House of Sticks

by Peggy Frew

  Bonnie glanced up at the clock. ‘Louie, Edie …’ She sighed.

  Louie got down off his chair. ‘I’ll get some cups.’

  ‘This’ll put some colour in their cheeks,’ said Doug, directing a lazy smile at Bonnie. ‘All this Slip Slop Slap and Don’t go out in the sun business. It’s all very well, but kids these days, well, they’re like a bunch of’ — he gave that tittering giggle — ‘little spooks. In my day, we’d be sent out to play in the sun. We all got burned, every year. Blisters. Peeling. I remember peeling the skin off me brother’s back.’ He held up his fingers. ‘Carefully. If you were really careful you could peel off these great big bits.’ Edie and Louie stared, open-mouthed. Doug dropped his hands. ‘Only kids with something really wrong with them stayed inside all the time. Like Michael Feathers, who lived down the road, who’d had some disease and was always really sickly.’

  Bonnie watched Edie and Louie, their fascinated faces. ‘Well,’ she said, and she couldn’t help her voice sounding prim. Fuck it, she thought, this is important. ‘These kids do play outside. We just — we’re teaching them to take care in the sun, because now we know how much damage it can cause. We never used sunscreen either when I was a kid. I know what you mean, Doug.’ She made an effort to look at him. ‘It’s hard to change habits like that, and … perceptions too.’ The children were staring at the bottle in Doug’s hands. He was putting the lid back on it. Nobody’s listening. Why bother? But still she went on, lamely, painfully aware of how formal she sounded. ‘It’s not about staying inside and never going out in the sun. It’s about, well, you know, like with anything, it’s about being aware, and, well, moderate in your approach …’

  ‘But, Douggie, how did you get the skin off your brother’s back?’ said Louie. ‘Didn’t it hurt?’

  But Doug was busy. He tightened the lid back on the bottle of juice and made a great show of shaking it sideways. Then he opened it, took the two mugs Louie had brought and filled each to the brim with the frothy thick red stuff.

  ‘Maybe not so —’ Bonnie started to say, but bit her lip. Bugger it. Let him learn.

  Louie and Edie lifted the mugs, both slopping juice over the table and down the front of their pyjamas. She felt a spark of bleak satisfaction as she watched the two faces, the two grimaces of disgust, the setting back down of the two mugs.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Edie in astonishment.

  ‘Me either,’ said Louie, licking his lips as if to make sure.

  ‘What do you mean? It’s delicious!’ Doug seized one of the mugs and gulped at it. ‘Ahh,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Delicious! Although’ — and he aimed that wink at Bonnie again — ‘it’s just not the same without the vodka and tabasco.’

  She grabbed a tea towel from the oven door. ‘Okay, guys,’ she said, scrubbing at the front of first Louie’s and then Edie’s pyjamas. ‘Let’s get ready for kinder.’ She hustled them out of the room.

  ‘Have a nice day,’ called Doug.

  She glanced back and saw him reach over to Pete’s plate, grab a crust of toast, tip back his head like a pelican and toss it in.

  She dropped the twins at kinder and went to the supermarket with Jess. She got every single item on the list, wheeling up and down the aisles, forgetting things and going back for them, revisiting the same section two or three or even four times. The list somehow actually became worn and thin between her fingers. She imagined a map, an aerial view of her bumbling progress, a haphazard web of inefficiency.

  In the car park she strapped Jess back into her capsule and piled the bags into the boot. Half trotted with the trolley to the bay, throwing anxious glances over her shoulder at the car with the unattended baby in it. Half ran back. Got in behind the steering wheel. Heaved a sigh of relief.

  At the house she staggered in with Jess on one hip and three bags in the other hand to find Doug sitting at the kitchen table. She pulled up short, heard her own embarrassing startled gasp.

  ‘Hullo, Missus Bonnie.’ He lifted a thick and asymmetrical sandwich to his mouth, bit, chewed, then stopped. Spoke through the mouthful. ‘Did I give you a fright?’

  She bent her knees and lowered the shopping bags to the floor. She let go of their handles and worked her fingers open and closed a few times. Her heart was pounding. ‘Oh, no,’ she heard herself say in a breathy voice. ‘Just — wasn’t expecting anyone to be in here, that’s all.’

  ‘The boss’s gone for a meeting with Grant,’ said Doug, tearing off another hunk and chewing. ‘Cold out there.’

  ‘Haven’t you got the heater on?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s not all that good though. And there’s nowhere nice to sit. Not like in here.’ He smiled, stretched his back and rolled his shoulders. ‘It’s nice to get away from all the sawdust. You know, have a bit of home comfort.’

  Bonnie looked down at his plate, the sandwich. Then over at the bench, the cutting board, the knife, the butterdish and unwrapped block of cheese. She noticed he’d used the actual crust, all that was left of the loaf in the breadbin, and at the same moment realised she’d forgotten to buy more.

  Jess blew a raspberry.

  Doug wiggled his fingers at her. ‘Hullo, princess. Been helping your mummy? Been a good girl, eh?’

  Bonnie turned and went back out to the car. Without putting Jess down she brought in the rest of the groceries in three more one-handed trips, piling the bags on the kitchen floor. Doug sat stoically and ate, looking at the newspaper. When she’d finished Bonnie went and locked the car. She took her bag and keys, put Jess in the pram, shut the front door behind her and walked down the street.

  She sat on a bench in the empty park and breastfed, shivering, staring in a cold, blank fury at the bare ground in front of her, the straddled legs of the picnic table, a broken beer bottle over near the barbeques. She tried to call Mel, who didn’t answer. Then she tried her mother’s number, but closed the phone before it connected. She put the phone away, settled Jess back in the pram with her blankets and beanie, and tucked her own clothes back in. Did up her jacket and rewrapped her scarf. Took her phone out again to check the time. Only one o’clock. The day yawned ahead. Her fingers on the pram handle were pale, bloodless with cold. She needed to go to the toilet. Fuck this, she thought. This is just fucking ridiculous.

  The lights were on in the neighbourhood house. As she moved closer she could see crowds of people in the windows, hanging coloured lights, garlands of what looked like paper stars. A door opened, and a family came out. Indian — two women in saris bright like cut flowers in the grey afternoon; a gaggle of lithe dark children; four men wearing bulky parkas over white linen. Two of the men walked ahead with the women and children; behind came an older man and a younger one, a teenager. They passed her on the path. The older man was being helped by the boy. He was quite old, Bonnie saw as they came level with her, with white hair and a wizened face. But his posture was good, and he walked with confidence. It almost seemed a formality, the boy’s arm linked through his. Bonnie heard his voice, sure, low, measured. She caught the listening face of the teenager, saw how he was shortening his stride to match the old man’s. His parka rustled. There was a faint smell, although she couldn’t tell if it came from the people or from the building they’d come out of. She breathed it again. Sweet. Some spice she knew but couldn’t name.

  The group went on through the park, and Bonnie kept going her own way, past the lit windows and the sounds of music and talking. She pushed the pram along the last stretch of path, through the thicket of banksia and out to the street.

  She was nearly back at the house when, crossing a laneway, she glanced down it and saw the smashed pot. The broken pieces with their pinkish insides showing, clumps of dirt sticking to them, and the pale tendrils of roots. The exposed backbone of the main stem lying there with the curved ceramic in loose fragments around it like a ribcage
busted open. Something dark was spread underneath it, a piece of fabric.

  She froze, shock jolting through her. She took two steps back, swung the pram into the narrow mouth of the laneway and bumped closer. Went right up to the edge of the mess and stood there. The smell of the bruised leaves of the plant rose, sharp and strong. She bent and picked up a piece of the pot and turned it over. Angled it in the overcast light to see the depth of the glaze, the network of cracks, the colour that seemed to change, sometimes blue, sometimes green. One of the edges was pointy and she pressed the pad of her finger to it, watched the indent it made, felt its tip like a blunt needle. Then she dropped the piece again, and it landed on the cobblestones at her feet and broke into three.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. Then she saw what the dark thing was, lying underneath. A blue towel, dirt-covered and torn. The smudged white label stuck out at one end. Sheridan. One of the towels Pete’s parents had sent as a housewarming gift. The only towels they owned that were soft and not frayed or threadbare.

  She looked around. The laneway ended not too much further down, at a greying timber fence. It seemed darker in there, enclosed, trees crowding above the fence-lines. She could smell urine. Everything was very quiet. She turned the pram again and went back out, trying not to hurry, trying to contain the fright that was buzzing in her arms and legs and hammering in her chest.

  She walked past the house, past Doug’s van and the space where Pete’s van still wasn’t, and down to the main road. Spent the afternoon in a cafe, in shops. She even went to the library, feeling naked without the twins. Found herself standing aimlessly in the middle of the children’s section, where a toddler kept throwing himself face down into the sagging vinyl beanbags and biting them. ‘Come on, Charlie, shall we read a book?’ the mother said, giving Bonnie a weak smile of embarrassment, but again and again the child launched himself, legs flailing, something too intimate in the way he pressed his face to the rubbery surface and then pulled back, teeth gripping. Bonnie moved away.

  She sat and leafed through magazines. Jess slept. Twice she took out her phone and started to call Pete, but then she thought he might still be in the meeting and put it away again.

  At three-thirty she walked back to the house. Pete’s van was there, parked behind Doug’s. She put Jess straight in the car, left the pram on the front porch and drove to the childcare centre.

  She checked the sign-in book. Mel was due to pick up Freddie in fifteen minutes.

  ‘Can we play for a bit longer?’ said Louie.

  ‘Yes. You can today.’ Bonnie followed the twins out into the centre’s yard and perched on the edge of the timber sandpit frame with Jess on her lap.

  ‘Look at this, Mum!’ Louie hung upside down from the monkey bars.

  ‘Mum! Mum! Look at me!’ called Edie from the mini-trampoline.

  ‘Wow! Great!’ The smile strained her face. Her skin felt numb, her whole body hollow and husk-like. She heard her voice go on responding to the twins with the kind of facile praise she’d always taken pains to avoid. It hardly felt like she was even opening her mouth, but there it went, echoing out of her, robotically insincere. She imagined a gust of wind or a blow from a passing child catching her, knocking her off her perch, breaking her apart, Jess tumbling back amongst the pieces into the sand.

  ‘Hi.’ Mel stood over her.

  ‘Oh. Hi.’

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Well, no, not really.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ Mel sat down beside her and as she did Bonnie felt tears rising, the mask of her fake-smiling face cracking, the terrible, unstoppable crumbling of her composure. ‘Bon?’ Mel’s arm drew around her shoulders.

  ‘Oh, sorry, sorry — have you got a tissue?’ She snuck a glance at the children, who were taking oblivious turns in some game on the climbing frame.

  Mel handed her one, and Bonnie wiped her nose and eyes. ‘Sorry, Mel,’ she said.

  ‘What’s happened? Do you want me to hold Jess?’

  ‘No. It’s okay.’ She held on to the baby, put her nose into the top of her little knitted beanie. ‘Oh god, sorry about this. Hang on, I’ll just pull myself together and then I can tell you.’

  ‘It’s all right. Take as long as you want.’ Mel rubbed her back.

  Out of the corner of her eye Bonnie saw one of the childcare workers approach, hesitate, move away again. She threw another glance at the children. Any moment one of them would come over, call out, want something. She needed to stop crying, to regain control. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly, in through her nose and out through her mouth, like she’d learned at birth preparation classes. Jess’s beanie smelled of wool wash. Calm down, calm down.

  All around the sounds of children went on, a busy tangle of noise.

  ‘Okay,’ she said after a while. ‘Did I tell you about the pot plant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay. Well, I’ve got this pot plant. A geranium — in a beautiful old glazed ceramic pot that my great-aunt gave me years ago. It was on the back porch.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Well. Yesterday I noticed it was missing.’ She took a deep, wavering breath. Another surge of crying threatened, but she pushed it down. ‘It just vanished. Off the back porch. And then today I was out walking just down the street and I saw it in a laneway. All smashed up.’ She turned to Mel. ‘Someone came into our backyard and took it — I don’t know when, in the middle of the night maybe — and carried it down the street, took it into that laneway and just’ — she heard her voice wobble again — ‘smashed it all up.’

  ‘Mu-um!’ called Freddie from the climbing frame.

  ‘In a minute, Fred.’ Mel kept her eyes on Bonnie’s face. ‘How awful,’ she said. ‘And it seems so much worse that it was out the back. I mean, even if it’d been out the front it would still be bad, but …’

  ‘I know,’ said Bonnie. ‘The thought of someone sneaking around the back of our house. I mean, we forget sometimes even to lock the —’

  ‘Mummy.’ Freddie ran to Mel, leaned into her knees. ‘Mummy, I want to go home now.’

  ‘Okay, Freddie. One minute.’ Mel turned back to her. ‘That’s so creepy. I wonder who it was?’

  ‘Come on, Mummy,’ said Freddie, pushing at Mel’s legs.

  ‘Actually, we do have to get going.’ Mel stood up. ‘Sorry, Bonnie. Will you be okay? It’s just that we’ve got my parents coming for dinner and I have to pick up some groceries on the way home and —’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’ She wiped her nose again and stood up too. ‘I’ll be fine. Sorry I had such a meltdown.’

  ‘No, of course. I understand.’

  ‘But the thing is …’ Bonnie put her hand on Mel’s arm. ‘Can I just tell you quickly?’

  Mel nodded.

  ‘It’s not just the idea of some random creepy, I don’t know, drunk kids or whatever, sneaking in and taking a pot and smashing it up for kicks or something. Even though that’s not a great thought. And I can’t really imagine why anyone would do that. But the thing is —’

  ‘Mum!’ Louie ran up. ‘Edie says I can’t be in her game.’

  ‘Hang on, Lou.’ She lowered her voice. ‘The thing is, Mel, I think’ — she dropped it to a whisper — ‘I think it was Doug.’

  ‘What?’

  Bonnie kept whispering. ‘I think it was Doug. He’s been acting weird. Apparently he was upset we didn’t invite him to the kids’ birthday party, which he found out about because he just happened to drive past our house on the day, which is weird and creepy in itself, because he’d have no reason to drive past on the weekend —’

  ‘Mu-um!’

  Bonnie edged away from Louie, closer to Mel. She had an image of herself, her bloodshot eyes staring wildly, her urgent whisper, her hand on Mel’s arm, holding her there. I must look crazy,
she thought. She probably thinks I’ve gone mad, that it’s all in my head. But still she kept going, the tense words rapping out. ‘And then he didn’t turn up for work for a while, well, pretty much all of last week, since the party, and he didn’t go to this reunion thing last night with Pete and his old mates from uni. And then yesterday I noticed the pot was gone, and then this morning he just turned up as if nothing had happened. Except …’ She wiped her nose. Wound her whisper even smaller, tighter. ‘I don’t know — I mean, I’ve always thought he had it in for me, that all his jokes were really just a way to get at me. But now I’m wondering. I mean, I could be imagining this whole thing, but I really feel like he’s giving me these knowing looks, and —’

  ‘Mu-UM!’ Louie tugged at her hand. ‘Edie says —’

  ‘Let’s GO, Mum!’ said Freddie at the same time.

  ‘I really have to go,’ said Mel. She leaned over and hugged Bonnie, squeezed her arm. ‘Sorry, Bon. I’ll call you, okay? Later tonight.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks, Mel. Sorry for …’

  ‘No, no. It’s fine.’ Mel waved as she followed Freddie back into the building.

  Louie yanked her arm. ‘Mum! Edie says she’s the princess and I can’t go in her castle unless I be a guard and I don’t want to be a guard, I want …’ His voice twined on.

  She stood in the middle of the tanbark, her arm limp as he pulled at it. She put her nose to Jess’s hat again, but the smell of the wool brought the crying feeling back so she lifted her head instead, shook her hair out of her eyes, stared up into the leaves of the small gum tree that shaded the sandpit. The way they raked and shook, their neat, clean spear-like shapes.

  In the car she called Pete. ‘Hi,’ she said, hearing her words come out weak and teary.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ The concern in his voice almost made her cry again. She was overwhelmed by a desire to be lying in bed with him, between warm, clean sheets, everything else, all concerns and responsibilities, simply removed, eliminated, dissolved. She could feel the tension between her shoulder blades, and her throat hurt.