The Paper House (22 page)

‘Maybe Perth have all those things and no rain, too.’ She laughed. ‘Snaps is ready. Can’t cook too long. Won’t bend.’

Curled and creamed and just slightly warm to the touch, the brandy snaps went on a plate to Fleur at the table. I ate mine in the kitchen on my own, straining to overhear the conversation.

‘How is farm?’

‘Matty says the sheep are dying. It’s too hot.’

‘But is raining!’

‘It’s not raining at the river.’

‘But you have many, many sheep, yes?’

‘No, not many, many sheep. Just some sheep.’

‘You have other animals on farm?’

‘Ducks.’ Fleur’s voice was momentarily lost in cream. ‘I have a fat old pig.’

‘What is his name?’

‘Grover.’ Crunch of biscuits. The sound of Fleur’s wall crumbling a little. ‘Too funny to eat.’

‘This is Mandrake?’

‘Yes.’ Quiet sobbing.

‘He so handsome, Fiore. He so, so handsome.’

‘I know.’

‘You have more brandy snaps.’

‘Thanks, Sylvia.’

Sylvia cooed from her throat. She had to get home, she said, and make sure the mice in her walls weren’t lonely without her. I watched her from the window; she waved to Ashok, and he tipped his hat, though he wasn’t wearing one. Fleur used a fork to scratch underneath her cast.

‘Fucking ants,’ she said. Everything was coated in a sweaty film. Summer beat away at the house with its fists. ‘Thought this was supposed to be a temperate climate. Where are we at?’

I checked the paper. ‘Thirty-nine.’

‘Christ. Give us a face cloth, would you?’

I ran the towel under cold water. ‘Dad and I are going for a drive,’ I said.

‘Great. Sounds like a party.’

Insides buzzing. ‘You can come if you want.’

‘No way,’ she said. ‘Anyway, Sylvia’s taking me to Mornington so we can go to Aldi.’

‘Right. Sounds important.’

‘Not everything has to be important.’
Scratch scratch scratch
. ‘Got any kero? Might take these ants for a ride.’

I picked Dad up from the Cosy Courtyard mid-morning. He seemed small. He swam in his Hawaiian shirt; his slacks billowed around him.

‘Where are you taking us?’

‘It’s a surprise,’ he said. He pulled me from the driver’s seat and installed himself there.

‘You know how much I like surprises.’

He smiled. ‘This is a good one.’

He gripped the steering wheel as though headed over an inevitable cliff face and I pretended to search for a radio station so he wouldn’t see my nerves. Past the service station, up the freeway, into the city. Just one long road, cars with their many people headed to their many destinations. Exit: 2 km. Exit: 1 km. Exit: 4 km. I watched them go by, all these micro escapes. His hands relaxed. The radio played a song with a disco synth.

We stopped for drinks at a sandwich shop in the city. People must still have been on holidays; the streets droned with the solemn clomp of those who’d returned early. No bustling crowds. A heavy-set man in a fluorescent t-shirt waited in front of us. The woman behind the counter moved slowly from tub to tub: shredded brown lettuce, limp tomato slices, white bread in square loaves. ‘Four ninety,’ she said, and he said, ‘And a Coke,’ and she said, ‘Seven forty.’ They didn’t look at each other as goods were exchanged for money. I got a salad roll. Dad chose some mystery slop from the bain-marie. We ate on the steps of the Rialto Tower and my feet danced involuntarily to the ring of the tram.

‘Where are we going?’ I said.

‘Do you want some of this camel intestine?’ he said.

‘Nah, I’m right off camel intestines.’

‘That’s too bad.’ He slurped them down. ‘Not far now. Half an hour.’

I checked the back seat before we got in, in case she was huddled there. My stomach churned and pinched. I couldn’t quite force my breath all the way down. We drove through the tunnel, across the overpass, onto the bridge.

How similar had the road looked when we were kids, coming up into the city to see the Christmas windows? Mostly Gran took us in her car, bunched together on the bench seats with two dollars to buy an ornament. Not the glass ones, of course. Never the glass ones. It was always warm on those nights, even when it wasn’t. Bit of Christmas magic, maybe. There wasn’t much of that going around.

The radio played a song about weekends.

‘So you’ve really never been back?’ he said.

‘Back where?’

‘To the house.’

‘No, never,’ I said. It would have required more than a car ride. A wormhole, perhaps.

‘Oh.’

‘What about you?’

‘Most years, I guess. Last year.’

‘That’s not where you’re taking me, is it?’

He shifted in his seat, gripped the steering wheel tight again.

‘Dad? I don’t think this is a good idea.’ There she was. I heard her breathing, quick-in-slow-out.

‘Last year, huh?’

‘I was here for work.’ He stared ahead, navigated the road with his fists.

‘Right.’

‘I wanted to see what they’d done with the place.’

‘Didn’t think to ask me along?’

‘What would you have said if I had?’

‘“Never call this number again”?’

‘Exactly.’

‘What was it like? Last year?’

He smiled. ‘The same. It’s always the same.’ We drove to a chorus of Top 40 songs and commercial breaks. ‘Change the bloody channel,’ he said.

Along the beach road grew rows of pine trees. The proper kind, triangular – thin on top, full-skirted at the bottom. Dad had told me they were to protect the houses from salt damage, but Mum said they were a Christmas plantation. Each year she climbed them to hang baubles on the branches. Dad’s hands: taut, white. My street. Dad and me and Fleur and Mum. And Gran. And the ambulance. Dad and me and Fleur and Mum and the ambulance and me and Mum and Gran. Dad and Gran and me and Fleur and the ambulance.

‘Stop!’

‘What? What is it?’

Dad and me and the ambulance. Dad and the ambulance. Mum and Dad and Gran and Fleur.

The shutters banging in the hot wind. The cruel turning over of the sea.

‘I can’t.’

‘You can.’

The car moved, and I moved with it. Me and Dad. The beach threw surfers into the air and down to the sea bed. People disguised as coloured umbrellas and children learning not to get caught in the rip.

In a second, there it was: Number 28.

Not a house at all. An empty block and cyclone fencing. Dad pulled over. We looked at the block. We looked at the road. Looked back at the block with knee-high grass. Looked at the block without doors or windows or telephones. Looked at the block without me and Dad and Mum and Fleur and Gran and the ambulance. Looked at Dad with his mouth hanging open.

‘It’s gone,’ I said.

Looked at the crack in the sky where she kept pouring through. We stepped back from the footpath and stood a little too close to the road, and he put his arm around me.

‘Sorry,’ he said finally. ‘I didn’t know.’

We found a kiosk with an awning and Dad bought a couple of drinks in glass bottles, and I drank from mine with my lips apart but I couldn’t taste it. Dad drove the Jetta to a house with wisteria on the verandah and an Italian lady in the house across the road, and I walked down my path of salt.

On the deck, I pulled out my sketchbook and reached for my memories of the house. It was a single-fronted weatherboard place, with a pretty curled verandah and a rocking chair. Or maybe the rocking chair was by the back door? I drew it at the front anyway. Dad had installed a lion’s head knocker on the door and an iron bell that you had to ring with a bit of rope, like in a church. A path wove unevenly from the gate to the door, which was flanked by two heavy pots housing cumquat trees. Above the verandah I drew the little attic window, wide open to let the sea air in, and looked inside for her but she must have been downstairs with Shithead. I stowed the book, saw Dad’s face in the window, then didn’t.

‘He took me to the house,’ I said to Fleur, who watched me roll rice paper and pork together but didn’t help. Her leg was sore again, she said. She had it propped up on a kitchen stool. Someone had drawn a little smiling face on it; I’d never noticed it before.

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘And it wasn’t even there.’

‘He told me.’

‘For a second I saw it anyway, you know? Like I knew it so well that I didn’t even have to actually see it to see it.’

‘Keep that one in the bank to tell your shrink,’ she said, and stuck a spoon inside her cast to scratch her leg.

M
UM’S BY THE
school gate in her new car. She honks her horn. Sounds like a duck dying. She waves at me to come over.

Your mummy’s come to pick you up? Fuck, Melanie is a bitch.

I stick my head through the window and Mum grabs it, smushes it in her hands.

My baby girl! she says. I’ve got a surprise for you. Get in.

I don’t want to get in. Ben Horn from Year 10 asked me to sit next to him on the bus. I want to catch the bus. I don’t want to get in.

Heather? she says. Her eyes are bulging out of her face.

I don’t want to, I say. I walk away and she honks her horn a few more times. Melanie is shouting some stuff but I don’t care because Ben Horn is holding my hand.

We all stand at the bus stop together. Someone in the middle of the group has a cigarette and they’re laughing and we look like a bushfire with all the smoke coming out.

Put it out! someone says. You want to get fucking expelled?

I know Ben is next to me because I can feel the space his body takes up. He’s tall and plays basketball and wears Tommy. He doesn’t live near us but I can catch the bus to wherever he goes and catch it back here again.

We get on the bus and Ben sits next to me and puts his hand right under my skirt. The Year 12s are trading little bottles of alcohol in the back seat. A kid at the front of the bus is crying. The bus driver just drives and doesn’t say anything.

Ben’s stop is fifteen minutes down the road. Some of his mates get off too. Tan has a joint. We go down the street to a park. It’s hidden behind a hedge and there’s a lady and her kids in the sandpit over the other side. Ben sits on a swing and pulls me onto his lap. After a minute I can feel his hard-on poking into my leg. Tan and Lucas are laughing and smoking the joint and it smells like Fleur’s room.

Ben slides his hand inside my top. His fingers are cold. I don’t know what to do so I just sit there. He probably thinks I’m frigid. Then he kind of turns my head around so I’m looking at him and pashes me. He sticks his tongue right down my throat. Feels like he’s dropped a snake in there. I try not to gag. Don’t want him to think I’ve never kissed a guy before. It’s weird. I can’t tell if I like it or not.

When he’s finished he gives me a big grin. See you at school, he says.

Ben and Tan and Lucas get on their bus. I wait for mine on my own. There’s a hole in my jumper and I stick my thumb through it. The lady in the playground looks at me. Her kids are laughing.

There’s hardly anyone on the bus. I sit up the back. It’s really cold and that makes me kind of wish I’d gone with Mum. Just for a second. Then I think about Ben kissing me and I feel warm in my body.

Dad’s standing at the front door. He looks mad, but that’s pretty standard for him.

He shouts, Where were you?

Caught the bus home, I say. What’s it to you?

He closes the door in my face and I sit on the doorstep for a while. I can hear him inside, banging around. Mum’s car isn’t in the driveway. She’s probably gone to complain to Gran.

When it’s dark Dad opens the door and says, Get inside. My knees are blue. He’s made two plates of dinner. It looks like a dog puked it up.

Where’s Mum? I say.

Out, he says.

Well, where’s Fleur? I say.

Out, he says.

Out where?

Eat your peas.

These are beans, I say. And you’re supposed to cook them first.

K
NOWING THAT
S
YLVIA
died before eating my cake was a deep sadness that stayed with me, inexplicably, long after the fact. It had been an apple cake – Sylvia’s own recipe – and we took it in the morning, after I’d told my sister again about the missing house, and after I’d touched a paintbrush to the memory of it, and after I’d sat in my bedroom and listened to Dave’s necklace buzzing in the drawer. After all of that had been done, Fleur had clip-clopped across the road and I had carried the apple cake in the biscuit tin and we had knocked on the door seven or eight times before Fleur had peered in the window and cried out, a clear toll, a bell.

The hospital in Mornington was just walls and ceilings, like any other. That was the way hospitals were, if you weren’t in the maternity ward. Every other ward in the hospital that wasn’t the maternity ward just bore the possible end of life. Even in routine surgery, even elective surgery, there was always that chance that someone would be the point-one per cent, the person who didn’t make it out again.

Sylvia hadn’t made it to the ward yet. The ambulance (KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST. FAIR PAY FOR AMBULANCE WORKERS.) had taken her to the emergency department and there she had stayed, glassy-eyed and limp-skinned.

They had searched the house and found empty rooms embalmed under years of dust, and a single bed with men’s striped pyjamas folded on the pillow.

Under the fluorescent lighting Sylvia’s skin was rippled and yellow like a sunrise.

Sylvia had not said a word.

She was conscious, they said, but unresponsive. Not completely unresponsive, but mostly. An almost-coma. Fleur buzzed and hummed around me, hissing and sobbing. ‘That girl is ahead of her, because she’s bleeding to death.’ Then shouting, ‘But she’s ahead of that man over there, because all he’s done is cut off his fingers.’ She tapped her crutches on the lino; she was in everyone’s way. ‘You’re going to have to sit down,’ they told her, and she screamed, ‘I’m a
fucking vet
.’

The triage nurses asked questions about Sylvia. Were we her next of kin? Did we know how to get in contact with the people who were? Where was she when she collapsed? Did she hit her head? When did she last eat? Did she have a history of high blood pressure, of heart disease, of stroke? They prodded her with thermometers and shone lights in her eyes. She breathed in and out. Sometimes the regularity was interrupted by a staccato sigh. Her fingers withdrew when I touched them, like eyes on a snail.