Six Bedrooms (5 page)

A dream came or a vision in which I opened my mouth and fire came out in a blast that levelled this place, scorched it clean. Afternoon sun was streaming in. I walked towards it and out on to the wide verandah. In the corner, sitting on a ledge, was my half-brother.

I went over and sat down next to him. He had his head down and he was staring at his shoes, which were polished a shiny black. With one hand he picked at the knot of his shoelace.

‘Where's James?' He didn't raise his head. His dark hair was just like our father's, just like James's.

‘He didn't come,' I said.

Oliver made a sound in his throat. It was clear that he was waiting, as I was, for James to appear on his motorbike, his leather jacket on, his helmet under one arm.

‘Do you miss Dad?' I said stupidly.

‘Duh,' he said.

‘I'll get us some alcohol.'

He lifted his head and stared at me. ‘You won't be able to. Mum'll see you.'

‘Bet you I can.'

 

Another memory, another fire. I am in the driveway of my father's house, which is made of sandstone and looks like a small castle. The driveway is big enough to have its own turning circle, a kind of roundabout constructed of small palm trees and shrubs. James has built a fire by raking up the leaves and branches that were littering the driveway. It was a job my father gave him. We are squatting beside our fire, with Georgie and Oliver hovering, scared, behind us. We have taken some of the rocks from the roundabout to make a circle around it, and James has brought pine cones from the tree at the back, which crack and pop when we
drop them in. We catch a beetle and drop that in too. It writhes frantically and then goes still in the heart of the flames.

Anne looks out of the kitchen window and James picks up one of the dead palm fronds, alight, and walks towards her. She pulls the window shut just as he lunges with it. Bits of burning palm hit the glass, splintering off and spattering fire into the garden.

James catches my hand and we run around the side of the house, away from our sister and brother, down past the swimming pool and into the bush that runs down to the harbour. We sit in a cave, panting, the cave that the neighbourhood boys use to stash their naked woman magazines. This is the place that we brought my father's
Playboys
when we found them under the mattress of the bed he shared with Anne. That was the day we were alone in the house, uninvited from our grandmother's birthday because of our behaviour, which Anne said was rude and devious. On that day, too, we lit a fire, and we burnt one thing from every room in the house. A pair of Anne's peach-coloured underpants, which I knew to be silk and very expensive. Our younger brother's Etch-a-Sketch, which I had coveted for years. Our sister's ABBA poster. A goldfish. A roll of toilet paper. A chequebook.

Alfred stood between me and a waiter with a tray of drinks. ‘I thought you weren't invited. That's what Judy said.' He was in a suit now, the same arrangement my younger brother was dressed in, the same almost every male was wearing – light-coloured chinos, a dark-blue blazer, a striped shirt. He had the portly, high-trousered look of an older man.

‘She didn't tell me you would be here,' I said, counterattacking.

‘We do all the funerals. And the weddings.'

‘What kind of singer are you?' I said.

‘A basso profundo. It's very unusual for someone my age.'

‘How old are you?'

‘Eighteen.'

Out came my mother from behind the tall curtain that hid the bathrooms, clutching a glass of white wine, which she must have taken in with her. Sometimes in our house there was a half-drunk glass, balanced on the cistern.

‘Who's this?' she said, seeing Alfred.

‘He's in the choir.'

‘I'm Judy's boyfriend,' said Alfred with dignity.

‘That makes sense,' said my mother, looking him up and down.

Alfred looked discomfited.

‘We're getting a drink,' I said, and grabbed Alfred's hand. It was not sweaty, as I had expected; it was warm, and quite soft. When I pushed him in front of me I could smell him. Apple shampoo.

We got to the bar. ‘Three Scotches and Coke. Three
double
Scotches,' I hissed at Alfred, and turned my back as the barman approached.

‘I don't drink,' said Alfred frantically.

‘Scotch is
good
,' I said over my shoulder. ‘For the
voice
.' I remembered Judy's mother saying this. She drank a tot before every performance.

Alfred made his order. I used my body to shield him from my mother as we went back out to the verandah. I carried two of the drinks. There was Oliver, waiting for us.

‘Coke?' he said, disappointed, as we approached. I handed him a glass. He sipped from it and grinned at me.

We sent Alfred back for more drinks. The afternoon took on a rounded quality, embracing us. I could not perceive things in the distance. After a while Oliver cried and Alfred and I sat on either side of him and comforted him. ‘It's not so bad. I don't even have a father,' I said to him, forgetting for a second where we were, who he was.

‘I have a father,' said Alfred.

‘What's he like?' I said, lifting my head to focus on Alfred's face. I kept one hand on Oliver's knee. He leant closer into me and I let him. I pulled him so close his head
was on my chest, and he sobbed into it. This was what James would do for me, if he were here. I stroked Oliver's hair and said again to Alfred, ‘What's your father like?'

‘He's a bastard,' said Alfred. ‘He thinks I'm – he says I'm a poof.'

‘But you're not.'

‘No.'

‘You love Judy.'

‘Well,' said Alfred. There was a high polish to the sky, boats on fire, a spill of light on the water. Oliver slid down into my lap.

‘She's all right,' said Alfred.

‘She's my best friend,' I said.

‘She's fat,' said Alfred.

I was pleased, and outraged, mostly because I had been tricked into taking this seriously, tricked into being cruel to Judy because she was leaving me. She wasn't leaving me. As soon as Alfred could find someone better he would be gone. Some other idiot girl with long hair would be impressed by his manly ways, his deep, commanding voice. Some skinnier girl. I put my face into Oliver's neck, and took a deep breath of him.

‘I'm going to spew,' he whispered, and I sprang up, and he managed to get himself to the railing, from where he vomited copiously.

It was twilight when James came to find me at the bottom of our street, where it gave into an empty reserve of long grass. I heard his motorbike but didn't look up. I had managed to get my mother's lighter open by stamping on it till it broke, and I was scattering a little trail of lighter fluid from a pile of gum leaves I had made. There was a slight breeze, which might be enough to get things moving.

‘Firebug,' said James. That was what our father had shouted at us the day we made the fire in the driveway.
Bloody firebugs.
That was why he banned James from his house, and that was why my own visits had become so sporadic, designed to inconvenience and irritate. He would never know how he had offended us that day, shouting that word at us. It had made us think he did not love us, even though we loved him because he was so handsome and strong, and because he had chosen others instead of us.

James got down from his bike and came over to me. We stood over my little pile of leaves. He felt in his pocket for matches, and handed them to me, then gave me a cigarette. I lit it, dragged on it, and then knelt down, and applied the burning end to a browned gum leaf. The leaves around it caught, and then the fire found the lighter fluid. It raced in a bright crackling stream across the grass and then it stopped. It smouldered briefly, reaching for
twigs and leaves nearby, and then went out. I dropped my cigarette on the ground and stamped it out too.

James put his arm around me and I turned my face into his chest. He smelt of leather and smoke. I could hear our mother reversing out of our driveway. She must have run out of wine.

E
MMA
and I were walking home from school together. It was September, spring, with a cheerful breeze running along with us, new leaves lit and flickering, the houses hung with wisteria and jasmine. We were walking with Peter, who had been troublesomely in love with Emma for several years. If she'd been alone he might not have dared to follow her but her younger, noisier sister made it easy. I was, without knowing it, combative; sparring with me had relieved the nerves of more than one of Emma's boyfriends.

Emma walked silently beside us, a spray of jasmine dangling from one hand. A truck, uncommon in our quiet, moneyed suburb, screamed past us. When it had gone, Peter said, ‘A truck drove into my house once.'

‘No, really?' I was balancing on the low stone wall that ran beside the road. ‘Tell us about it,' I said, hopping off the wall to land next to him.

He glanced at Emma, who continued to watch the pavement in front of her, which was lumpy with tree roots. ‘We lived on a corner,' said Peter. ‘It came too fast on the way round, and its brakes failed. It went straight through the fence and into the side of the house.'

‘Amazing,' I said, kicking a rock.

‘It was a big deal!' said Peter. ‘If I'd been playing in the yard it would have killed me!'

Suddenly inspired, I said sweetly, ‘Do you often play in the yard, little boy?'

Emma snorted with laughter and Peter blushed angrily. He was quite a handsome boy, with thick blond hair and long eyelashes. ‘It was years ago. I was much younger.'

A magpie whose nest we were passing swooped suddenly, clicking its beak in Peter's hair. He swung at it in fright. It flew up into the branches ahead of us and perched there, glaring.

‘Come on,' I said, prodding Peter in the small of his back.

‘You're much bigger than it is,' said Emma.

We went forward, turning to face the bird as we passed, then continuing to walk backwards. The magpie
snapped its beak again and hopped along the branch speculatively, but did not swoop.

 

When I was eighteen Emma and I moved to London, using the money that our grandmother had left us. We had a place to stay: a flat, belonging to wealthy friends of our parents, who lived for the most part in their farmhouse in Surrey. They were in their sixties, and had no children. The flat was furnished with cream carpet and cream brocade sofas. The windows had double glazing, so that the traffic outside could hardly be heard, although it made the ground bounce under your feet when you went outside. The kitchen shone. We took our boots off at the door when we came in, and the carpet would always be warm underfoot.

In our second week Emma started applying for work. I went with her to her first interview and sat outside on the street, in a quickly shifting rectangle of sunlight. First the sunlight was on the steps of the office, which was in a silent lane of low sandstone buildings with pretty window boxes. No cars. Then it moved to the pavement, so I sat there, my back against the cold stone. When the light moved on to the road itself I stayed where I was, growing colder, watching it cross the narrow space.

The door next to me opened and Emma was handed out by a man in a white shirt and linen pants. My legs had gone to sleep. I tried to get up to say hello but the door closed before I was upright.

‘Did you get it?' I said. I put one hand on the stone wall for balance while I flexed my stiff feet.

‘Pretty much,' said Emma.

 

They were a civilised group of people – all men except Emma – working in a white, light-filled space with its tilted desks set up at a sociable angle. They rarely designed actual buildings – everything they did was a renovation, a conversion, of one of the many difficultly small houses, apartments and offices owned and rented by the well-to-do of London.

Emma's office was only a few tube stops from our flat, and I met her for lunch sometimes, but mostly I sat at home, too weary to struggle along in the fine bubbles of her wake. I couldn't get warm. It was only September, and the flat was centrally heated, but I was doing nothing except sitting at the table in our white kitchen, whose window overlooked Vauxhall Bridge Road. Sometimes I ate porridge oats, dry, from a bowl. There was something solid and sustaining about them. You could make porridge in your own mouth, mashing the oats
into a warm paste with teeth and saliva. I could eat two or three bowls at once. I looked in the newspaper for work. Sometimes I had baths to try to ease the cold ache in my sides and legs.

One evening Emma brought a friend home from work. When they came into the kitchen I slipped down from my stool, shoving the book I was reading to one side. I wished they'd found me doing something, being busy. I saw myself in the face of the microwave, eyes ringed with black, mouth thick with red lipstick.

‘Your voice sounds English already,' I said to Emma, unable to speak to Jerome. He was black, and we were white, and he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. He grinned at me, knowing he'd caught me off balance. He wore a grey t-shirt, close-fitting, and dark jeans. His smile made the skin on the back of my neck feel hot and tight.

‘Not to me,' he said. His voice sounded flat London. He was looking around him at the kitchen, at its broad white counters, deep drawers, its double-glazed view of the traffic and the city beyond that. ‘Nice place,' he added.

‘It's not ours,' said Emma quickly.

I looked curiously at her.

‘We're paying rent,' she went on.

Mates rates
, I wanted to say, but it would not have been fair to her.

They wanted to know if I would like to come out to dinner with them. I knew Emma would have talked Jerome into this. He kept his body turned towards hers.

I didn't. I said so. I didn't have an English accent; I was not in England enough to acquire one. At home in the flat with the porridge and the paper, my voice was not needed at all. A friend had once said to me that I was like a shark that had to keep swimming – if I stopped talking I would die. It did feel as though I was sinking.

I stood up when the door had closed behind them and went into the bedroom. There was only one bedroom, with twin beds. There was a long mirror fixed to the wall between them. I looked at myself, lifted my Clash t-shirt and clawed a bit at my soft, white stomach. Then I lay down on my bed. Soon I was too cold, so I pulled off my jeans and forced myself between the sheets. After a while, I fell asleep, and didn't wake when Emma came in.

 

My cousin Karen and her best friend were also living in London, somewhere real, somewhere they had found for themselves. They were nursing in one of the hospitals in the centre of the city. They did a lot of night shifts, and had plenty of time to visit me during the day. Karen wore a leather jacket covered with studs and told me how she'd stamped on the toes of a man who'd shoved her at a
Smiths gig. Her Docs had extra-thick soles. Her face was set in a defensive snarl, which faded after an hour or so in the creamy quiet of our flat.

‘I'm fat,' I said to my cousin – something I could never say to Emma.

‘I'm fat too,' said Karen, who was looking in our fridge. Her spiked blonde hair brushed the shelves as she bent down to take out a block of cheese.

‘I've got a new way of losing weight,' said Ruth from the living room. She was lying full length on the cream sofa, her boots splayed on the cushions.

‘Yeah?' said Karen. We came to stand in the doorway, Karen holding the cheese.

‘The twist,' said Ruth, staring down at her boots.

‘What do you mean?' said Karen.

‘You know those fifties movies? You never see a fat girl, do you?'

We watched as she swung her boots round to the floor and stood up. She began to twist on the white pile of the carpet, her dyed hair flopping into her face. It was like the traffic that you could see through the window – odd, jerky, no soundtrack – except the hushing of her boots on the carpet.

Karen laughed scornfully, and began to tear open the plastic wrapping of the cheese. ‘It wasn't the twist. It was the Ford pills. They were all taking laxatives.'

‘I wonder if that works,' I said. Ruth kept twisting. Karen and I met each other's eyes.

 

Oh, Jerome
. I heard Emma say this one night. I had been asleep but woke at the sound of the key in the lock. I was suddenly rigid in my bed. The bedroom door was open. What should I do?

But they were only saying goodnight. I turned quickly on my side before Emma came in, and didn't answer when she said softly, ‘Jane? You awake?'

The next day was Saturday. Emma made me come with her to the National Portrait Gallery. We were early, and sat on the steps in the pale sunlight, watching the pigeons milling and crashing in the square.

‘You should stay at Jerome's house if you want to,' I said. I was clacking the toes of my Doc Martens together. I had recently noticed that I could not sit without some part of my body moving.

There was a pause. People were beginning to line up around us; we kept having to lean sideways to let them pass.

‘I wouldn't want to leave you alone,' said Emma.

‘I'll be all right,' I said. Then added, ‘You're not my mother, you know.'

‘What if someone broke in?'

I looked straight at her now, as witheringly as I could. I kept my feet still. There were three separate security doors between us and London, and anyone who did manage to breach them would not bother coming down the lengths of carpeted corridor, turning the corners, passing the stairwells, all the way to our flat. I couldn't imagine commanding that much attention from anyone, not even a murderer.

 

Jerome had a friend who managed a chain of bookshops. There was a job available in their smallest branch, which was on the fifth floor of a department store in Knightsbridge. In my letter of application I invented a bookshop back in Sydney, and named it after one of my university friends. I rang her up – long distance, still an event in those days – and asked her to make up some letterhead and write me a reference.

At the interview the manager of the tiny book section said, ‘You seem very nervous. Why are you so nervous?'

I was nervous because I had written the letter too quickly, I didn't have a copy and I couldn't remember what I'd said about my time working at Wood's Books in Enmore. He was holding my friend's letter and I kept trying to peer at it. I could see that she must have used one of the computers at university to type it up. I could
see that she had changed her signature to make her seem more like the proprietor of Wood's Books. I couldn't tell if it was obvious that she, like me, was only eighteen.

I think I was probably clacking the toes of my boots together again, too. I said, ‘I just really want the job.'

‘Well,' said the manager, looking down at the letter, ‘I suppose I'll have to give it to you then.'

I watched him as he sorted through his desk drawers for the right forms. His name was Rory. He had white skin that looked as though it would be cold to the touch, a tightly knotted woollen tie and a patterned waistcoat. He would only have been three or four years older than I was but his
I suppose I'll have to give it to you then
was elaborately patronising. I tried to imagine being friends with him – perhaps eating lunch with him – and felt my mouth make an involuntary grimace.

 

But I was glad of the job. I was grateful to be on the move again. I loved catching the tube in the mornings. I loved feeling as though I was the same as everyone around me. I enjoyed feeling exasperated with the tourists who stood in front of the turnstiles, holding their tickets, trying to work out how to get through. I wore headphones and listened to The Smiths or The Triffids. I learnt to make my face impassive as I stood in the swinging aisles of
the train, hanging on to a strap. I learnt not to look at anyone. My friend from uni who'd lived in London had not learnt this lesson fast enough – a woman in her office used to shout at her, if she caught her, ‘What the fuck are YOU looking at?'

Did Australians gaze openly around them? I tried to imagine myself doing this. I remembered exchanging smiles with people on a Sydney bus; it seemed a long time ago.

 

Every few weeks Emma got a letter from Peter, who was finishing his commerce degree in Sydney. I got letters almost every post, having channelled my lost voice into aerograms. My friends drew pictures and sent me bits of their lives – some hair, a leaf folded into the blue paper. Emma showed me one of her letters before putting it in the bin. Peter said that he hated his degree, and hated the other students.
I always wanted to be a pilot
, he wrote,
but my mother wouldn't let me. I shall never forgive her for that.

‘Why doesn't he do it now?' I said, handing the letter back to her. ‘He's twenty-two. He doesn't have to do what his mother says anymore.'

Emma just looked at me, then did what she always did, ripped the letter, once, twice, and stamped on the
bin pedal to flip the lid up. I didn't know if she was writing back to him.

In my aerograms I told my friends how wonderful, how amazing London was, and with Emma, Karen and Ruth I dutifully went to see bands, new movies, exhibitions. I was so often bored when I went to see bands, but found it hard to admit this to myself. This was London. I had read about these bands in the
NME
. If I could get drunk enough I would not be bored, but often my capacity for the large, plastic cups of brown, watery beer fell short of drunkenness. I got sleepy standing there next to Emma, holding my cup, watching the other two dancing, yawning till my ears ached.

 

I made a friend at work, out of necessity. Her name was Lauren, and we were united in our hatred of Rory. Poor Rory. His face seemed always to be sweating – pearls of it on his upper lip and forehead – while I was still cold and getting colder, clutching my coat around me as I stood in the lift going up to our floor. Sometimes I wore my coat all morning. Rory was not bad-looking: he had a classic, English look, dark hair and plenty of it, regular features. But the sweat, and the froglike skin, and the whining drawl he spoke in. I nicknamed him Rory the Reptile and taught Lauren to play
How much would
you charge?
We always ended up at the same place – how much would you charge to sleep with Rory? Lauren was one of those conscientious players who tried to put a realistic price on things. Two hundred pounds? Three hundred pounds? I was always unreachable – a million pounds. A billion pounds.