The Paper House

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘Is that a good thing?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  His hand so warm in my hand, clammy, vice-gripped. He pointed to the ground, to a knee-high row of olive saplings and a slightly taller one with a tinsel bow tie, like an older brother. And to another piece of ground, where winding threads of polished stones took us further and further into what might have been a forest, once, or an archway, or a bit of mud underfoot. I tried to place it, my old garden. I ached under the fullness of it, with the lush undergrowth and the thick canopy that hid the day so completely, that allowed me to escape. I felt fiercely exposed, as though midday might eat me up.

  At the back of the block we met a brick wall, ten feet high, cracked and mossy. We sat in its shadow and I looked back up the hill, at the garden that was no longer a slab of earth but a breathing would-be hideaway, a living embodiment of potential and of life.

  ‘I never did find whatever it was that kept you down here,’ Dave said. ‘You and your secrets.’

  I wanted to ask about the pond and the fork in the creek, but I couldn’t.

  ‘Now I need your help,’ he said, and he had his hands on my shoulders so I knew he was serious. ‘Tell me what else it needs.’

  ‘I can show you exactly what it needs,’ I said. ‘Wait here.’ He smiled.

  I knew I had pages of pink and purple and blue and orange and yellow and brown and green nested in chalked black outlines. Leptospermum petersonii: a lemon-scented tea tree. An ironbark, Eucalyptus sideroxylon. And three sweet acacias in different gelato colours. I heaved the throbbing, humming book from its place beneath the wicker chair and held it to my chest, the promise of it, the completeness of it. Dave waited by the wall, smile so wide I saw his back teeth.

  ‘What have you got, then?’ he said. I dropped to the ground next to him, hungry to see my garden come to life. We turned the pages together.

  ‘This can’t be right,’ I said. Turning, turning. ‘I don’t – Dave, I don’t understand.’ Turning, turning.

  ‘Let me see.’

  Turning, turning.

  The knot in my chest; my heart, my heart.

  ‘Dave,’ I said.

  ‘Just look.’

  Page after page of a little girl’s face. Laughing. Singing. Reading.

  And pink like a shell, like a sunset, like a heartbeat.

  THE KITCHEN IS empty. There’s ten bucks on the bench so I take that for lunch.

  Mum said she would drive me so I’m not late for my practice exam. Guess not. I nick a couple of cigarettes from her dresser, look around to see if she’s watching but kind of don’t care if she is anyway.

  It’s still pretty early. I sit on the front step and smoke and wait for the bus to come. It’s warm and my skin starts to heat up in the sun.

  I wonder if Gran’s come to pick her up again.

  She probably just forgot. Probably went to buy chocolate or a cat or adopt an orphan or something.

  I pick at the grass growing out of the step.

  Still, she seemed pretty keen yesterday. Said we could get a milkshake on the way. Said she was sure I would be fine.

  I butt out the cigarette on the cement.

  She said she would take me because she had something to go to afterwards. An appointment or something.

  I go back inside and call Gran.

  Have you heard from Mum? I say. She was going to take me to school.

  Not since yesterday, she says.

  Oh, I say.

  She says, When did you last see her?

  Her voice is shaking.

  I say, Yesterday.

  I twist the phone cord around my finger and look out the window. The bus will be here in five minutes so I’m going to have to leave without her.

  Gran’s breathing is coming down the phone. It’s really fast. She is saying some things about how she’s sure everything is fine, and do I need her to come and take me?

  Yeah, I say. That would be great.

  I put the phone down and keep looking out the window. There’s a bit of the beach where dogs are allowed and I can see Shithead down there, sniffing around.

  She’s not allowed at the beach by herself. Probably got under the gate again. Mum must have left without checking. I guess. I try to breathe slower. I think of Dad telling Mum not to catastrophise.

  It takes Gran fifteen minutes to get here from her house so I should probably get the dog back.

  I go down and Shithead runs off and I shout after her but she’s halfway down the beach already, playing with other people’s dogs.

  And then I see these orange running shoes.

  Dad got those same ones for her birthday. She was going to be a runner, she said. They were so expensive.

  My heart is slamming around in my body.

  I run to the bushes and up to the orange shoes and I look her right in the eye and she stares back at me and says nothing.

  I start screaming and I keep screaming and everything spins and jumps around and for a second I think I am back in the house on the phone to Gran but no one is looking at me, just people standing around and they haven’t even noticed, they haven’t even looked away from their own stupid lives for one second to see the woman in the sand with her running shoes sticking out and her hair all neat, neater than it has ever been before.

  And I kneel down next to her, the woman in the orange running shoes, the woman who must be a stranger, who can only be a stranger, a stranger with the same orange running shoes and the same blonde hair. I think I am still screaming but I can’t even hear it. All I can hear is the waves punching me in the face and my blood rushing around me and out onto the sand.

  I put my hand on the purple dress, the same purple dress she wore at my birthday, the same purple dress I saw hanging in her wardrobe. It is stiff and ironed. It has never been stiff and ironed.

  I drag my hand along the purple fabric and I just keep looking at the orange running shoes that are someone else’s running shoes, just moving my hand up along this cold purple dress and looking at the running shoes. And then I touch the collarbone, and it is cold and greasy but there is something on the collarbone and as soon as I touch it I know it’s a necklace with a shell on it because that’s the one I made at school.

  And my whole body just falls to pieces on top of this person, this person who is exactly my mother except not her at all.

  I don’t even know how to get Dad, but somehow I don’t have to and I see him, running across the road with his hands in the air. Cars are beeping at him and people are shouting, What the fuck are you doing? but I know he can’t hear them. He runs to the beach and he screams and puts his face right into the purple dress and his whole body is racked and torn.

  I don’t want to look at her but I do anyway, like I can’t control myself. She is smiling and her eyes are far away like she’s having a daydream, and maybe she is except for the blood coming out of her ears and her tongue thrown out of her face like a fat steak. And then finally someone hears us screaming, I guess, because a man with a green shirt comes running over and he sees her there on the sand with her orange running shoes and he says,

  Fucking junkies.

  And Dad gets up faster than I’ve ever seen and punches this guy right in the face.

  Then there are heaps of people everywhere, trying to stop Dad punching this guy and trying to stop the guy punching Dad back. They haven’t even seen her. I have to stand in the middle and scream at them to fucking stop it.

  Someone calls an ambulance. It’s the lady from next door. She says, We are at the foreshore and a woman appears to have committed suicide. Her voice is so calm. She seems very far away.

  And all I know how to think is that we should have called an ambulance yesterday, when she bought six new pairs of shoes, or the day before that when she took me on a picnic at the beach and we ate cheese until our faces hurt, or the week before when we crept out in the middle of the night and hung fairy lights from the tree in the front yard just because.

  Th
at’s when we should have called an ambulance. Not now, not now when we are looking down at her face with the blood drained away, not now with her fingers locked in place around a silver bullet, not now.

  Then Gran’s car pulls up and just at that second I remember the exam and school and Gran is just here to pick me up but I can’t make my legs run and I just keep sitting there in the sand and I can hear her calling my name. She is coming down the beach, calling my name, and I want to stop her so she doesn’t have to see but I can’t get the words out.

  She falls into the sand next to me. She’s on her knees and she has her old face on the purple dress and she looks like she’s having a proper seizure.

  So I put my arms around her body and she shudders and sparks and so do I.

  The ambulance comes and people just keep standing around, trying to make it into a story they can tell their wives at dinner.

  IT HAD BEEN six months since my daughter died. Our daughter.

  Dave was the only one who knew the date exactly, on account of his having been there when the light went out. He bought me daisies tied with string and made me a cup of tea. ‘We can think about her all day, if you like,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would like that.’

  In the morning we thought about her beginnings. We thought about the plans we had made for her, standing in the kitchen in our apartment. She would be a doctor, a singer, a writer, an engineer. We would go to Paris and Moscow and New York, and take her photograph, her wide-eyed wonder. She would like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and I would read to her about a secret world inside a closet and a boy wizard. We would have breakfast on the balcony, tiny sausages and toast soldiers to dip into egg yolk, and we would go for long walks to the beach, where we would watch her collect shells and play in the shallows. We would see her graduate from kindergarten, from primary school, from high school, from university. Our walls would be covered floor to ceiling with her awards, her artwork, her projects, her changing face.

  I had read in a book that an unborn baby could recognise its mother’s voice in the fifth month, and from that time on I had spoken to her, sung to her. I’d told her about the world, about the people banging around downstairs, about Mrs Carson in the next apartment, who was seventy-four but still brought home a different man every week. I’d told her about the Indian place around the corner, and how I would take her there for chicken korma, and I’d told her about the dumpling house at the end of the street, and how I would take her there for xiao long bao. I’d told her about the pancakes at Mart180, and how I had decided that was the first place we would go together. I’d told her I would buy her a pretty new dress for the occasion.

  I’d told her about her dad, who was nothing like my own dad but perfect in just about every way that was necessary. I’d told her about his scuffed shoes and his teacher’s clothes, and what great roast lamb he did, and how he had been making a doll house, but to please pretend it was a surprise. I’d told her he was a teacher, and that he had been waiting his whole life for someone to teach, a captive audience to learn about Napoleon Bonaparte and passive verb forms and how to write a cinquain poem.

  And I’d told her about her grandmother, wondered if she had seen her more recently than I had, whether her blonde mane had turned white, as she had always predicted, and whether she still wore flowers behind her ears. I’d told her about the softness of her grandmother’s voice, about her slippered feet and how much she had loved Shithead – Sadie. I hadn’t told her about the nights I had slept with the light on, or the crashing of the waves against a house slowly collapsing.

  In the afternoon we thought about her endings. We thought about the minute she left us, without profundity. Days of silence, trying to contain fear, fear fighting against logic, against hope. We thought about the nights in the hospital, women breathing and screaming and crying around us – sometimes with joy, sometimes without – and the blue walls like a prison. We remembered the doctor with the white moustache, and how he had filled the whole room, how I had suffocated with him there. We thought of the nurse with the blonde moustache, who had snuck extra biscuits onto the tray, which Dave had eaten because why would I eat biscuits, when my daughter would never eat biscuits?

  Dave remembered things about her ending that I didn’t. He told me about sitting in the room while I was in surgery, and how there was golf on the TV. A man with black hair and a blue shirt won a trophy, and the crowd clapped very quietly. He told me how he went for a walk in the hospital garden, where he met a woman on a bench whose husband had just called it quits with cancer. She took off her wedding ring and showed Dave the inscription, which he couldn’t remember, but he did remember the way the skin underneath the ring was as white as paper. He told me that his mum had called him, and the nurse in the maternity ward had shouted at him for speaking while the babies were trying to sleep, and that he’d cried over the phone, and the nurse had come into the room and taken the phone away from him.

  There were other things he remembered that I didn’t: eating stale chips from a vending machine, the almost incurable stiffness from sleeping upright in an old chair, watching me while I cried. He told me about the moment they wheeled her in, in her plastic crib, in the only bed she would ever have, and how he didn’t look at her but at me, and how he saw the life fall out of me and he knew he would have to be the one to hold on to it for a while. He told me about coming back to the house and seeing her everywhere, her little blue mouth, her clenched fists, and how he had to sweep her away from the corners and the crevices before I came home, in case I saw her peeking out at me.

  And in the evening we thought about not thinking about her; when we wouldn’t think of her every minute of every day. Dave thought about the first time he went a whole day at the school thinking about marking, and Rhonda in the office being marched out, and whether he would get a pizza on the way home. I thought about a morning I had spent drawing pictures of toadstools and blue-chested birds, drinking tea and thinking about the weather.

  In the wardrobe, behind Dave’s brown shirts, I found a dress on a plastic hanger. The finest Liberty cotton: sky blue with U-shaped petals in salmon and sunrod and sage; a frilled lace collar and capped sleeves.

  ‘I bought this,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘For Grace.’

  ‘For Grace.’

  And I knew all at once why I had waited so long to say her name aloud. I knew why we had needed the whole day to think about her before I could say it, and why Dave hadn’t said it either, in all of that time. And I knew it was because contained in that one day of thinking was everything that she was or ever would be, everything we would ever know about our daughter, everything that we had named: Grace.

  I would like to show my respect for and acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I write and love and breathe, and recognise Elders past and present.

  A COLLECTION OF THANK YOUS:

  Dad, for spending longer on this manuscript than is reasonable to expect of someone, and for reading every single iteration between the first version and this version, and for telling me where it was crap and where it was good, and for hours of enthusiastic brainstorming, and for telling me elaborate tales like ‘You’re one of history’s great writers’ and for buying me breakfast.

  Mum, for inspiring me every day to smash glass ceilings and have big ideas and go out and slam face-first into the things that challenge me.

  Gaz, whom I love with my whole heart, for letting me live inside your bubble, and for your tireless enthusiasm as a listener and consoler, and for the times you shouted from the next room, ‘ARE YOU WRITING?’ and for your encyclopaedic knowledge of trees.

  Georgia and Lily, for occasionally giving me slivers of time in which to work in peace, and for motivating me to be better, every single day.

  Allison Tait, whose contribution I cannot overstate, for talking me through the total devilish nightmare that is attempting to write any kind of complete work of fictio
n, and for taking time out of every week to beat me into something resembling a person who could do it.

  Alex Craig, for being susceptible to my literary advances and letting me drive you around in my car even though I’m not very good.

  Sophie Hamley, for understanding Heather and knowing where she should live.

  Jo Butler, for duly taking over her care, and especially for calling me just to see how I was going, to see if my head had fallen off.

  Bri Collins, for your clear pathways.

  Mathilda Imlah, for giving me exactly the directions I needed to get through to the end.

  Sam Sainsbury, for your deft and constructive manipulation of my original manuscript, with its middle soft as six donuts.

  Bethanie Blanchard, for without you I would have stumbled at the first hurdle and hidden in a cave of other people’s books forever.

  Julia Spargo-Ryan, for being my favourite sister out of one.

  Andrew Weatherall, for teaching me why insects live inside chest cavities.

  Mrs Rhodes, for Year 9 English, which was the first place I felt like a writer; and Miss McLaughlin, for championing my very first piece of published writing in Year 5.

  Erin Van Krimpen, Rose Powell, Alison Asher, Erin Riley, Lauren Brown and Daniel Reeders for helping me to glue down the loose tiles.

  Alex Kidman, for emotionally blackmailing me into starting this story.

  Beaumaris Library, for not once kicking me out, even though I skulked around like a literary spectre.

  Twitter, for always having the right answers, and for humouring me endlessly as I punched my brain into oblivion.

  And thank you The Internet, for without you I would probably have got a proper job and never written this book.

  OTHER THINGS OF NOTE:

  I haven’t given names to the illnesses Heather and Shelley live with in this story. I’m not a medical professional, and I don’t have all the information about these women. I imagine Shelley as being a woman trying to be a mother in the eighties, when mental illness was a bit more secret. Maybe, in 2016, she could have found treatment that would have saved her life, but maybe not. Brains are still well ahead of medicine and society in so many ways.