that it’s impossible to distinguish the well founded from the merely groundless, the morally persuasive from flimsy platitudes of precious personal taste.
Plus there’s the question of her father, which complicates things.
What she knows of her father, he’s handy. Mechanically inclined, people say, as if he’s tilted towards a machine and is going going gone.
Yes, her mother says, he’s down the tubes, and for Nora, that’s that.
Though Halley knows. She’s found out a thing or two by nosing; knows her mother keeps her father still, those bits she can. Like the unframed black-and-white photograph, a print so big that Nora’s had to press it flat in the back of the only book where it fits. Which is the Reader’s Digest Marvels and Mysteries of the Animal World.
So it’s a proper, serious photo, like the portraits of Halley and Jen in their smocked baby dresses and matching bonnets, taken by Norman Partington Studios.
A young man squats to inspect a titanic machine. The curved flank, though a hulking tonnage, is calmed beneath his hand. It’s all colossal cylindrical drums, bulging boilers, giant gibs, menacing cogs with enormous teeth and a piston whose stilled shaft is larger and longer than can be possible. But also there are small pieces. Finicky.
Leaning gently on the beast, the man is peering inside, his eyes asking What ails?
Their combined energy is throttled, yet both man and machine are distinguished by a tense, kinetic apprehension. The man’s nostrils flare, his jaw not exactly clenched, but still a degree too tight. Both expressions imply that he is impatient to get on with things, or has been instructed to do something he considers a waste of time.
This, Halley knows, is a ship’s engine. And this is her own miraculous father, way down in the engine room, bolted below decks within the bowels of the ship. A man among many, men mere flukes in the gut of a whale yet party to a digestive tinkering that serves an obscure intestinal purpose, the black clouded diesel belching across the oceans of the world.
Her father is a marine fitter and turner, whatever that means, and he must concentrate as he checks a component. Perhaps he’s shrouding toothed wheels, aiming to increase tooth strength where the amount of the increase will depend on the form of the tooth to which it is applied, and by clothing the pinion up to its pitch line, the threat of shearing failure – should the wheel be subject to unavoidable shocks – may be averted?
Something like that. On the passage bookshelf in Ixia Court is a thick study text called Machine Design, Construction, and Technical Drawing for Young Engineers. Neither new nor recent. 1919. Filled long years ago by Henry J. Spooner, C.E., M.I.MECH.E., M.INST.A.E., A.M.INST.C.E., F.G.S., F.R.M.S., HON.M.J.INST.E., ETC., with intriguing shapes and lines, shaded areas and sectional views, all to enable a young man to piece and disassemble, refit and subsequently make things whole. And such words to work through! The language is an enticing machinery of Couplings and clutches; Engine eccentrics; Stepped, helical and screw gearing; Piston packings; Bullivant’s patent rope clips and clamps.
The young men. They must be old now, she thinks, holding the book, or gone, tracing how insects have made tiny, angled tunnels through the pages, random letters disappeared. Some she can figure out from their neighbours; others remain total guesswork. A maze of sinuous boreholes. Musing, she sections the uneven tubes by opening the book here, and half through, and there, place-marking the pages with her fingers. Then welds a long, continuous length by closing the book into a single, thick chunk.
The eaten volume is a repository much too large for her to handle. Most of it is so specialised she can no more process the details than say, even with a knowledge of mirrors and secret compartments, how the magician cuts the woman’s body in two and subsequently joins the halves together again.
She knows she’s in the way, reading, blocking the passage like an immobile steel truss. Her mother and Jen must continually step over her (forty-five degree angles, lanky leg joists, chunky knuckle joints . . . ) as they pass from one room to another.
She does mean to move, she will – I will! – but somehow always lands up settling where she is, on the floor, because the diagrams haul her in. Her attention is riveted before she’s properly had a chance to think through moving, and soon she’s much too busy to go anywhere.
Every time she slides the tome from among its neighbours, imagining a slight grating as cylindrical friction wheels engage, she means to take the book to her room or maybe out onto the balcony, to get more comfortable . . .
But still she sits in the passage next to the bookshelf, her back contentedly against the wall, the morning sun streaming through the small bathroom window in such a way that it draws a rhombus of light cut by the lines of the wooden planks. She extends her legs up against the adjacent doorframe of the toilet, and reads. Looks, mainly. At. What is left to her. Spends hours in this complex, characterful, masculine company, never bored, absorbed in the personalities of nuts and bolts.
In the big photograph of her father, he’s not really doing his job. He’s not being an artisan but a model, sort of, though that sounds like a girl thing to do. He is demonstrating the accomplished skills of his ship repair firm, making the pretend seem real. He must look away from the photographer and the camera equipment as if he’s not aware of anything except the need to focus intently on his task, very serious-minded.
There may be people who remember this photograph from a brochure for . . . was it James Brown & Hamer? Dorman Long? Dorbyl? Elgin? Mark Murphy has at some point been employed by each of these engineering firms, gone from one to another, and been fouled for some misdemeanour. And sometimes, as luck would have it, has been taken back again during a shortage. Because when he works, Mark works; that nobody can deny.
But the photograph shows none of this. Instead, it extols the collaborative virtues of industrious man and humanised hardware, the picture an implicit slogan: Your valuable marine machines. Safe in our expert hands.
The idea is emphasised by her father’s youth and handsome, swarthy muscularity, though he is more clean-cut than she has ever seen him. Clean as a whistle while you work, which is much too clean to be true. Even the engine oil staining his boiler suit resembles sculptural shadow rather than regular monkey grease.
The clean dirt is clearly an effect of some kind, Halley understands, enhanced by the invisible equipment used to light the scene. This is out of the picture she holds, though if she imagines the fullest possible image, she knows there will be a camera and another person in the missing space.
It is a lovely picture, at once solid and lit with the aerial substantiality of sunlight breaking through cloud. In his mechanic’s benediction, the rays gleam off her father’s cropped black curls, brilliantined with Brylcreem.
The photo is perfectly radiant, which must be why her mother keeps it closed up in the big book, for fear of being blinded. She’s surprised her mother hasn’t thought to offer it to the OMO people, for an advert, as they’re right here in Durban. They’re called Lever Brothers. The same people who make Sunlight, down in Maydon Wharf.
Halley imagines the ad. She would . . . okay, so there would be the beautiful photo with a box of OMO washing powder angled across the corner, this being the only blast of full, powerful colour. Though maybe they should also have the word OMO along the bottom, and dots . . . leading up to Out Machine Oil. Pretty clever, huh?
OMO! Women would know that the single word meant the spots and stains would be magically gone, and no one would have to wrestle for hours with the dirt.
Every weekend at Ixia Court, first
