by Craig Ensor
What’s that?
It’s his secret whisky. I nicked it. Want a swig?
Here, she said, and took a swig, bravely screwing her face up after it was done. She handed me the bottle. Somehow I remember feeling flattered that she did not clean the mouth of the bottle with her shirt, which was bundled on the sand beside her. I took a sip, at first wondering if I could feel and taste her lips on the glass of the bottle before the acupuncture of the whisky hit my lips and tongue and throat and took all feeling away. Then I started coughing.
First time, she said.
I’ve tried beer, that’s all.
Why don’t you sit down?
Where?
Beside me, she said, and tossed her shirt to the side to make way for me.
She wore denim shorts and a white bikini top and her hair was wet around the edges of her face from tears and sweat. Her breath smelt like the last sip was not her first. In silence we looked out through the cave, at the sun-flecked waves crashing over the black rock and ending in a sprawl of water before our toes, and we looked out beyond the waves to the deep blue of the Tasman Sea all spoiled by the spit and drool of wind. We passed the whisky back and forth between us a few times.
I like it in here, she said.
Because it’s cool?
No, because I can’t hear that piano.
But I could hear it, ever so faintly, and back then I thought it was because I wanted to hear it and April, for some reason, did not, and I still think that to this day. I took another swig, the scald and medicinal taste lessening with each swig, and a feeling of tingling numbness, like when I had slept on my hands overnight, seemed to take over my face.
Can I ask you a question? she asked.
Guess so.
Where’s your mother?
She’s dead.
I’m sorry to hear that, Finch, she said, and put her hand on my thigh, her nails painted red, which was a colour almost shocking in this part of the world, a world that was either blue or yellow or olive or brown. When did she pass away?
Few years ago. We don’t talk about it much. Dad doesn’t like to.
My mum’s passed away too, she said.
I’m sorry, I said, and wanted to put my hand on hers, but I kept it where it was, fingers rooted into the wet sand for some kind of balance. What about your dad?
He’s around. One of the few left in Sydney. He’s not like your dad, though.
What? He’s not a cranky old prick?
She laughed. No, your dad loves you. You’re everything to him. With my dad I could never tell.
Guess so.
We’re kind of similar, aren’t we? Me and you, April said. Similar and different.
Not like brother and sister, I said, and my voice came out deeper, like the echo that would rebound whenever I talked into the dark nothing of the cave.
No, not like that, she said, and handed me the bottle back.
The tattoo along the inside of her forearm flashed before me and although my eyes were starting to lose focus I remember picking up certain words, words like life and backwards and forwards.
You like my arm, she said.
What does it say?
It says, Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Sören Kierkegaard wrote it. You won’t know him. A philosopher from centuries ago. I used to go to university, you know.
That’s cool, I said, pretending to understand what it meant.
Let me look at your arm, she said, and held the flat of my arm out in her hands. You’ve got some muscles there, she said, her voice wavering in pitch between huskiness and a sugary half-giggle. Have you ever kissed a girl?
I shook my head, feeling the slight burn of shame that went with it.
A boy? she said, and laughed.
No, I said, and almost spat out some of the whisky. There’re girls in my class but they’re …
Not real.
I shook my head, which had dropped to stare at the sand between our toes. Then her fingers, which were cool and stubbled with sand, lifted up my chin and her lips were only a breath away from my lips.
She said, Let me show you.
April kissed me on the lips, a kiss not long or deep enough to be one of lovers, but not so slight and short that it wanted to be got out of the way. It was, then and even to this day, more than educational. And with that kiss this feeling warmed through me, warmer than the weather outside the cave and warmer than the whisky that had taken over the solidity of my flesh, a feeling which I could not in any way sensibly describe, other than that it was a feeling of radiating warmth which I would try to find or rekindle throughout the rest of my days and nights.
33
While the rest of the world talked to each other through wireless chips studded behind the ear, Dad kept a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old telephone booth out the front of the general store. It still worked, with a slick black receiver permed to a black metal box with numbered buttons and a coin slot, even an old paper telephone directory from some past century, though it was all for show. It worked like any other cell phone. In the early days Dad set it up as a novelty tourist attraction, put signs along the road both north and south, signs that read ‘The Last Phone Booth on Earth’. Back then he charged twenty dollars for half an hour, and the price stayed the same to that day and even after that day. That day being the day April came walking down the road, all dressed up like she had a date: denim jeans, blue shirt buttoned down once or twice and her hair gone all wild and purposeful with its own music.
This looks like trouble, Dad said. Son, go and send one of those beeps to your school friends.
But you banned me from that.
Right, and you’re still banned.
April burst through the rainbow fly strips and moved up to the counter. I was sitting in the corner on an old milk crate, crushing boxes for recycling. That moment, the moment when she hipped her way into the general store, was a moment that smelt of sea salt and sunscreen and the green antiseptic froth that Dad used to mop the floor of the store. It was a smell of that moment, that time, and one, in all my years in Hobart and later in Antarctica, that I could not locate and relive in any way other than through memory.
Hi, Finch, she said and smiled.
Hey, I said, and looked back down at the boxes.
Then she turned to Dad, who stood behind the B-Coder. He had taken off his glasses, smoothing across his hair with a comb.
Does that phone still work?
It does if I let it.
How much?
Ten for half an hour, for you.
She put ten dollars down on the counter, walked out of the store and through the car park of sand and gravel, opened the door to the booth and stepped in like she would step into her shower. Dad flicked a switch under the counter. We went about our business, Dad repricing some cans of soup and beans while I crushed boxes, but the phone booth was made of clear glass, like a shower, and we could watch her poses shift around the receiver as she talked. Her hips and legs shifted from side to side, trying to run water into slips and hollows. And her hands moved as she talked, and that amazed me, because I grew up in a family of men who never moved their hands to make or stress a point, who relied upon the slow lope and hang and rise of their voice for effect. After a while her heels came off, and she seemed so much shorter standing flat in the booth, almost the height of a girl my age.
Son, let me give you a lesson about women.
What, Dad?
See the way she’s talking, with her hair out straight as a wall between us and the phone?
Yep.
That’s a woman who’s got something to hide. Probably on the phone to another man somewhere.
Really?
Really. That’s how it works.
When the half-hour was up she came back into the store and put another ten on the counter. She bought a bottle of water too, scanning her wrist for that. It was late afternoon. The sun squinted out the blue of her eyes as she went to make the
second call.
Who’s she calling now, Dad?
Her girlfriend.
Because it was on dusk, and because Dad would not let a young woman walk back along the road at night, not with the shady truckers that took the long haul north, Dad and I gave her a lift back to the beach house. Most of the way there was silence. I think she was thinking about the calls she had made, the people she had spoken to. Fifty metres or so out from the beach house she asked Dad to pull the ute over and let her out. She wanted to walk the last part. Neither of us asked why, but Dad and I sat in the ute until she walked safely over the last crest, which rounded down to the gravel road leading to the beach house. Only when Dad heard the click of the gate did he start up the motor and turn the ute back home.
34
Even back then, when I heard them argue, I knew somehow that it was not hate that made them argue, but love – love scattered into many broken pieces. It made me think of Speare’s composition, what would become of it only weeks later, ripped up into bits, and how when I stuck it back together it was together, but not perfect, not how it could have been, how April wanted it to be.
You’re not listening to me.
I am.
What did I just say, then?
He reeled away, as if punched in the jaw.
What? What did I say? You don’t know, do you? Too busy living in your own head. Composing great music. Music that will live on after we’re all dead. Well, what about the living? What about me? Us. You never have time for us.
April, that’s not true. That’s why we’re here.
We’re here but you’re not here.
April closed the sliding door so that she was inside and he was outside. She locked it.
I’ll let you in when you can tell me what I said to you.
That night Speare spent outside, on the verandah and down the beach, pacing up and down the shoals, punting balls of water into a wind which seemed to darken before the light did. I could see a child in the head-down way he moved. I could see myself after Dad had scolded me for something I did or did not do. As the sun parted from the western sky, the sky all girly with pink, he circled back to the verandah. He did not touch the piano. He looked at it but did not touch it and I felt, in the way his fingers searched for something to hold, that he wanted to, that he wanted to touch something that would respond with love and certainty.
The moon was full and low over the ocean, throwing an amber light over the verandah, a light that seemed to envy the sun, wanting to be something other than the moon, perhaps a planet, larger and brasher than our own. He sat on the verandah, looking out at the ocean. I knew that he did not need the piano to compose. And I knew that was what he was doing, composing, the way he looked sideways at a thing not seen, looked through the nothing of banksia and wind-clipped gums towards Sandy Rip. Near ten, all the lights in the beach house turned off. Sighing, he put away the last of the Scotch and walked down to the bed of lush grass around the jacaranda, lay down there to sleep, tucked up around its bone-thin stem. Even back then, knowing only the sparing love of my father, I could see how love, as broken as it may be, can reform itself in a moment, how it can patch itself up to form a blanket made for two. He had been asleep for a few moments when the verandah door clicked open and April stepped down in a white nightdress that floated over her bare ankles, her feet crunchy on the grass. She woke him with a finger on his shoulder, as if there was a switch there, and they helped each other back to the house, blanketing each other with their arms and walking like old people do, but they were not old. They were too young to walk as they did. Lights came on. Lights went off. The house was in darkness. And I crawled out from under it as a sea urchin would when it thought the world was empty of threat.
35
For a long time after the couple arrived I still went down to the rock pools because they were my old friends and they were expecting me to hang out with them after school and on weekends. Since I was six or seven I had given the rock pools names, friendly names like Mischa and Kye and Janson. I had my favourite: Tobias, my best friend, a rock pool as large as a bedroom with all manner of starfish and crabs and urchins and octopuses within it. Tobias always got me smiling, always had something new to show me, like the time he caught one of those funny-nosed sharks about two rulers long.
But after April arrived, the watery lens of a rock pool became less and less a window into another world of weird-looking sea toys, and more and more a mirror of the world outside the rock pool. My eyes were changing, maturing, closing in focus, so that when I sat down with my old friends, between Tobias and Mischa, and looked down into the water to see what new toys the sea had surprised them with overnight, I saw only the perfect reflection of the sky and rocks and, at times, my own reflection, and, on that day, April’s reflection walking perfectly along the rock shelf towards me.
I remember all of the things she wore that summer – and all the things she did not wear – but what she wore that day, white shorts and a blue singlet and white sandshoes, was my favourite beyond all others. Dressed that way she looked young, teenager young. She was carrying the fish bowl which I had made from one of Mum’s old vases and filled with a cluster of black urchins and red starfish and yellow-and-blue-striped fish, all of which I had handpicked from my friends.
She said, Finch, it’s very sweet but I can’t keep it.
Why not?
You shouldn’t have just broken in and left it on my dresser.
I didn’t break in. I used the key in the door.
I know. I’m not saying you did anything wrong. You’ll have to knock from now on. He’s taken the key from the door.
I don’t mind knocking. I prefer knocking.
She sat down beside me and heeled off her sandshoes.
We faced Tobias, our toes schooling in the water. The skin on our arms touched, wet and clingy, like the first time I had excitedly touched the cool, wet skin of a rock pool.
I can’t keep it.
Why not?
It’s complicated. You’ll understand when you get older.
You’re not that much older than me, you know.
Mature, I mean. When you get a girlfriend you’ll understand. I have to tip it back.
She put an arm around my shoulder and stroked her fingers along my forearm. I wanted someone to take an image of us, sitting together in the late softening light, looking out at sea, as we did in the cave before the kiss turned my mouth into something other than a place for food and water and words. I wanted proof of this, something to show and hold on to, to show my class that good grades were nothing compared to this. But then she stood up and reached for the fish bowl. In the end, she was there to do a job, and this was it. To end what we had. She looked at me, as if to ask which rock pool was worthy of my gift, but I kept my head down, sketching lines in some rock moss with an oyster shell like I was a much younger boy than I was then or ever was. Then she sighed and emptied the fish bowl into Mischa.
I’ll see you, she said. Tomorrow, maybe.
I kept my head down. There would be no tomorrow.
I’ll leave the vase here. Finch, I don’t want to do this.
She placed the vase gently on the rock beside me, respectfully.
Finch. See you tomorrow.
As April walked away along the rock shelf, around Sandy Rip Point to the beach house, I kept my head down, but down only so that I could see her reflection in the mirror of the rock pool, and see if she looked back one more time. The mirror of the rock pool said she did. And she did.
36
By the time Beethoven was fifteen he had published his first work, a set of nine variations in C minor for piano, and had been appointed organist of the court of Maximilian Franz, the Elector of Cologne. He was a paid employee for the court and a breadwinner for his parents and brothers. At fifteen he was destined to be the heir of Mozart; he lived in the cultural heart of Europe, had felt rain dampen his skin and snow fall and rest on his open teenage hand.
But had
he been in love? Had he seen a woman’s leg kicking under water, the rippling bite of muscle? Had his heart dropped as she pointed out a black-and-white-striped fish with yellow tips? Had everything else dropped when she reached to take his hand, to pull him along, show him a blue-and-orange eel goading from its nook? Had he ever seen the wet of a white bikini, the geometric strip of hair under the clinging wet? And when, so it went, we popped from the wave chop, heard the lilting flow of the piano, the pause for scribble, then the flow once more towards another touching note, where would he have been? He, Beethoven, would have been behind that piano, alongside Speare, a long way away from April and me.
One late afternoon, a week or so after April had given back the vase, we sat on the diving board of rocks that jutted out from Sandy Rip, our backs hard against the thrash of dying sunlight. Every so often, when the sun crisped our sea-wrinkled skins, we shucked our flesh from the rock, flopped into the tepid sea and floated there in a lapping kind of docility. When we could float no more, we pulled ourselves up to the rock and felt the sun dry our skins as if the sun was thirsty for the licks of sea water on our flesh. Sometimes I stayed put on the rock and watched April ease into the water and pull herself back up onto the rock – watched the way the water ran over her skin and darkened the rock, the way her bikini sucked, clung, gaped – all of which seemed to heal the pain I had felt a week before when she returned the vase. During all this, from across the other side of the beach, came the sound of the piano, the melody rising and falling with the waves that crashed against the rocks and our angling feet.
