Hold

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘So you’re both artists.’

  ‘Yep.’ Alicia bent down to collect a couple of brushes from the floor. There was no sheet under the easel, and the floor around it was marked with paint.

  ‘Where’s this?’ I asked, although it seemed obvious.

  ‘Bronte.’ The sky was grey in the picture, and the beach was empty of people, but it wasn’t a wintry scene. The clouds had the threatening density of a summer storm. I had painted that sky, that water and sand, so many times. If I had examined her paints I would have recognised the tints, could have named the colours, guessed the precise mixes of grey and white and blue, yellow and white and umber. Parisian Blue. Jaune Brilliant. Davy’s Grey. Cold Black. Cobalt Violet for the lavender shadows in the clouds. They nauseated me now. I brushed my fingers against my legs unthinkingly, wiping off streaks of paint that weren’t there.

  I turned away from the painting, towards the wall that joined our house. I hadn’t noticed it when I had come into the room, and it seemed impossible that I hadn’t, but now I saw it, a door in the wall exactly where my own door was, the door in the closet, although here there was no closet. The wallpaper had been roughly torn off all around the frame, and the plaster beneath looked fresh and pale, as though the door itself had been revealed behind the paper. The door was the same colour as the plaster, as if made of the same stuff. Alicia was still standing in the light, brushes in her hand. ‘There’s a door like this on our side,’ I told her, stepping closer to it. It felt strange to talk about the door; I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone for so long.

  ‘You found it, did you?’

  I glanced back. Her head was tilted slightly like a bird’s. How did she know that it had needed to be found? Maybe she had been through the house, when it was being sold, or before then. Maybe they had been friends with the previous occupants and had known about the closet and the door.

  The door wasn’t identical to mine. The panels were different sizes, and the whole thing had an unfinished edge to it, as though it had been painted and repainted so many times that its original contours had blurred. It had a handle, the same as the other doors in the house. The edges of the door fit closely against the frame, so that it was hard to tell where the door stopped and the frame started. ‘Mine keeps sticking,’ I said. ‘Half the time it won’t open at all.’

  ‘Really?’ Alicia asked. ‘We don’t have that problem.’

  ‘What’s behind there?’ The door looked to be in the same place as mine, a mirror image, like the rest of the house. But my room didn’t have another door, a door into their house. There was no space for another room there, between the houses.

  ‘It’s a spare room,’ Alicia said.

  I gazed again around the room we were in, wondering whether I had misjudged the proportions. Possibly it was smaller than our bedroom. But if anything it looked bigger; it seemed to expand as I looked at it, the balcony doors swinging wider open, the papered yellow wall stretching further away.

  ‘Take a look if you like.’ Alicia stood expectantly. She could have gone to the door and opened it herself, but she didn’t. She seemed to be waiting for me to ask, for me to open the door. It seemed to me now that I had been invited in for exactly this purpose, to see the paintings, to ask to open the door.

  I felt something like the tingle of strange excitement I had experienced that morning when I had found the door in the closet, now amplified so greatly that all kinds of other tones sounded that had been muted before, although they seemed to belong to the same sensation — the uncanny sense of going against logic, knowingly, confident that reality would reshape itself around whatever choice I made. I felt afraid, although I didn’t remember feeling afraid that first morning.

  It was in my power to say no, and Alicia’s obvious desire that I say yes made me perversely want to refuse. But I was curious. That invitation to unreality was addictive in its own way, and I was captured by it. I opened the door — the handle turned as smooth and light as air — and stepped through.

  I had known, or guessed, what the space would be like, but it was still unsettling. I was in my room, or a version of it. The sofa wasn’t there, or the table or lamp, but the chandelier was missing the same pieces. The wallpaper was the same rich crimson damask, maybe even deeper than in my own room. There was a door in the opposite wall that looked just like mine.

  The room looked the same as mine, but it felt different. Mine had been so immediately seductive. I remembered that feeling of wanting to stay in there all day and late into the night, the way it had seemed to embrace me, the way it had seemed so interestingly conscious and alive. This room felt blank in comparison. And yet it was familiar. I recognised the troubling atmosphere that I had noticed in the room recently, and an incipient sense of hostility.

  I remembered the night of the storm, the wet floor and the black night outside, how impossible it had been to tell what the view really held. I crossed to the frosted-glass window; it slid up as smoothly as the door had opened for me. And then I started back, letting go of the frame. I reached out to steady myself on the edge of the sofa and remembered it wasn’t there.

  The window showed me an impossible view, the whole frame crowded with the sculptures, clustered as thick and tall as a close forest. I could have reached out and touched them. Surely none of them was as tall as that; we would have seen them, over our fence. They seemed to grow and lengthen as I looked at them, with the horrible hallucinatory stretch of vertigo. One metal hand seemed almost to be resting on the windowsill, much like the hand reaching over our fence. Their faces were all angled away, and I was grateful that none were looking directly at me. A metallic clanking noise sounded from somewhere down below; it would be Rob, in the workshop, building them.

  The weird unlikely position of the room had been possible to ignore, earlier, with the window to the outside closed, but now that sense of vertigo tugged at my body. The whole view, the whole space was impossible, and I wanted to shut it out, to leave. I tried to push the window down, but it stuck. Alicia was in the room with me now, just inside the doorway.

  ‘Help me,’ I said. Her face had come back into focus, away from the dazzling light. It was the same as I remembered it, ambiguously young or old. There was something regal about her posture, the way she held the brushes carefully in one hand, like ritual instruments of some kind, her arm across her chest in the pose of an Egyptian goddess. She stepped towards me. When she touched the window it closed with a rattle.

  ‘How does the room fit in here?’ I asked. It couldn’t fit, not with my own room next to it, unless I had misjudged all the dimensions, the size of the room with the painting. It was the twin of my own room, but somehow more than that, with a more unsettling shared identity. I wanted to ask her where my things were, where the sofa was. It had to be the same space. It couldn’t be. She put her hand on my arm. I wondered what she made of my confusion. Was the room’s strangeness visible to her, too, or was it perceived only by me? Having a witness to it only made it seem more impossible. Her fingers felt papery and dry, but they were real, they had the solidity of flesh behind them, and I tried to anchor myself back in some kind of recognisable world. ‘We don’t use the room,’ she said. Her fingers tightened. ‘It used to be our daughter’s room.’ The atmosphere in the room seemed to shift at her words, and the emptiness in there coalesced into a sense of loss. I lifted my eyes and looked behind her, at the door we had come in through. It didn’t look like a door from this side. The shelves on one side of the fireplace had swung open. A hidden entrance.

  ‘It’s hard, when we lose people,’ she said. ‘We want them back.’

  I nodded, afraid to speak.

  ‘We’d do anything to have them back,’ she said. When she’d said ‘we’ the first time, it had sounded so general: when you, me, everyone, loses people. But now it sounded so personal. Not restricted to her and Rob, though, and their grief; it seemed as though I was included too, in her careful stress on the word.

  I thought of K
ieran as he had seemed in that first moment I recognised Conrad in him: flattened out by the resemblance somehow, made weirdly two-dimensional, and then how he had seemed so much more than that, so impossibly real, when he had stood in the room next to the sofa and I had let myself see it, see it all. My ghost, denser than life.

  ‘She was a lot like your Janie,’ Alicia said. My insides shrank at the pain in her voice. My intestines, my heart: I could picture them, I had seen them on pages printed out that very morning, labyrinthine, many-chambered. I wondered whether Janie was for them what Kieran was for me. And I wondered how it could be that Janie would be like their daughter: Alicia’s dark hair and Asian features, Rob’s heavy build. Those things could be superficial, though; it was possible to see echoes in the way people held themselves, the way they laughed or walked.

  ‘We like having you here,’ Alicia said. ‘Janie seems like a good girl.’

  I stifled an accidental laugh, tried to hide it with a cough. A good girl. We were due at the clinic in two days’ time.

  I pulled away from her grip. ‘My room,’ I said. ‘I can’t open the door any more.’ The door was behind me now, as I faced Alicia, the fireplace, the opened shelves. I felt as though I were pleading with her, as though she had the power to restore it to me.

  ‘You could open it now,’ Alicia said, and inclined her head towards it. I didn’t turn around; I couldn’t face the knowledge of it. I didn’t know what would happen if I were to take this path through her house, through this room of hers, to mine. Would it open onto my own version of the room? To my closet? Or to some other version of our house, one I wouldn’t recognise, one where I would fit even less than I did in the house we had? Would I leave behind whatever tenuous grip on reality I still had left? I had a frightening vision of a room full of the sculptures that lived outside, a house crowded full of them.

  ‘I want to open it from my side,’ I said. And then I said the thing it seemed I had been waiting for so long to say. ‘I want it to be like it was before.’ I would find a way to accept all of that unbearable strangeness, I knew, and whatever it said about me, however unhinged that made me, if only I could have it back.

  Alicia closed her eyes in a long blink, as though she understood, and for the first time she didn’t seem quite so bizarre to me, a creature from a world I didn’t know or understand. ‘I want it to be like it was,’ I said again. And still I couldn’t turn around. I didn’t have it in me. I wanted to find another way back, not through here. She wanted me there. I was a way to keep Janie around. And she seemed somehow strangely fuelled by my own longing, my own private drama of loss and compensation. I thought of her and Rob, listening at the door, watching from the balcony. I wanted it back on my own terms, not theirs.

  Alicia smiled at me, the brushes loose in her hand at her side. I walked past her to the door in the wall, lined with shelves, and through it into her room with the paintings.

  ‘Don’t you want to see the yard?’ she called after me. I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to see the yard, to see more of the sculptures, their elongated bodies and questioning faces. I went back downstairs and back into my own house, and readied myself to leave as soon as I could, ignoring the shaking in my hands, trying to block from my mind the image of those metal limbs, pressing in, and that moment when I reached for the sofa that wasn’t there, in the room that was and wasn’t my room. I threw my laptop into a bag and left. I would get the day back, I would restore it. The sun was out, hot and high in the sky, the light soakingly strong and clear. I headed up the street. I had work to do, tasks that were comforting in their discreteness, their neat and sensible compartments. I would go to a cafe nearby and work on the book, anywhere that wasn’t the house. I crossed over the road to walk by the huge figs and the footpath was reassuringly hard under my feet, the concrete broken up in places so that I had to step carefully over the cracks, concentrating, one step at a time.

  *

  I spent as little time as possible in the bedroom in the days that followed, trying to avoid thinking about the room, still recovering from the weirdness of my visit next door. But when the day arrived when I was due to take Janie to the clinic some of the sharpness had worn off the experience. The old longing for the space reasserted itself, and my resolve fell away.

  I slept late, and Janie got herself ready and left for school while I was still in bed — David had insisted that she attend classes in the morning, and she had a note to come home early for a ‘medical appointment’. He came upstairs to say goodbye to me and stood at the foot of the bed. ‘You’re okay doing this?’ he asked, as though it had only just occurred to him that I might not want to go along with it. I thought about saying ‘No.’ No, I wasn’t okay with it. I didn’t know how the hell it had fallen to me to be doing this, and why he hadn’t taken over. But it was too late. I felt obligated to her, more than to him.

  ‘I wish she would let Gwen take her,’ he said, though I could tell he wasn’t thinking of insisting on it. The moment of concern for me passed that quickly. Already he was back in the space of worrying about Janie, and her relationship with her mother, and how he might be responsible for damaging it, but how it really reflected poorly on Gwen. The thoughts played out on his face as he faced me, not really looking at me.

  Victor, the ballet teacher, had disappeared, predictably, and David had started paying a private investigator to track him down, someone that Gwen worked with. They had decided not to press charges, in the end, after Janie had convinced them that her humiliation wouldn’t be worth it. No one wanted the school to know about the abortion, after all. I wasn’t sure what David wanted from Victor, apart from a chance to yell at him. Probably just that. I understood. I watched him fantasise about a whole array of violent scenarios several times a day. He drank with a new form of determination, and fought off a hangover every morning, stayed late after work to go to the gym and run for miles on the treadmill, punch a punching bag for a while. Came home with his hair still wet from the shower, his work clothes stale with sweat.

  ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ he said with a smile, and gripped my ankle through the thin blanket, his hand warm and strong.

  I got out of bed and went straight to the closet, straight to the door, not pretending to ignore it or going through the motions of the morning as though they were more important. I put my hand to it so gently, wishing, giving in to the wish in the same way I had done all those weeks ago, that midnight on the street when Kieran had sent me the text and I had answered, letting myself soak in it. I wished for it to open, to give me just a few minutes inside, but it remained closed. I stepped back and pulled on clothes and shoes.

  The knocker on Alicia’s front door felt heavy in my fingers when I lifted it, stiff and resistant. I was ready. I would face the door in their room, and whatever was on the other side. I took a lazy, deep, exhilarating breath, still half groggy from sleeping in, not caring if my judgement was blunt. I knocked twice, and waited, and twice more. No answer. Maybe they were still asleep. I tried again, knowing it was rude to get them out of bed, if that was what I was doing, not caring. It must have been close to ten. No one came. A dull headache started up behind my eyes, an echo of that thudding knock. I stood there, just as I had stood at the door upstairs minutes earlier, hopeless.

  Back at my own front door I reached into my pocket. No keys. I was locked out and my phone was inside. All that exhilaration left me, and I felt my body creak and complain with caffeine deprivation, hunger, disappointment. Disbelief. I sat on the step, my back against the solid wood of the door, until the sun rose high enough to drench the verandah, and then I stood and started walking.

  *

  Tess’s office was a couple of kilometres away, downtown, and I was thirsty by the time I arrived, my feet sore from walking all the way in old sneakers. The girl at reception looked at me with disapproval and I saw myself as she must have seen me, sweaty and bare-faced among the expensively suited workers. She kept her voice low when she called Tess. ‘S
he’ll be right down,’ she told me, and went back to her computer screen. ‘Have a seat.’ I had been expecting to go up to meet Tess at her desk, as I had done once before, but I didn’t argue, and sat on a low leather bench against the wall.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ Tess said when she emerged from the elevator minutes later, and kissed me. ‘What are you doing here? I’m on my way out, have to rush.’ She smelled like wet flowers, like the tropical insides of a florist.

  ‘I locked myself out,’ I told her.

  ‘How did you do that?’ she asked, incredulous.

  ‘I just forgot my keys. And my phone was inside. Can I use yours? I need to see if David can come back early.’

  ‘Right.’ She nodded. She took a while finding it in her bag. I put in David’s number when she handed it to me. His name flashed up on her screen when I had completed it, and I felt a moment of surprise. He answered after a single ring. Things happened slowly then, or it seemed that way to me. I felt her eyes on me in that second between the ring and the answer, and I saw that her face was set and nervous under all the makeup and the little smile she wore.

  ‘Hello, you,’ David said, his voice low and warm. I met Tess’s eyes. She was keeping it up, the little smile. She blinked quickly a few times. She was standing close to me, she could hear his voice, she could hear the way he answered the call that came from her phone.

  I hadn’t wanted to see it, whatever I had caught a glimpse of that morning weeks earlier, the morning after I’d tried to show him the room. I was hearing it now. The smile Tess wore was so like the one he had given me then.

  I took the phone away from my ear. ‘Hello?’ I heard him say. ‘Tess?’

  ‘David, hi,’ she said when I pushed the phone into her hands, her voice bright. ‘It’s Tess. How are you?’ Her tattoo showed on her shoulder, poking out from under her sleeveless pale silk dress. The rose with its red petals, the skull’s dead teeth. It was years old now, but it was good work, the ink still sharp. I hoped it had hurt. She had been overly theatrical about it at the time, biting her lip and squeezing shut her eyes while the blood flowed and the needle buzzed, but I wished hard and hoped it had been real.