Dissonance (4 page)

‘It's written around a note row.'

‘Erwin.'

‘With a pedal, C-sharp, F-sharp, G-sharp, repeating. It sounds okay, I think.'

She took a moment. ‘I must hear it.'

‘You won't like it.'

‘How do you know?'

The rain was getting heavier. It came through the glassless windows in cold, flat sheets, soaking through school pants and a light cotton dress that hung off Madge's shoulders like a lead apron. Pools of water gathered and drained through holes in the rusted-out floor. Erwin took a tarp from the back seat, spread it across his lap and offered it to his mother. ‘It'll get in the way,' she said, pushing it away, using her forearm to wipe rain from her eyes.

‘Have you ever heard of Declan Hergert?' Erwin asked, above the rain.

Madge changed down through the gears as she approached a roundabout. ‘Who's asking?'

‘A girl in my geography class knows him. She works with him at the Co-op.'

Madge shrugged. ‘Who knows? The Valley's full of Hergerts. I'm not much interested.'

‘She says he looks like me.'

Madge tried to laugh. ‘Who knows, maybe your father got around.'

Erwin was unsure. ‘Where?'

‘Use your imagination.'

Erwin's face changed completely. ‘Oh …'

Madge tried even harder to laugh. ‘Can you imagine? I was the only one silly enough …'

Erwin looked at her carefully. ‘Dad wasn't … bad looking.'

‘Compared to what?'

Erwin had seen the photos – before Madge gathered them in a box the day after Jo's funeral, marched out to a smoking incinerator and threw them all in. He'd seen the black and white images of a younger Johann, a sort of Errol Flynn with chin whiskers, forking hay in the paddock beside Salem church, unloading groceries from the truck, done up in his Sunday best for a church picnic at National Park. It wasn't inconceivable that he'd got around. After all, Erwin guessed, there was nothing really stopping him.

He looked at his mother. He was beginning to realise that she only ever gave one side of the story. He could still remember his father, lying on his deathbed, pleading with him to hear
his
side.

‘Maybe a second or third cousin,' Madge said, putting her foot down as they climbed a steep hill.

‘But I've met all my cousins.'

‘Well, obviously not.'

Madge bit her lip and cursed him again, in the same way God had. That was the only evidence she had of His existence. Not only had He taken Jo but He'd done it slowly and painfully (although in the process, punishing her too). But then again, maybe God had been too merciful, relieving him of greater sufferings: red hot pain in his stubby cock every time he pissed, lying around for months in a sweat, a delirium – seeing black, pig-like angels with elephant balls flying around the rafters of their cottage – as he was visited by dead relatives in the form of devils.

Yes, maybe he'd been let off too easy. Excused from skin sores and organ failure, and insanity.

Madge was wet through, but it didn't matter. She was the one left to suffer. A bit of cold was nothing. Depressing the clutch, she selected fourth. When she let the pedal out something went clunk and she lost power. She tried the accelerator but nothing happened. She tried the clutch again, but there was no tension. After a moment the truck started rolling back down the hill. She braked and they jarred to a stop.

She looked at her son. ‘It's the clutch.'

‘It's broke.'

‘Jesus Christ.'

She let the truck roll back off the road and the wheels ended up in a drainage ditch. ‘Get some logs,' she barked.

Erwin opened the door and jumped down from the cab. He scouted around but found nothing. Further along he saw an old tractor tyre that had been painted white and labelled ‘Erskine Gorge'. He ran over and grabbed it as Madge hurried him on with her horn. As rain descended in heavy sheets he dragged the tyre back to their truck and wedged it behind the back wheels.

‘Okay,' he called, and Madge took her foot off the brake. She climbed down from the cabin and came back to him. ‘That's it,' she said. ‘The damn thing can stay there.'

Erwin squinted through the rain. ‘Forever?'

‘Forever.'

‘But it can be fixed.'

‘And then there's something else.'

Erwin pushed his hair back across his forehead. ‘What do we do now?'

‘What do you think? Get your bag.'

A few minutes later they were walking towards God's Hill Road. The rain was refusing to ease. Furrows in the road ran with clay-coloured water, filling their shoes and numbing their toes and feet.

‘How will I get to school?' Erwin asked.

But she didn't reply.

A ute slowed and pulled up beside them. An old man with wavy, grey hair wound down a window and looked at them. ‘That your truck?' he asked.

‘Yes,' Madge replied.

‘What's wrong?'

‘The clutch.'

‘Can I give you a lift?'

Erwin looked into the ute and saw the two brothers from school. I can walk, he wanted to say to his mother, but she was already opening the door.

It was awkward. Five across the front. Erwin had to sit on his mother's lap.

‘Bita bad luck, Mrs Erwin,' the eldest brother said to Madge.

‘Mrs Hergert.'

‘I do Maths with your son. We're in the bottom group.'

‘It's not the bottom,' Erwin protested.

‘Is so.'

‘Siegersdorf's got the bottom.'

‘But they're the vegies.'

‘It doesn't matter,' Madge interrupted. ‘It's just … numbers.'

‘Y' gotta be able to count your change,' the boy explained.

Madge closed her eyes and nodded her head. ‘If one's ­successful, one doesn't need to bother with change.'

The older man was lost in his own world. As he drove he looked into his lap and said, ‘I can fix your clutch, missus.'

Madge tried to twist to look at him. ‘You can?'

‘Yeah. If you get it towed to my place. Won't charge you no labour either, seein' how the boys are at school together.'

Madge wiped a strand of hair from her eyes. ‘That would be wonderful, Mr …?'

‘Lindsay, Charlie. Charlie Lindsay.'

‘I'm Madge, and this is Erwin.'

‘Your old man had the grocery shop, didn't he?'

‘Yes.'

‘Y' sold it?'

‘After he died.'

‘Shit … well, a widow. I can do you that clutch cheap.' He turned and smiled at her. ‘Might even be able to arrange a tow.'

Madge smiled back. ‘That would be wonderful.'

‘Leave it to me.'

She looked back at the road and hoped he was only talking about a clutch cable. Surely. Years of widowhood had made her suspicious.

‘Hergert?' the father asked. ‘You one of them old-time Fritzes?'

‘No,' Madge replied. ‘I'm a Bray. My parents have land near Williamstown.'

‘That's a bloody relief. Those people … I know they've been here a long time, but they make no attempt, eh? Stick to themselves, yabber in Fritz.'

‘My husband – '

‘They should make them speak English. Doesn't take a hundred years to speak English.'

Madge smiled. ‘I agree. My husband spoke German, but I changed that.'

She'd allowed it in the house, and even encouraged it. After all, Germany was the centre of European musical culture. She became conversational, and then fluent in Barossa Deutsch. When they had visitors she paraded her German around the house like a schnauzer. But then things changed. The ‘shed years' brought about the demise of irregular verbs,
Flöte
for flute and pickled pork for evening meals. But Jo wasn't so easily put off, teaching his son phrases on the way to school, using Barossa Deutsch whenever they were together in the shed, sitting on the porch reading stories in German and allowing the words to waft into his son's room. Until Madge emerged from the front door with her whip. ‘Get off. What did I say about German?'

Fetes and farm days, Jo slipping letters through a hole in the flywire of Erwin's window, with the request, ‘Reply in German, please'. German in shops and school, German films and libraries sprinkled with Goethe.

The ute pulled up at the top of God's Hill Road just as the rain stopped. ‘Typical,' Madge said, as she pulled herself from the collapsed bucket seat. ‘Thank you, Mr Lindsay.'

‘Charlie. I'll call you when it's ready.'

‘Thank you.'

‘See you, Erwin,' the younger brother said, smiling.

But Erwin was already at the front gate, shaking water from his hair and stretching his fingers in anticipation of Bach: Book 2 of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
. Soon he was sitting at the piano, freshly showered and powdered, in a pair of pyjamas Madge had made him from worn-out towels. He could feel his fingers getting warmer and warmer as they climbed and descended the keyboard, as Madge stood in the kitchen trying to sing along to fractured tunes, as she warmed a stew in a big pot on the stove.

He stopped, realising he had no idea what he'd just played. The dots had flowed from eye to brain to finger without him even noticing. So, it was time to try. He closed the book (so it just happened, like falling asleep) and then began to play. Sounds, all of the right pitch and duration, flowed like strands of barbed wire twisting around each other, loosening, stretching, always at risk of snapping. Flowing like water in the corrugations of a dirt road. And then stopping.

‘You started to think about what you were doing,' Madge said. ‘You've gotta trust yourself, and forget.'

‘It's that bridge,' Erwin replied. ‘Every time.'

‘Well, go over it.'

‘I have, a hundred times.'

‘Until you're not scared of it. Until you're looking forward to it.'

He started playing the bridge, slowly, counting under his breath, repeating individual notes and phrases.

‘Could you do me a favour?' Madge asked.

He looked up.

‘The light in the kitchen's blown.'

Erwin ran across the yard in a pair of leather thongs. As he went his towelling top blew open and his chest, already flecked with soft down, turned marble-white and patchy red in the cold. He went into the tool shed and switched on the light. He crouched as he approached his dad's old workbench: a hammer without a handle; wood shavings that had never been cleaned up; a knife sharpener; scraps of wood that had been measured and cut but never made into anything; a shoe-lace; a butter menthol wrapper and, under the bench, a box of magazines that he'd discovered when he was twelve, moving them to a spot his mother would never look, praising his father's good taste as he locked the door.

He walked across to his dad's old camp stretcher – damp and mouldy, coming away from its canvas fastenings. Sometimes when his mum was inside he'd lie here, wondering what it was like to be his dad – what he got up to, who his friends were, what he thought of his wife, and son. This is where he'd rest, years after his dad's death, trying to work out why his father lived in a shed, and why his mother walked around with a whip. This is where he'd sit and think and try to smell the truth in the vapour of turps and linseed oil.

He looked in a box on the bed. It contained the rubble of his father's life – the bits and pieces his mother had collected from inside the house after his banishment, and death. Things that reminded her of him: the Hergert coat-of-arms, framed whitework verses that had hung above doorways, a snowdome of Mad King Ludwig's Bavarian castle, prints, kegel balls and a family Bible with the names of all his ancestors written inside the front cover (the paper now mouldy, and Madge refusing to return the book to his parents). There was a German crucifix and a framed watercolour of the Lutheran pioneer, August Kavel, and yellowing and torn photos of his family dating back to the 1840s.

High on a ledge there was another box containing a patchwork quilt his aunt had given them for their wedding, his best suit, pants, shirts, jackets and underwear that she could've given Erwin, but didn't. There was a wall-hanging and tea-towels with prints of German scenes; all of them now brown and dusty, moth-eaten, smelling of rat and possum piss, turning black and mouldy where the rain had dripped down from the cracked roof.

Instead of all this, the Hergert home had been transformed into a budget Buckingham Palace. The King and his mum were there, sealed under thick glass. There was a fake ­elephant tusk dangling above the piano, a pair of old pistols in a velvet-lined case, a rifle and a small tapestry of Vishnu. There were sketches of Mozart and Schubert, and Madge would tell visitors that the greatest composers were all Austrians, not Germans.

‘What about Bach, Beethoven, Wagner?' they'd ask, but she'd just smile. It wasn't so much that she was pro-Austrian, or English, or anything, as anti-German, or at least anti-Jo-German. There was a rug and a few simple pieces of furniture – a dining table with two chairs, a lounge with a hard, wooden back, a small table with a doily and a lamp and a picture of Madge's parents.

Erwin stretched out on the camp bed with his hands behind his back. He could see the advantages of a tool-shed existence. For a moment he felt (like his dad must have) that he wasn't being scrutinised – that no one was watching or passing judgement, and that he could do as he liked.

‘Erwin, the light globe,' his mother called from the back door.

He stood up, adjusted himself and started searching an old tool-chest. He found a rusted saw and a hand-drill, a spirit level and an old tobacco pouch. Sitting down, he opened it and pulled out a small pile of letters. He flattened the first one on his knee and looked at the childish block letters running across the page.

Dear Dad, its been weekes and I miss you terribel.