The Paper House (21 page)

‘Stop it.’

She shook her head. ‘I went along with it, obviously. You had to. Sylvia, though? Could just be a lonely old widow, I guess.’

I snatched her plate.

‘Hey! I was still eating that.’

‘You okay here on your own?’ I said.

‘Yeah. Don’t be a dickhead.’

Sylvia told me she was allergic to bananas – ‘They make me so bloated!’ – so she took a Nutella pancake. The wind coming up from the garden was hot, and had an organic smell like rotting leaves, but we sat on the balcony anyway – me in the wicker chair, Sylvia in the blue armchair. ‘This is nice chair,’ she said. ‘More people should have couches at breakfast.’ Nutella around her mouth. She wiped it off with the back of her hand. She eased herself out of the chair. ‘I take these plates to kitchen if you show me your drawings.’

I looked at her. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

She put her finger to her lips. ‘It’s okay. You show me.’

I had drawn Dave, once, before he had ever seen any of my pictures. He was sitting on the balcony with a beer in his hand and hair over his eye, watching the city ease itself into sleep. I drew the Roman curve of his nose and his long lower eyelashes (the top ones were just regular length), and the shape of his fingers resting on top of the bottle as he strummed them, and his hunched shoulders. I couldn’t get his mouth right, the way it turned up at the corners but wasn’t exactly a smile.
Show me
, he said afterwards, and I said
No way!
but I woke up in the night and there he was, looking at himself the way I saw him.

‘I don’t do faces,’ I said.

‘I know,’ Sylvia said.

The sketchbook hummed. Birds, probably, or mice. I opened it. ‘These are petunias,’ I said.

‘I know petunias. I like pink flowers.’

I looked at the page. ‘These are white.’

‘Yes, white.’

She pawed through its pages, nodding her head and grinding her teeth. ‘So many drawings. You like drawing.’

‘I guess.’

‘Your favourite is?’

‘Snowdrops,’ I said. Their little bowed heads, white like bonnets with screen stitching. I opened to the page. ‘These.’

‘I call them spring snowflakes. Just grow from nowhere! I never plant them. Maybe they come on wind.’

Under her watch I drew the edible heads of nasturtium and the upright ballerinas that were primulas, and she told me how the street had changed. Her house was the oldest, she said. The original farmhouse, white-walled and bay-windowed. There had been stables down the side before they subdivided, which was what everyone did in those days, she said. Now there was a two-storey thing with
period features
that came from a modern factory. Sylvia hated it. When she’d moved in, she and Albert had had two black-haired boys and a Samoyed dog, and they’d grown vegetables and everything smelled of the ocean.

‘You tell me about this one,’ she said, pointing at the open page.

‘Flowering gum.
Corymbia ficifolia
.’

‘You know the fancy names!’

‘My mum knew them.’

‘Smart lady. Flowering gum.’ She repeated it in my broad accent. ‘Red flowers so pretty and all the parrots come to eat them and not my lemons.’

‘They’re good like that.’

She put her arm around me. I breathed her in: garlic, mornings, winter. ‘Heather,’ she said. ‘I will make you minestrone. Just in case.’

Dave emerged later in the morning and went to the kitchen without saying a word. He picked up his plate. ‘These are cold.’ His face fell. ‘Couldn’t wake me for pancakes?’

‘You had a big night.’

Dad followed close behind. ‘Pancakes?’

‘Sylvia ate yours.’

‘Sylvia!’ He tapped her arm. ‘You old joker. Cornflakes please.’

‘Maybe that works at your fancy B&B,’ I said.

Sylvia fussed and fossicked in the kitchen. ‘There is no Cornflakes. You want Coco Pops?’ Dad’s delight was almost palpable.

‘So, Heather,’ he said, with his mouth full of chocolate milkshake, ‘I went into your garden. Thought I might do some weeding.’

My throat constricted. ‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah. Couldn’t see any weeds. Not a one. Not a penny. Just these huge mozzies. Heather’ – he put down his spoon – ‘you should have warned me about your enormous country mosquitoes.’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘You gotta tell me your secrets. Up north I’ve got a yard the size of a laundry room and even then I’m weeding about every day.’

‘I think I might have asked the guy from down the road to pop in and do it. Periodically.’

‘What guy?’ Dave said.

‘The one from the house with the pillars.’

‘Well he’s doing a good job,’ Dad said.

Dave frowned at me. ‘I didn’t know you did that. How much is it costing?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I bartered some of Sylvia’s biscuits. Isn’t that right, Sylvia?’

She looked at all of us, from one to the next, wringing her hands. ‘I make cake! You like chocolate cake? I have recipe with chillies.’

‘Sure, Sylvia,’ said Dad. ‘I like cake.’

‘No thanks,’ Dave said.

‘But you love cake.’

‘No, I don’t.’ He slammed his fist on the sink. ‘I don’t know what’s going on down there but it’s not normal. For Christ’s sake. We’re just trying to help you. All of us. I don’t know what else to do.’

I shouted right back: ‘It’s not my fault Jenny-fucking-Greer’s gone to the Bahamas or wherever. She’s supposed to be fixing me.’

‘She’s in
Daylesford
. And she’s not fixing you.’ The door slammed behind him.

I told Dad, ‘She’s not even a doctor.’ He slurped the last of his Coco Pops and didn’t make eye contact.

I went to the bedroom, sat alone in the dark. I could not remember the last time I had wished for my mother so fiercely; I felt it in my arms and my legs and especially in my hands, which grabbed and grasped at the air in case she materialised, in case she appeared there and I missed her. I wished so intensely that I smelled her, butter and flour, gin and tonic, irises and daisies, there in the room with me with her hair down, brushing against my face, eyelashes on my skin, almost there with me in the room but

not quite

which was probably just as well, because I wasn’t sure Dave would forgive me for leaving with her.

It’s okay, Bunny
, she didn’t say, because she wasn’t there in the room.
Everything is going to be just fine
. And she didn’t smile, and then she didn’t try to eat my feet, and then she didn’t pick the flakes of skin from my scalp or make pancakes. So I sat there in the withoutness and I sat there until I couldn’t breathe without her, so I sat there without breathing.

‘Heather?’ Dad opened the door just a crack, his face black in silhouette. ‘I’m sorry.’ He sat on the bed, next to the place where my mother wasn’t, and told me that Sylvia was making the cake but with no one left to feed it to had decided to try swapping it for some lawn mowing. My mother didn’t laugh, she didn’t ask who Sylvia was, she didn’t ask why Dad had cut his hair. ‘I know your baby died. Haven’t forgotten.’ When he touched me, my skin burned and sparked.

My mother cried. The room was dark, just a wedge of morning trying to creep around the blinds. I saw Dad’s blue pyjamas and felt his weight on my bed and heard the howling of my mother behind the walls.

‘What can I do?’

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me everything you remember.’

He smelled like her, really, which made sense given that I had mostly smelled them together. I let my head fall into his shoulder and he stroked my hair with the back of his calloused hand. ‘When you were a baby,’ he said, ‘you had this red blanket that someone or other had given to us. A friend. Nothing special, just flannel. You loved that damn blanket. Carried it with you everywhere till you were at school.’ He rested his head on mine. ‘It got lost. When we moved. Someone put it in the wrong box or dropped it in transit or something. We unpacked everything and it wasn’t anywhere. Christ, you howled. Stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and poured your little guts onto it.’

‘I remember,’ I said. ‘It had a bird embroidered on it.’

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘That was the one your mum made. To replace it.’

‘Tell me something else,’ I said, remembering its smell.

‘You probably know everything already,’ he said.

‘I don’t care.’

‘Okay, then. My father, your grandad, was a gardener, right? Sometimes he took me down the hill in his truck so I could help him unload the boxes at the market. Left at four in the bloody morning. Truck didn’t have any heating, of course, not in those days. And the passenger window got stuck half the time so he’d talk to me about being a farmer like him and I’d be sitting there with my face frozen off thinking,
Not bloody likely
.’

‘I didn’t ask for stories about you,’ I said lightly.

‘I’m getting to it.’ His body stilled. ‘That’s where I met her. Your mother. Sitting behind the loading dock with some other blokes, Dad’s mates, smoking their pipes in the pitch black. I was sixteen, I reckon. Sixteen or seventeen. She was so bloody mad. They found her stealing potatoes right out of Dad’s boxes. Half a dozen of them, carrying them round in the pockets of this huge green coat.’ He took a deep breath. ‘One of the fellas from up in the hills brought her over. She was so beautiful. Dad shouted at her, like
What in God’s name are you doing?
and she was so angry about getting caught that she shouted out,
My parents were just killed!
So Dad let her off.’

‘But they weren’t!’

‘She was a damned liar, your mother. She didn’t even want the potatoes. Bloody awkward when our folks all met up and no one was dead. But I kind of liked that about her. Made life interesting.’

‘Interesting?’

‘In the beginning, anyway.’ He rubbed my arm. ‘Tell me something you remember.’

‘The house, I guess,’ I said. ‘Sitting on the verandah. How she always had tea. Gran coming to take us shopping and driving away and watching Mum there on the verandah with her tea.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And then how she was always still sitting there when we got back.’

‘She liked it there.’

‘That’s what I thought, too. But then I wondered if maybe she was just stuck there. Like, in the beginning she liked it, but after a while she couldn’t figure out how to stop doing it. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Not really.’

‘Like she sat in front of the house for so long that she
became
the house. Right? Part of the house.’

I had burrowed so close to Dad that I felt his body vibrate with words.

‘When was the last time you went there?’

‘To the house? Never.’

‘Never once?’

‘No. I’m afraid she’ll still be sitting there.’

He whistled through his teeth. ‘What a waste of time that would be.’

That night Dave and I slept with our backs to one another. I stared at the wall until it melted into ribbons of light.

*

At the beach house we had a tiny attic room with brown carpet and a raked ceiling. One year, when Dad was home for Christmas, he built a table to fit the trapezium roof. It was light wood, full of knots, and he drilled a big hole in it to make a cup for her brushes.

I could hear her from the stairs, her granular singing voice. I sat in the crook under a stained glass window and listened to the words of Joni Mitchell, and drew the way the light came through onto the carpet, the way it was fragmented by the angle of the stairs. After a while I took the drawings to her, and she filled in the colours thrown by the lead-lined flowers.

She let me sit under her arms while she painted. Under there it smelled like turpentine. I held her other hand, picked the dirt out from under her fingernails, and she hummed and painted and I watched the brush move across the paper. I would learn how to do it, if I just watched closely enough.

There was one small window in the attic room, and it overlooked the sea. In summer the people on the beach stretched out on coloured towels and we painted those, too, and she opened the window and the sea breeze came under the glass and sat at the table with us, wet and salty. It always made the paints dry out faster, but she didn’t seem to mind. She just dipped more water into them and showed me how red and blue made purple until you added too much red, and then you just had brown.

In winter, though, the beach bore just the tired slump of people on their way to somewhere else. Sometimes it was work or school. But not every time. Sometimes, it was a rocky outcrop where the tide couldn’t reach them.

The words came down the stairs, single-file – clouds, storms, a frozen river – and I caught them and they were heavy in my hands.

Afterwards, Dad closed off the attic room. Boarded up the door and put a bookcase in front of it. It didn’t even have books in it – only trinkets. Pieces of nothing lit in different colours by the light coming in through the stained glass.

*

Sylvia melted butter and sugar in a saucepan while I watched. The air was still cool, renewing, and the kitchen began to smell like the inside of a grandmother’s apron. Not my grandmother, but someone else’s grandmother. The kind of grandmother who wasn’t required to come to the rescue, and so had time to make brandy snaps.

‘You must not let it boil. You see? Just right.’ Then it was ginger, the smell of Christmas, of fancy German biscuits. She poured out six big circles and put them in the oven. ‘Tea?’

‘Rupert’s is closing down,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, I know this,’ she said. ‘People go to big supermarkets for food. Not Rupert.’

‘All the money he has must be tied up in that shop.’

She shrugged: ‘
Che sar
à
sar
à.’

‘But that poor man,’ I said.

‘Heather,’ she said, with her hand on my shoulder, ‘world is full of things that happen like this. Every day. All nice men and nice women with they own dreams broken.’

‘But that’s horrible.’

‘Is not horrible.’ Tea. ‘Is just the way it goes. Then there is new dream, or new life. That is okay too.’ Tea. ‘Maybe Rupert go and like Perth even better than peninsula.’

Who could have believed it? The peninsula, with its rocky outcrops and green hills, vines and forest and hidden creeks with tiny bridges, seafood fresh from the boat, the winding maze of roads to take passengers from coast to coast, from the bay side (where the water was still and blue) to the open sea (which was white-crested and prone to outbursts). It seemed just right, on paper.