Last Day in the Dynamite Factory

by Annah Faulkner

  Contents

  Cover

  About Last Day in the Dynamite Factory

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Acknowledgements

  References

  About Annah Faulkner

  Also by Annah Faulkner

  Copyright page

  For my two Als: Alison and Albert Svensson

  Come sit down beside me

  I said to myself,

  And although it didn’t make sense,

  I held my own hand

  As a small sign of trust

  And together I sat on the fence.

  Michael Leunig

  The death of the camphor laurel tree was brutal, but quick. Hacked off two feet above the ground, it collapsed with a great creaking sigh, its aromatic sap leaking into the warm earth.

  Chris flicked away a surreptitious tear. Many peaceful afternoons had been spent snoozing beneath the tree’s shady arms, working off Gran’s Sunday lunch. But Grandpa wanted the field for his spuds.

  The roots were not so easily dealt with as the great trunk. With Chris’s help, Grandpa dug a circular trench about four feet out, severing the camphor laurel’s lifelines. Even then, the tree did not give up: within a few days, a tiny green shoot had sprung from the stump. But the reprieve was temporary. Grandpa was determined to have it all.

  Tom, the farmer from across the road, offered his advice: ‘Blow it out.’

  Chris watched wordlessly as Grandpa planted his auger on the hopeful sprig and corkscrewed down into the old flesh. When the hole was deep, he wedged in a stick of dynamite.

  ‘More,’ said Tom.

  Grandpa raised an eyebrow, but slid in a second stick.

  ‘Another one,’ Tom said. ‘Stubborn buggers, roots. You’ve got to give them a proper nudge.’

  ‘There’s more than enough in there for a nudge,’ said Grandpa. But he added a third stick and a fuse, packed the hole with clay, trailed the wick twenty feet along the ground and handed Chris a box of matches.

  ‘You’re faster than I am, lad. Light it and run.’ He touched the boy’s shoulder and walked quickly with Tom to the back of the shed.

  Chris struck a match and set it to the wick. It hissed and flared and took off on a bright wobbly journey down the fuse.

  ‘Run!’ Grandpa yelled. ‘For God’s sake, boy, run!’

  Chris snapped out of his daze and galloped across the paddock on his long adolescent legs. Behind the shed he crouched down with Grandpa and Tom and plugged his ears …

  Jo’s end was brutal, too, but slow. Not felled by a single blow, but eaten away, from the inside.

  Chris sat with her during those last few days, giving her husband, Ben, a chance to slip home for a few hours’ sleep or a change of clothes. He murmured to her about the good times, stroked her forehead or held her hand – rigid with pain or limp with resignation – and felt the spirit of his beloved aunt ebb away. When she fell into a coma, he and Ben wrapped her in their love and let her go.

  Surrender to the inevitable has left him drained, but a crematorium full of people demands that he must – as Jo might say – press on regardless. He slides back a cuff of the shirt beautifully ironed by his wife, Diane, and glances at the watch Jo and Ben gave him for his eighteenth birthday. Eleven fifteen. The late is late.

  He shrugs within the confines of his suit. Damn thing: it’s too tight or too poorly fitting or just too … suit. He doesn’t wear suits; wouldn’t be wearing one now if not for Ben. Jo wouldn’t have cared if he’d worn pyjamas, except he doesn’t wear pyjamas, either. Diane gave him a white silk set four or five Christmases ago and when, at her insistence, he put them on, he felt like a Christmas angel or, more disturbingly, like a virgin. He wonders, now, if they were a message from his wife that he’d missed. He pats his jacket, seeking reassurance from the small piece of wood he always carries in his pocket. Not there. He pats the other pocket. No wood. Maybe the trousers.

  ‘Chris,’ Diane whispers. ‘Stop fidgeting.’

  What is he – eight? No, forty-eight. Today, in fact. Some party. Jo gazes at him from the photo on her printed funeral service.

  Chris lifts his glasses and runs a finger under his eyes, then pulls out a handkerchief and mops his forehead so anyone watching will think he’s blotting sweat, not tears. One of his favourite old groups, Blood, Sweat & Tears.

  Plenty of sweat and tears today, but not much blood. Some from Aunty Jo, his mother’s sister, but none from her husband, Ben. Yet it is for Ben that Christopher wears the suit. He’d wear a hair-shirt for Benjamin Bright if required. Beside him, his adoptive father is a crumple of grief, yet his suit is immaculate.

  ‘God created the suit for you,’ Chris told him once, ‘along with The Word for the rest of us.’ Ben had smoothed his lapel. ‘Imagine turning up for work in overalls – my clients would have conniptions.’

  ‘Surely that’s the point of being an auditor,’ Chris replied. Though the idea of Ben making anyone nervous was ludicrous.

  Phoebe, on Ben’s other side, bestows her grandfather with a brief, tender smile. With her mother’s composure and her father’s Nordic colouring their daughter is a head-turner. Today, her flaxen hair is pulled into a bun and her pink-grey suit, though fittingly demure, sticks to her figure in a way Chris finds discomfiting. Not that he’d say anything. Phoebe would arch her exquisite brows and suggest that he mind his own business. At three, Phoebe was her own woman. At twenty-three, you didn’t interfere.

  Chris rubs a hand over his chin, feeling the blond stubble that springs the moment the razor has passed over it. He read somewhere it keeps growing after you die. He doesn’t much like the idea of his body going on doing things after he’s left it.

  Archie sniffs, and Diane passes their son a tissue. He wears an ancient leather bomber jacket rescued from some musty welfare shop. His current girlfriend has cut his mop of dark hair and he looks neat, if not tailored. Chris has forgotten the girlfriend’s name but it probably won’t matter. At twenty, Archie’s turnover of girlfriends is so breathtakingly fast he might have forgotten too. Chris wonders what it would be like to have girlfriends whose names you don’t remember. ‘Serially monogamous though, Father,’ Archie boasts. ‘Faithful while it lasts.’ Archie has been using the word Father rather than Dad more frequently lately, mostly accompanied by a bout of moral superiority. Chris hopes he will grow out of it

  It’s stuffy in the chapel, unusually hot for Brisbane in winter, and the smell of lilies and wreaths propped against the featureless timber walls has intensified to the point of nausea. People murmur, foot-scrape, sigh, hunch over plans for the rest of the day, the rest of their lives. As one man lifts his watch to his ear Chris sees the hearse, a great black beetle creeping down the driveway and disappearing behind the crematorium. Moments later, the holy muzak fades away
and the curtain is drawn back to reveal Jo’s coffin. Open. Her body is in there, just below the lip. An hour from now, it and the coffin will be ash.

  The funeral director steps forward. ‘Those who wish to pay their respects to Josephine may now do so.’

  Chris doesn’t need to pay his respects to Jo by viewing her body. But Ben is struggling to his feet so together they walk towards the podium, Chris a full head taller than his adoptive father, and peer into the shiny walnut coffin. And there she is, a doll with satin and tulle frothed around her face, pale in death as an over-washed nightie. It’s a small, shrunken-looking Jo, the remaining fuzz on her head combed into submission. Gone, the springy blonde hair, the warm voice and hazel eyes. Gone, the aunt he loved like a mother, gnawed to death by cancer.

  Chris glances at Ben and wonders what he’s thinking. Despite a lifetime spent with Ben and Jo, he’s still not sure how he’d define their relationship. Affectionate and kind – without a doubt – but driven more, he suspects, by compassion than passion.

  He escorts Ben back to his seat and returns alone to the podium. In his head is a eulogy so painstakingly rehearsed there’s no chance of stuffing it up, but words have a habit of failing him when he needs them most. Worse – they arrive, but their intended meaning is buried in a tactless and clumsy verbal dump.

  Faces gaze up at him expectantly. He clears his throat.

  ‘Good … ah … morning. Ben and I – our – our family would …’

  Sweat springs beneath his shirt. He stands before the gathering, mute. The words have fled and will not return for at least five minutes – perhaps not even for five hours – depending on how well he can distract himself. Here on the podium he might be on hold for …?

  A man extracts himself from the crowd and hurries up the aisle. Half his height and – Chris reckons – twice the man, ‘Judge’ Baillieu, his best friend and business partner, nudges Chris aside and begins to speak. He sparkles with dark intensity, filling the chapel with the deep and genuine conviction that the world has lost one of its best. Chris wilts with relief. Everyone wilts with relief. Some shed tears, not only because of Judge’s oral artistry but because what he says is true.

  After the ceremony, Jo’s frail carapace delivered to its fate, people gather outside and loiter in the breezeway, clumping like sheep, running fingers beneath collars and fanning faces with Jo’s printed funeral service.

  ‘Hot for June, eh?’

  From his shore of voiceless grief, Chris watches them mill, recognising their uncertainty about how soon they can decently get into their cars and go back to his house for funeral tea.

  Diane comes to his side. ‘Are you all right? You haven’t stuttered for such a long time.’

  It’s not a stutter, no woodpecker hammer at a consonant, but a total inability to speak. Sentences form sleekly inside his head but something goes haywire between his brain and his mouth and either nothing emerges at all, or it comes out garbled. The ‘condition’ has been variously labelled Selective Mutism and Social Phobia but it’s neither. It’s a memory, a hand from the past that squeezes the air from his lungs just when he needs it most. For want of a better name, he and Diane have called it a stutter.

  He nods to her question and swings his arms.

  ‘I’ll drop you at the junction and you can walk from there.’ Diane shepherds the family into Chris’s old Rover and slips into the driver’s seat. At the Ashgrove shopping centre she pulls over and lets him out.

  He walks alone down the quiet, tree-lined streets, glasses misting, gut hollow. Fifteen minutes later when he reaches number 10 Appleby Street, his inclination is to continue on to the park and stay there until all the cars jamming his driveway and littering the street have gone. To be alone and remember.

  But he doesn’t. He couldn’t. He is the one who holds the family together.

  Besides, he could never do that to Ben again.

  He stands outside their house, an old Queenslander, beautifully situated on a sloping double block he and Diane bought back in ’74. A wreck of a place it was then, but as newlyweds and with Phoebe on the way it was all they could afford. Chris had not long returned from London where he’d spent two and a half years training with a firm of conservation architects.

  Over the next three years he and Ben undertook extensive renovations: restumping, rewiring, opening up the three verandahs which had been enclosed during the 1940s, tiling and painting, and gradually revealing the house’s original Edwardian charm.

  There’s an impressive staircase at the front which visitors stubbornly ignore in favour of the side stairs. At the top of these stairs is a landing, with one door leading left from it into the kitchen, another ahead into the toilet. Diane’s nemesis, that toilet: an embarrassing 1950s eyesore that blocks the view and the breezes which would otherwise be enjoyed by the kitchen. Chris promised to demolish it as soon as they installed a second toilet inside but with the arrival of Phoebe, and Archie a few years later, work on the second toilet stalled. Twenty-four years later it’s still stalled and a rare but persistent point of contention between them. The existing bathroom is too small to accommodate a toilet. They’ve already hijacked one bedroom for the ensuite and Chris’s den. The next encroachment would have to be on the living room or another bedroom and does she want to finish up with a two-bedroom house? No, she doesn’t, but he’s the architect, for Pete’s sake. Surely he can come up with something. So far he hasn’t, but neither has he tried. He likes the dunny on the landing. It’s peaceful.

  The kitchen is packed. Chris pushes though the crowd into the living room, filled with the hum of mourners trying to transform the somehow shameful ceremony of death into a celebration of life. It’s crap. A funeral is goodbye. Someone he loves is dead. He doesn’t want a party, he wants to tell everyone to go home so he can turn on the TV and blot out the new painful reality, or surrender to it and bawl. But he doesn’t, because – as Diane says – nobody wants to see him inside-out.

  A woman touches his sleeve. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Chris. You must be a great comfort to Ben.’

  Chris vaguely recognises her from Jo’s coterie of goodwoman volunteers but can’t remember her name, so he nods politely and takes refuge in his inability to speak.

  ‘I mean,’ she says, ‘you being his only child.’

  Ah, but he wasn’t always their only child. Once, forty years ago, there was another: Liam, Jo’s and Ben’s own flesh-and-blood son. But Liam died just before his sixth birthday, his body borne away by a rogue wave at the seaside and never recovered. Chris was just eight years old when it happened, and now most people have forgotten about Liam, if they ever knew.

  Chris summons a smile and moves on through the crush. If there were a hundred and sixty at the crematorium there must be at least half that many here. Jo’s friends from Meals on Wheels and Red Cross, nurses from the Buddhist palliative care centre and, from the oncology department, a clutch of scarfed, pale-faced friends who, with Jo, had traded jokes for smiles, nods of understanding, sighs of anguish and fillips of hope. For two years Jo ran up and down the scales of optimism and despair before abandoning that particular version of hope along with the scarf and letting her hair grow back in scattered tufts for whatever time she had left. Then this. The great collective sigh. The washing up, the tidying away and disposal of the corpse (God, what a maggoty word!) and afterwards, the loved one’s memory preserved in well-placed photos and a shrine, maybe, for the ashes, and decreasing mention in conversation.

  Chris returns to the kitchen, which is still seething with people.

  Diane clutches his arm. ‘Will you please get them out of here? Look at it, for God’s sake. I can’t get anything done.’

  ‘People like hanging about in kitchens,’ he says, suddenly re-voiced with his gravelly bass.

  ‘You know it’s not the kitchen that bothers me. It’s everybody traipsing through it, where food is being prepared, to get to that godforsaken toilet.’

  Judge’s wife, Karen,
juggling plates of club sandwiches, catches his eye. ‘Take these to the dining room, Chris.’ She thrusts the plates at him. ‘I’ll sort out the crowd.’

  The neat circles of bread remind him of the sandwiches Jo made with a round cookie-cutter when he was little. After he bit into them the remaining piece looked like a smile. He sighs, takes the cucumber, roast beef, egg and whatever offerings to the dining table – immediately magnetising a flurry of mourners – and goes to the corner by the French doors that lead to the verandah. Taller than most, he can see Ben moving through the crowd like a sleepwalker, daughter Phoebe offering plump, wholegrain asparagus rolls and small damp cakes that can be consumed without an excess of crumbs and Diane, honey-toned with silky brown hair that cups her cheek, dispensing tea and whisky with seamless efficiency. As she approaches, she shoots him a look that suggests he needs to circulate; this is not the time for self-absorption. Chris has no energy for circulation and remains where he is. Normally he would oblige; he has such a reputation for co-operation that Tabitha, their office assistant, once approached him with a small bottle.

  ‘Take this, Mr B.’

  He opened it and sniffed. ‘Brandy?’

  ‘It’s a homeopathic remedy for people with an over-concern for the welfare of others. You need it. Trust me.’

  ‘Will I grow horns?’ he asked hopefully as he placed four drops, as instructed, under his tongue. The idea of transforming into Lucifer, the angel hell-bent on having his own way, was not entirely unwelcome.

  He assumes a look of what he hopes is stubborn refusal and holds out his whisky glass for topping-up. Diane hands him a cup of tea. He looks between the tea and the thimbleful of Scotch remaining in his glass and wonders which to drink first.

  People begin to drift out, murmuring condolences and escaping to the day. Chris goes to the table where the food is, or was; where Judge is gouging holes in the remains of a cake that might have been Chris’s birthday cake if Jo hadn’t died. It was a sumptuous-looking thing that Diane had knifed carefully, slicing through its quivering layers to expose varying grades of vulnerability – icing, sponge, cream, jelly.