by Ashley Hay
Elsie’s children, the twins, Don and Elaine, came to empty the house for the sale. Elaine swept shelves of items into bags, disposing of them in the gaping maw of a skip emptied once, emptied twice. Don went through things piece by piece: cutlery drawers, button boxes, the old letter rack from the high kitchen shelf. Some of its receipts and notes dated from decades before. There were photos in there too: a gallery of grandkids, an image of Elsie before her own children were born, and the house up to its windows in water during the ’74 flood. He stood a while, wiping the dust off this last image.
‘That bloody flood—you know, I don’t think she ever got over it. We should have made her sell the house back then.’ ‘And made no money on it—who’d have bought here, after that? We’re lucky that people forget.’ Elaine had the fridge door open and shovelled jars and packets into a garbage bag. ‘Look at this—all out of date.’
‘Carol used to take her shopping once a week; some of it should be all right.’ Don slipped the flood photo underneath the other pictures, and stared a while at a tiny black and white of his mother, taken almost seventy years ago. ‘She was so pretty, wasn’t she, when she first married Dad? This must have been when she was working at that chemist’s in the city, before we were born. She always said she felt important, behind the counter in her starched white coat.’ He turned the photo over: ‘January 1941,’ he read. ‘The year we were born—and that’ll be seventy years ago, soon.’ He shook his head at this impossible thought. ‘So strange that she’ll never come home. Do you mind if I take these?’
‘This milk’s two months past its date.’ Elaine dropped it into the bag, bursting the carton so that the room filled with a terrible, sour smell. ‘I wonder why she never went back to work—she must have been so bored. God, we should have got a cleaner in and—oh!’ Her hand at her throat as a crow, big and shiny black, landed on the threshold, cocking its head to look through the door.
‘You don’t mind if I take these, Elaine?’
Elaine tied the bag with a savage twist. ‘Whatever you like.’ She glanced across at him. ‘You were always more sentimental than me—here.’ One of the pictures had dropped on the floor. ‘Here’s another.’ She reached down and passed it across.
It was a photo of a portrait, and Don frowned. ‘It’s a painting, but it almost looks like Mum.’ He held it close to get a better look.
‘A painting of Mum? Let me see.’ His sister took it from him and went out onto the deck, studying it in the sun. ‘It can hardly have been her,’ she said at last, folding the print—in half, then half again—and stuffing it into her pocket. ‘As if she’d get a portrait done like that.’
Most of the furniture went to an op shop, along with the clothes and almost everything from the crystal-fronted kitchen cupboards: the crystal, the crockery, the pots and the pans. ‘Of course, she’s not dead yet,’ said Elaine, which made Don wince as he set aside a painted vase he thought was his mother’s favourite and a book he remembered her reading, years ago, around the time that his father had died.
She looked small in the new place, he thought. She looked lost.
‘I must get back to reading to your father,’ she said when he next visited, patting the old paperback with its foxed pages and crumbly cover. ‘And did you bring my house keys? How will I get in when I go home?’
In each room, there was something Don baulked at removing. The sideboard in the lounge where his school sports trophies still sat arranged on one end. A plastic fern in the sunroom. The velvet-covered stool in front of his mother’s dressing table.
‘Your father did that upholstery—lovely rose-coloured velvet; a present one birthday,’ Elsie said when he mentioned it. ‘He said it was fit for a queen.’ She smiled. ‘But you’re right: I won’t need it while I’m here.’ She’d watched her reflection change through the decades as she sat on that elegant stool, her hair fading from a warm chestnut brown down to grey and the skin under her fine chin loosening. All those crystal canisters on the dressing table; the phials of perfume she’d never quite finished. Who was keeping up the dusting and the sweeping while she was away? Was Elaine chipping her nail polish pulling out the little weeds that grew between the white pebbles in the front garden? She doubted it.
When she visualised her daughter, she saw a younger version of herself. She was always astonished when the real Elaine arrived and looked, and was, so very different.
•
When the new people came, they put the stool and the fern into a skip along with all the wallpaper—‘a different pattern in every room,’ said the husband, Ben, laughing—and the thick green carpet. ‘Last vacuumed . . .’ he shrugged, glancing down at his small son. ‘I think Tom’s found a cockroach to eat.’ Ben was taller than he stood, his shoulders curled from years hunched over writing. His dark hair was greying and he kept his glasses on top of his head, ready to read things at a moment’s notice. He looked down at his son, his hands busy with the desiccated insect, with a detached kind of appraisal.
‘But these floorboards are going to look lovely,’ said his wife, Lucy, taking the cockroach out of the boy’s hand. ‘It’s such beautiful wood. And look, they’ve left a pile of pretty doilies.’ They were bundled together behind the door, and she paused for a moment, stroking the patterns on the delicate white linen runners and mats—a suite of flowers and fruit and elaborate twirling curls.
‘Look at this—’ holding up a star-shaped doily for her husband to admire. ‘So fine: the stitching’s as neat on the back as it is on the front. I wonder if they meant to take them; seems a shame that no one wanted them. Or maybe they meant them for us.’
Sitting on the floor, Tom unpacked small white pebbles from the back of a brightly coloured plastic truck.
‘Star,’ he said, pointing to the shape his mother held. ‘Star.’
‘That’s a beautiful word—and a whole new one.’ Lucy smiled so much she was crying.
‘See, Lu?’ said Ben, brushing her deep red hair away from her forehead. ‘I knew we’d be all right here.’
•
They spent three weeks stripping, painting, moving. The first night they slept in the house, Lucy woke at three, disoriented by the map made by the beading on the ceiling. Which house was this? Which city, which country? In the past years they’d been all over the place—to Washington, to London, back to Sydney, and now to Brisbane.
Where they seemed to have bought a house.
‘First step to feeling settled,’ Ben had declared—and Lucy thought she ought to trust that he was right.
Brisbane: the place where he’d grown up. Now it was where Tom would grow up too, while Ben went off to his new job with the paper. Gadgets, inventions and discoveries had always been the things that piqued his interest (Lucy preferred more seriously to describe it as science or technology), and he’d at last been approached to cover that round.
‘I’d be mad not to give it a go—all those magnificent stories,’ he’d said in Sydney when the offer was first made. ‘We’ll stay here until Tom turns one, then we’ll go. Come on—the next adventure!’
She had jobs that she did—administration, management. He had a job that he loved. That was how they both defined their working lives.
‘You’re mad to go,’ her sisters had said. ‘Tom’s so tiny. You need your networks.’
‘Get back to work,’ her mother had said. ‘Best way to settle into a new place.’
‘You’ll have a ball,’ her father had said. ‘A whole new city—and take your time.’
Their standard difference of opinion, thought Lucy, and here I am. She stared at the ceiling. Old bed, new house. It was the first house they’d ever bought. They’d been in Brisbane a month or so—and back in Sydney barely a year before that. She was unpacking boxes in this house that she’d packed in London, in Washington before that. She’d never thought of it as moving but as arriving, and there was a trick to arriving somewhere new—a person or a place that made it easy, or a sliver of coincidence that made
her think they’d landed precisely where they ought to be.
‘And now, the great Australian dream,’ Ben had joked. ‘The kid, the house, the mortgage.’ How very fast they’d made that real.
Now, in the night’s light, she looked at her husband’s face as he slept—he was always smiling, home each night with some great story, some great new moment from his day. While she made spaceships for Tom as she emptied their boxes, and began to work out where they were.
Their names had looked so slight against the weight of all that mortgage.
‘In at the deep end,’ she’d said to her sisters, trying to laugh. And they’d laughed too.
The floorboards felt warm as she walked to the kitchen. She liked the rich glow of the newly polished jarrah, and she liked how they felt underfoot. There was something warm about the whole house at night—perhaps it was the soft light from the streetlamps. She stood by the kitchen window, filling a glass with water, and watched as rain started to fall, smudging the reflection of the lamps in the park into patches of brightness on its concrete path. She walked into the living room with her glass, patting a doily that she’d left on the arm of a chair.
‘I know we’re not really doily people,’ she’d said to Ben, ‘but it seems wrong not to keep some of these—they’re exquisite.’ Now, as her fingers felt the stitching, she knew the tiny mats would probably hang around for as long as they lived in this house.
Elsie’s house, thought Lucy. Elsie Veronica Gormley. She’d seen the woman’s name on the settlement, and she’d pressed the neighbours for any more details. Elsie must have been around ninety, they’d said, and she’d lived here a very long time. She and her husband had bought the house when it was built, back in the forties, and they’d lived here with their twins, a boy and a girl. Her husband had died—no one could quite remember when; no one had been here that long.
And then she’d fallen. And then she’d gone.
‘I think they chose to sell to you because you’re a family,’ the estate agent had said as she slid the contracts across her cluttered desk.
‘We’ll look after it,’ Lucy said as she signed her name and passed them on to Ben.
‘Meant to be,’ he said, squinting through his glasses as he signed.
There was a tiny whisper in the darkness from some of the seventeen circles they’d found drilled into the different rooms’ floors when the carpet had been taken up.
‘Circumference of a broom handle,’ Ben had said. ‘I should buy some chocks.’ But he hadn’t done that yet, and the wind sometimes caught at them, stirring puffs of air like little breaths.
Lucy checked on Tom and headed back to bed, rattling the front door knob as she went by.
‘We should change the locks,’ she’d said to Ben earlier that day. ‘You should always change the locks when you buy a house.’
‘What?’ Ben had laughed. ‘What do you think is going to happen? Elsie’s going to let herself in?’
‘Elsie’s family—how many keys might there be in the world?’
Now, in the darkness, her fingers fiddled with the door lock’s button. Safe and sound, safe and sound, safe and sound. It was like a line from a lullaby.
In the quietness of the middle of the night, she turned these words end over end in her head, dropping back into sleep beside her husband and his warmth.
•
Elsie woke at three, disoriented by the hum of an air conditioner nearby. Three in the afternoon, she thought, looking at her watch. How could they have let me sleep so long—I’ve missed breakfast and lunch, and there was a bus I wanted to catch.
She buttoned her cardigan, and as she felt around for her shoes, her handbag, her hat, she knocked the vase that Don had brought for her, cracking it into four or five pieces as it smashed against the floor. She’d never liked it—it had been a present from one of Clem’s friends when they were first married. She dropped the pieces into the rubbish bin, wondering why it was so dark. Then she heard the rain against the window and nodded. This time of year, you could expect a thundery shower on a Brisbane afternoon.
She looked into the street: it was very quiet, and although she watched and watched, no cars or buses came. Perhaps there was a strike she didn’t know about. Still, it wasn’t far to walk: through the park towards the river and then along the road.
She’d see her garden, her lilies, her hydrangeas, her azaleas. She’d see how they’d fixed the front door—Donny said it was bright red now, which she wasn’t sure about—and how the walls inside had all been stripped of their carefully papered patterns.
She smiled: there and back in an hour. She’d feel like herself again once she was home. She’d let this strange dark rain ease up before she went.
•
The next morning, taking Tom into the garden, Lucy paused at the top of the stairs, registering the stray flecks of the new front-door paint spattered on the porch’s balustrade. Such a strong colour, somewhere between vermillion and scarlet. Fire engine, Lucy had called it, but Ben revised it—‘lipstick’—with a smile. Lucy loved how brazenly bright it was.
She scratched at a splatter, then levered the colour from under her fingernail and rolled it into a ball. Their new place. Leaning out from the top of the stairs, she saw the park, the busy through road beyond that, the streaks of shiny colour as the cars zoomed by. Hours of entertainment: Tom would love it.
There was a shimmer of movement and a kookaburra landed on the power line, its feathers soft and furry and its head tilted to one side, expectant.
‘Hello,’ said Lucy. ‘Are you a regular here? Look, sweetheart, isn’t he beautiful?’ She turned Tom around to see the bird’s smooth feathers, its still trust.
A car came around the corner then and the bird took flight, before settling itself further along the wire. Lucy raised her hand, uncertain if she was waving to the car, to the bird, to the house or the morning itself. Then she helped Tom down each step.
The kookaburra sat, watching.
‘Well done, love,’ Lucy said as Tom reached the last tread. ‘The first step in being somewhere new.’ She smiled. ‘And later, we’ll head out and explore.’
As she turned to herd his steps across the lawn, she saw footprints, smaller than her own and closely set, already pressed into the still-wet grass.
2
The clock
In the morning, Elsie slept through the time for breakfast and for morning tea. She slept through the time she could have joined the garden club and the time she could have joined a game of lawn bowls. When she woke, the sun was near its midday peak, blasting the flowers on the jacaranda tree by her window to an impossible luminosity. It looked hot out there: she waited for the day to dim.
In the old days, she and Clem had walked the streets at dusk this time of year—October and into November—inhaling the colour of these flowers. Had they been walking again? She rubbed at her calves and her shins: what had she been doing to make that ache?
Then her mind slipped into another time and place. It made perfect sense. It reminded her of reading Alice in Wonderland to Donny and Elaine, and then to the grandkids. It was like following Alice down a rabbit hole. She heard a bell ring nearby and knew that lunch would now be served. Might as well eat in the dining room as fuss about with cooking.
‘I think it’s chicken, Mrs Gormley,’ said the Cheshire Cat, sliding a plate onto her placemat as she sat down. ‘Lovely to see you today.’
It was quite a pleasant way to pass the time. In some moments, she thought her mind might just be wandering—that was the phrase people liked to use—but wasn’t it nicer to wander off into your memories, instead of holding them at arm’s length? Surely it was nicer to feel yourself back in the moment when your husband was ten minutes away from home than to remember that he’d been dead for thirty-seven years now, and would not be home again?
All this nonsense about which day of the week it was and who was the prime minister—Elsie had never cared much for politics. Everyone shouting at
everyone else and not a skerrick of manners in sight. Here was Clem, coming through the park; here were Elaine and Don, kitted out for their first day at school—way back in the summer of 1947.
Little things; her little things. Swinging their big bags up onto their shoulders and setting off through the school gate. Donny so quick with his numbers—she didn’t know where he got that from—and Lainey always top with her reading. Elsie could have burst with pride at the pair of them: and here they were, running back across the high-school yard, twelve years later, straight past her and into their lives. Ah well, Donny had made a happy go of it. But Elaine: no matter how muddled the stuff of all her memories, Elsie tripped up on Elaine’s disappointments. One of the last talks she’d had with Clem (here it came, unspooling like a length of film) was about his worry that they hadn’t done enough to encourage their girl.
‘But her baby—she had Gloria,’ Elsie had said. ‘What more could she have wanted than that?’
‘I reckon she’d a head for learning,’ Clem said, reaching over to turn off the bedside lamp and finishing the conversation in the dark. ‘I reckon we did her a disservice, not pushing her more towards that. I reckon we could have done more.’ Those last words eaten by his horrible cough.
Elsie braced against the side of the table, almost pushing herself to standing to get away from this memory. No, I don’t want that today. She looked at her chicken and found herself hungry, wolfing it down, while she let herself imagine gliding along the river in the handy boat that Clem had always talked of building, scavenged from bits and pieces he’d found in the swampy dump by the back of their place. That was better than hearing sharp words from long ago.
On the shelves in her new bedroom Donny had set up the bracket clock that Clem’s great-grandfather had brought around the world from Kent to Brisbane. Clem had loved the sound of the clock’s tick, and after lunch, Elsie lay on her bed again, her ears attuned to the beat of its pendulum. It was a drum. It was a footfall. It was the rain. It was her life.