The Paper House (28 page)

Fucking junkies.

And Dad gets up faster than I’ve ever seen and punches this guy right in the face.

Then there are heaps of people everywhere, trying to stop Dad punching this guy and trying to stop the guy punching Dad back. They haven’t even seen her. I have to stand in the middle and scream at them to fucking stop it.

Someone calls an ambulance. It’s the lady from next door. She says, We are at the foreshore and a woman appears to have committed suicide. Her voice is so calm. She seems very far away.

And all I know how to think is that we should have called an ambulance yesterday, when she bought six new pairs of shoes, or the day before that when she took me on a picnic at the beach and we ate cheese until our faces hurt, or the week before when we crept out in the middle of the night and hung fairy lights from the tree in the front yard just because.

That’s when we should have called an ambulance. Not now, not now when we are looking down at her face with the blood drained away, not now with her fingers locked in place around a silver bullet, not now.

Then Gran’s car pulls up and just at that second I remember the exam and school and Gran is just here to pick me up but I can’t make my legs run and I just keep sitting there in the sand and I can hear her calling my name. She is coming down the beach, calling my name, and I want to stop her so she doesn’t have to see but I can’t get the words out.

She falls into the sand next to me. She’s on her knees and she has her old face on the purple dress and she looks like she’s having a proper seizure.

So I put my arms around her body and she shudders and sparks and so do I.

The ambulance comes and people just keep standing around, trying to make it into a story they can tell their wives at dinner.

I
T HAD BEEN
six months since my daughter died. Our daughter.

Dave was the only one who knew the date exactly, on account of his having been there when the light went out. He bought me daisies tied with string and made me a cup of tea. ‘We can think about her all day, if you like,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would like that.’

In the morning we thought about her beginnings. We thought about the plans we had made for her, standing in the kitchen in our apartment. She would be a doctor, a singer, a writer, an engineer. We would go to Paris and Moscow and New York, and take her photograph, her wide-eyed wonder. She would like
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
and
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
, and I would read to her about a secret world inside a closet and a boy wizard. We would have breakfast on the balcony, tiny sausages and toast soldiers to dip into egg yolk, and we would go for long walks to the beach, where we would watch her collect shells and play in the shallows. We would see her graduate from kindergarten, from primary school, from high school, from university. Our walls would be covered floor to ceiling with her awards, her artwork, her projects, her changing face.

I had read in a book that an unborn baby could recognise its mother’s voice in the fifth month, and from that time on I had spoken to her, sung to her. I’d told her about the world, about the people banging around downstairs, about Mrs Carson in the next apartment, who was seventy-four but still brought home a different man every week. I’d told her about the Indian place around the corner, and how I would take her there for chicken korma, and I’d told her about the dumpling house at the end of the street, and how I would take her there for
xiao long bao
. I’d told her about the pancakes at Mart180, and how I had decided that was the first place we would go together. I’d told her I would buy her a pretty new dress for the occasion.

I’d told her about her dad, who was nothing like my own dad but perfect in just about every way that was necessary. I’d told her about his scuffed shoes and his teacher’s clothes, and what great roast lamb he did, and how he had been making a doll house, but to please pretend it was a surprise. I’d told her he was a teacher, and that he had been waiting his whole life for someone to teach, a captive audience to learn about Napoleon Bonaparte and passive verb forms and how to write a cinquain poem.

And I’d told her about her grandmother, wondered if she had seen her more recently than I had, whether her blonde mane had turned white, as she had always predicted, and whether she still wore flowers behind her ears. I’d told her about the softness of her grandmother’s voice, about her slippered feet and how much she had loved Shithead – Sadie. I hadn’t told her about the nights I had slept with the light on, or the crashing of the waves against a house slowly collapsing.

In the afternoon we thought about her endings. We thought about the minute she left us, without profundity. Days of silence, trying to contain fear, fear fighting against logic, against hope. We thought about the nights in the hospital, women breathing and screaming and crying around us – sometimes with joy, sometimes without – and the blue walls like a prison. We remembered the doctor with the white moustache, and how he had filled the whole room, how I had suffocated with him there. We thought of the nurse with the blonde moustache, who had snuck extra biscuits onto the tray, which Dave had eaten because why would I eat biscuits, when my daughter would never eat biscuits?

Dave remembered things about her ending that I didn’t. He told me about sitting in the room while I was in surgery, and how there was golf on the TV. A man with black hair and a blue shirt won a trophy, and the crowd clapped very quietly. He told me how he went for a walk in the hospital garden, where he met a woman on a bench whose husband had just
called it quits
with cancer. She took off her wedding ring and showed Dave the inscription, which he couldn’t remember, but he did remember the way the skin underneath the ring was as white as paper. He told me that his mum had called him, and the nurse in the maternity ward had shouted at him for speaking while the babies were trying to sleep, and that he’d cried over the phone, and the nurse had come into the room and taken the phone away from him.

There were other things he remembered that I didn’t: eating stale chips from a vending machine, the almost incurable stiffness from sleeping upright in an old chair, watching me while I cried. He told me about the moment they wheeled her in, in her plastic crib, in the only bed she would ever have, and how he didn’t look at her but at me, and how he saw the life fall out of me and he knew he would have to be the one to hold on to it for a while. He told me about coming back to the house and seeing her everywhere, her little blue mouth, her clenched fists, and how he had to sweep her away from the corners and the crevices before I came home, in case I saw her peeking out at me.

And in the evening we thought about not thinking about her; when we wouldn’t think of her every minute of every day. Dave thought about the first time he went a whole day at the school thinking about marking, and Rhonda in the office being marched out, and whether he would get a pizza on the way home. I thought about a morning I had spent drawing pictures of toadstools and blue-chested birds, drinking tea and thinking about the weather.

In the wardrobe, behind Dave’s brown shirts, I found a dress on a plastic hanger. The finest Liberty cotton: sky blue with U-shaped petals in salmon and sunrod and sage; a frilled lace collar and capped sleeves.

‘I bought this,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘For Grace.’

‘For Grace.’

And I knew all at once why I had waited so long to say her name aloud. I knew why we had needed the whole day to think about her before I could say it, and why Dave hadn’t said it either, in all of that time. And I knew it was because contained in that one day of thinking was everything that she was or ever would be, everything we would ever know about our daughter, everything that we had named: Grace.

I would like to show my respect for and acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I write and love and breathe, and recognise Elders past and present.

A COLLECTION OF THANK YOUS:

Dad, for spending longer on this manuscript than is reasonable to expect of someone, and for reading every single iteration between the first version and this version, and for telling me where it was crap and where it was good, and for hours of enthusiastic brainstorming, and for telling me elaborate tales like ‘You’re one of history’s great writers’ and for buying me breakfast.

Mum, for inspiring me every day to smash glass ceilings and have big ideas and go out and slam face-first into the things that challenge me.

Gaz, whom I love with my whole heart, for letting me live inside your bubble, and for your tireless enthusiasm as a listener and consoler, and for the times you shouted from the next room, ‘ARE YOU WRITING?’ and for your encyclopaedic knowledge of trees.

Georgia and Lily, for occasionally giving me slivers of time in which to work in peace, and for motivating me to be better, every single day.

Allison Tait, whose contribution I cannot overstate, for talking me through the total devilish nightmare that is attempting to write any kind of complete work of fiction, and for taking time out of every week to beat me into something resembling a person who could do it.

Alex Craig, for being susceptible to my literary advances and letting me drive you around in my car even though I’m not very good.

Sophie Hamley, for understanding Heather and knowing where she should live.

Jo Butler, for duly taking over her care, and especially for calling me just to see how I was going, to see if my head had fallen off.

Bri Collins, for your clear pathways.

Mathilda Imlah, for giving me exactly the directions I needed to get through to the end.

Sam Sainsbury, for your deft and constructive manipulation of my original manuscript, with its middle soft as six donuts.

Bethanie Blanchard, for without you I would have stumbled at the first hurdle and hidden in a cave of other people’s books forever.

Julia Spargo-Ryan, for being my favourite sister out of one.

Andrew Weatherall, for teaching me why insects live inside chest cavities.

Mrs Rhodes, for Year 9 English, which was the first place I felt like a writer; and Miss McLaughlin, for championing my very first piece of published writing in Year 5.

Erin Van Krimpen, Rose Powell, Alison Asher, Erin Riley, Lauren Brown and Daniel Reeders for helping me to glue down the loose tiles.

Alex Kidman, for emotionally blackmailing me into starting this story.

Beaumaris Library, for not once kicking me out, even though I skulked around like a literary spectre.

Twitter, for always having the right answers, and for humouring me endlessly as I punched my brain into oblivion.

And thank you The Internet, for without you I would probably have got a proper job and never written this book.

OTHER THINGS OF NOTE:

I haven’t given names to the illnesses Heather and Shelley live with in this story. I’m not a medical professional, and I don’t have all the information about these women. I imagine Shelley as being a woman trying to be a mother in the eighties, when mental illness was a bit more secret. Maybe, in 2016, she could have found treatment that would have saved her life, but maybe not. Brains are still well ahead of medicine and society in so many ways.

Heather, on the other hand, seems to be experiencing a break from reality, brought on by her grief and exacerbated by what she knows of her mother’s illness(es). She was probably an anxious child, and I’ve probably written her that way because I was an anxious child. She’s introspective and worried and able to talk herself into lots of terrible things. Maybe she just needed some respite from that worry. Maybe Noel came into her life to keep her afloat momentarily. I hope she will be well. I think she will be well.

About Anna Spargo-Ryan

Anna Spargo-Ryan has worked in digital marketing for fifteen years, including time on Ramsay Street, in the Formula 1 pits and on bus magazines. Her short fiction has been published in
Kill Your Darlings
, and she also writes on parenting and mental health for the
Guardian
,
Overland
and
Daily Life
, among other publications. She lives in Melbourne with her people, animals and a cat called Norman.
The Paper House
is her first novel.

First published 2016 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000

Copyright © Anna Spargo-Ryan 2016

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

EPUB format: 9781925479522

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Cover design: Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
Cover illustration: Nomoco,
www.pocko.com

The characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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