Whatever he said was muffled. I turned away.
‘Look, Shelley’s here at my office, she’s locked herself out.’ She waited while he spoke. ‘She doesn’t have her bag or phone or anything,’ she said. ‘Okay, sure. Thanks David. See you. Bye.’ She put the phone back in her bag and pulled out her wallet, took out a couple of notes. ‘David said to give you this and tell you to get a cab to his office.’ I looked at the money in her hands, her shiny red fingernails.
‘Actually, I thought you might have a key,’ I said. It now seemed like a possibility, and I thought I might as well ask. Fuck it. Who knew how long it had been going on, how far it had gone? I didn’t want to go to David’s office and meet him and put on whatever front I would have to put on, or have whatever confrontation would be necessary. I just wanted to get home. ‘I thought you might have a spare key.’
‘To your house?’
‘I’ve been meaning to give you a spare key. You know, in case I forget my keys,’ I said, trying to keep it up, salvage what was left of the normality of the conversation. Instinct. Trying to give her a way to say yes that wouldn’t be a disaster. Still trying to spare her feelings, to let her save face, even now. ‘Like right now. You know how that happens to me all the time. I might have mentioned it to David. I thought he might have done that. Given you a spare key in case we forgot our keys or had them stolen. Remember that time my bag was stolen?’
‘I don’t have a key to your house.’ Her face was serious. I waited a second in case she wanted to change her mind. ‘Okay then.’
‘Take the money. Take a taxi.’
She was wearing heels, and a belt that pinched her waist in to accentuate the wide curve of her hips, the round swell of her full breasts.
‘Shelley,’ she said. ‘Don’t get the wrong idea.’
She wore her hair down, and a heavy lock of it fell forward across her collarbone. I reached out and pushed it back, gently. There were crystal studs in her ears, glittering. Maybe they were diamonds. I wondered whether the pearl earrings had been hers, the ones in the bathroom of the Glebe flat. I would have said that they weren’t her style, but they would have gone with this particular outfit. Her hair was soft, styled carefully straight and smooth. ‘You’re dressed up,’ I said.
She managed a halfway smile but the crease between her brows stayed there. ‘I’m going to Government House. Posh as.’ She shifted her bag on her shoulder and the tattoo flashed again, and I wished that she would cover it up, this reminder of our history. And what right did I have to be injured, I asked myself, feeling the liquid anger pool and spread. Hadn’t I signed that all away? Wasn’t that part of the deal, stepping over that threshold I had told myself was magical, charmed, an insulation against pain and guilt?
I looked at the row of clocks on the wall: they showed the time in cities around the world. Sydney, Perth, Singapore, Shanghai, London, New York, Mumbai, St Petersburg, Paris.
‘Janie will be home soon. I’ll wait for her. You can tell David.’ I walked out before I had a chance to think about it any further, and didn’t look back to where I was sure she was standing there calling David, telling him that was me who had made the call and heard the answer. Let her call him, let her tell him. I couldn’t imagine wanting to speak to him again. I didn’t need to. The idea was like a release, and gave me a flicker of new energy.
I walked back along Oxford Street and took the long, winding street from where it began in the city, past Hyde Park and the old cannon facing into the intersection, past the nightclubs shuttered in the daylight, the fast-food places and sex shops and the courthouse, past the sandstone stretch of the barracks as the hill rose into Paddington, the pubs and delicatessens and clothing stores and boutique veterinarians. It felt like an even longer distance, on the way back, and I wished I had taken the money for a cab. My face began to sting with sunburn.
When I reached Oxford Antiques, the shop was closed, the windows barred with a rusted old accordion grate. All the lights were turned off inside, and the space was gloomy, full of shadows. The lion statue roared stiffly at me through the dirty window. I turned around and made my way home, and waited in the shade of the fig trees across the road.
*
Janie arrived just a few minutes later, and I opened the front gate as she was lifting her key to the lock.
‘I got locked out,’ I told her. ‘I forgot my keys.’
‘What?’ she asked, turning around to look me over.
‘When?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. I headed for the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. She stood a few steps away, her bag still in her hands, and watched me drink it.
‘I’ll be ready in a minute,’ I said.
She nodded, and her shoulders sagged with relief.
Upstairs I made straight for the closet, unsure for only a moment about whether I wanted to try the door again, and pushed it, not surprised when it refused to give. I tried one more time. It felt as though the door backed onto solid brick. Something broke in me then, some sense of understanding that it was really closed to me now. I slid to the floor. I hadn’t cried about it before, no matter how frustrating it had been, how much I had longed to open it. I didn’t count that night of the storm, that salt water that had poured down my face without me even knowing it. I hadn’t cried consciously for a long time, not since I had stopped painting and put all the paints and canvases and the easel in the skip a block away from the house in Rozelle. I had cried all the way back along the block from the skip to the flat, letting myself, knowing I would stop when I opened the door, and I had. But now, sitting against the door, I cried hard, with the force of a tired child.
I had closed the bedroom door but Janie must have heard me. She knocked. ‘Shelley?’ She knocked again, and called my name again.
‘Yes?’ I said, my voice stupidly thick with tears. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘Are you okay?’ she asked after a few seconds.
‘I’ll be right out,’ I said. ‘I’m just getting changed.’
I pulled the clothes across so that the door was barely visible, and swapped my sweaty T-shirt for a white blouse. I went to the bathroom and washed my face, scrubbing until my skin squeaked under my fingers.
‘Are you ready?’ I called out to Janie. ‘Let’s go.’
The taxi driver seemed to know where we were going when I gave him the address. He gave me a long, disgusted look in the rear-vision mirror and pulled away into traffic, then turned up the radio so loud that we could have barely heard each other talk, had we wanted to talk. The news announcer read a report on more fires in the National Park to the south. Janie looked at her watch and played with her phone. ‘We’ll be there in plenty of time,’ I said. She didn’t look at me.
The driver pulled up a block away from the address, a quiet street in Woollahra where all the houses were set back behind well-maintained fences and manicured front gardens.
‘It’s a bit further along,’ I said, but he stopped the meter and didn’t look at me, and took his time counting out the exact change when I handed him the money. He drove away as soon as I closed the door and we walked the extra few metres.
I talked into an intercom set into a high brick fence with a tall wooden gate, and they let us in. It looked like a regular doctor’s office from the outside, a two-storey Federation house with a plaque near the front door saying Surgery. Windows and doors were barred with security screens. It was different from the place I had gone to with my friend Diana at university when she was pregnant, a feminist-run clinic in an old Victorian terrace a few blocks away from the university, where women had provided us with tea in mugs and cut-price biscuits from a tin.
Inside, the hallway was thickly carpeted in a colour the same as the cream walls. We sat in a couple of oversized armchairs and waited. Across the room a young woman in a business suit sat on a couch reading a fashion magazine. There was a small pile of them next to her, as though she had been there for hours already, working her way thro
ugh them.
I was surprised when Janie spoke to me. I hadn’t expected her to want to talk.
‘Have you done this before?’ she asked. ‘Have you, you know, had one?’
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’ve had friends who have.’
She looked at me, not quite believing. There was no reason for her to trust me, really; I would not have told her even if I had actually had an abortion. It didn’t matter.
‘They were fine,’ I said. ‘Both my friends.’ I’d gone back to the feminist clinic two months after that time with Diana, the second time with Tess. The memory arrived, clear for just a second before it was clouded by the morning’s events, and I felt the sense of betrayal twist in me again. It had been her first pregnancy, first abortion. Since then there had been another one that I knew of. Her boyfriend at the time had decided he didn’t want to go with her, didn’t want to see her afterwards, didn’t want to see her again, and she had called me the night before her appointment, drunk and in tears. She had thrown up in a wastepaper bin moments after we had arrived at the clinic and again just after she emerged from the operating room, groggy and swaying. We went to get the tattoo that weekend. Now I wished I had let her get the ugly dolphin.
Tess would have been good in this situation, I thought. She would have known what to say, known how to be comforting and supportive and wise without being judgemental. The most I could seem to manage was the non-judgemental part.
The doctor called us in.
*
When Janie made her way out an hour later to meet me in the waiting room she looked strangely peaceful, and gave me a tired smile. It was the first time I could remember her smiling at me. It was probably the influence of the sedatives they had given her. I wanted to put my arm around her shoulders, but she was so tall it was awkward, and it would have been strange to put my arm around her waist. She was wearing sandals and had put them on with the buckles fastened too loosely, making her ankles look thinner than ever.
It was cool inside the waiting room, with the musty smell of airconditioning, and she pulled a thin pink hoodie around herself. I gave in to a tremendous wave of relief that it was over, and reached over to pull the hoodie tighter around her, and hugged her anyway, not caring that it was awkward, my arms around her skinny arms, just for a moment. She would probably always remember me being there. I wanted to be something she remembered about the day that wasn’t terrible. I wanted to be good at this horrible job, or good enough. ‘You look fine,’ I said. ‘You’re okay.’ I called a taxi, giving them the address of a house two doors down, and we went outside to wait for it.
Ten
I had put Gwen’s number into my phone just before moving into the new house: it was the ritual that seemed to most clearly mark my new status as stepmother. I had never used it before. I found it, and called it. She picked up after the second ring.
‘Shelley? Is Janie all right?’
‘Hi, Gwen,’ I said. ‘She’s fine. We’re home now. She’s fine, really, it seemed to go pretty smoothly.’
‘Smoothly,’ she repeated. ‘That’s good.’
‘But she’d like to see you.’
‘Yes,’ she said, as though I’d said something stupidly obvious.
‘I know David was planning to drop her over later. But I think she’d really like it if you could come to collect her now.’
A second of silence, two. The plan had been for David to take her over to Gwen’s when he arrived home, when Gwen was finished with work. ‘Of course. Is she there?’ Gwen asked.
Janie lay propped up with a cushion on the couch, looking at the TV remote in her hand as though she had forgotten how to use it. I passed the phone to her.
‘Hi,’ she said, and ‘I’m okay,’ and then listened for a minute or two before saying a short goodbye.
‘Can you call your dad when you get there?’ I asked her when she handed the phone back to me. I still didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want to hear the sound of his voice on the other end of the phone.
She nodded.
‘Do you want me to get anything from your room?’ I asked. She said she didn’t need anything. I took the remote from her and switched on the television and handed it back. One ad was finishing and another one started. We sat together and waited for her mother to arrive.
*
Gwen didn’t have much to say when she came. She stood in the doorway in her lawyer suit and high heels, and I should have felt small but she was so uncomfortable, diminished by worry, that I almost reached a hand out to steady her as she came in. She looked around in quick glances; it was the first time she had visited the house. Janie lifted herself off the couch and came over to us.
I had given up on the idea of anyone thanking me for what I had done, and had started to think of it as a service that didn’t exactly inspire gratitude, especially since I was in Gwen’s and David’s eyes so obviously the wrong person to perform it. I didn’t feel that Janie was ungrateful, exactly, and I didn’t need her to say anything. Gwen carried her bag for her as they walked to her car.
As soon as they left I went upstairs to the closet and tried the door. It stuck, but I wrestled with it. I put aside the idea of imagining smooth knobs turning and effortless opening in order to somehow persuade it; I knew it wouldn’t respond to that. I pressed it hard with my shoulder and pushed with all my strength until it hurt through to the bone. I made up my mind to find a screwdriver and force it open if it didn’t give in, just like David had suggested that one time. It was like offering an imaginary threat that the room would sense. It seemed possible that it would resent me taking that approach, using force, or threatening to, but I didn’t care, even though I knew that if the room faced me with hostility once I was in there it would only make things worse. I wanted to make it do what I wanted. I pressed myself against it like a firefighter trying to break down a door to rescue a child from a burning building. I was the child. I was the burning building. I thought the room could rescue me, if it would only offer me that solace it once had. The wood shifted inside the frame. The door opened, and I went inside.
*
The furniture had been pushed back from the centre of the room: the lamp stood by the window, the table back in its original position near the fireplace, the sofa against the wall, as though a space had been cleared for a special purpose. All the surfaces were dull with dust, and the air smelled stale and close. A drop from the chandelier had fallen off again and lay on the floor. No sunlight came through the window to strike the crystal and make a rainbow. When I looked back, I felt almost disappointed in myself, that I had been so entranced by the pretty colours on the floor that first day; now it seemed like an obvious trick of some kind.
My first thought was that Alicia must have come through from her side, or Rob perhaps, and moved things around. That made sense, I told myself, it was at least possible, although I couldn’t think why they would do it. Maybe they were angrier about my requests to move the sculpture than they had let on. But I couldn’t shake the sense that the room had some kind of agency of its own. It had appeared to me, once, in its most appealing guise, but I was no longer welcome. The sofa looked as beautiful as ever, softly glowing, although now I was suspicious of its appeal. It seemed to have been working somehow in conspiracy with the room. The sofa and the room together had brought Kieran into my life — had brought him to me, it now seemed, and given him a space in which to exist, a space for Conrad’s ghost to haunt and live. Now I had done something wrong, given the room cause to shut me out. Or maybe it had got what it wanted from me. Perhaps from that moment I decided to give Kieran up I was no longer useful, even though that had been just a moment, and the resolution hadn’t lasted. I remembered the dead feeling in the air as we’d dressed and straightened our clothes that day, the awkward silence before he left. It must have been enough. It had broken a circuit.
There was a stubbornness in me. I recognised it as the same kind of force that had kept me in that room in Rozell
e, painting insistently, refusing to rejoin the world for so long, the same force that kept me resolutely away from the water and the beach, the same force that made me so reluctant to make any concessions to Janie, or to try to make her like me. I didn’t want to give up on the idea that the room might still be available to me somehow. This might be a test of some kind, I reasoned, knowing that it was all unreasonable, against every sort of reason. Maybe I had to be prepared to come at the room from a different angle. There was another way in, and I had been afraid of it before because I hadn’t understood what it might cost me, and what unknown reasons of her own Alicia might have had for wanting me there.
I went downstairs to collect my bag, making sure my keys and phone and wallet were inside. My phone buzzed: David. I let it ring and then switched it off. The world outside seemed so distant: the office where he would be sitting, the lavish party where Tess would be drinking, the streets Gwen and Janie were driving through on their way home. Before I left I looked through the glass doors at the fence. The sculpture’s arm was still there, leaning down. And closer to the house, another one, with just a metal hand reaching over the fence. This figure had a long neck with a long, narrow head that seemed to tilt in my direction. The face on it was as crude and simple as the rest of them, but this time it didn’t look blank to me. The mouth appeared instead like an open cry, the face anguished. The sound of a hammer on metal started up from the workshop in their yard.
Alicia took a while to answer the door when I knocked. She didn’t seem surprised to see me. ‘Come on in, Shelley,’ she said, and stood back to let me inside. There seemed to be a couple more mugs on the coffee table, and possibly more burned-down candles. The room smelled like vanilla-scented incense, although that piney, resinous smell was still there underneath it. The matchstick blind in the living room was raised a few inches to let in thin, pale light. Through the window I glimpsed slender sculptural bodies.
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