ira friedberg*
half empty, half full
Second Place in the Writing Category of the 2024 Inner West Young Creatives Awards
www.innerwest.nsw.gov.au/young-creatives-awards/young-creatives-awards-past-winners
He peered through the three bars and lay his eyes on a favourite toy, one of many strewn on the floor. A ping pong racket; red-on-one-side, yellow-on-the-other, with an umbilical milkwhite ball. He imagined the ball bobbing on the surface of just-calmed water, carried from his room. The racket is heavy. It might sink, float down and past the submerged, flooded apartments. Or maybe the wet and wooden thing will be carried by a wave and settle on the apartment’s rooftop, where the sea level will have reached its peak. The string will get tangled in the spinning clothesline.
So far, the worst had come at age seven, when the kitchen flooded past his ankles. Standing by the oven and lightly kicking his mama’s dish pan, watching it float beside an uprooted pot plant. He shields his nose with an elbow. Fish, but not the fried kind, the kind served stomach side up, scales intact. He knows that every year he grows older, he will grow closer to an event worse than this. He resolves to never celebrate his birthday.
On the morning of his eighteenth, Stefano was still snoring in the bottom bunk. He had made no such moral sacrifices. The ten-year old was still playacting the king, admiring usurped land and the arsenal used for the taking. Model airplanes with stripes down their spines, tow trucks with vicious claw-arms, a reserve of plastic bricks and plastic men.
A decade later, some hours into writing his doctorate, he’ll look out his dormitory window at the criss-crossing highways, the empty sea beyond, and recall how the playthings of his youth were made of the materials which sank his home. Not only, they were models of bigger machines which hurried the process along.
But now, they are refuge. He can place one big toe after the other on the cool aluminium rungs, terrified to incite his brother’s underslept rage. He can levitate above the light pastel carpet and drop softly, a few inches from the shag. He can pick up a battleship and hold it above his head, let it sail in mid-air, back and forth until the room becomes a series of thin, rushing parallel lines, then curling waves, the stage of a great battle between twenty-first century firepower and the cannons of a galleon ship. In play, he can sink his enemies, emerge victorious, against an enemy of the seventeenth century, the likes his tutors have taught him about. Diagrammable, cartographic, comprehensible, defeatable. Stefano groans and turns slightly, hugs his pillow tighter to his ear.
It is still seven years until the boy will meet Theo, not far from Vespuccio’s bar. And there is still this party to get through.
His grandfather was next to wake. His loud stretching woke his wife, the boy’s grandmother. Her son, the boy’s papa, returned from work a couple of hours after sunrise. His wife, the boy’s mother, had been up the longest, making calls and putting out fires. She presented her husband with a sliver of cheese on an open-faced roll. ‘Keep yourself occupied with that,’ she said, covering herself in mink. ‘I’ll be back in five, Patrizia can’t get her gift down the stairs.’ The door slammed shut a little too loud, she yelled an apology even louder, and with that, their son, his brother, woke up.
Little brother loomed over big brother, interrupting a yawn with a party horn. Stefano pushed little brother out of the way, staggering to the bathroom, resisting a grin. Piss, wash your hands, scrub your face, shave for the fourth time ever. Brush your teeth. Make sure there’s no gristle, no crumb, and don’t dare eat before the photo is taken, not an orzo, not a grain. You will never have this day again. Pluck your filthy monobrow, and do your hair, but please, not with all that gel. You’ll look like a stockbroker.
Stefano ran at the smell of coffee on the stove. He left the tap running a touch. The sink was peppered with black hairs. The plug was still wedged in, water and shaving cream and soap swirling, reluctant to drain.
By the time their unit had mobilised and walked to Vespuccio’s, it was packed with relatives. The little boy was grateful that Stefano would be doing all the talking and kissing and hugging. For once, the weight was lifted off his own grabbable shoulders and pinchable cheeks. He sat in a booth and slid his boat along the table.
Vespuccio stood behind the bar, brandishing his ceramic teeth and overpouring red wine by the inch. Whether it was by generosity or hyperopia, who cared.
The old sat on the deck, on splinters folded out in the shape of chairs. They got woozy from the late sun and the Amarone.
The young men leaned against the walls and parapets, making whooping calls at distant cousins and their plus-ones. When Stefano escaped the embraces at last, he hung with them, let himself be prodded and cajoled into making a move on Lena, his object of affection since primary school.
It is a scene not dissimilar, perhaps with the light more faded and the paint more frayed, from when the boy will meet Theo, at Aunt Patrizia’s final wedding. Theo will offer a cigarette to the boy—now a man—and propose a stroll by the canal. The grown boy will oblige, walk with him through twilight and into dusk. Their feet will plop in the blue and bird-shit water, and they’ll pretend that the soft grazing of their toes is the doing of a floating plastic wrapper. Dull yellow streetlight will keep such activities ambiguous.
The water wraps around his legs, two inches above the ankle, the same point it reached when he was a boy. His legs are longer, but the sea level has raised to meet them. He will leave this place before the water can reach his knees.