No More Boats

by Felicity Castagna

  When they’d lived there, the whole terrace had had a hospital-like quality; there was always the smell of harsh chemicals lining the inside of your nose. On her mother’s nervous days she had cleaned the place like she was possessed. She would scrub the paint right off the walls so that things looked dingy and grey. All the boarders knew if you smelled bleach, Rose’s mum wasn’t having a good day. And Rose knew that she couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t leave her.

  That heat. Rose wasn’t sure why she always remembered it being so hot in the terrace. It must have been cold in the winter too, but when she looked at it now, all she could recall was the heat. She was always on the verge of suffocation, always had too many clothes on; those thick brown winter stockings and twin sets, all that hair pinned back neatly, the A-line skirts that sucked everything in and held it in place.

  Her mother had wanted out of Surry Hills, out to anywhere, that’s what everyone seemed to be doing after the war; half of Cleveland Street got up and moved to the safety of the suburbs, but they couldn’t afford it. Instead they stayed home, her mother cleaning, sewing clothes for people by hand. Rose went to school and later to work at the grocery store, but she was always home long before the dark set in.

  Inside the terrace, the dark would arrive through the windows. Her mother would sew in the lamplight without looking up. Rose had stayed locked up inside herself, sitting with her mother and the crackly talk of the radio. Nothing much to mark the days as being different from one another: A warm glass of milk before bed and the dishes washed, the floors scrubbed clean and her mother snoring softly under the blankets.

  Rose remembers when she was a child, her mother had still been waiting, watching out that window for the Japanese to invade after they sunk those submarines in the nearby harbour during the war, but they never came back. Later, the Italians came instead, and then the Greeks and the Lebanese Christians and the everything elses. The men wore their best pants and their only collared shirts of an evening, and they hung out on street corners in shiny black shoes, smoking cigarettes, leaning up against lampposts, always talking. To Rose they reminded her now of the extras in Casablanca. They brought their loud sing-song voices and their big hands and all those ‘r’s rolling off their tongues like molasses.

  ‘Stay away from the windows,’ her mother would urge. ‘They’ll see you.’ But Rose was never really clear on what could happen if she was seen, and besides, there was nowhere to go. The streets weren’t safe anymore, according to her mother and everyone else. So Rose sat at the windows imagining she was Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, just waiting to get out and explore the new world unnoticed.

  But the heat. The heat. She’d stayed all locked up, watching the New Australians from the window. Everywhere you looked back then, there was something you’d never seen before, a brightly embroidered skirt, fat loaves of hard brown Italian bread. Next to the new arrivals, Rose had thought all the Australians looked tired and thin. In the early morning, before dawn, before her mother woke, she would sit on her windowsill and watch the men and women walking up to the factories, brown paper bags in their hands.

  The morning her mother died she must have been hanging there in the laundry for such a long time. Rose had been sitting on the windowsill, watching a man with the darkest, curliest hair she had ever seen leaning up against the wall of the apartment block across the street, wondering if she could get her mum to take her to the pictures for her nineteenth birthday.

  Now, in her reflection in the window, Rose looked like she was going to burst out of her own body. She could be at Clare’s place in less than ten minutes but she didn’t want to go. The memory of that heat made her yearn for different things.

  27.

  What Antonio had gotten himself into here went further back in time than he could imagine. It started way back in 1914 when John Solomon’s father George Solomon wrote ‘Greece’ in that little space next to ‘Country of Origin’ on his application for Australian citizenship. ‘Lebanese-Syrian’ wasn’t going to cut it until the White Australia Policy was dropped sixty years later. A journalist had found George’s own words in the National Archives. ‘It is a true fact. I was born in Aleppo in Syria, on 18 February 1888, and the other application which was made in 1916 last, it is not the correct one, and you know it for a fact there were no Asiatics allowed to become naturalised unless he made an application and showed he was born in some part of Europe, and for that reason I got told to say so, and I do not know any difference it made in saying it.’

  This morning, Antonio and Skinhead Bruce with all the tears tattooed down his face were sitting at John Solomon’s kitchen table. The spirit of George, otherwise known as the King of the Riverina because he came to Australia with not a penny and ended up owning most of Main Street, was hanging over the scene like a bad smell. Skinhead Bruce, who had just this morning been put in his place again over the stealing of the megaphone at the protest in front of Antonio’s house, had talked about George, as he often did when he wasn’t getting enough attention, or when things weren’t going his way.

  ‘Sol-eeh-man,’ Skinhead Bruce said, ‘isn’t a very European-sounding name.’

  John Solomon wasn’t going to dignify the comment by giving it much attention. ‘It’s pronounced Sol-o-mn.’

  Skinhead Bruce sat back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest like a petulant teenager; in fact as Antonio looked at him more closely he thought he couldn’t be that far off a teenager in age. He was early to mid-twenties, scrawny, the kind of guy who finds it impossible to grow facial hair. Skinhead Bruce looked at John Solomon again and said, more loudly this time and at a closer distance to his face, ‘Did your father pronounce it that way? George Sol-eeh-man. I read about him in another newspaper article again. Says old George was a Leb from Syria. ‘Snot in Europe is it, Syria?’

  ‘My grandfather was from Greece. It says so on his naturalisation certificate. I sent it to the newspaper.’

  ‘Greeks, Arabs all foreign though ain’t they?’

  ‘No. Greeks and Arabs are a different species.’

  Antonio continued to fold pamphlets while Skinhead Bruce and John Solomon argued. He placed the pamphlets in a neat stack beside him and read the bolded quotes: ‘Today’s invasions don’t have to be military. They can be of diseases; they can be of unwanted migrants. – Solicitor General of Australia, David Bennett’. He was listening to John Solomon and Skinhead Bruce and he was not. Lately, he felt more than ever that he was walking through a dream he couldn’t wake from. It was hard for his conscious self to stay there in the room, to remain focused, to listen.

  Antonio remembered the Arab men on the building site. They could have been Greek, or maybe Italian like him. A couple of them, he’d never gotten their names, came around to see him at the hospital after the accident in which Nico had died. They had brought him biscuits drenched in honey. Now, they didn’t come around to see him anymore.

  Antonio knew he had just missed some important part of the conversation. John Solomon’s hand reached up, not far from Antonio’s nose, and slapped Skinhead Bruce hard on the cheek. Skinhead Bruce stood up, grabbed a chair as he left and threw it against the wall. The smashing sound made Antonio snap back to the here and now. His leg ached under the table.

  One thing that Antonio understood clearly at this moment was that the mention of his father made John Solomon angry. He took two more of the A4 sheets from the pile on the table and folded them quickly in an irritated manner. Antonio kept on folding and did not say anything until John Solomon looked up and glared at him.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is important work we are doing. Information, knowledge, you know that is the most powerful thing. That’s why I’ve spent so much of my time reading since I was a little boy, finding out about the world. That’s why I did my PhD in political science, because I wanted to know how the world worked and now, we have the opportunity – no, the privilege – to share that information with others.’

  John Solomon stoo
d up like one of those politicians at question time who had become so fed up with the opposition that there was nothing he could do but stand up and shout over the bodies of people who were clearly much more stupid than himself. He was getting fired up now. ‘You know, way back in university when I started the National Front it was our graffiti and literature displayed on walls and street poles that got Blainey thinking about the multicultural and immigration issue.’ He stopped speaking abruptly and clenched his teeth, like he was trying to steady himself before he got up and punched everyone out. He looked at the statue of Ned Kelly.

  A driver in one of the trucks on the Princes Highway pressed down on his brakes and the sound came screeching through the house. Ned Kelly shook slightly on his base, as if he might jump up at any minute and join the conversation.

  John Solomon piled the folded brochures into the cardboard box on the table and told Antonio, ‘You’re doing a good job.’ He looked at him for a long time like he wanted to make sure that Antonio knew he meant it.

  It was time to leave. Antonio knew this by now. There was always a strict formality to the way that John Solomon did things, an invisible schedule that must be followed. Lunch was always at twelve, afternoon tea at three. John Solomon required constant refreshment. The working bees ended at five. John Solomon needed time alone to work on his big ideas in the semi-dark of that terrace, with his notebook and pen and a thoughtful look on his face.

  When Antonio walked through the backyard to where his car was parked out in the lane, he heard noises coming from the shed. It was large, and sturdy-looking for a shed in the backyard of an old terrace in the inner west. It was made of galvanised steel and had a large lock on the door, which Antonio noticed was unlocked and hanging off the slightly open door. More curious to Antonio, though, was the fact that John Solomon didn’t really have much of a yard to speak of, just some patchy grass, a strip of concrete that didn’t require seeds, or potting mix or weed removers or lawn mowers – the types of things you keep in a shed.

  From the inside of the shed he heard another thump and suddenly the light switched on and seeped out underneath the door. When he opened it he could see Skinhead Bruce, unmistakably with his tattoo-teary face grabbing things off a shelf and throwing them to the ground. When Antonio opened the door further and stood at the entrance he could see what Skinhead Bruce was throwing – thick hard-backed books in solid colours, the type you find in the reference sections of libraries. The entire shed was lined with shelves holding mostly books in neat rows piled from the floor to the ceiling, with the exception of the back wall where there were stacks of pamphlets and posters and neatly folded flags. Skinhead Bruce pulled a row of the books out until the back wall was revealed. The books seemed huge against his thin limbs moving back and forth across the shed but he must have been stronger than he looked because it didn’t seem difficult for him. Antonio watched Skinhead Bruce feel around with his hands as if there might be something that his eyes had missed.

  It was a few minutes before he acknowledged Antonio’s presence by giving him a sour look and turning back to the work at hand.

  ‘You gonna help or what? Just stand there doing nothin’ like that prick. Fucking King Solomon.’

  The motion of his arms reaching back and forth, of books flying from one side of the shed and landing on the other made Antonio feel as though he were in a washing machine. He sat before he could fall over on a cardboard box by the entrance. He didn’t know what he was sitting on but he was glad it held his weight. He leant forward, rested his face in his hands and tried to concentrate on stopping the world from spinning.

  ‘It’s here,’ Skinhead Bruce was saying. Thump. Thump. Antonio could feel the vibrations of the books bounding against the wall behind him.

  ‘Motherfucker.’ Thump. Thump.

  Antonio lifted his head to see if Skinhead Bruce had found the thing he was looking for but clearly he had not. He was resting his forehead against the shelf.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘His gun.’

  Antonio could feel his palms start to sweat. He didn’t know if he should move. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m going to kill him.’

  This last declaration wasn’t said with much emotion. Skinhead Bruce’s voice had gone flat and he was standing there hunched over slightly, as though he had thrown all his conviction out with the books on the ground. He sat next to Antonio and caught his breath. Skinhead Bruce had a meanness, something deep down that was always there.

  ‘What makes you think he’s got a gun anyway?’

  Antonio doubted its existence. From what he had seen of John Solomon he seemed more of a ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ type.

  ‘Well, before he became a pussy, he was arrested for giving a guy a gun to shoot up the house of those Muslims that run Lakemba Mosque. Motherfucker says he’s all about books and knowledge and shit but really he just wants to shoot people back to where they belong.’

  ‘Shoot them.’ Antonio repeated. It was more of a statement than a question. He couldn’t begin to get his head around all that. He thought of Matilda and Joe painting stars on houses at night, and the young guys in lowered cars who threw paint bombs at his house; he thought of his daughter with that Asian boy standing on the pavement with the protesters mocking him, and the construction workers next door calling out all the time and laughing when he looked their way, and he thought a gun! That was something that made you take a person seriously, and then he thought no.

  ‘No gun.’ Antonio said, more as a way of steadying his own desires than as a reply to Skinhead Bruce who had begun to crack his knuckles as though he was gearing up for a fight.

  ‘I think we should get out of here now before John Solomon sees us.’

  ‘Couldn’t give a shit,’ Skinhead Bruce replied and it was probably true, but also, things were over and Skinhead Bruce seemed to know it. They left the shed and walked out to the back alleyway. Antonio was tired. His whole body began to ache. When he got into the car and rolled down the window Skinhead Bruce’s head was suddenly beside his. Up this close Antonio could see that his skin was pockmarked and flaky. There were small beads of sweat forming at the top of his dry lips.

  ‘I could get you one, you know,’ he said, wiping the sweat off with the back of his hand.

  ‘What?

  ‘A gun.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For your own protection.’

  28.

  Charbel’s apartment looked exactly the way you would expect the apartment of a 24-year-old male who had recently moved out of home to look: sparse on practical and also ornamental things. There were no saucepans or framed photographs, just that one couch he’d got from someone, a bed, the television on top of an esky, too many odd pieces of worn clothing on the bathroom floor.

  Francis was kind of living there and kind of not. He had slept over one night and he came sometimes in the afternoons to get a break from his own home on the days when he felt like he might just up and explode. His home wasn’t his home anymore. It was filled with silence on the inside, and there was too much noise on the outside. His mum and sister, where were they? He’d been left to carry it all. And he was meant to be the irresponsible one.

  It was all getting freakier than he’d ever thought it could. He’d walked through the garage last night and almost split in two when he’d seen his dad with that gun. His dad was just standing there, just like that, turning it over in his hand. He’d held it like it was enormous and heavy, and even in that shadowy space Francis could see that there were connections being made: his dad was thinking about something he shouldn’t, maybe about the protesters or the boats or his own diminished life. When Francis had leant up against the creaky door too hard, his dad got startled and dropped the gun and it broke into four different pieces on the ground.

  They’d both laughed so hard Francis had pissed his pants a little with the relief of it all. He recognised it later picking those plastic pieces up off the ground. Fr
ancis had bought the gun himself at the costume supply store for a gangster-themed party Charbel had had for his housewarming. He’d gotten a little carried away – in fact, he’d bought two guns so that he could put one on each of his hips. The larger, heavier one was still there on the shelf untouched.

  This was how it was; they were always on the edge of hysteria, he and his father, like two old ladies afraid of the dark. He knew that there was something missing here, some essential piece of information he was meant to get and didn’t. But he also knew that’s what made people, all those things you don’t get about them. His dad was stuck in some kind of pain he couldn’t get out of, and no one knew what the pain was, maybe not even he did. Francis kept thinking of him standing at the front door in his underwear, looking fragile and confused as the eggs flew through their door.

  But at this moment Francis was trying to push it all away for a while. He was in Charbel’s shower looking around for soap, but Charbel obviously didn’t have any and Francis was wondering if he really smelled that bad.

  He towelled himself off and put on the old shirt he would change out of just before they left Jesús’ house for the bars. In the living room Charbel was already dressed and sitting on the couch with a beer in his hand, watching cartoons. ‘We heading to Jesús’ soon?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Nah, what?’

  ‘He’s coming here. Can’t go to his place anymore.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Mami banned you.’

  Charbel raised his eyebrows and said it in that voice he put on when he wanted to act like a shit, ‘You’re not allowed to play with him anymore because your dad’s being a dick.’

  Shit. Banned like he was a twelve-year-old or something. He’d loved Mami, ever since for ever. Jesús hadn’t said anything to him and he hadn’t thought about Jesús in all of this. He’d forgotten about Jesús’ family – what had happened to his dad in Chile, why they came here, how this stuff might have made him feel.