by Craig Ensor
13
By the third month of delivering groceries, he had given up on meeting me at the gate. By then the gate was left open. They must have figured out that there were few visitors, either welcome or not, for a gate to work against. In these parts, Dad said, gates were as useless as rain, although there were more gates than there was rain. More gates – rusted and whiny-hinged ancestors from past times when gates meant something to the people who once lived up north. By then, in their third month, I would walk through the open gate and knock on the door until one of them came to open it. Sometimes she would if she was at home making something in the kitchen, not on one of those long dawning walks that took her hours either side of the beach house. Most of the time he would open the door, poking around in his wallet for the right money. Unlike her, he never left me a tip but for one time. The face he gave me, like Dad’s whenever I disturbed him during a stocktake. Always, as I approached the door, I wished and wished that she would be on the other side of it.
One day, despite my knocking, the piano kept playing and no-one came to the door. I took the groceries around the side of the house and walked them up the back verandah steps so that I was just metres away from him playing at the piano. Whenever that moment rushed through me, which was often, I saw him as if he were huddling over a dead loved one, grieving over it, and the sound that came from the piano was so much like grieving, as if only music, and especially his music, could make pain so beautifully listenable. The sound rose then fell away and, as it did, something rose and fell away inside me too, like every other time she appeared in and around the beach house. I wanted to touch the piano as if it were the flawless skin that held all her beauty together.
Excuse me, sir, I said.
He did not hear. He had one hand on the keys and the other jotting notes on the sheet music.
Excuse me, I said again, louder, stepping up onto the verandah. I have the groceries.
He swung around and said, You’re supposed to meet me at the gate.
No-one was there. The gate’s open.
Right. Was it? I’ll get the money.
While he got the money from inside, I looked at the piano. In places the black paint was blistered from the heat, and I remember, at that time and other times that I hung around his piano, wanting to burst those blisters, pick the scab of them, like I did many years before to the sunburnt skin of my seven-year-old back. The keys themselves looked like long delicate white fingers, so that playing those keys was as much an act of two, like holding hands out of love or sadness. All my life I had heard music come from machines, driven by batteries or electricity or something else I did not understand, and it seemed a small miracle that the piano, so worn and blistered, could make the most beautiful music from its own nature.
Why do you play outside? I asked him. Won’t the sun wreck the piano?
Probably. I like the company of the waves though.
Company?
It can get lonely inside the house. Play a note if you like, he said, and leaned back to allow a space to open up between him and the piano.
I hovered, then pressed a finger down on one key. It sounded like a mistake.
That’s A. Try this one, he said, pointing.
I tapped my finger down. A fine sound came from the piano.
That’s C. The saddest note, they say, but they’re wrong. The saddest note is the note between.
The note between?
The silence between notes. Here, I’ll show you. This is something I am writing for my wife.
He played the same piece he was playing as I walked up the verandah steps, and he looked over his shoulder at me whenever there was a space between notes and nodded his head as if he was conducting the silence.
Do you know why men don’t live as long as women?
I shook my head.
Women.
He played softly, his fingers butterflying across the keys.
Do you know why women live longer than men?
I shrugged.
Men. This song, every note is a day off my life. Some notes I lose a week. The best notes take months. I hope I’m still here when it’s finished. I hope we’re still together, he said, looking out at the foreverness of the ocean.
Can’t a robot do that, I said, make music?
It can. Incredible music. But there’s a huge difference.
What?
Me. It’s not me.
That day there were adult things to be said, and I would have to pass for an adult so that they may be heard. Even though I only understood partially what he said and what he was playing and the things he said about the way he was playing. And because I only understood partially, because there was a lack in me that made a full understanding not possible, I left that verandah with an emptiness which I have spent the rest of my life trying to make whole. If it was she who gave me the shape of my desires, it was he who gave me a solitary place of labour, a place to control and perfect an imperfect world through the discipline of music. That day I also left the verandah with the largest tip I had ever received from either of them: ten dollars and fifty cents. Another nine hundred and fifty dollars and I could buy a second-hand piano.
14
Back then she was seven years older than me and she would always be seven years older. It seemed to be a hopeless distance, the distance between childhood and adulthood, hopeless for a child wanting to be an adult, but even more so for an adult wanting to be a child, hoping to close that distance and give adulthood the originality – the joyful firstness – of childhood. Only later did it occur to me that when she was seventy-nine I would be seventy-two, both in our seventies, both old-aged, retired – compatibly so, counting the days by cups of tea and cream-filled biscuits – both eternally children, old-aged children.
But when she appeared at the gate for the first time, a twenty-two year old woman, with her long cello hair, with everything else as curved as a beach, I felt like I felt in class before the words of a poem I could only tremble at and not understand. I pulled the bike up at the gate, which she had unlatched, her thigh cleaving it open. Her thigh came through her silk dressing gown and I felt the skin on my face warming and tingling even as my eyes dashed away to the modesty of the front tyre of my bike. She smelt like soap, soap that did not smell like the yellow laundry soap Dad used and sold in bulk at the store, a smell that overcame the everyday pong of salt and sweat and sea wrack. This soap smelt permanent, like the aftersmell of bathed skin.
Thanks, she said, and went to take both grocery bags.
On the inside of her arm was a hologram tattoo of two lines in old joined-up writing, which looked like one of Mr Choi’s’s poems, the words changing as her fingers regripped the bags. I tried to read the lines, but her arm put the bags on the sand and her hand moved inside a pocket on her dressing gown.
I need some more things, she said.
She handed over a list.
She darted a look back towards the beach house, then up towards God’s Gates. The wind tried to undo her dressing gown but she held it tight before the flesh showed through and my eyes held on to the gravel just as tightly.
Do you have them?
We’ve got chocolate. Coffee …
What sort of chocolate?
Any kind. Anything you want, I said, even though I knew Dad only stocked plain chocolate.
Just plain chocolate, please.
We don’t have any wine, though. Only spirits and beer. Have to go into town to get wine.
Don’t worry about the wine. Can you bring the other stuff tomorrow? Leave it behind the bush over there. In the shade there. Here, is this enough?
She handed over a fifty. Her wrist showed and I tried to read the poem, read and understand it, but the words blurred as she moved.
That’s plenty. I can get you wine.
How? You’re not old enough.
I’m old enough to steal it.
She laughed and let go of her gown as she did. Don’t worry. I don’t want you getting int
o trouble.
It’s no trouble. I’m only stealing from my dad. Borrowing really.
What’s your name?
Finch. Finch Taylor.
It was my turn to ask her name, but I held back. I felt like there were a lot of things about her and her life which she did not want to tell me, and her name was just one of them.
Thanks, Finch.
As she walked back to the beach house the wind, gusting off the sea, felt around her right hip and thigh. There was no secret to what she was not wearing underneath. And still, to her, back then, there would not have been anything revealing in the way she filled that gown, the way her clothes, in the tight suck of the wind, made her naked before my eyes. To her I was a fifteen-year-old boy. The boy who delivered the groceries. A child. She wanted her chocolate. And she had gone past the gate to get it. She had given me a secret, trusted me with it as a friend would and, for the first time in my life, I felt the power of being entrusted, I felt the first charge of happiness she ever gave me.
15
Most of that year of strange beginnings I spent down the beach mucking about in rock pools, when I was not thinking about school or rock pools or both at the same time. On the other side of the road from the shop through scrub so angry and sharp it could poke an eye out, there was a rocky point, the sandstone scarred up with pools like the earth itself was a teenage boy suffering through acne. For hours and hours, I would drift from one rock pool to another, then head north along the beach to another rocky point and to another teenage face of rock pools. My movements were always northwards, towards the beach house, because everyone else, Dad reckoned, was heading south. All of us had choices. Our choice was to stay north. And, of course, both she and the rock pools were northwards.
They were timeless places, rock pools. Only the setting of the sun, the cool welcome of the dark, made them seem bound by time and the standing order to scurry home before nightfall. Within each rock pool there was another world of strange sea creatures, apple-coloured starfish and sea urchins and frothing crabs, fish so bloated they looked like they had swallowed their weight in water. The water was as still and sealed as glass, a bedroom window to be looked through. Many times I thought this might be how God – the God in Grandma’s piano – looked at us, at me, down through the window of the sky, and that we were as short-lived as the things in the rock pool. On some days, I counted all the starfish in a rock pool. Sixteen was my record. Some were married; others were alone like Dad. The sea things in a rock pool never fought each other, because I figured they were hiding from all the other nasty predatory things in the ocean. Rock pools were safe, like homes – some homes.
One afternoon, the shadows as long as the dying day allowed, she appeared behind me, the sun at her back, hair washed with sunlight and raying out from her face on the lightest of sea breezes. It seemed the most beautiful thing, how the sun changed her skin that summer, made it match all the sun-loved things along that beach, took her in through colour.
Finch, isn’t it? I’m April.
I think I nodded, squinting behind my hair and staring into a rock pool.
Do they ever leave, when the tide comes in?
Some do, I think, but I’ve never seen them leave. They leave when no-one’s looking. In the morning they’re back. But in different places.
They come back?
Some do.
She held her stomach at the base, like she had just eaten something that Dad might have cooked.
And the others?
The others never leave.
There was silence for a while before she sat down beside me and fished the hook of her toes into a rock pool.
Do you like your name? she asked.
Not really. Dad likes it. He named me Finch.
After a bird.
He loves birds. There used to be a few finches around here. Red-browed finches, he reckons.
All gone now?
From here they have.
I like your name. It suits you. I don’t like mine …
Why?
Because.
Because is no answer.
Because April no longer exists. The leaves changing. Turning yellow and red and purple. Every day is January now. Or worse than January.
On lonely days, towards the end, I would write her name in the sand, and laugh when a wave washed her name away, laughing because I would simply write her name, again and again, wave after wave, immaturely until dark sentenced me home.
16
At some point they started leaving the key in the front door. An old-style metal key from centuries ago, the kind that Dad used to lock up his grog, and it took me a while to figure out the knack of it. From then on I walked the groceries into the house and put them on the kitchen floor, before heading back home in time for my first class, making it back before the sun took over the day and took it away from those surviving under it. Sometimes they would be home, usually out on the verandah – him playing, jotting down notes on the blank sheet music, and her reading a book that looked thick and serious. On some days she would come inside and make me a cold drink, lemonade or cola, depending on what I had brought them. She would ask me to sit down like I was a proper guest, a friend. After a while he would stop playing and open up the glass sliding door and ask me things about the world, political things from here and abroad, questions about birth rates and refugees from the flatlands of Asia and other words I had never heard before.
She would say, He’s not allowed to ask those questions. Don’t answer him, Finch.
I was flattered that she thought I might know the answer, and relieved that I did not have to confirm that I did not.
Other times they would still be in bed or out walking along the beach or swimming in the forgiving light of dawn. At first I just dumped the groceries on the kitchen floor and took the money they had left under the fruit bowl and went for my bike. Then I started putting the milk and butter and meat in the fridge, went about putting some tinned things away in the pantry, sat down, fixed myself the cold drink she would have fixed me otherwise. Near the end, just before he said something to Dad and Dad took over delivering the groceries, before the key went from the door, I would walk around the beach house, into their bedroom and the bathroom. One day I remember just standing there, looking at her things – perfume, jewellery – looking down on her side of the bed, not knowing what to do but with this longing to do something. And I remember that I felt this longing all over, the same longing I felt when he played the piano seriously, his face bowed over the keys, eyes closed as if in the deepest prayer.
One day, when April was not home, I asked him, Why do you leave the key in the door?
In case we get locked out.
But bad people can get in.
Bad people. There’s only you, he said, and gave me a chocolate bar from a jar stored deep in the pantry. Now you’re bad, he said when I took it. That’s her secret chocolate.
17
This was a time in my life when nothing mattered, when yesterday looked and felt like today, when today looked and felt like tomorrow, when months were no different to weeks which were no different to days, when there was always a tomorrow and nothing to worry about other than school and Dad and falling from God’s Gates.
Dad, who owns God’s Gates?
No-one.
God’s Gates were two immense cliffs that jagged out to sea on the point to the north of the beach house. They were made of black rock and were as high as the skyscrapers of Hobart and Queenstown and the other great cities of the south. The waves rushed in between the Gates and crashed against the rock shelf, sea water sneezing from blowholes. When the sea sucked back, the black rock underneath was cut into geometric shapes, hexagonal mostly, stepping down in a civilised way to the water as if humans had a part in the making of it. Years and years have passed, yet the rocks would be now as they were then, but for the rise of water and the ocean dragging them down into the sea, doing them in like it did to the fallen skyscrapers of Sydney and
Brisbane.
He says the Gates are his. Says I should stay away. Then he keeps talking to me like he wants me to stay.
Who?
The man.
When?
When he’s sitting up top. He looks down at the waves crashing through the Gates. Says he needs to be alone. To watch the waves for inspiration. To help write something, he says, but he doesn’t have a piano or anything. It’s just him.
