Last Day in the Dynamite Factory

by Annah Faulkner

  Judge crams a monstrous piece into his mouth. ‘Happy birthday, Wren,’ he mumbles, alluding to Chris’s seventeenth-century architectural namesake. He snatches a glass of Scotch someone has left on the table and lubricates the cake’s journey, his dark eyes boring into Chris’s.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Chris.

  ‘You going to take time off work?’

  ‘No. The old theatre starts next week.’

  ‘I could take care of it.’

  Chris huffs.

  ‘Don’t be elitist,’ says Judge.

  ‘I’m not. Everything you know about heritage architecture would fit on the end of my—’

  ‘That small, eh?’

  ‘—pencil.’

  ‘Thanks,’ says Judge, whose real name, Peter, few people know. His nickname derives from his reputation for evenhandedness. Judge insists he isn’t nice, he’s simply too busy to be a prick. ‘All the same,’ he says, ‘you look like crap. When was the last time you took a holiday?’

  Chris shrugs. ‘Must be more than a year since Diane and I were in the UK. April, I think.’

  ‘I haven’t been back since you and I were there,’ Judge says gloomily, as if he misses bachelorhood, which Chris knows he doesn’t. He and Karen are like trees whose roots have intertwined, strengthening and supporting each other, no matter how hard the wind blows.

  ‘Have some of your cake,’ says Judge, scraping a mound onto a plate. He hands it to Chris who dips his finger into the icing, tastes it, and decides he isn’t hungry.

  ‘Go on, Wren, eat. You cannot lick the icing and claim to have eaten the cake.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Me. Just now. Brilliant, huh?’

  Chris cocks a cynical brow. ‘I guess I should circulate.’

  By two thirty, most people have gone. By four, only a dozen or so remain; Ben’s ex work cronies mostly, retired widowers like himself for whom Diane’s spread of food beats the hell out of a can of baked beans in an empty house. But they too eventually edge towards the door.

  Ben stands on the verandah facing a dense lace of trees, his arms dangling forlornly by his sides.

  ‘Shall I take you home?’ Chris asks.

  ‘No,’ Diane calls from the table where she is gathering up plates. ‘Stay, Ben. The spare bed is made up. Why spend the night in an empty house?’

  Because, Chris suspects, it’s not empty. Everywhere Ben turns in the home he and Jo made together, in the house where Chris grew up, will be filled with echoes of his dead wife. In the worst lonely hours she’ll slide beside him into their bed and each day there will be at least one small miracle testifying to her invisible presence. Her African violets on the kitchen window sill will be watered. Her wedding ring will disappear from his bedside table and reappear on the bathroom vanity unit. Her dressing gown on the back of the door will ripple when there’s no wind.

  ‘Stay,’ Diane urges.

  Ben looks at his shoes, so highly polished they’re like patent leather. He’d have spent half an hour on them that morning up in his shed at the back of the house. His special place, the shed – home to his pool table, work benches, tools, ancient radio and even more ancient fridge for his beer and Jo’s gin when she came up for a game of snooker. Ben dressed for her today in the shirt she bought him last Christmas. He’ll go on wearing that shirt – washing and ironing it – as if she can see him and he wants her to know he really does like it.

  When Chris’s eyes meet the wavy line where Ben’s hair springs from his forehead something tugs at his memory. It happens now and again, a nagging sense that there’s something he’s supposed to remember, but can’t. As usual, the impression flees the moment he reaches for it. At seventy-one, Ben Bright is still handsome. Though not tall, he carries himself with quiet dignity, has a full head of grey – once black – hair, and dark liquid eyes. At 188 centimetres, Chris dwarfs him, but today Ben looks even shorter. Today, his knees have buckled.

  Diane takes his arm and leads him to a leather chair in front of the TV. ‘Come on, Ben. Stay tonight. Jo wouldn’t want you to be on your own.’

  It is probably true but Chris is weary of Diane’s recent authority on Jo’s preferences. When a stray tear dropped from Ben’s eyes onto his wife’s stiff hospital gown, Diane gently drew him away. ‘She wouldn’t want to see you so upset.’ And while it was natural for Chris to be sad, she’d urged him to be strong for Ben’s sake. Jo would want him to be. Chris knew how uncomfortable Diane was in the presence of raw emotion but her efforts to diffuse it only make things worse. She knew the facts of his relationship with his adoptive parents but not the spirit; even after all their years together she didn’t understand how they were with one another. Chris didn’t need to be told to ‘be there’ for Ben. He had always been there. Grief had stalked their small family and they had always taken care of one another.

  ‘Would you like to watch the news?’ Diane asks.

  Yes, Ben, watch the news; cheer yourself up.

  The television springs to life. ‘Look. Volume here – up, down – mute.’ She puts the remote in Ben’s hands, which lie like old pancakes in his lap, and tilts her head at Chris. Sit with him, the tilt says, distract him, tell him things will get better. No doubt they will but Chris doesn’t know when and he isn’t going to pretend he does. He sits on a bentwood chair at the dining table, feeling its curves under his hand. Flesh, fabric, ceramic, wood. Clay hardened by heat, shells burnished by sand, driftwood worn by the sea. Shapes made by imagination, passion. Touch. His hand drifts from habit to the small piece of wood in his pocket, one from a bag of off-cuts a friend gave him when he was working in London. Even now, each time his fingers encounter it, he tries to sense its form, as he does with all wood before taking it to the chisel or the lathe, but he’s never yet been able to determine the shape of this particular piece. Over time it has become smooth from constant handling; perhaps its fate is simply to be. Chris’s passion for wood dates from long childhood hours spent with Ben in his shed, watching him whittle animals with small sharp knives or turn the leg of a chair.

  Diane brings cutlery to the table. Her normally serene expression is stamped with weariness.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ says Chris. ‘Your back giving you a hard time?’

  She nods. ‘A lot of standing about. I’m going to get dinner.’

  ‘Forget dinner. We’re full of food. Sit with us for a while.’

  The living room is spick and span. She and her flurry of decent women have cleaned away the food and dishes, decent daughter Phoebe has vacuumed the rugs and polished the tables and decent son Archie helped Chris shift the furniture back into place before leaving for his part-time job, hauling cases of wine and beer at the pub.

  Diane declines Chris’s invitation and leaves him to contemplate the familiar shapes of home: the wide, cool hallways, fretwork arches and tongue-and-groove walls. Beyond the French doors, against a backdrop of dense foliage, a vast verandah is dominated by an L-shaped teak sofa with plump red and cinnamon cushions, perfect for lounging on with the weekend papers. Without moving, Chris can slide from dozing to reading and back again with the kind of pleasant torpor weekends induce, and although that kind of weekend seems a long way off now, Chris knows it will come around again. And again. Theirs is a predictable life. Diane doesn’t shift furniture or even change cushions without warning. The only surprises in the Bright household are of the comforting kind: the unexpected appearance of his favourite rhubarb pie or Phoebe taking time out from her studies to watch a video with them after dinner.

  Chris looks at Ben, who gazes unmoving – and probably unseeing – at the flickering television, as if gestating, no matter how unwillingly, a life without his wife. Her body has gone, the rituals are over, except for her ashes. The ashes are for another day.

  Maureen has a pencil growing from her ear. It’s supposed to be tucked behind, like a grocer from the 1950s, but it tangles with the arm of her glasses and sprouts from her head horizontally. She is forty-five,
not married and there is nothing – as their draughtsman-manager-cum-office-rock – Maureen can’t do. She’s been with Baillieu & Bright Architects since its inception and Chris cannot imagine the place without her.

  When he gets to the office on Monday morning she’s nursing a sheaf of drawings.

  ‘How was the funeral, Chris?’

  ‘Oh … you know … Thanks.’ He swallows a lump and squints at the drawings. ‘Are they the sketches for Porter’s renovations?’

  She nods. ‘He’s with Judge now.’

  ‘That’s supposed to be my job.’ Chris doesn’t really care who does it but worries that Judge, with his unpredictable fads and penchant for the quirky, will recommend something completely inappropriate for Harold Porter’s beautiful but run-down art deco home.

  ‘Judge was here when Mr Porter arrived,’ says Maureen. ‘You weren’t.’

  ‘I was at Brook Street. They were restumping with untreated timber, would you believe it – what’s wrong with them?’

  Maureen smiles. ‘But you sorted it, Chris.’

  Through the glass partition, Chris can see Judge expounding. He doesn’t have to hear to know what’s going on. Judge will have mesmerised Harold Porter with his passion, and without Porter realising it, Judge’s ideas will become his own. Judge has never failed in his conviction that he knows exactly what a client wants, and he’s right often enough to get away with it. God only knows what he’s concocting now. A visionary and brilliant designer, Judge nevertheless has no feel for restoration work and is next to useless in dealing with the on-site realities of rain halting a concrete pour, builders disappearing to another job, a storm hitting shy of the windows going in, the wrong bath being installed and the wrong tiles … fallout which usually lands with Chris.

  Tabitha totters towards them on her four-inch heels and gasp-skinny legs, popping bubble gum and retrieving it from her face with a long tongue. Chris watches her, knowing she is far smarter than she appears. She sneaks a look over her shoulder to see if he’s noticed the gum, gives a little start when she realises he has. He’s forbidden her to pop gum when clients are present. Judge went further and forbade her to pop gum in the office at all. He says the effects of passive gum-popping are as bad as smoke, especially if it’s lime green. Despite the differences over gum, Judge and Tabi are alike, neither bothered about what other people think but simply and entirely themselves. This morning her fingers brush Chris’s shoulder as she passes by.

  ‘Morning, Mr B.’

  He can’t help it, his balls stir. Not that he’d touch her with a metre-long piece of two-by-four. She’s only six years older than his daughter, for Pete’s sake. And she’s staff. And she’s not his type. And he’s married. He gets a coffee and goes to his desk, stacked neatly with papers and trade magazines. He isn’t fussy or particularly organised but things seem to form tidily before him. Judge’s desk is almost empty. Everything is stored in his head. Occasionally he’ll come across something unexpected in his drawers: a pencil sharpener shaped like a concrete-mixer, petrified orange peel from last year’s lunch. ‘Hey, look what I found …’

  In twenty-five years Chris has never been able to surprise himself with the contents of a drawer. He could recite what’s in his by heart. Four grades of pencil. A slide rule. A key ring Archie made when he was ten that was supposed to be a beer bottle but is so gummed up with solder it looks like a dog turd. It’s the ugliest thing he’s ever seen but Chris can’t bring himself to throw it out. There’s a sketchbook filled with his own half-developed ideas – shapes mostly – formed for satisfaction rather than purpose, and a wallet Diane gave him which he has never used. Chris resolutely persists with one he bought in London long ago. Soft and fragile, the time is fast approaching when he knows he will have to surrender to change.

  From his drawing board, set in solitary splendour in a corner overlooking the streetscape, he has a distant view of Mount Coot-tha.

  Their suite occupies the top floor of a narrow, three-storey building in central Toowong. Recently they refurbished the office and, in a spirit of democracy, the staff were given the freedom to design their own work space. Judge opted for a surprisingly traditional office behind glass. Their other architect, Hamish – quiet, steady and ferociously accurate – walled himself in behind slatted timber. In ten years no-one has identified a single mistake in Hamish’s work, though Judge has made it his life’s mission to do so. Their draughtsman, Mick, is fast and creative and requires supervising in case his imagination inspires him to put the house atop the roof. His work area is surrounded by an 800 millimetre-high glass ‘fence’ which he steps over and an absurd little glass door by which he requires everyone else to come and go. Maureen’s unadorned work station presides over the centre of the office. Only Tabi, as receptionist, has restricted options. But she has pushed their limits with cherry-red visitors’ chairs, yellow cushions, a forest of pot plants and one appalling – and universally bullied – garden gnome. Although its long white beard clearly marks it as male, it has been given the name Doris. Judge drapes it in ladies’ hats and handbags; Mick opts for underwear and nappies, Hamish a raincoat. Chris wants to buy Doris a parachute but can’t find one the right size.

  Tabi remains unfazed.

  Chris frowns at a brief clipped to his drawing board. How many times does he have to tell Judge – no more churches!

  As if summoned by his ire, Judge flings open his door and Porter emerges with a hesitant smile. Judge escorts him to the lift and comes back beaming.

  Chris beckons him over. ‘He’s supposed to be my client.’

  ‘Yeah, and he would of been, but you weren’t here,’ Judge says, in a fair imitation of Tabi. He dumps a wad of notes on Chris’s drawing board. ‘Here, have it. He was expecting to work with you, anyway.’

  ‘And you take this.’ Chris shoves the church brief into Judge’s hands. ‘I told you. No. More. Churches.’

  ‘You didn’t mean it.’

  ‘I did!’

  ‘Oh, come on, be a sport – who else is going to do it? You’re our expert. Just one last time?’

  ‘No – I am not bloody doing it!’

  ‘Okay, okay. Not doing it. Not bloody doing it. Christ, you’ve changed your tune.’

  ‘I changed it ten years ago,’ Chris says. ‘But you weren’t listening. St Barnabas – remember?’

  ‘A triumph.’

  ‘A social disaster.’

  St Barnabas marked the end of Chris’s career in conservation work – in his mind, anyway. In reality, little has changed. Nobody is willing to release him from his reputation – a reputation not sought but acquired when the only job he could get in London after graduating was with a firm of conservation architects. With no clear plan for his architectural career and a lifelong love of working with wood, he didn’t mind. Three years later, back in Brisbane, he found a ready market for his skills. The high-set Federation style ‘Queenslander’ houses were back in vogue and over the next ten years Chris built a name for himself in restoration work. His biggest coup was winning the contract to restore the 100-year-old Church of St Barnabas, a pitted, peeling, shellac-encrusted timber edifice in the heart of Brisbane. Ad hoc alterations compounded the depressing effect: imitation hardwood linings, cheap door furniture and plastic light fittings.

  Over two years, Chris restumped, cross-braced and replaced rotted boards. Five layers of paint were removed from the main building and bell tower, and cracked linoleum was lifted to reveal five-inch floorboards. All the boards, pews, lecterns and intricate fretwork of choir stalls were stripped, sanded and waxed. Stained-glass windows replaced cracked glass and Chris sourced old light fittings and door and window hardware from demolition sites all over Australia. A specialist was brought in to repair and revoice the organ.

  At times, Chris wondered about the wisdom of removing everything added since the church was built. There was not much intrinsic value in any individual item but as each represented a facet of parish life over a hundred years, rem
oving them effectively erased the church’s history.

  The Board of Trustees had no such reservations, however, and at the Service of Reconsecration the pews filled with people, bells pealed loud and clear from the bell tower, voices rolled in the rafters and the organ thundered jubilantly from the loft. Sunlight shafted through gleaming windows and settled on the nourished curves of rosewood and cedar, as it had a century before.

  A triumph. God smiled.

  Compliments poured in.

  A year or so later Chris returned to admire his accomplishment. A dozen or so parishioners were huddled on white plastic chairs in a space created by pushing back pews. A boom box pumped out canned hymn music. The vicar stood not in the pulpit but among his small flock.

  Chris was dumbfounded.

  ‘We don’t have the numbers,’ the vicar explained. ‘The organist left and nobody else can play. If I stand in the pulpit, people can’t hear me.’

  ‘Convert one of the recesses,’ Chris urged. ‘Put in some carpet, a few comfortable chairs and a small organ. Easy.’ He took his proposal to the trustees, assuring them every change would be simple, identifiable and removable. He would work pro bono. The trustees declined. Why spend all that money on restorations if you were going to put back what you’d taken out?

  Chris had never returned to the Church of St Barnabas and, as far as he knows, nothing has changed since.

  But he had. He’d drawn a line between restoration and thoughtful renovation. ‘Old’ and ‘precious’ ceased to be synonymous, as did ‘new’ and ‘worthless’. ‘Historic’ no longer meant frozen in time. There’d be no more wholesale ripping out of changes made over a building’s lifetime.

  His change of style required people to switch from a dewy-eyed view of the past to valuing a structure in which its whole life is reflected. He now regards a building as having more value when it represents not just a construction date but all the eras and people who have lived through it. A community’s life can be traced through its buildings’ uses, their triumphs and failures. If their knees are patched and their teeth have fallen out, let it show. If an 1888 courthouse, for example, became a soup kitchen during the First World War, let it be seen. Not everyone shared Chris’s view, but enough did for him to acquire a faithful new following.