It was an old house meshed in an unrelenting grid of brick and weatherboard. Its walls still stood stark, red brick. Paint like tender old sagging skin on the timber windows. A bastard of a garden surrounded it, ran up brick wall and concrete path. The lawn, dead that time of year, luminescent in the streetlight. In the center of that void, a sign, Auction.

Inside, fans hummed, no lights on. A bit of light seeped in through the wild garden and the drawn blinds. The solid plaster walls were cracked, repainted, cracked, repainted. Littered with pictures, nailed photos, side tables filled with trinkets. A flickering of a television in one room. In another the sound of guitar.

There he was, on the edge of his bed, his guitar cradled, moving with it. Arms contorted and tensed and then released. A rhythm in those arms alone. It was escalating through the cracked walls, running through a loop pedal at his feet, ever-growing. His eyes disappeared into his skull.

His fingers climbed the neck. The phone was ringing. It was all coming together. Sharp echoes and muted notes, a driving rhythm beneath. The escalation. Ringing. Ringing. The phone was ringing. He hit the pedal with his foot. An echo for a moment, then nothing. The faint noise of the television. The fans. The phone was still ringing. He’d been waiting, his daughter, waiting for that call.

He stood up, a bit stoned, it helped with the pain. Walked down the hallway into the kitchen. The phone line was pulled tight across to the kitchen table from the wall. There was the phone, in the center that old wooden table, surrounded by piles of envelopes and bottles of beer. He leant on the table, picked up the phone, a bit out of breath.

“Hello,’ he said… “Hello. Hello. I’m here.”

“Henry…,” said a voice. Not his daughter’s melodic voice. This voice, coarse, grating like a file. “Henry, is that you?” He could hear the man breathing, that file waiting to grate again.  “You’re selling the place, I hear.”

“Who is this?”

 “It’s me, Frank.” More breathing. “We played together.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue, feeble and quiet now. “The drums, remember?”

 “Ah.” He paused. “You’re looking for my father,” he said. “My father,” he repeated.

In the dark kitchen he sat, among the unopened envelopes and empty bottles of beer. The fans still running. His father, ha, his father. That old man must have lost his mind, his father was long dead. In the corner of his eye, the flash. The television.

A light ran down the hallway. He stood up, a puppet on a string, looked down towards the light. Grunted, went to the fridge, pulled out a beer. Slunk back down to the table. He shook his head, swiped the envelopes to the side. He laid his hands across the hardwood timber of the table.

These hands don’t look like his father’s. They look like his father’s father’s. He remembers those hands. His grandfather’s hands.

His grandmother, the smallest of memories of her. In the kitchen with her friends, all laughing around the table. His grandfather walked past, placed his hand on hers. Hand on hand. He followed his grandfather out the back door. The fly wire door slapped against the frame. Down the steps. His grandfather in a blue singlet, whistling as he walked across the backyard. The back fence – bits of corrugated iron, pieced, wired together. The end one slipped to the side. “I used to take your father down here.” Out onto the road.

Down the easement between the brick and weatherboard to the creek. Its muddy water snaked through the grid, turning this way and that. Lined by thick matted grass, a few shrubs half subsumed by it. A gnarled river redgum lurched to the side, twisting and searching.

His grandfather stood under the redgum, threading a line through a hook. “He’ll be back,” he said, in that slow lilt. His hand slipped. The hook bit the flesh below his thumb. He looked at it. “I did my running years ago, like he does now.” Slowly pulled the hook out. “Through mountains, much colder than here boy, don’t you worry, boy.” He was looking at the blood on the hook, on his hand.

Weeks, months later, maybe. His grandmother was gone, that he knows; she used to keep him out of the kitchen at night. Now, the old man, his grandfather, at the kitchen table. A little city of long neck beer bottles. He was looking at them, tapping his fingers on the top, his eyes somewhere else. His hand swept across the table. Dark glass on the yellowing tiles. The old man on his knees. His hands on the tiles, picking up the glass. Blood dried and fresh.  Struggling to his feet. His hand shaking on the table, hauling himself up.

That same table, he sat at now. In that dark kitchen. His hands laid out across the grain. He caught the glimpse of a little hand on the edge of the table. Then it was gone. He looked at the phone. The sounds of the fans picked up. The flash of the television. Lights ran down the hallway, a redness swirling in that dark. He was drawn down the hallway, strings pulling him to the lounge.

The lounge. A sideboard covered in trinkets and mugs. A coffee table much the same. A long velvet couch, a few chairs. In the corner, the piano, only dust on that old piano. It pulsated, it grew and shrank, in that corner. He stood in the doorway, peering at it. He could remember his hands now, his father’s hands.

Behind, the hallway, the flicker of red, then dark again. The night his father came home. His grandfather, wearing that blue singlet. Rain on the roof. His father came in. Their embrace, his father’s wet hair on his grandfather’s pale shoulders.

In the lounge. His father, his body stiff. His shoulders hunched, closed together, his arms so free. His hands flowed back and forth upon the keys. His grandfather smoked a cigar, watching standing in the doorway. He never smoked. Later, he remembered his father paced up and down the hallway, in the kitchen, out of the kitchen. Always moving, moving to music no longer playing anywhere but in his mind.

Down by the creek, his father sat against the tree, more twisted, still growing. His father had one leg crossed over the other. His shivering hand held a cigarette before his lips. “I’m working hard. Playing a lot,” he said. His grandfather was holding a line down by the water, whistling. “No more sleeping at bus stops then, eh.” His father laughed. Got to his feet and jumped up and hung from the twisted trunk of the tree for a moment.

In the kitchen that night. The flywire door, slapping in the frame. His father’s voice, grandfather’s voice, both yelling. Heavy disjointed footsteps. The door again. Footsteps down the hall. The lights, the taillights, on the ceiling. He lay in his bedroom, just a boy. The taillights through the bedroom door ran up and down the hallway ceiling.

 The lights on the ceiling, they came and went. His grandfather grew quiet. He didn’t walk and whistle anymore. It came to the time that he didn’t drink in the kitchen. He went into the room with the television, and it flashed at him, and his eyes gave nothing back. It was the same fate for his father, years of coming and going until his arthritic hands could no longer run across keys. And that room took him too. And the boy was no longer a boy, a man, a daughter of his own, and then an old man.

The old man, he sat at the kitchen table. His hands laid out before him. The fans hummed. There was the flash of the television in the room down the hall. A little hand, on the edge of that table, eyes peering up, his daughter. Long red hair, now she was tall and strong. Travelling, not far from the mountains of her great grandparents. And he wondered whether she would care, would she miss these old timber floors, the bricks. The garden. The old man who lived in it.

He said, “Fuck it,” and went to the fridge for another beer. He could imagine his daughter, saying “Don’t drink so much, Dad!” and it comforted him. It wasn’t the beer taking him away this night; he twisted the cap, the memories with it and at that moment the phone rang. Her voice, melodic even now, far away in Warsaw. He told her the house was going, taken by the bank, the true bastards that they are, in his own true words. And she cried. And he did too.

It was quiet then. He walked down the hall, to the room of dead fathers and flicked off the television. He walked on further to his room. He sat on the edge of his bed. It was quiet, no doors slapping frames, no lights in the hallway. The hum of the fans was still there. He flicked on his amp. It murmured, for a moment. Then it grew and grew, sprawling through the bricks, the old hard wood floors, the tiles on the roof, on the kitchen floor.

Later, he’s in the lounge, on the floor, lying on that hardwood floor. The music is looping. His hands are on that dark timber and he’s thinking where it came from. And it feels like stone for a moment, cold stone of a long past winter, then pavement of the streets in the night of a more recent summer. A cave in the Carpathian Mountains. A bus stop in the dark of St Kilda. The music is coming round. It’s his music, his guitar, layered and looping. It’s made from his hands. Oh but it whistles, and it shimmers like ivory at its peak. It’s ending then and starting again. His hands, pain in his hands. A piercing hook in flesh and then dull from within the very bone itself. He cranes his neck, looks at them, laid out before him. These old hands across keys. These old hands threading fishing line. These old hands bleeding, shivering. These old hands on strings. The music is still looping. He thinks of that old, gnarled tree, by the creek. He will go there again, with his daughter. He will. His hands tensing against that hardwood floor, pushing himself up, growing before his very eyes.

Image: Esther Zheng