The Paper House (5 page)

‘You sure are,’ I said.

‘Nice garden you got there.’ My body stiffened, inexplicably, instinctively. ‘Good, solid pittos.’ She pulled a packet of tobacco from her pocket. ‘Keep the neighbours out of your business.’

‘I don’t think the neighbours are in my business.’ The red house hadn’t moved at all: not a light, a squeak, a bump. I had twice watched a woman help a small boy down the verandah steps on the south side, but she hadn’t seen me (or had pretended she hadn’t).

‘Even so.’ Cigarette paper popped and sizzled. Smoke curled into the sky. She tapped ash over the side of the deck.

‘How long will you stay?’

‘Next weekend. Then I’ve got Sandy in the sweepstakes on the Tuesday.’

‘The what?’

‘Sheep carnival.’

Trying to place Fleur in the house was like learning a foreign language. She was large and brash, and she thundered with her heavy boots and hung half out of windows and smoked cigarettes, and when she spoke, her voice came out in gusty bursts.

‘I could go a beer,’ she said.

‘It’s ten in the morning.’ She stared at me. ‘There might be some in the fridge, behind the pickled stuff.’

She came back with a beer in one hand and a jar of something in the other.

‘You okay?’ She rolled another cigarette. ‘You look kind of pale.’

‘I’m just tired.’

‘Dave said you were feeling better.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ve been in bed for days.’

‘Sounds good to me.’

‘No, it’s shitty.’

She blew perfect smoke rings, cloudy little halos. She stubbed out her cigarette. The jar popped as she opened it.

‘Good pickles,’ she said.

‘They’re just from the supermarket.’

‘Still. I get by on charcoal chicken, mostly.’ Laughter.

‘How is the farm?’ I said. I had been there once, hiding in her lino kitchen while the shears clicked outside. ‘Fleur?’

Voice like wind in a tunnel: ‘You know how it is.’ Six years older than me, and visibly older than the last time I had seen her, with maps of wrinkles stretching away from her eyes, and a leathery tan.

‘No, I don’t.’

She put the pickles on the table, screwed the lid back on. ‘Drought. Lots are closing up and moving to the city. Bank comes by and just kicks them out, sometimes.’

‘Really? What about you?’

‘Delivered the manager’s baby in the bank’s car park.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll be fine.’

We sat for a while in the wet air. She took shallow, wheezing breaths. I blinked often, to stave off whatever was pricking at my eyes. Finally she said, ‘I’m not a carer, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Just saying. I don’t know how to, like, make casseroles or whatever.’ She smiled.

‘Yeah, I remember,’ I said. Afternoons I spent listening for the clunk of her car in the driveway, our mother bundled under her bed or into the pantry, searching for a place small enough to contain everything. Trying to get her to eat, to shower. Dad away. And the driveway silent.

Fleur had her body all curled over the jar of pickles. That was her body: it didn’t know how to be two things at once. It didn’t know how to talk to me and open the jar of pickles at the same time. She turned to look at me.

‘We’ve all got our strengths.’

I frowned. ‘Yours must be well hidden.’

She pulled out her pouch of tobacco, let it rest on top of the jar. ‘I’m here now, aren’t I?’

The rising feeling in my gut pushed on, spewed from my throat. ‘I was always the one smoothing things over, cleaning up after your messes. You egged her on and I picked up the pieces.’

‘Give it a rest. You were like, five years old. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She paused with a paper half-rolled between her fingers. ‘Cigarette?’

‘It was always just me. Just me trying to put her back together.’

‘That’s not how it happened.’ She took a long drag and the paper hissed. ‘You were a little kid.’

‘I remember everything,’ I said. And I did. I remembered the mornings hidden under the stairs and the afternoons barricaded in the living room to stop the ghouls coming in.

Fleur reached out to touch my arm. Her fingers were rough and cold. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘No one blames you.’

Bile bit at my throat. ‘I might have a lie down,’ I said.

‘Oh, sure.’ She leaned back into her chair. ‘You should. I can entertain myself.’ Her pocked skin pulled tight across her face, beaten by the sun. I watched her from the doorway as she smoked, the in and out breath of a machine.

W
E’VE JUST GOT
home from Westfield. Mummy took us to see
Aladdin
. She bought us popcorn in buckets the size of our heads, and choc tops, and then when we had finished the choc tops she went and bought more choc tops. I didn’t really want one by then, because my tummy was starting to hurt a bit, but she had a look like I really should take it, so I did.

Now we’re sitting in bed together, us three girls, with our jammies on. Mummy is in the middle and she’s got her arms around both of us but Fleur is trying to sneak out so she can watch TV. I’ve got my head on Mummy’s lap and she’s stroking my hair, which is what she calls it, but actually she’s picking the dead skin off my skull and looking at it. She always does that. She does it to Dad too, but he tells her to piss off.

Mummy, I say, and she stops picking my head and goes, Hmm? I look up at her. Their faces are funny upside-down. Fleur rolls her eyes, because that’s what she does whenever I say anything.

Mummy, if you had three wishes, what would you wish for?

Fleur groans.

Mummy says, More wishes!

That’s cheating, I say. You can’t wish for more wishes. Weren’t you even watching the movie?

She taps her mouth with her finger to show me that she’s thinking. Only three wishes? she says.

Only three wishes.

Well, she says, first I’d wish for a feisty daughter who loves animals and hates being in bed with her mama. And she ruffles Fleur’s hair. Fleur rolls her eyes. I sit up and look right at Mummy.

Two more wishes, I say.

Well, she says, I think that’s probably the only thing I need! You can have my other wishes.

And I say, But! But!

And she tickles me under my arms so that I laugh and fall over, and then she lies right on top of me and I can feel her body all around me, and her hair is in my mouth, and her breathing is tickling the back of my neck.

Well, she says, maybe for my second wish I’d wish for another little girl, maybe one with blonde hair and a freckle on the end of her nose, and fingers like fat sausages.

Mummy! I say. That’s me! I do not have fat fingers!

She touches all of my fingers one at a time.

You’re right, she says. I must have been getting them confused with
my
fingers.

So I touch all of her fingers. She has pink nail polish and three silver rings. One of them is shaped like a dolphin jumping into itself, and one has a pink stone in it. Her fingers aren’t fat at all, they’re long and bony and I know she grows her fingernails long on purpose so she can tickle me. Fleur isn’t ticklish.

I say, You don’t have fat fingers either! and she laughs. Fleur tries to climb out of the bed but Mummy grabs the back of her pyjama top and pulls her back in.

What about your third wish? I say.

Mummy pulls us very close to her, and I can hear the
swish-swish
of her eyelashes because she’s blinking really fast, and I can feel her heartbeat under her armpit where I’m smooshed against her ribs.

Then she says, My third wish (and her voice is quiet like I’m remembering something she’s said before) is really very simple (and I lean in closer to hear her properly, and her body is shaking a little) because all I really wish for, even more than wishing for more wishes (and I know she’s lying now, because who wouldn’t wish for more wishes?) –

And she stops, and I hear the air rushing into her chest.

– is just to stay here with the two of you, like this.

We just sit there in the bed, waiting to hear the rest of her wish, but she has her eyes closed. Then Fleur says, Lame! and gets out of bed, and I stroke Mummy’s hair and she is crying.

I’m sorry, I say. I’m sorry.

A
S THE DAYS
passed, I slept a little. In my dreams, insects pried open my eyes. The world turned and sometimes I could feel it turning and other times it went around without me.

‘It’s time to get up,’ Fleur said in the mornings. Early. Outside the light was new and yellow.

‘I don’t want to,’ I said.

‘Come on.’ She pulled me from bed and dropped me at the kitchen table, the table that had been for three but was now just for one. She poured me bowls of cereal and burnt me slices of bread and lingered, watching me. A sick animal to be treated. ‘What are you feeling?’ she said. ‘Hot? Fatigued? Nauseous?’

I felt her in the house as a balm, an anchor while I was caught in my rip.

On one of those fractured days, I let my body push me from bed and into the pantry, with the cans and jars and long-life everything. I looked at it all and thought about how my daughter would never have cans of baked beans or half-finished packets of spaghetti, and when I was done thinking about that I took all those cans and put them right in the bin. Outside, the currawong trilled in the way he had, like he was a forest.

‘Fleur,’ I said. ‘I’m going for a walk.’

I heard her laughter from the living room. After a moment: ‘What did you say?’ but I was already closing the door.

It’s a funny thing, leaving a house you don’t know and standing in front of it. Like a blind date, the anticipation of the emotional fulfilment it has the potential to bring you but not knowing a single millimetre of its face. I picked up my feet and walked, hoping that by the time I got back, I would remember the story.

Our neighbours’ houses peeked out from their own discrete gardens – some with punches of hardy natives, others manicured with standard roses and neat bordered beds – and each had its own noises. A man kneeling in his front garden with a little white dog; a tall woman wearing a grey suit, who did a double take and slipped into her car with her eyes still on me. I knew none of them. I didn’t recognise a single inch of the road, though I looked and looked. I recognised its parts: hot bitumen, cracked pavement, power poles; all familiar pieces of the life I knew. But they had come together, those same elements, to create a place about which I remembered nothing. Same street, same footpath, same sky; all different.

Across the road an old woman bent like a paperclip over a line of upright roses. She wore gardening gloves in pink floral that matched her secateurs, and her hair was wrapped into a grey bun, as though thrown there by the wind.
Clip clip clip
. Rose heads fell to her driveway. Her clinker brick was not a beautiful house, like the one I had found, but ordinary.

‘Lady, you okay?’ Voice licked by age and life.

‘What?’

‘You stand in middle of road, you get run down.’

‘Oh. Oh, Christ.’

She pulled off her gloves and wiped her hands. ‘You new in that house, yes? Cabbaga?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, you white like sheet! I get you some water.’

‘No, no. It’s okay. I just need to know how to get to –’ I didn’t even know where to buy tea bags.

‘You walk to end of street,’ she said. ‘You find Rupert, he sell you tea bags.’

‘Thank you.’ I turned to walk away.

‘I am Sylvia,’ she said, and her hand was warm on my shoulder.

‘Heather.’

‘Yes, Heather. Like English garden.’

Down the road and around the corner I found Rupert’s Food Store & Larder. The man himself greeted me, squat and pink with fairytale eyes. Dressed for the occasion though, in a calico apron.

‘All of the produce is sourced from within the peninsula,’ he told me. ‘Mostly organic, but it’s expensive to get the stickers so some of them don’t. The juice, though. Apple and guava. Recommended.’

The shop was small, two rows of produce with a fridge at the back. At the front of the rows Rupert had stacked fruit under a sign shouting
ORGANIC
– glossy apples and round-bottomed pears and bananas with fingerprints up and down. Artisan breads with their floury artisan logos, baskets of them. A lot of fresh produce to move every day. I wondered where the rest of it went; whether Mount Eliza had someone to drive it around to the less fortunate. Whether Mount Eliza had any less fortunates.

I filled my green bags with sheep’s cheese and sourdough cobs and tiny bottles of balsamic vinegar, and spoke to Rupert about anonymous things. I told him about my gran, because Dave had heard all the stories I had to tell about her. On Sunday nights she washed my feet with a face cloth, making sure to clean between my toes; then she cut me slices of apple with the skin peeled off and I pretended I was too old for it (but we both knew that I wasn’t).

‘Grans, huh,’ said Rupert. His mouth curved out of his face. I stared at the protrusion of his jaw.

‘Can I get a coffee?’ I said.

‘I know how to make lattes and cappuccinos. None of this macchiwhatever.’

‘Cappuccino, please.’

You couldn’t buy a cappuccino in the city without someone casting aspersions. Your eighties coffee, your mother’s coffee. You could have a coffee in a glass or a cup the size of a thimble or nothing. You knew this while you waited in line and listened to the orders: a piccolo, a cold press, a chai latte with soy and honey. You wanted to kill yourself by the time you got to the counter. Or I did. But then maybe that was the point of the coffee in the first place.

‘You’re new here?’ Rupert said. His mouth moved from side to side when he spoke.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We live just up the road.’ We live just up the road. We live just up the road.

‘From the city?’

‘Yep.’

He pointed his underbite towards the coffee machine. When he smiled, his teeth caught on his lip. ‘It’s a good area. You know, for families.’ He gestured to me, my still-round body not hidden enough under my t-shirt.

‘I bet,’ I said.

My cappuccino came in a paper cup with no lid. Burnt milk and a dash of espresso. I licked chocolate powder from around my mouth.