The Life of Houses

by Lisa Gorton

  Kit sat very still. He never spoke much and was speaking now lightly, unbrokenly, with the same detachment, gazing at his hand on the box as if it were another possession. He was speaking, as he did in thought, to his things.

  ‘Yes, too successful for us, I’m afraid. A different aesthetic. Everything modern. Frightened of the past, I’d say. Always wanting new things. New clothes. New car. Even when she was overseas she kept calling us asking for money. Upset your grandmother quite a bit, that did.’

  While he spoke he kept stroking the box with his thumb. ‘I never did much, I’m afraid. Not my parents’ fault. They encouraged. I just wasn’t cut out for it. Never enough character. No, what I liked was things. Even as a boy, you know, I collected. The others had stamps. Never saw the point of stamps: too ugly. Shells, I liked. Now I think,’ he went on, ‘I think Admiral Kelty was a collector. You get your interest in houses from him, I’d say. Take this box—’

  ‘Mum’s a collector.’

  He smiled tolerantly. ‘I mean a real one. Not for money.’ He opened the lid. ‘Here we are now: look!’ The top of the box held shallow compartments. He slid up a strut between two compartments. From the side, a strip of wood swung out from a brass latch. ‘A secret drawer!’ He grinned up at her, delighted.

  Chapter Thirteen

  At the top of the steps, Kit started running—on along the drive, stones sharp underfoot, sometimes she plunged into sudden soft pits of sand. Now, standing with one hand splayed on the trunk of the gum tree, she caught breath. The tree’s shade was sketchy: there was no coolness in it. She would not look at the house. It loomed, as if on a hill. Her grandmother was in there, head lolling on the pillows, her two hands clutching at the sheets.

  So long as her grandmother had kept awake, the house had stayed within bounds. Setting her fork down on the tray, Audrey had motioned to the curtains; she had been asleep by the time Kit turned around. Even as Kit eased the tray off the bed, she had become an intruder. Shadows had crept out from under doors. The mirror was vigilant at the end of the hall.

  She stamped grass stalks down around her feet. The back of one knee itched. She bent to brush the insect off. Straightening up, light flooded her vision, dissolved the edges of the clearing. She thought: ‘Nothing, nothing to do.’ The place was so still: even the leaves did not move. The afternoon was endless: a stunned passivity extending in all directions.

  At her back, at the end of the drive, the highway cut away through low paddocks. In front of her, beyond the house, the dune, scratched grey in this light, shut off even the sound of the sea. On both sides, tea-tree closed her in. No, she could not see far. Still the heat, settling on the landscape, made it immense, part of the sky, remote as clouds. Standing rigid, picking off bark with her thumbnail, she did not ask herself, What do they do here? but, What does anyone ever do? She sat down in the grass, propping her back on the tree. Detachedly, she cracked the bark in pieces.

  At the end of the drive, a car stopped. The door slammed—nothing. She heard Scott walking up the drive before she saw him. Conscious that she should have been surprised, she was not surprised—at least, she was surprised only by his black suit, his narrow-toed black patent leather shoes labouring over the stones.

  She saw him stumble. He swore; picking himself up, he kicked at a stone. Like the haze of his aftershave (she could smell it even where she sat) he was closed in an intense personal atmosphere. Held in the day’s vacancy, she would have let him go past. Something, though, made him look sideways, through a sparse patch of tea-tree, to where she sat. His face, that first moment, was frighteningly naked: so much so it looked oversized, hung in the trees’ branches.

  ‘There you are!’ he said, his face wiped clean. He picked his way towards her. ‘I thought I wouldn’t change.’

  Standing in front of her, squinting against the sun, he touched his tie with one hand. ‘I couldn’t face it, the wake.’ Hitching his trousers, with an involuntary grunt he settled beside her in the grass. This close, she saw he had no colour in his face. Only his eyelids were inflamed, as though he’d been crying. He said, ‘I thought I’d come and see the only other person in town who isn’t there.’

  ‘I’m looking after Audrey.’

  He glanced up at the house. ‘I’m glad you’re outside, though. I’m not sure I’d have had the courage to knock.’

  She stripped a grass stem and split it, plaiting the hair-fine strips. She wound the plait around her finger, watching the colour darken behind her nail. He bent his head to watch her.

  ‘They lived here with Audrey’s parents,’ she said. ‘Audrey and Patrick. Did you know that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Did I?’

  ‘I mean they never lived anywhere else.’

  ‘Maybe they liked it.’

  ‘Still—’

  ‘I lived with my parents,’ he said. ‘I had to: I came back to look after them.’ He started picking out the grass seeds trapped in his trousers. ‘Only people your age think they can live wherever they want.’

  ‘You never left?’

  ‘I went to art school. Did my world tour. I was in London the same time as your mother, as a matter of fact. Never managed to catch up though.’ He laughed. ‘She’d have been frightened someone would see us.’ Giving up on the grass seeds, he rested his head against another angle of the tree trunk and closed his eyes. ‘Yes I lived in a lot of places, never very well. In the end I got tired of being poor. It’s alright when you’re young but I can’t be staying in share houses at my age.’ He slapped at a fly on his arm. ‘How is your mother, anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. He tilted his head and looked at her through half-closed eyes. ‘I mean, she’s left messages. There’s no reception at the house.’

  Shifting, he unstuck his shirt from his chest. ‘God, just listening to those insects makes me itchy. We should go for a swim.’

  ‘I have to stay with Audrey.’

  ‘Well…’ Pinching the sides of his mouth, he looked ironically across to the house.

  ‘She’s sleeping.’ She added: ‘I should go back.’

  ‘Yes, what are you doing out here, skiving off in the grass?’ He looked curiously into her face. ‘You do look dreadful.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’ There, hunched in the day’s dry glare, last night poured into her—small shifting sounds, worse when they stopped, animating the dark. She flicked the grass plait away. She brought out: ‘Patrick says there’s a ghost.’

  Scott stopped perfectly still, one moment. ‘I’d forgotten. Your mother used to go on about that. She used to say the house was haunted.’ He ran his palm back across his head. ‘Patrick’s little joke, I always thought.’ He twisted his head and looked directly at Kit. ‘You do realise he’s a tremendous liar, your grandfather? No, don’t look at me like that: everybody says so.’ In a falsetto voice he added: ‘It’s what we love about him. Seriously, though: Anna never told you? That little business about an antique print?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘He sold it as hand-tinted. Later it came out he’d done the tinting himself. Very naughty.’ He had dropped his head back.

  ‘But—he was a painter?’

  He grinned. ‘Yes, you could say your mother’s artistic temperament came from him. Probably all the dealers do it. Trouble was, he sold this one to some friends of Audrey’s mother. They were disappointed, naturally. Of course they were very nice about it. They always spoke as though they could have said much more. After that, he seemed not quite…’

  ‘Not quite what?’

  He sat forward and stripped off his jacket. Folding the shoulders together, he draped it carefully over his knees. ‘Up till then, they’d all thought of him as a romantic Jesuit. You know, they’re so far from religious feeling themselves they felt bound to defer to it. After, they all thought of him as a Catholic from Brisbane. Of course everybody was terribly kind to Audrey.’

  Kit stripped another grass stem. With her thumbnail, she split the green ve
in. Conscious of his eyes on her, she poked at some ants propping and eddying among the broken stalks. ‘It’s true though,’ she said. ‘About the ghost. I saw it in Audrey’s notes. Alice Black. She was a convict.’

  ‘To give her a name on the earth,’ he said lightly, self-consciously. He might have been quoting something. ‘How did she die?’

  ‘A man beat her. She was pregnant.’

  ‘That’s not very nice.’ With one foot, he kicked at some grass.

  ‘You know, they ought to mow all this. It’s a fire-risk.’

  Fiercely she despised him. She said: ‘I’m going to find out about her.’

  ‘Do,’ he agreed at once. ‘A school project.’

  Easy, casual, his mockery. Sitting beside her, he was every safe adult. That moment, she saw the scene as if from above. This ground where they were closed in the curve of the drive. There, the bright rectangle of the roof. Farther off, light warping over the dune. A scene like a map, and nowhere hers…

  She lay on her back in the grass. Over her the seed heads of the grasses filled with pale light. His fault, she thought, when the stupid tears came: resentment, tiredness leaking out of her eyes. Down here in the grass the noise of insects was immense. She could hear a sort of creaking of branches and, as if from far off, the rush of wind. Under her head she felt the edges of crooked and broken grass stalks and was conscious first of a general itchiness and then of an ant tracking through her hair.

  She sat up. At once a set of small lights, mottles, filled her vision. They were less like things she saw than like things scratched off the surface of an old film reel: little wavering absences. She closed her eyes and they were still there, more brightly. With her eyes closed, she realised that her head felt enormous, though not heavy. She had an idea of it floating up from her shoulders like an oversized helium balloon. All the weight from her head had sunk down into her hands, which she could not lift from the ground.

  She leant sideways and vomited into the grass—a single, neat retch. Surprised by how little shame she felt, or even surprise, she fixed her eyes on some grass stalks, five or six of them directly in her line of sight. They kept moving sideways and back with mesmerising slowness, vanishing behind the light flecks and appearing again. She saw them, that instant, with extraordinary clarity: a vision in which there was no sound, only the grass stalks and a vast space around her of uncoloured light. Except that there was sound, a voice sounding through her pulse. As she listened to it, her vision of grass stalks faded. In its place she felt an immense, a really cataclysmic headache.

  ‘Are you alright?’ His face came close. His hand, on the small of her back, pressed damp through her shirt. ‘Come on. Let’s get you inside.’

  She stood up. It was like wading, walking through the heat. Head bowed, she watched a sort of lightning storm in her head: jagged sudden lines of pain. He was following, his hand still on her back, his shadow wavering through hers. She realised she was going to throw up again.

  ‘You’ve got sunstroke. Where’s your hat?’

  The day was a struck drum, vibrating. The cool of the verandah brought a shutter down in her mind: simple relief.

  ‘Where’s your room?’

  She saw the wrought iron table and chairs. ‘Round the side,’ she said.

  Audrey’s blinds were down. Still no sound from that room; the day’s fixity spread from there. They went in the screen door, its echoing slam. The cool dark of Kit’s room was a pool of water. Stepping in after her, he closed the window. He drew the curtains shut.

  ‘You should lie down.’

  She did. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her headache, its nerve-flare lights. He was lifting her feet, resting them on something soft. She felt the blood pour into her head, a different sort of pain. A blowfly, trapped, was blundering against the glass.

  ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

  She lifted a hand. ‘Next door.’

  She was alone. A longing for sleep unfolded in her the memory of her bedroom at home, the striped quilt that Josie had pulled flat while she was at school. Did she iron it? How wet her tears felt—of course they feel wet, said her mother’s voice; but it was something she had never noticed. Scott was lifting her head, making her drink. A wet towel over her face, damp in her hair, on her pillow; she listened to him moving around the room. He opened the drawers of the dressing table—empty; she had done the same thing—and peered into the cupboard.

  He said: ‘Your mother never let me in the house.’

  Light flickered behind her eyelids: he had pulled back the curtain to let the blowfly out. With a whirr it cut loose; he let the curtain drop. In the room’s sudden quiet, he stopped dead. Even lying on the bed, eyes closed, she registered a change in his mood. ‘I can’t stay here. I can’t stay in this town.’

  Something—hardly deliberate—resisted him: his importunity, too raw: his black suit. She said, without opening her eyes, ‘You never liked it.’

  ‘True.’ After a long silence, he said again: ‘True.’

  Gloomily, he propped on the end of the bed, elbows on his knees, staring down at his hands. After a moment, he threw out a single laugh like a cough. ‘No, actually it’s calming, your complete indifference.’ He lay back—looked up, like her, at the ceiling. ‘You’re right, of course: never pity adults. Much better to be ruthless, like your mother. Get well away.’ After a pause, in which he tapped his fingers against his lower lip, he said: ‘Maybe I’ll go back to Byron.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, why not,’ he repeated dully. ‘Actually I loathe hippies.’

  ‘So stay here.’

  Turning onto one elbow, looking across at her, he said: ‘What’s so nice about you is, no one you know has ever talked to you about money…’

  He broke off. In the sudden quiet Kit heard the knob of the door click. She pulled the towel off her face. As if by its own mechanism, the door was swinging open. Audrey stood in the doorway.

  ‘I heard voices,’ she said.

  Audrey’s rose-sprigged nightgown had twisted, showing through synthetic lace the blue-pale swell of one breast. Her face, marked still with the folds of the sheet, looked as though it were a cast made of crumbling powder. She had hardly woken yet. She looked dazedly about the bedroom as though she had found herself by accident in a stranger’s house.

  Scott was standing straight-backed and formal at the foot of the bed. Audrey’s eyes travelled down to his shoes and up again. ‘They’re not back yet,’ she said. ‘I heard voices. I thought…’ She stood, hands clasped, folding her palms over her thumbs, blinking at Scott as though trying to bring him into focus. He might have been an apparition stepped out of her dream. When she spoke at last, she fell back on a sort of bewildered formality, prompted perhaps by his suit: ‘You’ll stay for tea?’

  ‘Actually, I was just leaving.’

  ‘I thought…What time is it? They’re not back yet.’

  He checked his watch. ‘Just after three.’

  ‘Treen said, two-thirty.’ She looked questioningly at Kit. ‘I’d have heard the car.’

  Kit said: ‘Should I make tea?’

  ‘I have a rest after lunch.’

  ‘I know. I…’

  But Kit did not know how to tell her own grandmother who she was. The room, its dust-thickened half-light, held them in its own stillness. They each separately waited: an instant when Kit saw all three of them facing each other like people in a photograph, an instant exposed and final. It was a mark of how far out of time she had gone that it was Audrey, at last, who said: ‘There’s the telephone.’ And at once Kit realised that it had been ringing and ringing from the depths of the house.

  Part III

  Chapter Fourteen

  The hospital had been a mansion once. Its yellowing white ornate plaster façade rose improbably over the car park. A portico had been cut into one side, a hall of steel and glass closed at each end by glass sliding doors. Kit and her grandmother waited inside the doors whil
e Scott parked the car. Above the lift, the numbers ‘2’ and ‘3’ kept lighting up. Her aunt and grandfather were there somewhere, on one of those floors. The lift’s metal doors, with their in-drawn gleam, stood between this world and that.

  After the phone call, it was Scott who had known what to do; so much so, they now waited for him helplessly, while a hospital worker lining up wheelchairs inside the entrance hall kept making the automatic doors open and close. It was Scott who had sent Kit to pack clothes for Treen while he fetched his car: Treen’s jeans, ironed and folded over a wire hanger, shirts so stiffly ironed they hung like phantom bodies in the wardrobe; oversized undies, bras that she could not bear to look at; a toothbrush and jars from the shelf of her bathroom: all these Kit had shoved into her own bag. It was there, at her feet. Somehow Scott had got a cotton dress and cardigan over Audrey’s nightie; she was in her slippers still. Her in-breaths kept catching on her teeth.

  There was Scott now. Smiling absently at Kit he crossed to the desk and dinged on a bell. Audrey did not look around. She put her hand up to grasp Kit’s shoulder. Her fingers dug in painfully. A man with blow-dried hair and a rubbery, impervious face emerged through a door and handed Scott a piece of paper. They spoke in low voices. Unsmilingly the man brought over one of the wheelchairs and set it behind Audrey’s knees. With a low grunt, she collapsed into it. Crouching in front of her, the man lifted each swollen foot onto a metal rest. He did this without once looking at Audrey or Kit. He showed Scott how the brakes worked. Then he walked back behind the desk and through the door.

  ‘Level three,’ said Scott.

  The wheels of Audrey’s chair stuck in the gap between the lift and the floor. Kit had to wrestle the chair forwards, holding the strut of one leg rest, while Scott shoved. Audrey’s fingers tensed on the armrests; she did not speak. She had her head back; her eyes, wide, saw nothing. Audrey would remember none of this, thought Kit: this was not time for her; she was waiting only. In the lift, Scott stood with bowed head behind the wheelchair. All the jerky flamboyance of his gestures had gone: he had reduced himself to this mild, serviceable manner.