by Craig Ensor
What is it, the thing you’re playing?
The thing? It’s a sonata. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
Who’s that?
Who’s that? You ask who’s that? That’s Beethoven. You haven’t heard of Beethoven? Ask your teacher about Beethoven.
Mr Choi only likes silence.
Silence. Well, tell Mr Choi that once he’s heard the Moonlight Sonata his life will not be the same. It becomes part of you. Where is it?
The other things he wanted, almost every third or fourth day, were pens and the large scrolls of paper upon which he composed. And, in particular, he wanted Scotch. The kind they made on the other side of the world, a place where cold water ran through mountain streams, at places called distilleries.
Sit down. I’ll show you how to play the first movement. Come on. Sit down.
Speare shuffled along the seat so there was room for half of me.
Put your hands here. On these keys. Like that, he said, arranging my fingers on the keys.
He played the first three notes of the sonata.
Now you go.
I played, but too quickly so that the notes all swam together.
Not bad for a first go. You have long fingers for a boy. You could be a pianist one day.
He looked out towards God’s Gates. In the distance April appeared, as small as a stone skimming along the ocean, a small tanned stone in the shadow of the cliff, the sun-capped teal of the ocean behind her in its fullness. He prodded me along the seat so that I was standing again. Then he opened the top of the piano and chucked the newspaper and Scotch and pens and sheet music inside the piano. Then he shut it.
One day you’ll understand. For a man to fall and stay in love his heart and mind must be like that with the thing he loves, he said, and made a ball with his fingers. And when that thing is not her, even if only for a single moment, it will lead to unhappiness.
What he said came to me all coded, like the periodic table of elements, and yet for all my lacking – lack of experience, lack of time – I was able to sensibly ask, Can the thing be anything?
It can, he said, unballing his fingers and placing them down where he had placed mine, ready for the first three notes of the sonata. You’d better run, go around the back of the house so she doesn’t see you. She’ll suspect something.
Can I come back? I asked. To learn the piano.
Keep bringing what you bring and I’ll teach you … the basics.
And I did, like he was a teacher, a real one, one that could not be forgotten when the class was over, could not be switched off by the loss of power or dreams or the presence of rock pools.
29
The sea was a bustling city. A breaking wave louder than a bus gearing away from a stop.
Such words – I just remember staring at April, the lips that made them, my face cocked sideways like a dog would stare at words treated to it. She spoke in poems which I understood only by the way she said them, her eyes all talk, the accent of her hands, long fingernails, printing the words deep into the pages of my memory.
She had other poems: God’s Gates looked as disapproving as her father. The beach house was a cranky old philosopher. The weather a totalitarian state. The ocean the other state, equally totalitarian. When the noonday sun touched the undertow of sand, the sea was the colour of his eyes – his, she said, some other him beyond us. All these poems I had to hold in my head, like I would hold my breath under water, until I got home at dusk and was able to breathe them out into the V-Pad by searching for the meaning of them.
One day she drifted south of Sandy Rip around the southern rocks, to where I was playing noughts-and-crosses in the sand by myself, driftwood for crosses, seaweed for noughts. That day her face and lips looked full of these kinds of poems. She stepped down from the rocks onto the sand, her toenails painted pink, the sand a caramel pudding around her feet.
I haven’t seen you for a while. I miss you, she said.
I looked down.
I’ve been looking out for you. Your dad does the deliveries now.
Dad’s banned me.
Why?
Dad says I bother you and your husband too much. Says it’s none of my business.
It’s. What did he mean by it’s?
Don’t know. That’s just the way Dad talks.
My hair flopped over my eyes, which were downcast, having spotted a gold ring on one of her toes – the first time I had seen gold in the sun, knowing then and there that gold and sunlight were made for each other. She lifted my head and pushed my hair to one side, and I felt, as she did it, as her fingers brushed my skin, that this had happened before to me, that my hair had been pushed to the side before by a woman such as her, or it would happen just like that one day.
There, I can see your eyes now. You have lovely eyes. What colour?
Same as my mum’s, Dad says.
I like this beach. Reminds me of childhood, the way it seems to go on forever.
It’s not forever. It’s seven miles long.
Knowledgeable, aren’t you? Can I play?
Sure. I’m noughts, though.
I’ve got a better game than this.
She moved up the beach to a smooth area of wet packed sand and used a bit of driftwood to sketch grids in the sand. She called her game hopscotch. Then she explained the rules to me, her explanation all girlish, and I was distracted by the sight of her, a black bikini under a white dress that was as loose and filmy as sea mist. It was a game easier shown than explained, she said, and she took off her dress before hopping and skipping, feet slapping down within the squares. The bikini parts bounced, the other parts tightened. She was as soft as sand in some places and as hard as sand in others. When she got to the end of the grid, she looked back at me and smiled and giggled like the girls did in class. The sun seemed so soft and unbothered on her sandy brown skin, so hot and bothered on the pinky white of me. If the sun picked favourites, she was it.
Your turn now.
Can you show me again? I still don’t get it, I said, smart enough, even then, to not get it three more times.
30
We lived at either end of the day. That polarity of living and the afternoon sea breeze made living that far north bearable – the elevation too, for most who lived in coastal lowlands were forced to abandon their houses or visit them by boat. When the sea breeze came, Dad said, it was like being handed a cold beer, perhaps two or three cold beers, but there were never enough of them to get decently drunk. On the western side of the dividing range, where the temperatures were over fifty degrees day after day, life happened at night or under the scorched land in caves and old coal mines and the shafts of those mines. There were stories from out west, from not long before the great movement south to Tasmania, that Dad said I was too young to hear at first, telling me days later as if those pent-up days in between were the only difference between adulthood and childhood. A drunken man passed out in front of a hotel, his skin melted to the footpath like chewing gum. Old wooden houses combusting from the heat. Air too hot to breathe, suffocating, two hands around a throat, police thinking all the deaths were suspicious, a serial killer loose, a strangler, such was the extent of the denial that the air that we all breathed, which we had lived on for centuries, had turned deadly. When the wind came from the west and the sea breeze forgot about us, Dad closed the store, locked down the heat shields over the windows and turned the house and store into a cave. He lit candles to save electricity and batteries. We sat in front of the fan, sucked on ice cubes. Once or twice every hour he checked the barometer, shook his head, and wrote the new record in a thick and tattered logbook he kept in a kitchen drawer. Much later I would see this as our particular fate. To live in a world that got darker and darker with light, relentless unforgiving suns of light, so much light it was as if the sun had grown other suns, a dark family of psychopathic suns. Other days the sea storms were so bad the tide looked higher than the beach, chest-out angry, the intimidating bully at school, stealing
back the sand it had so generously dumped there for thousands of years.
But Dad had a plan. Out west there was a volcanic plug hundreds of metres high, named after a town that was no longer a town, and by dint of that nameless. It was more a wall than a mountain, a sheer rise of black and grey rock topped by a flat stretch of dead vegetation. On those high-sea days, when the future seemed to be upon us, Dad would get out his plans for the house he would build on top of that flat plug and add another room, list out supplies and materials we needed. At one point, there were four bedrooms in this house, but only two of us. To me, then, the number of bedrooms seemed strange. Only later did it occur to me that, at one point, Dad may have had in mind the family I was yet to create.
One day, on a day that hit the early fifties by noon, I asked Dad when it had rained last.
Years ago. Back when you were a baby.
Fifteen years ago?
I was pulling your baby clothes off the washing line, I remember, and a big splat of rain hit my arm. Then it came down. Bucketloads. Flooded the garage.
Flooded the garage?
Yep. Your mother called it cloud milk. After that the clouds thinned out. Went on diets. Or headed south with your mother.
Why did the rain stop, Dad?
The boiling frog, son.
The boiling frog?
I had heard about frogs, the frogs of Tasmania, but had never seen one.
Well, we were the frog in the pot of water that came to a simmer and then slowly to a boil.
Why didn’t we leap out? I asked, knowing that much about frogs.
We liked water. We ignored that it was heating up. Drying up. Denied it. Acclimatised. We survived as we always did.
No-one tried to turn the heat off?
Sure. They tried. We all tried. But the earth’s more complicated than a boiling pot of water.
Even without the rain we got on with it, Dad reckoned. We had the sun. We had plenty of it. Wind. The sun made that too. We had the rain from the past bored up in dead creeks and riverbeds. We had food shipped and trucked north from Tasmania and flown in from New Zealand. And, on one day in the future, when the sea rushed through the fly-strip door of the general store, we had plans to leave for a purpose-built house up on the dead volcano. The only thing that will beat us, Dad said, was ourselves, and we were not the kind to give up. That was the spirit of this place, a pioneering nomadic spirit – that was what we got from our ancestors of all places and colours.
31
While it never rained along the coast or inland, storms the size of Tasmania pelted down over the ocean and the great dark skull of night cracked with light, with sharp ideas sheeting through from places beyond. Winds raged with such strength they could power the few cities and towns left on the mainland. Such was their violence Dad reckoned we were lucky to have relentless sun rather than relentless storms. But I did not see it that way. It made me sad, as if it were an awesome party, full of fireworks and bursting champagne, a party I could watch in the far distance on the horizon but never be invited to. Everything on land seemed so still and friendless, so boring with the everyday everywhere of sunlight.
One day, while watching one of these storms marble the eastern sky with lightning, I told Dad I wanted to be the captain of a ship at sea.
You do, do you? Why’s that?
To sail through the storms.
The storms. So you want to die, do you?
No, I want to live.
The day after, Dad emptied some ropes and tyres and fuel drums from the old rusted boat he kept in the garage. He wheeled it out, hooked it to the tow bar on the ute. By early morning we were headed south, down to a harbour where boats were once moored when the town was more than a road with a petrol station and post office and a dozen half-stocked stores, before the sea rise took the jetty and the moorings and boats that relied on such things. Apparently, all I had to do was get in the ute. Dad had it all sorted out. He was going to show me something about the ocean, apparently, which was a word the girl from Adelaide used a lot when things were not so apparent. On the ramp Dad tinkered and argued with the motor, something about the fuel lines, an argument that ended up with us rowing out to sea with a couple of old rotting oars. It was early morning, the sun like a cricket ball seaming off the water up at our eyes. Dad’s rowing elbows dripped sweat from where the muscles twisted, squeezed like an orange or lemon, all while he rowed out to a place that seemed to be no place but only chopped up water. As we went he put me to work with a bucket, scooping and tossing the slop water in the hull over the side.
One hole, one weakness, and you’re gone out here, son, he said. Being out at sea is never safe. And the captain goes down last.
We rowed so far out that I could look back and see the roof of the store and, farther north, the beach house. The beach house looked quiet with sleep or boredom. The waves were shark fins. All of them. Like Dad said, if there was a god he would not have made waves the same shape as shark fins, he would not have been that cruel. Or maybe he would. Still Dad rowed through wave after wave and the closer they got the more they looked like harmless waves.
Keep going with the bucket, son. We’re almost there.
About half an hour along, Dad stopped rowing and started looking down into the water, the boat drifting, slapping against the swell. The water was lighter under the boat, an ice-block blue in the light of that morning. He put on some goggles, leaned over, dunked his head in the water and came up with this grin on his face, a grin that made him look like he could have been my friend, if we grew up as brothers or something.
This is it!
What?
Where I used to hang out when I was your age.
You used to hang out under water?
No, no, son. I’m not a fish. You’ll see.
Dad tossed down a rusted anchor, fitted me up with goggles and snorkel and flippers, and watched me jump first into the water. The water felt warm and accepting, as warm as my skin. About ten or so metres under the water was a flat deck of rock and sand, dead with the roots of withered shrubs overcome by kelp and snot-coloured grasses and wayward trends of silver-yellow fish. Dad tapped me on the back and gestured with his hand to follow, and I did so until we came across a hut made of stone and wood and corrugated iron. Dad then swam down and I went with him to the doorway of this hut, the water so clear I could see a small iron bed and drawers and a chair and an area with pots and pans that must have been a child’s attempt at a kitchen. After swimming through the doorway, Dad went about picking up slippery green bottles and looking through drawers all bearded with moss, the whole place insane with glass-skinned fish, all showing how their insides worked. He looked back at me, said something, but only gurgling came out. Even so, I knew what he was going on about. I listened and trod water at the doorway, watching and listening for as long as my lungs could cope. Then I popped back up and looked for my own makeshift hut of corrugated iron and, further past Sandy Rip, to the beach house and the sight of April walking down through the sand for her morning swim, dressed as brightness itself.
We talked a lot on our way home. Dad was excited, grinning wildly, working the oars with the strength of a much younger man.
Dad, do you think the sea will take the beach house one day?
Dad stopped rowing for a bit and looked back towards the beach house. His smile went elsewhere.
Yes, son, it will, but I’ll be long gone. Maybe you too. The way it’s going, though, I think your children will be around to see it.
That shocked me, not the mention of the beach house being under water one day, but the mention of my children, for I saw myself only as a child and could not imagine any way beyond childhood, and certainly not beyond the children Dad hoped I would create.
On the way back to shore I sat at the front of the boat and watched the water pass under the bow. The water was clear and giving and beautiful. For most of my life I lived near the water, so neglectfully close I could not put a word to the very colour of it. It
would be many years later, as a young man building a career in Hobart, ready to take that step that was not so much a step as a state of being there to be honoured, that I came across an engagement ring that had somehow, remarkably, turned the colour of those waters into stone.
Water. It has no colour, Dad said, pulling the boat up onto the trailer.
Yes, it does.
No, son. It’s the things around it that give it colour. Light. Sand. Sky.
I cupped some water from the shallows and held it there in the cup of my hands. It was the colour of me.
32
On some days the midday sun became so hot it seemed to scald and crack my skin and my skin itself became too hot to touch. On those days I fled the rock pools for the shelter of a cave that ran deep under God’s Gates, leaving only when the sun had dropped to a simmer over the western ranges. No matter the time of day, there was always a large room of beach sand at the back of the cave, the rocks wet and dripping from some mysterious spring of water, and the air deep inside the cave was as cool as the air under our house. On one of those days, on a weekend when Dad had not piled up too many chores, I sought shelter in the cave. Because of the sound of the waves I did not hear April sobbing deep within the cave, but when I saw her sitting on the sand in the cool darkness, her legs crossed like a schoolgirl’s, I knew at once that the back of her hands were drying tears and not sweat, for I had seen something similar a long time ago: my mother, sitting on the edge of her bed, her face down and a tear about to leave the raw tip of her nose.
April, I said, softly, so as not to shock her. What’s the matter?
It took her a while to answer. She kept sobbing then slowly mopped the tears away with the tissue of her arm.
I miss him, she said.
He’s at the beach house. I just saw him on the verandah.
Not him, she said.
Part of me wanted to ask further questions but I felt there was a darkness there, a darkness colder and darker than the back of the cave, which I feared any question would throw a telling light upon. In all the times I had sought shelter in the cave I had never followed it down through that narrowing darkness. Dad would call it being soft. Later I would see it more as an instinct for survival, an instinct not to put myself in a place where I may be threatened, both physically and, with April sitting before me, emotionally. Then I saw the bottle down by her side.
