A sound from the hallway startled me, a door closing. I stepped to the door, through it and out of the closet, my heart high in my chest. ‘Hello?’ No answer. Seconds later the faint noise of the shower started up. ‘Janie?’ I asked.
‘Hello, I’m in the shower,’ she called back, irritated. Her bedroom door was open, showing piles of clothes on the floor, on the bed, slung over the chair at her desk.
I went back to the room, although entering it when she was in the house felt like crossing a taboo. But it had already been crossed, I reminded myself. She had been there, in the house, in her room, when I got home, I just hadn’t known it. The chandelier, the lamp. Had she been in here? It seemed at first so impossible — in my imagination the door was a charmed threshold, only able to be crossed at my invitation. The lamp shone on the sofa. A cloud passed across the sun, dimming the room, and the lamp’s rays were visible.
At times I noticed ghosts of picture frames on the walls, darker and lighter squares where paintings might have hung, or mirrors. One hovered there now, over the mantelpiece, between the empty shelves. It was silly to leave them empty, I told myself. I should fill them with books, the boxes of old novels and art history texts that sat in the corner of my study, getting dusty, still unpacked. I should hang my own pictures, buy myself a mirror to bring some lightness to the space. The room pushed back, as it always did when I thought about decorating it any further, with a stubborn sort of resistance.
I remembered Kieran on the street, so close to the house. Delivering garden furniture. It was natural to feel his presence here in some way, I told myself, after the time he had spent in the room with me. But the feeling was so much fresher than it should have been, and that sense of myself as an extraneous thing, not an intruder but an unnecessary adjunct, returned. I lowered myself to sit on the sofa, the sudden thought of them in the room together like an ugly blooming stain in my mind, a drop of ink curling outwards in water. Not that, I told myself, surely not. I glanced around the room, willing it to offer me some sense of calm and safety, but it still received me as though I were a stranger.
Music started up from the direction of Janie’s room, a blare of girls’ voices, and quietened as she closed her door.
It was ridiculous, the idea of the two of them together. And yet it wouldn’t shift. The sun came out from behind its cloud, warm and richer now with late afternoon yellow. I let it blind me, closed my eyes and lifted my face to it, tried to let it scour my mind clean.
*
David called out to me from the front door as he was leaving for work the next morning. ‘Shelley? Have you seen this?’
I went to him. He pointed to a rough canvas sack propped up against the wall of the house, just next to the door, knee high. ‘It’s full of stones,’ he said. I pulled aside the top of the sack and saw that it was filled with pieces of quartz, just like the ones Rob had given me the day before. I hadn’t told David about them; he had arrived home late, and the backyard was dark. When I looked out that morning the little pile by the tree had seemed flatter, as though the magpies had been through and knocked it over.
‘I think these are from next door,’ I said.
‘Do you mean they’re for next door? Did someone deliver them here by mistake?’
‘No, I think Rob meant to give these to us.’
‘Why would we want a sack full of stones?’ He checked his watch, irritated.
‘He mentioned to me something about them, about how they would go with the gravel.’
‘The gravel?’
‘The front yard.’
He shook his head. ‘They’re madder than I thought. Look, I’ll deal with it later.’ He kissed me on the mouth, his face smooth, just shaved, clean smelling. We said goodbye again and he left.
I looked at the sack. It felt like a trick from a fairytale, a strange gift that was a test of some kind. The sack was too heavy for me to lift without straining; I tried, and shifted it by a couple of centimetres. One of the tiles underneath seemed to have been cracked by the weight of it. I quite liked the idea of spreading the stones across the gravel; I imagined picking them up by the handful and scattering them, like seeds. But when I picked one up and held it, the desire passed. They were a different element from the gravel rocks, somehow. Their mysteriously marked translucency clashed with the opaque, neat little grey- and sand-coloured stones. I kept hold of the one piece of quartz and took it upstairs to my office, and rested it on the windowsill.
*
I didn’t go to visit Kieran at the shop, and he didn’t call. On my days at home I went into the room when I took a break from working and tried to read a novel, but something always interrupted me after a few minutes. A phone call; a parcel being delivered; the sound of rain, reminding me to fetch the washing from the line. Half-empty mugs started to collect at the foot of the sofa.
A week passed. David moved the sack of quartz into the tiny garden shed, where they spilled onto the floor. I didn’t catch sight of Rob again, although every night I heard fragments of terrible, drunk-sounding arguments any time between nine and dawn. Then I saw Kieran again on my way home. Not walking in my direction this time, walking the other way, almost at the end of the block. I quickened my pace, thinking to catch up with him. He turned the corner. By the time I reached it myself, he was gone. The street was full of other people: schoolgirls in a group, smoking as they walked; men in suits, talking. But he wasn’t there. He must have got into a car and driven away. Or turned into a laneway. I gave up.
Janie was home early again when I arrived back at the house. She opened the bathroom door as I walked up the stairs, her hair wound up in a towel, her pink robe tied tightly around her body, a muttered hello when I greeted her.
It took me a moment to see the table when I went into the room. I almost didn’t go in there, remembering how strange and resistant it had felt the last time I’d been in there when Janie was in the house. Then I did, thinking I would collect my coffee mugs and take them down to the dishwasher. I had already picked them up, holding the three handles together with one hand, when I noticed the table. It had a small round top and a central pillar that branched into three feet at the bottom; it looked similar to the three-legged table Kieran had been arranging near the sofa in the shop the first time we met. It had been placed in front of the fireplace — an awkward place to put it, was my first thought, before the oddness of it being there at all struck me. I went to it, and thought about shifting it closer to the sofa. It looked like the kind of table that was intended to hold a delicate Victorian fern in a pot. I liked the idea of having a plant in the room. A maidenhair fern. A porcelain pot. The surface of the table shone with a quiet gleam.
I left it where it was and went out of the room, out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Janie’s door was closed, the same music playing behind it that I remembered from last week. I had never knocked on her door before and I didn’t want to do it now. The mugs clinked in my hand and I had to concentrate to keep a grip on them as I went downstairs.
She had let him in. That was the only answer. The image of her hand on the lock on the front door played over and over in my imagination. She turned the lock, her fingers firm around it, and pulled. I got as far as the door opening, and a glimpse of Kieran standing there, and then it stopped and started again. That ugly ink stain in water, spreading in a quick bloom, jealousy.
I emptied the mugs and put them into the dishwasher, filled the kettle and switched it on, moving automatically. I would have to ask her about it, to get the conversation over with before David arrived home. It was hard to imagine her bringing it up herself, since she didn’t tend to speak about anything to do with me, but it was possible. She could bring it up over dinner, and I would have to explain that I had bought the table and arranged for it to be delivered, although I hadn’t. I could tell her that I had, but I didn’t know whether I could tell her and David at the same time.
The kettle bubbled and switched itself off. I stayed at the sink. Janie c
ame downstairs and walked through with a basket of washing in her arms. She went to the laundry — we called it that, although it was really no more than a large cupboard beside the kitchen — and bent down to shove her clothes into the machine.
‘Janie?’
She kept her head down, untangling a pair of tights.
‘Did something arrive for me this afternoon?’ I tried to keep my voice natural, smooth, forgetting just for a moment that I had never found a smooth or natural way of talking to her.
She shut the door of the machine and straightened up.
‘A guy was here with a table.’ She turned the dial on the machine and pressed a button, and the water rushed in with a hiss. ‘It should be upstairs. He took it up.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
‘It’s there, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it’s there.’
‘I didn’t know where he was going to put it,’ she said. She came over to the kitchen and reached into the cupboard for a mug. ‘He said he knew where to take it.’ Her hair hung straight down her back, dampening her shirt.
‘It’s fine, it’s there. It’s just something I bought.’
‘I thought it was okay, since he said you were expecting it.’
‘It was okay, absolutely. Thanks.’
‘So it was okay to let him take it up.’
Now I felt sure she was saying too much. I wondered if she was going to ask where it was now, although that would be unlike her. She closed the cupboard and turned to me, looking at me with a question. I didn’t know what the question was, only that it was there. I waited for her to say his name, feeling a hazy panic begin to spread through me, stiffening my limbs and hands. I dreaded it. Of course it had been him. I wanted her to prove that to me, and I wanted her never to have seen him. She looked away, and pulled a tea bag out of the canister on the counter. I went upstairs and it felt like a retreat.
She hadn’t said that she had followed him to see where the table went. There was no reason to think that she had been in the room. I closed the bedroom door and went back to look at the table. It still looked odd and out of place in its position near the fireplace. It was surprisingly heavy, its surfaces smooth. I lifted it and took it over to stand by the sofa, in a place where I could set a glass or a book on it when I was sitting down.
There was no way of knowing. The space gave no indication of whether or not she had been in there; Kieran had been here, but there was no indication of his presence either. The room felt flat and empty. And even if it had seemed to suggest a presence, to carry some echo of who had been in there, I reminded myself, that would be an illusion, a projection of mine. The thought was weirdly comforting. I sat down on the sofa. The table still felt wrongly placed. I took it over to stand next to the window, and it seemed to fit there.
My phone started ringing, and I left the room to answer it.
Six
When I went to hang out the laundry the next morning, one of the sculptures from next door was leaning over the fence: a tall figure’s stick-like metal arm, rusted in places. The totemic heads of other sculptures were visible, just, and several headless spikes, but this was the first time one of them had reached across the boundary between the properties. The figure had a flat, squarish head, with a wide straight line cut through for a mouth and eyes hammered into the metal. I turned my back to it and took down the shirts already on the line, stiff from hanging overnight, and pegged up the wet clothes and sheets. When the basket was empty I looked up, hoping unreasonably that the metal arm would be gone, or would somehow be less intrusive, but it wasn’t.
David came to stand in the open doorway, leaning against the frame.
‘Look,’ I said, and pointed to the arm.
He squinted at it. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘If we’d built the fence any higher we would have blocked all the light. It’s ridiculous.’
‘I keep thinking it could detach and fall off.’ I took another step away from it. It would be heavy if it fell.
He kept looking at it, as though assessing this possibility, and turned back to me. ‘I’ve got to go, darling. I’ll talk to them about it when I get home.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Should be back for dinner.’ His gaze slid back to the fence. ‘Ugly, isn’t it?’ he said, smiling.
‘I hate them,’ I said, and then was disgusted at my own petulance. I had meant the sculptures, but it had sounded as though I meant the neighbours too. Maybe I did. ‘I don’t want to have to see them. And I don’t want them poking into our space.’
David stepped forward and kissed me, his hand warm on my cheek. ‘I’ll take care of it,’ he said. ‘Bye.’
A minute later the front door slammed as he left.
I worked on the anatomy book, trying a new typeface, but the thought of the arm leaning over the fence bothered me. Why was I waiting for David to address it? It was my fence too, my yard, my house. A couple of birds started screeching in the lane. Magpies, fighting over an apple core. I went downstairs and pulled on some shoes.
The door of the neighbours’ house was black, the paint crackling and splitting from the sun into splinters in places. In the centre of the door was a large brass knocker in the shape of a hand, severed at the wrist, fingers hanging downwards in a slight curl. I lifted it, taking the metal fingers into my own, and knocked twice. The gesture felt like an occult handshake, as though I were shaking on a mysterious deal.
It was just after ten. I had checked the clock before leaving, making sure it wasn’t too early, although I had no idea what the neighbours’ patterns of sleeping and waking were. Sometimes the arguments or music would go on into the early hours of the morning; sometimes I heard noises from the workshop at dawn, and other times no sound until the late afternoon. The late nights and early mornings didn’t seem to have any discernible relationship or pattern.
Silence from the house. The thought that maybe no one was at home was a kind of relief. It would be easier to let David deal with it. But I lifted the knocker to try once more, and the door opened, pulling the knocker from my hand. I had hoped that it would be Rob who answered — I remembered the gentleness of his hands as he’d tipped the pile of quartz pieces into mine, and that look of sympathy he had given me; he seemed kinder, less intimidating than Alicia, as long as I didn’t let myself think about the shouting at night. It was hard to believe those noises came from the same couple I saw during the day, both so quiet and withdrawn, so self-contained.
‘Shelley?’ Alicia held the door half open. ‘Hi. What can I do for you?’
‘Hi, Alicia. Sorry to bother you.’
Alicia tilted her head and looked past me at something in the distance. The trees across the road, or the cars parked in front of them? I fought the urge to turn around to see what she was looking at. She met my eyes again. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Actually, I wanted to talk to you about one of your sculptures.’
‘Sculptures?’
‘The ones in the backyard.’
For a moment it looked as though she was going to deny knowing about any sculptures. She must be stoned, I decided. Her eyes were dark brown, yellowish around the whites, purplish shadows beneath. ‘What’s your interest in the sculptures?’ Alicia asked. ‘They’re Rob’s.’
‘One of them is leaning over the fence,’ I said. The resinous smell was there, the one I had smelled on her when we had spoken before, laced with something harsher. Turpentine, and maybe mineral oil. There was a smear of paint on her thin forearm, a smudge of sky blue.
‘How do you mean?’ Alicia asked, frowning. She looked me over, taking in my T-shirt, jeans, the sneakers I hadn’t tied properly. I wondered if Rob had told her about the quartz, about the sack of stones, and hoped she wouldn’t ask.
‘The arm of one of them,’ I said.
‘The arm?’
‘It’s leaning over the fence. Just the arm.’
‘Are you worried about the fence?’
‘No, we’re not worried ab
out the fence, it’s not pushing the fence over or anything like that, it’s just kind of sticking out.’
Alicia stayed still, waiting.
‘I mean, the arm comes out over the fence, so it’s in our space.’
‘Is it bumping into something? The fence is pretty high, isn’t it?’
‘It’s not bumping into anything, no.’
‘You built that fence when you did all that work on the house.’
‘We built it, yeah.’ We built it to block the view of your husband’s sculptures, I thought. We paid for the whole thing as well.
Alicia smiled. ‘Are you much of a gardener?’
‘Not really. There’s not much of a garden. We’ve put some plants in, but they’re still small.’ I tried to galvanise myself. ‘But with the sculpture, I just wanted to see if you could move it,’ I continued, ‘just so the arm isn’t sticking over the fence.’
‘I thought it might be getting in the way of one of your trees.’ Alicia was still smiling, as though I was exaggerating the situation with the sculpture to make a funny story out of it.
‘No, no, they’re not tall enough. The big gum is over on the other side of the yard, at the back.’
‘That gum’s a monster,’ she said with affection.
‘It’s not getting in the way, exactly. The sculpture.’
‘But it’s leaning over, you said?’
I started to wonder if I was explaining it all wrong. Were there words, proper words, for the space inside the boundary of the fence, the space where the arm was intruding? Was it still technically our space, up there at the top of the fence? Did we own that patch of air? If it was a tree branch, I wondered, would it matter as much? It wouldn’t. Depending on the tree. But it wasn’t a tree, a tree couldn’t help how it grew. It was a metal arm. When I pictured it now, I saw it reaching down towards me.
‘It’s kind of encroaching,’ I said, resolving on a term. It was an ugly word but seemed accurate. ‘I think it’s encroaching over the boundary line.’
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