The Paper House (27 page)

‘How are you?’ he said, which was the same thing he said every day.

‘Fine,’ I said. I hoped I was smiling at him. ‘Maybe tomorrow we could go to the zoo? It’s just around the corner.’

‘Maybe,’ he said.

When we got back we sat in the common room and ate trifle from plastic bowls. The sponge cake was stale and the cream had been over-whipped. It was nothing like Sylvia’s, but it reminded me of home.

‘Tell us about your daughter,’ they said.

I told them about her dark hair and her eyelashes like running stitch and her lips that curved up at the edges, and I told them that she had Dave’s neat nose and my ears that stuck out from my head, and I told them she was four pounds and three ounces or one-point-nine kilos, and I told them she was buried in the blue dress with roses embroidered on the collar that had once been mine.

Dave had a necklace and it swung from his finger like a pendulum clock. Clack-dog.

I sat at the window. In movies I would have looked out over green lawns, where people wearing white gowns and walking with frames sat in outdoor lounge settings and talked to children they had forgotten. After an hour of pleasant conversation, a nurse would bring tea and the shot would switch to a close-up of an adult son with a single tear on his cheek.

On the street, a woman with a pram raised her fist to a man in striped pyjamas.

People in movie hospitals always seemed quite happy and content, as though they were just having a rest, as though they were not in a hospital but in a resort filled with like-minded individuals. Co-patients who were not violent, who were not aggressive or dangerous, who were not so monstrously sad that they couldn’t feel their own hearts. Harmonious. Like a holiday.

In the hallway, the pitched voices of the newly arrived:
Get the fuck off me! I want to go home!

Even those who arrived of their own volition went through it; the sound of the doors locking sent the sanest of the insane into hysterics. Trapped.
Contained
. Waiting for their fates to be decided by the men and women with soft voices, the ones with the needles, with the pills, with the pass-outs. You could try to fake being well –
Yes, I haven’t thought about suicide for six days
– but you wouldn’t fool anyone, the other patients least of all. They trained their eyes on you, they saw what you didn’t.

The walls turned their ears to you.

But they had stopped listening to me.

D
AVE PICKED ME
up. There were no flowers to take with us, nor cards to pack away. That was the way it went in the ward with the double-locked doors and the tiny mandolin man. In the bottom of my overnight bag I had a single musky outfit, my wallet (the money had been removed) and a pair of purple bed socks. I didn’t say goodbye to the other patients; they just watched me through windows the size of cheese slices.

Dave touched my knee. Dave touched my face. Dave touched my hair. He was smiling.

‘I’m glad to have you back,’ he said.

‘I’m glad to be back,’ I said. I wasn’t sure what that meant. Mostly I looked forward to wearing sunglasses and eating real meat.

‘I thought’ – he looked at me – ‘we could visit Gran soon. Maybe. If you’re up for it.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and I meant it.

We drove home through rows of gnarled vines and fields of black-faced sheep and fast along the generic paddocked highway. We stopped at the petrol station by the exit and I got a Golden Gaytime and ate it with the breeze on my face. Dave jiggled in his seat, his knee going up and down and smacking against his keys, which sounded like a wind chime.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘Nothing!’
Jiggle jiggle jiggle
.

We pulled into our driveway –
Cabbaga
, a copper plate on a stone letterbox. Next door, Ashok’s car sat idle. On the other side, a child ran in circles with an ice-cream container on its head. Everything about the house was familiar, from the wrinkled bark of the sugar gum to the dip in the path that clipped the undercarriage of the car.

A sign on Sylvia’s house announced that it was FOR SALE. I wondered if Fleur might buy it, just for a moment.

‘How is Dad?’ I said. I heard his words again, traces of them. His relief.

Dave leaned across to kiss my cheek. ‘He said they might come down at Easter.’

‘Both of them?’

‘If you like.’

He took my bag inside. It weighed nothing.

I closed myself in the bathroom and lined up my pills along the shelf. One in the morning (football-shaped, with a blue tinge) to keep the fear at bay; one in the evening (white and round like a button) to keep my spirits up. I was to take them at the same time every day,
every single day
, not even five minutes late, under threat of certain readmission to the hospital. Dave had bought me a pill box – a plastic pocket Monday through to Friday – but I couldn’t bring myself to use it and become old so I put them all in a metallic green bag.

‘Heather?’ He lingered outside the door.

‘I’m on the toilet,’ I said, which was a lie, but having had my every move scrutinised for so many weeks, being alone in a room was a greater pleasure almost than I could fathom. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. Hurry, though.’ I heard his shoes on the wooden floor as he paced.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘No, nothing’s wrong. No. Are you done? Come on.’

I washed my hands with scalding hot water because no one had replaced the soap.

Dave hovered over me.

‘Okay, seriously,’ I said. ‘Have you eaten something funny? What is going on?’

At the top of the stairs we had new doors, white louvred panels that opened with a silver handle. I moved to open them, to let the light in, but hesitated at the garden beyond. It was a garden I hardly remembered, a half-unknown garden, a pond that I couldn’t reliably place, a forked fig tree and some planks of wood.

‘I made you a cup of tea.’ Bone china roses painted on. Not a garden. ‘I’ll help you.’ He pulled the doors in the middle; they unfolded to reveal my wicker chair, a frayed pink cushion, an iron table with a porcelain pot. And beyond, the garden, my garden. I strained to see it in the deafening sunshine.

The grass was flat. A sprawling green void.

‘Where are the pittosporums?’ I said, as though they had been a compass bearing.

‘Gone!’ His face so bright, a sun, a beacon. Lawn and dirt as far as I could see. Teacup quaking in my hand.

‘And the rest of it?’

‘Let me show you,’ he said.

We walked hand in hand past the bench and down the sloping face of the valley, no longer a mess of tangled drapery and tall soldiers and dark corridors, but wearing a robe of thin green wool. Where the pittosporums had been, neat rows of seedlings – impatiens and petunias and skirted primulas, identified by plastic cards with photos of their mature form. They had been carefully placed, six inches apart, room to grow and change and bloom. Closer to the fence line Dave had planted a bed of leggy flowers – the slender poison of calla lilies and bursts of agapanthus in white and purple; they grew like teenage boys, quick and hungry.

‘It’s very neat,’ I said.

‘Is that a good thing?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

His hand so warm in my hand, clammy, vice-gripped. He pointed to the ground, to a knee-high row of olive saplings and a slightly taller one with a tinsel bow tie, like an older brother. And to another piece of ground, where winding threads of polished stones took us further and further into what might have been a forest, once, or an archway, or a bit of mud underfoot. I tried to place it, my old garden. I ached under the fullness of it, with the lush undergrowth and the thick canopy that hid the day so completely, that allowed me to escape. I felt fiercely exposed, as though midday might eat me up.

At the back of the block we met a brick wall, ten feet high, cracked and mossy. We sat in its shadow and I looked back up the hill, at the garden that was no longer a slab of earth but a breathing would-be hideaway, a living embodiment of potential and of life.

‘I never did find whatever it was that kept you down here,’ Dave said. ‘You and your secrets.’

I wanted to ask about the pond and the fork in the creek, but I couldn’t.

‘Now I need your help,’ he said, and he had his hands on my shoulders so I knew he was serious. ‘Tell me what else it needs.’

‘I can show you exactly what it needs,’ I said. ‘Wait here.’ He smiled.

I knew I had pages of pink and purple and blue and orange and yellow and brown and green nested in chalked black outlines.
Leptospermum petersonii
: a lemon-scented tea tree. An ironbark,
Eucalyptus sideroxylon.
And three sweet acacias in different gelato colours. I heaved the throbbing, humming book from its place beneath the wicker chair and held it to my chest, the promise of it, the completeness of it. Dave waited by the wall, smile so wide I saw his back teeth.

‘What have you got, then?’ he said. I dropped to the ground next to him, hungry to see my garden come to life. We turned the pages together.

‘This can’t be right,’ I said. Turning, turning. ‘I don’t – Dave, I don’t understand.’ Turning, turning.

‘Let me see.’

Turning, turning.

The knot in my chest; my heart, my heart.

‘Dave,’ I said.

‘Just look.’

Page after page of a little girl’s face. Laughing. Singing. Reading.

And pink like a shell, like a sunset, like a heartbeat.

T
HE KITCHEN IS
empty. There’s ten bucks on the bench so I take that for lunch.

Mum said she would drive me so I’m not late for my practice exam. Guess not. I nick a couple of cigarettes from her dresser, look around to see if she’s watching but kind of don’t care if she is anyway.

It’s still pretty early. I sit on the front step and smoke and wait for the bus to come. It’s warm and my skin starts to heat up in the sun.

I wonder if Gran’s come to pick her up again.

She probably just forgot. Probably went to buy chocolate or a cat or adopt an orphan or something.

I pick at the grass growing out of the step.

Still, she seemed pretty keen yesterday. Said we could get a milkshake on the way. Said she was sure I would be fine.

I butt out the cigarette on the cement.

She said she would take me because she had something to go to afterwards. An appointment or something.

I go back inside and call Gran.

Have you heard from Mum? I say. She was going to take me to school.

Not since yesterday, she says.

Oh, I say.

She says, When did you last see her?

Her voice is shaking.

I say, Yesterday.

I twist the phone cord around my finger and look out the window. The bus will be here in five minutes so I’m going to have to leave without her.

Gran’s breathing is coming down the phone. It’s really fast. She is saying some things about how she’s sure everything is fine, and do I need her to come and take me?

Yeah, I say. That would be great.

I put the phone down and keep looking out the window. There’s a bit of the beach where dogs are allowed and I can see Shithead down there, sniffing around.

She’s not allowed at the beach by herself. Probably got under the gate again. Mum must have left without checking. I guess. I try to breathe slower. I think of Dad telling Mum not to catastrophise.

It takes Gran fifteen minutes to get here from her house so I should probably get the dog back.

I go down and Shithead runs off and I shout after her but she’s halfway down the beach already, playing with other people’s dogs.

And then I see these orange running shoes.

Dad got those same ones for her birthday. She was going to be a runner, she said. They were so expensive.

My heart is slamming around in my body.

I run to the bushes and up to the orange shoes and I look her right in the eye and she stares back at me and says nothing.

I start screaming and I keep screaming and everything spins and jumps around and for a second I think I am back in the house on the phone to Gran but no one is looking at me, just people standing around and they haven’t even noticed, they haven’t even looked away from their own stupid lives for one second to see the woman in the sand with her running shoes sticking out and her hair all neat, neater than it has ever been before.

And I kneel down next to her, the woman in the orange running shoes, the woman who must be a stranger, who can only be a stranger, a stranger with the same orange running shoes and the same blonde hair. I think I am still screaming but I can’t even hear it. All I can hear is the waves punching me in the face and my blood rushing around me and out onto the sand.

I put my hand on the purple dress, the same purple dress she wore at my birthday, the same purple dress I saw hanging in her wardrobe. It is stiff and ironed. It has never been stiff and ironed.

I drag my hand along the purple fabric and I just keep looking at the orange running shoes that are someone else’s running shoes, just moving my hand up along this cold purple dress and looking at the running shoes. And then I touch the collarbone, and it is cold and greasy but there is something on the collarbone and as soon as I touch it I know it’s a necklace with a shell on it because that’s the one I made at school.

And my whole body just falls to pieces on top of this person, this person who is exactly my mother except not her at all.

I don’t even know how to get Dad, but somehow I don’t have to and I see him, running across the road with his hands in the air. Cars are beeping at him and people are shouting, What the fuck are you doing? but I know he can’t hear them. He runs to the beach and he screams and puts his face right into the purple dress and his whole body is racked and torn.

I don’t want to look at her but I do anyway, like I can’t control myself. She is smiling and her eyes are far away like she’s having a daydream, and maybe she is except for the blood coming out of her ears and her tongue thrown out of her face like a fat steak. And then finally someone hears us screaming, I guess, because a man with a green shirt comes running over and he sees her there on the sand with her orange running shoes and he says,