The Paper House (26 page)

‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘Look.’

Where the creek diverged and took its snaking path out to the sea, a little boat. It bobbed in the shallows on its frayed rope leash. The purple woman climbed in first; she was afraid of nothing. The boat rocked. Water splashed against the sides.

‘Come on, then,’ she said, and held out her hand. I gripped her wrist, the one with the pin-up girl tattoo.

A storm had picked up during the evening, which was exactly what I had expected might happen on a treasure hunt. The sky hung dark and as weighty as a satchel. The purple woman rowed away from the jetty, and the muscles in her arms tightened into knots.

‘Had a boat like this once,’ she said. ‘Took you out in it. Had to fight off a bear. It was going after our scones.’

‘Gosh,’ I said, but the word was blemished by my chattering teeth.

The woman rowed. We broke through a blue gate and into the open water. I hung my head over the side and kept watch for sharks. Or said I was keeping watch for sharks, but actually coughed up puddles of vomit that passed as sea foam. The boat hopped and bounced, and the sky throbbed and spat.

‘Storm coming,’ she said. Rain cracked the water. Waves came up and over the boat and my socks grew damp inside my shoes.

‘Is this safe?’ I said.

‘God, no.’ She tore a strip of fabric from her dress and tied it around her head, pulled a telescope from her pocket and squinted into it. ‘Five thousand nine hundred and forty nautical miles, I reckon. As the crow flies.’ She pulled the boat into the wind. I vomited into the sea. The night grew thick and I pulled it around me as a blanket. Every metre looked the same: black and wet. Wind roared in my ears. The purple woman pulled a fishing rod from her bag and dropped a line over the side. ‘Storms churn up all the mackerel,’ she said, smiling her gold-toothed smile. They came in one by one, the silver fish. She strung them from a bit of twine and cut their bellies open, and they danced dead-eyed under the flashing night.

‘What’s that?’ she shouted over the storm, standing and pointing.

‘What’s what?’ I said. The sea popped and groaned under the boat.

She peered into her telescope. ‘There’s a shadow out there. Looks big.’ The boat lurched. In the distance, the grey hills of headland stuck out against the sunrise.

‘What do we do?’
my-dad my-dad my-dad.

The tiny boat listed deeply towards the waves. ‘It’s coming right for us. Take these.’ She threw the oars to me, but they slipped through my sweaty hands, and the boat howled and righted itself against the towering, ferocious woman with the purple bandanna. Cold air forced its way into my lungs and was trapped there, ice cubes fighting against my quick breaths,
in-out in-out in-out
. She dived from the boat.

I cried out to the hole in the water where the purple woman had just been: ‘What are you doing?’ and commotion stirred beneath me. A thumping tail. A thundering bicep. An open mouth with rows of teeth. Water flipped and tore and birds came to sit with me on the edge of the dinghy and we all watched together, watched the breaking water and the tumbling woman and the giant fish, and the birds shouted and I shouted and the giant fish tossed the boat clear into the air and when it came down, the ocean was red.

‘Well then,’ the woman said, climbing back into the boat. She plucked the purple bandanna from the sea and tied it around her head. The birds floated like buoys and picked at god-knew-what below the surface. Ahead, the land hummed. I picked up the oars in my sweaty hands and rowed into the wind. I rowed all morning – sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, sometimes in a circle – and the birds brought trinkets from the sea and dropped them at our feet. A gold watch. A serrated tooth. Water broke through the wood of the dinghy and pooled in the hull. Rain pricked my skin where the hot sun had burned it.

‘We have to get to shore,’ she said. I paddled and paddled and she stood watch and shouted: ‘Hard to starboard!’ and ‘Heave!’ and the wind whipped around us and we were gymnasts spinning in the air. ‘There.’ She pointed. ‘Land ho!’ I rowed and she jumped up and down and my stomach turned over. The boat thudded into the sand. It was a small island, small and green, small and green and grassy. The woman dragged the dinghy ashore and we stood together and watched the water swell.

A man came out of a corrugated shed with its door hanging off and rubbed his head.

‘Don’t see many folks out this way,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘Ernest.’

‘Shelley,’ the woman said.

He stood with a hand on a hip and motioned to the water. ‘Someone’s pulled the plug,’ he said.

‘You’re right,’ the woman said.

Higher and higher the ocean climbed, over the sand and the rocks and up along the beach and across the grass, and my body filled with every feeling I had ever had and the sky grew dark and full of bats.

‘Help me.’ I clawed at my throat. I grabbed Ernest’s salt-worn hands. ‘Help. There are insects in my chest.’

The woman in the purple dress came close to me and rested her hand against my ribs. ‘Shh,’ she said, disappearing momentarily beneath the water. ‘Of course there are.’

Thunder growled.

‘They’re attracted to light.’

And her voice caught on the wind, her voice everywhere around me and the cold wake from the sea and the water pounded down the path and the sea rose to my feet and I stood there up to my knees and she stood right there next to me, there with her hand in my hand and her feet in the ocean

and I said

Are you afraid?

and she said

It’s

just

w

a

t

e

r

The walls are so white. I can’t look right at them.

‘What do
you
think it means, Heather?’ A man with a clipboard and sweat in the folds of his face. He stood by a window. Beyond him, I saw the blue of the sky and the heads of skyscrapers that I recognised from some time before.

‘I can’t move my arms,’ I said.

‘We’ll fix that soon. So?’

‘What do I think what means?’

He held up a picture in charcoal – a woman with long hair and thin fingers, which she had wrapped around the fat arms of child, and both sets of eyes stared right past me.

‘The woman looks happy,’ I said.

People came and went, ones with coats and others with notepads. Fleur thumped her leg around my room, saying things like
I was gone for one fucking night,
and
What are we going to do?
and I wanted to tell her that I knew it was going to be fine but I didn’t know which words to use. Dave sat on the bed with his hand on mine, and I looked at him in a way that I hoped was reassuring, but the way he looked back told me it probably wasn’t.

‘It’s going to be okay,’ he said, and it seemed obvious and trite.

‘I’m going to draw for a while,’ I said, but I couldn’t find my sketchbook.

‘I have to pack,’ Fleur said. She was leaving on Wednesday, but I didn’t know how far away that was. Minutes or hours later: ‘I can’t do this again.’ She looked at me with childhood eyes.

I slept and didn’t sleep, drifting around a dense fog filled with things I had forgotten. Glass doors with steel bolts and multiple keys, the clanging as they closed one by one, and the nurse with breasts the size of my head staring back at me,
Go on then, get out, they have to rest.
Gran’s green coat, pockets as deep as my arm, fishing around for coins and finding tablets instead, white and scored and wrapped in tin foil that rustled as she snatched them away from me. Dad leaving to go back to sea, and Mum crying, holding on to his jacket,
I can’t do it without you, don’t leave me here on my own, I don’t know what I’ll do
, and me watching him get into his car and breathing a sigh of relief and then not even looking back to her where she stood in the doorway with her arms down.

Tell us about your daughter,’ they said.

‘I don’t know who you mean,’ I said.

The woman in the mirror hadn’t brushed her hair for weeks. It stuck out in all directions like straw in a field. She stared at me as if I had stolen her sheep, or slept with her son; just a kind of dumbstruck hollowness.

Sometimes I talked to her: ‘Gloria is crazy. Have you seen her carrying that cat around? Proper nuts.’ And other times: ‘Obviously I’m fine. I’m pretty sure they’ll be letting me out soon.’

At night I lay in the steel bed and looked at the moon reflecting off the mirror, and sometimes the face was there, staring back without blinking.

They took me to a small room with a window in the ceiling and I lay on a vinyl daybed and watched the clouds go over.

They said, ‘Heather, do you know where you are?’ and I told them about a time we found a merry-go-round in a park without trees, and Mum sat on a horse with a pink mane and I sat in a carriage made for two, and Fleur didn’t want to sit next to me at the beginning but eventually she did, and Mum told us to imagine it was spinning around and around, and by the end of the ride I was so dizzy in the head that I got off and vomited all over the ground, but Fleur just went and put her drink in the bin and walked home on her own.

‘So you think you’re on a merry-go-round?’ they said.

‘Obviously not,’ I said, but around it went.

‘Maybe I could get you something for your bedside table,’ Dave said. ‘Some flowers, or a picture frame. You know, something to remind you of home.’

‘You’re not allowed personal effects,’ they said.

‘I know,’ I said.

Dad came in the afternoon. He brought a personal effect anyway: a frayed photo of a woman and her children, one a baby. They had a cake. It was her birthday.

We all ate dinner together in a hall, wearing our blue gowns, with plastic knives and forks, sitting at round tables so we could all stare at each other. Mondays were the best day, when we had lasagne with Greek salad, and a man in a hat sat on the windowsill and played a miniature guitar.

I made friends with a woman who carried around a stuffed cat and spoke to it as though it were her child. She smelled like the inside of a shoe. Sometimes, when she fell asleep in her chair in the common room, I spoke to the cat. ‘I can stop crying and still love you,’ I said. ‘Just because I’m not thinking about you right now doesn’t mean I’m not always thinking about you.’

In the doorway, they scratched their pens on their paper like claws.

‘Tell us about your daughter,’ they said, and I told them what I knew, that she waited at the bus stop in the rain, and when it was dark and still no one had come to pick her up, she walked home close to the fence so that no one would kidnap her, and when she arrived the house was lit up like a carnival, and a man in the doorway looked at her and then his mouth dropped open and he started crying,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry
.

‘No, tell us about
your
daughter,’ they said.

In the morning, when my tray came around, I had Coco Pops for breakfast and a little side dish of chocolate custard.

Sometimes people died.

They took away anything that could help us take our own lives: no knives, no string, carefully regulated doses of medication.

But people died anyway.

They took them away in the middle of the night, gurneys down the hallway like rollicking ghosts. We watched them with our faces pressed against the glass, and they knew we did.

Sometimes people died.

I guess they just wished harder than the rest of us.

‘Tell us about your mother,’ they said.

‘I don’t know who you mean,’ I said.

Fleur called me on the phone in my room. It rang faintly, as though worried it might startle me, with a red light blinking:
If it’s not too much trouble, please answer the call
.

‘How are you?’ she said.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I think they might let me go home soon. I take three white pills in the evening, and two others in the morning. They say they need to try me on this regime, so they can see if it’s better than the one with the blue pills.’

‘I’ll come and visit you soon,’ she said.

‘How are the sheep?’

‘Don’t worry about the sheep.’

They wheeled Gloria away in the middle of the night, chattering down the hall with her stuffed cat.

They took me back to the small room and I watched the clouds while they talked about a house at the beach.

‘That one looks like a chihuahua,’ I said.

‘Does it?’ They wrote things on their paper and asked me to press a button when I felt something, so I pressed it without stopping because I could feel everything all at once.

‘We have something for you,’ they said. Thick paper and a rainbow of pencils.

‘Why?’ I said.

‘We thought you might like to draw,’ they said.

I did want to draw, but not for them.

‘“From scratch” is a funny thing that people say, isn’t it?’ Clouds shaped like cats went over the ceiling window.

‘What do you mean?’ the doctor said.

‘I mean, it’s never really “from scratch”, is it? They don’t plant the seed. They don’t milk the cow. They don’t slaughter the pig.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘We never really do anything completely for ourselves.’

‘Sometimes we do,’ he said, but I couldn’t think of any examples.

‘Tell us about your mother,’ they said.

‘She had soft hands,’ I said.

‘Is that all?’ they said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

Dave had an overnight bag and a pair of my old sneakers with pink laces.

‘These are the only ones I could find,’ he said. I put them on. He got a day pass from the front desk and took me next door, to a poky café with six chairs and one waitress (who made us order from the counter anyway). We drank coffee that tasted like the city, proud and bold, and he hooked his ankle around my ankle and his eyes bore through me.