No More Boats

by Felicity Castagna

  ‘Hey…’ he began to say, but when the other guy turned around fully he saw that it was some other young bloke, but now, anyway, they’d caught each other’s eye.

  ‘You here to see Philip Ruddock?’ He smiled that kind of big enthusiastic smile that you only see in children and politicians. Antonio looked at the other smiling face on his shirt and the words beneath: Ross Cameron 2001.

  He had seen the posters on the way in. Hadn’t paid that much attention. There were people’s disembodied heads smiling everywhere now that it was election time. He could see behind this young man that there were others filing in wearing Ross Cameron shirts. An older guy, somewhere around his age, with cheeks that looked like grey sandpaper came up to the bar and ordered a beer. ‘Yeah,’ Antonio said. ‘I’m going.’ Why not? There was nothing else to do but sit in that big ridiculous chair.

  ‘Cheers then,’ the young man said, raising his glass and clicking it against Antonio’s.

  He followed the young bloke to the back room of the RSL where the rows of plastic chairs were already filling up. The young man shook his hand and patted him on the back before walking away, as if he’d already done something great just by being there, just by being him. Someone had tied bundles of blue and white balloons to the legs of the table next to him. He looked at the brochures on the table. ‘Population Control’, ‘The Chinese Welfare Society’, ‘Our Fragile Soils’, ‘Protecting the Border’, ‘Family Fun Day’. He’d been in this room a few times on Rose’s insistence. At night it was filled up with retirees who danced in too-tight skirts and polyester pants to music they’d loved when they’d still been young enough to get away with their outfits.

  A set of scales was projected onto the screen at the front of the room. One side of the scales held the words ‘humanitarian intake’ and ‘skilled migration’ while the other side held the words ‘social integration’ and ‘economic impact’. At the top of the screen the word ‘balance’ floated around in space. At the side of the stage there were two men with blank faces that lacked, completely, any sign of emotion. One of them moved forward to the centre of the stage, coughed, tapped the microphone. The audience went silent.

  ‘I’m honoured to introduce Philip Ruddock today who has come back home, really, to the place where his political career began in the seat of Parramatta. Phil is well known as a man of ability and compassion with a long record in the human rights field. He’s here today in this community consultation to talk to us about something I know we’ve been hearing a lot about in the news lately, something that I know has always been of great concern to this great country with its large borders and its fragile ecosystem and may I say this great, and particularly in Parramatta, this great multicultural nation as well. But it’s all about balance and that’s what Phil is here to talk to us about today and that is achieving balance in migration.’

  When Philip Ruddock got up he stood in front of a screen. His speech was more about lines than about scales. There was a red line with an alarming upward arc, a blue line that dipped depressingly down and a green line in the middle that edged up surely and steadily from one side of the screen to the other. Only his lips moved when he talked about his lines. There was no expression on his face at all, but somehow he still managed to let you know just how much these lines meant to him, that he had dedicated his life to making sure that green line went along at just the right angle and at just the right speed. ‘What we want,’ he said, ‘what the ordinary everyday Australian wants to see is for us to achieve that green line.’

  The green line. Antonio was a man that understood about lines. At night, when he navigated the streets, he thought about the places that had shaped him as different patterns of lines: the erratic contours of the hills in Calabria, the straight, straight rows of Nissen huts at the Villawood Migrant Hostel, the squares within squares of the family home he had built, the loops of the Radburn projects where he’d first worked as a builder, the concentric circles of the Macquarie Links Estate where it all ended.

  When he stopped thinking lines and shapes he was back in the room again. The talking had ended. People clapped. The woman sitting next to him with the tight white bun of hair said ‘marvellous, marvellous’ over and over again and Philip Ruddock walked around the room shaking hands.

  Antonio looked at a brochure, ‘Australia’s Migrant Waves: are we keeping our heads above water?’ He was still looking at the glossy image of the ocean on the front cover when the grey arm of a suit extended itself out beside him and touched his shoulder firmly. ‘Thank you for coming, sir.’

  ‘No. Thank you.’ Antonio looked him straight in the eyes but the man didn’t flinch. Not a single part of his face moved. Not a millimetre. Here he was, this serious man and he was shaking Antonio’s hand and calling him sir, like he was someone to respect.

  Outside the RSL, the Flame of Remembrance was about level with the sun. Antonio leaned against his cane and smoked. Three o’clock and he didn’t want to walk home just yet. Two boys walked past him with their Arthur Phillip High shirts untucked. Between them they kicked a can back and forth. It had been a long time, a couple of years in fact, since Antonio had visited Clare at that school. She would be finishing now with her classes, getting ready for tomorrow. Maybe those boys were from Clare’s class. He picked a few gardenias from the bush at the entrance to the RSL. Something about the lecture had made him feel a little more cheerful. Optimistic, in fact. He would go and visit Clare at work. He would refrain from commenting on her messy table. He was proud of what she did, though he rarely told her so. Unlike her brother, she’d been good from the start. A man has a boy and you expect him to grow in your image, but Francis had always been more of a mystery to him than Clare. Francis was always rebelling against something or someone, mostly Antonio, though he could never work out why.

  When he got to the intersection where the school was, there was hardly room to cross the road. It was amazing to him what these kids got away with. There was an Islander boy with a bright pink hairbrush stuck in his tight curly hair and pants that were torn at the knees. He was holding hands with a blonde girl with purple streaks and a skirt that was pulled up so far it barely passed the line of her underwear. Crossing the intersection was like being stuck in a train station in Calcutta, the mob of bodies came at him from the opposite side of the road screeching loudly, whacking at each other. A boy pushed another boy and that boy slammed into Antonio’s side knocking the cane out of his hand.

  He fell onto the road and scraped his arm, curled up like a ball so he wouldn’t get trampled. He looked up and watched the boy who had pushed him over run after a smaller boy and push him to the ground. ‘Excuse you!’ Antonio said loudly to the bunch of scuffed black shoes that walked by him.

  ‘Excuuuuuuuuse you!’ he heard someone in the crowd parrot back in a high-pitched squeal. Two African girls came to his rescue. Thin things that didn’t look any older than twelve. They leaned down over him and grabbed his arms, pulling him up without asking his permission first.

  ‘You’re going to get hit by a car, man,’ one of them said as if she was used to clearing bodies from the pavement. He pulled his good arm back away from them and used it to prop himself up again. Someone passed him his cane and he turned towards the crowd that was walking away and yelled, ‘You should learn some manners!’ But they didn’t care what he had to say. They were all already across the street, taking over the convenience store.

  At the school gates he caught his breath, leaned against the bars just down from the entrance and watched the rest of them shove their bodies out of the gate and onto the street. He wondered what the parents thought of their children. Those Catholic schools he’d sent his kids to were worth every penny. They made the boys get a short back and sides and the girls wear their skirts down to their knees. He’d been devastated when Francis ended up here. Francis had grown his hair to his shoulders just because he could. He wondered if the parents of these children knew what they looked like when they went to school, or
if they pulled their skirts down and brushed their hair before they went home.

  When the bodies coming out of the gates slowed down to a trickle Antonio went inside. He knew where Clare’s office was, down the hallway and to the right. When he reached the door it was closed. The sign said English/History Staff Room. Underneath the sign there were posters and pictures thumbtacked to the door. ‘Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it!’ one sign said. Beneath it there was a poem by a man named T.S. Eliot, also pinned to the door. Antonio remembered Clare reading his poems when she was in university. She brought them home to him and read them out loud. They were all about damaged people, crumbling societies, people who did bad things to one another. That’s when Clare was hanging out with those idiotic Socialists and he’d tried to explain to her that that’s where Fascism had started, and did she know that Mussolini was in the Socialist Party when he first began his career as a politician, and did she know what he did to people, to his own people? But Clare didn’t understand because she was brought up in a country where people could always eat meat. And then there was no more T.S. Eliot and Clare didn’t speak to him for a while. He read the poem to himself…the hollow men…the stuffed men.

  He knocked on the door. A woman answered. She had a half-eaten sandwich in her hand and the rest of it clearly in her mouth by the way that she was chewing. She stared at Antonio. Swallowed. She wasn’t one of the teachers he recognised.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  He peered into the room where another two women were hunched over computers and a man was throwing a plastic ball into a small basketball hoop that was affixed to the wall.

  ‘I’m looking for my daughter, Clare.’

  ‘What year is she in?’

  ‘No. She’s not a student. She’s an English teacher. This is her office.’

  A blank stare. ‘We don’t have any English teachers here named Clare.’

  ‘Yes you do. Clare Martone? Maybe I have the wrong office.’

  The man shooting the plastic ball into his hoop stopped, looked at Antonio.

  ‘Oh, Mr Martone. I remember you. Clare’s dad.’

  ‘Yes, Clare. I just thought I would come to see her.’ Antonio looked at the gardenias in his hand. Everyone else looked at him.

  ‘Oh, Clare. That Clare.’ The woman said and turned to the man.

  ‘She’s not here,’ the man said.

  ‘Not here.’

  That Clare. The man got up off his chair. The woman with the sandwich turned around to the two people who were looking up from their computers now. They all looked at each other like they didn’t know what to do.

  The man walked towards him, awkwardly, shoved his hands in his pockets.

  ‘She doesn’t work here anymore. She left about a year ago.’

  ‘A year ago?’

  The man said it to him again slowly like he might not have understood the first time. ‘She doesn’t work here anymore.’

  ‘She doesn’t work here? Why?’

  Everyone in the room had stopped what they were doing. They searched each other’s faces for the answer to the question.

  ‘Because she doesn’t. She doesn’t work here anymore. You’ll have to talk to her about it.’ He smiled a weak smile and kept standing there, looking at Antonio.

  Antonio turned and walked into the hallway. He felt the weight of something pressing against his chest. A memory interrupted his exit from the school: Clare with her pigtails in plaits, standing with a piece of chalk at the blackboard he’d given her for her twelfth birthday, writing down words for a five-year-old Francis to copy onto a sheet of paper.

  He wondered who his children were now. This was the hardest thing about being a parent, the thing that no one tells you about. The fact that you grieve for your children from the moment they are born. Not so much because you’ve lost them but because they are always changing and you can’t get back all those different versions of what they once were.

  13.

  Rose was conducting a raid on the garden while Antonio took a nap. The tomatoes were infected with something that made their thin red skins explode and pour out a brownish-red goo every time she came near them. The basil leaves were pockmarked brown with the scars of whatever had been eating away at them. The pumpkins had taken over everything, had marked their territory by wrapping their long green tendrils around the zucchinis and rows of beans. There were pumpkins everywhere: they’d been eating pumpkin soup and pumpkin mash and pumpkin tarts for the last three weeks. She’d even learned how to make an American pumpkin pie from a recipe she’d found in a book at the library. She couldn’t imagine what else she could possibly make with a pumpkin.

  In her hand she held a contraband chemical spray to get rid of the insects. Antonio favoured sprays of garlic and lemon but Rose liked the certainty of chemicals. He didn’t like her messing in his yard, but they both knew he wasn’t up to it now. It was impossible for him to bend over and pull out the weeds that grew between the rows of his vegetables. She spotted a weed. Bent over and pulled it out, sprayed the patch of ground with weed killer so she wouldn’t need to pull out another weed in its place sometime later.

  Last week she’d been caught out, though he hadn’t mentioned it to her. She’d dug deep into the ground near where he’d planted wooden poles to support his eggplants. She’d found a square of plaster and dug deeper around it and pulled out the thing that was stuck in the ground there, an old statue of St Francis he’d buried upside down when they’d first moved in, some tradition he had in Calabria about burying saints in the ground upside down to keep your house safe. Its face had been worn away. Chips of blue on the arms said it was painted once, but it looked grim in her hands, as though it had been chewed on by something underground that hadn’t liked its presence there. She’d thrown it in the garbage bin but Antonio had found it somehow and it was now sitting on the mantelpiece in the living room. Neither of them had said anything to the other about it. It just sat there like a warning: don’t go near my garden.

  Antonio kept all that cultural stuff to himself. When the kids had come home from school with those assignments where they had to write about their family, he’d refused to tell them anything about his life before coming here. Clare had made a collage of images of Italy for multicultural day at her school once, and he’d just stared blankly at it and said, ‘We’re Australian. I’m Australian’.

  Rose did know some of the story though. He’d been more willing to talk about it in the earlier days when Nico was around, helping them build their house. She remembered the two of them in the front yard with all those old tombstones, sanding them down to build the front facade of the house. They had done the heavy work and she and Mona would sweep all the dust away and bring them endless snacks and drinks. Antonio and Nico would talk about the houses in the mountains in Calabria and the way that families would just whack up another level on their house when kids got married and brought their families home, and then the war, and the floods when those houses had just fallen apart, slid down the mountain and collapsed with all the people inside them. She knew that’s how Antonio had lost his parents.

  ‘I married a peasant,’ Mona used to say. She had come from Florence where the houses were solid and built on flat ground. Antonio hadn’t wanted to talk about it so much since they’d had children. It was as though he didn’t want to leave them with that legacy, or maybe Rose had just stopped asking him about it, she wasn’t sure. Time passes, stories get lost. Then again, maybe it was just because she didn’t feel like she was a part of it, maybe that’s why she didn’t talk about it so much. Even at her age. She’d never left Australia and here she was, surrounded by people who knew so much about the rest of the world. It made her feel small.

  ‘Rose, Rose…’ She could hear him calling, probably from the same chair in the living room where he had fallen asleep two hours earlier. ‘Rose, Rose…’

  She stashed her gardening gloves and the chemicals in the shed. Inside the house the air fel
t heavy. It was getting heavier every day, weighing on her like she was trying to breathe through fabric. In the living room Antonio looked up, startled, like he’d already forgotten he’d called out for her. His fingers stumbled over the mechanism on the side of the chair that made the footstool drop back down again.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where is Francis?’

  He looked at her panicked, like he’d just had a bad dream. She looked at her watch, it was six. ‘He’s not home from work yet. Probably gone out with his mates.’

  ‘Right.’ But it wasn’t.

  Nothing had been right since he’d returned this afternoon – well, he’d been even more off than usual. Antonio had told Rose that Clare had quit her job at the school and she’d asked if he might have become a bit confused. He’d told her that he went to Clare’s school after the RSL and all the teachers were saying she hadn’t been there for a year. Then Antonio had told her that he’d been run over by a giant boy with a pink comb in his hair and girl whose skirt was above her underwear. Rose had told him that he must have fallen asleep again at the TAB and Antonio had told her about some man and all his important lines on a screen and she’d said that he needed a nap. Sometimes she just didn’t want to talk to him at all. The effort was too exhausting. They went around and around and ended up at the same point.

  ‘Where is Francis?’ Antonio kept saying. ‘He’s never around very much.’

  ‘He’s twenty-three. He does what 23-year-olds do – they hang out with their mates. He doesn’t want to be at home.’ She didn’t really want to be at home either.

  Antonio had fallen asleep with the Sydney Morning Herald and the Parramatta Sun in his lap. They fell to the floor as he got his footrest down. He had taken to reading the newspapers lately with a religious fervour, every page. There was a neat stack of them piling up in the corner of their living room. Rose watched as he folded and unfolded the Parramatta Sun in his lap.