three. Charlie wouldn’t have fluorescent lighting and no day passed there without me risking my life up a ladder replacing incandescent bulbs.
The workshop was as Charlie had left it on the day he flew to Perth to attend the marriage of his youngest granddaughter to someone in the quarry business. His idea had been to be back inside twenty-four hours but he had been prevailed upon to spend ten days with another grandchild and his family.
Before he left, Charlie said to the workshop, not to me, ‘For what do I need a holiday?’
I was under a three-metre-long table, made of red cedar cut in northern New South Wales before World War One. Charlie bought the timber in 1962, wrote the date on it in pencil. I was examining the perfect fit of the wooden buttons that fixed the tabletop to the frame and would allow the timber to move seasonally for a few centuries until it stabilised.
‘You’ll probably never want to come back,’ I said. ‘It’s still warm. Hot. More than hot.’
He banged a huge fist on the tabletop directly above my head, causing me to feel that I was fainting.
‘Hot? You tell me what’s hot good for. One thing, you tell me.’
I crawled out, tympana still vibrating, got to my feet, braced myself against the table. ‘People go outside and do things, go to the beach, swim.’
Charlie made his pitying noise, a sort of snort enhanced with nasal sounds. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘They waste time. You think Mozart went to the beach? You hear that Liszt was a lot of the time swimming? What use is swimming, anyway?’
‘It keeps you from drowning,’ I said. ‘In deep water.’
He rolled his cheroot between thumb and two fingers, puffed at it, shook his head in a worried way. ‘Jack, Jack,’ he said, ‘don’t go in the deep water, how can you drown? What use is swimming then?’
‘I need some time on that,’ I said. ‘What do I do while you’re away?’
He turned away, walked off towards his machines to touch them goodbye, said over his shoulder, ‘Pack up and deliver the library, the lady’s waiting.’
I followed him. ‘Me? Are you mad? Mrs Purbrick’s paying a fortune for Charlie Taub.’
‘I told you already, Charlie Taub the woman got. You put a couple screws in the wall, that’s it. When I come back, I check.’
‘Charlie, that’s not a good idea. I could ruin your reputation.’
He wound the blade of a table saw up, wound it down, an action serving no purpose. ‘So ruin,’ he said, subject closed. He turned his head in my direction. A new subject. ‘The one with the horsetail, you know?’
I knew. The property developer who’d turned the old chutney factory in Carrigan’s Lane into four desirable inner-city New York-style loft apartments, lifestyle choice plus once-in-a-lifetime blue-chip investment opportunity not to miss.
‘I know,’ I said, with an icepick in my heart.
‘Six hundred thousand dollars.’ Charlie pointed around the space.
‘An offer?’
‘From the agent. Clive, Clive somebody.’
‘Clive Miller,’ I said. The repulsive Clive, gone on from accepting fellatio in lieu of rent and from dudding poor tenants out of their rental bonds to sitting on boards and living in the best part of Kew. Clive Miller embodied the recent history of Fitzroy.
‘That one. Nine hundred pounds I paid. One hundred and fifty cash down, five quid a week.’
‘So?’ I said.
Charlie straightened, ran a hand the size of an oven glove over the burnished surface of the cabinet, tested the stability of the fence.
‘So?’ I repeated, wanting to know, at that moment.
‘So?’ Charlie said. ‘So?’
‘Are you selling?’
‘Selling?’ The large head turned around, eyes under thatch bundles regarded me. ‘My workshop? So I can go to Perth and learn to swim? So I don’t drown?’
‘Just asking,’ I said, trying as nonchalantly as possible to get oxygen to my gasping little lung sacs.
Now I walked around the workshop, touched a few machines, just to comfort them, spent five minutes studying Mrs Purbrick’s library. It was pure Charlie Taub: classical elements — pilasters, mouldings, cornices — but pared of all showiness. The eye was drawn first to the beauty of the wood, then to the perfect balance of the design, its understatement and severity, and then, perhaps, to the craft of the joiner.
The ensemble, missing only its top and bottom trimmings, stood assembled in a corner of the workshop. It had been sanded, grain-sealed, shellacked and polished by Charlie’s finishing man, the voluble Arthur McKinley, retired coffin-maker. That work had taken six weeks. To reach the stage where the finishing could begin had taken a mere eight months because Charlie had set aside three days a week for the library. Progress might have been even faster had he had someone other than me to assist him. But speed had never been a concern for Charlie. He didn’t hear clients’ questions about how long a job would take.
Once, in the early days, entrusted with a small table, anxious about my progress, I asked, ‘When does this have to be finished?’
Charlie had been rough-planing an 18-inch walnut board with a block plane, working at an angle to the grain to avoid tear-out. The thick plane steel, sixty years old at least, honed and strapped, could clean shave a Gulf Country feral pig. With each stroke, long translucent shavings whispered through the plane’s throat, bending back with the grace of a ballerina’s arm.
‘When it’s finished,’ he said, ‘that’s when.’
I went to the storeroom at the back and got out the packing blankets, World War Two army blankets Charlie had bought in the 1950s. Then I disassembled the library. There was not a screw in it; secret wooden locking wedges held it together. By 8.30 a.m., I’d finished wrapping and taping the pieces. I was waiting for the water to boil and thinking about my anchovy-paste sandwich when I heard the vehicle outside.
Cam was in his stockbroker gear — chalk-striped charcoal suit, blue shirt, silk jacquard tie — and carrying a dark-blue cardboard box. He put it on the steel trolley Charlie used as a table.
‘Breakfast,’ he said and opened the box. ‘Scrambled eggs and barbecued pork New Orleans style on Greek bread. Coffee. Blue Mountain.’
Fusion cooking was completely out of control. What chance did an anchovy-paste sandwich and a cup of tea stand? We got going, sitting on the chairs Charlie had rescued from a skip. The pork melted in the mouth, the scrambled eggs had a faint mustard and cream taste.
‘Southern barbecued pork? Greek bread?’
‘Good?’
‘That’s not strong enough. Who’s the cook?’
‘Greek bloke in Brunswick, used to live in New Orleans. He’s got a brick oven out the back, looks like a rocket ship. Fat rocket ship. Little pig’s in about eight at night, comes from his brother in the bush, the neighbour comes off shift at 4 a.m., checks it. Bit of bastin. Ready at seven.’
‘Write down the address.’
He nodded, looked at me reflectively, tongue running over his upper teeth. ‘Talked to Cyn again. She’s gettin better, not so vague now.’
‘That’s good.’
We chewed in silence.
‘The one, he’s got a tatt down the middle finger. Right hand.’
‘What kind?’
‘The Saint.’
‘No, don’t say that.’ The stick figure with the halo was St Kilda’s emblem.
‘She says she was at the stove, it came to her. The head and the halo. Halo bigger than the head.’
I took the cap off the coffee cup.
‘Can’t drink it without sugar. Needs sugar,’ said Cam.
‘No.’ I sipped. This was coffee, Harry Palmer coffee, sugar ruined it. ‘That’s it?’
‘No. Ring each side she thinks, gold.’
‘She should go back to the jacks.’
