Last Day in the Dynamite Factory (11 page)

‘
Why?
'

The word is a bleat, a sound so pathetic Chris turns away in embarrassment. He fumbles in the sink for a glass, forces his gaze out the window – to the view of the western hills bathed in the deep golden glow created by the purple threat of rain – and down to the flaccid tea bag in the sink. Traffic whooshes distantly down Waterworks Road. He fills the glass with water and gulps it down.

‘All my life . . .' His voice is hoarse, despite the water. ‘
All
my life you let me wonder, let me carry around this great hole inside. Who am I? Where do I belong? Who is my father? What does he look like? Does he ever think about me? Does he
know
about me? Has he tried to find me? Did he try but couldn't? So I tried to find him and . . . and you . . .
let
me.'

Ben drops his head in his hands. ‘I . . . we . . . we didn't know how to stop you, without . . .'

‘For
years
I looked for Jack Ward but I didn't tell you because I didn't want to
hurt
you. And when I couldn't find him I told myself it was probably a good thing because compared with you he'd always be second best.' Chris scrubs his forehead. ‘I am a complete fool, but
you
. . .? What kind of person does something like that? What father doesn't acknowledge his own flesh and blood? My life is lies – all
lies
.'

Ben stares at the milky film that has formed on his tea.

‘I want the truth, Ben. Do you understand
truth
?'

‘Yes.'

‘
All
of it.'

Ben nods.

Chris's chest feels banded, the air is like dough. ‘Where did you meet . . . my . . . Alice?'

‘At our wedding. She was living in Melbourne but came back to be Jo's bridesmaid.'

‘You . . . had an affair at your
wedding
?'

‘No, no. Alice was only in Brisbane for a couple of days. She came up on the train with my cousin, Ian. You know, my best man. It was later . . . about a year. In Melbourne.'

Chris looks away, his eyes roaming the room and the familiar patterns of his old home. There's a broom in the corner. New. He can still see Jo poking a broom at the ceiling to hook down a cobweb. She hooked the spider too, which dropped into Chris's bowl of porridge and sent him and Liam into paroxysms of laughter. At the back of the dresser sits the old General Electric jug that no-one can bear to toss out; a survivor of countless gadgets since, a survivor of Liam, and of Jo. Once a benign symbol of his childhood, its shape no longer reassures. It's a relic, cracked and unreliable.

‘Melbourne,' Chris says.

Ben clears his throat. ‘Work took me there. I saw Alice and Ian together at first. They'd been dating on and off since our wedding.' He contemplates the muddy contents of his mug. ‘Alice was boarding with her father's cousin, Ellie, her husband and their swag of kids. Nice people. I loved her, Chris. I loved your mother so very much.'

‘What about
Jo
?'

‘I loved her too . . . but different. Completely different. As soon as I saw Alice I felt like I'd been holding my breath all my life and finally let go. What we had—' He smiles sadly. ‘What we had in our month together was . . . a lifetime of happiness packed into thirty days. It couldn't last, we both knew it. When I left Melbourne it was the end, physically. Not in here, though.' He taps his chest. ‘Never in here.'

The room is suddenly suffocating. If Chris doesn't get out he'll pass out or throw up. He pitches through the door and stumbles back to the car, fumbles getting the key into the ignition. His legs shake so much he can hardly operate the pedals. The engine roars to life and the car bunny-hops back down the driveway onto the road. Chris puts it in first and plants his foot – second, third – down the hill, eighty in a sixty zone.

It doesn't last. However fast he goes, there's no escape. He opened the book on his history and it will not be closed until it is read.

Bats have attacked the mango tree again. They come in the last light of day, twittering and cheeping and gorging on the ripe flesh with their sharp little teeth. If Diane gets to the mangoes first, it's mango mousse from November to February. Chris picks up the discarded seeds and notices, in a detached way, that the fishpond needs cleaning. Life is bent beyond recognition but the bats go on feasting and squealing and the fish go on shitting and swimming. Around and around.

The fish came to their household when ten-year-old Archie brought five home in a bag for his mother. Diane exclaimed happily over the gift and Archie was as proud as a rooster. She put the fish in a bowl and Chris watched them go around and around, mouthing silent protests against the glass until he reckoned if the fish didn't go mad, he would. He bought a fish tank with bubbles and fake grass and watched the fish go from end to end instead of around and around. Every so often one would float to the surface, dead. Chris would take the body outside to poorly attended funerals: just him and the birds dotted along the clothes line like pegs.

The fourth time Chris interred a golden body he suggested Diane might be over fish. But, no.

‘There's only one left,' he said.

‘I'll buy more. They're soothing.'

‘What's soothing about watching fish do the same thing over and over, day in, day out? And then die.'

‘Just that, I suppose.'

Chris sighed. ‘Well, from now on you'll have to find them soothing in the garden.'

He dug a hole, concreted it and lined it with plastic. Rocks next, a filter, water and fish. After a week the water began to look murky. The pet shop advised him to add oxygenating plants. So Chris put in the plants and spent every weekend thereafter trimming them. A year on, the pond began to leak. Again he suggested Diane might be over fish, but still no. So he emptied the pond, removed the fish and the lining and made a bigger pond. He relined it and planted it with lilies. The fish multiplied. Frogs multiplied too and brought in dirt. So Chris put rocks around the perimeter of the pond and concreted them in. Diane planted shrubs which looked attractive but began to drop leaves into the water, which required more cleaning.

He goes to the laundry under the house for a tub for the fish. Diane is in the top yard, pegging out washing in neat rows. When they first married he teased her about colour-matching pegs to clothes. She denied it so he swapped pegs, just to be a prick, and the next time he looked, the colour would have been corrected. He stopped laughing when it stopped being funny.

She's draping his shirts on hangers. The next time he wears them they will be beautifully ironed. Diane occupies herself so earnestly with housewifely duties he wonders if she's convinced herself it's as important as she makes it out to be. Unlikely. Housework never stilled a mind as sharp as hers. Hence the uni course – to give her brain something to chew on and still her questing soul – if it does, in fact, quest. She wouldn't let on if it did. Facts are safer than philosophy, distraction preferable to investigation. Diane is smart, but smart people are not always wise; sometimes they try to bury things before they are properly dead.

He watches her in the simple act of hanging out washing, her movements graceful and rhythmic despite the oft-present pain in her back, the result of a fall half a lifetime ago. He wonders what she's thinking. He'd like to sit with her over a beer and try to make sense of his beehive of thoughts about Ben, but she'd be uncomfortable. Things have a way of sorting themselves out, she reckons, without the need for belly-button examination. And, often, they do.

He takes the tub to the fishpond. Three fish circle one another elliptically in some strange fish dance. Ben, Jo and his mother. What kind of woman has an affair with her sister's husband? How did Jo react to news of their child?

Chris drops the tub.

How can he get outside this thing – make sense of it before his life collapses completely? It's already teetering; he can hear it – rivets popping, joists groaning, tiles toppling from the roof. A distant version of himself registers his only choice – to stand in the crumbling edifice and fall with it, or take charge of the demolition. Wrench up floorboards, smash gyprock, expose the white ants. With every lie exposed and every memory dismantled, something fundamental will change. But there's no stopping it. Things are changing already.

He submerges the tub in the pond and scoops up a goldfish. It darts about frenetically in its new blank world. Chris watches for a moment, then floats it gently back into the water.

‘Perfect,' says Judge. ‘But watch out, Hamish mate. One of these days you'll slip up and I'll be waiting – it's just a matter of time.'

Hamish glances at Chris, who shrugs. The three are reviewing designs for a new clubhouse for Coronation Bowls. Hamish's drawings tick all the boxes but are functional rather than funky. Judge favours funky but concedes it's not appropriate for this job.

‘Maybe I've already slipped up,' says Hamish, ‘and you've missed it.'

Judge looks affronted. ‘Are you saying I'm stupid, or blind?'

‘Oh, I know you're not blind.' Hamish ducks back to his office before Judge can summon a response.

‘Not like some,' says Chris. ‘How blind am
I
?'

‘Dunno, Wren. Take off your glasses and we'll see how many things you fall over.'

‘I mean about Ben.'

‘Oh,
him
.' Judge snorts in disgust. ‘You're not blind – he pulled the wool over your eyes – down to your ankles. Oh, speaking of wool, there's a defunct wool store at Teneriffe that needs your attention. A big one.'

‘Let me guess. A developer wants apartments.'

‘As many as he can squeeze in.'

Chris gazes at the plans for the bowls club; the lines and shading that will become timber and glass, the pencilled squares that will be sinks and bars and bathrooms and a dining room. Imagination taking form.

Judge elbows him. ‘Gone to sleep standing up?'

‘No.'

Chris goes in search of Tabi. She's squinting at the computer screen, a large bubble of green gum, as round as Fletcher, teetering on her lips.

‘Tabitha.'

She tries to gobble the muck back into her mouth but it explodes over her face and she scrapes her chin hastily with a long nail. ‘I don't have any other bad habits, but,' she says, offering him a wad of photos and a brief for the wool store.

‘Make an appointment for me to get a haircut, would you?' Chris says, then shakes his head. He'd meant to ask her to make an appointment with the new client.

Tabi stares at him. ‘It's not my job to do that. Anyway, you've just had a haircut; you'll go bald. Leave it alone. It's good hair, Mr B, for an old bloke. Thick.'

He gazes meaningfully at a smear of green gum stuck to the brief. ‘I meant the Teneriffe developer.'

She sighs and drops the gum into the bin.

At the door of his office, Chris pauses and looks back. Tabi is peering at the monitor and unwrapping another stick of gum.