Shooting Star

39

‘I couldn’t change the name from Sitesong,’ said David Klinger. ‘Appalling name but it was there before I was. I’ve lived with it all these years. Used to be very trendy.’ He sniffed. ‘Trendy. Not a word you hear today either. We were a bit trendy, a bit fashionable then.’

He drank half a glass of white wine, glass the size of a cricket ball. ‘Len was a guru, one of the mudbrick gurus.’ There was no admiration in his voice.

David Klinger, all that remained of the architectural practice of Sitesong, was a man having a go at defying age. He was well into his sixties, shaven head, rimless glasses, thin body in a black teeshirt and black jeans. We were sitting at a table in his studio upstairs in a square tower attached to a house. Half a cheese and lettuce sandwich lay on a large white plate, next to it, two open bottles of white wine, one half-empty. A drawing board with a plan on it looked over a golf course.

‘Very much gurus,’ I said. ‘Both of you. That’s why I was keen to do something on your practice when this assignment came up. I was thinking along the lines of short biographies with details of major works.’

‘Len’s been done,’ said Klinger, filling his glass. ‘A student at Melbourne Uni did a Master’s thesis on the mudbrick pioneers. What’s her name now? Kilpatrick, Fitzpatrick, something like that. They’ll all be in there, Knox, Len, the others. Visionaries, all of them.’ Much less than admiration in his tone. ‘Mind you, I’ve never seen it. She promised to give me a copy, spent bloody days here, let her see all the sketches, plans, everything. Never heard from her again. That’s bloody gratitude for you.’

He studied me, narrowed eyes. ‘You’re from where?’

‘Burnley, part-time.’

‘Teach architecture there now?’

‘It’s a landscape design project,’ I said. ‘We’re encouraged to see the buildings as part of the landscape.’

Klinger nodded. ‘Enlightened of them. I did a bit of teaching at Melbourne, place was full of career-change hopefuls. Didn’t have a clue what they were getting into, most of them, not a clue. This practice’s been going since 1956 and on average I doubt whether we’ve made more than the basic wage. People don’t understand that. Bloody brickie makes more, much more. Go and be a brickie, that’s what I used to tell them. They didn’t like that.’

‘I’m holding on to my day job,’ I said.

He was studying the view without seeing it, glass in one hand, tapping the bony knuckles of the other on the table. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Melbourne Uni will let you see the thesis on the gurus, get what you need out of that.’

‘I’ve seen the thesis,’ I said. ‘But what I wanted to do was talk about your partnership. I wanted to talk to you about how you worked together, how you influenced each other.’

Klinger laughed, it turned into a cough. He stilled it with wine, a little warmth came into his gaze. ‘Won’t have a drop? The Queen Adelaide, all I can afford these days. Price of wine’s bloody outrageous. Influenced each other? I don’t know about influencing Len. I’d studied in Europe, of course. Len never left Australia, very narrow was the guru.’

‘So you brought a wider vision to the practice.’

He drank wine, turned his lips down. ‘I was younger,’ he said. He burped. ‘Excuse me.’

‘That would’ve made a difference.’

‘Nothing made a difference to Len. He was a bulldozer. Get in his way, he’d go right over you, didn’t give a damn. Got into these fearful rages.’

Klinger finished his glass, filled it, most of the bottle gone. ‘Didn’t drink before sundown in the old days,’ he said. ‘Can’t stay awake long after sundown now.’

‘Lennox had a bad temper?’

‘Tantrums. Like a child. Ellen told me, that was his wife, died in an accident. Tragedy. I loved that woman.’ He fell silent, stared at his glass. Then he looked up. ‘What was I saying?’

‘Ellen told you…’

‘Yes, the tantrums. Len’s father was the same. Ellen’s father-in-law. He was a doctor, used to rage at his patients, felt they were letting him down. Ellen said he went to see a patient in hospital one day and shouted at the poor fellow so violently the man had a heart attack on the spot.’

‘That kind of thing can run in a family,’ I said. ‘Did he pass it on to the children?’

Klinger sighed, sipped. ‘Sure you won’t?’

‘Perhaps half a glass. That would be nice.’

‘Excellent.’ He was pleased to have drinking company. ‘I’ll just get a glass. Frank, it’s Frank, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘David. Call me David. No one’s ever called me Dave. I wouldn’t have minded that. Dave.’

He went to a cupboard in the corner and came back with another goldfish-bowl glass, splashed it three-quarters full.

‘What were you saying?’

‘His temper. Passed on to the children?’

‘Ah, the children.’ Klinger’s good mood dimmed a little. ‘The twins, well, they were a worry from early on in the piece. There’s something about twins, something mysterious, I don’t know. They were both late developers, didn’t start talking properly until they were, oh, five, thereabouts. But they had this private language, they made these sounds, not quite words. Word-like sounds. Only to each other, didn’t respond to their parents or to Cassie for ages, more or less ignored them.’

‘That would be a worry,’ I said.

‘Yes. Ellen took them around the medical profession, they weren’t any help. As usual. Len of course was too wrapped up in himself to take much notice. And then one day Keith, right out of the blue, started talking to Cassie. Advanced speech too for a child. Ellen came around here, she was in tears. Tears of joy and relief. I cried with her, I can tell you. And a few days later, Victor started up, also to Cassie.’

I drank some wine. ‘So they were fine after that?’

Klinger shrugged, drank. ‘Brilliant, both of them. Reading like teenagers at six, playing the piano by ear. Writing stories, plays. Then Victor attacked a girl at school. He was about eight. She’d been taunting him but he didn’t do anything, not in class. He waited until playtime and he called this little girl around a corner of the building and attacked her. A serious attack, an assault. Premeditated assault. That was the real concern. He beat her with an empty soft drink bottle, got her down and rained blows on her. A teacher was there in seconds but the girl had teeth knocked out, her whole face was a big bruise. She was in shock, had to be taken to hospital. No one had ever seen an eight-year-old hurt someone else like that.’

He shook his head. ‘Terrible. Murderous streak, that would be from his father, no question. Len had a conviction for assault. Knocked an electrician right off a building, he fell twenty feet. And that was the one that ended up in court. There were others. I was scared of him, I don’t mind saying that.’

I said, ‘Someone mentioned an illegal firearms charge.’

‘Didn’t put that in the thesis, did she?’

‘No. I heard it somewhere.’

‘Len started going weird after Ellen’s death. Survivalist rubbish, Indonesian invasions. Built this bunker, year’s worth of food, even bloody cold storage, some silent fridge thing he devised. And this in bloody Eltham. Hardly your backwoods mountain hideout, huge city on the doorstep. But it wasn’t a logical matter.’

‘Illegal arms. What was that?’

‘Part of the lunacy. Len bought guns from a bloke in Fitzroy. Back then, you could simply have applied for a licence, they handed them out like lollies. But the conspiracy theory said the traitors were going to give the Indonesians a list of all the people who had licensed firearms. So you had to have unlicensed guns, then the Indonesians wouldn’t know and you could take to the hills of Eltham and fight back.’

‘He got caught?’

‘He had them in the four-wheel-drive and he got stopped for drunken driving. They separated the charges.’

‘I sidetracked you,’ I said. ‘You were talking about Victor at school, the assault.’

‘School wouldn’t have either of them back. They’d had complaints about Keith too but not about violence. I never quite gathered what, Ellen didn’t want to talk about it. That was unusual, we talked about everything.’

He drank, reached for the bottle, topped up our glasses. ‘I’ll get the cork out of another one, just in case,’ he said.

He got up and went to a small fridge I hadn’t noticed, opened the door. It was full of wine bottles on their sides.

I said, ‘What did the twins do about school after that, David?’

He was applying a sleek black device to the top of a bottle. ‘Ellen taught them at home. Had to, no school would take Victor. That School of the Air stuff the kids in the bush do. And Cassie, she was five years older, very smart, behaved like a real teacher. That went on till Ellen’s death. They were eleven then.’

Klinger turned his back to me, holding the bottle in one hand, the corkscrew machine in the other. ‘That was the biggest waste of a human being I know of. Ellen’s death.’

There were tears in his voice, probably in his eyes. He didn’t want me to see them, but he wanted to tell me.

‘On the Eastern Freeway. Drunks in a stolen car, bloody police chasing them at a fantastic speed, car came right across the middle, over the dip. Head-on collision.’

Nothing I could say. I looked at his back, at the rigid set of his thin shoulders under the teeshirt.

‘I loved that woman. From the moment I came into the room and saw her. The first time. The day I came for the interview with Len. Loved her. She loved me, you know. Loved me.’

I drank, waited. Klinger put the corkscrew down, pretended to be looking in the fridge, wiped his eyes with a knuckle.

‘Don’t know why I’m saying all this,’ he said. ‘Not the vaguest idea. To a total stranger. That’s probably why. I don’t think I’ve ever said that to anyone. You’re a good listener, Frank. It is Frank? Names just come and go.’

‘Frank. So Ellen taught them at home?’

‘Yes. Then Cassie had to do it. They didn’t need much maths teaching, taught themselves after a while. Len bought them a computer, pretty new then computers, and the twins were off, writing programs, all that stuff I don’t understand. Obsessed by it.’

He came back with the bottle, not too steady now. ‘That’s also from Len,’ he said. ‘Obsession. The man didn’t have interests, he had obsessions.’ I held out my glass and he poured. ‘Good to have company. Get used to being on your own but it’s not good for you. Not for men. Women, they seem to handle it better. Unfair, really. Another bloody mystery.’

‘What did the twins do when they finished school?’ I said.

He sniffed. ‘Nothing. Same as before. Stayed at home and played with the computers. Made money out of it by then though.’

‘Money? How?’

‘Games. They write games. Is that what you say? Write games?’

I had a big swig of wine, felt acid rise in my gullet, felt the muscles of my back and shoulders tighten.

‘Write, yes, that’s what you say,’ I said. ‘They write games?’

‘They make up these computer games. Beats me how you do things like that with numbers. Anyway, they do. Make quite a bit.

Not surprising, they’re good at making up things. Even when they were little, they were always making up things, putting on plays, getting dressed up.’

‘They write commercial computer games?’

‘Somebody bought the games. I suppose they still write them. I’ve lost touch since, it’s been a while, six or seven years. Can it be that long?’

Klinger fixed me with an inquiring look, as if I knew the answer to his question.

‘Lennox died in 1988, didn’t he?’ I said.

‘Died? Killed himself. You could see it coming from the day Cassie disappeared. I went around there once afterwards but I didn’t have anything to say to them. Victor would only speak to Keith and Eric, and Keith never said much, sits and looks at you with this smile. And the place is like a shrine to Cassie. She was everything to them. Not just a sister, everything. They worshipped her.’

‘Who’s Eric?’

‘He was a labourer on a house we built out in Coldstream, didn’t have any family, and Len took to him, brought him home and there he stayed. Like a slave, really, didn’t get paid, board and lodging, did all the work, built mad underground bunkers, fixed cars, anything. He’s a bit simple. Good with his hands though, fix anything, any machine. And he can cook, God knows where he learned that. Fancy things too.’ He shrugged. ‘He loved Len, the children. Happy slave though. Like a Labrador.’

He sniffed, looked into his glass. ‘Cassie stayed here for a while when she was in her second year at uni. Had to get away from home, she was being smothered by them. But Len kept turning up, taking her back. She was scared of him.’

Klinger took a sip of wine, his sips were getting smaller. stared out of the window, blinking, not seeing anything he liked.

The day had turned, night in the wings, shadows on the golf course now, golfers walking behind their giant elongated shapes. From this height, the bunkers were half-dark, sinister hooded eyes.

‘Yes,’ he said, and there was something different in his voice, ‘she was scared of him. Very scared. Scared of the twins too later on, when they were grown up. It became a very strange family, Len and Cassie and the twins and Eric. Very strange. Cassie was like the mother, no girl should have that sort of burden placed on her. Unnatural. The whole thing was unnatural.’

I waited. Klinger wanted to say more, moved his lips twice, licked his lips, fought off the desire to speak.

Finally, he said, with a small smile, pride in the smile, ‘And she still went to school every day, driven by Eric, got good marks. Amazing, an amazing person. Could take up burdens and put them aside, come back to them. Like her mother. One never ceases to wonder at the strength of some people.’

He stood up, now distinctly unsteady. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long day for me. Frank. Show you out. It is Frank, isn’t it? Didn’t get anywhere, from your point of view. Come again, we’ll have another session, talk architecture. Aalto was my hero, I had a model of his church, do you know the church? Imatra? Lovely building. Len smashed it to bits one day, in one of his rages.’

I went ahead, down the steel spiral staircase, fearing for his safety behind me, down towards the client entrance at the bottom. Outside the door, a brick-paved path led to the side gate.

We stood in the stairwell.

‘Thank you for talking to me, Dave,’ I said.

His eyes were thin, body swaying.

‘Dave, no one’s ever called me that. I wished at school, never mind, I don’t mind being called Dave. At all. I like that. Dave.’

We shook hands. He held on to my hand, didn’t want to let go, looked into my eyes.

‘She’s mine, you know,’ he said. ‘Cassie. She’s ours. Mine and Ellen’s. Untainted by the vile Guinane blood.’