The Life of Houses (21 page)

‘You keep twitching,' he said.

‘The ground's wet.'

‘Why not say so,' he said crossly. ‘Here, sit on this.' He threw the backpack across to her. ‘Now your jeans will be wet.'

Even through his backpack, she could feel the seeping dampness of the ground. The tree trunk, which had seemed smooth at first, now pressed unevenly into her back. Across her cheek, and down her neck to her shoulder, she felt the pressure on her skin where he was looking. She was conscious, more than anything, of the impersonality of his attention. Where he looked, she felt her body flatten into lines and planes. She never had been able to work out
what she looked like and felt that more certain knowledge of herself growing under his hands on the page.

He said, ‘What I like about you is how you take so much for granted. You come here and you don't once stop to wonder how it might be for anyone else. That day you walked up to the café I thought you
were
your mother. The whole of my childhood started up around you. And your poor aunt, desperate to know you, frightened to speak in case you go running home. No, what's so nice is, you don't even notice.'

All the time he was speaking his pencil kept flickering over the page. His voice went on lightly, uninsistently. He was talking not to her but to the picture of her that he was making. The lake was pale light beside her and a sound of wind-ripples, birds filliping down, dry easings of scrub in the heat. She had sunk into a daze in which everything she heard, everything she saw, seemed part of her. She was not shut in her body but part of what her senses took in. Here she was, holding still—a trickle of sweat down her back, the half-unpleasant feeling of an ant going over the arch of her foot. Here she was; but she was there too: what he saw: surfaces on the page.

‘Don't look so frightened. All I'm saying is you're young. You're all foreground. It's just the rest of us stepping back and back. For instance you haven't said—have you even thought?—what your mother feels about your being friends with me?
Have
you told her?'

She shook her head.

He stopped and tipped his head on one side. ‘Do you know, it's only when you don't move that you look like her.'

‘You were mean to me in that art class.'

‘I can't stand those classes.' He worked in silence for a while. ‘Those ladies, my students. One of them is painting an angel and she's brought in chicken feathers to copy for the wings. She wants it to look realistic. No, don't laugh.'

He put his pencil down and stared at the picture. ‘This is terrible. It's a teacher's picture.' He grabbed another pencil and started shading. She saw flashes from his ring. ‘The fact is they hate art. They're used to seeing walls with pictures on them and they've decided it's cheaper to paint the pictures themselves. Really, they look at a painting and think they've done something equal if they copy it. Not that they
can
: all their copies have a squint.' He stopped as suddenly and looked at the picture again. ‘No good. We'll have to start again.'

She drew up her knees and clasped her hands around them.

‘I still have them, you know. All those pictures I did of your mother. I was looking at them last night. They're good. They're really quite good.' He flipped a page in his sketchbook. ‘The trouble is, I have wasted my life. No, don't be frightened. You raise your right shoulder when you're frightened, did you know that?'

The moment he said that she realised it was true. The small precision of this fact astonished her. She dropped her shoulder and felt the knotted rope of muscles in her neck.

‘That boy,' she broke out. ‘Miranda said you painted him.'

His pencil stopped; she saw tension travel up his arm to his face.

‘Did she?' The silence was startling enough for her to hear—to imagine that she heard—the small suckling sound of green things growing out of the mud. He put his pencil down. ‘How I loathe
Miranda.' He saw her face. ‘Now I've shocked you.' He closed up his sketchbook. ‘That picture…Because of that, Hughey's father tells himself it's my fault he killed himself.'

‘I thought…Miranda's friend said it was an accident.'

‘Miranda's friend,' he repeated in a mockery of Kit's voice. ‘I
knew

Hughey. I knew him from a baby.'

‘I'm sorry. I thought…'

When she turned back she saw that he had put down the sketchbook. With his elbows on his knees he was crouching forward, staring at his hands. He said, ‘The fact is, I'll have to leave if it goes on.'

She gestured at his sketchbook. ‘We can keep going.'

He smiled in an automatic way. ‘We'll finish another time.' He held out one hand. She stayed perfectly still, noticing the pale hairs on the backs of his fingers. ‘Would you mind passing the backpack?' he said in his politest voice.

He was still packing his bag when the rain started: first a gust of wind, a prickling sound in the scrub; then the light changed and it was downpour. Rain down the back of her shirt, her hair wet, the lake surface broken everywhere. It was sound more than anything: tumult and single drops that stung where they struck her cheek and neck, her hands. She was crouched, trying to force her shoes back on her muddy feet.

‘That's hail,' he said. He grabbed her arm above the elbow. He had his backpack clutched to his chest; they started running up the path. She had one shoe still in her hand and her bare foot splashed in water already flowing over the sand. The storm roaring overhead, she went after him into the tea-tree's cave-like dark. From in here
the rain falling outside looked almost bright—sheer breaking lines. She could see where each drop struck on the wet sand. The scrub on the other side of the path was shining green and moving against itself. In here the rain slanted in. Intermittently, in gusts, heavy cold drops scattered from the branches, the sound close and surprising, out of time with the rain. Beside her, he was still breathing hard. He took his hat off. With his whole arm, not his hand, he wiped the wet off his face and the top of his head. He put his head back, showing his whole throat, and laughed. ‘Listen to it! It's fantastic.'

Hunched next to him, arms round her knees, she realised how wet she was: water running from her hair down her forehead, behind her ears, down the back of her neck. It was not uncomfortable, not cold yet; it soon would be. Her bare foot was covered with dirt and small leaves. She brushed off some and forced her shoe on. She looked up from tying the laces, her fingers clumsy with cold. He was watching her. She twisted her head to look out at the rain.

‘How long will it last?' she asked.

After a pause he said, ‘I'm sorry for what I said back there. It's those big eyes of yours. You're so easily shocked. What did I say?'

‘You said I was young.'

‘Well, you are, you know. She's looked after you. Your poor mother and I were never as young as you.'

There was a sound of thunder out to sea. For a moment the rain stopped. The quiet was startling: everything seemed motionless, waiting. Then, as if with a human cry, the wind started again. Rain flung down on her in heavy drops. One struck the back of her neck; its pure cold went down her spine.

He reached out a finger and touched her cheek. ‘It's like you've cried one enormous tear.'

She kept rigid. Thought itself held still—she saw soft earth around her sneakers, a runnel of rainwater coming crookedly in around the trees' roots, a yellow leaf on its bright surface. She saw it, that instant, with astonishing clarity. At the same time she was conscious of him—conscious not only of his eyes on her but of his body an arm's length away, his breath visible in the cold air.

‘You're shivering,' he said. ‘Here.' He pulled a shirt out of the bottom of his backpack and draped it over her shoulders. For a moment afterwards she felt where his fingers had touched her neck. A painting shirt: old, stained, it smelt of turpentine. At that smell, close, familiar, she shut her eyes—shut out him watching her, the shuddering branches, the scrub's unstill bright leaves. Behind her eyes she saw easels blotched with paint. The room was pale light where she was sitting under the sound of her mother's voice. Behind her eyes, in that distant room, the rain was far off; farther, waves hissed back over sand.

He was saying, ‘I suppose we never do really know why we do anything. Or is it just me who feels that? You, for instance— you must be asking yourself why you're here?'

‘You said…'

He laughed. ‘The trouble with you is you're too polite. If you knew what they're saying about me—' He stopped dead. ‘We must get back.' He plunged out onto the path, out where the rain blew into his face.

His shirt was stuck to him, the cigarettes sodden in his pocket;
wet mud and leaves streaked his light-coloured trousers. She heard him splashing away up the path. She looked at the backpack he had left beside her. Her picture was in there. She took the sketchbook out. Her hands were trembling, not only with cold. What she dreaded was the intimacy of his discovering her like this—

She opened the book and the boy was there. His face black lines but he was
there
, caught in a moment's life. The boy was laughing—at something he had said, she thought: something cruel: he looked halfguilty and exultant. She turned the page: the boy again—quiet now: his bare shoulders, the back of his neck, his face in profile. Page after page…In his school uniform, in his board shorts: here he was with a camera held up to his face. Hughey, but his name belonged to the others. She could not think of him by that name. The sketches were two or three to a page sometimes, and not the same size: some a few lines, some worked up with shading. Impossible that this boy looking out at her was nowhere now. Gone, and never. In the book he looked alive. The wind came right in here, cold at the back of her neck, the roots of her hair; it seemed to be blowing back through her whole week. She saw it lifting the bedcover of her room in the dark, swirling papers up from the floor of Audrey's room, making the screen door slam. I'm cold, she thought, looking at her mottled hand on the page. What would Carol say now if she knew about these drawings? She saw her hand was shivering. Her numb flesh did not feel more her own than anything else she could see around her. All week, how stupid she'd been. What she had seen, all she had done: hunched in the wet cold among the tea-tree's dead-looking leaves, she felt her own experience growing away from her. How much
she had not understood. ‘I'll draw you then,' Scott had said. She remembered the beach, Will throwing the banksia cone in among the seagulls, their wings flashing whitely as they took flight. He'd said it was an accident. She saw him running away up the road. Drops spattered from an overheard branch, wet and heavy on her hand where it rested on the page, and on the boy's face. She blotted the page with Scott's shirt but one eye had smeared. The boy stared up at her, accusing. She started flicking through the pages with her thumb. The boy, pictures of him flickering past like animation stills, came more alive.

And there she was. She had the page to herself. The lake, the tree behind her were quick lines. She was shaded in. Listening for Scott's footsteps, she heard in nearby scrub a bird not singing but trying out two notes. The rain had stopped. Carefully, running the tip of her finger under the glued edge, she tore the page out and rolled it up. After a moment's thought, she hid it in her sleeve. Quickly, with a feeling of betrayal, she closed the boy's face up in the book. She slid the book into the dark of the bag and started after Scott back up the path.

Chapter Twenty-Two

P
eter's motel was built around a carpark. The wet bitumen was black, flickering where raindrops struck under the lamps. In Anna's head she still saw the road rising under her headlights, heard windscreen wipers beating off the dark. There seemed no end to her loneliness. Looking for his room, she walked past lit-up curtains, the sound of televisions. Everyone was stretched out on a bed in front of a screen.

He answered the door in his boxer shorts. The room was every motel room she had ever stayed in. His chest with its narrow fan of dark hairs, his skin almost blue where it stretched over the collarbone:
these
, she thought. He shut the door behind her. At once the sound of rain was far off. Light from outside, falling through sheer curtains, cast bright rain-shadows across his face and chest, across her hand when she touched him.

He said, ‘Are you alright?'

‘Not really.' He had only the bedside light on. She saw his book turned over on the bed. ‘I lost my temper.'

‘With Kit?'

‘All of them. I don't remember what I said.'

‘Where was Kit today?'

‘Off with Scott.' Seeing his blank look, she opened her hands and
let them drop. ‘I knew him years ago. Treen is still friends with him, apparently. He teaches life drawing. In the church hall.'

‘What was he doing with Kit?'

‘They went for a walk.'

‘In that rain?'

‘She says nothing happened. She says he drove her out to the beach and they got caught in the storm.'

‘What's he doing taking her to the beach?'

‘I don't know.' She sat on the bed, hands covering her eyes. ‘Half past four he drives up to the hospital with her. Can you imagine? I'm in the foyer, beside myself with worry. She gets out, sopping wet. I'm all over her. I'm crying. Do you know what she says?
That's not my problem
. I could have hit her.'

‘What did he say?

‘He stayed in the car. He was going to drive off, I think. I'm in the carpark shouting through his window and he as good as accuses me of neglecting her. My God! My father's dying and she can't be left alone for an hour.'

There was a pause. ‘Is it alright, do you think?'