The Paper House (13 page)

Where’s Mum? I ask her. We eat Coco Pops together. Coco Pops give her indigestion because she’s an old lady, but she eats them anyway. We slurp the chocolate milk together at the end. Sometimes she lets me slurp her chocolate milk as well.

Mum’s gone to stay with your Auntie Fay, she says, because that’s what she always says.

In Brisbane? I say.

Yes, in Brisbane.

I’ve never been to Brisbane but Gran shows me some pictures and in the pictures it is sunny and there’s a river running right down the middle of it.

The Brisbane River, Gran says.

That’s not very creative, I say.

I think about the Post-It note in my shoe. ARADALE ASYLUM. Aradale kind of sounds like a pretty woman’s name. Not like the places in the books. I reckon it’s more like the hospital I was born in. Mum points it out every time we drive past. It’s got a big lawn with a palm tree in the middle and a pond around the back and you can buy egg sandwiches in the kiosk. Aradale is more like that. I’m sure of it.

*

Fleur creeps up on me while I’m getting the phone out.

You scared me! I say.

You should stay out of it, she says. She thinks she knows better than me because she’s at high school but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know anything about anything except boys and stealing smokes from Mum’s drawer, and she’s an idiot because she thinks no one notices.

Dad will be really mad, she says. Like she’s ever cared about making Dad mad.

Aradale Asylum, says the voice.

I say, Shelley Herbert, please.

Just a moment, says the voice.

I listen to the dialling and then I start to imagine Mum at the other end with her arms strapped down and her feet tied together and her hair all matted around her face like in the books.

I put the phone down.

Who are you calling? Gran says.

No one, I say. And it’s true, because no one is on the other end anyway.

T
HE STORM CAME
in its work boots. It shook the house from its foundations. It struck the garden with its light swords. It clipped and bashed and punched us and we crowded into the kitchen and watched it with our eyes hanging out of our faces. When the power went out, Sylvia came tapping on our window with a candle in a glass lamp and the shadows tricked us with their human dancing. Ashok came thundering through the front door, Harriet shaking in his arms. ‘Power’s out!’ he said, and Sylvia said, ‘You scared, old man?’

Fleur’s door remained closed. When I knocked on it, she said, ‘Are you fucking kidding me with this rain,’ and I left a bowl of spaghetti in the hallway.

Around midnight, the kitchen window blew in. Glass everywhere, no way to find it in the dark. ‘Nobody move,’ Dave said, and nobody did. The wind attacked us with its sharp nails and curled around our chests and forced its way into our lungs. Rain pounded the sink. Gushed under the door. Came in rivers along the floor. We sat and held hands, a séance. Sylvia’s fingernails dug into my palms. Ashok snored.

We slept around the table, first by candlelight, and then in the dark. In the morning, Dave swept the glass into the bin and we cracked our necks and our backs and our knees. No other windows seemed to have been damaged overnight, but the front yard had been obliterated by a large branch from the sugar gum. It lay in a crooked sleep across pots and paving, knocking out a post from the verandah, where the wisteria now dragged along the ground.

Sylvia’s house seemed fine; all her roses marching in lines. Ashok’s yard was chaotic at the best of times, and so it was impossible to ascertain any damage. He tipped an imaginary hat to Sylvia, walked her across the road. Touched her face by the door.

Dave called someone from the school to come and help him move the branch. He sat on it with his back to me, laughing and cricking his neck. ‘Haven’t slept on a table since uni!’ he said, his voice lit with shared nostalgia. ‘You got a chainsaw? Yeah, me neither.’ Ha-ha.

I swept the broken glass into the bin and called the glazier. Sylvia had recommended him; a friend of Albert’s, or one of her sons’. Women of her vintage did things that way: a fat address book to contain everyone she’d ever known. She had a person for everything.

Fleur sat across from me at the table with her blue-ringed eyes. The bruises across her cheek had faded.

‘What are you doing today?’ she said.

‘Nothing. Getting the window fixed.’

She pursed her lips. ‘Anywhere doing better coffee than that sad fella?’

‘Nope.’

‘What kind of hell is this? You moved here on purpose?’ I wondered about moving anywhere on purpose.

From two or three houses down the hill came the hoarse boom of men, then the roar of a chainsaw.

I drew a stem. A thorn. Made a hole in the paper. Drew another stem. Another thorn. Drew ten stems and twenty thorns. Fleur came out of the bathroom and sat on the couch with her head on her knees, wrapped herself in a pink blanket I’d found in the room downstairs. It smelled of sex and afternoons.

‘Do the trees look closer to you?’ They seemed to have their faces pressed right against the window. ‘Hello, trees,’ I said.

Fleur looked up from the television. ‘Trees are rooted, Heather,’ she said. ‘By definition.’

I touched my fingers to the glass. ‘I suppose.’ Up close I saw the veins of the leaves, the way they spread away from their spine like arteries. I drew them upside-down, organs showing. I drew twelve of them on a single twig, branch weighed down by all of its leaves. Leaves growing and growing in spite of themselves. A thousand leaves and the sagging tree at the end with its long face, just blinking at the leaves and wondering why it had created such a burden for itself.

‘What are you drawing?’

‘It’s a tree, burdened by its fertility,’ I said.

‘Of course it is.’ On the TV, a couple celebrated having the best bathroom in the block. ‘Surprised you’re drawing at all.’

‘Why?’ I tipped the picture into the light. The lines were cagey, contained. Pressed right into the paper as though a child had drawn them with a ballpoint pen.

‘Oh, you know. Just that you told me you never wanted to, ever again, not in a million years.’ She was looking at me.

‘It’s relaxing.’

‘Relaxing. Or, to put it another way, escaping.’

‘I’m just trying it on,’ I said. ‘It feels good to do something productive.’

‘She said that. Remember? “It feels good to do something productive,” and then we found four hundred paintings under the house.’

The doorbell rang. ‘The glazier,’ I said. ‘I’ll get it.’

‘I mean, it’s your house, and I can’t walk.’ She had turned back to the TV.

The man standing on the threshold wore a Hawaiian shirt and shorts that gaped at the knees. He wasn’t quite old, but his face had slipped from its bones and as he stood there, mouth curled up under his moustache, his eyes flicked in and out behind bifocal lenses. I gasped.

‘Heather,’ he said. And it was him; that same voice.

‘Dad.’ He pulled me right into him, hugged me with his arms around my head. He smelled of frangipanis and home cooking and I let myself think about that for a second longer than nothing. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Come to see Fleur. I called her house and that nasty fella told me she’d had an accident.’

‘Matty? Apparently she’s taken him back.’

‘After what he did.’ Dad whistled through his teeth.

‘Yeah. She’s staying here for a bit.’

‘Is she okay?’

‘She broke her leg. Did you come all this way to ask me about it?’

He tried to put his big hand on my empty body. His mouth moved very close to my ear. ‘I heard you weren’t – you know. Feeling so good.’

‘They’re putting this stuff in the
Rockhampton Times
, huh?’

‘There’s no such thing as the
Rockhampton Times
.’ His leopard-print suitcase fell over. ‘Can I come in?’ I saw the looseness of his skin.

‘Sure, of course.’ He followed me through to the kitchen. I knew each dropped step, one leg shorter than the other. I offered him a glass of water and watched him drink, straining water through his moustache. ‘Dave asked you to come, didn’t he?’ I said.

‘Nope.’

‘Fleur?’

‘Nuh-uh.’

‘Do you even know anyone else?’

He shook his head. ‘No one asked me. Just thought I might be able to help.’

I was nine, tucked inside myself by the back door, listening to the screaming. ‘You can try.’

‘Got myself a room in a B&B or some rubbish, down the beach. Couple of fogies making a mint selling floral sheets and eggs cooked in rings.’

‘That sounds about right.’

‘Won’t be in your way, is all I mean. Don’t want to impose.’ He put his glass in the sink. ‘I can be here as much or as little as you want. But I’m just down the road.’

‘Did you come by yourself?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m here to help.’

‘Well, the garden needs tidying,’ I said. ‘We had a big storm here last night.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Fine. That I can do.’

I found a sharp edge of cheese and sat in the window to watch him, this yachted man and his leopard-print suitcase. He went out the front, clipped the roses under their heads and left a trail of their brains behind him, swept pine needles into neat boulders. After twenty minutes he pulled a book from a pocket:
Catch-22
. He held it close to his face and frowned into the pages, rubbed his glasses on his shirt. An hour went by, just watching my dad and Joseph Heller on my stone path. Sylvia clicked open her front door and brought him a cup of tea. He smiled at her with his hand on her arm.

‘Dad, come inside.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Whatever you like.’ He pushed his book into the suitcase. Someone else’s suitcase. I wondered about the person it belonged to; I wondered whether he had told my story to her.

We stood together on the balcony and drank in the garden.

‘It’s a beauty,’ he said. ‘Don’t get grass much like that in this weather. How’re you keeping it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It seems to keep itself.’

‘Does it now? Lovely impatiens,’ he said. Silence. The currawong whistled from the guttering. ‘Your mother’s favourite.’ He tipped the dregs of his tea over the balcony, clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Great place you’ve got here. Excellent pittosporums.’

The doorbell rang again.

At the beach house there was a little door under the verandah. For a long while we weren’t allowed to open it – red-back spiders, brown snakes and any number of my mother’s other phobias – but for my seventh birthday, we had an unveiling. What had been a wood box or cellar had, with a little imagination, become a room in a tower. Curtains, sequins, a tiny purple chair. A place to go when the inside of the house was draped in cobwebs.

That was him. Bruce. Dad. My mother said he had shopped for the gingham himself. Maybe she even knew why.

Of course, the only days we had harmony were at that house. When Dad was home, washed ashore in a little green boat, he was everywhere in the house. On Friday nights he wore a kitsch apron – the exact wording on which escaped me – and we all stood around the Weber until the chicken was charcoal. Mum, too; just the breath of her, blonde and milky with her back to the water. In those months we were cohesive; four. At night the southerly winds beat against the windows and I was afraid, but only the normal amount. I was afraid enough to climb between my parents, hands over my eyes, but not so afraid that my lungs closed over.

And they were in love, I was sure of it. I would sit in the hallway and watch them in secret – their reflection in the Ken Done painting he had bought for her fortieth. He held her around her waist and she rested her head on his shoulder, and everything they said was in whispers and glances.
Perv
, Fleur said. Her boyfriend was Jimmy Pavel, nose the size of a mandarin, and I knew that was why she didn’t understand love.
What would you know?
she said, and punched me in the arm.

The air moved in electric currents around my parents. She wore white dresses with lace keyholes, and he wore shirts with the top three buttons undone, and they always stared right into each other. When she cried, he didn’t tell her it was okay, to be quiet, to get a grip.
I wish I could trade places
, he said.
I wish I could take it away. Half of it. A quarter. Any of it.
And then he would kiss every part of her face, his big hands in her hair and on her shoulders, until the shaking stopped. Sometimes she smiled afterwards. Sometimes her eyes were dark. He didn’t mind either way; just held her hand the same as he always did.

Sirens in the distance.

Sometimes I wanted to call the ambulance just in case. A pre-emptive call. Hello, I think something bad
might
happen so I was wondering if you could just hang around nearby
in case
because I’ve heard on the news that sometimes it takes you quite a long time to arrive and you
just never know
.

But I didn’t. I just watched them in their easy silence, waiting to see who would leave first.

G
RAN TAKES US
in her big car with its bench seats. Fleur sits in the back and I sit in the front next to Gran, like always, slide up next to her so she can put her arm around me. It’s probably not too safe, but it feels safe.

We drive out of Melbourne and over the bridge and along the freeway. Outside there’s just paddocks and some horses with jumpers on. Fleur doesn’t even see them because she’s reading. I want to tell her. She loves horses.

Fleur, I say. There are horses.

She doesn’t look.

Fleur, I say again.

She has headphones in. I poke her arm. She just keeps reading.

Mum doesn’t always go to this hospital.

One time Dad took us to visit her on the other side of town. It was a big old building and all kinds of people had to live there. Mum was in a part of the hospital for sad people but Fleur said there was a jail there too. People who tried to kill other people sometimes went to that jail.

She said they had to strap them to their beds so they didn’t kill the nurses.

I try not to think about that right now. Aradale doesn’t have a jail in it. I’m pretty sure.