Features
‘Silence’
By Adam Curley
In a unique one-off experiment, we’re proud to present a collaboration between writer ADAM CURLEY and artist SARAH MARY CHADWICK. Chadwick has provided four illustrations (in pen, pastel and watercolour) for Curley’s short story ‘Silence’, which is making its debut. The story is a quiet, unadorned portrait of an Australian family whose members languish at loose ends.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] School ended and I decided to become the type of guy who said what was on his mind. I hadn’t been accepted to any of the fine-arts programs in Brisbane and was waiting to hear, fairly indifferently, which uni would take me for a general degree. It was as if I thought that by flipping off asides with an attitude gleaned from afternoon sitcoms, the brick split-levels and blinding windscreen reflections of Mansfield would rise up to meet a lowering sky and the world would transform into something I could see the edges of, something I could more easily master.
With only Dad and me in the house, that became a problem. ‘Curried sausages again?’ I said. ‘What, are we trying to win bums of the year?’ When he asked me to take the HiAce for a service in Mt. Gravatt, I said, ‘Sure, and while I’m there I’ll peruse the national museum and really learn something about life.’
My father, a handyman whose light-footed days were behind him and whose customers were now our neighbours and friends of friends, was as likely to laugh at my comebacks as he was to say, ‘Suit yaself,’ and spend the evening out tidying the yard, punctuating his silences by leaving the back door slam shut. I watched summer repeats of crime shows and thought occasionally to call someone from school, though the guys I hung around were better friends with each other, and the girls hadn’t noticed me. Besides, I wasn’t going to be the boy in the art room at lunchtime any more.
It was a relief to Dad and me both when my older sister Katie asked if I wanted to stay with her for a few days. Katie had moved in the spring with her boyfriend Nathan to the middle of a row of shacks on Petrie Terrace, near the city. Dad had to bite his tongue not to call it a shit heap in her presence. He waited until the two of us were back in the van for that appraisal. ‘I could do some work on it,’ was all he said to Katie, squinting along the raw staircase banister up to a window coated from the outside in dirt and vine weed. ‘Someone should check what the gutters look like.’
Katie breezed from the lounge room to the lower kitchen, not allowing the offer a settling place. She was interning as a reporter for the free city newspaper and was getting better at deflecting our father’s incursions of party-pooping. ‘You can’t just do what you like to a rental, Dad. And, anyway, of course we’re going to fix it up a bit.’
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Nathan was more of a hippie than anyone we were used to. He had a red tattoo of a lorikeet on the inside of his forearm and was softly enthusiastic about almost everything. He tucked his tanned feet between the worn cushions of their velvet lounge chair and gave me a wink. ‘Yeah, Mr Sanders, it’ll be magic. And just think of the history in these walls.’
He might as well have suggested that he and Katie were going to sleep on clouds and dine on rainbows for the look my father shot me.
Katie didn’t have to worry that Dad was going to show up on her doorstep each evening with his tools. Ever since Mum died, he’d made it his duty to keep her garden, and when he wasn’t doing that he was out in the shed or sorting through cupboards. His latest project was to acquaint himself with the second-hand filing cabinet Mum bought to give order to his invoices as well as household bills and odd bits of paperwork from teachers, doctors, solicitors. He had the first drawer’s files out on the floor of what we called the office. I’d made the mistake of sticking my head in the doorway as Dad was inspecting a letter or report on something or other. ‘Want me to advertise for a secretary?’ I said. Dad grumbled a response and went to bed without so much as mentioning dinner. When my own curled body, transposed onto an infomercial, startled me awake through dropping eyelids, and I remembered I had a shift at the supermarket in the morning, I dragged myself off to my room.
Katie threw a sheet over the lounge cushions, which she’d pulled to the floor under the window, to make a sleeping place for me. It was something Mum would have done, a plain yet unconventional solution, like the oversized filing cabinet and the border around her flowerbed made from a blown tyre left in the garage. At the foot of my temporary bed was a marble fireplace, the mantelpiece cracked right down the centre.
‘Can you make fires in it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Katie shrugged. ‘It hasn’t exactly been cold.’
Nathan was standing in the kitchen doorway with his feet crossed. ‘The chimney probably needs to be…’ He made the motion of brushing it out like a chimney sweep, thrusting a loose fist into the air.
‘Well, up you go then, old chap,’ I said. ‘I can feel a chill coming on.’
‘Ha,’ Katie said.
Nathan got a sly look on his face. ‘You’re being funny.’
‘No, no,’ I said, tugging the bottom of my T-shirt. ‘I mean it. I am the guest, after all. A cosy fire would be just fine, thanks.’
Katie smirked and looked up to the eaves. She and Nathan hadn’t done anything much to the room, anything much to the house, in the months they’d lived there. There were still folded cardboard boxes stacked in the sunroom.
‘I know what you mean, though,’ she said. ‘It does need something.’
“We listened to the seesawing music. I sucked on the joint, puffing three times to prove I knew what I was doing.”
Nathan was cooking a chickpea stew for dinner, with mint from the jungle that had overtaken the shacks’ back fences – you could see a wooden picket jutting out of a tree branch above a shoulder-height shed. We ate from plastic bowls on the back steps, the sunset peering through the thicket. After, Nathan filled three mugs with merlot from a cask and we went back to the lounge room. Katie lit tea lights on the mantel of the fireplace and put a CD on the stereo that not long before had been on her dresser at home. It now sat on a telephone table, the only other piece of furniture. I sat on my cushion-bed with the CD cover on my lap: Dirty Three, Ocean Songs.
Katie and Nathan propped themselves on the floor against the lounge chair and Nathan rolled a joint. Had I known Katie would be so fine with it, I’d have brought my own stash, which was under the bottom drawer of my bedside table.
‘You’ve got me thinking now, Mouse,’ Katie said. ‘What we could do in here.’
Only Katie and Mum called me Mouse, a nickname they’d given me for all the time I spent working on art projects in my room.
‘You mean a party?’ Nathan said, smoothing out the rollie with his fingertips.
‘No, I mean making it… I don’t know, more of a home?’ Katie stuck out her tongue at the cliché.
‘It would help if you had furniture, for a start,’ I said, though I knew they didn’t have any money. Nathan worked in a video store and volunteered at the community radio station in the Valley. I’d listened in while driving the HiAce but didn’t know any of the bands. Katie had told me, quite proudly, that he was training to become one of the presenters.
‘Dad would probably help,’ I added.
‘We could go scavenging,’ Nathan said. ‘Drive out to the tip.’ He lit the joint and passed it to Katie. She took a drag and, rolling her eyes to convey her obligatory dismay at the decision, handed it to me.
‘We could,’ she said, ‘but nothing’s going to fit in the Datto.’
I kept myself from again suggesting our father’s services. We listened to the seesawing music. I sucked on the joint, puffing three times to prove I knew what I was doing, and gave it to Nathan, who grinned.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] ‘We could paint,’ Katie said. ‘There are those old tins in the shed. Remember, we saw them? We could give the walls a coat.’
Before we knew it we were standing over four rusted tins of paint on the lounge room floor. One was a ten-litre, full and heavy. Nathan fetched a butter knife from the kitchen and pried open the cans. The paint in the big tin was cream, about two shades lighter than the walls in their current grubby state. The second was white and likely to be used as an undercoat, though the label was too faint to read. The next was canary yellow and the last, a small tin, was an amber colour, almost golden.
‘Well, they’re not too bad,’ Katie said. ‘The cream. Do you think someone went to repaint and decided it was hopeless? I can’t believe that.’
‘Yellow,’ I said.
‘The yellow’s unreal,’ Nathan said.
‘You’re stoned,’ I said.
‘Maybe apart from the yellow,’ Katie said. ‘But this is perfect. We’ve got the whole weekend. We’ll have our own little working bee.’
Nathan made a humming sound that I thought was meant to imitate a buzzing insect and I snorted. My head was swimming somewhere above me. Mansfield and high school were a blur far below.
‘I’m at the station tomorrow,’ Nathan said. ‘But I’ve got the night and Sunday.’
‘And I’ve got a shift on Sunday. The Dad is picking me up.’
‘Then I’ll have a different guy each day to help me,’ Katie said. She laughed and made a face. ‘Oh, the artist and my lover.’
“Even in the dim room, the white was fluorescent against the grubby, warped slab.”
In the morning we dragged my bed to the kitchen and used old copies of the city newspaper to cover the floor that met the wall opposite the fireplace. The wall was bare apart from a few nails for pictures, of which there were none. Some of the pages contained stories Katie had written, small items on deaths or accidents from the back section of the paper, before the notices. It looked so bold, my sister’s name in black print. We stirred the white undercoat with a stick from the jungle, which Nathan had stripped of bark and washed under the kitchen tap before he went off to work. He’d also found two useable paintbrushes in the shed, as well as the frame of a roller, but no cover for it.
‘We’ll just have to do the edges for now,’ Katie said. She had her hair tied up and had brought more CDs from the bedroom. ‘You’re the painter, you can lead.’
‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘Nope, I’m not being held responsible for this.’
‘What do you mean, not any more?’ Katie said.
‘You at least do the first damage.’
Katie took her brush and slopped a great stroke of white onto the wall, stood back and admired her work. Even in the dim room, the white was fluorescent against the grubby, warped slab. By midday there was a fluorescent border around the wall as well as the adjoining wall and around the fireplace. We took a break to drive to Kelvin Grove for sandwiches and to buy a second roller and roller covers from the hardware. When we got home, the phone rang. I could tell it was Dad by Katie’s impatient negotiations. She didn’t mention the painting.
‘What did The Dad want?’ I asked when she hung up.
‘Hard to say. He wanted to know which file Mum put our birth certificates in?’
‘He doesn’t have any jobs today?’
‘He’s on one of his bloody missions,’ she said.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] I considered whether or not I should call home later on, but when Nathan got back, the music was turned up, a joint was lit and we painted some more, finishing the undercoat. The room was white and clean and smelled of weed and paint, a smell that took the character of a medicated ointment as we drank more merlot and Katie and Nathan danced barefoot on the newspaper. Nathan took me upstairs when Katie went for a bath. We sat on the end of their bed and he removed a paperback from a pile on the floor. Katie’s dresser was a jumble of their combined necklaces, pendants on leather, Katie’s bangles and some of Mum’s old jewellery. ‘You’ll thank me, man,’ he said and put his arm around me, handing me a worn copy of Tropic of Cancer.
I knew in the first pages why he gave it to me, the sex and artists, and even though I didn’t read much of it, I fell into a dizzy sleep with the words pushing out of my chest and my boxers, dancing through the dark old house, but in particular those first few lines, which I’d gone back to as I skimmed the pages: I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
When Dad came to fetch me for work, it was decided that I’d return in the evening and stay until we’d painted the whole of the downstairs. Dad stood in the sunroom, silently inspecting the undercoat and the beginnings of the topcoat, which a shirtless Nathan had started on, the radio turned down upon Dad’s arrival.
‘We could have plastered all those dents first,’ Dad said. ‘We could still do it. I probably have some putty in the van. It wouldn’t take an hour.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Katie said. ‘It’s no big deal. Mouse will be late for work.’
Dad frowned as we turned onto the motorway. ‘Did you at least check the expiry dates on the paint?’
‘Why, yes, sir,’ I said, even though I had where the dates were legible. I waited until we were in the car park of the supermarket to ask if he had any jobs booked for the day.
‘The problem is everyone’s do-it-yourself,’ he said with his usual judgement of the fact. ‘I’ve got enough to do at home.’
‘Looking for birth certificates?’
‘I found those, smart arse,’ he said, but he couldn’t sustain his annoyance. ‘Under “K” for “The Kids”, would you believe? Made that discovery at three in the morning.’
‘Well, as long as you’re using your time wisely,’ I said.
“We reached into the jungle to grab handfuls of stem and leaves and brought it all back to us in choreographed lunges.”
In the supermarket, while I was unloading a pallet of Corn Flakes, one of the older women asked when I’d hear about uni. ‘Three weeks,’ I told her. She said I must be nervous to find out my future and for a second I was, nervous as hell there amongst the boxes. Later, I sat on the floor of the lounge room and watched as Katie and Nathan rolled great sheets of cream over the walls. Up and back they went, making the house new. When I was stoned enough, I picked up a brush to help.
We finished the lounge room and my bed was again moved the following morning, upstairs into Katie and Nathan’s bedroom, so we could paint the kitchen. Katie went off to her internship and Nathan and I got to work on the undercoat. It was a finicky job, getting around the pantry and the sink. I left the finer details until last, painting only the main areas and letting Nathan get ahead. I wasn’t disappointed when we ran out of the white paint with the room only half done. Nathan rolled a cigarette and we sat on the steps overlooking the jungle.
‘What do we do now?’
‘I don’t get paid till Tuesday,’ he said. He held his black curls off his forehead. ‘Flat broke, man.’
I shuffled my feet on the step and leaned back onto my elbows. ‘We could get blitzed.’
Nathan looked into the kitchen, checking over what we’d achieved. ‘I have to be at the station soon,’ he said and went in to clean the brushes in the sink before disappearing upstairs. I was still on the steps, still staring into the jungle, when he came down wearing a fresh T-shirt and jeans. ‘Why don’t you come?’ he said. ‘You can see how it all works.’
‘Nah,’ I said, ‘that’s OK. This face is not for radio.’ I asked if I could pinch some weed to smoke while he was gone.
‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘You’re gonna sit around by yourself?’
‘And so much is going to happen,’ I said.
‘Well…’ he said and went back upstairs. He handed the pouch to me, this time shirtless.
‘Come to your senses, Nancy?’ I said.
‘I guess they won’t mind if I miss a shift,’ he shrugged. ‘All I really do is answer the phones.’
We stayed on the stairs the rest of the afternoon, save a trip inside to find snacks and to get Tropic of Cancer so that Nathan could read out the dirtiest parts. He stood, wobbling on the top step with his feet held together, beaming with stoned delight. ‘There is a bone in my prick six inches long,’ he announced to an invisible audience. ‘I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania!’ I frog-hopped onto the dirt and threw half a rice cake at him, and he threw the book at me, missing me and landing it in a web of guinea vine.
I went to retrieve it, grabbing the vine and wrenching the book closer, but in the heat of the moment I continued pulling until the whole web was coming apart from wherever in the jungle it had attached itself. Nathan leaped over to help. We tugged at the vine ropes, our hands shredding the leaves and turning gooey green. ‘Heave, Nancy!’ I shouted at Nathan. We co-ordinated our attack; we reached into the jungle to grab handfuls of stem and leaves and brought it all back to us in choreographed lunges. I growled at the wall of nature, used everything I had to bring it down. ‘Heave!’ Nathan shouted back to me, his bare torso slapped by leaves and snapped branches, the vines grating my fingers.
We were coughing and laughing, bent over and holding our knees, a tangle of flora at our feet when we’d exhausted ourselves. I stood upright and looked at the hole we’d created in the jungle, a hole that looked to the street and clearly to the sky. We could see the houses beyond the backyard with their trimmed hedges, thin mowed lawns and neat fences, as if my father had been set on them.
‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Holy fuck.’
Nathan wiped sweat off his chin and went inside.
“Every fight that summer was in honour of the same thing; every evasion was a blind rush toward something else.”
I didn’t stay to finish the painting. That evening Katie returned from work to find us sprawled on the floor, stoned and nothing further done. Nathan had been quiet all afternoon. I had a fair idea why, but I wasn’t willing to admit to it. ‘What’s all this, ya lazy buggers?’ Katie said, her shoulders weighted with cloth satchels containing books and papers, the bag straps crisscrossing two mismatched necklaces from her dresser. She looked so much like our mother, the last daylight behind her as she stood over us.
‘This is what happens when you leave us alone,’ I said. ‘You only have yourself to blame.’
Later, I heard them arguing upstairs. I assumed it was about the mess in the yard or the fact that Nathan had skipped his radio shift, but in hindsight it could have been about anything. Every fight that summer was in honour of the same thing; every evasion was a blind rush toward something else. Katie came down to suggest I move my bed back to the lounge room seeing as the paint fumes had died down. ‘I am sorry it’s not a more comfortable place to sleep, Mouse,’ she said. ‘Hopefully, someday…’
I worked a double at the supermarket the next day and Dad picked me up and took me home. On my way to my room, I stopped at the entrance to the lounge. There on the floor were all the items from the filing cabinet, every form and letter and bill and receipt, laid out neatly in rows, from one wall to the other. Dad stood next to me, looking over it, an expansive grid of our past.
‘I wanted to get my head around it,’ he said. ‘Get it into some kind of order.’
‘Dad,’ I said, but that was all I had.
I stayed up and watched a DVD, glancing every now and then at the sheets of paper lined up on the carpet. When I woke, sometime in the dark early morning, the movie had ended and the blue glow of the title screen was spread over the wall and ceiling. I might have still been dreaming, or half awake, but it looked like one of the great artworks, or one from my future. A glorious, rising riot.
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