The Life of Houses (20 page)

The milk was off. Anna took it and poured it down the sink. They sat facing each other across the table. Cheap, thin walls: the cupboard doors weren't even set right, but crossed like crooked teeth.
Little Ian who lived up the road, Anna said to herself, thinking not of Ian but of Treen: that dignified unnoticing mildness, honourable in its way, which had always made Anna want to smash the cups on the floor and scream, except that Treen would kneel down then and clean up the mess. If she had not forgotten that quality of Treen's she had forgotten the feeling of being pitted against it: exaggerated, shrill, self-despising. Anna took one of the biscuits, its salt sweet taste first repellent and then insinuating.

‘They've loved having Kit,' said Treen. ‘She's been helping Mum with her book.'

‘Audrey's not still going on with that?'

‘A family history,' said Treen. ‘The library wrote asking for it.' Treen's face showed no sign of mockery or unbelief. Anna looked at her with a feeling that they were not simply out of touch but against each other. Treen could not have forgotten the years of Audrey's useless doomed writing projects: how the two of them had mocked her intimate conspiratorial way of talking about them; the neediness in Audrey's voice when she had called them to her room. ‘Is that you?' she had called out. ‘Are you home?' listening out for them tiptoeing down the hall.

Treen sighed. ‘We should get back,' she said. She looked down into her cup, breathing out, and sat so still she seemed at a distance. Anna saw her crouched by Patrick on the sunlit footpath: his long outstretched legs, the narrow toes of his best shoes.

‘Who helped him?'

‘What's that?'

‘Dad. You said someone gave him CPR.'

‘Yes…Yes, that's right. A nice young man—doctor—here for the summer. His poor children watching the whole thing. They'd come out for ice-cream.' Treen set her tea gently on the table. Half smiling, eyes closed, she pressed her fingers into the skin above her eyebrows. ‘I should have stopped him.'

‘What? Because of the children?'

Treen shook her head, still with her eyes closed. ‘He should have died then.'

‘The doctor said…'

Treen sat straight, conscientiously. ‘No. It was too long.'

Anna looked into Treen's face, its withdrawn, private expression, and for the first time realised that their father was going to die, really to die; and the feeling that rose in her was not grief but outrage. Somehow, in some stupid unlearning part of herself, she must have been hoping for a different end: one in which they could talk at last, understand each other, remake years. Now that could not be; that would never be. The knowledge that he would die—not that he
could
, but that he
would
—forced her to recognise him as a body, single and destructible, as her idea of her father had never been. It jarred her to realise: her whole life, there would be nothing more, nothing else, no other father for her but this.

‘I'm so glad…' Treen reached across the table for Anna's hand. ‘I'm so glad you sent Kit to us in time.'

Chapter Twenty

N
ow she was here, in the family room on her own. It was what she'd told them she'd do, and so with a desultory feeling of obedience Kit scrolled through pictures on her phone…All that was too far off. Midday, said her phone. Hours still: what should she do with hours? She put her phone down and looked around the room. White light from the window lit the bluish white of the walls. This was a room where the walls did not vanish. Cold tea bags on the draining board were not out of place here, where nothing had ever belonged to anyone. Kit heard the sound of a nurse's rubber-soled shoes along the length of the hall and thought: she is going to where he is. The image of her grandfather rose in her mind and she felt nothing at all. From the first, waking in a strange house, the day had driven strangeness in. In the airless room she could smell Audrey's spilt tea curdling. How solid, how really immense furniture was…

The hall was deserted. She had the lift to herself. She crossed the foyer and stepped through glass doors into the weather. All morning inside she had not noticed: the sky was half-full of clouds, bluishgrey, and the light looked metallic over the carpark. So this heat was what she had seen Peter stepping out into. That meeting in the foyer—Kit had the feeling of it in her still, like the sound of
a metal spoon scraped against a metal bowl. Coming to the edge of the footpath, she looked at what he'd stopped to look at: empty, uncommunicative road. It was the reality of all this that was so strange. Everything—that child's truck lying on its side in the grass; the letterbox like a toy house with a strip cut through the front of it: all this was part of a world in which her grandfather would die. Her grandfather, lying unmoving in that room on the third floor of the hospital, had changed all this for her: he was the centre of it.

Kit stepped onto the footpath by the milk bar. ‘Do you smoke?' Miranda had asked. Seeing again the expression on Miranda's face, Kit thought:
Why not?
She had the money her mother had given her.

The bell on the door jangled. It was dark inside the shop but no cooler than outside. Waiting by the counter, Kit looked down into a glass-fronted warming oven: three chiko rolls, a row of egg and bacon sandwiches sweating under fluorescent light. A grey-faced woman in a flowered apron stepped through a door and stood with her eyes fixed on something over Kit's shoulder. Kit waited, trying to look calm, for the woman to see her. She could hear the audience applauding on a TV quiz show playing in the back room.

‘You going to buy something?' the woman said. And then, sliding the packet of cigarettes over the counter, she brought out: ‘Lighter?'

‘Sorry?'

‘You want a lighter too?' the woman said. So she knew: without even looking, she knew that Kit was ignorant, under-age. It wasn't as though she cared. Why should she? Kit pocketed her change. The door closed behind her and she stood in the street.

How small the houses looked under all those clouds. Kit thought
with desolate fascination of the woman in the milk bar, who would not clear the cardboard boxes from the window or wipe the dust off the glass, or set mousetraps, or spray the blowfly fizzing in the window corner. She thought of her mother setting the table for dinner, even when it was just the two of them, even when they were eating takeaway.

She took her cigarettes and lighter around to the bench. In the heat the park seemed spiritless and forlorn—less like a park than a room with its roof and one wall lifted away, like the half-house Kit had seen on the back of a truck once, its living room exposed to the highway. The cigarette packet had a close-up photograph of someone's teeth, gangrenous black where they forced through the gums. She stripped the cellophane off and covered the picture with her hand. It wasn't Patrick she thought of, so majestic on his bed; but her own teeth, jointed to the skull behind her face. When she opened the packet the cigarettes' clean look surprised her. There they were in a row, like eggs. Three times the lighter did not work, and then it did. That near failure had been enough, though, to make her blink away tears: self-pity and self-contempt together. She would not have had the courage to go back into the shop.

Around the corner a car stopped. She put her hand out to hide the cigarettes and then stopped herself, half-hoping it would be her mother, and straightened up with a feeling of excited fury, but it was Scott. He said: ‘I was just coming to see your mother.'

‘She's not there. She's off with Treen getting things for tonight.'

‘Anna's at the house,' he said. He looked down at her and laughed. ‘And you thought you'd pop out for a ciggy. Here, it's gone out.'
He held out his lighter. Inhaling on its flare, she had to turn away to hide her cough. Sitting beside her, he pulled a cigarette out of the packet she'd left on the bench. ‘Menthol,' he said, turning it in his fingers. ‘You really shouldn't start, you know.'

He lit the cigarette and sat back. Legs crossed, his loose foot twitched. He watched it, frowning remotely. He had forgotten her. This sudden shutting down of his attention brought a kind of closeness. For once not conscious of herself she looked at him: that paunch straining his shirt buttons, drops of sweat on the side of his neck.

Rousing, sensing perhaps her eyes on him, he bent forward to stub his cigarette out, and got up to drop it in the bin. ‘Listen, you can't stay here all day teaching yourself to smoke,' he said. ‘Come on. I'll take you to the beach.'

He put the cigarettes in his shirt pocket.

In the car he drummed on the steering wheel with his fingers. His car was old enough to have wind-down windows. It stank of cigarette smoke and air-freshener: a cardboard pine-tree dangled from the rear-view mirror. He was a fussy driver, changing gears all the time. They turned right at some traffic lights and Kit realised that the milk bar and that row of orange brick houses were the edge of town. Out her window, paddocks opened up behind billboards advertising new housing estates. Out there, in the light off the storm clouds, the bleached grass was shining.

Scott turned onto a dirt road. ‘I'll show you the lake,' he said. On both sides, greyish scrub: ahead the road lifted and broke into mirage. Little stones kept striking the bottom of the car. The road
came to the edge of a dune and turned. There was a sort of carpark there: a widening of the road. Scott pulled in behind a campervan parked under tea-tree, though by now there was only narrow shade.

Stepping out of the car Kit stepped into cicada noise. After a few steps it seemed less the cry of living creatures than a sound effect of the heat, which had settled into the dirt and now burned upwards. From the carpark a track led up over the dune but Scott ducked sideways, through a fence of two loose wires, where a smaller track wavered off into scrub.

‘They blocked it off,' he said. ‘Revegetation,' he added, falsetto.

The sand of the path was a soft leathery colour, and littered with shells. Scott went ahead. Alongside them the plants grew head-high, closing them in between dense uneven walls. Now and again a gap opened out and Kit saw the green tops, soft swells. Somewhere a branch creaked in the wind; the small leaves hardly moved, though. She had forgotten her hat again and walked with eyes half-closed against the glare. Only the smallest details of leaf and branch suggested they had advanced. These small still leaves, thin branches: everything miniature and repeated: she was stepping into a dream she'd had as a child, walking insect-sized among corridors of grass. It was the clouds being so low, the air thick, as though the sky was pressing down. She could hear the sea beyond the dune, sand being ground down in the waves. She thought of seaweed heaped in the sun. She was hungry, she realised; her mother had been right about lunch.

Kit thought: she should never have left me behind. She lifted her fingers again to smell her cigarette on them. Checking her pockets, she realised that she had left her phone on the sofa in the family room.
She had a strange feeling that it was her life left there: pictures she could scroll through. She could go home; she could walk back into it: breakfast and a shower and her uniform and the train to school. This place, though, the stunned heat and close, parched scrub: it was outside, far off. She saw Patrick stretched out on the bed. The word
never
sounded in her mind like a struck bell. My hands, she thought, looking down at them. Ahead of her the path dropped steeply out of green scrub through a patch of tea-tree where Scott stood waiting for her, a darker shape in the dusty shade. At his back, through the tree trunks, the sunlight looked strangely unstill and bright. They had come to the lake.

Chapter Twenty-One

T
he lake had no high banks. There was no river out to sea from here. Kit thought: the water must seep through, under the dune. Along the dune's side tea-tree grew down into the water: fingerish roots reaching into their own reflections. Closer, the lake's edge was muddied sand, saltbush, clumps of grass bleached at the tips—what her mother called ‘regrowth grass'.

Scott was fussing with his backpack. A gold signet ring flashed on his little finger. Kit took off her shoes and stood at the water's edge. The water was warmer than she had expected and silky, though her feet, sinking through pale sand, touched cooler mud. She heard a car pass. Just in front of her, where the lake ran shallowly over sand, it was the colour of milk tea. Further out, it set the sky behind glass. Out there, a white long-legged bird stood in a cloud's shadow. The whole scene lay open before her: heat shimmering off scrub out where the road was, mile after mile of flat, low, secretive country. She found a sort of elation in it: a loneliness answering her mood. Sharp, scattering sounds drew her eyes to where the bird was lifting wing-beat by wing-beat up from the surface of the lake, its legs trailing in the water. She watched holding her breath; it seemed so unlikely the bird would rise.

‘I brought my sketchbook,' Scott said. From the side of his
backpack he unfixed a contraption that folded out into a threelegged seat. The surprise of it made her laugh. Without changing expression, he glanced at her and then over his shoulder at the sky. ‘You want to do some sketching?'

‘No thanks.'

He sat down. ‘I'll draw you then. I used to draw your mother. Did you know that?' He laughed to himself: ‘She did abstracts.' He gestured at the base of a tea-tree. ‘Sit there, out of the sun, for God's sake. My reputation won't survive taking you to your room again.'

‘What do you mean?'

He ignored her, or he did not hear. He had started drawing, working quickly with long strokes. He had put his hat back on his head and she could see him: his eyelids, with their pale lashes; the pores of his nose glistening with sweat. He put his bottom lip out when he was concentrating. The sound of his pencil made her conscious of the low suck and slap of the water.