‘Sylvia ate yours.’
‘Sylvia!’ He tapped her arm. ‘You old joker. Cornflakes please.’
‘Maybe that works at your fancy B&B,’ I said.
Sylvia fussed and fossicked in the kitchen. ‘There is no Cornflakes. You want Coco Pops?’ Dad’s delight was almost palpable.
‘So, Heather,’ he said, with his mouth full of chocolate milkshake, ‘I went into your garden. Thought I might do some weeding.’
My throat constricted. ‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah. Couldn’t see any weeds. Not a one. Not a penny. Just these huge mozzies. Heather’ – he put down his spoon – ‘you should have warned me about your enormous country mosquitoes.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘You gotta tell me your secrets. Up north I’ve got a yard the size of a laundry room and even then I’m weeding about every day.’
‘I think I might have asked the guy from down the road to pop in and do it. Periodically.’
‘What guy?’ Dave said.
‘The one from the house with the pillars.’
‘Well he’s doing a good job,’ Dad said.
Dave frowned at me. ‘I didn’t know you did that. How much is it costing?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I bartered some of Sylvia’s biscuits. Isn’t that right, Sylvia?’
She looked at all of us, from one to the next, wringing her hands. ‘I make cake! You like chocolate cake? I have recipe with chillies.’
‘Sure, Sylvia,’ said Dad. ‘I like cake.’
‘No thanks,’ Dave said.
‘But you love cake.’
‘No, I don’t.’ He slammed his fist on the sink. ‘I don’t know what’s going on down there but it’s not normal. For Christ’s sake. We’re just trying to help you. All of us. I don’t know what else to do.’
I shouted right back: ‘It’s not my fault Jenny-fucking-Greer’s gone to the Bahamas or wherever. She’s supposed to be fixing me.’
‘She’s in Daylesford. And she’s not fixing you.’ The door slammed behind him.
I told Dad, ‘She’s not even a doctor.’ He slurped the last of his Coco Pops and didn’t make eye contact.
I went to the bedroom, sat alone in the dark. I could not remember the last time I had wished for my mother so fiercely; I felt it in my arms and my legs and especially in my hands, which grabbed and grasped at the air in case she materialised, in case she appeared there and I missed her. I wished so intensely that I smelled her, butter and flour, gin and tonic, irises and daisies, there in the room with me with her hair down, brushing against my face, eyelashes on my skin, almost there with me in the room but
not quite
which was probably just as well, because I wasn’t sure Dave would forgive me for leaving with her.
It’s okay, Bunny, she didn’t say, because she wasn’t there in the room. Everything is going to be just fine. And she didn’t smile, and then she didn’t try to eat my feet, and then she didn’t pick the flakes of skin from my scalp or make pancakes. So I sat there in the withoutness and I sat there until I couldn’t breathe without her, so I sat there without breathing.
‘Heather?’ Dad opened the door just a crack, his face black in silhouette. ‘I’m sorry.’ He sat on the bed, next to the place where my mother wasn’t, and told me that Sylvia was making the cake but with no one left to feed it to had decided to try swapping it for some lawn mowing. My mother didn’t laugh, she didn’t ask who Sylvia was, she didn’t ask why Dad had cut his hair. ‘I know your baby died. Haven’t forgotten.’ When he touched me, my skin burned and sparked.
My mother cried. The room was dark, just a wedge of morning trying to creep around the blinds. I saw Dad’s blue pyjamas and felt his weight on my bed and heard the howling of my mother behind the walls.
‘What can I do?’
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me everything you remember.’
He smelled like her, really, which made sense given that I had mostly smelled them together. I let my head fall into his shoulder and he stroked my hair with the back of his calloused hand. ‘When you were a baby,’ he said, ‘you had this red blanket that someone or other had given to us. A friend. Nothing special, just flannel. You loved that damn blanket. Carried it with you everywhere till you were at school.’ He rested his head on mine. ‘It got lost. When we moved. Someone put it in the wrong box or dropped it in transit or something. We unpacked everything and it wasn’t anywhere. Christ, you howled. Stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and poured your little guts onto it.’
‘I remember,’ I said. ‘It had a bird embroidered on it.’
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘That was the one your mum made. To replace it.’
‘Tell me something else,’ I said, remembering its smell.
‘You probably know everything already,’ he said.
‘I don’t care.’
‘Okay, then. My father, your grandad, was a gardener, right? Sometimes he took me down the hill in his truck so I could help him unload the boxes at the market. Left at four in the bloody morning. Truck didn’t have any heating, of course, not in those days. And the passenger window got stuck half the time so he’d talk to me about being a farmer like him and I’d be sitting there with my face frozen off thinking, Not bloody likely.’
‘I didn’t ask for stories about you,’ I said lightly.
‘I’m getting to it.’ His body stilled. ‘That’s where I met her. Your mother. Sitting behind the loading dock with some other blokes, Dad’s mates, smoking their pipes in the pitch black. I was sixteen, I reckon. Sixteen or seventeen. She was so bloody mad. They found her stealing potatoes right out of Dad’s boxes. Half a dozen of them, carrying them round in the pockets of this huge green coat.’ He took a deep breath. ‘One of the fellas from up in the hills brought her over. She was so beautiful. Dad shouted at her, like What in God’s name are you doing? and she was so angry about getting caught that she shouted out, My parents were just killed! So Dad let her off.’
‘But they weren’t!’
‘She was a damned liar, your mother. She didn’t even want the potatoes. Bloody awkward when our folks all met up and no one was dead. But I kind of liked that about her. Made life interesting.’
‘Interesting?’
‘In the beginning, anyway.’ He rubbed my arm. ‘Tell me something you remember.’
‘The house, I guess,’ I said. ‘Sitting on the verandah. How she always had tea. Gran coming to take us shopping and driving away and watching Mum there on the verandah with her tea.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And then how she was always still sitting there when we got back.’
‘She liked it there.’
‘That’s what I thought, too. But then I wondered if maybe she was just stuck there. Like, in the beginning she liked it, but after a while she couldn’t figure out how to stop doing it. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Not really.’
‘Like she sat in front of the house for so long that she became the house. Right? Part of the house.’
I had burrowed so close to Dad that I felt his body vibrate with words.
‘When was the last time you went there?’
‘To the house? Never.’
‘Never once?’
‘No. I’m afraid she’ll still be sitting there.’
He whistled through his teeth. ‘What a waste of time that would be.’
That night Dave and I slept with our backs to one another. I stared at the wall until it melted into ribbons of light.
*
At the beach house we had a tiny attic room with brown carpet and a raked ceiling. One year, when Dad was home for Christmas, he built a table to fit the trapezium roof. It was light wood, full of knots, and he drilled a big hole in it to make a cup for her brushes.
I could hear her from the stairs, her granular singing voice. I sat in the crook under a stained glass window and listened to the words of Joni Mitchell, and drew the way the light came through onto the carpet, t
he way it was fragmented by the angle of the stairs. After a while I took the drawings to her, and she filled in the colours thrown by the lead-lined flowers.
She let me sit under her arms while she painted. Under there it smelled like turpentine. I held her other hand, picked the dirt out from under her fingernails, and she hummed and painted and I watched the brush move across the paper. I would learn how to do it, if I just watched closely enough.
There was one small window in the attic room, and it overlooked the sea. In summer the people on the beach stretched out on coloured towels and we painted those, too, and she opened the window and the sea breeze came under the glass and sat at the table with us, wet and salty. It always made the paints dry out faster, but she didn’t seem to mind. She just dipped more water into them and showed me how red and blue made purple until you added too much red, and then you just had brown.
In winter, though, the beach bore just the tired slump of people on their way to somewhere else. Sometimes it was work or school. But not every time. Sometimes, it was a rocky outcrop where the tide couldn’t reach them.
The words came down the stairs, single-file – clouds, storms, a frozen river – and I caught them and they were heavy in my hands.
Afterwards, Dad closed off the attic room. Boarded up the door and put a bookcase in front of it. It didn’t even have books in it – only trinkets. Pieces of nothing lit in different colours by the light coming in through the stained glass.
*
Sylvia melted butter and sugar in a saucepan while I watched. The air was still cool, renewing, and the kitchen began to smell like the inside of a grandmother’s apron. Not my grandmother, but someone else’s grandmother. The kind of grandmother who wasn’t required to come to the rescue, and so had time to make brandy snaps.
‘You must not let it boil. You see? Just right.’ Then it was ginger, the smell of Christmas, of fancy German biscuits. She poured out six big circles and put them in the oven. ‘Tea?’
‘Rupert’s is closing down,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, I know this,’ she said. ‘People go to big supermarkets for food. Not Rupert.’
‘All the money he has must be tied up in that shop.’
She shrugged: ‘Che sarà sarà.’
‘But that poor man,’ I said.
‘Heather,’ she said, with her hand on my shoulder, ‘world is full of things that happen like this. Every day. All nice men and nice women with they own dreams broken.’
‘But that’s horrible.’
‘Is not horrible.’ Tea. ‘Is just the way it goes. Then there is new dream, or new life. That is okay too.’ Tea. ‘Maybe Rupert go and like Perth even better than peninsula.’
Who could have believed it? The peninsula, with its rocky outcrops and green hills, vines and forest and hidden creeks with tiny bridges, seafood fresh from the boat, the winding maze of roads to take passengers from coast to coast, from the bay side (where the water was still and blue) to the open sea (which was white-crested and prone to outbursts). It seemed just right, on paper.
‘Maybe Perth have all those things and no rain, too.’ She laughed. ‘Snaps is ready. Can’t cook too long. Won’t bend.’
Curled and creamed and just slightly warm to the touch, the brandy snaps went on a plate to Fleur at the table. I ate mine in the kitchen on my own, straining to overhear the conversation.
‘How is farm?’
‘Matty says the sheep are dying. It’s too hot.’
‘But is raining!’
‘It’s not raining at the river.’
‘But you have many, many sheep, yes?’
‘No, not many, many sheep. Just some sheep.’
‘You have other animals on farm?’
‘Ducks.’ Fleur’s voice was momentarily lost in cream. ‘I have a fat old pig.’
‘What is his name?’
‘Grover.’ Crunch of biscuits. The sound of Fleur’s wall crumbling a little. ‘Too funny to eat.’
‘This is Mandrake?’
‘Yes.’ Quiet sobbing.
‘He so handsome, Fiore. He so, so handsome.’
‘I know.’
‘You have more brandy snaps.’
‘Thanks, Sylvia.’
Sylvia cooed from her throat. She had to get home, she said, and make sure the mice in her walls weren’t lonely without her. I watched her from the window; she waved to Ashok, and he tipped his hat, though he wasn’t wearing one. Fleur used a fork to scratch underneath her cast.
‘Fucking ants,’ she said. Everything was coated in a sweaty film. Summer beat away at the house with its fists. ‘Thought this was supposed to be a temperate climate. Where are we at?’
I checked the paper. ‘Thirty-nine.’
‘Christ. Give us a face cloth, would you?’
I ran the towel under cold water. ‘Dad and I are going for a drive,’ I said.
‘Great. Sounds like a party.’
Insides buzzing. ‘You can come if you want.’
‘No way,’ she said. ‘Anyway, Sylvia’s taking me to Mornington so we can go to Aldi.’
‘Right. Sounds important.’
‘Not everything has to be important.’ Scratch scratch scratch. ‘Got any kero? Might take these ants for a ride.’
I picked Dad up from the Cosy Courtyard mid-morning. He seemed small. He swam in his Hawaiian shirt; his slacks billowed around him.
‘Where are you taking us?’
‘It’s a surprise,’ he said. He pulled me from the driver’s seat and installed himself there.
‘You know how much I like surprises.’
He smiled. ‘This is a good one.’
He gripped the steering wheel as though headed over an inevitable cliff face and I pretended to search for a radio station so he wouldn’t see my nerves. Past the service station, up the freeway, into the city. Just one long road, cars with their many people headed to their many destinations. Exit: 2 km. Exit: 1 km. Exit: 4 km. I watched them go by, all these micro escapes. His hands relaxed. The radio played a song with a disco synth.
We stopped for drinks at a sandwich shop in the city. People must still have been on holidays; the streets droned with the solemn clomp of those who’d returned early. No bustling crowds. A heavy-set man in a fluorescent t-shirt waited in front of us. The woman behind the counter moved slowly from tub to tub: shredded brown lettuce, limp tomato slices, white bread in square loaves. ‘Four ninety,’ she said, and he said, ‘And a Coke,’ and she said, ‘Seven forty.’ They didn’t look at each other as goods were exchanged for money. I got a salad roll. Dad chose some mystery slop from the bain-marie. We ate on the steps of the Rialto Tower and my feet danced involuntarily to the ring of the tram.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘Do you want some of this camel intestine?’ he said.
‘Nah, I’m right off camel intestines.’
‘That’s too bad.’ He slurped them down. ‘Not far now. Half an hour.’
I checked the back seat before we got in, in case she was huddled there. My stomach churned and pinched. I couldn’t quite force my breath all the way down. We drove through the tunnel, across the overpass, onto the bridge.
How similar had the road looked when we were kids, coming up into the city to see the Christmas windows? Mostly Gran took us in her car, bunched together on the bench seats with two dollars to buy an ornament. Not the glass ones, of course. Never the glass ones. It was always warm on those nights, even when it wasn’t. Bit of Christmas magic, maybe. There wasn’t much of that going around.
The radio played a song about weekends.
‘So you’ve really never been back?’ he said.
‘Back where?’
‘To the house.’
‘No, never,’ I said. It would have required more than a car ride. A wormhole, perhaps.
‘Oh.’
‘What about you?’
‘Most years, I guess. Last year.’
‘That’s not where you’re taking me, is it?’
He shifted in his seat, gripped the steering wheel tight again.
‘Dad? I don’t think this is a good idea.’ There she was. I heard her breathing, quick-in-slow-out.
‘Last year, huh?’
‘I was here for work.’ He stared ahead, navigated the road with his fists.
‘Right.’
‘I wanted to see what they’d done with the place.’
‘Didn’t think to ask me along?’
‘What would you have said if I had?’
‘“Never call this number again”?’
‘Exactly.’
‘What was it like? Last year?’
He smiled. ‘The same. It’s always the same.’ We drove to a chorus of Top 40 songs and commercial breaks. ‘Change the bloody channel,’ he said.
Along the beach road grew rows of pine trees. The proper kind, triangular – thin on top, full-skirted at the bottom. Dad had told me they were to protect the houses from salt damage, but Mum said they were a Christmas plantation. Each year she climbed them to hang baubles on the branches. Dad’s hands: taut, white. My street. Dad and me and Fleur and Mum. And Gran. And the ambulance. Dad and me and Fleur and Mum and the ambulance and me and Mum and Gran. Dad and Gran and me and Fleur and the ambulance.
‘Stop!’
‘What? What is it?’
Dad and me and the ambulance. Dad and the ambulance. Mum and Dad and Gran and Fleur.
The shutters banging in the hot wind. The cruel turning over of the sea.
‘I can’t.’
‘You can.’
The car moved, and I moved with it. Me and Dad. The beach threw surfers into the air and down to the sea bed. People disguised as coloured umbrellas and children learning not to get caught in the rip.
In a second, there it was: Number 28.
Not a house at all. An empty block and cyclone fencing. Dad pulled over. We looked at the block. We looked at the road. Looked back at the block with knee-high grass. Looked at the block without doors or windows or telephones. Looked at the block without me and Dad and Mum and Fleur and Gran and the ambulance. Looked at Dad with his mouth hanging open.
‘It’s gone,’ I said.
Looked at the crack in the sky where she kept pouring through. We stepped back from the footpath and stood a little too close to the road, and he put his arm around me.
The Paper House Page 17
