The Paper House

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘We have to get to shore,’ she said. I paddled and paddled and she stood watch and shouted: ‘Hard to starboard!’ and ‘Heave!’ and the wind whipped around us and we were gymnasts spinning in the air. ‘There.’ She pointed. ‘Land ho!’ I rowed and she jumped up and down and my stomach turned over. The boat thudded into the sand. It was a small island, small and green, small and green and grassy. The woman dragged the dinghy ashore and we stood together and watched the water swell.

  A man came out of a corrugated shed with its door hanging off and rubbed his head.

  ‘Don’t see many folks out this way,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘Ernest.’

  ‘Shelley,’ the woman said.

  He stood with a hand on a hip and motioned to the water. ‘Someone’s pulled the plug,’ he said.

  ‘You’re right,’ the woman said.

  Higher and higher the ocean climbed, over the sand and the rocks and up along the beach and across the grass, and my body filled with every feeling I had ever had and the sky grew dark and full of bats.

  ‘Help me.’ I clawed at my throat. I grabbed Ernest’s salt-worn hands. ‘Help. There are insects in my chest.’

  The woman in the purple dress came close to me and rested her hand against my ribs. ‘Shh,’ she said, disappearing momentarily beneath the water. ‘Of course there are.’

  Thunder growled.

  ‘They’re attracted to light.’

  And her voice caught on the wind, her voice everywhere around me and the cold wake from the sea and the water pounded down the path and the sea rose to my feet and I stood there up to my knees and she stood right there next to me, there with her hand in my hand and her feet in the ocean

  and I said

  Are you afraid?

  and she said

  It’s

  just

  w

  a

  t

  e

  r

  The walls are so white. I can’t look right at them.

  ‘What do you think it means, Heather?’ A man with a clipboard and sweat in the folds of his face. He stood by a window. Beyond him, I saw the blue of the sky and the heads of skyscrapers that I recognised from some time before.

  ‘I can’t move my arms,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll fix that soon. So?’

  ‘What do I think what means?’

  He held up a picture in charcoal – a woman with long hair and thin fingers, which she had wrapped around the fat arms of child, and both sets of eyes stared right past me.

  ‘The woman looks happy,’ I said.

  People came and went, ones with coats and others with notepads. Fleur thumped her leg around my room, saying things like I was gone for one fucking night, and What are we going to do? and I wanted to tell her that I knew it was going to be fine but I didn’t know which words to use. Dave sat on the bed with his hand on mine, and I looked at him in a way that I hoped was reassuring, but the way he looked back told me it probably wasn’t.

  ‘It’s going to be okay,’ he said, and it seemed obvious and trite.

  ‘I’m going to draw for a while,’ I said, but I couldn’t find my sketchbook.

  ‘I have to pack,’ Fleur said. She was leaving on Wednesday, but I didn’t know how far away that was. Minutes or hours later: ‘I can’t do this again.’ She looked at me with childhood eyes.

  I slept and didn’t sleep, drifting around a dense fog filled with things I had forgotten. Glass doors with steel bolts and multiple keys, the clanging as they closed one by one, and the nurse with breasts the size of my head staring back at me, Go on then, get out, they have to rest. Gran’s green coat, pockets as deep as my arm, fishing around for coins and finding tablets instead, white and scored and wrapped in tin foil that rustled as she snatched them away from me. Dad leaving to go back to sea, and Mum crying, holding on to his jacket, I can’t do it without you, don’t leave me here on my own, I don’t know what I’ll do, and me watching him get into his car and breathing a sigh of relief and then not even looking back to her where she stood in the doorway with her arms down.

  Tell us about your daughter,’ they said.

  ‘I don’t know who you mean,’ I said.

  The woman in the mirror hadn’t brushed her hair for weeks. It stuck out in all directions like straw in a field. She stared at me as if I had stolen her sheep, or slept with her son; just a kind of dumbstruck hollowness.

  Sometimes I talked to her: ‘Gloria is crazy. Have you seen her carrying that cat around? Proper nuts.’ And other times: ‘Obviously I’m fine. I’m pretty sure they’ll be letting me out soon.’

  At night I lay in the steel bed and looked at the moon reflecting off the mirror, and sometimes the face was there, staring back without blinking.

  They took me to a small room with a window in the ceiling and I lay on a vinyl daybed and watched the clouds go over.

  They said, ‘Heather, do you know where you are?’ and I told them about a time we found a merry-go-round in a park without trees, and Mum sat on a horse with a pink mane and I sat in a carriage made for two, and Fleur didn’t want to sit next to me at the beginning but eventually she did, and Mum told us to imagine it was spinning around and around, and by the end of the ride I was so dizzy in the head that I got off and vomited all over the ground, but Fleur just went and put her drink in the bin and walked home on her own.

  ‘So you think you’re on a merry-go-round?’ they said.

  ‘Obviously not,’ I said, but around it went.

  ‘Maybe I could get you something for your bedside table,’ Dave said. ‘Some flowers, or a picture frame. You know, something to remind you of home.’

  ‘You’re not allowed personal effects,’ they said.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  Dad came in the afternoon. He brought a personal effect anyway: a frayed photo of a woman and her children, one a baby. They had a cake. It was her birthday.

  We all ate dinner together in a hall, wearing our blue gowns, with plastic knives and forks, sitting at round tables so we could all stare at each other. Mondays were the best day, when we had lasagne with Greek salad, and a man in a hat sat on the windowsill and played a miniature guitar.

  I made friends with a woman who carried around a stuffed cat and spoke to it as though it were her child. She smelled like the inside of a shoe. Sometimes, when she fell asleep in her chair in the common room, I spoke to the cat. ‘I can stop crying and still love you,’ I said. ‘Just because I’m not thinking about you right now doesn’t mean I’m not always thinking about you.’

  In the doorway, they scratched their pens on their paper like claws.

  ‘Tell us about your daughter,’ they said, and I told them what I knew, that she waited at the bus stop in the rain, and when it was dark and still no one had come to pick her up, she walked home close to the fence so that no one would kidnap her, and when she arrived the house was lit up like a carnival, and a man in the doorway looked at her and then his mouth dropped open and he started crying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  ‘No, tell us about your daughter,’ they said.

  In the morning, when my tray came around, I had Coco Pops for breakfast and a little side dish of chocolate custard.

  Sometimes people died.

  They took away anything that could help us take our own lives: no knives, no string, carefully regulated doses of medication.

  But people died anyway.

  They took them away in the middle of the night, gurneys down the hallway like rollicking ghosts. We watched them with our faces pressed against the glass, and they knew we did.

  Sometimes people died.

  I guess they just wished harder than the rest of us.

  ‘Tell us about your mother,’ they said.

  ‘I don’t know who you mean,’ I said.

  Fleur called me on the phone in my room. It rang faintly, as though worried it might startle me, with a red light blinking: If it’s not too much trouble, please answer the call.

  �
��How are you?’ she said.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I think they might let me go home soon. I take three white pills in the evening, and two others in the morning. They say they need to try me on this regime, so they can see if it’s better than the one with the blue pills.’

  ‘I’ll come and visit you soon,’ she said.

  ‘How are the sheep?’

  ‘Don’t worry about the sheep.’

  They wheeled Gloria away in the middle of the night, chattering down the hall with her stuffed cat.

  They took me back to the small room and I watched the clouds while they talked about a house at the beach.

  ‘That one looks like a chihuahua,’ I said.

  ‘Does it?’ They wrote things on their paper and asked me to press a button when I felt something, so I pressed it without stopping because I could feel everything all at once.

  ‘We have something for you,’ they said. Thick paper and a rainbow of pencils.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘We thought you might like to draw,’ they said.

  I did want to draw, but not for them.

  ‘“From scratch” is a funny thing that people say, isn’t it?’ Clouds shaped like cats went over the ceiling window.

  ‘What do you mean?’ the doctor said.

  ‘I mean, it’s never really “from scratch”, is it? They don’t plant the seed. They don’t milk the cow. They don’t slaughter the pig.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘We never really do anything completely for ourselves.’

  ‘Sometimes we do,’ he said, but I couldn’t think of any examples.

  ‘Tell us about your mother,’ they said.

  ‘She had soft hands,’ I said.

  ‘Is that all?’ they said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

  Dave had an overnight bag and a pair of my old sneakers with pink laces.

  ‘These are the only ones I could find,’ he said. I put them on. He got a day pass from the front desk and took me next door, to a poky café with six chairs and one waitress (who made us order from the counter anyway). We drank coffee that tasted like the city, proud and bold, and he hooked his ankle around my ankle and his eyes bore through me.

  ‘How are you?’ he said, which was the same thing he said every day.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. I hoped I was smiling at him. ‘Maybe tomorrow we could go to the zoo? It’s just around the corner.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  When we got back we sat in the common room and ate trifle from plastic bowls. The sponge cake was stale and the cream had been over-whipped. It was nothing like Sylvia’s, but it reminded me of home.

  ‘Tell us about your daughter,’ they said.

  I told them about her dark hair and her eyelashes like running stitch and her lips that curved up at the edges, and I told them that she had Dave’s neat nose and my ears that stuck out from my head, and I told them she was four pounds and three ounces or one-point-nine kilos, and I told them she was buried in the blue dress with roses embroidered on the collar that had once been mine.

  Dave had a necklace and it swung from his finger like a pendulum clock. Clack-dog.

  I sat at the window. In movies I would have looked out over green lawns, where people wearing white gowns and walking with frames sat in outdoor lounge settings and talked to children they had forgotten. After an hour of pleasant conversation, a nurse would bring tea and the shot would switch to a close-up of an adult son with a single tear on his cheek.

  On the street, a woman with a pram raised her fist to a man in striped pyjamas.

  People in movie hospitals always seemed quite happy and content, as though they were just having a rest, as though they were not in a hospital but in a resort filled with like-minded individuals. Co-patients who were not violent, who were not aggressive or dangerous, who were not so monstrously sad that they couldn’t feel their own hearts. Harmonious. Like a holiday.

  In the hallway, the pitched voices of the newly arrived: Get the fuck off me! I want to go home!

  Even those who arrived of their own volition went through it; the sound of the doors locking sent the sanest of the insane into hysterics. Trapped. Contained. Waiting for their fates to be decided by the men and women with soft voices, the ones with the needles, with the pills, with the pass-outs. You could try to fake being well – Yes, I haven’t thought about suicide for six days – but you wouldn’t fool anyone, the other patients least of all. They trained their eyes on you, they saw what you didn’t.

  The walls turned their ears to you.

  But they had stopped listening to me.

  DAVE PICKED ME up. There were no flowers to take with us, nor cards to pack away. That was the way it went in the ward with the double-locked doors and the tiny mandolin man. In the bottom of my overnight bag I had a single musky outfit, my wallet (the money had been removed) and a pair of purple bed socks. I didn’t say goodbye to the other patients; they just watched me through windows the size of cheese slices.

  Dave touched my knee. Dave touched my face. Dave touched my hair. He was smiling.

  ‘I’m glad to have you back,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad to be back,’ I said. I wasn’t sure what that meant. Mostly I looked forward to wearing sunglasses and eating real meat.

  ‘I thought’ – he looked at me – ‘we could visit Gran soon. Maybe. If you’re up for it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and I meant it.

  We drove home through rows of gnarled vines and fields of black-faced sheep and fast along the generic paddocked highway. We stopped at the petrol station by the exit and I got a Golden Gaytime and ate it with the breeze on my face. Dave jiggled in his seat, his knee going up and down and smacking against his keys, which sounded like a wind chime.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing!’ Jiggle jiggle jiggle.

  We pulled into our driveway – Cabbaga, a copper plate on a stone letterbox. Next door, Ashok’s car sat idle. On the other side, a child ran in circles with an ice-cream container on its head. Everything about the house was familiar, from the wrinkled bark of the sugar gum to the dip in the path that clipped the undercarriage of the car.

  A sign on Sylvia’s house announced that it was FOR SALE. I wondered if Fleur might buy it, just for a moment.

  ‘How is Dad?’ I said. I heard his words again, traces of them. His relief.

  Dave leaned across to kiss my cheek. ‘He said they might come down at Easter.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  ‘If you like.’

  He took my bag inside. It weighed nothing.

  I closed myself in the bathroom and lined up my pills along the shelf. One in the morning (football-shaped, with a blue tinge) to keep the fear at bay; one in the evening (white and round like a button) to keep my spirits up. I was to take them at the same time every day, every single day, not even five minutes late, under threat of certain readmission to the hospital. Dave had bought me a pill box – a plastic pocket Monday through to Friday – but I couldn’t bring myself to use it and become old so I put them all in a metallic green bag.

  ‘Heather?’ He lingered outside the door.

  ‘I’m on the toilet,’ I said, which was a lie, but having had my every move scrutinised for so many weeks, being alone in a room was a greater pleasure almost than I could fathom. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. Hurry, though.’ I heard his shoes on the wooden floor as he paced.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No, nothing’s wrong. No. Are you done? Come on.’

  I washed my hands with scalding hot water because no one had replaced the soap.

  Dave hovered over me.

  ‘Okay, seriously,’ I said. ‘Have you eaten something funny? What is going on?’

  At the top of the stairs we had new doors, white louvred panels that opened with a silver handle. I moved to open them, to let the light in, but hesitated at the garden beyo
nd. It was a garden I hardly remembered, a half-unknown garden, a pond that I couldn’t reliably place, a forked fig tree and some planks of wood.

  ‘I made you a cup of tea.’ Bone china roses painted on. Not a garden. ‘I’ll help you.’ He pulled the doors in the middle; they unfolded to reveal my wicker chair, a frayed pink cushion, an iron table with a porcelain pot. And beyond, the garden, my garden. I strained to see it in the deafening sunshine.

  The grass was flat. A sprawling green void.

  ‘Where are the pittosporums?’ I said, as though they had been a compass bearing.

  ‘Gone!’ His face so bright, a sun, a beacon. Lawn and dirt as far as I could see. Teacup quaking in my hand.

  ‘And the rest of it?’

  ‘Let me show you,’ he said.

  We walked hand in hand past the bench and down the sloping face of the valley, no longer a mess of tangled drapery and tall soldiers and dark corridors, but wearing a robe of thin green wool. Where the pittosporums had been, neat rows of seedlings – impatiens and petunias and skirted primulas, identified by plastic cards with photos of their mature form. They had been carefully placed, six inches apart, room to grow and change and bloom. Closer to the fence line Dave had planted a bed of leggy flowers – the slender poison of calla lilies and bursts of agapanthus in white and purple; they grew like teenage boys, quick and hungry.

  ‘It’s very neat,’ I said.