Like a House on Fire

by Cate Kennedy

  Scribe Publications

  LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE

  Cate Kennedy is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has been published widely. Her first collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She is also the author of a travel memoir, Sing, and Don’t Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight, Signs of Other Fires and The Taste of River Water, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2011. She lives on a secluded bend of the Broken River in north-east Victoria.

  Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056

  Email: info@scribepub.com.au

  First published by Scribe 2012

  Copyright © Cate Kennedy 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  These stories first appeared, often in slightly different forms, in the following publications: ‘Flexion’, Harvard Review and New Australian Stories (Scribe, 2009); ‘Ashes’, The Big Issue; ‘Laminex and Mirrors’, 10 Short Stories You Must Read in 2011 (Australia Council for the Arts, 2011); ‘Tender’, The Best Australian Stories 2007 (Black Inc., 2007) and Wordlines (Five Mile Press, 2010); ‘Five-Dollar Family’, Overland; ‘Cross-Country’, The Age and Summer Shorts (Scribe, 2011); ‘Sleepers’, Australian Book Review website; ‘Whirlpool’, The Monthly; ‘White Spirit’, The Best Australian Stories 2009 (Black Inc., 2009); ‘Waiting’, Readings and Writings (Readings, 2009); ‘Static’, New Australian Stories 2 (Scribe, 2010); ‘Seventy-Two Derwents’, Tales from the Tower, vol. 2: The Wicked Wood (Allen & Unwin, 2011).

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Kennedy, Cate.

  Like a House on Fire.

  9781921942952 (e-book.)

  A823.4

  www.scribepublications.com.au

  For the friends who’ve stuck around for many years,

  still talking, still laughing, still sitting around the fire,

  these stories are for you, with love and gratitude.

  Contents

  Flexion

  Ashes

  Laminex and Mirrors

  Tender

  Like a House on Fire

  Five-Dollar Family

  Cross-Country

  Sleepers

  Whirlpool

  Cake

  White Spirit

  Little Plastic Shipwreck

  Waiting

  Static

  Seventy-Two Derwents

  ‘In the fight between you and the world, back the world.’

  —Franz Kafka

  Flexion

  He misjudged the bank of the dam, people said when they heard Frank Slovak had overturned his tractor onto himself. Not dead, they said, but might as well be. Caught him straight across his spine. Turning at the embankment, some loose earth, must have been looking the other way and, bang, look what happens.

  His wife found him, they went on, pausing to let their listener visualise this, a nightmare they’d all had: hearing the faint throb of the tractor engine changing as it rolled, either roaring or cutting out; or else you’d be hanging out the washing, maybe, and look up to see it in the distance already on its side, metal glinting, upturned rake tines like fangs.

  Everyone had imagined, sometime, making that crazed run across the paddocks, faint with whimpering dread, the air sickeningly still over your head like the eye of a storm. Pounding through dust and weeds in that unearthly silence, steeling yourself for what you’re going to find.

  Yeah, his wife, they said finally, nodding. The quiet one.

  Frank’s wife notices the dust floating like a heat mirage as she drives up the track with the weekly shopping. She stares blankly at the silhouette on the horizon for what seems like a long time before she realises it’s the huge rear wheel of the tractor she’s looking at, the vehicle tipped upside down like an abandoned toy. As she runs she kicks off her slippery town shoes and feels dry furrowed earth rising and falling and crumbling under her bare feet all the way to where he’s lying.

  ‘Frank.’

  Eyes rolling back to her. Collar torn off the shirt she’d just ironed the night before, and shattered glass strewn around him like crushed ice.

  ‘Turn it off.’ His voice like a bad phone connection, a robot, between locked teeth.

  Shaking hand into the upside-down cabin, in and around the buckled steering wheel. Then turning the key, sliding out the familiar clinking weight of the set into her hand. Post-office-box key, car, tractor, truck, padlock for fences. They’re hot from hanging in the sun. Stunned and slow, she can smell diesel dripping from the tank cap. What is he saying to her now?

  ‘Phone.’

  She instantly sees the mobile phone where she’s left it on the passenger seat of the car. It’s not till she blurts this, tells him she’s running back to phone the ambulance now, and sees him swallow and close his eyes instead of shouting at her, that she realises just how bad it must be. Sees too, as she pulls his shirt up to shade his eyes, that every emotion he’s withheld from her for the last eighteen years, every flinch and grimace and jerk of the eyebrows and lips, is boiling and writhing across his face now. It’s as if the locked strongbox inside has burst open and everything in there is rippling free and exorcised to the surface, desperately making its escape. By the time she’s run home, phoned for help and returned — seven minutes there and eight-and-a-half minutes back — the spasms have stopped and he’s lying there with his face as emptied as a ransacked, gaping envelope, eyes closed, doggedly sucking air in and panting it out.

  You wouldn’t believe it, people say when they hear the news. What caught him, what injured him most, was the bloody roll bar. The safety bar that’s meant to protect you. Tell that to the Occupational Health and Safety dickheads. Some say he’s crushed his pelvis, some say he’s going to be a quad, but whatever it is, he’s fucked now. You don’t bounce back from that. And Frank Slovak, who’s a glutton for work and always has been, who’s got a temper like a rabid dog and a wife who wouldn’t say boo, he’s up in the hospital now with tubes coming out of him and they reckon the next forty-eight hours are crucial. No, it’s a week now. A fortnight. He must have fractured his … what is it? The vertebrae. The nerves. The man can’t feel a thing.

  Frank’s wife feels sympathetic eyes behind her as she wheels a trolley round the supermarket, women on the verge of saying something but thinking better of it, anxious not to be seen as nosy. After almost twenty years of near-invisibility, the accident gives her an odd kind of glamour. There are casseroles wrapped in foil left at the front door, anonymous gifts of jam and cake and soap. It’s like flowers at a funeral, she thinks; a gracious gesture that comes too late, sympathy delivered once you’re already dead and buried. And all for Frank, she thinks with bitterness. Frank, who’d rather cut off his own hand than be beholden to anyone, who’s never put himself out for any of these people, never done them a single spontaneous good turn. Frank, who liked his privacy to the point of glowering, hostile secrecy.

  The year she’d lost t
he baby, he’d driven her home from the hospital — the big hospital, half an hour away, so that not even the local nurses would know — and told her, looking straight ahead through the windscreen, ‘We’re putting this behind us.’

  No jars of jam then, no lavender soap, not a word spoken or confided, until she’d felt she might go mad with the denial of it. They put it behind them, alright. They harnessed themselves to it, and dragged it like a black deadweight at their backs. They became its beasts of burden. And not a neighbour in sight, then, to drop by with a crumb of pity or a listening ear. Frank had decided that nobody was to know.

  She puts the casseroles in the freezer for when she might need them more, and eats at the hospital, and as she sits in the visitors’ lounge at the formica table in the air conditioning she catches herself almost revelling in the luxury of eating the first meal someone else has cooked for her in years. It’s almost like being on holiday, the way they bring you a form like a menu to fill out, and come round with the trolley asking if you want tea or coffee.

  There’s nothing to do but wait, they tell her. Absolving her. Then Frank, greyer and gaunter by the day, contracts pneumonia. Sitting next to him in the afternoons, dozing fitfully and reading through old magazines, she listens to the laboured gurgle as he fights for breath even as he sleeps.

  It must be like drowning, she thinks as she listens. Just going under, slowly losing oxygen, into blackness. Like wading into the dam; the deeper you go, the colder it gets. Something you’d almost welcome. She’s shocked to acknowledge how resigned she feels to this, how it almost seems their best option, considering what prognosis the doctors gave at first. She imagines herself telling people after church: Well, you know Frank. He wouldn’t have wanted to live that way. It’s for the best, really. She thinks about serving those casseroles after the funeral, just something simple at the hall next to the church, something the auxiliary could help her organise. I’m forty-five, she tells herself with tentative amazement as she drives home of a night. That’s not old. Lots of women in those magazines are forty-five, and they’re all getting on with life.

  At the farm someone comes without being asked and puts chains on the tractor and pulls it upright and tows it into town for repairs, and someone else, quietly and without fuss, loads the yearling lambs onto their truck and takes them off to the market for her.

  Let him go, she imagines herself saying should Frank deteriorate and the hospital staff offer intubation. It’s what he would have wanted. It startles her, this shift to being able to refer to him so readily in the past tense, a smooth, logical transition like changing gears.

  But Frank beats off pneumonia, and the doctors start to say things are stabilising after the steroids and there might yet be a partial recovery after all, some limited movement, it’s hard to say, and she sits composing her face into relief and optimism while inside, truth be known, she feels cheated. Cheated as she watches Frank lifting a spoon to his face, scowling with a kind of ferocious, vindictive resolve, like he’s going to hit someone. Relearning it all like an automaton, determined to heave himself back.

  ‘I’m not going to be a burden on anyone, is that clear?’ he mutters to her when the physios finally leave them alone for the afternoon. And knocks her hand away, as she goes to wipe some gravy off his chin.

  That’s Frank all over. Can’t hold a fork, but can still find a way to smack her out of the way.

  It’s easier to nod and agree, to pretend to take his advice about what she should be doing about the farm work. Nearly two months pass and she expects any day that one of these rehabilitation workers is going to read him the riot act and tell him he’s mad to think he’s going to return to the farm, and this anticipation, this certainty, fills her with suppressed, patient hope.

  Maybe he’ll survive, maybe he’s not going to be in a hospital the rest of his life, but the argument’s over; they’ll have to move now, in any case, into town. A little unit or bungalow. Something new, with no steps anywhere because of the wheelchair. She’ll be able to walk into town every day to shop for whatever she needs, and there’ll probably have to be home help, which would give her breaks; it would be taken as read that she’d need breaks — they even give her the pamphlets explaining what she’ll be entitled to.

  She might even get a carer’s pension, on top of the insurance and what they get for the farm. A new car, maybe, with one of those hoists.

  This daydreaming is halted the day Frank claws himself up onto the machinery at the physiotherapy unit, growling like an animal and swearing a blue streak, his eyes popping with the strain, and as she watches in incredulous despair his left leg jerks itself out and wavers hesitantly above the rubber flooring, like someone learning to dance.

  And while the physio shakes her head in admiration, the doctors confer over his X-rays, making up new explanations for her, saying, ‘He’s recovered a great deal more function than we first anticipated, it’s excellent news,’ and all the time she’s standing there nodding like a doll, hating him so much she can’t trust herself to open her mouth.

  That afternoon when she goes home the plumber is there, the same plumber who’d quoted her something impossible last year when she’d asked how much it would cost to bring the toilet inside. Only now he and his assistant are installing a brand-new modular shower unit and sink with chrome railings, telling her it’s no trouble, anything for old Frank, we’ll have this finished in no time and get out of your way, Mrs Slovak.

  ‘You tell him hello from Pete and Hardo,’ the plumber says as he leaves, ‘and tell him Bob Wilkes says he’ll get his hay baled for him and into the shed no trouble this week, so don’t worry about a thing.’

  And once again, trying to show brightness and gratitude while inside her, choking rage burns like a grassfire, like gasoline.

  Because now any fool can see how it’s going to be. Frank unable to sit at the desk, standing over her telling her how to do the books, ordering her round and snapping at her. In the ute beside her as she drives, sighing with contempt every time she crunches the gears, unable even to get out and open the gates for her, Frank hovering over her entire working day, badgering her and criticising her and depending on her for everything. And her, running the gauntlet outside church and in town, having to dutifully tell everyone how lucky they’d been.

  Limited mobility is actually going to suit Frank, she thinks; he’s been minimising all his movements for years, barely turning his head to her when she speaks, sitting there stonily in the kitchen, immoveable as a mountain. Unbending. So now, with his back fused like he’s got a poker rammed down it, on one or two sticks or a walking frame, the doctors say, depending on how well his pelvis adapts, it will be Frank needing her to pull his legs sideways out of the bed and haul him into a sitting position and run for cushions and there won’t need to be home help for that; they won’t qualify. The community worker will come to assess them and see how well she can cope, and Frank will tell them he doesn’t need help, thanks all the same, he’s got all the help he needs. It’s marvellous, people will say to her after church, the way God works.

  ‘This your doing?’ is all he says when he sees the bathroom. ‘Couldn’t wait to go behind my back?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me. Pete Nichol did it.’

  He shoots her a look. ‘What — just turned up and did it? That’ll be the day.’

  Heaves himself forward on his frame to get a better look at the fitting around the sink, grunts dismissively when he can’t find anything wrong with it.

  ‘Better get ready to remortgage the place, then, for when his bill comes. Common knowledge the man charges like a wounded bull.’

  ‘He said not to worry about it.’ She tries not to make her voice sound too enthused, to give him less ammunition. It’s a skill, doing that.

  ‘What’s through there?’ He can’t jerk his head now, she notices. Just his eyes.

  �
��The new toilet.’

  ‘You’re bloody joking.’ He shoulders past her and inches over there, crablike. He looks around the door suspiciously then grunts again.

  ‘Well, he’s left me in the shit now with council, that’s all I can say. They’ll be straight onto me about having to pay for an easement. They don’t miss a trick, those bastards.’

  ‘Frank, he said he sorted the easement. Left me the permit and papers and everything. They’re in on the desk.’

  He pivots again, swearing as the wheels on the frame bang into the bath, to find her standing in front of him, waiting for his reaction. It would kill him, she thinks, to show pleasure or relief or excitement. Her loathing is such a pure thing she experiences a secret visceral pleasure to watch him cornered like this, tormented by something as incomprehensible and enraging as kindness.

  ‘So who came and dug the trench?’ he snaps accusingly.

  ‘That contractor he uses, Ian Harding, is it?’

  ‘How much did he charge?’

  ‘I’m telling you, they said not to worry about it.’

  He actually grimaces with discomfort, muttering at her to get out of his way as he shuffles past. Bangs out the back door and down the brand-new ramp that someone from Rotary came and fitted last week, replacing the back step that had been broken for almost eleven years. At the end of the backyard, in sight of the hay shed, he stops short and stares at his neatly slashed paddocks and stacked bales. It’s then she sees what his limited mobility is costing him now; how his neck and head are forced to stay erect while his shoulders sag at a stiff helpless angle, hands clinging to the brakes of his walking frame, the whole of him fighting against the suppressed tremors that threaten to shake him free of it.

  ‘Bob Wilkes did it,’ she calls, but he doesn’t turn or respond. She imagines him giving up and toppling, curled there on the ground. She’s never seen him curled up, not even when she sat there with him in the dirt, waiting for the ambulance. He’d stayed in control then too, sprawled there licking his lips every now and again, his eyes losing focus with something like bewilderment as he stared up into the blue, something almost innocent.