‘Who’s going to take care of the farm?’ Dave said. He was pushing Fleur’s things into her overnight bag.
‘Matty.’ Her tiny voice barely escaped through the sobbing.
‘Matty?’ I said. ‘I thought you kicked him out.’
‘Yeah. Yeah. I did.’
‘Prick.’
‘He’s not so bad,’ she said. ‘He’s working on it.’
‘But he can’t take care of you?’
She didn’t look at me. ‘He’s just busy.’
‘Do you need all this stuff?’ Dave said. ‘We’ve got magazines at our place.’
She shook her head, just a fraction.
‘She needs at least two nights here,’ said her nurse, whose name tag introduced her as ‘Helen’, ‘and then six weeks off the leg. No special care, just pain relief and rest.’
‘Got it.’
‘So you can put her things back, thanks.’
‘Oh,’ Dave said, and stood awkwardly at the foot of the bed. ‘I was just trying to be useful.’
‘You’re going to be just fine, Fleur,’ said Helen, without looking at her. I wondered what it was about six weeks that ensured a full recovery.
In the evening Fleur ate a piece of limp fish and a handful of peas. The hospital didn’t have anything resembling a canteen, so Dave went down to the Chinese takeaway and bought us a container of Mongolian beef, then smuggled it into the room.
‘How are you feeling?’ I said. Some of the colour had come back into her face.
‘You know he died, right? I fell and it was my fault, tried to jump him too high, his body’s too old – was too old’ – a little more crying – ‘and he came down on some rocks. We both broke our legs. For some reason I get to live on in this luxury while they put him in a kiln.’ A long howl, guttural.
Dave booked us into a three-star motel in the main street, and we slept in separate beds that felt more like cold slabs. He kept the TV on all night; I woke up every hour to a different person shouting at me to make a number of easy payments in return for something I absolutely and completely needed.
Helen had been replaced by a smaller brunette woman. ‘Hello there, I’m Gretel!’ she said.
Gretel explained Fleur’s care: keep the leg up, put it down some number of times every day to avoid thrombosis, eat lots of greens, here’s my phone number if you need anything. I went to take it from her, but she handed it to Dave, whose skin faded. ‘My baby just died,’ I bleated, and Gretel patted my shoulder. ‘You can try again,’ she said. Dave took the overnight bag out to the car. ‘There’s no one else,’ he said.
Fleur had things she needed from the house, she said, so we drove out to her farm with her sitting sideways in the back seat (‘Is that going to be safe?’ Dave said it would be fine.) and collected undies and some kind of lactose-free milk and a photo of Mandrake, the horse that had died.
‘The horse who died,’ Fleur said, clutching it like a baby.
She took us the right way home, not our ambling scenic route. The hills were eclipsed by long stretches of freeway. She cried the whole time: in the drive-through line at KFC, when we stopped for petrol and crosswords, when Dave let a family of ducks cross the road. She cried up the driveway and she cried while I put sheets on her bed and she cried when I told her I wasn’t going to move the TV into her room. Then she stopped, and didn’t start again.
*
Later, when the clouds had cleared, I sat with Noel at the top of the hill and he pointed at stars that had names. ‘That’s Orion,’ he said. ‘That’s the Southern Cross.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That’s Venus.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I know any other constellations.’
He pointed. ‘Ursa Minor. Now you do.’
We ate lamingtons with jam in the middle. His body was warm next to me.
‘Don’t you feel small, Heather?’ he said. ‘Don’t you feel so infinitesimally small?’
I did, in his shadow cast behind the moonlight, feel very small indeed. I ran through the mud, and over the mud, and around the mud. I ran into the trees where the water didn’t penetrate, past the olive grove and down the hill, across to the pond set alight by the moon.
‘Look at those mosquitoes,’ he said. ‘We’ve never had those before.’
And then, the rain.
I WAKE UP in the middle of the night to go to the toilet. Gran is staying over, just for a bit while Mum is in Brisbane with my Auntie Fay again. She goes there a lot. Way more often than Dad goes to see his sister. I wonder what they do in Brisbane. Shopping, probably. Mum loves shopping.
After I remember to wash my hands I stand in the hallway and I can hear voices in the kitchen. Dad and Gran are talking. I creep up and point my ear through the door.
They’re going to move her, Dad says.
Where? Gran’s voice is shaking like she’s lost something precious.
That one out west, Dad says.
The Hill?
No, not The Hill. The one in the goldfields.
Aradale Asylum? Gran’s voice might shake right out of the room.
Yeah, Aradale. Then Dad is crying and I know it’s him because when he stops to take a breath it sounds like a man’s breath.
In the morning it is Saturday and I ride my bike down to the library.
Do you have any books about ah-sigh-lums? I say.
The librarian squints at me and I feel like I’m doing something naughty.
Asylums? How old are you? she says.
Eleven.
What do you want with asylums?
Ah-sigh-lums. I wonder how to spell it on the computer.
I’m doing a school project, I say.
On asylums? She starts typing on her computer but she’s still looking at me. How does she do that? I lean over the desk to watch her type without looking.
Right, yeah, on asylums. A-S-Y-L-U-M-S. Asylums.
She takes me to the non-fiction part of the library and shows me where the books on asylums are, and the whole time she keeps on looking at me like I’m in trouble, and then she stands there for a bit longer while I take the books out and put them on the floor.
Is your mummy here with you? she says. She looks around as though Mum might appear from behind some shelves.
No, I say. She’s in Brisbane.
*
I find the number in the Yellow Pages. It doesn’t have an ad or anything. Just one line under MEDICAL. Just a line and a phone number. I write it down on a Post-It note and stick it on the inside of my shoe so no one will see it. I’m pretty sure if Gran sees it she will get sad.
Where’s Mum? I ask her. We eat Coco Pops together. Coco Pops give her indigestion because she’s an old lady, but she eats them anyway. We slurp the chocolate milk together at the end. Sometimes she lets me slurp her chocolate milk as well.
Mum’s gone to stay with your Auntie Fay, she says, because that’s what she always says.
In Brisbane? I say.
Yes, in Brisbane.
I’ve never been to Brisbane but Gran shows me some pictures and in the pictures it is sunny and there’s a river running right down the middle of it.
The Brisbane River, Gran says.
That’s not very creative, I say.
I think about the Post-It note in my shoe. ARADALE ASYLUM. Aradale kind of sounds like a pretty woman’s name. Not like the places in the books. I reckon it’s more like the hospital I was born in. Mum points it out every time we drive past. It’s got a big lawn with a palm tree in the middle and a pond around the back and you can buy egg sandwiches in the kiosk. Aradale is more like that. I’m sure of it.
*
Fleur creeps up on me while I’m getting the phone out.
You scared me! I say.
You should stay out of it, she says. She thinks she knows better than me because she’s at high school but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know anything about anything except boys and stealing smokes from Mum’s drawer, and she’s an
idiot because she thinks no one notices.
Dad will be really mad, she says. Like she’s ever cared about making Dad mad.
Aradale Asylum, says the voice.
I say, Shelley Herbert, please.
Just a moment, says the voice.
I listen to the dialling and then I start to imagine Mum at the other end with her arms strapped down and her feet tied together and her hair all matted around her face like in the books.
I put the phone down.
Who are you calling? Gran says.
No one, I say. And it’s true, because no one is on the other end anyway.
THE STORM CAME in its work boots. It shook the house from its foundations. It struck the garden with its light swords. It clipped and bashed and punched us and we crowded into the kitchen and watched it with our eyes hanging out of our faces. When the power went out, Sylvia came tapping on our window with a candle in a glass lamp and the shadows tricked us with their human dancing. Ashok came thundering through the front door, Harriet shaking in his arms. ‘Power’s out!’ he said, and Sylvia said, ‘You scared, old man?’
Fleur’s door remained closed. When I knocked on it, she said, ‘Are you fucking kidding me with this rain,’ and I left a bowl of spaghetti in the hallway.
Around midnight, the kitchen window blew in. Glass everywhere, no way to find it in the dark. ‘Nobody move,’ Dave said, and nobody did. The wind attacked us with its sharp nails and curled around our chests and forced its way into our lungs. Rain pounded the sink. Gushed under the door. Came in rivers along the floor. We sat and held hands, a séance. Sylvia’s fingernails dug into my palms. Ashok snored.
We slept around the table, first by candlelight, and then in the dark. In the morning, Dave swept the glass into the bin and we cracked our necks and our backs and our knees. No other windows seemed to have been damaged overnight, but the front yard had been obliterated by a large branch from the sugar gum. It lay in a crooked sleep across pots and paving, knocking out a post from the verandah, where the wisteria now dragged along the ground.
Sylvia’s house seemed fine; all her roses marching in lines. Ashok’s yard was chaotic at the best of times, and so it was impossible to ascertain any damage. He tipped an imaginary hat to Sylvia, walked her across the road. Touched her face by the door.
Dave called someone from the school to come and help him move the branch. He sat on it with his back to me, laughing and cricking his neck. ‘Haven’t slept on a table since uni!’ he said, his voice lit with shared nostalgia. ‘You got a chainsaw? Yeah, me neither.’ Ha-ha.
I swept the broken glass into the bin and called the glazier. Sylvia had recommended him; a friend of Albert’s, or one of her sons’. Women of her vintage did things that way: a fat address book to contain everyone she’d ever known. She had a person for everything.
Fleur sat across from me at the table with her blue-ringed eyes. The bruises across her cheek had faded.
‘What are you doing today?’ she said.
‘Nothing. Getting the window fixed.’
She pursed her lips. ‘Anywhere doing better coffee than that sad fella?’
‘Nope.’
‘What kind of hell is this? You moved here on purpose?’ I wondered about moving anywhere on purpose.
From two or three houses down the hill came the hoarse boom of men, then the roar of a chainsaw.
I drew a stem. A thorn. Made a hole in the paper. Drew another stem. Another thorn. Drew ten stems and twenty thorns. Fleur came out of the bathroom and sat on the couch with her head on her knees, wrapped herself in a pink blanket I’d found in the room downstairs. It smelled of sex and afternoons.
‘Do the trees look closer to you?’ They seemed to have their faces pressed right against the window. ‘Hello, trees,’ I said.
Fleur looked up from the television. ‘Trees are rooted, Heather,’ she said. ‘By definition.’
I touched my fingers to the glass. ‘I suppose.’ Up close I saw the veins of the leaves, the way they spread away from their spine like arteries. I drew them upside-down, organs showing. I drew twelve of them on a single twig, branch weighed down by all of its leaves. Leaves growing and growing in spite of themselves. A thousand leaves and the sagging tree at the end with its long face, just blinking at the leaves and wondering why it had created such a burden for itself.
‘What are you drawing?’
‘It’s a tree, burdened by its fertility,’ I said.
‘Of course it is.’ On the TV, a couple celebrated having the best bathroom in the block. ‘Surprised you’re drawing at all.’
‘Why?’ I tipped the picture into the light. The lines were cagey, contained. Pressed right into the paper as though a child had drawn them with a ballpoint pen.
‘Oh, you know. Just that you told me you never wanted to, ever again, not in a million years.’ She was looking at me.
‘It’s relaxing.’
‘Relaxing. Or, to put it another way, escaping.’
‘I’m just trying it on,’ I said. ‘It feels good to do something productive.’
‘She said that. Remember? “It feels good to do something productive,” and then we found four hundred paintings under the house.’
The doorbell rang. ‘The glazier,’ I said. ‘I’ll get it.’
‘I mean, it’s your house, and I can’t walk.’ She had turned back to the TV.
The man standing on the threshold wore a Hawaiian shirt and shorts that gaped at the knees. He wasn’t quite old, but his face had slipped from its bones and as he stood there, mouth curled up under his moustache, his eyes flicked in and out behind bifocal lenses. I gasped.
‘Heather,’ he said. And it was him; that same voice.
‘Dad.’ He pulled me right into him, hugged me with his arms around my head. He smelled of frangipanis and home cooking and I let myself think about that for a second longer than nothing. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Come to see Fleur. I called her house and that nasty fella told me she’d had an accident.’
‘Matty? Apparently she’s taken him back.’
‘After what he did.’ Dad whistled through his teeth.
‘Yeah. She’s staying here for a bit.’
‘Is she okay?’
‘She broke her leg. Did you come all this way to ask me about it?’
He tried to put his big hand on my empty body. His mouth moved very close to my ear. ‘I heard you weren’t – you know. Feeling so good.’
‘They’re putting this stuff in the Rockhampton Times, huh?’
‘There’s no such thing as the Rockhampton Times.’ His leopard-print suitcase fell over. ‘Can I come in?’ I saw the looseness of his skin.
‘Sure, of course.’ He followed me through to the kitchen. I knew each dropped step, one leg shorter than the other. I offered him a glass of water and watched him drink, straining water through his moustache. ‘Dave asked you to come, didn’t he?’ I said.
‘Nope.’
‘Fleur?’
‘Nuh-uh.’
‘Do you even know anyone else?’
He shook his head. ‘No one asked me. Just thought I might be able to help.’
I was nine, tucked inside myself by the back door, listening to the screaming. ‘You can try.’
‘Got myself a room in a B&B or some rubbish, down the beach. Couple of fogies making a mint selling floral sheets and eggs cooked in rings.’
‘That sounds about right.’
‘Won’t be in your way, is all I mean. Don’t want to impose.’ He put his glass in the sink. ‘I can be here as much or as little as you want. But I’m just down the road.’
‘Did you come by yourself?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m here to help.’
‘Well, the garden needs tidying,’ I said. ‘We had a big storm here last night.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Fine. That I can do.’
I found a sharp edge of cheese and sat in the window to watch him, this yachted man and h
is leopard-print suitcase. He went out the front, clipped the roses under their heads and left a trail of their brains behind him, swept pine needles into neat boulders. After twenty minutes he pulled a book from a pocket: Catch-22. He held it close to his face and frowned into the pages, rubbed his glasses on his shirt. An hour went by, just watching my dad and Joseph Heller on my stone path. Sylvia clicked open her front door and brought him a cup of tea. He smiled at her with his hand on her arm.
‘Dad, come inside.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Whatever you like.’ He pushed his book into the suitcase. Someone else’s suitcase. I wondered about the person it belonged to; I wondered whether he had told my story to her.
We stood together on the balcony and drank in the garden.
‘It’s a beauty,’ he said. ‘Don’t get grass much like that in this weather. How’re you keeping it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It seems to keep itself.’
‘Does it now? Lovely impatiens,’ he said. Silence. The currawong whistled from the guttering. ‘Your mother’s favourite.’ He tipped the dregs of his tea over the balcony, clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Great place you’ve got here. Excellent pittosporums.’
The doorbell rang again.
At the beach house there was a little door under the verandah. For a long while we weren’t allowed to open it – red-back spiders, brown snakes and any number of my mother’s other phobias – but for my seventh birthday, we had an unveiling. What had been a wood box or cellar had, with a little imagination, become a room in a tower. Curtains, sequins, a tiny purple chair. A place to go when the inside of the house was draped in cobwebs.
That was him. Bruce. Dad. My mother said he had shopped for the gingham himself. Maybe she even knew why.
Of course, the only days we had harmony were at that house. When Dad was home, washed ashore in a little green boat, he was everywhere in the house. On Friday nights he wore a kitsch apron – the exact wording on which escaped me – and we all stood around the Weber until the chicken was charcoal. Mum, too; just the breath of her, blonde and milky with her back to the water. In those months we were cohesive; four. At night the southerly winds beat against the windows and I was afraid, but only the normal amount. I was afraid enough to climb between my parents, hands over my eyes, but not so afraid that my lungs closed over.
The Paper House Page 10