Like a House on Fire

by Cate Kennedy

  It was a side to her I was seeing for the first time, this professional, acquired distance. At our house, in our script, Claire was the slapdash one, laughing at me when I patiently restacked the dishwasher more neatly or tucked the sheets in properly. She was as messy as the kids, and that’s saying something. ‘They’re kids,’ she’d say. ‘Don’t inflict your perfectionism on them, for God’s sake. Leave it for your job.’

  Which was how I’d always been, managing a team of workers who did tree-felling and hedge-clipping, at a point in my career where I never did any of this myself, just organised crews and timetables and equipment hire and safety requirements, so I can’t even blame good honest labour for injuring my back. I’d just finished supervising a job of clipping around tennis courts in a huge formal garden up in the hills, and the owner was about to stroll out and check our handiwork, and I saw — you can see where this is going, can’t you — an errant bit of cypress bough just at head height, offending my perfectionist streak. And it only takes thirty seconds to wreck a perfect safety record, and I used mine walking to the van as I cursed the new guy, picking up the heavy-duty hedge-clippers that were nearest. I jerked the start cord angrily and swung them up over my head to cut that one pointless, unobtrusive bit of stray greenery. Picking up, and lifting; you wouldn’t think that would do anything like the damage of, say, falling. But I was stiff and pissed off, with something to prove, my arms going up in an arc and then instantly down again as I staggered and the blades of the hedge-cutter stuttered themselves into the dirt, something hotly molten cracking open in my back and eating its way up my spine into the pain centre at the base of my head, turning everything white.

  So it’s been me, using up my own scrupulous work cover as sick leave, insurance that’s already expired and the half-pay remainder that’s running out very, very soon in the new year, when my doctor will look at my MRI again and say — and this is my worst, darkest fantasy — ‘Sixteen weeks? Frankly, I can’t quite see why this hasn’t resolved itself by now.’

  There is plenty of time to relive those thirty seconds, here on the floor surrounded by toys and mess I can’t pick up and driven mad by forgotten plates of toast crusts left on the coffee table. The immobilising pain of moving holds me completely still, and the scalding moments leading up to slipping the disc are on continuous repeat play, as I explore the million alternate universes that allow me to find the secateurs instead, or reach up and snap the twig off, or tuck it into the hedge and make a joke with the new guy, or just leave the bloody thing alone. Allow me, in a nutshell, to let it go. I am well aware of what’s keeping me pinioned here, the compressed, pinched thing that commands all my attention now. I stare at the cornices, the tumbleweeds of fluff accumulating under the table, the faint cobweb hanging from the ceiling in a floating, dust-collecting drift. Soon we will have mice, I think. Soon rodents will invade the house and step over me, sneering, on their way to that discarded toast.

  ‘I hate to say it,’ I say to Claire when she comes in to collapse into an armchair, ‘but there’s a cobweb hanging from the ceiling that’s really bothering me.’

  ‘Is there?’ she says brusquely, opening the TV guide. ‘Good.’

  They keep you awake, the anti-inflammatories. You could lie there for hours, thinking about what that sort of comment is all about.

  ‘Christmas presents,’ I say instead. ‘I’m worried …’

  ‘It’s all done,’ she answers. ‘I got everything yesterday in my lunch hour.’

  ‘What? All of it?’

  ‘Yep. I’m going to leave the wrapping up to you, though. You can sit and wrap big light boxes filled with plastic junk, can’t you? Hospital corners, and all?’

  ‘Yes, sure. Sure. It’s actually feeling pretty good now.’

  ‘Good,’ she says automatically, in a tone that says so it bloody should, unless that’s the medication making me paranoid as well as sleepless.

  ‘Sorry about the nativity scene,’ I say. It’s Claire’s, that set. Something she’s had ever since she was a child.

  ‘That’s OK. It was made in the Philippines. Funny how everything except the Jesus broke.’ She laughs. ‘Anyway, Evie’s improvising. Check out the dining-room table.’

  I hoist myself up slowly and hobble over to see the crib surrounded by toys; Christmas designed by Disney and Mattel. Barbie is the Virgin Mary, Postman Pat has joined Ernie and Bert as stand-ins for the Three Wise Men. I count four shepherds, only one of which is a panda, and take in the plastic farm collection and a squadron of My Little Ponies, a giantess Dora the Explorer who must be the angel — everything replaced except, in the middle of it all, the baby with the Napoleon kiss-curl, arms spread to receive the gifts, or else to declare: Come and adore me!

  ‘Don’t do the Christmas Eve shift,’ I say.

  ‘There’s no way round it. I have to.’

  I stand there thinking of last Christmas, when we were finishing a big commercial contract and I had a pile of overtime on my pay cheque, and Claire and I, reckless and laughing at the mall, spending it like water, bought them all bikes and a trampoline and then had that week at the beach. I get down on my hands and knees in dogged slow motion, like an old-age pensioner who’s dropped something.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘One of Sam’s tennis shoes is under the couch and I’ve been forced to look at it all afternoon and I’m going to finally pull the damn thing out.’

  ‘Look,’ she says, ‘either tell Sam to get it out, or forget about it. Just give the martyrdom and control freakery a rest.’

  I’m genuinely shocked. ‘Control freakery, is it?’

  ‘When it’s coming from someone lying flat on their back in the middle of a busy family room, it morphs pretty quickly into orders. I mean, why there? Just where you can keep your eye on everything, like Central Control?’

  I dangle myself over the arm of the lounge chair, stretching my spine, face in a cushion.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, my voice muffled. ‘I just can’t stand all this … chaos I can’t do anything about.’

  ‘Well, get out and go for a walk. The doctor said gentle exercise is good. Anyway …’ She hesitates. I breathe in the cottony cushion smell. ‘It should be better now. It really should. There’s no explanation for why it’s gone on like this.’

  ‘No. Well, Claire, I have no explanation either. I’m not faking it, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

  ‘I’m not saying you’re faking it, for crying out loud. Why would you put us all through this?’

  I take a breath to start in on how what they’re going through is nothing compared to what going through it with a herniated disc at L3 is like, having your kids step over you obliviously on the way to the TV, not knowing what’s going on at work, shifting your previously reliable body around like an unexploded bomb. I imagine saying all this muffled into a cushion like someone in a ’70s therapy group, then … let it go.

  Instead, I put my hand down behind the cushion and feel around for the small, pointy plastic thing that’s been digging into my face. ‘Look, one of Evie’s Polly Pocket dolls.’

  Claire holds out her hand. ‘I bet she’s been looking for that. That’s probably another shepherd.’

  After she’s in bed, I go to her laptop to check whether gentle exercise is a good thing. I type in back pain and it lists all her previous searches containing those words. The latest one is back pain psychosomatic. Hey, thanks, Claire.

  Two more painkillers, and I get each of those crappy presents wrapped so neat and perfect and pintucked, it’s like I have a degree in it. It’s like I’ve been in the army for years, drilling myself on just this thing, in preparation for a surprise attack.

  Now the humiliation of helplessness, the hands-down winner of all humiliations, after all, as on Christmas Eve I watch Claire scrape her hair back into a ponytail and put on t
hose squeaky white shoes, ready to go to work until 5 a.m.

  ‘I should have a to-do list,’ I say, ‘and I’m really, really sorry I haven’t got one. It would involve taking the kids to carols by candlelight and stuffing a turkey and making you breakfast in bed tomorrow morning.’

  Claire stares at herself in the mirror and grimaces, then grabs a lipstick and slicks some on. ‘Well, it can’t be helped,’ she says, and there it is, the sound of everything she’s really talking about, echoing in the big, hollow silence under her words.

  Listening to the two of us, you’d never believe that we used to get on like a house on fire, that even after we had the kids, occasionally we’d stay up late, just talking. But now that I think of it, a house on fire is a perfect description for what seems to be happening now: these flickering small resentments licking their way up into the wall cavities; this faint, acrid smell of smoke. And suddenly, before you know it, everything threatening to go roaring out of control. Here’s my wife with the hose, running to douse burning embers falling from a sky raining more and more embers on her, battling to save what she’s got. And what am I? The guy who can’t get the firetruck started? The one turning and turning the creaking tap, knowing the tank is draining empty, the one with the taste of ash in his mouth and all this black and brittle aftermath?

  Once she leaves, I shuffle around the kitchen making dinner.

  ‘Remember last year, Dad,’ says Sam, ‘you made those pancakes?’

  ‘I do. But we’re not having pancakes, we’re having delicious pasta.’

  It wouldn’t kill me to make pancakes. Except that I’ve succumbed to this reduced, curtailed movement, all this pinched, seized stiffness where everything is such an effort.

  ‘How do reindeers fly?’ says Evie, out of nowhere.

  I study the noodles in the saucepan, the grated cheese melting on them.

  ‘Yeah, Dad,’ says Ben, grinning that smart-arse eight-year-old grin. ‘I’ve got a few questions about those flying reindeer myself.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you have, Ben.’

  I think, with a sudden aching spasm, of the year before, when Claire and I had read his note to Santa. How are you, the note said, and how is Mrs Claus?

  ‘And how does Santa get into houses where there’s no chimney? And how did he carry our trampoline in his sack?’

  ‘Ben, I’d appreciate it if you thought for a second before you continued with this.’

  The other two are staring at him with wide hungry eyes. He falters. I see it.

  ‘They must be special reindeer,’ he says finally. ‘He breeds them.’

  ‘An excellent answer,’ I say.

  ‘After dinner, can we cook marshmallows over a candle?’ says Evie.

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  Definition of psychosomatic: something originating in the mind or the emotions rather than through a physical cause. On the website I clicked on, there was a whole theory about how low oxygen content in the nerve and muscle cells is the true cause of most chronic pain syndromes. They hasten to point out that this doesn’t make the pain imaginary, just redirected via some different circuit, I guess. So I eat charred marshmallows tasting of scented Santa candles and say, ‘Mmm, these are terrific,’ and when I get the camera to take a photo of Evie’s nativity scene, I see it now includes Transformer robots standing around the crib like bodyguards, and I say, ‘They look great, Sam. This is about the best nativity scene I’ve ever seen.’

  Then Ben reaches over and puts Darth Vader in the place of Joseph, and wheezes asthmatically, ‘Jesus, I am your father,’ and laughing feels like panting for breath, remembering what it’s like to be fit.

  At 1 a.m. I tackle the stairs up to their bedrooms, pausing halfway to allow plenty of oxygen into my nerve and muscle cells, timing my dose of anti-inflammatories but feeling hot pain building anyway, unstoppable. I grope my way in the darkness towards their beds and the sacks hanging off them with the armful of small, perfectly wrapped stocking-stuffers my wife has bought on her credit card.

  ‘Hi, Santa.’ Ben’s not asleep. He shifts in the bunk bed to squint at me in the dim moony glow of the night-light.

  ‘Good evening,’ I say. My voice comes out more resonant than I would have expected, considering I’m holding on to the doorjamb in a grabbing spasm, sweat trickling down my neck.

  There’s a short pause in which he could choose to wake his brother.

  ‘You’re looking fitter than I would have thought,’ is what he says.

  ‘Well, I keep in shape. Lots of stairs in this line of work.’

  ‘Reindeers OK?’

  I have to bite the inside of my cheek. ‘Excellent, thanks.’

  ‘And Mrs Claus?’

  Pain originating in the mind or the emotions — I’m clear on that now. It still locks like brakes, forcing you to skid to a stop. I gesture with the DVD I’m about to put into his Santa sack. ‘Doesn’t like me working nights. Lucky it’s just the one night, I guess.’

  He laughs softly, so he doesn’t wake Sam. ‘Will Mum be here in the morning?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Goodnight, then.’

  ‘See you, Benny boy.’

  You’ll think I’m insane when I tell you I make it back downstairs again just to turn around and work my teeth-gritted way back up again. My physio would roll his eyes and shake his head if I confessed. Especially if I said I climbed back up those stairs for no good reason, other than to get another look at each of them asleep, sprawled in their beds without a worry in the world. He’s twenty-six, my physio, and not a father, so it’s understandable, I guess.

  This whole mind/body somatic thing has got me spooked, so don’t think the irony hasn’t occurred to me that I can only get comfortable if I lie flat on my back, like the infant Saviour, with one leg raised. I wake up at 5.30 when Claire comes in quietly, and through the doorway, I watch her unloading stuff from the all-night supermarket in the kitchen: two barbeque chickens, a bag of potato gems, one of those seven-dollar ice-cream desserts with the crackly chocolate inside the kids love. She’s right, I can see everything from here: the dining-room table arranged with its galaxy of plastic and soft-toy worshippers, swirling around the unbroken Jesus like a constellation. The white cloth we only use at Christmas, with the centrepiece of something glued with curly pasta and spray-painted gold that Evie made at kindergarten. Over there, the stairs they will come down in a couple of hours, to step over me on their way to the tree.

  ‘Will you do me a favour?’ I call to Claire, and she comes over, picking up one of Santa’s shortbreads on the way and cramming it sideways into her mouth. ‘You remember that time I got a stiff neck on holidays, when you showed me that back-cracking trick?’

  ‘Um, yeah. But I’m not sure your physio would recommend it in your current state, would he?’

  ‘He mentioned gentle pressure. And that’s kind of what a chiropractor does, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not a chiropractor, though.’ She swallows the biscuit. ‘You were on holidays with a cricked neck, not recovering from a slipped disc.’

  ‘Go on. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t love to walk all over me.’

  She gives a brief, weary grin. ‘Oh, no, that part would be my pleasure.’ She gets two chairs and lines them up either side of me and kicks off her shoes as I roll myself onto my front.

  ‘Forehead and shoulders on the floor,’ she says. She grips the backs of the chairs and braces herself against them, and I feel her sure foot, bare and warm, align itself squarely between my shoulder blades.

  ‘Breathe in and out,’ she says, and then begins to press with slow careful weight, down onto my back. I feel her hesitate, like someone testing ice before stepping out onto it, and I hear her say, ‘Well, maybe this isn’t doing you much good, but it’s working for me,’ and I smile into the floor, in
spite of myself, feeling my sternum take the pressure. I exhale another cautious breath as her heel pushes a fraction harder and finds the spot and something cracks — we both hear it — like a flexed knuckle. A candle-flare passes up my back, flickering, moth-like.

  ‘There it goes,’ she says, lifting her weight gently off me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, and she crouches beside me and brings her face down next to mine.

  ‘Temporary respite,’ she says. ‘Happy Christmas.’

  I look at her, feeling that small heat build between us. Our breaths fuelling it, close to the ground. This is how you do it, I think, stick by careful stick over the ashes, oxygen and fuel, a controlled burn. I open my mouth to tell her sorry.

  Then I blink and refocus, distracted, and see, behind her in the greyish dawn, a line of ground-in glitter and stars stuck in the carpet. Probably with glue.

  ‘Look at that,’ I say, and she turns her head from floor height to see what I’m talking about.

  ‘What?’ she says, mystified.

  ‘Those stars. There.’

  ‘Oh … yes! Don’t they look great, in this light,’ she says, and I reach up to pull the elastic band and grips out of her hair.

  Five-Dollar Family

  ‘This is the most important meal of your baby’s life.’

  Michelle had opened her eyes, groggy and aching after the birth, and seen the midwife’s stern face loom into view over her. ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got to wake him up every three hours, remember? You’ve got a sleepy baby, and you’ve got to make him interested in feeding so that he gets all the antibodies he needs from you. And also to make your milk come in.’

  She’s the bossy one. The other one is nicer, the one who was on duty the morning after and asked Michelle how she was going. That was all — no looking at her stitches, no lectures, just how she was. Then she’d picked Jason up, unwrapped him, and passed him gently to Michelle.