Last Day in the Dynamite Factory (27 page)

Nineteen words. And thousands of pounds' worth of crops were damaged.

Eleven storeys below him, the river reflects a city's life. Crimson, purple and gold dance across the water in a festive jig. On this clear, cold winter's night of 1998, Chris is forty-nine years away. Time is no buffer against memory.

No memories
.

No memories, but something else: knowledge. Knowledge, at last, of his mother, and of his father. His father failed his mother in the most fundamental way. If Ben had taken care of the woman he claimed to love she'd never have had to wrap dynamite. She might still be alive now.

Alice.

Mum.

He's glad, now, that Jo forbade him to call her
Mum
, or Ben
Dad
. Apart from that sole concession to his mother's role in his life, they buried her, locked up the memories of her life and death and threw away the key. And with it, her life's meaning and its legacy. All too hard.

Yet Chris was complicit in her exclusion too, accepting feeble responses to feeble enquiries and giving scant thought to Alice's courage in keeping a baby under such socially and economically hostile circumstances. In the wordless way that families have, he, Jo and Ben colluded to keep the past – its pain and its mess – out of their well-pressed lives. Let the dead stay dead.

Like the truth about Liam.

Different. So different.

His mother's death reflected her courage; Liam's death was a meaningless tragedy, an event beyond explaining. The thought that shit simply happens makes him feel sick, but unless he can convince himself that God had more important plans for his mother and his brother, that's the fact of it. He removes his glasses and rubs gritty eyes. His head aches from where he banged it against the pole, his body from exhaustion. He lies on the bed and closes his eyes …

… His mother takes a stick of dynamite and rolls it in a sheet of paper. The hut is hot, stifling, the heat intensifying every minute until it's unbearable and Chris feels he's going to explode and he rushes to the door but it's locked. He bangs, kicks, beats and yells … and wakes, drenched in sweat.

He peers at his watch: ten thirty. The room is suffocating; he's forgotten to turn on the air-con. Across the river Southbank twinkles. He gets up and sets the thermostat, undresses and crawls into bed. Waits for sleep.

Nothing.

On the ceiling he can make out the shapes of the sprinkler and down-lights. Sometimes at home he lies in the dark like this, staring at what he knows is there rather than what he can see. Even without glasses his eyes register the slow turn of the fan, the dip and sway of the shadows of trees on the wall. This is when he hears the sound – the sound of his cells ageing every millisecond; the sound of one less breath.

He shuts his eyes and a waking dream forms; visions of a young woman walking to work in a hut set between muffling mounds of dirt. She sits at a table with other young women rolling dynamite in waxed paper. She watches her skin turn yellow; feels it peel. But this day she refuses to think about it because this is her last day. In a few hours she'll walk through those gates for the last time, with a wad of hard-earned pounds in her pocket. Pounds for her baby's future.

What did she want for him?

Same as anyone wants for their kids. Life lived to the hilt. Not dribbled through your fingers like a broken egg.

Chris falls into dreamless sleep for a few hours, then tosses fitfully for the rest of the night. Early in the morning he gets up, puts on runners and heads for the lobby.

As he steps from the lift the cabinet once again halts him. He bends to examine its glowing flanks and the tightness in his chest surrenders to a sigh. Such elegant understatement in the interwoven light and dark timbers and lean lines broken by the swelling curves of the handles. He examines the tag again. Peter Semple. Nobody he's ever heard of. Yet in each meticulously executed process, Peter Semple is revealed. His vision, his passion, his laboriously loving craft.

By their fruits you shall recognise them
.

He has no memories of his mother; everything he knows has been inherited from other people. Yet in their stories she is visible – her life and her death. She is visible in himself, in her passion for design and creation, in the joy of realising a dream from first imaginative spark to final stitch of fabric or coat of timber wax. This is what would have sustained Alice in her days at the dynamite factory: dreams of what she would do when she got her career and her skin back.

How much of Alice is he? Could he have done what she did?

Wouldn't you work in a dynamite factory for your kids?

Chris is first across the threshold of the State Library in Swanston Street at ten o'clock. Two hours later he's researched everything he can find on women working in post-war munitions factories and there's precious little. From bits and pieces in documents, articles, pamphlets and first-hand accounts, he gathers an impression of life in the factories.

The girls worked in timber huts surrounded by earth mounds and tin sides so that if one blew up, it didn't take the others. Sheep grazed between the huts to minimise the risk of sparks from mowers. There were four girls to a hut. Clothing was a plain serge or wool smock. No buttons, fastenings or jewellery of any sort in case it interfered with the gelignite. Large slabs of geli were delivered via a two-way cupboard and cut into pieces with a wooden knife. These were put through a machine to make sausage-like pieces which were then wrapped by hand in waxed paper, with both ends folded tightly.

His mother's hands. That's what she did in her plain serge smock and ringless fingers.

‘By the end of the day your thumbs would be very sore from folding and the nitroglycerine gave … terrible headaches.'

‘The girls' gowns were caked in geli and had to be removed before they could have a cigarette.'

Did she smoke?

‘At the end of the day everything had to be scrubbed with soda ash to neutralise the gelignite-soaked tables and floors.'

‘We … sang while we worked.'

‘… if the girls worked Saturdays they could earn up to six pounds a week, twice as much as they might expect to earn elsewhere.'

A more recent account from a worker who spent his war years in the Maribyrnong Factory noted:

‘Almost every day someone was hurt. Some were blown to pieces, building and all. I was sent to the detonator section, the heavy explosives depot about a mile away from the rest of the factory. Everything was painted red to remind us that the work was dangerous. I was a filler and … worked in a big room by myself. It was hot – around 90 degrees – to keep the powder dry, so we sweltered in summer. The powder I held in my hands was enough to blow up … the QE2.'

More than enough to blow up a twenty-one year old woman.

Chris goes out into the drizzle and starts walking back to his hotel. A train glides past.

Coolum, on a train.

Not Coolum. Box Hill.

Streets of the dead; homes for the unencumbered. A plot for each, some for a family. Fenced, unfenced, proud, humble, ornate, broken, loved and unloved, each with a name and a number and if not a doorbell, at least a bed.

As Chris walks through the cemetery, rain trickles through his hair. Thirty-nine years since he was here with Jo. She'd sat beside her sister's grave on a day just like this, apparently immune to the icy wind and hard ground. Chris hovered by the headstone, scratching off lichen with a fingernail and feeling superfluous. He wondered what Jo was thinking, but even wondering felt like an intrusion. He leaned his cheek on the headstone, hungering for information about his mother but unable to think of questions that might draw Jo out. When she finally stood to go Chris looked at her in the hope she might offer some insight or story he could add to his meagre knowledge. But she dusted off her hands, pulled her coat more tightly around her and turned away. She never looked back.

After all these years Chris's radar is sufficiently strong to lead him towards a clump of pine trees near the northern boundary. His mother's grave is where he remembers it, in the middle of a row, a forsaken rectangle of scant grass eerily reminiscent of Jo's hair after chemo. There are no plastic flowers, no scummy jars of water or twig-dry plants, nothing to indicate that anyone has been here for thirty-nine years. Nobody alive remembers Alice Johansson except Julie and his father, and only God and Ben know if he ever came here.

And there it is.

ALICE MARY JOHANSSON

11.1.1928 – 13.10.1949

Beloved daughter of Mary & Gregor Johansson
Sister of Josephine

Mother of Christopher.

Her headstone tilts slightly backwards, as if surrendering to her fate. Chris has brought nothing to put on her grave; no trinket or flowers, not even a rose.

Some son.

By their fruits you shall recognise them.

Would she? Would she recognise in his tall stranger's body and craggy features the face of her baby? He trails his fingers down the cold marble and sees at the bottom of the headstone a smaller inscription, barely discernible above the grass. He wipes fog from his glasses and dirt from the writing.

‘I came that they may have life,
and have it abundantly.'

John 10:10

Life. Abundantly.

Alice's life: short but abundant – career, love and sacrifice, all lived to the hilt. There's nothing to regret about her life except its ending. Chris can't remember his mother's face, the colour of her eyes or her smile. He has no memory of her touch, her voice, or what she smelled like, but her life is in those words. He presses his fingers to his lips and touches them to the cold marble. He doesn't want to leave her here. He wants to take her from this place of the dead and carry her home in the pocket over his heart.

On the train back to the city he pulls out his mobile. When Julie answers she sounds relieved.

‘I was worried about you,' she says. ‘Afraid I told you too much.'

‘No, Julie. I'm grateful. I've just been visiting my mother's grave. There's an inscription on it about life in abundance. You don't happen to know who chose it?'

‘Oh, yes … She did, sort of. The local minister came by one time. Nice man; didn't carry on about Alice being pregnant or anything. But he prayed and read things from the Bible like they did back then and I don't think Alice was taking much notice until he came to that bit, then she really lit up. “Life in abundance,” she said. “
That's
what I want for my baby.” Ma never forgot, and when Alice died, she told Alice's sister. I guess it was her sister that got it put on the grave.'