The Paper House (23 page)

‘Sylvia,’ Fleur said, ‘who can we call?’ The old body groaned involuntarily.

‘Old ladies always have address books,’ I said. ‘I’m going to look for one.’

I drove with both hands on the wheel. The road slipped past, as though I were not driving at all, but being propelled forward.

Sylvia’s front door was wide open, and Harriet yapped back and forth across the threshold.

‘Ashok? Are you here?’

The old man appeared in the entryway. ‘What is going on? Heather, what’s happened? Where is she?’ Harriet snapped at my feet.

‘Sylvia is – how did you get in here?’

‘I have a spare key,’ he said. ‘Where have they taken her?’

‘You have a key? Why?’

‘Even old fellas like me have feelings, Heather. Tell me what’s happened.’

‘Sylvia’s in the hospital. I don’t know who to call. They need a person who can make some decisions.’ I pulled papers from the kitchen bench. Birthday cards. Recipes. ‘Her sons, where are they? I just need a phone number, it must be here somewhere.’

The house breathed out, empty.

‘I’ve got their numbers. We’ll stop by my place on the way.’

‘Why do
you
have them?’

Ashok put his hand on my shoulder. ‘She’s eighty-nine years old. This is not the first time she has had a spell. Last time they were here they asked me to keep an ear out for her.’ Harriet licked the floor next to him. He locked her in his house and made himself a flask of tea (‘The tea there is horrible,’ he said), and we sat together in the emergency room. Fleur sat with her back to the vending machine, her cast across the floor, as though her pain could be eased by inconveniencing someone else.

Sylvia was responding to stimuli, the nurse told us, and she would be moved to a ward in an hour, or two hours, or sometime before dinner. ‘You can go home and get some rest,’ she said, but we bought egg sandwiches from the kiosk and ate them with our skin stuck to a vinyl bench. Through the window we watched the wind in the flowerbeds: agapanthus tossing their hair around, and a Wanderer butterfly with its wings of stained glass. He drank the tea from his flask. I had a terrible flat white from the machine in the corridor. The silence was uncomfortable; I only knew Ashok in the context of his big house and his small dog.

Gurney wheels squeaked for oil.
Code blue!
A stampede of people in coats and other people in scrubs and a clutch of children on their knees.

‘What did you do before you came here?’ Ashok said.

I watched the children as their hearts crunched to a stop. ‘I worked for the government.’ The boy had stitches in his forehead.

‘Oh, right. And what will you do next?’

A man in a black suit came running towards them. He picked up the smallest girl. ‘I like gardening,’ I said.

‘I can tell.’

The man’s face was red and swollen; the girl touched it with her pink hands. They were all hugging, then: the man in the middle and the children around him with their faces in his clothes, their hair wet and thick and their shoulders heaving, bodies aching for the air they had breathed in the moments before, when the doctor hadn’t come yet and the world was no worse than it had been yesterday. The walls turned their ears away from me, towards that cluster of babies.

‘It soothes me,’ I said.

‘That’s important,’ he said.

Sylvia had a bed by the window, sharing with one other lady who was equally faint, folded into the beds as though they were wax paper. Fleur sat in the chair with her crutches propped against the side table, reading from a copy of
Woman’s Day
with William and Kate on the cover. ‘They’re calling her “Waity Katie”, and if these photos from Majorca are anything to go by, she could be waiting a lot longer yet.’ The words were strange coming from Fleur’s mouth. Sylvia stared ahead.

To us, Fleur said, with some surprise, ‘Hey. Hey, Ashok.’

‘How is she?’ he said. He carried flowers that I hadn’t seen him buy.

Fleur looked to me and to Ashok and then to Sylvia, eyes like cherries. ‘She’s awake. She hasn’t said anything. They’re waiting for the MRI machine.’

Ashok’s shoulders drooped. ‘Stroke?’

‘Maybe.’

The old man sat at the foot of Sylvia’s bed and squeezed her tiny legs through the blanket. ‘Sylvia,’ he said. ‘The cakes were delicious.’ She blinked, and blinked again. Her eyes were damp and swollen. ‘I was going to bring Harriet, but I didn’t think I should. I got you these, though.’ He handed Fleur a posy of snowdrops and a little white box. Sylvia’s mouth moved, open and closed and open, a fish in a white puddle, brain starved of oxygen, heart full, and he squeezed her hand and she squeezed his hand. And then Fleur got up and left the room, click-clacking across the floor. I trailed after her like the least favourite child. The skin around her eyes had shrunk and puckered with her crying. The situation with Albert seemed so obvious in retrospect. I told her about Ashok’s spare key, about he and Harriet standing in the doorway as though they’d been there hundreds of times before.

‘Do you think they’re lovers?’ I said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Her fists were clenched.

‘Why would they ask him to look out for her, though? He’s practically as old as she is. Why not the guy on the other side, what’s his name?’

‘Please stop talking.’ She cracked her knuckles, frowning deep crevasses into her face. ‘What else did he say?’

‘He said this isn’t the first time she’s had an episode like this.’

She dropped her head. ‘The doctors said it might be early stage dementia. Or Alzheimer’s.’ I rubbed my sister’s back, saw my mother’s hand on her shirt, wondered at the memory of consolation, of Fleur needing to be consoled. I couldn’t remember anything like it.

‘We should wait until they’ve done all the tests.’

She put her hands over her ears. ‘But he’s so
old
. How can he care for her if he is just as old as she is?’

‘He probably doesn’t care
for
her. Just
about
her.’

I had thought about old age often. That I would never watch my parents grow old together. My parents had moved side by side. Their place together in my life had been brief, temporary. That they had shown me the way forward and then left me on the path on my own. For years I had mourned their agedness; longed to see them on a park bench with their white heads together, muttering their own kind of nonsense, knees touching.

Fleur read aloud from
Little Women
, which Sylvia waved away, and then from
What Katy Did
, which she seemed to prefer. Her face cracked in smiles and frowns, and when Fleur paused, the old lady motioned for her to keep reading, so she did. She read to the smell of stale clothes and alcohol wipes, and the regular beat of rain behind the faded awning. She read through the ringing of bells, and she read through the buzzing of alarms, and she read until the evening tea trolley rattled around and Sylvia put her hand on her arm and said: ‘Thank you, nurse.’

In the late evening, I pulled a chair up next to Fleur. Her body groaned under the weight of her obligation to Sylvia, though it was imagined. She kept reading after Sylvia had gone to sleep, read page after page to the soft rise and fall of the old lady’s walnut chest. My big sister, sunburnt, sandpaper, but childlike too, tripping over the longer words.

‘Hey,’ I said.

She sighed and closed the book. ‘Doesn’t even know I’m here.’

‘Yeah, but you’re doing it anyway. You’ve been here for fifteen hours. Have you even had a smoke break?’

She shrugged. ‘Nup.’

‘So you do care after all.’ I leaned my head on her shoulder. ‘Maybe that’s your version of casseroles.’ I listened to her blood running, the wheeze of her lungs. The very small voice that said: ‘Thank you.’ Or maybe didn’t.

‘They will put her into care anyway,’ Ashok told me in the hall. ‘That’s the way it goes.’

A nurse with a clipboard said that visiting hours were over – ‘Family only,’ – deaf to Fleur’s protest.

‘When will we know more?’ she said, and he shrugged and moved on.

In the darkness of the room, Sylvia was a mere whisper under the stiff blankets. ‘We’re being kicked out,’ Fleur said to the silence. Ashok slept with his head on the bed and his arms loose at his sides. A green light flickered in the hall.

Much later, with Dave asleep, I pressed my face against my bedroom window and watched the steam gather into ghosts.

In the next room, a phone rang.

Fleur’s voice: ‘Hello?’ and a pause. ‘Thanks for letting us know.’

The roar of her throat ran into the boards and shook the house, and I rubbed away the ghosts to watch the pittosporums shake. I went to her door. Pushed it open a little. She lay on the bed with her back to me.

‘I have to go to the hospital,’ she said without moving.

I slipped in next to her and wrapped my arms around her waist. My knee clunked against her cast. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve never done this before.’

‘What, invaded someone else’s personal space?’

‘Never hugged you like this.’

She was quiet. No part of her moved, not a single cog turning. A couple of possums shrieked outside the window. Fleur had left the curtains open. I didn’t know the house from this angle, looking out to the road. A single streetlight blinked yellow, watching over Ashok and his little dog.

‘Let’s wait until morning. You did everything you could.’

‘No one ever does
everything
they could.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Thank you.’ I pinned myself against her until she slept, twitching as she passed through dreams of the paperclip woman in her hospital bed.

The ground was hot but the garden hung limp and wet against the backdrop of grey sky, contained against its will. I imagined Noel’s little house picked up by the current of the creek and carried away to sea. He would bob around in the ocean like a shiny red buoy, just his head above the water and his legs flailing wildly underneath, and his house bricked and stoned in a sandy grave.

The plans I had had for the garden, in the weeks after we had seen the house but not lost our daughter (the best weeks), were quaint and easy. I would take out the pittosporums and replace them with elms like green paper. I would plant tall roses in a row, a private regiment. I would install a bench by the creek, where I would sit and stare at my daughter’s blonde head. I had imagined a bridge over the water and a circle of red-hatted toadstools.

Next door, the red house glowed under spotlights, the faint sound of a dinner party winding up. At the bottom of the hill Noel came out to greet me, squeezed into his shirt like a summer lamb.

‘Been hitting the chips?’ I said, and he looked down at his body, which throbbed with his laughter.

‘It’s important to enjoy oneself,’ he said. ‘You look nice.’

I saw I’d worn something of a ball gown, heeled shoes with bows at the toe. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I wonder where these shoes came from.’

I sat on a metal stool and noticed there was a window above his head, then wondered why a house in perpetual darkness would need a window. ‘It isn’t always dark down here,’ he said, and rearranged a family of ceramic chickens with their heads broken off.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind it. I like a bit of darkness sometimes.’

‘It holds you in, doesn’t it? Sometimes in the daytime I feel like I could just fly right off.’

‘You’re drunk,’ I said.

He bowed. ‘Guilty as charged.’ He told me he’d found a family of hopping mice and kept one for me, spinning in a wheel on the windowsill. It looked at me with its pointed face. ‘I think it likes you,’ he said. ‘You can visit it whenever you fancy. But first, a party.’

We took off from the path and through the steep undergrowth. The layer of moss was at once both a thick, safe carpet and a slippery foe. I was as light-footed as I knew how to be, plucking my way along the hillside in almost pitch blackness, leaning into the rough bark of the swamp gums for support.

He walked without pausing to feel his way over the rocks and roots as I did, wobbling and dancing like a birch tree. He moved through the night as though he belonged to it, a grey jaguar with young feet and long legs. I felt a hundred next to him. Steam climbed from his footsteps.

We hit a steep incline and I heaved my tired body through air thick with insects. Less than a minute later we broke through the trees and into a clearing. Under the threat of midnight, local wildlife headed for home. A hurricane of pelicans shuddered by, close to our heads. The air moved and buzzed around us, carrying with it the heady smell of wattle and eucalyptus. As the moonlight filtered out, our surroundings unfurled: the grassy blanket watched over by astute, commanding mountain ash, rows of juvenile grapevines marched south towards the sea. The gusting wind from the water caught my hair and my dress before it shot away.

The ground moved under my feet. A ring of mushrooms glowed under the moon.

‘A fairy party,’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

‘It’s perfect.’

A whisper in the trees and footprints the size of buttons in the mud.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘a party is not a party without wine.’ He pulled a bottle of it from nowhere. ‘This is a very fine drop, and I know that because someone nicked it from a very fine cellar.’ He winked at me.

‘Do you have glasses?’

‘Of course. What kind of party do you think this is?’

We sat under the trees and drank into the night. Each time a bottle was empty, another appeared. He told me stories about newts and horses pulling carriages, and I told him stories about oceans and pine trees with baubles, and we made up new stories about what might come later. He kicked off his shoes, poked his toes out from his moth-eaten socks. We drank until our heads had swollen to twice their size, until our mouths moved without thinking and our thoughts flip-flopped in the dirt like snagged fish.

‘I’ve been drawing,’ I said after a while.

‘Show me.’ His breath so hot near my skin, burning rings around my neck.

‘No way. I’m no good.’

He pulled up right next to my cheek. Acerbic breath, flesh pinched diabetic under glossy skin. ‘You don’t need to be good,’ he growled. ‘You just need to feel it in your bones.’ He leaned in closer. ‘Do you feel it in your bones?’