The Paper House (19 page)

‘What do you mean?’ I said to Sylvia.

She pressed her fingers into the skin below my collarbone. ‘You want to get better.’

The glut of oil sat thickly in my throat. ‘I don’t know if that’s true.’

‘I know is true.’ She rinsed the pan.

By the time Dave ventured out of his study, we had dunked a lamb roast in marinade and tossed potatoes in mayonnaise and rolled a jammy sponge cake into a spiral. I had let the old woman get drunk on the balcony, and she snored quietly in the shade. Dave wondered if I wanted to go out for dinner. ‘What about Fleur?’ I said.

‘Maybe your Dad can pop in?’

‘He said he had something to do today. Christmas secrets, probably.’

Dave scratched his ear. ‘I’m sure Sylvia would keep her company. Apparently they both like old-timey movies,’ he said, and there was a note of something burdensome in his voice.

We went to a Thai restaurant that someone in the staffroom had recommended. Dave had pad thai, which he always had, and I had red curry with duck, which I always had, and we shared a plate of spring rolls, which we always did. I told him about the latkes, but not the beach, and he asked me to please save him some next time. For dessert we had a banana fritter to share (which meant that I ate the ice-cream, and Dave ate the banana).

‘You look happy,’ he said, as though telling himself.

‘Thai food always makes me happy.’

The night at the drive-in seemed seasons ago. He reached across the table, threaded his hand into my hand. I noticed each familiar knuckle bone. ‘What do you want to do when we get home?’ he asked, with his ankle against my ankle, and I said, ‘Maybe watch a movie?’ which was the wrong thing to say, judging by the way his mouth turned down while his eyes stayed up, and his hand went back into his pocket.

Outside we stood in the glow of red and green lights, strung from telegraph poles and decorated with tinsel Rudolphs. A cacophony of carols played from multiple shopfronts –
Hark the red-nosed merry gentlemen
– but the street was empty. Eight pm, Christmas Eve. Home with family. We would watch someone spurt platitudes on a stage, the way we always did. And our bodies would knock against each other but not answer.

*

On Christmas morning Dave woke before me; I felt the bed move with his shifting weight. When I opened my eyes sometime later, he was sitting at the window, staring out, and it was my turn to watch him.

He was not a broad man, and the curve of his spine was visible under his t-shirt. His shoulders sagged at their edges, moved up and down with his breathing, punctuated by quick breaths. One hand rested on the windowsill; in the other, he held something small and pink. Sunlight cut his face into triangles, light and dark.

‘What are you thinking about?’ I said.

He startled, turned to me. His eyes were red and swollen.

‘Me? Nothing. Nothing.’ He wrapped himself in his blankets. ‘Happy Christmas. What time is Sylvia coming?’

Sylvia had bought an enormous panettone from Rupert, and we cut off fat sultana slices. ‘Sometimes I let my boys have panettone for breakfast,’ she said, and cut another piece. Her hair was wound in a knot at the base of her neck. I hadn’t seen the shoes before either.

‘Lucky boys,’ Dad said.

‘I like your shoes,’ I said, and she hushed me.

‘They are old ones.’ I thought about how glad her grandsons must have been to have a grandmother who wore her hair in a bun and got around in sundresses with lace around the bottom and shoes with flowers on them.

‘Oh, you think Ashok will come?’ The words came out too quickly; she tripped and turned away as she said it. I said, ‘Do you want me to ask him?’ and she said, ‘Only if
you
want to.’ So I went next door and knocked on the window. He sat in a brown armchair with Harriet on his lap and a mug in his hand, reading glasses pushed right up his nose. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I would like that very much.’

I sat with Dad and Fleur in front of the TV. Dave and Sylvia fussed in the kitchen, banging things together. The news came and went, and then a sad little animated nativity scene.

Dad cleared his throat.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Just wondering’ – he took a deep breath – ‘if you’ve called Gran. Even just to say hello.’

I opened my mouth to speak, but Fleur’s voice came out. ‘I did,’ she said.

I looked at her. ‘You did?’

‘Yep. When I was here the first time, I called the home.’

‘And?’

‘They told me not to tell her what had happened. Said she was pretty fragile and it might make her worse.’

‘Oh,’ I said, with guilt in my bones.

Dad rubbed my knee. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll call her. Say hello for all of us.’

‘She doesn’t remember us,’ I said. ‘She calls me Shelley.’

‘But you don’t look anything like her.’

‘That’s what they tell me.’

We watched a choir of robed boys sing carols in a cathedral. Their voices were clear and new, and ours had stopped.

Late in the morning I heard the little dog scratching at the front door. Ashok had trimmed his beard, and he had brought a bottle of wine. ‘Oh, Ashok,’ said Sylvia, ‘you no have pinot with lamb! Shiraz only!’ Harriet growled. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It was just something I had in the pantry.’ She took the bottle and put it out of sight, on the cupboard under the sink. I recognised Rupert’s sticky price label on the bottom.

They worked side by side in the kitchen: Ashok peeling and washing, Sylvia chopping and stirring. I heard their hands touching; minute electric shocks. The air became choked with garlic and onion. My eyes watered. Roast dinner had been a tradition at my house too, once. And my parents had stood together like that too, once, when she was lucid and he was home from the sea. Shoulders touching. Hands touching. Breathing the same air like that, in the kitchen. Mum was a vegetarian for a while (‘Nothing with faces!’) but when that ended, the slabs of meat came out. Sides of beef strung up to age, lamb in legs and racks and shoulders. She honeyed carrots and he rubbed herbs on things and she dripped duck fat on potatoes and he boiled oil in cupcake trays, which became crispy Yorkshire puddings as if by magic.

Ashok and Sylvia argued; Fleur set the table with mismatched cutlery; Dad lifted presents and shook the clues out of them.

Dave had saved me the seat across from his. He always did that. Sylvia had served up plate after plate of glossy vegetables, drenched in oil and with salt like snowfall.

‘Sylvia, where did you to learn to make a roast like this?’ said Dad. He had stuffed himself to gleaming; sweating under the strain of digestion but cramming in more and more potatoes.

She smiled, aglow with the praise. ‘Albert from England. His mother teach me.’ Next to me, Ashok’s body groaned.

‘Maybe I should have had an English mother-in-law,’ said Dave.

‘Your mother-in-law made roasts,’ I said, trying to catch the memory as it darted by.

‘Good ones,’ Dad said.

Sylvia was pregnant as soon as she was married, she told us, and her husband’s mother thought it imperative that she learn the basics. She told us about the white-haired woman no bigger than a child, an accent so posh that Sylvia – with her limited English – could barely understand her. ‘“Why you marry this foreign girl?” she say. So I show her how to make gnocchi and ricotta cakes and she show me how to make roast.’ Sylvia stuck her fork in a pudding. ‘Her gravy was no good though. I made new recipe.’

‘And we can all be glad for that,’ said Ashok, with beans in his mouth. Sylvia smiled at him. Under the table, a foot brushed against mine. I hoped it was Dave’s, but he didn’t look at me.

Late in the afternoon, the house was a sauna.

‘This is bullshit,’ Fleur said, trying to get a wooden spoon inside her cast.

‘Why don’t we go outside?’ I said. ‘It’s usually not too bad under the umbrella, if the wind’s coming up from the water.’

We took drinks and leftovers to the patio table, sat all elbows and shoulders on a carousel, and listened to each other. Ashok told us that he had nearly married, when he was a young man. She was a girl his parents had chosen for him but whom he had never met. She was beautiful in the photos, he said, and he would have married her, except that she didn’t make it to their wedding day – malaria. It had never occurred to him to marry someone else. ‘Even now my mother would turn in her grave,’ he said. Sylvia shifted in her chair. Fleur told us about her first marriage, and her second one. I had been a bridesmaid the first time around: when she was twenty-three, she had promised love in sickness and health to a fellow vet student, a man named Tim, who had a very big chin (a nickname that came up in the best man speech more than once). Three months later, he tearfully confessed that he was gay

(Sylvia gasped)

and the marriage was annulled. Two years after that she eloped with Frederic, and he lived on the farm with her until she caught him doing unsavoury things in the chook shed

(Sylvia wept)

and she never saw him again. ‘This is almost completely true,’ Fleur said, and winked at the old lady, who was hyperventilating into her hands.

‘Why haven’t I ever heard this story?’ said Dad.

‘What about you, Heather?’ said Ashok. ‘What about love?’

‘Can’t remember,’ I said, so Dave shared the story of how we met, on a train platform in the rain. I had left my mother’s favourite book there on the bench, got on my train and collapsed in public when I realised it was forgotten. I held out no hope that I would see it again, but of course, when I got back to my departure point thirty minutes later, there he was with the book in his hands, and he said,
I love A Moveable Feast
. Wet hair in his eyes. Brown suit. ‘Of course, not completely true,’ he said. ‘That was the second time we met.’

Fleur laughed. Dave glowed orange at the edges.

‘Life was easy then,’ I said, and the glow dissipated.

Sylvia fiddled with her cutlery, laid it out in parallel and then crossed it over, pushed on the prongs of the fork so it flipped up like a rake in a Warner Bros. cartoon.

‘Dad, tell Sylvia about the cat.’ He smiled. ‘We had this cat. Jeremy,’ I said. ‘I stole ten dollars from Gran’s wallet and went and got him from this appalling pet shop. Kept all their animals in tiny cages.’ Sylvia nodded. ‘
Jeremy
, though. Terrible name for a cat. He was a stumpy ginger thing with white paws. Mum kind of loved him, I think, but Dad made me take him back. More of a dog person, Dad.’

Dad leaned forward in his chair. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Uh, yes, you did. In your week off you came home and said, “Get that damn thing out of this house!” and we went back to the shop. Remember? Next to the hardware store?’

He shook his head. ‘Nope. Jeremy came from that shelter in Geelong.’

‘But I remember. They wouldn’t give us the money back so Mum got some terrible toy for Shithead.’ Sylvia gasped. ‘Sadie, I mean.’

He shrugged. ‘Guess it must have been some other Jeremy.’

‘Struggling in your old age, huh?’ I said.

‘He’s right,’ Fleur said. ‘It was the place in Geelong.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t. Anyway’ – I shoved cold meat into my mouth – ‘after Jeremy we didn’t have any more cats. Dad decided he was allergic.’

He laughed. ‘No, it was your mother who was allergic.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘She knew she was allergic before we even got Jeremy. But you know how she was, once she got an idea in her head.’

‘Oh.’ I turned to Fleur, who nodded. ‘Well, Sylvia, that salad was delicious.’ The old woman stared bleakly, glassily. ‘What did you put in it? Were there pine nuts?’ Dave pushed his foot against mine under the table. When I looked at him, he mimed a zip across his mouth.

‘Tell us about the rigs, Bruce,’ he said.

Dad eased back into his chair, folded his arms and the sinew pushed out and he appeared muscular and lean.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘God, anything,’ Fleur said.

I looked at my plate. I’d picked out the dense lamb fat and left it around the edges.

‘So I mostly worked out on the west coast, near Fremantle. Like school camp, all those guys on the rigs, eating slop in a hall.’

‘But what about that trip we went on to Lakes Entrance?’ I said, and Dad glanced at me. ‘It might as well have been a million miles away and we had that shitty old bus. Did you even know how to drive it? Remember how we couldn’t get the door working at Traralgon and Fleur started crying because she thought she’d have to live on the bus?’

Fleur stared at me. ‘That was you. You cried.’

‘Me? No, I remember it like it was yesterday.’

‘It was you. You were five or something, and you made me get your My Little Pony to tell you it was going to be okay.’

‘I really don’t think that’s how it happened,’ I said.

Dave said, ‘Go on, Bruce. The west coast.’

Dad rubbed my shoulder. ‘Right. Beaut weather out there, ninety per cent of the time. Then other ten per cent of it you’d be clinging to the rig for dear life while these storms ripped you apart.’

I was certain, though, of the bus. I saw it as though it were playing out in front of me: stroking Mum’s face while Dad shouted at Fleur for crying, and the sunset casting us all into a deep shadow from which we individually might have thought we’d never emerge.

‘That’s where I met my friend Stu,’ Dad was saying. ‘He moved to Rocky, too, last year. Set up the bar.’

‘Thank God for Stu,’ Dave said.

‘Too right.’

Then Sylvia sang ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’, and Ashok mumbled along with her, and the breeze was warm and dry.

‘Merry Christmas, everybody.’ Dad raised his glass.

And Ashok, as though it were a race: ‘Merry Christmas, Sylvia,’ and we all stared at him because in his haste, his teeth had fallen on the floor.

Sylvia knocked her cutlery off her plate. It clattered to the ground. ‘I am not feeling good,’ she said, and her eyes had drawn their curtains. ‘These is good stories, though. Tell me more tomorrow. You can help me, Bruce?’

She leaned on Dad as he took her home, in a way I found both familiar and startling.

‘She’s a weird old duck,’ I said, and Fleur said, ‘I like her so much.’ Her hands were stiff on my back, and her breath was quick and shallow near my ear. Dave watched from the table. I was hot in the foreign closeness. A minute passed as I tried to extricate myself from her discomfort, but she tapped me on the head and disappeared into her room. The front door clicked shut, then the door out to the deck, where Dad sat and laughed to himself.