Like a House on Fire

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘AWOL,’ I say. It’s true too. I know as I wheel him out the door that we’re crossing the point of no return, way beyond any casual fraternising I could explain away, but nobody sees us as we pass three rooms on the way to the exit door leading to the courtyard and, anyway, I can’t let him down now, not when he’s shaved and changed and keeps clenching and unclenching his hands with anticipation.

  It’s awkward manoeuvring the two of us around to depress the lever on the door and open it, and there’s a sucking sound as the airlock is broken when I lean into it. A draught of fresh air blows over us, and I worry that the cool air outside will bring on a coughing fit, but Mr Moreton takes a deep, careful breath with his face up to the weak sunlight, fumbling for the brake on the wheelchair as we reach the tanbarked square of garden, then settles his hands in his blanketed lap with a sigh.

  He watches me with gleaming, expectant relish as I tap out a cigarette from the packet in my bag and pass it to him, then dig again in my bag for the lighter. When I bring its flame to the tip of the smoke in his mouth, his hand grabs mine and holds it. Then I feel the grip relax as he tilts his chin and exhales like he’s been holding his breath for a long, long time. He lowers the hand with the cigarette to his knee with calm, slow relief.

  ‘What can I say?’ he whispers through a wreath of smoke. ‘Your blood’s worth bottling.’

  I smile and check my watch, my own hands shaking. It’s almost seven.

  ‘Just don’t inhale too deeply and start coughing,’ I say.

  ‘No chance of that,’ he mutters, bringing the cigarette back to his lips as if he’s blowing a lingering kiss. He’s like a different man with a cigarette in his hand. He gazes affectionately at the rosebushes and beyond them, off to the distant hills visible between the hospital’s east and south wings.

  ‘You look very nice,’ I say.

  ‘Do I? I feel bloody great,’ he says, stretching with a contented yawn, and there’s a little zephyr of morning breeze that washes over us, warm and fragrant with the faint scent of blossom, and I’m about to speak again when the propped-open door slides slowly shut behind us on its hinges. There is a terrible echoing click as it closes on its own deadlock, and I recognise the sound as soon as I hear it. It is the sound of a plane door closing without me, ready to taxi down a runway and take off for London. Suddenly I very much doubt I’ll be going to the staff Christmas party, either.

  ‘Was that the door?’ Mr Moreton says, his eyes fixed on the hills.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘So we’ll need to find another entrance?’ His carefully combed, side-parted hair and the prickles of white whiskers he’s missed on his face send a piercing, protective ache through me.

  ‘Yeah. But don’t worry, it’ll be fine. You can take your time now.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ he says. ‘I am.’

  He gives the butt one last regretful glance and throws it onto the path, where I stub it out with my toe.

  ‘Ready when you are,’ he says.

  I wheel the chair to the far corner of the courtyard and down past the pathology wing, around the corner, skirting rows of garbage skips, and up the path beside accident and emergency. There’s no chance of slipping through unnoticed now; the hospital’s come awake and nurses and doctors are walking in briskly from the staff car park, eyeing us curiously, as I make my way past a locked door and yet another emergency exit, also locked.

  ‘We’ll have to go in via the front,’ I say to Mr Moreton. ‘There’s no way round it.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I’ve been to the front and survived once already.’ I’m laughing as he adds, ‘I’m real sorry, though. You’ll lose your job, won’t you?’

  ‘I couldn’t care less about the job.’

  ‘What about you going off to London and all?’

  ‘I’ll just go a bit later than I planned. It’s not like it’s going anywhere.’

  ‘Sorry to make you run the gauntlet, though.’

  ‘Nothing to apologise for,’ I say.

  I’m around the corner now, wheeling the chair on the long sweeping stretch of pavement leading to the black glass doors of the impressive entrance atrium. The two black ash bins stand sentinel at either side, but someone else will be hosing them out this morning.

  ‘Here we go,’ I whisper, bending to Mr Moreton’s ear. The woody, clean fragrance of his Christmas aftershave makes me want to cry.

  ‘Eyes front,’ he whispers in return.

  We start up the wide concourse with its landscaped box-hedge border, morning light hitting the tinted glass of the doors and heads turning to us as we approach. Mr Moreton’s shoulders go back and his chin lifts and we’re clipping along now, left right left, there’s no way I’m going to do him the disservice of skulking in, it’s up and over the top for us.

  Down in the kitchen the other cleaners will be pouring their cups of tea out of the urn now, Marie remarking coolly on my absence, and Matron will be waiting for us, I am certain, at the nurses’ station, in the no-man’s-land of the hospital’s thermostatically cool interior, its sterilised world of hard surfaces, wiped clean and blameless. Someone else’s jurisdiction now.

  Mr Moreton feels it, I know he does, because I hear him start humming ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, which dissolves in a hoot of laughter then a coughing fit, and I reach down and grab his frail hand again till it’s over. Then we push on, both of us smothering laughter, and this moment is the one I remember most clearly from the year I turned eighteen: the two of us content, just for this perfect moment, to believe we can go on humming, and that this path before us will stretch on forever.

  Tender

  Up in under her arm, that’s where it aches. That’s what worries her. They say the biopsy will be a minor invasive procedure, a couple of stitches at most, but she can’t help thinking of that scalpel like an apple corer, going into her flesh, pushing in and twisting.

  ‘You haven’t written it on the calendar,’ says Al when he comes in.

  ‘It’s at 9.15.’

  ‘So you’ll — what — get the 6.35 train?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll drive down and leave the car at the station for you to pick up. Then back in time for after school.’ She pauses, then mutters, ‘Hopefully, I mean.’

  ‘Why didn’t you write it up?’

  She stops grating cheese, stares at him. ‘Why do you reckon?’

  ‘Chris, the kids know. I told them last week you had to have a test at the hospital. They’re fine about it. No point making it worse for them, keeping it all secret.’

  ‘It’s not going to be worse for them. They don’t even need to think about it.’ She looks down at the piece of roughened cheese in her hand, turns it to a new edge.

  ‘What do they call it again?’

  ‘A lumpectomy.’

  She hates that word. Lump. The ugliest word in the English language. Lumpen. Lumpy. She thinks fleetingly of the story Hannah developed an obsession for when she was three, which she’d demanded over and over, night after night. The princess with all the mattresses who still couldn’t sleep because of that tiny lump disturbing her all night long; that hard, resilient pea rising cruelly and insistently through all those downy layers.

  ‘Want a hand with something?’

  ‘No,’ she replies, taking a teatowel out of the drawer and pulling open the oven. ‘I’m right.’

  Hannah is off that story now. She’s on to another one about a family who end up bringing two stray dogs home from the pound instead of one. Christine had fantasies when the kids were babies: of Jamie, three years older, reading to his little sister of a night in the big armchair. She’d imagined a golden halo of lamplight, polished floors, the straw-bale walls finally rendered and whitewashed, everything as clean and wholesome as a cake of handmade soap.

  In
stead, Jamie is forever setting up complicated wars of small action figures that bite painfully into your bare feet when you have to get up at night, battalions of tiny medieval knights with pointy plastic armour and shields. Hannah couldn’t be less interested. Christine is having a few second thoughts, now, about the old nature-versus-nurture argument. What is it with boys and fighting? One hour of sanctioned TV a night, and still Jamie sprawls on the floor relishing battle scenes, while Hannah flounces and squeals like some miniature Paris Hilton demanding to wear nail polish to kinder. Where have they absorbed all this from, this nasty flotsam leaking in like battery acid?

  You couldn’t have told her, seven years ago, she’d be worrying about this stuff, any more than she would have believed they’d even have a television or electric heaters.

  She remembers Al and her arguing over whether to render the walls with mud and cement or just mud — statistics about toxicity, about pure environments, about every bloody thing, things that buckled in the face of practicality and time. Now the solar panels are just a booster for an electric system like everyone else’s, and to Christine that seems to sum up the whole experiment: it’s a bonus, a gesture, a grand theory of sustainability modified to a more prosaic reality. The trees outside, which she’d imagined sprouting into a shady arbour, are taller and stalkier now but still unmistakably seedlings, painstakingly hand-watered from the dam and the bath. The piles of clay turned over by digging the house site still glint exposed through the thin groundcovers, and Jamie’s BMX track has worn a looping circuit through the landscaping, turning her plans for terracing into an assortment of jumps and scrambles. Christine puts more wood in the firebox and, with a familiar mix of guilt and resentment, dreams her nightly dream of an electric oven.

  It’s not that she doesn’t love the house. She does — it’s just still so makeshift and unfinished. The spare windows are still stacked under a tarp in the shed, and they’ve spread rugs over the spots where the floor dips and cracks. You can’t have a bath without bucketing out the water saved from the last one onto some dry patch of ground.

  She can hear Al giving the kids a bath now. That’s Al’s version of a fun activity with kids — stick them in the bath and try to foam up some bubbles with the biodegradable shampoo.

  ‘Mum!’ she hears Hannah bawling from the tub.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need my SHOWER CAP!’

  ‘Get Dad to find it.’

  Now Al’s voice, muffled and distracted. ‘It’s not in here.’

  ‘Have you looked in the shower?’

  She hears the shower screen door open, then silence, a belated muttered thanks. Too late though.

  ‘My hair’s ALL WET ALREADY!’ comes Hannah’s wail, followed by that whiny crying that always sets Christine’s teeth on edge. Does Hannah do it at kinder? Do the workers there tut and roll their eyes about lack of discipline at home?

  ‘Shut UP!’ comes Jamie’s voice.

  Violent splashing, then another high-pitched scream.

  Why doesn’t Al do something to intervene? She pulls open the big drawer with an irritated tug and gets out knives and forks.

  Al had been the first one she’d told, of course, after she’d found it, late one night in the shower. She recalls his face as he raised himself on one elbow in bed, reaching for his bedside lamp, how he’d rubbed a hand over his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Then the radiographer: how quiet she’d got, after the initial small talk. Christine remembers the sharply intent way she’d leaned her head closer to the image on the screen, her hand clicking, moving the mouse, clicking again, the light-hearted talk over.

  Then the doctor, finally, looking through the ultrasound films as he made a point of giving her the reassuring statistics of how many lumps turn out to be benign. She’d hated the way he’d stared off over her head as his fingers had coolly explored the lump, gazing into the distance like someone solving a mental equation.

  ‘How does that feel?’ he’d said.

  ‘Pretty tender, actually.’ Trying to breathe normally.

  Him writing something on her card, like his final answer in a quiz, before meeting her eyes again. Briskness and neutrality finetuned, as he said, ‘Best to take that out and have a good look at it, I think.’

  Christine sits at the kitchen table now and listens to the wrangling in the bathroom, her husband’s ineffectual protestations as the children fight over a certain squeaky bath toy they both lay claim to. From out of the corner of her eye, she sees the familiar tiny dark shape of a mouse run the length of the skirting. If she puts another trap out, she’ll have to remember to tell Al to check them before the kids get up tomorrow. Finding a dead mouse is likely to set them both off, demanding a funeral and burial, which would make them late for school.

  She gets up and finds two traps in the pantry, in behind the jars and plastic containers and the box full of herbal cough and cold remedies, valerian tea and rescue remedy. Back when the kids were born, she and Al would never have dreamed of treating them with any commercial preparations from the chemist. And they’d been lucky: the kids never got sick; she hadn’t been in a hospital since Hannah was born.

  Rescue remedy, she thinks as she replaces the little bottle on the shelf. And can’t stop her mouth twisting into a humourless, cynical curl as she dabs some peanut butter onto the mousetraps and sets them, pushing them cautiously back into shadowy corners with the tip of her finger.

  ‘Al!’ she calls at last. ‘Will you get the kids out of the bath, for God’s sake? Dinner’s been ready for half an hour!’

  She finds herself watching him, sometimes, still a little incredulous at the dreamy way he handles life, how everything seems to flow around him. Once at a barbeque held at the community centre where he works, she’d impulsively asked a colleague how he managed everything there at the office.

  ‘Oh, fine,’ the woman had said, surprised. ‘Al just does his own thing, you know? It all comes together in the end.’

  Here at home, she never sees it coming together. Everything, on the contrary, seems to be teetering on the verge of coming apart. That, or just sinking into neglect, like the wheelbarrow half-full of compost and the shovel which has been buried in weeds for over a fortnight, outside the kitchen window.

  He never rises to the bait, either. Once, when he’d wandered in from the study and said, ‘What have you got planned for dinner?’ she’d snapped, ‘What have you got planned?’ but he’d only looked surprised and answered mildly, ‘Nothing. Is it my turn?’

  He only makes one dinner, though: tuna and pasta casserole. Christine supposes she should be grateful he’s so laid-back — relaxed with the kids, always in the same amiable mood. But he’s so vague, that’s the trouble, so blind to how much organising she has to do around him to keep it all running. It’s like she has three kids, not two.

  Now she watches him dump clean folded clothes out of the washing basket onto the rug, slowly picking through the pile looking for fresh pyjamas for the kids.

  ‘Hurry, Dad! Hurry!’ whines Hannah, jiggling naked and impatient on the spot.

  Christine drinks in the sight of her strong little back, the sturdy muscles in her legs as she jumps from one foot to the other.

  Al looks up at Hannah and raises his eyebrows, tickles her with one teasing forefinger. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist,’ he says, and Jamie guffaws with laughter at his sister, who complains even louder and kicks out at him. He aims his Jedi fighter plane warningly at her. Al doesn’t even notice. He glances down at the pyjama top he’s holding and with one distracted but surprisingly adept movement reaches his hand inside to the label and shakes it right-way-out.

  If they do the tests in the afternoon, Christine wonders, will they keep her down there tomorrow night if the results are bad? She tries the word in her head, exploratively, trying to take the t
errifying sting out of it. Malignant. Malignant. Would they be so prompt, or would some other specialist have to make the decision? Does she have tuna and pasta in the pantry, just in case?

  ‘I need a cardboard box,’ Jamie announces after dinner, ‘for my school project.’

  Christine finds him an old four-litre wine cask.

  ‘What’s this for?’ she asks as he cuts a hole in one end.

  ‘We’re making models. It’s going to be a little world, kind of. Like, I’m going to put blue paper in here, for sky? And some little sticks like trees. And when people look through the hole it’s going to look like a real place.’

  ‘Wow, that sounds good. When does it have to be ready?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he replies calmly.

  God, sometimes he’s so like Al it scares her.

  ‘Shall we go and cut some sticks and twigs, then?’ she suggests.

  He glances out at the twilight and shrugs. ‘OK.’

  ‘What are you going to stick them in, to make them stand up?’

  She watches his serious seven-year-old face consider this, and wants to take his arm and plant a kiss on the faded temporary tattoo of Buzz Lightyear there on his skinny bicep.

  ‘Playdough,’ he says at last.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Covered in grass so you can’t see it.’

  She feels the ardent rush of helpless, terrible love. ‘Let’s do it.’

  She feels it catch, like a little stabbing stitch, when she reaches up to snip off some wattle sprigs. In the armpit again, like it’s buried in her lymph nodes instead of the pale, pliant skin at the side of her breast. She’d been showering when she first felt it six weeks ago, soaping herself after a dusty day collecting bricks for paving. Her fingers had brushed over it, and she’d felt her pulse leap and thud, racketing to the roof of her mouth, and traced her fingers back to the tender place, tasting sudden adrenaline like solder. Yes, like a pea, buried but resilient, a small sly sphere nesting disguised between layers of flesh and tissue. Keeping you awake all night. Wondering how long it’d been there unnoticed, and what it might be collecting darkly into itself, like a little Death Star.