Finn put the phone down in a daze. Saturday morning continued a run of steamy days trying to set another hottest spring record, and Edmund had rung with a new commission and the chance of a second.
‘High four figures,’ he said. ‘I’ll have you up to five soon.’
Finn’s belly churned with an unfamiliar mix of excitement and nerves. Maybe the heat was making him delirious. He headed back out to the pool area, where the boys were playing in the water and Bridget was stretched on a deckchair, reading the weekend paper. Told her.
She lifted her sunglasses to stare at him. ‘How much did you say?’
‘Eddie says hang on and enjoy the ride.’ Finn threw himself down into a beanbag, grabbed his hair and pulled so it stood on end and lifted his scalp. ‘This happens to other people, Bridge.’
‘It’s your breakthrough moment, Steampunk.’ Bridget sounded like she didn’t quite believe it. ‘Can you do it?’
Finn suppressed down a squirm of guilt at the time he’d spent carving when he should have been doing metalwork. He calculated. ‘Dragon Sentry took three weeks. Eddie needs the Sculpture by the Quay piece in five days. Then the commission ASAP after that.’
‘Christ.’ Bridget blinked. ‘But you’ve already been working on the new piece, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Finn said slowly. ‘Ish.’
Bridget lowered her glasses again. ‘Better check if I can take some leave. We need child care!’
‘What d’you mean? Toby can hang out with me like usual.’
Bridget laughed and shook her head. ‘Get real. This is the big league. You can’t look after a toddler.’
Finn leaned back in the beanbag and glanced down at the pool where Jarrah was playing with Toby. The kid was giggling and squealing, like he usually did. Jarrah was solemn. He’d been that way a long time. Since he started school, or maybe earlier. Funny how brothers could be so different.
Finn had been the stay-at-home parent for Jarrah while Bridget finished her PhD and worked long hours, tutoring undergrads, marking their endless assignments. He’d loved it, especially when Jarrah was small. Loved carrying him around the hilly streets of Hobart in the backpack, or hiking up Mount Wellington with Jarrah burbling and waving his fists. Loved parking him in a safe spot on the studio floor while he carved. He was good at all of it, except cooking. Bridget had lowered her food expectations and Jarrah knew nothing different.
Finn had wanted more kids. Dreamed of a big Irish Catholic family like the ones his ancestors bred. Bridget was up for it, kind of, though not on the same schedule: she needed more time to establish herself at work. They’d started trying for a second child in a vague way when Jarrah was five. Then her father died and mother started going downhill. Finn never dreamed it would take another nine years and a miscarriage. They were almost ready to give up when Toby finally came along. Finn hadn’t broached trying again. Looked like two might be as good as it got.
A squirt of water hit him on the cheek.
‘Dadda!’ Toby, armed with a water pistol, Jarrah helping with the aim.
‘Right!’ Finn got to his feet. He crouched, swung his arms and leaped, tucking up his legs against his belly for maximum impact, knowing his ability to displace a major volume. Hit the water with a whump and heard Bridget’s shriek and Toby’s squeal as he went under.
He surfaced, grinning. She was sodden. Trying to look cranky, but smiling.
‘Gotcha,’ he said.
Toby was straining from Jarrah’s arms and Finn reached out, grabbed him and swung him onto his shoulders. Then held out his hand. ‘Come on, Bridge.’
She shook her head then launched herself at them without warning, straight from sitting. Splashed them all, all over again. Even Jarrah laughed.
‘I’ll take the boys to the beach this afternoon, and you can get some work done,’ Bridget said. ‘We’ll swing by and see Mum on the way back.’
‘But it’s Saturday!’ Saturday was sacred. Even when she was working hard, even during the PhD.
‘Steampunks don’t get Saturdays. Or Sundays.’
Finn lifted Toby off his shoulders and handed him back to Jarrah. He waded to the steps and climbed them, his sodden clothes hanging heavy as he rose from the water.
‘Hey, this is good news, remember,’ she called after him.
It was. It was. But the day felt heavy suddenly. Toby was too young to go into full-time child care. He was only two and a half. Finn had expected another couple of years of gradually handing him over to the world. He wasn’t ready to let him go.
‘I’ll bring you a coffee,’ she said, smiling. ‘Now scoot!’
At his downcast face, she swam over, pulled herself up and gave him a hug. ‘It’s your turn, Finn. We’re all with you. Go for it.’
Her hair was slicked back, her eyelashes wet. Jesus, she was gorgeous. He squeezed her, lifting her up out of the water. ‘I love you, woman.’
‘You too, Steampunk. Now make us proud. I’ll make some calls about child care before we head to the beach. Maybe we can drum up a nanny or something for the first week.’
The studio, closed up all morning, was stifling. Finn opened the windows and reluctantly pulled on his stiff overalls. Art had never been pressured before, but Edmund was going to stay on his back. He’d been alarmed but pragmatic when he learned of Finn’s lack of progress. Suggested that Finn assemble a free-standing clockwork creature that opened and closed a small gate. Audiences could walk through it as part of the outdoor sculpture experience. When the show was done, it could be adapted and reassembled for the first commission. It would deliver just what the customer wanted: an opening device mounted inside their wrought-iron gate, visible from the street but out of reach, triggered remotely once the person inside the house had ascertained they wanted to let the visitors in. Which in itself signified a lifestyle outside Finn’s imagining.
Sweat trickled down from his armpits. No welding, he decided. That was for early morning when it was still cool, or nighttime. He’d spread out the components on the floor, see what else he needed and hope to God he could replicate the creation of Owl and Dragon.
Would he ever get used to the heat? Finn’s beloved leather jacket was turning mouldy in the cupboard, barely needed in what passed for winter so far north. It wasn’t even summer yet. They’d timed their arrival nicely nine months ago in February for the start of the school year, just catching the last of the heat, and it had nearly wiped him out then. Winter had been superb – cool nights, warm days; he’d have been happy if it stayed just like that.
He heard voices drifting in from the pool: splashing, Toby’s high-pitched squeals of delight, Jarrah’s voice, barely raised, Bridget’s laughter. Whatever happened with the artworks didn’t really matter, he reminded himself. Look what he had.
He wouldn’t forget it again. He’d taken his family for granted, back in Tasmania. Hadn’t thought what he was risking. Hadn’t meant to risk it at all. Sandra Neumann was Bridget’s best friend and the two families hung out. Finn liked her professor husband Hans well enough, though they didn’t have much in common. Jarrah played with their son Oliver. It had been that way for years, and Finn had no idea why, in the course of a long, drunken evening at the Neumanns’, something shifted between him and Sandra. He’d followed her into the kitchen to help clear up, and they’d both giggled when their hips bumped at the sink, and the next thing they’d been kissing like crazy.
He’d pulled apart from her – faster than he wanted to, slower than he should have – and shook his head like a dog coming out of water. His groin ached. His wife and her husband were in the next room. All their kids were sleeping upstairs.
Sandra stared at him, guilty and rumpled and suddenly very sexy. ‘That can’t ever happen again.’
But it did. Twice. Each time hotter and more dangerous. More fumbling, more grinding, more exploration.
The thing was, it took him by surprise. Sure, their sex life had been quiet after Toby was born – but he was sure it would come back once they started sleeping normally again, just like it had with Jarrah. He didn’t know why Sandra was suddenly so attractive, until he thought back and realised Bridget hadn’t looked at him in that hungry way for a long time.
Finn picked up a cog and ran his hands around its rim. Tasmania was his old life. The long days and long nights of high latitudes, the dusks that lingered for hours, the cold. Woodwork. Leather jackets. Open fires. And family – brother, sisters, father. It was their Irish blood, he reckoned. The Brennans and Tasmania were a natural fit.
Metalwork, it seemed, was his new life. Instead of living in sight of those tall Tasmanian forests, he now resided in a landscape shaped by molten heat and pressure, an extinct volcano, whose crooked core loomed over the town, visible for miles. Now he was a welder, not a carver, and the digital world wanted his machines, wanted cogs and gears, wanted a fitter and turner-turned-artist to remind them how things worked mechanically.
So be it. He’d have been happy in Tasmania forever, and he hated being away from the rest of his family. But after Bridget found out about Sandra and him, she demanded they leave Hobart. Having felt the possibility of losing her, he’d have gone anywhere she wanted.