Last Day in the Dynamite Factory

by Annah Faulkner

  He flips through Judge’s notes from his meeting with Harold Porter. Nothing too outlandish – probably because all the remaining walls are load-bearing.

  His musings are interrupted by the phone.

  It’s Ben. He’s just collected Jo’s ashes from the crematorium. What should he do with them? It was something he and Jo had never discussed.

  Chris is stumped for a response. ‘Let’s think about it for a while,’ he suggests. ‘We’ll find somewhere special.’

  Ashes Day. A morning limpid and cool.

  For four months Ben has been dithering over where to put Jo’s ashes: beneath the jacaranda tree in the backyard, on her sister’s grave in Melbourne, or scattered to the winds from the top of Mount Nebo. Tellingly, he’s chosen Coolum Beach.

  He’ll be up already, polishing his shoes and ironing his shirt. Chris lies in bed listening to kookaburras chortle in the spotted gum tree outside the window. Beside it, the jacaranda is draped in a swan song of purple blossoms.

  Beside Chris, Diane sleeps on.

  She thinks it’s a mistake to scatter Jo’s ashes where Liam died so long ago. ‘It’ll re-open old wounds,’ she says. ‘What Ben needs is closure.’

  What a diminishing word: closure. Grief compressed, parcelled and disposed of neatly. Chris wonders, sometimes, about Diane and grief. She seems to stand outside it, not immune, but unwilling to surrender to sadness. Chris wasn’t surprised by Ben’s decision. Every year on the twenty-eighth of December for the past forty years he, Ben and Jo went to Coolum Beach to float flowers on the ocean in memory of Liam. Despite its tragic associations, Chris still loves the sea, though he has never swum since. He thinks scattering Jo’s ashes where his cousin died an appropriate reconnection of mother and child.

  Ben has gradually established a life without Jo. He’s eating properly, going for walks, frequenting his Services club and tinkering in his shed. His housekeeping skills, however, are sufficiently questionable for Diane to insist on hiring him a cleaner. Though Ben resisted, Chris agreed. He knew it wasn’t the cleaning Ben objected to but someone else doing what Jo once did.

  Diane stirs, blinks and proclaims her morning mantra: ‘I’ll get tea.’

  Chris throws back the sheet and goes to the ensuite. Without glasses his face is a blur. He dips his head at his mirrored self in an unconvincing search for bald spots. His blond mop needs cutting but so far there’s no evidence of balding. Jack Ward, Chris’s unknown birth father, must have had a good crop. Chris has almost given up wondering about the man who has never been more to him than a name on his birth certificate, except in his head, where he has variously been saint, demon, war hero and wino. Chris squints at the blobby reflections of his mouth and blue eyes. His mouth, according to Tabi’s cool observation, is his best bit. ‘Sexy … for an old bloke.’ He squirts foam on his face, runs the safety razor under the tap and pulls it slowly across his chin like a snowplough.

  Diane, swathed in her peach silk wrap, brings in his mug of tea and sets it on the handbasin. She leans against the doorjamb with a smile that suggests Chris is silly to persist with the razor while the electric gadget she bought him for his birthday lies in the drawer. He tries not to let her smile irritate him because it also hints at loneliness. Chris glances at her reflection while taking the razor under his nose. Not a single thing he could complain about, yet something inside him rises up, then flattens out again, like a lone wave on the sea.

  ‘Archie’s still asleep, I suppose?’ he says, frowning at his shiny face. He hates the shine. One day he blobbed on some of Diane’s face powder to de-shine it, and she caught him at it and gave him that smile she’s giving him now and he nearly wrenched the handbasin off the wall and crowned her with it.

  ‘Of course.’

  Archie is always asleep at this time of day. It’ll take him exactly ten minutes to be ready to go with them to Coolum. There’s no point waking him earlier. Their son is a night person, only managing to get to work at the pub by 11 am because Diane hovers over him with a jug of iced water. Chris and Diane are putting him through cooking school, but funding neither his affairs nor his motorbike.

  As Chris steps under the shower the phone on the bedside table begins to ring. Diane goes to answer it, chats briefly and returns to the bathroom to take his place at the handbasin. ‘That was Phoebe,’ she says, plastering gunk on her face. ‘She can’t join us for lunch. She has to be in Brisbane for a site meeting at two. Given it’s a three-hour return trip to Coolum she’ll take her own car.’

  Phoebe. Grown up and gone. Completed her Masters in Architecture and joined Armstrongs, a large architectural firm. Just recently she moved into a one-bedroom apartment and barely a week after that, her stockbroker boyfriend, James (who does not like being called Jim), moved in with her.

  It seems like yesterday Phoebe sat with Chris in his office, drawing houses with his ruler and pencils, her chin barely clearing the desk. A chip off the old block they call her, but it’s more like the other way around. When she was six, she asked him to help her build a dolls’ house, a large dolls’ house, big enough for Mrs Doll, various secondary dolls and her teddies. A month into the project, the floors down and walls in, Chris found Phoebe pulling out his carefully glued pieces, breaking them apart and reassembling them with sticky tape. He regarded the wreckage with dismay.

  ‘Pebbles, what gives?’

  Gerry, the bear Jo had given her for her birthday, needed a den for his drawing board and the old bear wanted his own bedroom. Over the next few days Chris watched Phoebe dismantle his fine workmanship and experiment with her own arrangements. He saw that unless she could pull the structure apart and reassemble it, she’d lose interest. He began again, making interlocking panels of three-ply and window frames of balsa wood that snapped together at the corners to form a variety of shapes and sizes. Walls were held in place by plasticine and the roof was a set of hinged panels that could be folded back and angled up. When it was finished, there were no walls or windows Phoebe couldn’t reposition.

  Now, the dolls’ house languishes in his workroom downstairs, along with other old toys, Christmas decorations and gardening gear. Chris has rammed conduit into the walls to take it all but more keeps accumulating on his workbench. Not that it matters; it’s a room he rarely uses. The light is artificial and the work area is cramped. One of these days he’ll build himself a proper shed, upgrade his woodworking skills and do justice to the timber treasures he’s salvaged from old buildings that are now spilling from four ancient plywood tea chests.

  Today he dresses as he does for work, in a navy and white striped shirt, immaculately pressed by Diane, and navy chinos. No tie. The last time he wore a tie, apart from formal functions and funerals, was at Brisbane Boys’ College in 1967, his last year of high school.

  Judge wears ties. Always sloppily knotted. ‘It gives me something to loosen when things get desperate,’ he says. ‘What can you loosen, Wren, apart from your moral rectitude – or is it “rectal moritude” – your bloody trousers? I hope not, since your arse is level with my nose.’

  Chris steps into his black leather slip-ons and goes to the kitchen. As he passes Phoebe’s room, he pauses. All she’s left are Mrs Doll, her two teddies, one lonely T-shirt in her wardrobe and the faint whiff of body lotion and shampoo. He breathes deep, inhaling memories. Kids. They unhinge him; make him feel vulnerable and fearful, no matter how old they get. From downy-skulled babes, heavy with trust, to worldly, sexually active adults – they continue to fill him with wonder, and they still make every frustrating thing in life worthwhile.

  The day Phoebe left, Chris sat on her bed, watching her pack. Part of him applauded her independent spirit but another part hated letting her go.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Dad.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you’re going to cry.’

  ‘No. Just thinking.’

  ‘What?’

  He tried to assemble an I-can-cope-with-anything look. ‘Not
sure. I’ll let you know when I’ve thought it.’

  Some vague guilt. Was it just him or did all parents fret about whether there was something more they could have said or done to prepare their reckless innocents for a world immune to their charms? Trying to do the right thing but not always knowing what it was. Phoebe’s departure did relieve him of the immediacy of concern; he can imagine everything is fine and not be faced with trying to fix the unfixable.

  Diane lamented Phoebe’s departure but looks forward to grandchildren.

  ‘We’re a bit young,’ Chris said, with a worm of discomfort. ‘I’m not ready for grandchildren.’

  ‘I am. I have lots of time.’

  It’s true. Even working part-time at the library, keeping the house immaculate and the meals coming, time seems to hang about Diane with the weight of a wet wool cloak. Recently she returned to university and Chris is relieved. Since the kids stopped needing her so much she’s turned her attentions on him and he finds it unsettling.

  In the kitchen she’s fixing breakfast. Designed as much for Archie as for Diane, the kitchen still gives Chris pleasure, being both user-friendly and user-proof, with surfaces that are good-looking but resilient enough to withstand a budding cook. Archie was born with one spoon in his mouth and another in his fist. At three he was making rissoles; at four, cupcakes. At fifteen he developed an inexplicable and intense appetite for cookie baking which continued for a month until Chris became curious when no-one in the house was ever offered one. The next time he saw cookies in the oven, he pinched one before they were done. The wide-eyed, smirking husband Diane found crooning in his den and the smattering of half-cooked biscuits on his drawing board told Diane all she needed to know. It took her less than five minutes to unearth a row of pot plants thriving under UV lights in the top of Archie’s wardrobe. These days he either hides his plants more carefully or is too busy cultivating relationships with women, attending lectures in food science and working at the bottle shop.

  Diane dips bread into an egg mixture for French toast and puts it in the pan. On the table she puts bacon, butter and Canadian maple syrup. Chris can’t tell the difference between Canadian maple syrup and any other sort but Diane insists on having the right one. She tucks her precision-cut silky brown hair – never dyed and now slightly grey at the temples – behind her ears. Composure is grafted to her face; only in her eyes does doubt sometimes linger. If Chris looks carefully he may glimpse traces of the Diane he met at school – sweet, needy and vulnerable. But not often.

  ‘How’s uni?’ he says, then mentally kicks himself. He can’t ask her again. He must write it down. Then he can say, ‘How is the course in Logical Reasoning, Argumentation and Critical Thinking going, Di?’ That’s it!

  ‘It’s fine, thank you.’

  Fine, thank you. No details. He wouldn’t mind details but unless he asks, he won’t get them. He likes that she isn’t a chatter-box but lately their silences seem louder. Not, unfortunately, suggestive of two people who don’t need words to communicate, but of a couple who have run out of things to say. As he drops a napkin on his lap Chris notices a splash of sturdy golden hairs, suspiciously dog-like, on his dark trousers.

  ‘Has there been a dog in here?’

  Diane looks miffed, as if he’s suggested she’s farted, then registers his hair-flecked trousers.

  ‘Oh, yes. Sorry. Yesterday Archie’s friend brought in a dog. I thought I’d got it all.’

  Chris brushes the hairs but they stick stubbornly to the fabric. He begins picking them off, one by one. ‘Hell, don’t these things cling!’ He glances up at Diane, who is watching him, mesmerised.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he says.

  ‘My … my parents did that.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Picked me off them. They said I clung.’ She shakes her head. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No – tell me.’

  She shrugs. ‘When they went away – field trips or whatever – I used to stay with a friend, Jane. Every night after dinner her family played music and Jane would climb onto her father’s lap for a cuddle. It looked so … appealing, I tried the same thing with my father. But I knocked the pipe out of his mouth and it fell on the floor and scorched the rug. He pushed me off – prised my fingers from his arm. He said I stuck like dog hairs.’

  Chris stares at her, aghast. He knows that her archaeologist father and anthropologist mother had always been emotionally distant – but this? Her face is splotchy with embarrassment. He reaches for her hand. The toast begins to burn. She pulls her hand free and grabs the pan off the stove.

  ‘I’ll make some more.’

  ‘Forget the toast, Di. Come here.’

  ‘No, I’ll make some more. I’m happy to.’ She pulls more bread from the packet.

  ‘Are you?’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Happy?’

  ‘Oh … um, yes, I’m content.’

  ‘Just … content?’

  ‘Y-yes, but that’s all right. Content is better than happy; more enduring, more … stable. You’re not all over the place, emotionally.’

  She dips bread into the egg mixture and takes it to the pan and Chris wonders if she’ll ask him whether he’s happy. Probably not, and probably just as well. He is neither happy nor content, but yearns for something which has no name. It’s a longing, a lurch of his soul that sends it crashing against an invisible wall. He’s certain there is something beyond that wall which does fulfil, but walls keep life in place. You don’t destroy a perfectly good house without a perfectly good reason.

  Diane slides now-perfect toast onto two plates and sits opposite him at the bench. Recomposed, she slices her toast neatly and drizzles it with maple syrup. Chris’s eyes travel the length of her body, encased in a dark gold linen sheath. She favours these sorts of dresses and they suit her. In winter she wears them with a smart little cardigan or a contrasting jacket. Her skin is palest olive and invites touch, her body substantial without being fat. She has the allure of a woman who doesn’t seek to attract but does anyway, and she still attracts him. Beneath her clothes, her body leans towards some unidentifiable longing. Chris wishes it was him, but doubts it. He wonders if even Diane knows what it is.

  He watches her hands, strong and smooth. Efficient with a deck of cards – she’s a killer Bridge player and has tried to get him interested but what appeals to her about Bridge is exactly what puts him off. Rules. Diane likes rules; she likes knowing what is expected. Chris hates rules but is good at them, a trait he finds depressing. His reputation as a responsible, reliable, decent husband, father and architect is harder to kick than smoking was. Not that he ever smoked much; it interfered with his tennis.

  Every Saturday for the last twenty years he and a bunch of mates have played on a court at Bardon, a lovely spot overlooking Ithaca Creek, partly shaded by a massive camphor laurel tree that reminds him of the tree Grandpa dynamited on his farm all those years ago. The tree has been declared a weed and the pest police want it dead but Chris loves it. He’d like to hug its trunk but settles for patting it – casually – in case anyone is watching. On the court, the thock of the ball and the urge to remind players ten years younger that there is still plenty of life in the old bloke obliterates the need for hugging trees. In the nippy days of winter, adrenalin floods his limbs and convinces him that he could, if required, leap tall buildings at a single bound. Yesterday, in the heat of late spring, he wasn’t quite so spry but he still won.

  After the game he flung his racquet onto the cracked leather seat of his old Rover and drove home, humming. Bounded up the stairs and burst into the kitchen. Hail, conquering hero!

  Diane looked up from her textbook. ‘Good game?’

  ‘Whipped their arses. Got Judge running like a bunny.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice.’ She returned to her book and silence descended, an incongruous Saturday silence. Archie, he supposed, was at work, supplying the thirsty footy crowds. He went to his den and put a Joe Cocker CD into th
e boom box, played a track or two and then swapped it for The Phantom of the Opera.

  A few minutes later Diane appeared at his door. ‘Chris, would you mind using the headphones? I’m trying to concentrate.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He put on the expensive headphones she gave him last Christmas so she wouldn’t have to put up with his schmaltzy taste in music, and warbled tunelessly along with a song. When he went into the kitchen for a beer fifteen minutes later, Diane had neat balls of cottonwool pressed into her ears.

  Subdued, he returned to his den, a room reminiscent of a shipping container with windows at one end and a door at the other. It doesn’t inspire. If ideas, especially subversive ones (of which there are pathetically few), were to pop up, they’d be more likely to do so in the dunny which overlooks a verdant sweep of lawn and the park at the bottom of the street. Light from the window in the den is plentiful but the garden beyond it seems remote, more like a picture than a reality. The room is furnished with a reclining chair, a desk, a drawing board and stool. Shelves on the wall are stacked with CDs, books (mostly adventure), National Geographic and architectural magazines. The bag of wood off-cuts from his friend in London sits on the desk. On the wall above is a picture from the same friend – a simple sketch of a woman lying naked in front of TV with a glass of wine. Beside it is a bold acrylic of a dog and a cat eyeing each other across a stream. A bridge between them has collapsed. Diane, who dislikes both pictures, gave him a fine antique drawing of one of Brisbane’s earliest churches. It hangs on the opposite wall.

  The corner of the den is occupied by a handsome chunk of camphor laurel Chris salvaged from Grandpa’s farm in the Mary Valley during his teens. A piece of wood enfolds a story, sometimes instantly visible, sometimes hidden. He still hasn’t decided on the fate of the camphor laurel.