listening to Mr Lo. He had come to Sydney, he said, for only one thing, to become a top man in building Hi-Li. He saw that Hi-Li would come to Sydney before it came to Penang, so his plan had been to get experience with Hi-Li here and then go home when they started Hi-Li there.
I felt the rain. My head was running with sweat and the rain was pleasant, but I should have been out getting a tarpaulin. I got the architect to accompany me downstairs and I took some money from the till. I gave him enough to buy a T-square and kept enough for the rent of the tarp. Then, because I could not wait to brief him, I walked with him up to Sayer's. I did not want him worrying about the skylight, but he could get to work on the accommodation. I had a lovely plan for making rooms with walls of fish tanks and Venetian blinds in front. It would have worked. We could have had light, movement, the sky, privacy, the works. I did not realize that he did not understand, that all he wanted to do was build Hi-Li, that I was bamboozling him with fishes.
But I made a bigger mistake, i. e., I imagined my client in the matter of the reconstruction was my son. Quite incorrect. But as I walked back through the storm with Mr Lo I did not know this. I used the phone at the town hall to order a tarpaulin from Jordan Brothers'. I entered the emporium already calculating the weight of water the fish tanks would add to the fourth gallery.
When Goldstein grinned at me I knew something was up. She stood at the rail. She smoked a cigarette and had a glass of beer in her hand. I did not realize what had changed her until I saw, not ten yards from her, Rooney's eyes. They were, of course, in Emma Badgery's face.
She showed me her teeth. I lifted a lip. No more was necessary between us.
51
While all other directions afforded great security, that eggshell roof, even when intact, sometimes made Emma giddy with anxiety. When she heard the bullwhip crack and saw the sky fall in, she felt a terror so great that it was necessary for her to crawl -she could not stand -down the stairs to find her husband.
Her arrival was heralded by the staff, and Charles, already in a panic about his building, ran up the stairs to meet her.
I knew none of this. I did not understand Emma's requirements in terms of shelter, sustenance and protection. I did not know about the meeting on the stairs. She had defeated me, but I was not yet aware of it.
I sat, that night, on the rubble in the middle of the kitchen trying to work out a way to get the broken bricks down to the ground floor. The tarpaulin flapped like a spinnaker above the skylight and although the wind came through the missing section it was not unpleasant to me -no more than sea air and spray – and I never thought it would be to anyone else. I sat there on the pile of bricks with a leashed lightglobe circling above my head, an echo, if you like, of the old goanna who lay beneath its similarly moving ultraviolet light elsewhere in the gallery.
My view of the gallery, and the goanna's swinging light – a necessary medication to prevent the onset of rickets – was nicely framed by the stepped edges of the high brick arch and, within that, the hard black lines of the RSJs. On the right-hand side I could see, through the lattice, Goldstein at work at her desk. She had a moon-warm light beside her and, as I watched, I saw her stop writing and run her hands through her tangled blue-black hair. I was still under the impression that she was writing a letter, and that, of course, is the trouble with schemes, that they begin as a celebration of happiness and end up leaving you blind to the people on whom your happiness depends.
I could not see Emma, but I knew she had locked herself up in her cage and would not talk to her husband. I had seen him pacing up and down around the bars and pleading with her. She had the children in there with her and I could make them out, could see Henry's dark unhappy eyes as he stared out into the gallery. He would not wave when I waved to him.
Mr Lo was at his drawing-board.
I sat on my pile of bricks and tried to work out a simple lift. I picked up a brick and started to scratch a plan on to it with a nail. It was then I noticed the thumb print in the corner. This is common enough with bricks of this age, produced by convicts down at Brickfields, but I had never been so struck with it before.
I was looking at this, considering a man's thumb print baked into a clay brick, when Charles came up the stairs he had exited so furiously an hour before and, rather than going grovelling to his wife, he came to me.
I was pleased to see him. I made room for him on my pile of broken bricks.
'You see this brick,' I said. 'You see the thumb print. You know how that got there? Some poor bugger working at Brickfields a hundred-and-fifty years ago did that. He turned the brick out of the mould and, as he did it, he had to give the wet clay a little shove with his thumbs, see. This one, and this one. They've all got it. So there you are. All around you, in your walls, you've got the thumb prints of convicts. How do you reckon that affects you?'
We, both of us, looked around. It was a big building. It was a lot of thumb prints to consider.
'Father,' he said, 'do you know how much money you've spent today?'
I was very tired, but I did my best to be polite. I explained that once you start a job there is no going back. Then, to get us back on a peaceful plane, I started to talk to him about bricks. I told him how some of them have special marks, the shape of clubs or spades for instance, pressed into them.
'For God's sake,' he shouted in my ear, 'at least have the grace to say you're sorry.'
'I'm not,' and, by Christ, I wasn't. I looked out from where I sat. Anyone could see I'd improved it out of sight.
'Not sorry?'
'Charlie, look what I've done.'
'It's a mess.'
'I'll clean it up. All I need is…' I was going to tell him about the cables, but he wouldn't let me.
'There's no water.'
'I'll connect it.'
'Don't touch it.' He moved himself off the rubble and stood over me. I stood up too. 'I'll get a tradesman.'
'Why pay a tradesman?'
'You're retired, Father. You're on the pension.'
'I've got to do something.'
'Go to the beach.'
'I'm too old for the beach. No one wants to look at an old man on the beach. I'll trap birds for you.'
'I already employ people to trap for me.'
'Then let me finish this.' My voice went a little strange. I didn't realize I felt so emotional about it.
He came and put two hands on my shoulder. 'Father…'
Then I saw her. She was out of her cage. She was standing in the corridor between Leah's lattice and the gallery rail. She had my Vegemite jar in her hand, but if there was a time for getting it back, it was past.
'Father… it's the money.'
Emma was smiling at me, but the smile was not friendly.
'Have the grace to admit the truth.'
'What truth?'
But we never got into it, because Emma came past me and embraced her husband. There, right in front of me, she hugged and kissed him. She gobbled his nose and licked his ear. I had to go away. I could not stand it. It was not the kissing and cooing. It was the bloody words.
'Oh, Emmie,' I heard my son say – a big man, fifteen stones – 'Oh, Emmie, Emmie, I'm sorry.'
52
Rosellas fucked, fertilized their eggs, laid them, hatched their young and did all the hard work feeding them.
