Nico was looking at.
‘The roof beams. They don’t look level. Can’t get tiles on uneven roof beams.’
Antonio needed to go to the toilet. ‘Yeah,’ he said, but he wasn’t sure about the beams from here. It was too hard to tell. Sometimes things just looked a little sideways when you were staring at them from below. Nico was more of a roof man than him.
‘I’ll be back.’
In the portaloo there were competing half-naked women of varying shapes and colours. He liked the big-breasted woman with the dark hair and something that looked like Russian scrawled at the bottom of the poster. A Korean girl in a tartan skirt and pigtails checked him out while he peed.
When Antonio returned to the bench Nico was gone but his food was still there. Antonio didn’t see where he was until he heard the sound of metal buckling. He looked up to see Nico on top of the scaffolding on the fourth platform up. Nico should have known better than to get up on a scaffold that didn’t have all its footings attached yet. It wasn’t stable. Antonio could see even from here that Nico’s heavy body was throwing everything out of alignment. The entire scaffold was slowly bending back away from the building.
Nico looked frozen there on the top platform. Someone shouted something. The emergency bell rang. Nico slid too quietly off the fourth platform as the entire scaffold continued to bend forward towards the ground and then began to break apart. The wooden beams of each platform fell separately and hit each other in midair as the metal tubing they were sitting on bent to the point where there was nothing securing them anymore.
Antonio didn’t remember Nico’s body in the air, couldn’t recall how it got from fifteen metres up all the way down to the ground. But he did remember Nico lying there on the concrete, his hat torn off by the fall, his comb-over all out of place and the large crack of his arse falling out of his pants. The foreman came running through the yard, yelling ‘get back’ and pushing groups of men away from where the scaffold was collapsing. Some ran. Some stared; if Nico was conscious he would have screamed at them, told them all to stop looking.
Later, Antonio might’ve realised that it wasn’t the most important thing to do, maybe not even to Nico. But right then his duty was clear, specific; it presented itself. He walked right up underneath the leaning scaffold where Nico’s body lay. He was going to lift Nico, gently, his whole body, turn him around and push his hair and his pants back into place. He didn’t want anyone smiling at Nico, didn’t want anyone laughing; he thought he owed him this. He crouched over his friend’s back. It was a short lift. He squatted. He worked his arms under Nico’s torso, surprised by the coolness of his body. For half a second his faith was unwavering and he turned with Nico’s body in his arms; they were almost there, and then something shifted above him – Nico’s belly pushed against his chest, and something else followed, a piece of metal tubing from the sky; Nico’s right arm slipped from his grasp – and he knew, close as they were, they’d never make it; an inch, a centimetre, a whole lifetime lost. And still Antonio held him, but there was no way, he felt his leg twist back. All one hundred and fifty kilos of Nicolai Molazzo pinned him to the concrete.
The sky exploded. Metal rained down. Antonio felt the bones in his arm shoot from the inside to the outside of his flesh. He began to scream, his face shoved into Nico’s belly. Nico who in the last few years had insisted that he had done enough listening, he would not listen to anyone again, not ever.
In the hospital Antonio drifted in and out of consciousness. The nurse showed him how to operate the button on the IV when the pain came back.
‘You know what I did?’ he said when Francis was standing over him.
‘Everyone knows what you did, Dad.’
He slept. He woke up. Rose brought in wet cloths to wipe his face. The man from WorkCover wanted him to explain it again, how it happened. He wanted to know if it was worth it: the risk, the loss, the exchange. An arm and a leg for Nico’s dignity. The idea of his dignity.
6.
Yes. Francis had arrived late. Fairly predictable. But he was here now, so everyone could just chill. Alright? He and Jesús had entered from the backyard so that Francis could pretend he’d been there for ages without being seen. I’ve just been outside checking on the tomatoes right? Sorry I didn’t see ya Mum. Been here for ages. Ages.
Jesús was wearing a bad paisley tie that was knotted too tightly. Francis should have worn a tie too. These were the things that Jesús always had down and Francis didn’t. Jesús was all into showing respect for your parents and their friends, at least in front of them.
‘Look at those fat fucks of watermelons,’ Jesús said as they passed through the garden. He stopped and kicked one lightly. There was the hollow sound of it against his toe.
His dad’s friends had been sent to the back verandah to smoke. John Farnham kept screaming out the sliding glass doors every time they were opened. They stood there with their potato faces sucking on cigarettes.
‘Aye, Francis!’ One of the men said as he got closer. He grabbed Francis on the shoulders, leaned in and kissed him on both cheeks. These men always kissed. ‘You’ve grown.’ They always said that too.
He grabbed each man’s fist. Wrapped his two hands around their one hand and shook hard like he meant it, like his dad taught him to.
‘This is my friend Jesús.’ The circle of men smiled and nodded their heads and shook Jesús’ hand too hard.
‘How’s it going?’ Peter said to Francis, whacking him hard on his right arm, ‘Y
ou taking care of your dad?’
He worked with Peter on site. He was one of the older guys, one of the very few of them still around. Greek or something. Too fussy. Too particular. They slowed construction down and talked too much. Their wives sent everyone Christmas cards at the end of the year like it was 1952 or something. He looked at the sunspots on Peter’s hands as he leaned, tired, against the back wall and smoked, nodding at everyone who entered and exited through the back like he was some sort of pretty con-man. Francis would be glad when they all retired. It didn’t matter how the guys like Peter treated him, they still made him feel like he was a kid because they’d known him when he was one. Francis lit up because it was easier than talking. He leaned up against the cement wall and the wood pylons and got on with the business of smoking.
Inside the party, things were rolling. His mum was sitting with the wives’ club on the couches in the corner of the living room. They were sitting with their legs crossed and their various shades of pink lipstick, drinking sherry. Great-uncle Mark, with his slow feet and the IQ of a four-year-old, danced with Clare. His father positioned himself on the outside but somehow also at the centre of the group of men. He was telling stories. Francis could tell even from this side of the room that he was doing that thing where he picked out each person individually and told their stories to the rest. The men smiled and nodded as they heard Antonio recount each anecdote, each one bigger and more impressive than the last.
In the kitchen Francis and Jesús took beers out of the melting ice in the sink. John Farnham asked questions from the stereo speakers:
What about the world around us?
How can we fail to see?
What about the age of reason?
‘Francis. Jesús. You’re here.’ His mother had appeared from nowhere.
‘Been here ages Mum. Just talking to everyone.’
She ignored her son completely, turned to Jesús and gave him a kiss. ‘I hear you are doing very, very well for yourself. Worked hard. Almost an accountant now. An accountant. Your mother will be able to visit you in your office one day.’
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