The Paper House (15 page)

‘Sort of,’ he said, his voice low.

‘But Fleur couldn’t find her shoes, so we all had to look for them before you’d take me to the hospital.’

‘They were expensive.’

‘I couldn’t help properly because my eyes had closed over.’ I squeezed them shut, made out as though I couldn’t see him. ‘By the time we finally went, the swelling had started to go down again.’

He was quiet for a moment, staring at Fleur. ‘You can’t have been
that
allergic.’

I threw my spoon into my bowl. The porcelain cracked, just a hair.

‘So yeah, she’s got you,’ I said, and stepped over the fracture that had opened between us.

*

Jenny Greer had adorned herself with a frayed green cardigan, a little elephant brooch. I sat on her couch and stared at her. She stared back. We did that for a while, just staring at one another. She didn’t crack. Staring. I blinked. Her air-conditioner hummed in the corner.

‘Nice day,’ I said.

She put her notebook in her lap, curled her fingers around it. ‘How are you, Heath-uh?’

‘My dad is here.’

She looked over her notes. ‘Your dad from Queensland?’

‘Right, that dad. My only dad.’

‘Were you expecting him?’

‘No, he sort of washed in with the storm.’

Her mouth made an ‘O’ shape. ‘How do you feel about that?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’ My shoes had scuffed the edge of the couples’ couch.

‘We don’t have to talk about him right away.’ She pushed a bit of stringy hair behind her ear. ‘David says you haven’t gone back for your check-up yet.’ I looked her up and down, her limp mouth.

‘Is he allowed to tell you that?’

‘He can tell me whatever he likes.’ The mouth curled up at the edges. ‘I can choose whether or not to listen to him.’

‘I don’t know how he has time.’

She shrugged. ‘My emails are always open.’ Pause. ‘Do you want to tell me a bit about why you haven’t been?’

It’s those walls
, I tried to tell her.
The walls with ears
. It’s the whiteness of them, the way you can’t look right at them. What if I get to the doctor and he tells me, you know, the thing.

‘What if he tells me the thing?’ I said.

‘What thing might he tell you?’ She used a red pen, as though correcting my life on the fly.

That I didn’t deserve it. That I wouldn’t be any good at it.

‘I don’t know.’

That I was broken.

‘It’s just a check-up. They’ll look you over, make sure everything is where it should be.’

‘Everything isn’t where it should be.’

She flicked through her notes. ‘You had a caesarean, right? Don’t you think it’s worth getting that checked, at least? That’s major surgery.’

The blue curtain and the blurred room afterwards with Dave in the corner, Dave watching TV, Dave eating my trays of gloop, Dave going out to get a coffee and talking to the nurses and me pushing my hands into my open wound.

‘It feels fine.’

The elephant moved as she wrote. ‘Perhaps you could find a local doctor. I’m sure they would be able to make sure everything was okay.’

‘Physically, you mean.’

‘Yes, physically.’

But I liked it open. I liked that when I needed to, I could find the wound again and pinch it, twist it between my fingers until the pain came back just the same as before. It was a time machine. A way to be back in the room with the baby in the blanket, before they wheeled her away.

‘I’ll ask around,’ I said, but I wouldn’t.

Jenny’s knees cracked as she crossed her legs. ‘This will be our last appointment for the year,’ she said.

‘Already?’

‘I’m off ’til the third week of January.’

‘Are you going away?’

‘Not far,’ she said. ‘Spa country.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I can keep myself alive until January.’ The walls turned their ears towards me.

‘Is that something you’ve been thinking about?’

‘Being alive? Nah. It just sort of happens, you know? Breathe in, breathe out.’

The notepad fluttered under her pen. ‘Do you have a plan to end your life?’

‘Of course not.’

‘So you haven’t thought about it?’

‘Everybody’s thought about it.’

She had her pen poised, her little red bullet. ‘Not everybody.’

‘I don’t currently have a plan to end my life, no.’

‘But before?’

‘Before doesn’t matter anymore.’ I tried to chew the words up again, undo them. The elephant brooch had hypnotised me with its emerald eye.

I wondered about plans. About that plan, specifically. I wondered about standing at the edge of a concrete bridge after months of waiting, the cold rush of water, the broken bones. I wondered about the lack of plan, the opportunist; a man who drives his car into a concrete pylon without considering his survival, his requisite life-long care. Planning exhausted me. If anything, if at all, if I ever did, I would be spontaneous. I would be dynamite, hurtling into space on a whim.

‘No,’ I said again. ‘I don’t have a plan. What about you? Do you have a plan?’

‘No.’ Clack-dog. I tipped the dog’s picture face-down. ‘Why does my dog upset you?’ she said.

I didn’t care about the dog. Ugly old thing. I righted the picture frame and looked at it again. Poor dumb dog, left in a kennel for a month so Jenny could go to Daylesford.

‘He comes with me, you know,’ she said.

‘What are you, a mind reader?’

‘His name’s Pavlov.’ I laughed. ‘I got him so I’d have a running partner, but he’s slow. So we just go out for cheese platters instead.’

‘Sounds like my kind of dog.’

‘He’s allergic to chicken. Stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Wouldn’t have survived five minutes in the wild.’

‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘That’s why we domesticate things, so they’ll rely on us.’

‘Is that the reason?’

Clack-dog. She ran her fingers along the frame.

‘What date in January?’ I said.

‘The seventeenth.’

She wrote the date on a Post-It note, passed it to me with her skeleton hand.

‘I’ll remember,’ I said. ‘That was my mother’s birthday.’

A big red line and a new circle, one with a cross through it. I pulled my legs into the couples’ couch. Doors to the other rooms opened and closed, feet pounded the hall as though the bell had gone for recess.

‘Do you have any children?’ I said.

Jenny put down her notebook. ‘Yes,’ she said, and nothing more. We sat in our respective parenthoods and watched each other while the clock ticked us down. The only photo on her desk, that gold frame.

Dave met me on the corner, leaning against the car with his hands in his pockets. His hair hung limp across his forehead. Lines ran away from him, down the curves of his face, his mouth, his neck.

‘How was it?’ he said.

‘Are you going to ask me every time?’

He frowned. ‘Probably.’

‘It was fine. I’m fine.’

He put his hand through mine; it was coal. ‘You have to want to get better, you know.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’ God, those aching silences. We drove home along the cliffs and I stared at his ear and it moved up and down as though he were talking. ‘Whatcha been doing?’ I said finally.

‘Working.’

‘Working? Boring.’

He smiled at me from the side of his face. ‘Someone’s got to.’ And then the smile was gone.

At home he sat at the table-for-two and pulled open his laptop. The house simmered in the late afternoon sun, dripping in from the west.

‘What are you working on?’ I said.

‘The school’s having a fundraiser,’ he said. ‘They’ve got me doing the flyers.’

‘What kind of fundraiser?’ I said.

‘For a new music school,’ he said. ‘They had some benefactor bequeath a few old instruments and now they have this idea they could have a whole wing just for music.’ He clacked away on his laptop. ‘No wing for History, of course, or English.’

‘Well, music is the food of love.’ I poured hot water into his cup, dropped in a tea bag.

‘That doesn’t make sense. It’s “
if
music be the food of love”.’ He threw his hands around. ‘“
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, / the appetite may sicken, and so die.”’

‘That’s what I meant,’ I said. He grabbed for my face and pulled it to his lips. ‘Anyway, they want to build a new music school, so we’re having a thing. A night. A gala.’ On his screen, he’d pasted a photo of an old-school drive-in screen into a Word document. ‘There’s a drive-in down at Dromana and they’re hiring the whole place out for Christmas.’

‘That sounds kind of nice,’ I said. I imagined a field of 50s fast-back cars, beautiful men and handsome women hanging from their windows. Kissing instead of watching.

His face brightened. ‘We should go. We can all go. Sylvia has that big old car.’

I then imagined all of us crammed into the boot of Sylvia’s car, sneaking in five-for-the-price-of-one. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, why don’t we?’

There were a thousand reasons not to, of course, but Dave throbbed in the space I’d created and said, ‘We’ll have such a good time,’ as though it were true.

I went out to the deck and looked over the garden and listened to the currawong with his song like a pan flute. I drew a sagging willow tree and her flurry of dandelion seeds, and the sad little eyes of the wood borers. Fleur sat next to me and smoked endless cigarettes. The rain pulsed just out of sight, a mere suggestion.

‘What are you looking at?’ I said to my body.

F
LEUR’S NOT HOME
yet so I sit on the doorstep and pick blades of grass from cracks in the cement. She’s always late, now Dad is offshore again. At Jimmy’s house. Everyone knows that’s where she is. Even Gran, but she says she can’t do anything about it. Fleur’s sixteen, she says. She’s practically an adult.

My body hurts like I’ve been bruised everywhere. When I bend my knees they moan and groan, and my tummy aches like there’s a pile of bricks stacked up on it. Mum says she feels like that sometimes. When she’s stressed out. Which is always.

Mum is at work. She’s got a new job down by the police station. I don’t really know what she does but it’s something with envelopes. Stuffing lots of envelopes, she says. I don’t know what that means, but she’s never home when I get home anymore. Not like before. She always had something for afternoon tea.

I look down the street. Sometimes a bus comes past, taking old people down to the library. I wonder if they would stop and take me down to the library. I could go to the chemist as well, ask them to check my knees and my tummy. This might be what Mum means when she says
her stomach is in knots
. Mine feels like it’s in knots. And like the knots are punching me. I take out the book I stole from Mum’s room at the top of the stairs:
Animal Farm
. Probably more Fleur’s kind of book. She loves animals.

Next door someone is making spaghetti bolognese or lasagne or shepherd’s pie. The air smells like tomatoes and onion and they’re clanging pots around and someone is laughing.

*

Fleur gets home right when the sun is going down and says, What are you doing outside?

I say, I forgot my key.

She rolls her eyes and opens the door and pretends to lock me out.

Seriously, Fleur! I say. I need to get inside!

She’s laughing and holding the door closed. Shithead is barking like crazy, trying to get her nose under it.

Fleur! I say. I bang on the door. I say, It feels wet in my undies.

Fleur says, Oh Jesus. You’re fucking eleven. She opens the door and makes me sit on the chair in the hallway. My chest is tight like I’m going to cry.

What’s going on? I say.

Just sit, she says. Stay right there.

She comes back with a bag with DOLLY on it and some wet wipes. Inside the bag is a packet of stuff that looks like cigarettes, and I say, I knew that’s what you were doing with Jimmy.

She says, They’re tampons, you idiot. That’s all I’ve got.

I don’t know what tampons are but I nod because I don’t want Fleur to think I’m an idiot. There’s a leaflet in the packet. It’s got a diagram of a lady’s bits and I try not to laugh but I do anyway.

Fleur says, It’s not funny, Heather. I’m not going to put your damn tampon in. Look at the diagram.

Gross, I say. I’m not doing that.

Fleur sighs and folds up a bit of toilet paper and shoves it in my hand.

You’ll have to use this then, she says. Ask Mum, if she ever comes home.

She goes off down the hallway and she thinks I can’t hear her but she says, I shouldn’t have to do this.

Mum gets home at five past nine. She’s tired. I can tell by the way her eyelashes are all stuck together.

Hi girls, she says. We haven’t had any dinner so Fleur makes some two-minute noodles and I eat them in the hallway and listen to Mum in bed and wish Dad wasn’t away.

The next day Fleur grabs me in the kitchen.

Tie your jumper around your waist, she says.

Why? I say.

Just in case, she says.

Then a bit later Mum knocks on my door and says, Is there anything you want to talk about? and I know straight away she’s found my undies behind the toilet.

No, I say.

She has a little bag and she sits down on my bed with it.

I got this for you, she says. It’s okay to be scared.

I tell her, I’m not scared.

I can just leave it here for you, okay? You don’t have to look at it now. It’s just to help you understand what’s going on in your body.

She’s sort of looking around me, past my ear.

Nothing’s going on in my body, I say. What’s going on in your body?

She puts the bag down. What are you reading? she says.

Animal Farm
, I say.

You’re a bit young for that, aren’t you? she says.

I like it, I say. It’s about how we’re all just animals.

She lets out a really big sigh, and she says, Come and talk to me when you’re ready.

When I look in the bag there are pictures of naked bodies and some nappies wrapped in plastic and I don’t know what to do with them so I put it all in the cupboard.

O
N THE LAST
day of the school year, Dad insisted on taking Dave and me to the beach. I met him at the Cosy Courtyard, where he sat on the porch with a woman about his age; she had an overnight bag spilling on to the footpath. His knees jiggled inside his shorts. I let the car idle for a moment and watched them, the woman talking with her head down and Dad putting his hand on her shoulder and taking it off again. He was long and dry, hair slapped across his scalp. The woman opened her mouth and closed it again, threw her hands in the air as though sharing a timeless epic. Along the pergola, wisteria had curled at the edges where the sun had burned it.