No More Boats

by Felicity Castagna

  He turned around as she came towards him, gave her a half smile, nodded his head.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ he said, as though she were the one who was prone to wandering, as if they would have connected more lately if it weren’t for their busy schedules.

  10.

  The photograph of Antonio’s father sat on the mantelpiece. He was standing in his orchard, his arms folded across his chest, his lips pressed together. His father was stout and serious. A man used to work. A working man’s man. Next to the image, a small crumbling statue of St Francis, the one that was meant to keep Antonio safe, always.

  On the TV, the dull man. The average, ordinary type of Australian man who does not talk too loud or too soft. He said in his perfectly paced sentences: ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’

  Antonio sat back in his leather recliner and pushed the handle on the right side that made the footrest pop out. He lay back, rested his beer in his lap, watched the TV. More boats on the screen. Australians were obsessed with boats. He flipped the channel to the Italian news. What were you meant to do all day when no one wanted you to work anymore? He looked at the cracked paint in the cornices of the ceiling. He needed to sand those corners back, to rub them over with sugar soap and paint them again.

  We will decide… We will decide…

  He looked at that image of his father again, focused on the hills behind him. ‘La miseria.’ Those mountains had been infected with the fever of departure since the beginning of time. One of those people who’d been infected with that fever was Antonio Martone. By the time Antonio had left Calabria at the age of twenty-three, he’d already been relocated north twice, after his village flooded, and that experience had shown him how easy it was to get up and go, to come back (perhaps). From the apartment he shared with his brother Christopher, he could see the famous illusions of refracted light and air that appeared in the straits sometimes, Morgan le Fay’s ghost boats calling him from the land into the sea.

  Christopher. He didn’t have an image of his brother. Didn’t want one. Christopher, the boy his mother had said was ‘no good from the start’, who always smelled like whisky and the cold damp of the mountain air. The year Antonio left, Christopher was twenty-seven and should have been married already, but instead he had a scar on his cheek that told the story of him getting up to no good.

  The night before he’d left home, Antonio, in his mother’s absence, had cut tomatoes and heavy slices of bread for their dinner, and brought in rainwater he’d caught on their balcony when the taps stopped working for weeks on end.

  ‘Where do you go all day?’ he used to ask Christopher, but he never got any answers.

  Antonio didn’t really want to know, not exactly, not any more than he’d wanted to know the exact details of what happened to his parents’ bodies when their house was eaten by a river of mud rushing down the mountain.

  Here in his living room, the man on the TV was saying the same thing over and over again. ‘We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come.’ He should get up and close the window. He could see particles of dust floating in the lamplight. Next door they were building a block of apartments. As soon as Mrs Tsilimidis had died her kids had sold off her house to developers. They wanted his house too. But Antonio wasn’t selling anything.

  He thought of Christopher again, sitting at the table of the apartment they’d shared, tearing at a thick slice of bread with his teeth. To Antonio, their father’s face was imprinted on Christopher – a ghost sitting just underneath his skin. It had been like that the last time Antonio had spoken to his father – he’d sat at the kitchen table watching him biting chunks out of something with his oversized jaws. His father was a big man too, like Christopher, but he always looked smaller, softer. There wasn’t the hardness around his jaw. That last time, he had tried to explain how it was, how because Christopher was the eldest he would get the land, because, he said, ‘That’s how it is.’ But the tone he’d said it in had made it clear he’d wished it was some other way and Antonio had wanted to say that it was all right, that he understood. Forgave him, even, for the way he turned away when Christopher struck Antonio with his fists, for the way he was so strong but too slow to run that last time the floods had come down the mountain. There must have been other conversations after that, but in his mind that was the last time they spoke.

  As he looked around, he thought his father would be proud of this place. Antonio had built his home with his own bare hands. His bare hands. People just didn’t appreciate that anymore. Buy a block. Knock everything down. Turn it into apartments with walls made of pressed cardboard. Nico and he had built their houses at the same time. Nico had built in Villawood but Antonio wanted out, wanted to get as far away as he could, so he’d landed in Parramatta, before all the apartments went up. This living room used to be the kitchen. The garage used to be the living room. That’s the way it was, you built one room at a time, you lived in one room until you could afford another. You used the best materials you could find.

  The facade of his house had even been made of real sandstone. Nico had helped him get it cheap from a developer who had been clearing a gravesite to build houses. They’d sat four weekends in a row on Antonio’s front lawn chiselling the headstones into squares to cement onto the wall. If you picked your way through the interior walls of his house until you hit the back of that sandstone you’d find names there. ‘Mrs Jane Smiley 1890–1940, May She Rest in Peace’, something like that over and over again. He liked the way it gave the place a history that was longer than itself, as if all those people were watching over him.

  Back then he and Nico had been working at the Vandyke Housing Factory during the week and building their own homes all weekend. The power of the machines amazed him every time. One careless move and a bandsaw could cut your arm off in three seconds flat. Slicing through wood and fibrocement board, they knocked out houses quicker than his father could harvest an olive tree. That was the way things were back then, standing next to Nico in his loudness and largeness, feeding planks through sanding machines, after the war, in a new country, making new houses.

  Nico had arranged that job for him too, and for all the other Calabrians at the hostel. When he’d shown up at the factory he’d had to tell Mr Van Dyke that he’d been ‘doing this sort of work for years in the old country’. Nico told him not to mention that he grew up farming olives or that he’d never seen a factory before.

  Who comes to this country?

  Outside, that new apartment building was going up. The noise of it. They were using a concrete hammer with the wrong-sized bit on the shaft. He could hear it in the thump and halt of the metal hitting the ground. We have the right…He turned the television off. He didn’t want it on anymore. He adjusted his chair.

  That image of his father on the mantelpiece undid him sometimes. He thought of him carrying old metal oil drums half filled with olives up and down the hills of his childhood. Calabria was so dry in summer, so very wet in winter. In those winter months the dry, still earth suddenly got up and moved as though it had been waiting for this moment all year to shake off its dormancy and show the world what it could do. The rain came and then it came some more. Sheets and rivers and days of rain. The whole place turned to mud and smelled of shit. At this time, post-World War II, the earth was already unstable on account of being blown to pieces by the allied forces not so long before. The pockmarked places on the side of the mountain where those bombs had hit filled with water and turned to mud. The buildings too, they turned to mud and the weak frames of houses that had been built too high, to fit too many people, they became bloated and collapsed and the people went with them, hit by falling debris, like his parents, they floated, unconscious, in the houses that became their tombs.

  Whole villages had vanished like that. The lucky ones survived, moved, materialised again somewhere else. Antonio still remembered that woman, back in the big flood of �
��53, remembered her face more than he remembered his own mother’s; the blue of her twisted dress above her knees, the dirt caught in the lines around her eyes, her open mouth, the soft peachy lips, the way her limp arms hung around the base of a tree in his parents’ orchard. He saw the woman in the blue dress everywhere that winter: she was the woman screaming for her son in the main street, she was the woman who jumped the bread queue, she was the reflection in the window from his parents’ house, the remnants of which he’d found in the dirt at the base of the mountain.

  The circumstances

  in which

  they come

  11.

  Maybe it was the sex. Maybe it wasn’t. She had always thought that sex might be able to give her more of a physical presence that she could feel, as though it could switch something on inside of her so she could stop feeling as though she was never fully awake. She wanted it to bring her back into her own body, to connect her in a sharp, focused way to the world. Clare had always thought that she would find sex less boring if she found the right person to do it with in the right way. After she went through that phase of letting herself get picked up at The Clock most Saturday nights, she realised it wasn’t true. Even in books, sex was boring or at best laughable – no matter what the author intended or the character said it felt like. But at least it wasn’t messy; at least you could turn the page and not worry about cleaning up afterwards.

  And then there was Richard. He was an old sometimes-habit like chewing your nails. Richard sat up in her bed, stretched his arms over his head. His back was long and freckled and the bones stuck out from his thin frame. Clare watched him slide his hand from the top of his skull to the base of his neck. He was looking away from her and at the wall where she had a poster of Ernest Hemingway reading in bed.

  ‘Hemingway,’ Richard said to no one but himself, reading the word out slowly from its lettering at the bottom of the poster.

  Clare scooped her shirt off the floor with her right hand without even looking down and pulled it over her head.

  ‘Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hemingway. It’s Hemingway’s famous line. “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk”.’

  ‘Ah,’ he smiled a half-smile, scratched his belly softly. This was the point at which she wanted him to leave. She wanted him to get out of her bed and put on the crumpled pair of jeans she could see sitting behind her bedroom door where he had left them in his own efficient way, taking them off before he’d even touched her, before he’d even made it to the bed.

  Clare stood up, put on the faded pink pyjama pants her mother had given her so long ago, tied her hair back in a ponytail. Downstairs she could hear her housemates yelling at a sporting match on the television. In her grandmother’s old mirror hanging on the wall, she looked at the bags under her eyes and wondered if she was too old for share houses. Thirty. She was thirty now. She wondered when she would start to feel like an adult.

  What she would like to do, really, was spend the rest of the evening reading in bed. She wanted to fall asleep with a book by her side and get up again tomorrow morning and read it some more and now that she’d had sex with Richard she could do these things and stop feeling like she hadn’t put some kind of effort into the outside world. This evening though, he was in a slow mood. He didn’t look like he’d be going anywhere anytime soon. He moved the sock he had abandoned on the ground around with his right foot. Clare sat down next to him on the bed. She folded her hands in her lap. Yawned.

  ‘What are you doing tonight?’

  She knew what he was doing tonight. She just couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was going to see a documentary about pineapple farmers in a place that was hot and far away.

  ‘Going to see a film. You can come, if you want.’ Finally he picked up his socks, looked at them, put them on, began to make a move.

  She didn’t want to go. He didn’t really want her to go. They both knew these things. Back when they were at uni, they’d hung out together more, but that was when they were young enough not to care that they didn’t have much to say to each other. When they were younger, it had been enough just to be together and to drink cheap beer and to ask someone you didn’t have much in common with endless questions about their life. Now that they were older, time was more important, even if they just spent it by themselves. They didn’t have the time to hang out with people just for the sake of it, so they didn’t do outside spaces together. He crossed the room and put on his jeans and his old Led Zeppelin shirt. She watched him put his red Vans on. He hardly looked down, just slipped his feet into them, used her dresser to steady himself with his right hand before tightening a shoelace with his left.

  Clare made her bed, as if she wasn’t going to get right back into it when he left. When he was finished getting dressed and she was sitting on the bed he came and sat beside her like he always did. He put his arm around her shoulder, rubbed it and said, ‘Was that alright?’ She hated the way he asked this every time. Her friend Hannah reckoned he did this because, like most men, he needed his ego stroked, but Clare knew that this wasn’t entirely true, not in Richard’s case anyway. Even having sex he wanted to make sure he went about it with the right politics.

  ‘Yep, fine.’ It was the question, not the sex, that made her blush. He was always so conscious of being good, of making the right decisions and doing the right things by people. She couldn’t arouse in herself that same kind of consciousness. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, but that she just couldn’t remember to think about everyone and everything all the time in the same way that he did. She yawned, smiled at him, hoped he got the hint.

  ‘I’ll walk you downstairs.’

  ‘Sure.’

  In the hallway there was the musty smell that these old terraces have. Her housemate, Anita, had left one of her orange platform pumps on the ground outside her bedroom door. The new housemate, Greg, a postgrad student from the UK, had put a poster of Derrida up on the wall. It was the kind of place that made her feel interesting. That’s why she lived here. She suspected that’s why most people lived in Surry Hills – because it made them feel interesting.

  Richard went before her, took two or three steps at a time, like he always did, almost jumping. In the living room at the bottom of the stairs the television was up too loud. It was a football game that Greg was watching, his face was in his hands, some team he had sworn his allegiances to was losing. He looked up for a moment, stared at Richard and said, ‘They’re smashing us.’

  Richard nodded his head sympathetically, made a kind of half-arsed gesture of looking at the TV as if he cared about what was on it and shrugged his shoulders. Greg looked over his shoulder momentarily, past Richard and towards Clare, gave her a half smile that made her wonder if he was judging her or just curious.

  She turned away from him and walked with Richard to her front door. Richard kissed her on the cheek, let himself out and she stood against the doorframe for a while just watching the street. The nights were beginning to warm up again but the people hadn’t started coming out of their houses yet. It was quiet this time of evening, right after everyone had made their way home from work and too early for anyone to be on their way out again. It was twenty to six and she had the feeling that in all these terraces, people were getting ready for something big to happen. She was going to make herself toast with plenty of butter and get back into bed with a bottle of wine and a glass and E.M. Forster or John Cheever or maybe Virginia Woolf.

  When she turned around she saw that Richard had left his cap in the hallway. Perhaps she wouldn’t call him again. It was just that it was Monday night and she needed something to help her get over the horror of the weekend at her parents’ place. At least Richard helped to remind her that she wasn’t under her father’s roof any more.

  12.

  Monday. Nothing else to do and Lucy was at his house again taking up all his space. That Filipina woman who made coffee pushed
a heavy plastic chair from the café all the way to the TAB section of the Parramatta RSL because she saw him struggling to sit on a stool with his cane. He sat there out of politeness, but now he wished he hadn’t. He was sitting with his head angled way back like a child trying to catch what he could of the three screens on the wall, looking up between the bodies of the men on their stools.

  He wanted a beer but he didn’t want to look even more ridiculous than he already was, sitting in a chair made for people having tea and finger sandwiches. The men looked like they had been here all their lives. They moved over slightly when someone new sat down, knowing exactly where he would take his place on the table. They talked without speaking in the way that men do, through gestures and a nod of the head.

  Antonio folded the form guide in his lap, looked at the TV, folded the guide again in a different way. There weren’t as many people to talk to now that he wasn’t on site all day. It wasn’t exactly that he didn’t want to talk to Rose; it was more that he couldn’t find enough to say to her when they were together so much. He didn’t have any news from his day out in the world to give her; there was nothing to report back, and now she was always trying to get him to talk about his feelings. He’d even found a book she bought hidden behind the couch Getting Your Man to Open Up. He was no one’s man. No one’s. Not even his wife’s. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk; he just didn’t want to talk about things that were bullshit. He wanted his son to tell him what the men were saying about him on the site. He wanted his daughter to talk to him like he wasn’t some kind of invalid. He wanted the guys he used to work with to come over more often and have a beer and not talk about much. There were more interesting things going on in the world than his own feelings.

  He got himself up. Wobbled slightly. Hoped that no one saw. At the bar he ordered himself a beer. Next to him, he thought for a minute that he saw Charbel.