Peter Temple: Black Tide

It doesn’t pay to ponder a question like that. I switched the TV off and went to my cold and lonely bed.

The bed warmed up after a while, the soul stayed cold. Deep in the night, I saw images of people loved. I saw their smiles, heard the sound of voices now stilled, heard our uncontrollable laughter, and felt the touches, the kisses, the hugs, the hand run lovingly over my hair. All gone. Utterly, irretrievably gone.

I awoke before dawn, unrested, got up, made tea, went back to bed and read the last chapter of an English novel in which people were, generally, pretty despondent about the way their lives had turned out. Looking around, noting the terminally unhealthy colour of the sheets that draped me, the soiled socks dotted around the room like the droppings of an exotic animal, the white shirt sleeve hanging from the laundry basket like an inadequate surrender flag, I could sympathise with that view.

I got up, showered, thought about how to pass the day. The days. While I was thinking, they passed. Saturday, shopping, cleaning. Sunday, lunch with my sister.

One sister is a difficult thing. Two would be easy. Three, you’d start confusing their names. Four, you’d be the team mascot. But one sister is your mother, writ smaller and without the uncontested authority, but nevertheless equipped with the means to make you feel guilty.

My sister has a special look. It says many things: you aren’t making the most of yourself, you’re letting us down, that tie doesn’t go with that shirt. The only way to counter the look is through a combination of evasion and attack.

Sunday night, I cooked for the freezer, the first time in a month or more. Beef and bacon in red wine and consommé, chicken pies with olives, onion and sherry.

Early Monday morning, startled awake by something in an unrecoverable dream, I got up. Uneasy, vaguely sick at the stomach, I scoured myself and drove to Taub’s in the dark, nothing on the streets but a cab full of drunks.

As always, some peace descended upon me as I stood inside the door of the workshop and looked around. It was the feeling I’d experienced years before when, feeling my way out of the black tunnel of despair and binge drinking I entered after my wife’s death, I’d come upon Charlie’s business.

Timber, most of it from a time carefree of any concern for the future and unobtainable now, more timber than Charlie could use if he had another lifetime, was stickered side-on against the walls. The most precious was in the rafters under the huge skylight. Charlie called the timber up there The Bank. The workshop had three workbenches, unlike any other benches, built by Charlie: 120-year-old redgum, Emmert 18-inch vices at each end, dog holes lined in 12 mm brass, dogs of lignum vitae. Behind them, the planes on their sides in their pigeonholes: thumb planes, block planes, bench planes of every size, planes for curves, planes for angles, moulding planes, multi-planes. Hanging up were the spokeshaves and drawknives. Next to them, the saws stood upright in their slots beneath two cabinets of chisels and carving tools and a cabinet of measuring and marking tools.

Against the righthand wall were the clamp racks: at the bottom, the monster sash clamps; above them, the lesser sizes; in the next rack, the bar clamps, the infantry of joinery, dozens of them in every size; then the frame clamps, the spring clamps, the G-clamps, the ancient wooden screw clamps that Charlie loved best, and flexible wooden go-bars arranged by length. Finally, an assortment of weird clamps, many of them invented by Charlie to solve particular clamping problems.

At the back of the shop were the machines: a Swiss sliding table saw, an old German table saw, a 24-inch thickness planer, a long-bed jointer, a 28-inch-throat bandsaw, a drill press, and a fifty-year-old English lathe. All Charlie’s machines were cast-iron, solid, true, no rock, no play, tinkered with, tuned, kept clean as museum exhibits.

I packed the stove with paper and shavings and little offcuts and a kitchen match set it humming. By 8 a.m., I’d glued up the four small tables made of thirty-year-old American cherry, clamping them with a version of a framing clamp devised by Charlie to ensure squareness. The tables were made to Charlie’s design, utterly simple, their elegance lying in the wood, the taper of the long slim legs, and the thin line of black persimmon inlay below the tabletops.

I made tea. Then, without any confidence, I started planing the tabletop edges with the wooden moulding plane Charlie had chosen from his vast collection. Most workshops used routers for this work. Charlie had an irrational hatred of routers. ‘Router,’ he said once. ‘Rubbish. Spinning rubbish. And what can it do a plane can’t do?’

‘Whatever it does,’ I’d said, ‘it does it quickly.’

‘Mr Hurry,’ Charlie had replied. ‘Mr Little Phone In My Pocket. You use a machine because the hand way is too hard. Or too slow. Or the machine does it better.’

I’d finished the edges, proud of myself, and was scraping the last tabletop with a freshly burnished scraper when Charlie arrived. He ran a hand over the perfect surfaces of the other three. ‘That’s a start,’ he said. ‘You give up the sleep too now? Don’t eat, don’t sleep. Next you give up the other thing too maybe.’

He went over to study the tables, giant hands reaching out to test the clamps.

‘You don’t give up the other thing, it gives you up,’ I said. ‘Who are these tables for anyway?’

‘Politician, some politician.’

‘What’s the name?’

‘I forget. David, some David.’

‘David Fitzgerald?’

‘Fitz, that’s right.’

‘He’s the Deputy Premier.’

‘So?’

‘Doesn’t the Deputy Premier expect the master himself to make the furniture?’

Pure scorn in the look. ‘Buy a Chippendale, you think Mr Chippendale made it with his own hands? Artist’s studio this? You notice not? Customer wants four little tables the same, asks nicely, lets me do it my way, he gets them. Now that I think, you tell Rembrandt, that “Night Watch’’, I’ll take four of them, you got them too probably.’

‘Seeing myself as being like one of Mr Chippendale’s or Mr Rembrandt’s helpers, that cheers me up,’ I said. ‘Do you think they got paid award wages?’

‘Only if employed by the business,’ said Charlie. ‘People walk in off the street, waste Mr Chippendale’s time, won’t go away like a cat, cost Mr Chippendale money, come and go as they please, those they don’t get any award wages. Those they should be grateful for anything they get. Air to breathe.’

‘I can see the force of that view,’ I said, making a final delicate pass with the scraper. ‘I think this one’s done.’

‘Think?’ Charlie said. ‘You have to know.’

He took the scraper out of my hand and went over to where the burnisher was lying on a workbench.

‘I’m off for breakfast,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll finish up. Cam’s picking me up at ten.’

Charlie didn’t look at me. ‘Gambling,’ he said. ‘I blame myself.’

‘You can do that,’ I said, ‘or I can blame you.’

‘Winter’s comin,’ said Harry Strang. ‘Need a bit of fat to see you over the winter. Fat’s bin scarce.’

We were in Harry’s study, Harry behind the desk designed and made by Charlie Taub, a piece of furniture that elevated the joining of wood to a breathless height. Behind me, the mahogany bookshelves rose five metres, the walkway for the upper shelves reached by four sliding teak and brass ladders. Behind Harry, I could look through French windows across a brick terrace to a deep garden. A stand of four mature maples was scarlet against a high, dark hedge.