Napoleon's Roads Read Free Page B

been. The size almost of the small laundry two floors above. And he found that the idea of it would not leave him alone. Having cleared it out, having found its dimensions, it seemed a question, almost a demand that had to be answered. He went down and sat there, on a three-legged stool he had brought from the garage. In the depths of the earth, had he been able to slow down his hearing – to slow it down, or perhaps it was to speed it up; he couldn’t tell; from a second, say, to a thousand years – it seemed to him that he would be hearing the songs of the great boulders as they swam so darkly and slowly. A deep, deep moaning. The rumble of an elephant, he had read, although inaudible to human ears, could be heard far, far off by other elephants. Whales made sounds that travelled hundreds of kilometres through the ocean.
    There seemed no choice but to make it larger, as if, having imagined it, there was nothing he could do but bring it about. The work was hard, dragging buckets of earth and stone up to the cellar level, to then fill the bins that could be dragged up and out to the skip. Sorting them first, conserving the full and the half-bricks, since if he were to make a wall it seemed logical to make it with what was already there. It took weeks, interrupted as it was by trips away. Now and then he would make, to her, some comment by way of explanation. Usually to do with finding the track of the water. He was surprised that she didn’t ask questions. Before long the cavity was almost the size of the master bedroom. But further back; only part of it actually below the cellar; another part – at least half, by his calculation – under the western foundation, maybe five metres below the fence, in the direction of the Sydney Blue Gum.
    He had started to think, rather dispiritedly, about another concrete floor, trying to work out how he might avoid a repetition of the water problem, when he noticed that a neighbour two doors down on the other side of the street was having his veranda-boards replaced. The ends of most of the old ones had rotted, but these could be easily sawn off. Good, sound Tallowwood, Eucalyptus microcorys . With a careful placement of beams beneath them they could be the makings of a wooden floor. He moved them in, beams and veranda-boards both, on a Sunday while she was out at the end-of-financial-year sales. By the time she returned there was hardly a thing left to be done, and little trace at all that anything had been. A floor. Hasty, yes, but a floor nonetheless. A plateau. An even surface to think upon. To sit on, on the three-legged stool, and plan walls, a trapdoor above, some more permanent access than the old wooden ladder he had used so far.
    Work distracted him again. Travelling. Motels in country towns. Tightness. Squareness on the ground. The gravelly solidity of the earth beneath. Now and then he would be given a room on a first floor, but that was only a sleight of hand, barely relief at all. In truth there was no escape. Not that way. Nor in the car, out on the plains. Everything horizontal. Everything visual. Even the sky seemed stubborn. Now and then he would stop, when he found one, at a grove of tall trees, turn off the car, walk out, stand still, try to hear water. Through the flies and the noise that most people seemed to mistake for silence.
    It was a month before he could go back down to sit in the semi-darkness and listen. Here and there roots hung out from the walls. At first he had thought to cut them but then, feeling their toughness and their moisture in his hands, thinking of the huge Sydney Blue Gum that had probably been there since before the house had been thought of, had decided to leave them be. The walls that he would build from the bricks he had emptied from the space could be made around them, with gaps and crevices wherever the roots seemed to need them. It was slow work. Months went by. He installed the second trapdoor, rigged it so that a