The Paper House (6 page)

‘You buying those?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

His hand-held scanner bipped. Cheese. Bread. Cheese. Bread. ‘Forty-eight sixty.’ I handed him a rumpled fifty. He gave me a few coins as change.

I sat in the window with my paper cup. The cookie-cutter houses sat silent, eyes closed, driveways empty. I listened for the laughter of children or the calling of parents but only the wind came through.

The coffee machine clicked and hissed behind the counter and Rupert talked to himself in his caged voice.
Six fifty. Carry the one. Don’t forget the beef stock
. He wiped his counter. He straightened salt in eight colours.

The door tinkled as it opened.

‘Fleur?’

She was rumpled, flustered. Came at me with her arms outstretched and grabbed my shoulders.

‘
There
you are.’ Breathless. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

‘Why?’

‘Bloody hell, Heather, because I was worried about you? That old bird across the road said she saw you walk off by yourself.’

‘I’m not an invalid,’ I said.

‘Uh yeah, you are. Remind me: how many days have you been out of hospital?’

I looked at Rupert; he was looking at me. I wondered what he saw.

‘Nine.’

His body slumped into the chair next to me. He pushed a mason jar of daisies to the side, making way for a tiny glass of near-black espresso.

‘How is your coffee?’ he said.

‘Fine, thanks,’ I said. It trickled into my bones, surged around my scaffolding. Body moving, beating, breathing. Still working, however reluctantly.

‘Country folk can’t tell the difference.’ He smiled. ‘Do you want some of these?’ he said. Red grapes. ‘They’ll only go to waste after today. Can’t sell them if they’re turning.’

‘Sure.’

Fleur stood in front of us with her mouth hanging open. Rupert and I tapped our coffees soundlessly.

‘Are you even listening?’ she said, or she might have said, if I had been listening.

Afterwards she carried the bags home, loped along the street in her heavy boots. I stopped outside the clinker house and waved to Sylvia, where she sat on her verandah, talking to no one.

*

Fleur was up with the sunrise. She came to my door: ‘Time to get up!’ but after a week with her, my body had started waking up on its own. ‘Body clock,’ she said, and laced up her steel-capped boots. ‘You look good today.’

I pulled my sketchbook from its hiding place beneath my chair, touched the corners where they vibrated. I drew a little man in a little house. I drew a fractured stringybark, turned it inside out to make a canoe on a river. I found a mouse inside the canoe, plucked him out and left him on the shore. Charcoal dust sat in the thick air.

Later in the morning Fleur sat next to me at the table-for-two. Her face was serious, her body rigid. She took a deep breath. ‘Has anyone told Gran?’

That plasticine home, pink and grey and still.

‘Not unless Dave has,’ I said.

‘Do you want me to call her?’

‘I don’t want to worry her. She probably doesn’t remember anyway. You know she thinks I’m Mum now?’ Gran’s dropped eyes, her rice paper hands.
We’re having a baby!

‘Does she? But you look nothing like her.’

‘I guess that’s not the reason.’

‘Give it a few weeks then.’ She disappeared out the front door. I heard her call out to the woman across the road, friendly, easy.

The day held a storm in its skirts, grey and tumbling, just the hint of rain, but dry earth. The garden called me with its high-pitched poetry, and I went to it aboard my downward wave. I would be careful. Hold my insides in. The grass was slippery; I skated into the shade of the pittosporums, reed-thin but with the rough faces of old men. I would take them out. Or get someone else to.

Behind the wall of trunks I found a crook in a surprising Port Jackson fig, with immense surfboard roots. It had been someone’s treehouse once: a few planks remained jammed between the branches and I had stepped on a broken teacup in the grass. It was easy to see why they’d chosen that spot; from the northern aspect (where I imagined the treehouse’s lounge room might have been – prime real estate) a stretch of vineyards broke apart in the morning sunlight, dewy leaves giving the appearance of thousands of icicles. A man in a straw hat bent over the vines, and he shouted things I couldn’t make out to a woman further along, whose throaty laugh carried across the valley like a bell.

Beyond my new seat, the grass curved and disappeared under a veil of willow and I could hear it, the creek, bubbling and chattering like a friend.

In the city, our garden had been three planter boxes on the balcony – petunias, mostly, or maybe they were pansies, and a limp tomato plant that gave us exactly one edible fruit each season. City flowers all looked the same. Forlorn, sorrowful faces; an aching stretch towards the sunlight, which came in glimpses but always moved on too quickly. Most people we knew didn’t grow anything on their balconies. Balconies were for drinking ciders on a summer afternoon, or sneaking a cigarette in the moonlight, or hanging undies on a cheap clothes horse. Flowers were no match for people stumbling out of bars, or garbage trucks in narrow streets, or blocks of flats so close together that you had to wonder why they bothered with separate buildings at all. I thought that our flowers persevered quite well, all things considered, until I came home from work early and found Dave replacing them with fresh ones from the punnet.
Oh
, he said,
you’re early
. But I let him think I hadn’t seen him, and the deception carried on like our own private Easter Bunny.

Which was to say, our city garden was nothing like the garden at Cabbaga. The new garden buzzed with the faintest suggestion of magic.

It was hard to say how long I sat, with the sun casting only dappled light with dancing shoes. The air, hot and damp, drew up from the creek and smelled of moss, that organic rotting odour like an old room.

And then, a mouse.

‘Come on then, mouse,’ I said. At the edge of my vision, a flicker of light. The mouse froze. Where the pittosporums gathered in their hilltop regimen, the grass moved. We pushed through a curtain of vines, me and the upright mouse with its satellite dishes. The air became wet and heavy like a Bangkok street. I had to work to draw it in. Unsteady, I felt my way through, leaning into stiff trunks, listening to the chatter of water for direction. ‘Shh,’ I said to the mouse. It tripped and skipped soundlessly at my feet.

Deeper and deeper into the garden, drowning in the wet air, in the twilight corners. In places it had the density of a forest; in others, it was a fairytale woodland. Pink and green and orange. Autumn leaves. Spring leaves. The heady bleating of babies learning to fly, to hunt, to hide.

‘Here we are, then,’ I said, but the mouse had gone.

I listened with my hands cupped around my ears. The creek hiccupped and hissed, and under my feet the ground had become mud. Between tree trunks – willows on the east bank, soaring gum trees on the west – a flash or a hum or a buzz, as though a spaceship might emerge.

I took off my shoes and tested the water with sweaty toes, gasped; the water was cold, maybe flowing from somewhere higher. It drew me into myself, filling the gaps where mind and body had separated. Startlingly present. Careful treading, deliberate and even. Over the sharp rocks, around the mossy outcrops. Steps away from the
if
, away from the
maybe
, further and further away from the
if only I had just
and deep into the belly of the garden, where the light was almost completely shut out. A great canopy of tightly knitted leaves created a tarpaulin where the creek diverged. One arm continued, snaking away to the next block, and the next, and eventually the sea. But the other rested sullen and still, at the end of its life in the darkness.

A branch snapped.

‘Hello?’ More of a croak. ‘Is someone there?’

I carried my shoes, slipped clumsily across the moss, under the weeping trees. Their canopy opened into something of a cave – blackness and the slap of wet leaves. Somewhere ahead, cracks and tiptoes.

‘Hello?’

The building was just a glimpse at first: a corner rounded by the passing of time, an eave protruding from the overgrowth. I didn’t know if I had really seen it – it might just as easily have passed for a shadow in my eye. But I could hear it. I heard the scratch of branches on corrugated iron and the creaking scrape against glass. The creek tripped and laughed. And the building moved. Not a lot. Like it skipped a frame.

‘Who’s there?’

The door opened a crack.

‘Hello?’

He was not the man you might expect to come out of such a place. Not an ogre, not part human and part tree, but just a straight-up-and-down man wearing a brown cardigan and rubbing a short beard. He was lit, from underneath, by a kind of phosphorescent whiteness that clipped the cresting water as it passed over the rocks. He didn’t seem alarmed to have found me there, or anything like it: not interrupted, or disturbed, or unsettled. Nor did he appear to be sizing me up – he just looked directly at me and put out his hand.

‘I’m Noel,’ he said, and his lips hardly moved.

My breath stopped, staring at his outstretched hand. He was a ghost, a wizard, a gremlin. But he was none of those. He had the manicured nails of a teacher or a scholar, and the round-rimmed glasses of a voracious reader, and the soft voice of a father. He slipped in and out of view, pallid, thin and as translucent as wax paper. ‘And you are?’ Heather. Dumbstruck. Mute. He put his hand back in his pocket and turned to go inside. The blue light dimmed. The tree cave was dark.

And all around me, electricity in the air, popping and crackling. I ran back to the house, tripped and stumbled.

‘Fleur. Fleur. There’s a man living in our garden,’ I said. My face was numb. I pushed my fingers into my cheeks.

Fleur shouted from the front garden: ‘What?’

‘A man!’

‘A
what
? Hang on, I can’t hear you properly!’ The door banged open. The woman from across the street was with her, plucking dead heads from our roses. She came closer, watched Fleur dust her hands on her jeans, then looked at me.

‘Okay, start again,’ Fleur said. ‘I thought you said there was a man living in your garden.’ Laughter.

‘He had grey pants,’ I said. Sylvia slipped through the door, pressed herself against the wall as if to be invisible.

‘Heather?’ Fleur frowned. ‘You had something to eat?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Get on the couch. I’ve got these apples I bought at one of those boxes on the side of the road. So crisp. Not too sweet.’ She turned to Sylvia. ‘Come in, Sylvia. Were you born in a barn?’

‘I put kettle on,’ she said.

Fleur pushed me to the couch. We moved slowly but her hands were firm on my arms and I was moving in spite of myself, stepping lightly across the floor. She grabbed a pillow and a blanket.

‘You are good carer,’ Sylvia said from behind her tea cup.

Fleur ignored her. ‘Don’t move,’ she said.

‘He had a cardigan,’ I said. ‘With owl buttons.’

‘It must be hotter out there than I thought.’ She tucked the blanket around me, dropped an apple in my lap. ‘Cosy? Need a biscuit?’

‘Don’t have any.’

‘If you’re really good, maybe Sylvia will bring some.’ She sat next to the old woman and the two of them watched me, blinked me into nothing. I could hear the scuttle of their whispering, but not the words. A while later, Sylvia got up and left, but her spirit lingered, furrowed.

I didn’t tell Dave about the man. He told me about lunchtime detention, about the boys who’d been selling Tiny Teddies on the school’s black market. When I didn’t laugh, he held me against him and kept me there until he was snoring. The garden and its occupant folded into blackness. Sleep evaded me. I didn’t know the sounds of the house. In the city, nighttime was punctuated with the rattle of the last tram (and the drunks that alighted and pissed on the kerb), the urgent scream of sirens, people shouting and banging and fighting. They were familiar, easy sounds that placed me. Even when I was alone in the apartment, there was the company of life going on around me.

But now, a thick silence; so earnestly silent that it seemed exacerbated by the sounds that did come. A heaving, breathy sigh. Fingernails on the ceiling. Throaty barking. Dave barely stirred. A sullen whisper. Scratching on the window. My body burned, ached, throbbed. The room rolled and groaned. I closed my eyes and willed myself back home – a twenty-four-hour convenience store I could hole up in until the madness passed, or a friend I could call on. Just my same old bed in this new and terrifying room. Breathe. Breathe. Stop. Breathe. Christ. Flight. Throw off the sheets, they will strangle you. Get out of the room, it will suffocate you. Get out, get out.

I threw myself from the bed and into the air. Nightlife moved in silhouette and shadow: the broad wings of a fruit bat against the sky, the low call of the boobook owl that always spoke in couplets –
mopoke
,
mopoke
. In the garden, the pittosporums stood to attention and the moon pooled at their feet.

Shhh
, said my body, folding around me.

G
RAN IS SITTING
in a window seat. She’s wearing her green coat and her hair is cut like one of those models in the magazines, all blonde except for the dark bits on top. She has a fancy coffee with froth but she hasn’t drunk any of it. Her lips are painted bright red and so are her fingernails.

My heart is running in my chest like wild horses, I’m that excited.

Mum puts her hand on my back and pushes me forward.

Go on then, Heather.

Gran turns to look at me and her eyes are smiling and she puts her hand out so I grab it. She smells like lavender and vanilla and the inside of a bakery and I let her wrap me in her green coat and I think I might just stay there for a while. I put my ear against her chest and listen to her breathing, in and out, slow and calm.

Heather, Mum says, and Gran frees me from her hold.

Shelley, Gran says. You look terrible.