The Life of Houses

by Lisa Gorton

  ‘Yes of course,’ he said, stepping quickly back. ‘Can I drive you?’

  In answer, she lifted one hand to show her keys.

  ‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘you’re right to drive?’

  Closed in her car, she felt recovered enough to call out, ‘See you again, no doubt.’ He bent double to peer through the car window, his one hand raised in farewell. As she pulled out she saw him standing there, hand still raised. Seeing him from this distance, a dark shape in her rear-view mirror, she could almost admit that he was pitiable. At this moment, though, his neediness was more than irritating. She found that she could resent him, and bitterly, for making her acknowledge to herself her own limitations. What was it, what was it for, this thing which overrode feeling, so that she would not ask him what she so much wanted to know: where Kit was?

  The highway was running through a field of canola: sudden chemical yellow. There had not been canola before. A metal sound, which Anna took at first to be the sound of insects, turned out to be an immense machine, an irrigator advancing along the field’s far side, its side-struts of rust-coloured metal extending perhaps a hundred metres. Under these, the sprinklers caught a blurred radiance. How implacably it advanced, as if on rails—it was perhaps that implacability which made it dream-like, which drove loneliness in. She thought, what I dread is not grief but something blander, more permanent: some final knowledge of my own incapacity. Because it had been the same thing: with Kit, with Peter, even with Scott back there on the street. Other people seemed to have accesses of feeling, of impulsive warmth, which she could not find in herself. All these months with Peter she had been reproaching herself for her recklessness but what had their night on the beach shown if not how careful with herself she had always been? Had it been that with Matt too? She had always believed that he was the one who kept back, who said so little. Had she from the beginning been too limited, unkind?

  With a quick motion of self-revulsion, she wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. She never could cry on her own without remembering how as a child she had lain awake in the dark imagining her own funeral and sobbing with her knuckles pressed against her teeth. On her face, now, a mocking smile—even the memory of that voluptuous self-importance drove her back upon a social mode. She could not be alone with it; she could not help but imagine how it would look to other people. And here I am, she thought, driving to see my dying father, and all the pity I feel is for myself.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Kit lay rigid under the covers listening to their morning. Someone was having a shower—Miranda’s father, maybe, or her brother. Carol and Miranda had already showered; they were talking in the kitchen. Carol was making coffee; her voice sounded out sharply over the whirr of the machine. Somewhere a door slammed. How long could she stay pretending to be asleep? People sleep till ten, she told herself, and looked at her watch. Just seven: hours to get through: hours and hours. She turned on her side, pulled Carol’s eucalyptus-scented sheets over her head. At once the memory of last night’s drive from the hospital poured into her. Even while it was happening it had been weightless, which brought it closer now—a dream happening again, the headlights of Scott’s car making a narrow world as though inventing it out of the dark. Over the cattle grid, along the overgrown drive, her grandparents’ house—Scott telling her not to forget her toothbrush, saying ‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ while he kept the engine running. When she opened the car door the sea, sounding so close, brought back her first night here. Out of the headlights, around the corner of the house, she stepped into utter dark. The kitchen was unlocked. Feeling for the light switch, she felt the house as a single presence: patient, opposed. The lights along the hall, the light in her bedroom, the light in the bathroom: she advanced along a track of light, but the rooms belonged to the house.

  She opened her eyes: Carol’s house. Morning, coming through the plantation shutters, marked stripes of greenish light on the carpet and up to the handle of the built-in wardrobe. Everything in Carol’s house was pale grey, duck-egg blue or beige. Everything matched, it had been chosen at the same time: it was a house without history. On the wall over her bed they had hung one of Miranda’s pictures in a gilt frame—a pencil drawing of three birds in a row on a very theoretical branch. Each bird was looking down its beak with a dignified and slightly pained look. In their almost-rightness these birds exactly illustrated how Kit felt: wrong in a way that was hard to pin down. Looking at the picture long enough gave a feeling like the beginning of a headache.

  Kit knelt on the bed to study Miranda’s signature: its oversized M with soft points like bunny ears, its d with an open loop. In its careful flamboyance, Miranda’s signature testified to an exercise book somewhere filled with trial signatures, probably one at least with a heart-shaped dot over the i. Kit thought, I have not been fair to Miranda. She had never imagined for Miranda those hours of trying out personalities line by line—hours of queasy self-absorption, filling out those quizzes where the animal you said you liked best was how you wanted to be and the animal you said you liked second-best was how you really were. Except that you weren’t: you were neither horse nor elephant but inescapably, helplessly yourself. Kit had settled on her name in capitals with a circle around it. She had been surreptitiously proud of that until she found the primary school lunch box on which her mother had written her name in just that way.

  Now she heard a man’s voice in the kitchen. That was not Miranda’s brother, she thought: he spoke in quick runs; she had heard him on the phone last night while she lay here in bed. So it must be Miranda’s father. The coffee machine whirred. She thought: Are they different with each other because I’m here? In France she had stayed in rooms which her mother and father had never seen. There it had been easy: she was foreign: nobody expected her—she did not expect herself—to know how to behave, how not to be rude or strange. But to be here, in their house, not knowing whether she should have a shower first or go straight to the kitchen (was it rude to have a shower without asking?) drove foreignness in.

  She could not think of her grandfather. Only now again, without warning, she saw his face, more than life-size, with the breathing tube forced through his mouth, his unprotesting look. At once the room became what she could not bear. She got up, pulled the sheet tight, straightened the quilt and pillow—I never slept there, she thought, looking down at the bed. The bedroom door swung shut behind her with a subdued click. Her steps made no sound on the carpet. In the bathroom, the noise of the taps made her look guiltily around.

  Hurriedly dressed, pausing outside the door into the room where they all were, she felt herself to be an actor stepping onto a stage. Three steps into the room Kit stopped, hearing that alive silence which comes after a conversation has been abruptly dropped.

  Carol set her coffee mug down on the marble top of the island bench. ‘There you are!’ she said. She was in the kitchen. Miranda, in shorts, was sitting on the other side of the bench with her bare feet tucked under the rung of her stool. Her damp hair was spread out over her shoulders to dry.

  ‘I’ve just heard from Treen,’ said Carol. ‘Your mother’s going straight to the hospital. So as soon as you’re ready—’ her eyes flickered to Kit’s hair, ‘we’ll hop in the car and head in.’

  ‘She needs to eat something.’ At the table, Miranda’s father folded up his newspaper and set it by his plate. With one hand he directed Kit to sit down beside him at the table. ‘How did you sleep?’

  His silky grey hair, thinning on top, gave him a high forehead. His ears, which were very small, stuck close to his head. His face had an over-inflated look. His cheeks swelled from the sides of his mouth, its damp half-smile; the skin was pouchy under his eyes, which were small and dull-coloured. In his ironed pink polo shirt, with his soft hands resting on the table in front of him, he had the self-satisfied look of a cat. ‘That place of your grandparents,’ he said. ‘Now that is an extraordinary bit of property.’

  ‘Kit love, how do you
take your coffee?’ asked Carol.

  From her seat at the bench Miranda said: ‘Not everyone is addicted to caffeine, Mum.’

  ‘Kit’s welcome to tea if she’d rather,’ said Carol. ‘Kit dear, you tell me what you’d like. What do you usually have for breakfast?’

  ‘Just toast, mostly,’ said Kit.

  ‘I was talking to Scottie yesterday,’ said Miranda’s father. ‘About the Wright place—you know it went for three and a half. He said to me: “Tony, you created that.”’ He laughed: a contraction in his chest, which sounded like a cough. ‘“You created that.” He said it to me.’

  Carol brought across three little white glazed pots: a smear of margarine in one; the others had strawberry jam and vegemite. Resting her hand on the back of Kit’s chair, she looked into Kit’s face. ‘You’ll have a cup of tea then? Just white?’

  ‘I’ll have a coffee,’ said Miranda, and then said: ‘What?’ and Kit knew that, behind her, Carol had pulled a face.

  Kit sat chewing her toast. In front of her, across the table, the wall was plate glass and looked onto a courtyard. Out there, past stone paving, a square of brushed gravel shimmered in the heat. At its centre, a sawn-off tea-tree branch made a sculpture. The courtyard wall was almost hidden behind plants with spires made up of small flowers, iridescent blue. They looked like candle flames—the burning look was bees, masses of them, vibrating rapturously over the flowers. In thought Kit went out into that garden, that oblivious light, the hum of bees. Yes, she was frightened here: she had no defence against whatever they might say.

  ‘People forget how the town was,’ said Tony. ‘They look at it now and forget what it was like’. He pushed his bottom lip out reflectively. ‘People said I was crazy buying up here, building nice houses.’

  ‘More toast, Kit? Bit of fruit?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Kit took her plate, stacked with the little pots, across to the sink. Carol had packed everything away, wiped all the benches down: the cloth hung folded over the tap. Looking at the gleaming bare surfaces, the walls without pictures, Kit did not so much think of her father as think it strange that she did not think of him more often. Tentatively she started running water into the sink.

  ‘Oh, leave that,’ said Carol. ‘I’ll pop it in the dishwasher.’ When she stacked the dishes her bracelets clacked. She swung the dishwasher door shut and turned it on. ‘We should get cracking,’ she said. ‘I promised Treen I’d get you there by nine.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Miranda.

  Carol rolled her eyes theatrically. ‘The hospital! Now go on, you!’ jerking her head towards the hall door. ‘Help Kit pack her bag!’

  Miranda unfolded herself from the stool with an expression of conscious forbearance. In the narrow hall, though, as the door closed behind them, she veered close, she took hold of Kit’s arm. ‘How come Scott was at the house with you?’

  ‘Just…My mum knows him.’

  Miranda went ahead through the door. Stopping with her back to the window, she said, ‘Isn’t that your sock? Under the bed.’ It was: the underside dark with dirt. Kit crouched to retrieve it. While she was crouched on the floor she heard Miranda say, ‘Hughey’s dad kicked Scott out of the funeral.’

  Kit kept her head bent. Her own bag was with Treen still, at the hospital. Last night at Sea House, she had found a plastic bag for her things. She felt, without seeing, Miranda’s amazed scornful look. She said, ‘He only came into the house because I got sunstroke.’

  Miranda went across to the mirror. Catching up her still-damp hair, she pulled it over one shoulder. Kit saw a birthmark at the base of her neck. She was born with that, Kit thought. Miranda started plaiting her hair. Kit sat on the side of the bed, which she had that morning neatly made, and watched Miranda’s hands fold one over the other.

  In the mirror, Miranda caught her eye. She said, ‘You know he painted Hughey? Hughey’s parents found the picture shoved down the back of the wardrobe.’

  ‘Naked?’

  ‘In his uniform. Hughey hated school.’

  Miranda leant in towards the mirror and with spread fingers dragged her plait out. She damped a finger and smoothed one eyebrow down. While she looked at herself, her face settled and went blank. Kit saw that for Miranda, her face looked the same always. Kit, whose face was always looming up, distorting, catching her by surprise, thought: I will never have that certainty, not ever. She thought of Carol urging Miranda up off her seat, down the hall with Kit. So they had talked about her, they had planned this out—last night, or this morning while she lay in bed.

  Aloud Kit said, ‘Your Mum told you to ask me.’

  In the mirror, she saw the colour rise under Miranda’s eyes. Miranda was perfectly still for one moment. Then she raised one shoulder and let it drop.

  ‘We were worried about you, if that’s what you mean.’ She bent to pick up Kit’s bag. ‘What, do you smoke?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your clothes stink of it, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s the hospital.’

  ‘People don’t smoke in hospital.’

  ‘Outside it they do.’

  Tugging the quilt straight again on the bed, Kit looked a last time around the room. It was unchanged; it had kept nothing. Faintly from the kitchen came the sound of voices. She followed Miranda into the hall.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Anna was already at the hospital, standing by Patrick’s bed with her back to the door. Audrey was in the wheelchair beside her. Anna’s dress was sleeveless: the backs of her arms gleamed palely. Flesh looked vulnerable among the metal of the beds and the machines. The nurse had kept Carol at the door. Walking on alone, Kit was conscious of each step advancing her into this still, quiet room in which the machines flickered secretly, in which the light itself was indistinctly grey. Around the bed, the adults were stopped, purposeless. They had only their hand movements, which looked too large; like an actor’s they did nothing, only showed feeling. Kit dreaded more than anything how, any moment now, they would turn, they would look at her, they would catch her up in that atmosphere of feeling that cut through walls, that had no end. She heard again the phone ringing from the depths of the house.

  ‘Kit!’ It actually hurt, how tightly her mother hugged her, the corner of a zip pressing into the skin under one eye. Past Anna’s shoulder, Kit saw Treen. This moment, when she thought that no one could see her, Treen’s mouth had collapsed. The skin by her nose was pinched; new wrinkles dropped from the side of her mouth down to her jaw. Grief was frightening in its ugliness, its distortion— Kit closed her eyes, breathed in her mother’s insistent familiar perfume, saw the plain glass bottle which stood always on Anna’s bathroom shelf, which drew to itself the mirror’s reflected light. Anna took hold of Kit’s shoulders and looked directly into her face. ‘But darling where did you sleep?’

  Kit saw, behind Anna, the nurse stand up. In her white dress she was hardly more individual than the machines. Her white rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the floor. She stopped behind Treen and said: ‘This is intensive care.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. We’ll all go.’

  The nurse, instantly placated, said, ‘You’re welcome to use one of the family rooms down the hall.’

  So they were leaving already. What Kit had been dreading became suddenly something she could not miss: she faced the bed. Her grandfather’s hands were in the same position on the sheets. Those fingers had tapped the mother-of-pearl box—how long ago? Impossible to believe that that body, so dense and pale, the hands with their hairs springing from the backs of his fingers, was a body only; that he would not, at any sudden noise, open his eyes and sit up. Along the sides of his throat, up his cheek, and over his upper lip, white stubble glistened. It seemed strange to Kit that hair was still forcing itself out through his skin. She said to herself, he is dying. It made no difference: the words went echoing off. She never had known anyone to die before. The difference between living and dying was fascinatingly abstract; it had nothing
to do with that body—person—under the blue-white sheet.

  In the sudden brightness of the hall, Audrey’s hand went fumbling out from the wheelchair. ‘They won’t wake him up,’ she said in a wavering, bewildered voice. She caught Anna’s wrist and tugged at it. ‘You’re here now. They’ll listen to you. You tell them. Tell them to wake him up.’

  Anna and Treen exchanged glances. ‘Alright Mum,’ said Anna. ‘We’ll just have our tea first.’

  Mum: the word reverberated. Because that was not possible— Kit pictured the pinch-faced girl who had stared down at her out of the pine tree. But the picture was transparent, unreal. Her mother, walking straight-backed beside her, banished the child she had been.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Treen. A square low room off the hall: two sofas and a low table filled it: impossible to move in any direction without thinking of bumped shins.

  Audrey’s wheelchair stopped just inside the door. Beside her, a corner shelf held an electric kettle, a bowl of tea bags, sugar sachets, instant pull-top UHT milk containers, a line of anonymous white coffee cups. With an exclamation of disgust, Anna went across to pull up the venetian blinds. Plastic, grey with dust—one of them was wonky—they opened only halfway, revealing the far edge of the car park and farther off, the terracotta-tiled roofs of houses across the road.

  Treen said: ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Kit sat on the edge of the sofa where other people had sat yesterday. Somebody else had been dying then. There was a pause while they listened to the kettle coming to the boil. Anna, staring down into the car park, kept coiling and uncoiling the blind cord around her finger. Kit, seeing Treen pass Anna her cup of tea, could have caught Treen’s sleeve and warned her: not like that. Kit knew—till now, she had not known that she knew—how shows of humility, anxious kindness, infuriated Anna, who saw in them only traps. Now Anna took the cup, glanced down into it without changing her expression—as if to say, rooms like this, cups like these, had nothing to do with her. Even as Kit registered this knowledge of her mother, the strangeness of seeing her here, with a sister and a mother, in this ugly bright room, made Kit feel shy and formal. This was not the mother she knew. Treen, who had changed out of the black suit that she had worn to the funeral, was more familiar, dressed in the jeans and shirt that Kit had packed.