‘Bring me some water,’ she said, not looking away from me, and someone ran into the kitchen and came back, handing her a glass. ‘Stand still,’ she said, and poured it over the side of my head, my ear, the tortoise’s face, and it let go immediately. Pain rushed into where its mouth had been, and she took the tortoise from me, put it on the carpet, and hugged me while I wept.
Then she did what she always did and took me to the bathroom to look at myself. Once I had slipped on the wooden floor and been carried to the mirror with my mouth full of blood, whereupon my shrieking became uncontrollable. This time I was calm. We both stared at me. My dark fringe of hair, tear-stained face. My whole ear was flushed red. There was no blood, only that little half-bracelet, the dark stamp of the beak on the sweet flesh of the lobe. In the background I could hear the women exclaiming, the sound of a cork being taken from a bottle.
I picked the tortoise up, its legs paddling. I still had the mark of its beak on my ear. We kept it in the old aviary that my father had built before I was born, and that had no birds. I brought the tortoise on to my lap, handing my mother my empty glass. She took it away and came back with her book of poems, and sat on the end of my bed. I lay back and allowed the tortoise to scramble further up my body until it was balanced on the cage of my ribs, and stayed there, eyes closing, panting gently.
My mother did not read aloud. She took one of my feet in her hands and twiddled the toes back and forth as she read to herself, and we stayed like that, each dreaming, as the autumn afternoon slowed into gold. I knew she would not make me write those letters.
SIX BEDROOMS
THE house we lived in had three storeys and six bedrooms. My room was at the back, facing east through a curtain of leaves; in the brick courtyard below was a mango tree, an avocado tree and a passionfruit vine climbing up the drainpipe.
Brett had the front room on the top floor, which he sometimes shared with his boyfriend, Neil. It was the most pleasant room in the old, rotting house, with a wide verandah looking on to the street, where occasionally I was invited to sit and drink beer. Against his bedroom wall Brett had a mirror, taller and wider than he was, with a gold curlicue frame. You sat on the verandah with a beer in your hand and if you leant in to look through the French doors you could catch sight of yourself, shifting about in its reflection.
Also upstairs was Danny, from New Zealand, with a rat’s tail, a beaky nose, and a girlfriend who had changed her name from Laurie to Lorikeet. Danny was a chef. He had a motorbike. He wore baggy black-and-white checked pants and smoked, all the time.
Then there was Evie, my friend, in the upstairs back room; we’d come together from our first house, looking to take some of the weight off our friendship.
On the middle floor at street level, down the hall from me, was Meera, with a nose-ring and a nasty tongue. She was looking for someone like me, someone she could make feel worse than she did herself. She’d probably learnt to divide and rule in the playground. Pretty soon she was closing the door to her bedroom, which I had to pass if I wanted to leave the house. I can remember pulling the tall front door shut behind me, turning into the street, and seeing through Meera’s window my other flatmates, clouds of smoke and the old Russian propaganda posters hanging on her wall. The sound of other people laughing as I set off.
Downstairs, below the level of the street, was the kitchen and the living room and the mattresses, where visitors from the commune slept or Danny slept if he and Lorikeet had had a fight. Lorikeet also had a rat’s tail, but the rest of her hair was fine and light and stuck up on her head, more like a cockatoo’s than a lorikeet’s. She had blue eyes, and wore glasses. She was softly spoken until Danny did something wrong. Then she and Meera ganged up on him. Lorikeet called him a fascist bullyboy. Meera called him a misogynist, and then her door would be shut on him too, and Danny and I would be left in the house together, our polite smiles indistinct in the dark corridor.
Sometimes we went out, our feet quiet on the grey carpet as we passed Meera’s closed door, tacitly agreeing to leave the front door open so that no one could hear us leave. I walked next to Danny in the gutter as he pushed his motorbike up the street. He wouldn’t start it till we reached the main road. I’m not sure why we didn’t want to be heard; I suppose it had to do with shame, with being seen to be left out. And also because we were going to talk secretly about the people we were leaving behind. Danny would lend me his spare helmet and we’d ride up to the Cross together and have coffee and yet more cigarettes at Bar Michelangelo. He would tell me how unhappy he was with Lorikeet, and I would commiserate. This kind of closeness, what seemed like honesty, made him feel as though we were intimate. He sometimes looked as if he wanted to kiss me but I made sure I sat just out of his reach. Then, when we got back on the bike, I would rest my body against his, very glad to be warm and holding someone.
I’ve left a room out. The middle room, middle floor, between Meera’s and mine. Probably the worst room in the house – no view out the back, or verandah out the front, and always the sound of feet as people trooped past and down the stairs to the kitchen – or the sound of the toilet flushing in the tiny bathroom next to it, or the front door incessantly opening and slamming.
For a while I didn’t think anyone lived in it. But then I opened the door and looked, and there was a mattress, sheets and a blanket, a pile of records and a poster of Elvis Costello on the wall. No cupboard or set of drawers, but a heap of clothes on the floor, and a clock radio plugged in where it could be reached from the mattress.
William loomed up at me out of the shadows one afternoon when the house was quiet, everyone gone to lectures or work. I’d been wandering the floors in that state of aloneness that is balanced perfectly between contentment and despair. I’d sat on the upstairs toilet with the door open, taking my time, staring at the stains on the opposite wall. I’d gone into Brett’s room and fingered his Mardi Gras costume – he was going as Jayne Mansfield, and his gold lamé dress waited for him on a dressmaker’s dummy. I’d considered reading Evie’s diary, but was just wise enough not to.
Eventually, knowing I needed to do something before the day tipped me into misery, I went down to the kitchen to make myself a coffee on Danny’s Atomic. I didn’t switch the light on. It was raining, so I didn’t hear the rustle of pages as William put his newspaper down, but something made me turn around. He gave me a terrible fright, coming towards me with his hand out, saying ‘I’m William.’ My head nearly hit the fridge as I started back, but I pretended it was nothing, and gave him my hand, and hoped he hadn’t heard me talking to myself as I’d come down the stairs.
We had a lot in common; mainly, we were both readers. We started by telling each other what we were reading now. Soon we were climbing the stairs to my bedroom, where we lit cigarettes and he stood in front of my bookshelves, scanning them, taking out books, turning to me to read from them. We talked and talked. With William it was competitive. He had read Kafka, Camus, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Kerouac and Pynchon. I had read Austen, Eliot, Woolf, Kipling and everything that Helen Garner had written, over and over again. I had pages of her work that I had typed and stuck on the wall next to my bed. I did not quite understand why I had done this; all I knew was that I was trying to get something started.
I pretended to have read Dostoevsky as well. I had tried, in fact, with Crime and Punishment, but hadn’t been able to scale the wall of pure dread it raised in me. We talked at each other; we lit more cigarettes; we made another pot of coffee.
He wasn’t especially good-looking – he had fine, sandy hair and very pale blue eyes, a pretty smile with pointed teeth – but I liked him very much. I did not feel bored or lonely in his company. He told me he was a journalist. He often worked late, which was why I hadn’t seen him before.
Then Meera came home. We knew it was her; she always trilled ‘Hello-o!’ when she opened the door, and if she was in a good mood, came in search of company. The sound of her bag being dumped in the hallway, the click of h
er lighter, and she was standing in my doorway, blowing a curling stream of smoke.
‘It’s you,’ she said to William. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Canberra,’ he said, closing the book I had just handed him.
‘You gonna pay some rent?’
‘Yeah.’
I looked from one to the other. There was that pulse between them, you could tell they had known each other well. My twentieth cigarette tasted awful, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to stand up and put it out.
William put the book back on the shelf. ‘See you later,’ he said to me without meeting my eyes. I watched him slide past Meera, who drew herself back against the doorjamb so that they didn’t touch. We listened to the loose slam of the front door.
‘What a dickhead,’ said Meera.
Everyone was getting ready for Mardi Gras. Evie was making us costumes. Meera was going as a flapper. She had her black hair cut in a very short bob, and a skullcap to put over it, with a feather. Her dress was gold lamé too, which you could tell irritated Brett, but Brett was on a Great Movie Stars float, and would be a long way away from Meera. I had a corset, black leather, and Evie was going to make me a stiff little skirt of red netting, which I’d wear with long boots. This was when Evie had stopped wearing dresses herself. And Danny and Lorikeet were fighting, because Lorikeet said Danny couldn’t come, because he was straight.
‘I’m straight,’ I said. We were sitting in a circle in the living room, Evie’s fabrics on our laps, Meera’s pile of make-up on the coffee table. ‘So are you.’
‘It’s different if you’re a woman,’ said Lorikeet.
‘All straight men are gay-bashers,’ said Meera, looking at herself in a tiny mirror, ‘whether they think they are or not.’
I met Danny’s eye. He shrugged, a very small shrug. He was smoking, leaning back on our old velour couch.
There was a clatter on the stairs, and we all looked up. It was William, in a suit, carrying his work bag. I had not seen him since we’d talked about books, more than a week ago.
‘Hey,’ said Danny, sitting forward.
‘Come down,’ I said, my heart flipping.
‘I will,’ said William. ‘Gimme a sec.’
He disappeared back up the stairs and Meera said, ‘Gimme a year, more like.’
We’d folded up the fabrics and were drinking beer by the time William appeared again. Danny was in the kitchen, making pizza. Meera had switched the television on and we sat on the couch and on the floor, all of us smoking except Evie, who had given up but never complained.
William sat on the one single chair. I smiled at him but it was as though the smile missed him, went over his head. He looked at me blurrily. Then his eyes started to close and his head came forward. He jerked himself back, his eyes opened, and then he smiled at me. ‘Long day at work,’ he said.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Meera, not taking her eyes from the screen. Outside it started to rain again.
The next night it was just me in the house, and when William came home from work I ran down to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of wine my father had given me. It took a while for him to come out of his room but when he did I stepped out of mine to meet him, and he was glad to see me, I could tell.
We sat on my bed drinking the wine and talking. Our talk had an odd quality this time, like a train caught between stations. We would seem to make a lurch forward, towards some other, some new kind of intimacy, but then stop. When the wine was finished I went into the little bathroom next door and got some water. I had a class in the morning. William seemed to have a very dry mouth – he kept smacking his lips, running his tongue over his teeth. He’d already drunk most of the bottle of wine but he was still thirsty. He hardly seemed to notice as I handed him glass after glass of water. He tipped the water into his throat and gave back the glass like a good child and went on talking, but never about me, or, after a while, to me. And sometimes right in the middle of a sentence his eyes would close, and then his head would do that snapping back and he’d pick up where he’d left off.
I waited for him to touch me. I left my hand lying beside him so he could pick it up, but his hands were busy. He was itchy, and he needed to smoke, so he scratched and lit and dragged and squashed out cigarette after cigarette. It was two am when I finally said, ‘I have to go to sleep.’
‘Of course!’ He staggered to his feet, his shoulder crashing against the wall beside my bed.
I saw him to the door of my bedroom as though it was my house. He was tall, much taller than I was. He turned to hug me, bent over me, and I put my arms around his waist and my face against his chest. You could still smell him, under the smoke. I reeled suddenly – his weight had become too much – he had fallen asleep on my shoulder.
‘You should go to bed,’ I said, lifting his arms off my shoulders.
‘I love you,’ he said.
I stared at him. He turned round, put a hand up to the wall, and guided himself back to his bedroom. He kicked the door shut. I heard him crash on to his mattress.
In those days lack of sleep was something different. It was like the dirt and gel in my hair. It built up; it made a shape out of my personality. I didn’t feel tired, I just felt different. I laughed very easily, and cried also.
I went to my film class the next morning. It was a big day – we were finally seeing Hiroshima Mon Amour. I found a place with my friends on the floor. The tutor switched the lights off, and the film started. It seemed to breathe; people on the screen whispered; my friends shifted beside me; I fell asleep.
I invented a persona for myself: I was a girlfriend. Almost. I was not stupid enough to rely on I love you. But I thought, or hoped, that in time it would come true, that there would be something material to show for my interest in William.
Of course, it was not just me that needed inventing. William was so insubstantial, and I saw him so infrequently. There were never any promises to meet again, and no indication of whether he would be sleeping in his bedroom or not. Weeks passed in which he did not seem to live with us, or came home so late that even I could not wait up for him. There was little to base my feelings on. I had to make him up, almost completely.
One night he said he would ask Sandy and Matthew for dinner, old friends who’d been together since uni, who lived over in east Sydney, near the water. The six years’ difference in our ages would show, I knew. These people owned their flat, were probably planning children. William said he would cook. I tried to talk him out of it, but that ended in our only fight, which was engagement of a sort.
‘You don’t trust me!’ he shouted. It was two in the morning; we were walking to the 7-Eleven for cigarettes. The rain had stopped, but I had to steer William around the puddles.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, keeping hold of his hand.
‘You’ve never trusted me!’ he shouted, wrenching himself away. He staggered, then fetched up against a telegraph pole. He was mad. I wondered if he was lost, muddled in his mind, and thought I was some other girl – a real girlfriend.
‘I trust you,’ I said. ‘You can cook.’
‘How can I cook if you don’t trust me?’ He launched himself at me, and I held out my hands – not to hold him off, but to catch him. I would never hold a man so soft again. He was like a big baby, flopping gently into my arms.
We couldn’t very well ask our flatmates to leave on the night that Sandy and Matthew were coming. As it turned out, Evie, Danny and Lorikeet were going to a party. Meera was somewhere, I didn’t know where. Brett came down while I was cleaning the kitchen and stood in a surly way over a saucepan of two-minute noodles while I flapped around behind him.
‘All right, all right,’ he said, when I snatched the empty saucepan from him and ran water into it. He took a bottle of Coke out of the fridge, wedged it under one arm, and headed upstairs, carrying his slopping bowl in front of him.
William came banging down the stairs with a supermarket packet of chicken breasts, a tin of green peppercorns a
nd a carton of cream. He crashed them on to the kitchen table, which I’d just begun to set. I hated chicken – that bloody, chemical smell of the factory floor, of their miserable lives.
The doorbell rang.
‘You get it,’ said William.
I ran up the stairs, along the corridor, and pulled the door open. Sandy and Matthew looked just as I’d expected them to – older than I was, nicely dressed, fashionable but hardly daring. Sandy’s long hair had been blow-dried into the curving, face-framing shape that was popular then. They smiled nervously at me and Sandy gave me a kiss.
‘William’s in the kitchen,’ I said, gesturing down the corridor.
‘Yikes,’ said Matthew as he passed me.
William shooed us out into the living room while he cooked. I opened the wine that his friends had brought, and we sat on the velour couch and they asked me questions, kindly, as though they were William’s parents and he’d proposed to me. It became quickly apparent that they had not seen him for a long time, and were hoping he might have changed.
‘Fuck!’
I got up, and went to see what was wrong. William, with a cut hand, was standing in a puddle of green peppercorns. He’d splashed his t-shirt. I bent over and picked up the empty tin, dropped it into the rubbish.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘I’ll go down to the shop and get some more.’
‘I’ll go,’ he said, lifting his feet as I cleaned the floor around him.
‘You need a bandaid,’ I said, nodding at his bleeding hand.
He wiped it on the back of his jeans. ‘It’s just a scratch.’
‘He’ll be back in a minute,’ I said to Sandy and Matthew, as they turned their surprised faces up to me. The door slammed, and the house shook. ‘Have some more wine.’
They left at 9.30. We’d finished the wine, and I’d introduced them to Brett, who’d stumped down for another bottle of Coke and the labelled bar of chocolate he had at the back of the fridge. Meera had come part of the way down the stairs, stuck her head round the door and retreated before I could say anything. William had not come back from the shops.
Six Bedrooms Page 10
