And they were in love, I was sure of it. I would sit in the hallway and watch them in secret – their reflection in the Ken Done painting he had bought for her fortieth. He held her around her waist and she rested her head on his shoulder, and everything they said was in whispers and glances. Perv, Fleur said. Her boyfriend was Jimmy Pavel, nose the size of a mandarin, and I knew that was why she didn’t understand love. What would you know? she said, and punched me in the arm.
The air moved in electric currents around my parents. She wore white dresses with lace keyholes, and he wore shirts with the top three buttons undone, and they always stared right into each other. When she cried, he didn’t tell her it was okay, to be quiet, to get a grip. I wish I could trade places, he said. I wish I could take it away. Half of it. A quarter. Any of it. And then he would kiss every part of her face, his big hands in her hair and on her shoulders, until the shaking stopped. Sometimes she smiled afterwards. Sometimes her eyes were dark. He didn’t mind either way; just held her hand the same as he always did.
Sirens in the distance.
Sometimes I wanted to call the ambulance just in case. A pre-emptive call. Hello, I think something bad might happen so I was wondering if you could just hang around nearby in case because I’ve heard on the news that sometimes it takes you quite a long time to arrive and you just never know.
But I didn’t. I just watched them in their easy silence, waiting to see who would leave first.
GRAN TAKES US in her big car with its bench seats. Fleur sits in the back and I sit in the front next to Gran, like always, slide up next to her so she can put her arm around me. It’s probably not too safe, but it feels safe.
We drive out of Melbourne and over the bridge and along the freeway. Outside there’s just paddocks and some horses with jumpers on. Fleur doesn’t even see them because she’s reading. I want to tell her. She loves horses.
Fleur, I say. There are horses.
She doesn’t look.
Fleur, I say again.
She has headphones in. I poke her arm. She just keeps reading.
Mum doesn’t always go to this hospital.
One time Dad took us to visit her on the other side of town. It was a big old building and all kinds of people had to live there. Mum was in a part of the hospital for sad people but Fleur said there was a jail there too. People who tried to kill other people sometimes went to that jail.
She said they had to strap them to their beds so they didn’t kill the nurses.
I try not to think about that right now. Aradale doesn’t have a jail in it. I’m pretty sure.
Gran puts the radio on. It’s talkback. That’s when people call the radio and shout about immigrants. Gran always laughs at talkback.
Gran, I say, can we get something to eat?
We’re nearly there, she says, then she laughs.
Out the window there’s a machine rolling up the hay. I wave to it. We cross a train line and Fleur takes out her headphones and says, Can you not make my fucking CD skip?
Gran laughs at the talkback.
When we get to Aradale a man at the gate lets us in and we go up the driveway and park near a tree. It is a big square building and it has little windows all the way around.
Sometimes I think I see ghosts in the windows but Fleur says that’s stupid.
The nurse takes us down a long hallway. We can hear people screaming. Some of them are saying, Let me out! and some of them are saying, Get away from me! I hold Gran’s hand and she squeezes. I’m glad Gran is here. If I had to come just with Fleur I would be afraid. Fleur never squeezes.
Mum is in a room with another lady. She’s wearing a white nightie and when we go in she has to look at us for a minute before she remembers who we are.
Then she says, My beautiful girls.
I sit on the bed and hug her arm and she kisses my head.
Fleur sits by the window and puts her nose on it until it gets foggy. Then she draws a cross on it with her finger.
Hi, Mum, says our mum. Gran sits on the brown chair next to the bed. She strokes Mum’s hand. Mum’s eyes get red.
How are you feeling? Gran says.
Mum shakes her head.
The woman in the other bed doesn’t have any visitors. She’s staring straight ahead even though there’s no television.
A bit later a nurse comes in and gives Mum some lunch. I ask if I can have some jelly but Gran says no. Mum sneaks me a bit when Gran’s not looking. It doesn’t taste like anything but Mum smiles at me and I’m so happy to be here with her that my heart feels like it could fill up the whole room.
*
On the way home we go past the park with the pond and Gran gets out of the car and sits on the bench.
Do you think she wants us to go too? I say.
Fleur says, Can you just be quiet for two seconds?
I get out of the car and sit with Gran. She is looking at some ducks on a rock.
What are those ducks doing? I say.
Nothing, she says. They’re just doing nothing.
I WANTED TO ask Dad everything, if I could find the order of questions. I let the car idle in front of the Cosy Courtyard and waited for him to appear at the window. It was an odd little building – two storeys, with the second teetering on the other, smirking. The spot was good, though. Walking distance to the village. Little back street, a dark corridor of trees.
The door cracked open. He stood there, lopsided, in his Hawaiian shirt and his pressed slacks. That someone else again, the someone who pressed slacks and bought shirts.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Give me half an hour? Fell asleep on the couch. All this fresh air’s no good for me.’
‘Can you meet me down there?’
I locked the car. That Mount Eliza smell, that soft and salty, easy smell. I walked along the main road, stopped at the supermarket to buy a drink from the fridge. ‘Good morning,’ said someone. ‘Good morning,’ I said, as though they were speaking to me.
At the roundabout the road diverged into five clear paths, and I took the one that wound its way around the foreshore. Canadian Bay: a litter of summer mansions, Tuscan spin-offs with wrought-iron gates and U-shaped drives. I peered through their gates, wondered who had planted the vines at the front, wondered whether they changed hands often. Two million at least, with that view over the water.
I took the dusty path between the hedges, made my way down to the beach.
The after-school crowd had gathered, children and their parents splashing in rock pools against the backdrop of red cliffs. An ice-cream truck dished out globs of white pig guts for six dollars a pop, but the parents didn’t mind, because the cones were dipped in sprinkles and the children laughed as though it was a song they all knew. Dad came up behind me, touched my arm. It was impossible to know whether it was out of affection or imbalance. The air was still heavy with rain.
We watched the birds come in with the tide and his face was alight with the dying day. I wanted to ask him, do you try again? Do you pull up your socks and give it another crack? Does it make the losing part easier, or harder? It was impossible to imagine; the same hospital bed, the same hospital room, the careful in and out breath of the baby in the box, the sweet flutter of its eyelids, the bouncing pulse in its soft neck. I had no reason to believe such a thing was even possible.
‘Do you want an ice-cream?’ I said.
‘No, but I know you want an ice-cream.’ He smiled.
‘Go on, surprise me.’
‘Let’s go together.’
I bought myself a vanilla monstrosity with pink sherbet and a clown face. It dripped down my face and onto my clothes, but that was part of the experience. For Dad I chose a raspberry granita, with a straw that was also a spoon.
‘Remember that time with Mum at the beach?’ he said. I baulked at the word Mum, just hanging there in the air.
‘She took us lots of times,’ I said, cagey. ‘We literally lived at the beach.’
He made a gesture with his hand
, winding back time. ‘No, there was a particular time. You’d know the one I meant, if you could remember.’
‘You’re going to have to be more specific.’
Dad described a day wet and windy, which had never deterred Mum from the beach. It was the school holidays; Fleur was away on some kind of horse camp and it was just the three of us at home, watching cartoons on the couch with a blanket over us. Mum had made hot Milo (the proper way, with milk warmed on the stove, not boiling water) and I had made us ham and cheese toasties – our usual weekend breakfast. Mum and I loved The Jetsons. Some of the tapes had been watched so many times that the picture was faded and jumpy. Can’t we watch Storm Boy? That was about the only movie Dad would watch with us; he usually just groaned and read a book. That day, though, Mum threw off the blanket, turned off the television and shouted, Look out there! We’re practically in Storm Boy! The wind howled under the door (she had kicked in the skirting board months ago) and it was cold and angry. And then we were out in it, all three of us.
The beach had been charged with life – birds fought against the wind, crabs were thrown into the sand, lightning cracking out to sea. Mum’s face, up and lit and wide. Let’s go into the water! And she disappeared, diving under the waves like a mermaid. Dad ran along the tide line and I chased after him with the salt in my eyes, shouting and crying until she resurfaced, and she was laughing.
‘She caught a stingray!’ I said. ‘I forgot. I forgot.’ I had tried to remember.
He smiled.
‘You shouted at her, though.’
He stopped smiling.
‘Yeah, well. Stingrays bloody kill people.’
I remembered her on the phone to Gran; the way she cradled the receiver afterwards.
‘I didn’t think you thought about those kinds of things.’
‘I don’t.’ He slurped his granita. ‘Just sometimes.’
Something was there under the surface and a couple of times he reached for it and I thought we might have the conversation, but we didn’t. He told me about his house in Queensland. ‘A Queenslander,’ he said. ‘Pretty original, right?’ and I imagined him there with his wife and his wife’s mother, laughing over his open beer while the breeze came through.
Kids sat in clusters along the stone wall, passing cigarettes between them. I recognised a couple from the bus interchange, the bump-and-grinders. I told Dad about them.
‘You’re lucky we never did anything like that,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘You didn’t. Your sister, though.’
‘I don’t remember.’
We hung loose in the pause. He rolled up his sleeves of and sipped at his granita. I drummed my fingers on the table: Why-didn’t-you-save-her? and the afternoon chirped back at me. The playground was full. I watched a girl in a pink tutu do a puzzle from a chocolate egg.
‘What do you do in Queensland?’ I said finally, brushing against it, not sure if I wanted the answer but laying it on the table anyway. He turned to look at me.
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘I don’t know. Tell me before I figure it out.’
A smile broke underneath his moustache. ‘Well, I work part-time down the local bar. A friend owns it. I go there three nights a week. I play golf. Sometimes the guys go quad-biking on the beach. Thuy takes me to church on Sundays.’
‘What?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Thuy. My . . . you know. My wife.’
‘She takes you to church?’
He laughed his gassy laugh. ‘I know. It’s just a little community one. No crucifixes. No confession.’
I laughed, and I liked the way it sounded.
‘And Thuy? Does she have a job?’
He slurped the last of his granita. ‘Let’s talk about her some other time, hey? Don’t want to push my luck.’
‘I’m glad you pushed it a bit, though.’
I remembered Dad, waiting for a cab. He had to catch a plane, he said. His two weeks were up. But he would be back soon. He would give it up, look after me. We could get a place in the city and walk along the river together and I could go to university and he could get dinner ready for both of us. He had looked at me with his heart in his eyes and his eyes in a hole, and his shoulders sagged at the corners, and his body was just a skeleton on a coat hanger.
The bottom of my ice-cream cone had grown soggy; the churned animal fat dripped on my fingers.
We drove back along the main road and stopped in at Rupert’s.
‘A coffee for the gentleman?’ He tapped his nose, produced a long macchiato with an Everest top. ‘And for you, Heather. Here.’ A tray of hand-spun truffles, dark and milk and white chocolate with claws carved into them. We took it all and sat in the sun, and Dad drank his coffee.
The table was a little small for two, but by the time we realised, it was too late. We sat there close as fish in a net, with nowhere to put our hands, so they rested together. And I really felt him there, in that actual moment and not in the one he anticipated. My dad. My heart pounded. My-dad my-dad my-dad.
*
In the morning Sylvia brought over a whole almond cake in a tin with a sheep on it. Fleur looked out from inside her bruised bones and said, ‘What would you know about broken legs?’ but Sylvia was unperturbed.
‘You know World War?’ she said.
‘Like Gallipoli?’ said Fleur.
‘You think I am one hundred?’ She held a glass of water to Fleur’s lips. ‘I was nurse in Cyprus.’
‘Really?’
‘I think so.’ She winked. ‘I know you feeling bad now. I make moussaka, yes? You will love it.’ Fleur protested but the old woman fussed and buzzed and would not take no for an answer. During the day, Fleur slept. At night, when she thought no one would see her, she limped around the house, and I lay in bed and listened to the swish of her mourning blacks in the hall.
‘Fiore,’ Sylvia said, ‘you must stay in bed. No walking around in night. You want your leg get worse, drop off?’ Fleur shrugged. Summer was thick. The ground was scorched; the flowers wilted. I sat next to my sister and drew new ones, upturned and lively. In the evenings, when the temperature dropped, I watched as they stood a little straighter.
‘She’s so cute I could die,’ Fleur said flatly.
I wished for someone to make me moussaka. Fleur’s stoicism exhausted me. Our comparative grief was miles apart: where she sat in the corner of a room with her leg on the table, I drew a black cloud around my body and cried until my eyes burned; where she carried Mandrake’s photo in her pocket, I buried a hospital bracelet deep under the floorboards.
‘Well, yeah,’ said Dad, ‘but that’s the kind of person she is, isn’t it? You’re wired differently.’ Which seemed neither fair nor true.
‘You help,’ Sylvia said to me, tying her apron.
‘No, thanks.’
‘Come on. I tell you secrets.’
‘I’ve got enough of those,’ I said, but she took my hands and showed me how to beat butter into flour and then into cream puffs, and her skin scratched against mine where her roses had pierced her.
‘When I was in war,’ she said, ‘I meet all these mothers.’ She pirouetted through a béchamel sauce. ‘You imagine. Far from home. So far. Some of these mothers five thousand kilometres from they home.’
‘What were they doing there?’
‘Running,’ she said, taking a clutch of parsley from a terracotta pot. ‘Some have their babies in the street.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘Yes, awful.’ She handed me two fat eggplants. ‘You cut those.’
I did, disorganised and thick.
‘You okay, English Garden?’
‘Why do you keep asking?’
She shrugged. ‘Your insides are outside.’
‘What happened to the babies?’
‘What babies?’
‘The ones born in the street.’
‘Oh. Sometimes they live long, happy lives. Probably some come to Australia like me.’
‘But not all of them.’
‘Not all,’ she said, layering the moussaka. ‘But some.’
Over lunch Dad asked Fleur if she wanted to scatter Mandrake’s ashes in the ocean. ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘He’s never been to the ocean.’
‘Just thought it might be nice,’ he said.
‘Not sure we all share your passion for the open water,’ she said, and took her cream puffs to the living room, ate it with her back to us. Sylvia sat next to her. Each silhouette propped up the other.
‘Don’t know if Fleur is coping very well,’ Dad said to me, rubbing his glossy face.
‘She seems okay to me,’ I said.
‘Spends so much time with the old bird.’
‘Sylvia.’
‘Yeah, I know. What could they have in common?’
I shrugged. ‘I think it’s nice she’s got someone.’
‘She’s got me.’
‘Yeah, you’ve always been a team.’ Cream coated the roof of my mouth. ‘Remember when we found out I was allergic to bees?’ I said. ‘We were at that caravan park on the river. Put my hand down on a stinger getting out of the water and my whole face swelled up.’
‘Sort of,’ he said, his voice low.
‘But Fleur couldn’t find her shoes, so we all had to look for them before you’d take me to the hospital.’
‘They were expensive.’
‘I couldn’t help properly because my eyes had closed over.’ I squeezed them shut, made out as though I couldn’t see him. ‘By the time we finally went, the swelling had started to go down again.’
He was quiet for a moment, staring at Fleur. ‘You can’t have been that allergic.’
I threw my spoon into my bowl. The porcelain cracked, just a hair.
‘So yeah, she’s got you,’ I said, and stepped over the fracture that had opened between us.
*
Jenny Greer had adorned herself with a frayed green cardigan, a little elephant brooch. I sat on her couch and stared at her. She stared back. We did that for a while, just staring at one another. She didn’t crack. Staring. I blinked. Her air-conditioner hummed in the corner.
The Paper House Page 11