I tried to go home; he threw his heft across the doorway and asked when I would be back. ‘Soon,’ I said. ‘I have some things to sort out.’ On my balcony, I drew a picture of an apple with a man inside it, and a little pink hedgerow with pocket-sized crows roosting.
*
In the morning I woke to an empty bed and a stream of sun. A January day like any other, the high-lit sky and the warm undercurrent of insects.
‘Dave?’ I said. ‘Fleur?’
I lay in bed late into the afternoon, waiting for the latch of the front door and the rush of paper and linen smell. But when the evening came and Dave was still not home, I rolled myself out to sit on the vibrating chair on the narrow deck and rubbed my book between my hands, which had dried out in the summer air. The book was up to its last few pages. I flipped through them, watched the garden I wanted grow from one page to the next. Saw the seasons change; the colours skipped in and out in the twilight.
Dad beamed out from the lawn in his Hawaiian shirt.
‘What are you doing down there?’ I said.
‘Pruning some of these old trees. Thought you said you had a guy doing it?’
‘I do.’ I shoved the book under the chair.
‘Well, he’s been slacking off.’ He snipped small branches from the skirt of the pittosporums.
‘Stop. Don’t you do it. That’s not your job.’
He rubbed a dirty hand across his forehead. ‘Just doing my bit. Helping, right? Helping.’
‘Come inside. Please.’
He filled the brown couch, elbows and knees.
‘Have you seen Dave?’ I said. ‘He hasn’t been home all day.’
‘Nope.’ He made a space next to him. ‘Come sit with your old man.’
I passed him a cold drink. ‘Do you know what day it is?’ I said.
He was immediately stone. ‘Of course I do.’
‘The seventeenth.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s her birthday.’
I pulled the nylon threads from his hibiscus shirt. Inside the collar, his skin peeled away. The couch was too hot and too small but I sat there with my head against his. He took a big gulp of water. I remembered a time I’d been in charge of her birthday dinner, broken her favourite dish. The way she’d stared at me for days afterwards, at a fixed distance, keeping me separate from her.
He said, ‘I’ve got a photo of you three girls. Took it on the first birthday she had after you arrived. She looks so tired.’ His body rolled as he swallowed. ‘She was a different person after that.’
‘How?’
‘Determined.’
‘She wanted to protect us.’
‘Yeah, of course she did.’ He squeezed my arm. ‘But you know how she was. There’s protective and then there’s wrap you in a blanket until you’re fifteen.’ His shoulders went up. ‘She was obsessed with something bad happening to you.’
‘Ironic.’
‘Tragic.’
We were silent for a time. I listened to the way his blood rushed through his body, the dull thump of his heart and the rollercoaster turns around his fingers.
‘Do you remember her corella?’ I said.
‘They’re those little cockatoo things, right?’
‘Yeah, she had that one she was always painting.’
‘Did she?’
‘Of course she did. You remember, it was in that bundle I took to Gran’s.’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’ The television flicked on.
I pushed myself into the cracks in his edges. ‘What did we do when you were away? Who looked after us?’
‘Your mother, of course.’
‘Not then. After.’
He changed from one channel to the next, through a stampede of game shows and men with their bleached mouths.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘Tell me. Who looked after us when you were away?’
‘I did.’ His voice barely slipped from his mouth.
‘You looked after us when you were away? That’s a good trick.’
He looked at me with his stripped-bark face. ‘Fleur was a grown woman by then, Heather. You know she was.’
‘And me?’
‘You wanted to go to your Gran’s. I told you I’d take you north and you said “that’s too far away.”’ He threw his hands in the air and the remote went flying. ‘Too far from what? I said.’
‘Too far from her.’ I breathed into my belly.
‘You seem pretty close to her now.’ He turned away from me and I grabbed his face, pointed to my body pegged against the doorframe.
‘How’d we do?’ I said. ‘How’d we do? Good?’
‘Stop,’ he said.
‘Turned out just the way you hoped?’
He closed his eyes. The heavy weight of his eyebrows dropped over the lids. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say. I was just trying to prune that damn garden.’
I sat up. He disappeared as I watched, crouched back into the furniture and his photo of my mother, so tired, a million miles away. I pushed my finger into his face. ‘Where’s Dave?’
‘I told you, I haven’t seen him.’
‘I don’t believe you. Fleur, then. She can’t have got far. Broke her leg, you know. Poor Fleur.’
He shifted against the velour and the static pricked the air around him and he said, ‘I loaned her my room at the Cosy Courtyard.’
‘Why?’
‘For a breather. They look after you there and she’s had a shit time.’
‘She’s had a shit time? Where’s my Cosy Courtyard? What about me?’
He stood and pulled me with him, cuffed at the wrists. ‘Maybe we should get you into bed.’
‘I’m not tired.’
‘Come on.’ He led me down the hall with his hands on my back and their electricity shot through me and away into the night. ‘I’ll tuck you in.’ No clean feet, no apple slices. I pulled the blankets to my chin and watched the shadows play gin rummy on the ceiling. The door closed. Fury stalked through me and settled in my corners.
Click. Dave’s shuffle down the hallway, his quick paces. I heard his satchel drop on the kitchen bench. Dad said, ‘Hi, David.’
‘Hey, Bruce. How’s everything been?’ Dave said.
‘Fine. Heather’s in bed.’
‘Wait here,’ I said to my body, and slipped along the hall, silent and dead and silent. The two men grew into one another on the brown couch and their bottles popped open and the beer slipped into their throats and they drew their lines of common ailment in the dirt.
‘Sorry to call on you like that.’ Dave rocked around and inside the origami man on the couch. ‘I was about to lose it.’
‘I know, mate.’ Dad’s voice – had it always been so rough at the corners, so weather-worn? ‘You need time off now and then. I sure did. Came back from the rig and most times just wanted to go straight back again.’ He paused. ‘Today’s her birthday, did you know?’
Dave nodded. I watched him form the question, his mouth moving in six directions and not one of them my direction: ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘’Course. Anything.’
Dave drank from his bottle. ‘How did you feel?’ he said. ‘At the end?’
‘Sad.’ Dad put his beer on the table. ‘Devastated.’
‘Yeah,’ Dave said.
‘But relieved, too, mate.’ He patted Dave’s shoulder. ‘I was relieved.’
My chest: my-dad my-dad my-dad.
*
The ground was as thick as tar but I walked in it anyway, looking for the places where I knew I would find the woman with the golden hair and shrill laughter; where she had painted herself into grabs and snippets that she must have known I would take with me everywhere. Slips of paper with her face painted on them, faces like impatiens and irises and daises, crumpled together in my pockets but as heavy as stars.
The house hid behind its familiar cloak of fog. I pulled my body through it and the mouse trailed behind me, searching in the low visibi
lity with its satellite ears. ‘I don’t have any food for you,’ I said to the mouse, clawing and pawing at the curtains. ‘I’m just trying to get home.’
I thought of a snail, crushed into the ground.
I thought of the woman with the blue and white mouth.
I thought of myself, alone by the sea.
The wind came and blew the fog apart, and under its net I found the lemon tree full of spider webs. I went into the house, out onto the deck, collected my sketchbook from where it vibrated under the wicker chair.
On the very last page I drew a curled bone and a row of dancing bees and trees that dripped with olives as big as pears.
I drew a tortoise on its journey from one end of the creek to the other, its self-containment. I drew a mosquito in the bowels of an ox, a bird in a blue nest.
I picked leaves from the sugar gum (Christmas lights still strung in its branches, too difficult to pull down) and glued them to the paper.
I painted a fairyland door with a pink knocker and dripped sunlight through its miniature leadlight window.
I leaned into the paper and out from the paper and turned it this way and that in search of exactly the right notes, of precisely the absolutely perfect garden.
Dave called from the balcony, ‘Heather?’ but I didn’t answer because I had drawn my voice into the page and it hummed there with the currawong which was yodelling back from its half-beak. It sat on the balcony railing and sang right at me, through me. ‘I don’t have any lizards,’ I said from inside the paper. But it kept sitting there with its face twitching. I drew a clean pond with another, smaller currawong. ‘Sorry, mate,’ I said to the bird. ‘Best I can do.’
The currawong laughed at me in its shrill way. I listened for the neighbours’ voices, that kid who was always falling over and the mother who never seemed to worry much about it, and I heard them say things like, Did you hear the lady in the beach house died? or maybe it was just, Have you got your drink bottle packed? or maybe nothing at all. I felt the aloneness deep in my chest, where my heart was beating.
Over the hill, the old man bowed crookedly over his vines, and his wife trailed behind him with a basket of flowers. Their laughter hooked on the wind from the sea and rested on me. I wondered if they had noticed an enormous man with a shiny face stamping around in the trees.
I walked behind the pittosporums and down past the Alice in Wonderland pond, where a pelican the size of a jaguar plucked an otter from the water. Under the willows and along the creek, where a carrion flower, misplaced and displaced, shot two feet in the air and then collapsed under its own weight and the stench of rotting flesh. The garden heaved and ached, burdened and drowning, flashing in and out of focus under the burning sun. I pushed my way through air as thick as gravy, battling flies like tiny planes, buzzing and humming, and the garden moved under my feet, me adrift in a swarm of planes on a waterbed. And the smell: acrid, rancid, putrid.
He thudded to a halt in front of me, invisible in the dark.
‘Heather.’
Breathy, arteriosclerotic, bloated. I couldn’t see him but I felt the air he displaced.
‘You look terrible.’
‘Thanks.’
He radiated the sick heat of dying sea life. Belched in my face, breath full of wine. With every step I took, something cracked and exploded under my feet. ‘What’s happening in here?’
The canopy exploded into light.
‘It’s no good, Heather,’ he said, and his face had swollen into a pumpkin.
The moving ground was not a waterbed but a churning, festering carpet of life. Colonies of ants marched cross-country through the fat spaghetti of maggots and I buckled and retched.
‘You see? We have to go.’
He grabbed me with his inflamed hand and pulled me through the agonising swamp. I felt thousands of tiny feet on my skin, in my clothes, in my shoes. He was a barge. He was a train. He was a monster. I was expelled into the clearing where the creek diverged and the ground was sand, and then I was inside his house as though washed there, spilling and tumbling and gasping for air.
‘That will do for the minute,’ he said, and his glass was full.
‘What is going on?’
‘Wildlife,’ he said.
‘I don’t understand.’
He smiled with teeth stained red and brown. His body moved and groaned as though sentient, towards me and away from me with its own motives. ‘You look like you need a drink.’
‘I think I’ve had enough.’ My throat, chest, fists so tight.
‘Suit yourself.’ He glowed red and purple and black.
He pulled away from the Alice in Wonderland pond, across the rear of the garden and near to the stone wall. ‘Where are we going?’ I said, and he said, ‘We’re going to find some food.’ At the back of the block he pushed me through a blue gate. I stood in the orchard, under that flaming red sky, and he poured in after me, brighter and thicker than he had been on the other side.
‘Apples,’ he said.
‘Whose place is this? Another one of your generous neighbours?’ I tried for lightness in my voice.
‘No. But you love apples, right? Everyone loves apples.’ He gorged himself on the fruit, two in each hand, juice pouring from his mouth and into the ground. ‘Come on, have some. Sit with me.’
I stared at the man squatting in the middle of a pool, eyes darting and scanning, eating and chewing, chewing and spitting, pips in the pool like beetles, eating and chewing and crying, even the apple cores, just the stems and leaves collecting in a pile next to his slippered feet, and when he had eaten as many apples as his body could contain, he stood up and wiped his face with the back of his sleeve.
‘Jesus, Heather. Just one apple,’ he said.
And he ate and ate, fat and sticky like a bun. His arms moved, sausages, and his legs moved, sticks of butter, and the more he ate, the rounder he grew, until he was nothing at all, just an apple with a head on top. I went back through the gate to the little house, the paper house. Stared into the garden, watched it fold around itself. It was a gift, a donation.
Why is the lady screaming? Voices from next door, pitched high, children’s voices. Do you think she’s okay? Then the deeper voice of the parent in charge: I’m sure she’s fine, come inside, and the nervous wait to see whether someone knocked, whether they would send someone around to make sure I really was okay, that no one needed to be sedated or injected or taken away. She was near me then, her skin against my skin, sitting in the dying light wearing her purple dress, and her breathing quick and uneven, going, ‘Heather, don’t let them take me.’
‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘Look.’
Where the creek diverged and took its snaking path out to the sea, a little boat. It bobbed in the shallows on its frayed rope leash. The purple woman climbed in first; she was afraid of nothing. The boat rocked. Water splashed against the sides.
‘Come on, then,’ she said, and held out her hand. I gripped her wrist, the one with the pin-up girl tattoo.
A storm had picked up during the evening, which was exactly what I had expected might happen on a treasure hunt. The sky hung dark and as weighty as a satchel. The purple woman rowed away from the jetty, and the muscles in her arms tightened into knots.
‘Had a boat like this once,’ she said. ‘Took you out in it. Had to fight off a bear. It was going after our scones.’
‘Gosh,’ I said, but the word was blemished by my chattering teeth.
The woman rowed. We broke through a blue gate and into the open water. I hung my head over the side and kept watch for sharks. Or said I was keeping watch for sharks, but actually coughed up puddles of vomit that passed as sea foam. The boat hopped and bounced, and the sky throbbed and spat.
‘Storm coming,’ she said. Rain cracked the water. Waves came up and over the boat and my socks grew damp inside my shoes.
‘Is this safe?’ I said.
‘God, no.’ She tore a strip of fabric from her dress and tied it around her head,
pulled a telescope from her pocket and squinted into it. ‘Five thousand nine hundred and forty nautical miles, I reckon. As the crow flies.’ She pulled the boat into the wind. I vomited into the sea. The night grew thick and I pulled it around me as a blanket. Every metre looked the same: black and wet. Wind roared in my ears. The purple woman pulled a fishing rod from her bag and dropped a line over the side. ‘Storms churn up all the mackerel,’ she said, smiling her gold-toothed smile. They came in one by one, the silver fish. She strung them from a bit of twine and cut their bellies open, and they danced dead-eyed under the flashing night.
‘What’s that?’ she shouted over the storm, standing and pointing.
‘What’s what?’ I said. The sea popped and groaned under the boat.
She peered into her telescope. ‘There’s a shadow out there. Looks big.’ The boat lurched. In the distance, the grey hills of headland stuck out against the sunrise.
‘What do we do?’ my-dad my-dad my-dad.
The tiny boat listed deeply towards the waves. ‘It’s coming right for us. Take these.’ She threw the oars to me, but they slipped through my sweaty hands, and the boat howled and righted itself against the towering, ferocious woman with the purple bandanna. Cold air forced its way into my lungs and was trapped there, ice cubes fighting against my quick breaths, in-out in-out in-out. She dived from the boat.
I cried out to the hole in the water where the purple woman had just been: ‘What are you doing?’ and commotion stirred beneath me. A thumping tail. A thundering bicep. An open mouth with rows of teeth. Water flipped and tore and birds came to sit with me on the edge of the dinghy and we all watched together, watched the breaking water and the tumbling woman and the giant fish, and the birds shouted and I shouted and the giant fish tossed the boat clear into the air and when it came down, the ocean was red.
‘Well then,’ the woman said, climbing back into the boat. She plucked the purple bandanna from the sea and tied it around her head. The birds floated like buoys and picked at god-knew-what below the surface. Ahead, the land hummed. I picked up the oars in my sweaty hands and rowed into the wind. I rowed all morning – sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, sometimes in a circle – and the birds brought trinkets from the sea and dropped them at our feet. A gold watch. A serrated tooth. Water broke through the wood of the dinghy and pooled in the hull. Rain pricked my skin where the hot sun had burned it.
The Paper House Page 20
