Hold

by Kirsten Tranter

  A sound came from behind the fence and I jumped back, startled. Perhaps it was Rob, moving the sculpture away. It had sounded like pieces of metal hitting together, not violently, a soft clank. I listened, and thought I heard breathing, a sound of exertion, but then it was quiet. I had been holding my breath; I breathed out. The metal arm stayed where it was.

  The idea that the lights would work when I wasn’t there in the room was ridiculous, I knew it was, but I wanted somehow to check. A new bulb would show whether that had been the problem all along. I collected one and went upstairs, closing the bedroom door behind me. The idea of entering the room while Janie was at home still felt like breaking some kind of agreement, the terms of understanding between me and the space, but I wasn’t planning to spend time in there, I reasoned. I was just checking the lamp.

  The door stuck again when I pushed it. I took a slow breath. It was just a matter of pushing it at the correct angle, with the correct pressure. I tried again, with no success. It was the humidity, the heat, the old wood. I placed the bulb on the floor of the closet, next to a pair of shoes, resolving to try again later.

  Janie’s door was open, I saw when I left the bedroom. I heard the sound of retching coming from the bathroom.

  They had an agreement, David and Janie, and supposedly Gwen too, about vomiting at home. About vomiting in general. It was a condition of Janie keeping up with her ballet classes, a deal they had made when Janie had got sick enough to wind up in hospital a few months before we had moved to the new house. David blamed himself for it, blamed the divorce, and agonised about it, but he was tough on Janie too, quick to anger about it. Once or twice since the move I had gone into the bathroom after Janie to find it fragrant with air freshener and the sour smell of vomit underneath, but I hadn’t mentioned it to David, hating to be in the position of informant.

  The toilet flushed. I waited. Janie’s face was pale when she opened the door, and anxious when she saw me.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  Janie stared at the floor.

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ Janie said quickly. ‘Seriously, I swear. I’m sick.’

  ‘You’re sick?’

  ‘I think I have food poisoning.’

  My first thought was of how unlikely that was, considering how unlikely it would be for Janie to eat enough of anything to get sick from it. ‘Look, I don’t want to get into it, I don’t need you to make stuff up,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t tell Dad,’ Janie said. ‘I’m sick, I mean it.’

  ‘Then you tell him that.’

  ‘I don’t need to tell him anything.’ Janie looked away and rubbed at a spot on her sleeve.

  If she was going to throw up, couldn’t she do it somewhere else, or at another time, I wondered. Somewhere I didn’t need to hear it or know about it and be stuck in this role, having to decide whether to tell David and what to say, having to endure even more resentment from her if I did, and a sense of betraying David if I didn’t.

  ‘This puts me in an awkward position.’

  ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ Janie said coldly. ‘But I’m not lying, although I don’t expect you to believe me. Do what you want.’ She stepped to her room and closed the door. I stared at it, feeling the sense of bewildered disorientation that arrived from time to time, as though I had been teleported suddenly out of my normal life and into this strange one, where I was a stepmother to a difficult teenager, with no idea how to be or what to do.

  I would call David. It would be better to get the conversation over with than to spend the time until he got home worrying about what to say and how to handle it. I went downstairs and pulled my phone out of my bag but got no answer when I tried his number. ‘Hi, it’s me,’ I said. He wouldn’t listen to the message anyway. ‘Just let me know what you want to do about dinner. Okay, bye.’ He was in some meeting or attending some faculty event. I tried to remember the last time I had called and he had picked up the phone. I couldn’t.

  *

  David came home a couple of hours later with shopping bags full of bacon and cream. He rolled up his sleeves and poured large glasses of wine for us both and started cooking, standing in the kitchen barefoot in his jeans, chopping and stirring.

  I gave in to a surge of irritation as I contemplated the conversation with him about Janie and what I had heard that afternoon. ‘This food is all wrong for the weather,’ I said, watching him crack eggs into the pan of carbonara sauce. The heat made it hard to feel hungry and we were still waiting for the cool change.

  David turned and kissed me, his mouth tasting of white wine. I brushed a tiny piece of parsley from his lip when he pulled away and he caught my hand and kissed my palm hard. ‘Can you get Janie down here?’ he asked.

  Janie came when she was called and politely spooned a healthy serve of pasta into her bowl. She hadn’t changed out of her school uniform. David watched her in that way he had, trying so hard to not be obvious about it. ‘This is great, Dad,’ she said, smiling. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Glad you approve,’ David said. She kept eating, and I saw him start to relax. Janie didn’t look at me until her plate was clean, and it wasn’t the cool stare I had been expecting, just a quick glance. She thinks I’ll tell him, I thought. David ate quickly and didn’t seem to notice me pushing the food around my plate. His phone rang and he went to answer it, wandering into the front room, talking. Janie stood and took her and David’s dishes to the sink, leaving me at the table, my plate still half full. I pushed it away and poured another glass of wine, and listened to Janie’s slow tread on the stairs up to her room.

  I had started to rinse the plates when David came back. ‘Sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘That was Malcolm.’ His agent. ‘An update on the series. Leave those, I’ll do them.’

  I let him take over. ‘What’s the update?’ I asked. It was something to do with the script, he told me, the other writer the producers wanted to bring on board. He asked me about the book and my meeting; he liked my boss, the publisher, who had once been his editor, and loved hearing stories about her power to intimidate underlings. Vanessa was in fine form, I assured him, arguing about the font and the position of every caption as usual. ‘Do you want to sit on the balcony?’ he asked.

  I’ll tell him once we’re up there, I decided. But his phone rang again on the way up, and he went back down to answer it, and I sat by myself on the balcony with my wine. I found myself wishing to be alone, to have the house to myself, to lie on the sofa in the little room and fall asleep there. When David joined me half an hour later the southerly had just started coming in, a wild gust of cool air, shaking the tops of the trees. A door banged in a house somewhere nearby, slammed by the wind or a person.

  ‘Malcolm again?’ I asked.

  He nodded. He stood with his hands on the railing, not facing me. The decision settled on me gently, and I was weirdly buoyed by it. I wouldn’t tell him, about Janie and the vomiting, not yet. Janie wasn’t my responsibility.

  ‘I’ve got some emails to finish,’ he said, and touched my shoulder. ‘Is it starting to rain? We should shut the doors downstairs.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I stayed there as he left, letting my skin grow cold, but no rain arrived.

  Seven

  I was on my way downstairs the next morning when I heard it again, the sound of retching from the bathroom, followed quickly by a flush. David was down in the kitchen making coffee, preparing to leave. I paused, turned around and went to wait outside the bathroom door. It opened a moment later. Janie was dressed in her uniform, her hair in a neat, bright braid that hung down her back.

  ‘I didn’t tell him yesterday,’ I said. ‘But I should tell him now.’

  ‘Do what you want,’ Janie said, crossing her arms.

  ‘Can I get past? I’m going to be late.’ She chewed the inside of her cheek.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. An idea presented itself. Light freckles stood out across Janie’s cheekbones and her eyes were puffy, red-
rimmed. She did look kind of sick. But there was something else, a trace of anxiety behind the usual cool screen of her face. ‘You’re not sick, are you?’

  ‘Can I get past?’

  ‘Are you pregnant?’ The idea seemed ridiculous as soon as I said it. But Janie didn’t give me a cold stare, or tell me to mind my own business, or say anything to dismiss or deny it. Instead she looked away, up at the ceiling for a moment, as though she was waiting for the question to disappear.

  ‘I’ll be late for school.’

  ‘Janie? Is that what’s going on?’

  Janie pushed past me and hurried down the stairs. It couldn’t be. A moment later I heard David saying goodbye to her, and she was gone. I made my way slowly down to the kitchen.

  David handed me a cup of coffee and kissed the side of my head as he stepped past me to the table. He pulled his shoulder bag from a chair and started riffling through the papers inside. ‘What are you up to this morning? Back in the office?’

  ‘Not today,’ I said. ‘I’m seeing Tess later on.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, glancing at me. ‘Is the coffee okay?’

  ‘The coffee’s great,’ I said, although I hadn’t tasted it yet. I set the cup down by the sink. That feeling from last night, the buoyancy of avoidance, had disappeared. ‘David,’ I said. ‘I’m worried about Janie.’

  ‘Janie? Is it the thing with your clothes again?’

  ‘What? No.’

  ‘I’ll speak to her if you like. I think she just forgets to return them. They’re probably right there in her drawer. Or on the floor more likely.’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’

  ‘I thought she was doing pretty well last night. Relatively civil. Even ate something.’

  He was about to say it, I knew, some version of a statement about how difficult everything was for Janie, and he was holding back. This time it was as irritating as him actually saying it. Thinking about my idea now it seemed unreal, impossibly unlikely. Janie never talked about boys. She seemed only interested in dance classes, from what I could tell. Janie had a history of bulimia, we all knew it, and we knew how common it was to relapse, how hard it was to stop. That’s what it was. I felt a small flash of sympathy for her, thinking how awful it would be to be trapped by that kind of compulsion. A moment later I saw my own reflection there, a hazy version, and then it passed. But it wasn’t my job to supervise Janie’s eating or not eating, or vomiting or not vomiting, or stealing a glass of wine. If it happened one more time, I told myself, I’d tell him. I saw him glance at the clock.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said.

  He gave me a long look. ‘Tell me later if it’s still bothering you. I’m more worried about you. You seem a little flat.’

  I straightened and made myself smile. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  He was quiet for a moment, long enough to send a tingle of anxiety along my skin. ‘I haven’t forgotten, you know,’ he said.

  I picked up my cup again, wanting the warm solid thing in my hands, something to hold. Was he talking about the room? Surely he had forgotten about it; he hadn’t mentioned it after that one time, when the door had stuck.

  ‘It’s next weekend, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  He shook his head in irritation. ‘It’s worse, you know, when you do that, when you pretend that you’re not thinking about it.’

  I remembered. The anniversary. I hated using that word for it. An anniversary was a word for a marriage or a happy event. It didn’t belong with death. I felt a sense of horror and a thrill that I had forgotten about it, a weird mix of guilt and relief.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. He wouldn’t believe me if I told him I hadn’t been thinking about it.

  ‘No, it’s okay,’ he said, straightening his collar.

  I felt bewildered by the conversation after he had gone; we seemed to be so often talking at cross-purposes, disconnected from what the other was thinking. I had expected something different from living together, I realised. What had I expected? The idea of closeness had intimidated me at first, when he had suggested the idea of buying a house. It was the thing that had made me defer the decision, the thing I was afraid of. The move had been a way of opening up that possibility, and I had agreed to it eventually, knowing I would never be sure I was ready until I tried. The first few weeks had been full of novelty, almost like a holiday, and the pristine white house had felt like a luxurious hotel. At first I thought David was making extra efforts to give me space, knowing my wariness and my sensitivity to being watched over, my resistance to routine. But by now it seemed more like his attention was simply elsewhere. I was here, now, as he’d wanted me to be, and yet I felt oddly invisible. Except for the moments when he thought I was looking too pale, or flat, when I could be an object of concern.

  I put the coffee down, still untasted, and looked around the white kitchen, at the expanse of glass that wrapped the back and side of the house, and out to the front window, across the open living room, all beige and ivory and clean lines, books neatly ordered in their shelves along the walls, the television hidden away behind doors in its smooth cabinet. It was hard to shake the sense that I was a visitor in the space, not fully inhabiting it. A ghost. I tried to imagine what the house would be like without me — if I hadn’t moved with David, if I had said no, and stayed in Rozelle, and he had bought the place himself. It would be no different, I knew with certainty. My office upstairs would be Janie’s, but apart from that, and the one or two pieces of artwork that belonged to me, the place would be the same.

  I remembered the old wardrobe left on the street, the bed left behind, the kitchen table and mismatched chairs at my old house. Most of the furniture in the place had belonged to Ruby. She liked to collect things off the street, side tables and shelves and chairs. The act of reminiscence didn’t feel melancholy, as I’d expected it to. I felt the same kind of relief as when I arrived at the new house that morning with David, after I had left the wardrobe and other things behind: unburdened. Apart from my desk, a neutral slab of particle board on trestle legs, there was nothing substantial here that I could associate with Conrad and the time we were together, and the time afterwards. I knew that this was a large source of the feeling of relief. I had left all those things behind; I was moving on. But where had I moved to; where was I in this place? I was still so untethered. Not in a way that felt like any kind of freedom or release.

  Without me the house would be the same — except for the room, I reminded myself. That was mine. The room would never have been found by David, or by Janie. I couldn’t believe that it would have revealed itself to them.

  I went upstairs. When I looked at the wainscoting around the bedroom now it seemed strangely pliable, as if I could have reached my hands into the tiny spaces between the pieces of wood and touched another world, another space, the space between the walls that seemed to be full of surprising dimensions. I reached through the cluster of shirts and dresses in the closet and tried the door, and was surprised when it opened easily. The chandelier was blazing and the lamp shone brightly on the sofa. There was an electrical hum in the air; I switched off the lights and the sound disappeared. The silence without it felt strangely dead. The space was dim, almost dark. The window showed blue sky, a flat square without brightness. I touched the arm of the sofa, and the nap of the velvet felt soft under my fingers, too soft, as though the fabric had started to decompose or melt. I took my hand away. I had been longing for the feeling of a tight embrace that the room sometimes provided, verging on a pleasant kind of claustrophobia, hoping that it would drive away the sense of being unmoored in space that had come over me downstairs. But the room didn’t seem to hold me in the way that I was used to. Instead there was that same feeling of being extraneous. There seemed to be nothing left of the lovely sense of possession and solace that had arrived when I had stepped into the room that first morning, when it seemed to welcome me like a charming, beautiful person.

  It had all c
hanged, ever since the afternoon I had come home and found the table there, and suspected that Janie had been inside. It had frayed, like the sense of a spell coming apart that I had felt the last time Kieran visited, when I watched him, imagining Conrad. That had been a week ago, and I hadn’t heard from him.

  The air grew darker. I didn’t want to bring back the humming noise that had accompanied the lights earlier, but the silence itself became unnerving. I heard the sound of a handle turning and a door opening, but it seemed to come from the wall across from me, from the mantelpiece, where there was no door. Then there was silence, nothing. A faint scrape from next door, possibly, or maybe a noise from outside. Still, the space felt somehow violated and unsafe; I had a creepy sense of being observed, beyond the familiar sense of the room’s occasional alertness. The door behind me was still open. I stepped back into the bedroom and shut the door so fast it closed with a loud thud.

  It didn’t matter that David had chosen everything in the bedroom, that nothing seemed to belong to me except the clothes on the closet rail. The space was bright and comforting in its small aspects of disarray: the crumpled blanket and sheets, a book open face down on the floor next to David’s side of the bed.

  I picked up my watch from the bedside table. Almost an hour had passed since I had said goodbye to David and come upstairs, although it had felt like I had spent only a minute or two in the room. It seemed impossible that I had been in there that long, given how badly I hadn’t wanted to stay in there, given the humming and the silence and bad mood of the space, the uncanny sound of the door opening. The batteries were flat or the watch was faulty, I decided, reminding myself of David’s criticism of the appliances whenever I burned something. I could have checked the clock downstairs, or on my phone, but I didn’t want to confront the disturbing possibilities. It had been like that ever since I had found the room, I remembered, the way time moved differently in there. Maybe it was more like my studio in Rozelle than I had admitted, the way the days used to pass in a blur of paint and turpentine smell. I didn’t want to think about it; the room was nothing like that. It wasn’t a trap: look how easily I had left it just now. That’s how I decided to describe it to myself. I had given up painting, I had left the house, I was a functional person now. I smiled at myself, at how much I made my own mind sound like a machine that needed care and fixing. That was how it felt, sometimes, tuning the delicate chemical balance of my brain, my heart.