Last Day in the Dynamite Factory (12 page)

It has the consistency of cling wrap and tastes like lime cordial and turps. It occupies his entire skull and the skill required to organise it into bubbles gives him new respect for Tabi's oral proficiency. Its appeal, however, escapes him. As he drives home he wonders if she will notice her last piece of gum is missing.

Diane is on the phone when he gets in and he tries to sneak past her but she puts out her hand. ‘It's Ben,' she whispers. ‘Speak to him, for heaven's sake. It's been a week.'

Ben has phoned several times but Chris has not returned his calls. It's not malice that stops him, but an inability to absorb any additional information until he's made sense of what he's already been told.

Diane thrusts the phone at him and turns to rescue a saucepan from the stove.

‘Chris?' That voice; so familiar, so treacherous. ‘My son, I am
so
sorry.'

Chris is stumped for words. He opens his mouth but the only thing that comes out is gum, which drops onto the floor. He picks it up and glances about for somewhere to put it, hesitates, then while Diane's back is turned, sticks it to the underside of the kitchen bench.

‘Please, Chris, talk to me.'

The words, the voice – it's too much. He puts the phone back in its cradle.

Diane spins around. ‘Did you just … hang up?'

The phone rings again. Chris picks it up and sets it back on the cradle.

Diane's voice, when she finds it, is feathery with disbelief. ‘You hung up on your
father
? How could you?'

‘Hh-how … can
you
,' he splutters, ‘not get … fail so … spec-
tac
ularly to understand? I'm trying to … to make sense of a lifetime of bullshit. Ben isn't who I thought he was.
I'm
not who I thought I was. I need time to process all this …
stuff
.'

‘How
much
time, Chris? How long are you going to carry on with this pathetic behaviour? You have to come to terms with what happened. Let go. Forgive and forget.'

‘For-
get?
'

‘Oh, for … all right!' She bangs a colander against the sink and glares at him.

He glares back. Each looks at the other as if they've unwrapped a parcel that doesn't contain what they expected.

The timer on the oven pings. Diane drags a tea towel off her shoulder and turns to retrieve a tray of perfect scones, evenly gold and studded with sultanas. The action flings Chris back eighteen years to an evening when the reality of his existence hit him with such monstrous clarity its tattoo remained on his brain forever. A child squirming in his arms, another at the dining table drawing pictures, a wife with a tea towel over her shoulder and the sudden realisation that this was it. This was his life. A life arrived at without a plan, without council approval or periodic inspections. Concreted, stumped and cross-braced into place, its doors clearly marked,
No Exit
. No way out from his precious, needy brood. Diane had brought a tray of perfect scones from the oven and caught his expression. The anxiety that filled her eyes told him she knew exactly what he was thinking.

I am a family man, he'd told himself, fighting panic. I have a wife and children. I am lucky. I am responsible. This will pass. Is this all there is? Stop that. Shut up. Help me.

There was no cosmic response, however. Just the sound of the clock ticking on the stove.

Get a grip, idiot. This will pass. Everything will be all right.

And it was. He'd made it – until a week ago – without his house falling down.

Diane takes a fresh tea towel from the drawer and covers the scones.

Chris goes to his den and puts
Les Misérables
into the boom box. He selects a track, ‘Bring Him Home', sprawls in his chair and allows the words of paternal longing to fill the room.

Minutes later, a tap on the door. ‘I can't handle that music, Christopher. Please use the headphones.'

He puts on the headphones, lamenting her dismissal of music so ‘sentimental', and pulls out a memory. Another one. This one at his mother's grave in Melbourne just before he, Jo and Ben moved to Port Moresby.

Jo had sat on the hard, cold ground, gazing at her sister's headstone. Chris stood nearby, trying to summon a memory, a feeling – anything about his mother – but all he felt was frustration that she had died before he could know her. He tries now, in the light of his new knowledge, to recall Jo's exact expression, but he can't. This has been the pattern of the past week – zigzagging across his history, trying to recast the characters. But they stubbornly resist: Ben is still his adoptive father, Liam is still his cousin.

Thinking of Liam makes his heart spongy. He can't remember his brother's voice but he does remember his laugh – a raucous outburst followed by an uncertain frown – as if he wasn't really sure something was funny after all. The first time he heard it Chris followed the sound and found Jo and Ben leaning over the baby's cot. They reached out to Chris as he came in and he stood between them, watching the little fellow laugh up at them and laugh even harder when they laughed back. He remembers Jo trusting Liam to his care on his first school day and being so proud he nearly floated away.

Chris picks up a pencil and draws Fletcher, gazing down the shaft of an old arrow. It's notched and frayed and unlikely to be reliable.

Chuck it.

No. This is history. You can learn from it if you're willing.

Early the following morning Chris stops by Ben's on his way to work. His father, still in his pyjamas, is perched on the end of the kitchen table, holding a bowl of cereal.

‘Oh!' He scrambles up when Chris appears. ‘I wasn't expecting …'

‘Sorry,' Chris mumbles, hovering in the doorway, ‘about last night. Didn't mean to hang up, but—'

‘No worries, lad.' Ben puts the bowl on the draining board. ‘I'll just go and put on some clothes.'

‘No.' Chris glances at his watch. ‘I've got to get to work. I just want … I need to know about Alice.'

Ben moves his bowl to the sink and turns on the tap.

Chris turns it off. ‘
Talk
to me.'

Ben steps back, looking so vulnerable in pyjamas Chris wishes he'd let him get dressed.

‘What do you want to know?'

‘After you left her … What then?'

‘Nothing. Until a couple of months later. Then she phoned me at work and told me she was pregnant—' Ben lifts his hands, ‘—
and
that she was keeping the baby. I thought … that's it. I have to leave Jo and look after Alice and the baby.' He looks at Chris with a baffled expression. ‘But …'

‘But what?'

‘Alice wouldn't let me. She just plain … refused. I'd lose my job. My reputation. We'd have to move. We'd lose Jo and we'd lose each other. We could never build a life together knowing what we'd done to her.' He twists a button on his pyjama top.

‘So – you just let her go?'

‘No! I
hated
letting her go. She was keeping you – people didn't do that back then. It was 1948, for God's sake. Women adopted their babies out or … had abortions.' Ben puts a glass under the tap and brings it, shaking, to his mouth. Water slops down his front. He grabs a tea towel and drags it across his chest. ‘Alice was incredible, a maverick. A crazy woman – brave – so
brave
.'

Chris turns in small circles, making the floorboards creak with mocking familiarity. ‘What did you tell Jo?'

Ben tosses the tea towel on the table. ‘Nothing. Alice delivered the news and Jo assumed the father was Ian.'

Chris snorts. ‘Which he denied?'

‘No … actually, he didn't. When Alice told him she was pregnant to somebody else, he offered to marry her. He loved Alice. But she … couldn't do it to him.'

A shape is beginning to form in Chris's mind of his mother: a gutsy woman, reckless, flesh-and-blood real. ‘So, she was on her own.'

‘Well, no, not completely. Ellie and her husband stuck by her. They accepted the situation without drama – saw the baby as simply another child to love. Ellie said she'd mind you when your mother went back to work.'

‘She kept her job?'

‘She told Myer she was going back to Brisbane to look after her sick mother. Figured if they didn't know she was pregnant, she might get her job back there again … afterwards.'

‘Did she –
afterwards
?'

Ben watches a fly crawl across the table and whirr into the air. ‘Yes. But she died before she could take it up.'

Chris snatches the tea towel and swats the fly, contemplating its marvellous stupidity, hurling itself after a lingering smell, an illusion that sends it crashing into a wall and knocking itself senseless. He misses the fly and flays the table. Ben flinches.

‘Go on.'

‘I told Jo we'd help Alice with money for the baby but she said it was Ian's responsibility. I said we didn't know for sure Ian was the father because Alice refused to say.'

‘Will you stop saying
the
father and
the
baby, like I was some brainless zygote? Oh, maybe I was. Am.'

‘Sorry.' Ben drains his glass. ‘Jo said it was time Alice told the truth. She phoned her and demanded a name. But Alice still wouldn't say. Jo said until she did, there'd be no money. Alice replied she didn't want our money. She'd saved, and would take in sewing. Jo was ropeable; started on me. I was in Melbourne around that time. Who was Alice seeing? If it wasn't Ian – who was it? Circling and circling … and finally adding two and two and getting …'

The fly, the stupid idiot, lands back on the table and scurries across it in fitful bursts. Chris whacks it with a magazine. ‘I can't understand why Jo didn't leave you.'

‘She tried to, but I talked her out of it. It might seem hard to understand now, but I did love her. Just … not in the way I loved Alice. I promised it was over between me and Alice, no matter what happened. “It'll never be over,” she said.' Ben gazes at the table. ‘She was right. Even now she's right.'

Chris claws at his ear, unable to hook a single question from the melee in his head.

‘So … she stayed.'

Ben nods. ‘Back then you didn't walk out on a marriage the way you do now. Jo knew if people found out why she'd left it would be gossip for the next twenty years. She'd have been a social pariah.'

‘And yet, she took me in.'

‘You weren't the problem.'

‘Just proof of it.'

Ben looks at him sadly. ‘Despite everything, Jo was really upset over Alice's death. For you, it was either us or an orphanage, and there's no way Jo would have considered letting you go to an orphanage. You were her family, her nephew; you even looked like her. And you were easy to love. The first time we saw you in your crib, so peaceful amid the turmoil, we were hooked. Both of us. You healed us, Chris. You made us a family.'

‘What if I'd worked out the truth?'

‘We expected you would.'

Chris raises his eyebrows.

‘We were going to say you were Ian's child.'

‘You … you were willing to destroy your cousin's reputation to save your own?'

‘Not willing. And as it happened, we never had to. Ian died not long after you were born: peritonitis. But if I'd had to … yes, I would have, because that was the condition Jo set for me to adopt you. No-one must ever know the truth. When Liam was born I vowed I would tell you as soon as you were old enough, regardless of my promise. But when he died you became everything to us. I couldn't do it. Jo had suffered too much. My affair. Alice dying. Liam dying. Her entire life, she never lost her fear of you finding out and leaving us too.'

Chris looks towards the garden. ‘You were my hero. My road map. All my life I tried to make up to you for losing Liam. I never took you or Jo for granted. Never suspected that what I regarded as privileges were mine by right. I still can't … get my head around it. Adopted by my own father, but never allowed to call him Dad.'

‘Because then you'd have had to call Jo
Mum
, and she couldn't bring herself to have you do that. In spite of everything, Jo never wanted you to forget who your mother was.'

‘Forget her? I never knew her. You never answered my questions about her – or the mythical Jack Ward …' Chris frowns. ‘Where did that name come from?'

Ben mumbles something.

‘What?'

‘The hospital. The ward you were born in. J-Ward.'

Chris can feel his head wobbling, a spring independent of his body. ‘Christopher … Ward. Christopher J-fucking-Ward.'