The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  ANNA RAN THE used clothing stall at the school fair. She put some things away for the boys. Bethany came down to the hall in the afternoon to see what she had. Anna held up clothes against herself, showing off the labels. Pleated skirts, velvet jackets that still held the imprint of brooches on their lapels, shirt-waisters, a voile silk skirt, a wrap-around skirt with a loose top to match.

  ‘Oh,’ said Anna, ‘I could get married in this old thing.’ She held the wrap-around suit up against her.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Nell Parker, fossicking at the other end of the trestle table. ‘I used to love wearing that outfit.’

  ‘Oh, was that yours?’ cried Anna.

  Nell Parker had been a friend of Bethany and Peter’s, in the far-off days of their marriage and of Anna, too. She saw herself as a respectable woman; she hadn’t called Bethany for the last two years. ‘And how are you, my dear?’ she said to her now. She didn’t say m’dear, in that endearing fashion that has been adapted to intimacy, but as if Bethany were a recalcitrant girl. She ignored Anna altogether.

  ‘I love the gear you’re wearing now,’ said Anna smoothly.

  Nell was clad in a red poplin boiler suit, belted at the waist.

  ‘Sydney?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘You look terrifically modern. I don’t suppose I could try it on?’ Nell looked nonplussed. ‘Oh, come on Nell,’ said Anna. ‘It won’t take a moment. We’ve got a little cubicle made up at the back of the stage. You’ll mind the shop, won’t you Bethany?’

  ‘Yes, go on, Nell,’ said Bethany, as if they were still friends, suddenly full of Anna’s malice.

  Nell was discomforted enough to want to make amends. She hesitated, and gave in. The two women disappeared behind the curtain. Soon, Anna reappeared, parading herself. Nell’s face peeked out from behind the curtain, her hand over her mouth. ‘Shit,’ she said.

  Anna looked magnificent, her hair let loose and tumbling across her shoulders, a cinch belt off the stall holding her tiny waist.

  ‘I’ll trade you,’ said Anna, taking Nell’s old suit off the stand, and throwing it towards the curtain.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ Nell said.

  ‘Are you coming after me?’ Anna called, laughing.

  Bethany was doubled with laughter, waiting for Nell to chase Anna down the hall in her knickers. She knew it wouldn’t happen.

  ‘I’ll give you fifty, no make it a hundred, you won’t get a better offer than that.’ Anna took some money out of her purse, and threw it after the wrap-around suit.

  Nell appeared in a few minutes, her face red and furious. Bethany remembered the time Nell told her, with sadness, that she couldn’t eat gravy any more with her roasts.

  PHOTOGRAPHS. THIS ONE, she finds loose in the back of a book when she is dusting. The red boiler suit is what Anna wore to her wedding. She stands by Des, dressed in a stiff out-of-date blue suit, his crinkly thinning hair slicked back from his forehead, a worried look on his face, as if he didn’t know what he was doing there. Perhaps there is a look of pained disappointment already in his expression. Anna stands radiantly by his side, as if it is all perfectly normal, a white bouquet held against the boiler suit. You can tell, looking at it now, that it is all disaster ahead. Lyle was a skinny, tall boy whose acne resisted every treatment. He was addicted to squeezing pimples, in long, tortuous sessions in the bathroom. He didn’t want a mother.

  ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Gerald had said, when he heard Anna was marrying Des. ‘That guy was in the military. He went to Korea. Besides.’ Besides what, he decided not to say.

  He seemed to get over his aversion quite soon. All the same, he said Anna was wasted on Des. Anna was always being wasted on someone, Bethany thought.

  FREEWAYS CAME UP for sale. The place was a ruin, only fit for demolition, the land agents said, but the land was rich. Fertile. A great market garden if everything on it was razed. ‘It’s not as bad as that,’ Anna reported. The cottage had burnt down before the last of the commune moved out, but the main house was intact, if you disregarded the bottles and tins lying around and a few broken windows. And the packing shed was fine. Not that it was much use to anyone unless they did plan to market garden. ‘If I had the money,’ Anna said, ‘I’d buy it myself. Eh, Petal?’ she said, squeezing Des’s cheek.

  Des smiled, a silly, pathetic look of gratitude that he had been noticed. They were a match for Jack Spratt and his wife. Des had become more inward and old-looking, as if he was out of his depth. Almost overnight, he appeared diminished from the burly, key-swinging guard who had captured the sisters at the festival. Bethany was fairly sure they didn’t sleep together. Perhaps they did once or twice at the beginning, as some sort of honouring of the contract. But it was clear that Des slept in the big bed with dark, stained oak ends, in a room that showed no sign of Anna. In the next room, Anna’s make-up stood on the dressing table and the single bed was covered with a bright Indian-weave spread.

  Yet there was something about Des that told Bethany he knew Anna as a wife. There was a term she remembered from the schoolyard, a grubby phrase, but she couldn’t get it out of her head. When Des looked at Anna, what she thought was, he’s cunt struck. Whenever she came near him, he furtively touched her arm or her wrist, as though she might dissolve if he did not confirm her reality to himself.

  At first it had appeared that he knew nobody in town, despite his long residence there. But gradually it became clear that he knew a great many people at a distance. As though he had been watching them, Bethany thought, and shivered. The people he did know were from the church his wife had attended before her death. Some of the women came to the church, wearing black, to watch him marry Anna. None of them came near him, after the wedding.

  So that, in the beginning, he and Anna were out on the same kind of limb as Bethany and Gerald, still pursuing their sinful private existence. In spite of himself, Des liked visiting them. It made Anna more content. And Bethany found she didn’t mind Des singing ‘Land of Our Fathers’ like Harry Secombe, whether the All Blacks were playing Wales or not. ‘Wales, Wales, Wales’, they all sang, stamping their feet, until her boys woke up and poked bleary faces round the door. Des cried when he sang, emotion so naked it frightened her sometimes. But it was real feeling and lately Bethany had found that this had become a blurry subject.

  THEY STAYED UP all night and talked when Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance came out.

  ‘We were before our time,’ said Gerald to Bethany. ‘I told you to think of the gap in the mountains.’

  ‘He thinks he’s Phaedrus,’ said Bethany, and Anna laughed. Only Des, who hadn’t read the book, was silent.

  ‘Actually, you told me that the mountains might not be mountains.’

  ‘It’s the same thing,’ cried Gerald.

  ‘I don’t think it is,’ said Bethany.

  ‘You’re talking about the existence of matter.’

  ‘I’m talking about what matters. I’ve been thinking,’ he said, suddenly portentous. Bethany didn’t like him when he was like this, expecting everyone to hang on his words. ‘I wouldn’t mind buying Freeways myself.’

  ‘Dreams are free,’ laughed Bethany. She could feel danger brushing her cheek. But there wasn’t much to laugh about these days. She wanted to be a couple with Gerald. ‘What would you do if you lived at Freeways?’

  ‘Make clay pots.’ Gerald had been going to pottery night classes for the past year. ‘I reckon there’s a huge market for domestic pots out there. Gardens are coming back all the rage. I could build a kiln out the back. That packing shed would be brilliant for displaying them.’

  ‘Very tempting, sweetheart.’

  ‘No, seriously. Would you come and live out there?’

  ‘Where are you going to get the money?’

  ‘We could sell this place,’ he said easily. The room had gone quiet.

  ‘No,’ said Bethany.’

  ‘Think about it. What’s so great about this?’


  ‘You’ve mentioned that before,’ she said stiffly. ‘Anyway Peter’s still got money in it. I wouldn’t get that much out of it if I sold.’

  ‘No, perhaps you wouldn’t,’ he said, and poured them all another drink.

  AFTER WORK, THE next evening, Gerald carried a bundle of papers when he walked into the house, not quite meeting her eye.

  ‘Busy day?’

  ‘Hell, really. We’ve got an inspection on at the office.’

  He put the papers down on the bench beside her, not wanting to comment on them, but meaning her to see them. The top paper was a signed option on Freeways.

  ‘Gerald! How?’

  ‘A bit of money I had tucked away.’ The paper mentioned a deposit of forty thousand dollars.

  ‘But you haven’t got that sort of money.’

  ‘Well.’ Shifting from one foot to the other. She remembered his father the bishop, purple and gold, she supposed. The bishop had been dead for years. He threw me out, Gerald once told her, in a moment of pathos.

  ‘Gerald, have you been sitting on money you haven’t told me about?’

  ‘I’m offering to share it with you now.’

  ‘I think you’d better go,’ said Bethany.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Gerald, leaning against the fridge door.

  ‘Get out of my way, I need some milk.’ Bethany began to push him, but found herself beating his chest with her fists. ‘Fuck off, Gerald.’

  He caught her wrists and held them in the air. ‘You know your trouble, you just want to have control over everybody. You’d have had control over my money years ago if you knew I had it.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘Well, look how you’re carrying on. I mean, look at you.’

  Bethany did look, but at him, his laziness, his arrogance; she thought about what he had taken from her. She wondered what on earth she could have found attractive. Flashing before her, that summer when she had been alone, a vision lurking at the back of her consciousness for the past year, but she wouldn’t admit to it. That solitude, it was still tempting.

  ‘You’ll see the kids then?’ She didn’t know whether it mattered to the boys or not. She was ashamed of how little she knew what they thought these days.

  ‘What’s this about, Bethany?’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’

  ‘You’ll be over this in a few days.’

  ‘It’s not my period.’

  ‘Then what? Tell me.’

  ‘Trust.’

  ‘You’re acting as if we’re finished. There’s nothing to stop you from coming to Freeways,’ Gerald said. He took a beer out of the fridge and flicked off the top. ‘I’m still Abbie’s father. That seems kind of important, that a kid has a father.’ Playing Peter’s absence against her.

  ‘I expect you’re right.’

  ‘It’s a change in direction. We can work it through. You’ll be surprised how this thing will go. I’ve done all the research. You’re not going to stop me, are you?’ Knowing that she couldn’t stop him doing anything.

  No wonder the bishop had thrown him out. All the same it wasn’t just over, the way she had, for a moment, imagined it might be.

  ANNA WENT OUT to help Gerald set up the pottery at Freeways. It’s not because he’s such great company, she explained to Bethany, it’s just that I always could see what it could be like out there if it was properly run. Three young people were employed by Gerald, two strong men and a woman who, Bethany, gathered from Anna, was there mostly to do the cooking and cleaning up.

  ‘It sounds like him,’ Bethany snorted. ‘I’ll bet he pays them peanuts.’

  Though it was astonishing how much money Gerald appeared to have to spend on the project. Bethany herself didn’t do much cooking or cleaning in his absence. Solitude was great, and it relieved one of the need to make much effort. She read, she smoked, she lay on the bed, her face upturned to the ceiling, and looked at nothingness. In the summer the kids went out into the bush, and she liked the quiet, the requirement to do absolutely nothing.

  But Gerald did better than anyone expected. His glazes were deep and richly coloured; Bethany could see that perhaps he had found something he could do, after all. They didn’t say they lived apart; sometimes Bethany thought she had made a mistake not going with him. She wondered, occasionally, what she would say the next time he asked her to join him. But he didn’t.

  HERE IS ANOTHER picture, one of herself she keeps at the back of the album. The face of the woman is bloated and strange, her clothes dowdy and unkempt. It is a photograph kept only because it is the last one her son Ritchie took of her, with the last gift his father ever sent him, a fancy new camera with a flash. It is one of a series of photographs her sons took over one holiday, when they camped outside at nights, like wild animals. Their bony, bare-chested bodies, the tiny biceps they flex as they look at the camera, a cigarette she never even thought of them having at the time. But why should she? For nearly two years her children were people she saw in a dream. Now she wonders, were they afraid at nights?

  WAS SHE TOO hard on herself? At the time, she did know that the boys were, more or less, safe.

  ‘I’ll keep an eye out for them,’ Des told her, on one of his visits. He had taken to turning up unannounced. Anna was away at teachers’ in-training courses, at conferences on children with special needs, at Freeways, helping Gerald. Bethany didn’t know whether Anna was having an affair with Gerald or not. She was sleeping with someone — you could tell from the way she glowed, the secret, amused smiles she gave the world, the way her eyes wandered off into space when she was talking to you. She was smitten with someone, not Des.

  It never was.

  Over the summer, Des prowled round at night, watching over her boys, out there in the wild. He had a regular round through the town, checking on business premises that hired him to guard their properties against burglary. Crime was rising. People were afraid of the way the town was changing, gone out of control; it started when that bunch of weirdos settled out at the commune.

  Not that there was any problem with the place now, very productive, buses carrying tourists visited the thriving little industry that had sprung up at Freeways. The owner showed people around at the weekends, wearing tight jeans and a white shirt open to the waist, a gold chain nestling in his chest hair.

  Des sometimes sat with his hands hanging between his lap, a far-off look in his eyes. ‘I said to her, where were you? Where did you go last night?’

  ‘What did she say?’ Bethany knew it was expected of her to ask this, but she hated herself all the same for doing so. A betrayal. Her sister.

  ‘Said nuffing. I could follow her, you know.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t, would you?’

  ‘No, no I wouldn’t.’

  Bethany was appalled. Poor bastard. You don’t want to know. Christ, Anna. There was something unravelling there in front of her, like a piece of knitting falling apart; she couldn’t pick up the stitches, her fingers like sausages, fat and clumsy.

  ‘I do love her, you know,’ he said, one morning, gulping down coffee. ‘I love Anna.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘Never fought I’d love anyone else after the wife died. Married her for Lyle’s sake, which you might say was a mistake. But not for me. You’d never know. Never know, Befany.’

  ‘Never know what?’

  ‘How much I want her near me. Just so I can watch the fings she does. Watch her when she’s asleep. Go into her room and watch her breeve.’ He paused, tears watering at the edge of his eyes. ‘I watch her hanging out the washing, arms up, you know, looks like she’s dancing.’

  Bethany worried about Des, although she told herself it wasn’t her business. Des had shaved his skull like a storm trooper’s, a scary look, but he said it was good to feel light round his head.

  ‘He doesn’t look okay,’ she told Anna. ‘He said he’s got headaches.’

  ‘Who hasn’t got headaches?’ said Anna,
with impatience. ‘Everyone gets them.’

  Des had come in with a big bruise on his forehead.

  ‘I banged my head,’ he told Bethany.

  ‘How did you do that?’ she asked, thinking he had walked into something, or an object had fallen on him.

  ‘Like this.’ He stood up and banged his head against the wall, faster and faster, as if she wasn’t there. When he stopped his eyes seemed adrift.

  ‘He said he couldn’t see straight,’ Bethany told Anna.

  ‘I’ll say he can’t,’ said Anna. ‘I wish he’d sort Lyle out. I’m sick of that boy — he’s the dirtiest kid you ever came across. Just about as untidy as you.’

  ‘Well thanks for nothing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but honest to God, what are you doing to yourself, Bethany?’

  The sisters seemed to be asking the same questions of each other. ‘Do you have a death wish or something?’

  After Ritchie’s funeral Anna cradled Bethany in her arms. ‘Sister,’ she said, ‘sister, what have we done to ourselves?’ They stood in the funeral parlour beside Ritchie, his little glassy freckled face with its downy upper lip. His mauve eyelids were like those of a choir boy.

  3: WORDS FROM ANYWHERE

  DES CALLAHAN WAS dead. He would have died. The tumour, a glioma, had infiltrated his brain with a speed surgery possibly couldn’t have halted. At least, that was what they could tell from what was left of his brain. It wasn’t the tumour that killed Des. He killed himself, one Saturday afternoon, sitting at the table in his kitchen. He held a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. Most of his brain and the front of his face was splattered over the plain kitchen walls where Anna had placed few pictures or decorations. Blood splattered the cross left by his wife.

  For years and years, Bethany would wonder what it was like for Anna when she walked into the room. It was the sight of Des, she decided, that made her leave town the next day, after the police had interviewed her, and before Des’s funeral. This sight had so shocked her that she said goodbye to no one, not even Bethany. This is what Bethany would think.