The Warming

by Craig Ensor

  Not sure. Could be.

  It doesn’t feel right, does it?

  What?

  Leaving here. Going on the Arc, April said, looking towards the immensity of it.

  No, it doesn’t.

  Not for us. Bly has to, though. She’s just a child.

  Even at forty.

  It’s terrible to imagine a world where your children may not survive.

  Some people just can’t imagine.

  Or won’t.

  Halfway through the prawns, the old man came before us on the footpath, pushing his trolley towards the activity down near the making of the Arc. He had an old army rucksack and a blanket strapped across his back and his clothes were rags, his feet bare and sharp. As he neared us, it became clear that he was not an old man, but a younger, middle-aged man, wearing the clothes and gait of an old man. The shopping trolley he pushed was bloated with food, cans and bottles and packets, some liquor propped up on the top, a bearer of more stock than my father had ever carried during the last days of the general store.

  My brethren, is that the ark of Genesis?

  The what?

  I can’t see well. Is that it? The great ark of Genesis? Of Noah? It’s just a grey blob to me.

  So caked in dirt and grime was his skin, it was difficult to tell from what part of the world he came. His accent was cosmopolitan English, which gave nothing away. And the pong that came from him on the sea breeze made both of us stop eating.

  You’re headed in the right direction. Keep going along the path.

  Thank you, my brethren, he said, half bowing.

  Are you going on it?

  One of the lucky homeless people, apparently. You can’t have a new world without your quota of the homeless. I am to be saved by the pity of God.

  You’re a bit early. The completion date’s a few years away.

  Need to protect it, don’t I? Stand guard.

  From whom? April said, her voice stronger, certain.

  The foreigners. The godless. They’re going to blow it up, you know. They’re letting them in every day with their weapons.

  Foreigners? April said. We’re all foreigners. Every single one of us is a migrant. Homeless, too.

  Easy there, my lady. I don’t mean to offend. I meant those against the future. Those against the will of God. Those not willing to be saved.

  He pushed on the shopping trolley, reaching for and finding a can of soft drink he had cradled on the child’s seat and taking a sip. He kept the Bible and the Koran on the other seat. In between the can and the religious texts was a framed photograph, strapped tightly to the steel frame of the trolley, three or four people within it, a family from some time promised and lost.

  What’s God got to do with it? April snapped.

  God. He’s behind it all. Done it once. Now he’s doing it again. Cleansing the face of the earth.

  By flooding it?

  Is there another way?

  Why?

  Because he’s God.

  He? said April.

  I said, I wish you were right, my friend. That God had something to do with this. Then he might be able to undo it.

  No. There’s nothing to undo, said the man.

  Why don’t you fuck off? April said, a word I had not heard from her in so many years I could not recall an actual time when she said it.

  Hey, don’t get violent, my lady. No need for that. We are all his children. Thank you for the directions, good people. I have important work to do, he said.

  The man shuffled off, crippled and bent, pushing the trolley with a grunt and a wheezing breath that had some undiagnosed ailment rattling around within it. By the time we finished the prawns, his smell still lingering around us with the salty air billowing off the rocks and apartments, he had made it no further than a seat near the crest of the park, where he sat and opened up one of his cans of food and looked out over the shadowy vagueness of his Arc.

  8

  In those days there seemed to be music played at all times, in shops and offices and in the halls and cloisters of the university, by buskers strumming folk songs on street corners and pumped through speakers built into streetlights, all manner of music from strings and violins playing symphonies from this and earlier centuries to the pulsing beats which Bly played too loudly and often. In this there seemed to be some noticeable yearning for the eternal, something more than the superficial pleasure of sound, such was the ubiquity of music throughout the cities of Mawson and Casey and beyond. While we were sitting in the waiting room of the medical centre, the speakers, which I could not locate anywhere in the room, were playing a compilation of adagios, from Bach through to Izokoff, the strings as faint as breathing. April sat between me and Bly. In silence we thumbed through the selection of virtual magazines streaming from the armrests in each chair, while April stared at a painting on the opposing wall, still perturbed about all the bother with her memory, which, for her, was shaky but otherwise fine. It had taken several weeks to convince her that she needed to see a doctor, and Bly and I were still in that process of convincing her all the way to the waiting-room chairs.

  April Taylor-Rossi, said a woman up near the counter, early thirties, wearing a long white coat over jeans and a white shirt.

  We stood up and followed her, April between us, down a corridor and into a room that smelt of musk perfume and antiseptic.

  Here, take a seat.

  There were three seats on the other side of her desk, as if our family situation, a single child with one or two ailing parents, was not unusual, even expected. The same music played in this room.

  My name’s Kelly, she said.

  You’re not even a doctor, April said.

  Yes, I am. Doctor Kelly Milne. I just prefer to use my name, that’s all. What’s your name?

  Is that a test?

  No, I’m just asking.

  April Taylor-Rossi. You just said it before. See, I remembered.

  Right, so everything’s fine, said Doctor Milne.

  I said, Well, the reason we’re here is that April … she’s been forgetting a few things lately. Small things but …

  We’re worried it’s getting worse, Bly said.

  Things like …

  She made a curry last week without any curry.

  How did that taste?

  Great, April said.

  Bly and I shared a look across April’s face. We had sat down on either side of April, her face still and unmoved. When we first sat down, we each had hold of one of her hands, but after a few questions April’s hands wriggled loose to be by themselves, placed on her lap, her fingers on one hand rubbing at the joints of the other like close friends bickering.

  It was pretty bad, dear, I said.

  Appalling, said Bly.

  Doctor Milne looked up, as unsmiling as April. She said, Anything else?

  I found her yesterday out on the street in her nightgown. In the middle of the afternoon when I came home from work.

  The doctor took down notes on some paper in a folder and turned to a blue screen beside her desk and started talking at it in soft tones, the words populating on-screen but too small for me to read. April had slumped forwards in her chair and was staring at a small ivory statue of a saint on the desk.

  Okay, let me ask a few questions. April, can you hear me?

  Mum, Bly said, and put her hand on her leg.

  Yes, I’m not deaf.

  Okay, can you tell me what state you are in?

  A terrible state, April said.

  Bly and I laughed, but the laugh seemed to be stubbed out by the look on Doctor Milne’s face, which was focused, professional.

  How’s your health otherwise, April?

  Fine. Feel like I’m as young as you.

  Right. Mac.Robertson Land is the state. And what street do you live on?

  Twenty-two Runnymede Street, Battery Point. Apartment three five one two.

  The doctor looked at me for confirmation.

  That was our address in H
obart, I said.

  April stared at the statue once more. It was a small statue of Raphael the archangel, the colour of polished shell. Only much later, weeks later, did it occur to me that April was not looking at the patron saint for healing, but at a glistening shell on the beach or, as Bly told me even later than that, at a toy from her childhood, looking at it with all the obsessed simplicity of a child. And even then, later than all that, it occurred to me that she knew, she knew all along that the statue had a symbolic meaning she was trying to will into fact.

  And what day is it today?

  The day after yesterday.

  That’s what she used to say to us when we were kids.

  No, April, the actual day.

  Tuesday, April said and kept staring at the statue of Raphael, reaching to pick it up, turning it in her hands.

  Correct. You have other children?

  A son.

  What’s his name?

  Jack, baby Jack.

  Mum. It’s Smith. He’s on the Arc, with his family.

  So you have three children?

  No, she’s got two.

  Poor little Jack, April said. Just a baby. I said he wasn’t well. The heat was too much. But no, he always got his way. He’ll be fine in the morning, he said. He’ll be better after a sleep.

  Mum.

  He wanted to try again. But I fixed that, April said.

  Mum, what are you talking about?

  The doctor started typing on the screen, which was hidden from us.

  Are there many more questions? I asked.

  A few more. We’re almost there, she said, and smiled a smile that looked more like a rejection of a smile.

  Can you remember the year you came to Antarctica?

  The summer of twenty-two sixty-one, April said.

  That’s right. It was the end of the summer. Just before Smith’s birthday, I said.

  And how long have you been married?

  Not long. Four or five years. We didn’t last, after Jack.

  Who are you married to?

  April looked down at the statue as if it suddenly had all the answers.

  Doctor Milne may have had other questions, other parts of the test that needed to be completed, but she ended the questioning at that moment, ended it humanely with the soft patter of voice appearing on-screen and the scrawl of pen on a script for medicine. There had been advances in the treatment of dementia. For some it could be cured, for others the treatment was not as successful. Either way the medicine was expected to improve April’s short-term memory loss. But the doctor had nothing, other than a smile and the careful way she opened the door on our way out, to deal with the revelations of April’s long-term memory gain. Bly went silent, distancing herself from both of us as we were led back out to the waiting room, a silence that lasted days. Since she was a child she was told that her mother and father met at a beach house and fell in love, that the purity of their love survived until we met again, as fate would have it, at the University of Tasmania some seven years later. She knew nothing of her mother’s marriage to Speare. Of the complications I brought to that marriage. And she knew nothing of the spare room in the beach house where nothing slept but the memory of the child they had lost and the dream of another child that would never be conceived. But I too knew of this only as a child would know it, through the knowing eyes of my father, and I would not dare to return to that knowing by way of thought or questions to April. Like so many others I would turn my back on it and head for the mountains, the darkness of the mountain caves, where the air was cool and the sea waters remained at the safe constant level of old stubborn memories.

  When we got home, Bly went straight to her bedroom and slammed the door, as she did during her teenage years, and I took April into the bedroom and laid her down on the bed, noticing, as I tucked the quilt around her, the statue of Raphael clutched tightly in her hand.

  9

  In the last decade of his life Janáček was moved by the bloom of late unrequited love to pen Sinfonietta and other late masterpieces. For Baker, in the middle of the twenty-first century, it was the loss of his beloved son in a terrorist attack that moved him to write the symphony The Lighthouse before taking his own life. Others were moved by the threat of impending death, such as Mozart, suffering from rheumatic fever in late 1791 as he worked on the Requiem Mass on a bed which his wife, Constanze, prayed would not be his deathbed. The aristocrat who commissioned the Requiem Mass, Count Franz von Walsegg, a Freemason and amateur musician, had suffered his own unbearable loss with the death of his wife in February of that year. As a tribute to his wife, he commissioned Mozart to write the Requiem Mass and would pass it off as his own during a private performance in Stuppach Castle, to mark the anniversary of his wife’s death. But the Requiem Mass was inspired by money as much as by the shadow of death, and Constanze, after Mozart’s death, arranged for several other composers, most notably Franz Xaver Süssmayr, to complete the work in order to receive the balance of the sum that Walsegg had promised. Walsegg, whose grief was matched only by his delusion of authorship, copied the music out in his own handwriting and on 11 December 1793 conducted the piece ‘Requiem, composts del Conte Walsegg’ for a small gathering of enthusiasts within the castle walls. For over fifty years I, Finch Taylor-Rossi, had William Speare’s early unknown masterpiece, ‘For April, Forever’, stored in a private drawer in my study and in an even more private place in my heart. And for fifty years I had not worked out whether I was completing or stealing or neglecting it.

  10

  Then there was the day, less than a year after April had started taking the medicine, months after it became clear that the medicine would not save her, that I found her in a park in downtown Mawson staring up at the purple bells of a jacaranda. That morning, a summer’s day and one of the warmest in Mawson’s history, she went out the front of the house to water the garden of azaleas and did not return inside. For almost the whole day Bly and I searched the places where April would usually go since she had retired, the cafe down on Orange Street where she would meet her other retired friends and talk or keep silent about the Arcs and their children and grandchildren and the possibility of a holiday to see the great lost cities of the north one last time. The Immigration Centre where, after retirement, she volunteered to help new migrants to Mawson find accommodation, completing and processing applications for the few who had not already migrated to either pole. No-one had seen her that morning. Some had not seen her in weeks. Others had seen her the last few weeks and were worried by the things she had said, the things she had not said, the gaps, the slips in memory. Other than on foot, the only means of travel in Mawson was a state- operated air-rail service that crisscrossed the city in grids, each square grid of air rail condensed with housing and shops and green areas, small communities connected to others by solar-powered rail. Cars had not made the trip from Hobart and the other cities of the north. Skills and resources were redeployed to building the Arcs in both hemispheres. At some point we found ourselves standing at the station, having to decide where a woman, our wife and mother, would go, what places her receding memory would cling to.

  The clinic. Her old practice. She’ll go there, I said.

  Do you think so? Won’t she be thinking about Smith? The Amery Docklands. The Arc. She’ll go there.

  We should split up, I said. We’ve a better chance.

  I guess so. Dad, what are we going to do?

  We’ll find her. Don’t worry. She won’t have gone far. You head down to the Docklands. I’ll head downtown to the clinic.

  We hugged and headed to different rail points. As the rail glided southwards, towards the business district of Mawson, I looked out the windows for April wandering around, wearing the pink dressing gown she wore that morning, and every other morning, to water the azaleas. It was a Saturday. The city was its usual industrious and playful self. At the time I was the very absence of thought. I was a basic yearning to find April, felt in my eyes and heart and skin and the
places of my mind that were as basic in their function as eyes and heart and skin. There were others around me on the air rail, sitting and standing, who did not see or hear or feel the torment inside me, who saw only an elderly man, serious faced, behaving as they behaved. They, like me, were doing nothing. They were passengers. Passengers within the air rail but also within their own minds. No doubt achievements were taking place, driving achievements, but it always amazed me that whenever I looked at my fellow Mawsonians, they were always standing still in their own preoccupied ways, walking or travelling here and there, not achieving anything of any real significance. In a world of such achievements, the medical cures and the Arcs and other technologies, the triumph of the imagination over political meanness, we, as a collective judged on the air rail, were busy achieving nothing. Achievements, if they existed, were personal, mind bound. Among them I was, despite all those advances, despite all the failures and blows of fate that had us stranded on this dying planet, alone in my concerns. We, as a community, had been forced to come together physically and to accept the elegiac quality of our lives. We were no different to a group of disparate friends and family coming together to attend one long funeral, to defer to the dying and dead and pay our last respects. Together and alone, for we were, at most moments, as we had always been, as I had been living with my father in the general store, as April had been walking the beach each morning. We were alone. We were alone and our only consolation was that we were not alone in that.

  There was a park downtown where April would eat her lunch while taking a break from patients, a park which was scattered with eucalypts, made to look like any other park in Australia, and I stepped off the air rail at the junction of that park and an office block, two blocks from where the water had risen to take half the city. There were people making their way by boat or bridge in among the skyscrapers, functional for the short term at least. People exercised in the park. Dogs stretched their leashes to cock legs on rows of gardenias. A group of teenage girls sunbaked near a water fountain. The sound of cicadas, a sound that had been imported from Australia with the planting of eucalypts and a colony of greengrocers, overcame the sound of music being pumped through microscopic speakers bugged around the park. The cicadas made a raucous symphony of sound which was, for me and so many who had come from Australia, the sound of heat itself. Then, as I moved towards the statue of Sir Douglas Mawson in the middle of the park, I saw the pink dressing gown, standing under the blessing of a jacaranda which must have been, from its size, one of the first trees planted in Mawson.