This is an excerpt from Beauty - a novel-in-progress - featuring retired school teacher Mrs B and her tenant Adam. Adam is a freelance music writer and an artist. He constructs his works from charred fragments, broken public signs and wildly distorted domestic appliances. He is more hammer than chisel. In his spare time he volunteers at Kerry’s Museum of Shipwrecks. Keira is a climate activist.

The cottage is always quiet at night, his half-sleep breathing to the rhythms of the ocean, each wave-thump of muffled timpani.

But some mornings he is woken by flame-green parrots screeching down the tin roof. They fly up and begin again, shrieking in parrot play as if they know he is down there in the dark, curtains closed, trying to sleep. They perform crazily and happily, he sure of it. He hears everything together: each wave-thump on the beach, the blue timpani of the ocean, cars heading off to work, the parrots laughing off-key and, soon enough, the clinking of Ben’s chain keeping time.

He throws back the curtains. Light parades in the glass.

Too often he is waking not to the morning sounds from the ocean, but the 3am dark of insomnia, and then not sleeping for however long, then waking again at 6am without enough sleep between these witching hours (his kind) and then leaning out of bed at 9am feeling he hasn't slept at all.

Insomnia is not itself. An animal it is forever forgetting where it lay down to rest. As unihemispheric as a fish, it keeps one eye open. As a rhetorician it says the same thing over and over and that same thing is pointless. As a person it is the nagging neighbour you try to avoid and keep finding around every corner.

So what does he do? The online news. There’s nothing like reading the sordid and sorry news of the world to ease you into sleep.

Insomnia is not an art form. If it was, he'd be a genius. After these ragged nights he really does feel like a Picasso, not the Picasso, a Picasso. Eyes on the wrong side of his face.

The wooden child in Kerry’s museum has begun to bother him. It is the only item in the display that follows Adam around. In his thoughts, that is. He carries the mental images of very few of the objects in cabinets; unlike their actual centuries-old survival, they fade from in him. Not so the massive black anchor Kerry values above all else, the item a crane lowered through a opened upper deck to position in the centre of the hull. Not the bulky diving suit Kerry has arranged standing upright beside the footing of one of the masts. The heavy canvas and the copper domed head piece with hinge and clamp to secure its circular glass facepiece the size of a plate. The man in the iron mask, made of copper.

The last time he went down the museum it took him an hour to realise Kerry had placed a plaster human head inside the helmet, its blank face staring out, trapped forever in a heavy suit, trapped forever on dry land. Funny bugger. Kerry had told him that neither love nor money would ever make him get inside one of those suits, submerge himself with barely any freedom of movement, sinking down like a pearl diver to the bottom of a harbour, to repair some cabling. Relying on the air pump oofing and gulping on the boat above him, passing air down the long pipe into the helmet. Even alive and well, he said, it would have felt like death.

Not the unforgettable child. The unknown child… made of wood.

Now he dreams of it. Where is the mind, and what is it? The child is there.

His inside evenings are solitary. Except for the bees, these companions he never sees. Today he reads of another bee issue, other than insecticides, devastating bee colonies world-wide. In Australia bee people in the industry, and perhaps even the bees, are worried about varroa mites, and by wild honeybees carrying the mite. Varroa destructor. These tiny mites are parasitic on bees and bee brood, and over time may cripple colonies. Are his bees good or bad bees? And since they look like European honeybees and 'wild' is a wild exaggeration, it merely nominates them as not-in-captivity, not as hot-tempered and nor as Indigenous - so should he report them?

The busyness in his cottage is not a commercial hive.

He reads of the government setting bait stations established to kill off wild honey bees with fipronil, whatever that is. Worse, the bees are attracted by design to eat this poison and take it back into the hive, becoming an even more disturbing thing, tiny, inadvertent agents of their hive’s death. How much sadder can it get?

Like the mass killings of cattle to fight off foot-and-mouth disease, it is a shocking way to protect commercial hives. Everyday insecticides and herbicides are dangerous enough. Now the heart-wrenching destruction of entire bee-farms, hundreds of hives per business, God knows how many beautiful busy and bees. It is a tragedy. The farmers are then bankrupt.

When he sees Mrs B outside, he goes out, asks her if she knows what fipronil is. Of course she does. She even draws it in molecular form, as she had for the plant growth hormones.

Why? she asks him. She has forgotten the bees.

He's grown very fond of them. The endless hum of live action, their ancient organic farming in the wall, bee beauty in their dancing, in their pouches of golden pollen, how he realised there was a mechanical metaphor in bees, crossing through his memory, between the low hum and strain of his hopeless little car, and the many-thousand cylinders of the hive running sweetly on and on, and going nowhere.

Anyway, it isn't only bees he shares the house with. There are several goannas underneath the floorboards and sometimes he opens the sliding door to find one of them lying flat on its belly, sunbaking on the wooden decking; now happily inert, this mall and ancient creature feeling a millennia of warmth rising from the boards in a single day. At night Adam hears at least two possums in the ceiling, and every morning parrots and cockatoos on the roof, and if he wanted and went outside to chisel into one of the floor stumps, he'd no doubt find termites.

In high winds the house creaks and sighs. He is not responsible for the house guests. Their co-habitation is casual. If the house was lifted and tilted by a giant hand they would all be face-to-face.

Harbingers

~

He has no shortage of companions. Animal calls, bird calls, these aural colours. Magpies singing, crows barking, currawong calling in their chirrup-chirrup eccentricity. The senses – we think we know them – until they escape and merge in sight and sound. On the first week of rental in winter he and Kiera had arranged a birdbath on the decking. Small birds arrived almost immediately, coming from wherever to splosh their feathers on early mornings, and in summer they swam breaststroke through its shallow waters. Finches, silver-eyes, lorikeets.

Overnight the water froze. Adam placed a coin on the surface. In minutes the coin melted its own shape in the thin ice and sank to the bottom. Still visible. Every so often he emptied the bath to scrub it clean but not before reaching through the water and lifting out the coin. He felt like Kerry, salvaging valuables from the water.

There is something Adam hears in the sound of the well-pump each morning, or late in the afternoon as the sun sinks over the bay. Separately and together, these impressions are the sound and sight: of the pump, and the Benchleys, and of Adam sitting out on the decking, all are openly addressing the east in the morning, the west in the evening, the well-pump beating the rhythm of the here-and-now and the eternal. More than once he feels it like a sequence of repetitions and modulations in the music of Philip Glass, the sun-god of Akhenaten sinking into the ocean.

But who needs a sun-god when most days he can see an osprey moving slowly above the inlet or (if he’s lucky) plunging into the sea? In the glare of morning sunlight, in the golden late-afternoons, the sea-breeze buffeting its plumage. Ospreys are unique, Mrs B has informed him, for being the single living member of the family Pandionidae. Not a hawk, as he’d imagined, but related to hawks and eagles in the family Accipitridae.

Adam and the osprey, as singular as Akhenaten and his Sun.

~

Adam is repainting the forward half of the hull all the way down to the keel. It has always amused Kerry when a visitor asked to get underneath to inspect the keel. Mate, he said, the museum is on the inside.

Quiet today, no visitors, no doubters. Kerry has warned Adam about rain coming in later, hence getting the painting finished … pronto? He’s not always right about rain, but the man knows his sky. A diver has to. Disastrous going down for an hour and surfacing to a heavy storm.

Earlier in the day Adam had felt a deep ache in his shoulder. From chopping wood recently? Or had he worked harder than usual carrying Kerry’s solid planks? Now the balm, oddly, of wide-brushing left-to-right and back, applying new black paint to old black paint. Like an old Malevich. This section of hull is directly underneath visitors walking onboard; the bay side of the Freya is unseen, unattended, merely smeared with creosote to protect it from the weather.

When he has finished he rises from the gloom of the hull into daylight. He cleans the brushes in turpentine and wraps them in rags, stores them in the deck hold. He is no longer upset by Kerry’s innocent image crushed new-borns. The wide-brush to-and-fro of painting, repeated again and again, free of any artistic anxiety, has been cathartic. So much so, he hardly notices the encroaching weather Kerry has mentioned.

Until he is caught in its heavy torrents: this time he feels like Adam, the first man drenched in a downpour. He is soaked through by the huge drops, by the sheer force of the fall, by the crazy wildness plunging onto him. This rain is lusting for skin. It is intoxicating. He is dumbfounded, then elated. He begins running home, not to escape the rain, not from disorientation, but because he is so energised he cannot not run. He is running, he keeps running. It is happiness running him. Running so easily his limbs seem more like leaping, his body flying and feeling not a single element of gravity. How can this be?! On and on he runs. He leaps.

Then sunlight breaks through and he is crazily engulfed in the shine. He is walking inside thinning rain, its bead curtain of glittering sunlight, a rupture where the world glows and sprays. In a sudden shift he is lifted up to where he is so beyond happy he is free, ecstatic, anarchic, sure he knows an extraordinary secret. He is like a man on acid.

The mere world of cause and effect is gone, gone from time, gone from loss, riven by shimmering spray and sounds pealing at such a pitch he is synesthesia, and the sun is bouncing blindingly on the street… if his hair is wet and stuck to his face this weather is deeper, and rushing through him.

Even as he reaches the old driveway, he is surging like someone on amphetamines. Then he sees her standing at the garden beds.

Mrs B is drenched from head to foot. She has lifted her arms, her head is tilted back, her eyes, her eyes, are closed in bliss. Rain is falling on her bare face. She too. She too. Ichi-go ichi-e. Both of them.

As soon as she sees him she cries out:

‘Isn’t this beauty? This lovely rain?’

Then it has gone. They stand there sharing not only the drenching but the way rain, unstoppable for a few minutes, has just … died. (Like the roses.) Out in the open all is a pristine stillness. As if the moment is saying: What? Me? I wasn't raining.

So he waits, captivated by the lull or its leaving, his attention on how the standing water on clay beside the house is the colour of turmeric, and over by the mint bushes it is the colour of tea.

How he cannot see but hears tiny frogs, a tiny a capella. Frogs in paper-deep water, blinking of life underneath. At the water’s edges, tiny handstands of grass.

~

Adam is no tiny version of anything. He is stocky and overweight, his face is tanned from daily walks and hours working on the deck of the museum. His hair hangs over his face until he pulls it back like a cool movie star. During the rain he felt more like Beethoven glorious after storms, stamping uphill as the rain became heavier again, the Pastoral Symphony playing in his head, its downpour of emotion, its storms, long hair matted on his face, his clothes wet through.

Program music. Awful! But his aches have gone.

Working with the metal, heating then hammering his saucepans, his frames and chairs, he is much more up-to-date in cacophonous derangement – in its raging hiss and spit, he is flat-out punk.

Two years earlier he had designed and built a theatre set for an avant garde production of voice and instruments. The soundscape was intense, intermittent, from drones to screams. The stage was built up with shifting floors of his charred rubble and walls of burnt wood. It was a wildly expressionist failure! Cool in that sense. An event cooked up to dramatise fire and climate change, supported by an ardent audience for a few nights … then no one. The kind of work that closes in the second week.

He returned to his other career, of writing about music. For years he had been a variety of cool: as founding editor of a musical journal, eventually moving it online. His editorial ethos was one of inclusion: contributors wrote about music of different styles, classical and modern or contemporary classical in his case, jazz, experimental, rock, anything wild, but nothing overtly commercial. He commissioned articles from around the world, the range as wide as he encouraged, about music and mathematics, music and cultural expression, neurological studies of music and the brain.

His career has been one of listening. Then writing about listening. With a deeply retentive memory he carries the music he never composed as a playback in his head. Because he cannot compose it, but writes about it, he sometimes feels he is a piece of music. Like the pastoral symphony in the rain.

Having two years ago sold his online music journal, its patrons, its advertising, and its goodwill, he is freed from the finding and funding as well as the finessing, and happy to be an occasional contributor. An honorary contributor. An esteemed occasional. He’s not retired; he’s remote.

Cool from a distance.

He will post another article this morning. Late by one diurnal shift – it was due the night before. A review, not of a CD or a concert, no concerts to be heard out here on the south coast, but of a book by Alex Ross, a man who writes about music. Adam is a man writing about a man who writes about music.

Alex Ross also writes about noise: the refined bedlam of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Or maybe un-refined according to your ear. Kerry’s ear, for instance. Composers like Schoenberg. And Adam makes noise. So he is a man who makes noise writing about a man who writes about noise. Well, he is at a remove, if he can’t employ this tautology, who can?

Adam once sat in a concert where Sergio de Pieri, organ virtuoso, played a piece by Gyorgy Ligeti full of detail and finger fluency, until the moment the score required the organist to play the double keyboards with his forearms. As if planting chaos into it. The hall filled with stupendous sound. Then silence. A tiny red light in the organ facia came on, just discernible to the audience. The silence was part of the composition, the big fooled-you coming after cacophony.

It wasn’t. The organ had died.

Accompanied by a group including Sergio, Adam led the way down to the concert hall gallery where the finalists of a national art exhibition were still hanging. Adam had a work called Genesis, a painting of expressionist chaos and visual noise relieved only at the bottom RHS corner, which revealed a tiny realist progression of primates rising from apes to humans, the cliched image of evolution. Sergio stared at this painting that looked like Ligeti sounded.

Well? asked Adam.

I like this bit, announced the organist, pointing to the tiny bit of quiet realism.

Ligeti once wrote a piece for a hundred metronomes. Not silence is it? Nor is it what the world thinks of as music. It was a critique of ‘blinkered thinking’. The system, the shape, the players?

Or a rock band chafing at prettiness with unrefined and improvising madness. They are chaotic, they live chaotically, they sell chaos, but the music rises, ecstatic in the audience.

It is transference. It changes channels. Music wants to know us. Music wants us. Adam can write this!

For a few hours a week, though it can be any day of any week, he listens repeatedly to the chosen composers, the chosen forms, the conductors, the players (he hasn’t a recording of the metronomes but it is online). He is obsessed with listening. The drawn-out writing is silent, since digital keyboards are like small fish bunting at the glass of their aquarium. He remembers typewriter keys being hit and then hitting the paper on the roller, or electric typewriter keystrokes going off like a hair-trigger, the golf ball (as they called it) smacking the paper more like someone firing at targets on a shooting range. Noise. He writes about it as much as he makes it. Thus the punk soundtrack of the tympanum of his sculpture.

He emails his copy to the journal editor (now more famous than Adam ever was). Done.

~

Another idiosyncrasy of Adam’s is his manner of speaking. Interrupted by some inner over-thinking, or noise, he might pause mid-sentence, before starting again, as if his speaking is punctuated by deep commas. People find him strange. Then he places his silent stare on the person addressed. He thinks he is more or less normal.

His life with Kiera, also. On her first trip back from the city she despaired of the increasing mess in the house. Tired of all the charred wood and ash, his inks and rocks on the floor, she had asked him if he was at very least writing something these days, surely a new article?

He felt she was just making conversation, or perhaps some of her city friends wondered what the partner down on the coast did for a living. She walked into her study, retrieved some school forms she had to fill in, then returned with an expression of I’m waiting.

Then again, Kiera is one of those tall and slim women who just by standing there seem to be asking a question. This he has always loved. He likes questions.

Yet for Adam to answer would mean explaining not if but what he was writing. About composers who underwent (what could the right verb be?) decades of creative silence. Not deliberately like John Cage. The silence of nothing-written or nothing-any-good. Since artists can rarely explain how the work arrives, or the why – why it is they create – how can they possibly explain the non-arrival and the why not? Especially of music. Or how it arrives but isn’t good enough?

In contemplating this, Adam too had gone silent. The silly irony of it.

Adam had begun compiling his essays on the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. He told Kiera how in his twenties, he heard the Sibelius tone poem The Swan of Tuonela for the first time. It made a haunting impression.

He heard it in daylight. Now, every time he hears it, the music moves him like a long dark night. He loves the deep tonality, the autumnal violins and wintry cellos, the strings resinous above a cold inlet and behind the cold mist the cor anglais – as a white swan drifts into view, regal, mythic, mysterious. The swan, gliding across the lake of Tuonela.

The silent realm of the dead.

Something very like that, he told her, had struck Sibelius. After the great success of his 7th symphony, he began composing his 8th. Years passed. A decade. He promised the new work for performance, several times, then withdrew it. Another decade. And another. To imagine what this must have been. For decades Sibelius both wrote and never wrote his 8th symphony. Sibelius’s wife Aino eventually told people that Sibelius, by then in his 80s, took all the pages of his unseen and unheard composition and burnt them. After which he seemed to be much relieved.

‘Which assumes,’ Kiera said, ‘Sibelius was well and truly finished with it. Whereas you - have burnt yours and kept going.’

He added how even finding a title for such a book was a problem. Or a bit of fun. The music writer Alex Ross wrote a book called Listen To This, so Adam is (if he finishes) considering calling his book on silence Listen to This. The ABC music presenter Andrew Ford wrote Undue Noise so Adam is also considering calling his Undue Silence.

She had laughed, remembering his teasing humour. Knowing he’d probably call it something like On Creative Silence.

Creative silence reminds him of the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Gould’s interpretations of Bach were a revelation. Listeners heard the multiplicity of voices which Bach had inscribed within the music as if for the first time. They heard not one melodic line or voice, but two voices, or more. For old Bach to compose them was one thing, for a young Gould to play them, separately but concurrently, was astonishing. Where had they been hiding? At 24 years old when he first played in Russia, as an unknown Canadian pianist in the nation of great virtuosi, he presented a concert not of the great Romantic concertos, but of Bach. The hall was only quarter-full, with men and women in grey suits and black, thick-rimmed glasses, an almost sullen audience, behind them the empty seats a performer dies from. It was cold, airless, dutiful, like a family birthday without any alcohol. In Russia?

Then he began playing. His left hand released voices in the music no one had ever heard. Playing at unheard-of speeds, it was crazy, Bach so fast, no, it was impossible. At the first interval people could hardly wait to reach the exits. Gould slumped backstage from an emptying hall. He would come to hate performing.

But the grey souls were not rushing home. They were rushing to every phone booth they could find. Come here immediately, they shouted to their friends and musicians, this young man is a genius! No he's not playing Beethoven or Rachmaninov he is playing Bach yes yes of course you say that but what Bach! You must hear it! Get down here!

When Gould walked out to play the second half the hall was already filling, then over-full. By the time his concert ended people were sitting and standing from the front to the back in the aisles and roaring like a soccer audience. This young genius! And … Bach! They were ecstatic. They heard old Bach become young Bach, a revelation which rushed into them from … Canada?

Adam has listened repeatedly to Gould playing the Goldberg Variations struck impossibly fast in the 60s and more slowly, more touched with gravitas in the 80s. Silence was being altered. By then Gould was not silent: he hummed loudly as he played and you could hear it. Adam hasn’t only been listening to Bach, he has been listening to how Gould plays Bach and now that included the bloody humming. He has written about whether that matters. Whether it interferes with the listening, if it is or isn’t precious. Answer: yes, and no.

Music enters the limbic centres of the brain direct. There is nothing like its impact on the emotions. He knows how it excites him – his physical and emotional changes are so strong he cannot eat or drink when listening to Bach organ works. He is even moved, he admits, by someone playing a series of chords on a full organ. Just the sounds.

And who knows: when old Bach was sitting up in the organ loft pounding out his fugues, maybe even he hummed along with them. There was no one within twenty metres of him and his colossal music; even in its quietest moments, its most (almost, for a Baroque composer) tender passages, Bach might have hummed away unheard.

~

After driving for half an hour to the east, Adam turns north. Driving more slowly he looks for rubbish on the side of the road, for signs of tips, and every time he sees an old road with a sign, not a driveway to a farm, he turns into it and hopes for ruins or rubbish or paddocks far enough from homesteads, everywhere and anywhere loose wood, boards, planks, discarded fenceposts might be found. Then he parks and walks.

Today the smell of eucalyptus gum is strong in the windless, hot air of mid-day, a thick treed area he is walking through will, by late afternoon, if the wind stays away, become even sweeter-smelling, seductively gummy. It makes international tourists swoon, especially any of them keen to ritual uses of scents, to incense and what Adam thinks of as olfactory customs. Not here, though; no tourists drive these gravel tracks.

There is also the smell of smoke. Far off, perhaps. And old smoke, too. Someone has tried to burn several planks in a sandy clearing. Odd, since it’s good firewood for anyone with a chainsaw. Listening and watching for snakes, Adam uses one plank to lever others aside, and selects instead a section of laminated wood, inspecting its changed but generally intact surface. The lamination is good; it will lift into clearer definition after careful sanding and discrete staining, both done just enough to highlight the ridged areas without reducing the strikingly weathered appearance. Or he might saw it into sections. Then he finds a second section, even better.

A car is travelling along towards the cross-roads, followed by a large truck full of cattle. Off to the sale yards. The animals in the truck are quiet, but occasional bellows carry through the still air from a property further away. The pastures are pale and yellow, without rain now for several weeks. This far inland, they miss out on the squalls that blow in over the coast.

Back home, he smacks his collected objects hard enough to shake loose any hardened dirt or grass, then carries them inside to his shelves and benches.

Over time more and more unsightly mess has accumulated in the house. Kiera said this wasn’t an art, it was hoarding. A timber yard. A junk yard. The oblong and odd-shaped wooden objects he was carving, boxes of off-cuts, shards, signs, fragments of wood he has found on pavements, median strips, the ever-public verges and, far from sight if not smell, the council dump.

They decided to move their bedroom into the smaller room, allowing him the room with extra floor space and sheer cubic capacity. His everyday work had achieved higher recognition; henceforth the room was known as his workroom. Scattered on the floor and collected in cardboard boxes were hundreds of small wooden blocks, raw wood and painted, old and new, boards, shards (he loves the word shards), broken signs, offcuts from a carpentry shop on the outskirts of town, a chaos of small, hard shapes.

An exuberance of waste existence. Beautifully spiralling wood shavings, splintering boards, broken drills, rags and paint spills, bent nails and screws and thinnish triangular plastic-like leftovers from a geometry class and, to his embarrassment, the saddest objects of careless painting in the form of left-all-alone-uncleaned brushes now completely solid. And what about the increasing smell of volatile paints and finishes?

As a workroom it had a central work bench, solid and serious, plus a table and his free-standing ordered and re-ordered shelving. She had to co-habit with all this while she was teaching.

For him it was essential: it was his work. He was marked by it, stained and scarred by it. Hands-on manual work. He has the proof in these hands, the hands of a cat trainer, cut and scratched and so often bleeding, they were swabbed daily with an antiseptic liquid which he patiently left to set and dry. It shone on his skin like varnish.

Most of the time they sat and ate at the kitchen table, in the large old-fashioned kitchen. The gas stove and oven were old and gave off a slight smell of cooking, or its history, from the grime under the burners and inside the small oven. When they first looked the place over Kiera had half-expected to find a wood-stove in pride of place, the kind women cooked over during summer months as if facing into a furnace. The tiny lounge area was all she had for her work, but it was hers; since then he had spread into the lounge too. The cottage was an encroachment area.

It wasn’t, she explained, the only reason she had deserted him for a few months to join a climate action group in the city. Then again … living like this would be enough scare away most people. There are people in the city who live more orderly days and nights and mean much more to her for putting their lives on the line when it comes to climate action. Well, they glue themselves to their convictions. They protest, they insist, they stir up public emotions. But they don’t live in a junk-heap.

Adam is older than her, more than likely turning inward, so for him the city is simply more people to come to terms with. Mr B would agree with Kiera, were he to know. Mr B would say: the sea-level is going to rise higher every year until we (and all you artist types) drown. If he could speak, that is. You lot. When even the best of us will go, why should any of you remain? A nutty Pentecostalist kind of rave. So protest! Not that he would ever join them.

Is there sense of purgation in his artworks? Or perdition? It has occurred to him that art as a question is answered but never solved, thank god. There are many answers.

To value distortion and symmetry? Beat one into the other.

To reconcile severity and beauty? Shou Sugi Ban.

Paradoxes.

On his workbench he sets the wood over a metal sheet and flames up his blowtorch, the throaty roar louder in a closed room. Then he burns the wooden surfaces of cut and block-shaped wood as evenly as possible in some, unevenly in others. For this he does wear gloves, heat-proof gloves. Smoke swirls around him and, on good days, he even makes himself wear the mask he should wear on all days. The blowtorch's blazing but contained flame is as blue as a Perth sky, in this room more like Scotland, like Islay, reeking of Laphroaig. As each cools he sets fire to the next, the next, the next, he stacks this flat wood turned blackly slate-like on the edge of the bench nearest the steel brushes.

For those pieces he wishes to crackle, he burns more fiercely, harder, for longer. Better still, he wets the wood first, which deepens the burn. The entire surface splits a centimetre deep and lifts in a network of rectangular fragments, a patterned black claypan.

Once cooled, he brushes them back from char by hand. The steel bristles loosen the blackened surface until fragments spill onto the bench like loose leaf tea. They even smell like tea - Lapsang Souchong - coarse-leafed, smoky, pungent. From whiskey to tea.

He bangs the knob on his electric belt-sander and sands some of the pieces down until the grain shows through, heightened and brighter than the burnt wood, the natural growth and timelines of the timber as exposed as calligraphy. Whorls of grain in a field of char. He leaves some scraped but still blackened, others he sands into paler paddles then brushes wood dyes into them.

Dozens of smaller blocks, too fiddly to scrape, too small for the grain to show through, he dyes into darker colours.

Onto these shapes he chisels letters of the alphabet, numbers, Roman numerals, Chinese ideograms, figures, icons, symbols from anywhere, of anything. Alone these are close to meaningless, no context. Shapes: Arabic, Sanskrit, Thai and Cyrillic.

Letters inscribed over and into the grain. Any little C is easy, like an I or L with or across or slant re wood grain. But then an S crossing the grain three times! Or cut over a knot and, like a C, in sync with the burl of the grain. Then, oh, Z and X … Irregular grains are his choice.

He inserts each block into the wood-vice and tightens it, a safe, un-moving block to cut into, less chance of chisel or gouging tool slipping off the wood and into his hand. He does not want his inscriptions written in blood.

And obviously, no gloves for these finer motor actions, close-up and cutting. Gloves are clumsy writers.

Just for Kiera, he has cut signs and even assembled into the shapes the letters XR and also XR’s logo.

The finished blocks fascinate him. Just the single letters or numbers or shapes of punctuation, maths and chemistry symbols. This atomisation of language. Sometimes he chisels into the wood an entire word. Then he assembles them within a rectangular or square frame, at random, or nearly random, or patterning them by colour and field. 

He sits in his armchair and studies the assemblage he has just finished. Not that completion is quite apt for something so open-ended.

The dyes are too dull; the wood shows through like a small act of resistance. If colours seem saturated and strong, by the following morning they have become lesser. One of the best colourants is not even a dye: he soaks the blocks in beetroot juice. He really must visit the leather-maker. The maker of cabinets. Perhaps this man is also an artist, a Joseph Cornell.

Get back to work, then. Nothing like actual work to push aside the doubts. Work is present tense. If such works are the showing of life’s fragments, is a man trying to stick Humpty Dumpty together again, from parts never Humpty, never Dumpty. He burns and scrapes away at paradox, keeping just on its edges, neither lifelike nor incomprehensible.

His latest super blowtorch is like a pill for confidence. The gas hisses mightily then explodes like something angry torn open (hold on! hold on!) into a blue flame that roars in front of him, the dragon of his ideograms. As if the blue sky is all aflame.

It makes him excitedly happy.

If Mrs B fears the house will explode, she has every reason to.

Behind the cottage works there is a sawn-through tree stump as dense as a butcher’s block. After carrying out a red-hot pan with his welding gloves, he sits it upside-down on the block. Smoke begins to wisp around the rim, a wide-bellied pan which will leave a circle burnt into the wood, and the sweet smell of smoke blends with the odour of the hot metal.

He uses three increasingly heavy hammers: a ball-pein, a small sledge and a long-handled heavy sledge. The ball-pein he uses for dinting and denting surfaces is the closest he gets to fine motor skills. No pig’s bristle brushes for oil painting (he doesn’t even eat pork), no fine-tipped intricacies  of brushwork for photo-realism (which he detests), no three-glaze depths of colouring (all that varnish?). No. He has more brutal methods.

From a high upswing using both hands, he thumps the long-handled sledge-hammer down into its base. This is the uncontrolled collapse of metal. Again and again. The pan folds into itself. His face is furrowed, intense, as if copying the metal. Then he pulls on his leather gloves, turns the pan over and studies it. Using his smaller hammer he knocks a series of dents into the rim. The smaller sledge is now perfect for beating the metal into twists and bends. While the metal is still hot he swaps hammers until he is pleased with the warping and dinting. The pan, or whatever it is now, sits wonkily on its base.

It rocks when he touches it. The metal is hissing.

He realises there is another sun-shower above him. Nothing like the last one that felt like grace. He walks underneath the wide tree near his block. Standing underneath it he feels enclosed, as if shifted from what he has been doing and carried up into its branches. Rain is spraying through the leaf-light in waves of rainbow. It makes patterns in the foliage above him as brightly brilliant as stained-glass windows, a meaning of no words.   

It has a quality, a qualia, so sensuous and mutable he cannot replicate. Nor does he want to. He is a complementary artist. If the world cannot deliver its own depth of truth, he is making objects, or even un-making objects, to posit that difference, the complementary assertions of a maker. The perception these unsubtle shapes generate, unlike the foliage and the sun-shower, are counter-intuitive, bluntly deliberate, challenging. And yet, objects are reassuring. They are more present than us. They have no doubts.

That is a kind of beauty. Walter Pater felt that all art aspires to the condition of music and Adam along with many, tends to agree, though when he first typed that quote in an article he was unintentionally playing with rapidity himself, and he typed all art conspires to the condition of music.

But whose music? Schoenberg’s?

Because Adam is a hammerer. One day he will compile a kitchen, the benches, stovetop and oven, cupboards and cooking implements, with one unavoidable difference – everything will have been catastrophically damaged. The two grids over the gas rings heated and twisted into blackly skeletal geometric insects mating; the doors bent double horizontally, vertically; the pans as Kerry has seen them, warped beyond sanity, and dragged out onto the floor. Smokey shapes of fire and charring bursting up from the mangled oven door and staining the cupboards black.

This is how his mind digresses. He calls this lovely chaos: My Kitchen Rules.

Kiera will get a shock when she returns next. This art of the crumple-rate is recent and his perfecting (is that the term?) of the results is something she has heard more of than actually seen. She is going to get a shock. Because now she will see just how much of it there is.

How deadpan it is. His joke. (Perhaps.)

This is fiery and urgent, if not melodic, and not the youngest art he might make. But youngest in temperament, to break the tidy order of our lives - symbols of domestic routine and responsibility. He feels feisty. He is punk in some (even ridiculous) sense of the term.

He wants to be young again. He wants to attack.  He wants to offend.

~

Morning. He opens the blinds and curtains and returns to bed. Beside the window his shirts are hanging from an open clothes frame, the stainless steel coat hangers glinting like silver treble clefs in the sun.

The knocking at his front door is Mrs B. She stands there breathing. For a moment she says nothing. Then mentions her grandsons again, how they will be staying over soon. How the oldest boy used to stay in the cottage. Sometimes the mother did too. He’s not a bad boy just takes after his mother. Staying here kept them both out of trouble.

It occurs to Adam she might be asking if that would be alright, the boy, staying … with him? But no. She is talking about her daughter-in-law as a grudge and a sadness.

‘He always said he’d leave her. I’m all for marriage but it was eating him up. He was a nice boy. She was a problem.’

‘Men, you said before. And drugs?’

‘Drugs and men. Pretty easy to guess. And a bit mental? If I can say that these days. He promised he’d leave her.’

‘And did he? Leave her?’

‘Then he had the accident. It was careless and he wasn’t a careless person. But I won’t let myself think about his state of mind. There’s no point.’

‘He wasn’t going to.’

‘He was a softie.’

Until Mrs B remembers:

‘How about coming over for dinner, next Saturday? Instead of disappearing with his plate into his study Mr B has promised to sit down with all of us and if you're lucky, or unlucky, take your pick, he might deign to say something. You’ll have to eat quickly though, the boys aren’t just hungry all the time, they’re ravenous.’

‘Um. Thanks, Mrs B. I enjoy your meals.’ (He pauses.) ‘But I might pass this time.’

She looks at him, gives a hiccup of a laugh.

On her way back she stops, just once, head down.

~

Hunger. If not quite ravenous, his own appetite is near enough. He had laughed when he discovered there is a plant called onehunga. It’s a prickle.

He often eats after working, regardless of meal-times. Usually he cooks. Sometimes Mrs B invites him down to share a roast with the bemused Mr B. Sometimes he walks into town to eat Pub Grub, eating on the cheap. The main problem with burger and chips or the steak and chips he consumes like a starving man, is not the calorie and trans fats and cholesterol count, but the occasional drinkers close by, not the old guys who have slow testosterone, nor the young groups of men and women who are cool, but the mid-range Herald-Sun blokes - Ah, you’re a fucken artist, are ya.

Not a question.

Summer. The pubs are full of tourists. Brightly coloured shirts and blouses. People are walking past, car parking or pulling out into the traffic. The noise levels are up everywhere.

Adam is still relatively new in town. At first he was the stranger, that mask-like first stage, then the oddity, then a sometime drinker and eater, until he happened to tell the fishermen who drank there that he came from farming stock. Local. Long time ago, sure, but local enough, which he exaggerated to make it sound like from here, mate, and ten more years of working than he actually did. Pub listeners are not mathematicians. They listen for the code. Work, and hard work, and out in the fucking weather. (Like beating out through the waves.) Slowly they drank it in and talked around him, then hauled him up their words like the evening catch. He was a fisherman’s other-self: farming the flat waves.

A week earlier, just outside the pub, Adam saw an old bloke topple onto his knees and elbows on the pavement in front of him. Not a drunk, but a trip and fall, though now it looks like a act of prayer. The nerve shock of it rushed through Adam’s knees and elbows like a tremorous pain. He lifted a man up whose face was pale but nothing compared to the puce, pixelated look of his tongue. Adam helped the man into the pub and sat him down. The bloke dusted himself off, wobbled the joint of his right knee with his hand, then inspected his elbows. Satisfied, he looked up and eyeballed Adam.

‘Couldn’t lend us a few bucks and a beer could you, mate?’

This time there is no old conman. Someone’s mobile timer go off. The tone that plays sounds like perfume. While he is eating? Sometimes when he is here, un-noticed, he hears conversations that stay with him. Like now, a man in his late 40s, facing the beer taps and not the two guys beside him, is saying:

‘I was never sure if my dad had any respect for me, you know? I mean even when he was on the wagon cos he was dyin. Never said it.’

He pauses.

‘Then when he really was dyin. He never said it. Just wanted to stop dyin.’

The man burps. It sounds like u-huh, someone acknowledging a mistake.

Adam has ordered a steak and knifed away the first few slices from the fatty end of a scotch fillet. Over this hot succulence and red wine jus he hears more of the fathers and mothers who have left them unhappy. It’s a list children of all ages might keep.

These blokes have been talking down their parents in turns, like shouting drinks:

My mother looked after us. It was kinda OK, until he came home and she stood back, let him go for it.

My dad was fucken scary. Got annoyed just like that. Walking on eggshells type of life with him. Yeah? Getting annoyed shouldn’t make ya a psycho.

And my old man was always quiet. Let things roll over him. So my mother was the police.

Mine were half as good as the fucking neighbours and worse than what I wanted.

Yea, I know what you mean. Like I said, I looked at my mates’ families and couldn’t believe their luck. Their parents were kind.

No such animal exists.

Yeah? I just said so. Not mine, theirs.

Nah. Statement of fact.

Then he returns to the bar for a few drinks before going home. A big man in a Hi-Vis suit pushes in between Adam and the men. Silent for long enough to hear much of the fugue of their parent gripes, as if like them he’s a bit lost in his beer, the man suddenly turns to them and says:

‘Aren’t you blokes a bit old for whingeing about ya parents? Jesus. Just fucken grow up.’

‘Mate, clearly you have never met my father.’

‘He must be a hundred by now, you old dick. Being a victim is just some woke kind of shit.’

By now Adam is shifting mentally, his thoughts gulping in time to the parents and pints diminishing. This cross-sectioning of parents. Behind it, though, the nuts and bolts of it, cross-threaded.

The men keep drinking. Just when Adam is ordering another beer, the vis-suited man mentions to the man next to him, if only as a figure of speech, but nastily, about the real issue being not your fucking parents but how you gotta every so often give ya fucking missus a whack. Yeah, give her a whack. He turns slowly and eyeballs Adam.

Adam reacts, hands facing up. He looks like an evangelist.

‘Nothing else, I hope,’ he says. ‘Just a … whack.’

The bloke grins, thinking he means there’s nothing else you can do with a woman. Then realises it’s a judgement on his violence.

‘Hey, I know you,’ he says.

Above the side bar the widescreen has been playing continuous bouts of UFC with muscley blokes in shorts and tight fingerless gloves writhing on the canvas, or bashing each other on the face, or both. A man has just stood up after a slip, face bloodied, as the other fighter punches him again hard in the face.

‘You’re the guy whose missus blocks traffic and shit like that.’

‘Not around here, she doesn’t. Look, she’s doing it out of principle.’

‘I’ve got principles. Getting the fucken job done. So she’d better not block my truck or I’ll drag her off the road.’

What can Adam do? Nothing. Doing nothing doesn’t work. And he’s had too many pints to shut up.

‘Really?’ he says. ‘Tearing the hands off a woman who can’t move?’

But sitting on a barstool is a precarious position to argue from.

The bloke leans in and punches Adam hard in the chest. Not in his face, but enough: he topples against the bar and down onto the floor. His fall is broken by the bar stool: he is on his back on the floor with his legs spread and the four legs of the bar stool bar under him like old Mrs B knocked down by her goat.

The pain and speed of the attack confuses him. He’s no pushover.

Even the man is surprised. But the man is looking unhappy with everything in general.

‘Fucken wanker,’ he growls.

The barman is shouting and the three drinkers, so troubled by their past history with parents, are staring down at Adam who is already scrambling up; you don’t stay on the floor for a kicking. The man suddenly walks out.

‘Mate. What was that about?’ asks one of the drinkers.

‘What do you reckon?’ says Adam. ‘I thought he was shitty at you lot.’

‘Nah, mate. We were cool. It was you riled him.’

Fred is waiting for him at the front door. Fred wants to go inside and be fed because he is as Adam likes to call him - a Labradoor. Meaning Let me in and feed me. Otherwise Fred is the most unlikely animal for his breed, he doesn’t like coming to his call. Fred, old Mrs B cries out, and repeats, and then trudges up to Adam’s house.

‘Fred. Come here for a pat.’

But Fred doesn’t. He waits to be let in.

They both sit in the main lounge. If the dog is staying, Adam is not objecting. Adam explains that a shithead of a man has pushed him over in the pub. A mongrel of a man, he adds. Fred is licking his left paw.

‘You are a mongrel,’ says Adam, ‘a quietly mental, retiree of a dog. You wouldn’t knock a dog over in the pub, would you? You are, care of the kindness of Mrs B, being led into un-Labrador habits. Goat-like habits. You are wandering in body and mind. You exemplify the centuries of stubborn self-interest and rankly impossible diets of Capra aegagrus hircus. You may note that I have been drinking.’

Outside all is quiet.

Fred is pleased to listen and waits for those scraps from the fridge. Any scraps formed of any sort of ingredients. In this he is very like a goat. Or an artist.  

As Adam lies in bed, alone as he is these nights, he hears long haulage trucks as they decelerate on the top road above the town, their engine-braking exhausts sounding like swallowed coughing duh duh duh duh duh … then slowing. He begins dreaming.

Duh. He dreams back into the pub:

Eyes clear by now, you see it coming, block his blow, kick the man so far off balance he swings halfway around and falls heavily on his right hip, his back to you. You could kick the man’s neck or head or kidneys. Hurt him.

You are stocky and hardened from all his hammering and carrying of metal. The bloke gets up and goes for you again, but you swing the pint glass in your hand in a counter-punch, a wild haymaker of glass. The man goes down hard, beer fizzing all over his face.

Except it’s not beer, it’s glass.

The bloke gets up and tries to swing again, then turns away, groaning, limping from his sideways fall, the blood, the pain in his hip.

The limp in you is different, the limp is your heart tripping and falling and getting up again.

No one is reacting to the fight. Maybe there hasn’t been any fight. But you’re down on the floor.

The bearded bloke nearest you is impressed:

He swung big at you, mate. You dodged it.

Your mind unlike your heart is still falling, not rising. No muscles in the mind, or slow ones.

The man grabs you by the arm.

Dunno if was luck or bloody good reflexes. But you’re overweight. You didn’t see the first punch.

It’s as if I let him.

The bloke coughs up a laugh but doesn’t know what to say to this.

So whaddya do for a living?

I’m an artist. And I write about classical music.

You what? … The man lets your arm go. People do that?

In the morning Adam remembers Mrs B’s drawing of a Brassinosteroid growth hormone. There among his sketches he finds it and understands what he’s feeling.

He can beat these component shapes out of big pots, frying pans and their handles and connect them to mimic the shapes. Hang this growth hormone – inverted now and pessimistic – from the ceiling, and then add to the lowest handle a tiny figure - of a man hanging on for dear life.

~ 

When Adam opens the door to the decking he must lean against the heavy wind and shit weather. He hasn’t slept. It’s dark out there, relentless. The ocean is a muscular dog, a silver-grey American Staffy, pushing and shoving onto the shoreline.

His back hurts, and his left arm. Not the museum work, the barstool. The fall. The assault has broken his envelope.

When Mrs B notices Adam she calls out, inviting him to go for a walk with them. Of all days. Yes, both she and Fred would like the company of a healthy young man on their regular … She stops there. Something about him. Anyway, what she actually wants is help with the dog pulling too insistently on the leash. The last long walk seemed fine until, in the days following, she realised the tendons at her right elbow were swollen. It hurt if she carried bags of things in her right hand. Odd, really, to have vertical pain when it was caused by horizontal pulling on the leash. And the goat’s chain. The story of her life, Ben and Fred.

‘You’re a healthy young man,’ she says.

So he locks up and follows her down. Young. Without any waiting around she suggests Adam takes the leash. Then she asks him … since … she is finding it harder to keep doing this physically … maybe, just maybe … Adam might take over the morning walks? When he can. It need only be for half an hour or so, down to the oval and back. Old Fred is still strong enough to make the walk  exhausting, and coping with the steep driveway is getting to be a battle. She feels like those men on the Tour de France grinding up into the mountains. And grinding is what her hip feels like.

‘Years of walking at a tilt, I’m afraid. My poor old posture,’ (she laughs) ‘and my age. Osteo arthritis is cruel enough but I have my own special version.’

He knows he can’t refuse. Also, he remains in her debt over the burning and the extraction vent. He can see she knows it too.

‘I’d love to, Mrs B, out of the goodness of my heart.’

‘I can tell. Mr B used to walk Fred. The dowsing bug took over. He’s always away, just like when he was a surveyor. Did I tell you he re-trained after the fire. Was away all the time. If he wasn’t, then he was in bed all day. Kept his job though. Said he was almost dying, not that he ever went to a doctor in those days.’ Adam realises she has told him this before.

Her head is down: ‘It’s not normal, is it? He’d rise from his death bed and be off for weeks, surveying new roads and then surveying paddock levels for farmers moving onto irrigation.’

Quite unexpectedly Mrs B asks if Adam has any children, but he doesn’t answer.

Perhaps he isn’t listening.

‘Speak of the devil.’ They have just noticed Mr B walking up the driveway towards them. Mumbling over and over and humming. Mr B smiles towards them, if that is where his smile is directed. He walks on past.

They are thus interrupted. But Adam’s silence has moved across her face like a cool breeze.

‘My son was lovely,’ says Mrs B. ‘He simply lacked judgement with women.’

‘Like most men.’

‘Like most women!’

‘Like you and Mr B?’

They have to laugh at this one.

‘Was he a recognisable offshoot of Mrs and Mr B?’

‘Look, another time. I’d better get back to the house. You don’t mind taking Fred with you?’

He thinks of Kiera, and of the small shape (and how to refer to the unborn?). He thinks of his fall. Thank God for happy old Fred pulling at the leash, even if it hurts Adam’s bruised back.