As he opened the heavy tome at the bookmarked page, his eyes were drawn again towards the blinking allure of the lights and shadowed machinations of the harbour with which he was becoming inextricably attached. There was a lull in the storm. He had sometimes imagined his life resembling the unceasing movement of the waters, which hinted at something in their depths, secrets waiting to be dredged like sunken cargo, discoveries that would allow his existence to feel fulfilled once again.
But like an amputee, while cossetted by darkness, Kant could still feel Sarah’s soft contours next to him in bed. Once or twice around the city he could have sworn he heard the velvety cadence of her voice. Of course they were just random women. Sometimes, sleepless at four in the morning, he’d stumble from his bed onto the plush, richly patterned Afghan rug he’d bought as a conduit to happiness, open the balcony doors to breathe in the salted air and pulsations of the harbour, welcoming their embrace. He longed for an estuarine smoothness, to be set down somewhere peaceful, on a sandy spit or maybe a wild ocean beach, where the salted waves could heal his wounds.
Kant’s thoughts floated back to the crèche that Sarah had set up in the Huon Valley. He wondered whether it would still be functioning. No reason why not, just because she’s dead, he thought bitterly.
He remembered the endless energy she’d poured into nurturing their property when Melinda was little, ‘ … so we can all benefit from healthy organic produce,’ she’d say, meaning, as well as the wisdoms gained from a rural lifestyle. They had lived simply. Sarah’s acre of usable land was home to straight rows of mixed vegetables, an orchard of fruit varieties, thirty fowls and geese, even a troublesome pig and litter one year, and a goat and a cow. They all contributed to a way of life that not only complemented her occasional articles on composting, small farming practices and preserving but enabled her husband to work as a reporter, which for several years was poorly paid with irregular hours.
Kant couldn’t concentrate. He snatched up the bookmark, last year’s birthday present from Rosie, his two year old grand daughter. Thank God for her. The rectangle of pink paper, festooned with colourful scrawls, stuck on gold stars and red hearts had survived the year because it had been laminated by her mother Melinda, a teacher at the Polytechnic in the northern suburbs. The riot of lines in Texta, blunt and fluffy after much scribbling and stabbing, looked so out of place in Kant’s minimalist magazine interior, but to him the most precious possession there.
Kant turned off his bedside light to allow the tree lights decorating Salamanca Place’s tree lined avenue to cast their magical shadow play. He listened to the tone arm lift off the record, jerk backwards and click to silence. Tomorrow he would visit Melinda because apparently Rosie had made something special for his 60th birthday .
Chapter Two
In the weeks following Sarah’s death two things induced Kant’s decision to move away from the sanctuary of his home in the country.
Melinda had never before witnessed her father weep, so at the sight and sound of him distraught and defenseless, and grieving her own mother’s death to the Cruel C, as she called the disease, she ached with sorrow.
‘Please come up town, Dad, so we can all be near each other.’ And knowing her father’s softness for his granddaughter, ‘You know how much Rosie loves her grandpa.’
He did. He felt supremely grateful. Amongst the rips of his emotions, barely keeping his head above water, this little girl, without an inkling of her influence, had buoyed her grandfather up in the bleakest of storms.
The second thing happened a week later.
Vashna and Barry’s other longtime friend Maxwell Dartford drove down from the city to stay the night at the cottage. A boys’ night’s what the maudlin old bugger needs, they’d plotted. Get him out of himself and back on track, they had decided before they phoned, refused to hear any excuses, turning up an hour later with a couple of Johnny Walkers.
‘Jesus, Barry, you’ve got more dirty dishes lying around than a Bangkok brothel,’ Max had started as soon as he entered the kitchen where the warm and welcoming aromas of home cooking had been replaced by a rancid and stifled coldness.
Max was a rare breed of human being, knowing nothing of emotional pain in his untroubled existence as capitalist, inheriting a bulging portfolio of investments, giving him the means to live more than comfortably, almost without having to lift a single digit. Financial advisers, brokers and a creative accountant took care of everything. All he had to do was find appealing ways to spend the profits while fostering his small city mystique and flashy front, which had the side effect of giving Barry’s life of solid plodding some pizzazz, like confetti sprinkled over a grazing bull’s back.
To give old Max his due, he did help propel the ailing economy when he became an art buyer, an activity that granted him specious social credibility. Healthy rumours that he was bound to be into some kind of unethical practice, and a brief scandal about an exploratory gay liaison, were to his manicured persona like healthy dividends at the end of the financial year.
‘Sensitive as ever, Maxi,’ Vashna had said. ‘Besides, it’s not about the dishes but the sustenance that’s been offered on them.’
But as Vashna’s mystical wisdom flowed, Barry had been distracted by a buzzing black ball of blowfly on one of the plates, spinning upside down between knife and fork frantic in its attempt to get airborne.
‘There I am,’ Barry muttered to himself.
Maxwell banged the bottles down on the table with significance, and began rummaging around for something hygienic from which to drink.
Startled by the noise, then pointing like a foot weary traffic warden, Barry snapped, ‘Fellas, go and find a seat in the sitting room and I’ll rinse a couple of glasses.’
An hour later all their banter was witty, to them, and it was in this climate of intoxicated fellowship that Vashna, the group’s self appointed sage, started illuminating his philosophic counsel, ‘Mate, mate, come up town and start a new history … ’
Vashna’s unshaven patches of gorse, on a bony outcrop, never quite cohesive enough to be called a beard, reflected his loose approach to self grooming. Downy white hair curtained unstyled to his shoulders. Clothes, loose fitting colourful aberrations, hung from his beanpole frame. Real name, Spencer, but only used in conjunction with his Broadhurst’s Collectables dealership, giving his business public credence, habitually a debatable trade with dubious earnings. He just happened to spend a hedonistic year or so drifting around India in his twenties, before running aground in a pot infused ashram in Goa on the West Coast, and for the last few decades Vashna had been a self proclaimed custodian of a number of esoterically wise and mystical one liners, invariably not backed up with any substantial research or reasoning.
‘Sarah’s had her story, shortened but beautiful. Now it’s time for his story, a new one,’ smiling at his old buddy, mind roaming in some whisky infused celestial no man’s land while Barry’s eyes remained morosely fixed on the dry glass at the bottom of his fourth whisky.
‘Clever, Vash, very clever.’
‘Haven’t finished yet. That’s when my story starts!’ And, in case his old friend had missed the subtlety of his convoluted insight, which he had, and trying not to look too smug at the same time, ‘You know … the Mystery.’
Maxwell stirred, feeling it an appropriate time to add weight to the profundity of the moment, ‘Baz doesn’t need bloody mystery. He needs to come up town and get a mistress with a nice pair o’ pups.’
Barry wasn’t sure if Vashna’s wordplay was taking the piss, but it really didn’t matter, his good hearted intentions combined with Max’s simple vulgarity had worked their magic on him once again and he found that he hadn’t forgotten how to laugh. So when Barry woke the next morning the words come up town, first from Melinda, and now these slumped and snoring reprobates,