Читать книгу The Paradise Stain - Nick Glade-Wright - Страница 7

The young woman had barely moved during the interview. The swollen, pulsing vein on the side of her neck a mere hint at the depth of her trauma as the details of her ordeal lay carrion raw for viewers to pick over. Studio lights glared fiercely. Clasping bony, bloodless fingers, Abrar Abdullah waited, rigid, for the next question. Barry Kant sipped water from his glass, present ed a benevolent smile to his latest guest this asylum seeker, this boat person, this refugee, this Afghan, this human being.

Kant touched his earpiece. The director had just given him two minutes to wrap things up before the audience were let loose with their customary questioning, prying and tactless.

‘Abrar, I believe your Muslim name means a devotion to God. I’m wondering whether you’ve been wrestling with your faith since your terrible loss.’

Abrar frowned. ‘Rezling? What is … ?’ But she became momentarily distracted by the sound of titters, unkind ones, emanating from several mouths in the studio audience.

‘Well, let me put it this way, Abrar, so these people have time to run through your story in their minds once more.’ Kant’s encouraging tone belied the knot in his stomach. ‘So, you escaped the terrors of war torn Afghanistan with your husband Khaled and baby boy four years ago. You did this by surviving a perilous sea journey none of us would dream of undertaking, halfway round the world, completely at the mercy of unscrupulous people smugglers. You then endured two arduous years in detention, and finally … finally finding sanctuary in this beautiful island of Tasmania, safe at last and gaining Australian citizenship, your son Ali who … ’ Kant paused whilst Abrar dabbed at her erupting tears, tears that had so easily welled at the mention of her son’s name.

While she struggled for composure Kant turned to Camera Two. ‘You are watching BKS nationwide, the show that probes the depths of people’s lives, and tonight I am in conversation with Abrar Abdullah, originally from Kabul, Afghanistan, who now lives in Launceston.’

‘Please, I am sorry,’ she whispered, as if the expression of her grief had been discourteous.

‘No need, Abrar.’ Kant smiled, paused for a skilful camera moment. ‘Ali would be four years old now. But he died senselessly due to an idiotic fireworks prank by drunken footballers outside your new home. So, can you tell the audience, Abrar, and the people at home watching this, whether all of this has affected your devotion to God?’

Abrar lowered her brimming eyes before looking up to face the audience directly. Taut, proud, and with unambiguous conviction she stated, ‘It is God’s will.’

Kant briefly looked towards Camera One, his mouth pinching minutely before returning to his guest. He had felt a flash of embarrassment but could now not help scrutinising her. Her hair would have been glossy black not so long ago. And those eyes! Kant knew great loss. But this!

‘And do you think it was God’s will that your husband Khaled should hang himself shortly afterwards?’

Absurdly ironic, he thought, knowing that suicide and attempted suicide, even euthanasia, were prohibited in Islam. Abrar remained upright, dignified as she turned again towards the audience, who were open mouthed like fanatical supporters before the kicking of a deciding goal.

‘I will pray for his soul. ’

Kant sighed, not for any camera this time. ‘It’s tough, Abrar, really tough. So I want to thank you for being so courageous in sharing your story tonight on BKS.’ And to Camera Two, ‘Abrar Abdullah is the final contestant on this third series of the Barry Kant Show.’ And to the audience, ‘So, now we’ve reached the part of the show where it’s your turn to ask Abrar your questions.’

Kant faced Camera Two poised to zoom in for a close up. ‘Then it’s up to you at home to SMS your all important votes.

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.

The thought made him fidgety. He went back to the bath room to turn out the light. As he pressed 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 .