Jenny’s receptionist looked me up and down. ‘She can bulk bill, you know. Is she bulk billing you?’ Pink gum stretched between her teeth. ‘Lots of her patients . . . clients . . . lots of her clients get bulk billed. Want me to ask her?’
I put my credit card on the counter. ‘How about I pay upfront?’
She shrugged. ‘Sure, whatever.’ The machine beeped.
Jenny’s room sweated.
‘Air-con still not fixed, I’m afraid,’ she said, squeezing her legs into her hips. ‘They’ve gone the other way now.’ I sat on the relationship-counselling couch. A couple had been in before me, figuring stuff out; their residual warmth was on both cushions; their argument hung in the hot air.
Jenny flapped her notebook. ‘How are you feeling?’
How am I feeling, Heath-uh? Well, my husband thinks I’m too sad. Isn’t that funny? I’m bringing him down with all my bad feelings like a bitch. And I’m drawing again. What an idiot, right? My mother used to paint, did you know? One time, she painted a wolf with a man’s head and they took her to hospital and probably showed her the Rorschach Test and asked her if she saw the Devil. Do you have those cards? Let me tell you what I see.
‘Heath-uh?’
‘Fine,’ I said.
Her mouth opened a couple of times, but no sound came out. She tapped her pen on the notebook, stared at me. In the corridor, a door slammed. I shifted my weight on the cushions; the dust of disagreement puffed out.
‘Listen,’ she said finally, letting her hair fall across her eyes, ‘you’ve had a very serious loss.’
It settled in my throat, the dust, caught on the wet throng of sails fluttering in there, and I stopped breathing for a second or twenty seconds, until my lips tingled at the edges. Inside the hospital walls, walls like these, the empty crib. People laughing in the next room. Calls over the PA system; a man rushing to a bedside. Mine.
She said: ‘You don’t have to talk about it.’
I coughed out a few words; they dropped to the carpet.
She said: ‘Grief is hard to quantify, Heather.’
‘I keep dreaming they found the hospital guilty,’ I said.
‘Guilty of what?’
‘Anything. Neglect? I don’t know. I dream that I go back there and the doors are locked and I sit in front of the doors and these women come and go, pass right through the doors. But when I try to follow them, the doors are still locked and I run right into them.’
‘You feel excluded.’
‘I feel like half a person.’
The dust grew legs, ran its choking footprints up and down my chest and into my guts. Jenny passed a box of tissues. I tried to push my whole face into them, tried to soak up the words I’d spilled.
‘You’re not half a person, Heath-uh.’
‘I can’t find my body,’ I said.
She had her hand on my knee. ‘I promise you, your body is right here.’ Clack-dog.
I dragged the box of tissues across my face. The dust was black and purple. It coated the room in a film.
‘I have to see the next client, I’m sorry.’ Time’s up. You need to leave so I can counsel the next sod. Did you see him in the waiting room? The one with eyes rolling in their sockets? Post-traumatic stress. No, I’m not a doctor.
Evening sky with its wax paper clouds, the dip and drop across the horizon into an infinite pink pool. It was balmy, and I was heavy from my appointment so Dave stripped a barbecued chook and laid out a spread on the patio. Summer smells, like a teenager’s perfume. Ashok from next door came around with Harriet, and the little dog lay at his feet under the table and waited for pieces of honey soy chicken and the ends of beef sausages.
‘Heather, this is Ashok.’
‘Hello,’ I said, extending my purple hand.
The old man politely declined to shake it. ‘We’ve met. A couple of weeks ago. You asked if you could borrow my mower.’
‘Did I?’ I said, as Dave said, ‘She did?’
‘I would have said yes,’ Ashok said, sneaking burnt meat to the dog, ‘only I don’t have a mower.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I remember now.’ But his face was just the same as any face, pieced together with spare parts.
Dave and I sat close enough for the electricity to pass between us and listened to Ashok’s stories of his time on the stage in the sixties. The colours. The makeup. He mimed a feather boa and did a slow tap dance to Dave’s raucous applause.
‘Heather,’ Ashok said, during a lull in conversation, ‘this is a beaut garden. I’ve always thought so.’ He shielded his eyes and looked down the block. ‘Huge. Good size for a dog.’
‘Ooh, no,’ I said.
Dave looked at me with his eyebrows raised as if to say, Why not? and I moved my eyebrows in a way that said: You know why. And he said, ‘Maybe when we settle in.’ But he was looking at me and not at Ashok.
‘My mum had a dog, when I was a teenager,’ I said. ‘From the animal rescue place. One day she came home with this minuscule brown rat thing shivering in a blanket.’
Dave’s hand on my leg. Harriet coughed up a too-large bit of chicken skin.
‘I mean, it wasn’t the first time she’d brought an animal home. You know.’
Ashok’s eyes rested on me with a kind of fondness, or pity (often they were one emotion).
‘Did she?’
I spooned out some potato salad. ‘She called it Sadie. We all called it Shithead. Because that’s what it was.’
Mum knew it too, but as long as it slept next to her while she watched A Current Affair, she didn’t care. It watched me while I read on the other couch, quivering, eyes bulging right out of its head, one paw on Mum’s leg like it owned her. For half an hour, Mum ate biscuits and rubbed the dog’s head and smiled. I felt for it nothing but gratitude.
Ashok smiled, wide and toothy and generous. ‘Sounds like a big personality for a little dog.’ And Harriet snapped at my ankle, but she didn’t seem to mean it. They were a pair, this crinkled old man and his terrier dog.
‘How long have you lived here, Ashok?’ said Dave. He seemed born here, right here on the patio with his hair in his eyes and his mouth full of chicken.
‘Oh, forever.’ Ashok rested his hands on the table. ‘Nineteen seventy-four we moved in.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘So you must know this place pretty well.’
‘Like the back of my hand,’ he said, predictably.
‘Have you ever noticed anything strange?’ I said.
Dave raised his eyebrows.
‘Strange how?’ Ashok said.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Unusual goings-on? Unsavoury types?’
‘All kinds of families have lived here,’ Ashok said, looking around as if for their ghosts. ‘When I moved in, it was the Biermanns. Frank and – Wendy? Wendy. Strange couple. He bred racing pigeons, come to think of it.’
‘How interesting,’ Dave said.
‘No one ever said anything about a house down the back?’
Ashok made a hmm sound. ‘There’s no house down the back, is there?’
‘No, there isn’t,’ Dave said. ‘Heather, could you help me in the kitchen?’
I blinked at my husband; his teacher’s clothes, his floppy hair. He looked back and his hand fell limp at his side.
‘But I’m listening to the stories,’ I said, and then to Ashok: ‘Tell us again about Guys and Dolls.’ So he did, and I drifted in and out of the hammock of his voice.
*
In the morning I knocked on Ashok’s door and he let me pick the blackberries that grew along his back fence. ‘Sylvia will make these into jam,’ he said. He offered me nothing about the garden, no further evidence of any house, with or without a man inside. Around lunchtime there was a knock on his door. Harriet rushed at it, her little body dancing with the force of her barking.
‘Sylvia.’ Light in Ashok’s eyes. ‘I wondered if I might see you today.’
‘You see me every day.’ She pushed her hand through the croo
k of his elbow. He smiled.
‘Do you know Sylvia, Heather?’
‘English Garden,’ Sylvia said. ‘Heather, you want a biscuit? You like my dress?’ She twirled on the spot and dripped back into Ashok’s grasp.
‘Yes,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure which question I was answering.
‘I promise Ashok I make him corned beef,’ she said.
We sat together and watched Sylvia in the kitchen. She took out an iron pot, chipped at the edges and worn into a grey smear around the middle. She moved with the grace of a ballerina, pivoting from one pot to the next, tossing salt over her shoulder. The kitchen clanged like a percussion section, and she popped and spit and cackled at its heart.
‘Now we cook two hours.’ She tapped her watch. ‘You make us drink.’
Ashok did as he was told: three tall glasses with slices of lemon.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘G and T, of course,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ I said. We clinked our glasses.
The two of them sat on the couch with their heads close, too deaf to whisper but speaking with the same clipped ends.
‘You all right, English Garden?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ I squeezed in next to her and we breathed the slow smell of beef and salt.
‘I know how to make it, you know,’ Ashok said, after a while. ‘She taught me years ago. During the Gulf War, I reckon.’
‘This is not true,’ Sylvia said.
‘I swear it.’ He put his hand over his heart.
Through the window I saw Dave in the driveway, craning his neck to the gum by the verandah.
‘Dave is home early,’ I said.
Sylvia peeked out. ‘Oh!’ said Sylvia. ‘He love my biscuits. You take him. Here.’ She pushed the whole tin into my hands. Harriet sucked on my ankle with her arthritic jaw.
‘I had a dog once,’ I said. ‘Even though I’m more of a cat person.’
‘Yes?’ Sylvia said.
‘While we were in the desert, just for a month.’
A family in an expensive four-wheel drive had come through on their way to Lake Eyre, dropped him at the general store and left him there. We thought they might come back, that they’d notice he was missing, but days went by and still he sat by the window. ‘Look at his sad eyes,’ I said to Dave, and Dave said he didn’t know why people attributed emotions to eyes. ‘Jelly doesn’t have feelings,’ he said, but we took the dog in anyway, called him Monty and fed him bits of steak, wondered if he realised how much we had to pay for it so far north.
He was a red heeler, or at least he was by the end. It’s possible he started as a blue heeler, before he spent his days rolling and running in the dust. With nothing to round up, we took him on walks in the outlying country, through the cemetery with its white quadrant and its Afghani quadrant and the makeshift graves of the Indigenous community, relegated to the corners of their own earth. We read the headstones together, over and over. All the white documentation: the fires and the childbirths and the men who drank until they were blind and aware of their isolation. Nothing of the upheaval and disruption of the native land, the men and women and children introduced to European disease and poverty and all those camels. We read them and thought of what our own children might say, with that morbid ease you’re allowed in your twenties, found a snake skin under a tree, sat in the shade of the church ruins and listened to the wind rush through them.
Monty slept on our bed for three weeks, crept in under Dave’s armpit. They walked to school together in the mornings, and Dave let him loose on the oval, watched him from the window. After school he ran laps around the kids with their cricket bats until we called him home and he squeezed between us on the couch. It was funny, though, the way having that distance between us made me feel closer to Dave, not further away.
‘What happens to him?’ Sylvia said.
‘One day he just ran out into the desert and didn’t come back,’ I said. ‘The drought made it impossible to tell one set of animal bones from the next.’
‘Oh,’ said Sylvia. ‘That is some story.’
Dave had gone inside. I ate the biscuits on my way back, left the empty tin by the front door.
*
I grew accustomed to Dave’s cold shoulder, to the house that had become both full and empty at once. He locked himself away in his study and wrote lesson plans or looked at porn or bid on old typewriters, and for a few days I perched by the door and waited for it to open, for his warm air to rush out. It didn’t.
I knocked on the door. ‘I want to go for a drive.’
His laptop slammed shut. The door opened. ‘It’s only been five weeks,’ he said, but he had car keys in his hand, jiggling them like a toy. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. I’ll take you to work.’
The car moved. Dave flittered next to me.
‘I knew you could do it,’ he said. ‘You look so good. Did you wash your hair? You must be feeling so much better.’
I gripped the wheel, white-knuckled. It took five minutes to get there, and I left him standing in front of the stone archway with students milling around him. He waved, smiling. I waved back, pinching my mouth into a shape I recalled.
I drove. I drove through paddocks spattered with black and white cows. I drove past a couple boarding a hot air balloon. I drove past a sign that promised MELBOURNE in big white letters.
At the end of the day, Dave was waiting for me on the corner, frowning into his phone.
‘Who were you talking to?’ I said.
‘What? No one.’
‘No more appointments. Please.’
‘Sure, I know.’ He waved to a woman in a floral dress. ‘They’re helping though, right? I mean, they got you behind the wheel.’
‘I got me behind the wheel,’ I said, which might have been true but which was mostly words colliding with his earnestness.
From the passenger seat he told me that Rhonda – who had been working in admissions since before the school was even built – had been caught stealing from the Parents and Friends drive-in night pool, and she was marched out by security with her handbag over her head. ‘As if no one knew it was her!’ he said. ‘She’s worn the same ugly cardigan every day I’ve been there.’ He shook his head, smug and warm in his story. ‘How was your drive?’
‘Fine,’ I said.
He asked me how I’d liked the car, whether I remembered which pedal was the clutch. I stalled it at the lights. A lady in a silver Mercedes beeped me.
‘Are you okay in there?’ he said, touching my hair.
‘Yes,’ I said, but I skipped dinner and slipped into the garden to search for Noel and his bottles in the darkness.
DAD’S BUILT a new desk in the roof. It’s Mum’s painting desk. He hammered it right into the walls. Mum put a jar of jellybeans next to her brushes but she only likes the black ones. I help her by eating all the other colours.
From the window we can see the tree tops so I’m drawing them and she is painting them in. Each time we finish one she writes its name on the page. She writes pine tree and lemon-scented gum and banksia.
Then underneath those she writes other words.
What are those words? I say.
They’re called botanical names, she says. It’s like how your name is Heather, but your proper name is Heather Artemisia Herbert.
How do you know all their proper names? I say.
I’m doing a course, she says.
She pulls me into her lap and takes a book from her shelf. On the cover there’s a tree with its arms spread out.
See this book? she says. Anything you need to know about plants, this book will tell you.
It’s huge, I say.
There are a lot of plants, she says. Why don’t you find one you like?
It’s so heavy I need both hands to pick it up. The cover has flaps and when I open it Mum’s name is there. Shelley Herbert. She has pretty handwriting.
This one, I say.
; It has fluffy red flowers. They look like ballerinas.
Corymbia ficifolia, she says. A flowering gum.
She gives me a little squeeze.
It’s getting late, she says. We should get dinner on.
She puts the book back on the shelf, next to the one about Leonardo Da Vinci. He was an artist but he also invented the helicopter. Then she kisses my head.
You can read it whenever you like, she says.
I decide to read it every single day.
*
The door to the roof has been shut for ages. I sit by it and look at the rainbow on the floor. It comes in through the window Mum made, all different colours.
They’re in the kitchen. Dad’s shouting.
It’s a waste of fucking money, he shouts.
Mum throws something. I can tell it’s her because Dad never throws things. The wall shakes a bit.
I’m trying to make something of myself, she says.
I go to the kitchen door and point my ear inside.
Dad is saying, It’s always like this. You were going to be a teacher. Remember? And a florist. And an interior designer. What else was there?
Face painter, Mum says.
Dad says, You never finish anything.
Sorry I’m such a disappointment, she says.
Do you ever stop feeling sorry for yourself? Dad shouts. He doesn’t wait for her to answer. He stomps out the kitchen door and doesn’t even notice me there with my ear pointing in.
I go into the kitchen. Mum has gone out the back door. I can see her through the window, talking to Sadie.
The bin has fallen over. The book is in there. The big plant book. I take it out with both hands and sit on the cold tiles and read all the names out loud.
They are hard to say. Sometimes it takes me a few tries.
My favourite one is Impatiens walleriana. It sounds like a dance. Like the words are dancing.
IN THE MORNING I took my cottonwool head to Rupert’s, where he slapped me out a mountain of goat’s curd (‘From over Red Hill way. They do things right down there.’). I bought whole salty anchovies (‘Not local, I’m afraid.’), six fat figs and a wide-hipped pear. He added a tub of fresh yeast (‘No one knows how to use it, so it just sits here and I have to bin it.’) and a brush of rocket, and he said, ‘Special occasion? Hot date?’
The Paper House Page 8
