Foundations - by Michael Blake
ISLAND | ISSUE 161In a collaboration between Island and the ‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival called ‘If These Halls Could Talk’, ten selected Tasmanian writers were paired with ten halls or notable buildings around the state, responding to place through creative literary works. This piece is one of the ten, which are all published in full on this site.
There used to be trees here, and there will be trees here again. But for now there is a paddock, desiccated foot-high grass spitting pollen, seed-heads nodding in the peak-summer breeze, midway through the lone month of not-green, the month when the place feels like the earth looks, when the flies finally feel earned, when the drapes stay closed in the house perched up the hill from the dam.
The house is long and low and ugly in the way that things built to look like their time are, this angle just-wrong and that roofing clashing just-right with those bricks and don’t even ask about the pillars.
But she is trying. She is standing on the mown path to the dam scratching the back of her calf with her foot and slapping at an insistent midge or mayfly – or whatever other winged annoyance has spawned this morning in the dark between the reeds – and looking up at the house and she is trying.
She is thinking about whether she’d get away with the pillars if she fixed the roof, whether an extension could redeem the main, what could be cut or trimmed or whether a grenade might just be best, thinking about the kitchen she put in this time last year and already wondering why she let that clown talk her into that colour.
Crossing her arms and worrying at the joint of her elbow with a thumb, she sighs.
‘Torch it.’
She looks around.
‘You heard, mate. Torch it.’
The voice is like someone scraping a bastard file across a detuned violin, or perhaps broken glass. Is it coming from inside her head?
“The voice is like someone scraping a bastard file across a detuned violin, or perhaps broken glass. Is it coming from inside her head?”
Nope, says her subconscious. Bugger-all in here at the moment. I’m with you on those pillars, though. Definitely past redeeming.
She shakes her head, turns back to the house.
The voice sits before her, tail flicking. It is a cat, and when the word ‘feral’ was first applied to the species it was probably this particular feline they had in mind. Hanks of blood-matted fur form a mane around a face in which two fight-nicked eyes float in a puddle of malice. An uneven scar runs almost vertically down through the whole thing, lending a certain cartoonish villainy to what would otherwise just be ugly, unpleasant and inclined to make you exercise a touch more caution the next time you use a chainsaw.
The cat says
‘Woof. That’d be the noise it’d make. Once it got going, anyhow. Never have to worry about redoing the roof, grind it down to the foundations once it cooled, use the insurance, start again.’
The voice is really something. There’s an addict-arguing-with-the-bus-driver note to it, sieved through a skein of barbed wire. She flicks a foot at it. It doesn’t flinch.
“The voice is really something. There’s an addict-arguing-with-the-bus-driver note to it, sieved through a skein of barbed wire. She flicks a foot at it. It doesn’t flinch.”
‘Wouldn’t do that again, if you enjoy having all your toes.’
She decides to leave, takes a step forward. Flexing a paw, the cat remains in the middle of the path, forcing her to stray out into the tall grass, dry stalks parting and crunching at every step.
‘Woof.’
Standing at the back door, she kicks off a boot and looks at the thicket of buzzies and seeds clustered at her ankle. Sighs. Casts a look back towards the dam, where the swaying grass ripples and lashes in the growing breeze. You could look all day and you wouldn’t see a tail.
*
She wakes at three in the morning, rolling suddenly awake into the space where Frank would usually be, silence and a cool emptiness in lieu of a reassuring, quietly snoring lump. He’ll be back on Tuesday, smelling of the desert and rolling his eyes about management.
Up, dressing-gowned, she stands in the deep-morning dark of the hallway and thinks about the cat.
Whether it might have a point.
Toes curling in the thick pile of the carpet, she smells petrol, kerosene, spirits methylated or barrel-aged, pungent; eye-watering, spattering and flaring as they catch, runnels of flame dripping from the drapes as they go properly, smoke billowing thick and black and noxious across wall and ceiling alike as the couches burn, as the TV melts – face cracking and drooling and spitting plasma onto the persian and the smouldering coffee table – all soundtracked by the shriek and howl of the smoke detectors as they’re swallowed by the roar, the hoarse crackling belches and – yes, yes – woofs as the roof finally gives out, a pillar of sparks spraying to drift and catch in the meadow, path and hill and paddock and house all burning and herself ankle-deep in the dam flicking matches like flares out into the mirrored black.
In the kitchen, she pours a glass of water and drinks it, looking at the oven. Reflected in the black glass of the door, something catches her eye – an offset break in the otherwise even lines of the cupboards beneath the bench. Glass in hand, she opens the offending article – ignoring the stacked pots inside – and sees the hinge hanging loose, a pair of screws barely clinging to the particle board, one almost all the way out and an untidy pile of sawdust on the shelf below. With a fingernail she presses into the head, and after a brief pause to murmur ‘lefty-loosey-righty-tighty,’ twists anti-clockwise.
Her nail flexes in the flat-head gap, but otherwise nothing happens.
Frowning, she puts down her glass, takes the weight of the door in her other hand, and tries again.
*
It would be nice to pretend that in the morning she thinks nothing more of it, but when she wakes the screw is standing vertically on the bedside table where she’d left it, and she feels it almost physically, a tiny dull pressure behind her eyes, a dropped ball-bearing on the rubber sheet of her brain saying something must be done.
The final screw graunches against the hinge as she opens the crooked cupboard door, surveying the interior like a crime scene. The void where she removed the screw (and the two holes that presumably also once held their own, although god knows where they went) is rough-edged and ugly, the pile of dust and wood-crumbs below an incitement to Further Mess; to a trip to the shed for a jimmy bar and the blockbuster; to the smell and tang of petrol and the Cheshire-like voice of the cat and a clicking barbecue lighter an—
No.
She examines the nicked tip of her nail. Also the wrong tool for the job.
*
It takes 20 minutes of dusty rummaging in the shed before she even finds Frank’s toolbox, and though she is prepared for disappointment, her shoulders still round on unclicking the one unbroken latch to reveal mostly things bought for her – a collection of cheap, undersized basics with pink handles long divorced from the flimsy roll they came in – a years-ago Christmas present from a well-meaning somebody now even further diminished by time: kinked measuring tape, always-useless foot-long level, a hammer too light to be used for anything except tapping in tacks, and a hex-tipped screwdriver handle designed to take attachments that presumably once sat in the rubber housing wedged under the roll of double-sided tape – the dozen hex-recesses neat, pleasing to the eye, but empty nonetheless.
Tools, then.
She buys a drill, a good drill, extra battery and a healthy set of bits and screw-fittings, two solid hammers (claw, rubber mallet), a few decent screwdrivers, and a jimmy bar – the old kind, instead of some newfangled rubber-handled spacey Demolition Tool. It is smooth and heavy and green and she wants to wrap a flag of red tape on it that says ONLY USE IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, but doesn’t.
She looks long and hard at saws but eventually figures if she’s needing to use a saw she’s done something wrong.
“She looks long and hard at saws but eventually figures if she’s needing to use a saw she’s done something wrong.”
Then she goes home and takes the rest of the door off the cupboard. The slot and push and zip-reverse of drill and screw and the hole left behind bring her a great deal of satisfaction, and the door lying on the bench with the hinges still hanging off the side yet more.
In an hour she has two foot-high stacked piles of doors – hinges poking out the sides like silicon-chip beetle-legs – and a neat bundle of handles beside them. She keeps every screw, rattling them in a bowl as she eyeballs the exposed contents of the cupboards, before reaching a decision and taking the first load (seven mugs, a teacup, looped clumsily on her fingers) into the spare room and carefully placing it in the corner.
Back, forth, back, forth – crockery; sugar-bags, rice, potatoes; flatware and the good knives and the bad pots and wedding-gift peppermills; dishcloths, cooking booze, the toaster; all of it packed into the space she creates by shunting the bed hard-up against the wall with the window, the only casualty of the whole process a sideplate she cracks neatly on the stockpot as she’s squeezing a stack into a gap. Empty, the cupboards yawn, only the occasional hand-grubby corona to show those once better-trafficked. She considers cleaning them; instead retrieves a grease pencil from the bottom of the toolbox and marks the entire place up like a flat-pack set – B1, D2, A3 – names the verticals and shelves, highlighting the weird notch in this corner; the slight bend to that; holes for hooks and towel-rails and the mountings for the fancy bins.
For dinner she sits on the porch with her feet up – throbbing – and drinks six beers; grazes her way through a family bag of white-corn tortilla strips and a half-kilo tub of hummus before feeling guilty about the lack of vegetables and eating a bag of button mushrooms, raw. Two carrots, and she falls asleep facedown on the bed with a one-sip beer still sweating on the nightstand.
Seeing no reason to stop, she’s back at it in the morning, dragging the trailer up from the ingrown bracken behind the shed to sit on the lawn by the sliding door, where she can more easily dump the fruits of her effort, a tarp to fold over the whole thing like a calzone in case of rain.
Out goes the island bench, stripped from below until she starts worrying about the benchtop crushing her while she’s working under it and realises she could have taken it off far earlier – vlert-vlerting screws from the brackets and bagging them all together, carefully tipping the bench-slab onto some cushions from the couch, easing it slowly over onto the waiting padding, where it lands with a heavy flump that makes her wonder about the strength of the joists. Once it’s on the trailer she washes the sweat from her eyes in the sink and turns off the water at the mains. Stubbornly hunts for a shifter for 20 minutes, only to find – when she takes to them, triumphant and shed-grubby – that she probably could have undone the tap connectors with her fingers.
Onward. The dishwasher is plucked from its nook and manhandled to the porch, the fridge emptied to eskis and drag-walked – Sisyphean – to the laundry and labelled, like everything else. FRIDGE. With an arrow and TIP THIS WAY to take advantage of the concealed rolling wheels she discovered far too late. With the sink out (the taps newspaper-wrapped, bagged with the washers and two neat rolls of braided hosing) she scrapes the silicone from around the hole and gently – first use of the jimmy bar – pries the first section of bench away from the wall, the weight of it dull and almost-too-much, forcing a complex rail-track of towels and folded dropsheets to the sliding door to avoid gouging the lino on the way out.
Then it is just her and the skeletal pine framing; the one remaining benchtop, containing the hob – the sole thing she hesitates on, a beautiful kidney-shaped array of complex variable-rate rings and elegant knobs – which will need dis- connecting; and the fancy dual-zone oven, which will need about three more pairs of arms than she has. She makes a call to the pub, offers a couple of cartons to divert the brothers Cronk when they arrive from work, and in the hours before then sets to the gas lines (easier than she thought, once she’d wriggled in under the laundry and found the angle-tap some moron had put four feet inside) and then the framing, for something to do.
Mitch and George arrive in separate utes, politely refuse refreshment. The three of them finagle first one then the other oven-section from their reinforced recesses, sweat popping and the only communication nods and precise jerks of heads, until the two segments are nestled neatly on the old dog-towels she’d laid on the trailer for the purpose, their titanium handles and tastefully minimal buttons somewhat diminished by the fact that you can see the plain galvanised sides and the tangle of cords and gas-fittings dangling out the back.
The last of the framing is as good an excuse as any to drag out the jimmy again, the repetitive action of pry and lean and lever somehow soothing, with only a couple of halted, wrenching cracks when she fails to spot a piece screwed instead of nailed.
And then she is standing in the doorway to the lounge, looking at the threshold where the carpet meets the lino, thinking In for a penny and going to find a Stanley knife.
“And then she is standing in the doorway to the lounge, looking at the threshold where the carpet meets the lino, thinking In for a penny and going to find a Stanley knife.”
Once it’s up (three hours total, split by a night’s sleep, a takeaway pizza and a two-thirds bottle of cooking wine) and rolled as tidily as she can manage, she squints at the boards, blinks – sees the blue flare of accelerant when the spark hits it – and figures they’ll need to go too. A second trip to town nets her a circular saw that’ll take the battery from the drill, and with a grease-pencilled track to follow she adjusts the metallic-howling blade shallow enough to avoid taking slices out of any beams she clips, and sets off in a screaming sawdusted circuit around the room. Lifting the boards reveals a discarded u-turn of PVC pipe, a long-ago-skeletonised possum, and a rusted spraycan of BUG KILLA all nestled in the dry red-brown dirt.
Finishing the packing of the trailer eats almost all of the remaining day, a tetris-puzzle of board and door intercut with stretches of coarse pine frame and masking-tape-labelled bags of DRAWER RUNNER BITS until she brings the car round, hitches it, and drives the whole thing out to the clearing in the lee of the hill, ratchet-strapping the tarp down tight and disconnecting the trailer with heaves of the jockey-wheel handle, moving the car back to the drive and standing before the blue-wrapped bundle exhausted, content; matches in hand. She takes a deep breath through her nose, smells the dust and the cut timber and the glue and the faint irremovable suggestion of roast lamb from the oven. Exhales.
A cough. The cat, sitting.
‘Well, seems a shame now, doesn’t it. All that work, and so neatly stacked. Maybe don’t. Maybe chuck it on Gumtree or something. Cheap. Might be someone else could find a use for it.’
Might be.
She writes the ad, keeps it brief. Sets the price low. Posts it and stands with her feet in the dirt in the void by the taped-over pipes, looking out at the trees in the far-off distance, afternoon turning to blue as the light dies.
Might well be.
AUTHOR’S NOTE ‘What’s that got to do with the hall, though?’ A reasonable question. When applying for this project I flagged the Scottsdale Mechanics’ Institute Hall as one I would be interested in responding to (the other was the Sorell Memorial Hall, where I wet myself at age four during my first-ever karate class, but that’s a story for another time) because I had a family connection to the town – my dad, his mother, and both his brothers emigrated directly from Ireland to Scottsdale in the ’70s (a classic move), and I spent a lot of time there through my childhood, visiting Granny Helen in her immaculate cottage on Hedley Street.
When I visited the hall itself I was pleased to find a beautifully restored building, replete with solar panels on the roof, new toilets, fresh paint and a nice, well-used community kitchen – which had been acquired second-hand for a very reasonable price. While mulling over possible creative responses to the space (on a stroll up Mount William), I made the note ‘could just be a story about a rich woman deciding to get rid of her kitchen,’ and here we are.
There’s also a bit of the spirit of the Mechanics’ Institute itself in the story: while the story is weirdly tool-centric, in spite of their name Mechanics’ Institutes were originally founded as places of general learning and betterment for the working man (learning and betterment up to this point mostly having been reserved for the wealthy and the clergy), but in Australia they also took on outsize importance as community centres and providers of amenities, and what says self-improvement and community spirit more than gutting your kitchen and paying two dudes a couple of slabs to help you lift an oven? ▼
This story appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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