Last Day in the Dynamite Factory Read Online Free PDF Page A

pub by 11 am because Diane hovers over him with a jug of iced water. Chris and Diane are putting him through cooking school, but funding neither his affairs nor his motorbike.
    As Chris steps under the shower the phone on the bedside table begins to ring. Diane goes to answer it, chats briefly and returns to the bathroom to take his place at the handbasin. ‘That was Phoebe,’ she says, plastering gunk on her face. ‘She can’t join us for lunch. She has to be in Brisbane for a site meeting at two. Given it’s a three-hour return trip to Coolum she’ll take her own car.’
    Phoebe. Grown up and gone. Completed her Masters in Architecture and joined Armstrongs, a large architectural firm. Just recently she moved into a one-bedroom apartment and barely a week after that, her stockbroker boyfriend, James (who does not like being called Jim), moved in with her.
    It seems like yesterday Phoebe sat with Chris in his office, drawing houses with his ruler and pencils, her chin barely clearing the desk. A chip off the old block they call her, but it’s more like the other way around. When she was six, she asked him to
help
her build a dolls’ house, a
large
dolls’ house, big enough for Mrs Doll, various secondary dolls and her teddies. A month into the project, the floors down and walls in, Chris found Phoebe pulling out his carefully glued pieces, breaking them apart and reassembling them with sticky tape. He regarded the wreckage with dismay.
    â€˜Pebbles, what gives?’
    Gerry, the bear Jo had given her for her birthday, needed a den for his drawing board and the old bear wanted his own bedroom. Over the next few days Chris watched Phoebe dismantle his fine workmanship and experiment with her own arrangements. He saw that unless she could pull the structure apart and reassemble it, she’d lose interest. He began again, making interlocking panels of three-ply and window frames of balsa wood that snapped together at the corners to form a variety of shapes and sizes. Walls were held in place by plasticine and the roof was a set of hinged panels that could be folded back and angled up. When it was finished, there were no walls or windows Phoebe couldn’t reposition.
    Now, the dolls’ house languishes in his workroom downstairs, along with other old toys, Christmas decorations and gardening gear. Chris has rammed conduit into the walls to take it all but more keeps accumulating on his workbench. Not that it matters; it’s a room he rarely uses. The light is artificial and the work area is cramped. One of these days he’ll build himself a proper shed, upgrade his woodworking skills and do justice to the timber treasures he’s salvaged from old buildings that are now spilling from four ancient plywood tea chests.
    Today he dresses as he does for work, in a navy and white striped shirt, immaculately pressed by Diane, and navy chinos. No tie. The last time he wore a tie, apart from formal functions and funerals, was at Brisbane Boys’ College in 1967, his last year of high school.
    Judge wears ties. Always sloppily knotted. ‘It gives me something to loosen when things get desperate,’ he says. ‘What can you loosen, Wren, apart from your moral rectitude – or is it “rectal moritude” – your bloody trousers? I hope not, since your arse is level with my nose.’
    Chris steps into his black leather slip-ons and goes to the kitchen. As he passes Phoebe’s room, he pauses. All she’s left are Mrs Doll, her two teddies, one lonely T-shirt in her wardrobe and the faint whiff of body lotion and shampoo. He breathes deep, inhaling memories. Kids. They unhinge him; make him feel vulnerable and fearful, no matter how old they get. From downy-skulled babes, heavy with trust, to worldly, sexually active adults – they continue to fill him with wonder, and they still make every frustrating thing in life worthwhile.
    The day Phoebe left,