No More Boats

by Felicity Castagna

  Now those cows were all gone. Instead they’ve got Australian Traditional, Federation, Colonial, American Colonial, Tuscan, Georgian. People like new stuff that looks heritage. One step forward. One step into the past. ‘There is no period in history that is finished,’ his dad had said.

  Before they got going Francis stopped for a piss and Charbel bought them sausage rolls from the lunch truck. They ate on the ledge of a half-built wall. It was, Francis realised, the first time they’d hung out together in a long time, just the two of them. Mostly, they also had Jesús with them, or some other guys from school. On the site and after work they ate lunch or drank beers with their younger workmates, or they’d hang around the demountables playing darts.

  Their conversation began on the subject of women. It was the way they got into really talking; it was their version of discussing the weather. Mostly, to be more precise, they talked about their lack of women. It was this complaint that always bound them together, the thing that made them closer to each other than to Jesús ‘always-getting-laid’ Consalvo. Didn’t matter if your dad owned a construction company or your dad painted giant boats in front of your house, it was still hard to get noticed.

  When they began their walk, Charbel was talking about Anita, from their school days.

  ‘She’s got like two children now and you know most women go to shit after that but I swear, she’s looking even better,’ he said.

  ‘Man,’ Francis cut his eyes towards Charbel. ‘Don’t you think it’s about time you got over that? I mean she’s married now bro. Married.’

  ‘I’d still do her,’ he said defensively.

  ‘But what would that do?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to do anything.’

  At twenty-three, Charbel still had a dorky teenage quality to him, like he was dressing up in his father’s pants because he needed to convince everyone that he was already an adult. But even so he was still doing better than Francis. Already this year he’d had two girlfriends, for a short time, but still, that’s something, and yet the moody bastard kept returning to a girl who hadn’t acknowledged his existence since way back when they were at school. Francis didn’t want to start any arguments so he let it go, just before they made their first discovery on the back wall of one of the completed houses that had sold only last weekend.

  There were six stars, each about two feet square, painted in an orange so bright it hurt the eyes, and there was a moon in an iridescent silver. They hung there against the Heritage Blue of the house, a tiny solar system orbiting spilled paint tins on a golf-course perfect strip of lawn.

  Charbel lifted his hands up, ran them through his fuzzy black hair and, in an uncharacteristic move, sat on the ground without caring if it’d fuck up his pressed pants. Francis sat down next to him and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. They smoked and stared so hard that the orange was still there when Francis blinked and looked away from the wall to Charbel, whose face appeared to him as though it had taken on an orange glow. Francis watched him take long drags of his cigarette. Charbel had never been one to think quickly and Francis knew that he thought hard, considered each move.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ Francis said. ‘I mean, not what they did. The paint job. They can paint and the paint’s good paint too. Must have cost them a shitload. All that silver metallic and the neon colours.’

  ‘Waste of paint. Waste of time,’ Charbel said, but Francis could tell he was thinking the same by the way he got up close and inspected it.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a batshit crazy thing to do but it is kind of good looking, all those stars on blue.’

  Charbel looked at Francis like he was mental and gave a half-smile. ‘You know my dad has this theory that it’s your dad who’s done it.’

  ‘That is also batshit crazy.’

  Charbel flicked his cigarette to the floor and crushed it underneath his foot. Francis thought; there it is again, that thin bad line. He wasn’t sure if this was a stab at him or his father or maybe neither. He knew that now they’d got their talk of women out of the way and were finally alone together, stuff would start to come out.

  Charbel said, ‘Could be.’

  Francis said, ‘Could not.’

  Then there was a kind of wannabe adult showdown where they sat on the ground next to the painting, under the light of the moon and the stars, so to speak, and they just looked at each other.

  He wanted to tell Charbel about something that had happened yesterday: on his mother’s request, he had followed his dad to a place in Tempe where he’d watched him enter a terrace with Eureka flags and busts of Ned Kelly behind the iron bars of its windows. He wasn’t sure what his father was up to. He felt like any minute something else was going to happen, something worse than boats painted on lawns and stars painted on walls. He watched him walk into that terrace in his blue suit, the one he always wore when he needed people to take him really seriously – his ‘I need a loan’, ‘I need a job’ suit, and he wondered what his father needed from these people. Neon orange stars just wasn’t what he was up to. He’d gotten himself into something darker than that.

  All these things were on the tip of his tongue but he didn’t know how to say it to Charbel. Charbel was looking at the stars, cracking his knuckles like he was irritated, like he meant business and he was about to go and sort things out.

  ‘Well whoever it is, I’m not putting up with it.’

  He gave Francis a look that said his words were a warning to him, his father and the rest of the world. Francis shrugged his shoulders and lit another cigarette and Charbel went on, ‘I’m going to drag that dipshit out of that security booth and show him exactly what is happening while he’s watching TV.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Francis said, nodding with a kind of enthusiasm he wasn’t feeling right now. He just wanted to get back to his bricks and his beats and to being a machine again so he wouldn’t have to spend any more time this afternoon trying to figure out how humans work.

  ‘I’ll get back to it then.’

  Francis walked off in one direction and Charbel the other. When Charbel was out of sight Francis slowed down. He looked at the houses he was passing more closely and tried to remember which walls he had built. He stopped in front of one newly occupied house where all the windows were open, the curtains drawn back. Through the bay windows he could see right into the living room where there was a small kitchen table with four chairs in a huge room full of nothing else. This was one of those things that had always amazed him, the big emptiness of these houses. He thought of those stars, a whole galaxy there like an arrow, drawing attention to that big loneliness.

  21.

  Paul still looked like he belonged in a high school classroom. Those big eyes with too much hair in front of them. For that one moment when he’d come into Clare’s house and she’d sat on the couch too close to him and his hand had become wedged between the couch fabric and her thigh for a second too long, she’d thought about inviting him into her bed but didn’t.

  Mostly, they’d just sat in her living room, drinking and talking and even that had felt like something illicit. He was six years younger, a former student. Now they were both older, the age difference didn’t mean so much, perhaps. But still in public, even at the shop, she felt funny to a certain extent talking to him. In her living room no one could see them. When she was alone with him she realised that they were more alike than different. They both had this public side they’d learned to put on and they were both more socially awkward than that façade suggested. They were both from the suburbs. They both had families they wanted to run away from. At first they had those kinds of conversation that Clare was an expert in, where you talked about everything and nothing at the same time, and you only let a little bit of yourself out and, maybe, if you started to feel comfortable, you let out a little more.

  And then, their in-the-shop relationship and their out-of-the-shop relationship started to look more alike than different. The two worlds had started to slide up against each oth
er so that the line between being together in public and being together in private was becoming more blurry all the time. Take today, for instance: the bookshop on this September morning. Those customers came in with the fifteen minutes they had before work or the dentist or meeting their lover in a coffee shop down the road, and they wandered the aisles aimlessly, plucking a book from the shelf, putting it back in the wrong place. They came in carrying the smell of hairspray and cheap perfume and croissants, and the breeze they let in through the door ripped open the stuffy air. Clare stood next to Paul behind the counter and read from the letters to the editor section he’d brought from home. This was Paul’s weekly gift to her. Mostly, they were all about her father. He’d drawn an ironic love heart in pink around this week’s favourite:

  No Racist

  I am not a racist. My dentist is Chinese and our favourite local butcher is from Korea. I even have an Indian obstetrician – all lovely people! But you know I understand that man with the No More Boats sign on his lawn. We can’t let everyone in. Look what’s happening with all those Muslim boys harassing white girls because they’ve got no respect for women.

  Signed,

  Anonymous Aussie (for fear of persecution in my own country)

  It was a strange kind of comfort that the people writing letters in support of her father made even less sense to her than he did. An older man with a gardening manual came to the counter and Clare folded the piece of newspaper up and put it in her back pocket. While she put through the sale Paul was writing his own letter to the editor on the back of one of the brown paper bags they wrapped books in. He pushed it over towards her side of the counter when he was done. It read:

  Everyone Came on a Boat

  I’m not racist. I’m Vietnamese. I just don’t like anyone else. Also, the guy with the No More Boats sign’s an ethnic too. He came here on a boat, just like everyone else.

  ‘You going to send it in?’

  ‘Maybe. Got to work on it a bit. You know, finesse it up. Why don’t you give me some feedback on it as my former English teacher.’

  ‘Don’t do that anymore. Couldn’t cope, as you said.’

  Paul looked at her and stopped smiling. ‘You hanging onto that still? You told me it was true yourself, that you couldn’t cope with the teaching. You even said you always hoped a car would hit you on the way to work so you didn’t need to go.’

  ‘I’m not hanging on to it.’

  ‘You are.’

  She looked away from him because they both knew she was. Her brother and her mum and now Paul, everyone was looking at her life with more insight than she ever had. Things went silent. They were still testing out where that invisible line lay between them. She was trying too hard not to have a close relationship with him even though she knew she wanted it. Paul kept jumping over the line.

  She watched Paul type paint+bulk+white into the search engine of the front counter’s computer. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said to Clare in that softly-softly voice men use when they are trying to make amends. Maybe there is a simple way that I can help you fix all these issues with your dad.’

  22.

  Antonio was driving down Woodville Road when John Howard told him exactly what he had always known to be true but had never quite put into words before. John Howard said: ‘The success or failure of a nation essentially begins in the homes of its people.’

  Antonio nodded and said, ‘Yes. Exactly!’ and kept on driving and listening to the rest of the things that the Prime Minister had to tell him: ‘Each one of us is responsible for building our lives and the life of the nation. All of us are accountable to ourselves, to those around us, to the future itself.’ And then the Prime Minister was interrupted by an advertisement for mortgage brokers and Antonio turned the radio off because it was those mortgage brokers, on top of everything else, that were currently causing him so much stress that he felt the need to drive and drive.

  He was going back to the beginning. To the cul-de-sacs and hexagons and loops that were going to save the world. It’d been his first job in Australia and he’d liked being part of the idealised geometric dreaming of those architects who said that all you had to do to create the perfect community was to give it the perfect shape. No grids! It was called the Radburn Design. It had been explained to him when he walked over from the hostel that first morning; you build a whole community on a hexagon instead of a grid, you turn the houses the other way around so that they face each other and not the street. You have cul-de-sacs everywhere, small alleyways that lead into communal parks; you force people to look at each other and not the road. You make them be a community whether they want to be one or not.

  A completely true fact he always remembered: Walt Disney designed Disney World on the same Radburn model because he wanted to inspire people to create better, more cohesive communities. Villawood and Disney World have the same street plan. Imagine that! On the other side of the world there was Minnie Mouse in Tomorrowland, singing songs about friendship and the future in the exact same position on a map as the Villawood Tavern and the Centrelink office.

  That last time he’d been out on the housing estate in Macquarie Fields, he’d been trying to tell a young couple he’d met about the Radburns. Matilda and Joe, he liked both of them. He’d shown Matilda how to make the stars she was painting on a wall a little more even-looking by using a spirit level and an old piece of plywood. Antonio had been smoking a joint with Joe and talking about the California Bungalow Joe and Matilda were building out near Richmond-way when suddenly he looked up and there was night-time, rendered more perfectly on that wall than in the sky above him. He’d run into those two a couple of times now, and he always looked for them. Last time, Joe had shown him pictures on his phone of the drainage system he’d built on his property, following Antonio’s advice.

  And now, as he pulled up in front of that Radburn estate he’d helped to build in Villawood all those years ago, he had all these things in his head. He parked in front of the house he’d bought three years earlier when the Housing Commission had started selling off some of the estate and tearing down the rest of it. Luckily, when it was set on fire there wasn’t much structural damage, but the tenants had to be moved out for a while so he wasn’t getting any money for rent and then there was the problem of the tenants not wanting to move back in, and of no one else wanting to live there either. Despite all his efforts, and even this late in the night, you could still see the black burn-marks on the bottom edges of the house.

  He looked at the house again and thought that at least he could take some comfort in having bought a good house, and in making it the best on this street. He’d built a porch all the way around the front and put in ornate white wooden pillars so that an ordinary old brick box was turned into an Australian Colonial. The builders who had come in to tear down most of the other houses laughed at all the time he’d put into it, but they were too busy building houses that faced the road and whacking those loops of roads into straight grid lines to really listen to anything Antonio had to say.

  Now in that same house he could see the dark shadow of a body moving from room to room until all the lights were turned out. He believed in all that stuff the architects said about utopias of hexagons. He still had the article he clipped out of the newspaper a few years ago before they tore half of the houses from the old Radburn design down and sold the rest of it off. ‘Everything that could go wrong in a society went wrong,’ one of those original planners had said. Who could have realised that if you turned everything into hexagons and loops, then you created all these dark alleyways that let people break in unnoticed? In those discreet little cul-de-sacs and loops, people did whatever they wanted, without anyone being able to see, and eventually the police left them alone, preferring to cruise the safety of the main street where people’s lives could be observed more clearly.

  When the front of his house had been set on fire, only the others living in that cul-de-sac could see it, and none of those neighbours said anything. That�
��s just the kind of place it was, everyone’s house looking at each other, and no one thought they were a part of the rest of the world and its rules.

  Antonio got out of his car and stood on the corner. The road was straight for blocks and blocks until it turned out onto the highway. He’d had his first job here, him and Nico laying concrete and bricks. He’d walked into this space as an olive farmer, and walked out as a man who knew something about building a house. Back then Antonio had never considered that he’d still be trying to prove himself. He’d thought that by this time of his life he wouldn’t need to explain to others what he was doing in the world. When you come from nothing, you either accept that you are nothing or you spend the rest of your life trying to be something, until one day you turn around and you realise you might never make it.

  23.

  On the lawn in front of her house, that boat was there again, painted this time in much more purposeful precise strokes. The lettering of ‘No More Boats’ looked as if it had been done using a stencil. She had gone to the movies with Lucy, and everything had been fine, and then when she returned it wasn’t.

  This time, when she entered the house he was walking down the hallway towards where she was standing at the front door. She looked at him. He looked at her. He appeared to be standing a little straighter, he was walking without his cane, and even though there was a noticeable limp when he walked, he looked stronger.