The Paper House

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘Been hitting the chips?’ I said, and he looked down at his body, which throbbed with his laughter.

  ‘It’s important to enjoy oneself,’ he said. ‘You look nice.’

  I saw I’d worn something of a ball gown, heeled shoes with bows at the toe. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I wonder where these shoes came from.’

  I sat on a metal stool and noticed there was a window above his head, then wondered why a house in perpetual darkness would need a window. ‘It isn’t always dark down here,’ he said, and rearranged a family of ceramic chickens with their heads broken off.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind it. I like a bit of darkness sometimes.’

  ‘It holds you in, doesn’t it? Sometimes in the daytime I feel like I could just fly right off.’

  ‘You’re drunk,’ I said.

  He bowed. ‘Guilty as charged.’ He told me he’d found a family of hopping mice and kept one for me, spinning in a wheel on the windowsill. It looked at me with its pointed face. ‘I think it likes you,’ he said. ‘You can visit it whenever you fancy. But first, a party.’

  We took off from the path and through the steep undergrowth. The layer of moss was at once both a thick, safe carpet and a slippery foe. I was as light-footed as I knew how to be, plucking my way along the hillside in almost pitch blackness, leaning into the rough bark of the swamp gums for support.

  He walked without pausing to feel his way over the rocks and roots as I did, wobbling and dancing like a birch tree. He moved through the night as though he belonged to it, a grey jaguar with young feet and long legs. I felt a hundred next to him. Steam climbed from his footsteps.

  We hit a steep incline and I heaved my tired body through air thick with insects. Less than a minute later we broke through the trees and into a clearing. Under the threat of midnight, local wildlife headed for home. A hurricane of pelicans shuddered by, close to our heads. The air moved and buzzed around us, carrying with it the heady smell of wattle and eucalyptus. As the moonlight filtered out, our surroundings unfurled: the grassy blanket watched over by astute, commanding mountain ash, rows of juvenile grapevines marched south towards the sea. The gusting wind from the water caught my hair and my dress before it shot away.

  The ground moved under my feet. A ring of mushrooms glowed under the moon.

  ‘A fairy party,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘It’s perfect.’

  A whisper in the trees and footprints the size of buttons in the mud.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘a party is not a party without wine.’ He pulled a bottle of it from nowhere. ‘This is a very fine drop, and I know that because someone nicked it from a very fine cellar.’ He winked at me.

  ‘Do you have glasses?’

  ‘Of course. What kind of party do you think this is?’

  We sat under the trees and drank into the night. Each time a bottle was empty, another appeared. He told me stories about newts and horses pulling carriages, and I told him stories about oceans and pine trees with baubles, and we made up new stories about what might come later. He kicked off his shoes, poked his toes out from his moth-eaten socks. We drank until our heads had swollen to twice their size, until our mouths moved without thinking and our thoughts flip-flopped in the dirt like snagged fish.

  ‘I’ve been drawing,’ I said after a while.

  ‘Show me.’ His breath so hot near my skin, burning rings around my neck.

  ‘No way. I’m no good.’

  He pulled up right next to my cheek. Acerbic breath, flesh pinched diabetic under glossy skin. ‘You don’t need to be good,’ he growled. ‘You just need to feel it in your bones.’ He leaned in closer. ‘Do you feel it in your bones?’

  ‘I feel everything in my bones,’ I said.

  We danced under the pittosporums, in ribbons of rain and a slice of the moon.

  *

  So it happened that on Wednesday, Sylvia’s sons came with four dark-haired grandsons like a pack of shiny ferrets. They were already at the hospital when we arrived – a tall, dark-haired man with a square jaw and small green eyes greeted Dave and I in the foyer. The night receptionist nodded to me. ‘You must be Heather,’ the man said.

  Fleur sat steadfast even after Sylvia’s body had been removed and the sheets had been changed. She sat in the white-walled room and waited for the sun to come up, so I sat with her with my hand in her hand. ‘I was going to go home this week,’ she said, and I said, ‘You were?’ and she choked out a cry. ‘Will someone tell us when the funeral is? Will it be soon? Do they have to do an autopsy?’

  ‘I don’t know, Fleur,’ I said. ‘How should I know?’

  The sun came in behind the blinds. I blinked into it and my head caved in and my chest rose and fell. The beds were empty.

  Dave drove me home and I sat at the table-for-two-for-one.

  ‘You can just nap off your hangover there,’ he said, and went to his study and slammed the door.

  ‘It’s not a hangover,’ I said. My body went outside and sat on the vibrating balcony chair and crossed its arms.

  When the rain started, I opened the kitchen windows and let the cleanness roll in, let it blow away the old spirits. I drew it through the angled doorways and into the pinched corners where the cobwebs gathered to live cobwebbed lives. I invited it through the dull hallways and down the spiral staircase, where I let it rest on my shoulders in a games room that no one had played in for decades.

  We sat like that, me and the cleanness, and when Dave came out of his study to find me it was after nine o’clock so we tried to order a pizza but no one was open.

  ‘Let’s go out and get something,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t find my body,’ I said, and he sighed deeply.

  ‘When does Doctor Greer get back?’

  ‘She’s not a doctor.’ The wind had a southerly bite to it, shooting right through me.

  *

  That night I dreamed of Ashok alone in his house. ‘Have you seen Harriet?’ His voice was short, urgent, his face stricken, but hopeful. We would have an answer. We would know that she was safe. ‘David?’ Dave would know where to find her. Harriet was definitely hiding behind Dave’s back, safe, Harriet there safe behind Dave’s back. ‘Have you seen her?’ Ashok’s body was hot, trembling. His hands knew, his hands heavy, dropped at his sides, his hands knew where Harriet was, like a divining rod, they knew where he would find her, so he couldn’t go there, he couldn’t go there on his own, just he and Harriet and the truth in the garden, which is why he was here asking us, asking us where he could find Harriet, asking us to tell him that Harriet was happy and well inside our house, hiding in a corner, waiting for him to come and find her because it was just a game, it was a game that he couldn’t find her, it was just for a minute, as a trick, and when the minute had passed he would find her and she would be so pleased to see him that they would hug for a week, the two of them there in the garden, just hugging, the two of them, Harriet with her face right next to his face so he could hear her laughing in her way about the funny game they had played when his hands had known that she was somewhere else, but she hadn’t been.

  In my dream, we all buried her, together at the back of his block, under a flowering cherry tree with a little stone garden, and Ashok held her in his hands forever, until she was buried, and until the sun had set, and until we had all gone home, and he held her like that until the world ended and she was really gone, and not just playing a game in the garden, hiding there in a corner, waiting for him.

  I didn’t get dressed. The currawong sat on the balcony railing and sang right at me, through me, head cocked to the side. ‘I don’t have any lizards,’ I said. ‘Only bacon.’ But it kept sitting there with its face twitching. I waited for Sylvia to come to my window. I waited for Harriet to scratch at my door.

  Deep in the garden, a giant slept and waited. I felt his hands near my throat and under my skin.

  I knocked on Fleur’s door. ‘We’d better get moving.’


  ‘Fuck off,’ she said.

  It would become hot later in the day, that was obvious, but the morning was clear and bright. We sat in a concrete chapel with a single pane of stained glass: me, Dave, Dad, Ashok, Fleur, the sons (Grant and Henry), one wife (Grant’s?), the grandsons, the lady from up the road, a few old women with faces rippled like silk, and a man with a dark beard who sat in the back row on his own. The funeral home had allowed Harriet, as long as no one was allergic and she didn’t bark, and she sat at Ashok’s feet in silence while he fed her strips of boiled chicken. At the front, a white and gold coffin five feet long and partially obscured by wilting lilies. ‘Friends and family,’ went the chaplain, in a bored monotone.

  ‘Mum would have wanted all of her family here,’ Henry whispered to me. ‘Big Italian mass. But we’re the only ones left.’

  ‘What about your dad’s family?’ I said.

  ‘All in England. Just us.’

  I thought about being isolated from family, about becoming an orphan and whether it was any different just because you were in your fifties. I thought about other funerals I had been to; standing at an altar, reading from the Bible while Auntie Fay cried into a monogrammed handkerchief, She was so tired, and then never spoke to us again. I thought about Judy and Graeme and Tracy and Mark, Dave’s people, and about my people, which was just Fleur and Dad.

  ‘You don’t have any children?’ I said, and he shook his head.

  Grant stood at the pulpit (a kind of second-hand knockabout with a plastic cross) and told us about Sylvia Jeffries (nee Scuderi), born after the first war but before the second one, an immigrant from Cetara, daughter of a fisherman and a homemaker. Spoke no English but married an Englishman, and later became a kindergarten teacher, loved for both her warm-hearted wisdom and her cannoli. Widowed at sixty. A much loved member of her community, and survived by her sons Grant and Henry, their wives Vivienne and Rachael (Henry’s loud sobbing) and grandsons Thomas, Lachlan, Benjamin and Angus. So loved. Deeply missed.

  I thought of my mother, then, of the words I had wanted to say about her but hadn’t, swallowed up by the deep mournfulness of my Gran. About how it wasn’t enough just to love her, that I had loved her the very best way I had known how and she had died anyway.

  The chaplain shook out his robes. ‘Our Father who art in heaven.’ Sylvia’s sons wheeled the coffin into the sunlight, with Ashok trailing behind. ‘Nice day for it,’ Henry said, and his eyes were red. Not a sound from Fleur.

  The air was thick with flies. We drove in convoy to the Dromana Cemetery, which rolled and slipped in the hillside, residents resting under skinny eucalypts, and smelled of strewn flowers and salt and goodness, the way a garden should, even this one. We watched as she was lowered into the earth, and I threw flowers and promised to love and miss her, and listened to the others as they promised the same. Harriet snapped at insects in the grass. We left Ashok to stand there with her, his bony frame casting a thin shadow across the neighbouring tombstone: Albert George Henry Jeffries / b. 5 April 1932 d. 19 July 1998.

  ‘Poor Fleur,’ Dad said. ‘As if things weren’t bad enough already.’ She cast a thick shadow across the turned earth.

  Ashok came back with us and stood in the kitchen with his eyes drawn into little black pearls and his skin loose like a Victorian collar, and Harriet stood next to him on her shivering legs.

  ‘I might go for a bit of a holiday,’ he said, though his mouth was fixed fiercely downward.

  ‘Can I make you a cup of tea?’ I said, or maybe Gran said, or Mum said, or Sylvia said. The elixir of problem solving, or at least a way of coating it.

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘Maybe I could just sit for a bit?’ Harriet was already lying on the floor, blinking and twitching on the rug.

  ‘Of course you can, Ashok. Stay as long as you like.’

  He eased his frame into the wicker chair on the balcony and I saw for the first time just what an old man he was, limbs folding stiffly under his meagre weight, brown slippers sullied by wet grass, old hands clamped together as though keeping hold of a secret, or another hand. I watched the back of his head. It was still. His shoulders shuddered from time to time, as though shaken by the wind.

  I HAVE TO finish this assignment but Vivian from down the road is here. Brought a bottle of wine with her as big as my arm. She sits with Mum on the front verandah and they talk. Vivian telling the stories. Mum laughing like it’s a ball she’s throwing around.

  I put my fingers in my ears but then I’ve got no hands to write with.

  Just put one finger in one ear.

  I bang on the window.

  Shut up! I say. Jesus Christ!

  They’re quiet for a second. I write some thoughts about Othello.

  I hear mum say, Teenagers.

  I go out to the hall and write there instead so I can’t hear them.

  What are you doing? Dad says.

  Othello, I say.

  Don’t know that one, he says.

  Vivian comes through the front door all lit up. Not laughing. She’s got her cardigan wrapped all the way around her.

  She says, Bruce, I’m gonna go. You should get Shell inside. Bloody freezing out there.

  Sure, Viv, he says. Thanks for coming.

  They have a weird little hug.

  Look after our girl, Vivian says.

  Dad’s shoulders are really low. Like he’s got worlds sitting on them.

  Midnight.

  I hear them through the thin walls.

  Her first, whispering: I’m sorry, Bruce.

  Then him: It’s not your fault.

  It’s the wine, she says. Vivian brought three bottles.

  She’s laughing. His boots drop to the floor.

  Stop it, Shelley. Just go to sleep.

  I don’t know if I can. What if I never sleep? What if I’ve forgotten how?

  Come over here.

  There’s rustling, then silence for a while. I count the cracks in the ceiling. Six cracks. There were five cracks before, I’m sure of it. Onetwothreefourfive. I must have counted one of them twice. The clock in my room has heavy arms and they beat around their circle, tock-tock-tock. Shithead scuttles along the hallway, stops at the end, scratches so hard her foot beats against the floorboards.

  One am. Creaking on Dad’s side of the bed. Their door opens. I hear him pulling himself up the stairs to the attic. I get out of bed and sit at the bottom of the stairs and I can see the outline of him in the moonlight. He’s naked. The big window creaks as he yanks it open and the wind comes through cold and salty. He stands there forever with his hands on his head and his elbows out.

  He opens her book, the one with her sketches. She’s working on a thing about living underwater. I helped her find kelp on the sand and we strung it up along the windowsill. Dad puts his hand on the paper. The pages move with his fingers and with the air.

  He turns the page, turns again. His other hand is moving now, up and down. He has his back to me but I can see his body moving and tensing, like his whole body is a fist. I want to stop looking but I make myself look because it’s important to get the full sense of things.

  Come on, he says.

  With his other hand he turns the pages again. Turning, fumbling. He pulls too hard and bumps the table and a glass smashes.

  Fuck, he says. Turns the page again. Flips through it like it’s a porno.

  Shithead stands at the foot of the stairs and looks at me. I put my finger up. She scratches and her foot beats against the floor. I wonder what Fleur is doing right now.

  Fuck, Dad says. Fuck.

  He steadies himself on Mum’s art desk, puts his hand all over her book.

  I go back to bed, lie down and count the cracks in the ceiling and listen to Shithead’s foot banging on the floorboards in the hall.

  Two am. Someone is crying.

  THE CREEK’S BANKS had burst. I took my shoes off and stepped through slippery mud and thick sludge, cold between my toes. Where the ground was higher t
he ground was bald, shiny. Evening sky with its wax-paper clouds, the dip and drop across the horizon into an infinite pink pool.

  ‘Bit wet.’ Noel’s voice came from somewhere above me.

  ‘Noel?’

  ‘Up here.’

  A man in a tree. A big man, with a grey suit jacket and grey pants, draped over a willow branch like a jaguar. His eyes glowed in the darkness.

  ‘What are you doing up there?’

  ‘Keeping dry. Has the rain stopped?’

  ‘More or less,’ I said. He dropped down from the branch and landed fatly in the mud, barefoot. He towered over me, larger than life, shiny and bulging. ‘Are you – are you well, Noel?’ Not sure if I was breathing.

  ‘I don’t know, Heather,’ he said. ‘I thought I had a little dog but she seems to be missing. Have you seen her? Everything is so different.’

  He barely squeezed through his little door, and had to turn sideways and backwards and drop to his knees. ‘Do you need help?’ I said, but he burst through with a pop! and laughed.

  ‘My door must be getting smaller,’ he said.

  ‘Must be,’ I said. He seemed to occupy the whole room, with his ballooning body and his voice like a trumpet. The teacups got lost in his gargantuan hands. When he sat, just a small corner of the bathroom remained, so that was where I sat. ‘Have you been – eating?’

  His body rolled and shook as he laughed. ‘Not really. Hard to grow anything with rain like this.’

  ‘It’s just that you don’t seem’ – I paused – ‘yourself.’

  ‘No, well, you would say that. Drink your tea.’ His shirt pulled open at the buttons, and one had popped off altogether.

  ‘Can I bring you something from the house?’

  ‘No,’ he said, and he put down his tea. ‘I don’t need anything from the house.’

  The enormous man who may have been Noel opened a newspaper. Laughing, he told me of a massacre in a US university. The room heaved its shoulders and shook in its belly. My tea was finished; damp leaves at the bottom made shapes from the red centre. A snake. A spear. A baby.