The Paper House (18 page)

Mum looks like her feelings are a bit hurt. Fleur yells too much sometimes.

We get a round table by the window. Some of the chairs are yellow and some of the chairs are blue.

That’s stupid, Fleur says. Why aren’t the chairs matching?

But I like it. I like sitting on a yellow chair and looking at a blue one.

At the next table there’s a woman and I know her because she has curly hair and I always see her in the driveway next door. Her mouth is down, like she’s having a tantrum.

Is that woman having a tantrum? I say.

Shh, Mum says.

The tantrum woman says she wants a coffee and carrot cake and she tells the café lady to hurry up. Her face is old. There are lines all over it and when she talks the lines move up and down.

She has a friend with her.

The friend says, I don’t know why you come here.

She has a fluffy pink scarf and round glasses. She looks like an owl.

Owls are wise, I say to Fleur.

That’s a myth, she says.

I don’t know what a myth is so I just nod a bit.

Mum orders milkshakes. I get a blue heaven milkshake, which everybody knows is the best flavour. Fleur gets vanilla. Mum says she’ll have a cup of tea but they bring it in a little brown pot.

Our milkshakes come in metal cups as big as my whole face. Fleur takes little sips of hers but I tip the whole thing upside down and try pouring it into my mouth in one go. It doesn’t work. There’s milkshake on the table and on the blue chair and the yellow chair and the lady has to come over with a napkin to clean it up.

Sorry, I say.

It’s okay, she says, and she smiles at me but with her mouth closed.

The woman with the old face says, Those poor girls.

Fleur looks at her.

I heard the mother went to hospital, the woman says.

Mum is pretending to look at the mice but I can tell she’s looking at the woman. I look at the woman too. We’re all looking at the woman.

She looks back at us.

Her friend says, It’s a wonder poor Bruce gets anything done.

And the woman looks right at mum and mum keeps touching the mice and she drops one and it smashes on the floor.

The woman says, They shouldn’t be allowed to have children.

Fleur jumps right out of her seat and Mum is saying, Sit down Fleur, but Fleur rushes over to the woman with the old face and the woman who’s an owl.

Stand up, she says.

The old faced woman ignores her.

Stand up, Fleur says again.

They both ignore her. They talk to each other about how their coffees are bad.

Fleur gets this look on her face like her brain hurts and she lifts up her hand and slaps the woman’s face and all its lines fly right off.

Everybody shouts. The owl woman starts hooting and screaming and Fleur stands at the table and tells her to shut up.

Mum is looking at the price tags on the mice. Maybe we could take a couple home, she says. They’re only two dollars.

Fleur says, You have to drive me to netball.

The next day the woman with the lined face is in her driveway. She’s watering some plants next to her car but she doesn’t see me.

I
T WAS EASY
to think of her at Christmas. Years spent sitting around the tree, waiting for her to get up. Some years she did, breezed into the lounge room with her hair like spun sugar, and the gifts came in torrents across the floor. But not every year. Later on, she spent the day in a medicated fog, pawing at the air around the bed.

Sylvia had put Dad to work in her garden. I saw him from the window, pulling weeds from a flowerbed, bent down on his crooked knees. Sylvia sat at the end of the path under a large hat, and she waved when she saw me but he didn’t look up. His mouth moved; she spoke back to him. The two of them laughed. I imagined them talking about me, hidden and ridiculous inside my old house, drawing pictures of spider webs. Had he told her about the shells? Had he told her about the woman on our beach in the orange running shoes?

Dave pulled into the driveway. ‘Sylvia, Bruce.’ His voice carried into the kitchen. ‘Nice day for it.’ Something from Sylvia. ‘I don’t know if she’s up to it. I can ask her.’ He came inside and plonked newspapers on the bench. ‘Sylvia wants to know if she can come for Christmas. Her treat. Says she can make a roast if it’s not too hot.’

‘It’s probably too hot.’

‘We can put the air-con on.’

‘Why isn’t she spending it with her sons? What are their names again?’

‘They’re taking their kids to Fiji or something,’ he said. ‘Nice for some.’

‘They must really love her.’

He rubbed my shoulder. ‘Well?’

‘Sure, Dave. It sounds nice. Maybe Albert can come too.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t think Albert will be able to make it.’

‘That’s a shame.’

At the front of the house, a sugar gum tree towered over everything else. It was a hundred years old – Dave had found it in a book entitled
Hastings and Surrounds: a tour of flora
, with a black and white man standing next to it – and it was pockmarked and gnarled but very beautiful. The bark was a tapestry, swirls of rusted brown and stark white. At dusk we strung blinking lights around it, and Dave climbed almost to the top to add a laughably small angel. I walked to Rupert’s and bought bunches of blue wax flowers and stalks of dried willow branches, and linked them all together with a garland of red and white felt baubles.

The time passed in the way it always did in the summer holidays, with food and television and board games. Dave read books with his feet on the coffee table, and I brought home bits of couverture chocolate from Rupert, at whose shop I did all of my Christmas shopping. ‘You’re getting a hamper this year,’ I told Dave, ‘and so is everyone else we know.’ I made a smaller version in a ceramic bowl for Noel, but I wasn’t sure if he preferred stuffed olives or pickled leeks, so I took it all out and wrote him a card instead.

And still Dave watched me.

‘What are you thinking about?’ he said.

‘Cheese,’ I said. My fingers moved on their own, picking tiny pictures into the vinyl bench tops.

‘How are you going without Jenny?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Fleur’s stuck here for ages. And I have Dad, and Sylvia. How many more people could I possibly need?’

‘You have me.’

‘I know. You are a marvel.’

He watched me, even when he didn’t watch me. And the ground moved under my feet and I stood as still as I could so it wouldn’t carry him along with it.

Our front-yard Christmas tree came right up over the top of the house. I stood on the back lawn and watched the lights flicker in and out, wondered if they were lights or fireflies, remembered the first night at the house when we had sat and speculated on the nature of the lights in the pittosporums, and how we had held hands then, as tight as knots, and we had both been in the same part of space and time.

I drew a Christmas tree on my left palm. The real kind, with needles and a terracotta pot. On my right palm, clumsily, I drew an angel in a white dress, and waited until the house was quiet.

‘Did you know,’ I said to Dave on Christmas Eve, ‘that more people kill themselves at Christmas than at any other time of year?’ He looked at me over his book.

‘Is that something you’re thinking about?’ he said.

‘Not at this precise moment.’ I fluffed my pillows. ‘Maybe it’s because their counsellors all go to the Alps.’

‘Jenny’s going to the Alps?’

‘She’s going to Daylesford.’

‘Bit of a difference.’

‘Daylesford has snow, at least. That last night we were there. Remember we went out to that place that did the white chocolate mousse and the snow was falling? I tried to dance with you under the streetlight but you told me not to be a dickhead.’

He put his hand to my face. ‘You were beautiful. Like a painting.’

Maybe it had been a painting, the warm glow of the lights in the windows. ‘First holiday we took together.’

He wiped his glasses on his shirt. ‘So it does snow there. But not in summer.’

‘Maybe she’ll come back early,’ I said. He peered at me through the binoculars of his hands.

Most years we spent Christmas with Dave’s family. Hundreds of them. Nine, at least. Dave’s family embraced it with childlike enthusiasm – gifts and costumes and pudding with silver coins inside. This was to be our first one without them in as long as I could remember. His sister was getting divorced and his parents were flying up to be with her. I wondered what it was about getting divorced that was more palatable than this.

It didn’t bear thinking about. Sylvia would help us.

‘I want Fiore to have nice day,’ she said, leaning hard on my kitchen counter. ‘This year is hard, no? You come, we buy ingredients.’

We walked together to Rupert’s and I marvelled at her enormous stride, stretching and contracting. She had made a list and followed it around the shop while I filled my basket with gingerbread and liquorice and chocolates shaped like puddings.

‘Rupert,’ I said, and he leaned in to listen. ‘I want to get something for Sylvia. Something she really likes.’

‘Brandy?’

‘Shh!’ Sylvia hadn’t heard us, engrossed as she was in a selection of jams.

‘Sorry.’ He whispered too. ‘The old bird loves her brandy.’

‘Right. Good.’ Then, louder: ‘Can you suggest something in a fruit mince? A plum pudding?’

He took my arm at the elbow. ‘Of course, madam. Right this way.’

Sylvia carried a bag of almonds. I carried everything else. ‘It’s my shoes,’ she said. ‘What you call them? Bunions. Shouldn’t carry too much things.’

‘Sure, Sylvia. It’s no problem.’

‘You okay, English Garden?’

‘What?’

‘You staring into outer space.’ She lifted her one bag. ‘My arms is tired.’

‘Yeah, it’s going around.’

She studied my face, frowning. ‘You not ready to cook. We go to beach.’

‘Now?’

She looked for someone or something that might be preventing us from going at that moment.

‘Yes, now. Why not now?’

‘Shouldn’t we get started, though?’

‘Beach will give us clear heads.’

It was the right kind of day for it, granted, with the sun strung high in the sky and the breeze coming up over the hill. We would need to take umbrellas and suncream and hats. ‘No need to bother with any of that,’ she said, and I noticed the leather of her skin and the bumps and scabs on her face.

‘Okay?’

‘Okay.’

She was smiling.

‘You take bags inside and I start car, yes?’

Sylvia took us rattling down the road at thirty kilometres an hour. The Saturday afternoon crowd was unexpectedly sparse: a man in a silver four-wheel drive with the windows down; a woman and an enormous spotted dog; a young couple wrapped in and around each other at the water’s edge. Between us we were old, frail, creaky, so we sat on a bench and took off our shoes.

‘People all come to water to feel what they feeling,’ Sylvia said.

‘What?’

‘You look. That man in the car. Look how he is sitting.’ He was a big man – broad across the back and square in the face – and he sat in his car as though his stitches had been unpicked, low and slouched and deflated. ‘What is he feeling?’ she said.

‘He’s sad,’ I said.

‘How do you know?’

I knew intimately the downness, a person whose bones had been crushed into powder by looming eternity, a woman with a blonde ponytail on a brown couch. I knew the curved shoulders of someone defeated, no hope that they might continue to the next minute, and the next minute after that. Just despair. Doomed, infinite loneliness.

Sylvia nodded. ‘Yes exactly.’ She pointed. ‘And this lady here, on sand. You know a lot about someone from the way they treat their dog,’ she said.

My mother and Shithead in the grass, on the swing, watching the ocean. Shithead eating whiting from a china plate, drinking spring water, catching butterflies. The shrill sound of mum’s unmitigated joy, a delight I could never bring her (though she never resented me for it), and the three of us at the drive-in watching
Star Wars
, and Mum laughing to herself.

‘Yes, you can.’ The woman on the beach threw a ball, and the dog ran after it. She threw it again, and again, always smiling.

‘She will never have husband,’ said Sylvia.

‘What about them?’ The couple in the water saw only each other, though their eyes were closed.

‘They come here to feel each other.’ She laughed. ‘No, they here for love. You know love, Heather.’

I explained the love I felt for Dave, in words. That he made my heart whole, that I couldn’t imagine life without him. I told her about our wedding day in our favourite garden, and how I loved that he wrote his own vows but didn’t care that I had copied mine from a book of poetry from the library.

‘That is not the love I mean,’ she said. And in the crack between their bodies I saw the third person – water rushing over new skin, the tiny pink hat – and realised they hadn’t been looking at each other at all.

We crawled back to the house in the old car. Sylvia took out crème fraîche from Arthur’s Seat, and gravlax trout from the farm in Red Hill, and in my kitchen she made latkes, bubbling and hissing. We ate them hot from the pan with our hands, faces smeared with cheese and oil.

‘You very brave,’ she said. ‘Brave people deserve to eat latkes.’

I remembered how I had tried to cook for Mum. My brave mum. I made her wholemeal toast with Vegemite and enormous cups of weak tea, and she smiled but left them on her bedside table. When Mrs Govey from next door had a baby, Mum pulled herself from her blankets and made a thick beef stew with carrots and beans, and told me to take it over in a Tupperware container when it was cool. Mrs Govey’s kitchen was covered in containers. Plastic ones like mine. Brown earthenware ones. Tin foil ones. My freezer isn’t big enough! she laughed, and put my container at the back, that hour my mother had managed to get out in the world, lost in a great mountain of generosity. I told her:
My mum is sick in bed
, and she said,
We know, honey
, but she didn’t offer me any of the food that was doomed to spoil on her bench.