The Paper House

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘What time is it?’

  He brought my hand to his lips. ‘It’s just after eleven. How are you feeling?’

  ‘I don’t know. Shouldn’t you be at work?’

  ‘I called in.’

  He moved the television into the bedroom. The rabbit ears got terrible reception, so we had the choice of round-the-clock news or learning the alphabet from adults with children’s voices. He pulled my head into his armpit and I let him Three men killed in head-on collision even though it smelled like a dank office building Record new unemployment levels and we didn’t watch the news together.

  For eight months I had tried to grow a family. Most of that time I’d spent doing what I was supposed to: foregoing soft cheese, playing Mozart through headphones, avoiding heavy lifting. But once, I did have a smoked salmon roll in the food court, after I bought the yellow jumpsuit with the fish on it. And once, I did have my hair dyed, when the greys began to curl around my ears like webs. And once, on Dave’s birthday, I did have half a glass of wine, listening to Al Green with the rain coming down. They seemed stupid and easily dismissed at the time – ‘My mum smoked when she was pregnant with me, and I turned out all right!’ – but in the dim corridors of the hospital, I wondered which of these moments had been the catalyst.

  They told me there was nothing I could have done differently. Placenta praevia came with risks, they said, we always knew it wasn’t going to be completely straightforward. I had been falsely reassured by the pamphlets and the midwives with soft voices. It wasn’t more common than I thought; it wasn’t less serious than I thought; it was every bit as terrible as the worst case scenario, and my baby had died with her hands over her eyes in the dark. I had tried to bleed to death but hadn’t been able to muster the courage. When they brought us back to the ward – me: breathing, tired, anaemic; her: still, blue-lipped, silent – Dave squeaked from his throat and then we were three. The family I had been growing, cut at the roots prematurely.

  Friends who had given me rattles and booties and ‘My First Christmas’ decorations disappeared without a trace, hiding in their homes with their living children. Maybe they were afraid it was catching; maybe they just didn’t know what to say. Part of me was glad that they didn’t. I wanted to talk about her, but not yet.

  I sat in bed and ate biscuits with jam in the middle. The sun went in. I read a book about a boy who took his mother to the sea in a wheelbarrow. I shuffled the quilt down from where it had become bunched in one corner. I took off my socks and rubbed my feet. I watched re-runs of cartoons that weren’t good the first time around. I breathed on the window and rubbed it clean. I named the grass parrots on the lawn below: Stanley, Francis, Prue. I did everything that wasn’t preparing for the next phase of life without her.

  ‘You have been so brave,’ Dave said, but he was talking to someone else, someone behind me. Wind hissed in the old house, shooting under the doors and in the gaps between the old glass panes. ‘We’re going to be okay, me and you.’ I wasn’t sure how he knew, but I longed to believe him.

  And then he said the very thing I had been willing him not to say, ever, to never, ever vocalise even under threat of death or in a moment of madness, and I was winded, blinking, grabbing for the bed sheets, crying –

  ‘We can try again.’

  – and I saw the paths stretch out ahead of me: to the left, where I stayed in bed forever, grieved endlessly; to the right, where I got out of bed, put my heart back together, grieved endlessly. To speak of ‘trying again’ while her ghost was still in the room was an insult to both the child gone before and the child that might come after. The child before might be merely a precursor, a practice run, a whole person deemed sufficiently remembered and loved; while the child after might be a bandaid child, a second child, a replacement child. Without time taken to wait – not until the first child was forgotten but until the hideous burning fire of grief had dulled – neither child could be fully a person, but just a function of the other.

  He slept, in a manner of speaking. Sometimes his eyes snapped open and he stared through me with glossy moons.

  In the deep emptiness of night, when even the darkest of creatures had hung up their boots, I forced myself against the bed and tried not to listen. Tried not to hear the creak in the floor; the whisper in the next room; the chatter in the garden. I lay and didn’t listen until the door cracked open, just a slither, and sleep crawled in against my body and nestled snug there for a couple of hours. When I woke, the first fingers of midnight were rapping on the bedroom window.

  Dave woke, groggy, blinking, around three, and helped me and my burning belly out to the balcony. He pointed down past the duck wearing boots and over the tyre swing and we looked at the constellation of fireflies. Shining bullets. Diamond candles.

  ‘They’re just fairy lights,’ I said, and he said, ‘How do you know?’ and I said, ‘I guess I don’t.’

  We ate old chocolates from a box and I told Dave that I loved him with my whole heart. I loved him from the back of my chest. I loved him from the bottoms of my feet. I tried to push my whole self right through him and out the other side, so he could feel the weightiness of my extraordinary, eclipsing love for him. He told me he loved me too, even though he had never pushed through me and out the other side. I knew he was telling the truth because he had written a song called ‘In the Heather’, which was a metaphor. I knew because he remembered to bring home lemon tart, which I loved. I knew because he always carried an emergency handkerchief.

  His skin rubbed against my skin until it was a river of fire, and I kissed him and hoped that he could feel me as I moved right through him. And we were, in the dark, just two people standing in midair.

  IT’S MY FIRST day of school. Mummy’s ironed my uniform and I’ve got my socks pulled right up. Fleur doesn’t want to pose for the photo but Dad said yesterday that she has to. I’m not making myself any breakfast because Mummy said we’re going to stop on the way and have pancakes.

  Fleur’s having toast in the kitchen.

  But we’re going out for breakfast, I say.

  I don’t want pancakes, she says.

  That’s weird, I say.

  I sit on the couch and watch cartoons and feel a bit sad that I won’t be able to watch cartoons on the couch with Mummy anymore, but mostly I’m excited. Last week we bought my uniform and Mummy got me an extra-large bag and some blue scrunchies so I can have a plait.

  She-Ra has finished so I watch a puppet talk to a blue-tongue lizard. Fleur is eating a banana. She’s going to be so full when we get to breakfast. I sit on the couch and swing my legs. I wonder if Gran’s coming to see me on my first day of school. I bet she is. Gran always comes to see the things that I do.

  What time is it, Fleur? I say.

  Quarter past eight, she says.

  School starts at nine o’clock. I know that’s when the big hand is on the twelve and the small hand is pointing to the nine. John and Benita taught me that ages ago.

  What time is it now? I say.

  Sixteen past eight.

  I wonder if Mummy’s forgotten it’s my first day of school. I go and check again that everything is in my bag. I’ve got a ham and lettuce sandwich and an apple fruit box and some sultanas and a strawberry Roll-Up. That was a special treat because it’s my first day. Mummy said I shouldn’t get used to having Roll-Ups every day.

  Is Dad here? I say.

  Yeah, they’re in their room, says Fleur.

  I wonder why they’re still in bed when we’re supposed to be having pancakes. I go in there and sit on their bed and they have all the blinds closed so it’s pretty dark. Dad has jeans on and he’s got his shoes on the bed, which is definitely not allowed, but Mummy is still under the covers with her blue nightie on.

  Hi, Bunny, she says, and her voice is all sharp like she’s been crying.

  Are we still getting pancakes? I say.

  She uses her arm to wipe her eyes and Dad kind of leans his forehead against her forehead.


  I’m going to take you, he says. Are you ready to go?

  I say, But are we still getting pancakes?

  Sure. You go and get your bag.

  No one takes a photo of us out the front, which makes Fleur happy. Dad drives to McDonald’s and we eat hotcakes on our laps in the car.

  I WATCHED THE garden. I learned that in the early mornings a currawong with half a beak came and sat on the balcony railing. I learned that we had flowers that closed when the sun went down and opened again in the morning, like a supermarket. And although I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t breathe it in, by the end of the week I felt I knew everything about it.

  I thought of my first house. I was ten, and it was the kind of brick veneer three-bedder that everyone had: nondescript suburban pedestrian. But the garden was the proper sort: full of hidey-holes and creepy-crawlies. My mother was still painting, and we’d moved there for the garden shed, which offered her artistic privacy, but had a view of the grass in case one of us hurt – killed? – the other. Fleur would roll down the hill face-first, a tumbling mess of blonde hair and broken sandals, and I would shout after her, Stop it! You’re going to kill yourself! But she would stand up at the bottom of the hill, hands on hips, and shout names at me. ‘Wuss!’ She was smiling. ‘Wimp!’ I couldn’t let her see my hurt feelings, but I would have sooner eaten live snails (another of Fleur’s renowned talents) than broken my legs rolling down a hill, so I took up my post at the shed door and moved my pencil across the page. I drew the spiny heart of the Guzmania (Guzmania lingulata) and the folded whiskers of the banksia (Banksia integrifolia) and the long fingers of the kangaroo paw (Anigozanthos flavidus). I drew the upright regiment of Iceberg roses and the snaking path that curled away from the shed and down to the pond, where I drew three goldfish and one dead fish, belly up against the sun.

  My mother painted them, dutifully, in her bright watercolours. ‘I love how you’ve captured the way the acorns weigh down the branches,’ she said. ‘There is excellent symmetry in this butterfly.’ And Fleur would tumble by in her new blue dress, but I only remember my mother smiling. ‘We’re going to have to watch out for that one.’

  In the mornings Dave kissed me on the mouth, and on the head, and on the hand. ‘It’s been two weeks, Heather,’ he said, or, ‘Do you think you should try going for a walk?’ with his face tied into worry. I boiled the kettle Gran had given me, and made cups of tea with the tag hanging out.

  ‘It’s been two weeks,’ he said, kissed me on the mouth.

  ‘Is it too hot for tea?’ I said.

  It was, probably, but the wind that was coming through the kitchen window had an essence of the sea, so I knew it was moody, clinging to the south.

  ‘Did you know we have an Acer palmatum? A Japanese maple?’

  ‘Fancy. I didn’t know you spoke Latin.’

  ‘Mum did a course. Horticulture, I guess. Started it, anyway.’ I still had her book on the shelf, the meticulous drawings with their botanical names underneath. Her decorated scrawl inside the jacket: property of Shelley Herbert.

  ‘Sounds interesting.’

  It wasn’t. Three months and she’d started something new again.

  The house was wrapped at the back in a wide verandah. On a warm morning that could have been any other, I sat on an old chair. Not our chair; it had come with the house. It rocked as my toes moved, and it might have been blue once, but the paint had mostly flaked away. Above, the sky darkened. I wondered how far into the garden I could get before the rain came. I toed the deck’s rusted screws. My lips tasted of salt.

  To the south, a weatherboard house and its gabled porch swayed in a nest of gums. To the north, a stout display of red brick and imported but robust greenery: crepe myrtles and the towering Monterey Cypress, a symbol of the goddess of the moon. The end of the block fell away out of view, running downhill behind the row of pittosporums with their straight backs. And over the top of the house, the morning sun came like glancing lightning, the suggestion of daylight. I dripped into the cushions, holding the still-raw wound stretching against the grain of my skin, sipped at my tea.

  The sun went in. The line of pittosporums didn’t move. The more I looked, the further away the garden got, until the sky was black and there were a hundred pittosporums instead of six, all lit up with the banking storm.

  Fat drops smacked warm on my skin, the stamping feet of thunder. I watched the torchlight in the sky, the transient embers of it. A sheoak (Casuarina cunninghamiana) hung in a lazy curtain, safe beneath the pittosporums which stood ready to absorb the blow of the lightning if it came to that. Rain ran in rivulets through the dirt. I sat in the storm until it was over and I sat until the garden had folded back into its usual arrangement – six tall soldiers with fairy lights.

  They were mostly like that, summer storms, like love affairs. The storm would pass, and the person watching had made a choice: to wrap their heart with the clouds or do nothing.

  Dave opened the door, blinked in the glare: ‘Be careful. It’s been raining,’ as though I had been sitting in it by mistake. ‘I’ll come home for lunch.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and he was gone again, he and his body.

  I thought of the way my mother’s body crouched around her paintings, as though trying to force her whole self into them. Her face close to the page, smaller and smaller brushes picking out all the things that mattered to her. Sinew. Mould. Algae. Somehow she knew how to lay them out so that they were beautiful. All the bits required to make the different shapes of life.

  I felt her featherweight next to me in my borrowed chair. Felt her familiar stream run through me.

  ‘I think there’s a pond at the bottom,’ I said into the day, thought of her hand moving across the page.

  Inside I found the stairs to the attic that unfolded from our ceiling. I climbed them with dust in my lungs. The attic was the way an attic should be: clambering for mystery, cobwebs the size of large men. I knew which boxes to avoid. NURSERY. BABY CLOTHES. If I were honest, I had assumed Dave might have given all of those things away to someone who could use them. Someone with an actual baby.

  In the back corner I found the plastic container I needed. HEATHER’S ART STUFF. Dave had left it between KITCHEN – OLD and VIDEO GAMES. In it I found the crack of watercolour paper, the pungency of oil paints, the black-brown dust of settled charcoal. The sketchbook didn’t balance on my knees at first. It was too big and I was out of practice. I leaned on it with my elbow, propped one edge against my bent knee and picked up a piece of graphite. Cool and smooth. My fingers shook. The paper throbbed.

  One line. I drew it. The graphite bounced like a record needle. The line came out crooked, gap-toothed.

  Two lines. I drew another. It was cleaner, but with a hooked nose in the middle. I looked at it next to the first line. Two lines, totally different in shape and texture and yet, unmistakably, both lines.

  Three lines.

  Four lines.

  I sat in the attic in the low light and drew lines on paper until the graphite had been worn into a nub and my fingers ached.

  By the time Dave came home for lunch – It’s so nearby; I wanted to make sure you were all right – I had swallowed up most of the morning, found the way my new body fit in the old chair. I had a twist of paperbark (Melaleuca styphelioides) and some smaller nandinas (Nandina domestica); natives that wouldn’t rob the plants of space or water, that would offer shelter to the wandering wildlife and to any painters who happened to be passing by. I had a bench and a grassy bank and, in the distance, maybe I had the ruffled edge of a blue dress. Or it could just have been those new-breed petunias with their frilled faces in the clean air. I heard his footsteps, shoved the book under the borrowed chair’s cushion. It hissed, exhaled.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ Dave said, face flushed, eyes bright and expectant.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Sitting. Relaxing. See?’ I pointed to my empty teacups.


  He dropped his bag on the table. ‘Fleur called me this morning. She wants to come down.’

  ‘For a holiday?’

  He frowned. ‘No, not for a holiday. She wants to make sure you’re okay.’

  ‘But I am okay.’

  ‘Well, good. Come and have something to eat.’

  I considered the way we sat around the table, in this new place that was supposed to be home. Dave leaned into his lunch, big shoulders crouched around, holding his fork like a pencil. Our dining table – lifted from a beach-side hard rubbish collection while we lived paycheque to paycheque – was odd in the room: too-dark wood that clashed with the honey of the floorboards; small and round in the corner of the breezy expanse of the open-plan kitchen and dining. I leaned forward too, to ease the pull on my caesarean scar. When I moved, my chair made a grating sound on the floor, like a knife against porcelain.

  *

  Fleur arrived two days later, a mirage under our wisteria, complete with overnight bag. She wore work boots and a dirty hoodie with MONASH UNIVERSITY on it. She was weather- beaten, grey and hard. Full of the earth, where I was empty.

  ‘Fleur,’ I said.

  ‘Heather,’ she said. She didn’t try to hug me and I was grateful. ‘You look like crap.’

  ‘Yep. I just had my body cut open to get the dead baby out.’

  ‘I know.’

  We sat in that meaty silence that fills all of the spaces, conspicuous silence, weighty silence. I tried to recall the last time I’d seen her, fleshy and ruddy. My thirtieth?

  ‘Got any food? Maccas breakfast sits in your guts like a fully formed turd.’

  ‘Dave left some stuff in the kitchen, so I wouldn’t have to go anywhere. Not supposed to drive.’