The Paradise Stain. Nick Glade-Wright

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СКАЧАТЬ the small, touch sensitive, designer shaped, stainless steel square Kant watched as the mirror light faded gently over three seconds to dark. He timed it again. It was four really. He shook his head, it got him every time. Gaye Salmon, his interior designer, a newly arrived Master’s graduate from the RMIT Interior Design Faculty, now heading the hip Hobart firm Space Works with her Gen Y self belief, had recommended these fixtures for the interior. ‘Soothing on the temperament,’ she’d assured her client. As if there was an indispensable necessity for someone of Kant’s vintage to require such obscenely expensive and by all accounts superfluous devices so that he could feel comforted by their ‘theatrically ambient dissolution’.

      ‘She actually used those words!’ Kant had snorted to Vashna back then. ‘Could have bought a cellarful of vino with the cost of one of those. It’s a light switch, for God’s sake!’

      ‘That’s true, my friend. It’s also the key to unlock the freedom caught between darkness and light,’ Vashna had replied, albeit incomprehensibly at the time to his grieving friend.

      Kant padded to the mezzanine bedroom space and his queen size bed, still not christened with the press of feminine flesh. He reached for the book Shantaram that he was halfway through the author had also started out as a journo but unlike in the unfolding saga in the Indian sub continent, Kant had no beguiling woman in his background, let alone lying next to him, let alone enticing him, let alone caressing him. Let alone. Plumping his pillows did allow him a certain amount of calming satisfaction.

      As he opened the heavy tome at the bookmarked page, his eyes were drawn again towards the blinking allure of the lights and shadowed machinations of the harbour with which he was becoming inextricably attached. There was a lull in the storm. He had sometimes imagined his life resembling the unceasing movement of the waters, which hinted at something in their depths, secrets waiting to be dredged like sunken cargo, discoveries that would allow his existence to feel fulfilled once again.

      But like an amputee, while cossetted by darkness, Kant could still feel Sarah’s soft contours next to him in bed. Once or twice around the city he could have sworn he heard the velvety cadence of her voice. Of course they were just random women. Sometimes, sleepless at four in the morning, he’d stumble from his bed onto the plush, richly patterned Afghan rug he’d bought as a conduit to happiness, open the balcony doors to breathe in the salted air and pulsations of the harbour, welcoming their embrace. He longed for an estuarine smoothness, to be set down somewhere peaceful, on a sandy spit or maybe a wild ocean beach, where the salted waves could heal his wounds.

      Kant’s thoughts floated back to the crèche that Sarah had set up in the Huon Valley. He wondered whether it would still be functioning. No reason why not, just because she’s dead, he thought bitterly.

      He remembered the endless energy she’d poured into nurturing their property when Melinda was little, ‘ … so we can all benefit from healthy organic produce,’ she’d say, meaning, as well as the wisdoms gained from a rural lifestyle. They had lived simply. Sarah’s acre of usable land was home to straight rows of mixed vegetables, an orchard of fruit varieties, thirty fowls and geese, even a troublesome pig and litter one year, and a goat and a cow. They all contributed to a way of life that not only complemented her occasional articles on composting, small farming practices and preserving but enabled her husband to work as a reporter, which for several years was poorly paid with irregular hours.

      Kant couldn’t concentrate. He snatched up the bookmark, last year’s birthday present from Rosie, his two year old grand daughter. Thank God for her. The rectangle of pink paper, festooned with colourful scrawls, stuck on gold stars and red hearts had survived the year because it had been laminated by her mother Melinda, a teacher at the Polytechnic in the northern suburbs. The riot of lines in Texta, blunt and fluffy after much scribbling and stabbing, looked so out of place in Kant’s minimalist magazine interior, but to him the most precious possession there.

      Kant turned off his bedside light to allow the tree lights decorating Salamanca Place’s tree lined avenue to cast their magical shadow play. He listened to the tone arm lift off the record, jerk backwards and click to silence. Tomorrow he would visit Melinda because apparently Rosie had made something special for his 60th birthday .

      Chapter Two

      In the weeks following Sarah’s death two things induced Kant’s decision to move away from the sanctuary of his home in the country.

      Melinda had never before witnessed her father weep, so at the sight and sound of him distraught and defenseless, and grieving her own mother’s death to the Cruel C, as she called the disease, she ached with sorrow.

      ‘Please come up town, Dad, so we can all be near each other.’ And knowing her father’s softness for his granddaughter, ‘You know how much Rosie loves her grandpa.’

      He did. He felt supremely grateful. Amongst the rips of his emotions, barely keeping his head above water, this little girl, without an inkling of her influence, had buoyed her grandfather up in the bleakest of storms.

      The second thing happened a week later.

      Vashna and Barry’s other longtime friend Maxwell Dartford drove down from the city to stay the night at the cottage. A boys’ night’s what the maudlin old bugger needs, they’d plotted. Get him out of himself and back on track, they had decided before they phoned, refused to hear any excuses, turning up an hour later with a couple of Johnny Walkers.

      ‘Jesus, Barry, you’ve got more dirty dishes lying around than a Bangkok brothel,’ Max had started as soon as he entered the kitchen where the warm and welcoming aromas of home cooking had been replaced by a rancid and stifled coldness.

      Max was a rare breed of human being, knowing nothing of emotional pain in his untroubled existence as capitalist, inheriting a bulging portfolio of investments, giving him the means to live more than comfortably, almost without having to lift a single digit. Financial advisers, brokers and a creative accountant took care of everything. All he had to do was find appealing ways to spend the profits while fostering his small city mystique and flashy front, which had the side effect of giving Barry’s life of solid plodding some pizzazz, like confetti sprinkled over a grazing bull’s back.

      To give old Max his due, he did help propel the ailing economy when he became an art buyer, an activity that granted him specious social credibility. Healthy rumours that he was bound to be into some kind of unethical practice, and a brief scandal about an exploratory gay liaison, were to his manicured persona like healthy dividends at the end of the financial year.

      ‘Sensitive as ever, Maxi,’ Vashna had said. ‘Besides, it’s not about the dishes but the sustenance that’s been offered on them.’

      But as Vashna’s mystical wisdom flowed, Barry had been distracted by a buzzing black ball of blowfly on one of the plates, spinning upside down between knife and fork frantic in its attempt to get airborne.

      ‘There I am,’ Barry muttered to himself.

      Maxwell banged the bottles down on the table with significance, and began rummaging around for something hygienic from which to drink.

      Startled by the noise, then pointing like a foot weary traffic warden, Barry snapped, ‘Fellas, go and find a seat in the sitting room and I’ll rinse a couple of glasses.’

      An hour later all their banter was witty, to them, and it was in this climate of intoxicated fellowship that Vashna, the group’s self appointed sage, started illuminating his philosophic counsel, ‘Mate, mate, come up town and start a new history … ’

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