The Life of Houses

by Lisa Gorton

  She said, ‘I’m just going with Treen to get Mum’s things. The hospital has some flat for us to stay in tonight.’

  ‘My flight’s not till Monday. So I thought—I’m booked at the motel.’

  ‘Mum, your phone’s ringing.’

  ‘That’s alright.’

  ‘It’ll be Dad calling back.’

  Peter said, ‘You can answer it.’

  Anna took the phone out of her bag. ‘It was Treen. Listen, I have to get back.’

  With self-conscious formality he walked out into the sunlight. They watched him go between parked cars, head bent against the glare. Heat, and the glass, made the scene far off. At the edge of the footpath he stopped, looked away down the road. That road, Anna thought, and then the next, and then the freeway…She saw in thought what she had seen that morning: grey light widening over paddocks vacant under so much sky, something washed about the morning light. Saltbush edged the road. In one paddock a single dead tree stood stripped and bleached, its fallen branches cleared away. He’ll go back to his motel, she thought. She saw him in his suit on the bed, computer on his knees, working, impervious to the ugly room, the sea at the end of the street. She thought: he keeps his life.

  ‘Why did he come?’ said Kit.

  ‘He told you. He was worried about me.’

  ‘What? Is he in love with you or something?’ A neutral voice, behind which lay resources of contempt.

  ‘Oh! Probably.’

  ‘Does Dad know?’

  ‘Dad’s not worried.’

  Kit said nothing. In the pause, Anna heard her own words again. Unexpectedly tears started in her eyes: shameful, self-pitying tears. He did this, she thought. That instant, she did not know whether she meant Matt, or Peter. With the back of her hand, she struck the tears off. Peter had come here. That was not love. He was relentless, insisting on himself. But she remembered how he had stood up, hesitating before he came towards them; she saw his tired, tentative, hopeful face.

  The ding of the lift made Anna twist around. People were coming out: an old couple and their grandchild. The child’s balloon had ‘It’s a girl!’ on it. So children are born here too, thought Anna. Going through the glass doors, the grandmother bent to take the child’s hand. Something in that act struck at her. How far off it seemed, that simple tenderness.

  Chapter Nineteen

  So they had put Kit in her old room. The room itself was unchanged. Sunlight came dust-hazed through the sides of the curtains. That was Kit’s T-shirt discarded on the rug. Automatically Anna folded it and set it on the end of the bed. There, within arm’s reach, a dint in the bedcovers where Kit had slept…

  Anna pulled back the curtains. Suddenly that view, so familiar that seeing it again was less like seeing it than rediscovering it within herself: that uneven curve against the thin pale blue summer morning sky. She opened the window. In the city the sea was wrong because it did not smell like this, this salt-dry smell of the garden. She thought of how the sea had looked that night with Peter: oily, climbing in small waves up the sand. That night was dream-like, more than life-size. She looked back at it almost frightened. What had they said?

  And he is here, in this place. I could call him now, this instant, and he would come. He would walk into this room. Aloud, she said: ‘I can’t think.’ She touched her hand to the window frame. Treen was packing suitcases—suitcases they had discovered at last under Audrey’s bed, coated in dust so thick it had formed clots. It was past belief, it was a sort of madness, the state this house was in: Audrey’s room reeking of urine, everywhere the smell of dust and mice, termites in the verandah posts. Anna could still feel under her finger the crumbling wood, so eaten out it gave way like icing sugar. That whole verandah was held up by paint. But when Anna had taken Treen’s hand, made her feel the rot for herself, Treen had pushed her upper lip down and refused to speak. It was an expression that Anna remembered from childhood. Treen’s vagueness always had been a form of obstinacy, she thought now: a way of resisting facts. Better the house be sold than go to ruin. With a sudden weightless feeling she pictured bulldozers going through it: a cleared space, torn ground. But even to her, the picture was like a child’s tantrum: impotent defiance. This house, could it be destroyed?

  Cautiously, like pressing a bruise, she tested what she felt, being back. In one way, the house was exactly as she remembered it, everything in the same place; and yet it was not as it had ever seemed. The house was keeping itself back from her. Following Treen through the door she had turned without thinking to the front room in which their father had waited for them to come home. In some lights they used to see—perhaps only imagine— his pale cautious face at the window, watching as they came up the drive. This time only the blank of the room had met her. That first instant, she had seen that the furniture in there was beautiful: museum quality, those little cedar chairs and the desk, its drawers with the walnut inlay. The early lithographs of the harbour—those, too, were rare. All this had come into fashion since she was last here. Following Treen down the hall she had found herself imagining the show she could put together, seeing the objects around her in the gallery’s clean clear light.

  She popped a bubble of paint on the window ledge and peeled the splintery paint back. Out there, heat shimmered on the dune. How quickly she had stopped hearing the sound of the sea. She was here, at the window. At the same time, she was stepping under tea-tree at the back of the garden, ducking her head under flickering light, following the path uphill until it came out at the top of the dune where suddenly the sea filled half the sky and seemed wider than it. Anna thought: But I was happy here. The feeling took her by surprise. She thought of those afternoons in winter when she and Treen had climbed out this window and up over the dune to the washed, wide beach, the grey exultant wind, when they had walked around the point to Main Street and sat in the window of the bakery licking the icing off their coffee scrolls. She remembered the exact look of the bakery window, its corners filled with pin’s head drops of steam; outside the pine trees had appeared remote and somehow historic through the BAKERY sign painted on the window, a sign readable backwards from where they sat. They had worn scratchy machine-knitted jumpers, she remembered, and jeans tucked into their socks.

  Now Treen was working away somewhere behind her in the house. Anna would have felt worse about standing idle at the window if Treen had not made clear, with an irritated movement of her hands, how much she’d rather Anna got out of the way and left her to get on with it. Treen always had been the capable one, back then. What puzzled Anna, what that gesture had made clear, was that for Treen nothing had changed. Anna was still the difficult younger sister Treen was bound to accommodate and endure. Wakes, Mitchy, Coops: in Treen’s set at school, girls and boys alike had given each other nicknames: the first syllable of their last name with an s, a, y, or an o added to the end of it. Stevo, she remembered. Clarkey. Sensible, companionable, unobsessive people. If Anna, who had been none of those things, had got through school unscathed, it was only because she had been known as Treen’s sister.

  And Treen had kept in touch with them all, judging by the messages on her phone. ‘Oh yes,’ she’d answered Anna’s question with a sort of amused incredulity, as though it could hardly be otherwise. ‘Oh yes.’ And Anna, who for years had not thought of Treen without guilt and resentful pity, realised that she had no idea how Treen herself regarded the life that she had here. Was it possible that she stayed on with the same ease, still seeing people she knew from school, as though everything else they’d done—moved away, married, bought farms and businesses, raised children—hadn’t taken them away from her at all? If Anna were to ask Treen today what had finally happened with the doctor she’d followed to Darwin, and Brisbane, and finally Toronto, Treen would only smile deprecatingly and say that she couldn’t remember, it was all so long ago. And perhaps that was true. Perhaps it was only Anna who wanted some crisis that could explain the choices that Treen had made, if they had even been choices at
all.

  Without warning, Anna remembered the ghost. A soft-edged pale shape, yes, but less a shape than a presence, watchful, malevolent, opposed. From time to time at dinner parties over the years Anna had told the story of how as a child she had seen a ghost in the house she’d grown up in. Now, in her old room, suddenly the memory was not quaint. From where she stood at the window, Anna felt the house build itself around that fear. The whole of her childhood was around her still. She felt again the force of the rules she’d made: the wardrobe doors had to be closed, the door to her room ajar; a foot or hand out of the bedcover made her vulnerable. She stood there looking out at daylight, conscious of the heavy furniture at her back, and felt again the terror that had always waited for her here in the dark. It had not had any shape, or name. It had been the dark simply: patient, unkind, immense.

  ‘Tea?’ Treen said from the doorway.

  ‘You gave me a fright.’ Anna shut the window. On the way out of the room she collected Kit’s T-shirt from the end of the bed. She held it against her chest.

  ‘Are you cold?’ said Treen. Anna shook her head. ‘The house never really heats up, even in summer.’ In the same polite and formal voice she went on, ‘You won’t have seen the new kitchen.’ She stepped through the old doorway into the cheap, bright room.

  ‘What have you done?’ Anna felt her mind refuse this—this trick, she would have said, as though the old, dim kitchen were still there behind this ugly new one. She pictured the small window over the sink, with cotton curtains strung from a wire; in the corner, the green enamel stove set into the wall beside the hotplates. The wall of that alcove had been tiled pale green, with a subdued gleam like the inside of a shell.

  ‘That old Kookaburra stove,’ Treen said, switching on the electric kettle and getting down two cups. ‘We couldn’t cook a roast in it.’ She peered into the old plastic biscuit barrel. ‘These should be alright,’ she said, shaking some out into a little bowl: the same biscuits they had always had, flat as cardboard and coated with stock-cubeflavoured dust. Anna had a vertiginous sense of Treen, week after week, pouring packet after packet of biscuits into that barrel. ‘Little Ian who lived up the road did a deal for us. Do you remember him?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ian. Round metal glasses, used to ride everywhere on that bike with a flag at the back of it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He does kitchens now.’

  Anna went to the fridge for milk.

  ‘Milk in your tea now!’ exclaimed Treen, with only half-feigned shock.

  ‘It doesn’t stain your teeth as much.’ The fridge, crowded with small bowls full of leftovers, gave off a sour-sweet smell. ‘You need to throw all this stuff out.’

  ‘We’ll leave it,’ said Treen. ‘The bins don’t go out till Friday.’

  Closing the fridge, Anna caught sight of the magazine article. ‘My God! What’s that doing here?’ She stared at the yellowed photograph with dismayed recognition: that craven placating smile.

  ‘Leave it!’ cried Treen, pushing back her chair. She picked the article out of Anna’s hand and smoothed it flat on the table. ‘They’re proud of it.’ She stuck it back on the fridge. ‘It’s the only photo we have.’

  The milk was off. Anna took it and poured it down the sink. They sat facing each other across the table. Cheap, thin walls: the cupboard doors weren’t even set right, but crossed like crooked teeth. Little Ian who lived up the road, Anna said to herself, thinking not of Ian but of Treen: that dignified unnoticing mildness, honourable in its way, which had always made Anna want to smash the cups on the floor and scream, except that Treen would kneel down then and clean up the mess. If she had not forgotten that quality of Treen’s she had forgotten the feeling of being pitted against it: exaggerated, shrill, self-despising. Anna took one of the biscuits, its salt sweet taste first repellent and then insinuating.

  ‘They’ve loved having Kit,’ said Treen. ‘She’s been helping Mum with her book.’

  ‘Audrey’s not still going on with that?’

  ‘A family history,’ said Treen. ‘The library wrote asking for it.’ Treen’s face showed no sign of mockery or unbelief. Anna looked at her with a feeling that they were not simply out of touch but against each other. Treen could not have forgotten the years of Audrey’s useless doomed writing projects: how the two of them had mocked her intimate conspiratorial way of talking about them; the neediness in Audrey’s voice when she had called them to her room. ‘Is that you?’ she had called out. ‘Are you home?’ listening out for them tiptoeing down the hall.

  Treen sighed. ‘We should get back,’ she said. She looked down into her cup, breathing out, and sat so still she seemed at a distance. Anna saw her crouched by Patrick on the sunlit footpath: his long outstretched legs, the narrow toes of his best shoes.

  ‘Who helped him?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Dad. You said someone gave him CPR.’

  ‘Yes…Yes, that’s right. A nice young man—doctor—here for the summer. His poor children watching the whole thing. They’d come out for ice-cream.’ Treen set her tea gently on the table. Half smiling, eyes closed, she pressed her fingers into the skin above her eyebrows. ‘I should have stopped him.’

  ‘What? Because of the children?’

  Treen shook her head, still with her eyes closed. ‘He should have died then.’

  ‘The doctor said…’

  Treen sat straight, conscientiously. ‘No. It was too long.’

  Anna looked into Treen’s face, its withdrawn, private expression, and for the first time realised that their father was going to die, really to die; and the feeling that rose in her was not grief but outrage. Somehow, in some stupid unlearning part of herself, she must have been hoping for a different end: one in which they could talk at last, understand each other, remake years. Now that could not be; that would never be. The knowledge that he would die—not that he could, but that he would—forced her to recognise him as a body, single and destructible, as her idea of her father had never been. It jarred her to realise: her whole life, there would be nothing more, nothing else, no other father for her but this.

  ‘I’m so glad…’ Treen reached across the table for Anna’s hand. ‘I’m so glad you sent Kit to us in time.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Now she was here, in the family room on her own. It was what she’d told them she’d do, and so with a desultory feeling of obedience Kit scrolled through pictures on her phone…All that was too far off. Midday, said her phone. Hours still: what should she do with hours? She put her phone down and looked around the room. White light from the window lit the bluish white of the walls. This was a room where the walls did not vanish. Cold tea bags on the draining board were not out of place here, where nothing had ever belonged to anyone. Kit heard the sound of a nurse’s rubber-soled shoes along the length of the hall and thought: she is going to where he is. The image of her grandfather rose in her mind and she felt nothing at all. From the first, waking in a strange house, the day had driven strangeness in. In the airless room she could smell Audrey’s spilt tea curdling. How solid, how really immense furniture was…

  The hall was deserted. She had the lift to herself. She crossed the foyer and stepped through glass doors into the weather. All morning inside she had not noticed: the sky was half-full of clouds, bluishgrey, and the light looked metallic over the carpark. So this heat was what she had seen Peter stepping out into. That meeting in the foyer—Kit had the feeling of it in her still, like the sound of a metal spoon scraped against a metal bowl. Coming to the edge of the footpath, she looked at what he’d stopped to look at: empty, uncommunicative road. It was the reality of all this that was so strange. Everything—that child’s truck lying on its side in the grass; the letterbox like a toy house with a strip cut through the front of it: all this was part of a world in which her grandfather would die. Her grandfather, lying unmoving in that room on the third floor of the hospital, had changed all this for her: he was
the centre of it.

  Kit stepped onto the footpath by the milk bar. ‘Do you smoke?’ Miranda had asked. Seeing again the expression on Miranda’s face, Kit thought: Why not? She had the money her mother had given her.

  The bell on the door jangled. It was dark inside the shop but no cooler than outside. Waiting by the counter, Kit looked down into a glass-fronted warming oven: three chiko rolls, a row of egg and bacon sandwiches sweating under fluorescent light. A grey-faced woman in a flowered apron stepped through a door and stood with her eyes fixed on something over Kit’s shoulder. Kit waited, trying to look calm, for the woman to see her. She could hear the audience applauding on a TV quiz show playing in the back room.

  ‘You going to buy something?’ the woman said. And then, sliding the packet of cigarettes over the counter, she brought out: ‘Lighter?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You want a lighter too?’ the woman said. So she knew: without even looking, she knew that Kit was ignorant, under-age. It wasn’t as though she cared. Why should she? Kit pocketed her change. The door closed behind her and she stood in the street.

  How small the houses looked under all those clouds. Kit thought with desolate fascination of the woman in the milk bar, who would not clear the cardboard boxes from the window or wipe the dust off the glass, or set mousetraps, or spray the blowfly fizzing in the window corner. She thought of her mother setting the table for dinner, even when it was just the two of them, even when they were eating takeaway.

  She took her cigarettes and lighter around to the bench. In the heat the park seemed spiritless and forlorn—less like a park than a room with its roof and one wall lifted away, like the half-house Kit had seen on the back of a truck once, its living room exposed to the highway. The cigarette packet had a close-up photograph of someone’s teeth, gangrenous black where they forced through the gums. She stripped the cellophane off and covered the picture with her hand. It wasn’t Patrick she thought of, so majestic on his bed; but her own teeth, jointed to the skull behind her face. When she opened the packet the cigarettes’ clean look surprised her. There they were in a row, like eggs. Three times the lighter did not work, and then it did. That near failure had been enough, though, to make her blink away tears: self-pity and self-contempt together. She would not have had the courage to go back into the shop.