The Paradise Stain. Nick Glade-Wright

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      Remember fifty thousand dollars is in the balance here. Which one of the ten contestants do you think deserves the money?’

      In the split second before he spoke again, Kant felt a tremor blaze through his chest. How on earth can any of this possibly help her? And why the hell am I still doing this?

      A bevy of impatient hands had already shot up.

      *

      Kant stood naked in front of his bathroom mirror.

      Outside, the lights at the ferry terminal across the road flickered feebly through a stinging downpour, which had stabbed at him just now as he’d scurried in. Now his feet were warming on heated slate tiles. He began inspecting his thickly grey hairline, making a stand like a defiant old growth forest on the brink of clear felling. He sipped at his whisky. The melancholy was still there.

      Heaving in a deep breath he held his lungs to capacity and then strained to cram in a final sharp in breath, to stretch their lining a fraction more. His blood began to surge.

      ‘What’s the point of this?’ he muttered, but continued to repeat the same action until he was eventually overcome by a wave of dizziness. Gripping the bench, he looked at the floor and frowned, saying, ‘Huh, who else?’

      His old friend Vashna had broached the sensitive subject of Kant’s approaching sixtieth last week, and being two weeks younger there was a small window for Vashna to take advantage.

      ‘Your lungs are a bubble, my friend, and at your age you need to keep them to capacity so you don’t sink,’ he’d added with an ambiguous grin, not believing Barry would actually try it out.

      Vashna was full of dubious wisdoms, to Kant a fine line between astute and extremely annoying. But Vashna had brought Saki. Besides, Kant had made the phone call, was having withdrawal symptoms from his self imposed curfew and needed a diversion. The problem was Kant’s celebrity. It had brought with it a need to escape his adoring but suffocating public. There always seemed to be someone in his face, complete strangers wanting to prove to their companions what intimacy they shared with the great man. Kant had never anticipated this at the beginning.

      ‘Hey Bas, nailed the show this week. Keep it up buddy’, followed by the usual ingratiating pat on the shoulder and, ‘Okay, see you round.’ A checkered green cardigan had toadied up only yesterday as Kant was absorbed in cheese selection at the deli. Of course, the rather nerdish young man had loped away before Kant could even look up.

      A sharp gust of wind found his bathroom window and delivered a personalised splatter of rainwater, startling Kant. Even in the shielded confines of Waterman’s Dock below, boats lurched in the frenzied squalls, their mooring ropes creaking as they resisted breaking points. And through the growl of the wind he could just make out the chorus of wailing halyard wires.

      A midsummer’s evening in Hobart.

      Kant huffed sibilantly, generating his own mist on the mirror glass. ‘If only they could see me now.’ Stripped bare and alone like this, ordinary, not Photoshopped as when so many magazines had ‘played’ with his face, he was confident the public would not see a single physical characteristic that could be described as extraordinary.

      Not so his enviably stylish harbourside apartment.

      Behind the stolid sandstone façade, several split levels had been exquisitely tailored within the space of the top two floors of the building, which had variously housed, in early Settlement times, warehouse and maritime offices. The building’s fabric reeked of the island’s nautical history, and who knows what else during the more desperate times of convict infamy. Contemporary materials and chic décor coexisted symbiotically with ancient Tasmanian Oak beams, colonial Baltic pine floors, and convict chipped blocks of sandstone. Dense rock wool insulation and double glazing incorporated in the refurbishment maintained a womblike thermal constancy of twenty two degrees, and the muted stillness of a recording studio, the fury of the evening’s storm being a mere suggestion.

      A vivacious melody played by a clarinet and string quartet danced lightness around the spacious living area. Obstinate splinters from his heaviness were beginning to dislodge. The spinning LP, Poco Adagio in E flat major by Crusell the Swedish composer, had been one of Sarah’s favourites. She had bought the record long before CD technology had asserted its digital ascendancy on the world.

      Kant had made the apartment his home for the past two years, and for two years he’d been on his own, ensconced, he knew, in the voluptuaries of his own despair since Sarah, his beloved wife, had succumbed to the ravages of cervical cancer.

      How could he forget those final weeks of her illness? Stoical to the last, Sarah had likened their marriage to the bond of clear river water flowing over its bed of rock. ‘The water being in constant transformation, reshaping its volume to match the forms of the riverbed as it turns rock into smooth boulders. And you must flow on when I am gone,’ she had found the strength to insist to her husband.

      But then, over the agonising months of chemotherapy, supplementary drugs, and more drugs to combat the side effects from previous drugs, Sarah seemed to become serenely at peace with what was to come, hovering in a space of tranquility, contrary to Kant’s strangled state of being. For him, an infinite darkness had simply swallowed him whole.

      And so, Barry Kant, small time country journalist, husband, father and grandfather, began to wear the jewel of agony around his neck, a talisman for his soul, keeping it polished to remind him that he still possessed life, even though in Sarah’s river he felt like a fragment of tumbling grit.

      Beyond the docks a serrated jag of white lightning abruptly lashed through charcoaled clouds, releasing Kant from the clamp of his memories.

      He put on his pyjama bottoms and his old dressing gown and went to the living space, poured two thin fingers of whisky, sat in an armchair, a sleek lined, black leather number, and allowed his gaze to submit to the darkness beyond the glassed balcony doors. He still wasn’t completely at ease with this up market style of city living, although, he found playing Sarah’s record collection a settling reminiscence of their life in the Huon Valley, affording him the solace to endure another solitary night.

      But listening to the music was more than that.

      Kant’s childhood had been bland in blue collar Lutana, just north of the city, and devoid of any religious nurture, his frugal minded parents believing it to be an inveigling uncertain force that might upset the balance of their unsurprising lives. But through Sarah’s music and particularly her passion for the Scandinavian classical and jazz composers who she thought expressed their geographic remoteness, like Tasmania’s, so eloquently, Kant discovered a small niche in his solitude where he felt at least some form of spiritual tranquility.

      He found himself thinking about the interview with the Afghan woman at the end of the last series. Over the last week Abrar Abdullah and her fathomless sadness had visited him in his dreams whilst he’d been on holiday, buoying him with her faith and grit. Does she really find consolation in her belief? That sort of trust in what he believed to be an abstract was elusive to his way of thinking. At times, as he sometimes lay awake at night he wished it wasn’t.

      Outside, the thirteen degrees of night air continued to descend on glistening bitumen. Kant could just make out a huddle of hunched figures tilting against the wind. He wondered what Abrar would be doing at this moment in her empty rental, while these friends below were making their way to the warmth of a wine bar for an evening of congenial cheer.

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