The Life of Houses (22 page)

‘I don't know. He drove her in to the hospital yesterday, apparently. And Audrey. He was at the house when the call came. In her room.'

‘Kit's room? Where was Audrey?'

‘Asleep. Half the time she doesn't know what's going on.'

‘You need to take Kit to the doctor. Tomorrow.'

‘She swears he never touched her.'

‘Well…How old is he?'

‘My age. We were friends. She says I'm what they talk about.'

‘What can they possibly say to each other about you?'

‘Oh, they make me into a monster, I suppose.' She looked around the room with exhausted calm. ‘I'm so tired.' The room's ugliness was consoling. There was not one thing in it to provoke interest or desire.

He sat down beside her on the bed. ‘Anna…'

She said. ‘It's our fault. If he's hurt her, how could we—You see?

It's not forgivable, what we've done.'

He said, ‘It's not—'

‘Matt should be here,' she said. ‘He shouldn't have left us. We could be as we were. You and Clare…'

He stood up. He went to look out the window. She watched him, his solid flesh against the sheer curtain, its folds blurring the outside lights. How far away he seemed. Her body was not hers any more than that bedside table, the clock radio with its shining red rectangular numbers. In the car she had felt that she could just keep driving, north up the coast. She thought: tomorrow night someone else will sleep here. Motel rooms have no ghosts. Every morning cleaners come in to empty the bins.

She said, ‘Is that clock right?

‘What time did you think?'

‘I've been here less than a day…' She pressed her fingers against her eyes to stop the tears.

‘Have you eaten?'

She shook her head. ‘I left them all having pizza in front of the news.
Rising above me,
shoving pizza down their throats.'

He opened the cupboard door to reveal a mini-fridge. ‘There's whiskey.'

‘We're seeing the doctor at eight tomorrow.'

He closed the cupboard door with his elbow and dropped glasses and doll-sized bottles onto the bed.

She said, ‘You know they make these covers so slippery to stop people having sex on them?'

‘Ice?'

She nodded. ‘What happened to the air-con?'

‘I can turn it back on. It sounded like an animal had died in it.'

‘No, leave it. I can hear the rain.' She rested her head on the pillow. ‘The clock keeps staring at me.'

He didn't answer. Not touching, he sat on the bed with his back against the wall. She was tired enough to feel the alcohol work in her—a click behind her eyes.

‘What they did want to talk about was the house. They're leaving it to Kit.'

‘Why is that funny?'

‘Oh the house, the house…' She heard her voice, how drunk she sounded. Really I am just tired, she thought. Matt would have known why it was funny. ‘Do you know, I was so poor in London Amy bought my clothes. She couldn't have me in the gallery in the clothes I was in. Then she got a friend of hers to let me stay in his flat—his mother's, really, but he'd put her in a nursing home. He used to come up every weekend to see her. And then he'd come round.'

‘You slept with him for rent?'

‘Well but I was such an innocent I never saw it like that. I think I thought he loved me—for myself, you know, not just my youth. Dennis McKay. He'd been a rugby player, played for England.
Hugely fat. He used to wrap himself in a towel to come to bed. He was nice to me. Though I do remember I was always depressed after he left. I used to see his mother sitting at the table. Anyway one day somebody said something at a party and I realised—they all knew.'

‘What a bitch Amy must have been.'

‘No. Everything I did, she'd have done herself.'

She heard the rustle of ice in his drink. She knew this detached incredulity was his last resort. He could not afford to give up on her now. She could almost hear it, the process of adjustment taking place in him while he sat without moving beside her on the bed, and she realised with a twinge of compassion how far he must be feeling from Clare. In the end it might be what we share, she thought: a sort of homesickness for our first lives.

‘I rang Dad and begged for money. He told me there was none. The only money he could give me was for a ticket home. Then I found out—those neighbours, the ones Kit stayed with. They'd made an offer on a strip of land out the back. You can't even see it from the house. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he'd said no.' She was ashamed of her tears: self-pity's oversized tears wetting the pillow under her cheek. Weak, stupid: and for what? Fine hair tufting up over a forehead, a freckled hand engulfing a glass of gin: aside from that, she could not remember Dennis McKay.

‘And now Kit gets the house?'

‘Kit gets the house,' she repeated. ‘After all that.'

‘What about Treen?'

‘Oh, she can have half. We'll knock the place down. Twenty
townhouses. Treen can keep half the money and a townhouse of her own.'

He shifted on the bed but said nothing. The sound of rain closed them in, its indifference like miles and miles. Just this morning, she told herself, I was driving here. So many other days have gone without a trace…I was right, she thought, all those years, never to come back here. Here I can only ever be a child of the house. Everything she had done, all she had been since then: for them it was so much affectation. They regarded her whole life with amused irony, recognisable from when as a child she had dressed herself up in her tutu and performed for their guests. She said to herself: yes, after twenty years it's still a phase I'm going through. But that flare of bitterness died to ashes in her mouth; because the trouble, the real trouble, she told herself, is that so long as I'm here I also feel I'm a fraud. She suddenly felt that what she loved in Peter, more than loved, what she honoured, was that he could not be dismantled like that—not by her; not even by himself.

Beyond the sound of the sitcom next-door, beyond the sound of rain, she heard the silence of the country she had driven through that morning. She pictured those paddocks out in the dark and rain falling on them. Not quite silence: an undersound of water, puddles forming in the churned-up dirt by the gates. How far she had come. The clock's shining numbers changed. They were silent, opposed. In the hospital over Patrick shining numbers counted his heartbeats on a screen. A nurse was sitting by him. Where was he? She saw him on his metal bed stretched out in those night paddocks, rain falling alike on his hands and face and on the sheet. He would not feel it.

Outside a car started, hiss of tyres on the wet. I should go, she thought. The car's headlights flung rain shadows over the carpet and the bed. She thought: we met on the footpath and cars drove away from us. Now I am here, with him. They were glad when I left. Kit was glad. She does not know I am here. Soon I will get up. I will walk back into their room; I will not have been here. Even now I am there still, with them. She closed her eyes. The rain was falling in the room, a touchable darkness. The sound of rain…She thought, he is here, in arm's reach. I will never know what he is thinking. It is day where Matt is. He does not know. I could go back and he would never know. These hours would not have existed then. His face on the pillow, waves running up the beach in the dark, that girl's laugh—they would be dreams, only. Where are my father's hours? His body is simple on the bed. His poor body in the ground—His face in the window when we came up the drive. The house could not be without him. All those things he loved: unspeaking things; they will suffer nothing.

Peter put his hand out, drew the hair back from her face. He rested his hand on her back. Under the pressure of his hand she could feel her breath coming in and out, could hear her pulse in the ear that rested on the pillow. Like the sea in a shell, she thought. She closed her eyes again and she was climbing out through her bedroom window. There was the path, threading close-branched shadow; branches closed over her head. The difficulty of being herself fell away from her. Flickering light, shade, grey-green scrappy-looking scrub, dry leaves scattered on the path: everything dry, various, indifferent, smelling of salt: a place she knew by heart. She came out
at the top of the dune into an emptiness of sea and sky. Instantly it was night on the dune and raining. The sand was heavy and cold with rain and she was late, she was trying to run over the wet sand, it was late and so dark the foam flecks shone on the sea—He woke her with an arm on her shoulder. Her glass on the bedside table, something missing: the rain had stopped. ‘What time is it?' she said. And then, ‘
I must get back
.'

Chapter Twenty-Three

K
it watched out the train window: rinsed light over paddocks of stubble, hay bales in black plastic glittering after last night's rain. She had turned off her phone. Simply to leave—astonishing that it was possible. She had the carriage to herself. Out there white birds flung up, turned messily in the sky, settled to feed again. She had sent the text from Anna's phone and Scott had come, reticent, hopeful, unshowered, sleep at the corner of his eyes. An hour's drive to the train station and he had not once mentioned the drawing she'd torn from his sketchbook. To slam the door on his talk, step out into distances of quiet…

On the platform a nurse in uniform, a man wrestling his paper from the wind, the tracks curving off. Down out of that shimmer the train had come. She had texted her father then, with the train turning real, tonnes of it pulling noisily into the station. Now she wondered whether he had known about Peter already. She heard again running water, Audrey and Treen in the bathroom murmuring grievances, that moment when she had rung her mother's phone and heard it on the bed. She had held Anna's phone in her hand—I knew then, she thought now. I knew even before I read their messages. What she had not known, could not have guessed, was the sort of person her mother would be in them:
needy, wilful, placatory.
Single
, she thought. All those xxxxs…

She put her head back, closed her eyes. What was out there was indifference, scrappy and flourishing. The train's continuous racketing was in her head; it took the place of thought. She saw her grandfather out in the garden, straightening up, looking back at the window: he was tiny, as if far off. She saw Miranda's boyfriend running away up the road. She sat up, opened her eyes: long lines of fences, stripes in the fresh-cut grass. A road alongside the tracks now; they passed a ute filled with farm machinery, a black and white dog sticking its face into the wind. The train was going fast enough for the shadows on the road to look as though they were flowing backwards. How long was the flight from London? Her father would come. She was almost sure he would. After that—

Soon they would be entering the suburbs. Backyards, the backs of houses.
Back
, she thought, the train on rails. This week had happened—where? In another week it would be Christmas. That first morning at Sea House things had not known her: chairs, boxes, little tables. They were there still. They had not changed. She thought: If I had broken something…

They would have finished with the doctor by now. When people switched off life support was it an ordinary switch on the wall? Who were they, who would do that? They pressed the switch, the machine shut down, the body stopped on the bed. They walked out of the room, they left the body behind, they went on afterwards. She had left in time. She would not have to face them after they did that, at least. After they'd done that.

In an hour she'd be home. She stepped in thought into the silent
house. To her right, the sitting room's white sofas, greenish in leafy window light; through an arch the kitchen, with its backdrop of glass; and ahead of her, black stairs rising to her bedroom. She saw the house entire: already a wrecked house. The train window was not glass but perspex. Where someone had cleaned graffiti off tiny scratches made a cloud. Someone had written over it, a name scrawled with black pen. There was graffiti on her seat too. Like pissing dogs, people leaving their marks. An empty coffee cup on its side in the aisle kept rolling back and forth with the movement of the train. Her own bag had been on Treen's bed with Treen's things in it—too brutal to tip them out. She had all her stuff in a plastic bag still. She pulled Scott's picture out of it. On her cheek still the pressure of his hand. Last night in the bathroom she had checked the picture; again this morning, before she shoved it in with her toothbrush and hairbrush, undies and socks rolled up in a T-shirt. Now though, she saw the picture in full daylight. The lake, opening out from a curved line, was there, and scrawny plants at the water's edge. The tree she had put her back against was there. And there she was, close-shaded, her hair unbrushed; the way he had done her eyes showed that she was facing into the light. Smaller, more coherent, prettier than she was… The eyes were wrong. Flattening the picture out on her knees, what Kit saw, all at once, with certainty and impersonal happiness, was that it was not like her. It was not like her at all.

Acknowledgements

Aviva Tuffield, Antoni Jach, Sarah Tutton, Cassandra Atherton and Kim Kane took an interest in drafts of the manuscript and offered me much useful advice. Sue Gorton, Sally Gorton and John Wentworth also read drafts and supported me in various ways over the years I took to write this novel. The book has benefited greatly from Alice Grundy's caring and skilful editorial work. Above all, I am profoundly grateful to Evelyn Juers and Ivor Indyk for their generous encouragement, advice and support.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.