by Craig Ensor
I thought I told you to leave those people alone.
But they don’t own the beach, do they?
No, they bloody don’t.
So.
I told you not to go there anyway.
Why?
Because I said so. It’s not safe.
I won’t fall or anything, Dad.
No-one intends to fall, son.
18
Between the wooden slats of the verandah I could see April’s high heels and the hem of her red skirt moving about and the candlelight flickering on the lightest of breezes that seemed to be no more than the pant of exhausted waves, the slow breath of heat-stroked water. Glass tinkled, then something poured, slurped, a drop falling between the slats and onto the part of my forearm where the hairs had started, only a few months after my fifteenth birthday, to thicken coarsely. It tasted like medicine that pretended to have a fruity flavour. She walked around the piano, placing a quiet finger on a key, then another. She, like me, was awkward around the piano, making a small talk of notes in what was otherwise silence, like serving someone at the store with no words to give, just frowns and money. After a while she left the piano and went to the railing, and my eyes went to the leering darkness within the red dress. Then a door slid open, boots scuffing the slats, the juicy smell of roast chicken and buttery vegetables.
Sit down, sweetheart, he said.
It smells great.
April sat down at the outdoor table and kicked off her heels, the moony flesh of her arch rubbing the slats, and he placed two plates down on the table.
Happy anniversary, sweetie.
I know, right? Three years has gone so fast.
I’m glad we came here.
I wasn’t at the start. I knew why we had to. I knew we needed a different life. But now I’m starting to feel at ease.
It’s what we need. To get away from it … that. To start again. To us.
The glasses clinked. Silence came between them, but not the humbling silence that my dad loved. This silence was like a chocolate they were savouring, holding in their mouths before swallowing. A silence that wanted to be celebrated but showed only in their hands, the way their hands wove together under the table. Then their hands pulled away and they started eating, cutlery scraping, chewing, clucking, moaning the food down with wine. Back home, with Dad gone to town for card night, there was leftover spaghetti and baked beans with five-point instructions on how to heat it.
I saw Finch today.
You did. More wine?
Yes, please. Down by the rock pools on the southern point. He looks lonely.
He is lonely. He should stay away, though. I’ll have a word to his father.
He asked me why he couldn’t go past the gate.
Why? He’s allowed now. What did you say?
I told him the truth. That we wanted to keep the world at a distance.
He’s a kid. He doesn’t understand.
I think he does. He’s not a kid.
How’s the chicken?
Really nice. Tender. Crispy. How I like it.
And the wine?
Love it. Remember our first date? You took me to that vineyard near Launceston. We drank way too much. I honestly didn’t know I was supposed to spit it out.
I did. I was trying to get you drunk.
You were too, April said and laughed, and her toes curled when she laughed. That was the first time I heard her laugh: a giggly kind of laugh, a laugh that had more girl in it than woman. That night was also the first time I had listened to her voice, her faceless voice, the harmony of husky rhythm and the melody of half-laughing sweetness, a duet of such interest I felt like I could listen to it for as long as I could listen to his piano.
Do you remember the picnic on your birthday?
You played ‘Happy Birthday’ for me on wine glasses. Filled them with wine from a sip to a full glass. Shiraz, wasn’t it?
Cabernet, I think, he said.
Hard to believe I was eighteen then. Such a long time ago. And you seemed so mature and distinguished. Talking about vintages, oaky undertones, tannin. You know, I thought tannin had something to do with the wine being left out in the sun. Tannin, she said, this time her voice raw and crackly.
I had no idea either. I was just parroting my dad. I was twenty-three then. All I knew was beer.
I do love this wine, though.
I have another bottle. To celebrate when …
There was silence, which was neither the humbling silence nor the kind they made before.
He asked about the tree, April said.
Who?
Finch. He asked about the tree. Why do we water it so often? Why do we want a tree to grow? He said we should go south if we want to see a tree grow green and tall.
I’ve had enough of this kid. What did you tell him?
Nothing. I started crying. Couldn’t stop. He told me a joke.
A joke.
He was nice to me.
That’s it. His dad can deliver the groceries from now on.
Until almost nine, until they had finished dessert and the last of the wine and gone inside, I waited under the verandah. I waited until all the lights went off. Then I crept out and rode my bike, which I had hidden between some saltbush, making it home just before Dad’s ute stumbled into the drive. I remember it was a full moon that night. I remember the moon was the colour of that part of her eyes which was not blue. That some stars looked red, no different to the lights of ships out at sea. That the air was dewy and perfumed with salt, salt not of the sea but that made by blood-stirred flesh. And that the bike, the shift of the gears, the whirr of the spokes, the churn of the rubber on gravel, seemed to have its own perfect music, the rhythm of which, for the balance of my adult life, I would try to reprise when playing the piano. And, at rare times, when I re-enlivened that rhythm, it filled me with what I felt on that warm night so deeply. It filled me with fear.
19
The day it almost rained she went to the bore-water pump and drew a bucketful and handed cups of water onto the sapling they had planted in the yard of withered grass between beach and house. Every morning she watered the sapling in this way. Within weeks the sapling greened. Within months the branches sprouted flowers the colour of grape chewing gum. The sapling grew against the will of all else, the will of the grass-spiked sand around it and the will of the olive crawl of saltbush and swamp oak and banksia around the house, prickly, old, hunched by wind into the shape of grandfathers. Sometimes, when she watered the sapling, he would stop playing the piano and watch the rusty water gulp and slake into the grass, watch the water bore under for another day, another year, another century. After the last drop he would return his fingers to the keys and something slow, clumsy, like a baby’s first words, struggled out and through the chorus of waves breaking on a low morning tide. It was the first toddling line of his sonata, the one he was composing for her.
After the couple had gone, I would come down to the beach house out of something – hope, habit, frustration – other times to fish on the rock shelf of God’s Gates, and I would pass this sapling and I would marvel. It was no longer a sapling. It was a tree. A jacaranda. For every year that I grew an inch it grew an inch or more, so that by the time I left for university it was my classmate, an eight-foot friend looking down into the curious green of my eyes with its own purple stare. If it also had a mouth, and was bold enough to speak of this world, it would speak of a world where rain was just a memory held by those who once lived in the last century. A world where clouds, like my grandfather, had no memory of what they once provided. But all year round its branches sprouted green leaves and once a year, in the season that Dad said was once called spring, before this part of Australia became one flyblown rot of a season, the jacaranda would bloom with the miracle of these purple-lobed flowers. This miracle I kept inside me, kept it even from my father, kept it like a secret gift I would give to April if ever there came a time. Or give to him, for he watered that sapling as often a
s she did.
20
Too often on weekends, to keep me from bothering the couple, Dad would set us both a project around the house. Scooping the leaves from the gutter in case a fire spread west through the scrubland. Waking before dawn to retile the roof with heat-reflective solar tiles. Painting the house with heat-resistant paint. Greasing the wind blades. A never-ending list of tasks he had, which he wrote down in hard block print on a notepad and, when the job was done, ruled a line through the project using a felt-tip pen. Though, with Dad, things were never quite done.
One Saturday, when I knew April would be taking her morning walk along Sandy Rip, he made us clear all the car tyres from the garage and stack them two deep, three metres high, along the south-west boundary where the land reared up into a rocky outcrop shaded by a scrum of banksia. Two Sundays later, nearing dusk and April’s nightly shower, he made me walk all thirty-two of those tyres from the backyard to the roadside where they would be collected by a truck the following day. It was night by the time I stacked the last tyre by the road. For all my teenage years, I was positive that Dad did this deliberately, created two tasks when there should have been only one, a conspiracy to keep me housebound and under his control. Many years later, fumbling my way through university, I started to keep lists of my own – research tasks, bills to pay, people to see – and to make sure that it was done I wrote down on that list, at number one, visit my father.
In the summer break of my second year I put a line through that task. I hired a car and drove north and north for two days, driving by night, sleeping by day, until I came upon the store, which was by then the colour of bone in the bleach of sunlight and felt as vulnerable and lonely as bones mired in a dry waterhole. We sat on the back porch with a warming beer as the sun, bearable at that hour, caged itself behind the western ranges. Dad had beside him a list of things to do around the house, some ruled through but most not. Somehow, while I was away at university, he had hoarded some old unwanted car chassis and engines from the tip and had built up another stack of tyres in the backyard. To build a car from scratch was number one on the list. He also had a pile of wood along the northern fence line, cut and measured for a pergola, yet to see hammer or nail. That was number two.
And it occurred to me then that those projects that stole my teenage weekends, that kept me away from the beauty of April and the piano, had more to do with my dad than they ever had to do with me. He had a son, one son to take his memory into the future, and he needed that son to fulfil a purpose for his life and our life together. Quite often the purpose failed through neglect or a misguided attempt. There were mistakes. A few successes. But the thing was to have a purpose, and the best thing was to have a shared purpose. He lived like I did as a student, by error and perseverance. Just as I would need to trash a failed essay with the touch of a button, he would need to move thirty-two tyres from the garage to the south-west boundary of the property, then, when his imagination failed him, move them east to the roadside. Sitting back on the porch, onto our second beer, he started to talk about building the pergola while I was visiting, and we discussed the design well into our fourth beer, both of us knowing that there was only the slightest chance that it would get built, but that chance gave us the right to talk it through like experts for hours and hours.
21
During school break Dad closed the store for three days and we headed south to Hobart to visit the grave where Mum was buried. Dad reckoned fifteen was old enough to see her grave, to deal with the adultness of that. She left us twice, my mother. The first time when she took the car and her favourite blue dress to town one day and kept on heading south. She wrote me a letter that said she had got her life all wrong and wanted to start a new life in another place, and that Dad needed me more than I needed her. I was five at the time, so it took me several years to learn how to read the letter, and even then I never finished the last few sentences of it because I somehow hoped those sentences would be different to what they were. The second time was when she passed away. I was about eleven at the time. A car accident on a wet slippery road through some place in the forests between Hobart and Strahan. Another man in the car was killed too. We were having dinner when Dad took the call from Mum’s parents, my grandparents I guess, although Dad never called them that. His face went all weak. As he listened to the phone he pushed the carrots and peas around on the plate like I did when I was desperate to prolong dinner, avoid the misery of homework.
What’s the matter, Dad?
Not sure yet.
After dinner, after I had eaten everything on my plate, Dad told me what had happened to Mum. That evening I did not head down to the beach alone. We washed the dishes together, Dad washing, me drying. Then we took a long walk together down along the beach in the moonlight, which made everything simple in colour even though inside I was so many colours – weeping, fiery, bruising colours. We walked to Sandy Rip and back, the surf rushing around our ankles, warm as socks, the wash the colour of the moon overhead. We said nothing for most of the walk. Then I said something.
Dad.
Yes, son.
What do you reckon the surf sounds like?
Sounds like surf to me.
Don’t you think it sounds like some god or something is shushing the world to sleep? It’s so loud and angry. Like an angry shush, don’t you reckon?
If there was a god, I guess he may have created the waves to shut us up.
It’s getting louder, don’t you think, all the shushing?
That’s because no-one’s listening, son.
22
The cemetery was as big as a suburb and had suburbs and suburbs of houses surrounding it, some houses with balconies and pools overlooking the graves and the lawns and gums between. Some graves were as big as my bedroom, made of stone or marble with rusted iron gates or a fence around them, and I remember Dad laughing at the thought of putting a fence around a grave, and me laughing with him so that he would not be alone in laughing. There were graves as small as shoeboxes, every second one sprouting a grip of flowers. Before we arrived in Hobart, Dad stopped at a flower place to pick up some flowers, pink and purple ones, and he gave them to me to place on Mum’s grave. That day was also the first time I had seen Hobart. It was a few suburbs away but the skyscrapers were all there, glass piano keys broken at different heights. And the sky was as cloudy as sink water, the air so cold it woke my skin up, turned it prickly, numb. And, as we walked around the graves, the wind came up from Antarctica and made our faces red and itchy before heading towards mountains that were as grey and windblown as the sky.
The wind hurts, Dad. Is there snow in it?
No, it doesn’t snow anymore, son. Not in this country anyway. Over here?
It’s cold.
It’s not cold. It just feels cold because you only know the heat. This way. It’s over here.
Mum’s grave was a slab of concrete with a brass plaque at the base. The brass was shiny. It gave her last name, which was a different one to ours. Over the grave there were leafy trees, which dripped and dripped as if the leaves were runny with flu.
Is this it, Dad?
That’s it.
But the name’s different. It’s not Taylor.
That’s the name of her second husband, son. I was the first.
For a child, as I was then, any confusion could be straightened out with a good lie. But there, for the first time, there was confusion and no lie to straighten me back into childhood. Dad simply looked at a space just above my mother’s plaque, and looked at the grave of the man beside her who shared her surname, while I looked for things on the grave that I could understand, that would link back to me and Dad in some probable way. The plaque said she was a loving daughter, wife and mother. It gave dates, a start and a finish. For the first time since she died, I remember crying at the thought of her, which was really not a thought but a hole in a thought, a mother-shaped hole.
Can we go now, Dad?
Don’t you want to say s
omething? Some people believe the dead can still hear.
No. Not really.
Well, put the flowers down then, over here, he said, pointing away from the bunches of flowers around the base of the grave, some new and brightly coloured, others old and rotting into dark. Where did these other flowers come from? Who were these people who knew and loved my mother so much they brought flowers to her grave four years after her death?
Son, there are two kinds of people in this world. Those that give up, and those who don’t.
You don’t give up, do you, Dad?
No. Neither do you.
Never.
Never. Even when they say it’s over.
Can we go now?
Yep, let’s go, Dad said.
23
Even in those days the mornings lasted only long enough for the sun to rise from the sea. Dawn lasted only a moment before the heat of the day began its assault, the sun waging war all day until a single moment of dusk when its spears of long light massed on the horizon, no quarter for a world that longed for the truce of night. On one such morning, not long after dawn, I saw a baby whale stranded in the shallows to the northern longshore of the beach with the tide ebbing. But first I saw April. For a while she went back and forth, carrying prayers of water from the ankle-deep shoals to where the whale was beached. Then she rubbed the water into its white belly like the whale was of her own blood and pressed the side of her face against its pectoral fin. She took off her shirt – a red bikini top underneath – and dunked it in the sea and knelt down by the head of the whale to mother the damp shirt over its face. And all along came the sounds of the man from the verandah, a warming up of cold clashing notes, then a narrowing into the melody that he had walked away from the afternoon before as if the piano was April in a venting mood, as if it had spoken back at him harshly.
Help! she yelled back at the beach house. Help!
