But now. Here was her home. Here was her husband smiling at her. Here was Antonio doing exactly what she asked him to do, cleaning a mistake off the concrete. So she smiled back, walked closer to him, put her hand against his shoulder as he leaned over.
‘Hey.’
‘Hi,’ he said, leaning back to sit on the ground like a child. She considered leaning over to pull him up into her arms but didn’t.
‘How about I make us some coffee, some breakfast too? I’ve got some eggs in the fridge. You could come in when you’re done. We could just eat, relax. Today, we don’t need to do anything.’
‘Right. Great. Eggs. I’ve got to finish this and then I’ve got some work to do this afternoon but good. We should sit, have breakfast.’
‘Okay,’ Rose touched him lightly on the shoulder again and entered her house. It was dark inside and the house had the presence of other people there, a jacket she didn’t recognise was hanging over the arm of a chair. Folders and binders and books that didn’t belong in her house were stacked in neat piles on the dining-room table. She would not spend time thinking about these things today. She wanted to make coffee and eggs and take a shower and maybe watch an afternoon movie on the television with Antonio.
She put the kettle on to boil, got the container of eggs out of the fridge. There was a kind of weight to being here that made her feel tied down. She thought for a moment of returning to Lucy’s, but instead, she leaned against the countertop and looked out of the kitchen towards the garden where things, as always, needed some help. Being in someone else’s house required less of you. Being in your own home, you had to be yourself and that was harder. It’s the house really. A house gave you a shape to fit your life into. The house had turned her into the kind of woman who tried to care about fingerprints on windows and dirty dishes in the sink. The kind of woman who wondered whether or not her children were happy when she heard the way they dragged their feet across a carpeted floor.
Sometimes she imagined what might have happened if she had stayed next door, if she would have turned into a woman, like Lucy, who tiled her own bathroom and took a woman for a lover, who did courses in night school when Whitlam made it free and drank cherry brandy sitting in gumboots on her front verandah most nights and who didn’t care if anyone noticed.
In the kitchen she felt the presence of the other woman she could have been. The kettle boiled. She spooned instant coffee and sugar into two cups. Maybe she could have gone to university like her daughter and had lots of different choices about what she could do with her life. Maybe she could have run her own business or backpacked around the world, she could have been someone that people took more notice of.
That day, a week before she moved out of Surry Hills as a sixteen-year-old to Villawood with all her possessions in one small suitcase, she’d been the one to find her mother hanging by a sheet fixed to an exposed roof beam in the basement laundry of that old terrace house. Her mother had always wanted so much more than a house full of boarders. She’d wanted trips to the theatre and Sunday afternoon roasts with her family who lived on another continent. She’d wanted someone to take care of her. She’d wanted a rest.
What Rose wanted to tell her children was that she had worked so hard for so long, that it was hard to be present and happy and graceful and kind. It was hard to be faithful and good. All you can do is to try to inhabit a life, to love it because it’s yours. Neither of her children had ever put in that kind of effort, had ever committed to the self-sacrifice and discipline that it took to try to be happy in your own skin.
19.
Harold Holt was eaten by a shark because he relaxed the White Australia Policy. The bloke with the shaved head sitting across from Antonio at a busted-up kitchen table in an old terrace in Tempe was explaining this to the others. He liked the idea of the sea reaching up in violent retribution and tearing Harold Holt to bits for beginning the country’s downfall.
It was Thursday, and although Antonio had been excited about coming here before, now he was not so sure. There was something about the place that unsettled him. The floors that looked like they were not vacuumed enough. The bust of Ned Kelly that had clearly never been dusted, the Eureka flag that had the faded shapes of rectangles permanently impressed on it from the light that shone in between the gaps in the thick bars on the windows.
The whole place had the look and feel of a cubby house for teenage boys. There were the two pasty-looking young men with shaved heads and bulky lace-up boots like boys playing at being in the army. There were three other men, more respectable-looking in chinos and collared shirts, and a woman who looked like the girlfriend of a bikie – she just nodded her head in agreement with everything and tapped her plastic orange nails on the table. But there was also John. John Solomon, who had appeared in front of Antonio’s house dressed in a black suit with a megaphone hanging off his arm. John Solomon who had quoted Arthur Calwell, William Lane and John Curtin in his firm and demanding voice to all the people gathered there. Antonio wasn’t quite sure who those people were, but from the gist of what John Solomon said they were great Australians and he thought Antonio was a great Australian too.
John Solomon kept on talking and Antonio went back inside himself even though it was a hard thing to do with him standing there, John Solomon just had this kind of voice, this way of standing so unwaveringly straight that meant you couldn’t help but pay attention to him. Antonio just didn’t know what he was doing here, or at home, or anywhere really. Nico had told him to paint that sign on the front lawn and then John Solomon had told him to keep it there. John Solomon reminded him of the Nico he’d known twenty years ago, built big and broad like a labourer in his prime, someone who people said yes to without really knowing why. Rose had moved next door, like she did all that time ago when she’d left him for a few years. He had grown anxious and tired and then he had scrubbed the concrete clean of everything he’d wanted to say. He was lonely but he also wanted to be alone. When he saw all those people on his front lawn, in his space, all he could do was take one of those pills the doctor had given him with a whisky and go back to bed until he woke up at some unidentifiable time of the night or the day and it was still too noisy but at least, at least there was John Solomon and he was helping him make some sense of everything.
And because of all this Antonio was wearing his blue suit. The one he wore when he wanted people to take him seriously. And because he wanted to show that he was a serious man he had armoured himself against the feeling that no one really took him seriously with a double-breasted jacket and pants that had a sharp crease down the middle.
John Solomon was also wearing a suit. He always wore one. He had a serious face, never smiled, spoke slowly, articulated every word, hung carefully off the vowel sounds so that when he said ‘elite lefties’ it came out sounding like ‘ah-leat lefties.’ He had a plump tanned-white earnest face to match his white hair and he had the body of a giant rectangular box. He was vain of his voice, had been a debating champion and a too-smart-for-his-own-good public nuisance who had grown up in a small town in the far west of the state. His family were some sort of small-business owners. What business they were in John didn’t specify to Antonio, but he was fond of saying they were hard-working, ordinary people. He was in fact more aligned to those grubby, leftist anarchists than they would like to think. He was fond of saying nationalism, true nationalism, had its roots in the union movement, in the working classes, in socialist democracy. Antonio was getting to know a lot about John. Yes. John Solomon liked to talk and he liked the sound of his own voice a little too much for Antonio’s liking, but he knew a lot of things and there was stuff going on here that Antonio wanted to understand.
When some young thug in a black anarchist shirt had tried to climb through Antonio’s window, John Solomon had pulled him out by the legs, just like that, like this young guy was nothing. He just slapped him to the floor and started lecturing him about public property and decency and respect. When he invited Antonio t
o this ‘meeting of like minds’, as he called it, what could Antonio say? He owed the man that much and besides, what else was there for him to do these days?
At John Solomon’s kitchen table they were having a meeting and the subject of this meeting was Antonio. The meeting began the same way that everything began with John Solomon. He talked about bees. More specifically, the Chinese and their bee-like properties as identified by Australia’s most prominent early unionist William Lane. ‘Nations,’ John Solomon explained, ‘have swarming populations like beehives. When nations reach a critical stage of over-population people mass-migrate. Lane said China had a swarming population of sixty-five million and that was the late 1880s. Imagine, now it would be the same for the Middle East. It’s happening every moment. We’re seeing the effect of those swarming populations sitting in a boat called Tampa, right off our own shores. They’re waiting, just waiting to swarm on in and start another hive.’ He paused for dramatic effect, pointed his index finger out and waved it around in a slow alarming spiral, before standing, placing his arms behind his back and pacing across the room.
The skinheads shifted restlessly in their chairs. Antonio imagined bees. One of the men in collared top and chinos (what was his name?) suggested that these swarming populations would probably get together with the Aboriginals, because they hate us too, and form some kind of militia and take over.
John Solomon nodded his head gravely, ‘We are a vulnerable, underpopulated island, ready for the taking.’ Everyone nodded their heads except Antonio, who was still thinking about it: Chinese bees, Aboriginal bees.
‘What do you think?’ John Solomon looked at Antonio and raised an eyebrow. ‘Are we offending you?’
‘No. Not offence,’ he said suddenly. Such a quick movement out of his thoughts brought out the Italian accent he had managed to suppress most of the time. ‘I guess mostly I am concerned that there are too many people.’
‘Too many people!’ John Solomon picked up his line before Antonio had a chance to finish it and threw it out to the room. The barred windows shook in a constant low murmur as cars zoomed en masse down the Princes Highway outside.
Antonio continued, ‘In Parramatta they are building everywhere, next door to my house, you should see there is this gigantic apartment building going up. Meriton. Made of shit. Everyone who lives there will be looking down at me all the time. They’ll be looking through my windows into my home. All those people.’
The same man in the collared shirt pipes up again. ‘There has to be a limit. We can’t take everyone.’
‘That’s the problem,’ the woman said. ‘They already have taken everyone, ’specially places like Parramatta. They took everyone.’
The skinheads shook their heads like they couldn’t be more disgusted if they tried. One opened a large packet of Smith’s Crisps and poured it into the plastic wood-coloured bowl on the table. The sound of his crunching filled the small room until John Solomon spoke again.
‘Exactly! Too many people. And when you tried to stand up to that you were bullied.’ He took a deep breath, looked at Antonio. ‘Your house was paint-bombed, the anti-democratic left showed up on your lawn and tried to shut down your voice.’ John Solomon sat down again then rose up for dramatic effect. ‘Now, nooow,’ like he was the king of everything. ‘What are we going to do about it?’
In the next few days, Antonio would lie awake thinking. He’d toss and turn and then leave the house at two or so in the morning because he’d feel as though he might stop breathing if he didn’t get out from between those walls. There was this something inside of him, this small pellet of disquiet growing bigger every day. Sometimes when he slept he was sure that he was being watched. When he woke up in the middle of the night he felt as though his sleeping-self had been locked in deep conversation with whomever was in the room and just at that moment, when the discussion had reached the point at which he was about to figure something out, he woke up before he could get any answers and he couldn’t remember what questions he was asking anyway. He was missing some essential information somehow, but the knowledge was there right in the back of his brain. One thing he knew for certain was that it was all connected with water. He lay awake thinking of waves, floods, tsunamis. He imagined people, slick like eels, being carried up on the white froth of turbulent water. He imagined them crashing down around him. He thought too of that boat sitting off the shore with its 438 people, just waiting there. Waiting for the moment when they could invade.
20.
Francis scooped up the mortar with his trowel, spread it in a slow even line across the top of a row of bricks and then ran the trowel’s tip across the mortar to spread it to the edges. He placed the brick down, tapped its top with the trowel’s handle and scraped off the excess mortar that oozed out underneath. He buttered the end of the next brick, placed it down, tapping its top with the trowel’s handle, scraped off the excess mortar…He began again. He liked this aspect of his job, the way you became a machine. After a while he entered into a trance state, like at those nightclubs when he was tripping and it didn’t matter if the song kept changing, because he’d already picked up a beat and it’d already got itself inside his bloodstream, and his arms and legs were moving and doing their thing independently of him and he knew that he was alive and he knew that he was a machine at the same time, and the beat and the beat and the beat and he was something holy.
It was, of course, that motherfucker Charbel who drew him out of that Zen space and back into the reality of the rhythmless world he didn’t want to be in. In this world the other men on the construction site kept saying things in unusually quiet voices, turning away when he stared. He did hear it though, that one guy, the one who always wore a skull cap, when he walked by him near the cement turner and Francis distinctly heard him say, ‘You Australians and your safe, safe lives.’
Safe. Safe. The word had interrupted his thoughts too many times already this morning. He didn’t know what the guy meant. And now Charbel was saying ‘C’mon, c’mon. Lunch. Don’t you think it’s time for a little break?’ And he realised that he’d been at it since seven and it was twelve now and he needed to pee so badly he was about to urinate out his eyeballs.
Charbel was standing there, cracking his knuckles, same as he had been since they were twelve. As usual he did not look like he’d been doing any of the hard stuff. Here, in this place, the lack of cement flecks on your shirt and mud stains on your pants made you stand out like a homeless guy in a bank. Two men walked behind Charbel, but when Francis caught their eyes they looked away and dropped their voices to a low hum.
‘Working hard today?’ Francis asked him, pointing to his clean shiny black loafers, but they both knew that Charbel was the one who took his job seriously and the clean pants were all part of that.
They used to work well together when Francis first came to work for Charbel’s dad a couple of years back; it was always a kind of competition. Francis could lay down walls much quicker than Charbel but he would always fuck them up somehow – a loose brick, a slight tilt. There was never anything really tense though, not like now when there was a thin layer of bad between them that never got talked about.
Anyway, Francis was still glad, really, for the company of an old friend and his pressed polo shirts. You didn’t need to explain yourself to people you’d known for such a long time. You didn’t have to talk.
But today Charbel had found something interesting and he’d already got the whole afternoon planned out for them.
‘They’re at it again,’ he said, and Francis wondered if this had something to do with him and all the men on the building site who didn’t look at him anymore, until Charbel unrolled the large poster he was holding in his hand.
‘They’re at it again,’ he repeated ‘those Hills Hoist lovers.’ He unrolled the poster and held it up for Francis to see.
We believe that all human beings carry with them the potential to live harmoniously together without imposed authority. We regard planners
and politicians as dangerous animals – or worse, mechanised robots bent on destruction and personal power. We believe that sufficient wealth and technological know-how exists in the world today to provide a happy life for all people and that does not require them to live one metre apart, in homes that all look the same colour with backyards that cannot accommodate a Hills Hoist.
‘Fuckers,’ Francis said. ‘Where did they leave them now?’
‘I don’t know. This is the second one I’ve found around the place. They put padlocks on the gate too. We had to cut them off this morning and they’d painted a wall of one of the display homes green. I keep finding things. Dad thinks we need extra security but I don’t think they’ll harm anything. They’re just hippies and shit who want to paint everything in rainbows so they can be different. How about we get some lunch, have a walk around together, see if they’ve planted flowers inside one of the portaloos.’
Charbel had their route planned out, start from the perimeters of the estate and then move inward. The largest road on the estate was a giant circle, and inside that was a slightly smaller circular road, and inside that an even smaller one, and in the very middle, a lake. It was near these outside houses that the protesters hung their signs and screwed things up. Once already this year they had broken in and ruined the floorboards of a house by installing an old Hills Hoist right in the middle of the lounge room.
He couldn’t understand the protesters (everyone had to live somewhere right?). But still there was something about them that he admired. All that effort to fuck things up, to creatively fuck things up. He’d only ever thrown rocks through windows. These guys had some originality to the way they destroyed things. He could imagine them after they’d drilled that Hills Hoist in, leaning back against a wall, smoking a joint and laughing to themselves. He wondered if they’d known this place before it was like this. Francis had, though he didn’t think about it very much. He used to come here as a child with his dad to visit some family friends who’d lived on a farm. It used to be all fibro shacks in the middle of paddocks. A lot of nothingness interrupted by the odd gum tree. This was the place where he had learned that you can’t really tip over cows – not for lack of trying on his part, mind you, but you just can’t push them over, even when they’re sleeping. They’re like concrete blocks on legs – immovable.
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