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Excerpt

Excerpt

In the Blink of an Eye

FINN

Later, Finn could trace the seismic shift back to the afternoon he stood in the fading light and slid the fine sandpaper over the curve of Huon pine. The initial scrape of grit had smoothed out to a soft glide, the grain of the wood revealing its hidden whorls. He lifted the sandpaper, puffed the fine dust away and ran his hand over the wood’s surface. It rose under his fingers like something alive.

The light was nearly gone and the air, at last, felt slightly cooler. Finn’s sweat had dried and crusted into a hard mix of salt and sawdust on his skin. Invisible creatures – frogs, crickets, he never knew what they were – burst into a racket outside his window, ushering in the evening.

He smoothed an oiled cloth over the haunch of wood, which rewarded him by glowing in the last of the light. He placed it on the ground, shoving aside the jumble of scrap metal with a twinge of guilt. That’s what he was meant to be working on; his agent was convinced his clockwork constructions were the way to a breakthrough. But it didn’t feel like real sculpture, not like his carving.

The piece Edmund had spotted during a Skype was a machine born out of Finn’s frustration with getting from the kitchen to his studio, a clumsy two-handed operation  with gates and latches and sliding doors in and out of the pool area. He’d put his mind to solving the problem, taking due account of the safety principles involved in pool fencing, and adding clockwork characterisations to amuse Toby. A wall-mounted system of pulleys and gears, styled as an owl, elegantly opened and automatically closed the gate between the verandah and the pool when Finn pulled the high brass lever. A second apparatus, with a dragon’s head and outspread wings, operated the sliding doors linking the studio to the pool. Yes, he’d created them to look good – clunky, evocative creatures made of oversized cogs and gears, burnished metal and chains that fascinated Toby when they cranked into life. But before Edmund declared them art and named them – Owl Sentry and Dragon Sentry – Finn considered them simply functional.

Edmund had demanded a spec piece – he was sure he could sell one. Just likeOwl or Dragon, he’d urged. But Finn had got only as far as gathering scrap metal, old machinery parts and gears and stacking them on the bench.

The sound of voices drifted over from the house and he looked out into the indigo-orange sky of a subtropical dusk. Bridget must have come home. When the wood had him, he didn’t hear a thing. He never kept a clock in the workshop lest its hard little hands yank him back from his thrall. And so, not for the first time, he was late. He’d left the kids to their own devices and now she was home, and it was Friday. That meant a bottle of wine with dinner, and probably she’d want to fuck to throw off the week and he’d want to fuck because of the sensuality of the wood under his hands all day, and they’d mark the passage from the working week to the weekend and the relief that their marriage was still intact. Their sex life had been revitalised by what happened, at any rate, and thank God it turned out they still desired each other’s bodies, no matter his convex belly and balding head and her bunions.
He should have started dinner, but he needed a swim. A quick plunge, no lights on, to sluice the dust and sweat from him; more satisfying than a shower. He pulled Dragon Sentry’s heavy lever, and with a clanking of gears the thing opened the sliding doors of the studio and admitted him to the pool area.

After ten months he could still hardly believe Bridget had agreed to buy this purple weatherboard home, with its red trim, wonky doors that didn’t lock, crooked corners and overgrown garden of bold tropical plants – mauve jacaranda, red poinciana, pink frangipani, yellow trumpet flowers. So different from their old brick bungalow in Hobart – and from the airy beach house Bridget had had in mind when making this sea change.

He shucked off his overalls and underpants at the pool’s edge, leaned over the water and tilted, making a hole in the surface with his hands and pouring his body into it. Underwater, he rubbed at his arms, face, hair, loosening the dust so it detached and floated in little whorls and bubbles.

In the Blink of an Eye
by by Jesse Blackadder

  • Genres: Fiction
  • paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
  • ISBN-10: 1250252946
  • ISBN-13: 9781250252944