The Life of Houses (11 page)

‘Don't let me forget Dad's paper,' said Treen.

From the bright footpath the General Store was a grey cave. Kit waited outside by a metal basket of thongs, a basket of frayed romance novels, and a postcard stand. One postcard of a black swan had the words ‘Wish you were here' splayed across it in home-computer font. Other postcards were glossy: a local's photographs glued to a piece of card: deliberately picturesque shots of a pier at sunset, a shell in close-up. Idly Kit thought of sending one to her father—though, what would she write on it?

Carol and Miranda were at the table already. With them was a boy Kit's age sprawled sideways in his metal chair, which looked toy-sized under him. The café's outside tables were set too close. Umbrellas, planted in a hole in the centre of each table, made a rickety overlapping roof, creating in their shade a hothouse effect of sweat and thickened light.

Carol held up her arm, waved, and leant across to say something in Miranda's ear. Without changing expression Miranda raised her palm.

Seeing Carol and Miranda side by side, it was possible to make out Miranda's features in Carol's face, though Carol's face had swollen and widened around them. Carol's body appeared as a set of glossy surfaces: red shellac nails, gold bracelets, bronzer striped across her cheeks. Her cotton shirt was startlingly white against her tan. The impression was of discipline. Kit could not look at her without feeling defiant and half-ashamed.

Carol said: ‘This is Miranda's young man. Will, his name is.' The boy glanced up without speaking. Concentrating on his phone, abstractedly jigging one foot up and down, he looked at once bored and agitated, as though they had already been waiting too long. His face—pale, freckled, fine-boned—was pinched tight around the eyes. He wore board shorts, thongs, a T-shirt: surfer clothes, but his dark hair stuck up in tufts, exaggerating his look of wary intensity.

Waitresses, tired of sidling between chairs, had given up: the tables were strewn with used coffee cups and plates. Carol pulled a serviette from the open-sided metal box and wiped a spill of milk from the table in front of her. At once the air over the table blurred with flies, blundering in small circles and settling on the table again, quivering over sugar spills and smears of butter.

Straightening her back, Carol looked across at Treen with the sort of smile that made Kit notice her lipstick. ‘Now how is your poor mother?'

‘It
was
a sleeping pill. She slept all afternoon and sat up wideawake at three in the morning.' Thinking of sleep made Treen yawn hugely, covering her mouth, making a high involuntary sound. Embarrassed, Kit glanced across at Miranda. If she was listening, it did not show on her face. Tilted back in her chair, eyes half-closed, she had settled into the heat.

Carol clicked her tongue against her teeth. ‘And you got up with her.' She turned to Kit. ‘Your auntie's a saint. An absolute saint.'

It was possible to guess where Carol's attention would turn by seeing who had drawn back, lapsed into private thought. Her talk at once went there, caught that person up. Straight-backed
in her chair, she turned her attention from one to the other with thwarted efficiency. Not hostile, she would tell all this afterwards over the phone to her friends. Now she was stretching out a hand to command the waitress returning to the kitchen. ‘We might order, Phoebe. When you're ready.'

The waitress stopped mid-step, turned her face towards them— her eyes did not change focus—and pulled out her order pad. She had a plump, cushiony face: her long ponytail, though it pulled the skin of her forehead back, left fleshy pouches under her eyes. She looked first at Miranda, who ordered a skinny latte.

The boy, Will, setting his phone on the table, glanced frowning at Kit and Treen, as though they had that moment sat down. ‘Just a regular coffee,' he said. Now that he had put his phone down his body was full of movement. He kept jigging his foot. He played his fingers against the palm of his other hand.

‘He means a full-cream flat white,' said Miranda. Tender, superior, she was like a mother explaining her child. She glanced across at him, her look shy, almost secretive, and questioning. For the first time Kit noticed her eyes: long, grey-green, with dense stubby black lashes. The next instant she pulled her hair over one shoulder, lifted her chin. At once what Kit noticed was the arc of her eyebrows, pin's head freckles along the top of her cheekbone, uncoloured fine hair along the edge of her jaw and down the side of her neck on the paler skin exposed where she had pulled aside her hair. She had a way of holding herself perfectly still behind the surface of her face.

As soon as they had ordered Carol smiled up at the waitress. ‘Now I think our table needs a bit of a wipe, don't you, dear?' When the
waitress was almost out of earshot, she leaned in. ‘Bit slow, that one. She in your year Miranda?'

‘Year below.' Miranda stretched out her legs, tipped her head back. ‘God! I'm so glad I decided not to work here.'

The heat of the day expanded into their pause. Kit, who had refused her mother's help with packing, unstuck her jeans from the seat. In this light, her black T-shirt was the colour of rust. Only Miranda, staring over Kit's shoulder, made Kit remember the sea: that distance opening at her back. Two surfers, coming out of the cafe with the slouching walk that came of years in thongs, caught sight of Miranda. Kit watched their expressions change: at first startled then furtive. Turning away, they muttered something to each other and laughed. Only a sudden rigidity in Miranda's pose showed that she had noticed them.

‘So what are your plans for the holidays, Will?' An edge to Carol's voice suggested that, if it
was
her job to keep the show moving, they needn't make it so hard.

‘Surfing, I guess.'

‘Didn't your brother do well!' Carol persisted. ‘Off to uni, is he?'

‘Yeah. Pretty good.'

Some metal entered Carol's smile. A different waitress brought their drinks, spilling the coffees as she unloaded the tray. Carol watched her dab at the spill with a dishcloth.

She turned to Kit. ‘Now wasn't it nice you could be here for that art class.' Setting down her cup, turning to Treen, Carol confided: ‘That new time doesn't really suit. Still, I thought we'd make an effort, support Scott.'

‘He's terribly upset by it, I think,' Treen said.

Carol made a face. ‘I don't need to tell you what they're saying about him and that poor boy.'

‘Oh!' Treen clattered her glass down. ‘I knew Hughey's father was saying some things but I thought…Well, that's his grief, isn't it.'

‘That's what I say! That poor boy…' Carol leant in. ‘Michael never accepted his homosexuality. And Rosemary always
yes this
and
yes that
. Never stood up to Michael. I'm telling you, the day they packed that little boy off to boarding school. Crying her eyes out, she was.' Carol straightened her back and looked past them. ‘No, that poor boy's father can throw the dirt around all he likes. Sooner or later he's going to have to take a good hard look at himself.'

Treen said: ‘I haven't told Mum and Dad yet.'

‘Well, you're going to have to, dear. The funeral's Friday. They won't want to miss that. Now, go on you lot…' Carol shooed at Miranda with her fingers. ‘Off you go, go for a walk. You don't want to sit around talking with a pair of old ladies.'

At once Miranda stood up and waited, eyes downcast, behind her chair. Will stood beside her shifting his weight from foot to foot.

‘Go on then!' said Carol.

Kit stood up. Treen's face took on a fixed expression, as though she had only that moment taken account of being left alone with Carol. She said brightly, ‘Carol and I might just have a quick look in the shops.'

Fatalistically Kit followed them across the road and down a concrete ramp cut into the side of the dune. As they stepped down it, stone walls on either side rose to close in the view. Only straight
ahead, a square of sea dazzled. The moment they stepped out onto the esplanade a child howled—the sound of a siren stuck on its first note. The child, in flowery bucket hat, matching rashie and shorts, was a scrap of face, an open mouth. In one hand she held an empty cone while at her feet a blob of rainbow icecream flattened into psychedelic swirls. A mother, almost in tears herself, said: ‘I
told
you, Mimi.'

Miranda said: ‘She shouldn't be feeding her that crap anyway.'

Once on the sand they spread out. At this hour the beach was almost deserted. Only some toddlers squatted at the water's edge, squeezing wet sand through their fists to make ornate dribble castles.

Miranda walked with the severe alertness of someone who expects to be looked at—conscious of her hair, hanging over her shoulders to the small of her back. The boy, Will, a half step behind, fidgeted even as he walked, punching the side of one clenched fist into the flat of his palm. Kit, who took his fidgeting as an agitation of nerves, fixed her eyes on it. She knew almost nothing of these two. What brought home her sense of isolation, though, was thinking how little they knew of her. For them, she had stepped out from Treen's background. Feeling what difficulties that opened up, Kit for the first time realised how her mother, by being known, gave her a start with people. She was her mother's child: if she was always painfully conscious of how often she disappointed, still there was nothing she had to live down.

Will, feeling her eyes on him, glanced sullenly and dropped his hands by his side. At once, the fidgeting settled into another part of his body. What had looked like nerves was his body's hunger for
movement. He started practising cricket shots. Without a word, Miranda struck out for the rocks at the base of the cliff.

Low tide, and the level wet sand looked lacquered. The sun's reflection under Kit's right foot flickered as she stepped across it. Always glittering from her eyes, the sea itself was impossible to bring in focus: looking at it was like looking for something that had been there a half-second earlier. She tried not to step on the bubbling air holes of buried crabs, tried not to think of them under there, their pale quick folding legs which looked as though they should make a metallic sound.

They were walking under the children's playground. Dimly voices came down to Kit. The beach ended here, under this cliff of pinkish eroded stone. At high tide the rocks would be covered. Seaweed, drying in the sun, gave off a sweet salt smell like the smell of beer at the end of a party. Messy, exposed, the whole rock shelf had the look of a room where a party had been. At the edge of it waves broke, throwing up white foam that fell back in slow motion. Further out waves, terraced one behind another, rose more than head-high.

That sea noise Kit could not get used to: a feeling as though she was walking into strong wind. The other two went stepping easily ahead of Kit. If they had not been so casual it would have looked like dancing, their quick-stepping lightness over the rocks. They would talk to each other, Kit thought. They would touch each other if I weren't here.

They had stopped. Propped on a high rock, they stood waiting for her. Picturing how she would look to them, Kit was conscious of glare, the sky immense overhead. They had not thought she would
be so slow but she could not go faster. She had to keep looking down, watching where she stepped. The rocks, mostly worn smooth, were sometimes pockmarked like acne under a microscope. At her feet waves poured narrowly in through a cleft in the rock, in which seaweed rose up and stretched flat with the water running out. How deep would the water get at high tide here?

‘Aren't you hot in those?' Miranda said, not unkindly, looking at Kit's jeans. Leaping down from the rock she took Kit's arm. ‘Do you need to shave your legs or something?'

Kit said, ‘My mum won't let me. She says I have to get them waxed.'

The boy twitched his eyes away. Out at sea, a freighter slid across the horizon. This one had its own crane. The ship was so heavy-loaded, so out-of-scale, it made the sky look like a sliding backdrop.

Miranda said, ‘The chemist is the only place. Mum says I have to wait till I'm sixteen.' She stretched out one leg and looked down its length. ‘It's not too bad. With blond hair.'

‘Your hair's brown. You dye it.'

‘They're called
highlights
.'

‘
They're called highlights
,' he repeated, with a mincing twist of his head.

‘You are such an idiot.' She turned on Kit a proprietorial smile. ‘He is
such
an idiot.'

Miranda stepped out to where waves flashed up white ragged foam. She stood staring out at the horizon: her pose said that she had forgotten them. Stopped at the top of his rock, dead still for
once, Will stared at her. Kit glanced up at him expecting to see admiration, hunger; but his expression was surprisingly hard to read. His eyebrows, thick and dark on his pale fine face, were what she noticed. It was the face of someone thinking hard, warily and without pleasure: thinking something through.

He caught sight of Kit watching him. She saw his eyebrows draw together, his expression simplify into contempt.

‘You don't say much.'

‘Will!' Miranda swung around with a scandalised cry.

‘Well, she doesn't. This whole time, all she's said is that she needs to get her legs waxed.'

Miranda, stopping, lightly slapped his arm: ‘
You
could say something.'

‘Me? What am I supposed to say?'

Miranda turned on Kit an exhausted smile, and started walking. Will prized a barnacle off the rock and pitched it into the rock pool at their feet. Its glassy surface absorbed the disturbance with a sort of shudder rather than a ripple. Kit, realising that Will was waiting for her to go ahead, started awkwardly into movement, skidding down a rock. Laboriously, head bowed, she kept on. Where her shadow fell on the rock pool she could see down into it, its sides clotted with some seaweed that looked like strings of miniature cucumbers. The silence sunk in that pool was permanent. Across its floor of sand and rock, ripples of light flowed. A longing for silence, cool water, opened in her. She thought: if they weren't here I'd put my whole face into that pool. Green-angled light, green silent sway—she let her mind sink into it while she stumbled away over the rocks.