The Paper House

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  I rubbed my temples. ‘My sister’s coming back soon. You met her.’

  ‘Ah, the tradie-looking one? When she came to rescue you?’

  ‘She didn’t rescue me.’

  He wrapped my curd in hessian. ‘Is she going to demand fancy coffees too?’

  ‘Probably.’ I leaned closer. ‘Splash of something harder in mine this morning, thanks.’

  He tapped his nose and reached under the counter. ‘I’ve got a sister. Lives in Perth.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s so far. Are you from there?’

  ‘Nah, we’re from Shepparton. Allison moved there with her husband. Works in the mines. You know, the fly-in-fly-out kind. Made a bucket of money and she just sits in the pool with it I think.’

  ‘Oh.’ The air was heavy. ‘My dad worked on the rigs.’

  ‘Yeah? Thirty-eight exactly. Cheque, savings?’

  I pressed the buttons mutely.

  ‘We hardly ever saw him.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘My dad.’

  ‘Oh, right. Cappuccino?’

  ‘Please. No sugar.’

  ‘Sweet enough, huh?’ he said flatly. ‘Sorry. Force of habit.’

  I drank from my paper cup.

  ‘You have a nice visit with your sister, Heather.’ In my bag, some pink salt I hadn’t paid for.

  At the top of the hill, Sylvia watered her lawn from a red can. She had the forward hunch of an old woman, and she wore a dress in peacock green and a wide hat. I waved, and she beckoned to me. Up close, the skin of her face was blotchy and torn like old leather. ‘Heather, you so skinny,’ she said. ‘No one feeding you?’ She pushed her hair from her face with the back of her arm. ‘Oh wait, no matter. I cannot see so good without my glasses.’ Her body moved like custard as she laughed.

  ‘I’m making pizza,’ I said, lifting my bags.

  ‘Pfft. What would you know about making pizza? You come with me. Come on.’ She pulled off her gloves and put her arm around my shoulder; the soft folds of a grandmother.

  Sylvia’s kitchen had the chaotic goodness that I remembered from visiting Dave’s nanna: porcelain cows and a floral tin with BISCUITS on the front and all kinds of regional tea towels, frayed at the edges. She pulled one of her biscuit tins from the shelf and opened it to me. Sweet melting moments piped into flowers.

  ‘Semolina flour is best,’ she said. Pantry stocked to the ceiling, rows and rows of different spices and herbs and flours in clear jars. ‘Makes it chewy.’

  She made a flour mountain on her vinyl bench top and covered it with salt like snow. By the warming oven, the yeast came to life. ‘You use fork like this, look.’ Bringing the ingredients together, stiff porridge. ‘Here, I show you.’ She put the fork in my hand and guided it with her own, pushing and prodding and mixing the flour. ‘There you go. Now you knead like this.’

  Her arms moved like jelly pistons. She beat the dough, threw it, smacked it. That old lady stood at her kitchen bench and kneaded for fifteen minutes. ‘I can’t do anything for fifteen minutes,’ I said, and she smiled. ‘Now you have done kneading, dough is all stringy. See?’ It was smooth and round. ‘Then just put in bowl with oil till lunchtime. You wait with me.’

  I went to protest, to find something better to do than sit in an old lady’s kitchen, but the way she smiled with her eyes made me reconsider. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Dave won’t be back until later anyway.’ She clapped her hands and opened her fridge, from which she produced a jug of blood-red liquid filled to the brim with swimming fruit.

  ‘Always time for sangria,’ she said. ‘Only little brandy.’

  The back of her house opened into an equally grandmotherly sunroom, with plastic-covered chairs and a canary trilling in a blue cage. She was on the hill, like us, and her garden dropped away under the house, like ours did, but where we could see the cresting waves from our balcony, she looked out at a freeway development.

  ‘Is real shame,’ she said. ‘I live here forty-six years and always just see hills. Now I will always see the big road.’

  The air in the sunroom was hot and still. The 10 am sangria made perfect sense.

  ‘Where does it go?’ It was close enough to see the movement of men in high-vis vests and the swinging arms of cranes.

  ‘Don’t know. Rosebud, maybe.’

  ‘Oh, I love Rosebud.’

  ‘I hate Rosebud.’ She laughed. ‘My mother live there.’

  ‘Your mother?’ Sylvia had the drooped look of a Basset Hound. Eighty, at least.

  ‘You do not look at me like that. My mother one hundred and three years old and she still ring me to make sure I eat vegetables. I say to her, Mama, I will be dead in the ground just so you stop bugging me.’

  I wondered what it might have been like to have a mother at your wedding, at your thirtieth birthday. At the birth of your first child. I gulped my drink and poured another. ‘Do you live here alone, Sylvia?’ I had seen her with her grandchildren in the front garden, four dark-haired boys. But her body stiffened and the air cooled.

  ‘Not alone.’

  ‘Your sons?’

  ‘No.’

  We fell into an uncomfortable silence. I paid closer attention to roadworks than ever before. The sun moved over the top of the house and cast shadows in Sylvia’s garden.

  ‘Oh, Albert is back. I hear door slam.’

  ‘Did it? I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘No, he definitely back.’ She put down her drink. ‘We out here, Albert!’ she said, but he didn’t respond. ‘Maybe he in bathroom.’ The ice in our glasses had melted, but the sangria was delicious. ‘We make pizza now.’

  She cut the dough into smaller chunks and rolled it into balls. ‘Thin pizza better. What toppings you bring?’ The figs went into a pan of sugar, and she cut the heads off the anchovies (which in turn went into the mouth of a ginger cat that had appeared at her side, so round in the middle that he looked like a balloon). My lovely goat’s curd slopped out of the tub. Sylvia moved as though she were part of the kitchen – chopping tomatoes with one hand, caramelising the fruit with the other, busy and sweaty and youthful.

  ‘There is your pizza,’ she said, fanning her hands in a flourish. ‘Now you take it home and share with family.’ I imagined her in southern Italy with sons and daughters and grandchildren around her, a marble piazza with creeping vines and an enormous table almost invisible under the food. And I imagined her one-hundred-and-three-year-old mother in her Rosebud nursing home, waiting for her daughter to call.

  ‘There’s no one home,’ I said, so we ate together at her kitchen table, and Albert never came out of the bathroom.

  *

  Fog trawled in overnight. It was too hot for fog, surely. The news said it was a combination of high humidity and a light wind. Even from the window, the garden was almost invisible – just a few tree tops and my hovering currawong friend.

  I poked around underneath the deck and found my little lemon tree full of spider webs. Dozens of them, radiating out from a pinprick hole, not an insect on them and no spiders to be seen. I sat cross-legged on the pavers and drew them all; each minutely different from the next, sticky and fragile and perfect.

  Dave went to buy a coffee. I set myself up in the borrowed chair and a hot wind came over from the grapevines and it had a touch of the sea in it. I dipped my brush into the neat rows of child’s paints from the attic, drew the coloured water across the page, watched it pool and gather in the rough spots.

  I painted my mother’s favourite flower, first and obviously, sweet Impatiens walleriana, as bright as parrots. They would sit together in tight circles at the top of the hill, delicate, always teetering right on the edge of fading. She never picked flowers. Sometimes I would pick a posy, when she was home from hospital, and the way they browned and drooped made her cry. But she seemed to enjoy that the impatiens needed her protection; even breathing on them too heavily could send them into floral meltdown. I painted the huge scalloped leaves and the heart sh
apes where the petals put their heads together, their neat symmetry as a welcoming carpet given pride of place where the pittosporums currently stood.

  I painted the flower for which my sister had been named. Before either one of us was born, before Dad disappeared into the ocean, before Mum was hung in a black cloud, they honeymooned in Paris. The way he told the story, they had spent more time on the plane than in the city itself, where he had food poisoning (‘Forget what anyone says – snails are not a food, Heather.’) and she read the only books the hotel kept in English (‘Your choice of eight different paperbacks.’). But she remembered it quite differently: a sunny afternoon on Montmartre (‘Before the tourists ruined it.’); chin dripping with butter and cream; dancing on the cobbled street to the sounds of street performers. And a man on a corner with buckets of Iris latifolia, like slender French women with blue hair.

  I painted my own favourite flower. Six white Bellis perennis – simple daisies – on a long stem, with thin leaves like fingers that dripped into the soil. They were the first flowers I had learned to draw, sitting in the dirt with my mother wrapped around me, guiding my hand across the paper. Around, around, petals joined together at the stamen, around, around, twenty petals tapering minutely into the sky.

  How many flowers would I need?

  The front door opened and I stowed the book. When Dave kissed me, his breath had a burnt coffee taste. ‘Rupert doesn’t usually burn it,’ I said.

  ‘I went somewhere else,’ he said. ‘You didn’t notice how long I was gone?’

  ‘Guess not.’

  Late in the afternoon, Sylvia appeared in the doorway. ‘You like porridge,’ she said, in a way that wasn’t a question. ‘You like sponge roll.’

  She laid out the table-for-two for four, with red gingham placemats I had never seen, and porcelain plates with scalloped edges, and tarnished forks with their tines bent outwards. The windows steamed up, hiding us from the outdoors and its giants.

  But I felt it anyway, the humming reverberation of the red earth.

  Sylvia sat between us, at the table-for-two-for-four (temporarily), and the fourth chair stared back at us. We were safe with her, Dave and I, safe at the table even with that seat empty.

  ‘Sylvia,’ I said, and Dave looked at me with dusty eyes, ‘do you believe in magic?’

  She clapped her hands. ‘Yes, English Garden. Of course I believe in magic.’

  *

  Early the next morning the phone rang. ‘For you,’ Dave said.

  Fleur shot from the receiver. A voice I hadn’t heard for years, vulnerable and spasmodic.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  ‘I’m in fucking hospital.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘I had an accident. Mandrake had an accident.’ A sharp breath.

  ‘What can I do?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I need your help.’

  Fleur’s closest neighbours were six kilometres away. If they were still there at all; if the drought hadn’t dried them out too.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Dave said.

  ‘You look mad.’

  ‘I don’t look like anything. It’s fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘If you keep asking, it won’t be fine.’

  It took eight hours to get to the river, not the seven she’d said, which was probably due to being in Ararat when we were supposed to be in Bendigo (‘Same difference,’ said Dave). Scenery whisked away into a diverse map behind us, every kind a person could imagine – the ocean, then the suburbs, then the sprawling uprightness of the city (‘Hello, old house,’ said Dave), then open plains with rolled hay bales and then the mountains. Funny things, mountains. From a distance they are at a soaring, towering juxtaposition from the flat ground. But once inside, navigating the curving roads and the dense mist, the perspective is gone. They are just roads like any other roads, one metre after another towards the destination.

  Dave filled in the silence: ‘What were you doing yesterday?’

  ‘What? Nothing.’ Drawing lines. Lines and lines and lines. You can’t know.

  The closest I had got to the mountains was six months in the Adelaide Hills. Maybe Dad was there for work, or maybe that was just what he told us so that Mum could get some fresh air. We drove over from Melbourne with everything we owned in the back of a truck, except for Mum’s rugs, which were strapped to the top of the car. Dad played 100% Hits and listened to talkback radio when we were closer to towns and the reception was better, and Shithead rode in the front seat on Mum’s lap.

  Fleur had cried the whole way. Come on, Fleur, Dad said, and she steamed up the window with all of her heartbreak and told him he wouldn’t understand, he had never been in love, how could he make her leave Jimmy Pavel – hottest guy ever to drop out of Year 10 – behind? Dad just smiled, and Mum put her hand on his knee.

  The house had been dropped into the hillside, a blemish among the sprawling estates for which the Adelaide Hills (or ‘the Hills’, as the locals referred to them) were known – they with their limestone walls and wrap-around verandahs and rose gardens; ours with rotting weatherboard and steel windows and back door butting up against the neighbours’ fence. It was tiny, and it was impossible to ignore the fact that it smelled like a possum had died in the ceiling. Fleur cried every night for two weeks, at which time Jimmy Pavel called and told her she was dumped, and she fell madly in love with a guy down the road who had a horse and a moustache.

  I’m going to homeschool you, Mum said, which I would later learn meant that we would watch midday movies with ice-cream up to our chins, and she would point out the relevant historical figures (‘Franklin D. Roosevelt. Distant relative of the other President Roosevelt. Teddy.’). She knew all kinds of things, like the first woman in space (‘Valentina Tereshkova. Those Soviets were surprisingly forward thinking when it came to women’s rights.’), and why a Diet Coke exploded when you put a Mentos in it (‘The Mentos has lots of small cavities on it that combine with the drink to form carbon dioxide bubbles. That’s what the foam is.’). She knew every Prime Minister of Australia and she could point out the Endurance’s final resting place on a map of the world. How do you know all these things? I said, and she told me it was nothing, that she just had a good memory.

  ‘Do you want to stop and get some food?’ Dave said. We were passing through Halls Gap, a town so pretty it was almost make-believe.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’m just going to use the loo, then.’ He pulled in at a bakery that I felt sure I’d seen before, the kind with vanilla slice better than any food you’ve ever eaten.

  ‘Maybe a vanilla slice?’ I called after him. A woman on the footpath stared at me.

  The plan had always been to live in the Hills indefinitely, as far as I knew. I don’t think we ever bought the house, but for a while Mum had an afternoon job selling buns to women carrying magazines and wearing fur coats. Two evenings a week she came home laden with them – Boston buns and finger buns and coffee scrolls – and raved about what a great day she’d had. Her eyes had fire behind them; her hands softened with the butter and flour. On weekends she sat in our tiny yard and painted the faces that she saw in the clouds.

  On a hot January night we’d sat with our neighbours on one of their many verandahs, and watched something called Sky Show, which was a series of fireworks programmed to music on the radio. (Fleur watched it from the lookout, in her boyfriend’s car.) The songs rang out across the hilltop – all those other families watching from their own verandahs, radios cranked to full volume. After the Choirboys had sung us through to the finale (hundreds of white explosions so close together they were indiscernible), Mum turned to us and said, I think I’m ready to go home.

  Back in the car, Fleur crying (less for the boy and more for the horse, Mum suspected) and our belongings in a truck. For weeks after that, Mum was robust and happy. Just the tonic, then, Dad said, with his mouth in the crook of her neck.

  It wasn’t, of course.
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  ‘Here you go.’ Dave had two vanilla slices, a pie with sesame seeds on it (the universal sign for chicken and vegetable) and a neenish tart with its would-be yin yang. I kissed his hands; they smelled like a public toilet.

  The Riverland had its own kind of landscape: green and almost lush, but with a hint that just over the road, on the other side of that field, two k’s down the road, was the desert. I was surprised by the fullness of the river and the liveliness of the main road, which was a funny mixture of country general store and sprawling Aldi. The drought seemed far away, here in town, but Fleur’s house was some way into the wilderness, another forty minutes on. Dave bought some flowers from the supermarket and I bought the paper with the quiz in it.

  She didn’t look as bad as she had perhaps led us to believe – just a leg in a cast, suspended in midair, and some bruises around her jaw. ‘It’s my ribs that really hurt,’ she said, and the nurse gave her a needle.

  ‘Christ, Fleur,’ said Dave, who had always wrangled her better than I had. ‘What have you done to yourself?’

  And she cried.

  Ugly cried, with her mouth hanging open, puffy-eyed and throaty. Cried with her fists pushed into her cheeks and her head down and her body moving with the physicality of the crying, the heaving to-and-fro. I told her she didn’t have to talk about it, and sat awkwardly at the foot of the bed, realising too late that there wasn’t any room for me and the plaster leg.

  Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen Fleur holed up with broken bones. At the brick veneer house with the hill and the shed, she’d climbed onto the roof and shouted to Mum to pay attention to her. That was something she did once a week or more until she was old enough to vie for the attention of teenage boys instead. It was only a matter of time before she came tumbling down, which is exactly what she did, and she was happy as a pig in shit for six weeks, while Mum pandered to her every whim. After the cast came off, Mum went into hospital for three days. No one pandered to her.