The Paper House (11 page)

‘Fine,’ I said.

He asked me how I’d liked the car, whether I remembered which pedal was the clutch. I stalled it at the lights. A lady in a silver Mercedes beeped me.

‘Are you okay in there?’ he said, touching my hair.

‘Yes,’ I said, but I skipped dinner and slipped into the garden to search for Noel and his bottles in the darkness.

D
AD’S BUILT
a new desk in the roof. It’s Mum’s painting desk. He hammered it right into the walls. Mum put a jar of jellybeans next to her brushes but she only likes the black ones. I help her by eating all the other colours.

From the window we can see the tree tops so I’m drawing them and she is painting them in. Each time we finish one she writes its name on the page. She writes pine tree and lemon-scented gum and banksia.

Then underneath those she writes other words.

What are those words? I say.

They’re called botanical names, she says. It’s like how your name is Heather, but your proper name is Heather Artemisia Herbert.

How do you know all their proper names? I say.

I’m doing a course, she says.

She pulls me into her lap and takes a book from her shelf. On the cover there’s a tree with its arms spread out.

See this book? she says. Anything you need to know about plants, this book will tell you.

It’s huge, I say.

There are a lot of plants, she says. Why don’t you find one you like?

It’s so heavy I need both hands to pick it up. The cover has flaps and when I open it Mum’s name is there. Shelley Herbert. She has pretty handwriting.

This one, I say.

It has fluffy red flowers. They look like ballerinas.

Corymbia ficifolia, she says. A flowering gum.

She gives me a little squeeze.

It’s getting late, she says. We should get dinner on.

She puts the book back on the shelf, next to the one about Leonardo Da Vinci. He was an artist but he also invented the helicopter. Then she kisses my head.

You can read it whenever you like, she says.

I decide to read it every single day.

*

The door to the roof has been shut for ages. I sit by it and look at the rainbow on the floor. It comes in through the window Mum made, all different colours.

They’re in the kitchen. Dad’s shouting.

It’s a waste of fucking money, he shouts.

Mum throws something. I can tell it’s her because Dad never throws things. The wall shakes a bit.

I’m trying to make something of myself, she says.

I go to the kitchen door and point my ear inside.

Dad is saying, It’s always like this. You were going to be a teacher. Remember? And a florist. And an interior designer. What else was there?

Face painter, Mum says.

Dad says, You never finish anything.

Sorry I’m such a disappointment, she says.

Do you ever stop feeling sorry for yourself? Dad shouts. He doesn’t wait for her to answer. He stomps out the kitchen door and doesn’t even notice me there with my ear pointing in.

I go into the kitchen. Mum has gone out the back door. I can see her through the window, talking to Sadie.

The bin has fallen over. The book is in there. The big plant book. I take it out with both hands and sit on the cold tiles and read all the names out loud.

They are hard to say. Sometimes it takes me a few tries.

My favourite one is
Impatiens walleriana
. It sounds like a dance. Like the words are dancing.

I
N THE MORNING
I took my cottonwool head to Rupert’s, where he slapped me out a mountain of goat’s curd (‘From over Red Hill way. They do things right down there.’). I bought whole salty anchovies (‘Not local, I’m afraid.’), six fat figs and a wide-hipped pear. He added a tub of fresh yeast (‘No one knows how to use it, so it just sits here and I have to bin it.’) and a brush of rocket, and he said, ‘Special occasion? Hot date?’

I rubbed my temples. ‘My sister’s coming back soon. You met her.’

‘Ah, the tradie-looking one? When she came to rescue you?’

‘She didn’t rescue me.’

He wrapped my curd in hessian. ‘Is she going to demand fancy coffees too?’

‘Probably.’ I leaned closer. ‘Splash of something harder in mine this morning, thanks.’

He tapped his nose and reached under the counter. ‘I’ve got a sister. Lives in Perth.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s so far. Are you from there?’

‘Nah, we’re from Shepparton. Allison moved there with her husband. Works in the mines. You know, the fly-in-fly-out kind. Made a bucket of money and she just sits in the pool with it I think.’

‘Oh.’ The air was heavy. ‘My dad worked on the rigs.’

‘Yeah? Thirty-eight exactly. Cheque, savings?’

I pressed the buttons mutely.

‘We hardly ever saw him.’

‘What’s that?’

‘My dad.’

‘Oh, right. Cappuccino?’

‘Please. No sugar.’

‘Sweet enough, huh?’ he said flatly. ‘Sorry. Force of habit.’

I drank from my paper cup.

‘You have a nice visit with your sister, Heather.’ In my bag, some pink salt I hadn’t paid for.

At the top of the hill, Sylvia watered her lawn from a red can. She had the forward hunch of an old woman, and she wore a dress in peacock green and a wide hat. I waved, and she beckoned to me. Up close, the skin of her face was blotchy and torn like old leather. ‘Heather, you so skinny,’ she said. ‘No one feeding you?’ She pushed her hair from her face with the back of her arm. ‘Oh wait, no matter. I cannot see so good without my glasses.’ Her body moved like custard as she laughed.

‘I’m making pizza,’ I said, lifting my bags.

‘
Pfft
. What would you know about making pizza? You come with me. Come on.’ She pulled off her gloves and put her arm around my shoulder; the soft folds of a grandmother.

Sylvia’s kitchen had the chaotic goodness that I remembered from visiting Dave’s nanna: porcelain cows and a floral tin with BISCUITS on the front and all kinds of regional tea towels, frayed at the edges. She pulled one of her biscuit tins from the shelf and opened it to me. Sweet melting moments piped into flowers.

‘Semolina flour is best,’ she said. Pantry stocked to the ceiling, rows and rows of different spices and herbs and flours in clear jars. ‘Makes it chewy.’

She made a flour mountain on her vinyl bench top and covered it with salt like snow. By the warming oven, the yeast came to life. ‘You use fork like this, look.’ Bringing the ingredients together, stiff porridge. ‘Here, I show you.’ She put the fork in my hand and guided it with her own, pushing and prodding and mixing the flour. ‘There you go. Now you knead like this.’

Her arms moved like jelly pistons. She beat the dough, threw it, smacked it. That old lady stood at her kitchen bench and kneaded for fifteen minutes. ‘I can’t do
anything
for fifteen minutes,’ I said, and she smiled. ‘Now you have done kneading, dough is all stringy. See?’ It was smooth and round. ‘Then just put in bowl with oil till lunchtime. You wait with me.’

I went to protest, to find something better to do than sit in an old lady’s kitchen, but the way she smiled with her eyes made me reconsider. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Dave won’t be back until later anyway.’ She clapped her hands and opened her fridge, from which she produced a jug of blood-red liquid filled to the brim with swimming fruit.

‘Always time for sangria,’ she said. ‘Only little brandy.’

The back of her house opened into an equally grandmotherly sunroom, with plastic-covered chairs and a canary trilling in a blue cage. She was on the hill, like us, and her garden dropped away under the house, like ours did, but where we could see the cresting waves from our balcony, she looked out at a freeway development.

‘Is real shame,’ she said. ‘I live here forty-six years and always just see hills. Now I will always see the big road.’

The air in the sunroom was hot and still. The 10 am sangria made perfect sense.

‘Where does it go?’ It was close enough to see the movement of men in high-vis vests and the swinging arms of cranes.

‘Don’t know. Rosebud, maybe.’

‘Oh, I love Rosebud.’

‘I hate Rosebud.’ She laughed. ‘My mother live there.’

‘Your
mother
?’ Sylvia had the drooped look of a Basset Hound. Eighty, at least.

‘You do not look at me like that. My mother one hundred and three years old and she still ring me to make sure I eat vegetables. I say to her, Mama, I will be dead in the ground just so you stop bugging me.’

I wondered what it might have been like to have a mother at your wedding, at your thirtieth birthday. At the birth of your first child. I gulped my drink and poured another. ‘Do you live here alone, Sylvia?’ I had seen her with her grandchildren in the front garden, four dark-haired boys. But her body stiffened and the air cooled.

‘Not alone.’

‘Your sons?’

‘No.’

We fell into an uncomfortable silence. I paid closer attention to roadworks than ever before. The sun moved over the top of the house and cast shadows in Sylvia’s garden.

‘Oh, Albert is back. I hear door slam.’

‘Did it? I didn’t hear anything.’

‘No, he definitely back.’ She put down her drink. ‘We out here, Albert!’ she said, but he didn’t respond. ‘Maybe he in bathroom.’ The ice in our glasses had melted, but the sangria was delicious. ‘We make pizza now.’

She cut the dough into smaller chunks and rolled it into balls. ‘Thin pizza better. What toppings you bring?’ The figs went into a pan of sugar, and she cut the heads off the anchovies (which in turn went into the mouth of a ginger cat that had appeared at her side, so round in the middle that he looked like a balloon). My lovely goat’s curd slopped out of the tub. Sylvia moved as though she were part of the kitchen – chopping tomatoes with one hand, caramelising the fruit with the other, busy and sweaty and youthful.

‘There is your pizza,’ she said, fanning her hands in a flourish. ‘Now you take it home and share with family.’ I imagined her in southern Italy with sons and daughters and grandchildren around her, a marble piazza with creeping vines and an enormous table almost invisible under the food. And I imagined her one-hundred-and-three-year-old mother in her Rosebud nursing home, waiting for her daughter to call.

‘There’s no one home,’ I said, so we ate together at her kitchen table, and Albert never came out of the bathroom.

*

Fog trawled in overnight. It was too hot for fog, surely. The news said it was a combination of high humidity and a light wind. Even from the window, the garden was almost invisible – just a few tree tops and my hovering currawong friend.

I poked around underneath the deck and found my little lemon tree full of spider webs. Dozens of them, radiating out from a pinprick hole, not an insect on them and no spiders to be seen. I sat cross-legged on the pavers and drew them all; each minutely different from the next, sticky and fragile and perfect.

Dave went to buy a coffee. I set myself up in the borrowed chair and a hot wind came over from the grapevines and it had a touch of the sea in it. I dipped my brush into the neat rows of child’s paints from the attic, drew the coloured water across the page, watched it pool and gather in the rough spots.

I painted my mother’s favourite flower, first and obviously, sweet
Impatiens walleriana
, as bright as parrots. They would sit together in tight circles at the top of the hill, delicate, always teetering right on the edge of fading. She never picked flowers. Sometimes I would pick a posy, when she was home from hospital, and the way they browned and drooped made her cry. But she seemed to enjoy that the impatiens needed her protection; even breathing on them too heavily could send them into floral meltdown. I painted the huge scalloped leaves and the heart shapes where the petals put their heads together, their neat symmetry as a welcoming carpet given pride of place where the pittosporums currently stood.

I painted the flower for which my sister had been named. Before either one of us was born, before Dad disappeared into the ocean, before Mum was hung in a black cloud, they honeymooned in Paris. The way he told the story, they had spent more time on the plane than in the city itself, where he had food poisoning (‘Forget what anyone says – snails are
not
a food, Heather.’) and she read the only books the hotel kept in English (‘Your choice of eight different paperbacks.’). But she remembered it quite differently: a sunny afternoon on Montmartre (‘Before the tourists ruined it.’); chin dripping with butter and cream; dancing on the cobbled street to the sounds of street performers. And a man on a corner with buckets of
Iris latifolia
, like slender French women with blue hair.

I painted my own favourite flower. Six white
Bellis perennis
– simple daisies – on a long stem, with thin leaves like fingers that dripped into the soil. They were the first flowers I had learned to draw, sitting in the dirt with my mother wrapped around me, guiding my hand across the paper. Around, around, petals joined together at the stamen, around, around, twenty petals tapering minutely into the sky.

How many flowers would I need?

The front door opened and I stowed the book. When Dave kissed me, his breath had a burnt coffee taste. ‘Rupert doesn’t usually burn it,’ I said.

‘I went somewhere else,’ he said. ‘You didn’t notice how long I was gone?’

‘Guess not.’

Late in the afternoon, Sylvia appeared in the doorway. ‘You like porridge,’ she said, in a way that wasn’t a question. ‘You like sponge roll.’

She laid out the table-for-two for four, with red gingham placemats I had never seen, and porcelain plates with scalloped edges, and tarnished forks with their tines bent outwards. The windows steamed up, hiding us from the outdoors and its giants.

But I felt it anyway, the humming reverberation of the red earth.

Sylvia sat between us, at the table-for-two-for-four (temporarily), and the fourth chair stared back at us. We were safe with her, Dave and I, safe at the table even with that seat empty.

‘Sylvia,’ I said, and Dave looked at me with dusty eyes, ‘do you believe in magic?’