The Life of Houses (18 page)

‘They've screwed the picture to the wall,' said Anna. ‘Who do they think would nick it?' She put on a voice: ‘A little memento of when my father died.' She looked at her watch. ‘God! Are they even going to tell us what's happening?'

‘The doctor said we have to wait and see,' said Treen.

‘The doctor. When did you speak to him?'

‘It's a her. Last night. She did some test—'

‘What sort of test?'

‘Oh I don't know.' Dropping her chin, Treen pressed the tips of her fingers against her eyebrows. ‘They're worried the blood supply to his brain was cut off.'

‘So he's brain dead?'

‘We have to wait and see.'

‘When will they know?'

Dropping her hands, Treen looked full at Anna. The light from the window lit up her face, showing the papery dry skin, white hairs sprouting stiffly from her chin. She was at some final reach of feeling. Exhaustion, sorrow made her monumental. That moment, Kit would have reached out wonderingly to touch her: she was not herself, or anyone.

‘They didn't say.'

Audrey's teacup fell with a soft thump onto the carpet. Anna cried out…

‘It's alright,' said Treen. ‘She's just asleep.'

Audrey's head had slumped down and sideways oddly on her chest. Kit knelt to pick up the cup and saucer, trying not to look at Audrey's ankles swelling out of her slippers, the skin blotched with blue-brown bruises. With a tissue Kit started scrubbing at the dark streak on the carpet.

‘Just leave it,' said Anna irritably. She was watching Audrey. ‘Did they give her a bed?'

‘They tried. She wouldn't get into it. She kept saying “But it's my husband who's unwell.” The nurse said to make sure she has a walk today.'

‘There's no point her even being here.'

‘Oh! But she wants to be—'

‘It'll kill her too,' said Anna. Abruptly, she clutched an arm across her chest and made a sound like a guttural cough. Kit only worked out that she was crying when Treen stood up and, clumsily reaching over the edge of the sofa, put an arm around her sister's shoulders. After that first cough, Anna's crying was soundless, but her whole body shook…‘Don't.' She pulled away from Treen, ran her fingers under her eyes. Their lower rims, and two patches high on her cheeks, were a damp bright red. ‘If I start I won't stop.' She breathed in and out. ‘No, I'll get a coffee. Kit will come with me.' She took hold of Kit's wrist where it rested on the sofa.

Kit looked down at that hand. Through it she could feel like an electric current her mother's agitation. Her arm stiffened with the effort of holding still, of not drawing back. It was wrong, she only felt, it was dreadful: this wanting. She concentrated on her mother's hand, so pale it showed a blue tracery of veins. The nails, kept short, were painted gloss purple. That moment, the detail was consoling: it belonged to that other world in which this bleak room, this grimy sofa, its upholstery worn to a plastic shine, had no place.

They had not closed the door. A nurse standing in the hall knocked and, without pausing, stepped into the room. At once Anna withdrew her hand and stood up. At the same moment Kit drew back, as though guiltily, and folded her hands in her lap.

‘Now we're all here,' said the nurse, propping on the arm of the sofa. Her body, straight-backed, kept unnaturally still while she turned her head and smiled at them and spoke. Her hands were placed in her lap; her legs, in their white stockings, were crossed.

‘Mum's just dropped off,' said Treen.

The nurse nodded. ‘Mum needs a walk today. We don't want her leaving in a wheelchair.' She did not look at her watch though, lifting her chin, she might have: they all became conscious of time.

‘Mum…' Treen, kneeling, shook Audrey's knee. ‘The nurse is here.'

Audrey lifted her head and stared around, mumbling with her tongue against her bottom lip. While she swung her head, the blindness of her eyes drew back: she started looking. She saw the nurse and sat up, clasping the arms of her wheelchair. She said: ‘Why won't you
do
anything?'

The nurse's smile tightened.

Treen said: ‘This has all been very sudden.'

The nurse took Audrey's hand and brought her face close. ‘Your husband has suffered a heart attack.' Without losing her smile, fixing her eyes on Audrey's, she nodded twice. ‘He's very sick. We think his heart attack may have stopped the blood supply to his brain.' She touched the side of her forehead.

Audrey jutted her bottom lip out and looked at Anna over the nurse's shoulder. ‘They talk and talk,' she said. ‘They don't do anything.'

The nurse straightened up, releasing Audrey's hand. Her patience was deliberate; it had nothing to do with them. Kit wondered
suddenly how they looked to her, and noticed a butter stain from breakfast on her jeans.

‘We can talk later,' the nurse said. ‘There's no rush.' She pushed her shoulders back, visibly took a breath. ‘What I would ask you to think about, though, is what your father would have wanted.'

Treen put her hand up to her throat. Her fingers tightened around her neck as if she could by that suppress the low moaning sound she was making. ‘I'm sorry.' After a moment, she brought her hand down and held it pressed under her other hand on her lap. ‘The doctor said to wait and see.'

The nurse held her smile. ‘This is a very difficult, very emotional time.'

‘You want the bed for someone else,' said Anna.

The impersonality of the room made Anna's rudeness more shocking. Everything in it was strange: its torn-off milk containers, its used cups in the sink.

The nurse only nodded thoughtfully, as though the conversation had gone well. ‘I'll leave you in peace,' she said. Inside the door she stopped. ‘Was there anything you wanted to ask me?'

Anna said: ‘Yes. Where can you get a decent coffee here?'

Chapter Eighteen

I
n the lift they said nothing. Kit's closeness put everything else at a distance: the unambitious graffiti on the lift's steel walls; the lift ticking down between the floors. Impossible that Kit had grown in just these past few days and yet Anna was startled by how grown up she looked, closed in her thoughts, staring straight ahead with her chin tucked in. To have her in reach…Anna kept her hands by her side, ashamed of her sudden feeling of elation, a feeling she and Kit had not so much left as escaped from that grey room. In a moment the lift doors would open. She and Kit would step out together.

In front of them was another windowless corridor. The nurse had said to follow an orange line painted along the wall. How like something in a dream it was, following that line along these silent corridors, past closed doors around corner after corner. Once they passed two orderlies pushing an old man on a trolley. Bare toes sticking up, the man was making a thin wailing sound through his closed lips. He was still attached to a fluid drip on its stick, which a second orderly was pulling along with them.

Around the next corner they saw a carpeted room that opened, surprisingly, onto a brick-paved courtyard. Hiss of a coffee machine, a clink of cutlery, the warm hush of people talking—the ordinary
familiar noises brought home to Anna how strange she felt. There were three tables outside. At each of them someone sat smoking, talking into a phone and squinting in the light. Kit and Anna sat inside, by the window. Anna found her sunglasses. Four doctors sat at the next table. They were young, interns probably: one of them had acne flaring up his cheekbones. They had come from an operating theatre, still in their blue shower-cap hats. It seemed strange to Anna that they could sit down here, ordinary people drinking coffee and laughing competitively. For them this day was not worse than any other, it was not different. Casually they lived among other peoples' disasters.

Anna lent across the table and touched Kit's cheek. ‘I feel as though I haven't seen you for weeks.'

‘Have you spoken to Dad?'

‘I tried. He's turned his phone off.'

‘He said he might come back for Christmas.'

‘When did you speak to him?'

Kit shrugged. ‘Two days ago. Not about this—'

‘No.' Anna looked at Kit's hands clasped around her coffee. She had been biting her nails again. Nerves in Anna's hand tightened. She thought: But I'm not allowed to hold her hand any more. She turned over the salt-cellar on the table, finding browning bits of rice among the salt. ‘You never called me back,' she said. And then, ‘How is he?'

‘Alright. It was the middle of the night.'

Anna clasped hold of her elbows. He had called Kit, not her, in the middle of the night. She forced herself to look out into the
courtyard. Close, just the other side of the glass, a man in his twenties sat frowning in concentration, his eyes fixed on the ashtray where he was stubbing out a cigarette. Yes, Anna thought, that's what it's like: you watch yourself doing ordinary things with a sort of amazement.

‘Has it been alright here?' she asked. ‘What you expected?'

‘I didn't expect
this
.'

‘No…' How implacably Kit put her in the wrong again.

‘At least I got to meet him.'

‘Yes, I'm glad.' Anna looked at her watch. Eleven o'clock. She gazed around at the walls of the café: dark pink, closing them in with each other. Her feeling of elation had drained away—through her pores, it seemed. How tired she was. Always, when she was tired like this, she felt her features warp and swell. It's why they don't have Picasso prints in a hospital, she thought. They need pictures that keep things outside, apart from thought.

Kit was staring down at the table. Anna thought: It's my father up there. But Kit would never pity her. Looking at that sullen face, Anna felt, massed in her chest, those hours upon hours when she had pushed Kit on the swing, watching her face rise up with clouds behind it; hours when she had crouched in the sandpit turning out castles for her daughter to stomp on; hours on the side of the bed reading, yet again, the sticky-paged stories she knew off by heart. Breakfast mess, morning tea mess, lunch mess, afternoon-tea mess, dinner mess—all that organic mess she had got down on her hands and knees to clean off the floor. Dressing her, changing nappies while she kicked her legs and laughed, admiring her scribbled pictures: years that were nowhere except in her, years Kit would never remember.

‘Aren't you going to call Dad?'

‘You call him. He'd rather hear from you.'

‘I'll use your phone.' Kit reached for Anna's bag. ‘Why do you have that?' she said. ‘You know I hate that picture.'

Anna's screenshot was a photo Kit had sent from France: Kit in a straw hat grinning in front of Notre Dame.

‘Who's Peter?'

Anna took her phone out of Kit's hand. ‘A client.'

‘He's called five times.'

‘I was supposed to be meeting him. Anyway, use your own phone. I pay for it.'

Kit shrugged, pulled out her phone, pressed it to her ear. They sat watching each other. Neither of them moved or spoke; a single instant transfixed while they waited for Matt to speak.

‘Still not answering.' Kit put the phone down.

‘You didn't want to leave a message?'

‘You said you had.'

There was a pause. Anna was stopped by the sight of Kit's bare wrist on the table: narrow, and all the tendons of her arm showing under its pale skin. How young she was. At her age— And poor Miss Suitor died in a nursing home, she thought. Their neat girlish art teacher with a secret passion for Gauguin: she used to clasp her hands to her chest when she spoke of him; she wore a gold locket outside her buttoned shirt. For all their terrible snobbery, she and Scott had never laughed at her; not out of kindness, Anna thought now, but because the ambition that Miss Suitor had for them matched their secret ambition for themselves. Anna saw again the picture that Miss
Suitor had paid to have framed and hung in the art room: Scott's charcoal sketch of trees with Anna at the edge of it. Staring down at Kit's wrist, Anna thought: But I can't remember, not really, what it was like. In any silence, any solitude, there it had been: the giant stone face of the future, carved with a mocking smile. And Kit is living like that now, she thought, in that state of almost rapturous indecision: the stone future saying, ‘I will tell you what you are. Only not yet.' But of that immense dreadful life of hers I see nothing. I am permitted to see nothing. She tells herself, ‘My mother would not understand', which only means that for her the worst thing of all would be my understanding. Whatever her life will be, she tells herself, it will not be like mine. And that is why I sit here stupidly saying nothing, why I do not take her hand in my two hands.

Anna pushed her chair back. ‘Shall we walk?' She could not bear to go back—give Kit back—to that hushed room, the body long on the bed. She thought: I should have kept Kit from it. An irrevocable thing—after this, death would look like that for her always.

‘There's nowhere really to go,' said Kit.

‘We'll just go round the block,' said Anna. ‘I need air.'

Slowly Kit got up. She never would walk beside her mother, only ever a step or two behind.

‘Red line to exit.' Anna read the sign aloud and heard her own forlorn-sounding laugh. The idea that her father might die, go right out of the world, made her body feel weightless. It seemed odd to her that anything was where it was, or as it was, at all. These lines, for instance…She pictured the workmen painting them, at each corner poring over their maps; before that, a committee meeting in which
a bureaucrat stood explaining the idea with PowerPoint slides. Not just these lines but everything Anna looked at seemed spurious, invented. The hospital itself—it had been someone's house once. This passage where she and Kit were walking sliced right through that old house—morning room, drawing room, dining room, entrance hall. Someone had sat down to eat their breakfast, perhaps, in this place she and Kit were walking through now. Back then, they would have had a view over marsh flats and tea-tree. Land stolen from the start… Walking along the gleaming linoleum, Anna felt in her flesh that nothing belonged to her. Only Kit is mine, she thought, and stopped. ‘Have you eaten?' she said. ‘We should have got you something.'