The Paper House (12 page)

She clapped her hands. ‘Yes, English Garden. Of course I believe in magic.’

*

Early the next morning the phone rang. ‘For you,’ Dave said.

Fleur shot from the receiver. A voice I hadn’t heard for years, vulnerable and spasmodic.

‘What’s going on?’ I said.

‘I’m in fucking hospital.’

‘What? Why?’

‘I had an accident. Mandrake had an accident.’ A sharp breath.

‘What can I do?’

She took a deep breath. ‘I need your help.’

Fleur’s closest neighbours were six kilometres away. If they were still there at all; if the drought hadn’t dried them out too.

‘It’s fine,’ Dave said.

‘You look mad.’

‘I don’t look like anything. It’s fine.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘If you keep asking, it won’t be fine.’

It took eight hours to get to the river, not the seven she’d said, which was probably due to being in Ararat when we were supposed to be in Bendigo (‘Same difference,’ said Dave). Scenery whisked away into a diverse map behind us, every kind a person could imagine – the ocean, then the suburbs, then the sprawling uprightness of the city (‘Hello, old house,’ said Dave), then open plains with rolled hay bales and then the mountains. Funny things, mountains. From a distance they are at a soaring, towering juxtaposition from the flat ground. But once inside, navigating the curving roads and the dense mist, the perspective is gone. They are just roads like any other roads, one metre after another towards the destination.

Dave filled in the silence: ‘What were you doing yesterday?’

‘What? Nothing.’
Drawing lines. Lines and lines and lines. You can’t know.

The closest I had got to the mountains was six months in the Adelaide Hills. Maybe Dad was there for work, or maybe that was just what he told us so that Mum could get some fresh air. We drove over from Melbourne with everything we owned in the back of a truck, except for Mum’s rugs, which were strapped to the top of the car. Dad played
100% Hits
and listened to talkback radio when we were closer to towns and the reception was better, and Shithead rode in the front seat on Mum’s lap.

Fleur had cried the whole way.
Come on, Fleur
, Dad said, and she steamed up the window with all of her heartbreak and told him he wouldn’t understand, he had never been in love, how could he make her leave Jimmy Pavel – hottest guy ever to drop out of Year 10 – behind? Dad just smiled, and Mum put her hand on his knee.

The house had been dropped into the hillside, a blemish among the sprawling estates for which the Adelaide Hills (or ‘the Hills’, as the locals referred to them) were known – they with their limestone walls and wrap-around verandahs and rose gardens; ours with rotting weatherboard and steel windows and back door butting up against the neighbours’ fence. It was tiny, and it was impossible to ignore the fact that it smelled like a possum had died in the ceiling. Fleur cried every night for two weeks, at which time Jimmy Pavel called and told her she was dumped, and she fell madly in love with a guy down the road who had a horse and a moustache.

I’m going to homeschool you
, Mum said, which I would later learn meant that we would watch midday movies with ice-cream up to our chins, and she would point out the relevant historical figures (‘Franklin D. Roosevelt. Distant relative of the other President Roosevelt. Teddy.’). She knew all kinds of things, like the first woman in space (‘Valentina Tereshkova. Those Soviets were surprisingly forward thinking when it came to women’s rights.’), and why a Diet Coke exploded when you put a Mentos in it (‘The Mentos has lots of small cavities on it that combine with the drink to form carbon dioxide bubbles. That’s what the foam is.’). She knew every Prime Minister of Australia and she could point out the
Endurance
’s final resting place on a map of the world.
How do you know all these things?
I said, and she told me it was nothing, that she just had a good memory.

‘Do you want to stop and get some food?’ Dave said. We were passing through Halls Gap, a town so pretty it was almost make-believe.

‘Not really.’

‘I’m just going to use the loo, then.’ He pulled in at a bakery that I felt sure I’d seen before, the kind with vanilla slice better than any food you’ve ever eaten.

‘Maybe a vanilla slice?’ I called after him. A woman on the footpath stared at me.

The plan had always been to live in the Hills indefinitely, as far as I knew. I don’t think we ever bought the house, but for a while Mum had an afternoon job selling buns to women carrying magazines and wearing fur coats. Two evenings a week she came home laden with them – Boston buns and finger buns and coffee scrolls – and raved about what a great day she’d had. Her eyes had fire behind them; her hands softened with the butter and flour. On weekends she sat in our tiny yard and painted the faces that she saw in the clouds.

On a hot January night we’d sat with our neighbours on one of their many verandahs, and watched something called
Sky Show
, which was a series of fireworks programmed to music on the radio. (Fleur watched it from the lookout, in her boyfriend’s car.) The songs rang out across the hilltop – all those other families watching from their own verandahs, radios cranked to full volume. After the Choirboys had sung us through to the finale (hundreds of white explosions so close together they were indiscernible), Mum turned to us and said,
I think I’m ready to go home
.

Back in the car, Fleur crying (less for the boy and more for the horse, Mum suspected) and our belongings in a truck. For weeks after that, Mum was robust and happy.
Just the tonic, then
, Dad said, with his mouth in the crook of her neck.

It wasn’t, of course.

‘Here you go.’ Dave had two vanilla slices, a pie with sesame seeds on it (the universal sign for chicken and vegetable) and a neenish tart with its would-be yin yang. I kissed his hands; they smelled like a public toilet.

The Riverland had its own kind of landscape: green and almost lush, but with a hint that just over the road, on the other side of that field, two k’s down the road, was the desert. I was surprised by the fullness of the river and the liveliness of the main road, which was a funny mixture of country general store and sprawling Aldi. The drought seemed far away, here in town, but Fleur’s house was some way into the wilderness, another forty minutes on. Dave bought some flowers from the supermarket and I bought the paper with the quiz in it.

She didn’t look as bad as she had perhaps led us to believe – just a leg in a cast, suspended in midair, and some bruises around her jaw. ‘It’s my ribs that really hurt,’ she said, and the nurse gave her a needle.

‘Christ, Fleur,’ said Dave, who had always wrangled her better than I had. ‘What have you done to yourself?’

And she cried.

Ugly cried, with her mouth hanging open, puffy-eyed and throaty. Cried with her fists pushed into her cheeks and her head down and her body moving with the physicality of the crying, the heaving to-and-fro. I told her she didn’t have to talk about it, and sat awkwardly at the foot of the bed, realising too late that there wasn’t any room for me and the plaster leg.

Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen Fleur holed up with broken bones. At the brick veneer house with the hill and the shed, she’d climbed onto the roof and shouted to Mum to pay attention to her. That was something she did once a week or more until she was old enough to vie for the attention of teenage boys instead. It was only a matter of time before she came tumbling down, which is exactly what she did, and she was happy as a pig in shit for six weeks, while Mum pandered to her every whim. After the cast came off, Mum went into hospital for three days. No one pandered to her.

‘Who’s going to take care of the farm?’ Dave said. He was pushing Fleur’s things into her overnight bag.

‘Matty.’ Her tiny voice barely escaped through the sobbing.

‘Matty?’ I said. ‘I thought you kicked him out.’

‘Yeah. Yeah. I did.’

‘Prick.’

‘He’s not so bad,’ she said. ‘He’s working on it.’

‘But he can’t take care of you?’

She didn’t look at me. ‘He’s just busy.’

‘Do you need all this stuff?’ Dave said. ‘We’ve got magazines at our place.’

She shook her head, just a fraction.

‘She needs at least two nights here,’ said her nurse, whose name tag introduced her as ‘Helen’, ‘and then six weeks off the leg. No special care, just pain relief and rest.’

‘Got it.’

‘So you can put her things back, thanks.’

‘Oh,’ Dave said, and stood awkwardly at the foot of the bed. ‘I was just trying to be useful.’

‘You’re going to be just fine, Fleur,’ said Helen, without looking at her. I wondered what it was about
six weeks
that ensured a full recovery.

In the evening Fleur ate a piece of limp fish and a handful of peas. The hospital didn’t have anything resembling a canteen, so Dave went down to the Chinese takeaway and bought us a container of Mongolian beef, then smuggled it into the room.

‘How are you feeling?’ I said. Some of the colour had come back into her face.

‘You know he died, right? I fell and it was my fault, tried to jump him too high, his body’s too old –
was
too old’ – a little more crying – ‘and he came down on some rocks. We both broke our legs. For some reason I get to live on in this luxury while they put him in a kiln.’ A long howl, guttural.

Dave booked us into a three-star motel in the main street, and we slept in separate beds that felt more like cold slabs. He kept the TV on all night; I woke up every hour to a different person shouting at me to make a number of easy payments in return for something I absolutely and completely needed.

Helen had been replaced by a smaller brunette woman. ‘Hello there, I’m Gretel!’ she said.

Gretel explained Fleur’s care: keep the leg up, put it down some number of times every day to avoid thrombosis, eat lots of greens, here’s my phone number if you need anything. I went to take it from her, but she handed it to Dave, whose skin faded. ‘My baby just died,’ I bleated, and Gretel patted my shoulder. ‘You can try again,’ she said. Dave took the overnight bag out to the car. ‘There’s no one else,’ he said.

Fleur had things she needed from the house, she said, so we drove out to her farm with her sitting sideways in the back seat (‘Is that going to be safe?’ Dave said it would be fine.) and collected undies and some kind of lactose-free milk and a photo of Mandrake, the horse that had died.

‘The horse
who
died,’ Fleur said, clutching it like a baby.

She took us the right way home, not our ambling scenic route. The hills were eclipsed by long stretches of freeway. She cried the whole time: in the drive-through line at KFC, when we stopped for petrol and crosswords, when Dave let a family of ducks cross the road. She cried up the driveway and she cried while I put sheets on her bed and she cried when I told her I wasn’t going to move the TV into her room. Then she stopped, and didn’t start again.

*

Later, when the clouds had cleared, I sat with Noel at the top of the hill and he pointed at stars that had names. ‘That’s Orion,’ he said. ‘That’s the Southern Cross.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That’s Venus.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I know any other constellations.’

He pointed. ‘Ursa Minor. Now you do.’

We ate lamingtons with jam in the middle. His body was warm next to me.

‘Don’t you feel small, Heather?’ he said. ‘Don’t you feel so infinitesimally small?’

I did, in his shadow cast behind the moonlight, feel very small indeed. I ran through the mud, and over the mud, and around the mud. I ran into the trees where the water didn’t penetrate, past the olive grove and down the hill, across to the pond set alight by the moon.

‘Look at those mosquitoes,’ he said. ‘We’ve never had those before.’

And then, the rain.

I
WAKE UP
in the middle of the night to go to the toilet. Gran is staying over, just for a bit while Mum is in Brisbane with my Auntie Fay again. She goes there a lot. Way more often than Dad goes to see his sister. I wonder what they do in Brisbane. Shopping, probably. Mum loves shopping.

After I remember to wash my hands I stand in the hallway and I can hear voices in the kitchen. Dad and Gran are talking. I creep up and point my ear through the door.

They’re going to move her, Dad says.

Where? Gran’s voice is shaking like she’s lost something precious.

That one out west, Dad says.

The Hill?

No, not The Hill. The one in the goldfields.

Aradale Asylum? Gran’s voice might shake right out of the room.

Yeah, Aradale. Then Dad is crying and I know it’s him because when he stops to take a breath it sounds like a man’s breath.

In the morning it is Saturday and I ride my bike down to the library.

Do you have any books about ah-sigh-lums? I say.

The librarian squints at me and I feel like I’m doing something naughty.

Asylums? How old are you? she says.

Eleven.

What do you want with asylums?

Ah-sigh-lums. I wonder how to spell it on the computer.

I’m doing a school project, I say.

On asylums? She starts typing on her computer but she’s still looking at me. How does she do that? I lean over the desk to watch her type without looking.

Right, yeah, on asylums. A-S-Y-L-U-M-S. Asylums.

She takes me to the non-fiction part of the library and shows me where the books on asylums are, and the whole time she keeps on looking at me like I’m in trouble, and then she stands there for a bit longer while I take the books out and put them on the floor.

Is your mummy here with you? she says. She looks around as though Mum might appear from behind some shelves.

No, I say. She’s in Brisbane.

*

I find the number in the
Yellow Pages
. It doesn’t have an ad or anything. Just one line under MEDICAL. Just a line and a phone number. I write it down on a Post-It note and stick it on the inside of my shoe so no one will see it. I’m pretty sure if Gran sees it she will get sad.