The Ink Bridge (23 page)

HEC WAS SET TO WORK with Silent Boy. Two mutes quick-fingering candles into boxes. Ten to a box, twenty boxes to a carton, a hundred cartons to a pallet, ten pallets to a day. Hec had never known boredom like it. He felt it swelling, minutes drawing themselves long and fatty, like stringy mutton inside him. It was suffocating to think of this stretching for years and decades if he didn't take the path back to school.

But then there was the rhythm and it lulled him. He began to drift, even as his fingers pushed the candles into boxes.

Bells came and went, smokos, lunchtimes. A week was swallowed. He watched Silent Boy opposite him and wondered what his story was. He had tried to listen as the boy's uncle talked to him at lunch, but he could only guess at the meaning, from the way in which the foreign words were presented through bared teeth; in dolorous growls from the back of the older man's throat, punctuated by sprays of rice and onion. Hec saw the power in silence. In holding back. He remembered an old saying:
It is better to remain silent
and appear stupid than to speak and show your stupidity
. With silence, no one could use words against you.

At ten to three on a long Friday, the hour when mind-drift tightened its grip, Silent Boy got the whisper. He jumped quickly from his workstation and evaporated out the back. When Hec looked around he noticed gaps in the line, faces missing. Merrick appeared with two men in suits. They stopped to question some of the workers – Sami, Sheila, Mabor. They all shook their heads, stared at their toes. The line slowed. Everyone was watching. Hec could feel the walls of the factory suck in as it held its breath. Tran whistled in his ear, ‘Immigration.'

One of the men caught Hec's eye. He was a jowly sort of bloke with thin red hair and flaky skin – a fantapants. The man held Hec's gaze, not blinking, not smiling. The other guy grabbed him by the crook of his elbow and said something to him, smiling. Fantapants broke off and laughed. Then the two men shook their heads at Merrick Hope and left.

At the end of the day, Merrick called Hec into the office. Silent Boy and his uncle were there, the boy scuffing his shoes on the floor while the uncle gave his stained teeth an airing.

‘Hec, come in and sit down.'

Hec shuffled further into the room, but stayed standing. Merrick got up from behind his desk, walked around and sat on it. The office wasn't big and the effect was alarming. Suddenly they were all very close to each other and Hec felt unsafe. The uncle licked his teeth and Hec noticed his tongue was forked. Silent Boy was scuffing his shoes, sending little jolts of noise into the room. The door swung itself shut and Hec jumped.

‘It's okay, mate. There's no trouble or anything,' Merrick said. ‘I mean, your work's good. You get along. You're a bit on the quiet side, but we're used to that around here aren't we?'

The uncle chuckled. He kicked at Silent Boy's feet and the scuffing stopped.

‘It's just . . .' Merrick pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘We have a little problem. Well, not so much of a problem, really, more like an opportunity. You see, Massoud here and his nephew need a place to stay for a while.'

The uncle drew closer to Hec and he could smell the sourness on him. One of his pupils was a full-stop. The other – a bullet-hole.

‘I mean I'm going to have a word to your dad and everything, but I wanted to clear it with you first.'

The uncle shut his lips and nodded at Merrick.

‘You can think of it as an educational experience. It's not every day that you get someone from another country come and live with you. And they'll be no trouble.'

‘Naw trawble,' gurgled Uncle Massoud.

‘They'll pay your dad board and help around the house.'

‘Helup, yas.'

Hec looked at Silent Boy, but his chin was buried in his chest.

‘So can I take that as a yes, then?' asked Merrick.

‘Yas!' said Uncle Massoud, a little too loudly.

It really made no difference what Hec said, his dad would have the last word.

‘Okay, that's all settled then. I'll call your dad and set it up, let him know you're on board.'

‘Awnbawrd?'

‘You'd better get going or you'll miss your train. I'll see you tomorrow.'

The chalkboard read:

Massoud and nephew moving in. Keep house clean.

And with that the deal was done.

They got his mum's old room, the one she used to paint in. The one that leaked music into the garden through the old, warped French doors. They slept on thin cotton mattresses that they rolled up each morning, balancing their plastic bags of stuff on top.

Silent Boy found the typewriter on the first Sunday morning. Hec woke to the pecking of keys on paper. He sat and listened to it for a while then rolled over and covered his head with a pillow. Still the noise kept coming. Hec could feel the weight of the words, the syntax crash like cymbals. What was worse was the noise between, the aching silence before the next letter. Hec couldn't see the point in typewriters. There was simply too much at stake. You had to get it right first time or there were pools of Wite-Out involved.

When he was ten, he had begged his mum for the old machine. It had been his grandfather's and Hec had loved its solidity, its permanence. It had lived on his desk until he had jammed the keys. But the romance of the machine gave way to the ease of the computer, the ability to cut and paste, to rewrite. Mum eventually rescued it from the floor and carried it back to her room.

He had not heard the sound for years, but he immediately knew it. It sliced the air –
shik . . . shik . . . shik . . . shik-shik
. He hauled himself out of bed, he turned on some music. But the noise worked its way between the key changes, the gaps between the songs were trashy with it. For a mute, Silent Boy knew how to make himself heard.

Hec got up. It was a cold morning and he could feel the breath of winter easing up between the floorboards. Pulling on a jumper, he walked to the doorway of Silent Boy's room and watched. He was sitting at the desk with his back to the door. Hec could just make out the high pass of his cheekbone in profile. He typed two-fingered, dashing them on the keys. There was already a small stack of paper beside him. How long had he been at it? Why did this story come in such a rush? When Hec wrote a creative piece for English it would come in fits and starts, like an old car working its way up a hill.

Uncle Massoud slept noisily on the floor, unaware of the story unfolding around him. His lips were open and his slit tongue lolled from his mouth. There was a huge patch of drool on the pillow.

As Hec turned to go, the door creaked away from him. Silent Boy looked up, his eyes wide. Hec smiled and shrugged, pursed his finger and thumb together and pushed them to his lips.
Breakfast?

Silent Boy nodded. He got up and hid the typewriter back in the desk drawer. The typed papers went inside his pillowcase.

They sat in the kitchen. Hec felt comfortable with Silent Boy. You could hear the crunching of Froot Loops, the snap of fat Saturday news hitting doorsteps along the street, Dad calling out in his sleep, pigeons playing woodwind on the telephone wires. Even when there was silence, there wasn't. People who talked didn't understand. They didn't listen, except to their own breathless hunger. Their need for words.

‘
Salam
.' Uncle Massoud was awake. ‘Good maarning.'

Hec nodded to him.

‘Brakefass? Gooood.' Massoud rubbed his belly, but instead of sitting down he went to the bathroom. Hec never saw the man eat. He saw the remains of his odd hour snacks – the wasted food left to harden until the morning, the plates he made Silent Boy wash and dry. He was an odd man. There was something not right in the way he treated his nephew.

Massoud was twenty minutes in the bathroom, but showed no signs of being any cleaner. He seemed sleepy and happy.

‘I see Meestar Merrick,' he said, leaning on Hec's chair back with his scarred paws.

Hec nodded even though he thought it strange that Massoud would have business with Merrick on a Saturday. Massoud showed no sign of going and Hec felt uncomfortable with him lolling behind him. Silent Boy kept his head down, herding his Froot Loops into his mouth with his spoon. Hec needed to break the spell. He touched Silent Boy on the arm and nodded to the door. They got up together and went out into the static morning.

It was a good day for walking as they turned out of Acland Street and onto the Esplanade. The Espy was nursing a hangover, its mouth open to the street, belching the syrupy last-drinks memory from the back of its throat. Kitesurfers were already at it, pulling themselves free and landing to camera clicks from the pier. Silent Boy watched the bay, a mistrustful knot between his eyes. Hec tried to read his thoughts, but all he could retrieve was the buzz and beep of traffic searching for espresso and the biggest Big Breakfast.

It took them more than an hour, but they made it, crossing the sour swamp of West Gate Park as the sun was eclipsed by the bridge.

Mum would often tell Hector that Melbourne didn't have the Harbour, the Opera House or even a coathanger bridge. It didn't have the ferries, or surf smacking up close to the city, or a zoo that climbs from the water like a sundrunk iguana. But it wasn't second-best to Sydney. It had its cafes, it had European styling, the upside-down river, museums and the wickerwork cone of the Arts Centre. It had gardens, the clocks at Flinders Street, meals for five bucks at the Hare Krishna joint on Swanston Street. It had sushi and gnocchi and fish and chips and live bands on a Sunday afternoon. But Hec chose to show Silent Boy the bridge.

And it was as if Silent Boy understood because he lay on the pontoon, his stomach flat on the grey hardwood, and touched the water. Where his fingers broached the surface, rings formed and radiated like shockwaves. His lips moved, but only silence poured from them. Hec watched as he brought his fingers to his lips and, as he sat up, to his heart.

Hec could smell the old man coming before he could see him. It was the smell of someone who'd lived too long in his body. An argument between stale fish and whisky, and a backnote of King Mulloway about him. And he came in his tangle of greasy clothes, whiskers tucked into the creases in his face, a small stool looped over his shoulder. He came with his bucket and his bag and the curve of a knife slipped between his red flanny and his waistband.