by Craig Ensor
What are you looking at? April?
Looking for devils.
They’ve been extinct for years.
Maybe they’re not. Maybe they don’t want to be found. Maybe they want to be alone.
As I floored it round the last bend and down into the lowlands along Lake Binney, it occurred to me that she may have seen me conversing and laughing with a man she also recognised as Speare, the William Speare who had, by her actions, been rendered extinct from our lives as surely as the Tasmanian devil.
April, it was a bloody ice cream.
Typical, you think it’s about ice cream, April said, turning on me, her knees with blood-red dents where they had been pressed up against the armrest.
Seriously, you’re going to make an issue of this?
Don’t give me a reason to doubt.
Doubt what?
Us. Our future. There’s a lot at stake, she said, and turned back to looking out the window.
Like my father, I was a man of calmness rather than passion, of thought rather than opinion, but there was something in the way April wielded her inexplicable silence that day which could turn me into a man I was not naturally disposed to be.
Right, have it your way, I said, gripping the wheel and pulling over before turning the car back around towards Tarraleah. Let’s go and get your fucking ice cream.
You’re an idiot. Let me out.
What? We’re in the middle of nowhere.
Exactly. Let me out, she said, and opened the door.
To prevent an accident, I pulled the car up on the verge. Within a moment she grabbed her handbag and leapt out of the car, cool air and mist gasping into the car before the door slammed shut. Then she was gone, gone before I could even tell if she was heading down to Lake Binney or back up the rise to Tarraleah. That day, that moment when she left the car and became lost to me in the mists of the Tasmanian highlands, was one of the few moments beyond childhood capable of profound echoes, where that moment and the feeling of frustration and loss would return to me at other times of loss and frustration. I remember punching the wheel, strangling it, knowing that this weekend, so artfully composed towards a proposal of marriage, was becoming unplayable. For almost an hour I drove slowly along Lake Binney, sweeping either side of the road for the vague appearance of April in the mist until the mist gave way to curdled sunshine in the grassy flats along the lake. Then, when it occurred to me, dumbly, that she would be heading back to Hobart, I turned the car around and headed up to Tarraleah through the thick separation of mist, which for me, in that moment, had all the malevolence of the sun and the storms that drenched the rising seas. It wanted to do harm, to April, to me, to us, and I hated it like I hated any and all other forms of weather that had made an enemy of us. And I felt the panic of ebbing time. Through the misted windows everything looked like April. The yellow road signs appeared as her. Backpackers, stooped under red and blue packs, were her. Mountaineers were her. Sapling trees were her. And time was passing, gathering speed, taking the day downhill and away from us, as if weighed down with too much time.
Near the last bend leading back into Tarraleah the mist lifted from the side of the road momentarily and there, climbing her way up through the dewy grass, was April. When she heard a car brake and pull over, she stopped and waited in the clearing of mist, head down, her back shelled against the elements. We did not look at each other – out of shame, out of fear of seeing the sadness and relief in each other’s eyes – it mattered not then and not since. What mattered was that we embraced by the side of the road as if the world consisted of two people only, embraced until the mist came back and swallowed us up in whiteness such that I could not see the car nor the trees on either side of the road. We were alone in all that whiteness, a place where, to be a couple, to be safely together in this world, we could not leave each other’s arms.
Then she looked up at me, smiling, her cold hands having found the warm pockets of my jacket.
Can I ask you a question? I asked.
Sure. What?
What flavour?
The one I asked for last time.
Chocolate, I guessed.
Yes please.
As we walked each other back to the car, entangled, her hands still deep in my pockets, a truck bound for Hobart steamed past and the mist made us invisible to the rest of the world.
13
On the last day that it rained in Hobart I found out that April was pregnant with our first child. So much had changed and yet the test for pregnancy, a simple urine test performed in the bathroom at home, had largely remained the way the miracle of a child first revealed itself to the world. And so it was for us that morning, as I returned to the bathroom to brush my teeth and prepare for my first lecture, to find April sitting on the toilet with her head bowed in her hands.
What’s wrong?
She showed me the two lines on the pregnancy kit.
Twins, I said.
Twins! One at a time, Daddy, she said and laughed, the tears making her eyes look full and ripe with blue.
Later that morning, after we had hugged and wept and talked, after I had finally let go of her belly with my hands, which was no different to when she was not pregnant but then and for the nine months that followed seemed to be what the retreating world had concentrated to, to this fragile point of beginning, I headed out from our rented apartment in Battery Point on Runnymede Street. I walked under the shade of the plane trees along Salamanca Place, past Parliament House then along Collins Street and Argyle and Liverpool, walking up through the rose garden past Domain House and beyond to the Arts College. By then skyscrapers, both complete and spired with cranes in the great surge upwards, had taken over the Hobart skyline to the extent that Hobart resembled the great lost cities of Melbourne and Sydney before the warming took their streets with sea water. Already the day was warm, and I traced the long cool shadows thrown by the skyscrapers through central Hobart, my thoughts turning from excitement to fear and regret, regret for the world that our child had been handed down, the tattered and ill-fitting clothes of this world. A world where the seawall would soon be overcome, where rising seas would take more than the wharves and streets around Constitution Dock, where the hopeful lived by night or in the shadows of glass towers and those without hope lived in caves and the shadows of mountains, where the noonday sun burnt the skin within the time it took to cross a street, where certain plants and animals, deprived of hydroponic and other technologies required to artificially sustain their lives, perished day by day.
And yet this world would still have laughter and love and other pleasures to replace the old ones – and hope, which, as I rounded the corner of Collins and Argyle, showed itself to me in a way which I had been blind to all those years when April and I had lamented our failed efforts to have children. All around me, as I stood on the corner of Argyle and Liverpool, waiting for the lights to turn green, were pregnant women. A woman entering the Royal Hobart Hospital, a bump stretching the tightness of her dress. A woman pushing a stroller towards the university rose gardens, up the hill towards Domain House. Another queuing for coffee with friends in a cafe off Aberdeen. So many had made the choice, against the trend, against the logic of denial which had owned this century and the century before as much as the warming. Despite all and everything, they had made the choice to bring a child into this dying world, and they were around me, in numbers, and presumably there were other pregnant women in other cities of the deep north and south, in Scandinavia and Canada and Argentina and New Zealand, who had made the same choice.
By the time I crossed into the university rose gardens, I had moved on to the question of sex – boy or girl – and potential names, all while a cloth of dark clouds wove together over the Derwent and swaddled the city in relieving shadow. In time a few drops began to fall from the sky. A couple walking up towards Queens Domain, dressed for sunshine, looked up at the clouds in disbelief. Within moments, as rain started to pelt down across the city, that disbelief t
urned to cries and grunts of practicality, as the couple and others stranded in the gardens ran for cover, using their hands as umbrellas, running to pergolas and toilet blocks and the leafy awnings of Moreton Bay figs which lined Aberdeen and Davies Avenue. And that is where I took shelter, sitting on the buttressed root of a two-hundred-year-old Moreton Bay, watching the rain sheeting down and people scurrying for cover like rain was something to be feared, a virus suddenly airborne. Like me they did not know. If they knew that this would be the last time it would rain in Hobart then perhaps they would have stopped on the open grass, embraced the rain, opened their mouths to taste it, gulp its juice, let their clothes and hair soak with arms out praying in sheer belief as if the rain itself was a departing god. But they, gladly, were protected by only knowing the present, a present comforted and informed by the selected knowledge of the past. And so, without umbrellas or raincoats, everyone in the gardens assumed there would be another day of rain and took cover, denying their last chance to farewell the rain as they would farewell anyone or anything so loved and hated and depended upon for all their lives.
In the years that followed we would build rain parks for entertainment, for nostalgia, to make up for the loss, but our children would never smell the damp sourness of storms sweeping in from the Derwent and beyond, would never feel the tickle of rain on flesh or see the way a sudden downpour turned streets and gutters into a wilderness of creeks and waterfalls. At least not in Hobart, and not, for that matter, in any other part of Australia. They would need to go further south for that. But that moment, sitting on the root of a fig looking over the sodden gardens and down over the rain-blurred metropolis of Hobart, was one of the happiest moments of my life. We were having a child. And there would be other children for our child to play and grow and love with. And, at that moment, there was rain pelting down relentlessly, cold pure rain, dripping through the juicy leaves and dripping onto my head, and there would be rain for our children. For our children the rain would fall, as it did that day, in miraculous wings across Hobart, as angels would fall from the sky if the world still deserved such holy things or even, so I hoped, if it was not so deserving.
14
Days as a child seemed so very long but not as long as they seemed as an old man. For my father time slowed to the early learning movements of a baby, clocked around to where it all began, slowing down to the final tick before the final stop. The last days of my father were full of slowness, slowly moving from his hospital bed to the toilet, slowly spooning soup to his mouth, slowly waiting for the nurse to appear with a bad hand of five pills. Even the days outside seemed to move so slowly, the afternoons lingering as if the sun refused to give up on those battling away under its demands; the ocean, seen from the window by his bed, seemed to hold on to the late afternoon longer than most would hang on to a loved one nearing their end.
Dad, we need to get you down to Hobart. You need surgery.
He shook his face, which was sick and weary, even though his eyes would never admit it.
My heart’s fine, he said, and I don’t want to bother anyone else with my little problems. I’m happy here. Look, I can see the ocean. Still beautiful, isn’t it? I’m glad I lasted this long.
Dad, you’ve got heaps of time left. Just need to get you south to a doctor who can help.
I was worried that if I went too soon I would leave you all alone. Had that worry every day since your mother left.
Dad.
But I don’t think you need me now, son.
Dad, I’m not talking about this. You need to rest.
No, it’s good. I’m happy. You’re married. Children on the way. You have a life. A career. Music, of all things. There is one thing, he said, and winced as some pain shot through his left side, and his face, for that moment, leapt out of slowness.
Dad, I’ll get the nurse.
No, they’ve made me an offer. For the store. Some big travel company from Launceston. Want to make it a tourist stop on the way up to the ruins of Sydney and Brisbane.
Dad, we can talk about this later.
I have the papers. It’s not a lot of money but more than I would otherwise get. It’ll get you started with your own place.
Dad went to lift himself up but the pain pulled him back down.
The papers are in the drawer. Over there. They say the money goes to you. You need to ask the nurse for a pen. You can be my witness.
Dad, I’m not witnessing anything. You’re not signing. It’s your house. Your store.
He closed his eyes, settled back into the pillows gingerly as if they were painful too.
Later that evening, after the sun had finally left the day alone and the tipped hull of the moon came from and over the ocean, I drove into town to find something for Dad that could get him half interested in food. The streets were warm and empty. The only places open were the local pub and a Chinese takeaway that had been there since I was born. I ordered two dishes and some boiled rice and headed back to the hospital, calling April on my way back. I remember lying to her about Dad, going on and on about him recovering well and considering a move south, although I did not know why I took to lying. Apart from my dealings with Speare, it was the only time I ever lied to her or lied about something really important. And yet it gave me something, the relief and happiness in her voice, the false refrain of it in my own, which lasted like a sustained note until I walked into his room and found him collapsed on the white linoleum floor. He had just got out of his bed to open the window, it seemed, and the ink of his signature, witnessed by the nurse on duty, was drying on the warm night breeze coming in through that window.
15
Around three months after my father’s funeral I made the trip up north to the general store to pick through his things and keep those worth keeping and dump everything else at the tip. The sale of the house and store was also due to settle later that month and, although the tourist company bought the store half stocked, the house had to be delivered up vacant. By the time I arrived at the store it was late afternoon. The store and house were bloated with heat and dust and the smell of an old man whose flesh had started to bruise and wither and flake from the bone. Despite the sun bearing down relentlessly outside, the light inside, with blinds pulled to the floor and sill, was overcast, gloomy, as if the air threatened rain. The shelves of the store gave the look of abundance, of being fully stocked with packets and cans of food and other products, but when I pulled out a box of cereal, behind it was an absence. The same for pastas and sauces and detergents. A hollow absence behind that thin skin of abundance. I walked into his bedroom. The bed was as he left it the day of his first heart attack, made tightly and neatly but for where the sheets and blankets were folded back, the point where he entered and exited the bed every day. For all my days living in that house he had never touched the sadness of the other side of the bed, neatly made and as flat and final as a grave.
In my father’s study were folders labelled along the spine, the majority marked as account statements and receipts and invoices, the whole trading history of the store kept manually, for my father did not trust that which could not be felt, spread out or ripped up in his fingers, and computers and other technologies used to store such information were not to be trusted or, rather, not trusted completely. My mother, the betrayal he felt at her leaving him for that virtual world, and the new reality which grew out of it, had played a part in this. But there was more to it than that. Like many others he thought there would come a day when there would be a reckoning, when all would be forced to return to simple manual lives, and the day of reckoning he thought would be nearer than the day of his own death. On the desk was a list of tasks to complete, which I had first seen after he died, but I remember nothing of that time as if the pain of that loss was too deep for memory to bring it back to the surface of being. There were ten things on the list, as there always were; ten for the focus of its ambition, for my father believed in the future as much as those who would call him a relic of the past.
It also had some sort of biblical resonance, the number ten, which my father did not believe in but it seemed, like many other things of faith, to follow him around and seek some kind of daily acknowledgement from him as if he were a believer. The first thing on the list was to sell the store. The tenth thing was to visit the doctor. Beside the list were half-a-dozen or so envelopes, and half of them had written on the reverse side, ‘William David Speare, Muse Studios, 78 Bathurst Street, Hobart’. I opened one of the envelopes and inside was a cheque for one hundred dollars. A similar cheque was in every other envelope.
I activated the implant behind my ear and spoke April’s name.
Hey, it’s me.
How’s it all going, sweet?
It’s hard. Very hard.
You all right?
Oh, not really. He was my whole world.
I know he was. I wish I was there with you.
I do too. How’s Smith?
Sleeping, thank God.
Two days later, when I left before dawn, I had beside me in the passenger seat all that was worth keeping, which was all that my father wanted kept, having made a list for that as well. Then there were the things that he did not put on the list, worthless from the perspective of market value, but which for me at that time, and still to this day, bring my father back to life, make the feeling of him stand up decently and half smile at some place near the back of my throat. This was a diminishing world. There was no place for these things in a two-bedroom apartment. And there was definitely no place if we were forced to move on, further south or higher into the mountains. For these reasons most people lived lightly; clothes and cars and technologies were the extent of their assets, and most held no place for sentiment, for the useless things of the past, when replacing those things with the new was critical to overcoming the next day or month or year. However, beside me in the passenger seat, in a box which I had buckled up with the seat belt, was the barometer my father kept on the wall and his logbooks of weather patterns over the past four decades (temperatures near his end trending in the mid to high fifties) and the two-inch-thick pile of lists of completed tasks.
