The Life of Houses (15 page)

‘Why not?' she said.

‘Yes, why not,' he repeated dully. ‘Actually I loathe hippies.'

‘So stay here.'

Turning onto one elbow, looking across at her, he said: ‘What's so nice about you is, no one you know has ever talked to you about money…'

He broke off. In the sudden quiet Kit heard the knob of the door click. She pulled the towel off her face. As if by its own mechanism, the door was swinging open. Audrey stood in the doorway.

‘I heard voices,' she said.

Audrey's rose-sprigged nightgown had twisted, showing through synthetic lace the blue-pale swell of one breast. Her face, marked still with the folds of the sheet, looked as though it were a cast made of crumbling powder. She had hardly woken yet. She looked dazedly about the bedroom as though she had found herself by accident in a stranger's house.

Scott was standing straight-backed and formal at the foot of the bed. Audrey's eyes travelled down to his shoes and up again. ‘They're not back yet,' she said. ‘I heard voices. I thought…' She stood, hands clasped, folding her palms over her thumbs, blinking at Scott as though trying to bring him into focus. He might have been an apparition stepped out of her dream. When she spoke at last, she fell back on a sort of bewildered formality, prompted perhaps by his suit: ‘You'll stay for tea?'

‘Actually, I was just leaving.'

‘I thought…What time is it? They're not back yet.'

He checked his watch. ‘Just after three.'

‘Treen said, two-thirty.' She looked questioningly at Kit. ‘I'd have heard the car.'

Kit said: ‘Should I make tea?'

‘I have a rest after lunch.'

‘I know. I…'

But Kit did not know how to tell her own grandmother who she was. The room, its dust-thickened half-light, held them in its own stillness. They each separately waited: an instant when Kit saw all three of them facing each other like people in a photograph, an instant exposed and final. It was a mark of how far out of time she had gone that it was Audrey, at last, who said: ‘There's the telephone.' And at once Kit realised that it had been ringing and ringing from the depths of the house.

Part III

Chapter Fourteen

T
he hospital had been a mansion once. Its yellowing white ornate plaster façade rose improbably over the car park. A portico had been cut into one side, a hall of steel and glass closed at each end by glass sliding doors. Kit and her grandmother waited inside the doors while Scott parked the car. Above the lift, the numbers ‘2' and ‘3' kept lighting up. Her aunt and grandfather were there somewhere, on one of those floors. The lift's metal doors, with their in-drawn gleam, stood between this world and that.

After the phone call, it was Scott who had known what to do; so much so, they now waited for him helplessly, while a hospital worker lining up wheelchairs inside the entrance hall kept making the automatic doors open and close. It was Scott who had sent Kit to pack clothes for Treen while he fetched his car: Treen's jeans, ironed and folded over a wire hanger, shirts so stiffly ironed they hung like phantom bodies in the wardrobe; oversized undies, bras that she could not bear to look at; a toothbrush and jars from the shelf of her bathroom: all these Kit had shoved into her own bag. It was there, at her feet. Somehow Scott had got a cotton dress and cardigan over Audrey's nightie; she was in her slippers still. Her in-breaths kept catching on her teeth.

There was Scott now. Smiling absently at Kit he crossed to the
desk and dinged on a bell. Audrey did not look around. She put her hand up to grasp Kit's shoulder. Her fingers dug in painfully. A man with blow-dried hair and a rubbery, impervious face emerged through a door and handed Scott a piece of paper. They spoke in low voices. Unsmilingly the man brought over one of the wheelchairs and set it behind Audrey's knees. With a low grunt, she collapsed into it. Crouching in front of her, the man lifted each swollen foot onto a metal rest. He did this without once looking at Audrey or Kit. He showed Scott how the brakes worked. Then he walked back behind the desk and through the door.

‘Level three,' said Scott.

The wheels of Audrey's chair stuck in the gap between the lift and the floor. Kit had to wrestle the chair forwards, holding the strut of one leg rest, while Scott shoved. Audrey's fingers tensed on the armrests; she did not speak. She had her head back; her eyes, wide, saw nothing. Audrey would remember none of this, thought Kit: this was not time for her; she was waiting only. In the lift, Scott stood with bowed head behind the wheelchair. All the jerky flamboyance of his gestures had gone: he had reduced himself to this mild, serviceable manner.

The lift doors opened onto a pale corridor. On the wall facing the lift, a sign said: Intensive Care. A nurse in soft-soled white shoes stepped out from behind the desk. Around her like a dome of glass she carried an air of controlled and deliberate quietness. ‘Yes,' she kept murmuring, ‘Yes,' while Scott explained. ‘Yes, family only, I'm afraid. You're very welcome to wait here.' She pointed Scott to a low chair and took charge of Audrey's wheelchair.

‘We'll just wash our hands,' she said, stopping by a sink set into the wall. ‘Your grandfather is it, dear?' she said, looking at Kit, while she ran antiseptic soap around Audrey's wrists and soft-pinched soap down the webbing of her fingers. ‘He's going to look a bit different,' she said, setting Audrey's hands back on the armrests, giving the top of one hand a little pat.

Audrey's lower lip was jutting. She had slid out her bottom teeth and was sucking on them. The nurse was expertly brisk. With a single movement, she got the wheelchair through an automatic door. For Kit the worst was that she felt nothing: at least, nothing adequate. Low windows opened onto the corridor. Through one of them Kit saw the back of Scott's head. There was a nurse seated by each bed. On the beds alongside them bodies rested head to the wall, toes to the middle of the room. With their little heartbeat-like lights, the machines above each bed seemed the most living things in the room. To Kit, they seemed to be drawing their life from the bodies their lines came out of.

And there was her aunt, looming out of the dimness with outstretched arms; terrible, the smile on her face. She pressed Kit's cheek into her shirt buttons. Kit thought of Scott, safely in the corridor outside. With her hands on Kit's shoulders, she put her at arm's length. ‘Not what we wanted for your time with us.'

‘I packed your things.'

Treen touched her cheek. ‘Thank you dear.'

A nurse, seated by another bed, lifted her head.

Treen, with a sad exalted smile, turned towards the bed. On the white sheet Patrick's hands lay motionless. The skin, with its few
white hairs, looked like wax. The fingers were curled in and had no tension in them. The nails were ridged and yellow. Kit thought how strange and even repellent fingers were: like tendrils, like sea plants, closing and opening.

Patrick's head emerged hugely from the covering. There was something taped to his mouth. A machine was breathing for him, regular gasping breaths. The skin of his face had an odd sheen and was so pale that the veins at the sides of his cheeks showed. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth had stretched smooth. Only a fold of skin ran from the outside corner of his eyes down to his jaw. Impossible to imagine
that
head fallen in full sunlight onto the pavement by the ice-cream shop, alongside torn ice cream wrappers and children on plastic seats. He did not look in pain but as though he was concentrating on something far off—as though, with immense politeness, he had drawn back from the violence of that apparatus shoved into his mouth.

More tape on the side of his neck: a needle there, in the vein. He was not dressed. His scrawny shoulders showed over the top of the sheet, the cleft in his throat where a few long hairs survived his shaving. For Kit that nakedness was a shock, as though his body was dead already and only his head was alive, his face closed up in its expression of forbearance. His hair was perfect still, curving in white waves back from his forehead.

‘Dear…' Treen brought her face around to Kit. Her eyebrows, raised, made her whole face startling. ‘The nurse says…She feels
all
Dad's family should be here. I just wondered, if you did have your phone with you…' She put her hand on Kit's shoulder. ‘I know
you'll be needing your mother. I have to stay with Audrey, you see. The nurse wants a little chat.'

With dazed obedience, Kit produced her phone from her pocket.

‘Oh no, not here. No—the machines.' She glanced out to the corridor. ‘Scott's waiting, is he? Could he take you downstairs, do you think?'

Kit was released into the corridor. Scott, his face in profile, sat straight-backed on a low chair, his suit coat carefully draped over one knee. He was so still he could have been asleep, except that he was staring with strange fixity at the wall ahead of him. Something about Kit's presence caught his attention. He jerked his head around. The expression on his face, before he brought her into focus, was frighteningly blank.

‘Alright?' he said, with automatic liveliness, starting to his feet.

‘I have to call Mum.' She looked around hopelessly. ‘Where should I…' How strange it all was: the corridor's stunned quiet, in which everything they said, all their gestures, echoed. They might have been underground. The corridor narrowed into the distance without showing any less light. Looking down, Kit saw that she had several faint shadows.

‘We'll go downstairs. I'll leave this with the nurse.' He went across and dropped Kit's bag, full of Treen's things, by the desk.

‘So. This phone call.' In the lift he stood with closed up thoughts, gazing down at his shoes. At the bottom, he held the lift doors open with one arm, smiling remotely. ‘Out,' he ordered. ‘Let's get some air.'

She was surprised that it was day still. Almost five in the afternoon and still the bitumen burned up through the soles of her shoes.

‘My parents died here,' he said.

‘Here?' she repeated stupidly, looking across the carpark at a line of gum trees, not thriving in the hard-packed dirt.

She caught him looking at her, amusement flickering across his face.

‘Not in the carpark. The hospital. Listen, do you mind if we get across to that milk bar before closing? I've given up smoking and I desperately need a cigarette. There's a nasty little park the other side. We can call from there.'

He put his arm around her, shepherding her across the road, her shadow running along beside her like a short-legged dog. Patrick had collapsed on a footpath. The
wrongness
of it—Kit saw, as if from his eye-view, shoes hurrying past, the tyres of a car—a wrongness that distorted, like petrol haze, every ordinary view.

The door of the milk bar, swinging shut behind him, set off a bell. Even under the milk bar's awning the air was dense with heat. Across the road, a wall of orange brick marked off a row of low, square, orange-brick houses. Silent under their tiled roofs, they looked as though nobody had ever gone in or out of them. Kit thought: If I screamed here it would go on and on and nothing would happen.

Set against the milk bar's tiled wall, the front covers of newspapers and magazines were already yellowing in their metal cages. ‘Rapist Walks Free', ‘Amazing Bikini Bodies', ‘Stars Without Makeup'. Stacked cardboard boxes blocked the inside of the window: bottles of reef oil, shampoo, tomato sauce, packets of Arnott's biscuits. She thought: But I can't stay in the house by myself.

‘I got your sweets,' said Scott, holding out a white paper bag.
He lit up a cigarette, breathed out. With the tips of his fingers he touched the small of her back; the other hand, holding the cigarette, gestured towards the park.

Hardly a park: a patch of ground the size of four parked cars between the newsagent and a high wooden fence. One tree with a park bench under it: dank-looking ground scattered with cigarette butts. In a corner by the footpath the rubbish bin overflowed with icy pole wrappers and soft drink cans. Wasps groggily circled there. Along the fence dark green plants with fleshy stalks flourished in the shade. She sat beside him on the bench. The smell of his cigarette mixed strangely with the taste of her musk stick.

‘You do realise he's dying?' he said. ‘That will have to be got across. She'll argue; people always do with bad news. You must tell her to come now, right away, at once.'

Chapter Fifteen

A
nna sat forward over the steering wheel, cold in her summer dress. It had been dark when she set off: an hour driving at the same speed along the highway, its white painted lines rising towards the headlights. Now the long-shadowed early morning country poured past: dead trees, weatherboard houses with gardens the highway cut through. The phone rang— Peter again. He had a reverence for grief. His messages this morning had been abashed, chivalric. Hearing them, she had thought first, how
honourable
he is. She had not liked herself for her next thought: that he would stop pressing her for a decision now. She had months more. How bloodless she felt. And yet last night, leaving a message on his phone, the nervous formality of her voice had surprised her: she had heard in it a level of feeling that she could not now discover in herself. Or was
this
feeling, she asked herself: this noticing so much she was shut off from, all that unmeaning country outside her car?

An oncoming car sent its headlights over a rise. It would have been better, she thought now, to have set off at once, that first quarter-hour after the phone call. There would have been something saving in rush, disorder. Last night, standing over the clothes set out on her bed, the first shock had frozen. Not grief, not sadness
even, but only this dread, her thoughts skittering back from what might come, so that she had been unable to pack even. She had spent an hour picking things up and putting them down until in the end she had taken down her Samsonite suitcase and put all of it in…Yes, quickly, the black suit.