Alicia nodded, slowly, her smile replaced by an expression of vague concern. ‘I don’t go out there,’ she said.
‘Could you ask Rob, maybe? See if he can just shift it over a bit?’
‘Sure, okay, I’ll ask him. He’s moving some of the pieces out this week, moving some in.’ She glanced back inside the house. ‘I’ll ask him when he’s up.’
‘Thanks. That would be great.’
She smiled again, showing no teeth. ‘You’re at home today?’
‘Working at home, yeah.’
She laughed, a dry sound. ‘There’s always more work to be done, isn’t there?’
I wasn’t sure how to reply. ‘I work at home a few days a week. Most of the week.’
‘The girl’s with you today, isn’t she? Tonight, I mean? Janie?’
I said she was, surprised that she had already noticed the pattern to Janie’s coming and going.
‘How old is she?’
‘Fifteen.’
She nodded, pleased for some reason. ‘We had a daughter,’ she said, the words coming quickly, forced.
Had. I waited for her to say more, not wanting to ask the obvious next question: what happened?
‘Oh, she’s long gone,’ she said, waving her hands dismissively, as though I had asked the question anyway.
‘Gone?’
Her hands went still. ‘She was fifteen.’ She shrugged, an exaggerated gesture with a dramatic sag of her shoulders. ‘Missing. She took off. She’s out there somewhere.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Janie’s a lovely girl.’
I agreed that she was. ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked, curious.
‘We’ve seen the whole area change,’ she said, gesturing with one hand to the street around us. ‘It’s nothing like what it used to be around here. But we’re not going anywhere.’ She shook her head. ‘She knows where we are. We’ll be here.’
I couldn’t help feeling a moment of disappointment: sometimes I fantasised about them leaving, about the yard next door being free and empty. But they would never move, the sculptures would never go. They were waiting there for their daughter. I wondered how long it was since she had left. Maybe that’s where Rob went, the days he left the house and returned looking as though he had been walking the streets all day. Looking for her.
‘See you later then.’ Alicia gripped the door in a way that suggested she was ready to go back inside.
‘See you later,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ The door closed while I finished speaking. I remembered that faraway look she had when she first opened the door, as though she were looking at something over my shoulder, across the road; looking for something, someone. I wondered if grief was the cause of her fragility, that prematurely aged way of moving she had, which I had interpreted before as the legacy of years of drugs. It could have been both.
A fine rain had started falling, misting the pavement. The morning was already warm and the rain only seemed to make it warmer. By the time I went back into the house and out the back to get the laundry in, the rain had intensified to a hard, rhythmic fall and my clothes began to soak through as I stood there, unpegging. The metal arm above me didn’t look as I had remembered it a moment ago, reaching down towards me with sinister intent. The rain seemed to avoid it: the metal darkened with wetness, but no drips fell from it. I took the damp laundry inside to the dryer, rationalising that this was why we had the machine, wet days like this where nothing would dry, and clothes would sit there on the rack staying damp and getting mildewy. Janie used the dryer for everything, staring blankly when David lectured her about the waste of energy. It was full of her things now, leggings and leotards and singlets, and I pulled them into a basket. I straightened and turned around to face the fence through the glass doors, still open enough to let the rain in, a light spatter on the floor. I let them stay that way.
*
I called David and left a message: no need to ask the neighbours about the sculpture, Alicia was going to ask Rob to move it. A moment after I ended the call the phone buzzed into life again and I answered, expecting it to be David calling back.
‘Are you home?’
‘Kieran?’ I could hear traffic noises in the background, as though he was driving. ‘I’m working at home. Where are you?’
‘I’m out. How busy are you?’
I let the question rest for a moment. I went to stand in the doorway, leaning in just the way David had leaned that morning, squinting at the metal arm. I still felt bruised inside at having missed him the day before, at the idea of him in the room without me. Stupid, stupid. My own longing scared me and I wanted to hurt him back. To see if it was even possible.
‘Shelley?’
‘Why are you calling me on the home phone?’
‘I tried your mobile. No answer.’ My phone was in my bag in the hallway, probably still switched off after being in a meeting the day before. ‘If you’re working, that’s okay.’
‘I am working.’
‘How’s it going?’
I sighed. ‘Horrible.’ The desire to injure him passed, mollified by the phone call. Stupid again.
‘What major organ are you working on today?’
‘The liver.’
‘Look, I’m going to be back over your way in an hour or so.’
‘Do you have another lamp for me?’
‘I’ve got some crystal drops for your chandelier. Close match.’ He had his professional voice on. ‘Seriously, picked them up a couple of days ago at an estate.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Should I drop them around?’
The rain let up suddenly, and all the small sounds around me seemed clearer and brighter for a moment: the dryer turning, the magpies continuing their argument in a neighbouring tree. I pictured the lock on the door, my own hands opening it, the spectacle of his presence, the unreasonable, beautiful gift of it. I had stood in the same spot as David to remind myself of him, of my duty, to chastise myself. It didn’t work. I saw that masked smile of his, instead, remembered the unexplained late nights and the phone that was never answered. ‘I’ll be here.’
‘See you soon.’
I pressed the button to end the call and put down the phone, trying to remember when I might have given him the number for the landline.
*
Kieran took his boots off to stand on the sofa while he fixed the drops to the chandelier, closing up the tiny wire loops with a pair of pliers he pulled out of his back pocket. I watched his feet in their dark blue socks, toes and tendons flexing as he kept balance.
‘Are you sure it’s okay to stand there?’ I asked. ‘I don’t want to damage the sofa.’
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘It holds more weight than you think.’
I stood by the window and waited. The sofa creaked gently. It was a good time to tell him, I thought. I had chastised myself after all, after the phone call, in the long difficult minutes when waiting for him to arrive was worse than the tense pressure in the air before a storm. It was time. That pressure was close to crushing me. When he arrived, time passed into a sublime phase of heightened present tense, an unreal bubble around his presence: all other time seemed to be reduced to simply waiting for him, or reacting to his departure. I wanted time to go back to being of more manageable stuff, to release myself from that hold, even as I felt my heart contract at the idea. And none of that needed to be confessed, least of all my own weakness. I tried to keep that hidden, with no idea how far I had succeeded. It had been fun; should I say something like that? Or nothing at all, just that it was time to stop. The reasons were obvious, weren’t they. I didn’t need to say anything about what it had been or meant.
But I hadn’t told him yet, and I let myself linger in the intimacy of the moment, his stockinged feet on my sofa, his boots carelessly on the floor. I watched his arms move, and the way his hair fell, and let myself, with that feeling of indulgence that comes with performing an action knowingly for the last time.
He fell in and out of recognition, or misrecognition: there was Conrad in the way he raised his arm, and the fall of his hair, and he was somehow there too in the careful way Kieran manipulated the pliers. But Kieran’s stance was his own, the way he positioned his feet firmly on the sofa. I focused, or rather unfocused, and saw the parts of him that weren’t him. I wanted the spell to hold, while feeling, sickeningly, that it was fraying.
‘Table looks good in here,’ he said.
‘Did you get my message?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘About the table?’
‘Ah, yep.’
I had called to thank him yesterday afternoon. He hadn’t listened to the message, I thought, but it didn’t matter. I had told myself I wouldn’t ask, had put the idea firmly at the back of my mind, but now the question slipped its way into my mouth. ‘So Janie let you in yesterday?’ That panic edged its way in again, the stiffness in my body. I was afraid to move, afraid to let it show.
His focus was all on the chandelier. ‘All done.’ He gently tapped the drop he had just fixed on. ‘Still some smaller ones missing. I’ll keep an eye out for a match for you.’ He stepped down to the floor. ‘Switch it on.’
I stepped over to the cord and pulled it. The little bulbs shaped like candle flames stuttered for a second and lit. Kieran looked at me and raised his eyebrows, looking for approval.
‘Lovely,’ I said, and smiled at him, and the panic began to soften.
He glanced over at his boots and I wondered whether he was going to put them on and leave, just like that. He would probably ask me for money first. My chest tightened at the thought. The delicate intimacy of the earlier moment felt ruined.
‘You know, I don’t actually just sit around here waiting for you to drop over,’ I said.
He nodded, his hands by his side, still holding the pliers. I waited for him to put them back in his pocket, but he didn’t. ‘She let me in, yeah,’ he said. ‘Sorry, should have given you a ring. Didn’t realise she’d be home.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘She seemed pretty pissed off about it,’ he said. ‘I got her out of the shower.’ He stepped towards me, as though he was going to walk through the door, leaving his boots behind. But then he stopped, and reached for the door and pushed it closed. ‘She’s not here today, is she?’
‘She won’t be home until later.’ I was still holding the cord. My anger left in a rush and I just wanted to forgive him, to say whatever it was I needed to say to make him stay. He placed his hand over mine and drew it down, away from the cord. I thought of the doorknocker next door, the cold brass fingers in mine, so dead, and his hand so alive.
He let the pliers fall to the ground with a thump. ‘Leave it on,’ he said. ‘Or do you want to switch it off?’
I shook my head. His mouth was warm when it pressed against mine, and he let go of my hand to hold my waist, and pushed me so that my back was against the door. I tried to conjure that sense of finality from earlier on — I had meant it, at the time, I had been serious — but it wouldn’t come. Even as I failed to bring the feeling back, I remembered his glance at his boots, the sense that he had been about to leave, and felt powerless. It could be the last time anyway; the choice wasn’t mine.
He had got Janie out of the shower, he said. I saw Janie’s fingers on the lock again, opening it, her bare arm, her body in a towel. No. She would have worn her dressing gown, probably; she hated showing bare skin.
Kieran lifted my shirt off over my head and dropped it on the floor, and the door felt cool against the skin of my back. ‘I know you don’t sit around waiting for me,’ he said, undoing his belt with a soft click. ‘In fact, I like to think about dragging you away from your busy day.’
‘I am very busy right now with this job,’ I said.
‘This horrible job.’
His hands slid down my waist. ‘Where is the liver, anyway?’ he asked.
‘Probably right there.’ The seat of the soul, it used to be believed. The seat of love, anger, courage, all emotion. How strange it was, this geography of organs and tissues inside, invisible and unfelt under the surface. A hidden world, with such mysterious passageways between its parts. His hand was warm against the surface of my skin, with a heat that seemed to travel right through it.
*
I stayed out of the room for days afterwards. The next time I tried to reach the door, almost a week later, the closet seemed overly full of clothes, David’s side crowded with unused hangers and shirts slipping off their hangers, jeans slung over the railing, dresses on my side squashed and tangled up with skirts. I tossed David’s jeans out of the closet, aiming for the bed and missing. They landed on the floor in a heap. My hand paused on the hangers as I prepared to push his shirts aside; I could smell something, a fragrance that didn’t belong to me. It could have been Janie’s. It was sweet and floral but not girlish, a hint of jasmine. It reminded me of those pearl earrings in the cabinet at his Glebe flat; had I ever smelled it there? I lifted one of David’s shirts to my face, trying to tell whether the smell was attached to it, but it smelled only of laundry detergent and sun, the smell of cotton dried outside. I replaced it and reached through to the door.
The knob stuck when I turned it. I pushed again, harder, but it felt as though the door was locked. The same thing had happened when I had tried to show the room to David, that one time. I kicked the door. There was no give. The wood felt as solid as brick. ‘Let me in,’ I said, hearing my words fall flat, addressed to no one.
Bright sun slanted in through the open balcony doors. Another humid day. My hair was still wet from the shower, and would probably stay damp all day. I was due in the office in just over an hour, a meeting to discuss the latest pages. What had I wanted from the room in any case? At times I craved the sensation of the velvet of the sofa against my skin as though it was another body, a lover. I wanted to lie on it with my head resting on the upholstered arm, and look through the pages I had printed out.
The air smelled faintly of ash again, blown in from new fires away to the west. I closed the balcony doors and went back to the closet, pulling out a dress to wear, a dark red tunic, tearing it free from its plastic sheath, leaving the bag on the floor with the jeans.
*
When I returned in the afternoon, I tried the door again, this time craving the coolness of the room, which never seemed to get as warm as the rest of the house. I tried not to let myself think about the possibility of it sticking this time, and imagined it opening smoothly with a neat turn of the handle, as though I could project this image into reality. The handle turned, although the door resisted for a moment, then it opened, as though it were rewarding my precisely imagined idea of it. I stepped inside. The room was cool, as I had expected, but the air felt stale. I crossed to the window and it refused to open, as usual. I reminded myself to ask Kieran to have a look at it the next time he visited, and then stopped. It seemed wrong to think about him like that, as though he was a presence I could rely on. Or was this the right way to think about him: performing a service, delivering furniture, fixing the light fittings? That was too depressing, too close to the pornographic cliché of the housewife seducing the plumber.
The staleness of the air seemed to increase, as if the oxygen in the room had been all used up. It seemed dimmer inside than usual, for the time of day. The sun outside was harsh by now, and my red dress had damp stains under the arms. I pulled the cord for the chandelier, but it didn’t brighten. The lamp stayed dead when I switched it on: a fuse. The idea of a trip downstairs to fix the switch and then back up again seemed exhausting.
When my hand reached the door, I heard a small buzz and turned to see that the lamp had lit up. Its yellow beam was visible against the sofa. There was that sense again of being extraneous to the room, almost rejected by it. The lamp darkened again. The bulb must be faulty, or dead. But it felt horribly as though it was waiting for me to leave, refusing to work in my presence. I couldn’t shake the feeling that
when I left, the chandelier would brighten and the lamp would light again, and the room would come back to life without me. The door closed tightly in its frame as I closed it behind me.
I was halfway down the stairs when the front door opened. Janie kept her bag on her shoulder and waited for me to come down before taking the stairs herself.
‘Didn’t you have ballet this afternoon?’ I asked.
‘I did,’ Janie said, not turning around. ‘I left early.’
‘Okay,’ I said. She went to her room and closed the door.
I had never looked at the fuse box myself. It was David who had checked it and fixed whatever needed to be fixed when the toaster or hairdryer overloaded the system, but I found it easily, next to the laundry. The cover opened with a thin metallic clang. There were at least twenty switches inside the box, rows of grey and blue, all facing neatly to one side; I had no idea which one might correspond to the room, but it seemed as though they were all working correctly. I wondered whether the lights in the room were on a separate circuit, not part of the rest of the house or the fuse box.
I crossed over to the sliding doors at the side and opened them, but the hot air outside was no less oppressive. The metal arm of the sculpture was still there, reaching over the fence. The metal had a dull oxidised surface and didn’t reflect any light. I supposed it was iron. What were they for, I wondered, or who were they for? When Rob shifted them — moving some in, moving some out, Alicia had said — where did they go? They were too tall to fit inside a house and it was hard to imagine anyone choosing them for garden art. The faces all wore the same blank expression, grim or fearful or startled depending on the angle of light and shadow. They looked something like a three-dimensional rendering of a small child’s drawing, a stick figure. The hand reaching over the fence — leaning, not reaching, I reminded myself — wasn’t really a hand at all, just three pointed fingers attached to a stick of an arm. The rough simplicity of it made me think of a witch’s doll, a voodoo figure made to have pins stuck in it.
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