Dave plucked me from the hall. ‘I have something for you.’ It had been such a hard year, he said. When it came down to it I had been so brave, so strong.
‘Thank you,’ I whispered, and his eyes were full and wet. He gave me a red box with a velvet bow. I felt it hissing in my fingers immediately.
‘Open it,’ he said. ‘Or don’t open it. I don’t want you to feel like you have to open it. Or even like it.’ And he snatched it back again. The hissing stopped.
‘What’s in there?’ I said, but I could taste the blackness of it, and when he opened the box I was not at all surprised to see the necklace: silver and sapphire and a pendant in the middle with a pair of footprints the size of a button.
‘They’re hers,’ he said, as though I didn’t know my own child’s undersized soles, and I said, ‘I know,’ and I stared and stared at them, touched my fingers to the cool metal. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry, I thought you would be okay with it, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ From the window, I watched the shadows change below, become darker, fuller.
I tried to say I loved it, but instead choked out, ‘Today might have been so different.’ I was suffocating.
He took the box, shut it in his bedside table. We watched the stories they always played on Christmas Day. The Small One was his favourite, the little donkey that saved the day. His fingers on my skin, food in his belly. Body twitching, then snoring. I heard Fleur’s light switch snap down. In the next room, Dad said, ‘Bye, Ashok,’ and the bells on the front door jingled as it closed.
Rupert’s Christmas pudding had nothing on Mum’s, but I cut a slice and took it in a plastic bowl, brandy custard on the side. I stepped lightly on the boards, tiptoeing past the piles of plates and Dad snoring on the couch and out the back door. Just silence. Just me in the garden on my own, hot and wet, blinking at the bright moon. Next door, a child cried for his mother, and I painted it as though it were music.
‘This is delicious,’ Noel said. ‘You are so clever.’ He shovelled it in without chewing, cheeks bulging.
‘It’s just store bought,’ I said.
‘Well, I appreciate the thought.’
He had dressed his little house for Christmas, with a real tree thick with spiky needles and terse red berries. It leaned heavily to one side, where dozens of decorations hung, silver and blue, and around the middle he had strung lights shaped like starfish. At the top, a paper star coloured yellow with crayon. In his brown jacket, a sprig of holly with a little face.
‘Happy Christmas,’ he said, and we raised our drinks. He towered over me, thick as a tree trunk.
‘Isn’t there someone else you should be celebrating with?’ I said.
He scraped his bowl clean. ‘Who else?’
‘Family?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe another year,’ he said, and I tried to guess his story.
‘Are you a renegade shopping centre Santa?’
He stretched his arms. ‘You got me.’ He licked the bowl clean. ‘Now, come on.’ He slipped into the pond without a splash and disappeared.
‘You’re supposed to wait half an hour after eating,’ I said, but stripped to my skin and touched the water with a toe. The water was warm. A kind of honey. I sat on the bank and felt the mud under my legs and then I slipped in, too, into the dark.
I rolled onto my back, looked up at the night. Through the canopy the stars came into view, jumped in and out of view as the water moved. In the silence I heard everything: my blood in my ears, my heart in my ribcage; the opening bars of ‘Graceland’; my mother’s voice calling from the beach. Water pried at my nostrils, forced the air out in streams. My chest grew tight but the water was comfort, wrapped in and around me, suspending me in safety from things that lurked below.
I pushed up, broke through the surface. The night air slapped my cheeks. Noel sat on the bank, naked, gleaming. I pulled myself from the water and sat next to him.
‘Like a bath, right?’ he said.
‘Why’s it so warm?’
‘That water’s coming right from the Earth’s veins.’ He shook out his hair. ‘I told you, the garden is changing.’
‘Are you worried?’
‘A little.’ He resembled a fish, then, the silver glimmer of his scaled skin. ‘How about you? Did your family come for Christmas?’
‘Some of them.’ I pulled a photo from under my clothes pile – my missing family.
Noel looked at it. His whole body looked at it, rapid breath and sunken shoulders and the rapid ripple of gills.
The baby in the photo had a blue face. Not blue like the sky, broad and light. Not that kind of blue, endless and sweet-smelling, soaring and clear. Not blue like the water, deep and grotesque. Not that kind of blue, stretching and bottomless, mysterious and unspoken. Not blue like a song, or a berry, or a widow.
The baby in the photo had a blue face like meat past its use-by date, like the faded corner of carbon paper, like the middle of winter. The baby’s face was cold like an ice cap, coffee left on the bench, rubber. The baby’s mouth was shut tight, clamped down, stitched, locked in place. The lips were lined with red and purple pen.
The baby was tiny. Not the fully formed baby I had imagined when I held my hand across my belly; not the enormous child I thought I must have been beholden to, with its size four feet in my lungs; not the actual and complete child I saw when I closed my eyes. The baby was the size of a forearm, of a milk carton, of a heavy paperback.
And then he said: ‘She was lovely,’ and for the first time I saw her upturned mouth.
He put his hand on my shaking knee. He felt like nothing; like soil, like air.
BECAUSE IT’S MUM’S birthday, I’m making dinner. Trying anyway. I’m making a shepherd’s pie. Some of it is from a packet but I’ve cut up all the vegies myself. I mash some potatoes. All the extra bits come through the masher like worms. I lick them off. Mum says, That’s disgusting! She has Shithead and both of them are kind of shaking on the couch together. Mum’s eyes are big. She looks like she’s staring through glass.
The pie filling pops and hisses. It’s like a volcano. The middle busts out and the gravy splashes on the stove. It smells so good. Shithead is trying to get away from Mum. She’s squirming and fidgeting like she thinks she can come over and have some pie.
Dad comes in and sticks his finger in the saucepan.
Christ, that’s hot! he says. He licks it off. Kisses me on the head.
I pour it into this ugly brown dish and slop all my mashed potato on top. Sprinkle some cheese on. Open the oven.
Shithead gets under my feet. She’s yapping her head off. My hands are slippery and I’m trying to hold on to the dish but she’s tripping me up and I’m shouting, Piss off, Sadie!
And then the dish smashes on the floor. For a second we all stand there and look at it. There’s pie filling everywhere. Peas and carrot and gravy. It takes a couple of seconds for me to notice it’s all over my foot and it feels like it’s on fire.
Heather! Dad pushes me out of the way. Mum is crying. He goes straight to her and puts his arm around her. Fleur gets the dustpan and sweeps up the broken dish. She keeps missing bits. There are chunks of it all underneath the bench. The peas are smeared everywhere. Little green corpses.
Eventually Dad comes back and makes ham and cheese sandwiches. He puts mine on a plastic plate with Peter Rabbit on it.
I’m not a kid, I say.
He sighs. His entire body goes up and then down again. He says, You really upset your mother.
I feel like I’ve got bubbles in my chest. I say, It’s not like I did it on purpose. The bubbles start moving into my arms and into my hands. I try to shake them out.
Dad sighs.
I feel weird, I say.
It’s not always about you, Dad says.
I try to remember the last time it was about me.
He washes the dishes and sighs every five seconds like it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I hear the front door click shut. For a minute
I wish Fleur would take me with her.
Dad says, Go apologise to her.
The bedroom is dark but I can hear her breathing. When she’s been crying it stops and starts. A little breath in, a hiccup, a shudder, a breath out.
Mum? I say.
When did you stop calling me Mummy? she says. She is over in the corner by the window. I climb into her lap and she puts her hands around my back. She has long arms. Monkey arms. If I push my head up under her chin I can smell biscuits and pinecones.
We sit like that for a bit. The moon comes up. Her shoulder bone is digging in to my cheek and her body is stuttering and jittering and each time she breathes I hold my breath until she starts again.
I’m sorry about your dish, I say. Breath, hiccup, shudder.
My grandmother gave it to me, she says.
I’ll buy you another one.
I take all the money from my bedside table and leave it on the dresser. In the morning it’s still there, and it stays there until my birthday, when I get a blue Care Bear with a rain cloud on its belly. The next day I trade it with Jenna down the street for a black lipstick and two wine coolers from her mum’s fridge.
THE DAYS CAME and went. Dave retreated into his study, poured himself into volumes of books, camped under his ceiling fan. I walked with Dad along the sand and he pointed out the birds and I pointed out the people, and we came back to the house browned and salty. Sylvia cooked for us every night. I watched her lean against Ashok in the kitchen. I watched them laugh together. I pressed my ear against Dave’s door, listened to the pages turning. I sat on the couch with Fleur and we watched endless documentaries together, and she explained the animals to me in her veterinarian way.
On New Year’s Eve we spread a tablecloth across the patio table and Sylvia brought out salads and cold meats and pavlova and cheese. She had great jugs of sangria, as red as blood with fruit buoys bobbing in them. Dad drank straight from a jug as though it were a beer stein. Everyone laughed. Harriet snapped at our heels, stole a wedge of cheese, passed out in the shadows. Everyone laughed. It rang out across the hillside and ran in rivers into the garden, where it fell silent against the dead air.
At one time in the afternoon I went into the kitchen for napkins and found myself looking through the new glass. It was so clean that I could have been indoors or out, or both. The garden seemed close, tendrils and knots poking up through the decking, scratching at the invisible window. The sun dipped behind the pittosporums; their silhouettes grew large and dark. The people on the patio rolled in their laughter. Fleur put her leg up on the table and Ashok let his hand rest on Sylvia’s hand and Dave took a long draw from the sangria jug until it was drained. Dad looked to the window. I touched my fingers to it, left prints to reinstate the boundary between inside and out.
‘Well,’ Dad said, lifting his glass for the fifth time, the sixth time, nine, ten times, ‘Happy New Year, everyone.’
Later, Dave stretched out across the bed, his back arched against the mattress, his belly curved and soft. He had got meaty at his edges; where his hip bones once protruded, he now carried pails of milk. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come here.’ He reached for me. His hands were warm.
‘Look at you, you’re a mess,’ I said.
‘Kiss me.’ He pulled on my dress. I leaned into the bed and his erection pressed hard against my leg. ‘That’s it,’ he said. He kissed my shoulder, my neck, the length of my jaw, his hands firm against the small of my back. Breath short and desert-hot in my ear. My mouth met his with a kind of soft resistance. He searched mine; I was startled by the foreign taste of his. He held me there against his face with one wooden hand on the back of my head and my body shattered across him but he held the pieces together as he rocked against me.
‘I miss you,’ he said.
He slumped heavily into me. All of his weight wrapped in and around me. My body reacted in spite of me, reaching for him. I looked around him and into another time, when we’d done this in mind of a future happiness and a current happiness. His breath, sangria-dusted, lashed my neck. His hands pushed a little too hard into my bones. He ground his hips against mine – his doughy body and my fleshy one, and his soft grunting in my ear, Oh yeah, oh yeah, and I stared into the cornices and the cracks and into the past.
‘Was that okay?’ he said afterwards, and I said, ‘Yes.’
Dave breathed. He slept. From the garden, the currawong called long and sad to the crack of fireworks.
*
I woke up early and watched the new year open to see if it was any different, but the morning sun just glanced off the tips of the paperbarks as it always did, and the magpies dive-bombed field mice as they always did, and Sylvia took in her bins as she always did (she never remembered that Sunday was bin night, despite a Post-It on her fridge).
Dad liked pancakes with chocolate chips and blueberries and Nutella inside (it was a wonder of modern science that he had somehow remained free of diabetes), so I did that. I liked them with lemon juice and sugar and draped in maple syrup. Dave liked banana, so I did that too. I made two for Dave, two for Dad, and one for me. I took Fleur a plain one with a little sugar sprinkled on top. She liked things no-nonsense.
‘Thanks,’ she said. We ate together on the bed with our legs crossed. The pancakes were thick and much too sweet.
A knock came on the window – Sylvia’s tat-tat-tatat. The old lady raised her hand from underneath her bonnet, a kind of forlorn lack of expectation.
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘Oh!’ She feigned surprise. ‘Hello. I have some things for you.’ She went to the front door, let herself in.
‘Is she actual crazy, do you think? Or just old lady crazy?’ Fleur said.
‘Don’t say stuff like that.’
‘I mean, sometimes I think she’s actual crazy. Remember how Mum used to talk to the stained-glass in the front door? Whole conversations.’
‘She didn’t.’
‘That’s why Dad took it out, don’t you remember? Got that metal thing with the ugly flowers on it.’
‘He did that so the air flowed better.’
Fleur leaned back in bed. ‘Went out there one day and she introduced me to it. Sitting in her rocking chair on the porch. Fleur, this is Sandra.’
‘Stop it.’
She shook her head. ‘I went along with it, obviously. You had to. Sylvia, though? Could just be a lonely old widow, I guess.’
I snatched her plate.
‘Hey! I was still eating that.’
‘You okay here on your own?’ I said.
‘Yeah. Don’t be a dickhead.’
Sylvia told me she was allergic to bananas – ‘They make me so bloated!’ – so she took a Nutella pancake. The wind coming up from the garden was hot, and had an organic smell like rotting leaves, but we sat on the balcony anyway – me in the wicker chair, Sylvia in the blue armchair. ‘This is nice chair,’ she said. ‘More people should have couches at breakfast.’ Nutella around her mouth. She wiped it off with the back of her hand. She eased herself out of the chair. ‘I take these plates to kitchen if you show me your drawings.’
I looked at her. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
She put her finger to her lips. ‘It’s okay. You show me.’
I had drawn Dave, once, before he had ever seen any of my pictures. He was sitting on the balcony with a beer in his hand and hair over his eye, watching the city ease itself into sleep. I drew the Roman curve of his nose and his long lower eyelashes (the top ones were just regular length), and the shape of his fingers resting on top of the bottle as he strummed them, and his hunched shoulders. I couldn’t get his mouth right, the way it turned up at the corners but wasn’t exactly a smile. Show me, he said afterwards, and I said No way! but I woke up in the night and there he was, looking at himself the way I saw him.
‘I don’t do faces,’ I said.
‘I know,’ Sylvia said.
The sketchbook hummed. Birds, probably, or mice. I opened it. ‘These are pet
unias,’ I said.
‘I know petunias. I like pink flowers.’
I looked at the page. ‘These are white.’
‘Yes, white.’
She pawed through its pages, nodding her head and grinding her teeth. ‘So many drawings. You like drawing.’
‘I guess.’
‘Your favourite is?’
‘Snowdrops,’ I said. Their little bowed heads, white like bonnets with screen stitching. I opened to the page. ‘These.’
‘I call them spring snowflakes. Just grow from nowhere! I never plant them. Maybe they come on wind.’
Under her watch I drew the edible heads of nasturtium and the upright ballerinas that were primulas, and she told me how the street had changed. Her house was the oldest, she said. The original farmhouse, white-walled and bay-windowed. There had been stables down the side before they subdivided, which was what everyone did in those days, she said. Now there was a two-storey thing with period features that came from a modern factory. Sylvia hated it. When she’d moved in, she and Albert had had two black-haired boys and a Samoyed dog, and they’d grown vegetables and everything smelled of the ocean.
‘You tell me about this one,’ she said, pointing at the open page.
‘Flowering gum. Corymbia ficifolia.’
‘You know the fancy names!’
‘My mum knew them.’
‘Smart lady. Flowering gum.’ She repeated it in my broad accent. ‘Red flowers so pretty and all the parrots come to eat them and not my lemons.’
‘They’re good like that.’
She put her arm around me. I breathed her in: garlic, mornings, winter. ‘Heather,’ she said. ‘I will make you minestrone. Just in case.’
Dave emerged later in the morning and went to the kitchen without saying a word. He picked up his plate. ‘These are cold.’ His face fell. ‘Couldn’t wake me for pancakes?’
‘You had a big night.’
Dad followed close behind. ‘Pancakes?’
The Paper House Page 16