The Warming

by Craig Ensor

  Sometimes I wonder how we go on?

  You’re meant to be getting some sleep, Dad.

  Can’t. Got something on my mind.

  Bly kept her eyes on the road as we veered away from Lake George and headed up the incline towards Canberra.

  Like what? How we go on? What do you mean?

  With everything passing on. Not just your mother. But everything else. The end is in sight.

  Many would disagree. Smith would.

  Many wouldn’t. And they still go on.

  Because it takes no effort. We do nothing to make the next moment happen. Time drags us on. Like a supportive friend. It drags us into the next moment.

  More like a sworn enemy.

  Dad.

  Through the windscreen we could see the scattered lights of Canberra. Bly leaned forwards in her seat, looking for the left turn-off to the airport.

  Have you heard of Closure? I said.

  How do you know about that?

  I read about it in one of your sites.

  Yes, I know about it. It’s just a new form of being De-born.

  Sounds different to me.

  Dad, you’re against it. Remember? Paulo.

  That was a long time ago. Things have changed.

  Dad, you’re not going anywhere. Your treatment starts next week. You heard what the doctor said. A good chance of a total cure.

  Less than fifty-fifty, I heard. I’m against it but this Closure thing sounds true. It sounds right. They said it feels like a hand put over your heart, slowly closing it down until it stops beating. I keep on seeing that hand.

  Dad, this is silly talk.

  It’s your mother’s hand, you know, reaching into my heart and closing it down.

  At some point we had driven past the turn-off to the airport, the van, in the absence of instructions, self-driving over Waterloo Bridge and the waterless hole of Lake Burley Griffin, the wreck of Parliament House before us through the windscreen, a flagpole and the Australian flag lit by a single white light. The red earth. The black night. The sun, full and central, scorching the earth. The flag told of what had happened to Australia. It was our destiny.

  16

  One day, after I delivered groceries and was standing in silence beside Speare at the piano, he told me that every composer sets out to write a masterpiece and nearly all composers learn from the end of the very first refrain that the masterpiece in their mind, when reduced into notes, takes them, note by note, away from the promise of a masterpiece until, by the end of the first break, at the point the pause descends like a guillotine, their masterpiece is merely a composition among the millions of other ordinary compositions. And it is therefore true, Speare told me, while looking away from the piano and down over the beach, towards where April would appear after her morning walk as an insignificant jot of colour on the sand, that the most masterful and moving pieces of music are never reduced to notes, but are played over and over in the empty auditorium of the composer’s mind. On another day, a day when April did not appear from her bedroom, Speare told me that making music was about taking, taking from everything and everyone, letting it stir and boil and reduce within. This process could take years, he said, even longer than years, until there was a moment of giving, and the greatness of that giving would be measured by the unfamiliarity of the music and, upon the first or last listening, by how familiar it all sounded. Speare was twenty-six years old the day he told me that. The same age that he was when he penned ‘For April, Forever’, his lost masterpiece of the first cycle of his career. And it was at the same age that Igor Stravinsky wrote Pogrebal’naya Pesnya (or Funeral Song) in memory of his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, shortly after his death in June 1908.

  Although both great composers, Stravinsky and Speare had nothing in common musically other than an early masterpiece that was lost. Stravinsky’s Funeral Song was performed in a Russian symphony concert conducted by Felix Blumenfeld in the Conservatoire in January 1909, and was always thought to have been destroyed in the 1917 revolutions and civil war that crippled Russia in the early twentieth century. In late interviews Speare spoke vaguely of a work that was destroyed by water at a beach house, saying that he could not remember the composition but that it was the link between his apprenticeship sonatas and the symphonic masterpiece, The Road to Cradle Mountain. So too Stravinsky could not remember the music for the Funeral Song but remembered it as a necessary precursor to The Firebird, the ballet that brought him instant fame when it was staged by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes in Paris in June 1910. For a hundred years Russian musicologists thought the lost manuscript might be preserved in the mass of uncatalogued music in the archives of the St Petersburg Philharmonic or the Conservatoire. Natalya Braginskaya, a specialist on Stravinsky, mounted many unsuccessful searches at the Conservatoire but found, in the autumn of 2014, the manuscript of the Funeral Song hidden behind rows of stacked piano and orchestral scores. Two years later Valery Gergeiv conducted only the second performance of the Funeral Song, over a hundred years after the first, in the Maryinsky concert hall in St Petersburg. By all reports the Russian audience and scholars were thrilled to hear this piece, one of their greatest composers reborn and the mysterious absence between his early scherzos and The Rite of Spring revealed. Some fifty or so years had passed since Speare had played ‘For April, Forever’ and ripped it up into pieces as a display of the love he felt for April, a love which he must have realised, at that time or soon after, could, like a composition, never be reduced to music. Over the years I had played, reworked and extended copies of this early masterpiece, but at its heart it remained the same piece that Speare had composed on the verandah of the beach house. It felt like it no longer belonged to April and it no longer belonged to me. It was time. The moment of giving had arrived.

  17

  One mild and clear spring day, the kind of perfect day where the people of Mawson forgot about their mortality, I headed out to the reserve between the outer suburbs of Mawson and Amery Harbour to watch the Arc, Smith’s Arc, Humanity One, appear over the horizon. The Arc, moving more slowly than the pace of the circumpolar current, had spent the last six years orbiting Antarctica, passing by the southern tips of Africa and South America and Australia. The Arc was scheduled to move closer to shore off the coast of Mac.Robertson Land, where families and friends could be flown to and from the Arc, reunited for a few days, and others could purchase the right to inhabit the Arc. At about midmorning I found a wooden bench beside a creek that trickled and pooled through rocks and ferns, bird’s nest and maidenhair, dappled by the leaf-shade of ash and beech and figs, all planted in the early days of the Mawson settlement some fifty years ago. From there the creek dropped steeply towards the sea, gathering water from other branches and leaping in waterfalls until the final pour into the shore break of Prydz Bay. Above the tops of the figs and beeches I could see out towards the Southern Ocean, the day cloudless and the horizon empty but for the differing blues of air and water as they met in a space which seemed, to my eyes, from the time of the beach house to the days of Mawson, to be the very shape of instability. I put on some glasses that had a binocular feature, enabling me to have twenty times ordinary vision. I looked out towards the rising horizon.

  What are they, mister?

  It was a boy, clear skinned and stick looking, about a year or so away from the spurt of teenage years, his shoes and socks wringing wet and hooked with leaves and weeds. Behind him, leaping down from a rock into a soft mattress of ferns, were another boy and girl about his age, perhaps younger still.

  Binocular glasses.

  What are you looking for?

  I’m looking for the Arc. One of them. On the horizon.

  Why?

  My son’s on it. With his family.

  My dad says that the Arcs are for cowards.

  Does he now?

  Yeah, reckons there’s plenty of land left for everyone. He’s building a house up in the mountains. What’s that in your hand?

  Not
hing, it’s … just papers we need to sign.

  Papers? No-one uses paper anymore.

  They’re important papers. Legal.

  Robbo, we found a frog, said the other boy. Check it out.

  The boy racked off towards the creek and all three of them huddled around a crevice in a rock that cupped the creek waters in a pool about knee deep. I focused back on the horizon, magnifying the image by widening my eyes and holding them to lock the magnification. The news report had scheduled the dawn of the Arc for a few minutes after eleven. At quarter past eleven there was nothing on the horizon.

  Hey mister, do you know how to catch tadpoles?

  Not tadpoles. Fish I can catch. You kids better look out for the Carers.

  They don’t come into the reserve, said Robbo.

  Are tadpoles fish? asked the girl.

  Believe so, I lied and lifted off the bench, the pain in my back lessened by a new medicine the doctors were testing to somehow overcome what the sun of my childhood had done to my skin and now my bones.

  Can you show us?

  The other girl and boy were chasing the tadpoles around the pool, stirring up the clarity of the water, and the tadpoles had easily retreated to the reeds and rocks. They were empty-handed.

  What are you going to do with them?

  Take them to school for a project, the youngest boy said.

  Watch them become frogs, said the girl.

  Then what?

  Then we bring them back here. Set them free, said Robbo.

  We’ve got a glass bowl.

  Right, I said. Why don’t you all step out of the water – but not you, Robbo, is it?

  I sat down on a rock and took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my trousers so that they came to knee height. Holding on to a rock I eased my way into the creek, the water sharp with cold, the chill of the Antarctic permafrost lingering in all the creeks and rivers that crossed the continent. Slowly the silt on the bed of the creek settled, the water resting to a camomile-like clarity.

  Now, the trick is to remain completely still, I whispered, shuffling over to the reeds where the tadpoles were hiding. Come with me.

  What trick?

  Well, you need them to think you are part of the earth. Like a rock, I said, and a burning sense of April, of her talking about our place on the earth, seared through me. A harmless rock. As still as a rock you need to be.

  Robbo did what I did. I planted my feet about shoulder width apart. So did he. I whispered. So did he. I cupped both hands and slowly dunked them under the surface of the water on the edge of the reeds. So did he. And he waited as I waited, longer than I thought a child, as he and the others were then, had the faculty to wait. In time tadpoles started to wriggle from the reeds and swam around and into the net of our hands.

  Wait, I whispered.

  I gestured for the other boy to bring over the glass bowl, which they had filled with water. In a moment more tadpoles appeared, larger ones, some with small legs growing from where bellies met tails, wriggling out from the reeds and into and around our hands.

  Wait.

  Robbo looked at me for a sign.

  Wait. Wait … Now! I yelled, and scooped up my hands, emptying three tadpoles into the glass bowl.

  Robbo did the same, pouring from his hands four tadpoles into the bowl, and the silence that had absorbed us for those moments of fishing for tadpoles became hysterical with laughter and cheers as we all gathered around the glass bowl and watched our tadpoles swimming in their new temporary home.

  Dad, came a voice.

  I looked up.

  It was Bly, standing up near the park bench and holding the lunch that she had promised to bring, looking down at her seventy-six year old father knee deep in creek water, rolled trousers and shirt covered with excited patches of water, standing by a boy called Robbo and two other nameless children and smiling as broadly and innocently as any of them.

  Dad, what are you doing?

  Catching tadpoles, I said, and held the glass bowl out as proof.

  Tadpoles. The Arc. The Arc is here, she said, pointing out towards the ocean.

  18

  We lived with the burden and benefits of our limitations. The limitation of gravity. The limitation of ethics. And the most critical limitation, our dependence on the earth, as dependent on the earth as a newborn baby is upon its mother, but more so, for in so many ways we were still within the womb of the earth, supported by its amniotic atmosphere and the generosity of its flesh. In many ways, if not all ways, we were yet to be born and never to be born. Perhaps it was the sense of an ending, a sense that seemed to be in the Antarctic air that we breathed, but I felt somehow that the warming took place inside each of us as much as it did outside us. And that, ironically, this warming kept us together within a common morality which I could only describe as elegiac, when the climatic warming could otherwise have so easily turned us against each other. For those who no longer believed in that morality, in the elegiac quality of the human story, who believed in telling their small story within the larger one, it was, like everything else, a matter of choice.

  More a burden than a matter of choice. The choice made by so many not to have children was as much about logic and reason as it was about the grief felt for a child yet to be born. What is the point, so many would say? And many more would not believe that the Enlightenment, this great trajectory of reason and science, would lead us inevitably towards extinction, and still more would not believe it when the facts became evident around them. Other people were having children; statistics were not reliable: these were the standard answers to the unanswerable question. But we did not need statistics. We needed to look no further than our family and friends. The world was losing people as rapidly as it was losing land and no-one would or could do anything about it other than revolt, almost irrationally, and breed on the great Arcs that circled the northern and southern poles.

  This burden of choice seemed to darken our sleeping thoughts as much as our waking thoughts. For most of our days in Mawson I would wake from broken sleep and a dream that told of the end of my life and the world itself. The dream, when it came, would snap sleep in half and send me out onto the verandah, my joints as frail as driftwood, flesh unusual, to breathe in the sweet peace of night. Sometimes, because April was as much a part of me as I was of her, she would wake from the dream with me, and she would hold her head against my shoulder as we soaked up the moon-loved harbour of Mawson. Often, at such times, she would say that we could survive on the light of the moon. It would be plenty for us to go on. But not that night, not the night when the dream revealed what it had, until then, only been suggesting in ways I could not comprehend. The ocean had risen so high that only those on the roofs of the tallest houses and buildings outlived those who were not. Somehow, as a young man, not much older than I was when I met April for the second time, at university, I was one of those who had found the roof of a house on the tallest peak of the highest suburb, and she was there beside me as we watched a wave curl and crash through and take a family, our family, Smith and Bly – just children – stranded on a lower roof. So, at the end of days, there were only two left in all the world, April and I, having watched the agony of losing our children, which felt, in the dream, to be a reconciled loss, no different to children leaving the family home. Hour by hour the waters rose around our feet towards our knees, all while we drank tea from rose-patterned teacups and saucers. The sun was so brutal, so twisted in its brutality, it seemed to grip us by the neck and push us down into the drowning waters. And, in the end, that was our choice. By water. Or by sun.

  Which? I said, as she lifted her head from my shoulder, her hands deep in my pockets, for the weather had suddenly turned cold, snow tipped.

  As long as there are two, there is always hope, April said. Wherever we go, we go together.

  And so we made that choice, together, jumping into the water before the water took us. And that was where it all ended, which was where it all began. Then I wo
ke with her beside me, breathing, perfectly, together for another warm night.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With special thanks:

  To my beautiful wife, Ali, for being my first perceptive reader, my biggest cheerleader, and for giving me time, encouragement and support in our busy lives to make this novel as good as it could be.

  To my daughters, Bronte and Tess, whose birth, the love I have for them, and my concerns and hopes for their future made this novel grow and shape and deepen in ways that it would not have otherwise.

  To my mum and dad and family, for giving me life and love and an opportunity to make a novel like this possible.

  To the team at Ventura – Jane, Zoe, Eleanor and Sophie – for seeing and believing in the promise of the sapling manuscript that came across their desk, and for watering and nurturing it to full maturity like the jacaranda at the beach house. And not least of all, to Catherine, my editor, whose comprehensive reading and attention pruned and trimmed the novel into a thing of self-contained beauty.

  And finally, to all those real persons and places and events mentioned throughout the novel, the contextual soil, to labour the metaphor, which was crucial to giving a novel of speculation a sense of reality.