The Life of Houses

by Lisa Gorton

  Around the corner a car stopped. She put her hand out to hide the cigarettes and then stopped herself, half-hoping it would be her mother, and straightened up with a feeling of excited fury, but it was Scott. He said: ‘I was just coming to see your mother.’

  ‘She’s not there. She’s off with Treen getting things for tonight.’

  ‘Anna’s at the house,’ he said. He looked down at her and laughed. ‘And you thought you’d pop out for a ciggy. Here, it’s gone out.’ He held out his lighter. Inhaling on its flare, she had to turn away to hide her cough. Sitting beside her, he pulled a cigarette out of the packet she’d left on the bench. ‘Menthol,’ he said, turning it in his fingers. ‘You really shouldn’t start, you know.’

  He lit the cigarette and sat back. Legs crossed, his loose foot twitched. He watched it, frowning remotely. He had forgotten her. This sudden shutting down of his attention brought a kind of closeness. For once not conscious of herself she looked at him: that paunch straining his shirt buttons, drops of sweat on the side of his neck.

  Rousing, sensing perhaps her eyes on him, he bent forward to stub his cigarette out, and got up to drop it in the bin. ‘Listen, you can’t stay here all day teaching yourself to smoke,’ he said. ‘Come on. I’ll take you to the beach.’

  He put the cigarettes in his shirt pocket.

  In the car he drummed on the steering wheel with his fingers. His car was old enough to have wind-down windows. It stank of cigarette smoke and air-freshener: a cardboard pine-tree dangled from the rear-view mirror. He was a fussy driver, changing gears all the time. They turned right at some traffic lights and Kit realised that the milk bar and that row of orange brick houses were the edge of town. Out her window, paddocks opened up behind billboards advertising new housing estates. Out there, in the light off the storm clouds, the bleached grass was shining.

  Scott turned onto a dirt road. ‘I’ll show you the lake,’ he said. On both sides, greyish scrub: ahead the road lifted and broke into mirage. Little stones kept striking the bottom of the car. The road came to the edge of a dune and turned. There was a sort of carpark there: a widening of the road. Scott pulled in behind a campervan parked under tea-tree, though by now there was only narrow shade.

  Stepping out of the car Kit stepped into cicada noise. After a few steps it seemed less the cry of living creatures than a sound effect of the heat, which had settled into the dirt and now burned upwards. From the carpark a track led up over the dune but Scott ducked sideways, through a fence of two loose wires, where a smaller track wavered off into scrub.

  ‘They blocked it off,’ he said. ‘Revegetation,’ he added, falsetto.

  The sand of the path was a soft leathery colour, and littered with shells. Scott went ahead. Alongside them the plants grew head-high, closing them in between dense uneven walls. Now and again a gap opened out and Kit saw the green tops, soft swells. Somewhere a branch creaked in the wind; the small leaves hardly moved, though. She had forgotten her hat again and walked with eyes half-closed against the glare. Only the smallest details of leaf and branch suggested they had advanced. These small still leaves, thin branches: everything miniature and repeated: she was stepping into a dream she’d had as a child, walking insect-sized among corridors of grass. It was the clouds being so low, the air thick, as though the sky was pressing down. She could hear the sea beyond the dune, sand being ground down in the waves. She thought of seaweed heaped in the sun. She was hungry, she realised; her mother had been right about lunch.

  Kit thought: she should never have left me behind. She lifted her fingers again to smell her cigarette on them. Checking her pockets, she realised that she had left her phone on the sofa in the family room. She had a strange feeling that it was her life left there: pictures she could scroll through. She could go home; she could walk back into it: breakfast and a shower and her uniform and the train to school. This place, though, the stunned heat and close, parched scrub: it was outside, far off. She saw Patrick stretched out on the bed. The word never sounded in her mind like a struck bell. My hands, she thought, looking down at them. Ahead of her the path dropped steeply out of green scrub through a patch of tea-tree where Scott stood waiting for her, a darker shape in the dusty shade. At his back, through the tree trunks, the sunlight looked strangely unstill and bright. They had come to the lake.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The lake had no high banks. There was no river out to sea from here. Kit thought: the water must seep through, under the dune. Along the dune’s side tea-tree grew down into the water: fingerish roots reaching into their own reflections. Closer, the lake’s edge was muddied sand, saltbush, clumps of grass bleached at the tips—what her mother called ‘regrowth grass’.

  Scott was fussing with his backpack. A gold signet ring flashed on his little finger. Kit took off her shoes and stood at the water’s edge. The water was warmer than she had expected and silky, though her feet, sinking through pale sand, touched cooler mud. She heard a car pass. Just in front of her, where the lake ran shallowly over sand, it was the colour of milk tea. Further out, it set the sky behind glass. Out there, a white long-legged bird stood in a cloud’s shadow. The whole scene lay open before her: heat shimmering off scrub out where the road was, mile after mile of flat, low, secretive country. She found a sort of elation in it: a loneliness answering her mood. Sharp, scattering sounds drew her eyes to where the bird was lifting wing-beat by wing-beat up from the surface of the lake, its legs trailing in the water. She watched holding her breath; it seemed so unlikely the bird would rise.

  ‘I brought my sketchbook,’ Scott said. From the side of his backpack he unfixed a contraption that folded out into a threelegged seat. The surprise of it made her laugh. Without changing expression, he glanced at her and then over his shoulder at the sky. ‘You want to do some sketching?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  He sat down. ‘I’ll draw you then. I used to draw your mother. Did you know that?’ He laughed to himself: ‘She did abstracts.’ He gestured at the base of a tea-tree. ‘Sit there, out of the sun, for God’s sake. My reputation won’t survive taking you to your room again.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He ignored her, or he did not hear. He had started drawing, working quickly with long strokes. He had put his hat back on his head and she could see him: his eyelids, with their pale lashes; the pores of his nose glistening with sweat. He put his bottom lip out when he was concentrating. The sound of his pencil made her conscious of the low suck and slap of the water.

  ‘You keep twitching,’ he said.

  ‘The ground’s wet.’

  ‘Why not say so,’ he said crossly. ‘Here, sit on this.’ He threw the backpack across to her. ‘Now your jeans will be wet.’

  Even through his backpack, she could feel the seeping dampness of the ground. The tree trunk, which had seemed smooth at first, now pressed unevenly into her back. Across her cheek, and down her neck to her shoulder, she felt the pressure on her skin where he was looking. She was conscious, more than anything, of the impersonality of his attention. Where he looked, she felt her body flatten into lines and planes. She never had been able to work out what she looked like and felt that more certain knowledge of herself growing under his hands on the page.

  He said, ‘What I like about you is how you take so much for granted. You come here and you don’t once stop to wonder how it might be for anyone else. That day you walked up to the café I thought you were your mother. The whole of my childhood started up around you. And your poor aunt, desperate to know you, frightened to speak in case you go running home. No, what’s so nice is, you don’t even notice.’

  All the time he was speaking his pencil kept flickering over the page. His voice went on lightly, uninsistently. He was talking not to her but to the picture of her that he was making. The lake was pale light beside her and a sound of wind-ripples, birds filliping down, dry easings of scrub in the heat. She had sunk into a daze in which everything she heard, everything she saw, see
med part of her. She was not shut in her body but part of what her senses took in. Here she was, holding still—a trickle of sweat down her back, the half-unpleasant feeling of an ant going over the arch of her foot. Here she was; but she was there too: what he saw: surfaces on the page.

  ‘Don’t look so frightened. All I’m saying is you’re young. You’re all foreground. It’s just the rest of us stepping back and back. For instance you haven’t said—have you even thought?—what your mother feels about your being friends with me? Have you told her?’

  She shook her head.

  He stopped and tipped his head on one side. ‘Do you know, it’s only when you don’t move that you look like her.’

  ‘You were mean to me in that art class.’

  ‘I can’t stand those classes.’ He worked in silence for a while. ‘Those ladies, my students. One of them is painting an angel and she’s brought in chicken feathers to copy for the wings. She wants it to look realistic. No, don’t laugh.’

  He put his pencil down and stared at the picture. ‘This is terrible. It’s a teacher’s picture.’ He grabbed another pencil and started shading. She saw flashes from his ring. ‘The fact is they hate art. They’re used to seeing walls with pictures on them and they’ve decided it’s cheaper to paint the pictures themselves. Really, they look at a painting and think they’ve done something equal if they copy it. Not that they can: all their copies have a squint.’ He stopped as suddenly and looked at the picture again. ‘No good. We’ll have to start again.’

  She drew up her knees and clasped her hands around them.

  ‘I still have them, you know. All those pictures I did of your mother. I was looking at them last night. They’re good. They’re really quite good.’ He flipped a page in his sketchbook. ‘The trouble is, I have wasted my life. No, don’t be frightened. You raise your right shoulder when you’re frightened, did you know that?’

  The moment he said that she realised it was true. The small precision of this fact astonished her. She dropped her shoulder and felt the knotted rope of muscles in her neck.

  ‘That boy,’ she broke out. ‘Miranda said you painted him.’

  His pencil stopped; she saw tension travel up his arm to his face.

  ‘Did she?’ The silence was startling enough for her to hear—to imagine that she heard—the small suckling sound of green things growing out of the mud. He put his pencil down. ‘How I loathe Miranda.’ He saw her face. ‘Now I’ve shocked you.’ He closed up his sketchbook. ‘That picture…Because of that, Hughey’s father tells himself it’s my fault he killed himself.’

  ‘I thought…Miranda’s friend said it was an accident.’

  ‘Miranda’s friend,’ he repeated in a mockery of Kit’s voice. ‘I knew

  Hughey. I knew him from a baby.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought…’

  When she turned back she saw that he had put down the sketchbook. With his elbows on his knees he was crouching forward, staring at his hands. He said, ‘The fact is, I’ll have to leave if it goes on.’

  She gestured at his sketchbook. ‘We can keep going.’

  He smiled in an automatic way. ‘We’ll finish another time.’ He held out one hand. She stayed perfectly still, noticing the pale hairs on the backs of his fingers. ‘Would you mind passing the backpack?’ he said in his politest voice.

  He was still packing his bag when the rain started: first a gust of wind, a prickling sound in the scrub; then the light changed and it was downpour. Rain down the back of her shirt, her hair wet, the lake surface broken everywhere. It was sound more than anything: tumult and single drops that stung where they struck her cheek and neck, her hands. She was crouched, trying to force her shoes back on her muddy feet.

  ‘That’s hail,’ he said. He grabbed her arm above the elbow. He had his backpack clutched to his chest; they started running up the path. She had one shoe still in her hand and her bare foot splashed in water already flowing over the sand. The storm roaring overhead, she went after him into the tea-tree’s cave-like dark. From in here the rain falling outside looked almost bright—sheer breaking lines. She could see where each drop struck on the wet sand. The scrub on the other side of the path was shining green and moving against itself. In here the rain slanted in. Intermittently, in gusts, heavy cold drops scattered from the branches, the sound close and surprising, out of time with the rain. Beside her, he was still breathing hard. He took his hat off. With his whole arm, not his hand, he wiped the wet off his face and the top of his head. He put his head back, showing his whole throat, and laughed. ‘Listen to it! It’s fantastic.’

  Hunched next to him, arms round her knees, she realised how wet she was: water running from her hair down her forehead, behind her ears, down the back of her neck. It was not uncomfortable, not cold yet; it soon would be. Her bare foot was covered with dirt and small leaves. She brushed off some and forced her shoe on. She looked up from tying the laces, her fingers clumsy with cold. He was watching her. She twisted her head to look out at the rain.

  ‘How long will it last?’ she asked.

  After a pause he said, ‘I’m sorry for what I said back there. It’s those big eyes of yours. You’re so easily shocked. What did I say?’

  ‘You said I was young.’

  ‘Well, you are, you know. She’s looked after you. Your poor mother and I were never as young as you.’

  There was a sound of thunder out to sea. For a moment the rain stopped. The quiet was startling: everything seemed motionless, waiting. Then, as if with a human cry, the wind started again. Rain flung down on her in heavy drops. One struck the back of her neck; its pure cold went down her spine.

  He reached out a finger and touched her cheek. ‘It’s like you’ve cried one enormous tear.’

  She kept rigid. Thought itself held still—she saw soft earth around her sneakers, a runnel of rainwater coming crookedly in around the trees’ roots, a yellow leaf on its bright surface. She saw it, that instant, with astonishing clarity. At the same time she was conscious of him—conscious not only of his eyes on her but of his body an arm’s length away, his breath visible in the cold air.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ he said. ‘Here.’ He pulled a shirt out of the bottom of his backpack and draped it over her shoulders. For a moment afterwards she felt where his fingers had touched her neck. A painting shirt: old, stained, it smelt of turpentine. At that smell, close, familiar, she shut her eyes—shut out him watching her, the shuddering branches, the scrub’s unstill bright leaves. Behind her eyes she saw easels blotched with paint. The room was pale light where she was sitting under the sound of her mother’s voice. Behind her eyes, in that distant room, the rain was far off; farther, waves hissed back over sand.

  He was saying, ‘I suppose we never do really know why we do anything. Or is it just me who feels that? You, for instance— you must be asking yourself why you’re here?’

  ‘You said…’

  He laughed. ‘The trouble with you is you’re too polite. If you knew what they’re saying about me—’ He stopped dead. ‘We must get back.’ He plunged out onto the path, out where the rain blew into his face.

  His shirt was stuck to him, the cigarettes sodden in his pocket; wet mud and leaves streaked his light-coloured trousers. She heard him splashing away up the path. She looked at the backpack he had left beside her. Her picture was in there. She took the sketchbook out. Her hands were trembling, not only with cold. What she dreaded was the intimacy of his discovering her like this—

  She opened the book and the boy was there. His face black lines but he was there, caught in a moment’s life. The boy was laughing—at something he had said, she thought: something cruel: he looked halfguilty and exultant. She turned the page: the boy again—quiet now: his bare shoulders, the back of his neck, his face in profile. Page after page…In his school uniform, in his board shorts: here he was with a camera held up to his face. Hughey, but his name belonged to the others. She could not think of him by that name. The sketches w
ere two or three to a page sometimes, and not the same size: some a few lines, some worked up with shading. Impossible that this boy looking out at her was nowhere now. Gone, and never. In the book he looked alive. The wind came right in here, cold at the back of her neck, the roots of her hair; it seemed to be blowing back through her whole week. She saw it lifting the bedcover of her room in the dark, swirling papers up from the floor of Audrey’s room, making the screen door slam. I’m cold, she thought, looking at her mottled hand on the page. What would Carol say now if she knew about these drawings? She saw her hand was shivering. Her numb flesh did not feel more her own than anything else she could see around her. All week, how stupid she’d been. What she had seen, all she had done: hunched in the wet cold among the tea-tree’s dead-looking leaves, she felt her own experience growing away from her. How much she had not understood. ‘I’ll draw you then,’ Scott had said. She remembered the beach, Will throwing the banksia cone in among the seagulls, their wings flashing whitely as they took flight. He’d said it was an accident. She saw him running away up the road. Drops spattered from an overheard branch, wet and heavy on her hand where it rested on the page, and on the boy’s face. She blotted the page with Scott’s shirt but one eye had smeared. The boy stared up at her, accusing. She started flicking through the pages with her thumb. The boy, pictures of him flickering past like animation stills, came more alive.

  And there she was. She had the page to herself. The lake, the tree behind her were quick lines. She was shaded in. Listening for Scott’s footsteps, she heard in nearby scrub a bird not singing but trying out two notes. The rain had stopped. Carefully, running the tip of her finger under the glued edge, she tore the page out and rolled it up. After a moment’s thought, she hid it in her sleeve. Quickly, with a feeling of betrayal, she closed the boy’s face up in the book. She slid the book into the dark of the bag and started after Scott back up the path.