Last Day in the Dynamite Factory

by Annah Faulkner

  ‘I do, Pebbles. But I’m afraid you’ll come unstuck.’

  She smiles. ‘I’ll know who to call if I do.’

  Chris takes his feet off his desk and moves the mouse. The Pattersons’ house springs to life in 3D. He squints at it, trying to find the inspiration to finish this job by tomorrow’s deadline. He glances towards Hamish who is frowning at a drawing on his board.

  They have, in effect, swapped jobs.

  Hamish accepted his new role without complaint but without confidence. Chris has confidence but lacks enthusiasm and each struggles to fill the other’s shoes. Hamish can cope with the technical requirements for a classic renovation but is unversed in the nuances of heritage work and doesn’t see beyond the obvious. He’s not Christopher Bright and he knows it.

  In the monitor, Chris sees his face reflected like the ghost of a giant man in a little house, peering out the windows. His head aches.

  The previous afternoon, he and Hamish had inspected heritage-listed Hamilton House. The plan was for Hamish to do the work with Chris supervising. It’s not possible. Built in 1874, Hamilton House was sold twenty years later and its new owner added a second storey. The whole house is a classic restoration job right down to the last detail, but details for each storey are slightly different. Internally, the building has been so messed about with, Hamish wouldn’t know where to begin. Chris realised he would have to do it himself or Baillieu & Bright must let it go.

  First thing this morning he’d charged himself with coffee and fronted Judge.

  ‘Ah … Hamilton House,’ he said, jiggling change in his pocket. ‘It’s beyond Hamish.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise,’ said Judge.

  ‘Big and complicated and needs someone who knows the ropes, and – no, not me.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘In the absence of anyone suitable, I’m letting it go.’

  Judge drew in his breath and his nostrils flared. ‘What use are you, Chris?’

  Chris shook his head and went to the door.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Judge roared.

  Chris escaped to the deli for another caffeine hit and a sausage roll that stuck in his throat. He walked along the street and back, then returned to the office and applied himself to the Pattersons’ monstrosity.

  His head is aching so badly now he needs a tablet, and he’s just about to go and find one when Judge passes by his desk.

  ‘Enjoying the work?’

  Chris nods.

  ‘Bullshit.’ The word emerges more like borscht, bringing to mind beetroot soup, but the message is clear. Also fairly accurate.

  The drawbacks of working with old buildings have been replaced by the limitations of designing new ones: restrictions imposed by land, building height, aspect, cost and most disheartening of all, client vision. Everyone wants a five- or six-bedroom mausoleum, bigger and better than the one next door. Never mind that the kids are leaving home – it’s all about size.

  Maureen brings him a business card. It has a pink heart in the top right corner.

  ‘What’s this?’ says Chris.

  ‘Your eleven o’clock appointment, Mr and Mrs Tucker.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Maureen, have we got any headache tablets?’

  ‘No,’ she says, glancing after Judge. ‘We’ve used them all.’

  Mr and Mrs Tucker perch primly in Chris’s guest chairs. Each wears a yellow T-shirt and matching yellow boat shoes. Both are fifty-one years old and each calls the other Bunny.

  ‘An oval swimming pool for my Bunny?’ says Mr Tucker.

  ‘Yes, Bunny. Lovely.’

  Mr Tucker nods thoughtfully, then inspiration lights up his eyes. ‘No! Not oval, Bunny; heart-shaped. A heart-shaped swimming pool!’

  ‘Oh, yes – definitely heart-shaped.’

  Mr Tucker walks his fingers up she-Bunny’s dimpling arm. ‘With a little heart-shaped spa at one end.’

  Mrs Tucker giggles.

  ‘Chris?’ says Mr Tucker, and Chris wonders if his face reveals a zombie-like enthral. ‘Can you make us a heart-shaped swimming pool?’

  Chris nods, adding it to the list of other nauseating requirements, including a heart-shaped doorway to the main bedroom. He pushes back his chair and stands up. ‘I’ll get some concepts going and be in touch. Thanks so much for coming.’

  The Bunnies shuffle off, whispering. At the door, Mrs Bunny pauses and studies Doris, the garden gnome. ‘One of them,’ she says. ‘We’ll get one of them. Although I don’t think I like the nightie. We’ll get a girl-gnome too. It’d be lonely on its own.’

  Judge, standing by the door, watches them go with a look of disbelief, and for a moment Chris thinks he’s going to laugh but he merely flicks a piece of paper on Chris’s desk.

  ‘Your girlfriend took a call. Somebody wants an artisan’s studio at Montville. Can you check it out?’

  Chris ignores the jibe and glances at the paper. An afternoon away from the office is too good to pass up.

  ‘I’ll go now.’

  He guides the Rover north along the old Bruce Highway towards the Sunshine Coast hinterland. The road winds steadily upwards through the leafy towns of Peachester and Maleny and emerges onto the escarpment high above the Maroochy plain. Below him the distant winding river, golden cane fields, blue-green clumps of eucalypt forest and dotted settlements unfold like a silent film. Behind him are the prehistoric contours of the Glasshouse Mountains, ahead the cone-shaped peaks of Pomona and Cooroy. In the east he can see the blip of the grandiosely named Emu Mountain and the monolithic lump of Mount Coolum and although he can’t see her, somewhere between them is Bertie. Beyond it all the ocean is a vast innocent blue frilled with foam. He drives with the window down and the fresh, spicy bush smells of early spring make his spirits soar.

  The site is on the western edge of the range, accessed by a deeply rutted track. It ends in a natural amphitheatre of rain-forest and a huge ramshackle barn. Chris emerges from the car to a peaceful hush broken only by birdsong and the murmur of voices. At the door, a sign boasts weavers, artists, potters, a glassblower and a welder. He is welcomed by five artists and a mug of instant coffee, a biscuit that looks sturdy enough to break his jaw and a barrage of ideas.

  ‘Whoa,’ says Chris. ‘Let’s start at the beginning. He pulls out his notebook and pencil. This workshop: how big do you want it – the size of this barn? Bigger, smaller?’

  The question seems to take them aback.

  ‘We want to keep the barn,’ says one. ‘And fix it up.’

  ‘You … you want it renovated?’

  Yes. Gallery levels, more light. Retain the rustic feel but make it an efficient workspace for artists and inviting for browsers.

  Chris knuckles his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, but they’ve sent the wrong person for this job. I don’t do renovations. I’ll have to organise someone else.’

  ‘Aren’t you the expert?’

  ‘No.’ Chris stands and picks up his book. ‘I’m not.’

  You’re the bunny.

  He urges the Rover back along the track to the main road. Judge and his dumb antics are costing them money. At the intersection he pauses, forcing himself to calm down. What a crappy day. The Hamilton House debacle, the crazy Bunnies, the drive up here with next to no lunch and another two hours’ drive back to the office to face Judge. Stuff it. He’ll take the coast road home and stop at Coolum Beach for fish and chips. He turns left and heads down the range towards the hunched shoulders of Mount Coolum.

  It’s four by the time he reaches the beach. The takeaway shop across the road is putting out a tempting aroma of hamburger and he opts for one with ‘the works’ instead of fish and chips. While he waits for it to be cooked, he crosses the road to the beach. Marooned jellyfish, domed spaceships of the sea, dot the sand. He wonders if they’re still alive. How would you know, if they don’t move?

  He takes his burger up to Point Perry. The air is luminously clear and a ping of cold lurks behind the fading warm
th of the sun. He sits on a bench overlooking the rocks and the limitless ocean and unwraps the burger. Mince, beetroot, onions, lettuce, sauce and a fried egg – the tastes and textures of childhood. He bites deep, releasing memories. Birthdays with Liam, Ben and Jo. His birthdays were always hectic affairs: parties with lots of kids or picnics in the park. On reflection, he can see Jo was probably trying to distract herself from memories of the circumstances of his birth. He’ll never be able to hear how she dealt with that particular grief, never be able to tell her he understands why she imposed her condition of silence, even while grieving it.

  What might he have done differently if he’d known Ben was his father? If he’d known his mother worked and died in the dynamite factory? Would it have inspired him to make bolder choices?

  Choices?

  Yes, he chose, even if more by default than design. Jo and Ben steered him away from woodworking towards architecture but they didn’t insist. Necessity initially directed him to conservation work but he let it become his life’s work. Phoebe’s arrival prompted marriage but he wasn’t forced into it. Things happened. He let them. Never again. Stopping conservation work is the biggest decision he’s made in his working life, and the most unpopular. But right, despite the fallout.

  He zips up his jacket and wanders down the ridge towards town, taking the same path he took every morning on his aborted trip six months earlier. At the cottage where the old man used to sit with his mug and cigarette, a For Sale sign is tacked to the fence. Roofing iron and rotting barge boards litter the ground. A demolition job by the look of it – the owners imagining an empty block will be easier to sell. The cottage is peeling and shabby with salt-encrusted windows but the block is lovely: a long gentle slope rising to another empty block behind it, each separated from the other by a vast weeping fig tree. He pauses for a moment, then continues to his car. The moon rises, shedding cool light over the sea; the sound of the waves is desultory. Chris stands by the Rover, fingering his keys. The thought of a long drive home in the dark is wearisome. He takes out his phone.

  ‘Where are you?’ says Diane.

  ‘C— Montville. Came up to look at a job but it’s too dark to see much tonight. I’ll stay over and finish in the morning.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were going to Montville.’

  ‘Judge dumped it on me this afternoon and rather than start world war three I just came.’

  ‘He’s doing it tough.’

  ‘I know he is, Di. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  He looks up at the hill where lights are popping on. Bertie is just a couple of streets away. He could invite her for dinner, but then he’d have to invite Stuart too and he doesn’t feel like making conversation with a stranger. Besides, he’s full of hamburger. He checks into a nearby high-rise, eats late and alone in a bistro overlooking the ocean. He drinks alone. He stands alone on the balcony at midnight, watching waves fall under moonlight on the beach.

  By six in the morning, he’s out walking. By the time he returns, two men in T-shirts and boots have begun work on the old man’s cottage, wrenching out roofing nails and ripping apart the quiet morning air. The shack gazes defiantly out to sea, resolute in the face of destruction. It has three-foot timber stumps, fibro cladding and the remains of a corrugated-iron roof. Banks of louvre windows front the ocean beneath a metal awning. The tree at the back offers welcoming shadow, its leaves gleaming in the sunlight.

  ‘Buying or gawking?’ one of the men calls.

  Chris lifts up the orange barrier tape and walks up to the house. ‘Chris Bright,’ he says, holding out his hand.

  It’s met with one that feels like sandpaper. ‘Dave Johnson.’

  The house, Dave says, belongs to his father who has been moved into a nursing home. Chris feels his heart drop. A nursing home – for a man who began each day watching the sun rise over the ocean with coffee and a fag? From wide sea to four walls in the blink of an eye. Next stop …

  ‘Okay if I have a look around?’

  ‘Be quick or I’ll have the roof on ya.’

  A large room that reeks of fish, a few crumbling chipboard shelves, a sink littered with fish scales and a boning knife constitute the living area; two green plastic chairs, a stained tarp, a wrench and a crowbar comprise its creature comforts. A doorway leads to the only other room – a bedroom of sorts – with a stunning view, a wire bed-base and a stained mattress. Out the back is a plastic shower tray with a torn curtain, a stained hand basin and a separate toilet. If you were to sit on the dunny with the door open, you’d have the same spectacular view as the living area and bedroom. An unpretentious dwelling to say the least, but a useful little pad with unlimited light in a cracker of a spot. It’d be a day’s work to get Dave and his mate to replace the roof and put up some new barge boards. Another to clean it up, a few more to paint.

  Outside, he narrowly misses being crowned by a length of guttering.

  Go on, ask.

  Hang on; I need time to think.

  Think? Just think of the old man in the nursing home.

  ‘How much do you want for this place?’ says Chris.

  ‘Two eighty.’

  ‘Two eighty? You’re dreaming.’

  ‘Two blocks, mate.’

  ‘Two?’

  Dave dips his head at the block behind.

  Chris wades up through the long grass. From here, the views are even better. A three-story unit block obscures part of the northern aspect but the building on the southern side is set back, offering views thirty kilometres south to Mooloolaba. The weeping fig straddles both blocks, its dense foliage spreading across the sky. Chris pats its trunk.

  Make an offer.

  He walks back to Dave.

  ‘I could manage two thirty,’ he says. ‘Cash. Two grand today, the rest in seven days. I’ll know by lunchtime.’

  ‘Now who’s dreaming?’

  ‘It’ll take you blokes a fortnight to dismantle this heap and clear the block. Then you’ll have to wait till the land sells and no-one’s going to match your price. Two forty; that’s it.’

  Dave drops a piece of rusted downpipe on the pile with a crash. ‘Two sixty, final offer. It’s gunna be two days’ work getting rid of that tree.’

  ‘I don’t want it gotten rid of.’

  Dave snorts. ‘You’ll be sorry. Them roots are a bastard. Cash. Seven days.’

  ‘Can you hold off work until I talk to the bank, say – midday?’

  Dave looks at his friend. ‘It’ll cost ya.’

  Chris roots in his wallet. ‘Here’s fifty.’

  ‘Fifty!’

  ‘All right. A hundred.’

  Dave looks at his watch. ‘Five hours till midday. Five hundred bucks.’

  Chris waves his empty wallet. ‘A hundred,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back in twenty minutes with the rest. And two fifty is my offer. My final offer.’

  Seven twenty. Chris can hardly keep still. Nothing has excited him so much in years but he doesn’t have the cash Dave has demanded. He’ll have to convince Diane to increase the loan on their rental property or number 10 Appleby. His stomach rumbles. Too late to call Bertie for breakfast, or too early? She can bring her man. He doesn’t care. He has to tell someone.

  ‘Breakfast?’ says Roberta. ‘Is this going to be a habit?’

  ‘My treat. Meet me at Sandy’s Bar. Bring your … Stuart.’

  ‘Um, I’d like to, Chris, but—’

  ‘Oh, come on, Bertie. I’m here, I’m hungry and I have to tell someone.’

  ‘Tell them what?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when you get here.’

  ‘Oh, Christopher!’

  ‘Be here in ten.’

  ‘I’ll be there when I get there.’

  She arrives alone twenty minutes later wearing a white shirt and black baggy trousers, her hair a dark messy halo silhouetted against the light. She weaves between the tables pointing her stick at him menacingly.

  ‘What took you so long?’ He stands up and pulls out
a chair.

  ‘Exterior decoration. I could hardly turn up naked.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Yes, you would, trust me. Now, where’s the fire?’

  ‘I’ve found a property up the road.’

  She hooks her stick over the chair and sits. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Lovely land, Bertie – two blocks with scorching views and my name on them.’

  ‘When did all this happen?’

  ‘This morning.’

  Her eyebrows shoot up. ‘It’s—’ she peers at her watch, ‘—not even eight o’clock.’

  ‘I know. Let’s order.’ A waitress saunters over with a notepad. ‘Eggs Florentine and smoked salmon,’ he says. ‘And another coffee. Double shot. What are you having?’

  Roberta rolls her eyes. ‘You’re wired.’ To the waitress, ‘I’ll have what he’s having.’

  She turns her attention to Chris, her eyes moving slowly from his mouth to his eyes. ‘You have your sparkle back.’

  He grins, a smile of boyish pleasure.

  ‘Is it the land or life in general?’ she says.

  He pulls a face. ‘Life in general is somewhat … messy.’

  ‘Your father?’

  The waitress sets coffee on the table. Bertie spoons in a mound of sugar and watches it sink through the crema.

  ‘Yes, my father,’ says Chris. ‘And my mother. I did some digging and found out things about her that … I could never have imagined.’

  He releases the story. The whole story. When he comes to the end, Bertie seems unable to say anything. She contemplates her coffee, then offers him her hand. Chris covers it with his own. Her grip is strong and reassuring and when he returns the pressure she sandwiches his hand between both of hers.

  ‘I’m trying to focus on how she lived, rather than how she died.’

  Bertie nods.

  ‘I went to see her grave. There’s a wonderful inscription on the headstone. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”’

  Bertie’s eyes become damp. ‘What a gift.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hence the land.’

  ‘Hence the land.’ He nods. ‘Other changes, too. At the office. I’ve quit doing conservation work – been wanting out for years but never had the guts to follow through.’