Last Day in the Dynamite Factory (7 page)

‘My son!' Ben's roar echoes down the years. ‘
My son!
'

Ben grinds the heel of his hand against his eyes and closes the photo album.

Chris takes it from him. ‘How about I take this stuff home, sort it and bring it back? You can decide after that what to keep.'

Ben nods and Chris takes the cartons to the car.

When he returns, Ben is sifting through Jo's wardrobe. If ghosts lurk, Chris reckons, they lurk in clothes. He touches a dress and it sways, a shirt, and it ripples. Practical clothes, Jo's, mostly for work. After Liam died she threw herself into volunteer work – Meals on Wheels, Red Cross; even learning Braille so she could translate books for the blind.

When Ben wasn't at work, he got through the months following Liam's death by whittling. Up in his shed carving birds which had so delighted his lost son: richly detailed kookaburras, mynahs and fat willy wagtails, lovingly carved eyes and feathers, sanded, stained in two or more tones and preserved in lacquer. He could easily have sold them but he gave them away.

Ben touches a skirt. ‘May as well go.'

‘All of it?'

He nods.

There aren't many things worth keeping. A half-finished cross-stitch of flowers in a vase, her watch, a string of pearls Ben gave her for their thirtieth wedding anniversary. He fingers them for a moment then passes them to Chris.

‘I'd like Phoebe to have these.'

In a box at the back of the wardrobe they find Jo's wedding dress, her only truly glamorous garment, a satiny champagne thing with a train and covered buttons up the sleeves. ‘I'll keep this,' says Ben. ‘Your mother made it. Did you know? Beautiful thing.' He touches the bodice gently, returns the box to the wardrobe and runs his hand along a shelf. ‘You inherited her creativity, Chris. Look at this. Solid. Built to last. You weren't even eighteen years old when you made them.' He gives Chris a smile of wistful pride and slides open a drawer; the corners beautifully dovetailed, the timber finesanded and waxed. ‘How's that for glide? No wobble. Almost thirty years and still beautiful. These days they've got wardrobe organisers at whopping prices with workmanship not worth your spit.'

Chris examines his construction, looking for flaws that might indicate he was no kind of craftsman, but can't find any.

‘I miss doing this sort of thing,' he says. ‘I'm fed up restoring other people's work. There's nothing of me in it. Judge's buildings are unmistakable – that flair and cocky assurance.'

He takes a couple of blouses from their hangers, folds them and puts them in a cardboard carton. By the time Diane arrives with lunch, Jo's wardrobe is empty, her small pile of possessions packed in boxes on the floor.

Ben looks at them as if he can't decide which one she might still be in. ‘What am I supposed to do now?'

January holds Brisbane in a steamy post-Christmas torpor. Building goes on hold; people stream to the beach, pack air-conditioned movie theatres, lick ice-creams, flop into backyard pools and sprawl on lounges in the shade with stubbies of cold beer. Dogs collapse panting beneath high-set houses, roses die, frangipanis drench the air with fragrance and hibiscus burst crimson for one short day of life.

The staff are on holidays and Chris and Judge take turns at the office. Chris finally gets around to tackling Jo's boxes.

He takes them to his den and unpacks old toys, games and baby books. Even as a baby Liam looked like his father with his nuggety build and tousled black hair. Chris's hair is tousled too, but blond like his mother's. There are two photos of her in his baby book. One was taken when she was a toddler, looking much the same as he did at the same age; in the other she's about sixteen, pretty, and with a hopeful expression, as if eyeing a bright future.

Deeper in the box he finds his old bunny, a once-yellow rabbit with long velvet ears, now bristly and balding. Jo replaced an eye with a button not quite matching the original and re-stitched its nose. Renewed, but too far gone to restore. There's a toy tractor with peeling red paint, an old View-Master and 3D pictures of Egyptian pyramids, Moroccan souks and the Yosemite National Park; a box of dominoes – mind how they fall – and an exercise book. A lump gathers in Chris's throat. He opens the book, soft and frayed with age, and there they are. Page after page of his drawings of Fletcher, the cartoon character he invented to talk for him during his month of silence.

Liam's body was never found. There was nothing to bury, nothing to cremate, no small white coffin to put flowers on, no face to kiss goodbye. A memorial service was held at the local church, packed with relatives, friends and strangers.

The night of the service, a violent storm raged through the suburbs of Brisbane. Rain clattered like gravel against Chris's bedroom window, wind moaned in the downpipes and thunder boomed throughout the house. For a long time he lay awake listening to water overflowing the gutters and thudding onto the ground, haunted by the memory of water in his lungs and ears and Liam's weight on his chest.

The next morning he woke to sunshine, soft air and a stain on the ceiling where water had leaked in. There were two circles – a big one and a small one – that together looked like a little man with a lopsided smile and one eye half closed as if winking. There was a line beside the circles that looked like an arrow. Chris reached for his exercise book and drew the picture before the stains could dry and disappear. He gave the man hands, feet, ears, a bow and a quiver of arrows and a name: Fletcher. A teacher at school had told him a fletcher was an arrow maker. To fletch, or fledge, meant to fit with feathers. Not just to put feathers in arrows but to nurture baby birds, to feed and care for them until they could fly.

Chris turns the pages of the old book, every one filled with sketches of Fletcher going about daily life: eating, reading, dressing, whittling arrows and expressing in word clouds what Chris couldn't say.
What time are we leaving? Where is the butter? Who is she? I'm not hungry
. In some, the anguish of loss is baldly revealed without words: Fletcher bleeding, Fletcher dead. With Liam gone, Fletcher was not only a way to communicate, but another self who whispered in his ear and marched in his head.

Chris puts the book on the floor and wipes his forehead. The room is suffocatingly hot. He goes to the window and raises it to the max, admitting a draught of warm air and the deafening screech of cicadas.

At the bottom of the box he unearths a
Girl's Own Annual
and a stack of journals. Three journals are covered in pale blue fabric with gold edging, the fourth is red. He weighs it in his hand, then turns back the cover.

TPNG 1960–1962
Josephine Bright

Her handwriting is decisive; the warning clear … but … New Guinea. A swirl of colours and smells …

Chris turns the page.

Port Moresby, 18th April 1960

Who'd have thought it?
Three and a half months already and I
still don't know how I'll survive this heat. Ben doesn't seem bothered by it and Chris
is positively thriving. I'm sure he's grown two inches since we arrived. Swimming is the
main way to cool off, but I can't bear going near the water. As if it doesn't matter.
For me, it may as well be yesterday I lost my darling Liam. I'd take Chris to the beach
if he wanted to go but he's afraid. After nearly drowning, why not? I suppose I should
be encouraging him to learn to swim but I haven't the heart. He's a wonderful boy. Boy?
Growing up so fast; nearly as tall as his me! I'm glad Ben accepted this posting
(despite the heat). The change has been good and learning to drive liberating. Most
women here drive. Go where you want, when you want. I'm still not sure about having
someone do my housework – especially my laundry – and I keep checking but the haus-boi
seems to be doing a good job and you'd be considered odd if you did it yourself.
    
Liam would be nine next week.

The heat, the smells, the sounds. Thongs slapping heels, hands slapping mosquitoes, their insistent whine and the hypnotic sound of the locals singing, the pungent scent of flowers, of dust and drenching rain. The polyglot of kids; school, marbles, monkey bars, mischief. Girls – pretty knots of them in sundresses and sandals.

Diane. Stefi. Roberta.

Diane Rudge was a quiet, intellectual kid with a lost look that made Chris feel protective. Her parents treated her like an afterthought, a punctuation mark in a sentence that didn't need it. Diane's goal in life – apart from being Chris's favourite – was to depose Stefi Breuer as Class Brain. She never did. Nor did Chris, despite his best efforts. Stefi was a sweet kid with messy ginger hair who made no effort to maintain her academic standing – an attitude that infuriated Diane. Roberta Lightfoot infuriated Diane too, but in a different way. While no academic threat and crippled by polio, Roberta was spirited, artistically gifted and pretty, and Diane's main rival for Chris's affections. He was a popular boy – tall for his age, good-looking and kind – especially to the underdog. His month of silence had taught him what it was like to be invisible. When Terry Prior wet his pants everyone shunned him. Chris put a racquet in Terry's hand and taught him to play tennis. Within a month Terry was winning nearly every game and his pants were dry. Chris showed Bobby ‘Buck-tooth' Bailey how to play darts and he coached Roberta, with her crippled leg, to play softball. He coaxed details from Diane of her emotionally barren home life and became her comforter and friend.

So long ago. What happened to them all? Stefi he hadn't seen since school, and Roberta … Bertie, not since London in 1973. By then she was … He stares down the memory for a long moment, then wipes it along with sweat from his forehead. The breeze has dropped and the air in the den is once again thick and flabby. He gets up, switches on the ceiling fan and returns to the diary.

28th April 1960

The dry season is on its way. Afternoon rain storms have tapered off
and the humidity has dropped. Thank God. I'm at a loose end. Some women complain their
haus-bois can't cook but my problem is that mine can and I'm afraid I'll forget how to
boil an egg by the time we go home. I don't want to finish up like some people here –
hopping from card parties to dinner parties and picnics and drinking themselves
senseless. I'm no wowser but the amount of alcohol that gets guzzled and the carry-on –
ladies included – is alarming.
    Ben enjoys life here but isn't challenged by the work and doesn't plan to extend his contract beyond two years. Chris will be
disappointed but no doubt hide it when it's time to go. He's eager to please and
endlessly thoughtful. He has his mother's creative streak and her brains but no evidence
(yet) thank goodness, of her capacity for betrayal. Or his father's, for that
matter.

Betrayal?
What the hell did that mean? And his father: Jo obviously knew more about Jack Ward than she'd let on. Maybe Archie was right in his fanciful musings that Chris couldn't find his birth father because he was prowling prison corridors doing life for murder or armed robbery, or both. Chris might have inherited the criminal gene. He wipes his forehead with the edge of his T-shirt.

23rd June 1960

A picnic today at Brown River with the Rudges. Not inspiring
company unless you happen to be obsessed with archaeology
or anthropology or whatever-other-ology. I felt sorry for their
daughter, Diane. She may as well not have existed for all the
attention they paid her. She wanted to swim but wouldn't go in
unless Chris did and I could see he was torn. I know it's wrong
to let him avoid water all his life so I encouraged him to go. It
wasn't the beach; there were no waves and it was too shallow
for harm. So he went in, but only knee-deep. Then Ben joined
him and they all mucked around in the shallows together which
was nice. Then – when they were coming out – I saw it and I
thought, my God, my heart will explode. I felt faint, sick to my
stomach. I knew I should be expecting it sometime but so far it's
only been the occasional look or mannerism. But today, seeing them side by side like that, watching where they stepped with the
same look of concentration, their hair springing up from their
foreheads exactly the same way and that wheezy laugh they both
have – it was obvious to anyone with eyes that they are father and
son. Thank God the Rudges were too self-absorbed to notice.
Chris will. He's bound to. He can't help it. I must warn Ben
to expect it. Thank heavens Ian has gone. I shouldn't say it,
poor man, but at least no-one can prove anything.

Chris reads again.

And again. The words look peculiar:
father and son
; hieroglyphs on a page whose meaning he can't grasp.
Father and son
– addling his brain –
father and son
– huge, wraparound words –
father and son
– that tighten –
father and son
– and squeeze his throat.