Hold

by Kirsten Tranter

  At these moments, when he bullied the machines around the kitchen, I saw his insecurity. It was as though he worried that the failed dinners and burnt breakfasts were a sign of things going wrong between us, or as though he was afraid I would begin to see it that way.

  The bread felt spongy and soft as I dropped it into the toaster. Janie ate only white bread, the kind that came sliced in a bag. I remembered the cardigan from the other night, which I hadn’t seen since. Could Janie have gone through the closet, I wondered, one afternoon when I was out or somewhere else in the house, and discovered the door? It would be typical of her to keep it to herself. But the room had seemed so uninterrupted, in a way. I couldn’t believe that she had been there.

  The toaster popped. Janie kept her eyes down as I handed her a plate with two perfect golden pieces.

  ‘Hurry up,’ David said to Janie. ‘I’m driving you, remember.’

  Janie smiled at him through a mouthful of toast, a genuine smile of happiness. Was it because he was taking her to school — she loved to avoid the bus — or because he’d given her an excuse to leave aside her food, I wondered. Janie set the plate down on the counter and went to collect her schoolbag.

  ‘See you next week,’ David said, and hugged me. ‘Don’t burn the house down while I’m gone.’

  I went with them to the front gate and watched as they walked to the car, Janie’s schoolbag hanging heavily from her shoulders. Ours was the last house in the row, with a narrow lane on one side. I looked across at the house next door. It was the same design as ours, an almost identical twin, although in a state of sad disrepair. Brown paint peeled away in swathes, like sunburnt skin, from the plaster of the facade. The mouldings around the windows were crumbling in places and had been crudely patched in others. There were few houses left in such ‘original’ unrenovated condition in the area, one of the wealthier eastern suburbs that had gentrified steadily over the past twenty years.

  I rarely saw the inhabitants, a middle-aged artist and his wife. Every week or so they got into a noisy, abusive argument that lasted late into the night, but that was all we heard from them, apart from the relentless, muffled clanging from his workshop, a corrugated-iron shed adjoining the back of their house. Their backyard was crowded with his sculptures, tall totem-like figures welded together from long pieces of beaten metal. The first time we saw the house, the sight of the sculptures had been enough to make me reject the idea of buying it. The sculptures were taller than the fence between the properties, their thin necks and crudely rendered heads visible from the yard, and the rooms upstairs at the side and back looked over them, a forest of rusty metal creatures. They were ugly, I protested, and made the outlook oppressive. I found them secretly disturbing, not just in their ugliness but in their sheer number, crowded together in such a menacing way.

  David talked me around in the end. We both loved the house in every other way, he reminded me. It was the very thing we had been looking for, a Victorian terrace in a good location, and it had the original iron-lace balcony railings that I loved. There was a thick-trunked gum tree in the small yard that was gradually taking down the brick fence that backed onto the laneway. It was a hazard, and looked as though a strong storm would send it crashing into the lane, but David was confident we could have it removed. ‘A magnolia would look good there,’ he’d said. I wouldn’t have to use the rooms that looked out over the neighbours’ yard, David said. One of them would be converted to a bathroom in any case, and the other could be Janie’s room, or his study. We could build a higher fence. And we did, in the end, and the frosted glass in the bathroom upstairs showed only metallic blur.

  Across the road was a row of monstrous old Moreton Bay figs, the pavement cracked and erupted all around them and covered with rotting fruit and bat droppings, the tree’s uncanny aerial roots drooping down like tendrils. Every time I passed them they suggested something human — a straggly long beard, thin fingers, a collapsed ancient face — but this lasted only for a moment before they became strange again. The house had a sandstone foundation, neatly cut and finished around the sides of the house, giving way to rough-hewn slabs that formed the base of the front fence, held together with messily applied mortar, with iron railings topped with worn fleur-de-lis set into the stone. Little ferns grew in the spaces between the crumbling slabs. I loved the weathered look of the stone, the surface scarred as though eaten into by little worms or pitted by centuries of rain and wear. Pieces of the stones in the fence seemed to fall off regularly, in small clumps or flakes of shale-like layers. It was such a crumbly stone that it seemed like a marvel that it would work as any kind of foundation; on the rare occasions when the weather was wet I would imagine the stone soaking up the water like a hard, patient sponge, preparing to one day turn back into grains of sand.

  David complained from time to time about the condition of the house next door, worrying that it would damage our own property value. I found it hard to care. The neighbours’ house looked like the houses I had lived in as a student and I was still getting used to coming home to the beautiful house, not the dilapidated one. I’d never owned property before, and had put a relatively small amount into the purchase of the house, although it had taken all my savings. David was the one with the money. My name was on the contract and the mortgage — it was mine, it belonged to both of us, but at the same time it didn’t feel to me as though I owned it. I had no idea what that sensation would properly feel like: the most valuable thing I had ever owned was a new computer, followed by an espresso machine, an extravagance I’d splashed out on when I’d got my first full-time job. I had left the thing with Ruby when I moved: I didn’t have the patience to make it work, though she managed to.

  As I turned to go back inside, the neighbours’ door opened and the sculptor’s wife stepped out. She wore dark glasses, huge black frames that covered half her small face, her black hair pulled back. I waved at her, conscious that I was still wearing my pyjamas.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said in a lazy, creaky voice. A smile spread slowly across her face. ‘How’s it going? Happy with the house?’

  ‘We love it,’ I said. It was the first time we had exchanged any words beyond a basic greeting.

  The woman nodded. I felt a sudden certainty that she knew about the room. I was being anxious, I told myself, getting paranoid. I made a promise to myself to make time to meditate over the weekend, to find the relaxation CD that had disappeared in the move, the one I had yet to take out of its plastic wrapping. Would the room make a good meditation space? It seemed like a legitimate use for the room, but it was hard to imagine emptying my mind there: it was too alive, asked too much of me, somehow.

  ‘You guys did a lot of work on the place,’ the woman said, as though she were imparting an embarrassing secret about someone else. She turned her head abruptly and shouted inside the house, her voice a shrill roar. ‘Rob! Get going!’ She looked back at me and smiled, calm again. ‘Always running behind.’

  I kept my eye on the door, expecting the artist to burst out of it, shouting back at her. ‘I hope it wasn’t too noisy for you,’ I said. ‘The work.’

  She laughed, a low, knowing chuckle. She took a step closer, out of the shade of the overhanging verandah. In the sunlight her skin was heavily made up, covering old acne scars still half visible beneath. There was a dark bruise below her collarbone, an oval shape turning green around the edges. I wondered whether the glasses concealed a black eye. It was difficult to guess her age: she was small and slightly built, wiry like a runner in her faded blue T-shirt and leggings, and could have been a young woman aged by drugs and smoking, or middle-aged. Thirty-five or fifty.

  ‘I’m Alicia,’ she said, walking stiffly down the steps and across the dirty concrete towards the low fence that separated the front yards of the two houses.

  I hesitated, then stepped over the gravel, feeling the sharp pieces press into the soles of my feet. ‘Shelley,’ I said, offering my hand. Alicia shook it gently. She smelled of ceda
r and something else I couldn’t identify, green and resinous. It seemed to be the fragrance of the house, its interiors, clinging to her body. ‘David’s my partner,’ I said. ‘And Janie. Janie’s his daughter. You might have seen her. She stays here a few days a week.’ Alicia kept hold of my hand, smiling while I babbled. I pulled my hand back and she let it go slowly. Maybe she was stoned, I thought. Maybe the glasses covered pinned pupils.

  Alicia turned back towards her house and I braced myself for another bout of yelling at the man inside, but instead she simply watched the open door, alert, as though listening.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ I said, backing up.

  Alicia nodded. ‘Yeah, you too. See you round.’

  *

  The house felt empty once I was back inside, but the faint tang of burnt toast and new paint smelled good to me after the scent of the house next door. I contemplated the weekend ahead with a combination of boredom and creeping relief to have the place to myself. I made coffee in the press and took it upstairs. I had an office at work, of sorts; a desk I shared with another designer at the publishers, two days a week, a corner in a massive open-plan space where you could hear every phone call and conversation from across the room. I preferred working at home in my office upstairs with its window overlooking the lane. It was the smallest room in the house, little more than an alcove, but I loved the way its furnishings and shelves all fitted together perfectly like a carefully designed puzzle, and its greyish filtered light. I thought of it as an eyrie, a mysterious word I had never spoken out loud. Here there was a different class of overheard conversation: the occasional drug deal, the occasional fight, and now and again, on weekend nights mostly, sex behind the garbage bins.

  I hadn’t been back to the extra room since that first morning I’d found it, but it was never far away from my thoughts. That corner of the house seemed somehow hotter and brighter than the rest in my imagination, glowing and quietly magnetic. Despite having told David, it still felt like a magnificent secret, waiting for me. I touched the keyboard to bring my computer screen to life and sat at my desk.

  An hour later I went downstairs to hang out the load of washing sitting in the machine. The tall fence we had built to shield us from the sculptures next door was made of sheets of dark metal riveted together, and the clothesline extended out from it. A neon pink pair of underpants stood out against the pile of washing in the basket: one of Janie’s things that had been left in the machine. They had become entangled with the strap of one of my bras, and I reached down to untwist them, hating the feeling of uninvited intimacy that came with touching her underwear. That’s what they called them, in the department stores: intimates. It was tempting to leave them there in the basket for Janie to collect herself, but instead I pegged them up. I didn’t want to be petty. The fabric felt thin and synthetic under my fingers. The clothes all had the damp, sour smell of having been sitting around wet for too long.

  I looked up at the house, searching for the window belonging to the room. Our bathroom window was there on the top floor, and not far from it the line of paint that marked off our property from the house next door, but I couldn’t identify the room. It had to be one of the windows on the other side of the line. The organisation of the space bothered me, as it had the other day; it was hard to tell how the room could be positioned in the house so that its window looked out with this aspect. David had suggested finding the architect’s plans, but I didn’t know where they would be. And there was no reason to think the architect even knew about the room. He was a young, incurious man who had done some work for one of David’s colleagues which David had liked; David was the one with strong opinions about the arrangement and design of the space, and he was the one who had talked to the architect. I had still been coming to terms with the idea of having enough resources to knock down walls, install new plumbing and replace floorboards, uncomfortable with this kind of mastery over space. David made efforts to include me in the process, insisting that I choose the paint colours, though only from within a fairly narrow palette of whites and greys. My study was a pale greyish-lavender, and Janie had chosen a dark teal for her own room, the only spots of real colour in the house. Apart from the room, now, with its obscenely pinkish-red walls.

  *

  That afternoon I saw Alicia in her front yard when I left the house, close to the front gate. She was bent over, collecting copies of the local paper and other junk mail that had collected just inside their fence, a sodden pile on the concrete that left a stain when she lifted it. She didn’t seem to notice I was there. I opened the gate and she straightened up, gazing across the road, her attention somewhere else entirely. She wasn’t wearing her glasses but a cap obscured her face, the brim pulled low. Her hand rested on one of the fleur-de-lis spikes of the fence, and I remembered the feeling of her dry fingers in mine when we shook hands that morning.

  I walked to the shops on Oxford Street to buy food for dinner, and spent too much money at the deli on cheese and olives and more things than I could reasonably expect to eat by myself over the weekend. The bags of supplies I ended up with were heavy, and the plastic cut into my fingers, but the feeling of walking was a relief after spending the day at my desk arranging type against images of kidneys and lungs and chambers of the heart, and I kept going down the street instead of heading for home. The afternoon was sultry and bright, with that tingle in the atmosphere that comes before rain. The air carried a trace of salt with it from the water; a bus idled next to me, erasing the salt smell with the fumes from its exhaust.

  I stopped a couple of blocks later at a shop that sold second-hand furniture, one of the few stores that hadn’t been turned into a boutique, restaurant or specialised delicatessen. It had been there as long as I could remember, from the days when I had been a high-school student, hanging out at coffee shops here on the weekend, just like Janie did now. Some of the objects in the window looked familiar from that time: I seemed to recognise a thick plaster Corinthian column, two feet high, that served as a base for an ugly abstract sculpture; underneath it sat a Chinese-style statue of a lion, round-eyed and growling. I ventured inside the cool, shadowy space, curious to see what else had changed inside. Bookshelves and cabinets filled with trinkets and vases had been placed side by side to create narrow, precarious pathways through the room. I wandered through piles of salvaged stained-glass windows stacked against each other, chairs and tables, a dense muddle of objects ranging in condition from battered junk to valuable-looking, polished collectibles. Towards the back of the shop a man was lifting a small round wooden table with three legs from where it had fallen against the seat of a red velvet sofa.

  The sofa had a carved wooden frame and one curved upholstered arm. It was long enough for three people to sit together, or one person to lie down. Instead of another arm at the other end of the sofa, it ended bluntly, although the edges were covered neatly with the same fabric as the rest. I guessed it was really a chaise longue, but it looked strangely as though it had been cut down from a longer original design. Little brass studs secured the fabric to the frame, and the upholstery was tufted on the backrest like a Chesterfield. It made me think of a cross between a psychiatrist’s couch and a piece of bordello furniture. It was a couch to recline on, and seemed to invite it. I pictured women fainting on it, and ladies in corseted gowns resting while they caught their breath at a ball, and complicated lingerie being undone while shoes were kicked off.

  The man set the table down on the floor by the side of the sofa and noticed me when he straightened up. ‘Have a seat,’ he said. The table almost matched the sofa, the wood a slightly different colour and style. ‘Mahogany,’ he said, touching the sofa’s velvet arm. ‘It’s French. Beautiful upholstery.’ He was tall and slim, with straight hair long enough to push behind his ear.

  It was that one gesture that did it, that revealed his resemblance to Conrad. My heart lurched. Once I had seen it, I couldn’t believe that I had missed it earlier: the high cheekbones, the carefully shaped
brow and angled jaw, the slim hips, all of them echoes of his face and body. It had been at least a year since I had seen him in someone else in that way. In the months after he died it had happened all the time: I would see him across the road or through the window of a bus or car, or in the supermarket or at the park. And I knew it couldn’t be him, but there was always that short second of recognition, a moment where I didn’t remember he was dead. It left me feeling freshly bereft every time.

  This was less painful. I didn’t forget, but it didn’t hurt as much as it once had. I tried to put it out of my mind, to see the aspects of him that were different. Longer legs. Thinner. I didn’t want to look too closely.

  ‘I’m just looking,’ I said.

  He smiled and walked in the direction of the stacked glass windows. I watched until he disappeared from sight behind a monstrously carved bookshelf. He wasn’t as tall as Conrad, but he moved with the same lanky grace.

  The sofa was the same red as the wallpaper in the extra room. The bags in my hands were heavy and I gave in to a desire to sit. The velvet cushions felt cool and firm. I leaned back and thought about the pale linen-covered couch at home, the red-wine stain on the fabric at one end that wouldn’t come out. I let my head fall back and began to relax.

  The same man, Conrad’s double, was standing behind the counter in the back corner when I went over a few minutes later. The counter was crowded with lamps in various states of disrepair, boxes and papers, ledgers and books of receipts, a small pile of paperback novels. A laptop was open in front of him, a new-looking machine out of place in the dusty surrounds.