by Kim Kelly
After twenty kilometres or so, past the turn-off to Roz’s folks, the radio sputtered out of range with the tall gumtrees and wide rolling scrub of the National Park; she looked over her shoulder at Nick: he’d closed his eyes, dozing, filling the whole backseat. The swelling at the top of his cheek had almost completely gone down, but the bruising still made her wince; the whole concept of boxing was beyond her. She wondered if affection transmitted through atoms to heal wounds, and supposed it did; she supposed it helped, at least.
She looked at Dan, lost in his own thoughts, focused on the road; she said to him, to the neat triangle-tip of his nose: ‘Thank you, for driving. I hope you haven’t given up a better deal for this.’
‘Heh.’ He gave her a quick grin. ‘No. I can do without a Sunday jam session today.’
‘Oh? Band practice?’ Immediate jab of guilt that she’d taken him from a pleasure.
He chuckled: ‘Yeah, band practice.’ She wanted to capture that chuckle in a jar, so she could spread it on toast. He said: ‘Paul will be annoyed, but he’s always annoyed.’
‘Who’s Paul?’ She had not the slightest.
Dan gave her a quick squint, a little surprised she didn’t know: ‘The bass player.’ Didn’t mean anything to Addy; she didn’t know the name of the other guitarist, either, the jingle to Dan’s jangle. She shrugged an apology, and he continued: ‘Paul’s just arranged a weekly studio booking for us, but I don’t know if I want to keep going with the band, anyway.’
‘Really?’ She found that oddly relieving; not that Elbow were that bad, she just wasn’t super keen to be one of those girls who went out with a boy in a band.
‘Yeah.’ Dan explained: ‘He’s got us an audition for that new TV show – Star Search. Have you seen it?’
‘No.’ She’d seen the ads for it on TV, flicking around the channels during attempts to watch the afternoon soapie serials through their snow-storm reception: it was a talent quest type of thing, but she hadn’t had a couch-slouching evening opportunity or inclination to watch the show.
‘It’s terrible,’ Dan told her. ‘I don’t want to do it. I couldn’t do it unless I was triple-fried – and I’m not doing that on national TV. I’m a coward, no doubt about it, but some things shouldn’t be turned into competitions. I don’t like the idea of it. Any kind of art – music, writing, painting, whatever – how do you choose who wins? Not that Elbow is art, and not that I’m really a musician. You know what I mean …’
‘No.’ She snorted: even if her imagination had inflated his talents, he was a musician. She said: ‘You play two instruments, sing and write bad poetry. I think that makes you an artist.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’ He smiled at the road. ‘Art is for everyone, hey? Like sport. Soon as it’s professionalised, soon as you put money on the table – bam – all the love goes sliding. It’s just a job. One of my brothers – Dunc – he’s a violinist with the London Philharmonic – sounds great, hey, and it is, it’s fantastic, but he still hates his boss sometimes, and he’d rather be at home with his family instead of travelling all over the place. He’d rather be working on his own music. I don’t ever want to not love playing music. I don’t know what I’m talking about really. Anyway, they want to change the name of the band – the TV people. Though they haven’t even seen us play yet, they’ve decided. “Elbow” is just too weird, apparently. They can shove their weird up their shiny TV arses.’
She laughed, another layer of fear slipping from her like a fast-food wrapper flattened and forgotten under the wheel of the car, but she had to admit: ‘Elbow is pretty weird. What’s the story with that name?’
‘Oh.’ A soft groan, eyes still on the road: ‘I suppose it does seem a bit dumb now. Last footy season, in the semi-finals, I landed awkwardly in a tackle and twisted my elbow. It wasn’t a big deal, but Dad wouldn’t let me play in the finals, carried on about it like you wouldn’t believe – like I’m a five-year-old. I wasn’t very happy about it, had a bit of a sulk, like a five-year-old, went and got monumentally fried and then I wrote a song about it – no, you’ll never hear that one, it’s so bad. That’s how the band started, though – in part to piss Dad off. And also, I don’t know … Granddad’s always had this bunged-up elbow, on the arm he draws with, always bandaged and smelling of liniment and sort of “fuck you” determination. Just about every part of him was smashed up during the war, inside and out, and I’ll never know anything like it – I’ll never know that hardship or sacrifice or that daily grind of pain. So, I named the band after him, in a way. A bit of fuck you, that probably doesn’t make sense at all. Just me being a wanker.’
‘No,’ said Addy, falling and falling and falling. ‘I don’t think you’re a wanker.’ I don’t think you could be a wanker if you tried your hardest. He was quite possibly the most sincere person she’d ever met.
He ignored the vote of confidence; he told her, through a streak of shade: ‘I’m turning twenty-two on Tuesday. When Granddad was twenty-two he was sitting in a trench on the Western Front. It’s time for me to stop frigging around. Granddad’s not going to be with us much longer. It’s more than amazing he’s gone on this long – Grandma checked out three years ago, and everyone thought that’d be the end of him. I’ll never be ready to see him go, but I don’t think I could hack it if his last sight of me was on the revolving stage of Star Search.’
His laughter was a loud song, and she joined him there: the best sound ever, clashing around the car. He kept his eyes on the road; she kept her eyes on him. She saw him swipe off a tear with the heel of his hand, smiling again – and it was there, right there, she finally let herself fall completely and irretrievably. She fell right to the garden floor, she landed softly on the tender grass, inside that loving, laughing tear.
At the first salt-tingle of the ocean, she smelt home; she seemed to smell the wholeness of time; grandfathers breathing the same air across a battleline; those atoms somewhere now, all of them, in the earth, in the sea, in the sky; and out of the corner of her eye she saw something of the deepest and most never-ending truth of all – there, there.
But in the next breath it was gone; a gull sailing in the wind above the sand-blown stretch of Wollongong’s northerly suburbs.
‘Turn left up here,’ she told Dan, hard-wired to the way as they neared a set of lights just gone green under the sign that pointed to Port Kembla.
‘No – go straight through.’ Nick stirred in the back, with the first words he’d spoken in over an hour and they were rasp-edged. ‘Go into the Gong – I’ve gotta drop something off.’
‘What?’ Addy looked around at him: ‘It’s nearly twelve. Dad’ll be —’
‘Don’t worry about it, Add.’ Nick looked at Dan in the mirror again and she saw the exchange this time. What’s that about? she wondered, but she didn’t ask, unsure if it might merely have been a glance of acknowledgement. On through the centre of town they went, shut-up shopping malls straddling the road like abandoned plague ships, oozing loneliness and regret. Addy hadn’t been here since sometime just before her final high school exams, looking for a new pair of swimming cossies to distract herself from the stress, and not finding any that weren’t too expensive or too daggy; she’d wandered around empty-handed, cold, and caught the bus back to Port. She shivered now with the memory, as Nick said: ‘Drop me here – I’ll see you at home.’
‘Nick!’ Addy called after him, but he was already half out of the car. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Don’t worry about it, Add,’ he said, from the footpath. ‘I won’t be long – five minutes.’ And off he walked, towards the cab rank above the railway station, where he got into the solo Sunday cab that was idling there.
Addy clicked her tongue and shook her head: ‘Well, there’s my brother for you.’ Arseface – always something better to do. ‘Ug.’ She looked at Dan, and winced apologetically: ‘He didn’t happen to mention to you where he might be going, did he? When you were talking last night?’
‘N
ah, I don’t know.’ Dan shook his head, too, pulling away from the kerb. ‘Where to now?’
She directed him down the next left, and back on the road home, a niggling suspicion that she’d just missed something. What’s Nick up to? All she could think was that he was off to square a bet with one of his old school mates, and wanting to hide the evidence of gambling from their dad, who didn’t much approve of that sort of thing – Nick had done that a few times before. Whatever, she put it behind her with the last of central Wollongong.
At the first glimpse of the great long sheds of the steelworks, her heart was truly home: this was the closest thing to chest-swelling pride she ever felt, hailing from this place, but it was a pride she could never quite articulate. The towering stacks, chugging away, rusted onto the sky, the sheer extent of the site – seven hundred football fields’ worth of nonstop solid industry – and her father worked in there. He was an important man in there: king of a shed that spanned a whole kilometre.
‘Wow.’ Dan hunched at the wheel, taking it in, the mountains of the Illawarra escarpment to the west, rising above it all. She felt his thoughts: this was the place where his grandfather was born. She wanted to take him up there, hiking the trails: she would one day. He looked back over at the steelworks to the east, rolling on, and on; he said, ‘Wow,’ again, and again.
‘You don’t think it’s ugly?’ she asked him; she’d grown up with the smudge of that word all her life, its breath laced with lead and sulphur dioxide, toxic smog wafting over the clothes line, over her primary school playground, the heady tang of it on a hot day, like some strange sherbet lingering under her tongue.
‘Ugly? No,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s not an oil painting, is it. But it’s where stuff is made. Steel. The stuff I make gates out of for my uncle Evan comes from this place. Amazing. I’d love to have a look in there, hey …’
She’d arrange that one day, too. She took him around the Old Port Road now, so that he could see the harbour view: this shore that had called in thousands, the hopeful and the heartbroken, with the promise of new beginnings across this boundless Pacific blue. The world met itself here and made its three-bedroom monuments to peace from red brick and pastel-palette fibro.
Two more left turns and a right, and Peter Loest was pruning the rangy tips off his iceberg roses out the front on Gallipoli Street, cigarette in one hand, shears in the other. She always loved her dad at first sight, his frown of concentration overlaying a lifetime of concern, his crisply ironed shirt – today’s a honeyed butter colour almost perfectly matching the house, which was a pristine time capsule itself, cut straight from the everyman’s architectural catalogue of 1964 with its groovy low-line roof extending on the right-hand side over her dad’s beige and beloved three-year-old Holden Commodore. He looked up and saw the unfamiliar car that approached him now, frowned deeper still and waved; then he smiled on seeing her: and there, in all his joyful creases, there was all that was beautiful in man.
‘Dad!’ She leapt out of the car, suddenly bursting with happiness, so excited to be about to introduce him to Dan, so excited to be about to give him a cheesecake, she was dancing on the spot as Dan retrieved it for her from the boot.
Peter Loest extinguished his cigarette in the spin-lidded outdoor ashtray on the front verandah table, placing his garden shears beside it; then he wiped his hands with his handkerchief before meeting his daughter just inside the gate. All within the moment that followed, he blinked at her as if in some surprise, opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, gave Dan the once-over with a typically unreadable glare, which he then returned to Addy with a flash of high-voltage alarm: ‘Where’s Nicky?’
No wonder I’ve never had a boyfriend. ‘Hello, Dad.’
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, BUT SOME THINGS ARE MORE POSSIBLE THAN OTHERS
‘What do you mean you don’t know where he is?’ Her father wouldn’t let her finish the sentence, his black-cloud dread suspended over them on the front path.
‘He said he’d be here, Dad.’ Be calm, think of rainbows, don’t start lunch with an argument. She made an attempt at levity, for Dan’s sake more than anything else: ‘Funnily enough, Nicholas doesn’t ask my permission before he goes to visit his friends.’
Her father did not find that amusing: ‘Who is he visiting?’
‘I don’t know! Dad – please.’ You’d better not be cheating on Dave or anything like that, she inwardly frowned, wondering, as she outwardly smiled, thrusting the white bakery box at her father: ‘We’ve got cheesecake, here —’
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’
Just as well I love you. ‘Of course. Dad, this is Dan, Dan Ackerman. Dan this is —’
‘Ackerman?’ Peter Loest gave the young pretender before him another inscrutable up-and-down: ‘Are you German?’ More accusation than question.
‘No, not really. Ah – hi, Mr Loest.’ Dan thrust out his hand, evidently not too bothered by the business of overbearing father, and as they shook under the cheesecake, Addy saw the trace of an approving smile on her dear dad’s lips: must have been a good, firm shake, and doubtless another point for correct pronunciation of their name.
‘Are we allowed to go inside now, Dad?’ She kissed him on the cheek, stepping past him, another admonishment following her up the front step: ‘Don’t be rude,’ he said.
Inside, beyond the tiny foyer panelled with mustard-tinted glass, the house smelt of apricot chicken simmering in the electric frypan, a pot of rice beside it on the stovetop, around the corner in the kitchen that lay at the end of their roomy living space. The place was white-walled and sparsely furnished in shades of walnut and burnt orange, but it was comfortable, made to last, and always preternaturally clean. Not that any of those details mattered much when their almost floor-to-ceiling picture window was filled with such a scape of the sea: deep blue, unfathomable, hovering above the back paling fence to the horizon, to infinity.
‘You would like a beer,’ her dad was saying to Dan, behind her, and again it wasn’t a question.
Dan declined, of course, ‘No thanks.’
Addy turned and caught her father’s dubious glance; she could almost hear the wheels turning: What is wrong with this boy? Everyone drank in Port Kembla – everyone – unless they had a terrible illness or personality disorder, as far as the functionally alcoholic consensus was concerned.
‘You are at university,’ the interrogation continued across the breakfast bench, her father checking under the lid of the rice pot.
‘Yes, electrical engineering, final year.’ Dan seemed to be undeterred.
And Addy could feel her father’s sigh of relief that it wasn’t a fine arts or basket-weaving student he’d let into his house; he asked: ‘In what field will you work when you finish your degree?’
‘Um, I haven’t decided,’ Dan replied, awkward for a second, stooping, then straightening to his full height, which was a good couple of inches taller than her dad, who wasn’t short himself. ‘Realistically,’ Dan explained to him, ‘I’ll probably go into sonography, medical ultrasound, on the design side of things, if I can. I’m interested in acoustic technology, too – micro-acoustics in hearing aids and all that. Or maybe music production, if an opportunity came up. But yeah,’ his shoulders folded around the question again, ‘I don’t know yet.’
But yeah wow. Nice answer, Dan the Man. She’d never know just how much he was shitting himself at that moment – but yeah, anxiety was like that, wasn’t it?
‘Sprout.’ Her father’s sudden command was short and sharp, and he cocked his head towards the dining room that lay to the far side of the kitchen through a set of louvred doors: he wanted a word.
‘Won’t be a sec,’ she said to Dan, following her father, a clockwork daughter. The table was set, the good placemats laid out on the crisp white cloth, the way they always were for visitors, but, she supposed, he’d found cause for disappointment with this visitor today, cause to stop the show. It had happened before: most notably
, the one and only time she’d brought Roz home to Port, to help her pack for the move to Flower Street. He’d called Addy into the dining room and said: ‘She will leave tomorrow.’ Why? ‘She is too loud.’ He hadn’t liked the sound of her large, unbridled laughter: it had upset his need to remain permanently on edge. Addy stared into the pattern of the placemat nearest: fawn-lace daisy chains, round and round and round.
‘Where did you get that dress?’ he asked her, an urgent whisper.
‘What?’ That was the last thing she expected to hear; she took a moment to absorb the question, looking from table to frock, at the blooms cascading down the tulle; too loud? ‘This dress?’ she said. ‘A shop in Newtown.’ Whatever that shop might have been; it didn’t matter where she’d actually got it: she looked up at her father and found the grief in his eyes – the grief that was always there, waiting to ambush and overwhelm him.
‘Your mother had a dress like that,’ he said, letting her see how bereft he was at the thought. And he was one-hundred percent sober: he never drank before lunch.
‘This dress?’ Addy felt every quantum dot of her being stop still, listening.
‘No.’ He shook his head, the lines on his brow whole valleys of lost love. ‘It couldn’t be. I think the colours were different – I can’t remember. She would decorate dresses and blouses this way – with flowers, like these. She made them herself, from silk scraps she got from the factory. Ah, what do I know about dresses? It’s just that —’ His knuckles were white, fist tight around the top of a dining chair.
‘Dad, I’m sorry.’ Addy tried to think what she might get changed into – all she had here these days was an old netball skirt, tracksuit pants and some pyjamas. She wanted to turn the frock inside out, so he couldn’t see the flowers at all. She wanted to bring him new love, a love to break this spell of loss, but that was never going to happen: it had been almost seventeen and a half years; he was trapped inside his mourning, held fast in a tangle of snapped strings, as if Elke had left him yesterday; as if to love again would only risk a further loss and one he could not bear.
