‘I like the way the creek becomes two creeks,’ I said.
‘Yes, I do too.’ He sat on a rock and I could make out the shape of his face, pointed and crooked. His hair fell to one side. ‘So, why are you down here?’ he said.
‘I live here.’
‘That is not the question I asked,’ he said. His jacket was wrapped curiously around his body, like a sloth.
‘I wanted to know what was down here,’ I said.
‘And what did you find?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Precisely,’ he said, and took a squirming lizard from his shirt pocket and set it on the ground.
‘How did you do that?’
‘Do what?’ He grabbed my hand. ‘Are you cold? You’re shaking.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘Come with me.’
I followed Noel into a room which was, as best I could determine in the dark, a kind of windowless brick chamber, one-roomed and smelling faintly of ginger. It was poorly lit, but where there was light, it fell from above in discrete rays, and as he moved under them his body flickered in and out of focus. In the far corner he had a makeshift kitchen – a ceramic pot wearing mildew, a clean towel hanging from the edge of it, a plate and a spoon positioned neatly in parallel. Facing that, something I assumed was his bedroom – torn blankets and flat leaves and a knitted hat stuffed with some type of foliage.
‘This is home,’ he said, and I said, ‘I see,’ but I didn’t. ‘Cup of tea?’ he offered. There were no obvious tea-making facilities. ‘No, thanks,’ I said.
He told a bit about his life. Born in a snowbank in Michigan. He’d met his wife, Lucille, selling cartons of puffin eggs on a train station platform. They drove east to west along Route 66 to visit Jack Kerouac, and he took them out in a wooden rowboat and they fished in a lake into the night, when the Northern Lights danced above them. After that they’d stowed away in the wheel well of a jumbo jet and watched the Pacific Ocean pass beneath them on their way to Sydney, then hitchhiked down the Hume Highway to live in the attic of a Carlton terrace.
‘You don’t have an accent, though,’ I said.
‘I’ve been here a long time.’ He smiled. ‘A long, long time.’
‘And Lucille?’
He paused. ‘No, not Lucille.’
‘Oh.’
‘What do you do?’ he said, his grey mouth mechanical.
I tried to remember. ‘I think I draw, sometimes.’
‘Oh, an artist!’ I felt the word in my throat.
‘Not an artist. Just someone who draws sometimes.’
‘Draw me.’ He puffed out his chest.
‘I couldn’t if I tried,’ I said. ‘I can’t draw faces.’
‘Oh.’ He asked me about what I did draw – what materials did I use? Had I tried gouache? It wasn’t that hard; painting was easy if you knew what the shapes looked like. Did I have anything I could show him? Had I ever had an exhibition? Did anyone buy my work?
‘No,’ I said again. ‘I just draw for myself. Only me.’
He sipped on the tea that he had conjured from nowhere and looked me up and down. His eyes met too close in the middle; they were comical behind his glasses and I wasn’t sure whether I was looking directly at him, or at the walls behind him, which swelled and eased. The teacup disappeared into his bony hands and he stopped, cracked his knuckles, frowned.
‘Why?’
In a bluestone cottage at the end of a sweeping gravel road, Mum and I hung her paintings from sharp hooks. She had painted women knitting in armchairs, and men pulling dogs back from the road, and two girls running naked through a river. I hooked them all, admiring my handiwork as I went, and she followed behind me and realigned them, swapped them, changed them. Her eyes blazed, her fingers shook. When we had hung all of the paintings, we sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor with our backs together and looked at the exhibition, and she said, This is going to be amazing. But nobody came. At the end of the week she went back up to the bluestone cottage with her roll of red stickers and took down every painting, and left them in the back of her car for three months while she read New Idea and cried into her hands.
‘Oh,’ said Noel. And then he might have said, You are not your mother, or maybe I just heard an echo of the hundreds of other people who had said it.
‘I should go,’ I said.
‘It was nice chatting with you.’
In my kitchen I found an assortment of strange and wonderful food. Dave had stocked up on tea bags, ginger biscuits shaped like flowers, and tiny fish in brine, which I shoved into a sandwich. I took my plate and my sketchbook to the balcony, where the charcoal blew away as soon as I touched it to the paper, and I drew petunias wearing striped pyjamas, and the pink trumpets of Linnaeus’ Heath, and an invisible man in his paper house.
*
The first – and only – time I saw a shrink, I was sixteen. School-assigned, compulsory. At the end of a long corridor, I opened a small grey door and saw a small grey man. He asked me two questions: Do you have private health insurance (‘Yes.’); Are you on any medication (‘No.’). I told him about my childhood – stranger in hindsight, and the things that seemed good at the time were maybe the bad bits, and vice versa – to which he raised his grey eyebrows and wrote things on a notepad. (I would later get a peek at it and see a picture of a man riding a stallion and holding a morning star.) I told him about staying with Gran, and cooking with Mum, and the balcony on the house at the beach, which overlooked the grey water, and Mum telling me how she thought about just walking out there, just walking out into the sea and never coming back. (He nodded and pinched his lips together.)
At the end of the session he took out his prescription pad and scrawled some gibberish. After dinner take one of these, and one of these, he said, and come back to see me in two weeks. The grey door closed, and it did not open again. I put the prescription in the bin. The school did not chase it up.
It was a subject of some conjecture, the idea of a hereditariness to the illness. It had been for years prior, Gran watching my mother, and Dad watching me, with the same stricken eyes, narrowed, seeing things that were there and things that weren’t there, and tying them together. In my moments of heartbreak, they wrapped me in blankets and held me tight in the corner, shushing and whispering. In my moments of joy they were more afraid still, clinging to the railings of the windows as I went into the world, and still clinging there when I returned. How are you feeling? And me not understanding that in feeling good – in feeling great – there could be any danger.
Jenny Greer’s waiting room reeked of false comforts: an air freshener plugged into a wall socket; a receptionist doused in sunny perfume; a landscape in a cheap frame. Dave watched me, watched me, making sure I wouldn’t leave, or that if I did leave, he could follow me. He could follow me out the door and down the street and I wouldn’t get away because where would I go? I would stand in the street and he would come running after me and take me back, and we would sit in the waiting room until I went in, one way or another.
‘Do you want me to come in?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Heather?’
Ms Jenny Greer. Not a doctor. She wore a tiny orange cardigan. Her hair hung in distinct oily strands. ‘I’m a counsellor,’ she said. Her hand like wet paper. Dave shook it.
I said, ‘Do you have a bone density issue?’ Dave’s steel grip on the air surrounding me.
‘You should probably wait outside,’ Jenny Greer said to him. Her mouth hung to the side.
She sat on a small red chair and I sat on a long blue couch. ‘So, Heather,’ she said, and waited. The couch was usually for couples counselling, she said, but I put my shoes up on it anyway. One large window overlooking the car park, and another high up, like we were going to look into next door’s bathroom.
‘They have tints that cover greys now,’ I said.
She smiled, thin on one s
ide, made a note on her paper.
‘Tell me about why you’re here today, Heather,’ she said.
‘They told me I should.’
‘Who told you?’
‘The people who know better than me.’
She turned to a fresh page in her notebook, clicked a cheap pen. ‘The way this works is: we spend about an hour getting to know you. After that the sessions are forty-five minutes and we’ll mostly let you lead. I don’t want to push you into anything. Does that sound okay?’
‘I guess so.’
‘So, first I’d like to ask you a bit about your family, if that’s okay.’
My gut twisted. I thought of my mother between white walls, her face gaunt.
‘Why?’
‘That’s just how this works. I ask you some questions, you tell me some answers, maybe we have a bit of a laugh, you go home and have a good rest in front of the TV.’
‘There’s nothing good on.’
She smiled. ‘The guy in the waiting room – your husband?’
‘Yes. David.’
The pen went round in circles. ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’
‘One sister,’ I said, trying to peer over the top of the paper. ‘Fleur.’
‘How old is she?’
How old was I? ‘She’s forty.’ Fleur and Dave. My family.
‘And your parents?’
She’d worn a dress with a pom-pom fringe, and he’d had a pink flower in his pocket. His kissed each of her knuckles one by one, her hand white under the moon, which followed them across the porch. Her shoulders were exposed and glossy.
‘I have an aunt in Brisbane.’
Jenny waited. The clock on her desk clacked. Clack. Clack. One minute, ten minutes. I suffocated in the tight air but I did not move, feet on the couch, eyes on her limp mouth. There’s a man living in my garden, my brain said. He wears terrible jumpers.
‘Well, that’s all the time we have,’ she said, and closed her notebook. ‘Make an appointment for three days’ time. We can talk more then, if you’re up to it.’ Hair falling around her in spider webs. She had her hand on my bare shoulder, a split second with our skin connecting.
Dave leaped at me as though I were on day release.
‘How did you go?’
‘Fine,’ I said. Jenny Greer shuddered behind me.
‘Helpful, do you think?’
‘Oh yes, very helpful.’
I drowned in the flood of his relief, in its winds and waves.
*
On a winter’s afternoon when I was six, I put my belongings in a paper bag and ran away from home. I had a doll with eyes that didn’t close and a packet of bubblegum that I’d found in Fleur’s room and a map of Melbourne, and I got on a bus with fifteen cents that I’d stolen from Mum’s purse, and the driver asked me if I knew which stop I needed to get off at, and I told him I did even though I was only half sure. I sat on the bus with my paper bag and I talked to a moustachioed man who took photos as a job, just travelled around the place taking photos of things. This is your stop, he said, took a photo of me and clicked the film over. When I looked back to him from the folding door, his head had changed, eyes all folded in. Clicked over.
When I stepped from the bus I saw Gran’s green coat and I knew Mum must have called ahead, because when I tripped down the stairs and into her arms she just held me as tight as she could until they came to pick me up. No one shouted, except Fleur who yelled at me for stealing her gum. But the man, I said. He swapped his head. I was stupid, Fleur shouted, I was a baby.
‘Dave took me to a shrink,’ I said, and Fleur raised her eyebrows. ‘Not even a shrink. Not a doctor at all, just a shitty counsellor.’
‘Right,’ she said.
‘What do you mean, right? I don’t need a counsellor. That’s why you’re here.’
‘That’s not why I’m here.’
‘It’s a bit why you’re here.’
‘No, I’m here to bring you toast and play cards.’
I leaned closer to her, listened to the way her breaths stopped in the middle. ‘How long will you stay?’
‘Just until I know you’re not going to lose the plot completely.’
‘I’m not going to.’
‘Well, that’s what they say, isn’t it?’
‘That’s what who says?’
‘Crazy people.’ Parts of her face were smiling. ‘Couple more days. Dave seems to have things under control.’ She flicked through the channels, stopped on a verbose documentary. ‘Whales,’ she said. ‘I’m going for a smoke.’ She took her earthen smell with her, her baked and battered smell.
Late in the evening, the sunset broke across the garden and created a theatre. Fleur took her truck into town to buy sausages. I sat on the grass at the top of the hill and the orchestra beat out at me. My ears rang with the music. High above the pit, a canopy of green tendrils and flat leaves and birds with rainbow faces.
Inside, Dave wrote end-of-year reports: Johnny has demonstrated improvement in maths; Sally with the nose continues to outperform all other students; Heather is inept in the areas of physical education and general life skills.
A ladybird crawled along my arm. I pushed my fingernail under its belly, tricked it into changing course along my hand.
‘We haven’t had any dinner!’ Dave called from the window.
‘Fleur’s getting it,’ I said. ‘You know, because she’s helpful.’
The window banged shut. Moments later, he sat in front of me with his head on my knees, as usual. In the orchestra pit. A conductor. An analogy: I felt all of the heat of him coming through my knees and into my chest, all of his electricity and his life.
‘Counselling can bring up a lot of stuff.’ He said it as though it were a great insight, something truly profound. ‘I guess that’s why they make you go more than once.’
‘Like when you go on a holiday and you need another holiday to recover.’
He kissed my kneecap. ‘Exactly.’
The crying stuck in my ribs, trapped and frantic, like a heart palpitation, like arrhythmia. The bones quivered, waiting for the crying to begin. The muscles contracted around it, holding it there. Sharp breaths, each sticking in the butterfly cage.
‘Please tell me what I can do.’
‘If I knew, I would tell you,’ I said. I stroked his head, listened to his breathing catching in the damp air. ‘I just didn’t think this part was over yet. That’s all.’
‘Which part?’ he said.
‘The part where we just miss her.’
‘Oh.’ He kissed my hand.
‘I just want one more minute. That’s all. I just want to see what I forgot to remember.’
He told me he would stay up with me after dinner, watching the Late Late Late Something, and I sat with my back against the headboard and thought of a deep pond with lily pads and frogs floating belly-up, hands swollen and bug-eyed. I thought of a yucca with its fuzzy head cut off, and a ring of petunias with purple lips. Dave laughed in his half-sleep. Eventually his hand dropped from my leg and his eyelashes flicked on his skin. On the TV, a laugh track skipped round and round.
FLEUR WALKS WITH me to school. She’s in the big school now but she still walks me. She says Gran told her she has to. I don’t mind.
My teacher Mrs Maynard makes us line up outside the classroom and put our hands on our heads. She says it will stop us getting into mischief. I wave to Fleur and she goes to her big school and I stand there with my hands on my head.
In my lunchbox I’ve got a strawberry Roll-Up. It’s a special treat because Dad packed my lunch today. I don’t think he knows about food pyramids. Mrs Maynard says we’re only allowed home-made stuff for recess but Dad has never home-made anything and anyway I always eat up the back where no one can see me. Especially not Mrs Maynard.
Roll-Ups don’t really taste like strawberries even though it says it on the packet. More like those lollies with white on the bottom and red on top. I think that’s better, but it’s n
ot even the real reason I’m excited about my Roll-Up.
The best thing about having a strawberry Roll-Up is that they are Amy’s favourite and since I’ve got one maybe she will play with me.
Last week we played on the monkey bars but she got tired so some girls from year six threw sand at me for a bit. They must know that sand is soft so it doesn’t hurt.
Heather, Mrs Maynard says. She’s talking pretty loud. Heather, are you even listening?
I’m not listening but I say, Yes, Mrs Maynard.
You can put your hands down now, she says.
Some of the boys laugh. I put my hands down.
One of them is doing a squeaky voice, going, Heather! I love you, Heather!
I’m pretty sure he’s joking. I don’t think he really loves me.
Stop it, Hugo, I say.
Then he does a deep voice like a man. Heather, he says, we have to go to the hospital.
Amy is laughing.
I think about how I’m going to share my strawberry Roll-Up with her.
Boys! says Mrs Maynard. That’s enough!
Hugo smiles at me. Maybe he does love me.
Mrs Maynard counts all of us and tells us we can go inside. Hugo gets in the line behind me and gets really close to me so I can hear him breathing.
Your mum’s a spastic, he says.
Amy starts laughing again.
At recess I don’t even eat my Roll-Up at all. I just put it in the bin by the sandpit.
DAVE FUSSED AROUND me all weekend. He scuttled – opening windows, closing windows, turning on the fan, adding another blanket.
‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. You’re being ridiculous.’
‘It’s my fault,’ he kept saying. ‘You should do these things in a monitored way, you know. Can’t just go and dredge up all these feelings without having a plan afterwards. Did she give you a plan? Maybe I can find a plan online.’
On Monday afternoon, Fleur slipped alongside me. ‘Dave’s gone nuts,’ she said.
‘Don’t say “gone nuts”,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘He has. Got any snacks?’ I produced a bag of pretzels, a block of local organic chocolate, a tin of butter biscuits. ‘No jerky?’
The Paper House Page 6