Last Day in the Dynamite Factory

by Annah Faulkner

  The enormous red missile that had smashed into the front of Ben’s Morris Oxford in the half-light of dusk and sent the car into a ditch. The boys had scrambled out and run to the body. ‘Go back,’ said Ben, but they hadn’t. They’d looked into the eyes that stared at nothing and they’d seen its blood – the same colour as their own – running onto the bitumen. Ben had taken the broken beast by its hind legs and dragged it off the road.

  Chris put his hand on Liam’s cheek, feeling the still-warm skin. Then a wave smacked him hard in the back and flung him onto the sand, Liam’s body spreadeagled on top of him. As sea engulfed them, Chris struggled beneath Liam’s weight but he couldn’t move. He clawed upwards, gasping for air, but his lungs filled with salty water and his ears shrilled and red bubbles wove between strands of Liam’s hair which swayed like seaweed in front of his eyes, then pinpricks came, then …

  … sand … rough against his cheek. A rush of salt water tearing up his throat and bursting from his mouth. Coughing, gagging, someone pushing his back. ‘Alive!’ A stranger’s voice. ‘He’s alive!’

  Then Ben’s voice – sliding and crazy – ‘Chris! Chris! Oh my God, my boy, oh my boy. Liam! Liam! Where’s Liam?’ He clamped Chris’s face between his hands. ‘Where, lad, where? For God’s sake, tell me – where?’

  Chris fish-mouthed for words.

  No words.

  Ben shook him. ‘For God’s sake, Chris – where?’

  Chris gasped and tried again. Nothing. Again and again he reached for words but none came. Nothing. Nothing.

  ‘I tried,’ the stranger sobbed. ‘I tried but I couldn’t get him – he – he was gone …’

  ‘My son!’ Ben’s roar echoes down the years. ‘My son!’

  Ben grinds the heel of his hand against his eyes and closes the photo album.

  Chris takes it from him. ‘How about I take this stuff home, sort it and bring it back? You can decide after that what to keep.’

  Ben nods and Chris takes the cartons to the car.

  When he returns, Ben is sifting through Jo’s wardrobe. If ghosts lurk, Chris reckons, they lurk in clothes. He touches a dress and it sways, a shirt, and it ripples. Practical clothes, Jo’s, mostly for work. After Liam died she threw herself into volunteer work – Meals on Wheels, Red Cross; even learning Braille so she could translate books for the blind.

  When Ben wasn’t at work, he got through the months following Liam’s death by whittling. Up in his shed carving birds which had so delighted his lost son: richly detailed kookaburras, mynahs and fat willy wagtails, lovingly carved eyes and feathers, sanded, stained in two or more tones and preserved in lacquer. He could easily have sold them but he gave them away.

  Ben touches a skirt. ‘May as well go.’

  ‘All of it?’

  He nods.

  There aren’t many things worth keeping. A half-finished cross-stitch of flowers in a vase, her watch, a string of pearls Ben gave her for their thirtieth wedding anniversary. He fingers them for a moment then passes them to Chris.

  ‘I’d like Phoebe to have these.’

  In a box at the back of the wardrobe they find Jo’s wedding dress, her only truly glamorous garment, a satiny champagne thing with a train and covered buttons up the sleeves. ‘I’ll keep this,’ says Ben. ‘Your mother made it. Did you know? Beautiful thing.’ He touches the bodice gently, returns the box to the wardrobe and runs his hand along a shelf. ‘You inherited her creativity, Chris. Look at this. Solid. Built to last. You weren’t even eighteen years old when you made them.’ He gives Chris a smile of wistful pride and slides open a drawer; the corners beautifully dovetailed, the timber finesanded and waxed. ‘How’s that for glide? No wobble. Almost thirty years and still beautiful. These days they’ve got wardrobe organisers at whopping prices with workmanship not worth your spit.’

  Chris examines his construction, looking for flaws that might indicate he was no kind of craftsman, but can’t find any.

  ‘I miss doing this sort of thing,’ he says. ‘I’m fed up restoring other people’s work. There’s nothing of me in it. Judge’s buildings are unmistakable – that flair and cocky assurance.’

  He takes a couple of blouses from their hangers, folds them and puts them in a cardboard carton. By the time Diane arrives with lunch, Jo’s wardrobe is empty, her small pile of possessions packed in boxes on the floor.

  Ben looks at them as if he can’t decide which one she might still be in. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’

  January holds Brisbane in a steamy post-Christmas torpor. Building goes on hold; people stream to the beach, pack air-conditioned movie theatres, lick ice-creams, flop into backyard pools and sprawl on lounges in the shade with stubbies of cold beer. Dogs collapse panting beneath high-set houses, roses die, frangipanis drench the air with fragrance and hibiscus burst crimson for one short day of life.

  The staff are on holidays and Chris and Judge take turns at the office. Chris finally gets around to tackling Jo’s boxes.

  He takes them to his den and unpacks old toys, games and baby books. Even as a baby Liam looked like his father with his nuggety build and tousled black hair. Chris’s hair is tousled too, but blond like his mother’s. There are two photos of her in his baby book. One was taken when she was a toddler, looking much the same as he did at the same age; in the other she’s about sixteen, pretty, and with a hopeful expression, as if eyeing a bright future.

  Deeper in the box he finds his old bunny, a once-yellow rabbit with long velvet ears, now bristly and balding. Jo replaced an eye with a button not quite matching the original and re-stitched its nose. Renewed, but too far gone to restore. There’s a toy tractor with peeling red paint, an old View-Master and 3D pictures of Egyptian pyramids, Moroccan souks and the Yosemite National Park; a box of dominoes – mind how they fall – and an exercise book. A lump gathers in Chris’s throat. He opens the book, soft and frayed with age, and there they are. Page after page of his drawings of Fletcher, the cartoon character he invented to talk for him during his month of silence.

  Liam’s body was never found. There was nothing to bury, nothing to cremate, no small white coffin to put flowers on, no face to kiss goodbye. A memorial service was held at the local church, packed with relatives, friends and strangers.

  The night of the service, a violent storm raged through the suburbs of Brisbane. Rain clattered like gravel against Chris’s bedroom window, wind moaned in the downpipes and thunder boomed throughout the house. For a long time he lay awake listening to water overflowing the gutters and thudding onto the ground, haunted by the memory of water in his lungs and ears and Liam’s weight on his chest.

  The next morning he woke to sunshine, soft air and a stain on the ceiling where water had leaked in. There were two circles – a big one and a small one – that together looked like a little man with a lopsided smile and one eye half closed as if winking. There was a line beside the circles that looked like an arrow. Chris reached for his exercise book and drew the picture before the stains could dry and disappear. He gave the man hands, feet, ears, a bow and a quiver of arrows and a name: Fletcher. A teacher at school had told him a fletcher was an arrow maker. To fletch, or fledge, meant to fit with feathers. Not just to put feathers in arrows but to nurture baby birds, to feed and care for them until they could fly.

  Chris turns the pages of the old book, every one filled with sketches of Fletcher going about daily life: eating, reading, dressing, whittling arrows and expressing in word clouds what Chris couldn’t say. What time are we leaving? Where is the butter? Who is she? I’m not hungry. In some, the anguish of loss is baldly revealed without words: Fletcher bleeding, Fletcher dead. With Liam gone, Fletcher was not only a way to communicate, but another self who whispered in his ear and marched in his head.

  Chris puts the book on the floor and wipes his forehead. The room is suffocatingly hot. He goes to the window and raises it to the max, admitting a draught of warm air and the deafening screech of cicadas.

  At the bot
tom of the box he unearths a Girl’s Own Annual and a stack of journals. Three journals are covered in pale blue fabric with gold edging, the fourth is red. He weighs it in his hand, then turns back the cover.

  TPNG 1960–1962

  Josephine Bright

  Her handwriting is decisive; the warning clear … but … New Guinea. A swirl of colours and smells …

  Chris turns the page.

  Port Moresby, 18th April 1960

  Who’d have thought it?

  Three and a half months already and I still don’t know how I’ll survive this heat. Ben doesn’t seem bothered by it and Chris is positively thriving. I’m sure he’s grown two inches since we arrived. Swimming is the main way to cool off, but I can’t bear going near the water. As if it doesn’t matter. For me, it may as well be yesterday I lost my darling Liam. I’d take Chris to the beach if he wanted to go but he’s afraid. After nearly drowning, why not? I suppose I should be encouraging him to learn to swim but I haven’t the heart. He’s a wonderful boy. Boy? Growing up so fast; nearly as tall as his me! I’m glad Ben accepted this posting (despite the heat). The change has been good and learning to drive liberating. Most women here drive. Go where you want, when you want. I’m still not sure about having someone do my housework – especially my laundry – and I keep checking but the haus-boi seems to be doing a good job and you’d be considered odd if you did it yourself.

  Liam would be nine next week.

  The heat, the smells, the sounds. Thongs slapping heels, hands slapping mosquitoes, their insistent whine and the hypnotic sound of the locals singing, the pungent scent of flowers, of dust and drenching rain. The polyglot of kids; school, marbles, monkey bars, mischief. Girls – pretty knots of them in sundresses and sandals.

  Diane. Stefi. Roberta.

  Diane Rudge was a quiet, intellectual kid with a lost look that made Chris feel protective. Her parents treated her like an afterthought, a punctuation mark in a sentence that didn’t need it. Diane’s goal in life – apart from being Chris’s favourite – was to depose Stefi Breuer as Class Brain. She never did. Nor did Chris, despite his best efforts. Stefi was a sweet kid with messy ginger hair who made no effort to maintain her academic standing – an attitude that infuriated Diane. Roberta Lightfoot infuriated Diane too, but in a different way. While no academic threat and crippled by polio, Roberta was spirited, artistically gifted and pretty, and Diane’s main rival for Chris’s affections. He was a popular boy – tall for his age, good-looking and kind – especially to the underdog. His month of silence had taught him what it was like to be invisible. When Terry Prior wet his pants everyone shunned him. Chris put a racquet in Terry’s hand and taught him to play tennis. Within a month Terry was winning nearly every game and his pants were dry. Chris showed Bobby ‘Buck-tooth’ Bailey how to play darts and he coached Roberta, with her crippled leg, to play softball. He coaxed details from Diane of her emotionally barren home life and became her comforter and friend.

  So long ago. What happened to them all? Stefi he hadn’t seen since school, and Roberta … Bertie, not since London in 1973. By then she was … He stares down the memory for a long moment, then wipes it along with sweat from his forehead. The breeze has dropped and the air in the den is once again thick and flabby. He gets up, switches on the ceiling fan and returns to the diary.

  28th April 1960

  The dry season is on its way. Afternoon rain storms have tapered off and the humidity has dropped. Thank God. I’m at a loose end. Some women complain their haus-bois can’t cook but my problem is that mine can and I’m afraid I’ll forget how to boil an egg by the time we go home. I don’t want to finish up like some people here – hopping from card parties to dinner parties and picnics and drinking themselves senseless. I’m no wowser but the amount of alcohol that gets guzzled and the carry-on – ladies included – is alarming.

  Ben enjoys life here but isn’t challenged by the work and doesn’t plan to extend his contract beyond two years. Chris will be disappointed but no doubt hide it when it’s time to go. He’s eager to please and endlessly thoughtful. He has his mother’s creative streak and her brains but no evidence (yet) thank goodness, of her capacity for betrayal. Or his father’s, for that matter.

  Betrayal? What the hell did that mean? And his father: Jo obviously knew more about Jack Ward than she’d let on. Maybe Archie was right in his fanciful musings that Chris couldn’t find his birth father because he was prowling prison corridors doing life for murder or armed robbery, or both. Chris might have inherited the criminal gene. He wipes his forehead with the edge of his T-shirt.

  23rd June 1960

  A picnic today at Brown River with the Rudges. Not inspiring company unless you happen to be obsessed with archaeology or anthropology or whatever-other-ology. I felt sorry for their daughter, Diane. She may as well not have existed for all the attention they paid her. She wanted to swim but wouldn’t go in unless Chris did and I could see he was torn. I know it’s wrong to let him avoid water all his life so I encouraged him to go. It wasn’t the beach; there were no waves and it was too shallow for harm. So he went in, but only knee-deep. Then Ben joined him and they all mucked around in the shallows together which was nice. Then – when they were coming out – I saw it and I thought, my God, my heart will explode. I felt faint, sick to my stomach. I knew I should be expecting it sometime but so far it’s only been the occasional look or mannerism. But today, seeing them side by side like that, watching where they stepped with the same look of concentration, their hair springing up from their foreheads exactly the same way and that wheezy laugh they both have – it was obvious to anyone with eyes that they are father and son. Thank God the Rudges were too self-absorbed to notice. Chris will. He’s bound to. He can’t help it. I must warn Ben to expect it. Thank heavens Ian has gone. I shouldn’t say it, poor man, but at least no-one can prove anything.

  Chris reads again.

  And again. The words look peculiar: father and son; hieroglyphs on a page whose meaning he can’t grasp. Father and son – addling his brain – father and son – huge, wraparound words – father and son – that tighten – father and son – and squeeze his throat.

  The diary falls to the floor, face up; the dirty mess of it displayed beside his bare foot. His foot? His legs? The skin, the hair, the creepy familiarity.

  Ben’s.

  Despite the fan, the den is stifling. Chris feels dizzy, nauseous. He lurches up and teeters into the passageway, just making it to the ensuite before throwing up. He tries to dodge the mess but slips on it and crashes onto his back. The ceiling swoops down and his ears shriek, warning of oblivion. His eyes close. A face looms – the face of a traitor, a liar, a thief; the face of his – his father.

  How …

  his breath comes in streaks,

  could …

  he …?

  ‘Chris!’

  He blinks, but can’t focus.

  ‘Chris – what happened? Can you talk?’

  He opens his mouth and the sea rushes in. Liam’s body presses on his chest, his lungs scream for air. Liam … his brother. His brother.

  ‘Oh, my God, Chris … can you understand me? Can you see me? Smile … smile, Chris – please!’

  Breathe … it’s all he can do to breathe.

  Diane takes his hand. ‘Can you feel my hand?’

  He can feel her hand, yet he seems to be shrinking away from it, becoming smaller, smaller; doll-sized … marble-sized … a baked bean … a dot … the absence of a dot. A hand touches his face. His own – waxy and alien.

  He struggles to sit up.

  ‘Thank God.’ Diane touches his face. ‘Can you feel this?’

  He nods. Water. But he has no voice.

  Diane heaves a sigh of relief. She helps him up and walks with him back to his den.

  ‘What happened?’ she says as he sinks onto his chair.

  Jo’s diary is still open on the floor. He kicks it. She picks it up and slides on her glasses that dangle from the ro
pe-thing on her chest. As she reads, a vertical line appears between her brows. She turns a page and the sound is shocking, it’s so casual, as if she’s reading nothing more significant than a newspaper.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, her eyes round as olives. ‘Oh – Chris. I can’t believe it – in all that time I never saw it.’ She stares at him, scouring his face and connecting the dots. ‘There were things – easy to say now, I suppose – but there were things … I dismissed them. There was a boy at uni, the living spit of his father, yet he was adopted. You look so much like Jo, I – well, you have some of Ben’s mannerisms – but I put that down to living with him.’ She fans her face with the diary. ‘I suppose … I suppose it’s good that it’s out in the open but what a shock. You’ve always wondered who your father was. Now you know.’

  Chris shakes his head, more shudder than shake. Diane nods, shuts the diary and puts it on his drawing board.

  ‘Yes, a lot to absorb. I’ll make some tea.’

  When she leaves he sweeps the diary onto the floor and leans on the drawing board, cradling his head in his arms. Beneath his elbows, Mrs Stanton’s plans for renovation await his attention. Renovation? Ridiculous. Her house is so badly fucked about with, it should be demolished. He’ll tell her. He picks up a pencil and gouges an X across the drawing, his eyes following his hands. His hands? Long, strong-fingered, adept with a pencil, a computer and a lathe. The lathe, taught to him by his … Ben, who also taught him to play cricket and tennis, who explained the spark plug, the head gasket and the diff. Ben, who showed him how to shape timber on the bench in his shed, to use handsaws, chisels and planes that coiled slivers of wood as finely as butter in a dish, who taught him to make joints – biscuit, dovetail, mortise, who advised the best knives for scribing against a rule – single-bevel skew, double-bevel skew, spearpoint – the sharp ends of which allow crisp straight lines in either direction. Crisp straight lines. Despite architecture’s convincing case for straight lines, he doubts there are any. Adopted. Adopted by his own father.