‘Sorry to bother you. I’m still having trouble getting into my room,’ I said to Alicia. ‘The one on my side. The door won’t open.’ I decided to tell her only that much. ‘I thought maybe I could try getting across from your side, see if it opens that way.’
‘Sure,’ she said in her creaky voice. ‘I’m not busy.’
She took me upstairs. ‘I hope I didn’t interrupt your work, your painting,’ I said. ‘I know how annoying it can be when that happens.’ I couldn’t tell whether she wore her paint-stained clothes only when she was painting, or if they were her regular uniform. There were more smudges on her pants than I had noticed before.
‘It’s no problem,’ she said.
The easel was in the same place, sitting in the light from the open balcony doors. A palette sat on the floor next to it, filled with patches of paint. Blue, green, yellow. Jaune Brilliant. And greys and Cold Black, taking up half the palette. In the painting on the easel the sky looked heavier, darker. Spots of colour that looked like children’s plastic buckets dotted the strip of yellow-white sand. It seemed to me now like a trap, the painting like a bizarre lure.
‘How’s Janie?’ Alicia asked.
I told her she was fine.
‘Not staying with you this weekend? I saw her leaving earlier. Driving off with her mum.’
‘She lives there half the week.’
I wondered if Alicia had been at home that morning after all when I had knocked, had seen me unable to get in, sitting on my own doorstep. Or taking off with Janie in a taxi and returning a couple of hours later. I wondered what kind of sense she would be able to make of those fragments of our lives that she saw, what kind of narrative it might make if she strung them together. Maybe she and Rob had seen Kieran come and go; maybe they’d seen everything, heard everything. My skin crawled at the idea.
The plaster-coloured door was open a fraction of an inch.
‘Go ahead,’ Alicia said. She busied herself arranging cushions and pillows on the futon in the corner. Tiny mirrors sewn into the cushion covers winked and shone as she lifted them.
I opened the door and went through into the room, the same as before. The window glowed with afternoon light. I went straight to the door in the opposite wall, the one that would lead into my own room, and grasped its large crystal knob. The knob was fixed into the door, not a latch, just a thing to push or pull. I pushed. The door felt very heavy as it swung open, as though it were much denser and more solid than it looked.
There it was: my room, almost as it had been. The door I had just opened was concealed, as in Alicia’s room, by the shelves on one side of the mantelpiece. The little table sat in front of the fireplace to my right. The chandelier twinkled. Against the wall the sofa gleamed in all its red plushness, looking more than ever as though it had always been part of the room, and through my exhaustion and distress I felt glad to have brought it here, to have restored it to this place. The space in the middle of the room seemed inviting now, a charmed circle waiting for me. But there was something flat and strange and two-dimensional about the scene, the disconcerting effect of a reflection that falsely appears to have depth. The air was hazy and thick, as though smoke was clearing from the room.
I stood on the threshold. ‘Go through if you like.’ Alicia’s creaky voice sounded close behind me, and I turned to find that she had followed me. ‘It’s a lovely space, isn’t it?’ she asked eagerly. ‘It’s nice to have a room of your own.’
If I stepped inside, would I be able to open the door again to get out? The charmed circle of space seemed more ambivalent now, like an echo of a faerie ring that could take you and hold you for years as time moved differently in the world outside. I wondered again what kind of deal I had made when I first took the fingers of the doorknocker downstairs into my hand, and knocked, and entered.
The space seemed to wear its wrongness, its impossible architectural nature, more proudly now. I didn’t trust anything I saw, or the truth of the heavy door and its crystal knob in my hand. It looked so real, and felt so strangely false. I looked back at the door that led into the room with the easel and paint, and it seemed too far away, as if the distance across the room was telescoping outwards slowly as I watched. Surely it was more than the few steps it had taken me to cross over to this door. I held the doorknob tighter and it was solid and dense under my hands. I gripped it until my hand hurt but the discomfort didn’t seem to bring any kind of reassurance that my senses could be trusted.
I had thought I was ready, but I was afraid to cross over, afraid of breaking whatever thread kept me however slightly tethered to the world. I remembered the crowd of sculptures at the window of the room on Alicia’s side, the mad, dense, knowing forest of them with their crying mouths. Even if I didn’t ever try again to open the window of my room, I would always feel their presence there, pressed so close to the glass. Rob would never move the sculptures. They would be there always reaching over our fence, forever outside the window. Waiting for a way in. That arm over the fence had been a hand beckoning me, an arm reaching to pull me here, to where I was, to where I was about to go if I crossed the threshold into the room on my side. And it was me holding on too, wanting to reach back through time, reach across the impossible space.
I was already caught in that ring, that circle of space at the centre of the room, however much I thought I stood apart. I had woven it around myself that warm midnight weeks before. If I stepped inside now, it seemed to me that the door might never open onto the bright real world again. I loosened my grip on the doorknob and the blood rushed back to my hand in a fast throb.
Alicia was right behind me, close enough to thrust me inside with a push of her hand. I stepped back and pulled the door closed. Then there was quiet around me, as though a noise I hadn’t even noticed was there had stopped.
*
On Oxford Street the concrete pavement smouldered with the accumulated heat of the long day and sunny afternoon. I had walked there in a hurry and my back felt damp with perspiration. The shop was still closed, the accordion grate pulled across, the windows greasy behind it. The lion opened its mouth in its silent roar, and the ugly abstract sculpture on the column glimmered with an improbable shine. A massive roll-top desk with many drawers was piled with an assortment of lamps that I hadn’t noticed previously. There was a light on in the shop, somewhere near the cash register at the back, a dull fluorescent gleam. A couple of claw-foot bathtubs flanked the area just inside the entrance-way like empty sentinels. The floor was crammed with bookshelves and windows and other pieces of furniture, antiques and recently made things, junk and collectibles, with little sense of organising logic. They were the same objects I remembered, but seemed to be arranged differently.
I remembered a game I had played at a party years ago, a late-night party at someone’s house in college, where a guy I recognised from a still-life class told me to imagine going into a forest and meeting an animal and finding a box and opening it to describe what was inside. I went along with it, along with another girl he was trying to impress, and when we had imagined all these things and described them he went back over them with us with triumphant excitement, explaining how all these things corresponded to aspects of our psyches. ‘The box is yourself,’ he said with stoned gravitas, expecting us to be amazed, and the other girl was. She was proud of her box, a treasure chest with elaborate hinges. But he was disturbed by mine: it seemed to be at first transparent, made of glass or crystal, but as I looked at it in my mind I saw that it was a mirrored cube with no obvious lid or opening. I could open it, though, and I did for a virtual moment, catching a glimpse of its reflective empty sides.
The objects in the shop seemed like those imaginary elements in the story, curated from the minds of various people, dream shards left in a jumble with all their symbolic content rendered incomprehensible. The shadowy interior made them look like ghostly images in an old black and white photograph, all the colour and substance bleached away. I had walked through them, al
most stubbed my toe on the feet of one of those tables, worried about the stained glass windows breaking if I’d tripped. I had sat on the sofa and had it brought back to my room. I knew they were real, locked away behind this rusty grate and dirty glass. A small sign on the door, blotchy with age, said Open. I would have knocked on the door if I could have reached it, but the grate barred the way.
The game had ended with arriving at a beach. ‘The beach symbolises how you relate to people around you,’ the guy had told me. The other girl remembered a beach on the South Coast from her childhood holidays, with all her family there. My beach description made me sound like a pretty well-adjusted person: there were people swimming in the water and sitting on the sand and walking around and playing with a beach ball, even making sandcastles. The guy was interested in how close or far away the people were in this image. I made it up for him: a Sydney postcard. I hesitated to tell him about the place I had really imagined, a narrow greyish ribbon of sand, and water lapping the beach with small, sluggish waves. The people I could see were close by, swimming and wading in the water, their faces turned away. It wasn’t a premonition: there was no death or violence, no anguish. It was inscrutable. I had been drinking vodka and beer all night, and looking at a lot of bleak German art in class for the past several weeks, and it probably showed. Creatures from the forest I had travelled through watched the beach through the trees with their neutral animal gazes.
I took out my phone and dialled Kieran’s number, half expecting to hear a ringing from the depths of the closed shop. But it didn’t answer. I waited for it to go to his anonymous machine-voiced message system, but it rang on and on. I started counting when it had already been ringing for a while, and reached twenty-five before I hung up.
I turned back to the street. The Friday afternoon footpaths thronged with people, on their way to shop and eat and drink, and the road was choked with cars. A cab across the road could take me downtown into the city, and from there to Rozelle or Glebe, or anywhere. Buses in the other direction could take me to Bondi Beach, or to Centennial Park or Double Bay, all those suburbs ringed around the water. A 378 idled at the traffic lights at the end of the block: the bus to Bronte. I thought about it. In three years I had never been back there, or to any beach. Maybe it was time to go and face those demons or whatever the appropriate expression was. The timing was right: the eve of the anniversary. The beach would be packed with people trying to wrestle with the difficult water, the cafes crowded, the park filled with families setting up their epic weekend barbecues. The lights changed and the bus drove forward and passed me, but I didn’t run to the bus stop to board it.
The city seemed to extend outwards around me in a new way: the green, shady little Paddington streets behind me, the laneways of Surry Hills all stained with vomit from last weekend and broken bottles and cigarettes, the manicured avenues of Woollahra, the cramped elegance of Elizabeth Bay and the slowly gentrifying blocks of the Cross. I could start walking and find my way to any of these places, find myself among them, following my own sense of direction. I began to understand how limited the city was that I had recently made for myself, restricted to just a few pathways between the house and Oxford Street and the office. My feet still ached from having walked all the way this morning, the miles to the city and back, the sweat still clinging to my skin. Wherever I went, it would be away from the house, away from those pathways.
I crossed the road and caught the next bus that came, aggravating the driver with my pile of small change. It took me down through the city to Circular Quay.
*
I saw him there at the Quay, moments after my ferry had left the dock. That distinctive profile, the shirt I recognised, the familiar stride, walking quickly. He seemed to be with someone, he turned slightly and I thought I saw him shake his head, no. It looked as though he was with the crowd who had just disembarked. It felt like my last chance. What could I do? There was no conductor to ask, no way to turn the boat around. I could have got out at the next stop, caught another ferry back, tried to guess his route. I checked my phone; no service out here on the water. Waves slapped against the boat, and for a moment the motion was sickening. I put my phone away.
It would always happen. It would always be him, for the time it took to see him and want to follow him, and be trapped in that place and unable to go to him, or for the moment until he turned into someone else, the time it took to remember that he was gone. I let myself wonder if he was catching a train, or going to the Opera House to see a show. He could have been visiting the Art Gallery, or showing a tourist friend around the Botanic Gardens or the pubs in the Rocks. Any of those stories. The ferry drew further away from all those destinations, all those possibilities, carrying me away with it.
The journey took me north across the harbour to Milsons Point, six minutes of salt spray and diesel stink, and I walked past the ghastly smile of Luna Park around to the entrance to North Sydney Pool. The idea of washing the day off myself was appealing, the clarifying rigour of laps that I remembered. It hadn’t occurred to me that I didn’t have anything to wear for swimming or a towel, but when I wandered inside the cool, tiled entry I saw that all these things were for sale, on racks beside the register. My own swimsuit was packed in a drawer somewhere, all the elastic in it probably dead and slack now. I chose the simplest black one-piece from the rack and the least luridly patterned towel, and asked the girl at the counter for a pair of goggles. ‘Which ones?’ she asked. There were at least ten different kinds on a shelf behind her. ‘Just the most basic,’ I said. She chose a pair and set them down on the counter in front of me, then put everything into a flimsy plastic bag.
‘We close at seven,’ she told me. A clock on the wall showed that there was almost an hour left.
*
The concrete around the pool looked hot and inviting, and I longed to lie down on it and feel the heat climbing hungrily into my skin, the lazy pull of summer gravity. But time was short. I went to sit on the edge of the medium fast lane and put my feet in the water, and they tingled in the cold. A woman swimmer arrived at the end of the lane, the sunlight glinting on her plastic cap, and turned in a swift tumble, brushing my legs. I was in the way. I let the rest of my body slip into the water, lowered my head and pushed away, expecting the chemical stink of chlorine. I had forgotten that the water was half salt. It seeped through my goggles, stinging slightly, until I adjusted them. It was easy to imagine that I was swimming in the water of the harbour, just metres away, bright blue and choppy through the tall, arched windows of the pool. A smoother, cleaner version of it, anyway.
The underwater world was quiet and noisy at once: no sounds from outside, and only my own breath loud in my ears. My lungs protested after two laps and I stopped at the end of the lane, resting my arms on the tiled edge. The great arch of the bridge sat suspended over the water, connecting the two halves of the city. From here I could look across at it as a separate thing, my city, the Quay and skyscrapers, the eastern beaches and eastern suburbs and the west sprawling out to the mountains, the south stretching down to the fires that still burned at the edge of the National Park.
Less than an hour left. I thought of the clocks around the wall at Tess’s office, showing the time in significant cities around the world. In London it would be the dreary end of winter, everything sodden and grey with weeks still to go before the beginnings of spring showed themselves, the grass in the parks a luminous wet green. I felt a sudden, deep craving for that cold, that absence of harsh light and fire. I had visited once years ago, a month-long holiday with a boyfriend in art school who had wound up staying there and getting a work permit to be one of the hundreds of Australians serving beer in pubs. We had talked about my going back to join him at the end of the year, making careers there together, but it didn’t happen. I hadn’t heard from him since his last letter at the end of that year — it was the nineties, we still wrote letters, pages of airmail stationery in fat envelopes, mine sent with Sydney flowers pressed inside, h
is with beer coasters from the pub.
My boss, Vanessa, had come from London, originally, and travelled to the offices there a couple of times a year. She was going there later in April for the book fair — she had been talking about it last time I saw her, discussing what kind of shoes to take, since her Prada heels gave her some kind of horrible foot condition if she had to be on her feet for more than a couple of hours. I could ask for her help.
I calculated what was in my bank account and what a ticket there would cost, and somewhere to live; it felt like scraping together all my small change for the bus fare earlier. But there was the house, too. I would leave it along with David. I imagined it now as an object that could be valued, taken to pieces, separated into dollar components. This made it feel so small, like a tiny doll’s house I could pick up in my hands and split apart. Where would the secret room be, I wondered, if I were to do that; would it fall out like a loose piece, or remain hidden inside? Any sense of belonging I had ever felt towards the house evaporated — I could see it as a fine invisible mist dissipating in the blue sky over the roof. David could buy me out if he wanted to stay there. I felt a qualm at the idea of leaving the room there for another owner to find, but then I thought about how firmly closed the door had been at those times it wouldn’t open for me, and let it go.
Once I caught my breath I felt tired, and almost pulled myself out of the water, tempted by the thought of my towel and the hot concrete. Another swimmer turned around brusquely next to me and started back down the lane, arms slicing through the air and water in a beautiful, compact freestyle. A few seconds later I followed him. The movements came more easily this time, as though my body had started to remember. I seemed to feel every muscle, many of them protesting at being put to such use after so long. I kept going. My muscles complained and then acquiesced. The pictures I had worked with last week came to mind, those Renaissance anatomical illustrations of flayed men standing in balletic positions, skin hanging down in strips, displaying their layers of musculature so gracefully. It would hurt later on. But now those parts all agreed to perform their pushing and pulling, moving in harmony with my lungs and heart, all these pieces held in place by one another and contained by the skin, such a fragile boundary.
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