The Life of Houses (12 page)

Will said: ‘Tide's coming in.' He caught up with Miranda, put his arm around her shoulder. He was only just tall enough to do it. From the back it was almost funny, how the two of them had to walk in step. The two of them, she thought: what was it that made them so impossible to her? How they were in their bodies, their unthinking ease. Kit wondered what it would feel like to be Miranda and look in the mirror. She imagined not pride, exactly, but a sort of pleased calm vigilance—a check to see that all was as it should be, the way a pilot might check over the controls of the plane.

Miranda had been right about her jeans. At each step her thighs chafed. Sweat pooled behind her knees, making her jeans stick there. In thought, putting on a baby voice, she quoted herself back to herself: ‘My mum won't let me'. Tomorrow: with a flash of defiance she decided that she would get to the pharmacy tomorrow, buy herself a razor.

They came around the headland onto a ragged-looking beach strewn with seaweed so rubbery Kit mistook it for ripped wetsuits discarded on the sand, salt-crazed black-brown. That beach was sunstruck glare, hours between tides. Wooden steps led from the beach up to a carpark—a rough-edged spill of bitumen. At the back of it, a sand path cut across the cliff. They were turning back. At the turn they stopped. Here the ground was scuffed bare: a sand patch edged with a wooden fence: a viewing spot. The top strut of the fence was worn smooth where walkers, resting their elbows on it, had stopped to look at the sea.

Far out, light reverberated off its struck metal. Closer in, a fishing boat bucked in waves otherwise barely noticeable. The broken-topped
posts of an old pier rose out of the water. Alongside them a new pier, concrete, made a straight line over sea and land together. Half past one, and the pier's shadow was slipping out from under the pier. Looking at it, Kit pictured stingrays like shadows adrift. At the end of the pier men were fishing. Patience had settled their bodies into crooked shapes; from this distance they had the stunted look of tea-tree bent from the wind.

Will turned to Miranda. ‘You coming down the back beach this arvo?'

Miranda shrugged. ‘I have to work.'

‘Yeah, checkout chick.'

‘Shut up! At least I have a job.'

‘I work. I worked yesterday.'

‘For your
brother
.'

‘It's still work. You try lifting hay bales all day.' He swung his arms back. ‘My shoulders are killing me.'

Miranda lifted her hair into a ponytail and let it drop. She turned to Kit. ‘God, you must hate it here. Mum says your dad's in London.'

‘Just…His parents live there.'

‘I'm going to London,' said Miranda. ‘As soon as I've finished school. That's what I'm saving for. All my friends here, they're like, “You should buy a car.” That's all they think about.'

‘We're just sick of driving you.'

Teased, even so blandly, Miranda lifted her chin. Her face switched off. Impossible to tell whether that look comprehended distances or emptiness.

Will said: ‘Your mum said Hughey was gay.'

‘Yeah. That's why he killed himself.'

‘Hughey's car crashed.'

Miranda smiled at the sea. ‘On a straight road.'

Will's body straightened as if on a string. ‘You can't say that.' He pushed back off the barrier. Kit saw his pinched face large against the scene. ‘You don't say stuff like that. Unless you actually know.'

Miranda stood very still. The wind, catching at the ends of her hair, exaggerated her resemblance to a ship's figurehead; she had a figurehead's sly smile. For a moment Kit wondered whether she had heard him. Serenely she shrugged.

‘Fine. It was an accident.'

‘It
was
.'

Will picked up a banksia cone and pelted it at some seagulls waiting for fish scraps at the end of the pier, tilting their eyes at each other like businessmen waiting for their morning coffee. The banksia cone arced slowly, dropped onto the pier. Wild again, the seagulls scattered up with rawking cries. Their wings caught the light, flashed white. Will watched them until they had settled back. Dropping his head, scuffing again at the grass, irresolutely he said, ‘You just don't say it.' Miranda kept still, said nothing.

‘I'm going.'

‘Bye.' Miranda answered without looking around.

Kit echoed Miranda, slightly late. He had already turned. He started jogging away up the road, his thongs slapping on the bitumen. Miranda, her face set in a half-smile, might have been counting to a hundred. Her concentration was hypnotic. Kit's eyes looked where she looked: saw, without seeing, the horizon's long curve.
Another freighter was sliding through the view. What was strange was how nothing seemed to propel it. But the freighter was part of that immense structure of trains, warehouses, trucks, timetables and invoices…In thought Kit saw again those rusty packing crates, stacked in a warehouse's concrete acres, which her train had passed.

Miranda said: ‘Shall we go back?'

Chapter Eleven

S
tepping down the hill with a basket on one arm, Carol answered Kit's smile with a freezing nod. Two steps farther on, she swung back. ‘Kit! Sorry, love. I was in my own world.' Automatically she looked Kit up and down. Confronted with Carol's certainties (unmoving hair, bright lipstick, starched white linen blouse) Kit was uneasily conscious of the surface of her face. In the pharmacy she had tested foundation, peering into a mirror the size of a credit card, wearing an expression of fake judiciousness while she smoothed the stuff on. Now Carol was looking at her crookedly—had she left a smear? Some foundation had got on her lips but she had covered that, she thought, with one of the lipstick testers, a sticky gum-pink gloss. She raised the pharmacy plastic bag in her hand.

‘Treen's at the helpline. I'm getting a prescription for Audrey.'

‘How is Grandma?'

‘Tired, mostly.'

‘You'll be wanting a lift, then?'

‘Just that Treen got the bike out for me.'

‘Oh, good on you. Bit of exercise. Tell you what: you and Miranda should grab a coffee. She's working today, up at the deli. She'd be glad of some company. She's on her break at twelve. '

‘Treen said, before lunch.'

‘No, you enjoy yourself. I'll take that. I go right past.'

Carol was reaching for the bag. Kit felt herself blush under her foundation mask. ‘This is Audrey's,' she said, pulling out the prescription, leaving her shaver in the plastic bag.

‘That's alright then,' said Carol, suddenly grudging, as though Kit had asked the favour. ‘I'll take it there for you now.'

Kit had left her grandfather taking a bucket of scraps out to the chooks in his dressing-gown and slippers. She pictured the front rooms' amber-coloured curtains, a single fly brokenly whirring on the window ledge, and Carol at the front door dropping the brass knocker, sending reverberations through the house.

‘I'll tell Miranda to expect you. Tea shop okay?'

Kit watched Carol across the road before turning, herself, towards the sea, walking at first with false resolution—the consciousness of Carol watching her, though when she glanced back the street was deserted. An hour to wait.

She was outside a jewellery store. Its glass diamonds and goldplated chains, set out on dusty purple velvet, added to her sense of the town as a stage set. The wind had more reality than these narrow, bright shopfronts, huddled under awnings. Their deliberate quaintness emphasised the street's exposure and vacancy—the sea opening out where the other side of the hill should have been.

Across the road, two people came out of the Green and Gold newsagency: the woman walking as if breasting waves; the husband, a step behind, carrying a plastic bag full of newspapers. They vanished into the bakery's shopfront of black reflective glass.

The wind nagged at cellophane packets piled in a toy-sized barrow outside the sweet shop. Kit bent to the barrow and turned the sweets over. Fudge, jelly-babies, liquorice straps: the dried-up sweets prompted in her a queasy feeling of nostalgia. Looking up, she glimpsed a tight-faced woman watching her from the dimness inside the shop.

Kit could not see someone think her a shoplifter without registering that possibility in herself; without knowing her face to be pinched and furtive. She thought: that shopkeeper would have smiled at Miranda. She walked downhill. The fish and chip shop on the corner and then the town stopped. Out there, past where the road turned, was a disused rail line, grey weeds flourishing among the sleepers. Kit crossed the tracks. After the rail line, the ground dropped steeply. Stopping, glancing back, she saw the town stacked behind her, roof by roof up the hill.

And here was the sea. Raising both hands to shade her eyes, she saw that it was, after all, tame: a bay, its edge of unwashed sand lumpy with footsteps and plastic drink bottles. Only the light had made it vast. All that Kit saw (white crests torn out of the waves, a sailing boat swung into the wind, sail hollowly clapping) was painted over blankness. She did not know this place. An hour to wait…

Dirty sand, a smell of oil and seaweed, everything crowded and vacant: this was every loose-end hour. She had no place, did not exist in it. The shaver in her bag, the stuff on her face—and after that, what? Her despair extended to everything she looked at: useless, immense, a painted scene.

‘Did you get your sweeties?' Scott was, that moment, an upright shadow stepping out of the glare, taking on colour and dimension only when he stepped close. ‘I saw you mooning over the barley sugars.' His talk was full of these odd phrases that he spoke lightly, mockingly.

‘The shopkeeper thought I was stealing.'

He laughed, throwing his head back. His Adam's apple flashed in the sun. ‘You can't think how profound you looked just now, staring at the bay.'

‘I'm meeting Miranda at twelve.'

He glanced at his watch. ‘An hour to kill,' he said in a high voice. ‘Here, let me look at you.' He stepped in front of her, pushing his sunglasses to the top of his head; they looked odd on his baldness. ‘How like your mother you are.'

He was close enough for Kit to see how the wind had raised water in his eyes, in any case the kind of pale blue that looks blind. He smiled abruptly and stepped back, putting his sunglasses on.

‘You've no idea how strange it is to see her face sliding in and out of yours the whole time. Is everyone always telling you how alike you are?'

‘Not really.'

‘That's because they didn't know her at your age.'

Without answering, she looked across the bay. A sailing boat cut across the water, out where swathes of darker blue slid under the surface, broke against the boat ramp as waves. On the far side a tractor climbed soundlessly up the bleached paddocks.

He said: ‘Aren't you going to ask about her?'

‘Were you really friends, though?' She tightened her grip on her arms. ‘She doesn't talk about you now.'

She never had been so rude. She had hurt him; she heard him draw in breath. She was suddenly conscious of wind, of brightness. Out there, cloud shadows swung over the water. In truth, she had never doubted that he'd known her mother. What she had meant— what she had felt—was that her mother had never been this young. The woman who sat down at the dinner table each night with that fixed tolerant smile: she had never suffered this.

But he said lightly, ‘Oh,
now
. I know all about her now. I read the magazines. We were friends, though. I went to art school with her. Did she tell you that?' I'm the reason she went.'

‘You?' The blankness of her voice nettled him.

‘She copied my application. She had no idea. She liked Drysdale.

Once she got there, of course…' He shrugged.

‘What?'

Smiling secretively, he said nothing; he put his sunglasses back on and looked pleasantly out at the sea.

‘When she got there—
what
?'

‘Let's say she flourished,' he said, and put his head back, laughing showily. As abruptly, his manner dropped. Forgetting the sea he looked sharply at her. ‘What did Treen say about me?'

‘Nothing much.' She conceded: ‘Just you knew Mum.'

‘That's all?'

‘What should she have said?'

‘Oh I don't know.' He laughed again, emptily. ‘Treen was always the successful one at school. Your mother and I were the
odd ones. Never be too happy at school, that's my advice.'

Kit thought of her friend Louise standing up in assembly to sing the school hymn. But she frowned. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, your aunt…Her friends are still the same people she was friends with at school. Honestly, she has about a hundred godchildren. She remembers all their birthdays.'

‘So?'

‘Nothing. Just, you should hear them together. They have their nicknames still from school. Triny, they call her. They sound like schoolchildren and then you look at them and they're people in their forties with wrinkles and potbellies and brats at their knees. Your mother for all her faults always dealt with reality.'

He held his thumb near her face. ‘Speaking of reality, do you mind? You've got a great clump of makeup on your forehead.'

She felt the colour flare in her face.

‘No, it's good,' he said. ‘It's just this one bit looks like an enormous wen.' He laughed. ‘That's better.' He flung his arm out: ‘Come on. I'll show you our old haunts.'

‘Just that I'm meeting Miranda at twelve.'

‘Miranda! Yes, you mustn't be late for Miranda.' He glanced at his watch. ‘Don't worry. I'll get you back in time.' He swung around and started walking, with quick steps plunging through the heavy sand.

He walked with his chin up, shoulders back. Sweat had run down the back of his neck, darkening his shirt. Seeing him from behind exaggerated the difference between his broad torso and the short legs that with rolling steps, knees working sideways, ankles turned in, propelled him over the sand.