Jack Cox - Dodge Rose

Here look at this said Eliza. She pointed to an entry that barely read ralph Siv 977 8218 will buy beefwood. What do you think of that. Would you know beefwood if you saw it.

I wouldn’t.

Naturally Eliza thought it would be worth looking in the dining room. But the dining room furniture is all maple.

All of it.

It’s a set.

To simplify, the same idea came to us at once. Back in the living room we went over to the bookcase. It was a composite piece. Eliza pulled on an empty draw at random. That’s easy, she said and sniffed. Cedar.

And you know what that is I said tapping the reddish side panel.

Yes.

But the rest. I don’t know. The key to the oval windowed doors was in the lock. If Eliza had been hoping to crack it she was gracious, allowing me to open them and together we removed the things that had been arranged inside. Aside from the framed photograph there was a long legged person getting swept by the wind in bronze that was far too big for the low shelf, a few porcelain ladies and a hairy faced beer mug and a spoon from Government House. We laid them out in a row on the sofa and I got a torch from the kitchen to see if I could show up an inscription, the traces of a stamp, but there was nothing. Eliza pulled open the top drawer and felt blindly along the walls. Here, she said, I think, and took it all the way out onto the carpet. She pointed to a patch of yellow paper disintegrating at the edges and covered with an angular, old fashioned script. By an impurely formal logic the ragged arc where the bottom right hand corner of the label had been torn away led our eyes to the last finished word

King. &so remain

family it is

Beefwood

Bingo.

Too easy.

Eliza shook her head appreciatively. This is real she said. This could be worth something. Nonetheless we put off making the phone call. Nothing happened. We were living on domes of silence. Another rent notice arrived before we took up the address book again. Albert was obviously not in a hurry to take possession (why) but by then our funds were getting low and there wanted less than a week before the notice on our application for letters ran out and we weren’t sure who might start trying to get in contact after that. We had no fear of creditors but there are others. Our level of comfort was also beginning to decline. We were far into the more obscure end of the silver and most of the food had gone rotten. Fancy clothes are no good if you have to eat the lingering pickle. Eliza had put the books without spines in the bathroom. Time had caressed us, as brief and personally riotous as it had been. The welcome had been overstayed, we were being coaxed out.

She thought I should be the one to make the call. I carried the phone from the dresser and put it on the dining table while she recovered the entry for Siv. And if the eights are threes. We can try it again, in different combinations.

I got an answer straight off. I said I was calling about the Beefwood bookcase.

Dodge Rose is selling?

The situation was explained. There was a long pause. He didn’t think he was in a position. He said, he would call back. Perhaps, in the meantime, we could send him some photographs.

Do you think it’s a bargaining technique. We couldn’t afford to wait. We decided to take the bookcase to him. The postal address he’d provided was in Manly. We would catch a ferry.

The next day we took the bookcase in the shopping trolley down on to Macleay Street. After wrapping it in a spare blanket the fit was perfect. For the route we decided to take in Cowper Wharf, the Art Gallery, the Domain, Spring Bent Street, then Loftus to the Quay. That should satisfy the local historians in me. It’s not like I don’t owe it to them. Eliza did the lateral steering and I pushed. We almost ran up the back of a Phoenix but had no serious trouble otherwise. It was good to be out. The controller in the ticket booth at the wharf made us buy three tickets then opened the service gate so we didn’t have to haul over the turnstile. At the end of the platform a man wearing an uncommonly dusty pair of aviator glasses turned his back on us to wait. We sat in the shade of the Freshwater, a hand each on a rickety wheel, rocked on the low waves. The smell of guano and brine was like a purgative, I mean a pick me up. No hang on I do mean the other one. I leant over the edge and watched the seaweed swell and contract around the pillars in the deep green water. Objects beneath the surface are not where they appear. They aren’t there at all. Eliza scrubbed her latterly strawberries and cream then rancid cheeks ecstatically. It’s nice down here. She started laying out plans for moving the rest of the furniture, offered to push from now on. What we ought to do, she said, was get someone to value it anyway. Yes, initiative, that’s what we needed again. The situation was not so dire. After all we had nothing to lose. What a beautiful day. A bar of sunlight had fallen between the ferry and the platform roof and began slanting in on us, warming through the chill breeze. I thought about unlacing my pumps. It was complicated. I might not have time.

Was it the Barrenjoey that picked us up or could I have called a ghost ship in from the Heads, what echoes, her hull clean of cement and what must be making itself felt as the no less speaking blubber/meat of that smallish but unhappy whale who would drag a vermilion zigzag through the harbour before failing, as a corpse, to stop washing up on the shore. Maybe the boat had already been condemned, it can be hard to keep count. Apart from the known survivors, which don’t tend to run into the pavement anymore. So many ferries since The Lump made her maiden voyage have gone under, smashed to matchsticks in the vanished smog. I thought I would like to remember all their names; that would have taken some distilling. This tide you used to wish you could drain away in your separate fantasy, at last hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy with only the diggers of the molten vessel for the Cpt. Cook Graving Dock, like horrific, repetitive dentists pulling the stump of a bloodwood tree from the inaurous silt exposed forty eight feet below sea level. These estoppels and reversals won’t do forever. I am the skipper of something.

There was a shout. Some people came off the boat. The man in the sunglasses got on and we followed him, rolling our burden over the gangway ahead of us. The engine coughed up with a shudder, a yellow petrol cloud swirling over the water and we floated out, smooth, as if there were no longer an engine. Towards the Heads the ferry began to pitch. The spray hissed up the sides to strike our parched lashes. A little prosopopoeia. I have a vague notion about Manly. Once children used to sift in the long shadow of the pines on the beaches, wet hair making rosettes in the hot sand, for sovereigns and bones and older coins, and their discoveries were published in the daily papers. We turned into Henrietta Lane from the Corso, after which indeed I am obliged to stop labouring the loom. Needless to say, I didn’t write that either. Wherever they were, our terminal white gloves, which even looked like sails at first, reeking, roughly washed of their gore, belonged to a small antiques dealer’s, the kind you normally find in country towns, a maroon flag above the door with Antiques on it.

A handy cove. Didn’t know they kept such characters. Should help us when we’re back in the saddle, so to speak. I do not know what I can be hoping for from these inane citations but I draw the line at knicking, I mean stealing onelegged men’s crutches. Such quandaries as engulf the general user, fingers trailing in the ferried clews, the suddenly modern. Maybe if I slit my wrists, I almost said my correspondences. Could I have missed an appointment of some kind, with all this scurrying out of public exits. Let it be the unwound trammel of my braue Mayd’s original perdition, and me on her coattails, and see where that gets us. She mumbled to herself as we pushed the door open with the trolley and the tinkle of a real bell. At the Yass Historical Society museum there is everything from a Koertz wool press to a tiny trouser button stamped Bracken. This little shop was truly packed. From among the generic clutter a man with a kind face peered over his. He smiled, lifted what looked to be a thesaurus from his lap and laid it in the hollow he left in the seat of an easy chair. His quick, gentle eyes went to the trolley then met ours without flinching. Maybe in the bad light he thought he was on familiar ground. Do antiques dealers get visits from bag ladies. Eliza had been skipping showers to save soap. We introduced ourselves. He might have started then, his steady eyes deliberate. Yes yes, he said, welcome. You needn’t have come out here yourselves, I’m obliged. We told him what was in the trolley. Eliza unfolded the top layer of the blanket and Mr. Siv nodded in recognition.