Prochownik's Dream Read Free Page A

call was a distracting resonance in his mind behind his anxiety for his daughter. What was Robert and Marina’s news? Did they want to share it with him? Did they want to pick up the old friendship where they’d left it four years ago? He could see them both: Robert’s faint smile, knowing something. Marina standing by his side admiring him. They were focussed people. A successful team. He had never known them to be without ideas and projects. The telephone call puzzled him. What did they want? He caught Nada on the back swing and pushed her away gently.
    â€˜Higher, Daddy! Higher!’ she demanded.
    He caught her and pushed her higher, the tails of her red jacket flying out behind, the wind of her flight lifting her brown hair, her friend Snoopy Dog clutched against the chain of the swing. His heart contracted in his chest with love for her.

two
    A little after midday on the following Wednesday he bought a bunch of expensive out-of-season Iceland poppies at the florist and drove across town to Richmond. It was hot again and his car was not airconditioned. He worried that the delicate flowers would wilt before he reached Robert and Marina’s and thought that he had made a mistake buying them instead of robust proteas or natives; except that there was for him something emblematic in the vivid fragility of the poppies, and their name, Iceland. In the relentless heat it seemed like a message of hope.
    Before he reached the river he turned out of the traffic into a side street. Three blocks later he turned right again and pulled up at a small square of park tucked between a row of houses. He sat looking through the windscreen, gathering his thoughts and remembering the park. Theirs was the last house in a terrace of painted brick and timber cottages, dwellings that had once been the homes of factory workers but which had been expensively restored and redesigned to accommodate young professionals. The scene before him was unchanged from his memory of it. The withered oleanders in the park and the small patch of bleached grass shimmering in the heat, the solitary palm tree, and beneath the palm tree the bench, still broken . . .
    That summer night four years ago, Robert and Marina’s friends had spilled from the lighted house into the park. Robert Schwartz and Marina Golding, the brilliant collaborative team, were relinquishing their position of influence in Melbourne’s art scene for the vertigo of the great metropolis. That, at any rate, had been the understanding, a sense that it was Robert’s largeness of vision that compelled them to go. A feeling that it wasn’t so much that they had decided to go as that they were being drawn along the golden path of those who had found success in Syd Of being abandoned even. And, for a few, no doubt the departure of Robert and Marina for Sydney must have seemed a confirmation of their own failure. For the older ones especially. For it was what they had all aspired to. So there was a certain envy among the less-generous spirits. Despite their worldliness, despite their fervent scepticism, they had all privately clutched at a shamefaced hope of that sign of a divine care that placed upon a body of work a recognition that was not disputable.
    When the last guests were leaving, Robert entreated him to stay with them in the park under the stars. It was he whom Robert had chosen to be the very last to sit with them on the grass, drinking wine and talking far into the night—Had it been that he and Marina could not bear to arrive at that moment when they would be alone with their happiness and without a witness to its splendours? Now they had returned.
    Today the park was deserted.
    He reached across to the passenger seat and picked up the bunch of flowers. As he lifted the blooms a scatter of petals was left on the grey nap of the seat. He was nervous now at the thought of seeing Robert again. He stepped out of the car, locked it and walked the few paces to