‘Sorry,’ he said finally. ‘I didn’t know.’
We found a kiosk with an awning and Dad bought a couple of drinks in glass bottles, and I drank from mine with my lips apart but I couldn’t taste it. Dad drove the Jetta to a house with wisteria on the verandah and an Italian lady in the house across the road, and I walked down my path of salt.
On the deck, I pulled out my sketchbook and reached for my memories of the house. It was a single-fronted weatherboard place, with a pretty curled verandah and a rocking chair. Or maybe the rocking chair was by the back door? I drew it at the front anyway. Dad had installed a lion’s head knocker on the door and an iron bell that you had to ring with a bit of rope, like in a church. A path wove unevenly from the gate to the door, which was flanked by two heavy pots housing cumquat trees. Above the verandah I drew the little attic window, wide open to let the sea air in, and looked inside for her but she must have been downstairs with Shithead. I stowed the book, saw Dad’s face in the window, then didn’t.
‘He took me to the house,’ I said to Fleur, who watched me roll rice paper and pork together but didn’t help. Her leg was sore again, she said. She had it propped up on a kitchen stool. Someone had drawn a little smiling face on it; I’d never noticed it before.
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘And it wasn’t even there.’
‘He told me.’
‘For a second I saw it anyway, you know? Like I knew it so well that I didn’t even have to actually see it to see it.’
‘Keep that one in the bank to tell your shrink,’ she said, and stuck a spoon inside her cast to scratch her leg.
MUM’S BY THE school gate in her new car. She honks her horn. Sounds like a duck dying. She waves at me to come over.
Your mummy’s come to pick you up? Fuck, Melanie is a bitch.
I stick my head through the window and Mum grabs it, smushes it in her hands.
My baby girl! she says. I’ve got a surprise for you. Get in.
I don’t want to get in. Ben Horn from Year 10 asked me to sit next to him on the bus. I want to catch the bus. I don’t want to get in.
Heather? she says. Her eyes are bulging out of her face.
I don’t want to, I say. I walk away and she honks her horn a few more times. Melanie is shouting some stuff but I don’t care because Ben Horn is holding my hand.
We all stand at the bus stop together. Someone in the middle of the group has a cigarette and they’re laughing and we look like a bushfire with all the smoke coming out.
Put it out! someone says. You want to get fucking expelled?
I know Ben is next to me because I can feel the space his body takes up. He’s tall and plays basketball and wears Tommy. He doesn’t live near us but I can catch the bus to wherever he goes and catch it back here again.
We get on the bus and Ben sits next to me and puts his hand right under my skirt. The Year 12s are trading little bottles of alcohol in the back seat. A kid at the front of the bus is crying. The bus driver just drives and doesn’t say anything.
Ben’s stop is fifteen minutes down the road. Some of his mates get off too. Tan has a joint. We go down the street to a park. It’s hidden behind a hedge and there’s a lady and her kids in the sandpit over the other side. Ben sits on a swing and pulls me onto his lap. After a minute I can feel his hard-on poking into my leg. Tan and Lucas are laughing and smoking the joint and it smells like Fleur’s room.
Ben slides his hand inside my top. His fingers are cold. I don’t know what to do so I just sit there. He probably thinks I’m frigid. Then he kind of turns my head around so I’m looking at him and pashes me. He sticks his tongue right down my throat. Feels like he’s dropped a snake in there. I try not to gag. Don’t want him to think I’ve never kissed a guy before. It’s weird. I can’t tell if I like it or not.
When he’s finished he gives me a big grin. See you at school, he says.
Ben and Tan and Lucas get on their bus. I wait for mine on my own. There’s a hole in my jumper and I stick my thumb through it. The lady in the playground looks at me. Her kids are laughing.
There’s hardly anyone on the bus. I sit up the back. It’s really cold and that makes me kind of wish I’d gone with Mum. Just for a second. Then I think about Ben kissing me and I feel warm in my body.
Dad’s standing at the front door. He looks mad, but that’s pretty standard for him.
He shouts, Where were you?
Caught the bus home, I say. What’s it to you?
He closes the door in my face and I sit on the doorstep for a while. I can hear him inside, banging around. Mum’s car isn’t in the driveway. She’s probably gone to complain to Gran.
When it’s dark Dad opens the door and says, Get inside. My knees are blue. He’s made two plates of dinner. It looks like a dog puked it up.
Where’s Mum? I say.
Out, he says.
Well, where’s Fleur? I say.
Out, he says.
Out where?
Eat your peas.
These are beans, I say. And you’re supposed to cook them first.
KNOWING THAT SYLVIA died before eating my cake was a deep sadness that stayed with me, inexplicably, long after the fact. It had been an apple cake – Sylvia’s own recipe – and we took it in the morning, after I’d told my sister again about the missing house, and after I’d touched a paintbrush to the memory of it, and after I’d sat in my bedroom and listened to Dave’s necklace buzzing in the drawer. After all of that had been done, Fleur had clip-clopped across the road and I had carried the apple cake in the biscuit tin and we had knocked on the door seven or eight times before Fleur had peered in the window and cried out, a clear toll, a bell.
The hospital in Mornington was just walls and ceilings, like any other. That was the way hospitals were, if you weren’t in the maternity ward. Every other ward in the hospital that wasn’t the maternity ward just bore the possible end of life. Even in routine surgery, even elective surgery, there was always that chance that someone would be the point-one per cent, the person who didn’t make it out again.
Sylvia hadn’t made it to the ward yet. The ambulance (KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST. FAIR PAY FOR AMBULANCE WORKERS.) had taken her to the emergency department and there she had stayed, glassy-eyed and limp-skinned.
They had searched the house and found empty rooms embalmed under years of dust, and a single bed with men’s striped pyjamas folded on the pillow.
Under the fluorescent lighting Sylvia’s skin was rippled and yellow like a sunrise.
Sylvia had not said a word.
She was conscious, they said, but unresponsive. Not completely unresponsive, but mostly. An almost-coma. Fleur buzzed and hummed around me, hissing and sobbing. ‘That girl is ahead of her, because she’s bleeding to death.’ Then shouting, ‘But she’s ahead of that man over there, because all he’s done is cut off his fingers.’ She tapped her crutches on the lino; she was in everyone’s way. ‘You’re going to have to sit down,’ they told her, and she screamed, ‘I’m a fucking vet.’
The triage nurses asked questions about Sylvia. Were we her next of kin? Did we know how to get in contact with the people who were? Where was she when she collapsed? Did she hit her head? When did she last eat? Did she have a history of high blood pressure, of heart disease, of stroke? They prodded her with thermometers and shone lights in her eyes. She breathed in and out. Sometimes the regularity was interrupted by a staccato sigh. Her fingers withdrew when I touched them, like eyes on a snail.
‘Sylvia,’ Fleur said, ‘who can we call?’ The old body groaned involuntarily.
‘Old ladies always have address books,’ I said. ‘I’m going to look for one.’
I drove with both hands on the wheel. The road slipped past, as though I were not driving at all, but being propelled forward.
Sylvia’s front door was wide open, and Harriet yapped back and forth across the threshold.
‘Ashok? Are you here?’
The old man appeared
in the entryway. ‘What is going on? Heather, what’s happened? Where is she?’ Harriet snapped at my feet.
‘Sylvia is – how did you get in here?’
‘I have a spare key,’ he said. ‘Where have they taken her?’
‘You have a key? Why?’
‘Even old fellas like me have feelings, Heather. Tell me what’s happened.’
‘Sylvia’s in the hospital. I don’t know who to call. They need a person who can make some decisions.’ I pulled papers from the kitchen bench. Birthday cards. Recipes. ‘Her sons, where are they? I just need a phone number, it must be here somewhere.’
The house breathed out, empty.
‘I’ve got their numbers. We’ll stop by my place on the way.’
‘Why do you have them?’
Ashok put his hand on my shoulder. ‘She’s eighty-nine years old. This is not the first time she has had a spell. Last time they were here they asked me to keep an ear out for her.’ Harriet licked the floor next to him. He locked her in his house and made himself a flask of tea (‘The tea there is horrible,’ he said), and we sat together in the emergency room. Fleur sat with her back to the vending machine, her cast across the floor, as though her pain could be eased by inconveniencing someone else.
Sylvia was responding to stimuli, the nurse told us, and she would be moved to a ward in an hour, or two hours, or sometime before dinner. ‘You can go home and get some rest,’ she said, but we bought egg sandwiches from the kiosk and ate them with our skin stuck to a vinyl bench. Through the window we watched the wind in the flowerbeds: agapanthus tossing their hair around, and a Wanderer butterfly with its wings of stained glass. He drank the tea from his flask. I had a terrible flat white from the machine in the corridor. The silence was uncomfortable; I only knew Ashok in the context of his big house and his small dog.
Gurney wheels squeaked for oil. Code blue! A stampede of people in coats and other people in scrubs and a clutch of children on their knees.
‘What did you do before you came here?’ Ashok said.
I watched the children as their hearts crunched to a stop. ‘I worked for the government.’ The boy had stitches in his forehead.
‘Oh, right. And what will you do next?’
A man in a black suit came running towards them. He picked up the smallest girl. ‘I like gardening,’ I said.
‘I can tell.’
The man’s face was red and swollen; the girl touched it with her pink hands. They were all hugging, then: the man in the middle and the children around him with their faces in his clothes, their hair wet and thick and their shoulders heaving, bodies aching for the air they had breathed in the moments before, when the doctor hadn’t come yet and the world was no worse than it had been yesterday. The walls turned their ears away from me, towards that cluster of babies.
‘It soothes me,’ I said.
‘That’s important,’ he said.
Sylvia had a bed by the window, sharing with one other lady who was equally faint, folded into the beds as though they were wax paper. Fleur sat in the chair with her crutches propped against the side table, reading from a copy of Woman’s Day with William and Kate on the cover. ‘They’re calling her “Waity Katie”, and if these photos from Majorca are anything to go by, she could be waiting a lot longer yet.’ The words were strange coming from Fleur’s mouth. Sylvia stared ahead.
To us, Fleur said, with some surprise, ‘Hey. Hey, Ashok.’
‘How is she?’ he said. He carried flowers that I hadn’t seen him buy.
Fleur looked to me and to Ashok and then to Sylvia, eyes like cherries. ‘She’s awake. She hasn’t said anything. They’re waiting for the MRI machine.’
Ashok’s shoulders drooped. ‘Stroke?’
‘Maybe.’
The old man sat at the foot of Sylvia’s bed and squeezed her tiny legs through the blanket. ‘Sylvia,’ he said. ‘The cakes were delicious.’ She blinked, and blinked again. Her eyes were damp and swollen. ‘I was going to bring Harriet, but I didn’t think I should. I got you these, though.’ He handed Fleur a posy of snowdrops and a little white box. Sylvia’s mouth moved, open and closed and open, a fish in a white puddle, brain starved of oxygen, heart full, and he squeezed her hand and she squeezed his hand. And then Fleur got up and left the room, click-clacking across the floor. I trailed after her like the least favourite child. The skin around her eyes had shrunk and puckered with her crying. The situation with Albert seemed so obvious in retrospect. I told her about Ashok’s spare key, about he and Harriet standing in the doorway as though they’d been there hundreds of times before.
‘Do you think they’re lovers?’ I said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Her fists were clenched.
‘Why would they ask him to look out for her, though? He’s practically as old as she is. Why not the guy on the other side, what’s his name?’
‘Please stop talking.’ She cracked her knuckles, frowning deep crevasses into her face. ‘What else did he say?’
‘He said this isn’t the first time she’s had an episode like this.’
She dropped her head. ‘The doctors said it might be early stage dementia. Or Alzheimer’s.’ I rubbed my sister’s back, saw my mother’s hand on her shirt, wondered at the memory of consolation, of Fleur needing to be consoled. I couldn’t remember anything like it.
‘We should wait until they’ve done all the tests.’
She put her hands over her ears. ‘But he’s so old. How can he care for her if he is just as old as she is?’
‘He probably doesn’t care for her. Just about her.’
I had thought about old age often. That I would never watch my parents grow old together. My parents had moved side by side. Their place together in my life had been brief, temporary. That they had shown me the way forward and then left me on the path on my own. For years I had mourned their agedness; longed to see them on a park bench with their white heads together, muttering their own kind of nonsense, knees touching.
Fleur read aloud from Little Women, which Sylvia waved away, and then from What Katy Did, which she seemed to prefer. Her face cracked in smiles and frowns, and when Fleur paused, the old lady motioned for her to keep reading, so she did. She read to the smell of stale clothes and alcohol wipes, and the regular beat of rain behind the faded awning. She read through the ringing of bells, and she read through the buzzing of alarms, and she read until the evening tea trolley rattled around and Sylvia put her hand on her arm and said: ‘Thank you, nurse.’
In the late evening, I pulled a chair up next to Fleur. Her body groaned under the weight of her obligation to Sylvia, though it was imagined. She kept reading after Sylvia had gone to sleep, read page after page to the soft rise and fall of the old lady’s walnut chest. My big sister, sunburnt, sandpaper, but childlike too, tripping over the longer words.
‘Hey,’ I said.
She sighed and closed the book. ‘Doesn’t even know I’m here.’
‘Yeah, but you’re doing it anyway. You’ve been here for fifteen hours. Have you even had a smoke break?’
She shrugged. ‘Nup.’
‘So you do care after all.’ I leaned my head on her shoulder. ‘Maybe that’s your version of casseroles.’ I listened to her blood running, the wheeze of her lungs. The very small voice that said: ‘Thank you.’ Or maybe didn’t.
‘They will put her into care anyway,’ Ashok told me in the hall. ‘That’s the way it goes.’
A nurse with a clipboard said that visiting hours were over – ‘Family only,’ – deaf to Fleur’s protest.
‘When will we know more?’ she said, and he shrugged and moved on.
In the darkness of the room, Sylvia was a mere whisper under the stiff blankets. ‘We’re being kicked out,’ Fleur said to the silence. Ashok slept with his head on the bed and his arms loose at his sides. A green light flickered in the hall.
Much later, with Dave asleep, I pressed my face against my bedroom window and watched the steam gather into ghos
ts.
In the next room, a phone rang.
Fleur’s voice: ‘Hello?’ and a pause. ‘Thanks for letting us know.’
The roar of her throat ran into the boards and shook the house, and I rubbed away the ghosts to watch the pittosporums shake. I went to her door. Pushed it open a little. She lay on the bed with her back to me.
‘I have to go to the hospital,’ she said without moving.
I slipped in next to her and wrapped my arms around her waist. My knee clunked against her cast. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve never done this before.’
‘What, invaded someone else’s personal space?’
‘Never hugged you like this.’
She was quiet. No part of her moved, not a single cog turning. A couple of possums shrieked outside the window. Fleur had left the curtains open. I didn’t know the house from this angle, looking out to the road. A single streetlight blinked yellow, watching over Ashok and his little dog.
‘Let’s wait until morning. You did everything you could.’
‘No one ever does everything they could.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Thank you.’ I pinned myself against her until she slept, twitching as she passed through dreams of the paperclip woman in her hospital bed.
The ground was hot but the garden hung limp and wet against the backdrop of grey sky, contained against its will. I imagined Noel’s little house picked up by the current of the creek and carried away to sea. He would bob around in the ocean like a shiny red buoy, just his head above the water and his legs flailing wildly underneath, and his house bricked and stoned in a sandy grave.
The plans I had had for the garden, in the weeks after we had seen the house but not lost our daughter (the best weeks), were quaint and easy. I would take out the pittosporums and replace them with elms like green paper. I would plant tall roses in a row, a private regiment. I would install a bench by the creek, where I would sit and stare at my daughter’s blonde head. I had imagined a bridge over the water and a circle of red-hatted toadstools.
Next door, the red house glowed under spotlights, the faint sound of a dinner party winding up. At the bottom of the hill Noel came out to greet me, squeezed into his shirt like a summer lamb.
The Paper House Page 18